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الســــــــنابسي

 

By Hasan Hujairi

 

 

      And then, I remembered the elderly back home; our pride. Our villager-pride. Small-framed elders; grandparents of those we spent our afternoons running around in the scorching alleys, barefooted. Playing games. Small-framed elders, always with the sea in their longing eyes. The elders told me that my house is built where the sea once was, a time not too distant but before my time. The sea that would never return.

 

On their heads, they carried – alongside their sheaves of years – an enormous cauldron of rice to feed an enormous family. Always helping one another, those people of the village. On their heads, a cauldron seven strong, young man would find difficulty lifting.

 

The women would stay home, caring for their children and their children’s children. The men would get together. The understood meeting point. Even if a man from outside the village would walk into the village, he was home. He knew where to go. The meeting point. The men would walk through the clay walls. Clay walls drenched in emblems of the darkness of their pasts and the time of the sea. Today, freshly stamped emblems of the pains of today are still being put on, secretly. This was the only issue of the village in which the children would not ask their usual question of why. Inside the clay walls, the smell of rosewater and sincere handshakes filled our senses with wonder. This was home. A home in which the most painful image to see is acceptable. The image of grown men crying to songs and stories they heard for thousands of times. Tales they told us thousands of times. They cried out of faith.

 

……A home for all.