Lost in Translation: North Africa

For those of you still loyal enough to keep reading after such a long hiatus, do not be alarmed! It will be worth the wait.

I write this from Morocco where you find me lost and seemingly bound up in my own disbelief at having ended up in yet another scenario of not knowing how to call the street I live on, ask for juice at a local shop, or even make a phone call. “How many more times I can do this” I used to say to myself in Malaysia, “I do not know!” Apparently the answer is ‘at least once more’.

The reason I had not written after the auction sale was simple. I had literally no time. Once the auction sale was done we moved on to packing the house up and making a move to my parents’ rental property a few miles away. We worked through Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day and finally the day before we had to be off the property. In the end it was horrendous, in ways you cannot even begin to imagine. My uncle worked to take apart the banister that had been in the house since it had been built. We sorted clothes and looked for ways to clean out old spaces with long forgotten bits of long forgotten vacations all over America and Europe. There were spoons from Eastern Canada, postcards from the southern U.S., and tiny statues of birds or dolls in traditional dress from Scotland and Wales. And it all went in the same direction ---out! Regardless of where it ended up it all had to go out of the house.

By the time this was done I had 2 days to pack and get ready to leave for England.
This is the reason I have not written.

When I got to the UK, I found myself jetlagged and tired. I was emotionally drawn from the havoc of the previous month and a half and just wanting to stop and sleep for days.
This is also the reason I have not written.

Now, I am in Morocco and it is the week before I start my 6 week programme teaching Moroccan business students. And now, I fear that I may have lost my will to write about home. Home is gone. But at the same time I know that I need to make closure and propose closure of some kind to those people who have been loyal readers. So on that note, this is for you as much as for me.

Waves

I had so many plans of how I would tell this story, and it would be told in great detail. Now I think back and there is no purpose. The details don’t matter. The details will fade. The only thing that really matters is what struck me on that day, like an ocean wave of sadness that came when I did not expect it. It was seeing my sister cry.

I walked out to my grandfather’s shop, this place long hollow without his workings there to keep it alight. People milled inside and sifted through piles of tools. Beside the shop and set back in the yard by the ashen fire pile, my sister squatted on the ground. Before I even thought of approaching, I knew what she was doing. What she did on the outside, I was doing on the inside. I walked up to her and put a hand on her shoulder; she stood up and clutched me.

“I know” I said, “I feel it too. Don’t even try to stop it.”

“I love you so much” she cried.

“I feel like someone has stolen something from us”, I responded.

In the days that led up to the auction sale, we all got on each other’s nerves. Sometimes we snapped, once or twice we yelled. In the days that followed, we seemed to break down at various times.

My mother broke down when we had to give the keys to our home to someone we despised.

I saw my father nearly cry the day before I left when he said that he was so sorry we had not taken time to visited on a trip home that had been far too short.

I held back tears when I watched them walk away at the airport…again.

These are testaments to the emotional moments that hit us unexpectedly in our lives, like waves that nearly bowl us over and leave us clamouring for some foothold. We try to stand and find ourselves sinking or being dragged away.

The auction sale made enough money to pay off the debts it was supposed to, but in the end it left me empty. Dismantling our home was about stripping it down to bare things and making it into a series of objects that I didn’t even recognize anymore. I felt I had to help destroy things that I loved. I think in retrospect that that was why I loved the fire and burning those things so much. Because then I could let things go and be destroyed as they were, still in a form I recognised. They could turn from beauty to dust in minutes. Taking these things apart was like stripping naked a dead friend and in the end these things I loved were not turned to dust but merely naked bodies, anonymous and vulgar to me.

The three photographs are a triptych which to me represents the essence of the auction. They were taken within a 12 hour period: before, during and after the sale.
A friend of mine told me I should take them and frame them and have them in our home. My response: never. Doing that would bring back the hurt too much.