I remember the slanted signature of the painter’s name in the bottom right-hand corner of each painting: O. Onsi. The O stood for Omar, the name my parents would have given me had I been a boy. A name that made my bilingual brain shudder imagining the French word for lobster, homard, and picturing a wrinkly red-faced baby with beady black eyes.
I remember being told Onsi was a poor artist barely able to feed his family, and my mother, an admirer of his art and a lover of nature, bought all his paintings. She gifted them to her parents and cousins, and they in turn purchased more. And so it was, that no visit to Lebanon was without spotting an Onsi. Gazelles on the walls, their generosity leaping above my childhood.
Gazelles don’t outrun cheetahs; they outmaneuver them.
My father ran the Montreal marathon, but it was my mother who could see the finish line. He ran through winter blizzards and summer heatwaves, while she silently trained in the invisible chores of cooking, driving and laundry. A red-brick Victorian house in Montreal, a compact, white-walled apartment in Geneva. She knew distance by intuition, pace through family conflict, and could always rely on the slow gain of endurance to run a household.
There are no ribbons or awards for the lifetime achievement of motherhood. She was the one cheering from the sidelines and celebrating our victories. She kept all my swimming trophies, even though I begged her to throw them away, and years later, she sent them to my children, who now treasure them. She glued photographs into albums for every year of my childhood. I wish I had more pictures of her, but of course she was always the generous eye behind the lens
My father tells me Onsi became a family friend to my maternal grandparents and was invited to their summer house in the mountains of Haniyeh. Apparently, the artist took great pleasure in watching and painting the nimble gazelles that roamed freely through the arid hills and paused in the shade of the olive groves. He set up his easel under the parasol pines and drank the wild with his brush.
I know little of my grandparents’ summer residence, only that the name is spoken in a whispered breath of sorrow; like the name of a ghost that remains lodged in your throat. The house and property in Haniyeh were bombed by Israeli troops, leaving behind only rubble and feces. There is no place for generosity. Not then. Not now.
Gazelles honk when they’re nervous.
In Beirut, honking can be a signal for joy, boredom, or frustration. It blends with the chaos of driving communication and dysfunction. Honking to the beat of Fairuz on the radio with one hand, the steering wheel the Dabke drum with the other. Honking to scold the blaze of scooters passing on your left at moc speed. Honking because the newly set up traffic lights are taking too long to turn green and half the drivers are ignoring the signals entirely. For my mother, being behind the wheel was a place of comfort and confidence. With her elbow out the window, strumming a lock of black hair, she wove the only Jeep Wagoneer in Geneva across narrow cobble streets. She knew the rules and if anyone crossed her, her horn was quick to respond.
Though I’ve never driven in Beirut, I am just like her. At the four-way stop, I hover my palm over the horn ready to honk at anyone who thinks they got there first. My boys hiss at me from the backseat, begging me to refrain. In our small Canadian town, honking is considered rude and offensive. But I can’t help it. It is part of my genetic composition, coded in my DNA. I’ll admit I enjoy a generous dose of satisfaction from a blast that releases my nerves.
There is an Onsi painting above my parents’ bed. I wish I could remember which one. Apparently, the artist has dedicated it to my mother: “a Hayat.” I like to imagine his gazelles dancing above my mother as she took her last breath. Something happened that night and I still don’t know what. Maybe internal hemorrhaging? Perhaps side effects from her cancer medication?
How strange that after nearly a decade of grief-work, I’ve never dwelled in the how. The question everyone asks seems so unimportant. She was in remission. Until that night. Perhaps the thought of her under a down duvet is a comfort. Sleep is the softest way to leave. Above her pillow, watercolour gazelles are leading her home to the generous skies of Lebanon.
The scientific name “gazella gazella” comes from the Arabic word
غزال ġazāl, rooted in a form of Arabic love poetry known as ghazal.
After a lifetime of repression, my mother allowed her inner artist to burst when she turned 50. With manic joy she threaded beads along silver strings to create intricate jewellery composed of pale sea-glass, ancient brass, and nacreous pearls. She took classes on peinture sur porcelaine to create her own ceramic collections with a fine boar-hair brush. My kitchen cupboards burst with slender mugs adorned with her slanted transcriptions of Wordsworth, Keats, and Browning. Every December, I unpack the Christmas plates with icy-blue mistletoe and tidy bouquets of holly. Each day, I sip my espresso in a demi-cup dipped in gold with Gibran’s “On Children” inscribed in a ring on the saucer.
