طین (Mud)

Issue 49 • Spring 2024 • Poetry

First place winner in the Spring 2024 Contest Issue, judged by Shayla Lawson

1. Meanings of Mud

Grief is a heavy, thick problem.

Like mud, it stains.

To muddy yourself means,

“I’m experiencing grief.”

2. How to make bricks

The clay has traveled from the mountains, collecting bits of land and uniting them along its way. The clay is rinsed by water. As it journeys it speaks to fish. When tired it clings to the riverbanks from which it is harvested.

The clay is clean, but salty. It has collected sweat on its journey. It must be placed in troughs, and water added. The salt separates, rises to the top, and is skimmed off – over and over, until the clay becomes صافي – soft and pure.

Next, the clay must be kneaded: kneaded by feet. While the clay is being kneaded, it is mixed with hay. It is kneaded and kneaded until it is dough.

We need a mold of wood for the bricks. The clay-dough is placed in this wooden mold, it is pounded and pounded. A brick comes out, dries in the sun.

3. Meanings of Mud

Egyptians say, “I will muddy his life.”

They mean, “I will give him a big evil problem.”

4. Meanings of Mud

If “he sticks his foot in the mud,” he gets stuck:

He enters the problem.

5. How to build a house in Baghdad

Well, first I’d have to have a feeling
that no one would come take it from me.

Buildings stolen like wives.

Nowadays, I fear making something.
That someone would want
to come take it away from me.

Outside Iraq, I don’t have this fear.

6. Freedom

The mud used for building is called طین الحر

حر means pure
shares the same root
as freedom.

adobe

It comes from the riverbank.
It comes from the holy city of Karbala.

Karbala, soft earth,
believing in many beings.

Karbala, the home of bricks
before religion.

طین حر و طین صافي
mud pure and mud soft.

7. Where to build a house in Baghdad

I would build it to the south of the city, on the road to Babel, away from people.
There are orchards there – palm trees, fruit trees.
It is open, there is peace and quiet.
And the clay will come from the same location where the house is built.
The clay should stay in its home, where it is familiar.
From the clay I dig out, there will be a hole. And that hole will be the basement. So the
clay that comes up from the earth, builds. We do not leave some grave in the ground.
The clay is not dug up without circular purpose.

8. The First House

If someone dies – then there
is someone who has
a dead person.

To have a dead person –
to have lost someone.
Motherhood in reverse.

For instance, my mother
when her mother died.

She was 26, a child
when Grandmother died.

So she muddied herself,
salted the mud with her tears.
In a moment
with mud, she aged.

I saw my mother with mud
in her hair.
I saw my mother with mud
on her face and in her hair.

I saw my mother, but she
was not my mother.

My mother was not my
mother with mud on her
clothes, my mother was
not my mother
with mud on her face,
with mud in her hair.

Mother meant beautiful,
clean, refined.

In a moment she had turned
herself into something else –
a creature.

For months, she wore her black abaya.
Black, like mud.
For months
dressed in mud.

9. The Ur- House

In the single photograph I have of my grandmother, she is holding me in her thick arms. She had a fair complexion and her eyes were green, though you can’t tell in the black and white photograph. She had a very Dutch face. Later, in Europe, I’d see strange women who reminded me of her. She was beautiful to me. As a child, I would sleep in her lap, sleep and sleep with her fat arm around me, like she was an understanding pillow. She had tattoos on her arm – dots in blue ink. Four here, two there. They reminded me of stars. I liked that arm, those stars. Playing with them, I thought they were marks from the heavens, like freckles, that they had come naturally from God. Blue ink, blue spots. A constellation there. Her name was Fakhriya, Daughter of Asma. My mother told me in Heaven a person is named after their mother.

10. Clay

Clay on clay    surround it
with slip
and – slap –
it sticks.

Slip liquidy,
it acts like glue.

And doors – second-hand, used.

A whole red house
the color of clay
red walls sixty centimeters thick
walls the color of weather.

11. How to build a house in Baghdad

In grief the dead become distant from you and you must bury them in the earth. So تلطم
to be closer to them – to be a piece of what they are becoming.
You follow your love into the earth. You will cover yourself with earth, with their
becoming. Perhaps this is the closest you’ve ever been. To the earth.
To the one you love تلطم تلطم تلطم – a lullaby. Bury yourself in their burial.

Contest Judge Shayla Lawson on “طین (Mud)”:
The beauty in this multi-verse poem is how well it renders the loneliness of a family’s forced migration—its ancestral, generational wounds—through the elemental. The way “Mud” turns over the definitions of its titular tenor forms a memorable and revelatory exegesis on grief. And therefore, remarkably, freedom.

Issue 49 • Spring 2024

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry