echolalia echolalia week 1 reflections
Hi everyone. This week I read "Reimagining the Autistic Mother Tongue" and the pieces from the "Unreliable Nar
If you haven't bought it yet, please consider placing the order here. We'll be reading for the next few weeks, so there's still time to join us.
Also: I really want to hear what people have to think about some of the pieces from echolalia echolalia; if you read anything from the book this week, and if it left you with thoughts (even half-baked thoughts), I'd love to hear them tomorrow (read to "video chat details" for info about how & when to join).
reflections
I kept coming back to "incense search engine #AskYrAncestorsAnything", reading it in different lights each time this week.
Mostly I found myself reflecting on my own wandering journey back toward embracing Iraqi culture in some capacity. As a kid I was resentful of my identity as an Arab for a lot of reasons, both internal and external. Reading some of these queries - like "how do u say help me in yr language" and "what's yr favorite tea" - I thought a lot about web searches I've typed into my phone with my thumbs over the past few years, as I've reconnected with a culture that I experienced as a child but didn't appreciate at the time.
I'm not sure if I was "supposed to" take this feeling out of it, but after repeated readings, I feel a surprising amount of melancholy. I regret that I didn't wish to ask these questions of my aunts and uncles when I was a child. I'm nervous, and it makes me a little mournful, to think about what might have been if I learned more of this stuff growing up rather than now as an adult, typing notes into my phone with my thumbs and reading about idioms from some old website, or learning how to wrap dolma leaves from a video.
15, or maybe 20, years ago, my aunt made a compilation of recipes to share with us. The documents were inconsistently formatted, and words were misspelled in such a way that you could only decipher what she was talking about if you both knew how she spoke and also spoke the text aloud in her accent. Otherwise, the intensely phonetic way she spelled even basic words made the recipes nearly indecipherable.
What's more, because my aunt might have never in her life had a modest occasion to justify making dolma or tabouleh for just a handful of people, every single recipe is scaled to feed 20 or more people. All this is to illustrate how situated these documents are, and perhaps to convey that reading these recipes is a little like hearing her speak, and hearing her plan to make food for a very specific party or event, because that's exactly what these documents were made for.
One day my partner was on the phone with her parents back home, and she mentioned that we had at least a week's worth of dolma after following my aunt's instructions. To explain, she told her parents that dolma is kind of like dumplings.
(... she's not totally wrong)
While I was reading this piece, when it got to "how do u fold yr dumplings tho", I realized I never asked my aunt, or anyone really, how to wrap dolma. Grape leaves can be surprisingly delicate; I suppose you eventually learn by doing it about a hundred times, but I realized as I was reading this piece that I wished I had asked and gleaned just a little bit more from her when I was a little kid sitting in the kitchen watching her. I wish I could have asked her parents, or her aunts and uncles. I wish I could ask about all the little decisions they make that make something "Iraqi", and whether that's actually something Iraqis do or if it's just something weird that my family did.
I doubt any of this is especially relatable, but every other line in this piece got me thinking about all the questions I could have, but didn't, ask; and now I'm piecing together little bits of knowledge from different places from strangers on the internet. I guess I'm grateful for those. But I also feel a twinge of longing.
video chat details
Tomorrow at 12pm ET let's get together1 and chat about whatever we've read this week. The link to join is here (if that doesn't work, the url is below)
https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom
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