What is the date you began writing this memoir and the date when you completed the memoir? Actually, I started this memoir year ago, I don’t remember the exact date but I’m very sure I started writing it on 2020 and I finished it in April 2021.
Where did you do most of your writing for this memoir? And please describe in detail. I don’t have a specific place for my general writing but I remember every day I wake up at 6 in the morning and start writing before eating my breakfast. I wrote this book in my living room, and when I grew tired from writing there, I would make tea and I take my laptop to my balcony to finish what I started. at 12 o’clock noon I’d feel tired I take walk in the forest for half hour or a little longer, and after that I’d go back to my home to start my normal day as a mother to two teenage and as single mom I do everything in my home, I cook, clean, and I go shopping too.
What were your writing habits while writing this memoir- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day?As I said I wake up at 6 o’clock in the morning a very day to start writing, then I finish two paragraphs or more by noon and then I leave my writing to the next day, I can’t continue writing all day I have so many things to do , and I have kids they need my attention and my care- as you know- .
Out of all the specific memories you write about in this memoir, which ONE MEMORY was the most emotional for you to write about? And can you share that specific excerpt with us here. The excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer, and please provide page numbers as reference. I think that this each of these memories is very special and dominated by sensory emotion. But the situation when I went to my mother to wash her and shroud her after her death, stayed with me It was one of the most painful situations I’ve encountered in all my life , you will read that in chapter 13. On manuscript p. 342:
(Once I had finished reciting this prayer, my mother snored audibly once and never woke again.
Weeping, I roused my sister. When she observed what had happened, she started slapping her face and head fiercely while wailing, “Why did I fall asleep? Why didn’t I bid her farewell?”
The other women in that ward were frightened. One screamed, “I see the angel of death approaching!” Then she died.
Another woman, whose daughter was with her, asked the daughter to remove her from that ward. The girl quickly took her mother outside to the garden, where she died.
A fourth woman gestured to me and said in a barely audible voice, “Recite Qur’an for me.” So I ran and placed the visitors’ book by her head. Then I quit the room, which resounded with the cries of women slapping themselves while crowding around my mother’s body.
My twin brothers were the first to perform the funeral prayer over the pure, shrouded body of my mother in her coffin, in the garden of the hospital, before they took her to the corpse-washing station.
Not much muscle was required to lift that coffin from the ground. My father and brothers and one other man carried it and placed it on top of a taxi to take it to the corpse-washing station. We girls hired another vehicle that followed the taxi bearing the corpse.
The corpse-washing station’s door panels, on which time’s fingers had carved deep grooves, were open wide. The place stank from a mixture of camphor and dry leaves of the buckthorn tree with the stench of dead bodies. Even its beige wall did not tempt people entering to stand there and contemplate it, not even for a few moments.
We walked down a concrete hallway toward two rooms. The room on the right was reserved for men and that on the left for women. They carried her into the room where women’s bodies were washed. Spiders had spun pale webs there, and fine dirt covered the black stone of its window ledge as well. A loofah sponge lay beside a bar of soap.
Once the men carrying the coffin entered the corpse-washing building, with us girls trailing behind them, a woman of about sixty approached us. She seemed old to us but still retained the energy to perform her job with few breaks. She welcomed us with the expression of a person accustomed to dealing with death and told the men, “Place her here.”
They did. Putting the coffin on the floor, they opened it and lifted my mother’s body from inside. They placed my mother’s body on a solid, hexagonal, concrete counter that was two meters long and three meters wide. It was situated opposite an oval basin with a water tap at its head. Its other end was a drain to catch the water from the corpse-washing.
We tearful women were anxious to see what this woman would do with our mother’s body. The old woman entered the room and stood in the walkway between the counter and the basin. Once she was certain that all the men had left, she removed my mother’s garments, one at a time, setting them on the edge of the counter. Then she fetched a little water and a bar of laurel soap and began to wash my mother’s hair, which glowed like a constellation of stars in the night sky. As the water poured over it, it began to glisten. Next, she mixed a little camphor, the fragrance of which haunted the entire place, with water and poured that liquid all over my mother’s body while murmuring appropriate surahs from the Qur’an.
After that, she pulled my mother’s hair back and fastened it with a white cloth cord. Then she placed my mother’s head inside a bag of white cloth, which she fastened tight. Next she dressed my mother in a white, sleeveless blouse that reached below her navel—after she allowed her interlaced fingers to press on my mother’s belly to make sure there was nothing left inside it.
She wrapped a cord of the same fabric around the belly. Then the woman dressed her in a third piece of fabric from the belly to the feet. Finally, she clad the entire body in its shroud.
Throughout these procedures she murmured many prayers. Another woman, who had been waiting outside this room and watching her skillful movements, helped her carry the body to the coffin and place it expertly inside.
Then the corpse-washer asked the men, who had been waiting outside, to enter and take away the corpse. Some of our relatives picked up the coffin after covering it with a clean black abaya. They carried it through the courtyard of Imam Ali (Peace on Him) in preparation for the soul’s passage to another life.)
Click to pre-order WAR AND ME from Amazon. War and Me will be published in August 30, 2022
Can you describe the emotional process of writing about this ONE MEMORY? Whenever I remember the moments in which my mother died and the mixed feelings that controlled me at that time when I was with her in the hospital sharing her last moments of her life as well as the overwhelming feelings of sadness and intense and fear when I saw women prepare her and taking her to her grave, it is not easy and it- can’t ever- be erased from my memory.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? By writing these memories I expressed of a lot of feelings that had been suffocating me for so many years., Now I can say I felt happy when I finished writing this memory, because it was a great opportunity to heal myself from all the bad – feelings that accompanied me throughout the war and the economic blockade that I lived through.- My goal in writing this book was to show people how we used to live in a time of calamity and I hope that those who read this book will sympathize with each other and feel the beauty of the life without wars , and respect the people coming from different countries, in the end we all deserve to find peace in our lives.
Click to visit Faleeha Hassan’s facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004321951511
Click to visit Faleeha Hassan’s website
https://www.faleehahassan.com/
Click to hear Faleeha Hassan speak