In defence of neighborhood bonds

Here I am, at this vantage point, high on a balcony atop a building overlooking what, for more than a decade, existed only as a homeland reclaimed in memory, preserved in brief flashes within a traveller’s mind during fleeting visits.

This time, I am actually sitting here, not like I used to, when distant lands would corner me in their half-baked days, and I would push back by creating a day that stretched as far as my memory could take it, one that began with the aroma of Somali tea and the sound of a radio station whose announcer’s voice had never once changed. With boys who could step onto the clouds if they wished, yet never believed that the road to school could grant them even an inch of the map in geography class; a gentle-faced policeman squatting near the tea stall, counting his twenty years of life as if to deduct them from his salary. Reckless drivers, roaming vendors, and the hundreds of others chosen by the director (my mind) to let the day reign over the scene.

By mid-morning, everyone slips out of the scene, and only along the sidewalk do you glimpse mothers hunched over their sewing machines. You can’t quite tell what they’re weaving this time: a shirt, perhaps, or a patched-up history, one that flaunts its victims and its tales, and chooses its heroes by the color of their shoes. And since it’s impossible for public taste to agree on one shoe color, the people have never agreed on a single hero. So we commemorate dates and national occasions, but without names. The day ends, and the curtain falls on another scene.

It’s now noon, and the radio surges again. Now the windows echo with what lips do not dare say: messages smuggled through songs, understood only by the neighbors. Su’ad braids her pigtails on the doorstep every day at this exact hour, and the radio blares the same song from the window across the street. Faces peek out from every house, all smiles and knowing winks. A simple ritual on the surface, but at its core a genuine epic; without such details, everyone in the neighborhood would fall into the grip of stagnation and monotony, or worse, God forbid, a wild chaos of conflicts.

So they invent joy in every way possible, just to survive the dullness. As Sa’ad Nachid writes in Healing Through Philosophy: “Joy is a fissure in the monotony of time, a partial fluidity, and a miniature salvation.” And so, government decisions never truly affected the neighborhood, nor rising taxes, nor even the nomination of the grocer’s wife’s cousin’s son-in-law to parliament. All of these were marginal events, none as serious or consequential as Su’ad’s affairs.

Even the children no longer know one another; ask your younger siblings how many kids live in the house next door, they won’t be able to tell you. So it’s no wonder that politics has slipped into every home, leaving deep fissures between them.

Now, that I’m back, those details are no longer here. In every neighborhood there is a large yard separating the residents, another kind of border, this time one that blocks anything that could help build a collective memory. Somehow, the small rituals that once nurtured a tightly knit community have vanished. Grandmothers no longer sit outside in the late afternoon, surrounded by the women of the neighborhood. Su’ad and her friends no longer set their traps nor loosen their braids. The elders and the men no longer gather by the tea stall to untangle the neighborhood’s knots. Even the children no longer know one another; ask your younger siblings how many kids live in the house next door, they won’t be able to tell you. So it’s no wonder that politics has slipped into every home, leaving deep fissures between them.

Memory occupies the largest part of both our social and personal identity. Individual memory often fuses with collective memory — the memories we share with others. As the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs observed, “There is no memory and no remembering without a group, nor apart from it.” It is through this shared remembering that a community’s identity emerges. Popular chants, traditional dances, poems, literature, even the history taught in schools — all the elements that shape a people’s identity — are ultimately the products of interactions among individuals that crystallize into collective memory, which then becomes the blueprint of a nation’s identity.

You can see how certain popular rituals have become the defining identity of entire peoples. Flamenco, for example, in Spanish heritage, is not merely a ritual or a tradition—it is the memory of an entire people. And when tracing the history of this musical dance, most accounts say it draws from the catastrophe endured by the Muslims of Andalusia. This is also the view of Levante Blas, the thinker and political writer known as the father of Andalusian nationalism; according to him, flamenco reflects the merging of the exiled Andalusian Muslims with the culture of the itinerant Romani(gypsy), who used singing as a vessel for their sorrow.

Blas traces the word flamenco to two Arabic terms, falah mankub, meaning “a dispossessed peasant,” referring to the Andalusian farmers whose villages were confiscated. Thus, it is Andalusian muwashshah melodies blended with Romani music and dance, each carrying the weight of its own saga of exile and wandering. Yet despite this painful past, flamenco endures as one of the most joyful, harmonious, and inventive musical expressions. Walk through any neighborhood in Córdoba, Seville, or anywhere in Spain, and you’ll find people gathered around the sound of flamenco.

If we want a society more open to itself and to others, and a homeland that stretches like fields of corn and groves of sidr, we must start by weaving ties among neighbors, ties that reach every alley and every home, then building a single cohesive city that shares rituals capable of forming a common memory

You might ask: what is the link between flamenco, Su’ad’s story, the grandmothers on their doorsteps, and the building of walls? The relationship among neighbors is the lens through which we understand a person’s bond with their homeland and its people. The stronger the bond among neighbors, the more deeply a person feels anchored to the land they inhabit — and thus their fate becomes interwoven with the fate of those who share that land, the city, the neighborhood, the street. And those invisible borders between districts begin to dissolve.

I could hardly believe my shock when I learned about the city’s strange demography, a division so sharp that moving between neighborhoods barely half an hour apart is described as “crossing to the other bank.”

In the current circumstances, which is among the most convoluted and volatile of our times, if we want a society more open to itself and to others, and a homeland that stretches like fields of corn and groves of sidr, we must start by weaving ties among neighbors, ties that reach every alley and every home, then building a single cohesive city that shares rituals capable of forming a common memory and a shared identity. In the end, memory alone is what binds us more than geography or tribe. It is our only talisman against those who never miss a chance to turn people against one another.

I return to my seat, to the balcony that looks out over a city stubbornly holding on to its essence, refusing to let its features fade. The mountains that sprawl along its edges feel like guardians, circling the city as though shielding it from itself. And I return to my own inner world, after ten long seasons of ripening, each one like an ear of grain opening into countless versions of myself, unfolding into different stages and eras. At times, it feels as if I could dig through my own mind just to set them all free.

I wonder: wasn’t this journey meant to be an act of mercy against my own memory, a deliberate attempt to lighten the weight of what I carry? Didn’t I walk every street hoping to erase the trace of my footsteps? Can roads ever return our steps to us simply because we offer them our feet? It seems, at moments, that retracing old paths is a way of reclaiming something lost, though the Egyptian poet Ahmed Bakheet, in his poem The Four Nights, argues otherwise, insisting that “no one returns the step to the foot that has already walked.”

This tension; the longing to remember and the yearning to be free of remembrance, echoes the insight of the celebrated Arab novelist Abdulrahman Munif who, In Desert of Darkness, writes that “memory is a coveted curse, a dangerous toy; for as much as it grants a person passage toward freedom, it also becomes his prison.”

And so, as I both honor my memories and release myself from them, I’m left asking: what becomes of our personal identity when we banish memory? And, perhaps more urgently,what remains of our neighborhood, of this country, when it no longer resembles the one we once knew?