home is where my ancestors had slept
homegrown
home is the first jinn story, the first nosebleed, the first fever. home is where my ancestors had dreamt, where my ancestors had slept. i came out of my mother’s womb knowing my family is dispersed all over the khaleej, mostly in kuwait and saudi arabia. my childhood was a mix of machbous and sukkari dates and bahraini halwa; of VHS tapes my mother had collected in her childhood in kuwait; of her slowly slipping her childhood-digested kuwaiti accent to her own children––ones so subtle they would pass you unnoticed. at school i learned not to use “ولهانة” but “مشتاقة,” not “قذلة” but “غُرّة,” and the more i grew, the faster the words faded away. my mother loses the accent she had grown to conceal whenever she gets tired. before the passing of my great-grandfather, my eids were never spent in riyadh––fitr was always in kuwait and adha in unaizah, and while adhas in unaizah continued, fitrs in kuwait had started to fade along with my vocabulary.
unaizah stood as the middle ground for my family all over the khaleej. there, i plucked pomegranates and oranges with my grandfather, tried to feed cows but always ran off, and had one of my baby teeth fall into its soil––my grandfather would tell me it would grow into a beautiful palm tree, one with sukkari dates so golden you could swear they are made of caramel.
the very first memory i have of unaizah was sometime in my early childhood: droplets racing down the window as my uncle drove us around town––the world was grey and warm and everything that seemed to be like home. my uncle in his zbairiya, despite the pouring rain, had hopped out the car to get us some tamees, his leather soles splashing into the mud. the first bite was like my grandmother’s kiss, warm and full of sugar.
growing into a teen there had its own privileges too; i could finally sleep over at my aunt’s, the house three hopscotches away. my sister-in-law and i would see-saw my mattress so it doesn’t scrape against the cobblestone. she would hum, “شيلي قشّج,” with a laugh at the overstuffed bag on my shoulder, fraying at the edges. together, we would sit, cross-legged, until we realize we had pulled an all-nighter. we would run to the mosque at the edge of the farm to perform eid prayer, shadows of leftover mascara smeared under our eyes, the rubber soles of our sneakers in friction with the rough concrete. our abayas battling the wind.
the august sunrise would begin to bleed as my grandfather passes us in his pickup, offering a ride to all nine of us girls to huddle in the trunk because it’s faster to reach the end of the farm before the prayer starts. we say no and run as fast as we can. by the time we spent enough time together, our accents would begin to dilute, making us sound an ambiguous mixture of kuwaiti and saudi at the same time. i think despite all this, the feeling of home slowly began to fade away. our visits became truncated, filled with back-to-back gatherings so intense i would always end up returning sick. for some time, i never wanted to come back. not if it’s always going to be this way.
homebound
it had been three years since my last visit. my grandfather, as a form of temptation, would pull out some old pictures we had taken there––he knew my heart sings for nostalgia, but the tug in my stomach did not need any more convincing, i knew it was time for me to come back home. on the dune lined with olive trees, dragonflies are kites that swim against the sky, playing hide-and-seek behind minarets until i lose them. the stars are clear at night, almost as if fulfilling a promise to my ancestors: they’ll always be their compass.
my grandparents made sure our trip got extended for two weeks. i remember straightening my back during lunch as they broke the news, a ball of fish machbous stuck in my throat. they made sure we roamed around town every day, showing us the places they used to walk in their teens, the mosques they would pray at, my grandmother’s old house hidden in an alleyway, the spice shop owned by siblings, the midwife’s house whose husband took out my grandmother’s appendix, and the dunes where they would camp. on the last few days, my grandfather drove us down the farm, opening the wooden doors of the abandoned diwaniya. he tells me he has a picture of me there, pointing his index at the orange tree draping its curtains over the skeleton fountain. i tell him i don’t remember.
i tell him i don’t remember, just as i don’t remember the crystal chandeliers and the hand-painted dining table from italy. everything that built the identity of my great-grandfather’s diwaniya remained unmoved, somehow as if time had stopped there. for a moment i felt like i was trespassing, and then it came falling like an avalanche: this is where my dad and his father used to sit; where my grandmother had sent trays of sweets for our guests to indulge in; where my great-grandparents would catch up on their journeys around the world; where my baby hands, fresh of henna and white musk, came to munch on sugar cubes. and despite all this, i stand as a stranger.
i think handling early memories requires a different kind of carefulness. they’re fragile and cling to the very last thread of your consciousness, and when they’re gone, you can’t pull them out again. how am i now standing on the same spot my dad’s father used to sit? how do i feel so immensely for someone that never crossed paths with me? what thoughts would enter his mind knowing the granddaughter he had never seen now stands in the same place he used to love?
in one of our walks around town, my grandmother pointed at a minaret that fell over her uncle’s house back in the 60s; lightning had struck the clay pillar, its top crashing on the land to what now stands a money bank. the land to the right was her grandfather’s house, but now on its back carries a lineup of small jewelry shops. the passersby oblivious to all the stories, the people that had once slept in its corners. my family.
i passed by countless ghost towns. crumbling houses that once were bustling with people now hunch as limp corpses, their naked windows gaping open, showing me all corners of their abyss. but i look at the orange tree under our house and remember my great-grandfather, pushing his index against the dimple on the crook of my smile and asking if a worm had eaten it. “أنت تفاحة؟” he would ask, and i would think it’s the funniest thing in the world. i think my homecoming only gave me a reflection of what i truly am: the pomegranate i plucked with my grandfather, the tooth that now stands as a palm tree, the chandeliers i had never touched, the sisterhoods formed by milk, and the dreams my ancestors had dreamt.
