Non-Fiction
Heartlands / Amani Al-Kidwa
Image courtesy of the author.
One of the most endearing things about my grandfather is a habit he kept throughout his life: when speaking on the telephone, the further away whoever was calling lived, the louder he would speak into the receiver. The volume changed depending on the interlocutor. Ivar in Oslo was loud, about the same decibel level as friends who lived in Portugal, or maybe southern Italy. Calls to friends who lived in other parts of France were fairly gentle. Pleasant, soothing tones reached small villages in Alsace, my grandmother’s sisters’ houses in Provence, the south-west, Paris. The loudest voice was reserved for my mother in America, and calls to Martinique. The exception to the rule was when we lived in Cairo. I spoke to him, trying to gauge the noise level. Definitely lower than when speaking to Ivar—even though Cairo is almost twice as far away as Oslo, respectively 4,230 kilometres and 2,249 kilometres from his living room. A detail that left my heart tender after every call, the reassurance that we were never too far away from one another. Our level stayed consistent, even after moving back to Provence, and when I left for London.
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I remember the salty fat specks of duck rillettes I’d spread onto torn-off pieces of baguette and the tang of the accompanying cornichons. We hid away from the midday heat on woven straw mats with red and green fabric piping along their edges, in the shade of a pine forest. The needles carpeting the ground managed to poke our tender limbs through the mats designed specifically to prevent this whilst we worked our way through our packed lunch. I felt sorry for anyone who existed anywhere else. And then, what we had come here for: the ocean.
My brother and I still have sand between our toes, despite our grandfather’s meticulous system for rinsing our feet before we get back into the car. Enthusiastic chatter, dishevelled hair, saltwater skin warmed by the afternoon rays—true poster children for a wholesome day at the beach, were it not for the occasional grumpy yelps, stepping on the too-hot tarmac as we pack up. We open the cooler in the trunk, carefully place the bucket with our bounty in it. We make sure it won’t tip over by wedging it securely in place with a consortium of ice packs: our Grand’Pa thinks of everything. The bucket is full of water, sea urchins, mussels, and an assortment of dazed crabs of all shapes and colours. They look like pebbles, smooth and red like rust, beige, seaweed-coloured, black with tiny specks of sand glistening like mica on their little shells. We would spend the afternoon capturing the crabs in the shallows, poking our yellow fishing nets between the rocks and waiting hopefully. Our grandfather’s swift hands, impervious to their snapping claws and unbothered by such live and crawling creatures, did a lot of the work for us. We drive back home, singing along to the same cassette tape we always listen to. One of the songs is about people dancing without shirts or trousers on, only in their underwear, to our absolute delight. We sing louder, the car weaving gently through the golden country roads.
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These are some of the familiar landscapes of my childhood: hot summers in Provence and its surroundings. Parched soils, evaporated stream beds full of fat pebbles, yellowed grass, and thick air were the backdrop to my joy and to the incessant chirping of cicadas. I still remember an incident that my grandmother relayed to the rest of the family with glee when I was five or six, in which an American tourist had been run out of the village shop by angry locals when he had asked for a pesticide to kill the cicadas because the noise “had been bothering him”—she rolled her eyes, “Il n’a qu’à rester aux Etats-Unis!”
These times were an exercise in learning how to live in my budding body. It was an education in feeling and noticing, in how to exist and be delighted for it. My best teacher was my grandfather. He taught my brother and me the simple language of the joys of water, first in a paddling pool he would diligently blow up and fill for us. This gradually evolved to visits to the sea as young children, and then to wilder rivers and lakes when we were older and excited by their inky lure. These swims punctuated our days. They were moments of grace when we forgot all about the heat, and perhaps they made us more sensitive to other moments of solace. We took note of the pleasant sensation of walking barefoot on the smooth terracotta tiles of the house on our way to the kitchen to make ourselves a glass of sparkling grenadine, which we sipped slowly. We relished sitting outside once the sun had dropped and the evening air had cooled, trying to spot shooting stars in the August skies.
Forever moving in my youth, the feeling of having been uprooted was never very far away. Noticing things proved a valuable skill to help myself come to grips with yet another new environment. Finding common threads to string these places together, so they felt more like a singular home, however makeshift, started as a game that morphed into a grounding exercise. There wasn’t one anchor in particular, but several small things I held onto.
