I first encountered Narda Dalgleish in the most frivolous way. Drawn like a
magpie to the jewel colours of clothes in a shop called Narda Artwear,
around the corner from Broadcasting House, I saw bright patches on strong
colour, bold giant mosaic squares of hand-dyed silk matka, dresses and
jackets rescued from kaftan dreariness by colour and cut and a simple
eccentric fishtail fall.
I had always had a taste for robes: swirly dressing-up clothes rather than the
weaselly body-conscious fashion of the late Nineties; I went in, swirled,
and spent too much. Over the years it paid off: when you can’t find anything
but dark trousers and a T-shirt, a Narda jacket takes you anywhere, con
brio. On the wall of the shop was the designer’s credo: “Clothes for the
woman whose beauty is determined not by the perfection or imperfection of
one or a few attributes she may possess, but by the whole of her original
purpose.”
I giggled a little, thinking it merely a cunning code for “These fit
everyone,” and thought no more of it. In 2005, though, a modest flyer
arrived in the post signed by Narda herself, explaining that the London shop
would close because of business troubles after the death of her youngest
son, Rotem Moria, in an al-Qaeda bombing.
I had not known that the flamboyant designer was Jewish, or indeed a woman.
But the flyer carried an astonishing poem (O Ahmad), a bereaved mother’s
response to terrorism.
Amid the bleak landscape of Abu Hamza rants and Israeli vengeances such a poem
– from such a victim – cut sharply through the bigotry that divides the
people of the Abrahamic religions. I wondered about its author; and this
year found her in her last remaining shop, in Oxford.
As I had lost a son myself, we fell into conversation, and I learnt that she
was close to publishing the book of mystical poems – I, Israel, Ask – of
which O Ahmad is the first.
So this is Narda’s story, told to me in her shop’s lunchtime closure.
She was born in a village suburb of Tel Aviv in 1951, on that narrow neck of
land bordering Jordan; the fledgeling state of Israel was three years old.
“The whole nation was emigrant, a complete mix of races and languages from the
Diaspora. My parents had fled from Iraq to my mother’s uncle in Tehran, then
to Israel. They were teachers. My mother used to teach in a Palestinian
village in Jerusalem, and she would bring us to weddings or celebrations. I
really liked playing with the kids, or going to the zoo with them. I didn’t
know Arabic, and they knew just a little Hebrew, but we got on. I remember
walking with a friend alongside a barbed-wire fence – and she was talking
across the wire to a little girl. Afterwards I said ‘Who was that?’ ‘My
cousin.’ ‘Is she coming to the wedding?’ and the girl said ‘No, she can’t,
she’s in Jordan’.” Narda takes a deep breath, remembering. “I was utterly
alarmed. Jordan – foreign – meant enemy, danger, taboo! My friend explained
that the village was cut in half by the wire, but the people on the other
side were OK . . .”
The need to cut through that wire, through all wires, stayed with her.
Years later, she says in parenthesis: “I found an old Hebrew grammar book in
English. The preface contained three old letter sounds that are omitted
today from modern Hebrew, (gh, dh, th) I was so moved – it reminded me of
the way my grandfather spoke, sounding so much like Arabic . . . Ecstatic
with joy, I started reviving words with old Hebrew sounds, like Ruth, or
Shabath. I saw language – any language – as the Live Being of God . . . and
I started weeping. Weeping!” Her family, however, was not devout. “A few
years back I asked my father, do you believe in God? He said yes, but there
was no talk about it in my childhood. We did not go to the synagogue.”
As for her own religious instincts, “I used to lose keys, pathologically, and
climb to the first-floor balcony. Sometimes I found myself in innocent
prayer – ‘Find the key, God, and I will paint you a beautiful picture of
dawn . . .’ and then I turned the bag, clink, found the key!” She laughs at
the simplicities of childhood belief.
In her early twenties she married, and after two children and a divorce came
to Britain. Her sons and daughter stayed with their father for four years –
“at their own request. It was hard, very hard. My consolation was that their
father was devoted to them.” But at 36 she began a quest. “To go deeper. I
had been studying in Israel and come to a dead end. Then I met these people
who intrigued me, the way they talked . . .”
