On every corner, a memory.
There, between the electronics shop and the silversmith, the memory of when I was a little girl, dashing down this street in slapping sandals, long braid flying. On the next block, beside the censer of oud billowing smoke from its perch on a plastic stool, a memory of my husband, when he was my fiancé, and the way we strolled down this street hand-in-hand. I said something that made him laugh and I can still hear it now, the swooping joy of it, and I can still feel the glad smile on my face. And there, just outside a halwa shop, where the air is a cloud of sugar syrup and saffron, is a memory of being caught in the rain one long-ago winter as a storm crashed its way across the city.
The souqs of Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province and Bahrain are the places of my childhood. They are also the places of my parents’ childhoods and my grandparents’ young adulthoods and middle age. There is a thick weave of familial memory here, one that stretches back long before I was born. Throughout my life, roaming through these streets and feeling the churn of change across the years, both spatially and personally, has always been a fluid beholding.
But that has now changed because I wrote a book.
Drifts was published one year ago today.
In it, I share stories of myself and stories that I have gathered over the years from the Arabian Gulf, the place I call home, and knit them together in something that is part memoir, part psychogeographic exploration, part poem, and part something more besides.
As mythologist Martin Shaw observes, the stories that we tell do not necessarily arise from a human perspective, and this is how writing much of Drifts felt, as if stories were clamoring up from the seabed, the wadi, the sun-spangled asphalt, all vying for their own chapter.
The jebels - the moonlit flanks of their heights, the splashing babble of their wadis – the jebels wanted me to tell of the sentience of the land itself, the forms of knowingness contained in granite and basalt. And among the jebels was the chorus of the spiraling honey buzzard, the sweet acacia, and the yellow-eyed fox. In the cities, each neighborhood clamored for its own narrative thread. Khobar was speed and sharp-elbowed fervor, haggling and laughing and cups of amber tea. Manama was a heady chorus of languages, thick with clashing accents, while Muharraq was a dreamscape of serendipity, mirages of flower and coral stone.
As Ben Okri writes:
This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.
In pulling together these stories of self and place, there was an aspect to writing Drifts that took me a while to come to terms with: I knew that what I put down on the page would be considered by many to be definitive by virtue of it being static. I often think this is one reason the book took several years to swirl itself into being. How could I capture the changing flux of this place and the changing flux of the self?
If there are inherent, eternal identities to place and self – which I believe there are – would I only obscure that in my attempts to write about it? Was there a way to write about both the changing nature of place and self while maintaining an orientation toward the vaster underlying reality? Even telling myself that I was only writing about this particular moment did not help much. I know if I were to write the book again today, much of it would be different. This is simply the way of things.
Myth is helpful here. It can teach us the dynamism of being. It can tell us that a self can fold into other selves, that a self can sprout wings and take flight and become something altogether different – all while retaining the self’s true essence. This, I think, is a useful way to think of a places.
When I go to the Manama souq today I am not always sure what souq I will find. There are layers, you know, souqs within souqs, souqs beyond the souq. Walking its alleys again and again over a lifetime has a way of revealing the sedimentary notions contained within the streets, the accumulated ways of being that can exist within a single space. Landscape, it has been said, is the oldest mnemonic device, a memory trigger through which we move. And as we pass through a place we know we are simultaneously passing through earlier forms of ourselves.
I have come to think of Drifts itself as a landscape, one that I can meander through much as I do the winding streets of the Manama souq. I can see the crisp lacuna of a page break and remember mulling over that specific decision. At a rolling stream of adjectives I can pause and recall how I closed my eyes to see the scene I was describing more clearly and to conjure the rhythm that was somehow already there. At the prose poems I pause, remembering how it felt to allow these jutting dunes of strangeness to populate the text. Rereading Drifts, I remember not only the places as they were but the self that I was when I was walking through them - as well as the self that I was when I was writing about them. Writing is an odd way to come to know oneself, like writing a myth as you are living it.
I have a novel coming out later this year and I’m currently working on a third and a fourth book, slaloming between the two. The upcoming novel and the two books I’m currently working on are very different than Drifts, but deep down they are intensely connected. There is, in all of them, a movement toward wonder and the living weft of this wild world. I think of them as slipstream projects, pulling from genres we are told shouldn’t really go together, swirling together ideas and places and styles that generate the most maddening ripples. I don’t know any other way to write, though. Sometimes books surprise us even in the writing of them, as they reveal the porous nature of self and place, pulling us to our very edges - and beyond.
I just bought Drifts and I’m really looking forward to reading it.
"The jebels - the moonlit flanks of their heights, the splashing babble of their wadis – the jebels wanted me to tell of the sentience of the land itself, the forms of knowingness contained in granite and basalt. And among the jebels was the chorus of the spiraling honey buzzard, the sweet acacia, and the yellow-eyed fox..." -- so lovely, Natasha, and so recognizably you. Can't wait to read the novel coming up!!