LETTERS FROM DIASPORA: #1

 

Grief |al- huzn الحُزْنُ
/ɡrēf/noun
eep sorrow, especially that caused by someone's death.

الحُزْنُ والحَزَنُ: نقيضُ الفرَح، وهو خلافُ السُّرور.

وعامُ الحُزْنِ العامُ الذي ماتت فيه خديجةُ، رضي الله عنها، وأَبو طالب فسمّاه رسول الله، صلى الله عليه وسلم، عامَ الحُزْنِ؛حكى ذلك ثعلب عن ابن الأَعرابي، قال: وماتا قَبْل الهِجرة بثلاث سنين. الليث: للعرب في الحُزْن لغتانِ، إذا فَتَحُوا ثَقَّلوا، وإذا ضَمُّوا خَفَّفوا؛ يقال: أَصابَه حَزَنٌ شديد وحُزْنٌ شديد؛ أَبو عمرو: إذا جاء الحزَن منصوباً فتَحوه، وإذا جاء مرفوعاً أَو مكسوراً ضموا الحاء كقول الله عز وجل: وابْيَضَّتْ عَيْناهُ من الحُزْنِ؛ أَي أَنه في موضع خفض، وقال في موضع آخر: تَفِيضُ من الدَّمْعِ حَزَناً؛ أَي أَنه في موضع نصب.

“I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her.” -Jandy Nelson, The Sky is Everywhere
See also: Love/hubb حب

Funeral Homes بيوت العزا 

لبيوت العزاء رائحة مميزة
رائحة ممزوجة من رائحة القهوة السادة والهيل والعود وشيء من رائحة الجنة

في بيوت العزاء نشعر بالحزن في فناجيننا
نقدمه للضيوف ونراه يتلالا في سواد اعينها
تسع كل احزاننا فيها ولا تسع في جدران البيت الكبير
تبهت كل الوان السجاجيد
وتعتم كل الغرف
وتبدا الجدران بالتقشر**

**Funeral homes have distinct smells. They smell like the bitter mixture of ground cardamom and roasted coffee beans, boiled in water and set so the grounded spices and coffee could settle before being served. Jiddo’s funeral was the second home I had been to where the deceased was actually somehow related to me. Somehow the grief of the family fit into the small cups, but was too big for the house. Somehow the small cups withstood the pain, but the carpets greyed, the walls peeled, the circuits were shorted. Funeral homes felt like the pain in my lower back from bending to offer the hundreds of guests dates from the heavy crystal dishes my aunt set aside for us. Funeral homes smelled like ground coffee and tasted like dates.

 

Mamma, your teta, was upset when I told her I would call this letter byut al-'azza—she thinks I’m being too depressing. But byut al-‘aza stopped being “depressing” for me when her grandfather died. They started feeling like home and the last thing I had left of him.

This Wednesday, the 26th of October, marks the two year anniversary of jiddo, your great grandfather’s, death. 

Jiddo used to sleep every night at 10:30, with two exceptions: the first day we arrive from the States or the last day before we have to go back. We had been in back in the states for two months, and your grandmother had spent the entire month of October worried--with this overwhelming feeling that she had to go back. Maybe the things destined for us, because they exist in ālam al-ghayb and outside of the realm of time, are always pulling on us as we continue living, so that the closer we get in time, the stronger that pull becomes. And maybe the homeland is always calling her children from the diaspora.

Some hours after jiddo went in to his bedroom, he was woken up by loud screaming and the screeching of tires and a car and house being set on fire. He went outside, despite protests from the son that lived with them and teta, your great grandmother, and the expected how could you go outside in your pajamas? This was a man who only rarely got angry, but who could not sleep through an opportunity to help. Two of his nephews, he discovered, were in a fight with one of the neighbors and his son. 

Jiddo walked out, without his cane, without his shmagh or his ‘abaah, onto the street lit only by one lamp. His nephew did not see him, and as he sped down the hill, he hit jiddo. He flew into a pole. It was death on impact. 

My darling girl, every ibtila’ after this one was negligible. I knew it would be like this. When khalto Sakha’, your grandmother’s sister, told us, she did it in pieces. She told me he was sick first. Then that he went into a coma. I remember it so vividly. I was on the floor mattress in my bedroom, and I was reading her messages, and I put the phone down, and I begged God to not test me with his death. God, I told him, I know he has to die eventually, just not now. Please don’t do this now. Please don’t test me like this. Not now. And then she told me to tell my mother to call her. He was “in a coma” for an hour before my aunt told us, in a message that seemed to hold all the finality in existence, “Lulu, your grandfather is in the gardens of eternity. And to God we belong and to Him we return.”

We came like guests to my grandparent’s home, aboard the first flight available from JFK, we arrived at the end of the first day people were coming to give their condolences. 

When he wasn’t there to greet us, but other women in long and dark colored jalabīb were, I knew the house was transformed from beit il-eilih to beit ‘aza. It used to be the family house, but now, it was just a home of the deceased. Still, it was a home. A home that would come to hold the grief of our broken hearts. My darling girl, it was the moment that this house transformed into a beit ‘azza that I came to feel at home in homes where people were being mourned and others were coming to offer their condolences. And it was the moment that I felt might be captioned with that unspoken but certain condition of living in the mahjar:

            "لما تعيشوا في الغربة لازم تتقبلوا فكرة انه ممكن يموتوا وانتو مو هون"

But that at least meant you had some valid grief—even if it meant you signed away your right to mourn properly or say goodbye to the deceased before they buried him because well, we can’t delay. But we can’t delay sounds too much like your grief is less important for me to hear it any other way.

