Lamia Makkadam is a poet and translator from Sousse, Tunisia. She began writing poetry at an early age and studied Arabic language and literature at the Faculty of Arts in Sousse. She has lived and worked in the Netherlands for over twenty-seven years. She has worked as a journalist and radio host for Radio Netherlands International and as a criminal translator for the Dutch courts. 
She has published four collections of poetry. Her books have been translated into Dutch, Italian, French and English. 
In 2000, she was awarded the Al-Hijra Prize and in 2001, in the Netherlands, the Literary Prize for Migration.

I opened my eyes in the dark place
between earth and sky.
I heard no music, for I was born before it.
I wept not, for I had no mechanism to turn blood into tears.
I was born a hidden body,
from decaying matter that the sun dropped from its heart.
I grew, I matured as stones do.
And when I was born, I saw myself in the mirror, first as a woman.
Then a man.
And when I remembered,
I knew that I was just a body.
***
The light attacked me
and found a pair of sunken eyes. 
The wind entered me                                                                                                                                       and shook my heart from its place until it cried out,
my heart called out for someone to save it from the storm
and has been crying out ever since.
The wind bore blood into my veins
and gave birth to thought beneath the skin,
and there, between the blood and the veins
between truth and its shadow, was born my misery;
Wryly, I named it 'pleasure'
***
No one moulded me with their hands 
No one supported my creation
I created myself through necessity
I was rough
Then, with time, I became malleable 
The spirits that passed from one mind to another
Tamed me,
gave me a narrow name
and adjectives that did not contain me.
And today 
I am the surplus, apart from the name and description
I speak, not as crucified
naked 
or paralysed. 
but as stones 
which have stored all kinds of knowledge 
until they harden
A neglected breast : A stone at the bottom of the sea
A mouth without kisses: A stone in the mouth of a fish.
As for the hardest and most cruel enemy, 
it is an organ that is not touched nor from which water can flow
It is an ignorant stone 
A stone born of another
***
Today, I want to tell you about the test: 
Everything that is matter possesses an eternal spirit. 
A spirit of pure matter. 
The body's test is time
the truth is hidden within it,
a form of continuous remembrance
***
The breast spoke and said: 
I have suckled everyone yet no one has suckled me. 
I was born of touch, and was still crawling when a claw dug into my back
and caused me to lose the ability to walk. 
I clung as trees cling to a dream
I resisted the earth and its gravity with my smallest
and most insignificant dreams
a mouth bit me, and I spoke for the first time.
I don't remember what I said
but it was enough to condemn me to death in a public square.
I was put to death, executed, and much blood flowed from my neck
I was crucified like Christ.
I cried out
only to weep for the hands that had abandoned me
and the day I cried out, the earth learned to become a mother and stopped drawing the universe to her like a child
the teeth that bit my nipple were the sign
that guided me to hunger
***
Then the mouth spoke and said: 
love hurts me -
kisses whose bearers forgot to bury them before
lips parted, forming the first idea of an answer
while what inhabits me and moves me is the inner enigma.
But my happiness comes from the idea that behind everything lies an enigma
that unites all things
and that what attracts one lip to another, is the desire
to understand 
and to think in the midst of a vast world that doesn't think
My interior is in conflict with my exterior
and so thus I was.
I seek to reach nothing
no consciousness behind the inexplicable
neither below nor above the
void.
No justice other than that of chance encounters.
I had a head of water that I introduced to matter and it crumbled, to skin and it became a river
Most of us follow the same path
a path that eventually leads us 
to the rift
where everything goes in the end
***
Then the hand spoke and said: 
Once again, faced with the reality of memory on one hand and the body on the other, It is I who propose reconciliation and caresses the wounds.
Unified and indifferent to the one who wrongs and the one who suffers,
to the one who falls and the one who perseveres.
I focus all my efforts on awakening the dead dream in the dead limbs,
and from my fingers, I release that warmth that returns each thing to its place
and each thought to its origin.
which returns love to its mother and father
and the child to the dust.
I care not for immortality, nor worry about endings, but trust in blood
and illusion. 
He who has no wings will one day have them.
The race is not for the fastest,
nor the battle for the strongest.
***
The heart is not only rebellious - it is the heart that tries to unify the whole with the whole, and it's from there that faith begins, isolated and peaceful. 
Balance between the old and the new,
An equation that reaches the limits of trial 
Preoccupied more with what has been lost than with what is to come, and it is in this place that it settles.
At night, the heart goes out into the open to seek the star, yet knowing that it is not there,
was never there.
But it prefers not to think about the logic that governs the outer machine; it would rather lose itself in the internal struggles.
There was a time when everything seemed reasonable,
until it realised that the life spark was its continuing passion for the dark.
And before the heart speaks, everyone must understand 
that the heart only speaks when absolutely vital.
and that it doesn't speak of specifics
but to warn of the end.
The heart says, resting hand on heart:
In an authentic book, I would have been the Communist party defending the poor,
the white flag waved by refugees crossing the borders of time and space
the refrain of a hymn or song glorifying life on planet Earth. 
And in time, I would have been the little boat that carried everyone back to shore
without a single straw of them drowning,
or a lipstick falling from a girl's purse into the sea.

But here, in this context, I want to tell you that I've always wished to be a rubber tire,
A balloon carried by the wind, 
a shoe in a dog's mouth.
-
I wished for all this, and it was in wishing-
I mean that from deprivation- sprang channels that connected my interior to the interior of every living thing
and my pores to the waters of the earth. 
I was gentle and tender and, after many attempts, I learned to substitute myself for shells in wars,
and for viruses in epidemics.
I am a heart, and this is clear in everything I do. 
My home is not in matter, but in the soul. 
I could have been born in the middle of a river
and no one would have felt the difference.

Extracts from "The Book of the Body" published by Dar Takween as part of the "Eshrakat" series overseen and presented by poet Adonis.