Nour Mobarak

December 19, 2011





Nour

Dear NASA or Richard Branson,
It occurred to me yesterday that "gravity" must have the same etymology as "grave." This humble epiphany evoked a world of philological landscapes in my terrestrial mind, which have resulted in my writing you all this letter, petitioning you all with the, at the very least, poetic potential of the conception of a human in anti-gravity. I hereby come forth with a plea that you grant me the opportunity to offer my sex in space as a service to our numbing and wearied human race.

I believe that our globalized society is still trapped within a surface-level paradigm that cannot conceive of human life unaffixed to a surface. Our political situation is thus very grave, as our archaic views of [life] we choose to utilize the gift of our systemic minds only to create more surfaces and divisions. Life on earth has always been wrought with everyone’s eventual death. I think it would be very beautiful then, for the sake of our collective fantasy, to make a baby that is not only from no land but from no grave.

I am youthful, very fertile, of child-bearing age, and belonging to no real land. I am 26, have traveled to every continent, and believe I would be the perfect candidate for this project. I thank you to please deeply consider this proposition, and to please imagine the new realms our baby could bring to the weighted human mind.

Yours in Parts and Labor,
Nour Pamela Mobarak




Joanna Biggs

New York, November 2024



Dear Professor Lloyd,

You must get many, many letters like this. I write to you because I have been shaped by your revolution trilogy, profoundly so. I grew up in an unimportant suburb of London, far from any sort of intellectual life. My school was down at heel when I attended but it was once rich, and the library showed the traces of someone who knew things were happening beyond our small town. I didn’t act in school plays or participate in netball tournaments, I read. I read novels composed of frigid, perfect paragraphs; wobbly, energetic manifestos; smooth, slick poetry—and then I discovered you.

It’s no exaggeration, in a world full of them, to say that you have been my companion these twenty years of what I call—if you’ll forgive me—my intellectual formation. I don’t flatter myself that you’ll remember me from your lectures in Geneva. In June, we talked briefly about women’s role in the late nineteenth-century revolutions, variously central and irrelevant. It is something I am interested in.

What is a woman for, I was asking myself then, for myself, for perhaps the first time. I thought of many answers, but I kept returning to one idea. I confess I was almost disappointed in it: care. Care in the widest sense, I came to think, is about expanding our notion of what should be recuperated, nourished, allowed to grow. What did I want to see grow in the world? The sense of what a woman can do, certainly, including respect and even reverence for concerns historically deemed feminine. I do not have much hope there, globally. But locally, privately, say?

I am 35, and ripening. I have my books, my students, my cats, my cottage and garden, my mother and sisters and nieces, and my friends who are so dear to me. This is enough, more than. I take my nieces to see things: paintings, buildings, natural environments. Marking birthdays has begun to feel as important as working on my next paper. In this way I have been led, like a horse to water. I decided to spend my years of thinking, reading and saving on a child of my own, and began IVF.

I am trembling to write it, but I do think this is a rational proposition. I am seeking a donor, and I would like it to be you. There, I said it. You’re horrified, aren’t you? Has the letter dropped from your hand? Pick it up again and let me explain.

At a suburban clinic, in an overlit room with a print of a hound dressed as a doctor on the wall—hardly reassuring—I was given a binder of men to choose from. Inside plastic sleeves each soul was condensed to facts. A childhood photo, their eye colour, height, ethnicity, medical background and educational attainments. I had felt inspired until I saw that binder. I sensed I could only go so far against the established qualities of humanity—selfish, petty and mendacious as it is. (And short.) My mind wandered to you. You have no children, I believe. Shouldn’t one of the greatest minds of our time leave a genetic trace on earth?

I do not want a deeper relationship than the one I have with you already. My days are full and would become fuller. I do not need financial or practical assistance, other than the initial donation, for which we do not need to meet. I have rented a storage unit inside which I have placed a fridge set at 20 degrees celsius, the optimum temperature for sperm motility. And inside the fridge you will find a sterile plastic cup labelled with your name and academic titles. My plan is to raise the child in a circle of women, using the wisdom in your books. No human men will be regularly involved. Those are conditions for the child’s utmost happiness, I believe.

