The Anemone’s Children: A Conversation with Nada Samih-Rotondo

[An Excerpt from All Water Has Perfect Memory]

THE BRIDE IS TAKEN:

TETA’S STORY

Yafa, Palestine 1948

“I’ll never forget the moment, perhaps because it happened during the spring. In Yafa, the rainy season was coming to a close. The warm sun shimmered on the sea as the surrounding hills filled with the colors of blooming wildflowers. Bright red anemones, cheerful pink cyclamen, and rich blue lupine mingled alongside Jerusalem sage, thyme, za’atar, and chamomile. While the earth was coming alive and expanding, we were contracting with fear of war. We were well-practiced running emergency drills at the school, showing students how to scamper under desks and cover their heads at a moment’s notice.

“On days I wasn’t teaching, I would help out in Baba’s tailoring shop, answering the phone and getting customers their orders. The shop was filled with sewing machines, a long rack of men’s wear and a cash machine on the counter. There was also a curtained-off fitting room with a raised floor for measurement, while the other side was lined with a worktable for sewing and pinning extra fabric. Baba was well known in the city for his quality suits that he would make by hand. I learned how to sew many things from my baba. Did your mother tell you I used to make all of their clothes when they were young? Anyways, we would usually listen to our favorite shows on his big wood-paneled radio, but lately the shows were interrupted by news reports of massacres and settler attacks. One time at the shop, we heard a big explosion so we dove under the sewing table and covered our heads. When the world was quiet again, we went out of the shop along with everyone else in the city and looked up in the sky. A small low-flying airplane had dropped thousands of leaflets. It was raining white pieces of paper all around us scrawled with a warning:

The same thing that happened to Deir Yassin will happen to the people of Yafa if you do not leave immediately.

“I was one of ten children — my youngest sister, Sabah, was only a newborn baby. My family, seeing that others were packing up to leave, decided to do the same, assuming that they would be right back in a few weeks when the fighting died down. We never thought this would be the last time our feet would touch Yafa’s soil — the last spring we would witness the anemones bloom, or inhale the sea breeze. It was supposed to be temporary: this abrupt departure, this contraction in fear. Our family, thanks be to Allah, had the resources to flee to Syria. Baba had friends there who were willing to get us on our feet. Others were not so lucky. Many Palestinians ended up in refugee camps in what later became the West Bank, the south of Lebanon, or Gaza. Many of us were pushed into the sea, left to scramble onto ferries and boats with our children and anything we could carry, leaving our hearts behind. Some of us ended up dead, of course. Like my uncle — Mama Labeeba’s brother — Allah rest his soul. He died fighting for us and our land. I saw many dismembered bodies in the city square, limbs hanging across the movie theater marquee where I once saw Gone with the Wind. I remember turning back to look at the once-familiar city square and feeling like I had entered an entirely different world, so much had changed. The air was charged with waves of panic and chaos as we scattered around the world, severed from the place of our ancestors.

I will always picture the Nakba this way: the jarring juxtaposition of death in the newness of spring, blood running alongside the light green of new plants, bodies sprouting among the wildflowers, war planes set against a bright spring sky.

“We almost didn’t make it to Syria — the bus we were riding had to wait out a blinding sandstorm, but hamdulla we were saved by the angel Gabriel. I didn’t know he was an angel at first of course — angels can take on any form when they come down to Earth — but I remember it well. He was wearing all white and appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the sandstorm to help the bus driver find his way through. He was gone as soon as we were out of the storm, disappeared in the horizon.”

This was usually the part of the story where I would interrupt Teta with an incredulous grunt, but quickly take it back when it was clear how firmly she anchored herself to this version of events. I learned it was best to not interrupt.

“After about two years in Syria, my sister saw an ad in the newspaper calling for teachers in Kuwait. That is where I met and married your grandfather, where I had my family. In the 1950s Kuwait was still an underdeveloped desert. The people used to fish and dive for pearls, but after they discovered oil everything changed. They needed us — Palestinians, Egyptians, Indians, Sri Lankans, and many others — to build the roads, teach in the new schools, clean and care for families at home. Your grandfather, the oldest boy in his family, was an electrician and together we raised five kids while he put his younger siblings through school.”

