the ship has sailed the ship
the ship and my teeth
my teeth all braids and lineage
blood spooling and prayers
prayers
light
يا حي
احفظ اخواني
pearls and cardamom and sea
sea see
my brother see
me
shadow
والعين عيت تباتي
ياخوي
غصبٍ عليَّا
live I live for you
and him my veins
my jugular
عساي أشوف
حقولكم
apricots and palm leaves
home water of my eyes
my teeth
Author’s Note: This poem is an erasure of my great-aunt’s ode to her brothers. My great-grandfather, 11 at the time, traveled from ‘Unaizah to Bahrain to become an apprentice for a relative. After not getting the chance to bid goodbye to them, Hessa was 16 when she recited this poem. In it, she prays for their wellbeing; that they return to ‘Unaizah bearing fields of fruit. Hessa passed before seeing her brothers again.
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.
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.