Protein

There is a story my mother used to tell.

On a belated honeymoon with my father to Kabul, Tehran, and Istanbul from Kampala in 1968, she went to offer her prayers at the Blue Mosque. Svelte in her cotton churidar pajama, she was kneeling in supplication when she felt a sharp tug on the thick, black rope of braid that trailed all the way down her back, well past her knees from under a narrow 1960s dupatta. Swiveling in pain and shock, she came face to face with a stern-faced Turkish woman. 

“Haraam,” said the woman, pointing at my mother’s braid.

My mother surveyed her accuser, clad in a calf-length cloak, her own hair hidden under a headscarf. She reached out her hand, pointing at the woman’s bare legs.

“Haraam,” she replied.

———

A Palestinian artist I admire recently wrote a love letter dedicated to her daughter. She said, I love my daughter’s laugh. She said, my love for her was one of the greatest love stories I’ve ever lived, honest, connected, and renewed. She said, I love my mother because she reminds me of how to extend to so many people before me. In her presence, I am not alone in time or place. She said, I hope her love for me is one of the greatest love stories ever told.

I am not Palestinian, though I was named after a Palestinian freedom fighter, and reminded often of the spirit of my namesake. Reminded of her resistance and her refusals by my own mother, who did not name me (even if she did) and by my aunt, who did name me (even if she didn’t).

I think they named me in response to an echo, fading and mutating through generations of migratory upheavals and turbulent times. In response to a memory, something essential. Something about land, something about birthrights. They were indisputably convinced of their existence, from the perspective of blood and phlegm and bile, but their fixation on their point of origin, their truest genesis, grew inchoate and inscrutable over time. 

And so, in naming me, they threaded yearning into mine. 

———

We have been cautiously circling my mother’s hair these past few years, my sister and I. After decades of being the only woman in her family to wear it in a short, neat bob, she stopped going to the salon for haircuts in her late seventies. It began as a sudden aversion to having strangers handle any part of her body, perhaps as a way of reclaiming control after the death of a daughter and a quadruple bypass, compounded with the discovery of theft by a trusted household employee. 

Despite her advancing age, her hair blossomed as thick and healthy as before, and we watched it grow abundantly, even as the rest of her body receded. Ever faithful to her strict routine as a biology teacher, she washed her hair every Saturday, using a specific imported shampoo and conditioner. Every morning she brushed and fixed a ponytail on top of her head, and it grew and grew as she entered her eighties. 

Her gait slowed and her hearing dulled and her arms grew tired. She switched to a local shampoo and conditioner in one, and her hair continued to grow. Occasionally, my sister or I would suggest a trim, and quietly snip a portion of her ponytail while she ate, or conversed, or watched television, but over time, the filaments from her scalp began to commune and converge. 

“Shall we get your hair cut?” we would ask in gentle desperation, fingering the matted clumps. “Shall I do it? Shall she?” 

But my mother remained adamant. Her hair must be allowed to flourish. 

———

We live in a time of desperate rupture. 

For the displaced, the dispossessed, and the systemically discomfited, our inherited signposts are fragmented and lost. We cast about for the comfort of unbroken truths, increasingly turning to ancestors for guidance. Long chains of matriarchs, a spiritual scaffolding, rich with historical detail. Something to hold onto. Something to pass on. 

But as her own life unfolded, with its mix of fortune and loss, my mother’s rebellion took the shape of a staunch disavowal of memory. 

“I don’t remember,” she would snap at my father any time he innocently attempted to re-live a shared experience. 

“I don’t go in the past,” she would growl darkly, alerting us to an impending unraveling so we could spring to action, choreographing theatrics of distraction to right the balance of things. 

It became a type of mantra, an ironic zikr, the thing she coached herself to remember through a daily act of repetition. A way, in all likelihood, to block out the eternally unmetabolized pain and shame of a lifetime of being out of sync with her surroundings. Perversely, to protect her own thinly strung psychic coherence. 

I don’t remember, an injunction and a plea, a new way of life, disconnected and discombobulated. 

I don’t remember what kinds of grain we ate as a child. I don’t remember if or how long I breastfed you. I don’t remember the story I once told you about vegetables that grew abundantly in the fertile path of the sewage truck trailing from our outhouse to the back alley. I don’t remember the names of my biology professors, my favourite classes, my best friend. How it felt to be the first person in my entire clan to go to university in a whole other country.