I’m aware that this letter might in fact dissuade you by its mere existence. But I make this proposition, an utterly rational one, with the earnestness my friends tell me is my best quality. You may only say no, and then I am where I always was, holding the plastic binder. And you might say yes!

I am visiting Geneva next month and I will attend your lectures while I’m there. I will wear a red scarf.

Yours, in hope,
Dr Elizabeth Fowler

Deborah Eisenberg

New York, September 1, 2024



Dearest (If I may):

Do (and here I’m charitably speculating that my previous letters have for some reason not reached you and that you have not already definitively done so) ignore what could be seen as pleas for help. All good. All fine. Adjustments have been made.

Your people pointed out (none too affectionately) that if I was “actually in such fucking despair,” I could “take the other option.” Well, what might that mean, exactly! A certain tone does not escape me.

You’ve observed that the list of things I don’t believe in is long. So true. And one of the things I most don’t believe in is “heaven” (Or does one say “Heaven” – there’s so much I’ve forgotten!) But why should I, I wonder. Aside from being deeply improbable, the concept, expressed by the word/s - or enduring bit of jargon, whatever you’d call it, is so vague, so candidly symbolic, so slobbily abstract as to offend one’s sense of dignity, n’est ce pas?

To be honest, I can’t imagine how anybody at all – aside from the exceptionally entitled or exceptionally deprived - can subscribe to such a notion, it’s an effort just to imagine imagining it. “heaven/Heaven” – the word/s suggest/s a home for the over-aged and over-wealthy – utterly sterile, institutional, the pompous authorities, a bit, how can I put it? Lifeless. (Joke.) If I could imagine a heaven/Heaven, no doubt it would feature little moons, hedgehogs, some very good music, birds and flowers and so on, no financial sector, you, and other delightful elements which I don’t quite have the energy to enumerate here.

In case my previous letters have not in fact reached you, I’ll just say that they (possibly rather frequently) have mentioned that the dog took off some months ago, I don’t know why – some things just don’t work out, and that my phone number is still the same, likewise my address, my email, and so on. If I have anything to apologize for, I apologize. And for what it’s worth, in case it’s not clear, I think of you with something like, something like special human feelings. I think of you . . .

Krithika Varagur

New York, December 2024



Dear Negar,

You’ve asked me why I’m always on Reddit. I think it’s the greatest website in the world. It’s like a house with so many rooms that there are “wings:” R slash ultralight (as in packing), R slash home defense, R slash actual lesbians, R slash adultery, R slash optometry.

You can’t believe I spend so much time on there; I can’t believe anyone chooses to go about life so unattended, so alone. In September, Reddit advised me on 152 subjects including: “Is organic food a scam?” “Resources for Egyptian genealogy.” “Has anyone gone to therapy for crippling email anxiety?”

Marx once evoked a “general intellect” that channels the minds of many and becomes a force of production. It’s striking, to me, that the general intellect of Reddit is not monetized – that this peerless website is free.

It’s not like me to reference Marx; the reference comes from Ricky, who was sort of delivering lectures on demand last spring, to keep me awake on an eight-hour drive to watch the solar eclipse. I was wired on Celsius after two late nights triaging our itinerary on R slash solar eclipse. (Tagline: “totality or bust, check the forecast and adjust.”) Thunderstorms were forecast all across the eclipse’s path in the Texas Hill Country, but Reddit pointed me to several informative cloud maps. By cross-referencing them, I determined that we had to cross state lines, from Texas to Arkansas. We did. And, exactly as Redditors had predicted, we got to see more than four minutes of the eclipse, of sudden twilight over a blindingly sunny day, in Paron, Arkansas.

You know when someone isn’t generically pretty, but beautiful in a way that only you were put on this earth to appreciate? That’s what some Reddit comments are like, especially when it comes to medical mysteries – of which there are many, if you know where to look.

