GHABA EL-MERICAN

Memories are making their way down the end of a crackling telephone line open the attachment, you’ll see…she’s yelling from the other side. I click on the email with the word teswira in the subject line. In the body of the message a group of people are looking away from me out of a full colour JPEG. Its an image of a slapped together picnic we staged, in late 1993 with the members of my extended family. Sitting on woollen hand woven rugs spread over the grass in a place called Ghaba El-Merican literally translated as The American Forest. Now, some of the men and women in that photograph are dead. The babies and children have changed, morphing into versions of people nobody could have guessed they would become.

This picnic owes its name to the way we threw things into a bucket (several) and went out bush, not letting our elders prepare the food in the way they traditionally would have. We kissed their hands, helping Jadda and Jaddu into the back seats of the white Mercedes, a car common on the streets of Tangiers in those days. We whisked them away before they’d had the chance to spill the basket of baguettes over the large kitchen bench, roll up their sleeves and degut them as though they were fish; stopped them from rolling hard boiled eggs against their palms on the stone bench; slicing tomatoes, cucumbers and onions; heaping Ketchup and mayonnaise with teaspoons, then snapping the bocadilio shut and wrapping it tightly in a tin foil blanket.

There was a red plastic bucket where our Amtis tossed the white bread crumb interior, filling it to the brim like a bucket of clouds. I wondered at this habit, so different to what I had seen in my own home.

A couple of years later, feeling all out of place at a suburban playground in Australia, I watched kids sawing through sandwiches then tossing the tan crust out, still half wrapped in plastic film. Some kids only took a shy bite of flat peanut butter or Vegemite sandwiches then tossed the whole thing out.

That day, everybody ate everything and then rolled on the blankets, looking at each other through squinting eyes under an autumn sun. The images of loved ones and family members arrived at their corneas like pictures through a prism, bodies heavy with the gravity of a full stomach.

The clouds were given to the babies, with the purpose of both fattening them up and aiding any child who may have been suffering from teething pains. Normally, my parents and I (on holidays from Australia) would spend many a splendid summer days indoors. Our relatives bored by the same landscape that we considered a novelty, a good waste of good weather. Perhaps it was our way of unconsciously doing life outdoors in Australia or the urgency of being on holidays. That day has never happened again. We talk about it often. This photograph, the only piece of material evidence that it ever existed.