Wadad Makdisi Cortas was a pioneering Lebanese educator. She wrote the memoir, A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman, in the 1960s in Arabic then translated it into English. Her daughter Mariam Said pushed for the book’s publication, a year ago. I’m going to be quoting it in days and weeks to come for two reasons, it is beautifully written, and it offers a window on how the Palestinian issue convulsed Arab society in the 1930s and onward, even the most privileged families. The book allows others to understand how Arabs looked on Zionism. But it’s the weekend, and here’s a non-political passage:
The older I grew the more I shared my father’s belief that Arabic is the loveliest language in the world. Throughout our childhood he had missed no opportunity to encourage in us this passion for the word… He was fond of chants and poems and would hum verses to himself almost automatically, in a monotonous tone that had the effect of drilling these same verses into our heads. Now, from time to time, I recall one fo them:
The days unveil what is not known,
and messengers come with news untold;
Unknown the future and the past;
unknown to you the hidden scroll.
As a youth I didn’t appreciate these verses as much as I would as the years moved on. I savor them now. The line he hummed when my brothers were quarrelsome:
Your brother, your brother, keep him close;
Unarmed through life a brotherless man.
The lines his old friend in Baghdad wrote while in financial distress:
I have known all the pleasures of life–
the dearest is well-being,
I have know all the bitterness of life–
the hardest is obligation to others,
I have carried iron and stone–
the heaviest is debt.
The lines he hummed so frequently they were like air:
We dwell in many homes on earth, the dearest is the place of birth.
