Tati El Mallah

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does not rot
standing again on fallen ground
samaki

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Programming

On Maintenance (Zone 6, 2026)

At one time the façade before me had been a house, and before that it had been a home to my father and his three siblings. Now it stood at the base of the mountainside, its exterior a decrepit bag of shit, looking out over the edge of the country where the sun dipped slowly into the sea each evening. Around 19:10 it turned a red so deep and bloody you could stare straight into it without squinting, painting the village beneath in gold.

Behind an archway at the front of the wreckage is a door leading to the farmland beyond. The path is lined with cigarette butts that the neighbors on either side toss from their balconies with a carelessness that seems almost innate. The land is quiet and overgrown, vines overtaking the Marlboro ends. Some of the vegetation is so wet and trodden it has begun to collapse into soil.

Still, some crops thrive. Cabbage sprawls out like fungus and the olives hang 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 watch 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 droop under the weight of fruit. The stretched handles press into the skin of his arm, pulling his long grey hairs tight against them. He takes only the perfect ones, leaving behind what the birds have found first.

This routine of ours is well practiced, and today will be the last.

Under the glow of the scarlet sun I’m a child again.

In the depths of the August heat we would drive along the corniche from the house to the base of Cornet Chahwan. Near the exit to my grandmother’s village the streets are lined with shops bearing my name - a butcher’s, a baker’s, a grocer’s, a library. Baba would park in the same place each time, as if the spot were waiting for him, the only man to move in this slow corner where the shops stood empty and the neighbors’ windows stayed closed.

Here he let me ride in the front. Unbridled by road safety laws, I would poke my small head above the dashboard as we flew over potholes and swerved sharply around corners. I made this journey countless times, but it never truly imprinted itself in my mind until I began driving here myself.
He would lift me from the side of the car and set me down before I sprinted toward the limestone house. The small arch opened onto a set of stairs, tall and wide, which felt endless to my small legs. My father would hang back, letting me push myself up and up and up to the second floor, where I would arrive breathless at the apartment door.

By then he had caught up but stopped at an invisible barrier on the last step, just out of sight. He would nod, and I would prepare for the performance of a lifetime.

I knocked gently on the door, slouching into myself. When it creaked open I stared desperately into the wrinkled, fierce eyes of my Tayta and asked:

‘وين بابا؟’
‘Where’s Baba?’

As if this moment were always the first, she would scoop me into her dress and shout down the stairs.

‘Tanios!’

It was her favourite word. Tanios - my father’s name, and his father’s before him. An heirloom passed down so many times no one remembered the first. Baba said that when he was a child she would shout it out the window all morning until Jido hobbled out of the garden and left for work. Then she would turn to my father and continue her parade until evening, when Jido returned.

That memory wasn’t mine. I knew her only as a quiet woman. Perhaps she thought the same of me. My Arabic ran out quickly during our visits, so she spoke to me through her needle. She stitched with tight hands, passing me the thread each time she ran out. My father would head to the garden, sometimes with me, sometimes without, while Jido sat across from her with his cane resting against the rocking chair. When I arrived he was sitting. When I left he was still sitting. Baba said he had moved a lot in his life. He started work at the water plant further up the mountain when he was sixteen and burned his leg in his early twenties. It didn’t stop him. He stayed in the same job until his seventieth birthday.

On that day my father bought him two African Greys. The birds lived in a cage on the kitchen floor beside a small table. For the most part they were quiet, squawking to one another while I scribbled onto paper as Tayta made dinner. But after some years they began to mimic her voice.

“Tanios, Tanios!”

Baba would rush into the house with a bushel of kousa or zeytoon in hand, fooled again and again, while Jido shouted from the other room:

يا لطيف شو هلّأ؟
“Oh God, what now?”

The parrots were still squawking the day I returned to an empty rocking chair and a fiercer, older woman. She moved slowly around the kitchen, chopping parsley and passing the needle. My Arabic was no better. When she embraced me at the door her head reached only my chest. Everything the same, but cracked and abraded.

It felt as though my hands had changed. The texture of the room, once soft as fabric, had thickened and felted. She passed me the needle. I threaded it and watched as her hands moved - slower now, though still faster than mine - as she darned a hole in the same floral dress she had been wearing since I stood at her feet.

All the while the Greys beneath the kitchen table called out for a man who was no longer coming.