“Don’t go in the past,” my mother impresses firmly upon my daughters on a family visit. 

After a short pause to reflect, she adds, “and don’t go in the present.” 

My daughters sneak baffled glances my way. I can only shrug helplessly. Our realm of possibility continues to shrink. 

———

“Do you like diamonds,” my mother asks my daughter as I squat on a stool beside her armchair, fingers working through tendrils of hair that have nested tightly unto themselves. I keep a plastic comb and a pair of silver scissors near me, fervently alternating between tools in a race against the ticking clock of her impatience. I don’t know what prompted her change of heart, but I am not waiting around for her to change her mind again. 

My daughter hesitates, knowing my own aversion to gems and precious metals, unsure of how to respond. 

“I had a lot of jewelry,” my mother continues. “All of it is for my grand-children.” 

I don’t cringe or protest. Instead, I mutter at my niece, who sits at her other side, “keep her talking. Ask her questions.” 

I’m counting on the lottery of her answers to keep us all going. 

———

When my mother rises in the middle of the night she is beatific. Ever the schoolteacher, she awakens my father on schedule, then shuffles to the kitchen for what my parents call the midnight feast. “She’s like a young girl again,” my father says later, smiling wearily, “different to the way she is in the daytime. I don’t like to disappoint her.”     

They heat two cups of milk, cut two slices of pound cake, and sit at the round kitchen table. My mother’s face lights up if either of my daughters happen to join them, and she punctuates the late night silence with an ever-shrinking orbit of anecdotes, pulled from the previous day or weeks or years, or the newspaper, or her Indian drama. Snippets of fact and fancy loosely stitched together into something like memory but better, benevolent if slightly loopy. She knows who we are, her inner cast of characters, and she replays her favourite stories of us, adding new flourishes with each retelling. 

They say memory is the reactivation of specific groups of neurons. Synaptic plasticity allows neurogenesis, or the creation of new neurons, in the hippocampus. My mother’s hippocampus is florid and febrile. She has applied herself with characteristic diligence, pulling from her lifelong well of discipline to create an alternate garden of history, which she rigorously manicures with a scalpel of forgetting. I wonder about where excised memories go, how they take up residence like fatty deposits in inappropriate places—arteries, liver, lymph nodes. 

Hair. 

That my mother, fastidious with personal grooming all her life, disparaging of the slightest crease in clothing, thrusting lipstick and perfume and kitten heels on any unembellished woman in her vicinity, is trying, despite herself, to communicate something urgent and unspoken through her hair. 

———

I think of rules as I work her skull. 

A younger brother, sitting with her at a different kitchen table in a different era, casually remarking on how women shouldn’t wear short sleeves, pointedly not looking at her short sleeves. A younger sister flipping a roti and commenting on how women shouldn’t wear their hair short, or down, or uncovered while my mother busies herself in another part of the kitchen. 

As I pry apart her strands of keratin, massaging them with conditioner and bisecting them with a scissor blade when they refuse to yield, I think of boundaries, whose rules we allow to permeate our psyches. How we internalize and ossify them, then hold them up as legacy. Of who, after capitulation, is there when your long, long tresses turn serpentine, folding in on themselves. I think of what feeds my own choices around how I practice memory.

And I think of protein. Every morning, my mother asks me what protein I have fed my children. Eggs? Tuna? Chicken? Time unfolds and my mother’s purpose distills into essential strings of amino acids. 

———

I love her umbilically, in the way of an untherapized virgin. 

I know that my love for her sits on a quicksand of roiling emotional magma. I know that love is ferocious and primal, and also pocked with betrayal and regret. I love her with and despite her, as she builds and undoes us all. I listen intently for messages of ancestral wisdom in her rejection of the past. There must be some connection in this disconnect, some way of ensuring we are not alone in time or place. 

———

When they are done their midnight feast, have returned the milk and leftover cake to the fridge and wiped the crumbs off the table, before turning off the fluorescent kitchen light and slowly making their way back to their bedroom, my mother grasps my father’s arm.

“My mother,” she says. My father looks at her with the same open patience he has had since they married sixty years ago. 

“What about her,” he asks.

“What was my mother’s name?”

Perhaps our ancestral scaffolding will not be a long chain of matriarchs, but an unbroken strand of amino acids, an intricate protein complex spanning time and land. A love story beyond borders and the hubris of human-made rules.

My mother was a biologist, after all.