I'm hungry, too
Illustration by Alex.
I often wonder when it first started being this way. When Ramadan began to feel like a soul-depleting trial of delayed gratification, the reward at the end dull and meaningless. I remember the sun being brighter but less oppressive than it is now. I dream of erasing my memories, because then the morning birds wouldn’t remind me of you and dad drinking tea on our old green couch. Time and the fading of color on your jalabiyas forced me to see how much life has changed. How I’ve outgrown my little self, waiting on you, waiting on sweet dumplings.
It was so much harder then. You bought a potato peeler with a pink handle, but its head was wobbly and so the knives stayed in your hands most of the time. Your face would flush red as you opened the oven door, the heat rushing out in 180° clouds of steam that swallowed you—I only knew of those clouds, but when it was time for my hands to take over, I realized our oven door handle was an excellent conductor and so I sat wondering how it is that you never talked about your hands burning. I like to make you an emotionless character in my recollections. It’s a lot easier than acknowledging that you were tired. Today, and every Ramadan since you’ve passed, I’ve heard the knocks of fatigue on my door grow louder with every year. I wish I could feel relief at the thought that perhaps it was easier for you than it is for me now—that being older and having chosen to have us meant that it was all okay. But mom, I couldn’t find the potato peeler a few days ago. It was 6:02, and I’d only barely started. I used a knife. It wasn’t that bad though, because after I’d cringed at the thick lines that wasted so much of my potatoes, I shoved them in the air fryer and sat down.
But I know that after you were done, there remained instructions for dishes you would make, passed down to you in mind and memory—an intangible family heirloom that I struggle to find again within recipe websites; instructions so tedious that they never allowed for pauses and idle waiting. The websites speak to me now and to the air fryer that you’ve never met. I’d wished they’d spoken to you—so I can piece together what your voice would’ve sounded like repeating it back to me, but either way, back then, the kitchen had no space for sitting.
I have indulged this suffocating expectation for years, but I do not recall when it fell on my lap, and I mistook it for responsibility. Was it when dad had said that if I didn’t take care of my brothers, they would cut me off with the first breezes of their travels away? Narratives of generations of women giving were his damning evidence against me that there were silent, honorable threads under every plate and ironed vest. That his love and respect for them was maintained even when age had started to wrap its wires around the skin of his neck. Which woman and where wouldn’t give and give again to embed her legacy and a good name? But mom, I did not care for legacy that day. I had imagined I owned the breeze.
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Dad would often make fun of how when our relatives call, the women have nothing to say to spark up conversation other than “What did you eat today?”. In only the short time it takes to make a few jokes, he’d succeed in reducing them down, from once admirable figures for their lifelong patience and work that embedded invisible familial threads within everything they touched, to inappreciable and simple-minded women, unable to surpass the small talk he could not relate to. These two narratives could come about and overshadow one another whenever it seemed convenient, but as far as he was concerned, only he had the authority to dictate when. I knew it was because he was blind to the way threads could easily turn into barbed wire—that his preoccupation with comfort had left him oblivious to the fact that the respect and love he imagined were not mutual, only remnants of dying tradition. In the same way I never knew of unreliable metal handles and burning hands, he was positioned far from the world he’d ramble about. All that mattered now was the giving that looked to him as a right so perfectly shaped for his self-realization as Man. Far from this world he sat, always at a safe distance from the oven and its heat.
He’d cruise into traditional Palestinian restaurants, comfortably ordering dish after dish, recounting to me their associated memories with pride. Every morsel of food he’d eaten for the first time had not come from his hands or the hands of gloved men in tight kitchens—they had all been from the hands of our female relatives he routinely mocked. Still, he tells me of the value of family and how it is my responsibility to let chores that should stack up on my brothers’ shoulders fall on mine, his language pleading with me to stay forever tolerant to keep away the threat of severed future family ties. If kept away, this sacrifice would be for the promise of a few moments on a phone call with them, years and years later—when life had finally built up its mountains between us and made away with the tangled mess of threads, now like barbed wire winding around my body, not quite deadly, but on their way there—when I’ve made the assumption that this theoretical future could escape the poison of its past and that by now, they must have learned of how angry pouches of air at 180° feel and of how quickly hands can burn—I ask, what did you eat today?
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Mom, you weren’t really a superhero, so it’s no surprise to me that neither am I. Not a chef, not a therapist, and not a default friend to be taken for granted, but they have clothed me in these uniforms long before I was able to look past the pretty bow ties. The days where they don’t bother to wake up and the table is set, I wear the only thing I’ve given myself my own right to: a frown. I do it all. The meticulous timers I set to get everything ready by maghrib, the never-ending search for recipes online that seem familiar, or even the frantic efforts to remember how you used to position our plates and cutlery—I do it all so that they can have a feeling of home. A memory of the safety a younger version of ourselves had felt, hearing the morning birds, completely certain that a few steps out of our rooms gets us the sounds of shuffling and clinking of glass teacups. The encompassing warmth of you and dad, under the sun, brightness wrapping around us like soft linen—I still don’t feel happy. I know the alternative: forgoing these seldom appreciated attempts and leaving them to wake up feeling the rigidity and cruelness of time, with no refuge from the futility that can seep into them in only seconds at the sight of empty stovetops and the crushing panic quarter an hour before the adhan. I know that they can feel what I’ve felt for years. That on rare occasions, they’d tried to put something together quickly to protect dad from the panic they felt when the kitchen stayed empty despite maghrib nearing. Time slips quickly when one is not used to those emotions. It may have been half an hour, but it must’ve felt like nothing to them.
In protecting them from that feeling of futility, I had let it well up in me instead, relentlessly wearing me down. Dipping my fingers into water to seal my pastries felt like nothing special, but on the bad days, I wished the water would wrap around my head and drown me. I felt guilty every time I failed to satisfy the bare minimum of Ramadan’s expectations. Within that guilt I’d hope that they would stop depending on me. That their disappointment in me would stop them from coming to my room with furrowed eyebrows, puzzled that I was not as panicked. Funny that. Their panic was at me not acting, and my panic was at them feeling sad, hungry, and helpless. I prayed countless times that one day they would get up the same way that I had only a few short months after you died and that they’d realize that it was finally time to shoulder some of the weight. They make silly little jokes while I unload second batches from the air fryer, tiptoeing around me, but both of us understood there was never enough space in me to laugh and go along while the fatigue that visited yearly sat at the door.
I know other boys and men sleep to escape the probability that their mothers, sisters, and daughters need help in those crucial hours. But I also know that after He took you from us, they felt your loss ringing in their fingertips the same way I’d felt it in mine. I know that they sleep because the remnants of loss still linger, and it only grows stronger when they see that I’m disheveled, calmly moving spices off the dishwasher for space, quietly getting my unfair duty done without acknowledging them or bothering to ask them to share the load. It might’ve been different when our loss was recent, and we still had childish and forgiving minds. I could’ve given them excuses, that they just didn’t know, that I was good at hiding what I was feeling. But time has passed now, and while they have memories stacked on memories of intention and attempts at remembering you on our dinner table, I only have left that desire of drowning in the water that gets cloudy with flour during the long days of Ramadan. ◆
Sana Al Shaar is a Palestinian-Egyptian diaspora completing her final year of A-levels. Having left school in the 8th grade to self-study, she is now creating herself anew from a secluded childhood. Her interests are still in the making, but currently she is interested in reading and writing about the SWANA female narrative. Find her on Instagram.