an Algerian women haunts my dreams

interweaving the origins of my yearning for liberation - my father, television, Palestine, history, urban landscapes, Ahlam Mostaghanemi, Tripoli, nostalgia, late Dr. Otared Haidar & imagined futures

Za’atar, olive oil, and bread remind me of my dreams. Of all sorts of dreams. The largest dream I was raised with, that followed me across time and place, of a free Palestine, ingrained in me from a young age. I understood a free Palestine before I understood contradiction or nuance, the torment of history, the relentlessness of oblivion. I understood the future. I understood the vision. I am not alone in that. The dream of a free Palestine permeates through entire generations in the Arab World. Only now, I do not feel that dream as densely as I used to.

My dreams of a free Palestine must have risen when I grew up in Saudi Arabia, between 2004 and 2007. I had just started to learn Arabic, and while it took a few years for the language to settle on my tongue fully, and for me to understand it outside of the dialect my family spoke to me, my political consciousness rooted in the events of the Middle East did not know any language barrier. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya took rotations on the living room television. Or at least, it felt like it did. I learned from my Lebanese teachers at the French School, that would inform me of the events in their country. In February 2005, I came home from school and informed my parents that “something terrible happened in Lebanon today”. The event in question was the assassination of former Prime Minister Raffia Hariri. I was nine days away from turning five. A more morbid anecdote was while my family and I traveled to Kuwait. My father told my older sister and me we were en route to Iraq. Ameni and I pleaded and cried for some time, believing that our father was taking us to the same worn-torn country that we had viewed televised. Around that time, the news must have also shown Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, and its subsequent blockades. My memory cannot fully confirm this, but I believe that my first engagement with Palestine was through Gaza.

In Saudi Arabia, I learned about the Middle East. I specify this because, an upbringing in the Arabian Gulf, does not guarantee a full immersion. You can live a life of ignorance and indifference if you choose to do so, in relative safety. Now more than ever.

I write you as Israel carpet bombs residential neighborhoods in Beirut. I write you as over a quarter of the Lebanese population are displaced within their country. I write you as Western academics refer to the military strategy of doing so to kill the leader of Hezbollah as “tactical geniuses”. I write you as Western Media continues to dehumanize Arabs and use passive language that fails to ignore Israel and its allies’ involvement and complicity. I write you as some in the Arab World and elsewhere see this as a celebratory moment, ignoring the civilian casualties and devastation. I write you as we have lost some of our attention from Gaza, which is a week away from the one-year anniversary of Israel’s ongoing total annihilation. Given all it is that I have just written, my dream of a free Palestine has taken priority over all my other dreams.

I dream my friends in the Levant can return to their homeland in safety, and those who have never been to Palestine, return to their ancestral land. My dream extends outside of the nation-state. I dream of a road trip across the Gulf, the Levant, and the Maghreb. I dream of our countries no longer under the direct or indirect control of bloodthirsty Imperial Western and Zionist powers. I dream of our collective liberation. On the good days, I can dream this way, but today, I struggle to dream. But I have to. I have to dream of the end of the ruthless killing because systems of oppression win when we struggle to imagine the future. Imagination is not only resistance, it is meant to be liberatory.

I am thinking much more about dreams than I ever have, only because I have realized that is an element I would like to add to my research. In the span of two weeks of interviews, I spent a portion of my interviews asking people about their dreams, a practice that had reminded me of my very own. I have come across a challenge. Dreams are difficult to retrieve, simply because they are difficult to locate. They come from so many places, and only when I started to ask questions in my fieldwork along these themes, that I was able to recover some of my own. It does not suffice to ask the question - what did/do you dream of? If there is one thing I have come to realize, is that I need to ask questions about the city, dreams of its urban planning and development, to access individual dreams, that are often shared and shaped, in a larger collective. I know some of my dreams come directly from a living room in Saudi Arabia. I know some of my dreams took shape and rose when I left Libya following the start of the revolution in February 2011, and other dreams accumulated during walks around Downtown Abu Dhabi. Some of my dreams came from Arab children's television such as Spacetoon and Tuyor al Jannah, and others from United State’s cultural imperialism; Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. J.K Rowling must have had something to do with them too, I was an avid Harry Potter and I now find myself walking around the same places the films were shot.

But some of our dreams come from our parents, from the depths of their subconscious. One Saturday afternoon in Abu Dhabi, whilst having lunch with my parents and younger sister, I let them know that the geography of my dreams was shifting, away from the Gulf and my native Tunisia. My dreams are shifting outwards to the West, in hopes that I find more permeance elsewhere, and that I get a citizenship that would provide me better mobility.

