In Loving MemoryReflections on Rula Quawas

Diya

Understand this. We never believed that a giant's heart could be punctured by fumbling, undeserving fingers. I will not say that the how does not matter now. The hows of death matter—especially of women giants.

________

I hold close this soundless memory from the summer of 1993, like a soft-glowing crystal ball surrounded by delicate cotton-fog—

walking up the steps of the humanities building at the University of Jordan to get to the English Departmentmaking a leftand all the way at the end of the hallwayan office to the left.

It is Rula Quawas's office. There she is on the right, at her desk, her figure surrounded by framed quotes on the wall behind her, all by women she admires, including the usual suspects—Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf.

In a department full of men, many of them old, performing imposition, magnetized to their spots in chairs or atop small wooden stages in lecture halls, solemnly intoning their lessons, Rula was a spinning, fluid force. I was a young seventeen-year-old. As I looked at this beaming short-haired woman, unashamedly space claiming in this tucked-away office, the reach of her energy across the desk told me that I can also be this way:

—untucked, spinning, always reaching.

________

In every community, there is work to be done.In every nation, there are wounds to heal.In every heart, there is the power to do it.

—Marianne Williamson—Rula's email signature, 2015

I am a nervous wreck before a panel presentation at the University of Jordan in spring 2005. Presenting in Arabic when I usually do so in English and up on a stage with important panelists who included Rula and a member of the Jordanian royal family, I am feeling small and scared. Rula must have sensed this. She makes an insignificant comment about my hand on the microphone: "How professional," she says, as if I have somehow managed to impress with that little gesture.

Her student Suha asked her whether she knows "Diya," and not knowing Suha to be my cousin, Rula tells her firmly but kindly, "You mean Dr. Diya." It was the small things with Rula—her comments about the gesture of your hands, the wisdom in your eyes, the beauty of your daughters. And the big things also—the way she told you that the world is brighter and richer because you exist in it; that you made others stand tall when you spoke your truth; that your light is gracious; that you are amazing, brilliant, superb, a winner; that she is proud of you; that she loves you, loves you, loves you. Your heart enlarged and your body felt special and noticed.

Rula protected her female brood fiercely, loved them with the intensity of a mother bear, did not accept slights, even self-slights, especially so. Respect and love for women and self-love and self-respect above all else. Remarkable also was her assured knowledge of the absolute essentialness of her words and phrases, big and small. That they could make you bigger. That you could be a giant, too.

________

Sometimes our light goes out but is blown again into flame by an encounter with another human being. Each of us owes the deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this inner light.

—Albert Schweitzer—Rula's email signature, 2014

And I grew.

Big enough to be her surrogate when, in spring 2006, I taught her seminar on Arab women writers at the University of Jordan to study-abroad students while she was on leave. Big enough to exchange speaking invitations with her, each of us showing the other off to our students—she at Guilford College in 2013 and I at the University of Jordan in 2014. Big enough to be a threat. Like her, I was shunned by my own institution for absurd "infractions."

She stayed. I left.

She never judged.

Instead, she salved and embraced. She invited me to join the fold of the "bad girls...