In Which The Dandelion Clock Strikes Midnight

Bouquet

by HEATHER MCROBIE

Running alongside the events of those years was like in the cartoons where the animated out-sized character doesn’t realize he’s run off the edge of a cliff, until he looks down and so – to comic, cartoonish effect – suddenly starts falling. 

Sometimes I thought of Tahrir Square like a coral reef, everyone moving as one, shoals darting between the barnacled city walls.  Sometimes I thought of breezy, light Tunisia like a dandelion clock that all the young people and sad people blew at once, scattering the seeds of it everywhere, like this would be the first and last birthday cake whose candles we’d all ever get to blow out. At other times I thought of it like a grapevine, each bunch ripening in tandem, and at other times I couldn’t believe any of it at all.  A lot of metaphors also ripened during this time and because we were still growing up we overused all of them, and I’m sorry for that.  There are lots of stupid, easy things to say about spring.

The man I was in love with then did algebra and never used a metaphor, which I respect now more than I did when things were starting. For the purpose of this story I’ll use his brother’s name, Ibrahim, not so much for anonymity but more just because things between us were always a bit dislocated like that, like someone forgot to carry the one in an equation.  Something always got left over from the last thing, or nudged down one unit in a row.

He wasn’t Brahim, my friend from early Cairo-unbelievableness, with whom, in the infinite possibilities of this outside-time year-zero, I carved out a perfect friendship uncorroded by the complications of politics and sex.  “Guess how short my skirts are when I go out in London? And guess how short they are when I go out in Manchester? And guess how short my skirts are when I go out in Liverpool?” Brahim would put his hands to his face like two giant leaves covering the centre of a sunflower but you could tell from the glow that peaked out that he was always laughing.  We were laughing in our language classes and laughing on the balcony and only not-laughing when he took me to the cemetery and even then afterwards he made jokes, of a kind. 

The man I was in love with who studied physics and was bemused by all of this came with me on a boat to Tunis where we imagined all the ancient Greek shipwrecks that must lie between his port-city home and the port-city someone with his surname had once left for the lower-lip of southern France.  We became professionally annoying with our photographs: every flag and every protest, me taking my dress off in our bedroom in the heat (later after Ibrahim left I was working at home in my underwear because it was too hot and heard the clicking of a camera by an amateur creep who was peering in through the window). We photographed the hospital and photographed the morgue and photographed the bars called “Facebook” and the cafes called “Twitter”. I sent emails to professors in Europe and North America telling them all their theories were outdated now, after this miraculous blossoming of spring. I mainly got out-of-office replies.

Since Ibrahim grew up in the south of France but studied in Paris I came to understand a relationship that had nothing to do with me, a north-south tension that didn’t play out in my life.  The ‘grandes ecoles’ of regimented Napoleonic education and the starched northernnesses of his classmates were as alien to him as they were to me, and he moved around Paris as half-bemused as he was half-bemused in Tunisia, home of his father.  I thought of him – because I loved him and he loved mathematics – as the mathematically-precise centre-point between these two, Paris and Tunis, held comfortably in his smiling certainty that this would all turn out alright, don’t worry my love.  I started to think of the Mediterranean like a mouth, with southern Europe as the upper teeth and north Africa as the lower teeth, how they had once slotted together, before some tectonic shift exposed the wet middle of sunken Greek ships.

Years later in Odessa I thought similarly and differently of the Black Sea: Ukraine glistening above and Turkey propping it up assuredly from underneath.  The heartening enclosed-ness of it all.  I liked to hold on to enclosed things, after the places and events since the start of the revolution that unraveled and just kept on unraveling.   I thought maybe the Mediterranean Sea was Ibrahim’s mouth beaming in the sun and the Black Sea was Amela’s mouth in that period when I thought about Amela’s mouth all the time, when she’d sit out by the library, and say funny and clever things and purse her lips in between so that they looked, improbably, like an exact map of Australia coloured in with lipstick.  ‘Amela’ is also a fake name for someone whose identity I need to smudge into imprecision, but her lips really did shape themselves, perfectly, just like that.

The best and worst thing about growing up motherless is you have to learn the artifice of femininity really carefully, like you’re learning algebra – when to carry, when to drop, when to press a little, when to stop.  I remember thinking of this in the Tunis hospital where the blue corridors were casually lined with dirty bandages.  How the hands of the nurses wafted at me in unison like seaweed in some sticky, maternal mauling.  How had they learned to touch bodies like that? It seemed as definite as maths but whole in natural-ness, precise but organic, like a starfish.  They sent me back to the apartment in Tunis with my own bouquet of bandages.

Ibrahim grew up in a town in France that had the same position as the town I grew up in in England: unromantically run-down, un-special, near to a famous port-city.  Walking around it in the spring before the hospital I remember thinking how at least the Runcorn of France had palm-trees, and there was something to be said for what sun can to do wash away any kind of ugliness.

Much later I stood in a central station looking up the bus schedule to Tripoli and I realised that my period was late because I was looking at schedules; later I was looking at the bandages that lined the blue corridors of the hospital and realised we were all too late.  But I couldn’t tell anyone because the doctor was so kindly and quietly explaining to me that it wasn’t meningitis, I was probably just overcome by events. Everyone was overcome by events. 

