no bicycles were allowed kan

lazim permit :: حصان ابليس

first was your grandfather

ubu your grandma :: as in your grandmother

from milk ::

كل أحد أخو كل أحد

his was the only house with electricity ::

before the company

حاطه في غرفة جابه

من البحرين ::

and to bahrain he will return

the first year we went to unaizah ::

ركبنا مكينة كهرب كبيرة

بالبرغوش

in the mud house ::

 so big :: we shared it with the masjid

and the neighbors :: oh

استانسوا

they were overjoyed :: 

and we set it up on a barren

land :: away from

 its noise

بيتين ثلاثة نفتحهم

2 or 3 houses during

our visits :: we would scatter

and sleep on rooftops :: kan

no aircon no fans :: no diesel

after midnight :: نروح نركض

كل واحد يزيّن فراشه

بالسطح ::

with water and water :: lest the heat

dries us up ::

it was so nice :: the quiet days

Author’s Note:

Previously renowned for its bustling im/migration activities and agricultural topography, the poems I present borrow from my grandfather’s oral recounts of our hometown, ‘Unaizah, Saudi Arabia, pre- and mid-oil boom. The first sighting of bicycles, priorly known as ‘Satan’s horse,’ as well as the inceptive use of electricity—brought to us from Bahrain due to Indian Ocean trade—are highlighted to amplify what ‘Unaizah, as a real and imagined landscape, used to look like. From these interviews with my grandfather, I am given a new lens for a new outlook of what I know of our hometown: my grandfather, via memory, becomes a historian.

Additionally, I make use of Arabic in these poems, whether in their original script or as romanized transliterations, to not only place emphasis on my grandfather’s form of speech, stress, and exclamation, but to also denote my personal tensions with the language as a ‘globalized’ body: English as intrusive language, but also English as vehicle to universally narrate. Rarely then do I offer translations of the Arabic; perhaps it becomes a form of syntactic rejection, similar to Marwa Helal’s “Poem to Be Read From Right to Left”; these oral narratives must be read by their own rules. It becomes a language that grants itself the permission to narrate. I also use the Arabic as a mode of excavation: to cut the cord of disappearance, particularly in my great-aunt’s poem, and give voice to what has been buried. It is the interweaving of the present with the absent, by way of preservation, that I utilize these poems as archival material. 

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Jood AlThukair is a researcher tracing oral narratives, women’s memory practices, and the shifting ecologies of the desert. Working across (anti)archives through bilingual and ethno-poetic methods, she explores how stories endure, erode, and reassemble. Jood is the founder and lead curator of the Khaleeji Women’s Library & Archive (KWLA), a community-led library, research lab, and alternative archival practice. She is also a Rhodes Scholar (2022) and holds an MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation from the University of Oxford.