Jean Naggar

Two years ago, I had an idea for a novel. It would have its roots in Egypt, but would quickly move to a community of exiles living in New York, centering on one character in particular, JAMILA, a girl from a small Nile village who became Jasmine, a celebrity model. What fun to research clothes and fashion agencies, and an entire world I knew so little about.

I gave Jamila a brother, Ali, left behind in the Nile village while his beloved sister disappeared into a life he could not even imagine. I plunged energetically into Ali's bitterness, stirred it about, and started to research how terrorism might take hold in the malleable minds of the young. I wrote and wrote, researching behaviors and evolving plots and wonderful scenarios that would link my growing list of characters to each other and to the larger worlds they navigated. Entire plot lines came and went, The novel covered decades, sprawling into dark corners of possibility. I loved it. I loved writing it. I loved every word.

Then my personal life received a blow from which I knew I could never recover. I lost my eldest son. Writing a novel became a ridiculous frivolity totally at odds with the pain and drama of my real life.  The novel had a title by then, FOOTPRINTS ON THE HEART. I set it aside and tried to regain some personal equilibrium. It lay fallow for many many months. Two months ago I found the courage to pick up the manuscript and read it again. Suddenly, links to plots that had long ago bitten the dust, or characters whose motivations had swerved and changed direction stood out from the story I was reading. They didn't belong at all. How had I not noticed this before? Intrigued, I began to move sequences and characters into a different file in the computer. I could not bear to actually delete any of my beloved work.( Anyone else been there?) I swallowed the multiplying losses and moved on, streamlining the flow of the book.

After all those months it began to fall into an intensely readable progression. The characters refused to be pushed into moments that did not fit their lives. Their voices became stronger, more distinct. FOOTPRINTS ON THE HEART became a novel as I worked, no longer a pile of connected incidents. The voices of Jasmine, Ali and Sol created a new music. I knew the sound was a rich and blended harmony. I had excavated my novel from the morass of its past. Stay tuned. Publication is close.

Years have gone by. Days weeks months have gone by. At the very end of December 2017, my world shattered. My eldest son, Alan, died in Los Angeles, in a sudden septic shock situation following what he had taken to be a gastric upset. He had been in New York for Thanksgiving, and to help organize my surprise 80th birthday celebration with his siblings. Within a few days, I plunged from a state of heady happiness, surrounded by husband, children and grandchildren, to a terrible crash into a boundless, borderless, unchanging relationship with anguish. My son was gone, suddenly and irrevocably. The wound still gapes a year and a half later, but now I can contain it for some of the time, and weep alone at night when the reality of my huge loss sweeps over me. The wound will never heal. The pain will never go away.

But now it is time to reclaim whatever remnants of myself remain.

That is the challenge I see ahead as I prepare to welcome my first novel later this year.

Meanwhile, I post today in memory of my firstborn son, a poem written months ago from the depths of my pain.

 

Alan

In the deepest black of night I cry your name,
Tortured by memories of a past when you were small
And I could tell you where to be.
"Don't run" I cry, "Don't get there before me.
You were never supposed to get there first.
Come back. Please, Oh please come back. You'll get lost."
I listen, holding my breath, but no-one replies.
Pain swells out and wraps my soul in fire.
Those are such bitter tears I cry for you my son,
Wrenched from your life out of your turn.
I can know nothing of you now except this silence.
My firstborn son, where are you now?
Are you alone? Afraid? Lost in eternity?
So much love I had for you from the first faint flutter
I recognized as yours, long before you were born.
You made me a mother and my mother's heart
Cannot believe that you have ceased to be.
And yet I call your name
And strain to hear, but no-one answers me.
Pain leaks from my heart with every breath
As alone and lost in the dark
I try to understand your death.

