By AMAL AL SAEEDI
Translated from the Arabic by NASHWA NASRELDIN
Piece appears below in English. To view the original Arabic, please click here.
Translator’s note:
Amal al Saeedi’s Side Entrance to the House immediately caught my attention. For one, literature that centers the house intrigues me; perhaps it’s the innate mystery held within the brick walls that surrounds us, the way it enfolds us, inhabiting us as much as we inhabit it. Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, The House with Only an Attic and a Cellar, by Kathryn Maris, Laura Scott’s So Many Rooms, Eman Abderahim’s Rooms and Other Stories, have all lured me in by the title first.
Al Saeedi’s story held particular appeal, told from the perspective of a young Omani woman rare for us to read so transparently. Her world is welcoming and relatable, her references broad, and her writing balancing both light and shade. Her voice, at times intimate and reflective, at other times funny and cryptic, is always confident. As we follow the narrator’s return to the family home, we allow her to nudge us into side rooms of memory, entering scenes of coming of age, to more recent unsettled events. The house is an integral character throughout the retelling, its spaces gradually becoming as enigmatic as our own.
—Nashwa Nasreldin
Circling around the house
The beginnings of the house
I always warned my mother that I wouldn’t stay in that house for a single day after I turned eighteen, and that, when I started university, I would never go back, no matter what happened to the place. But now here I am, 26 years old, in that same house—although not in my old bedroom, since the rooms have been switched around multiple times since then—running away from my job and from everyone I know, and seeking the shelter of our home and everything that comes with it.
It was 7:30 p.m., and I was feeling sleepy. Since I felt so secure here, I could finally be rid of my insomnia and not have to suffer through even a single sleepless night, now that I was back in our old home.
Everything that had bothered me about our old home—the fine black lines on a gold-coloured wall, with the appearance of cracks added for decorative purpose, the brown tiles with designs of extravagantly shaped flowers popping out, the bright Persian rug, the attempt to create a colour scheme, the curtains, the flooring, the ceiling, the bedcovers, and the shared wardrobe—all of it was in complete contrast to my own apartment in Muscat, where the colour of all the furniture, which was from Ikea and easy to assemble, was neutral and slightly washed out, calculated not to offend. Everything in the old house was precisely what I wouldn’t allow in my new apartment. Yet, despite this, I was here now.
We moved to this house in 2002. For weeks, we’d pestered our parents: when would we sleep over at the new house? Each time, we’d get a different answer. Apparently, there was no fixed date. They were set on moving, but there was more work to do, like cleaning, connecting the electricity, and so on. Then one night, on our way back from my grandpa’s house (it was quite late, and I’d fallen asleep like I always did), we arrived at the house and my dad carried me up from the car and lay me down in my new bed. I woke up in the middle of the night, terrified by the strong smell of paint. That was my first experience of the house, as a place that felt somewhat absent, and that was strange and alarming, as it would continue to be.
For a poor family, where the head of the household’s salary never surpassed 300 riyals, this house held a special significance. They all thought it was enormous, even though it was quite cramped with all of us in it. To my mother, it was a “Taj Mahal”, even though she didn’t know anything about the palace in India. The new setting filled everyone in the house with a kind of pride that propelled them toward a different future. Before this house, the four of us lived in one tiny room, sharing a bathroom with ten others. When I would try on my mother’s fancy shoes, I couldn’t even walk around the room, because there wasn’t a metre’s worth of space between my mum and dad’s bed, and mine and my siblings’ bedding on the floor. Then there was the constant sound of my mom and dad fighting, which left its mark on everything.
A few days after we moved into the new house, my mother killed a snake that was several metres long. I was horrified by this, and the event happened to coincide with a topic that was popular amongst my schoolfriends at the time—magic and sorcery. I began to hate the house after that day, especially since we didn’t have a kitchen. My father built a small hut outside with a fridge and a stove, so that we needed to take a long walk just to drink a glass of water if we didn’t want to worry about running into a family of serpents. The next day, I watched my mother dig up the earth and plant some mint seedlings opposite the kitchen, as if nothing at all had occurred the previous day. And that was the attitude everyone in this house would assume for a long time to come.