This is the part of the story my teta was silent about, the part that my mother and my aunt later filled in. Teta was from Yafa — a city girl — while my grandfather was from Tulkarem in the West Bank: a fellah, or “peasant.” Their union placed a huge strain on Teta and Labeeba’s relationship. Coming from a farming family was considered beneath my teta, who was raised with access to higher education in a time when most falahi women were not. According to my mom, had Palestine been left whole, their union would never have happened. Theirs was a union of diaspora, a new generation’s way of moving on. To my great-grandmother Labeeba, it was a shame to have devoted years raising and educating a daughter of Yafa only to lose her to a fellah. Pluralistic as Palestinian society might have been, class divisions were present and strong. To Labeeba, Teta’s marriage was a betrayal, a punch in the gut: another tragic loss on top of a growing mountain of losses. Their relationship was never the same after Teta left for Kuwait and married my grandfather, and I always assumed it was due to the deep class divisions and the spillover of trauma from the Nakba. But like most stories, there was always more to it that would reveal itself in time.

My mom visited her grandmother Labeeba with her siblings in Damascus a few times during summer vacations. My mom described the handful of times she interacted with Labeeba as brief and awkward, noting a lack of warmth and a feeling of being unwanted. Eventually, Teta stopped taking her family to stay in the same house as Labeeba during these visits, choosing to rent out a separate house instead. Apparently Labeeba passed away with much left unsaid between her and my grandmother.

Teta quickly rose from teacher to principal and finally superintendent of schools during her forty-year education career in Kuwait. She described those early days vividly, as Kuwait was a stark contrast to Yafa and Damascus. In the 1950s there were not yet paved roads or air conditioning, and the average temperature between June and September was over one hundred degrees. Often, families were forced to sleep on the flat-topped roofs of multifamily apartments to escape the heat. Teta joined a group of young teachers in building Kuwait’s educational infrastructure. She was sent to rural areas with few resources under instructions to set up a full school campus. She remembered moving furniture into empty classrooms, ordering food wholesale, and hiring help for the cafeteria while setting up the school clinic. Teta spoke of girls passing out from dehydration and malnutrition, and needing to teach them not just to read and write but also how to take care of themselves and their families.

Teta’s career was at the center of her life, even after she married my grandfather and started a family. My grandfather’s younger sister attended the same school my teta worked at. He often lingered in the school office under cover of waiting for his sister, all to catch a glimpse of my teta. The few photos I have of them showcase my grandfather’s smoldering James Dean eyes and slicked-back dark hair, while my grandmother commanded presence with her trendy beehive updo, cinched waist dresses, and sensible heels. My grandfather’s job often took him out of the country for months at a time, leaving Teta to take on running a household while teaching full time. My mom and her siblings grew up with a khadama, or “domestic helper,” who lived with them most of my mom’s youth. I could only imagine what life was like for this young woman who put off life with her family, just to help someone else’s family. She was left with my mom and her siblings when they were as young as eight weeks old, as that was how long my teta was allotted for maternal leave.

The summer my secondborn baby was four months old, my teta was visiting Rhode Island for the first time in years. While I was excited to introduce her to my son, she had recently started to show signs of dementia, and I wasn’t sure how much she would be able to follow what was happening around her. Thankfully, she recognized me after some prodding from my aunt, but after a few moments she regarded me as a stranger, and began to narrate thoughts she otherwise might have kept to herself.

She whispered, “Why is this woman here with her child?” and “When will they leave?” She would flow in and out of conversation, sometimes aware of my presence, sometimes not. At one point, she studied the baby carefully and asked, “The child looks to be older than two months, are you back to work now?”

