We’re not sure when exactly Salma El Tarzi started trying to remember her face, but we know she chose to start her narrative with the moment she accidentally came across a collection of photographs of her mother on a fishing trip she went on alone. Salma’s mother was 35 when the pictures were taken, while Salma herself was ten. This was 31 years ago; today, Salma has exceeded her mother’s age in that particular photo she describes in the beginning of her book. In it, the mother is on a fishing yacht, her legs crossed, and on her face is the ghost of a smile that Salma can’t quite interpret — is it sarcastic, or maybe flirtatious?
The woman in the picture, Salma muses, is not the mother she always knew. “Suddenly, I felt betrayed. This might be the only picture of you since I came into your life where I’m nowhere to be found. The woman in the picture is a stranger to me, her existence not tied to mine, a woman I’m jealous — rather than possessive — of. It’s as though you’re two people in one, and on that trip, you shed your outer self and showed the other you: your inner self. You shed your outer self and you shed me.”
While reading the previous passage from An Attempt to Remember My Face, I felt as though I was experiencing what Iman Mersal wrote about the ghosts of motherhood from an opposite angle: how motherhood is a conflict between two selves, each trying to negate the other. It is a relationship mired in threat. Mersal wrote from the point of view of the mother, while Salma writes from that of the daughter. But An Attempt to Remember My Face is not really about motherhood, nor is it about daughterhood for that matter. And it’s not just about Salma’s relationship with her mother. In the end, it is the author’s attempt to remember her own face, not her mother’s.
But which face is it that Salma is attempting to remember? Her current one, or her face in those moments she chose to recount? Perhaps there’s no contradiction here. I never studied geology, but I know it’s the science that deals with the layers of the earth, those that accumulate over time. The layers violently press against one another until, finally, they merge. Perhaps that is the face Salma is attempting to remember: the culmination of those layers after they’ve become one — the sum of all her faces. In her frown, for instance, Salma sees the same frown her mother used to wear years ago; no one ever has a single face.
In her practice, Salma employs multiple tools, including writing, drawing and filmmaking. Many first began to recognize her name after watching her documentary Underground on the Surface (2013), where she followed budding mahraganat stars Oka, Ortega and Wezza. She has also published several articles, as well as a research study titled You Know You Want It, which tackles the culture of sexual violence in mainstream Egyptian cinema. Her latest project, An Attempt to Remember My Face, is a blend of text and drawings, or, as she described it in a chat we previously had with her: “It is something you can look at, read, or touch.”
The book can be situated among a growing series of contemporary works of art centering on their creators’ relationships with their parents, including Amr Ezzat’s Room 304 or How I Hid from My Dear Father for 35 Years (2018), filmmaker Mohamed Rashad’s Little Eagles (2016) and Nadia Kamel’s The Newborn (2018). But Salma’s narrative extends beyond her relationship with her mother to include myriad reflections on death, loneliness and other fleeting or consistent personalities in her life.
One can’t read Salma’s attempt to remember her face without recalling memories of their own. I thought I could probably start at a similar point in the history of my family, trying to trace the many faces present in the face that I know. I remember what my therapist said about how we harbor many voices within us, ones that are often conflicting and irritating, and that ultimately the only thing we can do is to accept all of them, try to understand them, and negotiate with them over the space to be. Something about us nearing our parents’ age as we remember them from our childhood makes us more willing to invest in such attempts at acceptance, perhaps because now, there is no longer a need to fight. As Salma writes to her mother: “You know I love you, right? But your death, in a way, has liberated me.” We are no longer captive; not to their expectations, at least.
This is where Salma starts her journey: a family of four that is no longer whole after the mother’s death; her disappearance. Death is the tightly strung thread tying the book together from beginning to end. We’re introduced to it once more when Salma writes about Youli, her nonagenarian paternal grandmother, lonely but for the company of Salma, who is herself terribly lonely in the old woman’s presence. Youli will not surrender to death, which, to Salma, seems like the only logical thing to do. As each of them stares into the other’s loneliness, Salma eventually decides to go, leaving Youli in a convent that’s also a nursing home, where there’s a giant wall covered with hundreds of dead butterflies, killed with gentleness and preserved with care.
