Siham
Her picture is on the front page of the book. Most likely it is a picture of her when she was still in high school, her first year there. She is wearing a dress that looks more like a school uniform, with buttons in the front and a round collar, one of those types known as a ‘baby collar’, maybe because of its association with children’s clothing. Her hair is smooth, thick, and long, parted in the middle and falling to her shoulders, but not covering her forehead or her ears. Her complexion is white, her eyes light-coloured (the picture is black-and-white, and so doesn’t reveal the green of her eyes). A long face with a broad brow, a small nose, and somewhat full lips; her face has grace and a sweetness, or innocence, or gaiety hiding behind an apparent seriousness and visible placidity. There is perhaps also a touch of sadness in this face, betrayed by a slight cast to the right eye that you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t look closely. In her ears are earrings, circular in shape – are they gold or silver? In a black-and-white photograph you can’t tell for sure. A child, a girl, and a woman in the making converge in the picture.
Above the picture is her name, and next to it, ‘Flower of the student movement.’ A subtitle follows in the third line: ‘The seventies generation.’
Beneath the picture are words in a fine, brittle script. (The confused scrawl of those who, like me, were educated at French schools, and didn’t have handwriting teachers or get that strict training in the aesthetics of Arabic calligraphy.) The words read ‘Love cannot be blind, for it is love that causes us to see’ (a maxim she wrote in 1966, when she was in high school).
The book includes recollections offered by her brother and some of the leaders of the student movement, and women friends of hers who had shared life in a prison cell with her. It concludes with an appendix comprising fragments of her early writings, when she was fifteen years old, as well as some later texts, and Qur’anic verses she had transcribed with care. This included, under the heading, ‘God’, a list of twenty-two of His attributes as laid down in the Qur’an, beginning with ‘the Merciful’, and ending with ‘Verily God is your Lord and greatest protector’. Following this, as a conclusion to the section: ‘And God knows that which is within your very hearts.’ Then there is a snippet in which she sees the world as a mountain that all people climb, each kicking those who are below, to prevent their ascending, and she concludes this thought with, ‘Where is mercy, where is kindness?’ Following this is a quotation from the words of Jesus: ‘Blessed be the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’ In another snippet she writes, ‘Give love instead of hate, and you are a point of light.’ And, ‘Smile upon him who strikes you, and give him a rose – thus you will be a soldier in the only true war, and you will be victorious because he was victorious. Jesus said, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” And where did he say it!’
There are two selections in the appendix written in 2002, exactly a year before her death, the first of them dated 14 March. In this one she acknowledges the twentieth anniversary of her decision to give up her graduate study in the Soviet Union, saying, ‘The step I took so courageously was to reach for the sky, and nothing but the sky would have done,’ and ‘It’s a decision I would take again if I could go back in time: a triumph of the spirit over the body, a triumph of light over darkness.’ And, ‘From that day on, despite all the hardships, I am still climbing the spiritual ladder . . . twenty years of genuine struggle, struggle in the name of God.’ And, ‘O Lord, guide my craft to the shore that lies distant.’
In the second selection, the date – Tuesday 26 March – is written in French, followed by an English expression, which she translated, ‘The word “freedom” is merely an analogue, for man no longer has that which he has lost.’ After this, in Arabic, ‘The important thing is not for a person to be Marxist or Muslim or Buddhist or Christian – the important thing is to be an honourable Marxist, or an honourable Muslim, or a genuine Christian.’ Then she talks about the stairway ever rising that we seek day and night, ‘. . . at demonstrations in the daytime, at night in reading, and in contemplative inquiry at all times.’ She concludes, ‘From one stairway to another, God has led me to climb toward His unmediated image.’ On the next line, all by itself on the line, are the words, ‘His radiant image.’
Her brother said, ‘She was doing a lot of reading and writing. All through the years she wrote incessantly. She wouldn’t leave the house. She read and wrote. All we have is scattered papers and notebooks whose pages generally aren’t in any logical order. She left only a few notebooks. It’s a strange thing, because she was writing all the time, and this went on for years. I don’t know what became of those papers. Did she get rid of them by burning them? Was she tearing them up? Or was she tossing them from the balcony, the way she used to do with other things?