“No, I am not working right now,” I answered hesitantly, not finding the right words in Arabic to explain that while I was normally a teacher, my husband and I planned for me to stay home with the baby for as long as we could comfortably afford. I didn’t know how to explain that I could have rushed back into a career like she did, but I chose not to.

“As soon as the baby was eight weeks old they would call me,” she stated. “The school wanted me back. ‘Can I have more time?’ I would ask them. My breasts were full of milk. ‘No, they would say, ‘we need you back now.’ ” She paused and looked at her hands, spreading her fingers flat along her lap.

“So I would get milk from the can, pour it into a bottle, hand the baby to the khadama, and go back to work. Eight weeks.”

I nodded my empathy as she circled back to her original question, “The child looks older than two months, are you back to work now?”

My teta barely got to nurse her babies past eight weeks, needing to go back to her job. I see this early separation from her children as being eerily similar to our separation from the land: an interruption of nourishment, an interruption of healing.

Of the many stories my teta would tell me over the years, there is one she never dares speak of. As the years turn into decades, untold stories settle deep in the body like debris on the seafloor. But sometimes storms churn up the bottom of the ocean, and what was left buried floats up to the surface for all to see.

*

On page 36, you write, “I will always picture the Nakba this way… spring.” This is such a vivid and painful thought — having lived through war and seeing what’s happening right now in Gaza. The way you put it helped me read the rest of the book through a certain lens, which I could be biased about because this is a theme I am very interested in — home. I connected with your experience, and your book helped me find answers to my questions about home. I haven’t yet reached the definition which fulfills the meaning I’m looking for. I think you do a great job connecting the land, women’s bodies, the country, the language, the traditions — like the sugar wax …

It is just so encompassing: family, the actual house. And as a child, though immersing your active and energetic mind and body, maybe you did not realize and comprehend what was going on around you. You were deprived of a lot of components of that. You were in a place where people didn’t speak your language. You didn’t have these family gatherings anymore. You didn’t get to sit with the girls and make the hair removal honey. Your book defines this concept and this deprivation of certain components of home very well, and I really admire that. So, this brings me to my first question. What do you want to tell your child self today?

Ah! That’s such a beautiful question. The biggest source of courage for me to get as deep as I did was to heal that inner child, so I think I would tell her, “It doesn’t make any sense now, but just keep going.”

You have painted an image of this little immigrant girl not only alienated in an American culture where people didn’t speak her language, didn’t share her culture, but also by family. The years when you lived at your uncle’s house were so honest and, having come from a collectivist society — and I know how collectivist families treat each other — and also the way you also described your mother. Despite all the pain that comes from family, she insists on staying with them, which is also a source of pain. I completely understand that. It’s not clear to a lot of people who do not come from collectivist cultures, but it makes sense to us, right? Was it hard to be honest and write about these things, in terms of what that might do to your relationship with your family? Did you hesitate?

It was really hard, but I did not hesitate for a couple of reasons. For one, I know I can do hard things. For another, the way I was brought up, with a lack of support — collectivist, individual, or otherwise — gave me the confidence and the courage. I didn’t feel I had anything to lose. I had more to gain by risking my comfort.

This is very inspirational. I always hesitate. Maybe I need some of that courage because I’m always in between wanting to do that and some fear that’s not justified. I feel similarly, that I don’t have anything to lose. At the same time there’s this wall that’s hard to break. So, I applaud you for doing such work and being so honest despite it being difficult and against what a collectivist society might want us to do.

The next question is more general about the book itself. How long did you think and plan to write this book before actually starting to work on it? Was it a project that started in your mind since you were a kid? Or did it actually start when the Covid pandemic started?

A great question. When I was in my MFA Program, I was intentionally studying fiction with the idea that if I’m going to express any of those autobiographical details, it has to be filtered through fiction. And even though I developed a thesis I was proud of — a collection of short stories — I left that program feeling like, “This isn’t it. I need more. I need to get deeper.”

