Repatriation
Deborah Williams
Word Count 1148
Eleven years ago, I left New York for Abu Dhabi. I didn’t travel light: I brought a husband, our two little kids (6 & 10), nine carry-on bags, and twelve giant suitcases. We landed in the middle of August in the middle of Ramadan, (not) ready for our Year of Big Adventure.
I walked out of the airport to the car that would take us to our apartment and stopped. The evening air was so thick with humidity that it fogged my glasses, my phone, my watch. I couldn’t see where I was, couldn’t see where to go.
A breeze, hot and wet, carried the smell of the ocean and something else, something tangy and sour that I would learn was the smell of dates, smushed and fermenting on the ground. Eventually, I would learn that to avoid this fermenting stickiness, the city pays men to climb the ubiquitous date palms that line the streets and tie green mesh bags around the ripening fruit—sort of like poop bags on the carriage horses in Central Park.
I would learn too that during the summer, it does not get cooler when the sun goes down. Instead, through some alchemical reaction between the Arabian Gulf and the desert, the hours after sunset get sweatier. It doesn’t really “cool off” until ten or eleven at night (although “cooling off” is an entirely relative term: a shift from 115F to maybe 85).
The car whisked us along a broad road lined with palm trees; I stared out the window as my sons dozed in my lap, undone by jet lag and excitement. We stopped at an intersection to let a huge tanker truck cross in front of us. In the glare of the truck’s headlights, I could see what was on the other side of the palm trees.
Nothing. A shadowy expanse of flat earth. The palm trees were an arboreal scrim, a thin curtain of growth separating “road” from “desert.” The truck thundered past into the darkness but not before I could read what was written on the side, in both English and Arabic: “drinking water.”
In those first months, everything was difficult, everything took longer than it did “at home.” I’d been prepared to miss my family and friends, but no one had warned me that I would miss myself: my efficient, familiar self, the New Yorker who could multi-task like a bitch and didn’t cry in the grocery store because there were twelve kinds of ghee but apparently no peanut butter. Those Silk Road traders were intrepid, sure, but even they would have been intimidated by navigating a huge Carrefour grocery store in the hour before iftar.
And yet, despite the tears and the sweat and the strangeness, we stayed. Stayed and stayed. Made a home in this place where old and new collide, like the old woman with a gilt burqa across her face getting out of the Barbie-pink Hummer in front of Marks & Spencer; where paradox is everywhere, even in the simple fact of a humid desert, of a city threaded with creeks and estuaries but where drinking water arrives in trucks; where at the base of every green growing thing is a black irrigation hose.
Just over a decade. And now it’s over. This July, we pack up our lives for the reverse journey: already we are assembling the carry-on bags and the big suitcases; we will fly home while our household goods brave the maelstrom of the supply chain: tables and chairs and lamps and mirrors will get boxed up and put on a container ship, eventually (inshallah) arriving in New York.
They call this return journey “repatriation.” It’s a strange term. I don’t feel much “re” because we’re going to a New York that is not the city where I lived as a graduate student and then as a parent with little kids. We return with teen-agers on the verge of leaving home to a city that has been hollowed out by the pandemic. Lots of boarded-up shops and what’s not boarded up seems to have become a bank or a CVS. As for “patria”? Do I want to claim America as my patrimony? The stranglehold of evangelical patriarchy in the US makes the UAE look like a progressive paradise. Very often, when I’ve visited the States over the past decade, I get asked how on earth I can handle living in “such a repressive society” (a fact about which people are very certain, despite never having actually been here). My answer has always been to ask them the same question.
“Home is where the heart is,” they say, which is slightly more optimistic than Robert Frost’s: “home is the place that when you go there they have to take you in.” When you’re a long-term expat, “home” becomes a kind of splinter; there is always a nagging pull towards the place where you are not. But as if to compensate for that, it means there is more than one place that has to take you in.
Eleven years. I’m at home here in a way I never was in New York, despite having lived there for more than twenty years. Home is not durational; you can live somewhere for a long time and have it never feel like home. I couldn’t wait to leave the Midwestern city where I grew up; didn’t much like Boston when I lived there during and after college. The first time I went to LA, though, I thought “aaaahhh.” And I’ve always been an ambivalent New Yorker. I moved there for grad school, never intending to stay, but then, you know, there was love and marriage and a job and kids—and then boom, I was forty.
It will be wonderful to be closer to family But what I’ve realized, as I wander my apartment trying to MarieKondo all our stuff, is that part of the wrench of this move is that I’m leaving behind the place where my kids grew up. I’m leaving two homes: this city and their childhood.
Living in this harsh desert climate, I’ve gotten soft. Life here is slower than life in Manhattan; it’s gentler, too. There’s more light, more air, more space. There’s a sense of possibility here that reveals itself in surprise: scarlet bougainvillea exploding over dusty alley walls; gleaming dolphins playing chase in the waters just offshore; skyscrapers covered in pink reflective glass; intimate neighborhood mosques set at Mecca angles.
Last week, sitting in a chair overlooking the creek near my apartment, I looked up to see a blue heron glide to rest in the date palm next to me. Tucked into the fronds was a nest with another heron and two downy chicks. Google tells me that the chicks will be ready to leave their nest in about six weeks. That means they’ll be flying away in early July.
I guess we’ll be leaving together.
Deborah is a writer and literature professor based in Abu Dhabi. Her work has appeared in various publications, including The Common, The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, and The Rumpus. She is finishing a novel based on the life of Lady Hester Stanhope, who defied convention (and Napoleon) to wander the Mediterranean and the Levant with her much-younger lover. Follow Deb on IG and Twitter: @mannahattamamma
