Ahmad Rashed’s father sat under the shareesha tree, making his fishing traps and watching the arrival of the neighbourhood’s first fridge. Bought by a neighbour returning from work in Kuwait, the new fridge was greeted like a bride entering the house of her groom. Children ran behind the car that carried it, shouting in excitement.
The fisherman watched this scene and resolved to build his own fridge, just as he built his own nets.
His son recalls: “He collected boards of wood and made a box of the exact size of the refrigerator which he had seen ... and opened its door and discovered that it had not made water cold, and that refrigeration required some device about which he did not know.”
This memory is one of hundreds from the oral history collection First Home: Study and Conversations About the Childhoods of 50 Intellectuals from the Emirates. By focusing on childhood memories and homes of the two decades from 1950 to 1970, Algerian author Ayyash Yahyawi taps into themes commonly overlooked in popular narratives of Emirati history, like women’s active participation in private and public spheres, local identification with current events overseas.
First published in 2007, a history student at New York University is translating the book from Arabic to English for his doctorate on the transition between the pre-oil and oil economy in the Emirates. It is the first time such a collection has appeared in English and could prove a valuable resource for future scholars.
“This book was particularly interesting because it talked about homes and structures as lens through which to see an entire society and with which to trace entire communities,” says Matthew Maclean, a PhD candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies.
“What’s most interesting is the richness of the memories which you don’t have to be a researcher or have any particular interest in history to enjoy. A lot of them are similar to childhood memories in other places.”
The book centres around life in the home and the fareej, small neighbourhoods defined by community rather than physical streets, shops or buildings. The fareej could be as small as a few streets and alleyways or street several kilometres along a coast.
“The word itself is used in the whole Gulf and originally came from an Arabic classic word which means fareeq, a group of people or team,” says Hassan Al Naboodah, a historian at UAE University. “So the fareej is the people.”
The book is written as a conversation between the author and 50 actors, broadcasters, professors, storytellers, poets, artists, historians and researchers from Dubai and the northern emirates.
Interviewees are from a range of social backgrounds but all bring to life with their characters of their childhood memories.
In one conversation, Mr Rashed describes the people of Khor Fakkan: the aged shepherd of Al Madifi with heavy slippers, a sailor without family who shared his fish with the people, the blind muezzin of Wadi Yeshi, Hajia Aisha, who united the teachers and families of Khor Fakkan by spreading news, Bilal, the brick worker and his wife who was haunted by djinn.
He also describes the Arabic-speaking British representative whose beach swim attire “would raise comments without end about how strange his clothes were”.
Characters were not only human. The sculptor Naja Makki describes Bur Dubai’s souq fareej as “full of dogs. But cats entered the homes of the fareej, house by house. They were part of the daily landscape”.
The Dubai storyteller, Ibrahim Mubarak, recalls making a pet of a seagull while Asma Al Mazrouei’s dog Bubi followed her to school where he waited by the door for her studies to end so he could walk her home.
Childhood memories describe communities managed by women. They ran the household when men were away, had an active role in the public sphere and many were respected teachers and mutawwas. Mosques and schools bore women’s names.
“All the stereotypes that one has about Emirati women, about Muslim women, about Arab women and so on are basically not present in the book,” says Mr Maclean.
“Most of the muttawwas who taught the Quran to young children were women. People remember their mothers and grandmothers and aunts very fondly. When men left for Kuwait to work women were the ones who managed the home independently. Men would be away for a year or two and come back only very rarely.”
Abdullah Ali Al Tabur’s childhood heroes were the religious instructor, Zahra bint Daleel and the elderly Mariam bint Yusuf, who regularly slept at his home. She would arrive after sunset to tell stories about the djinn such as Baba Daria, Um Duwais and Abdel Mazeel, whose feet were bound in chains and rode donkeys backwards.
Mariam bint Yusuf was “renowned in teaching the women of the fareej” and taught him to read.
“I want to point out here the many instances when Mariam and Zahra crossed the ancient soil of the Emirates, and that it shows that those who detract from the role of women in the traditional societies are nothing but ignorant of their role in education,” says Mr Al Tabur.
He lived “in the folds” of his mother. “I sat near my mother and lent my ears to those stories, which nourished my consciousness and imagination together.” His father, like many others, had gone to Bahrain and had died there. The narratives are full of fathers and grandfathers “swallowed by the sea”.
Fatima Al Maghni, a woman from Kalba, attended the Jameela Bu Heerd School, named after Djamila Bouhired, an Algerian militant sentenced to death by the guillotine in 1957 during the Algerian Revolution. The sentence was not implemented.
“I can say that our childhood was distinguished by an early awareness of Arabism,” says Ms Al Maghni, “for we followed the speeches of Jamal Abdel Nasser by radio in the square of Jameela Bouhired school, and the students who developed this awareness the most were the Sheikhas.”
Arab school teachers fostered identification with Arab nationalism of the 1950s and 1960s and relations were well-established with Indian Ocean and Arabian Gulf countries, particularly Kuwait. Even young children identified a strong connection between their home and far away places.
“I think one common misconception about the Trucial States before federation and independence was that it was isolated. These oral histories show that people were very well aware of political events in the Middle East and were connected by trade with not only Kuwait, but also India, Qatar and Bahrain,” says Mr Maclean. “It was a society with dense and rich social connections that were built out of migration and also it was connected to a much broader world.”
Mr Rashed, from Khor Fakkan, says of his Egyptian maths teacher: “He taught us to applaud Egypt, the country that we echoed in our quasi-revolutionary queues. And during this period the presence of Jamal Abdel Nasser and Egypt increased in our memories, to Kuwait, to India, to Zanzibar, to Mombasa, because Khor Fakkan was in their midst.”
The death of Nasser, particularly, is mentioned as a clear memory time and again.
School is also synonymous with disciplinary beatings.
“The beatings were not torture, the point was discipline and civility. If people didn’t assess rewards and punishments, proper behaviour would not result,” says Abeed bin Sandal, a heritage researcher from Sharjah.
He recalls his father telling the mutawwa, “deliver me his eyes and bones alone and to you the rest. Any beating you want but don’t hit his eyes and don’t break his bones”.
Above all, family came first, and family meant the fareej.
The Ras Al Khaimah poet Ahmad Issa narrates how he hit a friend’s face while throwing stones at other children. When the doctor offered to write a report for the friend’s mother to register a complaint, she turned on the doctor to defend Ahmad, referring to him as her son.
“You want me to raise a complaint against my son? My son hit his brother, why would I make a problem of that?” ... This was the way of the Emirati mothers in the days of the fareej.”
So, asks the author, does the fareej live on? Can it exist after its buildings and alleyways disappear?
“Deep down it’s alive and if you had directed the question [to the house] it would say that “I am still alive in my depths,” Mr Al Tabur tells him. “ ... the houses are not able to forget us and if we returned to them they would welcome us, and ask us where were we all this time, so as not to offend us.”
azacharias@thenational.ae
