In Praise of Hatred

Hatred has taken possession me. I was enthused by it; I felt that it was saving me. Hatred gave me the feeling of superiority I was searching for. 

The hatred was like pus coagulating thick and yellow within us, without any possible release. 

Hatred was worthy of praise, as it lived within us exactly as love does. It grief moment by moment in order to settle finally in our souls, and we don’t want to escape it even when it causes us pain. 

Very rarely you read a book in first person narrative, and one to a level where you never learn the name of the protagonist cum narrator. It somehow hides the identity of the character whose mind is the presentation of the entire story. Everything happening around is actually happening in her mind and her own interpretation and response to those events. But that still doesn’t take away anything from the reality of the story, yet retain its dreamlike texture. 

Aleppo turned into a city of wails, curtailed funerals, silent elegies and deep sadness in mothers eyes as, a few meters away from them, murderers strutted about in their uniforms and boasted. 

So this book takes us to Syria via Yemen and Afghanistan.

And what do we learn about it’s culture, the foods — lamb stuffed with almond and laid on a mound of freekah fried in butter, stuffed kibbeh, molokhiyya, ghazal banat, cheese pastries

The music - Um Kulthowm, Abdel Halim Hafez, Zakaria Ahmed, Jahiliyya, Mohammed Khairy, Najah Salam 

The writers - Sura Yusuf, Sayyid Qutb’s Social Justice in Islam 

Movies - Trinity is still my name 

The scene inside the hammams- naked women sprawling over, lusting for water  and indulging in relaxation, laughter and cleaning rituals. Oils, Herbal infusions, bilun the special clay from Aleppo. 

The culture of trilling to ward off evil on a good occasion, or the small time perfumer makers who try to capture the essence of butterflies and sunflowers into their scents and sell to young women with their passionate origin stories. 

The city sizzles with strifes amongst its own children, for religion, communism and foreign interests. I wonder if the villain is really evil, or it’s a person who really hates something and someone. Our terrible hate for someone makes us do evil things. After all what is misery, it’s the inability to love and evil, an extreme hatred for something or someone. 

And this narrator is how the general populace responds to the events happening, the euphoria of collective thinking, obsessive hatred for the opposite and the war which becomes corrupt and bloody. Then the losses which make you rethink the entire purpose of a collective thought which never came true. A vision based on the mirage created in the collective innocent minds to guide them for petty political interests which are in the business of wars and weapons. What do common people do in the background of a created strife which takes its own shape and destroys like a butterfly effect across not one but many countries.

the story unfolds in the old house of a Syrian carpet family where the men wander for the illusive Islamic heaven whereas the women wait for their return, praying to their faith and maintaining piousness in an ugly and cruel world. The young protagonist hates to her core but sits on the wall as she finds the hatred burning her insides and making her hollow of her soul and ability to love. Extreme hatred is nothing but the lives of Voldemort extinguishing and finishing the one it’s meant to preserve. 

‘We need Scheherazade.’ One of the simplest but poignant lines from the book, where a tragedy of the highest order needs a story teller, who can tell a lie in its various forms so the reality does not turn so ugly and it’s something that can be only imagined and never done. 

The story is innocent and true. Being respectful and disrespectful as it says everything and nothing to offend as well as defend the story and it’s characters. The protagonist has no name and I wonder what could be her name if the author ever wanted to give one - a young college going girl who leads prayer circles and talks about the the heaven after death. 

The smell of sweat mixed with women’s perfume began to relax me, like a woman whose desires are inflamed by chanting. 

Waiting for something which never came was better than having nothing at all to wait for. 

A carpet with line of Mutanabbi’s:

Homes! There are homes for you in our hearts

You are now deserted, yet you are inhabiting them. 

Their stupid stories about falling in to genie backs, as Wasal used to describe them 

Nothing will save me but love 

That was what I loved about her; she listened at intently to whoever needed it that the other half of the truth, which had always been concealed, came to light. 

Marwa embroidered handkerchiefs. I didn’t know who she would give them to; she piled them in her wardrobe and postponed her death a day at a time. She offered to teach me hoe to embroider and I told her seriously and to her astonishment, ‘I don’t want  to wait for death.’ 

The prince, exhausted after abandoning humans to the remembrance of his dream, concluded his speech but saying briefly, I want a palace which looks like my mothers womb. 

People were prepared to die for God. I used to think: if people die as martyrs for God, hoe do both the killers and killed enter paradise? 

After reading the works it Trotsky, amounts of revolutions and The Communist Manifesto, Bakr quietly responders, ‘Enemies always have something to teach us.’ 

I remembered the sunflowers Safaa had brought from a nearby village. She had picked them before sunrise so they would retain the dew. She gave them to Radwan and persuaded him that their extract when brewed, released a scent no words could describe, adding carelessly, ‘It helps pregnant women with an easy childbirth.’ 

She was bewildered by the force of the fear of death, close to a desire to laugh; they overlapped to such a degree that it was difficult to establish where the separation lay between them. 

Like a fish striving for the shore and which, having reached it, can no longer return to the safety and care of the sea. 

Abdullah Vented his desires for Safaa in love poetry which had a broken metre but also a strange charm in its composition, and which was limited to words which rhymed with ‘Safaa’. 

Disregarding the scores of lovers whom she had left longing for another taste of her kiss: she did this whether hates or loved him. The worst men, for her, were those who aroused neither rage nor longing; she would turn her back on them with no regret for their vague, insipid image. 

Advertising created prominent men, and power created statesmen.