Ćilim, uncredited google image search

A ćilim is a kind of woven rug, made from wool. The word, like many others in the language is loaned from Turkish, famously also a carpet people. They came and stayed for centuries and now some of their words are footprints on our carpets, our ćilims. My grandmother had a loom, and she once made these.

In one series of photographs, just before she was widowed, she sits on a chair outside the house where they all lived, and the ćilim is tacked to the white outside wall. I say white because the photographs are in black and white, so it isn't possible to tell the colour. She holds a baby on her lap, this is my mother. My uncles, just children, are at either side of her knees, and her parents stand behind her. My great grandmother is tiny and all in black, including the kerchief knotted under her chin. My grandfather is also there, and glare of the sun turns his eyes into black holes in his face, it isn't possible to tell their colour.

He looks like he is thinking about what it will be like to be a ghost.

Of course I don't know what he was thinking, I am projecting. A photograph is a kind of projection, of light onto film first, and then on to paper, and these particular photographs then into pixels, then paper again. Seven people arrange themselves in front of a ćilim in 1943 and are projected into a frame which sits on my coffee table, next to the lamp. I read once that when photography was invented some people were afraid that being photographed might capture a part of their souls. Sometimes when I look at them in the frame I think about this.

After she was widowed my twenty two year old grandmother returned to her loom but in this story there are no suitors and Odysseus doesn't come back.