A Poet in Secret

I laid my head on the pillow. My chest was pounding as if I’d run miles. I was breathless and my vision blurred. I was panting after an impossible journey, like someone returning from Miraj. Buraq has gone and left me alone. I saw what I saw and no one will believe me. I was in a state of exultation and fear. I started repeating in a triumphant whisper: I wrote a poem! I wrote a poem!

What was I going to do, now that I’d written a poem?

I have to protect this small creature, this delicate and fragile thing. I have to protect its life no matter the cost. If Saqr found out about it, if he found out about my new relationship with language, he would ruin it. He would strangle my poems and steal their birds, he would dirty them with his hands that smell of fish, its letters would die as soon as he set his watchdog eyes loose on them, searching—never, I won’t allow it!—for witnesses to the crime.

Saqr doesn’t have to know about it, I thought. I won’t let him come to me with another fatwa prohibiting the writing of poetry or the reading of novels. I won’t allow him to sit with his legs propped up, fatwa in hand that he printed off the internet for a small service charge, and read to me the millionth lecture: The blessed sharia states that all doors to the temptations that lead to evil shall be closed, and the temptation of women is one of the greatest temptations men face. Thus we find in the two great books of hadith that the Prophet, God bless him and grant him salvation, said, “I have left behind me no trial more harmful to men than women.” For that reason the sharia blocks all roads to this temptation. Women are forbidden from traveling without a mahram; they are forbidden from being alone with a strange man, from allowing their beauty to be seen by them and from speaking to them with a softness of speech, along with other doors to temptation that the sharia has closed. There is no doubt that reading stories and poems goes against the purpose of the sharia because of the evil acts that it brings about, such as arousing natural impulses, paving the way for base fantasies and thoughts, and devoting time to things that are of no benefit to one’s religion or the world, and are in fact harmful.

I can’t let that happen. For him to seize hold of the one thing I have left, the one thing that I can do. I won’t give him the chance! Since that first poem I decided to keep it all a secret, to get very good at hiding my writing before he could ruin it, before he could find out about it and start squashing my creations under his shoes.

If it was just about him tearing things up it would have been much easier, but his hostility was more subtle than that. He was the type that would take the journal hidden under your pillow and read it to everyone in the house until they were curled up on the floor in laughter. I imagine Saqr reading something I wrote, something like “That night my soul went out.” He would be lying on his back, munching on sunflower seeds and spitting the shells everywhere, and he would read with a booming voice that was more than the delicate words could bear. Then he would ask, pretending to be dumb: Oh, so your soul went out. Are you a light bulb? And everyone would laugh and I would go to pieces. Throughout the following weeks everyone would call me “light bulb,” and I would stop writing forever. This exquisite pleasure, extraordinary, that I’d just experienced a few minutes ago, it would disappear from my life.

I wrote my first poem on the bottom of a box of tissues. A short and disjointed poem, trembling like a tear, and I was happy with it, that tear poem, as if I’d stumbled upon myself.

I am a poet in secret. I write the silence and melt inside it. The world has no room for my poems.