This piece was originally written for a Creative Writing class at NYU Paris taught by Eugene Ostashevsky.
Habibi, Palermo, Sicilia
With you I have rediscovered myself, if not the landscape of my homeland, then its essence. With you I feel I have returned home after these years of enslavement in a foreign land, in a foreign religion. Returning to the religion of my father has allowed me to return home, if not in body, then in spirit. You have reminded me that my true home is in Allah, praise be unto Him, not in the confines of Palermo, a city I was dragged to as a captive in the belly of a ship.
Upon my arrival I felt it a necessity to comply to the religion of this land for my own survival. I hope you do not fault me for it. Allah, praise be unto Him, surely cares for the preservation of human life, even if that preservation takes the form of renunciation. But I assure you, my back may have been turned, but my heart was not. I have always been a woman seeking transcendence by whichever means necessary, and as a result of my captivity the ruling religion of this island became a necessity.
I may have preserved my own life through this conversion, but I lost myself as I lost my name when that Holy Water touched my head. With those drops I became Susana. But now I hear the soft sound of my birth name through your lips and I am freed. My name has become my secret salvation, which I dare not utter lest it be taken from me once again.
But please remind me always of that soft sound, as we lie entwined in the dead of night, fulfilling our passions. Remind me again and again who I am, where this body comes from. Your body speaks to mine in that dark silence, and with it I recall the smells, sounds, sensations of my homeland. But more than that, I am reminded what it feels like to be free through the memories of my spirit. Our secret love has the power to make me forget my enslavement, if only for those few moments of ecstasy. For this I must thank Allah, praise be unto Him, for crossing our paths through this life, and making your form a ship upon which I may return home to a country where I was not a victim or a captive, I was as free as a woman may be in this world. I was allowed love through devotion, and the freedom of my mind through words written by others and myself.
I just have one hesitation. As much as it pleases my soul to return to Allah, praise be unto Him, is this an act of courageous defiance, or foolish isolation, and even violence? I am a woman seeking soulful exultation, that indefinable freedom of spirit that may be the only freedom afforded me given the captivity of my body. The life of a slave is one of misery only improved through compliance. I want to keep my spirit, but also my life. Please guide me in this.
With love and devotion,
Your Susana
Neshama, Palermo, Sicilia
With you I am freer than I have ever been! Free from the confines of my childhood in a world openly ruled by Allah, and now free from the suppression of the religion of those who hold me captive. With you I have returned to something more ancient, more pure. My life feels full of purpose, with an air of simplicity and certainty I have always lacked.
This newfound home to my soul feels like a precious secret, something that is only mine, that ties me to no person and no place, save you. Living as a captive on this island of bleached stone, across an ocean from my place of birth, means I am a woman unpossessed and without possession. But now I have something far more precious than any physical possession, something that cannot be taken from me. What I possess now, thanks to your kindness and love, is Truth, something older, the original means of transcendence.
Up till this very moment, this precious moment, my life has been ruled by two angry giants, ever at odds with one another. First as the daughter of an angry father, both on this earth and heaven above, in a land so distant I wonder if it ever existed. And then here, on this rough island, subject to the violent whims of every passing ship, with its ruling Trinity. My whole existence has been caught in this conflict, one I am finally free from. Every religious path dictates the proper mode of living, yours in no exception. But as you know, I am a passionate woman. While my life is limited by my captivity, that does not limit the other freedoms I may experience through the transcendence of the spirit and the amnesia of pleasure. I have grown tired of the guilt pushed on me through hard words of a man who does not know the nature of desire, let alone the body of a woman. How can he know, unless he has touched as you have touched? Unless he has felt that moment of suspension between life and death that two bodies can create? Yes, that guilt makes me nauseas, and I seek to banish if from my life once and for all! Though I admit I fear it will haunt me, cling to my skin as that holy incense clings to my clothes and remains after washing. Please guide me in this, my love.
Ani ohevet otchah,
Susana
To the most Holy Office,
I have sinned and I can no longer allow my guilt to plague my conscious any longer. I beg you, do not judge me too harshly (a privilege which must be left to our Father above), for I am writing to you to confess my sins in hopes of forgiveness and, if it not too much to hope, redemption, a redemption that I know can only be found through punishment.
To put my predicament in the most honest of terms, I am an wanton woman. I was captured in the lands of Allah, where His minarets scratch the sky, and brought here as a slave. Since that time, the only freedom I have known is the freedom afforded my spirit through religious devotion, and the corporal freedom of pleasure. I will not waste your time with my plentiful escapades, but know that I have loved and been loved, if not in spirit, then in flesh.
But there is only one such love I wish to confess here, one that makes all the others appear the most chaste of interactions. I have know the flesh, most intimately, of one of your priests. I have not known this man of God before, or since – we met by chance. Indeed, I went to the church to confess my sins, only to commit the greatest sin yet.