I am the one who picked up poetry’s sad notes. I do not compose ghazals – following precise rules for syntax, couplets, and rhyme was not in either of our artistic genes. Even with free verse, though, I am always listening and recording “the painful wail of a wounded deer.” In a ghazal, the opening couplet repeats a word known as the radif at the end of both lines. In the following stanzas, the refrain is only repeated in the last line. Repetition can have a magical effect. The final couplet is called the maqtaa. This is where the poet’s takhallus, or pen name, is revealed, often in creative ways. This can offer a depth of meaning to what was never said. On this page, I can scribe the words I could not speak at her eulogy but came to my pen immediately when she died: my mother taught me generosity.
I look up Onsi on Wikipedia and immediately wish I hadn’t. His connection to my mother, her homeland, and the sacredness I have created around them is nowhere to be found in this biography of an artist’s life and works. The claim that he was a renowned impressionist painter upsets me. I want to imagine my mother alone recognizing his talent and seeing her name cited as a guide along his artist journey. I scan for what I want to read and linger with the information that he was named after his paternal grandfather, the scholarly poet, Omar.
I can’t find anything about this Omar. I wonder if he was a contemporary of Khalil Gibran’s? I remember travelling to Gibran’s house in the mountains of Lebanon. I must have been 18, hoping to study English Literature, the strings of poetry and romanticism intricately woven in my teenage heart. I remember my surprise that Gibran’s house was so small. Simple. Barely larger than a hut and hanging over a cliff, haphazardly. In the distance, snow-capped Mount Lebanon sparkled, and if you squinted, a faint line of the Mediterranean hung like a mirage. Gibran, like Onsi, was a poor and relatively unknown artist until he died. Legacy is a generous gift that comes too late.
Gazelles hide their babies in long grass until the mother
deems them ready to join the rest of her herd.
My mother nursed me until I was six-months old, and then returned to full time work. Her days as a curator in Montreal were long, and my sister and I had a series of nannies to care for us. I remember faking fevers throughout elementary school to make her stay home from work. It was the only way to have her all to myself, all day. Was I hungry for my mother’s love and attention like any other child, or did I have a premonition? An inner knowing that this bond would be cut. For her, sexism and racism would dictate her unemployment in Geneva. For me, as a teenager I would push her away, her new presence an infringement on my freedom and orientation towards peers. As a new mother, I would grieve the lifetime of loss ahead of me as a motherless-daughter.
I prefer to imagine a river, a cool breeze through long reeds, her blinking brown eyes above me. There is the shadow of Moses in my reverie, which may be imprecise because I’ve never read the Bible. But I feel it in the allegory of devotion, a mother’s willingness to risk the wild to protect her babe. I wish it, in my longing to have my mother by my side. I want a generous memory to hold on to.
I discover that Onsi was regarded as an innovator, bringing an originality and freedom of expression that had never been seen in Lebanon. My mother was a Muslim woman who left the Middle East to attend university in America. Then at Harvard, she fell in love with a Polish Christian fellow, several years her minor. Against the will of both sets of parents, my future mother and father held their secular marriage ceremony at The Fogg Museum.
Perhaps in some ways, she gave me permission to be radical too. Not in my risky environmental activism as a young adult. Not in the alternative and inaccessible rural town I’ve chosen to call home. In a deeper way. In my courage to finally become an artist and to trust that the universe, regardless of misfortunes, will care for me. In my strength to step into my female form with grace and endurance. In a freedom to say yes to life and trust that a generous abundance will prevail.
The gazelles of my childhood were watercolour paintings.
Within minutes of wandering the homes of my Lebanese relatives I would find them. The framed artworks were similar in style, but I always stopped to notice the small differences. It was like those Compter les Différences magazine games found beside crossword puzzles. Two nearly identical images printed side-by-side, challenging the viewer to count ten miniscule differences. If you look closely, another dimension is revealed.
The gazelle was always in motion. Leaping, grazing, or stotting into the air. Wet but textured browns and greens to sway olive branches in the wind, and tall strokes of golden bushes to mark an arid horizon. Sometimes, a brush of lapis blue by the gazelles’ hooves marked a trace of the beyond, like a mirage. Source of water is the name my mother gave me. Her brown eyes blinking in the mirrored reflection of my eyes of blue.
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Logo by Mina M. Jafari
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We Are More is an inclusive space for SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) and SWANA diaspora writers to tell our stories, our way. Curated by Michelle Zamanian, this new column seeks to disrupt the media’s negative and stereotypical narratives by creating a consistent platform to be heard, outside of and beyond the waxing and waning interest of the news cycle. We’ll publish creative nonfiction, graphic essays, fiction, poetry, and interviews by SWANA writers on a wide variety of subject matter.
