Tati El Mallah
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Sammak
Sept 2024.
The ladyfish are staring at me this Friday morning.
The hundreds of them patterned upon each other with thick and circular eyes that grip me in their circles, a tapestry I watch as my father beside me barks orders at the monger in that sweet slow way he speaks his arabic. I do not have to understand the words he says to know completely what he wants done to them: guts removed, bones kept in. Scaled with the skin still on.
When we arrive at Jido’s house by the sea I will pour out a vat of acid and fry this tapestry whole and we will eat them together as a family.
My body is alive, it is full and strong, it eats and shits and holds. It grips on unneeding of aid or other affects. I have no bruises, invisible or otherwise. *Though I am begging to be healed of that kind of inescapable rage that knows no bounds. This pain is everywhere. It’s in your smile of assurance. As the bodies play out on the glow of the pub TV and you see mine floating through the room. Suspended in air. In this space where spaces meet, a space unknown to you. Though you reach your hand through and try to grasp me. *I wonder if justice always stings this deep, I wonder if she is a friend of hope.
***
It is everywhere.
All over your hands stained with ink from the newspapers rolled up in the rain. You grab them at the corner store and read them to me. As you ramble away, my head in your lap, the words all bleed together my beautiful beautiful mumbler. You turn the pictures away from me. I fear your softness, having others see it on me. I fear the day you witness that *fear written across my flesh and wish to eat it, with me in tow.
It is everywhere.
My love, you cannot reach me, I am with the cedars now. I am home.
I am swimming through waters too warm for you to encounter.
***
Jido’s farm is lined with cigarette butts. The neighbors on either side toss them from the balconies with carelessness as to where they will fall. The land is quiet and overgrown with vines overtaking the marlboro ends and some are so wet and trodden you can barely tell them from the soil. Though untended, the crops thrive, the cabbage sprawls out like a fungus and the olives are juicy and ripe. My father walks to the back of the plot, behind the peppers. He is hunting.
As I peek around the corner I see him pluck his favorites into the plastic bag he took from the kitchen this morning. There is a precision to his movements, a care. Slowly the plastic begins to take form, weighed down I see it pressing into the skin of his arm, pulling his long gray hairs into the tight handles. He packs only the perfect ones, leaving behind what the birds have found first. Except for one half-pecked fig, which he immediately bites and stretches out his hand offering me the rest. I take it gladly. As a child I refused to eat them. There was something alien about their insides, the strange fuzzy flesh. My father insisted they were like pure sugar, I never trusted the words of a diabetic who hadn’t had sugar in years. He’d leave me be, knowing I’d inherited his stubbornness and waited until the day I first gave in. He’d buy them often in those years we hadn’t been back. Though his complaining was endless, scoffing at the bitterness or the firmness or the color or the shape. I think that he found they never quite tasted like home.
The weather never as good, the nature never as beautiful, the people never as friendly. The Lebanon of my childhood, the one I had seen, the one I had touched with my own hands has a utopian purity reflected in my fathers eyes. In his patient waiting, in his yearly pilgrimage, in his hope that one day he will come home and it will look like home. He’d take me in the afternoons to my grandparents. I’d sit there, with my Tayta as she’d sew with tight and wrinkled hands. Passing me the needle to thread each time she’d run out. My Arabic was never good, it’s worse now but at the time we’d found ways to speak in actions. Jido would sit across from her with his cane knelt up against his rocking chair. When I came in he was sat and when I left he was sat, he could have slept in the chair every night and I wouldn’t have known. He had a bad leg most of his life, attributed to a chemical burn from his job in the waterways and had earned his laziness in old age. I never saw him move from across the television in the room covered in fabrics.
One day I will take him to Jido’s house on the sea and we will go to the mongers and I will look at the fish and that sharp violence will be invisible. I will stand with my father and they will just be fish.