Shama

Shama’s eyes welled up with tears and then literally splashed down her face and onto the front of her top. I was sympathetic of course, actively playing the role of nurturer and guide, but the process of crying fascinated me.

We were discussing her friend back in Sri Lanka, when suddenly Shama’s youthful face contorted and slipped into the vortex of her painful emotions. It’s quite an ambitious description but that is how I feel it can be aptly described.

Then she blurted out: My home no calling me. My mother no calling me. Me no sending money, mother no calling. Now one month.

Young Shama is a widow with a toddler back at home. Her mother also works as a domestic helper in another Gulf state, but as a parent, demands that Shama sends money her way as well. I suppose her mother thinks it’s to pay her dues for supporting her during her childhood back in Sri Lanka.

Shama is starved for love and nurturing. While she was growing up, her mother was away in a Gulf state working as a domestic helper, sending back money to support her family. Instead of building a house and improving the lives of his children though, the  father spent the money on women and booze. It was a turbulent childhood for Shama and her siblings and at a young age, she married the man whom she thought would make up for all those years of suffering and separation.

They had a child but not long after that, Shama’s husband was killed in an accident. She had to support her child and the price to pay was to leave him with the in-laws and come to Kuwait.

More tears plopped out of her cinnamon-coloured eyes as she recounted how she only thought of her son, sending him clothes, toys and sweets when anyone went back to Sri Lanka for holiday. She cried: I haven’t bought anything for myself. Only my son. Now she was feeling sorry for herself. No one was thinking of her, it seemed.

By now, she was flicking the tears off her fingers. There was a lot of pent up sorrow here. I cooed reassuring words, and repeated advice I knew she would not heed.

Everyone borrowed money from her. She borrowed money also and spent months paying it back.

Remarkably, her eyes did not go red when she cried but the white became whiter, and more glassy as she sulked and pouted. Her hair, neatly parted down the middle and swept off her face, started to curl on top as shorter strands responded to the flash of emotions.

OK, she sniffed. Ok.

Mayful

Another May. You are about to depart again. It was like that: until May do we part. My month of many endings. I keep thinking what if I lose my sight? What if I lose sight of that point in time? A collection of memories not in a box; not in letters with tied ribbons, nor in virtual clouds. Memories of May become like scars, barely discernible, harder to grasp, like dragonflies in the air, hazy even when gazed upon from this distance.

This May I make peace with that which I cannot feel anymore but that I can remember well. My heart has been turned in. My brain has been reformatted. I am not new. I am an antiquated model that has been upgraded, having shed its soul once again.

Looking for you has been an endless journey. Peering into many faces and looking away again with glazed eyes. There is no determination. No singularity of purpose, I admit. I liken myself to the dried arfaj that tumbles along the empty beige expanse of desert.

Honey Lemon

Honey

You

sure leave a good taste

in my mouth.

It’s not poetry

it’s a flash card

for your eyes

only

coming out of the shower

conquering

that honeycomb

makes me

as giddy as

a puppy

and the world

will be just as sweet

today.

*To be read with an American-style accent if possible. Which regional one is left up to the reader.

I am Ismeralda

I part my lips

and kisses

float out

like Bubbles

in holograms.

Ride your

Mighty Dragonfly

into misty

waters

and keep

me safe

from the yellow spider

hiding in the

spray of creamy

Henna flowers.

Matters of intimacy and passion

At our larger women’s gatherings, we rarely talk about sex and hardly ever about our intimate relations with our husbands. At our last gathering however, one woman started the subject by discussing her recent findings of the marital relations between Lebanese women married to Kuwaiti men. This information was gleaned through her new friendships with Lebanese women and the ensuing discussion she had with them on why Kuwaitis preferred them.  She said: “My dear, the Lebanese wife never says no. She is always ready to have sex and will drop everything. As long as the thing between his legs is satisfied, he will never complain about his clothes, his food, or anything else. He will treat his wife like a queen. She is ready to seduce him and make love to him and through this she controls her husband’s moods and turns him into a lamb.”

The Lebanese women practiced the art of seduction not only in their manner but through the outfits they wore and the entertaining dances and poses they displayed for their husbands.