One winter’s night, I got hiccups. It was during the first few weeks after we’d moved into the new house, and we were at my paternal grandfather’s. “Now I know who broke the lantern at the front of the house,” my father declared. I hadn’t realised it was broken until that moment, and I began to rack my brain over who the culprit might be. When I looked over at my father, I realised that he was staring directly at me, and it made me jump with fear. My hiccupping suddenly stopped, and everyone broke out in peals of laughter. And that was how I discovered that fear cures hiccups. Although that trick never worked on me again, since anything to do with the house, with that thing they all considered enormous, would, to me, resemble a perpetual threat. It always felt as though I was on the cusp of betraying some kind of covenant if I acted out of my own free will. Like someone who drives an expensive car, but doesn’t own it, and is worried about embarrassing themselves if they get into an accident—ignoring the fact that this accident would put their life in danger. Instead, all they care about is that they don’t own the car and that the owner spent a great deal of money on it, and so they mustn’t lose so-and-so’s money!
Since we lived in an empty part of the country, the school bus wouldn’t pick us up from the house. Instead, we walked about a kilometre and a half to get to school. We were totally isolated, and there were no corner shops, no neighbours, just some sprawling green fields here and there, a deep, dried-out wadi north of the house, and a few resolute acacia trees scattered around. Whenever we had visitors, out of respect they would stay at my grandpa’s house nearby, and we would go there to meet them. That house played no social role other than seeming immense to those who lived in it. Within a few years, it would be filled with a variety of flowers: jasmine, daffodils, bougainvillea, night-blooming jasmine, day-blooming jasmine. My mother would insist on photographing me in my elementary school uniform, which at that time was yellow, in front of the jasmine. She kept taking the photo over and over again, because I would refuse to smile.
In the centre of the house
It was traditional to slaughter a ewe or a ram after a move into a new house, but we deferred this until my brother was born. Whenever anyone asked my dad when we were going to have the big gathering to celebrate the new house, he promised them a “aqiqa and wakira”, merging both the celebratory feasts for a newborn and a newly built home into one. And my brother really did come along, the lone son after three daughters. That’s when the smell of Arab samna wafted through our home, and my grandma baked bread every day, bringing it over to my mom along with Sumur honey. It was November, when the doors would stay open all day long and there was no need for air conditioning. The walls of our house were painted in such dark colours that it always seemed as if the sun that snuck in was fighting a lost cause.
The village mosque was two kilometres away from us, near my aunt’s house, and it was known by the name of its nearest neighbour: The Mosque of Ould Seif. There was a fig tree, although I never dared taste its fruit. Just outside hung a swing, and there was a seesaw, too. I was frightened by the son of Ould Seif’s first wife, who would visit them during the holidays and who had sharp features and a strange hairstyle. That’s why I could never understand why people insisted on having sons, if they would ultimately turn out to be scary. My grandma would leave me there because my dad worked in Salalah and my mom was experiencing some complications with her pregnancy. We didn’t have any play equipment at our house until I was in my second year of university. No one had ever even mentioned anything about getting a slide, so I was surprised when I found a big one at the house. This confused me, for since when did children play with anything beyond the limits of their imagination?
During our first years there, I would work at clearing the yard of the leaves that fell in the garden, surrounding the front door in a U-shape. On the day of my 13th uncle’s wedding, I asked for something—I don’t remember what—and my father adamantly refused. I began to bawl and, because of that, I spent my first day alone in the house. My dad decided that, as punishment, he wouldn’t take me with them to the wedding. It was 11 o’clock, a late morning in August, and the heat of summer stifled all semblance of life. I was angry, and since there no one was there to stop me, I started to uproot the thin branches of the trees from the soil. When my father returned, he was shocked to find these piled-up plant “corpses”. He grabbed my arm, facing no resistance from me, and tied me to a wooden pole that had been intended to form one of four poles making an aluminium sunshade for his car—although it was so far only one rod. Beneath the blazing August sun, I lifted one foot and lowered another whenever the scorching heat of the ground grew unbearable. I never cried on my first day alone in this house.
