So Much More Than A Meal
This was my chance. My mother was out, and I was going to do it. I opened her closet as its doors greeted me with their squeaky tunes, and my hand travelled to the corner that had her picture. I take out the treasure I recently discovered to take my time to look at it. I don’t know what my sister came to do here. She tries to snatch the photo from me. We get into a fight, and all I remember later is the photo’s wooden corner hits my eyebrow and starts to bleed.
My mother is back home. She wipes away my blood and puts a band-aid on my eyebrow. My wound heals, but the gap in my eyebrow remains until today a souvenir of my small rebellious act, looking at my grandmother’s picture.
For as long as I can remember, the part I looked forward to the most was when it was time to visit my maternal grandfather’s house on the first day of Eid Al Fitr and Eid Al Adha. Eid Al Fitr is the Muslim holiday that marks the end of the month of fasting, Ramadan. Eid Al Adha is the holiday that follows it a couple of months and a half later. It honours the willingness of Prophet Ibrahim to sacrifice his son Ismail as an act of obedience to God’s command out of absolute deep faith and devotion to God. Believers celebrate both holidays by wearing new clothes, gathering with their families and loved ones, and giving out an amount of money as a gift to children in the family. As a child and the adult, I am today, I honestly go for the Couscous.
Couscous is a North African dish of small steamed granules served with a stew. The way it is made varies from one country to the next and from one community to another. We make it the Algerian Berber tribes’ way. If you’re Arab or have enough knowledge of the geography and demographics of the region, you might ask yourself:
Why would a Lebanese family prepare a North African dish for a holiday family meal?
Well, my Lebanese-Syrian maternal family has Algerian blood flowing in its veins. My late maternal grandmother, whom we lost to the vicious Lebanese civil war, was of Algerian origins. It’s not common for people in the Levant to marry from North Africa. I’ve always wondered why my mother rarely brings up her family history, neither paternal nor maternal. Maybe she considers her family just like any other, and their lives are just regular lives like any other. To her, her family members have led or are leading humble and quiet lives. For me, they are interesting people whose stories are worth sharing. That may be motivated by my deep belief that every person’s life is a story worth sharing if we care enough to listen to them in the first place.
My mother’s maternal grandparents were poor Amazigh people who fled the French regime in Algeria in the 1920s from their hometown, Tizi Ouzou in north-central Algeria, on boats to a town named ‘The Moroccans’ Neighborhood’ in ‘As Souweqa’ town in Damascus, Syria. Amazighs or Berbers are the indigenous people of North Africa. The people of Damascus call those from the North African countries of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria Moroccans or ‘Maghariba’ in Arabic. My mother’s grandfather was a baker, and her grandmother a homemaker. In the 1940s, they married in Syria. They moved as a newlywed couple from Damascus to Beirut, back when there were no defined national borders between the two neighbouring countries, for better opportunities, and there they started their family.
My 16-year-old grandmother was wed to my grandfather, a much older man and well-known butcher of Syrian origins. She had four kids with him, one of whom is my beautiful mother. She died at 42 years old when a civil war missile hit their home in the Tariq Al Jadidah area in Beirut before seeing any of her kids marry and make families of their own. My mother tells me that her grandparents’ dialect was a mixture of Algerian, Syrian, and Lebanese vocabulary. However, their deep connection to their Algerian heritage is what they never allowed to get lost on their way on their daunting trip to a new land. A couple of my mother’s uncles even moved back to Algeria, claimed their Algerian citizenship, connected with their family, and studied there. One of my mother’s uncles was a leader in the Algerian war of independence from France (1954–62).
My mother and her siblings never claimed their mother’s Algerian citizenship, but that never meant they thought less of their mother’s roots. I believe their insistence on preparing Couscous for every Eid is much more important than claiming their Algerian citizenship to reinforce their connection to my grandmother and her heritage.
My mother and her older brother are the only two in their family who know how to cook this meal. They learned the recipe from their maternal family, who religiously prepared it at every family gathering. One of their aunts even knew how to make the grains of Couscous, which are nowadays readily available in boxes on the shelves of supermarkets.
I cannot describe how much I love the flavour of Couscous and how I eagerly wait for the first day of Eid to taste it after my mother prepares it lovingly.
Why do I have to wait for Eid to eat it when my mother, with whom I live in the same home, is around to prepare it when I ask her for it?
Based on previous experience, it doesn’t taste as good when not prepared for an extended family gathering. My mother says that as far as she knows, this dish, even in Algeria and other North African countries, is made for big family gatherings. This meal is prepared in large quantities, eaten hot and steamy, and ends with the least amount of leftovers on the table.
I came to a few realizations throughout these years of waiting for Eid and enjoying every spoonful. I don’t think my maternal family insists on making Couscous every Eid for the sake of preserving their Algerian roots. If they were so attached and interested in their Algerian lineage, they would’ve at least planned to visit their mother’s homeland. They are indeed not planning on doing that any time soon. I believe that preparing Couscous every Eid is their unspoken way of keeping the memory of their late mother alive. It is the implicit yearly announcement of how much they miss her and wish she never left them so early on in their life in a country and region that pours unbearable amounts of challenges and hardships generously.
It never stops feeling sad for my siblings, maternal cousins, and me to hear stories about my grandmother’s endless kindness and innate optimism.
It’s odd how raw ingredients we buy from a supermarket when mixed together, can wake up the dearest of memories. They gather people who may have not seen one another in months to reconnect, share memories and make new ones.
Grandma may have passed many years ago, but her beautiful soul keeps giving as mothers do. Despite the subtle and subliminal effects of consistently and continuously preparing Couscous for Eid, nothing will change if my mother decides to stop doing it. My grandmother is so much bigger than to be remembered with chemical reactions among some lifeless ingredients bought from dusty supermarket shelves.
My grandmother was a woman who led a small yet meaningful life. She raised four children instilling in them the moral weapons they needed to face life’s challenges as if she felt somehow she would leave them early on the way. I never got the privilege to meet the woman who raised my mother and uncles. I don’t need to have met her to love, respect, and honour her memory. I genuinely believe that some souls are too beautiful to keep facing the dark side of life, so God saves them the suffering by taking them so soon.
I don’t regret having the scar on my eyebrow because it reminds me of the curious little child that opened her mother’s closet to look at the face of the woman who led that short yet meaningful life. I don’t think I will ever stop wondering how different life could have been if she had lived longer to see us. Rest in peace, grandma.