“Why do you want to move far away from me?” My mother had asked me

“I think the UK is a good idea for a place to settle, she will be close to Tunisia” My father tried to reassure her.

“Papa, what did you dream of?” I asked him

He looked at me, confused, I further clarified “When you were young, just having completed your master’s degree, what did you dream of?”

“I wanted to make enough money to buy a car and build a house. Work enough years in diaspora and then go back to Sfax [his hometown]” He responded.

His dream of a permanent return to Sfax, or Tunisia more broadly, had deferred to an indefinite future. He is constantly stuck between the skies, moving between Dammam where he works and lives on weekdays, and Abu Dhabi on weekends. The mornings in both places this time of year bring about a similar humid air. I thought of my father’s constant travel on my flight from Dubai to London, where I watched the sunrise for over two hours from the window. I was convinced that my father's and my dreams were connected, and extended forward since they originate from about the same place. My dreams of settling somewhere permanently, of resting my head on the same pillow for four months straight, must come from my father’s deferred dream. We were both graduate students who were lucky to receive a fully funded education, which opened up new possibilities. He was the first among his siblings to leave Tunisia, and I am the first of my siblings to leave the Gulf. Only now, I have to decide if I will, and if I can, extend my departure from the Gulf.

My fieldwork starts at home and expands outwards is a revelatory sentiment, since it is at home where many of my dreams, and hopes originate from, and that is also where my dreams get deferred. Home informs most of my academic work and artistic practice, and that is why I never find any rest. I am always thinking about nostalgia. I wonder at times if I shouldn’t have picked a research interest so close to home, that originated from my inability to recognize home.

“One of these circumstances emerged nostalgia as we know it today: the longing for an unrecoverable time. Before it was so easy to return home, many thought they were longing for a place. However, once they were able to go that place, they realized what they yearned for was a lost era. As a writer noted in 1935, “People talk so much about homesickness and such, but I’m not so sure if there’s any geography involved at all. The country one left, the name of which is childhood or youth - that nobody can return to. We who go on living in the same place don’t notice it the same way as those who leave. People don’t understand that it’s their own youth or generation they have left behind, and so they confuse it with something geographical - when it’s rather something inside us”. Those who traveled back and found their homes gone gradually came to this same realization.”

Susan J. Matt - “Homesickness: An American History”

Reading the above passage clarified why it was so difficult for me to return to the two places that I call home. With every return and departure, the distance between myself and my childhood and teenagehood widens into a growing rift, expanding, haunting. Susan J. Matt wrote in the context of the immigrants who had chosen to settle in the United States, in the late 19th century and 20th century, some of which, upon their return to their place of origin, no longer recognized their home. Nostalgia had previously been closely associated with war, in the context of soldiers, being homesick in the trenches of the battlefield, and returning to their homes that had become lost in time, not quite the same, as a result of the devastation of war. But migration in a “modern” world, brings about the nostalgia as we know it today, efforts to recover a lost time, that exists mostly in our memories. I am privileged that the places I call home are unaffected by war.

If I were to return to my dreams, it may come as a surprise that it is za’atar, olive oil, and bread that remind me of my dreams, as opposed to something closer to my Tunisian heritage, like harissa, olive oil, and bread. But that is the case because I spent my teenage years rekindling Arabic as my mother tongue to whom I was an estranged child. Most of my teachers were from the Levant, with the exception of a select few. One of my earliest memories of learning Arabic in school was in the 5th grade, in Madame Chenouda’s classroom. She was a sterotypical stern and difficult Egyptian teacher. If my memory did not fail me, she would hit the boys’ arms with a ruler. She made us all hate, if not dread the language. Then, modern standard Arabic was a small classroom in Tripoli, Libya, whose’ atmosphere was dark and cold, the sun sometimes reflected through the windows, revealing the shadow of the iron bars of the window. It now occurs to me that what I could describe may very much feel like a prison. And that is what I possibly may have felt. Imprisoned. Suspended in time.

I used to blame my parents for how bad my Arabic was, but my teenage temper tantrums concerning my identity crisis were not entirely their fault. I do not think my parents could have anticipated that raising their children in the Arab world would lead their kids not to speak Arabic well. But that was the case for my siblings and myself since we were in French schools. My Arabic was subject to neglect. Moving into the United Arab Emirates in 2014 brought about a different possibility. I had a series of teachers throughout middle and high school that brought back what Arabic should have always been. Somewhere further from the stomach where fear is felt, towards the heart, where home exists.

