Meeting Catherine’s Ghost

Meeting Catherine’s Ghost
at the Rhetoric Conference

Catherine…you are the only woman I had ever loved. You are the love of my life. I am head over heels in love with you. You confessed to Nelly, “I am Heathcliff” and I now confess to you, “I am Catherine…If all else perished and ‘you’ remained, I should still continue to be, and if all else remained, and ‘you’ were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger”.
Catherine, the Arabic Renaissance of my dreams,
I met your ghost at
The Fourth International Conference on Rhetoric and Rhetorical Studies.
I bumped into your ghost listening to the heated arguments over
feminism, lost utopias, the power of naming, resistance, intercultural communication, narratives and narration, scientific and forensic discourse, modern architecture and hypertextuality.
I came across your ghostly presence in the glaring looks of enthusiastic students raising questions and holding discussions with people of the literary academy. I found you smiling at the cultural misunderstanding finally resolved into human understanding among Arabs and their fellowmen from the West. I encountered your soft, smiling looks, when you heard Ihab Hassan, the famous Egyptian American literary critic, deploring the lack of personal reflection, self-examination and what was really known in the heyday of Islam under the name of “Ijtihad” or freedom of thinking and expression. Then, I saw your ghost staring to the people, lost in thought: “What really brings about a deep change of heart? Is it through changing the way people dress or rather through the way they think? Is it by rejecting the veil as regressive or rather by examining our real weaknesses: “resistance to change”, “undermined self-confidence”, “inability to formulate a vision” and “short-sightedness”?”


Arabic Renaissance, Arabian Catherine, Arabic Development:
One Arab People, One Arab Market,
One Arab Resistance to Zionism.

Luckily, my confidence proved not misplaced. “Catherine came to me, one morning, at eight o’clock, and said she was that day an Arabian merchant, going to cross the Desert with his caravan” (Wuthering Heights: Ch. XVIII). Finally, all the students of the English department stood together to sing, and I started singing my own songs:


وطني حبيبي الوطن الأكبر .. يوم ورا يوم أمجاده بتكبر ..
وانتصاراته .. ماليه حياته .. وطني بيكبر وبيتحرر ..
وطني ... وطني ...

..........................................

و لكننا أبدا لن نرد الأمل
الذي يطرق بابنا بإصرار.

..........................................

إرمي البصر على قد ما تقدر و تشوف
تلقى جميع الأمكنة
لساها مستنية ضحكة كلمتك..
إصرار ف دقات القلوب..
جريء و هازم أي خوف..
وهتلقى شمسك يا جدع ..
من غير خسوف ..
تقدر تنور في الطريق ..أعتم كهوف !