– Hanna
Any woman who is capable of expressing herself artistically yearns to dive deep into her relationship with her mother. To draw her, to write about her, to dream of her, and to worry about her seems to her as primal as breathing.
I do not call myself a writer; I am merely a chronicler of my life. But within me burns an indomitable longing to write about my mother waiting to be set on fire like camphor – to sanctify the insides of my body birthed out of trauma. As Annie Ernaux writes in ‘A Woman’s Story’, “I believe I am writing about my mother because it’s my turn to bring her into the world.”
The sum of what I know about my mother, or rather what she has allowed me to know so far weighs less than the figs my father buy from the supermarket. A few of its dark violet skin lay beside the green ones like wild green grass in a cemetery. I can see my seventeen-year-old mother lying bedridden in her room battling hepatitis as if from a peephole to her teenage years. And when she was in the ICU working as a nurse in Saudi, her meticulously tied silky long hair unravelled defiling the sterile room as if it was Medusa’s. Once in a while, she asks me to play the ghazals of Mehdi Hassan, and sometimes, if she is not in a “hysterical, frantic state of mind”, she hums along secretly. There lies the plain whole truth. Simple and bare like the bruised skin of figs scattered on my table beside a laptop filled with futile notes about her. Though it may seem slightly controversial, I do believe that nobody in this world has known her like I do.
On days when I lay in my bed bleeding for hours with heat pads on my stomach, I often wonder about her. Who is she? How old is she exactly? What’s her favourite colour? Thus, the obsession to write about her and record her life in a language of my own. I carry her within me – her rage and her resilience like her twins in a womb so sacred and strange. She gave me layers in which we both exist – our affinities and disparities coexisting like tiny eggs nestled in the curves of my fallopian tube. To rediscover her through art has become the axis around which my life revolves.
Design by Neenu Elza
Article 19 