 

A month ago, my son-in-law brought me some plants for our terrace, since various annoying setbacks prevented me from reveling in my usual happy spring foray at Saunderskill Farms in upstate New York, almost walking distance from our country house. He had chosen a glorious array of purple and white petunias, delicate spires of purple florets, pink fuschias that revealed silky purple interiors, and a magnificent hanging fuschia bursting with fat pink buds, that quite took my breath away. I imagined drinking my morning coffee under the swaying blooms once they had all opened.
We have a ficus tree that winters behind our white reclining couch in the living room, and then settles decoratively into a corner of our small terrace when the last frosts are over. We nursed it from a sprig, many years ago, to its present impressive height, and every year it gets a little harder to maneuver it back and forth between apartment and terrace. My husband heaved a sigh of relief when he had pushed and pulled it to its usual corner, and it was only later that we realized that one of its branches was in the way of the hanging fuschia, which immediately reacted to sharing its sparse light and sun by dropping buds and blooms all over the terrace floor. It had become a mass of swaying green leaves. I was devastated.
Meanwhile, the ficus, dancing in the light spring breezes, began to unfurl new leaves of delicate green, mixing in with its dark and dusty winter foliage. I noticed that the hanging fuschia seemed to have developed bunches of low hanging buds, and sprigs waved above the ficus with sprays of new buds reaching upward to the light. Today, they all opened, creating a gorgeous lacy filigree of pink and white between and above the leaves and branches of the ficus. They adapted to each other and created a superb counterbalance of shades of green and bursting clusters of color. Their combined beauty outshone their separate existences. A lesson to be learned?

I read somewhere "You don't get harmony when everyone sings the same note."

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I am becoming fascinated with the different way that time impacts my life now that I do not have a measurable job to go to. Hours drift past, indistinguishable, tumbling and swirling in the quiet until they cede space to the next hour, and the next. Sometimes no words are spoken for many hours, so they pass me by in silence, offering no interaction with others. There is no schedule to brush against, nothing to push against nothing with which to make contact in the soft slurring of the days. Time is mine now. But how to fashion something meaningful out of it ?
In between the long stretches of road with nothing to mark my passage, there are suddenly stretches where a complex scenery defines itself. A flurry of phone calls, obligations, emergencies, doctor visits, plans, everything crashes at once into the baffling serenity, stirring up clumps of purpose that flower and dazzle in the calm.
I start the old "master of the universe" stride, but realize that it no more exists than the many years that refined it. Now I walk carefully, gauging the pavement, looking for seating here and there, sighing with relief that there is no more need for hurry, there are fewer sharp edges to avoid. It is almost pleasant to wander in a blurred landscape. There is much to do, much to see, much to savor.
There is always a growing sense that the last time never announces itself, so each time is fragrant with the poignancy that it could be the last. Few angers warrant stoking. Many loves crowd in to embrace. So much in this beautiful world to admire. I have seen and enjoyed so much. Fear for the future recedes. The future will take care of itself. I can only watch and hope.
People smile and pass me by. My panoply of needs and desires lose their urgency. I have one more revision to undertake on my novel. My heart clings to the hope that it will fly out into the world and be seen, that all that I need to say will be heard. I may be old, but I will not be invisible.

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A year ago, I plunged into my novel and stopped writing my monthly blogs, wanting to channel all the energy of my creativity toward the one goal that beckoned enticingly from the shadows. Now winter has passed, an astoundingly mild winter, but one that seems reluctant to cede its place to spring. Clouds race across the sky, propelled by an unseasonal wind. Storms and hail batter the middle of the country. Here we are, in May 2016, and the chill in the air still makes the crocuses and daffodils shiver along with the rest of us.
I spent a year of writing and thinking about writing. My novel is done, except for responding to advice from agent and editor. I have neither. I am stranded in the nether world of doubt and despair from which I rescued other writers for years. Who will love my brain-child? Who will make it all real? I wait. Answers will eventually come. They may not be the answers I so desire. I am not a patient person I discover, although I always thought I was.
I set out to write that novel, clear about where it would begin and where it would end. I knew the beginning. I knew how it ended. I was fuzzy, but hopeful that I would be able to sharpen focus on everything that needed to happen in between. What I had not anticipated was the way certain characters, just a name at first, struggled and elbowed their way to importance, and in doing so, unfurled infinite possibilities, influenced interaction with others, tilted the story differently and through their motivations and individual needs skewed the involvement with their environment and world events their way. I felt myself being dragged along to unpremeditated scenarios by the energy the characters themselves projected. It was a mind-blowing experience.
Now, like so many other writers of first novels, I sit on hot coals, pretending to do and say all that is expected of me in my real world, while the world and characters I created bang on the door of my consciousness, demanding to know what will happen next. The novel (tentative title, CHILDREN OF THE NILE), is finished, but not final, as I wait for responses.
This the mere beginning. But what of the people whose lives I explored, whose lives I lived as I wrote them? They became more real to me than flesh and blood. We lived together for so many months, shared Eureka moments, struggled against each other, flew above the clouds into the zone together and emerged dazed but triumphant to read words that wrote themselves, words I loved, and was unaware of having written.
Now there is only the pain of waiting.

