by Sheila Toomey
(Reprinted from “The Anchorage Daily News,” September 4, 2000.)
“Dewy, misty mornings. Walking on grass. That’s green.”
Sahar Husseini has never seen color. She was born blind. Undaunted by theoretical obstacles, she took up beading as a hobby about a year ago, and it quickly became an obsession: long, lovely hours stringing colored or carved gemstones or bone or porcelain or wooden beads into necklaces. Hundreds of necklaces.
“This is red jasper and pewter,” she says, lifting a rope of burnt sienna from a tangle of different colored strands. And another: “This is purple amethyst and crystal.”
“How do you do that?” mystified customers asked at a recent show, the way they might ask a magician how he made the rabbit disappear.
Husseini grinned. Identifying beads by touch, by texture and temperature and shape and weight, is not so mysterious. Husseini’s fingers know her beads, and she has thousands. She has a phenomenal memory and knows what names and colors go with what bead. Onyx equals black; lapis equals blue.
The real mystery is color itself. How does she decide which color beads go well together? Or how does she choose her clothes in the morning? What is color to someone who has seen only the black inside her closed eyelids and a brightness called “light,” a non-darkness gift from the sun or a bright bulb?
Husseini does it by transferring the sense she doesn’t have to ones she has — sight to touch, to taste and even to smell. “I think of grapes when I think of purple. I think of this rich velvet that you can put your hands into.”
Husseini was born 30 years ago in Jerusalem. She was four months old when her family figured out she couldn’t see, a condition called congenital Leber’s, she said. She was six when her father, a doctor, died.
Her mother and older sisters read books to her and spoiled her, she says. She eventually learned Braille and became a voracious reader. Husseini, whose first language is Arabic, was sent to an Anglican boarding school in Bethlehem, then a Catholic high school. She was a good student, often first in her class despite having to learn English and not being able to read the textbooks. After high school, while considering the options for her future, she spent six months at home reading everything she could get her hands on.
“Our house was made of stone, with no insulation. I remember sitting in the bathroom — it was the smallest room in the house and could actually get warm in front of a gas heater and reading.”
Husseini saw little future for herself as a blind woman in Palestinian society. “In a traditional society, people who are different don’t really have a chance,” she said. “I knew I’d never get married, never have a family. And that’s a big deal back home.”
Why shouldn’t she have at least a chance for marriage and a family, she asked herself. “The fact that somebody is blind or has any disability doesn’t mean they have to do less. They may do things differently, but they don’t have to do less.”
So on her own, still a teenager, she moved halfway around the world to California, where an aunt, also blind, lived. Husseini enrolled at Grossmont College. She got a talking laptop computer to take notes on. She did well. She went to graduate school and got a master’s in social work from San Diego State University.
She came to Alaska three years ago to take a job at the Alaska Center for the Blind in Spenard. “We teach blind people to live in the real world, to be independent,” she said.
Husseini tried her hand at beading for the first time on Easter 1999. She remembers the moment. Within a week she had visited the Black Elk bead store and spent $864. “I don’t do things halfway,” she said.
But she was interested in color before that. She cares about clothes, has closets full of outfits and bureaus full of sweaters — 223 at last count.
And jewelry. Before she started making necklaces, she bought them. “I think I had one for every day of the year.” Fussy about her appearance, perhaps even a little vain, she was determined that her dress would be appropriate, tasteful. She is impatient with blind people who don’t care if they clash. “Because we’re a minority, it’s assumed blind people aren’t going to match,” she said.
Over the years, Husseini listened carefully as people talked about color. “I ask and I remember what goes with what.” An expensive little computer the size of a cell phone, called Colortest, helps her coordinate. Press it up against anything, and it says the color out loud. When it says “orange,” she thinks “bright.” It tells her the color names of her beads, and her imagination does the rest.
“White is just light,” she said, “this shimmer.”
“Royal blue. I have a picture of it in my head, a dark color that is rich.”
“When I was a child, colors were more vivid in my mind, as if I had really seen them,” she said. “Now they’re more abstract. I wonder if in another life I was sighted.”
Her fingers move through the strands. “Red. It’s heat. I think of fire. I love to wear red, probably because I get compliments on it.”