It was a combination of my own independent study, where I got in touch with friends of mine from an MFA Program, who now teach Zoom memoir classes. They gave me a bunch of reading lists and topics, and I just started to delve into them. There were bits and pieces that ended up in that book I had started drafting ten years before. I didn’t even think it could be a full book. Because there were memories that are very prominent, like that moment Kuwait’s bombed, and you know, I couldn’t get the cartoons to work. The memories of me as a six year-old were very prominent.

So I had already written those down, but I just didn’t quite get the framing. So, in those ten years, I got remarried, I grew my family, I took a couple writing workshops, and it was in one of those community workshops — where it was very experimental with the form, and all these things started coming out in a different way. I knew I was onto something. I knew I couldn’t share it yet; I was almost scared of how big it was, and that was that piece of that chapter where I talk about my mom’s self-harm experience. I didn’t even know that memory was still in there. You know what I mean? I was still looking at it through this creative lens. It wasn’t my intention, and it came out in this way, and I was like, “Oh, I have something here.” So, I sat on all of these pieces. I always have fifteen million projects in varying processes. That’s just how I work. But it wasn’t til the pandemic, the lockdown, that I thought, “it’s time to revisit this and be more serious about it and more intentional.” Also, my Teta passed away that April. So that was when I was truly channeling her, and she was in my dreams. It was this very intense spiritual time for me that wasn’t intentional initially. Then it started to become intentional. This is actually what this time is supposed to be for.

It took a good one to two years, once I decided I have enough for a book where I worked on it and got the complete draft. But yeah, there are pieces in there that started in journals ten years before.

Wow! I’m very sorry for your loss.

You just said you didn’t even know that memory was there. Does the process of writing help you remember things? You write about a certain memory and then you’re like, “Oh! something else happened that day!” Does this happen?

Yeah, not necessarily a memory, but it’s more that because I’m reframing it now, more about the perspective on it. How do I show it and what does it actually mean? You think this memory means this one thing, but it actually means this bigger thing because now I don’t just have a role of old me looking back at young me. Now, I have the role of a writer. And that is just a freeing and healing thing because now I get to be on this whole other platform, like a filtered lens.

Yeah, absolutely. I write mostly poetry and a lot of narrative poems, mostly confessional. It helps me remember things in a completely different way. It’s on a much deeper level, and it can be very painful.

Yeah, so it’s important that it’s playing that role in your life because otherwise that wouldn’t have never come up for healing. It would’ve stayed in the background.

My next question is about the different voices in the book. So, there’s you and the family and the people, but also, there are other voices. There’s history, academic-styled writing, and mythology. It just feels like these take their own character in the book. It feels like art, history, mythology, and the people, the human characters in the book, even the places, are analogical. Can you tell us more about that, about your choice of including that other voice in your book?

I love that question. I was really intentional with this structure. For one, I am a very picky reader and easily bored, so I wanted to make sure I wrote something I wanted to read and that isn’t something I see a lot. I definitely created that. I wanted to combine elements that I really love from writers that I love, but in my own way. We’re very much shaped, I feel, by the land, the mythology and the folktales and the story, by history. By family. I wanted to do those histories justice. To do that texture in the right way. I wanted to include as much of that as I could.

I think this is the first time I read a book like this. It’s very new, and I really like how analogical things are. Sometimes you start writing about certain things and then about people and then the reader is connecting this event to this particular object, which is very interesting. There are three parts, and the first part is titled “Mercy,” the second “Lightning Strikes,” which, when you look at it from a religious standpoint, is the opposite of the connotation of mercy. And the last one starts with “Objects Are Closer than They Appear.” What was the choice behind starting with these?

That’s a good question. Part One was what comes earlier, the narrative of my great-grandmother, grandmother, my mom. Kuwait was still under Part One. And Part Two, I wanted to be intentional about how now we’re in the United States. It’s a different vibe. In Part Three, it was more recent. I tried to organize it in that way. I wanted the three parts, too, because I wanted to intentionally show the past generations. How we started out on Palestinian land and then Kuwait and Rhode Island — to show that connection to the land.

