My mother and I lived without a key. She has never had one attached to her body, but she left me a whole horde of wishes that she never fulfilled. All my mother owned were keys to awe, homesickness, loss, and stillness. How could I have lived my entire life in a house without a key? I ask myself every time I return home a little late. Is that the upside of not owning one? That you can come home whenever and however you want?
I think whoever invented the key wanted to keep some secret. And when you live in a large family like mine, how are you supposed to keep secrets?!
"Outside is the loss of your personal security"
It is said that the first lock with a key was invented in Ancient Egypt around 2000 BC. It was like a big wooden bolt that was fastened to the gate from the outside. Outside means insecurity, outside is the loss of your personal security, so I'm even more worried about the key. It lifts the pins out of the holes in the latch, allowing it to move freely again, and so the gate with the lock opens and the chariot of my life trots ahead without me being able to keep pace with it.
According to science, every lock has a key.
I've always wished I had a key, that's why I bought numerous keyholders over the years. I am thousands of miles away from my mother's house today, and yet I only long to see the only keyholder my mother will wear. Maybe she won't wear a pendant at all, but will tie her key to the side of her headscarf, like the other women around her.
So I say: Well, dear longing, I'll leave you a key in a little crack in the wall, or under the gravel of the abandoned flowerpot, so you can find it if you come early. I'll leave the door ajar for you. Don't let the angels see you and come secretly sneaking like sin! So I wrote once to the love that crept over me with all the keys that I had made on my own.
"All tents are open to the sky, so said my grandfather"
I was leaving my parents' house and moving into my marital home at the age of almost 35. Like any other Arab woman, I wanted to take the key to the house I grew up in with me. I wanted to take it or leave it — it makes no difference. But as a family we had never had a key to the door (the front door I mean). What does a nomad need it for when he inhabits the sprawling world of God?! All tents are open to the sky, so said my grandfather, and I say it after him.
I am the nomad who was born in south Damascus and never had a key, but I've been dragging a lot of locks over the past few years, all without a key.
I crossed an ocean without a key, one to my rescue I mean, only with a life jacket that a smuggler had given me. Maybe he said that was the key to security. I crossed Eastern Europe without a key. Anyway, what should I have done with it when I was carrying a girl on my back and had to leave a four-year-old boy in the land that had locked all the locks before us for four hundred years?
After I moved out of my parents' house, I had always lived in rented houses. The landlord dropped the key in my hand, covered in sweat and dirt from the many hands that had held it. First I attached the old/new key to a new holder, but before that I had to disinfect it. I scrubbed it meticulously, so I removed the traces of all the hands that held it before me, the tired, sad, poor hands.
"I crossed an ocean without a key"
In the book ''Life is a Novel'' by the French writer Guillaume Musso, the three-year-old Carrie disappears while playing hide-and-seek with her mother. There is no explanation for the child's disappearance. The door of the apartment and the windows are locked. The mother runs through the spacious apartment and wishes for herself the happy ending that a game of hide-and-seek usually has... victory over disappearance.
The mother rushes to the entrance hall. The armored door is firmly locked. The key is in the lock and hangs on the bunch of keys with the others. The way to safety is clear to the mother, because nobody can open a door from the outside if the key is in the inside of the lock. With the mother calling the police, the game of hide-and-seek does not end on a satisfactory note...
This article was written in Arabic and previously published on raseef22. It was translated into English by Manal Ismail. It was translated into German by Sonja Jacksch and first published.
https://www.kohero-magazin.de/ich-bin-die-nomadin-ohne-schluessel-meine-zelte-sind-zum-himmel-offen/