My mother, the most beautiful mother, passed on Mother’s Day, Sunday, March 21, 2021, at 12:30 p.m. in a hospital far from her daughter and son and her home and her pen and her intimate things.
I visited Nawal in her Shubra apartment in October 2019. She had called me and asked me to come. When I arrived Mona was in the room next to her mother, distraught. We exchanged a few words. Three years later Mona shaped her emotions into these poems for and about her mother. They exemplify the way Marianne Hirsch (1989: 30) theorized a daughter’s imagination: “a longing to re-experience symbiotic union with the mother (by identification with her) or by a struggle against an identification which still reveals a profound and continued closeness . . . a struggle with a bond that is powerful and painful, that threatens engulfment and self-loss even while...
