My father’s handwriting Religion

My father wrote with beautiful and elegant strokes carefully and patiently. His Parker was a treasure trove of ink pens, like nothing else. When he opened that box and replaced it with an empty ink cartridge, it was a ritual. He handled that pen with the grace of the collectors. Once he touched his little notebook, he wrote and wrote in Arabic and French with a wonderful movement, as if each letter had to be finely composed, playing each word like a musical chord. His writing had the finesse of calligraphy, with strokes drawn in intimate harmonious lines. As a child, I was mesmerized by the sound of his pen landing on the page and his hand moving in a quiet chorus with his thoughts mesmerizing me.

My father was not a writer. She loved writing with her ink pen. I never wondered what he was writing or why he was so intent on writing. I once looked vaguely at his notebooks and realized that his words were notes on readings, ordinary reflections, perhaps dreams aborted, and attempts to write a life in the newspaper interrupted by a long and terrifying pain of illness. I will never know. My father died more than 30 years ago and my family lost their notebooks. What I remember is its mystery and the mystery of the words that didn’t matter enough to me at the time of reading.

I was 10 when my father was diagnosed with oral cancer. Doctors in Morocco and France did not believe he could live for more than a few months, but for 10 years he was suffering from a terrible disease. A savage treatment never healed him. He was barely relieved of his suffering as his energy subsided and half of his face froze and hardened, leaving him horribly and spectacularly scarred over the years. It was hard not to notice how this ruthless disease had ruined his body. Frequent hospitalization, severe fatigue, and gradual loss of vision were eroded. His head was wandering the streets and the look of fear and pity must have weighed heavily. I remember him, but with a constant determination to live. He read and wrote through long pains, and even when one of his eyes gave way, his will never faded.

I know he would have told me more about his writing and what it would have meant if it hadn’t been for the sheer interference of his illness. Perhaps he wrote to escape the bitter existence after his diagnosis. I wonder if he wanted to give his children some wisdom, if not in person. Perhaps he came up with the words to break the boredom of his life as a government employee. Or perhaps drawing a letter on a page offered a soothing meditation that you would not find anywhere else. I will never know.

My father’s memory is full of vivid signs, however. The suggestions of a lawyer who studied philosophy at university to deal with his family after the death of his father after his father’s death. His stories of the time were often marked by a touch of remorse, an unfulfilled and lost passion for the duties of affiliates. Her home library witnessed a dream that was too soon taken away. The beautiful blue volumes of Islamic exegesis in Arabic were carefully arranged along with French books by Descartes, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Zola, Hugo, Maupassant.

I didn’t ask why these authors, why this bunch of books, if there was harmony in this collection, but I later understood that in addition to the lessons he taught at the Koranic school, it was in the hands of my father in Morocco in the 1930s and 1940s. In the colonization of French tutors. At the beginning of each lesson, everyone talked about a strict guardian who insisted on repeating the deceptive colonial slogan “La France est ma nouvelle patrie” and a tutor called “petits indigènes” (the little ones) and gave them French names. As a child, my father’s education was in the service of the empire, a force of indoctrination disguised as a benevolent endowment. “When the French colonize you,” he told us, “they colonize your mind.” That’s it. Great load of meaning in the shortest statements. I had to read it much later to realize the dissonance that my father must have felt between the corporal punishment of the Koranic school and the deceptive courtesy of modern colonial education. Learning was an imposition or a double proposition.

But despite the cunning calculation of the empire, my father maintained a genuine fondness for French philosophy and literature. He spoke perfect French with an elegant accent, perhaps a deliberate sign of a reversal of the colonial language. As the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine would say, we kept French as a “war booty,” even though it contained our subordinate words. Maybe that was the reason my father wanted to embellish his French words with the smooth strokes of his handwriting. He had to calm the memory of the dehumanization of the school with the soft pen of an ink pen. In this way he recovered, in the most humble way, the voice that had been tamed as a child by the violent transactions of the colonial school.

Fearing illness or fearing the darkness of colonial memory, his father did not talk much about himself, his past, or his dreams. At times, he felt resigned to his silence simply because he was tired, but in retrospect, his speech was reduced, like most people of his time, because he did not want his children to be burdened with a history laden with pain and humiliation. Not everyone has the talent and peace of mind to echo the past and make sense of themselves and others. My father was not one of those people. His stories had no life-changing wisdom, no trace of what I needed to “know myself”. Perhaps his writings concealed a talent or regret for the ease or physical strength of the language to be the guiding voice of his children. I will never know.

As I looked back, like Jorge Luis Borges, I wanted to learn more about my father’s library, the books on his shelves, and his favorite writings that planted the seed in me. I don’t know why my father wanted to be a philosopher, why he read Descartes and Hegel, why he continued to read the Koran and its interpretation. I was too young and distracted to ask these heavy questions, but something profound may have bothered me. Perhaps his obsession with finding harmony between his deep faith and the intrigue of philosophical doubt. I meant that I was fulfilling my father’s dream of being an educator and a sage, that the prudent hobby of reading and writing was the source of my early awakening, or that today I am giving voice to his quiet existence. . And maybe that’s all true. I am an extension of my father’s broken destiny and it is beautiful to feel, even at one point, that the dream of his life was not silenced.

But I have no way of securing that connection. If my father had any frustrated intentions from a writer or scholar, he was able to hide it well. In his meager things, traces of him now living in a sad garage, I searched his notebooks angrily to find a clue in one of his books or to find a hidden note, but my persistence only created frustration and anger. The things I value most in my father’s memory are gone forever and only my imagination can save this side of him from oblivion. His handwriting hangs over me like a whisper, a mere memory dripping in subtle but painful strokes.

Maybe that’s why writing as an Arab, a Muslim doesn’t come easy or easy for me. My words come to the page as confrontation, catastrophe, elegy, a spectacle that confronts another spectacle of my identity, my history, and my culture. Unlike the calmness I imagine in my father’s handwriting, mine feels turned on, assigned, a call made by the anxieties of not answering too many insults, without revealing too much arrogance. “I build my language with words,” said Martinique poet Édouard Glissant. I build mine as they throw stones at me, and I wonder why some can write without being provoked, while others see their writing doomed to a perpetual response to a painful call to do pain and assess harm. I want to recover from the ugliness of the task that always awaits the subaltern writer the forbidden tranquility of my writing. I don’t want my pen to turn into a sword, its ink being a common goal. My tongue didn’t have to feel like a stop bleeding, so as not to cause too much damage to fix it. My words were not to be thrown like a dart into the world of an immediate enemy. I do not shy away from honest struggle and believe in the gift of a wild tongue and a mighty pen, but I do not want my writing to always be a clamor, an armor, a cry in the face of distress and harm. I wish my pen to match my father’s pen line.

I have to believe that what I am holding on to is the inaudible beauty of my father’s handwriting, a wordless poem to liberate and plead my writing, to defend and deliver me from violence. imposed response. On the day he died, my father’s sight returned for a few minutes to see us again. It was a wonderful moment of fleeting joy before the unspeakable mourning, but now I remember how I can imagine those tender strokes of his writing. My dad’s notebooks were full, and maybe that’s enough memory to live with. His words were not for a reader, but for the editor. He wrote and wrote, as Gloria Anzaldua asked us to do, so that the ink would not clot in our pen. “Write with your eyes like a painter,” he said, “with your ears like a musician, your feet like a dancer, you are a truth-teller with a torch and a torch.” I may never know what my father wrote or if his writing was meant to be a torch for anyone, but it left me with the biggest lesson of all. Never give up your pen to write for someone else.