For many years I’d given up on the keratosis pilaris on my arms. But a couple of months ago I idly revived my query on the great website and after several (dozen) tabs, I found something, or someone. “The ONLY product that completely got rid of all the bumps was a 30% urea lotion/cream... at 10% or higher concentration it is keratolytic, basically an exfoliating mechanism.” Keratolytic! The unassuming post was buried over a dozen replies down a low-profile thread. I alone could see the special genius of its author, who had peered far beyond generic offerings to arrive at this “molecule found in mammalian urine,” which a peer-reviewed study suggested would have the property of dissolving the keratin plugs in your skin… I ordered it immediately. And? It worked.

I know, I know. You can spiral, too. When I got the first real sunburn of my life and had to be taken home early from dinner, I sunk into the Reddit abyss. Laura took my phone away. I was annoyed; I was in the middle of someone’s absorbing account of how sun poisoning made his penis blister.

I don’t linger on forums that regularly get over 100 replies. At that level of engagement, your views are probably represented in mainstream media. No; it’s for the less-illuminated regions of the human condition that I come back time and again to Reddit, where millions have asked and answered, like Wordsworth asked the leech-gatherer, “How is it that you live, and what is it you do?”

I need – and find – regular assurance that my fellow humans have also experienced extreme distraction, rumination, despondency. More often, it’s not about me at all. I’ve spent countless hours perusing subs about “love addiction,” “dead bedrooms,” coparents from hell.

Recently, for instance, I found myself wondering about the life of a stay-at-home dad – textbook “none of my business.” I’m not a stay-at-home dad, nor did I have one. That didn’t stop me from getting so many interesting perspectives:

“It's been 4 years since I hung out with my friends in private…” “Mostly I play solo tabletop games. There's quite a vast category of [them]. I suppose that's considered a personal time after everyone else is asleep in the night…” “I feel you 100% on the depression. I’m treatment resistant, but he gives me a literal reason to get up like you said and not waste away in bed… He’s been a better treatment than any medication I’ve taken in the past for my depression… Just wakes up happy and (as long as he’s fed, like a reverse gremlin) just plays and laughs with me all day long.”

Such investigations are prurient, yes – but I think that anonymity takes off the voyeuristic edge. When it comes to the lives of others, there are only so many games in town: novels, journalism, gossip (but it corrodes the soul), talking to strangers (but everyone wears headphones now). So I keep coming back to Reddit.


Love,
Krithika

Simon Wu

New York, September 15, 2024



Dear committee,

I was sitting at the kitchen table, my socked feet sliding back and forth on the linoleum, looking out of the window above the sink to the backyard where the contractor was taking the first of his morning smoke breaks. I was reading from the archive I manage, an archive of the suburb that I live in, that the museum tasked me with acquiring and I have now preserved for years, when I glanced at my phone and I saw the ad for a mysterious award.

The website announced that it would be announcing the nominees slowly, over the course of the week, and it was only Monday, while the category I would be available for––suburban archivists–-would not be announced until later in the week. I was surprised an award existed for archivists, let alone one so specific, but it made me excited. So I ignored it, and continued reading.

When I got distracted, I looked at my text messages, and then my social media account, and then my work email, and then my personal email. I felt that I was scratching the same itch until it was raw.

Dear committee, when I say that I have never been struck by such green envy I do not exaggerate. For when I opened my computer on Thursday morning and saw that a certain archivist colleague, who I have learned duly from and always felt to be more splendidly skilled at the task than I was, had been honored with the award this year, I felt angry. My palms began to sweat and I felt trapped. My capacities for empathy and happiness shriveled, like a paper plane drowning in the mud of an algae-filled lake.

I picked at the skin at the edge of my cuticles. I adjusted my seat. I stood up and looked out the window. I poured myself a glass of water, tapping my foot against the bottom of the countertop and set my hand against my hip as the contractor walked back towards the house, uselessly brushing his feet off in the patio and tracking light mud spots across the linoleum. I felt abandoned.

Outside, across the street, a lawnmower revved into existence, decapitating the heads of thousands of blades of grass. Perhaps, in the midst of my envy, the sound of contractor’s nailing, and the grass being cut outside, I missed the first two or three knocks on the door, mistaking them somewhat for the lump of tears that I had swallowed in my chest, until the knocking became more insistent and I realized that I had a guest.

