For My Awoowe,
Unable are the loved to die for love is immortality – Emily Dickinson
The other day, *Adeer said he would take the little boys to the park and I said I would join them. He said he would show us the bench where my late *Awoowe (whom I never met) used to sit when he used to visit this park during the brief time he lived in London in the mid 90s.
This is a park I am very well acquainted with. I know it like I know my name. Every nook and cranny, every beaten down path and stretch of grass. I have ambled through it many times over the last 16 years. It was a place I frequented in childhood when life was simple & golden and entirely confined to that area where I lived. It is reminiscent of relaxation with my family after eternal primary school days and is permeated with childish giggles and the delectable taste of bubblegum ice lollies from the ice cream van that stood outside it, day after day… year after year. Nothing ever seemed to change.
It was a haven for afternoon picnics with loved ones on sweet, sweltering and soporific summer days and solitary walks on rainy evenings. It was the oasis of calm I would retreat to during university exam season, memorising facts about sleep disorders under the resplendent and endlessly blue sky.
This particular day was an overcast and slightly chilly July afternoon. On that day, we walked through the park as I usually do but this time I was consumed with anticipation. And then I saw it. I must have walked by it thousands of times and I never really noticed it. Why would I? It’s completely commonplace and entirely unremarkable. But in that moment, I looked at it from a distance and the earth reversed on its axis ten thousand times and it was the year 1995.
As my eyes scanned this mundane wooden bench, I thought about how beautifully melancholic and painfully poetic it was… I was seized by some foreign emotion that the English language is far too paltry to encapsulate. I thought how serendipitous it was for me to grow up playing in the very park he used to visit well before I even existed. In that moment, it was as if that bench existed in a realm where my grandfather was still alive and I could sit beside him. It connects the dots between generations that never laid eyes on one another – a physical manifestation of the past in the present…a sweet, enduring forget-me-not. Like Jeffrey Harrison describes in his poem ‘A Drink of Water’, it ties us together across the bounds of death and across time.
I walked towards it and sat where I imagined he did. Looking out at the view I knew all too well, I wondered were his eyes may have lingered. Perhaps at *Aabo and Adeer running around in the vast and open space. Would he anticipate that his own progeny would sit on the same bench and stare out at the same sky? Adeer told me that the park is almost the same as it was during those days, that only the trees and foliage mark the decades that have passed without him and that pleased me…
I wonder what he thought about during the many hours he sat there. Adeer said he was often sad to have left the land of his forefathers and great-grandmothers. He missed the place he left behind, the people, the foods and familiar scents. He longed for the warm and docile airs of his beloved homeland. And so it is of great consolation to me that he took his last breath where he took his first. It’s only right that it was in Somali soil he was laid to rest.
Maybe he thought of my grandmother who passed a few years before this. What would he tell her? That they had made it to a strange and foreign land with perpetually cold weather, where the call to prayer cannot be heard from the sitting room window? Perhaps…
So although we never met, I am glad to have been shown this bench. Even if they do, as I’m sure they will at some point, remove this bench, it’s okay. His memory is kept alive by his many children and grandchildren. He may not be immortalised in the history books but he is undisputedly memorialised in childhood stories from my elders that I have committed to memory, anecdotes I can imagine vividly, wisdoms and life lessons. My very own *dhaxal awoowe. If I want to know who he was, I need not look further than my own father whom he raised, who in turn raised me. He is the source of an upbringing centred around the Most High, an upbringing that placed importance on the value of honour, of integrity, of family…
And so it is my distinguished honour to carry his name; I am filled with joy that it always appears next to my own, like a trustworthy handhold that will never break. I find comfort in the unyielding truth that we moved and breathed on same earth, even for a few seasons and that he knew of my existence.
So it’s okay that we never met because it has never felt that way. Even for a minute.
I’ll be seeing you Awoowe, under the throne of the Most Merciful.
Glossary
- Awoowe – grandfather – could be either maternal or paternal.
- Adeer – a paternal uncle who is the brother or cousin of one’s father. Somalis also use this term as a form of respect to address an older man even if they are not related to them. In this instance, I am referring to my father’s brother.
- Aabo – father
- Dhaxal awoowe – an inherited legacy.
