After the rain falls (holy cow it's long!)
November 22, 2004
Today was the first winter rain. Actually, I think it rained last night, but I was so out of it apparently that I didn�t know until I read about it in a fellow Cairene diarylander�s diary. At least, that�s what I think that entry was about.
So today I got up much, much earlier than usual. My dad gets up around dawn each day and at around 7:30 or 8 goes for brisk, one-hour walk. I was supposed to go to the club with him, but was too tired, and didn�t want to keep him, so I told him I�d catch up with him later. Heh. I ended up getting to the club just as he was leaving. It�s okay though, I went running for the first time in about 2 months. I only managed to do about a mile before getting the shakies. Honestly, I only went running in the morning because I wanted to get an early start to my day and figured that would wake me right up and I need the exercise, but I hate working out in the morning. My muscles and joints are so unbelievably stiff. The difference in my body between morning and later in the day is huge. When I was stretching this morning I could barely touch my toes from a standing stretch. I just stretched now and was able to wrap my hands around my toes and touch my head to my knees. But, though a bit stiff, I feel pretty good now.
Okay, so the point�I went to the club, and on my way to the club I realized that it had rained at some point in the night. I did my run/jog and on the way back home it started drizzling. As I was nearing my building I saw a man sitting in the front seat of his parked car, his head tilted back and his mouth opened in, what seemed like, ecstasy, hands out of sight. (I am really suspicious of scenes like this). As I got closer though I realized that he was just asleep. Don�t ask why I didn�t keep my head down and walk the other way. Sometimes curiosity really gets the better of me.
I went home, hopped in the shower, and then set off for some research and study time at the American University. I couldn�t really find many sources for this second paper I have to write, and it�s really starting to get to me. While walking through the stacks I found myself thinking that I would just hand in the one paper I�m almost done with, take my Israeli Lit comprehensive this weekend, and then just fuck the second paper. Shoot myself in the foot. Go down in my own history as the dumb girl who missed getting her masters by one damn paper. That would be *just* like me. So sad.
I stupidly decided to catch a cab home from the university, which is in the heart of downtown, at rush hour. Four cabbies rejected me before one came along who would take me home. He was a youngish guy�actually I found out later he�s only a year older than me. He has a degree in business, but couldn�t find a job for years after graduating, so he works as a cabbie during the day and at night he�s a waiter. He was sweet, and a little flirtatious, but in a way that didn�t make me uncomfortable. It really started pouring on the way home, and I told him how much I loved the rain in Cairo. Two seconds later his windshield wiper fell off. Oops.
As we turned onto my street, which is also the home of the Ministry of Agriculture, and therefore a lot of government employees, people kept trying to wave my cab down, calling into the slightly open windows the names of the streets they wanted to go to. My cabbie said, �Can�t they see you sitting in the back? Why would I pick them up? I can barely fit two people in here let alone another two or three.� I told him that sometimes, because of the way the light reflects off the glass, you really can�t see if there is anyone sitting in the back or not. His response? �Yes, maybe they are blinded by all the light you radiate.� Haha. I thought it better not to tell him that my last name is in fact Light. He was sweet though when he dropped me off he almost seemed to be waiting to see which building I would go into which kind of creeped me out. I guess it�s a good thing I always get out at least two buildings away from where I actually live�
In general, I think rain is nice if the overall weather is not too yucky, but I absolutely love it when it rains in the Middle East. I mean, in Cairo it gets messy as hell if it rains too much, since after years of sloshing through muddy, knee-deep puddles the authorities still have not figured out that an overhaul of the drainage system is sorely needed.
Despite the messiness though, I love it when it rains here. You can feel the city cleaning up, and if you go to the outskirts of the city the already green, green delta farmland is that much greener. I think though nothing will ever top the way the rain feels in the Gulf. I remember reading Bader Shakir al-Sayyab�s Ode to the Rain for the first time in a seminar my junior year at Penn, and before the poem explicitly stated that it was set in Iraq (I didn�t know then that Sayyab was Iraqi), I could tell that this poem was set in the Arabian Gulf region. There is nothing, in my mind, like rain in an arid desert. In Kuwait, the day after a heavy rain, you could go out near the 6th Ring Road where it is mostly desert for miles and miles except for the baseball fields and the equestrian club (which, long after the war, housed scud missiles and other �fun� war paraphernalia), and suddenly where the day before there had just been miles of sand and a few tufts of brittle desert greenery there were tiny flowers in bloom everywhere and lush green vines. In six years it never lost its beauty for me.
And of course, I�ll never forget the great flood of �96 where it rained hard, heavy rains all day longs, and because Kuwaiti roads are not equipped to deal with such heavy rains there were areas where the water just pooled, sometimes 6 feet deep or more. And rumor has it that some people brought out their jet skis and were skiing through the streets. Wee! I remember my brother and I trying to get home on the late bus, when it broke down (the little engine that just couldn�t anymore) about 3 miles from where we lived. I don�t remember how we got home that day�I think one of my dad�s co-workers saw us and took us home�but it�s one of those memories that my brother and I look back and laugh over: the day we got stranded in the torrents of rain on the streets of Hawalli. There was such a great feeling about that day and the next one�there was something about the way the air smelled and felt, like God had started off really angry, but decided to take pity on us. I can�t really describe it.
