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| John Martin & Najet at a reading I produced for Black Sparrow, Borders Books, Santa Rosa |
I went to see my old friend, Lee Perron at Litton Station Road in Healdsburg to watch the lunar eclipse. Black Sparrow publisher John Martin and his new wife from Morocco came late, halfway through the eclipse. Najet looked as if she had stepped out of the painting, The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau. Only this time, the lion slept at her feet. Najet’s English had improved dramatical ly since the last time I saw her, and we can converse, as I speak no French or Arabic.
As we sat watching the earth's shadow slide across the moon's surface, I told my friends about my experiences at Poetry International, and I asked Najet if she knew Egyptian activist poet, Zein El’Abidin Fouad on a fluke, and she exclaimed, yes! I told her about a poem he had read in Arabic that gave me goosebumps, and the one word I recognized over and over again, that sounded something like sh-hilim. Dream.
I was stunned when she began to recite his poem from memory, apparently in the Arabic world, it’s a very famous poem. I could pick out the Arabic word for dream again and again. Her voice, as she incanted the poem, raised the hairs on my arms, and we were transfixed under the moonlight, mesmerized by the Arabic cadences.
She said the word was chulm, it was also a word for woman, and that women very much like this poet—for it was a poem for women. Not men. She said Zein was famously known as a woman’s poet, and champion for human rights. Especially for the disenfranchised who had no voice. Zein, whose epithet was “the singing bomb,” created a street play of poems with the untouchable women who gleaned Cairo’s garbage. For that, he had to flee for his life. In Egypt he has a price on his head. Yasir Arafat saved his life.
She talked about how in Morocco during the full moonlit nights, or during eclipses, how everyone gathered outside to have dinner and watch the celestial show. Like tonight. I was in the presence of an ancient, ageless memory, a time capsule of culture. Najet was John’s sleek black sparrow dreaming in the moonlight, dreaming of Morocco.
I was transported to North Africa, seeing the moonlight on the dunes, and I could almost smell the strange smoky odor of burning cattle dung, crushed mint, and the cry of the villagers, the drone of village dogs, a distant memory in the kingdom of imagination. That curious sensation of recognition and déjà vu.
And earlier, as John and I leaned on his car to steady the binoculars, I recalled that I had a dream fragment, staring at an orange moon like this, and there were others gathered in the moonlight, they were speaking in language, I did not understand. I couldn't see them very well. In that moment, I realized it was John and his lovely new wife in the dream.
Perhaps it was John and Lee in the dream as well. We seem to have a strange and wonderful connection. Call it kismet. I don't even know how long ago the dream was, or where it was set, or even who was in it. Did I write it down? I usually wrote down my dreams. What I do remember was the moonlight glowing orange, and our game of moon tag. And the stories.
Then I begin to wonder if the reason why I was so profoundly affected by Zein’s poem was because I'd already met them in the secret story in a dream, such as this night. And then, when the poem unfolded for the third time, I was merely returning to the mortal plane of reality, for I had already experienced it within the dreamscape.
When Zein had read that poem, I was riveted to my seat, listening with every pore of my body to the Arabic. I was transfixed. Time, telescoping, backwards and forwards at a furious rate, leaving me breathless.
Perhaps John was also seeing a new side of her too, it was like a surprise gift. He’d begun to think he knew her and then she surprised him with this poem beneath the full eclipse moon. In that male-dominated world of putting people in their place, the bonds between women are forged in something ancient and tribal, we had an intimacy and rapport that men seek, but can never find. For a moment they were jealous.
John’s smoker’s cough is much worse now, I am worried about him, his heart is not good, and his voice, his lovely voice, is hoarse. He says his eyesight is also bad, but he tells me, that for $60 you can go to UC Med Center and be tested for 50 different ailments.
John told us us the moon looks like a side profile of a sheik. I shrieked, look there's John Martin in the moon! and we all laughed. He told us a convoluted story about being stuck in Rotterdam between trips when he was working on freighter ships, I assumed this was during his vagabond days, staying in some funky hotel or fleabag flat that hadn't yet been bombed in World War II.
What American communist sympathizer was visiting Rotterdam in 1932? Most likely a man. And why, for Rotterdam was merely a huge industrial port, with no artistic aspirations, not like Amsterdam. No Chet Baker falling over and over again from that second store window in the Hotel Prins Hendrix in the Red Light District.
As we sat watching the earth's shadow slide across the moon's surface, I told my friends about my experiences at Poetry International, and I asked Najet if she knew Egyptian activist poet, Zein El’Abidin Fouad on a fluke, and she exclaimed, yes! I told her about a poem he had read in Arabic that gave me goosebumps, and the one word I recognized over and over again, that sounded something like sh-hilim. Dream.
I was stunned when she began to recite his poem from memory, apparently in the Arabic world, it’s a very famous poem. I could pick out the Arabic word for dream again and again. Her voice, as she incanted the poem, raised the hairs on my arms, and we were transfixed under the moonlight, mesmerized by the Arabic cadences.
