Fourth Phone Call

“You don’t understand! You never understand! I’m trying to preserve what little fragile existence I have in this world. It’s pointless for us to talk about any relationship in which one person is this worn down! You leave us to rust and rot and be killed, but still the relationship is sacred and must be respected! Marriage must be respected even if it harms someone. Everything that is not beating or cursing is not considered harmful in any way. Any discussion of the ‘relationship’ when one of the people in it is incapable of being themselves is merely an attempt to falsify and oversimplify reality. Writing saves me from all of that. When I write I am me. Why do you want to take that from me?”

“I didn’t forbid you . . .”

“The drugs, the sleeping pills, the antidepressants, the migraines, the nightmares . . . What a heavy price you’re making me pay in order to stop writing.”

“There’s no problem with you writing within the framework of the rules that I set out for you.”

“The rules that my writing must remain in my drawers and notebooks! That I hide the scandal called ‘Fatima,’ the catastrophe called ‘Fatima’! No, I won’t do it. I won’t write in tombs, no more tombs! No more!”

“We live in a small country. You know how people would receive something like this.”

“No one can tolerate beauty.”

“What garbage!”

“You can all tolerate ugliness, tolerate child abuse and rape, you can tolerate cursing and swearing, domestic violence, racism, you can tolerate Israel, America, your sectarianism, government corruption, underage marriage, everything! You can tolerate all the garbage in the world but you can’t tolerate a poem.”

“You could publish them under a pen name.”

“No.”

“I’m trying to accommodate you but you aren’t trying, you’re determined to reject every solution, you refuse to compromise!”

“There is no compromising on a principle. I don’t see any difference between how I was buried alive in Saqr’s basement and what you’re doing when you read my poems with critical eyes, put its lines on trial and interrogate me about what I meant with this word and that expression. Then you lock the poem in your drawer and decide to ‘allow’ me—because you are kindhearted—to keep it. As long as I write for myself. In case you haven’t noticed, I am wasting away in my loneliness and I want to enjoy a full life. I want to work, to get a degree, to write, and maybe volunteer for a civil rights organization and carry signs condemning Arab governments. I want to enjoy my life in full. Why does it have to be so difficult? Because I am a woman?”