Well, look at me babbling on and on. Procrastination will do that to you I guess. I�ll leave off then with one of my favorite modern Arabic poems, maybe one of my favorite poems ever. As my friend Ian said after reading this the first time, �If the Arabs ran their governments like they write their poetry, they would rule the world.�
Amen.
Your eyes are two palm tree forests in early light,
Or two balconies from which the moonlight recedes
When they smile, your eyes, the vines put forth their leaves,
And lights dance . . . like moons in a river
Rippled by the blade of an oar at break of day;
As if stars were throbbing in the depths of them . . .
And they drown in a mist of sorrow translucent
Like the sea stroked by the hand of nightfall;
The warmth of winter is in it, the shudder of autumn,
And death and birth, darkness and light;
A sobbing flares up to tremble in my soul
And a savage elation embracing the sky,
Frenzy of a child frightened by the moon.
It is as if archways of mist drank the clouds
And drop by drop dissolved in the rain . . .
As if children snickered in the vineyard bowers,
The song of the rain
Rippled the silence of birds in the trees . . .
Drop, drop, the rain
Drip,
drop the rain
Evening yawned, from low clouds
Heavy tears are streaming still.
It is as if a child before sleep were rambling on
About his mother (a year ago he went to wake her, did not find her,
Then was told, for he kept on asking,
After tomorrow, she'll come back again . . .
That she must come back again,
Yet his playmates whisper that she is there
In the hillside, sleeping her death for ever,
Eating the earth around her, drinking the rain;
As if a forlorn fisherman gathering nets
Cursed the waters and fate
And scattered a song at moonset,
Drip, drop, the rain
Drip,
drop, the rain
Do you know what sorrow the rain can inspire?
Do you know how gutters weep when it pours down?
Do you know how lost a solitary person feels in the rain?
Endless, like spilt blood, like hungry people, like love,
Like children, like the dead, endless the rain.
Your two eyes take me wandering with the rain,
Lightning's from across the Gulf sweep the shores of Iraq
With stars and shells,
As if a dawn were about to break from them, But night pulls over them a coverlet of blood. I cry out to the Gulf:
O Gulf,
Giver of pearls, shells and death!"
And the echo replies,
As if lamenting:
O Gulf,
Giver of shells and death .
I can almost hear Iraq husbanding the thunder,
Storing lightning in the mountains and plains,
So that if the seal were broken by men
The winds would leave in the valley not a trace of Thamud.
I can almost hear the palmtrees drinking the rain,
Hear the villages moaning and emigrants
With oar and sail fighting the Gulf
Winds of storm and thunder, singing
Rain . . . rain . . .
Drip, drop, the rain . . .
And there is hunger in Iraq,
The harvest time scatters the grain in-it,
That crows and locusts may gobble their fill,
Granaries and stones grind on and on,
Mills turn in the fields, with them men turning . . .
Drip, drop, the rain . . .
Drip
Drop
When came the night for leaving, how many tears we shed,
We made the rain a pretext, not wishing to be blamed
Drip, drop, the rain
Drip,
drop, the rain
Since we had been children, the sky
Would be clouded in wintertime,
And down would pour the rain,
And every year when earth turned green the hunger struck us.
Not a year has passed without hunger in Iraq.
Rain . . .
Drip, drop, the rain . . .
Drip, drop . . .
In every drop of rain
A red or yellow color buds from the seeds of flowers.
Every tear wept by the hungry and naked people
And every spilt drop of slaves' blood
Is a smile aimed at a new dawn,
A nipple turning rosy in an infant's lips
In the young world of tomorrow, bringer of life.
Drip.....
Drop..... the rain . . .In the rain.
Iraq will blossom one day '
I cry out to the Gulf:
O Gulf,
Giver of pearls, shells and death!"
The echo replies
As if lamenting:
O Gulf,
Giver of shells and death."
And across the sands from among its lavish gifts
The Gulf scatters fuming froth and shells
And the skeletons of miserable drowned emigrants
Who drank death forever
From the depths of the Gulf, from the ground of its silence,
And in Iraq a thousand serpents drink the nectar
From a flower the Euphrates has nourished with dew.
I hear the echo
Ringing in the Gulf:
Rain . . .
Drip, drop, the rain . . .
Drip, drop."
In every drop of rain
A red or yellow color buds from the seeds of flowers.
Every tear wept by the hungry and naked people
And every spilt drop of slaves' blood
Is a smile aimed at a new dawn,
A nipple turning rosy in an infant's lips
In the young world of tomorrow, bringer of life.
And still the rain pours down.