Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

najat el hachmi

always revisiting this image I find so amusing: the voices of women from such small villages, with such small lives, crossing continents along telephone cables. So much technology to chat about so much trivia on a Sunday afternoon. I don’t know what she told me while we were having breakfast, I was striving so hard to capture her as she is now, so I would remember her like that forever, I paid no attention to what she was saying. I wanted to register the way she grasped the pieces of bread in a pincer-like movement of her first three fingers while she rested the other two on the surface of the soft dough in the frying pan. Yes, I know, it’s not a frying pan, it’s an imsajja or imsajjar, because the final r is silent, but so what at this

point in time? Why worry over such a homely word. I found it hard to swallow the irqqusen, the scraps of bread soaked in oil, there was an unbearable pain in my throat, the kind you feel when you want to cry but stop yourself because it would be out of place. She got up, leaving me to collect the dishes, and disappeared down the dark passageway. I thought: goodbye, mother, thanks for everything, though I thought that in Catalan, not in her language. A thought that suddenly didn’t ring true. There are thoughts I have only had or can only recall having had in the language that is not hers. There was still a chill in the air when I walked down Baixada de l ’Eraime. I could have opted for Carrer del Cloquer,

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