Sousou!

There is a place where my mother sits: a big, dusty-white house by the Arabian Sea, in a suburb of Kuwait City we call Fintas. We moved here in 1976, when I was five, my sister four and my baby brother not yet one. Back then the area was a hinterland, no asphalted roads, no settled name – just desert and sea, an area variously known as Fintas, Funaitees, or Messilah – and though it has since been officially absorbed into the larger city and renamed Funaitees, we, the denizens of the white house, still call it Fintas. We were here first, one of the earliest families to inhabit this nowhere land, as my mother liked to call it, when my father moved us out to the outskirts of town because he loved the sea. We came for the beach, the open space, and we never left.

The white house is our family home. My mother lives here full-time; my sister and I come and go; our brother has a house not ten feet away – it is where I stay when I visit. It is a beachfront house built on the site of an earlier home, my girlhood home, which was torn down and re-built almost two decades ago while our father lay dying in hospital. In this house, this later version of our family, every afternoon without fail, my mother, Mona – Mama – watches TV on a tangerine-coloured sofa. She watches alone, for hours, sitting perfectly still, her hands folded on her round belly.

Although she was born in Sudan, Mama has lived most of her life by the sea in Fintas. Nowadays, her life is one of absolute routine. I never have to wonder where she is. This sofa, in this house, at the edge of this sea, is where I see her whenever I think of her. When she is not in bed – where she spends much of each day, though not necessarily asleep – she will be sitting on the tangerine sofa, her carers shuffling in and out of the kitchen with the door left open. Later, when she has had enough, usually around eight-thirty or nine, she will call out, “Yallah, Baina,” and the evening ritual will begin: one carer will switch off the lights and lower the blinds (even the doors here are shuttered), the other will help Mama to her feet and carefully escort her upstairs. Every day is the same, and that is a good thing.

It has been years since Mama ventured beyond the house, fifteen or so since she last left Kuwait. She stopped travelling not long after our father’s death. The house is her whole universe. Frail now, unsteady, happily housebound as she moves into her 80s, she is tethered to this place. So we come to her several times a year: me from London, my younger sister from Milan.

Whenever I am in Kuwait, as I am now, Mama wants me near her.

“Sousou,” she calls out, inviting me to join her on the sofa. She likes it when we watch television together, just the two of us, feet apart, evidence of our indestructible bond: two women, one old, one getting old, side by side. Sometimes Mama calls me Sousou. It is her nickname for me, the one my father used too. The happier she is, the more melodic I become; otherwise I am plain, dry Sarah. Tonight, luckily, I am Sousou, and Mama is excited – I can hear it in her voice. Mama takes her TV viewing very seriously; she can be a harsh critic. Some nights she will deem a movie beauuutiful, stretching the vowels when she approves; other nights it is all zift. Zift, ya Sousou. Zilch. Tonight, Dalida the biopic of the French-Italian diva and Cairo-born singer-actress, one of Mama's all-time favourite artists, is about to start on TV.

“Sou-sou, Dalida, Sou-sou!” Mama’s voice grows louder, more insistent. When she needs something, Mama tends to repeat herself, calling out a name over and over in ever-ascending volume, until someone reacts. It is the most irritating thing in the world. Because I always hear her the first time, I am already weighing up my options. Most nights I will sit with her; I know how much it means. Some days, however, I don’t have the capacity for the sofa, the too-loud TV, or for her. I tell her I have to work, miming typing on a keyboard, or I stop by for a little while then quietly slip away, returning intermittently, buying myself some time. It depends on the day I’ve had.

Summer days in Kuwait can be long and punishing, the heat soaring into the fifties, the days shapeless and quiet. With my sister and brother both away, it is up to me to ration our time together. Too little, and my presence feels superfluous; too much, and Mama grows possessive, clingy. It is still early evening, so I take my place beside her. After all, her Dalida is also my Dalida – the soundtrack to my childhood, when I was a girl and the car was our listening room. Mama was the musical one in the family. It was she who introduced us to Dalida in the 1970s.

Dalida begins. Though the cast and director are all Italian, the film is in French, a relief after so many back-to-back American ones. Cairo, 1933. Dalida is born. Her parents are Italian immigrants. Her father is a violinist in the Khedive’s orchestra (Egypt is still a monarchy), her mother a seamstress. Dalida grows up multilingual and musical in a vibrant, cosmopolitan Cairo, yet her life is also marked by poverty, war, her father’s early death and an eye ailment that leaves her with a permanent squint. Her story reads like an Elena Ferrante novel with its echoes of childhood cruelty, precarity and the violence that young girls sometimes experience as they nurture their dreams. Soon, Dalida grows into a startling beauty. Fluent in Arabic, endowed with a sensuous voice, able to dance, she is crowned Miss Egypt in 1954, an iconic moment replayed in a leopard-print bikini.

Dalida is a songfest. So many familiar tunes, one infectious hit after another. I check to see if Mama hasn’t dosed off; she is watching intently. When we were little, in the early 1970s, our father would drive us across Europe in his beloved silver Mercedes he had shipped over from Kuwait for the summer holidays. On those long, dozy drives, Mama used to entertain us with cassette tapes she had brought from home. One of our favourite songs was Salma ya Salamah, which I now find myself humming and tapping my foot to.

Dalida sang Salma in several languages, but none as enduring or affecting as the Arabic. It is still played at weddings across the Arab world. Salma means “in safety,” and the song had a very catchy chorus line, Ruhna w jeena bil salamah – we went away and returned safely – which Mama, my sister and I would hoot out in the car. Composed in 1911 during Egypt’s colonial struggles, Dalida remade the song, transforming it into a joyful hymn of return. An ode to travellers, a mantra, Salma was like our very own lucky charm. It made us believe we could do anything and always find our way home safely.