Za’atar, olive oil, and bread remind me of my interactions with the Levant, through its people, its food, and broader culture. But as of late, it reminds me of Dr. Otared Haidar, one of my most recent Arabic instructors.

The first time I met Dr. Haider was in a room in the basement of the Asian and Middle East Faculty (formerly called Oriental Institute) in Oxford. I knew she lived in the diaspora for at least three decades, and yet, it still felt as though she was part of the future of the Arab World. She was imaginative. In part, it was due to her optimism that the youths of the Arab World still spoke Arabic well. I did not feel that way, considering my upbringing. At the end of each term, we had a celebratory last class of the semester, where we had a small traditional Arabic breakfast. It consisted of olive oil, za’atar, at least three types of bread, cheese, cucumbers, and red tea. I brought the olive oil, and Dr. Haidar brought the za’atar from the Netherlands, which came from Syria. We would play Fairouz while discussing different topics in standard Arabic. It was not a homecoming. It is a reality I know of, and I can access many more “authentic” contexts to it. But it felt like home, or a type of home. A familiarity. A familiarity that found its place in the least likely place, Oxford. Within structures that are very much in opposition to the places that I call home, or at least, the origins of its inceptions.

Dr. Haidar taught Arabic Literature in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, she, among other professors such as Dr. Nader Uthmani, has grown and expanded my love for Arabic literature. I cannot quite explain the imaginative component that Arabic literature evokes in me. It feels like a possibility. I know it feels that way due to my Eurocentric high school education, reading among the likes of Gustave Flaubert, Shakespeare, and Jules Verne. I had spent my teenagehood years reading the books of white male English and French Men from North Africa and the Gulf, removed from the geographies to which I am most familiar. I dedicate this essay to the memory of Dr. Otared Haidar, who suddenly passed away over the summer. A few days before I had received the news, I thought of how much I looked forward to seeing her again, for our weekly classes diving into the depths of contemporary Arabic literature. I still feel like she is part of the future somehow. She is part of my future.

I started a Middle Eastern Studies Masters this time around last year, on the eve of October 7, in a university where I can trace many of the Orientalists that had imagined the region in the wrongest of ways or have had a direct impact on the current geopolitical crises, such as the Balfour declaration. But the Orientalist had gone to study in Oxford to imagine the Orient, some of which go and return, with their embellished and warped imaginaries. I had, and still do, grapple with the ethical implications of being in this place, but centuries later, I find myself in the same place as the Orientalists. I have gone to Oxford to imagine the Middle East and North Africa. To imagine its future that moves away from our death, our destruction, our devastation. I am imagining the distances that stretch between my body and the places I call home, and the places where members of my chosen family are from.

I believe some people belong to the future. My family, my besties, and my comrades constantly inspire me to fight for a more just world. The people who belong to the future haunt my dreams. They live around me and within morsels of my imagination to propel me forward in time, as opposed to my usual tendency to go back. All it is that nostalgia has pushed me to do is ruminate. But I believe the future is coming. It is arriving at us in a much faster force than it used to. Nostalgia and the future are akin to Newton’s cradle. The cradle demonstrates the conservation of energy and momentum, in which the impact of one ball will move another ball of the same mass at the same distance at the same speed. The gravitational force that pushes both balls in constancy, unless physically interrupted, are dreams. Dreams transform the static longing for the past into a process of imagination and possibility. The dreams from the past become accessible, which can be reconfigured and projected forward. My dreams of liberation, personal stability, and collective freedom emerge from this constant movement. The future is shaped by the weight of memory, grief, and loss, where there is potential to reconfigure home and for liberation. In dreaming of the future, home constructs new meanings - a physical return, an imagined and possible liberation, and/or the emotional, psychological, and mental peace that comes from finding stability in a place where one belongs.

Nostalgia informs our dreams, giving them substance, rootedness in history, and individual and collective memory, while individual and collective dreams propel us toward the future, allowing us to imagine possibilities that require us to transcend the over-glorification and rosy-tinted lens of the past. The future, is an anticipation, an aspiration, and an arduous thing, requiring one to navigate the pull of nostalgia, while still dreaming forward.