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Writing my memoir, The catalyst that started the process of writing my memoir came zooming out of left field soon after the births of my first grandchildren. I realized then, that while they held the key to the future, I held the key to their past. They were entitled to find it, if they ever went seeking. The community and the world I had known as a child before the Suez crisis of 1956 had completely disappeared. It seemed increasingly important to write it back into being, to preserve the vibrant personalities and idiosyncrasies of beloved family members, along with the rich and complicated world in which they flourished.
I never meant to share my reflections with the world. I wrote for my family, in an attempt to make sense of it all, to seek out the vanished past that left its faint footprint in the present. But as I began to open locked doors and allow the past back in, more and more memories, more scenes, more scents and sounds of a lost world swelled into being and jostled in my mind for attention. There was a profound satisfaction in feeling that I was rendering homage to those who came before me, and laying a path for those in search of themselves to follow. I began to see myself as a mere fragment in time, the sum of choices made by unknown ancestors, in a distant past.
Each memoir is both unique, and universal. I learned that each personal memoir holds truths and commonalities way beyond those experienced by the writer. Every life, whatever the circumstances, turns out to be a universal tale of reversals and transformations, shaped by the storms of politics, economics, wars, and losses; the prism through which each tale is viewed is what bends the experience into widely differing shapes for each individual.
In striving to make sense of our own lives, we are drawn to read about the lives of others. Whether those lives mirror our own or offer a taste of exotica or trauma we have not shared, we enter them for a brief time, taking pleasure or pain in the sharing, and always finding a common humanity.

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Spring is hiding, but I am in no mood for a game of hide-and-seek. I need the real thing after the winter we have had this year. I am rigorously proceeding with all the spring requirements: spring cleaning, sorting and tidying, Passover etc., but the touch of spring sunshine on my face is missing. I dare not put my plants out on our small terrace, although they suddenly feel claustrophobic in the living room. The inhospitable cold wind still breathes an ominous chill into every day. The sight of buds bursting into bloom and trees leafing into delicate spring exuberance is yet to come. Winter is refusing to let go, hanging on with a relentless grip, and it seems that spring is not powerful enough to insist that it's time is now.
Nonetheless, life moves on. I wrestle my way forward into my novel and find that new directions emerge and new connections are made between characters in a larger more metaphoric sense. It is such hard work to move with the characters as they swerve from the path I planned for them and create enticing new opportunities. Letting go of a lovingly crafted episode that no longer advances the direction the story is taking is truly painful, but I will wait until I have completed a full draft and have had some "beta" readers react to it, before making the decision, even though I sort of know now that the painful excision will have to be made.
I am having so much fun with the process and the fulfillment of my life's dream to write a novel. Who knows if it will ever see the light of day, but meanwhile, I forge ahead, loving the work, loving the opportunity to try

