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ALAWIYA SOBH THREE CHAPTERS FROM HER NOVEL, AN TA'ASHAQ AL-HAYAT To Love Life TRANSLATED BY NANCY ROBERTS Chapter One “ I’ve told you a lot so far, but I don’t remember anything anymore. I can’t tell my story in chronological order, but where was I? Can you remind me? Since getting sick, I’ve developed a habit that I don’t know how to break.When I’m talking, and even when I’m not, I keep pressing on my wrist, as if I think that will keep my memory from slipping out of my head from all the sedatives and other meds. “All I remember is that whenever I finish the first chapter, I find myself starting a new, different ‘first’ chapter.Then I start a second one, or a third one or a fourth . . . I’ve lost count of all the ‘first’ chapters in my story! My delirium, my forgetfulness, scares me to death, not because beginnings are so difficult and confusing, but because they’ve started to get mixed up with endings, like sleeping getting mixed up with being awake. There are no boundaries between things anymore, no separation between one time and the next when the present burns up the past and turns to ashes.The present’s stained with blood. Even Nature’s seasons have started to overlap and get all confused.Their names have changed as though they’d lost their memory, or as though they were sick and delirious like me. Time itself has become ambiguous. “Please listen to me the way you do when we have long talks over the phone and we never run out of things to say.You don’t have to rearrange the story to however suits you, or the way a novelist would do, or the way my friend Anisa does after she finishes the first draft of a book. 78 BANIPAL 70 – SPRING 2021
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ALAWIYA SOBH An Ta'ashaq al-Hayat, Dar Al-Adab 2020 “Let my story wander around lost, the way I do. When my body gets its memory back, my life will catch its breath, recover its chapters, its seasons. But for now, leave my words scattered just the way they are, and just the way I’m able to recall them on my own. Imagine what a struggle it is, what a war I have to wage with my memory, and how much I agonize! As if the war my body is waging against me weren’t enough. I have so many thoughts, but they evaporate in a flash before I can tell you about them. I strain to recall this idea or that, or to grab hold of the thoughts that cross my mind. I’ll be determined to put them in your hands, but they escape from me. It’s like trying to fill a basket with water. Because of the sedatives, my memory is encased in a thick, white fog that feels as hard as iron. “Sometimes I’m lost to myself. I lose track of when I was born, of how old I am. I even lose track of my here and now. I can’t tell where I am: am I in some wrecked, blood-stained room in Syria, or Iraq, or Libya, or Yemen? Or am I in a country where this room is all that’s left? I’ll be so disoriented that I can’t even conjure an image of my own face, and I need to look in a mirror to remember what I look like. I often don’t recognize this woman with the spasmcontorted face, her features destroyed. “I wander through the rooms and down the corridor, trying to recognize a place that seems unfamiliar to me. All my homes feel alien to me now: my body, my memory,Youssef, my country.When I get up in the morning to make my coffee, I often put two cups on the tray: one for me, and one for my mother, who died fifteen years ago, and swallow the lump in my throat. Sometimes I’ve got up off the couch at night, fighting off the convulsions racking my body, and danced around the room. Its walls feel like mirrors all around BANIPAL 70 – SPRING 2021 79

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ALAWIYA SOBH

THREE CHAPTERS FROM HER NOVEL, AN TA'ASHAQ AL-HAYAT

To Love Life TRANSLATED BY NANCY ROBERTS

Chapter One

“

I’ve told you a lot so far, but I don’t remember anything anymore. I can’t tell my story in chronological order, but where was I? Can you remind me? Since getting sick, I’ve developed a habit that I don’t know how to break.When I’m talking, and even when I’m not, I keep pressing on my wrist, as if I think that will keep my memory from slipping out of my head from all the sedatives and other meds.

“All I remember is that whenever I finish the first chapter, I find myself starting a new, different ‘first’ chapter.Then I start a second one, or a third one or a fourth . . . I’ve lost count of all the ‘first’ chapters in my story! My delirium, my forgetfulness, scares me to death, not because beginnings are so difficult and confusing, but because they’ve started to get mixed up with endings, like sleeping getting mixed up with being awake. There are no boundaries between things anymore, no separation between one time and the next when the present burns up the past and turns to ashes.The present’s stained with blood. Even Nature’s seasons have started to overlap and get all confused.Their names have changed as though they’d lost their memory, or as though they were sick and delirious like me. Time itself has become ambiguous.

“Please listen to me the way you do when we have long talks over the phone and we never run out of things to say.You don’t have to rearrange the story to however suits you, or the way a novelist would do, or the way my friend Anisa does after she finishes the first draft of a book.

78 BANIPAL 70 – SPRING 2021

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