Najwan Darwish

I need a strict manager and an energetic secretary and a correspondent to make my coffee and my tea I need an intellectual and a poet and a mafia godfather to divide my life among them And I’ll announce, after a while my bankruptcy like the companies do I need a servant and a traitor a lover to have me murdered beaten to death by sandals in the bath: I need a queen to betray me with the king

And what did the Armenians say? An Umayyad monk spins wheat and wool above us Time is a scarecrow • That’s what the Armenians said

My mother is obsessed with reading about Jesus these days. I see books piled by her bed, most of them borrowed from my library: novels, handbooks, sectarian polemics, writers coming to blows. Sometimes when I’m passing by her room she calls on me to step between them and resolve their disputes. (A little while ago I came to the aid of a historian called Kamal Salibi, whose forehead had been split open by a Catholic stone.) What a diligent reader she is when she’s searching for Jesus, this woman I never failed to disappoint: I was not martyred in the first intifada, nor in the second, nor in the third. And just between you and me, I won’t be martyred in any future intifada either, nor will 
I be killed by some booby-trapped stork. As she reads, her orthodox imagination crucifies me with every page.... while I do nothing but supply it with more books and nails.