I Killed Scheherazade

Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman

Joumana Haddad

• Publisher: Saqi Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780863564277
• eBook ISBN: 9780863564444
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Literature

Joumana Haddad is angry about the way Arab women are portrayed in the West. In I Killed Scheherazade she challenges prevalent notions of identity and womanhood in the Middle East and speaks of her own intellectual development and the liberating impact of literature on her life. Fiery and candid, this is a provocative exploration of what it means to be an Arab woman today.

The Poet’s Chapter

Attempt at an Autobiography

GEOLOGY OF THE I

A poem is a naked person
Bob Dylan

I am the sixth day of December of the year 1970;

I am the hour just after noon.

I am my mother’s screams giving birth to me

and her screams giving birth to her.

Her womb releasing me to emerge from myself,

her sweat achieving my potentiality.

I am the doctor’s slap which revived me.

(Each subsequent slap trying to revive me quite destroyed me.)

I am the eyes of the family upon me,

the gazes of father, grandfather, of aunts.

I am all their possible scenarios;

I am the curtains drawn, the curtains behind the curtains and the walls behind those,

and I am she who has no name, no hand, for what comes behind.

I am the expectations of me, the aborted dreams,

the voids suspended as amulets around my neck.

I am the tight red coat I cried whenever I wore,

and every constriction which still makes me cry.

I am the brown-haired doll with plastic eyes;

I am that discarded doll I refused to rock,

cast aside, still oozing blood from the base of the head,

(Two drops on ordinary days and three on days off and holidays).

I am the sad hole in my teacher’s socks.

It still stares at me like the reproach of Abel in my soul,

staring to tell me of her poverty and my impotence,

the exhaustion of my patience and the terror of her despair.

I am the times table I haven’t mastered to this day;

I am the two that adds up to one, always one.

I am the theory of curved lines, never joined up,

and I am their applications.

I am my hatred of history, of algebra and of physics.

I am my faith, as a child, that the earth revolved around my heart

and my heart around the moon.

I am the lie of Santa Claus,

which I believe to this day.

I am the astronaut I used to dream I would become.

I am the wrinkles of my grandmother who committed suicide;

I am my forehead leaning on her absent lap.

I am the boy (was he called Jack?) who pulled my hair and ran off.

I am he who made me cry, which made me love him even more.

I

am my little kitten;

and the neighbours’ son’s bicycle which ran me over and I did not protest.

(I sold the souls of my cat for a single glance from that handsome boy.)

I am blackmail, my inaugural vice.

I am war

and the corpse of the man the combatants dragged around in front of me,

and his torn up leg trying to catch up with him.

I

am the books which I read as a child which were unsuitable for me,

(Which I now write and which are still unsuitable for me).

I am the adolescence of my right breast,

and I am the wisdom of the left.

The power of both under a tight shirt

and then my awareness of their power: the beginning of the descent.

I am my rapid boredom, my first cigarette, my late obstinacy,

and the seasons past.

I am the granddaughter of the child I was;

her lack of my anger,

my disappointments and my triumphs,

my labyrinths and my lusts,

my lies, my wars,

my scars and my wrong turns.

I am the tenderness I bear despite myself;

I am my god and my greed;

my absences filled with my dead;

and I am my dead who never sleep,

my slain who never sleep;

I am their last sighs on the pillow each dawn.

And I

am my resentment, my contagion,

my danger,

and my flight from cowardice to worse.

I am my waiting around not knowing the time

and my not understanding space.

I am the silence which I have learned

and the silence which I haven’t mastered yet.

The solitude which steps on my soul like an insect.

I am the granddaughter of the child I was:

My lack of her innate carelessness,

of her selfless perfection.

I am love’s disaster

and happening.

I am the wolf of poetry coursing through my blood

and me running barefoot with it;

I am she who is in search of her hunter

not finding her hunter.

I am the frothing waters of my lust as it gestures onto lust;

I am the succession of tongues which irrigate its froth,

and my lipstick anticipating their thirst.

I am my fingernails too: what lies beneath them and what they sink into.

I am the memory of their wounds,

the memory of their anger,

the memory of their weakness,

the memory of their streng...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note to the Reader
• Foreword by Etel Adnan
• To Start With ... On camels, belly dancing, schizophrenia and other pseudo-disasters
• I. An Arab Woman Reading the Marquis de Sade
• II. An Arab Woman Not Belonging Anywhere
• III. An Arab Woman Writing Erotic Poetry
• IV. An Arab Woman Creating a Magazine about the Body
• V. An Arab Woman Redefining Her Womanhood
• VI. An Arab Woman Unafraid of Provoking Allah
• VII. An Arab Woman Living and Saying No
• To Start Again ... Am I really an ‘Arab woman’?
• Post-Partum: I Killed Scheherazade
• The Poet’s Chapter: Attempt at an Autobiography
• Acknowledgments