A Sundial in the Shade

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As a child, I "abhorred coloring". I do not know that from memory, nor do I pretend to recognize ever having (at such an early age, anyway) hatred strong or all-encompassing enough to warrant the usage of that term by a kindergarten teacher...but there it is. Apparently, I abhorred coloring enough to deserve three separate mentions in the four report cards I received for my first school year. Which serves to show at least that throughout my life, I have been nothing if not opinionated.

If I had to guess why I hated coloring, I would say that my motor skills back then must not have been developed enough to do it to a standard I found in any way satisfactory. I would have been, after all, just learning how to properly grip a pencil for maximum control. Perhaps I could not stay within the lines consistently enough, or achieve the same level of saturation throughout. I was certainly concerned with quality, enough so that I still, to this day, remember the slowly-dawning but joyous epiphany of discovering that coloring in the same direction could make all the difference.

But it is perhaps because of this perfectionist leaning that I had that I went on to hate art class altogether, for try as I might I could not draw or sketch anything with any degree of fidelity towards either my imagination or whatever reality I was attempting to re-create. All of my other temporary hobbies were likewise plagued with this insistence on quality...I would take something up only long enough to determine whether I was any good at it. If the answer was a "yes", a check mark was (neatly) made in the margins of my mental list, and I pursued the activity moderately. If the answer was "no", I abandoned the pursuit, never looking back or feeling any regret. So dancing fell by the wayside, and sporting suffered an equally early demise. Ignoring the efforts of my father to nourish and empower my inner strategist, chess lasted all of a few weeks before I abandoned its campaigns forever to my more patient, and infinitely more strategic twin brother.

It is not that I had no respect for practice. As a former stutterer, a former bad speller, bad grammarian, bad English speaker, bad first grade mathematician, I knew that one could improve. I had overcome enough of my deficiencies in certain areas to know that. However, all of those triumphs were undertaken and celebrated in the name of my parents. It was not for me that I read above my grade level, not for me that I learned multiplication tables before they were introduced to my class, nor was it for me that I my efforts ultimately improved my penmanship. That is not to say that I needed a smiling picture of my parents on my study desk for motivation, nor to keep my goals in sight. It is to say that they had successfully and without guilt - as Arab parents are wont to do - subsumed my own interests into their own, so that to me they became indistinguishable, one from the other.

In spite of all of these personal triumphs, I was an essentialist still when it came to certain talents and sensibilities, things that I felt practice could improve upon only on the precondition that there be some implicit core of giftedness. A core that by necessity was intrinsic and inseparable from the person. That certain individuals walked with extra-ordinary fluidity and grace seemed blindingly apparent to me, even about children my age. That someone could sketch a hand or a tree leaf without instruction and have it resemble the real seemed to me to indicate that their worldview was somehow different from my own. That their visual field spoke to them candidly and in volumes, while mine whispered barely a word to me, and was guarded and pithy in its remarks. I realized early on that there was a glass ceiling I would contend with for the rest of my life when it came to visual art, and very quickly got sick of bumping my head against it in my attempts to stretch the limits of my potential. I hunkered down instead, into myself and into the things for which I knew I had larger possibilities.

You might think this a limiting perspective for a child to have, and you would be right. That I challenged myself with first grade mathematics, and penmanship and the articulation of my rolling letter r, and felt those to be worthier pursuits than something more creative is a loss of many minutes of my childhood spent simply wishing that I was doing something else. And yet my priorities had been prescribed, my philosophy regarding perfectionism and talent unchallenged by the Arab lifestyle I led, consisting primarily of study, and academic, results-focused vigor.

I find myself sliding back into essentialist expectations now that I am (oh cliche of cliches) trying to write fiction. Perhaps I have been ruined by the testimonies of published writers who talk of the process as if it were to them as unavoidable and insistent a need as that to breathe, that they speak of it as if possessed by an other spirit that produces and produces and produces. I find myself wondering whether there is something missing in me, that nugget of talent so essential to the core of the artist, that makes me deficient in feeling like only myself when I sit down to write. Where is the other Mariam that, like Borges's Borges, is supposed to usurp me from myself and wrest my pen away from my own grasping hands and into hers...and I powerless to stop her?

There was a time when I lived in Kuwait where the entrance way to our apartment led into a view of our large dining table, which served my family when we hosted denizens of our friends for Ramadan dinners, and more frequently as the place my brother and I laid out our homework to do in the evenings. I was, as with most things school related, meticulous about the presentation of my work as much as about the content, and so spent many neck-breaking hours leaned over my work at that table, working on satisfying my own preconditions. I handed in many reports that I insisted were to be written on blank, unlined paper, and had perfected a method by which to write in straight lines. After dividing the paper up into equal vertical segments, pencil lines drawn faintly across would serve as my guide. Erased afterwards, these pencil lines left no mark.

My older brother, who was living with us at the time, happened to glance at my work just as I had finished writing and erasing my guidelines. What I had left was a report on George Washington Carver and the many uses he'd discovered of the unpretentiously pedestrian peanut, all written on blank, unlined paper in lines perfectly straight, belying both my age and its reputation for carelessness.

Pathetic as this might be to admit, I do not think I've ever seen my older brother as proud of me as at that moment. Perhaps he, being an engineer at the time, had an unduly high regard for what he assumed was a good eye on my part, capable of writing straight and spacing equally? I remember he took it as a point of pride that he could estimate distances fairly accurately, and so it was perhaps this mirroring of his talent that he appreciated? At any rate, he called my mother over, showing her my feat. I struggled for a moment, unsure of whether to tell them how it was that I came to write without a slant. Transparency won over vanity, and I showed them how I made my guidelines.

My brother's eyes dimmed, his interest vanished almost instantaneously. Had I been a magician, this would have been the moment I told him my tricks of the trade, erasing wonderment and mystery in favor of the mundane machinations that, to the uninitiated, manifest themselves as magic.

My mother had the opposite reaction. After initially seeming uninterested in the quirk that my brother took as aptitude, she praised me for my attention to detail, for taking the time and making the effort. My mother who, not having been taught to read music, taught herself difficult pieces by ear, picking out the notes and somehow producing on the piano Fareed Al Atrash pieces on an instrument generally incapable of catering to the micro-tonal maqam scale. My mother who, though interested in French literature and displaying an aptitude for the humanities, gave up her own interests and pursued her father's suggestion that she "try" medicine. My mother who circumstance had widowed twice, who had raised as a widow five children, once as a twenty-something year old and once again as a fifty-something year old. My mother who was as a result unimpressed with talent, it having served her very little in life.

My brother had the leisure of appreciating talent, and of believing that he lived in a world where it might mean more than perseverance. I wonder which of their worlds it is that I live in?

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