The Proof of the Honey (8 page)

T
he Thinker kindled a fire. It burned in me for a time, even more so after he left. Was that the price of my initiation? Was that the price of being awakened to life? While waiting for other thinkers and further revelations?

It has come down to us from the ancients that an old woman gave her daughter the following advice, before giving her to her husband: “I will give you a piece of advice, my daughter, which if you hearken to it will make you happy, make your life sweet, and make you fall in love with your husband. If he comes to touch you, gasp and moan, sway your body, and show him languidness and languor. If he grasps your breasts, gasp loudly. If he enters you, weep and speak whorish words, for these arouse sexual desire and assist in strengthening the erection. When you see that he is close to ejaculating, gasp for him and say, ‘Come deep inside me!’ And when he has filled you, clasp him to your bosom, be patient with him, kiss him, and tell him, ‘My master. How sweetly you fuck!’”

My mother never said anything like that to me, not at all. The most risqué thing she ever told me was that angels in Heaven exchanged kisses. The substance of this was that whatever angels did, perforce, mortals were authorized to do. The immediate and practical application of this knowledge was that I had permission to kiss the neighbors’ son, but nothing more.

By the time she explained this to me, I had, of course, gone way beyond kissing. I may have laughed out loud, but the thought of angels kissing was engraved in my memory. It’s the same thing with all parents: by the time they decide it’s the moment to open the door, their children are already out in the garden.

The joke has it that a father says to his son, “You’re big enough now for us to talk frankly about sensitive subjects.” The adolescent replies, “Tell me, what would you like to know?” We knew more than our parents as young people, and our children will know more than we do. If my mother had read what I have in the ancient books about the kiss, she would not have spoken to me about angels.

Know that the kiss arouses desire to begin with, and then sexual vitality. It brings on erection and ejaculation. It causes the penis to rise, and inflames the woman, especially if a man intersperses his kisses with gentle bites and light pinches.

The only mothers one encounters who are wise enough to teach their daughters lessons on desire are to be found in books of erotica. The advice she gives to her son-in-law will not be less important. In some of the books we find the father himself playing this role and advising his daughter.

Huba did not content herself with teaching the women of Medina “the art of kissing,” as prescribed by the books; indeed, she extended her experience to her son. One day, he asked her: “Mother, in which positions do women prefer to be taken by men?” To which she replied: “Dear son, if she is old like me, you should make her lie on the floor with her cheek to the ground, and then insert it all the way into her. And if she is a young girl, you should pin her thighs to her chest, and you will know your desire, and you will have what you want.”

Nobody taught me. Not my mother, not my father, and not even my big sister. No one explained anything to me. I studied the theory in books, films, and stories, and by watching men and women around me. As far as practice was concerned, I learned a little at a time, by trial and error. Slowly. I was cooked on a very slow fire; often, indeed, the fire was out. This is not a play on words.

Yes, I started my sex education with writing and films—novels, magazines, films, and serials. Sex education? Well, emotional, at least, with small doses of practical sexual culture and traditional Arab theoretical knowledge. I would have to wait to move to Paris to discover, in French, pornographic films, books, and magazines.

I’m not alone in this ignorance. It seems to be widespread in this age of sexual decadence in which we all now live. I have only to read the questions on sex in the Internet magazine
Elaph
to discover the extent of Arab sexual deprivation. I picture the specialist pulling out his hair as he writes up his findings. How can we talk about sex education when even a rudimentary knowledge of anatomy is still to be acquired?

Yesterday, I happened upon the response of an exasperated physician: “Looking for the hymen in the Arab World has become like looking for a needle in a haystack . . . And waiting for girls to acquire a sound sexual culture is like waiting for Godot.” In the fifteenth century, the sheik al-Suyuti authored a book for use by women on the art of making love, but the readers of
Elaph
would not understand a word of it: you may as well give a Neanderthal woman a book on computer programming.

Young men are no better off. Indeed, the number of questions they ask regarding the length of the penis (in repose, erect, at half-mast, real and ideal) would be worthy of the
Guinness Book of Records.

Every time I venture into this terrain I am more convinced than ever that those who read the old books on sex will be sure to avoid the pitfalls of deprivation. It follows therefore that bringing these books out into the light is a matter of public well-being. We must no longer fear them, but recite from them publicly. We must no longer hide them, but bring them into the open.

This idea will form the conclusion of my study. I shall call for these books to be republished again and again, to be distributed, to be taught.

Hungry for knowledge, I forced myself to explore the word of Arab erotica on my own. I studied our literature assiduously at university, but not one of my professors ever mentioned these ancient texts. When I talk about them, I discover how few of those around me have read them and learnt from them. Several years ago, a literary magazine published the various names used for the male member, as found in one of the erotic tomes. This caused a minor scandal: everyone reads magazines, but books are hidden, reserved for those curious souls who search them out.

During a semi-official banquet, the director of the library, a Frenchman, came out with a witticism: the supine position, he said, was best for both bottles of wine and women. Everyone denounced his shamelessly sexist pronouncement. I reflected that if he could say such a thing aloud he probably didn’t think it through. I have learnt life lying down. I don’t think I lay down in order to learn, but learning came in concentrated form in the arms of a man.

Yesterday, in my friend Fadia’s office, I found myself gazing at her and thinking that her chastity belt was strangling her, that her beauty needed years of rolling around on the body of a man to emerge. He should rub her skin, at length, as though she was in a bathhouse, and only then her self would be exacted from the layers of imposed abstinence. Indeed, he should rub and rub until he had expunged all the bad, stagnant blood. Only then would she make peace with her body and with the world.

