{"id":8113,"date":"2019-09-09T21:43:24","date_gmt":"2019-09-10T04:43:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=8113"},"modified":"2019-09-10T05:43:38","modified_gmt":"2019-09-10T12:43:38","slug":"post4-38","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=8113","title":{"rendered":"“The Currency of Tears”, The Paris Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sabrina Orah Mark,\u00a0

One day in nursery school, when I was five I think, I cried. My teacher, in her floral apron with gigantic pockets, handed me a paper cup. She handed me a paper cup, and told me to collect my tears as they slid down my face and drink them. \u201cAnd when you drink your tears,\u201d she said, \u201cthink about your ancestors who were slaves in Egypt.\u201d It must\u2019ve been close to Passover. She didn\u2019t intend to be cruel. Her face was covered with freckles the same rust color as the flowers on her apron. The other kids wanted to taste the tears, too. The teacher told me to pass the cup around. And I did. And from the little paper cup the children drank.<\/p>\n

I wish I could remember what I was crying over.<\/p>\n

In 2014, a story appeared about a Yemeni woman who cries stones. She produces as many as a hundred stones a day, and she cries most of the stones in the afternoon and evening. She is one of twenty children, and she does not cry stones while she is sleeping. None of her sisters or brothers cry stones. Her name is Sadia, which means \u201chappy\u201d in Arabic. The tears look like tiny pebbles, and they collect under her lower eyelids. It is not impossible that the girl\u2019s tears are the same pebbles Hansel and Gretel use to make a path home. Local doctors cannot offer a scientific explanation, but some villagers agree she is under a magic spell.<\/p>\n

One year earlier, a fifteen-year-old girl from Bajel city, six months after her wedding, began to cry stones, too. In addition to the stones, \u201cshe experienced a swollen belly.\u201d And in 2016, in China, a farmer removed silvery white stones from his wife\u2019s eyes with a wire hook. The farmer and his wife believed the stones to be her tears, but doctors who couldn\u2019t explain the phenomenon called it a hoax.<\/p>\n

I believe these women really were crying stones, but I also can understand their desire\u2014the farmer\u2019s wife, the girl with twenty brothers and sisters, the child-mother-bride\u2014to play a trick. How else do you call attention to your sadness? There are days I wish I could cry one whole boulder. A city of rubble. Glittering hail.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t cry as much as I used to. Maybe the headlines have broken the neuronal connection between my lacrimal glands and my limbic system. Like a petrified tree branch that stiffened and cracked. Or a blown fuse. I look at my phone and see this headline: \u201cCourt Says Detained Migrant Children Must Get Soap.\u201d Like water rising, my head fills up with it: \u201cCourt Says Detained Migrant Children Must Get Soap Court Says Detained Migrant Children Must Get Soap Court Says Detained Migrant Children Must Get Soap Court Says Detained Migrant Children Must Get Soap Court Says Detained Migrant Children Must Get Soap \u2026\u201d I can\u2019t cry. Instead, something hard and bitter has formed in my throat. I should stand outside a detention center and cough up something useful. No child would feel clean washed in some strange woman\u2019s tears.<\/p>\n

In the mid-nineteenth century, Franz Xaver von Sch\u00f6nwerth compiled five hundred fairy tales that were boxed up for over one hundred years. Dusty and asleep, these tales were unpacked in 2012 and translated by Erika Eichenseer. One of my favorites is \u201cPearl Tears,\u201d the one about the girl with a dead mother, a wicked stepmother and stepbrothers, visions of God, and an indifference to the stirrings of love. The stepmother spent the father\u2019s fortune, and the family lives in miserable circumstances. One day Maria\u2019s stepmother and stepbrothers beat her so badly she bleeds.\u00a0 \u201cShe retreated to the kitchen and leaning over a washbasin, she began weeping. Her blood trickled into the basin, and each teardrop that fell into the basin made a ringing sound \u2026 She noticed something shiny in the basin and discovered some of the most beautiful pearls she had ever seen.\u201d Newly rich, the family can now return to festive times. Maria is so thrilled she begins to laugh, and as she laughs one rose after another drops from her mouth.<\/p>\n

Before long, though, the pearls are spent. So the stepmother and stepbrothers begin to torture her again. And so she weeps more pearls. Eventually she runs away, and lives out her days taking care of the poor and the sick.<\/p>\n

Tears, like pearls, are currency. I ask my eighteen-year-old stepdaughter what she plans on doing (job? school?), and she bursts into tears and runs into her room where she stays for days and days and days. So I\u2019ve stopped asking. \u201cLet her be,\u201d says my husband. Snow White cries, and the huntsman lowers his knife. Cinderella plants a hazel sprig on her mother\u2019s grave and waters it with her tears. A beautiful tree grows, and in this tree lives a little white bird that grants her what she wishes. And the Little Mermaid would have cried, \u201conly a mermaid hasn\u2019t any tears, and so she suffers all the more.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I give the eulogy at my grandmother\u2019s funeral, halfway through, something happens. I don\u2019t cry. Instead a sound like soot comes out, like a forest on fire. Burnt trees and smoke. Shriveled animals. I turn my head away, and clear my parched throat twice.<\/p>\n