One of my favorite things is that connection you draw between women, the multi-generational aspect of it, and then the land and water. There is a lot of focus on water, and of course, the memoir’s title is All Water Has Perfect Memory. You write: “we are a part of nature and we complete each other.” Everyone is connected in some way to objects, to the land, to culture, to art. I think this connectedness is very unique in the book.

I was asked this question once, and I had to think about it a lot, and I don’t think I found an answer for it. What is home to you?

This is something everyone in the diaspora gets asked. If you would’ve asked me this question when I was twenty years old, I had no idea. I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t feel at home in my body, I didn’t feel at home anywhere. I tried to figure this out intentionally — by doing the study abroad program at my junior college — after being in the States most of my life. I needed a break from the United States.

That semester, part of the project I got the scholarship for was to interview other people. To ask them, “What do you think of home?” Of course, everyone had different answers. It wasn’t really until I had my oldest son, who’s almost fifteen, that I understood home. Home for me is caretaking — where am I caretaking, and being taken care of. So, it’s where I have my garden, my children, where I’m taking care of my house and the land around me. That’s how I feel about it now. Home feels or needs to feel, you know, different for everyone. That’s when it was important for me to recognize it’s ok for it to look different, to pave my own path. My experience is very unique. It’s important to appreciate and accept its uniqueness and stop trying to look outside of myself for that sense of home or acceptance of comfort. I know it sounds cliche, but it really was turning inward. And it’s still unfolding; it’s not done, right? The more inward I turn, the more I realize everything I need is actually already here inside me.

Caretaking! That is a very new one for me. I haven’t heard that before, but when I think about it, yes, it’s this nurturing and loving and being loved. I will add that to my dictionary, for sure, for my journey looking for home.

The title of the book is All Water Has Perfect Memory. The different parts take place during the 1920s, 1990s, 2004, but the sections within are not linear. At a certain point we’re reading your diary, and we move back and forth in time. At certain points, you’re young, and then you’re older, and then you’re back, within the sections. Is that supposed to imitate the movement of water? I’ve been thinking about linearity.

That’s really good, yeah! That is a beautiful reading, and if it flows like that, honestly, yeah, sure. It imitates water. That structure was more due to the fact that trauma (and healing from trauma) is not linear. Memory, when you’ve been traumatized, is also not linear. So, your brain on trauma is not going to make sense in that type of way; it makes sense in a different way — there is a different order of things. I was making these choices after reading a bunch of memoirs; I decided on structure before I knew exactly which pieces would go where. I should start by saying that I had a team support me, and I was seeing a therapist through that time. It was obviously not an easy process; it was very much like trauma moving through my body as I was working this out. But part of it was just acknowledging there are certain years of my life that stand out to me more than others, and really exploring and putting the flashlight in those dark corners to ask, “why”? What is it about those years that stand out? What most comes to the surface? It was putting myself in that mindset that I took the lead for the structure.

For example, for the chapter, “Lightning Strikes,” fifth grade was a big transition year. If I looked back at my childhood, it was my favorite year. Yet, it was also my least favorite all in one year. How does that exist in one year? And I’m like, oh, trauma. There was a huge before and after mark, a delineation. There were all these circumstances beyond my control that were impacting me as a ten- and eleven-year-old. In that moment, at that age, I was just in the moment and went about my friends and what we’re gonna play and what we’re gonna eat, and what we’re gonna talk about, that kind of thing. It wasn’t till I got older that I wondered, “ah, why is this a sore spot in my memory? What’s happening there?” So, yeah, a lot of it was intentional because I wanted readers to look at it from the lens of not being necessarily connected in linear time but with themes, events, ideas, memories, like what you were speaking about before — the history, the relationship to the land, the relationship to the water. That’s the connection. I really truly believe — I’m not an expert in quantum physics or anything, but there are those theories, right? — that time is not linear. We experience it like this because of gravity, and all these things happening to us, but time is actually cyclical, right? I very much felt that energy. I felt I was in a position in my life where things were calm and I was resourced and supported enough to finally throw love and healing back to that timeline. To have that ripple out into time and space and finally close that cycle and be able to move on.

