FatherLess Child of Eternal Absence

by Nizar F. Hermes

 

Nearly fifty years ago,

On a crisp southern Tunisian morning,

I dropped my small, unassuming cartable.

and fled the school.

When I was a little older, I tried again.

as though memory itself was retracing their confused steps.

 

I was the only boy in school,

whose illiterate grandmother held my hand.

Her hand was my sanctuary.

Her bakhnūq was my identity.

There was no father in sight,

No other hands waved me to the door.

 “Mamma” was a widow, bearing in her silence

the ghost of a husband from the far south of Morocco.

An Amazigh village she could not remember.

She had learned to gather absences.

to cup them gently and feed them to her fatherless grandson.

whose mother had to leave for work before dawn each day.

 

Despite the thousands of miles,

I always return to that day; to the first school gate,

where my tiny heart trembled,

while gripping my grandmother’s hand.

It was as if I had never left the harsh southern town,

that pardons neither absence nor divorce;

even when it was never harām.

 

I stuttered with a name that wasn’t mine, 

answering innocently with my mother’s family name.

As though any choice were mine.

But today, I am in distant exile,

I surrender to an old ache.

The ache of not fully knowing,

What it means to be a father.

These words are my alphabet of reckoning.

the language of a child who learnt to read absence between the lines.

…and still does in every unanswered question.

Notes:

–bakhnūq: a traditional southern Tunisian shawl.

–cartable: satchel

– ḥarām: forbidden

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Nizar F. Hermes is a polyglot scholar, poet, and translator of North African origin. His Arabic poetry has appeared in leading cultural venues across the MENA region, including Al-Majallah al-Thaqāfiyyah al-Jazāʾiriyyah (The Cultural Magazine of Algeria), Al-Muthaqqaf (The Intellectual), Majallat Anhār al-Adabiyyah (Anhar Literary Magazine)  Dīwān al-ʿArab: Online Pulpit of Culture, Thought, and Literature, Awtār: Magazine of Culture and Literature, Azzaman Newspaper, Intelligentsia for Culture and Free Thought. His English poems have been featured in Spillwords, Transverse, Inner Weather and are forthcoming in others. He is currently preparing a poetry collection titled A Blitz on the Territories of Amnesia, or Very Exiled Thoughts. https://mesalc.as.virginia.edu/nizar-f-hermes

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Featured image: Photo by Aditi Gautam on Unsplash.