The man who greeted me outside stood sheepishly, a stance that belied the green of his eyes and the curl of brown hair atop his head. He was dressed, in a style familiar to me from my days in archival school, like a well-dressed pauper; in loafers, a pair of black slacks, a colared shirt slightly unbuttoned, and a dark green chore jacket. When he began to introduce himself, his mouth parted to reveal a set of charmingly incongruous front teeth, with a slight gap that sweetened the symmetry of the rest of his features. I didn’t know why he was here. I must have looked odd. The moment seemed to stretch on. The green of his eyes and the green of his jacket and the green of my envy looked back at me unflinchingly and I said “OK.”

Sincerely,
The Archivist

Mona Chalabi

New York, November 2024



Dear Isabella,

I have so many reasons for leaving that I don’t know why I’m doing it. Ever since I gave notice, I’ve been doubting myself. On the way back from your place the other night, after I had tried to help by arranging a small stack of your books and you tried to help by neatening my dating profile, after you talked about ruins and I talked about my body, I took a taxi home. I studied the man from that angle. You know how you can see a nape, a cheek bone, some eyelashes and I wondered when he had last peed. A driver once passed me his phone to enter my address, but the map showed his last search and it said public restrooms. Me and my cousin barely know each other except through our shared adoration of my mum and so when he offered me a lift one evening last year, our conversation was painfully polite. When he turned the car a plastic bottle slipped out from under the seat and I remembered that he had been working as a driver and understood that he had found himself without a restroom. The car turned again and thankfully the bottle slipped back from view.

On the ride back from yours, we slowed in traffic and found ourselves close to another taxi crawling in the opposite direction. The passenger in the back was talking, opening his mouth wide with every syllable and I wondered for a moment if he was in conversation with the man driving the car but then we moved forward and I saw he was talking to the woman beside him. Maybe the driver was relieved or indifferent but I assumed maybe he felt something sadder.

In the taxi from yours I cried, but just briefly. There were willow trees and I don’t think I’ve ever seen willow trees next to a highway you know? I promise I’m not trying to be poetic, but come on, willow trees? I thought maybe I was leaving New York because I was stranded here but that’s not it. I’m loved and it’s unbearable so I’m repeating an old pattern of running away from the gifts I’ve been given. Solitude is so much easier. I’m a monk when it comes to feelings you know.

I’ve been here too long. This city is quicksand. If I’m not careful, I will end up succumbing to the mundane wisps of after-the-dinner-is-over conversations, they’ll infiltrate my soul and I’ll end up getting Botox or smiling at bastards or marrying a man who wears a puffer vest or worse a man who wears shorts in winter. The man who lives below me is from some European country but we have never spoken for long enough for me to learn which one. Whenever I say hello, he looks nervous. One time, he bumped into a friend of mine downstairs and rather than holding the front door for her, he closed it in her face so she would have to buzz in. She shrugged when she told me the story and said “I’m a Black woman”. I stole his copy of Architectural Digest yesterday, by accident but I was happy when I realized I had done it. I could give it back, discreetly add it to the mail pile downstairs no harm done but instead I’m going to look at it on the toilet then throw it in the bin.

I went to a dinner last night. It was organized by a university here after I had spoken on a panel about this exhibition I’ve been working on. There was a professor and a dean and a curator and the head of the museum where the art was installed and I felt an old instinct to knock the cocktails out of the hands of the very nice people who gave me these opportunities. Ahmed came and sat beside me, a journalist I’ve gotten to know a bit these past few months. He’s writing an article about children who have had their limbs removed. Babies with that beautiful skin of theirs, those smiles where you see their little white Tic Tac teeth, smiles that make you think you’re a good person. They’ve had body parts ripped from them. He’s going to Amman to interview them and I worried if he would ever recover from writing this piece and I told him so and he shrugged and then I suggested a Haaretz article I read earlier this year where Israeli snipers explained to the journalist about how they compete over how many limbs they can get.

I’m crying again. Why am I so terrified to leave this savage kingdom? Pray for me, I’ll send you love back.


