How to mend: motherhood and ghosts

If I’d been more aware and someone had asked me about “my mother’s picture” I would have shown them the bird she’d stitched onto the canvas herself. It is not aesthetic vision or skill that summons my mother’s presence in this canvas, but the slight “punctum” the bird gives me. I get nothing of this sort from our studio portrait. The bird’s eyes are always looking at me, as though they belong to her. The bird. Motionless. For whose sake my mother sat and stitched by the window where the light came in, each pinprick a symbolic laceration in the process of its embodiment: cuts by the hundred to make it whole. Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet, essayist, translator and literary scholar.