I enquiry therefore about seduction, about this jeu de role that is an anthem to the figure and that in her work keeps coming up as a gentle, sweet weapon. A weapon that must be difficult to manage in the midst of the cult of the veils. But in Maram's opinion, seduction is not only femininity, or sensuality as conventionally intended. Yet again it is attention, or the need for. As Edelman maintains, humans need words, because they are blessed with the disease of emotionality, with the necessity to destabilize themselves, to tremble, to short-circuit themselves. And at the same time with the desire for safety, for confirmation. The urgency of a movement that would channel toward oneself energies, flows. To seduce then in the etymological sense of leading toward oneself. “I think that seduction is a live and very important element for each of us. In the arts as well as in human relationships. Seduction is a call to love, to mental or physical pleasure. A relationship that no longer has this engine is destined to die. Babies seduce their mother since their birth. They smile… I recall seeing a child on a train talking to her mother. While [the mother] was watching outside the window, I observed this five year old and her intense activity to seduce her own mother. She touched her face and forced her to watch with her wheedling … She interpreted in front of me a seduction scene worthy of an artist, only to get her mother to look at her and smile, to feel loved. I was moved. It is a noble art, that of seduction. I love to be admired, to me it's respect for the other, but it is a purposeless seduction. It isn't to get to something; it's limited to beauty and nobility. Sometimes I think I really am naïve, as my children say. But I got rid of any willingness to obtain a favour, and I offer my tenderness to people.”

Since 1982, Maram escaped from Syria three times. She has been living for 23 years in Paris, where she keeps baggage that she tries to hold close. It's a baggage filled with sick relationships and separations, with an extremely painful bereavement. Until, following the abduction of her son and the claims of a country to get involved in her own rights without any respect for them, she decided never to set foot there again. “I divorced from my past, my religion, my land, and even from my language. It lasted 13 years. I
did not write to or see my family, I stopped eating syrian food, or listening to the radio. That was the punishment I inflicted upon my country. I was taking my distance from it.” It was the end of her attempts to chase “the status of respected woman”. All that came from this was a celebration of independence and of limpidity, the convergence of her instincts into a life style that'd harmonised with them. “I am a free woman. When I was younger, my mates kept saying it. Back then I did not understand this freedom. To them, it was immoral because I was swimming, dancing, I used to wear mini-skirts, greet boys go to the movies. My family sent me to Damascus to study. I used to go to England, and love a boy from a different religion, without hiding. I suffered so much. To them it was somehow insulting, while to me it was moral, honest, non hypocritical, to me it meant feeling good with the other person, respecting each other. [It meant] to be transparent, harmonise with one's own thoughts.”

I ask her how was it possible to abandon her own roots, to amputate deep bonds, and suddenly privatise her life. To try and give to it, far from her nucleus, a western sense of atomism, of solipsism. Here Maram is drastic and very straightforward: “I feel no relationship with the land. My relationship is with human beings. It is them that make a place a country. Your country is where you are loved and respected (in terre and être there are the same letters…). I love Paris because there are my children there, and the people I love, my habits. This is reassuring… I could live in Granada, Bologna, Cordoba, Rome: everywhere there are the people I love. I don't know if I could live in an arab country, go back to Syria. There is the rest of my family there, but I don't think I could.”

