“She knows all about home and its wreckage. She knows all about disabled bodies and the force that comes with being expelled from within your body. My body breaks down every day and I cannot understand how I no longer feel at home within it. ”
By Shahd Alshammari
“The body knows best.” “The body always carries the wounds of war.”
These are a few of my favorite generalizations. And yet, when I feel the effect of my body breaking down every day, when I remember my Teta, I know these are not clichés.
She is nowhere near home, but she says her home is there now. My brain tells me that I can hear her.
I speak to ghosts.
Suad Wafa, circa 1964. Photo courtesy of Shahd Alshammari
Teta came to Kuwait long before she knew that home could be a place you called home. Long before she ever heard the saying “Home is where the heart is,” and long before she hung a plaque with these words on it in English – a language not her own – on her kitchen’s wall.
But then again, everything had been replaced. Wall décor that announced its concern with definitions of home was one way she could recreate a sense of home. Sometime in the early 1950s, she was ripped from her family, estranged, taken away by sea, removed from any sense of Palestinian holiness, the smells of jasmine and Turkish coffee long gone.
Kuwait became the new home she created by making education her profession. She became a teacher. An average, young, Palestinian woman carving her path in a country that welcomed her warmly. Her students were bright young women who wanted to learn the beauty of the Arabic language, the twists and turns of its melodies, the literary canon and its greatness. Her classroom became her home. It was the place where no one asked her about her past, no one asked about political allegiances, and everybody invited her over to their homes.
The girls brought her Kuwaiti dishes, asked her to try them, and asked her which she preferred. All the while, she was still getting used to the spices, the cardamom, the saffron. Her tongue still tasted olives and pure virgin oil, the best kind, Palestinian olive oil that let her great-grandmother live to the age of 102. They swore by its immortality, and my Mama still insists it heals any and all maladies.
The unfamiliarness of Kuwait soon became her definition of home. She settled down, married, and lived a beautiful and happy life, raising her children in the land that seemed to welcome everyone who had a story to write. She wrote her story, and her children wrote theirs, becoming dentists, teachers, lawyers, business owners. She grew comfortable and she could no longer taste the olive oil on her lips. Instead, she looked over at her olive tree in the back garden, where she had tended to it over the past forty years. Its canopy of leaves loomed above, sheltering her and her family. Until that fateful day, where darkness set in and refused to leave.
The Iraqi Invasion took place, and here they were, running for shelter. Everyone fled the country, looking for safety, looking to start elsewhere. Except Teta. She stayed at home alone, watering her tree, watching it every day as the danger began to creep closer and threaten her. The Iraqi soldiers killed her black German shepherd, a sign that she was next.
She did not want to leave but her maternal duties won. Her children demanded that she leave the country she called her motherland – but she was not prepared to leave behind her second home, which had now become her last love. Her children didn’t care for the romanticism; they wanted their mother to come join them, in the place they were trying to survive. Nobody wanted to be the one who would have to bury her. They had heard horror stories of what war did to women. Colossal damage. She left her motherland vowing to return.
Except Teta, like so many other Palestinians, could not return.
Diaspora became her new reality. She settled into yet another new country, with a huge apartment and a balcony that felt so magical she thought she could see Kuwait and her tree if she looked hard enough. She lived her life waiting for the day she could re-create her home in Kuwait, with its distinct smell, its humidity, its shelter. Her tree stood the test of time, and I visit it to check on it for her.
“I want to be buried in Kuwait,” she used to say, looking at me for assent. We both knew this would not be.
She died of cancer.
Cancer, because her heart was broken and longing to return home, as my mama and maternal aunts concur. I used to listen to them and nod my head, attempting to understand how grief can strike the body and leave it wasting away. I used to be of the opinion that the body would react to trauma, responding inefficiently, unable to comprehend the loss, and just begins to deteriorate.
But I became disabled and a disability studies scholar much later. I don’t see illness as a metaphor anymore. I don’t see the body as a war zone. I know now that the body is its own material entity and does not symbolize the heart. But perhaps there is a bridge that still exists, and I still visit it from time to time when I talk to her – her ghost.
She knows all about home and its wreckage. She knows all about disabled bodies and the force that comes with being expelled from within your body. My body breaks down every day and I cannot understand how I no longer feel at home within it. My hand does not feel like mine as it cannot hold the pen when I need it to. My eye twitches involuntarily when all I want is a good picture to keep the memory of myself intact, here, in the moment, looking good and alive.
But the body betrays me and decides to not yield to the camera’s desires. The body is more material than the professional camera I bought to try and document every significant event of my life. My voice sounds shaky and weak, raspy and strained as I try to speak. My vocal cords are disconnecting from my brain’s neurons and I no longer feel housed within this new body.
I was four years old when the greatest massacre happened in Kuwait. The burning of the oil wells took place before the Iraqi soldiers left the country, leaving the skies a dark black, polluted heavily with toxic fumes. For months on end, we couldn’t tell day from night, and I would ask Mama when the sun would rise.
So many explanations for illness, so many scientific hypotheses and theories. Did the toxic air find its way into my brain, infecting it with invisible black lava that broke its intricate wiring?
I do know that Teta lost her home, not once, but three times.
Palestine. Kuwait. Her body.
I know that war never ends and that stories are carried within the body. I carry her memories within me and I hear her whispering about teaching days as I walk into my own classes. I visit hospitals and see her smiling, longing to touch the Kuwaiti hospital walls, wanting to listen to the Kuwaiti dialect again as the neurologist speaks to me. I see things twice, through her eyes and mine.
I speak to ghosts.
Shahd Alshammari is Assistant Professor of Literature at Gulf University of Science and Technology, Kuwait. She is the author of Notes on the Flesh (2017) and Head Above Water, her forthcoming memoir, out with Neem Tree Press in 2022.
Banner image of Palestine is by Nour Tayeb and downloaded from unspash.com