From Reem al-Kamali’s ‘Rose’s Diaries’

Yesterday, we talked with Chip Rossetti about his translation of Reem Al Kamali’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction-shortlisted Rose’s Diaries. Today, we have an excerpt from the middle of the novel, where the narrator recalls her lost nuclear family. 

58.

I sighed internally for your sake, Father. All my memories of you were of you putting to sea with sails white like a dove’s wing, but no sooner did the dāʿī winds spring up, each one summoning the next and setting the waves in motion, than you would raise your hand high so that the sihānī winds would follow it, helping to move your ships in one direction as the winds beat on the heart of the sails affixed to the mast, leaning at an angle. Nothing moved except at a hand signal from you.

For a long time, when I was a child, my mother repeated your life’s story to me before I fell asleep. She would enrich my imagination and my mental perception of the sea of your stories. Of those stories, the closest to my heart was the story of the “coffee-maker.” He poured his bitter drops to eliminate the salty taste in the mouths of sailors, who were delighted with the taste, and whose good mood afterwards made them amenable to rowing on gentle waves that would glide them along like children between the rise and fall of the silky surface of the deep. My mother would smile with love when she told me about the coffee-maker washing out the cups. When a cup fell out of his hand into the ocean, he hesitated as he looked at my father sitting in his elevated captain’s chair. The boat had started to move out to sea, and with his fleet of boats behind him, my father asked with a smile, “Hey, coffee-maker, do you want to get the cup back?”

He hesitated, thinking about how he didn’t know how to dive, since he was merely a laborer who had nothing to do with the work of sailors or divers. But did he want the sailors to laugh at him? There was a kind of hard-edged humor, a joking around, that crept into the empty spaces of boredom among the crew.

My father was silent as he set sail, and, according to the sea chart, the boats were headed toward the oyster beds. The sunlight was between the clouds, pouring forth in straight paths of color. Each diver would descend to the ocean bottom to gather oysters, with the yida rope connected to the diyyīn basket hanging around his neck, and the nose clip on his nose, and the zayban rope, weighted down with a rock, attached to his leg, helping him reach the bottom of the diving area. As soon as he reached it, he pulled the heavy zayban off his leg, and he picked up oysters from here and there, collecting them in the diyyīn, until he was done. And then he had the seeb pull up the yida rope by giving it two tugs so he could come up from the sea bottom with the diyyīn filled. The diver would ascend to the top, making his way toward an oar that had been set out for him, left on the surface of the water and tied to the boat. The sailors on board waited to shuck the oysters with their tools, delicate in comparison to the size and variety of those pearls. The day would progress, and the direction of the winds would alternate from the sihānī to east and west winds that intertwine together to give the sea a phosphorescent hue, one that lent itself to contemplation. The waterways of the Gulf become random only in the eyes of the sailors.

But my father ordered them to go back until he reached a certain place, and suddenly he ordered the ship to be anchored, smiling as he called out to the coffee-maker, “Coffee-maker, do you want to get the cup back now?”

The coffee-maker stammered and became flustered, silently asking himself, why doesn’t he just forget about the cup? Then he replied, “No, sir. We have no hope of finding it after all those expanses we crossed, over waters that all looked alike. And the cup isn’t important, either.”

My father called a sailor to stand without delay on the section next to the second oar and let himself drop straight down and bring the coffee cup from the ocean bottom. He did no more than say, “I hear and obey,” then plunged headfirst down below. The coffee-maker gasped at the idea that had stayed in my father’s mind, until the other man emerged, with the coffee-cup itself in his hand, painted green in the shape of palm fronds, just like a set of coffee-cups he had.

Everyone on the deck of the mahmal laughed with joy, and displayed a happiness, delight, pride, and astonishment at my father, now smiling with affection, for his knowledge about the characteristics of water shown by his coffee cup being brought out after having spent the whole day in the water.

Reem Al Kamali is an Emirati novelist. Her novel Sultanate of Hormuz won the 2015 Al Owais Creativity Award. Her novel Dalma Statue won the 2018 Sharjah Creativity Award. Her novel Rose’s Diary was shortlisted for the 2022 Sheikh Zayed Prize as well as the 2022 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), making her the first Emirati novelist ever to be shortlisted for the IPAF.

Chip Rossetti is the managing editor of the Library of Arabic Literature translation series at NYU Press and a translator of contemporary and classical Arabic writing.