Documenting Sanctuary #1

In my teta’s backyard, there was a spot where a dirty puddle always formed. My stuffed toy found its way into it once upon a time, and now the spot’s all dried up. Traces of what was mud are caked onto the concrete. Looking up, you’d see a garden divided into squares by leftover pavement blocks, creating homes for the vegetation my teta stubbornly grew despite Sharjah’s unrelenting heat. Eggplants, tomatoes, cabbage, and okra numbered her green army. Surrounding trees bore leimoon and toot, providing shade for traveling street cats. A rest station. My teta hated the cats, especially a ginger tabby who liked to flatten the herbs into a bed, no matter how often my teta chased him away. Mint, headstrong, grew like a weed and claimed every drop of water from a drain nearby. Later, its leaves would find their way into black tea saturated with sugar. Baba would say This is sugar with tea, not tea with sugar as he watched me place another heaping spoonful into my cup. This garden whispered of the times my cousins and I played Shurta wa Harami, when my sido had his heatstroke, and when heavy cat mothers felt safe to birth their litters. My teta still tends to her garden, now with two artificial kneecaps and a walker by her side. 

Nada Al Mosa is a Palestinian writer and artist based in Abu Dhabi. Currently, she is a student at NYU Abu Dhabi, where she studies Literature and Creative Writing while also pursuing Visual Arts and Gender and Sexuality Studies on the side. While finding it difficult to commit to identifying as a writer or artist, Nada is comfortably accepting the role of an imposter in the world of the arts. She dabbles in digital artwork, collage, and mixed media, but she is currently focusing on writing poetry inspired by archival and documentary-style writing.

Artwork by Myriam Louise Taleb