Here there was much laughter from the women in the circle. A couple of women then proceeded to discuss how they dreaded Thursdays and Fridays which were the prescribed night for sex, because of the weekend. One woman said, I’m so happy when I have my period on the weekend. I get the night off. The women dreaded the ghusl and washing up after sex which seemed tedious.

Some women also laughed and said that marital relations were now almost filial, as husband and wife were almost like brother and sister they had been together so long.

At that,someone told the story of a woman who insisted on having sex every single night with her husband whether he felt like it or not. She would massage his penis and his balls until he became aroused. The women in the group laughed and made comments about the effort that would involve.

One woman stood listening on her way to perform prayers and said that she did not feel comfortable seducing her husband in that way. It would feel degrading.

I thought about the women in the room and tried to imagine them in passionate abandon. Intimacy and public display of affection is rarely displayed in public even amongst family so it was hard to imagine the couples together easily.

No doubt we are all curious about other people’s sex lives and intimate relations with their partners. Women don’t like to boast or talk about their husband’s prowess in bed for fear of the Evil Eye or bad vibes so more often than not you will hear a woman put down her husband. She would rather sound disgruntled than satisfied and happy to avoid being the object of envy.

One thing the Lebanese woman suggested to the Kuwaiti woman was preparing a foot bath to massage her husband’s feet when he came home. This idea was found to be repulsive to most of the women at the gathering, and most considered it degrading.

Here I think is the crux of the matter.  Passion and ardor have nothing to do with pride and barriers. To love, there must be mutual trust and a willingness to share pleasure to the highest degree. If a woman is afraid of losing respect, and this is all too common amongst us, there will always be something holding her back from enjoying lovemaking to the fullest with her partner in life and in passion.

I will drive starting June 17

A new campaign in Saudi Arabia urging women to start driving by June 17th

YouTube channel

Twitter Women2Drive

And on facebook as well.

the GCC newcomers

solution to tired summer feet

Whatever does this mean?

Post on Just Landed:

clean your feet

Posted in: Cleaning in Kuwait
Last updated: 23/04/11

Arabic handsome man I’m doing Cleanup to the feet of women with  work of massage to the feet of women carefully and cleanliness of abnormal
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Is this an ad for a man who will clean and massage women’s feet for 1 KD? I wonder if he has a foot fetish.

Welcome to My Garden

Often

you appear to me

in the form of a bird

not any one kind

but an

assortment

and I stop and smile

say hello

and the bird mostly looks at me with

certain trepidation

unsure why it is the vehicle of such a

shapeshifter

and my eyes

glitter green as a cat’s

in the sunlight

amused at your visit

and how far you traveled

to be so close

Self-immersion in useless thoughts

It was a short distance to my car. Under the white fluorescent light, the walls of our house looked even paler than usual. My eyes were drawn by brownish specks on the wall. I approached to take a close look wondering what insects were now in season.

The brown dots on the walls were bees, each one in its own place, separated by large white spaces. What brought on this bee-diaspora? Where was their hive? And more importantly, where was their Queen?

Had their been a revolt somewhere in the green depths of my garden? And were these lonely bees in exile under the harsh lights? Too many questions. I left them to their own devices.

People change. Bees change too. We all experience a change of heart.

I wanted to be part of this revolution but like millions of others who participate only through watching, I am only a “slothenly” revolutionary. I did not hold up arms. I did not hold up flags. I did not hold up banners. I did not even hold up flowers.  I simply watched, like millions before me, counting and doing countdowns.

Lovers have a change of heart. Sometimes at the beginning of a relationship, anticipating its ending is more painful than the actual moment. You think: How can something so beautiful and so unaffected, change? Emotions dissipate. Lovers suffer from ennui, from dying embers, from the ending at the beginning.

The more life experiences a person endures, the hardier one becomes. More matter of fact. More accepting. Broad-minded and certainly more flexible when it comes to the seriousness of relationships. This happens when after a series of disappointed affairs, one comes to the conclusion that all is fair in love and war and that in order to be a grown up one must accept life’s downfalls as a given. Dust off your knees, dear, and move on.

