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Yaffa AS (They/She)
They smile, I smile.
Looking into the sea, feeling the red of the setting sun filling my brown skin, tingles dancing along my sides, my abdomen, my everything.
I inhale the salt in the air, filling my veins with courage and warmth. I love this part, when you see someone and for reasons beyond there’s a warmth, feeling the universe parting ways for you to embrace. I love this part.
I love this part enough that I am full here and now, nothing more needed or requested.
Then they wave the next time I look over and maybe I desire a little more.
Their palm fits in mine, skin flirting and I take a deep breath.
It’s the walk on the beach.
It’s the staying up late around a community bonfire talking about Ghassan Kanafani, Eman Abdelhadi, Mama Ganuush, Car Nazzal, Noor Aldayeh, Duha Dahnoun, Lama, Ali Khader, Aram Ronaldo, Sonia Sulaiman, Jenan, AB Bedran, noor il alb, Maria Zreiq, رند, Mays Salamah, Haneen, Mishandi J. Sarhan all the greats of the last hundred years.
Mama Lama smiles and I wonder what she knows that the rest of us don't.
Mama Rawda tries to ask a million questions and I take their hand and run off dangerously close to the water.
Mama Kawthar is the worst though. “Did you have fun?” She asks, wiggling her eyebrows way inappropriately and I groan and run away. Not out of shame, not out of anything really but silliness. I can tell them anything, they can tell me anything, it’s been like that for all sixteen years of my life.
I sleep, melting the day away and I dream of the sun setting, the sea full of blue, and love.
***
I know her from class. She knows me from Mama Kawthar.
She introduced us once, but my memory is fuzzy, so I say I know her from class, because it was in class, sitting cross legged between the olive trees that our eyes connected.
My heart felt like it didn’t know how to beat anymore.
She smiled and that was that.
I love this part.
Her gaze fit in mine as she asked about Mama Kawthar.
I couldn’t say a word and she smiled that brilliant smile, dimples piercing my soul as if they were made for this moment and this moment alone.
We talked about how class was going. Like me, she was an artist and wanted to explore how her art can build environmental homes. She wanted to design treehouses, allowing people to live in the heart of trees that have always been home to us. I wanted to design graves.
She raises her eyebrows at that when I say it. “For decades, humans were toxic to the land, so everytime we buried someone they actually did more harm than good to the land. We’ve been able to fix that with mushroom burial suits but the toxins are still in us and the land. There are some trees and plants you can grow that remove toxins from the ground. I want to design gardens that are purifying our bodies while we’re still alive, as they purify the land and the bodies we bury. They did something similar in Jenin and the Congo. Although the Congo used gemstones instead of trees. I want to do something on the cliffs here, in Yaffa.”
She stops looking at me with that smile.
I’m about to say what when she says “I wonder if I can incorporate the same thing into the treehouses, make the walls a living and breathing extension of your work. You know in some cultures the dead are buried in the house you reside in. What would it look like if we lived in treehouses above the graves you’re building, overlooking the sea, farther than the reach of the sea, transcended between the heavens and the earth.”
“Let’s do it,” I say.
***
He doesn’t know me when we meet, and it feels creepy for me to know of him, but of course I know of him.
We’re at a roundtable, talking about healing the land and deepening the connection to her. He talks about the boroughs in the Congo, made of restored gemstones that were robbed from the people decades ago. How not only do these boroughs serve as altars for the 12 million who were murdered for them but they serve as a spiritual gateway, always healing, in living, in sleeping, and in death, as if we all have not heard of the structures that are now being adopted in different ways, from the selenite structures on turtle island, to the pink salt caves in the Himalayas, even to the olive tree residences in Falasteen.
“One thing that we’ve done to reduce flooding in the coastal cities is to build treehouse cities. Our trees are not very high or large but we found that the mix of fig and olive trees can build effective structures,” I say a little later. The conversation changes from there, moving to rituals and practices with and for the land.
***
I remember the first time I met them. I'm three, and we're running around a wheat field, the place I am always home. The sun shines in their smile, reflected in their eyes, and I'm so happy.
They were there before, of course. But this was the moment I met them, their overgrown body, so high up, so giant.