Perhaps if Salma hadn’t broken free from her mother’s idealism, she wouldn’t have been able to write about Youli and the dilemma of leaving her with the dead butterflies. And perhaps if she hadn’t made peace with her mother’s idealism, she wouldn’t have been able to break free of that same tendency: “I saw contradictions in how she dealt with people and tolerated their gravest mistakes on one hand, and how she wouldn’t tolerate our slightest offences on the other. She wanted us to be perfect, and she wouldn’t accept any less. She expressed that need in the most idealistic of ways too. Now, as I draw closer to her age when she died, as I see her in my frown — as I understand what lies behind that frown — I am beginning to understand that I was harsh in my assessment of my mother. My mother was lonely, and her loneliness was a black hole threatening to swallow her, and so she had to fill it. My mother wasn’t faking saintliness; she was making offerings, in order to be relieved of her pain.”
Death never disappears from Salma’s journey toward remembering her face. It returns with the passing of her friend, Bouda, who took his own life. Salma muses on the line between life and death, and where they intersect. She thinks of those who were at the frontlines during the 2011 Mohamed Mahmoud clashes, edging closer and closer to that line, but all the while retaining their ability to retreat in a definitive moment — a game they played over and over.
“I never imagined that death would be such an integral part of my life. We all think death is far until we lose someone, and then we’re left stunned at how much death there is in life, until we ourselves die,” she writes.
But in Salma’s narrative about her face, death isn’t that mysterious visitor who suddenly arrives then just as abruptly disappears, leaving behind panic and loss. In her story with Youli, death is the most logical solution, and its absence creates an illogical situation. As for her mother, who suffered intense bouts of asthma, there were many rehearsals of death before it actually happened, which left enough space to reflect on the particularities of “imminent death” or “constant death” — death as an expected event. Perhaps because death, when it came, wasn’t a surprise, Salma tries to imagine its most sensual aspects; not out of a real desire to end her life, but in an attempt to explore what she refers to as the “climax” of a horizontal life that goes on and on.
Salah Jaheen writes:
“The instant death pushed down —
gentle yet omnipotent, one desultory day —
On a button in this kingdom —
The film stopped, frozen.”
Yet he never tells us what happens after the film freezes. Perhaps this is what Salma is trying to understand.
She writes of a moment similar to the one Jaheen describes: “Somehow, time stopped at the moment of your death. Maybe because of the shock, or because your life stopped then. It stopped, it didn’t end. It froze, to eternity, and, with it, a part of my own life froze. A part of me never got past that moment, and despite the passage of time and the fact that I am growing older, this part of me does not grow old. The truth is, it stopped growing long before you died: the first time I realized the imminence of your constant death.”
It is as though death has two natures: one is the “iconic” death that freezes the film, the other is death in its most normal form: a logical solution in Youli’s case, a way to reach climax in a life that stretches in a straight line. The iconic death in Salma’s life did not take place when her mother died, but when she realized that she was always about to die, as she says. Everything that came after that realization was normal, including the actual moment of death. Perhaps this is what happens after the film freezes.
Does each of us have an iconic death in their life? Perhaps. I’ve definitely known the normalcy of death; I experience it each time I’m at a funeral and thinking of all the appointments I had to cancel. At first, I’m ashamed of my thoughts, but then I tell myself there’s no need to force some contrived kind of reverence onto the situation. I am here only as a witness of a death that, to someone else, is iconic. Such a type of death is a burden carried by one and one alone, and there is no salvation from such loneliness.
In Salma’s attempt to remember her face, loneliness has three faces: Faten, Queen of the Lonely; foul-mouthed Sabah; and Ihsan, who “hides behind her pots.” While Faten lives on a sidewalk at the intersection of Mohamed Mahmoud and Youssef al-Gendy — regarding the world with the disgust of a woman who chose to withdraw — Sabah appears in the middle of the night, stands in a spot not too far from Faten, and begins a long tirade of curses directed at no one, repeating her performance every night with no change in content or tone, like someone observing a religious ritual. As for Ihsan, we don’t know much about her beyond the fact that she hid behind her pots, made cotton pyjamas every year for Salma’s family, and was buried next to Salma’s mother.
Salma writes that she often finds herself alternating between a desire to withdraw, like Faten, and a desire to curse the world, like Sabah. Both are forms of protest — against the iconic death she experienced, perhaps, or the perpetually temporary life she was made to live after her mother’s death, waiting for something to happen so that her “real life” could start, with no real notion of what this real life would look like.
Near the end of An Attempt to Remember My Face, Salma draws herself as a little girl, all alone in a two-page spread filled with a black emptiness. She ends the book with a large, bold colon, as though anticipating some kind of explanation for all the previous stories — an explanation that’s nowhere to be found in the pages of her book.
