Tuesday, June 19, 2007

What or who has stolen my sleep? Part 2

A more personal reason:
I woke up from my shallow sleep of murderous imagery with a realisation that someone I know not too well has multiple traumas - that I and others around here have to cease using inadequate terminology for her, such as 'depression, paranoia'. I now see that her life stretching back 45 years is one of resentment, fear, disappointment, suspicion and cultural disorientation; left isolated, this experience has been no less than traumatic.
She is a cowardly, neurotic mother who abandoned a daughter with special needs in a shopping mall, fleeing the scene before the police arrived.
She is a woman of 45 years of age who was once beautiful and highly desirable and still attractive looks at my younger, slim body with more than avowed envy - with vague distress.
She is pretty Syrian girl brought up in Kuwait, largely confined to the house by a paranoid father.
She is a resentful daughter forced to witness the constant arguments of her parents whose contempt for each other grows each year.
She is the eldest of 5 daughters; where is the son that was supposed to arrive if not instead of her, after her?
She is suddenly 32 and unmarried.
Now she is pregnant from the handsome rich husband who is leaving her.
Now she has the child and refuses to admit that her own daughter has 'special needs'; she is not the child the woman was expecting, is partly a stranger to her, who as she grows up partly rejected, partly neglected, partly clung to, becomes hellishly annoying - talking incessantly, repeating the same questions over and over.
Now she moves to England with another handsome man.
Now the man leaves her and returns to Kuwait.
She becomes slightly mad alone in Liverpool with her daughter and the police and social services grow sick of her and her inability to be the responsible, integrated immigrant.
She fails to fully comprehend the seriousness of her actions, whilst the authorities fail to give her any respite from her daughter.
She resents other Arab and black immigrants for giving her, a blond Alawi Syrian a bad name.
She resents and blames everyone around her. She has forgiven nothing.
She goes shopping with her daughter and the girl refuses to come into the supermarket, so she waits outside. Soon the girl is telling passers-by that her mother hits her. They surround her and call the police. Her mother emerges from the chilly supermarket to see a foreign crowd with distrust, perhaps loathing, in their eyes, protecting her daughter from herself. She tries to take the girl home, but the crowd stop her and tell her to wait for the police.
The woman flees the shopping mall and takes refuge in a friend's house

No comments: