Flights of Fancy

In her graceful artistic style, Samira Azzam writes her Flights of Fancy especially for The Woman's Voice — they make you laugh, or pinch your conscience... How clever her pen is at catching rare morsels for your eye... and for your mind!

Wealth

The foreign visitor, who had come to get acquainted with woman in our country, said to me:
— I have noticed that half the wealth of the Arab countries is in the hands of its women.

I opened my eyes wide in astonishment, for the objectivity of the visit and of the conversation required that nothing should find its way into the guest's head but what reflected the true state of affairs. She noticed my astonishment and added, jesting:
— Bracelets and jewelry.
And here I closed my eyes — to open my mouth in a bitter laugh.

An Invocation

You can hardly pass through the streets of Beirut without their being blocked by...
a big red truck... whose owner is a man in whose heart love does not dwell...
Not because he startles the passers-by so that they scatter onto the sidewalks like rabbits...

Nor because he has hoisted the picture of a five-fingered hand of no known parentage, to drive ill luck away from the 'battleship' — but because of a wicked sentence he has written, in an ugly hand, on the front of the truck, which says:
— May the envier's eye be struck with blindness..

What a hideous picture to strike people with, just so, without preliminaries...
And then, why does he run ahead of events and assume that there really is someone who envies him — to the point of deserving to have the light put out in his eyes?
Why?

Until these wicked assumptions disappear — of the kind of 'Beware the evil of him to whom you have done good,' and 'Thinking ill of others is the keenest shrewdness,' and 'the envier's eye, etc.' — a nation will remain unable to claim that it has felt its way to the beauty of things.

A Letter

She is a tender schoolgirl, going contentedly about her studies in the first secondary class of one of the schools. I visited her family, and she came up to greet me and beg me to help her — in writing a letter that the Arabic teacher had assigned her in the composition lesson.

I said: very well, you shall be helped. Let us suppose you are writing to a friend you love — what would you say? She said: 'My friend, the well-guarded Miss.' I said: let us suppose she is dear to you, and people are simpler than that with those they hold dear — so what would you say? She said: that is how the teacher required it to be said. I said: very well, and after that, what do we write? She said: 'I send you a longing whose perfume is sweetened as the gentle, dewy breeze bears it to you...' I interrupted her: did we not say we would write simply? What need have we now of the longing with the sweetened perfume, and of the gentle, dewy breeze? She said: the teacher wants it so. I said: very well, we shall do as the teacher said. And then? She said: 'No day is spent and no night settles but...' I said: gently now — will you tell me how you came to have these phrases by heart?

She said: the teacher wrote a model letter for us on the blackboard, and I copied it out word for word. And the model carried the day.
And I grieved for the young girl who is learning her language at the hands of a teacher from the school of the literature of the gentle, dewy breeze.

Wisdom

Socrates the wise said:
Marry, my son; for if you do not become wise, you will become a philosopher.
And whoever looks into people's homes will thank God that we are by no means poor in philosophers.