On Christmas I remember Christmases, scattered across the globe: childhood Christmas in Yemen with the tiniest sprig of a tree, wrapped gently in a single layer of tinsel and hand-carved ornaments. Presents built from backyard scraps, nailed together into the shape of boat or a bow and arrow or a bedside table. Presents burnt from friend’s CD collections and repackaged with hand-written labels. Presents bought in Australia and carried thousands of kilometres, hidden in luggage, stored away for nine months in cupboards waiting for the holiday season. I compare my childhood Christmases with the consumerist bunkum of the Western world in the 21st century. Yemen hadn’t embraced consumerism at the time, although there was an abundance of cheap plastic trinkets shipped in via shipping container from China. Similar to your Kmarts and Targets of Australia, although without the advertising budget and weekly specials. This is not to say that the Arab world wasn’t fully in the grip of rampant aspirationalism. The land of high-end luxury cars and watches and fashion (think Dubai) lives neatly entwined with the land of crippling poverty and subsistence wages. Even from a young age I was somehow aware of which cars were in high demand. Yemeni men had a habit of nicknaming car models after famously beautiful women, and the Laila Elwi was considered a prize across the Arab world. Imagine the uproar if Elon Musk named the new model Tesla after the body shape of a Hollywood celebrity…. Continue reading “On Christmas”
On Mum If I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Dad, I need to dedicate equal thought to Mum and the impact she’s had on my life. There is no Dad without Mum. There is no me without Dad and Mum. This is the yin and yang, the cosmic duality that created me and I can’t fathom seeing either of them without the other. Continue reading “On Mum”
On Dad Last week was Dad’s birthday. It neatly lines up with Father’s Day (Australian) every year, landing in the same week. I feel like my Dad has always been the same age. Always slightly bald, tufts of white hair and a white beard, a little Bernie Sanders-esque. Always present, the person in the other room tapping away at his laptop, piles of papers strewn across the desk. He’s been the constant presence in my life since birth. Crazy to imagine it. The three people who have been with me the longest still exist, still maintain spaces in this physical world. We swell from a cell into a conglomerate of matter, sucking parts of the universe into our own being for such an insignificant amount of time, days or months or years and then the time ends and we slowly expel all of these atoms back out into the universe. Continue reading “On Dad”