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Iman

6/19/2014

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Writing by Iman from the first workshop.
Picture
Photo from http://ghth.wordpress.com/2007/10/21/blog-7-autumn-rains-and-harvest-time/
Iman

Seven thousand years of known history and seven billion people on earth - that’s a fact.  

How many more facts I need to know the simple answers of my being?

Digging into, digging onward, digging at; not to stop digging is a fact.

***

I am from a land that gets very dry in the summer and scarcely wet in the winter
from an olive branch that taught me to pick and prick
from a neighborhood that smells donkey shit and fed me childhood

I am the daughter of a strong female lineage that sowed love and resistance
breast-fed milky-way dairy and backed faces of martyrs to feed my people

I am the happiness of a child finding a shekel on the ground and a rage of an old man not able to cross the road to his village because the road was hijacked by a settler

I am the carrier of a Canaanite bone and beauty and the daughter of the goddess of sacred marriage

I am the autumn leaf that keeps dying and resurrects in all your religions

***

Mary is a name that I always fancied. It was the name of my childhood friend, a name that I wanted to have, but how can I have a Mary name when my mother is called Marie, the French equivalent of the English Mary.

The same name in Arabic is Mariam, a name that people think  comes from the Virgin Mary, but it is the name of the northern part of Palestine during the Canaanite era.  

A name that grabs the strength of red soil, green land and the music of the waves of the Mediterranean Sea: Miriam, Mary, Marie.

Marie had another name - when she was young, she was called Alice. Every time, my great grandmother gave birth to a daughter she would call her Marie, and the child would die. 

She lost three Maries and insisted on calling my mother by the same name, a sadomasochist act that I never understood.  

Alice/Mary carried the burden of her dead aunts and kept a promise to her grandmother to fight death despite the many visits he attempted at her.

Mary though was never married. she is still the neighbor of the virgin Mary.
1 Comment
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9/8/2023 11:21:22 am

Thhanks for this blog post

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