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I caught home in glimpses: in Cairo, the quality of the air was most evocative. I can’t do justice to the sensation of stepping off the plane there when I try to describe it to someone who hasn’t experienced it first-hand—the air has a definitive weight to it. An engulfing warmth, followed by a lingering savoury-sweetness almost reminiscent of sesame when you breathe it in. It is the first gulp of this peculiar air that tells me: you have arrived. The drive from the airport to my aunts’ homes, and then eventually to our own home in Maadi, almost always happened at dusk. Vast landscapes, busy and sprawling, stretch out before me, people going about their business in the cool respite of the evening. Old men talking together, sitting in circles in their white plastic chairs, telling children off for knocking full cups of tea over as they run around. The combination of sand and the soft rays of the sunset tints everything gold. The heat scintillates until you feel like you can almost reach your hand out from the car window and touch it as you speed along. The lampposts turn on, alternating orange and purple lights that fall into my lap. Home is the dusty limestone steps leading up to my aunts’ houses, the old apartment blocks of Heliopolis with the squeaking, ancient elevators that have two sets of sliding wooden doors that need to click into place before they will take you anywhere. I find comfort in the details of the entrance’s tiling, speckled with sand, and in the fantastic smell of familiar cooking invariably wafting through the corridor, warm and inviting.
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My grandfather showed me how to navigate the unknown. Naturally curious, he was a fountain of knowledge. He absorbed all the anecdotes he could about his whereabouts, no matter how temporary, and retold them freely to anyone who’d listen, or who cared to ask. I was enraptured for the most part. Maybe there was an element of safety in knowing where you stood, especially when where you stood had never been an obvious place.
I watched Grand’Pa in action. Small nuggets of knowledge helped a young me build confidence and agency. I knew the best time of year to pick perfectly ripe figs. As a child: last week of August/first week of September, now, rather alarmingly: last couple of weeks of August. I’d tear the fig in half to check for any insects, pinch off its milky stem before plopping it into my mouth, satisfied. I was taught how to find wild thyme and fennel and how to stuff a fish with them, how not to confuse oleander for bay laurel—the etymological association of the two plants is more obvious in French, with oleander called “laurier rose” versus “laurier-sauce” or even simply “laurier” for bay laurel—and how to dry the latter’s leaves for later use. I looked for and found Tarentola Mauritanica eggs in the cracks of stone walls, and knew to avoid the wasps that sheltered from the sun in the same porous hideouts. I never saw any eggs hatch, but the full-grown provençal tarentes, those psychedelic geckos, were the mascots of my summers. Lovingly nicknamed “petits crocodiles” by my brother and I when we were young, they hung from the walls and ceilings, both in and out of the house, like so many good omens.
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I also learnt that place is a fluid thing. In my childhood, the environments I inhabited were arid and dusty, dry places where the main concern was negotiating the searing heat. As I grew older and my universe slowly expanded, my understanding of the surrounding landscapes morphed into a more fully-formed picture. The Var is one of the greenest regions of France, with over fifty-six percent of its landmass covered in forests. There are the ubiquitous stone pines, smatterings of palm, cypress, and oak trees everywhere you look. There are the emblematic olive trees, of course, delicate almond trees and mimosas bursting forth with yellow blossoms at the end of winter. I am not sure why this hadn't occurred to me when I was younger, or why I had imagined the vegetation that had surrounded me was standalone, an exception to the rule. It seems evident to me now that these groves full of ancient trees and flowering shrubs made a forest. This understanding of my realities, and the world, as ever-changing was further compounded by my unexpected discovery of the gorges du Verdon as a teenager, a twenty-five-kilometre-long canyon formed by the Verdon river, named for the startling colour of its waters. It is often described as the earth’s second biggest canyon, after the Grand Canyon, the water having cut a ravine to a depth of seven hundred metres in certain places through the surrounding limestone. I couldn't believe my eyes the first time my friend Juliette and I drove to the lake at the end of the Verdon's course: I had never seen such clear, turquoise-green waters in my life. My desert of lavender fields and wild fennel, turned forest, turned timeless paradise.