She said the word was chulm, it was also a word for woman, and that women very much like this poet—for it was a poem for women. Not men. She said Zein was famously known as a woman’s poet, and champion for human rights. Especially for the disenfranchised who had no voice. Zein, whose epithet was “the singing bomb,” created a street play of poems with the untouchable women who gleaned Cairo’s garbage. For that, he had to flee for his life. In Egypt he has a price on his head. Yasir Arafat saved his life.
She talked about how in Morocco during the full moonlit nights, or during eclipses, how everyone gathered outside to have dinner and watch the celestial show. Like tonight. I was in the presence of an ancient, ageless memory, a time capsule of culture. Najet was John’s sleek black sparrow dreaming in the moonlight, dreaming of Morocco.
I was transported to North Africa, seeing the moonlight on the dunes, and I could almost smell the strange smoky odor of burning cattle dung, crushed mint, and the cry of the villagers, the drone of village dogs, a distant memory in the kingdom of imagination. That curious sensation of recognition and déjà vu.
And earlier, as John and I leaned on his car to steady the binoculars, I recalled that I had a dream fragment, staring at an orange moon like this, and there were others gathered in the moonlight, they were speaking in language, I did not understand. I couldn't see them very well. In that moment, I realized it was John and his lovely new wife in the dream.
Perhaps it was John and Lee in the dream as well. We seem to have a strange and wonderful connection. Call it kismet. I don't even know how long ago the dream was, or where it was set, or even who was in it. Did I write it down? I usually wrote down my dreams. What I do remember was the moonlight glowing orange, and our game of moon tag. And the stories.
Then I begin to wonder if the reason why I was so profoundly affected by Zein’s poem was because I'd already met them in the secret story in a dream, such as this night. And then, when the poem unfolded for the third time, I was merely returning to the mortal plane of reality, for I had already experienced it within the dreamscape.
When Zein had read that poem, I was riveted to my seat, listening with every pore of my body to the Arabic. I was transfixed. Time, telescoping, backwards and forwards at a furious rate, leaving me breathless.
I would never have told Najet about the story or the dream, but out of the blue, she had asked if I'd heard him read the poem in Arabic. So she's part of the dream landscape, too. I watched her transformed under the moonlight as she recited the poem. I was bearing witness to something both holy and profound.
Perhaps John was also seeing a new side of her too, it was like a surprise gift. He’d begun to think he knew her and then she surprised him with this poem beneath the full eclipse moon. In that male-dominated world of putting people in their place, the bonds between women are forged in something ancient and tribal, we had an intimacy and rapport that men seek, but can never find. For a moment they were jealous.
Was it because she and I had sat huddled together in lawn chairs beneath my down sleeping bag? I felt it again when she hugged me goodbye, the aha factor, the deep connection of the woman’s world of the harem, perhaps. Not sexual, but deeply connected. Of course, I am curious about her. It's not often one gets to meet a Moroccan woman on such familial, or intimate circumstances.
But that night, under the blood-red moon, we were sisters. She didn’t know that Lee and I were once a couple, but Lee and John are best friends, and I am included in this extended family by proximity. I wonder if John knows about our past. Men do talk. I am sure he does.
John’s smoker’s cough is much worse now, I am worried about him, his heart is not good, and his voice, his lovely voice, is hoarse. He says his eyesight is also bad, but he tells me, that for $60 you can go to UC Med Center and be tested for 50 different ailments.
He and I joke about the moment when we knew our eyes were failing us. Unable to read a map at night, unable to help ourselves if we were lost in the streets of Amsterdam. We giggle. Lee is somewhere else in his own world. And we laugh some more, saying we couldn't even read our own star maps in order to to help ourselves.
Maybe the landscape of the dream unravels, unavailable to us during our conscious moments, and we let go of the other feeling of defeat and helplessness. Rights of passage. I gaze upon a middle-age man at 43 going on 44, a man who once meant the world to me, and now I am too clearly moving towards middle-age, and my eyes are lazy dogs.
Maybe the landscape of the dream unravels, unavailable to us during our conscious moments, and we let go of the other feeling of defeat and helplessness. Rights of passage. I gaze upon a middle-age man at 43 going on 44, a man who once meant the world to me, and now I am too clearly moving towards middle-age, and my eyes are lazy dogs.
John told us us the moon looks like a side profile of a sheik. I shrieked, look there's John Martin in the moon! and we all laughed. He told us a convoluted story about being stuck in Rotterdam between trips when he was working on freighter ships, I assumed this was during his vagabond days, staying in some funky hotel or fleabag flat that hadn't yet been bombed in World War II.
He said there was an alley that had a library of sorts. John said that he found a copy of the Mein Kampf with a Berkeley public library card stuck inside, dated 1932, that was 25 years overdue he brought it back to the Bay Area, and returned it to the Berkeley Public Library with a note. Wow.
Rotterdam was, of course, destroyed by the Nazis, and very little old architecture still exists. The fact that the book survived so long is amazing. Even more amazing, the book was from Berkeley, there's a communist republic of memory simultaneously developing the bomb and giving birth to red diaper babies.
What American communist sympathizer was visiting Rotterdam in 1932? Most likely a man. And why, for Rotterdam was merely a huge industrial port, with no artistic aspirations, not like Amsterdam. No Chet Baker falling over and over again from that second store window in the Hotel Prins Hendrix in the Red Light District.