Wow, thank you for explaining that. I have a similar thought about time because of an anthropology class I took. We actually not only talked about time not being linear, but the concept of time being like — we made that concept.

Yeah, it’s cultural! It’s social.

I really agree that we definitely are connected by themes and events, not particularly time. When we recall experiences, the memory doesn’t come because of time; it comes because of the experience we had in that certain memory. So, that makes a lot of sense right now. What are your next projects?

I’m currently working on a second memoir, focusing more on my paternal side. I’m hoping to shape the chapters by talking in more detail about my paternal side’s experience with the Nakba and their journey out because it was different than my maternal side. But also, a big chunk of it will recount the experience. My husband and I had that big reunion in Amman, Jordan with my dad’s side of the family after thirty years in 2021. So, the memoir will delve into being there for those couple of weeks, the conversations we had, the things we experienced, the connections we were making. Now I’m just organizing it, considering how I want to tell these pieces. Sometimes the memoir does call for a linearity, and sometimes it’s like … well, why not have fun with it, do something else? The memoir will have chapters similar to this first one that flashbacked to specific points of childhood, teenagehood, and some early adulthood stuff that was very formative for me, that just didn’t quite fit in this first memoir. Yeah, so that’s the next nonfiction project. I have a bunch of different fiction projects in the works, too.

I definitely would love to read that. I’m waiting for it.

Are you planning to connect anything to what’s happening right now in Gaza?

That’s a great question. Absolutely. I already had this idea before October 7th , and everything that happened has been fueling that idea more. During one part of my visit in 2021 we went to Petra. That was my first time seeing it and learning that, you know, this is the Rose City and this is why. There’s different layers … Yeah, so a part of the big torestra is that there’s layers of sediments that are different colors and each one tells a different story to archaeologists about what was happening — the dry years, the flooding years, and all these weather events and things that might’ve happened. So, it’s like these beautiful colored layers. Well, here in New England, we have an island called Martha’s Vineyard. It’s Indigenous name is Aquinnah. This particular part of Aquinnah Island is actually owned by the Wampanoag people. It’s not a reservation; they bought that land to preserve it. So, it also has layers — their mythology and their origin stories — which are so similar to the Nabataean ones. The parallels are super interesting. I wanna contemplate that, how, when you think you’re displaced or uprooted, but when you look right where you are, there’s actually so much similarity. The Aquinnah story is that there was this grandfather figure who is the caretaker of the tribe that’s considered to be a giant. He taught people how to fish and hunt and protect themselves. There was this giant bird that was going around kidnapping people’s children and collecting, and there was this very visceral image of a pile of children’s bones. So that’s that piece I’m thinking about connecting. Because this is something — I mean the Gaza situation, it’s like very much similar to what’s been happening for the past 100 years in Felestine, but what really sticks out to me, especially as a parent and as a teacher is its super deep impact on childhood and children’s lives. It feels to me that’s the draw to really look at because there’s also here this mythology of this collection of children’s bones. We also have in the Middle East a similar story of the rook, that giant bird, that’s also terrorizing people. So there’s a lot there. I’m processing as I go, and I’m not really looking at my journals about this project yet, but I know I will eventually. If anything, it’s just gonna deepen the overall message or the questioning really, like the dissection of how much deep, continuous harm colonization has done to us in the land. How do we undo that harm, how do we come back from that, how do we heal from it? So that’s gonna continue to be the theme.

It’s painful thinking about what’s happening, what’s been happening, thinking about the childhood. I’ve lived through a similar thing. I was seven in 2003, so the war definitely — like a place where a child grows up and when the place is undergoing circumstances like this, it never leaves you. So, yeah, thinking about it is painful. Writing about it. It is very painful to process, like you said. It’s just like the whole process definitely does need a therapist.

We need a lot of collective.