TITLE: Saïdé
Following my previous series, Coda (2021), depicting my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s, I went back to Lebanon to see her. When I walked through the front door, she was once again sitting in the living room, her wheelchair parked under a bright yellow light bulb. When her eyes met mine, a smile took over her face. As I rushed to hug her, she embraced me tightly, her body trembling with emotion. A tearful face meeting another, I caressed her cheeks and told her my name. She promptly grabbed both of my arms, pulling me next to her.
For a week, I saw her laugh and sing. We developed our own inside jokes, fueled by looks or sentences like “téta, say ôf” which would prompt her to sing “ôooooof” with power in her voice unlike her usual whispered words; or if I interjected, using Egyptian dialect, “ezzayik?”, she would answer, with a playful, mischievous smile “kouwayissa!”. I discovered her special fondness for dirty jokes. Mostly, I saw a world beyond her disease.
One evening, I showed her Coda and she bit her bottom lip, moving her head left and right “I’m a looker aren’t I! I’m like the moon!”.
The day that I was leaving she seemed to recover a perplexing lucidity. “Don’t leave, there’s no place like Lebanon”. Her words were articulate, her stare fierce. My silence shut her eyelids, veiling her face with ache. The pain of separation shadows her ephemeral memory. When she reopened her eyes, gray like a wave-less pond, they were dull again. Her entire face fell like melting ice revealing the crevasses of her cheeks.
I saw the most beautiful moon this November, my Saïdé. I’ll see you soon my darling, in just a few months. You'll see how time runs to unite us again.
AUTHOR: Sabine el khoury (France)
I'm an architect by training currently residing in Paris, France and a reluctant immigrant, product of the failed Lebanese state. My preferred medium of work is black and white film. I like to experiment with the fragility of light and its emergence from the lack of it.
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