I don’t know yet, sweetie, where I’ve brought you up, and I don’t know where we all live, whether it’s with our family, or if everyone is on their own, and I don’t know how lonely you may feel, or if, even if we live together, you sometimes feel like you live in some sort of diaspora or that your claim to loving someone or something you don’t live with is challenged or tested. 

When I got ready to leave to the airport with her, mamma asked me why I was going. Her question made me feel like I was on borrowed grief. It reminded me of every time I told her I wanted to move to Jordan and she said “You’ll get tired of it, you’ve lived your whole life here, you couldn’t possibly.”  I felt like my mother was doing to me what everyone else there did to her. 

Here is unspoken but certain condition of living in the diaspora #2: to everyone else back home, you are simply less—less attached, less genuine, less true to your roots, less loving, less bereft, with less right to mourn. Because even when we arrived, after all the people left our house around 11, and before they came the next day at 9am, and after they left again at 11—throughout that entire week I was there, everyone made me feel like my grief was borrowed and that it was second to their own, to the grief of someone who lives in Jordan, someone who has not moved away. 

My sweet girl, in those days grief felt like a competition I was bound to lose.

They all told stories, about what happened when they first heard, how they reacted, how happy and peaceful he looked, they all posted these super sentimental Facebook elegies (and I was the writer), started thinking of different ways for his children (not grandchildren) to give charity on his behalf (passing out meat, money, books, paying for water pumps, etc.). They were all very expressive. I said nothing, because my story felt irrelevant. My aunt told the story of how my cousin found out—over and over again, and every time it felt like everyone who listened was nodding away my right to grieve. I cried, and I sobbed, and I heaved, but mostly I acted like I always did. So it felt like they only saw the lack of expression, and the ordinary smiles and laughs, and I heard in it all she’s only his granddaughter, and she doesn’t even live here.

I could not begin to heal. My grief felt so unearned and unworthy—so second to everyone else’s. I was not unused to this feeling, but I’m only making the connection now as I rewrite this letter for the third time to you, and after some distance. When jiddo died, I had just gotten out of a marriage I had spent two years in where I constantly felt like my emotions were second to his, that he probably had it worse and telling myself to see it from his point of view, that he was depressed and there is nothing wrong with you, suck it up. In retrospect, I think a lot of my feelings about how much less valid my grief was had to do with this. 

So I stayed quiet and I grieved politely, as I expected I could without bothering anyone else, without making them feel like I wanted to win the competition, that I was doing anything but respecting the pain I must gracefully admit is more than my own. When I returned in April without my mother, and everyone’s pain had eased into a daily sort of mourning I could not upset with my own, I cried every night. For three weeks, when everyone slept, I blew my nose into napkins, wiped tears on the sleeves of the black hoodie I wore to bed, sat on his bed and talked to his pillow, and memorized the tiles on the bathroom wall through red and stuffy eyes. 

I am writing this letter to you, my dear, because I want you to know that Grief is never a competition. Just because someone has it “worse,” that doesn’t mean that you’re okay, and you don’t have to be. And just because you may live away from the people that you love, it doesn’t mean that you love them any less, or that you would grieve at their passing any less. And just because we grieve in these different ways, and in different times, none of our grief is invalid or less

My love, this is not a letter where I tell you never to move or visit new places because someone very close to you might die and you may never see her again. This is a letter where I tell you that everyone will grieve differently—and some of us without knowing that we grieve. And to tell you that when we break—the cracks along which we separate and shatter are different for each of us. 

We may never be unbroken. But I will be with you when you break, and when you begin to heal, and ya rabb too when we’re in that place where we can’t ever break or fear or grieve again.

I love you, 
R.
October 22nd 2016
 

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TEXT: R. K.
THUMBNAIL PHOTOGRAPH:
MESHARI BIN HASSAN

 

MAPPING HOME

I have never stayed in one place for more than nine months. One hundred and sixty-six visa stamps between Lebanon and the UAE. That is eighty three trips in total turning into an average of a three months stay at one place before leaving. Looking at a map I was not able to pinpoint home as a location, instead my meaning, as well as most kids who grew up between multiple locations, of home transcends location and turns into an experience of home rather than a tangible structure or place. Mapping Home is my experience of finding home by weaving the tangible with the intangible using everyday objects like maps, threads, needles, and tokens collected throughout my life. In this piece, as I repeated the motion of stitching threads through a map, the locations themselves faltered into voids giving the threads a predominant location of a map that wasn’t accustomed for them. As the holes thickened and there was not enough space to weave through the two countries, the previous threads, my previous journeys, gave support to the threads to come as I started weaving through the line of wool itself and not the map. All the while the back end of the map was left to organically weave itself through and through creating a secondary mapping, a map that more accurately describes the terms of what a home means to me; tangled lines, relations, some taut, some loose yet all contained in one space, in the thread of wool, in my experience of living.

FIRST TRAVEL BETWEEN ABU DHABI AND BEIRUT IN 1995

TRAVELS BETWEEN 1994 (YEAR I WAS BORN) AND 1997

TRAVELS UNTIL 2005

TRAVELS UNTIL 2016

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ART:
NADIM CHOUFI
LEBANON

POSTCARD #8

Sobh bekheir,

I just woke up, thought I’d write you a couple lines. How are you feeling today? What are you doing all day? 

In all my dreams, I run back to you, we meet again in our arms, we meet again at the sea, we meet again in the sky.

Delam barat tang shodeh, I miss your perfume, the taste of your lips, the softness of your fingers caressing each square of my body, my skin shivering,

I need you like I need air. 

As soon as I am back, I’ll ask you something very important…

PS: I forgot to tell you, I found a beautiful green djellaba at the souk, I bought it for you. I know green is your favourite colour.

Asheghetam,
Bedrood.