Maram al-Massri's poetry is a poetry of small things, of myricae. The poet Adonis pinpoints exactly this attention for details, this discovery of the detail as pregnant, full of meanings, almost a speaking detail. The object becomes capable to intervene in a relationship, to forecast, to preannounce, to medidate. It must therefore be decoded, interpreted: captured (Stop me, my wise husband/ from climbing/The high-heels of my femininity,/ for there at the crossroads/A young man : awaits me ).
It is the revolution of a woman that in her own life has given to freedom a huge and meticulous value, piercing as well as realised by small pieces, by the discovery of precious and daily possibilities not taken for granted. This infantile eye, this ingenuous attention to the object, this putting it into words and renewing it, the raising of it to the status of 'bridge and gate' to inner universals, is the result of a non conventional journey. A tortuous and finally privileged journey. Maram's harmony has gone through renunciation, annulment of herself, until she reached the attentive capacity to reflect about herself and others, with the advantage of a hybrid eye. In a place where the transformation into a Creole, the 'life abroad' is not a glossy, exotic flavoured party, but is suffering, difficulty in fitting in, to give one's life and feelings a meaning and a continuity. “I have always been a 'mestizo' woman, between two cultures. Already when I was in Syria. Westernised by my brothers who used to love The Beatles and Bob Dylan, by the literature translated into films, thanks to a mother who was an artist, a father who was a secular Lebanese with a Christian mother. I used to suffer down there, and I still suffer here. I am not a westerner. I have neither the means nor the independence. I am this mix between the submissive and rebellious woman. My freedom is so difficult and so desired. I suffered for it so much. I looked for it so hard. It's true. I know now that freedom is also to wear lipstick, a miniskirt, a sleeveless top. I was deprived of this freedom in France, and this can look odd. Nothing is like going out at night as a type of freedom. To go to University is freedom, to drive a car. I have no moral judgements on sexual freedom. Anything that is not harmful to somebody else is allowed. Sex and Love are linked, in my opinion. They are a search for freedom.”

Maram's lyrical impulse has swiftly gone through a 'civil' period, that's to say: ethical, patriotic themes, but she was ready to let that go very early. What feeds her lyrics are the human trivialities sap, not a romantic, languid love. It is a vivid and daily motion at home, on the street, in a trip. And a language which is part of the universe, that does not have the function to describe but to create it. (where horses/ cannot galop,/ where there is no / crack / to allow:a beam of light to pass,/ where no grass/ grows,/ I cling/ to the feet of word). Words as things, words that are capable to realise, baptise, perform rites. In any case, a soft style, on which labels, or attempts to find in it what it isn't, clash. It is useless to compare her to any local or American author, too. “Obviously, – she explains, – there is some Arab culture in my poetry. Equally I can trace some western influence on my first works in Syria. It is like a fruit that does not resemble either of them. Arabian critics find it difficult to classify me into some sort of known category, and so do the western ones. Sometimes I have used the Koran. I don't know how. But my mixed culture is affected by the life of this woman I write about, by her desires, her fears, by her ghosts and her naïvety. As a matter of fact, I talk about a woman who could be Arab, French, Spanish or Italian, because she is me and you.”

I come to the cherries and the tile floor. She agrees with my interpretation, and says that it's true, in her poetry the woman is a solitary, foreign character, but also swollen, passionate. And the man, a man “with no creation”, infantile, incapable to mould shapes, to create subtlenesses, to reinvent himself, incapable to give himself new eyes.
Here perhaps Maram is her roots, her journeys. She often defines herself naive, which is a way to say ingenuous, but most of all essential, drafted, dotted. And in fact, with skilful and patient spontaneity, she recreates not so shaded categories, basic, fundamental colours, that nearly clash and are used to create new colours through their mixing together. When she refers to the ancestral dicotomisation of the genders universe, we manage to go on swings, to see the sensual middleeastern woman that wants to escape and play, and at the same time prays the lover-master to hold her back. (desire inflames me/And my eyes glimmer,/ I stuff morals/in the nearest drawer,/ I turn into the devil/ and blindfold my angels/ just / for a kiss ).

Maram seems to have some sort of indifference towards the excessive exercise to complicate everything. She likes the universal, magmatic forces, the timeless laws of the fulcrum and the magnets. Between the two halves of the world, man and woman, take place desire, vitality, lies, rivalry. The cherry-heart. And the incapacity to defend it, the constancy to live and live again one's dramas, the familiarity with pain, to which we deliver ourselves – we naïve – as if to a parent.