Dalida’s hit songs are steeped in longing. Her private life is dogged by tragedy. Loved ones die by suicide, grief accumulates. As the plot darkens, I glance over at Mama. I worry that what comes next might upset her. There was a time when Mama was easier to read, when her emotions sat nearer the surface. Nowadays she is more enigmatic – a little sad, a little happy – her inner life largely sealed to us. Watching her here, so placid, I am reminded of her namesake, the Mona Lisa. Only our Mona’s equanimity is sustained by an antipsychotic drug prescribed to her some three decades ago.

In one scene, Dalida returns to Egypt with her brother Bruno. It is the late 1970s; she is a megastar, one of the most recognisable women on the planet. The siblings drive out to their old home in Shubra, a working-class neighbourhood in Cairo. Dalida pokes her head out of the car window and glances up at a rust-flecked balcony adorned with flapping clothes. Soon she is spotted, their car is swarmed and they have to drive off, never to return.

“Shubra, ya Sousou, Shubra.” Mama is suddenly animated. “Look, see Dalida’s street? I knew it well. My school was nearby.” I am astonished to learn of her connection to the place. Mama tells me that Shubra used to be her old stomping ground, when she was a girl of eight. “It was faar, ya Sousou, faar – an hour and a half by car to central Cairo.”

In 1951, aged eight, Mama’s parents sent her away from Khartoum to study at Le Bon Pasteur, a French convent school in Shubra. In those days Egypt was the Arab world’s seat of learning and culture; Shubra a quiet, verdant Coptic village on the outskirts of Cairo where the elites summered. Suddenly it dawns on me. I am not only watching a movie about a long-dead pop diva – this is also my mother’s story. Besides the obvious physical resemblance between the two women, their striking looks, both tall, blonde and faintly tragic, there is also a convergence of time and place. Like Dalida, Mama came of age in Shubra, attending boarding school there until she was fourteen. Growing up multilingual, a Catholic among Muslims, she too was an only daughter. As a young woman, Mama, like Dalida, left home to follow her heart, moving to Kuwait in 1967, where she met and married my father.

It is hard to imagine now, but Mama was once very beautiful and glamorous. In photographs and press clippings, she is radiant – cheekbones bronzed, eyes kohl-rimmed, gemstones tugging at her earlobes. She was every inch the diva Dalida was. For a time, both women ruled the worlds they came to conquer.

In the film’s final act Dalida sings Je veux mourir sur scène. I want to die on stage, my heart open and full of colour. On the night of 3 May 1987, broken and tired, she takes her own life. She is fifty-four. La vie m’est insupportable, pardonnez-moi, she wrote.

That same year, the year I graduated high school in Kuwait, Mama, too, exited the stage. Hounded by delusions, long suspecting our father of infidelity, she stopped bathing, stopped eating our home cooking for fear of being poisoned and began a separate existence in her own corner of the house. The Mama I knew as a child, the one who raised me as best she could, never came back. After the illness set in, another Mama appeared. She looked remarkably like the first Mama, only everything about her was different, from her taste in clothes to the way she spoke and held herself. Fundamentally altered, the new Mama was like a cover song gone wrong. It is the dissonance between the two versions that I have found hardest to fathom – where the unresolved has dwelt.

Mama reminds me now that we saw Dalida in concert at L’Olympia in Paris in 1981. I would have been around eleven, but I have no memory of that night. My own sighting of Dalida took place in broad daylight, at the Jardin d’Acclimatation, an entertainment park near the Paris flat where we used to summer. I was with my sister when Dalida appeared with her companion, both still in evening dress, as though they had taken a wrong turn on their way home from a night out. I recognised her immediately. She looked resplendent in her long sequinned gown and full make-up. But also odd and awkward and very much apart among noisy children and fairground rides. It wasn’t long after that I learned of her death.

With Dalida’s demise, the film soon ends: the credits begin to roll. I do my best to recompose myself. I am still reeling from watching Mama watch Dalida in my old home in Kuwait, my head abuzz with her tunes. Outside darkness has fallen; the distant hum of the Fahaheel Expressway drifts in, and the sound of softly crashing waves. I look over at Mama. Her eyes remain glued to the screen, but I can tell that something has shifted. Something in her gaze has softened. Slowly, ponderously, she sits up and turns to me and smiles.

“Min zaman, ya Sousou,” she says. “Min zaman ma ghannit Dalida.”

How long it has been, how very long, since Dalida last sang.

How long, indeed.                                             

Sarah al-Hamad was born and raised in Kuwait and currently lives in London. She worked as an editor at Saqi Books and is the author of several cookbooks, including the award-winning Sun Bread and Sticky Toffee (2013). ‘Dalida, Mama, and Me’ is an extract from her recently completed memoir about her mother and her childhood in Kuwait. Her work explores memory, family, migration and the ways place shapes our identity. She holds an MA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of East Anglia. 

Visual Art
Carol W. Berman, MD, is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at NYU Langone School of Medicine.  She received her MD from NYU, completed her residency at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, and returned  to NYU for a research fellowship, where she has happily remained since. 

Dr. Berman is a visual artist, author and playwright and when not treating patients or writing, she paints  in acrylics, oils and watercolor. She studied at the National Academy of Art and the Art Students League.  She would describe her works as neo-surrealistic or post-psychedelic art. 

Many patients have inspired me to paint. My painting, “This Is What Is In Her Mind,” illustrates a  person’s inner self constantly commenting and directing the self. Many times, this is toxic and the inner  self or id is negative. One of my books, TAMING THE NEGATIVE INTROJECT” ( 2019, Routledge, N.Y.)  deals with this kind of self-sabotage. 

To see other paintings please visit my website: carolwberman.com

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