Mona

Isabella Hammad

Email from January 2020



Sorry about the storms over there, and the institutional uncertainty. Have the skies and/or the situation cleared a bit? Is it nice in the new house? Insulation in Palestine is terrible, yes. After some snow here it's been oddly mild for which we can prob thank global warming. Yes funny about our mutual friend, you came up in conversation and she was saying you were very close "and send videos", whatever that means. Although I guess you have technically just sent me a video. I haven't known her long, less than a year, but I like her a lot. She is quite bananas, which obviously appeals to me.

Things are fine here, although New York in winter is draining. I've nearly finished a draft of my silly radio story about the gun and am now getting back to the novel. I thought these two months would be solid novel writing but of course life and life here especially produces a million extra tasks and jobs that suck the time out of the day. The upside is it makes me feel a bit more urgent about the clock, so in theory more efficient. We'll see. I prefer the more dreamy, lazy kind of writing day, alas ...

No need to read the book! In fact, don't. It's very long. Read something short to get back into reading. Maybe a Coetzee? I also liked the new Elias Khoury, although he is not exactly concise.

Last night we went to see Little Women, me and the other two women authors I live with (I don't know if I explained my living situation. I personally think we are just housemates in a large duplex; the other two like to call it a "kind of literary commune," which I think is silly but maybe it's because they are at an age when they would prefer not to admit they have housemates). I found the film saccharine and sentimental and very American, with an excess of emotionally coercive violin music, but I also wept repeatedly about the character who plays the piano and dies, so I'm not really sure what that says about me. Also I never read Little Women which I thought was normal because I'm not American but just this week three men from different middle eastern countries told me they read it as children in Arabic or Farsi, which amazed me.

I will have a go at the yoga although I can't help but notice that within the first two minutes he does a handstand followed by some casual acrobatics. I think this is maybe pitching a little high. But thank you very much for sending it.

And have a nice time in London. Already January has gone, it happened so fast. My remaining housemate and I have decided to have a party on the last day of the month. I haven't hosted a party in an extremely long time and suddenly it dawns on me that actually it might be slightly ... stressful? The range of people will be very broad, I think. It will be like a social experiment! Anyway we invited our landlady and I just tried to persuade my amto to come, but I think that's unlikely since she goes to bed early, although she would undoubtedly be the heart and soul. She quote "loves to dance".

We went to hear Aida Touma Sliman speak at CPS on Tuesday, which was interesting, she was quite defensive and keen to prove her revolutionary credentials, while still using all that state lingo. I guess it's inevitable. Nothing else new to report, although I gave a lecture yesterday to a room mostly full of elderly women, who to my surprise had the best questions of any audience I have ever had. There was only one batty lady, who said something indistinct about how the tribes have been fighting for millennia, and then as I was saying goodbye afterwards began to tell me, "I hope your next book will also discuss the god-given ... " I said the what? It was very loud in there and she was old. "And the refugees," she said, "why do they insist on living in those awful refugee camps--" "Time to leave!" said the adjudicator, for which I thanked her.

I feel you about the living from a suitcase. I'm still not sure where I live, although my stuff is all here. But it sounds like you now live in Jerusalem, which I hope feels comforting, despite it being Jerusalem, and despite the travel.

Omar Berrada: A letter from Samih al-Qasim to Mahmoud Darwish

Jerusalem, February 8, 1988



Mahmoud, dear brother,

As you can see, we always return. We launch into remote parts of the earth and the body, vanish into recesses of the soul, and we return. We always return, to the eyes’ touch, to the heart’s gaze and the fingers’ vision; to this place, where immaculate stones lie next to a gondola bush that flourishes winter after winter. We return to births expected and unexpected in the chaos of this cruel and astounding time.

Our correspondence was interrupted for many heavy months. The postmen who used to open our letters and read them before us got bored. […]

When I returned to my office, I was greeted by stacks of unanswered letters. Two of them caught my heart, yours and that of our great friend and brother Abu Tawfiq Nizar Qabbani. Al-Ittihad newspaper had already published your letter to me and to your brothers of the Arab Writers Union, as well as Nizar's letter, so full of warmth and pain, and love for the children of the stones, whom he describes as the Palestinian dynasty that deposed the kings of poetry and reclaimed the reins of power.