Three years after the revolution in Egypt, Bassem Sabry, the brightest, truest young writer of those times, fell to his death from a Cairo balcony and I couldn’t stop thinking of him.  I re-read his recent writing, shocked that he had touched something now as complete and grown-up as death.  I couldn’t stop thinking of him and of how everything just tumbled like that.  As the revolutions buckled under themselves everything was either the swollen pregnant pauses of the curfew or the sudden internal caving-in of blood.

All I want to remember from these years of my life is that night when he and I were taking pictures of each other in the dark.  This was in Tunis before the hospital visit and before I found out that I needed glasses and I didn’t know how the pictures or anything else would turn out.  I thought that it was going to be something blossoming and abundant – like spring, or a revolution. Instead of what it really was: something mutant and unsustainable – like a miscarriage, or a lie.

Heather McRobie is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Oxford. She has written for the Guardian, the New Statesman, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, the Times Literary Supplement and Salon. You can find her website here.

Photographs by Sumeja Tulic.

In Which Only A Few Of Them Were Lingering

Užásno!

by SUMEJA TULIC

Užásno! she said as she passed. Her crisp blue eyes pacified the fullness of her blonde hair and the wind that swept through the darkness of the street, like being tickled by someone you are going to punch in the nose.

The train mended the space between two buildings as if to say that nothing can be broken or perhaps nothing can be mended forever. Brighton Beach after dusk is the closest I am to home in New York. I am there because of the sea and for the long train ride back. I’m there for the restaurants that stretch along the shore and their female Slavic names - Tatiana, Alina, Vera. Probably named after owner’s and everybody’s first love, mother, daughter. Probably, but all I could think of while pressing my nose against their windows is how there must have been a Tatiana, Alina and Vera, teenage soldiers who many decades ago were freezing in the woods. I’m there for the old people in proper coats, sitting on benches, in streetlight-interrupted darkness.

These old people may have been vampires. They were still, but impossible to photograph. They didn’t attack anyone or at least it was not reported by the Post the day after.

Back on the Brooklyn Bridge I am merely one of a hundred total strangers standing there and thinking of love and suicide. In their extreme intensities, love and suicide may be the same, the egg and chicken paradox of self-destruction; a circular reference to a minimalistic obituary reprinted every time I wish for the one that pains me most.

This is not quite true when one is on Brooklyn Bridge or, for that matter, on any given bridge. The water is simply darker and colder than betrayal or cruelty can ever amount to. You can jump into its coldness. Darkness after you have jumped quickly blends into fear and regret. Later, once you are soaking wet: that feeling turns into life after death. That is eternal and in most optimistic accounts, a boring blank space. No love and pain are ever boring, blank. So don’t jump.

It starts to rain and everybody with and without an umbrella is disappointed. The arches of the bridge become too crowded and the romance of taking photographs against the glowing lights of uninterrupted greatness of the Financial District doesn’t do it anymore. To see a city while it rains is to see it in its pajamas. The sincerest moments of one's life happen before a shower and coffee, in your underwear. Only a handful of people appreciate it.

One morning when I was ten or eleven I woke up and ran out of the house to a tree completely covered by butterflies. It wasn’t a tree in our garden, but the one across from it, some yards away. The butterflies kept flying to it and flying from it. I stood in front of my house, not sure what to do. I wasn’t afraid but also I couldn’t go closer to the tree. Nobody really took notice of what was going on, as if butterflies attack tall trees planted on the brink of the desert every day. I didn’t know back then that this is something to be photographed. Also, my family didn’t own a camera.

Instead, twenty years later I remember it still. I remember it and measure my wonder and affection according to it. I don’t believe in love at first sight but sure do believe in not being able to move and divert you eyes from someone or something because they are the kind of loveliness that doesn’t elapse, like a kind tree on the brink of a desert. They are so wonderful that you want to tell them every little thing that happened to you up till the moment you met them. Instead of that, you release all your many, silent butterflies at them, at once.

I want to release all myself on him, like a rain that came as blessing and ended up as a natural disaster. But we never even shook hands, not even when we said goodbye. Once, we took an elevator together so that I could practice not looking at him in confined spaces. If I had looked his way he could tell I made my peace with some crazy, uncalled for waiting.

I’ll wait until I’m 44 and he is 45, when we are away from New York, comfortably seated on the porch of our house, broke and tired. I’ll drift away, probably into the nothingness of a flowerless garden, and he’ll start calling my name. At first, he’ll say it the right way, and then, suspicious or annoyed, he’ll start saying it the wrong way, which sounds like something God would shout at his people from the top of a mountain. If I could only forget to think and think and think. I’ve taken up smoking so that I have something else to do while alone. But that is only worsening the problem. Every day, there are fewer places to smoke in. As I type this, one bus station has just been designated as a non-smoking area. So I take my not thinking to my room.

Some folks may lose the blues in their heart, but that is not me. I never will lose the account of all the sadness that is bestowed after one reaches a self-assigned point of maturity.

