We are of water, and to water we shall return.
“We are of water, and to water we shall return.” Thus I try to fathom the legend that foretells this island—sprung upon us in a sudden ebb, made our dwelling when the sea withdrew—will one day go back to the sea. We were weaned on that warning. As I was writing, I slowed myself to contemplate, with care, the changes the island has undergone these past decades, hoping—while I burrowed through the myth—to find an answer to a restlessness that lives in me.
I feel our generation was deceived. That is what I say when someone asks why I wrote The Forgotten Between Two Waters: what I had taken for solid ground, for firm earth, proved to be a buried sea. And we know the difference in their nature: land is steadiness; water is ceaseless motion.
That shock ignited the question of identity within me: to which do I belong when the receding sea and the land that devours its blue are locked in struggle? I am a daughter of an island; the sea shapes my identity and that of my ancestors. The chants and most of the rituals, my fears, the stories that bind us—spun by grandmothers’ imagining—came with the surge and retreat of the waves. When the water was besieged and interred, something in the island shifted: songs and chants were effaced, the story’s cords were cut.
There is a collective memory that ties us to the sea. I remember in my childhood I would not step outside at night for fear of Bu Daryah, a jinn immortal in our memory. And because we live in a land of eternity, eternity has more than one form: here is Bu Daryah, deathless in tale—a long-limbed spirit who disguises himself and sings in a woman’s voice to trick the sailors; at times he cries for help, and men rush to save whom they imagine a wretched woman, and he clutches one of them and drags him under.
In my work I lean on such water-myths, which grant us a distinctiveness unlike our neighbours; and I turn through memory to uncover veiled, far-flung epochs. What gathers them is the relation of the person and the community to the sea, a sea with many personae: guardian of the island; treacherous thief of pearl-divers’ boats; and a separator of islands so that plague does not spread.
I followed the water as the sea thinned and drew away, turning its back. The images of the massive dunes, stacked along its shores to smother it, terrified me; and when it turned to land, the gull would stand, faithful each morning, upon the quay, reminding us that this is his sea.
We return to the change I lived through and could not explain; I only felt that places altered with such harshness is a kind of violence. And because I had grown used to the sea’s door remaining open to us when all others shut in my face—and just as we once followed the sea to cast it an offering, a woven palm basket bearing the Hayya Beya sprout—so did the land keep stretching out to swallow it and turn its blue to brown. I resolved to trace the border of the water. The novel’s idea is founded on a reckoning with an identity fashioned by water, and on tracking the succession of religions upon the island; the outsider does not know that this island possesses a deep history ferried in by the waves and drunk in by the land. But to write, I had first to know this sea. Each morning I walked upon the waterline with the fishermen, learning to read it. I searched the unrecorded folk memory and the occluded histories for tales to retell, for lives time had erased; and I found the earliest mention of Iya Nasser, a figure I wove into the novel, on a Dilmunite seal from two thousand years before Christ, near a communal burial ground that has become a paved road not far from where I live.
As for Salīma, I shaped her from a verse about the women’s maqāliyya: the woman whose children will not live unless she treads upon a sharif’s blood—she leaps right and left upon his corpse and the sharif dies and her child lives. In the island’s modern memory, in the age of pearl-diving, the women would leap upon the bīṣ, the bare skeleton of the boat, and the shipwright would perish and the foetus would live.
In my private memory I see my father leaping right and left on the floor of our house—surely built upon a buried sea, a deceitful man-made land—so that the noble sea would die and the earth be peopled by our line, we islanders dwelling upon water. These myths, steeped in the local, burst open a memory I carry and incited me to write.
In the novel I was careful to craft a structure of its own: I set marginal notes between the chapters that pursue the story of the two waters—salt and sweet; al-Bahrayn. And when I traced the story of the land, I found there is land the sea gave us generously, and land we ourselves seized.
I elegise the sea in my work. It has died—we killed it—hemmed with blocks of sand and buried. I mourn our sea with its singular geography; here Gilgamesh sought the flower of immortality. I lament the island whose memory is written upon Sumerian tablets—the island that was once a paradise where no crow cried and no man slew his brother.
I keep my gaze upon this sea that the stranger sees as water in turmoil, blue and green in places, though it hides its truth beneath its watery skin: valleys and mountains, shifting sands, a different life, and sweet water erupting. From that sweet water welling up within the salted sea the myth takes shape, as do our identity and the name of our island—al-Bahrayn, the Two Seas—so that we carry its identity in our own, we Bahrainis. All this has been altered by the urban sprawl; and so in The Forgotten Between Two Waters I follow several characters of my invention—yet born of the sea, formed by its surge—and I pose the old, unending question of our belonging: to which do we belong, earth or water, we who were fashioned from clay and water?
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Bu Daryah (بو درياه): A Gulf seafaring jinn of local lore who lures sailors by singing in a woman’s voice.
Hayya Beya (الحيّة بيّة): A children’s sea-offering—sprouted shoots placed in a palm-frond basket and set upon the water.
Dilmun / Dilmunite (دلمون / دلمونيّ): The ancient civilisation centred on Bahrain; “Dilmunite” refers to its people or artefacts.
Iya Nasser (إيا ناصر): Proper name as used in the text; presented here as Iya Nasser (alt. scholarly renderings sometimes vary).
al-qallāf (القلّاف): The traditional shipwright.
al-bīṣ (البيص): The bare boat-frame or hull skeleton.
maqāliyya (مقاليت): A folk notion describing a woman believed to lose her infants unless a ritual—here stepping upon a sharif’s blood—is enacted.
al-Bahrayn (البحرين): “The Two Seas,” alluding to the coexistence of fresh and salt water; the etymon behind Bahrain.
The Forgotten Between Two Waters (المنسيّون بين ماءين): Novel title rendered in UK English.
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