I didn't understand mirrors yet, but they're a mirror. Into who I am and who I will become, their sperm creating me, but I didn't know any of that. I was just happy to play with the giant in this wheat field.
Everywhere after that became the wheat field. Their smile the first time I came home after planting trees with the other children, mud holding onto me like he held onto me. They smile and I already know I'm supposed to shower outside. He takes my hand and the cold water washes over me. They dry me outside, then carry me in, sitting me in the communal kitchen.
The falafel is still hot when he puts it in front of me, with a bit of hummus, my favorite. He's my favorite.
One day I'm scribbling on a note pad, some wheatgrass and the sun setting at home. "That's beautiful," he says leaning over me without me noticing.
"Yislamo," I say.
"Can you teach me?" He asks and I nod hesitantly. I don't know why I hesitate. I've taught before, but what if... I'm not even sure, as if these thoughts are someone else's.
We do some lines together, my small hands fitting around his giant ones as I help him straighten them. His hands shake and he smiles every time. Then we do the grass, shooting up from the ground, and the sun like a smile in the distance.
We draw together every Jummah, sometimes alone, sometimes Mama Kawthar joins, sometimes Baba Munther joins, but it's always our space, they're guests.
We do this until his hands shake uncontrollably and instead I draw for the both of us, him telling me what to draw. A beach, the forest, a starry night. By then I had been taking art classes with artists from all around.
I drew him once, pretending to be drawing an elephant. He cried. I cried.
It's the first day of the week. He's lying in bed, on his side, still smiling at me. I'm twenty-six.
I draw a wheatgrass field and a sunset, the two of us staring towards it. His eyes are closed when I look up.
We bury him that evening, the picture I drew of him hanging in the common space as the community comes and holds us.
****
We're by the water, the cliffs of Yaffa behind us, the old city walls looming above. Down here we witness the waves crashing. There are four of us, we witness; waves crashing, clouds forming and breaking apart, I notice every breath. I inhale life, exhale death, and repeat the cycle.
I've been in this group ever since I could remember, but now it feels different after Baba died two weeks ago. I feel him with me, I breathe him in, and honor his release with every exhale. I feel the warmth of the tears before I'm conscious of crying.
"What do you need?" Maria asks from my right, barely whispering.
"To be physically held," I say and they nod, their arms wrapping around me. I cry silently with the waves.
After, I lie in the sand, allowing the smallest of particles to merge with my essence. They were once living stone, now they are living sand. I wonder what type of living and dying Baba is.
I smile as the water reaches me in that moment, rolling my eyes and then start laughing. Of course, you're the waves; both embracing and letting go in a perfect balance. I am wheatgrass, dancing in the wind, and he's always been the waves.
***
Sweat covers my eyes, I'm panting and I'm worried that I won't make it. Haifa's shores are on my right, I'm more than halfway through but I am tired. Why did I think I could do this? Everything hurts, and the endorphins they talk about seem to have fully abandoned me.
"You got this," M smiles beside me, and then I feel his arms on my shoulders, moving me forward, telling me it's okay to stop if I want to and it's okay to keep going if I want to.
I've known M my entire life. He was the first person I spoke to as a child, unable to speak to anyone else until I was 6.
"You're not the one running this marathon," I say back, still out of breath but definitely feeling better.
"I've run plenty of marathons," he says back, now running backwards ahead of me to show off.
"Fine, but where have you been? I could've used your support up in Beirut," I say.
"That was the start," he says as if he doesn't know what I'm saying.
"Yes, I needed more support at the start, I needed you to tell me not to do this to my body," I say and I know I'm not actually angry with him or myself. I'm exhausted and I'm so excited to make it to Gaza, to camp at Gaza Beach, to see Reyhan.
***
Reyhan's eyes radiate the blue of the sea, his black skin shimmering from the water. She is the love of my life.
I melt into them, as if we're not separated by space and time. They hold me and I am home.
Our tent is on the beach, the Mediterranean sprawling beyond us. Unlike the cliffs of Yaffa here it is sandy beaches for miles.
We sit on a prayer rug and stare into each other's eyes as the sun sets around me.
Her children and wife off in the distance giving us this moment, these hours, this day.
My body aches, and my soul is so full here. Always. I have loved him as he carried children, as he married, as he grew as I have, and I will watch him until my or his final breath.