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I have never looked forward to March as fervently as I do this year. We have family birthdays cropping up early in the month. My mother's birthday was on March 13th. She would have been 101. In celebration of her life and in thanks for the life she gave me, I have posted another of her paintings on this month's blog. A wide variety of her paintings can be found on this website,

http://grannyart.free.fr/grannyart/

April will bring two BatMitzvahs of close family, as well as the yearly ordeal that is Passover. Surely by then, we will have segued into warmer weather and the use of our terrace once again? I think often of Stony Creek House, its sturdy stone walls warding off the cold, the roof sagging under snowfalls and ice, the view drere and somber as the house freezes in solitude and we pray that no pipes burst and no trees fall victim to the ice and the cold.
I am so tired of snow and ice, white and grey, multiple layers of clothing, and hefty boots to dare even a few steps outside. The one Manhattan blessing is the way the skies are often blue even when the thermometer plunges to Arctic depths.
Still, the gentle warmth of spring sunlight and the slow wash of color as flowers and leaves break into bud and bloom, the first happy trills of courting birds, these are the moments my heart desires. Enough of winter hibernation for this year! We need spring!
I am getting used to living in two universes, the one we all live in, and the one in my head that clicks into place more and more as my novel grows. Every small detail that parallels my story or my characters leaps out at me when people are conversing, or when I read the paper or listen to the news. I am living there as much as living here, and sometimes it is hard to make the bridge from one to the other. This is a new and absorbing experience. I am grateful for the opportunity to savor it to the full.

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Snow, ice, wind, storms, sleet and bone-chilling cold. That has been the recipe so far for this bitter winter. Even the stoics are shaken. For hibernating creatures such as myself, the days stretch, unwinding opportunity as I sit and contemplate the blank screen of my computer.
Groundhog Day came and went with no clarification as to how long this weather will hold us prisoner. The three warring groundhogs of the Northeast could not arrive at a consensus, so - weary sigh - we either have an early spring or five more weeks of winter.
I planned to hibernate, but I did expect to be able to poke my nose out of my burrow now and then to sniff the air.
Meanwhile, my life as a writer is taking me by surprise. I am learning that having made a commitment to my characters and the story they are weaving, everything I hear, see and read measures itself subconsciously against them. Everything around me feeds into my story. I am working internally far more than I expected and I am loving the process. My characters are growing wings and flying on their own. Only time will tell if their wings take their story into the minds and hearts of readers. They have made it into mine.
If anyone reading this is an aspiring fiction writer, I strongly recommend John Gardner's fantastic book, "On Becoming a Novelist." Along with Stephen King's engaging book on writing, it has spun a web of very useful insights into the process and reach of the imagination and its relationship to writing fiction, to creativity, and truth.
Other books have been somewhat helpful, but these two set my feet firmly on a path I am treading with wonder and delight, breathing in the air of discovery and marveling at the view, all the while hibernating and waiting for spring.

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Strange December weather.
Two azalea plants are flourishing on our city living-room window-sill, encouraged to spectacular bloom by the subtle wafting of warm air from the radiator nearby and the delicate winter sunlight sifting through the glass of the window pane. They bloom year after year, sometimes twice a year. Every new array of strong little buds comes as a charming surprise as the years go by.
Spring-like days offer gentle air and blue skies, but hidden in our cautious, almost disbelieving delight there lurks a sense of foreboding. Will we have to pay for this unseasonal gift with harsh and cruel winter months to come, as a new year moves in?
I am drifting slowly toward the moment when I will be able to sink into working on my novel without guilt. January begins next week. My year of transition is over.
I have not succeeded in staving off some of the words that have begun to crowd my subconscious. 15,000 of them now sit enticingly in my computer. Every time I dare to open the file, I am sucked deep into the lives of my characters, who are filling out in unexpected ways, gaining strong voices, past lives, and a destiny.
I feel that this forage into the realms of the imagination is what I was always meant to do. Time disappears. There are no hungers but the hungers of the individuals I have invited to live in my mind. I am merely a conduit and like a Jinn billowing from a bottle, I can offer them a future that only I can conjure into reality.
There is research to be done, and I am reading into the period when the novel is set, and into some of the background. I am so excited to be embarking on a new challenge, a new project that will push beyond what I know and enlarge my interior world. I so hope it will all come together to produce the shape and resolution of a fully realized work of fiction. I am stepping with optimism and energy into my writing life.
Onward, 2015! And a happy new year to one and all.

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