Two beds, then three beds, then four. A small room with no space between one bed and the next, so that we had to walk across the other beds if we wanted to leave our own. Yet we never accidentally stamped on a foot, or booted a stomach; we knew exactly where to step next. Later, my mother decided that we needed bunkbeds, because our wooden beds took up the entire room. My father came across a good bargain on beds at the Bedaya souk, and we began to argue over who would go up high and who would end up below. Naturally, everyone wanted the top bunk, so they could experience the grand transformation, given that this was something completely new for all of us. Personally, I preferred the bottom bunk, because I couldn’t stand the vast expansiveness above, whereas below was like a burrow. Before the bunk beds, I would build a tent from our bedcovers and hide inside. There was no name for this at the time, but it existed, and it was a great adventure, since it created a place from which there was no return.
I often wished that I had a slight limp, like the classmate who sat beside me at school, or that my mom was from India, like the mother of another classmate. I wanted something unique, related to this house, to suddenly come to light. We never had to go to any hospitals, apart from once when my brother’s head split open when he was still crawling. The same child whose aqiqa had seen the slaughter of a sheep fell down the front steps of the house, then looked more like a red rag in my mother’s hands. I raced over to my grandfather’s house, calling out to my eldest uncle in broken sentences: hospital…steps… blood…so much…died, while my mother rushed over, wailing. My brother’s forehead still bears the scar from that first year in the new house. On those same steps, we would witness the only major event that took place in that house, a truly rare occurrence: my father kissing my mother on Eid mornings when he came back from the mosque—on her lips—as though that was allowed and that our raucous reaction was, in fact, not at all unusual.
A little after the house’s midnight
Our porch was so long, it took a good thirty seconds to walk from the front door to the top step outside, which is where we usually left our shoes. Shading the steps was a purple-flowered night-blooming jasmine tree, four metres high, known as ‘the queen of the night’. On the other side, a grapevine extended along a thin piece of rope, all the way to the satellite dish on the roof. Upon entering the house, it felt as though the sun had never ventured as far as the corners of each room, thanks to the dark paint that seemed to cling to the walls with an iron will. There is a photo in the family album taken from the stairs at the front of the house. The lounge door is open, and I’m carrying my now-17-year-old brother. I’m wearing a long brown thawb, and my aunt is standing next to me, although our faces are totally obscured. We’re indistinguishable because of the low-level lighting, so that the lens barely captures us. Every time I see this photo, I am immediately transported to the general ambience of that period: the feeling of the air, our physical presence, the hair coverings hanging over our shoulders, the large plaque listing Allah’s attributes, the vase filled with untidy bunch of fake, colorful flowers. Objects that make a huge impact, mysterious though the connections may be, heat frittered away, tiny gestures that would cost us our whole life ahead.
In the centre of the lounge, a staircase led to the roof, at the entrance of which my mother kept a large wooden box. In addition to the little insects that proliferated there, there were hundreds of handwritten letters, which my mother and father exchanged in the early days of their marriage, when he used to work a long distance away. There were also letters from girlfriends and generic Eid cards. My mom told me that she decided to remove the staircase in order to extend the lounge, and that we wouldn’t have an attic anymore. This made me wonder where she would store this apparently redundant box. Maybe she should recall the letter from Mona, who wrote about the weariness she felt in her new home, using simple language as she complained about how she didn’t want to do any more work. Or how about Samia, who dictated letters that were written down by Alia, I miss you… I was waiting for your letter…I’m sorry I didn’t reply to your last letter, Um Seif. My mother went by ‘Um Seif’, even though I’m her oldest, a girl who arrived in this world after around five attempts at reaching full term. Shadows streak my face as I browse through all the torn envelopes and ordinary stamps. Buried within them are secrets about her relationship with my father, hints of an impending abandonment, of fatal jealousy, and an arduous surrender. Where could all this loneliness go if we knocked down the staircase to the attic?
The house had no neighbours except for my grandpa’s home. We constructed an appearance for the area, a succinct interpretation—now those are big words, aren’t they? On working days and holidays, at times of joy or sorrow, any car passing by would bring us a blast of other people’s lives, and the world that encircled them would become part of our life too. Birdsong was the most prevalent sound here, drowning out any noise we made throughout the day. As for the night soundscape, that was the domain of the local hyenas that lived in the nearby wadi, producing an extraordinary symphony at a distinctive tempo that we had come to recognise. Even the sounds of inanimate objects were powerful, and we didn’t trouble ourselves to get much done. Maybe this was all there ever was: a piggy bank on a table, not a gift for me, or for my sister. My uncle got rid of it; the hole was very big, and how convenient that seemed, since my patience had run out, now that I was suffering this entire house by myself.