Tayta never got rid of them. Instead she continued the careful maintenance of that small house, day after day, until a few months ago when she could no longer climb up the steep stairs.

Under the glow of that red sun we loaded the African Greys into the boot of the car and drove back up into the cool mountain air. We slammed into deeper potholes and swerved around corners that had never been repaired. When I looked back at my grandmother’s village - still sparkling like polished amber amid the country’s disarray as the sun sank into the sea - I turned toward my father.

A wrinkled smile carved into the side of his cheek as the birds called out to him, and to every Tanios before.

Standing Again on Fallen Ground (Toe Press, 2025)

He arrived in Great Britain in the autumn of 1951
At the beginning of the Afterlife

I arrived seventy-one years later, on a cold wet and fickle Island

clinging to a past
that no longer serves her.

And I fell in love.

In a life that spread out from me quicker than I realized.
I listened out to the whisper on the wind.
A sharp whistle that sent a tingle on the back of my hands.
And most nights, as soon as it came

It passed

Leaving me sat alone in the still,
cold of the evening.

This is when the clouds would darken and turn the sky that dusty temporary blue
before the moon became visible and the warmth of the day began to let go.

On those nights I lay back for a while and felt the weight of my eyelids.

Hanging over like a shelf,

I felt the sting of their closure. And waited
For things that move, for ground to fall away.

And start again.

There was another time where he was here in icy lands with unfamiliar faces.
He sat under thinner trees and thicker grass

With a woman whose hair was the colour of dusk
Pointing at the stars and telling him their names

Through teeth as sharp as diamonds.

I am learning to fall in love with precarity.
With the tightrope

Ever present

Document exchanges, justifications
Learning to feel wanted in places I am not

.

This land we’re on is weak and full of hatred.
Shifting plates under the foot,
Sinking soil, and it is dark here. Too dark.

Still, I choose to settle and fall back into the damp the wet and freezing,
Coming out the other side peppered in goosebumps in the frailer body of a younger self.
I am at the edge of the pool shivering as my mother tells me she’s a mermaid,
That my father found her on the shore of Andoni

Where the ocean thins out into the river.

I grew up a strong swimmer and I grew up a coward.
Reluctant to tread water where I couldn’t stand

And my mermaid mother
Would gaze at me across the sea and

Tell me I was my grandfather

His name was Chukwu Emeka Oyolu, and he was born from fire.

A late birth,
From a long pregnancy,
11 or 12 months I was told.

That one day the village listened to his mother’s footfalls

Fade into the depths of a nearby jungle

Where she met a woman who would light a fire

Over the top of her swollen belly
And there he was.

He was fickle like a flame
Kept alive
By a kind of trepidation that bled
Into all other aspects of himself
And kept him thinking of home

Spurred to nurture closer things

The smallest of details.

He wrote of tradition and Egusi
His country and fate

Of meeting others under a dying mother
A commonwealth with dwindling wealth
And a reluctance to share.

Yet he found himself in the north of England
Surrounded by things he loved and hated in equal measures.

He found a bride here

A beautiful and angry woman
Who’s hair glowed auburn in the sun

And had made one too many mistakes.

To her family, he was the greatest one

She was warned before, about men ‘like him’

Men with fire in their blood
And skin the color of soot.

This island is still shrinking by the day.
You can see her waning
You can feel it in the flesh and blood

When it becomes angry and slow
Like our own when we pass that point of growing

And begin

The steady fade

I’m home here.
I have tempered my warm blood

I have not seen Igboland
Not since my memories were a collection of possibilities

Viewed through glass.

All the images feathered at the corners

Distilled through pancakes and peacocks and whatever else young eyes seem to notice.

Beautiful with its faded edges,
And it’s blood spilt in the afterlife of the Empire

It continues.

They built a bridge there and wondered why

The bridge went both ways

Ancestry, connection to place that is further and further away.

Fraying corners

And memories that hold the space of dreams
I know that land like I know my grandfather.

Through his mythologies
Through the paper cuttings on my mother’s bedside
From his age-stained pictures like an after-image
From my mother’s admiration and my father’s disdain
From my hands that smell of the same food
From the handwritten eulogy at the bottom of a box of letters
From my feet which stand once again on fallen ground

And my mind that begs to stay.

