Holes in the sand and invisible stories

by Elisa Laschi (Italy)

Making a local connection Kuwait

I knew a few words of Arabic and could barely read the numbers. But that date, 2/8/1990, scratched with a white can spray in front of my eyes would have been readable even if it was transparent. Everything on august of 1990 on this Island had been stopped. The arrival of Iraqi tanks, still parked next to the camel driver's farm, had interrupted a daily life thousand of year old. Usually, we are taking the chance of living in the present, however, on this Island, Failaka, every day dawn rises only on the traces of the past. Dilmun is the name of his first inhabitants, then the Greeks with the temples of Zeus and Aphrodite, the Nestorian Christians who drank wine in black amphorae, and finally the people of Islam. For 5000 years all of them had lived on these former green coasts, growing carrots and fishing for pearls. Today the houses are creaky and pierced by machine guns. It is not easy if you were born in Europe to imagine what a post-war scenario is. Still, now this is right in front of me and is detailed in every hole opened by bullets. I think about what it would be like to take this walk a different day from Friday when the American army comes to train and the sound of firearms rumbling from all sides. The rubble would have sounded like during the invasion. I probably wouldn't have been so calm, although calm is not precisely the right word when all around you are just ruins. You can see, among the typical Arabian houses made of clay, a forgotten book, a broken plate, some clothes, including a red and white keffiyeh, which you don't dare to take as you could do with an ordinary souvenir. There is also a road sign initially bright blue, written in Arabic and English. It says, "The beauty of the Island... Reflex your inner beauty." It's a kind of ironic. At five o'clock the loudspeakers of the mosques sing in the old villages, with their half-moon rising over minarets. This song takes me on my walk: crosses the town of Zhor, the glass factory, the old school with its raw brick walls. It penetrates the windows of the houses left open, and like the wind, moving the curtains. It even arrives on the dusty sofas, where no one sits anymore, at the extreme southern edge of the Island. The adhan crosses the cabin of the stranded fishing boat until it disperses into the waters of the Arabian Sea. No one has lived here since 1990. Each Friday you can take a ferry, and I think of the day I met Amaal on the Island. She is my age and studied in Europe. The facial features and brown skin betray her Kuwaiti origin. Still, you notice immediately for her excellent English and her jeans that she grew up somewhere else in the world. She remembers when she was 4 years old and was forced to run away. Amaal saw us working and approached curiously, "Salam-Aleikum!", "Peace be unto you!" She asked what we were doing and said she'd be back the next day. So she came for lunch, bringing her sister, her niece and a doughnut that she covered with liquid chocolate poured in front of our greedy eyes. Her face is always smiling. She tells us about her family, her studies in England, and why she comes at Failaka when she can. "Here is the still partly standing of my grandfather's house. Now it's all mine." She then jokes, "I know what you think about my veil, but it is actually a sign of freedom. I choose every morning to wear it because it's important to me to show the pride, "fakhar", to be a Muslim woman. Everywhere I am, also in your country!" She is laughing. Simple words, but they make me realize that who came from a wrecked village will never forsake his roots. I look at her town on the background: those pitted stones, that seems fragile, appear now at me extremely valuable. The Arabic beauty of the Island was reflected in that peaceful but proud gaze.