There’s the kindhearted Nizar returning to his task, “with childlike innocence in his eyes,” and we know that his task is in line with his position as official spokesperson for the public conscience. But what about us?

For my part, I must say I have resigned from my job as spokesperson for the present. This job hurt me too much with its ceaseless disappointments. From now on, I will deal with the present only through the future. But allow me to share my worries and my fears.

I believe that the uprising of the Stones’ children, or the “Free Youth,” as I like to call them, is the most significant event in contemporary Arab history since the Free Officers' Revolution in Egypt... Here’s a quick recap.

The Free Officers Revolution... gave us Anwar Sadat.

The Arab soldiers’ victory over themselves and their enemies in the October War led to Camp David.

The Sinai, dear to our hearts... was swapped for Palestine, the Golan Heights and Lebanon, all precious fragments of our nation that deserve to be dear to our hearts.

And from the six-month strike --“The 1936 Revolution”--, we ended up with the Six-Day War! Why?

Because politicians always resort to poetry (bad poetry of course!). When politicians were promoting the poem “Let the sword speak”... they knew the sword was in the enemy’s hand rather than their own. Thus fell the sword of the poem, and thus fell the poem of the sword, leaving us with real swords hanging over our necks, the swords of colonialism, Zionism, occupation, reaction, and backwardness.

And now? We poets go to politics and demand protection for the achievements of Palestinian stones. And I fear that the politicians will once again go to poetry and satisfy themselves with singing “Let the stone speak.”

It is true, dear Mahmoud, that leaderships have shifted and varied, and it is true, there are fundamental differences between yesterday's leaders and today's, but the Palestinian leadership is not alone on the scene. “Independent” Palestinian decisions remain governed by “nationalism of the battle and internationalism of the conflict,” and there lies the danger. We cannot ignore the regimes that chose a different poem that goes, “Let the dollar speak.”

How happy and optimistic I am about our roses rising from a stone ... and yet at the same time, I fear for the rose.

Now let's look at our stones from another angle.

Two hundred million Arabs, a vast continent of limitless bounty and wealth, are finding their lost dignity in naked stones thrown by the palms of nearly naked boys in a refugee camp that has been nearly naked for forty years.

Why?!

Why couldn’t the opposite be our lived reality?

Why couldn’t these Arab millions be the ones who restore the Palestinian boy's violated dignity?

Has our great nation sunk to such political and moral poverty?

Can't these millions reclaim their dignity - our dignity - by themselves?

Are there no stones in the Arab world?

I swear, by all that we love and hold sacred, if this Nation decided to boycott American Coca-Cola, it would topple the world and raise another.

But what can we do when we are not in control?

God save us from being in control in the usual sense. The word actually came to me in the presence of two verses that Wadi` al-Bustani, the Lebanese-Palestinian poet, recited decades ago. At the time, Bustani came across the Jewish Agency's office in the British government palace and in anguish he muttered:

I see the homeland rising from the ground

And in the palace a room bent on blocking it

When not in control, remind them of a memory

For fear of the day reminders will no longer serve


Wadi` al-Bustani was not in control. We are not in control... Al-Bustani reminded us, and here we are remembering. The reminder did not help then. Can it help now?

I hope so, beloved brother.

I hope and I pray... the stones are my qibla.


Samih al-Qasim

Yasmine Seale

New York, January 2025



N,

When you asked me for a letter I thought of one I had seen as a child, though only a couple of words have remained in my mind and everything else about it has disappeared, the writer and the recipient, the Syria from which it was sent, the fastidious copperplate and the sense of something delicate being weighed, as if the whole thing had been written with suede gloves.

The letter was a response, a fragment from a larger correspondence between two men of the same age, discussing a decision they must have both suspected would be catastrophic.

One had asked for the other’s blessing to marry his daughter, a question his correspondent, this fastidious Syrian, confessed had thrown him into a “Hamletian agony.”

The phrase stayed with me, perhaps because of how much was left unsaid, the violent knowledge lurking between the tidy lines of blue. Was it diplomacy or cowardice? I couldn’t decide, but I knew — though my very existence hung on the decision — that I, too, would have advised against it.

In lieu of a letter, would you accept a memory? A self-cancelling thought?


Y
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