Dr. Otared Haidar reminded me of my dreams. She is no longer with us, but she lives in the future. And to her, I owe many things. A renewed love for Arabic Literature, and my discovery of Ahlam Mostaghanemi, an Algerian woman that haunts my dreams.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi, an Algerian poet and novelist born in Tunis in 1953, is a literary pioneer and the first Algerian woman to write a novel in Arabic. Her works are deeply intertwined with her family’s history, and the political turmoil that shaped modern Algeria. Mostaghenmi’s father was an Algerian nationalist who was imprisoned after the Sétif riots of 1945 and suffered a mental breakdown following the Boumediene coup of 1965. The personal history of disillusionment and resistance influenced Mostaghenmeni’s writing, and she dedicated Memory in the Flesh (1993)  “ذكرة الجسد” to her father, knowing that he would not be able to read it in Arabic, considering how French Colonial administration had removed Arabic instruction from schools.

Memory in the Flesh tells the story of Khalid bin Tubal, a former freedom fighter who lost an arm in Algeria’s War of Independence, and Ahlam, the daughter of a fellow fallen soldier he once knew and named at birth, and twenty years later, fell in love with. Set against the backdrop of post-colonial Algeria, the novel interweaves personal and collective memory, reflecting on how urban environments shape individual identities and broader social histories. The narrative, from Khalid’s perspective, is fragmented, mimicking the nature of memory and highlighting how cities are ever-changing, living entities that leave an indelible mark on their inhabitants. Khaled’s return to his native Constantine from a painting career in Paris is shattered by the reality of a deteriorating city that once symbolized his earlier years of hope and renewal in his years of freedom fighting. After independence, he feels alienated and subtly questions whether his sacrifices are worth the current corrupt state of the nation. His sense of belonging is fractured, though deeply tied to Algeria. He feels out of place in his current political landscape. Khalid proves what I have always known - the impossibility of returning as if you never left. He is stuck between two temporal entities, the place where he once dreamed, to the present where boredom permeates his life

“Could boredom, loss, monotony be some part of the characteristics of this city? Is it me who is entering old age, or the entire country now entering an era of collective decline? Does the country not hold some superior power both to make us grow old and to become old in a few months, sometimes in just a few weeks?”

Memory in the Flesh, Ahlam Mostaghanemi (11)

Embodiment is an important theme of the novel, borrowing from James McDougall’s definition of embodiment as “the enactment of selfhood in one’s physicality, in performance, and individual self-presentation”.¹ In the novel, we see Algerian selfhood enacted, as Khalid realizes his memories are not a thing he can be rid of, throughout the novel, he tries to write his own, by putting his memories into something more tangible. He is a deeply embittered man, self-loathing, struggling with his psychological and intellectual frustrations, grieving his lover who left him for Ziad, his Palestinian friend. He is searching for something that would alleviate the physical and psychological pains of memory. But embodiment comes back around towards the end of the novel, where Khalid confronts and comes to terms with his current reality, realizing it is not enough to carry his memories in his flesh. He embraces the complexity of his multiple selves and how nostalgia, exile, heartbreak, and disillusionment have fragmented him.

I think Khalid and I would have gotten along well, if he were a real person, meeting him would be the start of a madness. We both grapple with how to imagine belonging in a place that has changed, and whether it is possible to reconcile nostalgia and the dreams of the past, towards a liberated future. Both of us are fraught with disillusionment, as we realize the places tied to memory no longer reflect the ideals or experiences they once did. I have dreams that I have deferred. He has his deferred dreams, such as having a family but instead is a husband to exile, to the brush and the words he struggles to put to the page. But we both are aware of how collective dreams get deferred. How do I return home to find that my dreams of revolution and collective liberation are pushed into an indefinite future? How do I return home when my dreams are stuck between its walls, making me a prisoner of what I aspire for? How do I return home if it has continued onwards without me, ignoring my absence?

When I read the novel, I understood Khalid as a cautionary tale, on the risks of my nosedive of delving into asking questions on home and (dis)belonging. I am still in the temporal void between myself at the present and the flows of time from my childhood and teenage years. Only that, I am no longer embittered. I still hold disillusionment in my mind but no longer in my heart. The Arab World in which collective liberation was at the forefront of our dreams does not exist at the time of writing. I am attempting to accept it. Nostalgia does not trap me the same way it used to, it helps me project myself onto an imaginable future, in a nightmarish present. Memory in the Flesh is heart-wrenching, tenderly written for those who know what it means to search for home in an unrecognizable homeland, or a lover’s arms.

1. James McDougal, “Social Memories 'in the Flesh': War and Exile in Algerian Self-Writing”