Today is the summer solstice and I’m happy to share you with a chapter about a summer solstice many years ago from my book Drifts. Published by Footnote Press in 2023, Drifts is a lyrical memoir that explores autism, transcultural identity, and the culture of the Arabian Gulf through a psychogeographic journey of place and self. Drifts was a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.
Saar, Bahrain, 2016
Summer solstice and the path of the sun and the pits where the Dilmuns made their beer. Dust. Dust in the sky and in my eyes and in my nose. Dust cloaking the broken mounds of the archeological site. In every inhalation, the smell of atomized earth. The smell of forgotten places and forgotten people and the dirty job of remembering.
The archeologist who invited us here is standing down in one of the pits, explaining the beer-making process, which involved wheat and water and feet. I am already scanning the sky, worrying that we will miss what we have come here for.
The archeologist’s theory about the summer solstice – that it marked the beginning of the Dilmun year – is not fact but conjecture. All of us gathered here today have come on the basis of his supposition. His theory could be true, and it could not be true, and in an hour or so the sun will follow its curious solstice path into an ancient temple and we will all reach our own conclusions.
Right now the sun is a mealy yolk hanging over a batch of spiky buildings in the distance. The sky itself has faded to its traditional summer pallor. Next to the spiky high-rises next to the archeological site there is a bulky mega-mart and next to that is a multiscreen cinema and next to that is a village of low, pale houses and listless palm trees. On the wind is the scent of burning rubbish and distant salt shores baked hard in the sun.
It is Ramadan and none of the Muslims in the group have had food or water since sun up. It is not acceptable for anyone, including non-Muslims, to eat or drink in public during daylight hours. The high today was nearly fifty degrees centigrade, and the humidity so stifling that my jeans are stuck to my legs like soggy towels. Among the crowd, I notice more than a few sidelong glances toward the boxes of water stacked along one ancient wall, waiting to be broken into as soon as sunset prayer rings out from the mosques surrounding us in all directions.
A Filipino couple holds their toddler between them, each clutching one of her chubby fists. Two young people wearing T-shirts from a Scottish university are following the archeologist’s every word, asking questions by raising their hands, like we are all in class together. A Japanese student is tapping into his phone. A Bahraini man stifles a yawn.
Movement.
In the distance, something shifts between earth and sky.
A tiny point twists in on itself.
A clot – a welt – an abrasion.
A broken place amid the symmetry.
I squint, but the sun is too bright. Whatever it is, it is moving toward us quickly even though the earth is littered with thorny bushes and broken car fenders and tangles of barbed wire.
The movement finally breaks free from its shroud of sunlight and becomes visible. It is a human figure. It is a woman dressed in white. I see white hair and I know it is an old woman. Closer she comes and I can see sloping shoulders, clenched hands, and the pale, fish-belly skin of her throat.
She circles the crowd, then comes closer and stops. No one else seems to have noticed her. I turn to the woman in white and smile.
‘You are walking on the dead.’ She says it flatly, so that I think I’ve misheard. Then she repeats herself. ‘You are walking on the dead.’
Her voice is strange, with an accent I can’t place.
‘Actually,’ I say, ‘the archeologist explained that the graveyard is some distance away. This is where people lived. That was a pit where they made beer.’
The woman in white continues, ‘Dilmun was the Land of the Living. The dead were once alive.’
The archeologist gestures to the crowd and heads down the path. The crowd follows. I follow, thinking that the dead were once alive. The dead were once alive and the dead were once alive here.
There are no plaques or guidebooks or displays, nothing but an excavated site of dirt lanes, unearthed buildings, and low, broken walls. Without the archeologist to lead the way, I would be unable to recognize anything. He moves quickly, excited, leading us to a stone building with two rooms that are not much larger than closets.
‘4,000 years ago this was someone’s home,’ he says, as we all step over the ankle-high walls into the space. ‘The cooking was done here, and here is where we think they slept. Probably the parents in this corner and any children they had in the other.’
People are taking photos, whispering to one another, nodding.
The woman in white stands some distance away, across the dirt lane from the house, gazing up the hill. Despite the dust, her white clothes – blouse, slacks, loafers – are pristine, like she hasn’t been walking through the same desert as the rest of us. Following her eyes, I realize she is looking in the direction of the temple, where this solstice tour will end.
The archeologist leads us from place to place. With his explanation, nondescript piles of rubble become homes and storage rooms and kitchens and wells. We learn about Dilmun farming practices and their distinctive pottery. We learn about their family life and diet and construction methods. My mind drifts. I think of the preparations taking place now in all the houses in the neighborhoods that surround this site. I think of the kitchens full of vine leaves, fragrant rice, roasting lamb, raisins, saffron, cumin, and syrupy kunafa. I think of grandmothers stuffing pinches of onions and beef into hollowed-out zucchini, children sneaking into the kitchen to marvel, uncles and cousins on plastic-covered couches rubbing their hands and eyeing the clock. Everyone hungry, everyone waiting.
Coming up next to me, the woman in white whispers, ‘Do you know about the water chambers? The God of the Abyss?’
I look around. The archeologist is talking about an oven and bread and the fecundity of Bahraini soil. Everyone is listening to him so no one else seems to hear the darting whispers of this woman.
