A Different Light

Light cannot be ‘new’. It’s different. A different light. Stories are never new. They’re told differently, heard differently when they come to light.

March is Women’s History Month. Stories.

March is Daylight Savings Time. Light.

New is actually knew, a matter of knowing.

“Songs for the Brokenhearted” by Ayelet Tsabari popped into my Facebook feed as part of a March author series.  I saw Israel, Yemen and Women.  I saw my sister in law in, and I wanted to learn more.  When asked to choose a woman to celebrate for International Day of the Woman, I choose my sister in law. She is a woman who affects the light in which I see myself, how I tell my story.

When asked to choose a woman to celebrate for International Day of the Woman, I don’t choose my mother. How could I? I didn’t know her. I forget she’s there in the shadows, waiting for new light. My mother was outspoken; Zohara’s mother was not. Still, the words were equally dusted over. It's not my mother's story I find in March, it's Zohara’s, the main character in a novel that lifts up both historical events and cultural knowledge saved in the poetry of women’s voices.

When I finish the novel, I leave my sister in law a voice message. I told her I had missed so much behind what I noticed about her. I had observed a family tradition that loved singing and was good at it, but it was so much more. I envied her dark curls and heard my brother comment on the shade of her skin, but that too, now meant something more.

Light cast on difference. Different light.

I was living in Guatemala when I learned about International Day of the Woman. I connected to the women’s space through backstrap loom weaving in Guatemala. I lamented that in my family, the women do nothing together. Not even cooking.

Before Guatemala, I considered cooking a role requirement, a punishment even. My grandmother made me watch her cook. She told me I had to learn. I saw only the task and not the space it opened. When I returned from Guatemala, I was determined to expand my identify as a woman, to learn to cook, and to dust off memories of my mother. My first months at home, I cooked through her recipe box, because it held cards labeled with other women’s names: my grandmothers, my aunts, my mother’s friends. The recipes were disappointing. They were not ‘cooking’. I asked my aunt for more recipes, and the theme repeated, a mixing of powders, sauces, and pieces of food processed in cans.

Without other family voices, I squinted, finding my mother's story between the lines of Kitchen literacy : how we lost knowledge of where food comes from and why we need to get it back. Despite the low light, I vaguely remembered sitting at dark tables with my mother unaware of the leadership she was providing for a health food restaurant in which she had invested. Local, healthy, sustainable, ethical. I reimagined the my experience as a child eating tofu in the spaghetti instead of hamburger and peanut butter I had to mix on our shelves. Like the Yemeni women’s unrecorded songs, my mother’s acts had disappeared in the air. Tablecloths. Veils. Curtains. Still, even in bad light you can see dust loosened from truth.

Above the stove in her kitchen was a large plaster bump. It was on the wall because there was a chimney. When the chimney was no longer needed, the men took no time nor care to modify the space. They covered the bricks and then painted the surface.

When you break things down or when you don’t accept an ‘always’, you also create dust. Everything shifts. It falls to make way, perhaps barely hanging on. Dust will settle again, with time. People won’t notice what’s different if they’ve never seen the space before. Stepping into my mother's story meant I knew I could want something else. I could keep asking until I found someone who would give me what I wanted. Zohara and her mother too. My sister in law helped me pick the new kitchen light.

But, what is the goal of light as it chases time, and time as it changes light?

To find more heroes. 

Resistance

To decipher villains.

Revolution

Women are skilled at pretending absence when they need to use dark corners, until eyes (and hearts) adjust and acknowledge. .Such is the shadow, cast before questions and fought after answers, waiting for a change of light.

Dust can be seemingly nonexistent, but in my father’s house at certain times more than others, sunlight exposes its shape.  Whisps.  Grains.  Dust is problematic.  Dust is elegant.  The difference is the light. When I removed the chimney bump, massive amounts of dust was unearthed. It poured from the ceiling. We were amazed at how much had accumulated, ignored across time.

Today, recipes hang on that wall written in multiple women's handwriting. I pay attention to the glass. Minimize obstruction to all versions of story in a different light.