But when should we adopt a grown up vantage point? At twenty, we should remain idealistic, believers that we are going to be a better couple than our parents, more understanding, more savvy. That we shall avoid all their mistakes. That we will always do things together. That we will always go to bed content that you have not wronged your loved one in any way. At twenty you promise you will do your best not to be party to the transgressions and misdemeanors that plague other couples. You will be different, you promise, and you will uphold that ideal no matter what. At twenty, you are as idealistic as they come.

Have some caramel cookies

Have some caramel cookies and think about the sorry state of the world.

I keep writing down haphazard words. Thoughts dart in and out of my conscience. But I am lame. A horse that is lame limps. And that is me. Limping around.

Is there a difference between a brown bear living in the wild and one that lives within the confines of a zoo?  I am my own keeper.

I’m not eating caramel cookies. I don’t even know what those are. It is just an inane sentence that was swimming around my head a couple of months ago. But nothing came out of it.

And now, over some chai and milk, with less than a minute of creative freedom, there is not much that can be said.

Is that your child?

We’ve previously discussed the issue of fathers discovering that they were raising another man’s child. This issue is not restricted to a certain society or culture. I’m sure there are psychological reasons and sociological explanations that the experts can provide us with.

I was quite interested to see the news report below on the establishment of a new department to investigate cases of marital infidelity and the parentage of children.

Normally in Islam, any child born to a couple is automatically is regarded as the husband’s child even if it was fathered by another man. This is the case of course unless there are actual witnesses to the act of adultery taking place.

This is the reason why DNA testing was at first not encouraged in Kuwait.

However, this news report shows that an increasing number of men are indeed suspicious that the kids they are raising are not their own:

large number of wives ‘cheat’ on their husbands

KUWAIT CITY, May 2: A new department which has been established to look into cases filed by husbands who accuse their wives of infidelity is said to have received in 2010 alone 1,679 applications to check on the parentage of their children, reports Al-Qabas daily quoting legal sources.

Of these, 70 cases have proved to be negative. The sources say this shows a large number of women cheat on their husbands.

One of the lawyers disclosed when one man hired him to prepare a DNA test on his son he discovered the child was fathered by someone else.

The lawyer added, it is strange there is no clause in the Kuwaiti law to punish the wife who cheats on her husband unless she is caught in the act while committing adultery. To the contrary the husband is forbidden to kill or harm his wife because the law protects the wife and will punish the husband.

According to another news report, a Kuwaiti who holds PhD, requested a DNA test on his 8-year-old son and was shocked when the results did not match.

An elderly man who has four sons received more shocking news when he discovered each of his sons was fathered by a different man.

Meanwhile, lawyer Riyadh Al-Sanea speaking to the Al-Watan daily said the DNA tests have solved many problems.

For example, he said, when an unidentified maid accused her wealthy sponsor of impregnating her, the DNA tests proved she was telling lies. The tests proved the woman became pregnant after she had sex with a man working for the same sponsor.
In another story, one wife actually reports to the police station that her child is a result of an affair with another man:

Unfaithful’ Kuwaiti wife spits out truth after years

KUWAIT CITY, Feb 24: In a strange case, a Kuwaiti woman went to police to confess that she had illegal relations with a compatriot man several years ago and that she has a son by him. In a report she filed at Sulaibiya Police Station, she said she is married to an expatriate who still doesn’t know that ‘their’ 12-year-old son is not actually his son. She said 12 years ago, her vehicle had a flat tire and a man stopped to assist her in changing the tire. She said she continued friendship with the compatriot man and it developed into an affair and they even slept together at his house. Subsequently, she got pregnant and delivered a baby boy who was registered as the expatriate husband’s son. She said she continued living with her husband and that although he believed that their son was his, he occasionally had doubts and sometimes beat her to get the truth out.
Tired of all the drama, she said she wanted to confess everything and confirmed that the real father of her son was the Kuwaiti man. Incidentally, her expatriate husband is out of the country and still doesn’t know about his wife’s report.
The Kuwaiti woman also said that when she learnt about the pregnancy, she filed a complaint against the compatriot, but investigators found some forgery and the case was withdrawn.
Police took details of the Kuwaiti man and will summon him for investigations.

It’s an interesting glimpse into the secrets of society that would have remained under wraps if not for science.