***
I was named a death guide when I turned 32, when we are gifted our role in our community, a role I can change over time, but it is rare for it to be wrong. I knew it was right.
I stand above the death gardens I created in my twenties, and I walk alongside community members as they come and reflect on their own journeys.
You can not be given a role without first navigating the cycles of life and death. For without accepting and honoring both, how will you carry the sacredness of being?
Mariam smiles at me and my heart still flutters every time. I take her hand as she whispers her truths to herself. I do not say anything unless she needs me to. Most of our sessions are in silence, as she finds her way through her death.
She lost her sibling as a child, and decades later still holds onto that, no death and life group has been able to truly support her in how she needs.
"I struggle with it because why did it happen? And how could I have prevented it? Then another part of me knows that even if I had banished all water, they would still have died and I hate that about the world," she shares, speaking towards the olive trees below us.
"Then I think to myself, maybe I don't need to know the reason for it. Maybe it just is, and if it just is, then it can't be evil and I am not to blame."
She shares upwards to the fig trees surrounding us.
"Why is it so important for you to be blamed?" I ask, a question she asked me to ask when we first started, honoring that I may know when to use it.
"Because if it's my fault then it won't happen to anyone else," she says immediately and I nod, I get it.
"May I show you something downstairs?" I ask and she nods. Everyone is permitted downstairs, but not many are drawn to where bodies are washed and then buried, most are often more drawn to the rituals and ceremony out here. Our bodies belong to the land, memories belong to us.
“Have you ever seen a body washed?” I ask and she nods immediately. I don’t normally ask questions I know the answers to, but this was necessary.
We enter a room filled with plants, a greenhouse of sorts, usually flooded but where plants thrive in the moisture, where bodies are washed in between.
“If your blame can be embodied in any of these plants, which would it be?”
She walks around for a bit, looking beneath surfaces and above, where there are smaller plants. At first I think she might go for one of the larger plants on the ground, instead she reaches for a small pot above with a ميموزا مستحية mimosa pudica, of course. I smile as she brings it towards me.
“Would you like to wash it like we wash bodies?” She nods and we move towards one of the slabs of wood in the center of the room. I hand her a small washcloth. She bows her head, muttering some prayers and I do the same.
Leaf by leaf, she lightly washes the plant. Leaf by leaf the plant withdraws, hiding in the process. Halfway through she starts laughing at the withdrawal and I laugh too.
“Would you like to bury it?” I ask Mariam and again she nods.
We walk back outside, above the treehouses to the roof gardens. She walks forward and stops at a small patch of soil, in the sun and away from the other plants. She buries it with her hands, the small shovel still in my hands, and she freezes, staring towards it all of a sudden.
I wait, and I wait, and I wait.
Then she wails, her head rising as if in a deep howl, her sound cutting through the crisp spring air. I wait, she wails, I wait, she wails, she falls backwards and I’m there to catch her. She cries then laughs and cries some more. Finally, her body relaxes, melting away as if entirely, but she holds onto her body just enough to stay.
“How did you know?” She asks a while later.
“I didn’t, but you did, you’ve always known what you need, that everything dying deserves its moment in the sun, to be washed and buried, given back and remembered.”
***
Reyhan is grey under his hijab, my black curls drift in the wind, careless for age. We’re in the garden, her grandchildren in the distance exploring. I take his hand in mine and mindlessly massage it. Our wrinkles curve around one another and I lean in to kiss him as the sun disappears behind a cloud.
“I think I’m nearly there,” he says as our lips part and a tear automatically falls to the side as if it had been waiting there the last six decades. I nod and squeeze her hand tighter.
It’s two weeks later, two weeks of smiles and laughs, of coughs and sitting by her bedside wiping away sweat from fevers begging her to come home.
His wife and I wash his body, mapped with the life we had together, the journeys from Yaffa to Deir Al Balah.
The bonfires are so large after the burial that I can’t see past them. Drums beat, children crash into water that seems still for once, dabke circles left and right.
I’m there when Hanan goes. I’m there when even the eldest goes and I see a guardian.
I head home to Yaffa for a weekend, the treehouses seem bigger than ever before. A gust of wind blows as I open the door and I know. I’m going home.
Art by Yaffa AS