The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: All Water Has Perfect Memory by Nada Samih-Rotondo

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                            SILENT PERIOD

                                          Rhode Island, 1990

    My  body  is drawn to bodies of water. I was born  in Kuwait
City,  minutes  from  the  shores of  the  Persian  Gulf.  For  six
summers I waded in the waters of the Persian  Gulf,  the same
waters  my grandfather  fished after leaving Palestine to settle
in  Kuwait.  He had  a boat he would take  out in  the  morning
with  his  brothers, returning in the  evening with piles of slip-
pery fish. My grandmother gutted, cleaned, dressed, and fried
or  roasted  this  gift  from  the sea for the family.  My  mother
and  her  siblings  were  born  and  raised  along  those shores,
but  were  never  granted  Kuwaiti  citizenship: a coveted prize
rarely   awarded  to descendants  of  the Palestinian  diaspora.
Nevertheless,  Kuwait  was home  to  my  family,  as  it  was  to
400,000 other Palestinians.
    At  age  six I ended up  in the  United  States,  specifically  in
Rhode  Island,  aptly  nicknamed  the  Ocean  State.  I’ve spent
the  last thirty years  inhaling the salty  Atlantic, the tips of my
fingers pruned, my curly hair matted and waterlogged. I  grew
up   wide-eyed  and  feral,  stomping  along  muddy riverbanks
barely  recovered  from  industrial  ravage.  But  it was  always
the  Mediterranean—the  turquoise  shores  of  Yafa—that  my
blood ebbed toward.

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