Under the Gardenia Bush (Wayzegoose, 2024)

I’ve forgotten the scent of my favorite flower. Tattooed on my left hip, owed to a sixteen year old who found themselves facing a very sexy Frenchman with a very large needle, and a sudden inability to say no. It’s taken just three years to come to the conclusion that gardenias are quite ugly. With strange cabbagey petals in an alien spiral. Caricatured leaves a toddler would draw on the end of a spiral to make it a rose. I have an acute awareness of how wrong they look on my body. The buds warp and stretch when I stand straight. Lines have bled out or thinned. Parts of the stem faded into a blue-grey under my skin.

He’s tracing their pale blooming heads with his thumb. Grabbing the side of my face and pulling me in. Eyes dark and hungry, lying through swollen lips. Asking what they are, saying they're beautiful, that I am too. Then I’m outside under these covers. In mediterranean fields running through thick, damp grass and I’m smelling peaches on the trees and trying for the flowers and that hand is by my neck and that thumb is still tracing and I’m smelling and fucking trying. And I’ve forgotten the scent of my favorite flower.

They would bloom at the height of the Lebanese summer. Mid-July and burning hot, right outside the house in Baba’s garden. By browned pine trees that stretched up to little red roof tops on the mountains. Beneath I’d lie in the thick green amongst the harvest and the swarming flies. Around sweet vine fruit that rotted quickly and dropped faster, landing by my small knees. In the early morning, Baba would stroll through and pluck what he could find carefully from the stems. With each break he’d return to stand above ivory petals in the shrub. With a wrinkled hand outstretched, looking at each bud carefully. Shoving that protruding downturned nose into the bushes to catch the sweet stink. I followed, his persistent little shadow with a basket, catching berries tossed over his shoulder. Until forced inside. The birds would swoop down in the late afternoon and tear into what was left. Singing cries that filtered through glass panes where I’d sit in his study while he’d translate his newspaper.

His face was thin. It's somehow thinner now, life sucked clean from his features and left to his neck, spotted with ingrowns and thickened pores. I’d only very recently noticed how far up his facial hair grows, he had kept it quite clean in my childhood but had to shave very often. When he’d kiss my cheek I’d feel a slight sting from his stubble and shriek as though he’d pull away to a gash down the side of my face. He somehow found ways to indulge my dramatics. Placing me on his lap sighing

“Sorry binti ” with a greyed, furrowed brow and a sincerity clouded over the usual mischief in his eyes. The rare instance my father would apologize. Out loud.

He was a patient man. I had an abrasive knack for wearing that patience very thin. Two debaters who couldn't see the line drawn in the sand. Our conversations accelerated quickly and his volatility would usually accompany. Abrupt disputes that lacked conclusions. Sometimes I’d get a dismissive grunt, or a chuckle or a condescending attempt to convince me to be a lawyer. He had this tendency, after a shitty fight, to cut fruit from the garden, stand at my doorway and silently watch me eat it.

There were a handful of very special days, on the worst of days, when he’d exhaust his capacity with words that cut deep and a violence to his voice that the world had forced inwards. Suddenly that sandy line was crystal clear and it was a trough and I’d be standing on one end and he’d be gazing past that expansive ditch, vision still cloudy with red. It was on those days that tears in my eyes felt like home and the closest escape was the corner of my bed where I could pretend to sink into the thrush and stare up at the flowery bush. I’d watch pink filtered light bounce off misshapen petals at an imagined sunset. Shortly after, hear his quiet worn down loafers up the stairs. Turned away, I’d feel him slowly sit on the adjacent edge and displace my weight lifting me from the cocoon I’d formed. My room would fill with the mix of his aftershave and something sweet. He wouldn't say a thing. Perhaps he’d tap me on the shoulder, perhaps he’d simply leave. But when the heavy breathing was done and my face dried and salty, I’d turn around to find a cabbagey little flower laid next to me.

Laid down with his thumb still tracing, I’m back under these sheets. My mouth is swollen too and the answer feels heavy on my tongue yet I’m gasping Gardenia as I look down to my hip. Those leaves poke out from under his fingers and they’re so damn ugly, My head is foggy, my eyes are foggy. I’m crying. The birds are crying and I’m nineteen under his hands and I’m sixteen under a needle and I’m ten years old under an ivory bush and the air smells like the words I’m sorry.

Last Updated 24.10.37