Upon recounting the stories of my other lovers and false spiritualities that have beckoned to me, he became intrigued by my story. You may know that a woman such as myself has an instinct for the breath of men, and this man I could tell in that moment was not a man of God, but a man of flesh. I could hear his breath quicken through the screen of the confessional, and I must say that Lilith possessed me and I could not help myself.
I joined him in his holy box, but the as yet unsparked passion that arose in him quickly overflowed that confined space. As one we tumbled out of the box seeking a place to quickly fulfill our passions we came upon the Holy Alter, upon which this holy man discovered the carnal passions of the flesh. As a result of this discovery the church linen came to know the juices of our union and the consecrated host tumbled to the floor as he laid his hand upon my body like the sea crashes and caresses the rocky cliffs of this island in a storm.
I must admit I saw God many times that day, though you surely would not call such rumbling pleasure God. As he came into me, my body surrounded his, and in that union created something greater than either of us apart. I experience the unadulterated ferocity of a man who has never before known the body of a woman, and at once the tenderness of that beginning. The rhythm of such unions mirrors the transcendent rhythms of the hymns sung each mass in that same holy place.
These are as many details as I dare share of my sins, but I presume they will suffice for your judgment.
In hopes of redemption and praise of forgiveness,
Susana Daça
Amore mio, Palermo, Sicilia
May I call you that, amore mio? Soon I shall receive my sentence from the Holy Office, life imprisonment I suspect. But before I am removed from the world of love and the senses once and for all I want to express what that love and those sentences meant to me while I enjoyed some semblance of freedom, though I am a slave. Now that I have confessed my guilt I want to express my gratitude and satisfaction. I am still a woman conflicted, pulled between spirit (and the punishment I deserve) and body (the pleasures I have enjoyed).
Amore mio, words so intimate and familiar, surely they do not suit you, a man I have seen and heard from on high many times, but have known only once. But you are my last, so I want to leave the outside world with some words to you.
You have torn me as I have never been torn by a man, perhaps it is the taint of God on your skin, saturated with the smell of incense and communion wine. Never before have I felt such intensity of feeling and sensation, and yet that beauty commingles all too nastily with guilt. This is why the morning after our tryst I confessed my sinful actions to the Holy Office. Despite its pleasures, and the heaven I feel through them, I knew it must be my last. The transcendence I have always sought may only be achieved fleetingly through pleasure.
I must also confess to you that the pleasure for me begins with that most subtle shift of gaze and quickening of breath. They are intoxicating to me, and I must persist till the man is no longer a man, but some wild thing without name. This is what I relish, this is where my wickedness lies.
But despite the baseness of these pleasures, they are where I seek those precious moments of timelessness, where I am no longer tormented by captivity and the emptiness of spiritual conflict. As a slave, a woman, and a foreigner, these are freedoms I may never fulfill. By body, this imperfect thing I wear, is the only thing I possess to experience the most fleeting freedom. For this, I hope you will forgive me.
Amore mio, I must write those soft words one last time before all chance of love is held from me. What more beautiful words are there? To be loved and possessed, these are things I have sought and touched, but never known. They have been denied me in this life, and surely my wantonness has denied me them in the next. I fear I will spend my eternity in that second circle of Hell. Perhaps there I will find my rightful place in it.
Con affetto,
Susana
To my God, which I do not know,
This letter shall never be delivered or read, but it eases my mind to write to a Being, rather to an empty void, but I trust that God will know my words as I write them.
I find myself more a captive than I have ever been, and yet my resigned nature offers a calm freedom I have not known before. My prior confusion of Gods and lovers has given way to a simplicity of being dictated by my daily misery. Each day commences with the same view, of the same grey stone, continues into oblivion of a day like every other, and ends in the same haze in which began. And yet, here I am free of the conflict of my origin with my place of captivity, free of the hungers of desire. Here, of all places, I have found unity. Here, like everyone else, I am a sinner and nothing more. My origins and actions no longer matter.
To whichever God is listening, to whichever God exists (which, I do not know), know that I have no regrets. I have sought transcendence, and isn’t that, after all, what you promise? Or if not transcendence of my solitary spirit, then salvation of my soul through God. These are things that have been denied by my origin, station, and sex in this life, and as such I am a creature seen as incapable and unworthy. So how can I be faulted for using the only means at my disposal – my body – to seek those promises denied me?
But now I am free from that seeking, that hunger. Perhaps it was that seeking, not my enslavement, that truly held me captive. I do not know. I have grown weary with such thoughts. God and pleasure have become dull to me. I am content to give into my numbness, the safe grayness of it, and sacrifice the hunger that once was my sole motivation.
I suppose this letter, as it is reaching up to the Heavens one last time, is a note of departure – from salvation, from life, from myself. I am finally content, and that contentment demands that I cease to exist and sink into obscurity. No more yearning of spirit or body. I am a woman stripped of origin, name, freedom, and now existence. And yet here I am, still fleshy and full. But soon that will wane, and I will become as grey and cold as the stone that confines me. When we merge, like two lovers, perhaps then I will know freedom.
Remember me, in my final days, for no one else will,
Susana
encultura 