My father and stepmother bring over an old cupboard filled with my grandmother\u2019s china and mount it on my dining room wall. It\u2019s brown with birds on it, and the teacups are blue. Sometimes I put my head inside the cupboard and breathe in because she hasn\u2019t even been dead for a year and it still smells like her and here I am. I look like a Louise Bourgeois house, swaying.<\/p>\n

\u201cMama,\u201d says my six year old, \u201cis just crying with her head in the cupboard because Grandma Gert is dead.\u201d But I\u2019m not really crying. I just want to be alone with my grandmother. I feel around for my eyes. A little wet, but not wet enough. I wish my tears were feral tears. Like wolf tears with fur and teeth. Tears like a cold lake that has only ever reflected sky and trees. A lake, so faraway, it has never reflected a face. Not even once.<\/p>\n

The fairy tale is a dead body that goes on living, which makes it impossible to cry over its grave. And if the fairy tale did have a grave, it wouldn\u2019t be a hole in the ground. It would probably be more like this cupboard I have my head inside.<\/p>\n

Wild pearls, formed without human intervention, are rare. Hundreds of oysters and mussels must be opened and killed to find a single wild pearl. This is why the girl cries pearls and not pennies or diamonds. To cry a pearl means something living was cracked open and lost.<\/p>\n

I wonder if like the Tin Man, all my tears have rusted up my joints. I go to the doctor and tell her my bones hurt. \u201cWhere?\u201d she asks. \u201cMy carriage,\u201d I answer, sort of pointing around my waist, but then down and then up. \u201cIs that what you call this? A carriage?\u201d She is a very kind doctor, and the corners of her eyes turn downward like mine, like she knows the whole world is always on the verge of bursting into tears. After blood work and X-rays, we conclude I am sad. \u201cYou\u2019re sad,\u201d she says. \u201cNo,\u201d I say, \u201cI\u2019m a Jew. This is how we look. But also,\u201d I agree, \u201cI guess I\u2019m also sad.\u201d She prescribes a small dose of Lexapro, which makes it now even harder to cry. It is a round white pill, and from far away it could be mistaken for a pearl.<\/p>\n

\u201cOr maybe now that I\u2019m fifty,\u201d I say to a friend of mine, \u201cI\u2019ve run out of crying.\u201d She says, \u201cYou\u2019re not fifty. You\u2019re nowhere near fifty.\u201d But I am near fifty. Nearer than I\u2019ve ever been.<\/p>\n

I wonder if tears have ghosts. I recently read somewhere that trees cry. If we can count on anything remembering everything isn\u2019t it the earth? A tear is a hurricane. It\u2019s all the water on its way back home.<\/p>\n

When my sons cry, I hold them and say, don\u2019t cry, don\u2019t cry, don\u2019t cry, don\u2019t cry<\/em>, when really I should say, cry, cry, cry<\/em>, or I should just hold them and say nothing. I save all their teeth, but I don\u2019t save their tears. It\u2019s been zero days since someone in my house didn\u2019t cry.<\/p>\n

When I was a kid, I remember asking my father why the newscasters didn\u2019t cry while they reported the hurricanes, and the wars, and the fires, and the dead children, and the starvation, and the injustice, and the murder, and the rape. And even now I am still always half-expecting the reporters to burst, and the screen to fill up with salt water and waves. Driftwood and fish bones. Crying as old as the oceans. Once, a newscaster did cry while breaking the news on \u201ctender age shelters,\u201d where babies would be held after being taken from their parents under Trump\u2019s immigration laws. \u201cPut up a graphic of this?\u201d she asks. But there is no graphic. They can\u2019t cut away. The only graphic available is the newscaster crying.<\/p>\n

The preferred weight measurement used for pearls is the momme<\/em>. The preferred weight measurement used for loose tears is the \u201cmother\u201d or the \u201cmommy.\u201d I made that up, of course. My sons cry everyday. Some of those tears are mine, and some of my tears are theirs, and some are my mother\u2019s, and some of my mother\u2019s tears are her mother\u2019s tears, and her mother before her, and her mother before her.<\/p>\n

Crying in fairy tales is like one gigantic tear, hardened into a swing for all human sadness to rise and fall. Back and forth. Back and forth. A glistening swing pulled back by all the mothers who let go, and send their children into the air. A whooshing sob made out of the place where abandonment and liberation overlap, and punctuated by a mother fading backward into the distance.<\/p>\n

For 200 euros you can order a Tear Collection Kit from Maurice Mikkers (an artist and medical laboratory analyst) and have your tear imaged into a work of art. The project is called Imaginarium of Tears, and the tears collected under a microscope look like ancient moons covered in starfish and grass. They look like the letters of a future alphabet. They look like thumbprints and battlefields and secret planets. I wish I could send in the first tears my sons shed. And the last tears my grandmother shed. Because I want to keep everything. I want to hold everything in. And then I want to let it all go.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections\u00a0<\/em>The Babies\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Tsim Tsum.\u00a0<\/em>Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The Paris Review<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Sabrina Orah Mark,\u00a0September 9, 2019 One day in nursery school, when I was five I think, I cried. My teacher, in her floral apron with gigantic pockets, handed me a paper cup. She handed me a paper cup, and told me to collect my tears as they slid down my face and drink them. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8113"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8113"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8122,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8113\/revisions\/8122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}