The place I came to overlooked the lake. A stony blue. Isolated, despite the restless city that with each year inched its way closer against its passive shores. A home at last. After a lifetime of endless migration. Our caravan had long been destroyed... whatever jewels left from my mother's inheritance had been taken away with each sand and storm. I was beautiful still, even after the war, but beneath my skin told of another story. The more disillusioned I became with the passing seasons, my innocence seemed to recoil with it to cinders from an unforgiving temperament that became our fate in desert lands. My mother swept the dark strands of hair away from my eyes. Her hands were calloused and wounded at the palm from where she held onto the rope in vain and for far too long. Her brother begged her to let go, but she could not hear through the deafening screams of her children's demise. That was the last night I spoke. It was a night that took four of her children. I was the eldest, and the only one that remained. How I survived, to this day I do not know. It was by ill fortune that some would say was a blessing but felt like a curse instead. That I should survive and not the others. That when the caravan was raided and I was dragged out by my hair... the others were left pulling dead children out from the rocks below. My mother's children beneath boulders, swallowed back into the dry earth that had birthed them only a few years before. My escape from death was entirely void of love. I resented life after because what marked my survival was not the gentle hand of our God but the lust of another. And the making of love, was in fact the taking of. My voice and womanhood were stripped from me only yards away from my family, before even the natural blood of a girl's initiation gives permission for a man to regard her with that kind of devotion. Devotion? What little I knew of sex was understood to be in love and marriage. Not on the sandy grounds of a dry earth tinged with my kin's death. My first lover was masked and slain on top of me. I was pulled out from beneath him and held in the familiar embrace of my mother's brother, but by then I had long died inside. I did not recognize his face, his eyes and trembling hands. All I felt was the insufferable damage that had been caused to my body, between my aching thighs. We bled there for the rest of the night, the last of my kin and I. Of the ten of us traveling this road, only three remained, as the rest had been reclaimed again by the cruel, sovereign state. When we were found at dawn, a lifetime had passed. Our mouths cracked with dehydration, eyes shot blood where tears could no longer flow. Silence followed after losing consciousness on my mother's lap, the last sounds upon the greeting darkness, her heart wrenching cries in the night. Until the age of ten, I was Aphra, the eldest daughter of Nashwa and Jahid. Our ancestors were of the Midianites, my mother's father was a high priest whose three wives bore him twenty children over the years. We were part of a large, nomadic family that traveled across the desertlands from the Red Sea to the Euphrates River. It was there where my grandfather resided with his family for some time. A time, my mother recalls, that was the most peaceful. Where many of his children married, including my mother, and gave birth to children of their own. "You were born there," she would say to me. "I gave birth to you in the river itself, with my own mother behind me, rooted like a tree." She squatted down, smiling as she reenacted my birth. "I took my mama's arms like this, and moaned into these currents to help deliver you." I drew myself closer to her bosom and shrieked with laughter every time she told the story, never getting tired of it. Each time she told the story, the more she recalled. The dimples in her cheek deepened. "You are of the waters, my love..." That was what she would say. "And when the roads are blocked, water always forges a new way." ~~~ I believe the gift of foresight my grandfather possessed was what preserved our family. When he died, the stability of our kin was once again uprooted. His eldest son, Rafiq, led the family across the desertlands once more. His responsibility was great. When my grandfather died, his eldest son was only forty years and carried on his shoulders the pack of sixty of us. All his siblings, their spouses and children, along with his own family. But we were closely knit, and migrated everywhere together. There was very little disputes in my memory that I recall as a child. We were raised in music, in prayer and song. That was all I remembered, it was never one place, it was us that became each other's homes. Those memories are what became the marrow and nutrients in my bones. It allowed to endure the life that came after the slaughter of the last of my kin. Where is the kindness in survival? When on that night my mother and uncle remained close to me, only to be savagely taken away three days later. It was the beginning, not the end of a brutal massacre... and I've never wept harder than on the day I was torn away from my mother's arms in the middle of a market, and sold. |
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