Exploring Southern England: Unearthing Links to Ancient Iraq

Growing Up Between Worlds: My Journey of Homelanding by Dalia Al-Dujaili

pictures by Zaineb Abelque

A Personal Exploration of Identity, Belonging, and Cultural Interweaving

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Babylon, Albion: A Personal History of Myth and Migration by Dalia Al-Dujaili, published by Saqi Books. The book is available for order here.

"To be honest, I am tired of longing and remembrance. Nostalgia is no longer my song. The countries have become alike. I know what I'll see here and there as if I were traveling the lines of my palm, as if I'm always on the same old bald plateau."

Saadi Youssef, author, poet, and political activist

I observe the youth streaming out of Jum'uah prayers in South West London. Their heads are draped in humility, their feet adorned with freshly purchased Nikes. A chasm exists between me and them. They grew up with the Mosque as their sanctuary for regular fellowship. I, on the other hand, spent my early life without any mosques, with the woods serving as my temple of belonging, of solace.

As a suburban dweller, bordered by neat English gardens, streets like Edgware Road in central London-with its cacophony, flashing lights, and the aroma of greasy meat and shisha smoke wafting from every open door-became my second home. Under bright overhead lighting and glossy marble flooring, dark men barked out, "dijaaj low laham?" (chicken or lamb?) from the grills. Layla K. Feghali, author of The Land In Our Bones, recalls that she knew the scents of her homeland-before she could visit it-due to her grandmother and her kitchen. Here, not too far from quaint Surrey cul-de-sacs, the bi-monthly pilgrimage to Edgware Road for a shawarma or falafel became a ritual for building community, for ensuring I was still aware of where I was "from."

In actuality, I hail from the spot where the pub wall meets the Indian tech shop offering iPhone cases. I am from the place where the "foreign currency transfer" sign hangs beside the red, white, and blue Tesco logo. I am from the language that awkwardly slips an English word into an Iraqi accent. Surrounded by people who looked like me, men whose fingers shared a resemblance with my own father's, under the same aromas of my mother's kitchen, I felt at home within these aromatic eating temples of late-night indulgence.

I once witnessed my dad be called a "fucking paki" by an Englishman and his teenage son. Our vehicle was obstructing a gate. I was perched in the passenger seat. We were parked outside my father's office, the one he purchased years prior to my birth, when he and my mother first relocated to Surrey from Aberdeen; the one he established his business in, which he worked tirelesslyto build.

My father shared a tale, one of numerous stories that I savor hearing, about his one-eyed uncle who would travel through their Iraqi village, Dujail, bringing the most incredible watermelons anyone would ever imagine tasting (the story of how the uncle became one-eyed is a delightful anecdote that will be shared at a later time). My mother related a similar tale about these same watermelons being used in Baghdad to keep its citizens hydrated when a drought depleted the city.

My life, though not quite. That is the utopia these tales present me. The suggestion of what my life could have been like. Would I also labor the land with my calloused hands? Would I also pick grape vine leaves (my namesake; dalia) from my grandmother's garden at dawn? Would I run the length of the sandy road, waving down carts filled with produce?

I have become infatuated with watching YouTube videos of a hajiya and her adult son residing in the marshlands of Iraq as they tend to their primitive farm. They capture themselves for hours, creating and caring for their fire, weaving baskets out of dead palm leaves blanketing the soil, and collecting fresh eggs. They arrange their lunch and sit on the ground with fresh baby cucumbers and brewing dark tea, with nothing but the birds singing overhead for background noise, with nothing but the breeze as their conversation. Sometimes I search my face amidst the pixelated frames. I look for my hands in theirs. I attempt to see myself sitting with them, and I ponder what the old lady might teach me. I seek their lessons, their wisdom, their years of experience. My hands wouldn't have the first idea about milking their sheep. Would they consider me a foreigner? Would they view me as a stranger in their land?

When did that ancient creature of ancestry and of place, the one entangled within me in knotted weeds, cease to be something so reviled and start becoming so cherished? I spent years trying to scrub away the filth I believed lay beneath my skin, eradicating the Iraqi within me that I was taught to despise, who I did not understand, who in moments frightened me. When did I begin to comprehend her? Did I begin to seek her after attempting to banish the echoes reverberating in my ear canals of schoolgirls asking, "why is your mum so ugly?"

My beautiful mother, with her cascading waves of dark hair and her thick arched Mesopotamian eyebrows, framing eyes as dark and mirrored as a lake at midnight, shimmering under a meteor shower. When did Arabic start sounding like the warm embrace of the sun pushing apart clouds, instead of dreadful thunder? We tend to forget these moments; we are ashamed of them. Those moments when we wished so hard to discard the body we inhabit. We detest the memories of wanting our parents to speak softer, for now we crave their voices to be as loud as, even louder than, the adhan that calls the evening prayer. However, these memories are black crows that can provide delight by how much they can teach you of their cunning, their generosity, and their purity, if you let them.

In New Malden-an immigrant suburb of Iraqis and Koreans just off the A3 highway connectingSurrey and London-lies Abu Ghassan, our local Arab supermarket, the closest shop we had that provided noomi basra, sour Kurdish torshi, amba, and fresh Iraqi sumoon-ya Allah, bless the sumoon! Perusing the dusty aisles of these markets in South West London's suburbs provides me the closest I can get to them. My fingers searching between jars of olives and pickles feels like a form of gathering, the closest I can get to a past existence.

Joy surfaces in the recollections of my mother's spice cabinet. Jars filled with disparate substances and powders, labeled in marker pen with Arabic words-curcum, za'atar, shbint, za'afaran-haphazardly preserved. Our universal immigrant identity cards are, in reality, cupboards filled with recycled jars, tattered packets of Maggi stock cubes, and decades-old bottles of rose water with a faded label still partially readable. The doors of these cupboards have witnessed both fierce family disagreements and tender moments when Mama instructs you how to cook kubba. For the displaced, these doors might serve as a portal to bygone times within sun-baked stone houses and missiles just out of earshot- whilst for the diaspora, they mark an ancestry that no longer holds geographical significance.

If "homeland is not a place; rather, homelanding is a continuous project," as Iraqi academic Kali Rubaii posits, then our rituals of "return" are constantly recreating the homeland. The homeland can be understood not as a geographical location, but as a feeling we carry within us. "I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was," Toni Morrison once wrote. This is not to disconnect from the material importance of the land but rather to spiritually and physically reconnect with the lands where our journeys have led us. To re-create a homeland in a foreign land is to declare, "we belong."

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Dalia Al-Dujaili, the author of "Growing Up Between Worlds: My Journey of Homelanding", explores themes of identity, belonging, and cultural interweaving in her book.
In her book, Al-Dujaili discusses the contrast between her upbringing without any mosques and the community formed through regular visits to Edgware Road in London.
Al-Dujaili also reminisces about the sense of belonging she felt in the aromatic eating temples of late-night indulgence, which she describes as a second home.
Al-Dujaili shares a story about witnessing her father being racially abused, emphasizing the struggles faced by immigrants in their adopted lands.
Al-Dujaili expresses her fascination with observing YouTube videos of Iraqi people tending to their primitive farms, searching for similarities and lessons in their lives.
Al-Dujaili reflects on the journey of understanding her ancestry and the Iraqi within herself, expressing dissatisfaction with her past attempts to distance herself from her roots.