The knock on the door echoed in my hallway as a child. Even now, after having moved houses, it still has the same effect. I remember being able to hear the sounds of my aunty laughing even before we opened the door. It’s a loud laugh that lets everyone in the room know that she’s there.
By the sound alone I could picture her wide smile that reminded me of home and comfort. Her barely-there dimples poking through her soft and round cheeks provide me with the same feeling even today at the age of twenty-one. That wash of ease that flows through you and lets you know that you’re okay.
We would open the door and in her hands would be a pot. Not one of those sold on the infomercials that would play late at night - the only thing to watch come past midnight. It would be a pot that was scratched and resembled those that my grandma used in our homeland.
A pot that was carried in a knitted woollen sleeve, pale pink some days or pastel yellow others, to protect eager hands from being burnt and to safeguard the goods that hid within.
My sisters and I knew just knew what that meant and what was to come. Nestled inside was something that Assyrian children believed part of childhood. If it’s not our mothers, it's our grandmothers or aunties that dedicate a whole day to picking grape leaves, folding the leaves and then eventually cooking them. A food I grew up with, and learnt to love as almost a part of my childhood, is dolma.
According to a quick Google search, dolma is literally defined as “a stuffed vegetable dish that has so many variations across the Middle East, Turkey, the Balkans, and Central Asia.” [1] It normally includes rice, some sort of red meat, tomato and onion. Whilst there are multiple variations of dolma across the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern region, dolma is considered sacred to an Assyrian.
To me, it holds a symbol of warmth, home, and belonging. The image of both my maternal and paternal nanas bent over the kitchen countertop folding grape leaves has etched an eternal imprint onto my consciousness; a fingerprint with its ridges and furrows marking the contours of my ancestry. Dolma has become more than just a food to me.
Growing up, I was lucky to live in close proximity to most of my cousins and extended family. There was a safety in being surrounded with people who you knew and loved in a country that seemed quite unfamiliar. The communal act of sharing food with family, including that uncle you never spoke to, was second nature.
The most notable feature growing up as the third-youngest grandchild of 18 on my paternal side was, besides being overly babied at times, the encompassing presence of warmth.
I use the word warmth to describe the blanket of home that is the women in my life. The soft and wrinkled hands of my nana who would hold my hand as we watched shows in English she never could truly understand but would nevertheless enjoy. The eyes of my aunty that resembled my own too much as she would relentlessly fill my plate with more and more until I eventually just stopped refusing. The lilt of my other nana’s native tongue caressing my name as she asked me how school was in a way that she could only imagine because she never got the opportunity to continue her own education. My mama who always reiterated the importance of remaining kind in a world that was often built to be against people like us.
I sit here as I write this and struggle to truly articulate the way in which the Assyrian women in my life shaped my own sense of self. In a community and world that often had no place created for women, who believed their education to be unimportant and their own sense of self diluted to lift others. I am conflicted that my own joy came at the expense of the generations of women before me; that is, my mother, aunty, grandmothers and cousins who fled a place that was not home. Who, like a stone skipped into a flowing river, settled somewhere meant to be home, but was too different, fast-paced and distant from what once was.
As a young woman born to parents that fled our homeland, commonly known as Iraq and less commonly known as occupied Assyria, my connection to my culture has fallen victim to disruption and disconnection. This is compounded by the obvious impacts of living in a diaspora which include but are not limited to loss of language, traditions, cultural understanding and a sense of community and self.
The struggles of the older members of my family and community are physically manifested in war, political instability and an eventual act of fleeing. Even now, seeing our parents flinch at loud noises or have a fear of thunder is a common experience across most Assyrian households, with overprotective instincts being universally accepted amongst all Assyrian parents. I joke around with my other friends that Assyrian parents must have a handbook that they all follow but underneath it, the universality of their experiences shows.
Whilst my own experiences aren’t necessarily the same, I can’t call myself a stranger to disconnection. Struggling to fit into a society where I was the perpetual Other; my eyebrows were too dark and thick, I had too much body hair, I spoke a language that seemed too angry, eating food that smelt or looked a certain way, getting called a terrorist because I was from the Middle East, and being told my English is “actually good” on a regular basis. These experiences formed the foundation of my identity that couldn’t be tethered to the physical, and possibly explains why I have this attachment to the strongest people in my life, the women who have experienced the same, and worse than me.
The reminders of my otherness compounded in greater difficulties. The role of diaspora in perpetuating further disconnection occurs in the physical distance from my homeland. However, the effects of losing my fluency in speaking, reading and writing Assyrian occurred through the process of assimilation into greater society.
Having never visited my home village nor the place where my parents grew up, the tether to the women in my life remains more important than ever. Though I haven’t seen the physical homeland, my homeland is in my people. It is in my resilient but kind grandmothers, in my overwhelming but genuine aunties, and in my strong-headed but intelligent mother.
Seeing my culture lived out and practised daily, by partaking in meals together of our cultural food, intertwining our language into our daily conversations and encouraging growth and learning within a heritage that can be lost, shows the belonging of the women in my life. The places they have carved in my heart forever bears their shapes as I I think of the hands that have spent countless hours repeating the same pattern to fill even one pot for one family to eat.
These shapes take the form of being hunched over for hours folding grape leaves, having long conversations with my nana in our native tongue about her life in our homeland, wearing my traditional clothing with my mum at weddings and celebrations and being inspired by this all and participating in advocacy and awareness for my people as a result. It looks like dolma; like the effort needed, the community coming together and the excitement and gratitude that fills people.
So yes, that knock on the door still echoes in my hallway. As I still open the door in child-like excitement to see the same rusty pot, I think of this. The spaces the Assyrian women in my life have created for themselves are touched by their genuineness, resilience and continued efforts to create a home. I can only hope that the space I call my own, the fingerprint I leave on my community and my people, undulates with the richness and warmth of my culture.
Rosie Malek-Yonan said that, “I may not have a country with boundaries, but my country is in me. My country is in my soul and in my heart. I am Assyria.“ [2] This resounds, not dissimilar to the knock on my front door, with me as I look at the spaces etched in my heart. The spaces that look like my mama, nanas, aunties and cousins who create a boundless nation.
[1] Amina Al-Saigh, ‘Iraqi Dolma (Middle Eastern Stuffed Vegetables)’, Hungry Paprikas (9 December 2020) <https://www.hungrypaprikas.com/iraqi-dolma/>.
[2] Rosie Malek-Yonan and Monica Malek-Yonan, Rosie Malek-Yonan’s the Crimson Field: A Historical Novel (Pearlida Pub, 2005).
Written by Vanessa Wishalim and edited by Minrui Li