I read a few pieces from Tufulat Nahd by Nizar Qabbani. I read them because I did not know they were unfit for me; and they fixed me in my opinion of man — this creature of whom you say that we ought not to fear him or be bashful before him. I came to fear him, and to blush at his insolent glances: for when he describes a girl he does not describe a worthy idea, or treat one, or bring one out in any fashion — he describes a body and nothing more, as though woman's body were the one thing to which he must turn his attention and parade before people as art...

— Let me show you, Mama, a scene to match — of a little boy

remembering, just as in the piece "Lahwat al-Tufula" that I read you just now, of a little girl remem-bering. Read the piece "Dawwarna al-Qamar" from the book Tufulat Nahd; it will spare you the trouble of a long comparison.

So said my daughter, and turned and fled before I could find my tongue to answer this flood of precocious accusations, precocious reading, and precocious conclu-sions — a deliberate discomfiture not without childhood's mischief and adolescence's recklessness.

And instead of going after her to make her understand things which, it seems, I ought to have

made her understand long before this age, I found myself before the modest bookcase, pulling down Tufulat Nahd to read in it what my little one had bound me to:

"I hungered, and the slope hun-gered, and still I wait, watching the blue windows with a hamlet's longing; and she came on, trailing in green, the stone beneath it, hiding a little breast... one half of it rounded, and a half... not yet. She said: Morning of roses! So it is you, you of the whistle — are you still, as you were, a dangerous boy? You would make of me, upon the earth, games... and chopped-up verse, and when we rose, there was in our faces the seething... A time