Before I reply, she goes on, ‘The Dilmun god Enki was lord of the freshwater sea – and of wisdom and creation and magic. Enki’s domain was in the watery abyss beneath the world and the Dilmuns built shrines so they could speak to him.’
‘The Barbar Temple?’ I ask.
‘There are secret things in the earth,’ she says, ‘in the land, that want to be told. They rise up through us. In these ancient stories, long ago Bahrain did not have the freshwater springs it has now. It was barren and dry until Enki ordered the land to have fresh water and it did.”
She continues, painting a scene so vivid with damp stone and hushed underground echoes that I almost feel I can step into her words and vanish from the heat of the surrounding day. She tells me how these dark chambers were a sacred threshold between the subterranean world of the gods and the terrestrial world of humans. In this in-between space, the Dilmuns believed they could work the most powerful magics. She describes supplicants making their way to the temple, carrying offerings of copper and dates, warm wine and goats’ cheese. They spoke to their gods, they beseeched them, they prayed for abundant crops and good health. They left behind the world of the living, of mundane sunlight and blue skies, walking out of the brightness and into the dark, venturing into a liminal space where man could speak and gods would listen.
The woman in white goes quiet and before I can decide what to say to her she is walking away from me. I watch her spare white figure move down the path, so focused on the precise movement of her small feet against the dry earth that it takes me a moment to realize the whole group is walking, too. The archeologist is bounding ahead of us, pointing at the setting sun. The time has come to visit the temple.
The temple sits at the top of a small rise. It is small and deeply sunken into the earth. At the urging of the archeologist, we all sit down onto the hard, rocky ground and dangle our legs into the space – and then we jump.
I land hard and steady myself against a rough, crumbling wall – a wall that is 4,000 years old and that I probably shouldn’t be touching. But then I look around and realize everyone has their hands outstretched, fingertips tracing the rough pale stone. Down here, within this basin of earth, sound is muffled. There is a line of massive stone columns running through the center of the space and along one pale wall there is a jutting altar of stone topped by a crescent moon carved out of rock.
The archeologist turns to the group and begins to speak. Twenty years ago, he tells us, he was working on the site as it was still being excavated. After a long day, he collected his tools, stretched his back, and, out of the corner of his eye, noticed something. The steady glare of the setting sun was wobbling. As he recounts this story, he animates this wobbling of the sun by lifting his hand to his face and waving his fingers in a waterfall motion. He says he realized the sun’s light was being caught precisely in the corner of the temple.
He leads us now to a doorway. Through the doorway is a small, triangular-shaped room, only large enough to hold a few people. Shoulders jostle against shoulders, bodies bump bodies, as everyone pushes for a glimpse.
Peeking inside, I see it – the sun, almost set, is hovering over the corner of the room. It is slightly off-kilter now, so many thousands of years after the temple was built on shifting sand, but the alignment is uncanny.
Murmuring from the crowd. People grab for their phones to take pictures. The sun, which moves so slowly when perched high in the sky, is now rubbing against the horizon and descending swiftly. In silence, we watch it fall.
We are standing in a space where, perhaps, thousands of years ago temple priests stood to mark time. It was a way for them to understand the processes of the natural world. A conversation, if you will, held at the end of one Dilmun year and the beginning of the next. Thousands of years have passed and the sun is still moving through this narrow alcove. Thousands of years have passed and we are still gathering here to watch. We are speaking now to the world as the once-alive Dilmuns spoke to the world. We have done our part by coming here, by standing in the desert in the heat and the dust, and the sun is doing its part by falling toward the Earth.
But, this isn’t entirely true. In truth, we are witnessing the movement of the Earth in relation to the sun. It is those of us gathered here today who are moving. Spinning through space on the arc of the Earth’s orbital path, today reaching our closest point to the sun before, tomorrow, hurtling away once again. We have not only come here to witness the sun, we have come here to witness ourselves.
It is over quickly. We stare at the bleeding red edge that is left behind on the horizon for a long time, no one wanting to break the spell. I am suddenly keenly aware of how close I am standing to the strangers around me. I can feel every movement of them – the bend of an elbow, the sway of a knee.
And then, from across the island, comes a wave of noise. It lifts up from every direction, as hundreds of muezzins in hundreds of mosques begin the call to prayer. The sun has set, the day is over, fasting is done.
We clamber out of the temple. My body feels watery, unwieldy, and it takes me several tries to heave myself up and out over the scrim of earth. There is the sound of cardboard boxes being torn open and a warm bottle of water is pressed into my hand. Two fasting men open tins of dates and offer them to everyone before taking any for themselves. When I put the date between my teeth I find it sticky and sweet as molasses. Then comes the smell of dark coffee and green cardamom. Two men roll out rugs directly onto the ground and many gather to pray. Everywhere is laughter. We offer one another toasts and well wishes – happy new year is cheered.
I look around for the woman in white but cannot see her anywhere. But then – a curl of movement. Melting across the desert, a column of white. She hasn’t disappeared, she has just left. I watch her walking across the desert as the fierce daylight fades from the sky and colors – plum and scarlet and blue – return to the world. I watch her as a spinning cloud of gulls wheels overhead. I watch her until the clot, the moving abrasion of her, rejoins the fine line of the horizon and is gone.