Posts tagged daliya

English is not my mother tongue. I was born in Egypt and I live and write in Arabic. Words are inseparable from their history, from politics, economics, and culture, so I feel the limitations of writing in a foreign language, feel as though my tongue is no longer a part of my body, of my mind, and my spirit. It has been sent into exile. Words in Arabic have their own music inseparable from meaning, content and shape just as the flesh is inseparable from the spirit.

Nawal al Saadawi from “Exile and Resistence”

I can not even begin to speak of how I identify with this. Although even in my identification with this, I still find myself falling short. Because both languages, I speak, are not my mother languages. Arabic is a product of my “arabisation” in language -as a “southern Sudanese” (and I am losing profeciency because of many years in the U.S.). So now I speak english, yet I always feel like I can never capture the essence of anything I am trying to say. Speaking either language leaves me with a strange emptiness. I say strange because I was never taught my mother tongue (the language specific to my ethnic group), so why am I feeling emptiness where it never occupied me? I always feel that my tongue is not part of my body. I am always left dissatisfied whenever I attempt to express myself.

This is why sometime I find myself painting with so much intensity. It’s the only language that feels absolutely true to me. I can construct my own meaning. My own language.

(via daliya)

I can relate to this too.  Growing up in the States and going to high school in Nigeria, I never learned my mother tongue, Igbo, ‘til about 15. And even then it was still a little disconnected because I didn’t understand how significant it was to be speaking the language of my ancestors til after I left Nigeria.  With each year that passes I feel like my Igbo gets a lil worse and I feel like I’m losing my connection to home. It’s a weird feeling.

Back home in Naija we’d do praise and worship as a family or at church after mass and I can’t even describe how wonderful it felt to pray in my language. It’s silly because God hears even our silent prayers so, of course, the language we speak to Him doesn’t matter.  Yet whenever we lifted up praises in Igbo the feeling of joy that swept over me was real.  I don’t think those prayers were holier or better or anything like that.  But I do know that I loved the way they rolled off my tongue…straight to God.

dalidadali

It is difficult for me to describe the pleasure I feel when I am writing a novel. It is a physical mental and spiritual pleasure all at the same moment. That is why some people think inspiration is divine. The power of creativity is derived from the pleasure and happiness that invades the whole body, mind and spirit. It has the power to undo the historical separation between the physical, the mental and the spiritual in the human being. It has the power to undo the fragmentation of knowledge, which we inherited from the slave period, and which is maintained until today by academic education and political religious teaching.

-Nawal al Saadawi

From: Women Creativity and Mental Health

(via daliya)

Amazing Read: Woman At Point Zero
Saadawi wrote Woman At Point Zero and it is one of my favorite books.  Highly recommend it.  I gotta check out more of her stuff.

dalidadali

daliya: youmightfindyourself: Wild dogs that commute from suburbs to scavenge in city The clever canines board the Tube each morning. After a hard day scavenging and begging on the streets, they hop back on the train and return to the suburbs where they spend the night. Experts studying the dogs say they even work together to make sure they get off at the right stop — after learning to judge the length of time they need to spend on the train. The mutts choose the quietest carriages at the front and back of the train. They have also developed tactics to hustle humans into giving them more food on the streets of Moscow. Dr Poiarkov told how the dogs like to play during their daily commute. He said: “They jump on the train seconds before the doors shut, risking their tails getting jammed. They do it for fun. And sometimes they fall asleep and get off at the wrong stop.” The dogs have learned to use traffic lights to cross the road safely, said Dr Poiarkov. And they use cunning tactics to obtain tasty morsels of shawarma, a kebab-like snack popular in Moscow. I never liked dogs as a kid (OK, I was afraid of dogs) but the older I get the more I’ve warmed up to them (don’t tell anyone though).

daliya:

youmightfindyourself:

Wild dogs that commute from suburbs to scavenge in city The clever canines board the Tube each morning. After a hard day scavenging and begging on the streets, they hop back on the train and return to the suburbs where they spend the night.

Experts studying the dogs say they even work together to make sure they get off at the right stop — after learning to judge the length of time they need to spend on the train. The mutts choose the quietest carriages at the front and back of the train. They have also developed tactics to hustle humans into giving them more food on the streets of Moscow.

Dr Poiarkov told how the dogs like to play during their daily commute. He said: “They jump on the train seconds before the doors shut, risking their tails getting jammed. They do it for fun. And sometimes they fall asleep and get off at the wrong stop.” The dogs have learned to use traffic lights to cross the road safely, said Dr Poiarkov. And they use cunning tactics to obtain tasty morsels of shawarma, a kebab-like snack popular in Moscow.



I never liked dogs as a kid (OK, I was afraid of dogs) but the older I get the more I’ve warmed up to them (don’t tell anyone though).

thesun.co.uk