‘Yes there was a period during which she used to throw her things from the balcony. She didn’t want to own anything, anything at all – she would throw away clothing, keepsakes, and jewellery, among other things, and it caused problems between her and our mother.
‘Sometimes she would overeat, or eat irregularly. She would gain weight noticeably. And sometimes she abstained from food, fasting for days at a time.’
‘What about the zoo episode?’
‘That wasn’t the low point, although our parents saw signs of sheer madness. She was still able to make beautiful things, and wanted to – she wrote lines of poetry on the walls of her room. She did embroidery. She was good at embroidery, at making toys for children out of cardboard, and other things. One time she decided to take some coloured balloons and stand at the gate of the zoo to distribute them to the children. She talked about the policemen who demanded a bribe in exchange for letting her stand with the vendors who set up their portable stalls near the zoo. She was still capable of telling a story, of offering criticism and ironic commentary.’
Then came silence.
‘She didn’t want to talk. She was entirely silent for a whole year, barricading herself behind silence, refusing to talk to any of us.
‘Before this silent period, she had been talking in a way that suggested she was approaching a state like that of a Sufi, or sometimes the things she said leaned toward Christianity, and sometimes just the opposite of all this.
‘No, she didn’t go into a convent, as some said.
‘Yes, she attempted suicide more than once. She tried to jump from the balcony, but the neighbours saw her and she was rescued. In Paris, while she was staying with our mother, she swallowed a lot of pills, then went outside and fell down in the street, so she was taken to the hospital. Then she tried again, when she was in the hospital for a simple operation on her foot. She read in some magazine about spray guns. She sneaked out of the hospital, bought the gun, and tried to kill herself.
‘We took care not to tell her about Arwa’s suicide. We were afraid of the effect the news might have on her. Then she found out . . .
‘For years we kept taking her to the hospital. She would undergo treatment. The therapy would leave her with a glow that quickly faded, and she would go back into hospital. She would improve and the doctor would say, “There’s no need for her to stay.” We would go home – in a matter of days or weeks, she’d go back. Yes, she gained weight noticeably. She refused to take medication. She would get rid of it; give up speaking altogether; go on hunger strike, and write.
‘I don’t think she committed suicide. She was hit by a passing car. In all likelihood she was completely oblivious to what was around her – perhaps oblivious to the fact that she was walking on a busy thoroughfare.’
Siham died on 13 March 2003. One week before the invasion of Iraq. Had she been following the news? Did she know anything about the approaching battleships, the massing of soldiers, the matériel? Did she decide to die so as not to witness what she saw was coming? Did she decide to die or was it a traffic accident? Did her brother say all that he knew?
The last of her extant writings that I have goes back to the year before she died. Dated 26 March 2002: she wrote about a feeling that was drawing her to write a book in which she would tell the story of her life – she described it as ‘an important book, containing a warning,’ but she stipulated that she wasn’t looking to publish it. ‘I don’t like publishing, ever.’ ‘But,’ Siham went on in her delicate, spidery script:
It’s important to record the story of my struggle
Should I set down snippets of it, or chapters, in my memoirs
But it’s a long tale, and multi-faceted, and besides
At any rate, I’ll see how it goes
But I’ll definitely get started
I won’t publish everything
That’s not for me
In another passage she writes:
Lord, all I ask is to become a martyr
So take my soul tomorrow morning
Before my eyes open upon another day
I’ve asked for martyrdom and even abstained from food and water for eight days.
And fewer than that and more than that.
A resistance whose cruelty only the honourable and pure know,
I’ve asked for martyrdom for the sake of truth
And now I can’t find it.
Deliver me, O God
For suffering has been emplaced upon suffering
Upon suffering
I weep so often, this you know.
She was struck by a car on 13 March, corresponding to 10 Muharram. By accident or by design? I don’t know.