The Home

Abstract

The Home Mona Zahra Attamimi (bio) Emptying my mother's home, a map—the colour of tea stains, marked by rivers and oceans, a compass rose,wind symbols over Asia, and trees and roots belonging to women who'd sewn date-pipson to their black tunics and left palm leaves to dry between holy books—I found,among seventy bottles of human hair. A bottle each for a yearof her life—that was how my mother's mind ticked. I stooped over them,touched the jars with my ankles. The glass was cold. Next to the map was a wooden chest.The weight of her death caused me to lean forward and tripover a shoe. I hit the chest with my elbows and what was revealed were pagesof her diary, patched and quilted into a long funeral shroud. Her writingswere prolific, dating back to 1953. She wrote on the day her father died and whenher mother gave her away to a lady who'd lost her voice on the ship to the Moluccas; she wrote of the time she was trapped inside old rooms, and when she travelled in the tunnelsof a colonized city; she wrote of the time she gave birth and died as a woman; and shewrote of the time when her memories nearly killed her, of how having a daughter chainedher to the table where she drew the map [End Page 113] of a country snaked in rivers and stainedin tea. Her funeral shroud was elaborately designed in the shape of her will. The outline,in avocado green, declared that the house, after she was gone, had to be burnt,the jars of hair to float on the rivers, and the girl-child, who'd found her shroudand ate the words, must inherit the map. Her spell has stayed on my sleeves, it roamsthe sea and the stony cliffs they call the Matriarch. Whenever I passthe ashes of winter homes and hear crying in the dry wind, she whispers: have youburied my shroud, have you kept my will in the urn? Mona Zahra Attamimi Mona Zahra Attamimi is an Arab-Indonesian writer based in Sydney. She lived in Jakarta, Washington, DC, and Manila before settling in Sydney at age nine. Her poems have appeared in Southerly, Meanjin, Westerly, Mascara, and Cordite and have been anthologized in Contemporary Asian Australian Poets Anthology and To Gather Your Leaving: Asian Diaspora Poetry. Currently, she is working on her first poetry collection. She was the recipient of the Asialink Arts 2019 Emerging Writing Residency. This is her first appearance in Antipodes. Copyright © 2021 Wayne State University Press