I know she’s caught in a vicious circle: she cannot learn on her own, and for the moment the man is absent. Her initial education cannot succeed without a man. There is no denying that the man makes things easier, facilitates a woman’s apprenticeship. Where is that man? Why has his path not crossed Fadia’s? Why has he not seen in her the radiance that I see? Why does she live alone, her fire consuming her?

The scenario is unchanging. Fadia and I begin by talking about work and then the discussion drifts elsewhere. How, that day, did we get started on the subject of sex education? Why did the conversation wander off?

“No one taught us how to behave around boys,” she complained. “No one taught us how to decipher that unknown world, a completely different world.”

“When we’re small, we are taught. When we get older, we teach ourselves,” I replied.

They didn’t teach us? Indeed. But I did not want anyone to teach me. I learn on my own, filching my knowledge from the one I’m learning from. I learn by pretending to be blind, deaf, and dumb.

Fadia was still talking, but I’d lost the thread . . .

“My mother worked it out only recently. She’s proud of us now. She says, ‘My daughters are as independent as men. They work and live on their own. Like men.’”

“Like men?”

“She’s not used to seeing women lead that sort of life. For her, a woman has to be kept.”

Fadia said, “Men are afraid of independent women.”

Fadia said, “I’m waiting for a faithful man before I commit.”

“Well then, you’ll stay single,” I joked, hoping my laughter would soften my words.

“Why? There have to be some faithful people in this world. My mother was faithful to my father. My brother is faithful to his wife.”

“How can you talk about other people with such confidence?”

“I’ll put my hand in the fire if they’re not faithful.”

“Don’t promise to put your hand in the fire unless you’re speaking for yourself. Other people, whoever they may be, are full of secrets.”

“I’m sure of what I’m saying,” she said, over and over again.

I said nothing and she changed the subject. “Women talk too much. We don’t know where to stop or how to stop. They didn’t teach us.”

I told her about the latest episode of the American serial
Sex and the City
. The heroine is making love with a man who is sucking her breasts and murmuring sweet nothings. She reacts: she is not his mother, he isn’t a suckling child but a man and so he shouldn’t call her breasts by such ridiculous childish names, or suck her nipples that way, because she’s a woman whom he desires and not a wet-nurse, and so on. During her lecture, the man’s erection droops and finally collapses altogether. In the end, he puts on his clothes and departs, and she sits there with her eyebrows raised in astonishment, wondering why on earth he has left. The viewer understands very well that she should have shut up and left him to suckle her breasts until he was satisfied. Until they were both satisfied. But the heroine didn’t understand.

Fadia and I had a good laugh. Then she objected, “Still, it’s unacceptable, what he did, absolutely inadmissible.”

“You’re a lost cause.”

I love to learn, but I don’t know how to teach others. Nor does Ibtisam, my closest girl friend. We’ve known each other since childhood, but I don’t remember that we ever shared our discoveries. When we were in love, we wouldn’t give away any details. On occasion, we’d talk about trivial things where love was involved, but never sex, as if we belonged to some sisterhood of angels. As married women, we’ve had a lot of children, but again, even today, we never venture beyond mere allusions.

When I see in films nowadays how young girls talk to one another, I’m astonished by the tone of their shared secrets, so different from our own as girls. Intimate talk is a true cultural exchange. I’ve experienced it at times, but only with women I’ve met by chance, in passing. Never with my closest girl friends, or even with my sisters. Not even after we got married.

The only woman who ever shared the details of her sex life was Rihab, and I listened to her with curiosity. Both of us were expatriates; no doubt this circumstance had helped certain Arab women to free themselves from the tyranny of dissimulation, both orally and in writing.

For a program on the French cultural radio station, a Lebanese director working in France questioned young men and women of Arab origin on their sex lives. In dialectal Arabic with simultaneous French translation, their testimonies were remarkably frank and courageous. They could speak like that because they knew they were addressing a Western audience on a Western program. In any event, no Arab station would ever broadcast such material.

Rihab broke the Law of Dissimulation with vulgar, crude language. She came to Paris from a traditional environment and works with us at the library. Her veiled sisters, whose photos were prominently displayed on the walls in her office, never let us out of their sight whenever she was relating the adventures of her sex life, as if they were so many medals. She was a greedy woman, both in her manner of talking and of eating. I would laugh along and feign interest. Her stories were always about the latest man in her life, never more than a fleeting presence . . . and who could blame them. Rihab was irritating, exasperating, annoying. Not a single man had ever been able to stay. The first man was seeking a way to obtain legal residence in France for himself and his girl friend; so his arranged marriage with Rihab lasted the time it took for his fiancée to get her papers. Once the divorce was finalized, he went back to his girl friend and married her. Rihab cannot keep track of how many men have followed in his footsteps.

Perhaps it was her stories about men that bound me to her. If I put up with her breathless panting as she delivered her frenetic descriptions, it was, after all, to hear her stories.

“He was at the lady next door’s. He didn’t even try to deny it. When I accused him of being unfaithful, he answered quite simply, ‘I was helping her in the garden. Why are you making a drama out of it?’”

“So why were you making a drama out of it?” I asked, thinking of the series
Desperate Housewives
, with Gabrielle Solis and her gardener lover.

“Imagine! He dared to say such a thing, and look me in the eyes as he said it. And after everything I’d done for him.”

In the previous episode, Rihab had fed and housed and married the man, “according to the Law of God and His Messenger” at the mosque in Paris, while waiting for the civil marriage at City Hall, just so that the young student could obtain his permanent residence papers.

“For a year he’d had nowhere to sleep. I rescued him. You know, the first time he came to my place was to do some repair work. I’d just moved in and he offered to help. The moment he was in there he never left again.”

Her hysterical giggling punctuated her sentences like so many ellipses.

“He was a student on paper, that’s all. He already had a university degree. In fact, when I met him he was selling vegetables at the market, to get by. No sooner did he move in with me than he quit working.”