Life becomes clear for what it is – blocks of houses, cafés and pastries, shops and cinemas and Luna Parks. All that is equally predictable and mind numbing after a while, unless if you can remind yourself what this life would have looked like without it – an honest-to-God wife, which you wouldn’t want to fuck. From Midtown and up there are a few boutiques which sell suits, purses and scarfs for somebody really old but alive. These boutiques are never open when I’m around. They are filled with yellow and purple or pudding-like pink light that drips onto the street if the doors of the shop are open. Bastard shops adopted by the avenues. Growing among them, learning to eat with cutlery, debutantes that will never be married.

Aaron told me that it’s a lie what they say in the movies. New York sleeps. It’s only people with jetlag that roam the city. Yes, everything goes to sleep. Even the fish in cheesy aquariums in the bars between Little Italy and Chinatown sleep. Only angels, trains and delis are lingering. It’s not a good idea to have coffee that late while your shoes are soaking wet and no filter can make your selfie look better. Not to mention the cigarette in your hand and the cheap bouquet you bought because (1) you are never so broke you don't have money for flowers, and (2) no flower should be left behind. Simply, Užásno!

Sumeja Tulic is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find her website here.

Photographs by the author.

"Human Contact" - Catey Shaw (mp3)

"Brooklyn Girls" - Catey Shaw (mp3)

In Which This Is Inspired By Acute Depression And Envy

Baking the Egg

by SUMEJA TULIC

The way it goes for not that pretty girls with freckles and wavy hair is to adopt a survivor mode that enables anticipations associated with pretty girls. And that is exactly what I did. I chose rich and to some extent delusional interpretations of my reality and coupled that with curiosity and outspokenness.

Of course, if you are raised in a confused patriarchal family – where your mother is your father and your father is a mother with short outbreaks of bad temper – this will get you into lots of trouble. For instance, the first time I was punished for my curiosity was when I asked why Jews and Muslims wear small hats and should one give it up? Had I not had my own interpretation of the slap that surprised both me and my father, I could have gone through life blaming him for my subsequent lack of courage, sense of adventure and maybe even lack of academic ambition, but I took pride in the fact that I felt fear and anger in my father’s eyes more than the warmth that seared my cheek. I just knew I had to.

Luckily, amongst the decomposed layers of things, ignorance and fear that made my 1990s, fragments of narratives slipped in. I never got the whole story or the accurate chain of events. All I knew was fueled by the excitement that rushed in while realizing that I had nowhere to go with my questions. My mother was a sad beautiful woman trapped in a desert, my father was tired and worried and most he could do was to explain verses from the Quran in a puppeteer sort of a way. Our school textbooks were the well-implemented thoughts of a poorly educated submissive male.

My knowledge on sex came from few completely different formats and sources. My school friends and graffiti could give speculative information on the subject in form of nervously written "Fuck." However, in one of the houses my family lived in, the former attendant left a stash of Van Damme movies and what I later in life figured out was a porn collection. I never got to the porn, but the action films that my parents kept contained a few riddling scenes. Some disturbed me, others – such as the one in which a man literally bakes an egg on women’s chest – made me confused.

Later, while visiting a friend, I stumbled on One Thousand and One Nights. Strangely, my parents didn’t mind me sitting by myself on a green couch in their friend’s house; reading soft erotic tales dipped in a sea of adventures every time we visited. Up to this day I don’t really know how did I learn what sex technically meant. Actually, when I think of knowing about it, it is sort of a memory. A defused and blurred collection of cinematic fragments starring random people I knew, places and walls in dusty towns I lived in.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that intertextuality doesn’t only come to the well read amongst us. Of course, well read people can line up few legitimate footnotes beneath their claim. Others can't. I hope I don’t come off as a completely ignorant and smug, bragging about one's self-credited genius, because, in all honesty, I'm not trying to. If anything, this is inspired by acute depression and envy that I regularly feel when reading and listening to some of you, dear peers from other places.

The drama of it all is that I can divert myself from my own fault by rightfully blaming few dictators and warlords along with my teachers and parents. All those were members of a gang that crippled the education and wider academic upbringing of entire generations. And it was so easy: they took books off shelves and put nothing instead. Literally nothing.

During the lunch breaks at school, I would sneak out and cross the highway. I would run very fast to a newspaper stand. The vendor was used to being confronted by angry fathers demanding a refund, so I lied, telling him my parents gave me money to buy a kids' magazine. Once I was back at school, beneath my blue school uniform, the colorful pages of the magazine would be glued by sweat to my body. I knew I did my part. The rest was up to somebody else.

Coming back to not that pretty girls with freckles and wavy hair: when you grow up to be a not that pretty woman with very cute freckles and God knows what kind of hair, you realize that your survival mode fails you badly when you are talking to that attractive guy who seems very smart. But this is something completely different and I am not comfortable talking about it just yet.

Sumeja Tulic is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and photographer living in Sarajevo. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about her childhood in Libya.

Photographs by the author. You can find more of her photography here.

"Joan of Arc" - Madonna (mp3)

"Borrowed Time" - Madonna (mp3)