Amman – Novels tend to explore a variety of issues across different settings, but Jordanian novelists delving into childhood memories and making them the focus of their literary works is a unique experience worth reflecting on.
Dr. Ziad Abu Laban, author of “Suppressed Breaths”, Mohammad Al-Amiri, author of “The Loofah Tree”, and Dr. Mohammad Al-Qawasmi, author of “Voices in the Camp” and “Thalatheen Street,” have returned in their literary works to revisit their childhood memories. These reminiscences evoke a yearning for the warmth of a mother’s embrace and their childhood wishes “to be kids again, sitting in the bathtub, enjoying the aromatic bathing rituals imbued with the scent of their mother”; an issue worthy of exploration and scrutiny.
Mohammad Al-Qawasmi: The mother’s harshness with her child during bathing is a reflection of life’s misery (Al Jazeera).
From these memories stem questions in search of answers; most notably, why do these novelists return to the past? Is it because of its apparent beauty, or perhaps due to the ugliness of the present; considering that all of them grew up without silver spoons, but rather with tales of varying degrees of life’s austerity?
Could it be that these writers harbor a suppressed scream, a stored emotion, or buried feelings that accompanied their life’s journey like scars, and now the right moment has arrived to disclose them?
This is what we try to uncover in this report.
Suppressed Breaths
Dr. Ziad Abu Laban, author of “Suppressed Breaths and Other Stories”, stands out with his coherent narrative. Across 119 stories, Laban effortlessly weaves his characters, allowing them complete freedom within the events sequence without intervention. His works, adorned with realistic struggles with life, express themselves in fluid and unambiguous language, compelling readers to remain engaged.
The heroines, 11 girls with assorted names and the mother as the protagonist or the driving force, are seen as observers and guides, leveraging their experience and knowledge, while he simply watches their movements and the shattering of so-called taboos in confined spaces. Time and place are constrained by the movements of his heroines.
Ziad Abu Laban: The mother is a school, and my youthful heroines confront a culture of shame (Al Jazeera).
Regarding the role of the mother, Laban says: “Surely, the mother is a primary catalyst in all the stories; she is the educator who raises a generation capable of facing life and everything possible and impossible. She intuitively understands her children’s behavior, and even if experienced in life’s battles, her instinct warns her of the dangers looming over the child from behavioral deviations influenced by social media and the technological space. In the stories of ‘Suppressed Breaths’, she’s the main driver of events, central to their unfolding.”
Fathers and Children’s Questions
Laban sees that fathers find themselves distinctly embarrassed when faced with their children’s questions, especially since these inquiries stem from an innocent yet bold childhood. Children are the strongest in posing bold questions; this innocence gets contaminated as they grow up and becomes a source of their fear in facing the culture of shame or confronting the unknown. Parents, who lack scientific understanding, find themselves unable to answer their children’s questions, at times responding with ambiguous answers that raise further inquiries in their minds, leaving them hanging as they grow older and their questions diminish, as he describes.
Expounding, he adds: “When one of the story characters (young girl Suad) can’t comprehend the slow-moving death creeping towards her father through bone-ravaging cancer, she writes a letter to God to save them from starvation and places it on her father’s grave to deliver it to God. Like the child ‘Khalil’, who approaches the sea whispering ‘I want mama’, the same mother who died from coronavirus… These children possess a profound awareness of the world, an awareness that is not fake or tarnished by adult sins.”
Laban concludes his talk to Al Jazeera Net by stating that “the stories of the collection remain the most daring in addressing the culture of shame when it comes to children, presented in a style that carries the beauty of language with all the poetic nuances. They offer a fresh perspective on the world of the young and the children, a world haunted by fear.”
Friday Bathing: A Compulsory Torment
With his smooth and agile language and the human touch in his creative output, Dr. Mohammad Al-Qawasmi walks through the halls of poverty and misery. In his novel “Voices in the Camp”, published in two parts “The Resurrection” and “The Gathering”, the mother plays a significant role in building the narrative that tells of life in the Palestinian camps and scenes indicative of life’s misery, and what would traditionally happen on Fridays when mothers bathed their children.
According to Al-Qawasmi, the novel details this arduous process for both mother and son. Saleh, the story’s protagonist, dreads this day, tries to escape, and devises excuses to avoid the compulsory torture he will undergo. He flees to the street, but to where? His mother chases after him, dragging him back to the kitchen, which is typically the place for various activities, including cooking, washing, studying, and bathing.
Al-Qawasmi feels the depiction of bathing in the novel is indicative of the human ability to adapt to misery, poverty, and suffering, and to generate joy from the simplest of tasks. The harshness displayed by the mother in her treatment of her child during the bathing process is a reflection of life’s misery.