A similar event played out in Egypt. The last time I was there, we—aunts, uncles, and cousins—piled into as many cars needed to fit us all, and drove to Faiyum. The Faiyum basin was originally a barren region transformed into fertile agricultural land by the natural silting of the Nile, which diverted a significant branch of freshwater in its direction. The water carried along with it the nutrient-rich soil of the Nile riverbed, which settled around this newly-created lake. It had taken me twenty-six years of regular visits to venture about eighty kilometres south-west of Cairo to finally visit this oasis. I had imagined a small, pond-like thing dotted with a few date palms, the kind you see in cartoons. My heart caught in my chest when we stepped out of our cars, taken by surprise. On one side, spectacular golden-red cliffs and buttes dramatically jutting out of the sand-dunes we stood on. On the other, far below, what looked like an inland sea of glassy blue, extending out as far as I could see, peppered with greenery, shrubs and young trees. Perhaps trying to anchor yourself too firmly to a place is not as fun, or moving, as watching it try to surprise you.
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I was, of all places, near Oslo when I received a phone call from my parents to tell me my grandfather had died. He had joked about having had not one, but two strokes in a row a few years ago—without noticing—on a night he had been out dancing and had come back home in the early hours of morning. He’d felt a little tired the following day, and his alarmed doctor informed him of what had been narrowly avoided. My grandfather, this force of nature, thought not much of it. He graciously accepted the medication he had been prescribed, and then carried on living a happy, care-free life, full of dancing and companionship, good food and good wine. He sadly did not survive his third stroke. He had called me a couple of weeks prior, to wish me happy birthday, and to ask whether I wouldn’t try to meet up with Ivar during my trip. The wave of grief that hit me was phenomenal. I had of course known I would be heartbroken, but I had not yet realised the extent to which our relationship had helped me grow into myself. I had not expected to mourn the person that had provided me with much of the framework within which I experienced and understood the world.
A couple of days later, my partner and I are on a westward train to visit his parents. It is still dark when the train pulls out of Oslo’s central station, the tell-tale long nights of Scandinavian winter. As we make our way along the winding route through the middle of the country, the sun slowly rises. The snow-covered landscapes in the budding dawn light are some of the most breath-taking I have ever seen. Everything pulses softly. Immaculate pinks and blues melt together, blunting any sharp edges in the landscape, making the icy shores of the lakes we cross glimmer invitingly. Despite the moving beauty all around me, I spend the entire seven-hour train journey impossibly nauseous, trying not to cry.
Later during this same trip, we walk the long beaches south of Stavanger, a fitting homage to Grand’Pa, that man who loved the water. Golden grasses and boulders made smooth with lichen frame the tranquil dark sea. As our heels dig into the wet sand, I contemplate the orange skies and pink tufted clouds floating on the horizon, my heart somewhere low in my body. To someone more religious than me, this might have felt like the bridge between heaven and earth.
Most of the places I’ve seen in Norway over the last couple of years have felt similar. There is something humbling in the wild, almost arcane, juxtaposition of water and sky. Shorelines sit a stone’s throw away from perennially snow-capped mountains, shouldered by deep fir woods, waterfalls everywhere. We walk through a waterlogged forest carpeted with moss one afternoon, a slight bounce in our step. I feel like I am walking on a cloud, not able to fully place my weight onto the ground. I am floating. I stop to admire the lichens and mosses, and the olivine fuzz that grows on the torvtak, the sod roofs of small traditional houses, all birch bark and green fur. I am starting to believe that home is something other than the sum of familiar parts.
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It is late spring, and I, like almost everyone I know, am in self-isolation, exercising a civic duty to stop the spread of a novel disease. It is one of my favourite times of year. I share a bedroom with Knut on the outskirts of London. We both daydream about forests and what seeing the horizon feels like. I position myself in a sunny patch, sat in the wicker chair by the window, watching the live-in landlord at work in the garden, ripping out the wildflowers that had brought us such solace in the early days of isolation. The hum of bees weaving clumsily in and out of the violets, daisies, and small buttercups, their dutiful investigation of the oddly shaped blades of grass and the yarrow, was the best possible background we could have had to our mornings. A few days later, I notice a single rogue dandelion, undulating triumphantly in the bare earth.