Mother
Mediterranean
My Mother Mediterranean
My mother made me sensitive to the world of perceptions, thus offering me the Mediterranean milk. She made me sensitive to History. History of war and peace because she had personally painfully lived some wars. She made me sensitive to the laws matters, as she began her professional career with lawyer studies, in Oran, with my godfather, Mr Dufour.
She also made me sensitive to every issue that can touch women.
She was the French, modern woman. When she was a young woman, she crossed the Sahara during a trip; there she discovered a south that would have a great impact on her life. Reading, literature and news papers helped my mother to understand the world. She made me sensitive to the Arts just like she had been made sensitive herself; she told me that my godfather had welcomed Camus. I was impressed.
My mother used to put Art into life. She put Art and some fruitful Mediterranean, some afición, into my life.
She loved Victor Hugo, she new it by heart, and also Arab literature. She loved the Orient and its poetry, Oum Kalsoum and Mahmoud Darwich, and still this oriental part in Lorca and in the flamenco, where you can cry out, groan, hit, and hammer…freely.
Did she think that poets had found what archeologists have always been looking for, just like a depth of depth? She used to write poems with a fixed shape, surrounded by a lot a dictionaries in every language since she was fascinated by translation. Nothing fascinated her more than the Arab cultural center in Paris and in Spain in Barcelona La sagrada familia by Gaudi and La casa Mila, La pedrera.
No straight line. Everything curvy, soft, distorted, roofs with chimneys like helmeted warriors. Tours like melting candles or sand castles. And the arena, the tauromachy and the geometry of the fight: death in profile for Lorca…
My mother loved to fill nervously the sensitive world and above all, she got into raptures over everything with which she could fill it OTHERWISE and particularly THEATRE. She was fascinated by this aesthetic.
I consider that my mother gave me the world.
My mother was the reader-examiner assisting my works: my PhDs (she received a special grade during my viva) and my books.
She believed in a tolerant, brave, and sharing Mediterranean, and believed in its Union.
My mother died on the 3 January 2009. Until the end, she kept on offering and getting things moving.
I began to write about my mother’s life and works, to find back my ground swell, my transparent coral and mollusk, hippocampus and bird, inside and outside water, hippocampus Horse Sea. My mother gave me Poetry like somewhere else in here.
The Mediterranean is said to be a cradle, actually I maintain that it has completely been one for me.
Cradles had saved my mother two times. During the war in Algeria our car had been the only one spared in a very long line of fired cars, maybe because it had a cradle on its roof rack. And after, during a bomb attack, a cradle had once again protected my infant brother.
How could this infinitely light tight tulle support such heavy glass pieces? This mystery of the cradle has surely fixed a profound belief in a common wealth.
And at the end we will wonder: Was Andalusia
Here or there? On the Earth… or into the poem?
Mahmoud Darwich