“The Loofah Tree”: A Stream of Memory
Described as a “stream of memory”, Mohammad Al-Amiri’s 170-page novel “The Loofah Tree”, published by Spaces for Publishing, is termed as his “inventory of memory”. It’s a collection of childhood excerpts written in a poetic language that depicts the life of a child as if he were writing with a camera. The “Friday bath” was a special ritual and had unique torments; his mother treated his body like she treated the copper household utensils. She would heat up water on a kerosene stove, and the protagonist’s soap was the sharp and coarse Nabulsi “Abu Miftahain”. “Something abrasive and severe scraping my back… I would try to escape… I was like a detainee under the scrubber’s pressure,” he narrates. The loofah is from the loofah tree that grew in front of the house; although it felt like family, it was not edible.
Mohammad Al-Amiri: Describes Friday bathing as a compulsory incarceration (Al Jazeera).
The novel also documents the memories of a child who witnessed student mischief and the events of the region, narrated amidst life-like imagery like fetching water with his grandmother. It records his relationships with childhood friends and neighbors, who are the true heroes of “The Loofah Tree”, as well as the trembling waterfalls, the rural festivities, and the circumcision ceremonies which Al-Amiri describes as an execution party for a revolutionary who doesn’t fear execution.
Childhood and Coloring Birds
In conversation with Al Jazeera Net, Al-Amiri says, “Childhood is a pantry or a reservoir of delightful memories I leaned on for narrative, poetry, and untainted things. I firmly believe that a child’s memory is akin to an unblurred camera, possessing striking power that one cannot forget.”
He recounts witnessing, in his fifth year, the Battle of Karameh, where the Israeli army bombed their location in the northern Jordan Valley, which housed Palestinian guerilla headquarters, forcing them to flee to Al-Sareeh near the city of Irbid, the bride of the north.
Al-Amiri continues with his recollections: “In the north of the kingdom, I saw for the first time a well… This term did not exist in my hometown ‘Qal’at’, where there were springs and waterfalls. The first time I entered a well was one of the most terrifying scenes because its bottom was a black mirror… I started to understand new traditions very different from the northern Jordan Valley… And since my childhood was linked to agriculture, my connection was with the river and the waterfall dropping from the ‘Zqlab’ dam, like a white soap foam that we often bathed in at the weekend’s end.”
I Still Smell the Scent of Childhood
He adds, “Even now, as I descend to the northern Jordan Valley to meet my mother, and she hugs me despite my age, I still smell the scent of childhood milk, the same little boy in her arms. I always try to provoke her memory to tell me about those paradoxes to say, ‘I saw you before birth,’ a story that still occupies me to this day. ‘As I was pregnant with you, I described you in detail to the neighbors, a lock of hair different from mine… I saw you standing on the dome of Saad bin Abi Waqqas’s shrine, reading from a large book,’ and when I was born, the features were the same. As a result, my father sacrificed a sheep as ‘Aqiqah’ and dressed the shrine in green cloth, so the villagers rushed and took pieces of cloth as bracelets and necklaces, as a form of blessing.”
He continues, “This event works in my memory with a lot of questions about the relationship between the mother and her fetus. It is still an image not yet revealed by science, as a mother can feel its movements, but my mother knew what I looked like before seeing me.”
“I want to say that villages have magical, realistic memories that have not yet been written correctly. For instance, my grandmother was an expert in hunting an owl. She would pluck its feathers, place them in a kohl container, and then apply kohl to the owl’s eyes. She’d put a small bead necklace around its neck, utter words I didn’t understand, and set it flying toward the sun to ward off its presumed malice, as this bird is linked to superstitions of bad omen in Arab heritage.”
The Mother as Homeland
Also, critic and poet Rashid Issa views the mother beyond the meaning of women, “She is your homeland that does not ask for a passport or taxes. She only asks you to stay, to enjoy giving you affection and love, the only being who gives you the essence of her heart without expecting thanks or reciprocity.”
Rashid Issa: The mother is a homeland that does not ask for a passport or taxes (Al Jazeera).
Issa explains, “That is why writers around the world have always revered the theme of motherhood as sacred, and summoning childhood in literature is the greatest indication of the eternal attachment of the child to the mother. Motherhood represents freedom unmatched by any other, a freedom not susceptible to betrayal.”
He continues, “As we lust for the space-time of childhood out of fear of death and dissatisfaction with adulthood’s tribulations, we wish to stay forever as children, devoted to play, dreams, and oblivion. The mother’s embrace is the only one we trust unconditionally, and thus we long for it as we grow older.”
Issa describes the mother as the paradise within a desert of dashed hopes, where even the greatest sultans, overwhelmed by worries, remember their mother’s embrace.