An itch on the neck, caused by the pin on the school headscarf. I walked along the road, and the bus picked me up one and a half kilometres away from the house. My stride was short—the bus driver was the first to alert me to this fact. Then I tried to speed up, not looking back no matter what. I was scared of upsetting him, although in fact no one was getting angry. When I opened the door and sat down, I didn’t think about this moment in time. It seemed to me as though what I was experiencing resembled an intermittent reality. The teacher asked us: how many of you are there in the house? The answer changed every three years. It was a direct question, and I didn’t put any imaginative effort into it. But I was alone!
I still remembered my elder aunt’s weeping. As for my younger aunt, who was expecting her first child, she was staring at my grandma’s bed, which was empty, with a tortured, absent-minded expression. I couldn’t bear to look at my grandfather’s face. I clambered up to his bedroom window and watched as my uncle tried to dissuade him from sewing the shroud. My grandfather could hardly see; he wore glasses and despite that, his eyesight was still very poor. They were waiting for an ambulance that would bring the dead. Walking one and a half kilometres, coming and going late at night, I didn’t feel scared. On that road, the shadow of my grandma’s frail body had been forever laid to rest.
Since that day, we stopped growing older. There was a certain silence, a firm loneliness, passing through all our houses. And there was that thing that continuously tormented me: could it be that nothing ever happened to these houses? It wasn’t just that we lost my grandmother; I still can’t believe that three of my siblings never knew my grandma. It seemed that we were all there, and that we would never go anywhere else.
The End of the House
My dad objected when my mom wanted to lay the yard with artificial grass, but she stood her ground, as she always does. Dad says that he loves mom very much but that she used to love him more in the past. When they lost their first child, my mother clung to my father’s neck; she held on to him as she wept. He had been at work, far from her, and returned as soon as he heard the news. Dad recalls clearly how repulsed he felt by this embrace, especially as they had been living in a large dormitory-style room with more than ten beds and no partitions between them. He clearly remembers the way everyone’s eyes fixed on them—or at least that’s how it felt from the silence that suddenly enveloped the place. Now, he says, he wishes he could go back to that moment. Mom loves him less now, he’s sure, as a form of punishment for not loving her enough back then. But when she hears this, my mother chuckles bashfully and casts him a reproachful look, as though to say: you’re emotionally blackmailing our children so that they can value and appreciate my affection.
I took my mother to the UAE to buy some new furniture for the house. My best friends had emigrated, while I stayed, comparing the costs of shipping companies that would transport the new furniture to the house. I gave careful consideration to the various options, imagining my father’s reaction when he heard which deal I’d chosen. I didn’t care about the furniture in that house, even though I was still terrified of the place. It was as if I’d never grown up. Do people really change? Or are we lying to each other? Why was my heart still filled with the same old sadness, the same rhythms of the abandoned house, and the way we were cast off into the furthest part of the village, our voices lower than the rustling of its trees?
My little brother is in love with a girl—one of our distant neighbours. We all know this, but no one talks about it. He’s still young, but he loves her very much; he roams around the yard contemplating a tatty old ball that no one’s playing with. When it rains, my mother prepares ginger with honey—that was the first thing we learnt to associate with winter; maybe it was our only tradition. We have spacious storage cupboards, and we separate our clothes in it according to the season. My father raises bees in the ‘qanoot’ and insists that honey can cure everything. My mother has been reading more Quran. My sisters gather to gossip; sometimes, we chat about university or work. They can’t stand it when I cry. Honestly, I don’t cry much, but when I do, I weep over the house, and how palpably cramped it feels at those times. What an achievement for its firstborn to weep, as though this had all been ordained since the moment the first hole to create its foundations was dug.
The house, the house, where will it take us next?
Amal Al Saeedi is an award-winning writer based in Oman. She is also a journalist, podcaster and an editor at Alpheratz magazine.
Nashwa Nasreldin is a writer, editor, and translator of Arabic literature whose book translations include the collaborative novel by nine refugee writers, Shatila Stories, and a co-translation of Samar Yazbek’s memoir, The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria.
