Yasmine Rashidi - Chronicle of a Last Summer

The next morning I found Mama in the kitchen wiping the counter. I had walked in with the newspapers and a glass of juice. It had become a habit, sitting on the balcony together before I went to the club to run and see Baba. I knew Mama had been thinking about the house from the comments she dropped over the years since the revolution. She spoke about a memory etched permanently inside her, about feeling reborn. One day she mentioned the weight of a physical burden anchoring her down. That morning, as she sipped her coffee and we looked out onto the garden, I could feel her neck and shoulders slightly tense. It was always the sign she was going to address something uncomfortable. She looked out to the sliver of Nile or a point beyond or something in the garden or maybe just her mind’s eye, and without turning her head, she paused before telling me she had something to say.

—

It has been three months since that moment, and in early August we began to pack. The conversations around leaving the house and what it might mean for how we live and all we have known have been few, and cautious. Mama turns seventy this year. She sleeps in the bedroom she was born in. I can’t imagine what a new life might mean, even though in ways she already has one. Mostly we have sorted through things on our own, but we have looked through albums together, told stories, laughed. We found Baba’s ring together, in the back of a drawer stuffed with his papers. Mama talks of a party, opening the house to all those who haven’t been here in years. I want to invite everyone, she tells me. Sitting on the balcony I ask her, hesitantly, if Baba can come. It has been thirty years since he set foot in this house that once was his home. Mama looks at me, eyes wide. She puts her mug down. Her neck stiffens, then relaxes. I tell her I wish Uncle were alive. She dreams of him often, she says. I wonder what Nesma and Granny would think. She looks at me, and I hold her gaze. I watch as she then turns her neck, puts her hand on the side of her chair, as if seeking support, and looks in the direction of the Nile.

I would like to thank The Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Townhouse Gallery, and the Hammer Museum. My thanks also to Tim Duggan, Zoë Pagnamenta, and Will Wolfslau.

The scene in the record shop was inspired by Abounaddara’s The Inheritors in Discord.

I am deeply grateful for a small family of friends who supported me in various ways through the writing of this. Thank you, Amy Atwood, May Al-Ibrashy, Sarah Rifky, Negar Azimi, Elizabeth Rubin, Galila Nawar.

Special thanks to Julie Mehretu.

I am indebted in lifelong ways to my brother, Seif El Rashidi; my father, Mamdouh El Rashidi; and most of all my mother, Nevine Hussein, for whom words alone will never be enough.

Yasmine El Rashidi is an Egyptian writer. She is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and an editor of the Middle East arts and culture quarterly Bidoun . She lives in Cairo, where she is currently translating the works of Egyptian novelist Khairallah Ali.