She came to the Beshara School for Intensive Esoteric Education in the
Scottish Borders: a school predicated on a nondenominational, mystical
perception of oneness and spirituality. Here she met her English husband,
Graham, a business analyst, and they moved to Oxfordshire, where the first
Narda Artwear shop opened in Burford.
Beshara ideas remained central. The mission statement about defining women not
by appearance but by “their whole purpose” owes much to it. “I was moved to
serve,” she says, gnomically. “The style came by a taste of the heart.”
Starting small, she took her baby Hannah on the bus to Brick Lane in East
London to buy fabrics, and gradually prospered, opening in Oxford and
London. “Things we needed just came.”
Her son, Rotem Moria, came too. “For six months he lived with me, the longest
we had been together since I left Israel. I loved his company.” He was very
politically conscious, read a lot of newspapers. After 9/11 she sensed “a
huge bias against Israelis. People came to the shop and I was afraid to say
I was Israeli. But Rotem was very pro-peace. After 9/11, as his friends
moved to the right, he argued with them towards peaceful solutions.” She was
at one with him there; the poem O Ahmad was started after 9/11, stating the
unity of all creeds. “That vision of the soul in the mosque – who turns to
right and left. Who is he greeting? Is there any way he can turn his head
where the Lord of all Lords, who is in every man, is not there?”
In summer 2004 Rotem left for Israel “for the election, to volunteer for a
party that never stood a chance. He went on holiday and was killed in the
Taba Hilton with many others. He was 27.”
A van of explosives rammed the hotel and ten floors collapsed. Narda had an
early-morning call from her daughter Neshem. “She said, ‘Not good . . .’ Her
voice was breaking. Rotem was in Sinai with two companions. One of them told
us that he and his best friend had gone to the hotel loo and couldn’t be
found.”
If ever there was a test of her belief this was it. Yet (almost, I sense, to
her surprise) it was unshaken. “I went to the funeral in Israel and felt . .
. extraordinary. Everything I have learnt, with a sense of certainty which
has nothing to do with the intellect, was Love. It is not to do with one
relative self in reference to another self. It is about what is real in
every existence.” She pauses, dryly. “That is not to say that I was not
grieving. Pain is not removed. But grief – it strips you down.”
Is grief, then, a gift? “It is a very, very great mercy. We have contracted
death to be a defeat. That is wrong. It connects you with the heart, makes
you ask. I, Israel, Ask . . .” She has been criticised for writing O Ahmad.
One good friend read it to mean that she supported terrorism.
“But I stood at the funeral and the rabbi read from the prayerbook, and what
struck me as odd was all this ‘Avenge, O God . . .’ I stood there and
thought ‘What would be my greatest vengeance? For those who have done this
to come to Vision! We cannot be, we cannot forgive, unless vision is in our
hearts. At the Shiva, our custom when people visit you after the death and
bring you food and you talk and cry, his former headmistress was shocked at
me. ‘How could you say things like this, when this al-Qaeda person bombs
your son!’ I explained. I think she understood.”
The price of grief accumulated; the business faded to near-insolvency.
“I lost the heart to serve it properly. I became detached. I was drawn to sit
still, to be available. For the poems to come, you need space. I am
seeking,” she concludes, “a new language of love.”
Darknesses still fall on her. “This is necessary. It is for the heart, it
moves you to reaffirm the real, and the real reveals it to you afresh.
Darknesses can be greeted with courtesy, as respected visitors. You converse
and listen and they either acquiesce or flee. In the end you see that all
your visitors are love, in disguise. You give yourself to it, like a beggar.”
She rises from the chair, majestic, maternal. “But all is One. By ‘Israel’ I
mean our fullest potential; if you love God as one undivided Self, you can
love your neighbour, your enemy, even your own deprecated self. This is the
Mosaic credo: One God, today. This is real peace, mankind’s utterly
reachable greatness. We can unite, because our Self is one.”
We say our goodbyes, and I walk out into the roaring traffic. In the
newsagent’s opposite, the 7/7 trial is filling all the headlines with bombs
and death.
orazpublication.com
