In My Homeland Memories Are Forbidden

“Where Memory Meets the Sea” by Laia Asieo Odo

There is sea and there is land and there is the place where the two meet. They slip and slide into each other, a shuddering of sunlit sprays and burnished pebbles. It is the place where change is constant, where we can lay our bodies down and feel the commingling of two forces tugging the sand out from under us, land-dried fecundity reentering the wet. Our skin is scraped raw and clean. The salt mattes everywhere.

It is impossible to block memories on the ever-shifting shoreline, and that is why so many of us come here, through summer and winter, for the relief of unfettered remembrance. Standing in the flushing tide we are able to see the faces of our lost loved ones, to recall their embraces, in some cases to remember their violent deaths. There are many who refuse to come here, afraid of the ragged holes of love they will find, while those of us who do, come with the rhythm of ritual, ready for the complications of grief renewed. We grow to recognize one another, sometimes holding each other through the spasming of sobs or listening while someone recounts a story, a smile, a laugh, or a fight. “Hold this memory with me” we tell each other, “for in a minute we will walk back inland, and the memory will be gone. Bear witness to my grief, so that I may know that it is real.”

And then we turn back. Walk across the sand to the road where our cars are parked. Dry ourselves off. Already, the memories have faded. Already, we do not know what we remembered on the shoreline, in the grit sand that dragged under our toes. But we feel it in our bodies, that we have cried or been elated or mourned. We feel the soft imprint of a fellow rememberer’s hand on our shoulder and know that we took part in something strangely collective and human. And we go home. Our bodies relieved by the reprieve of connection.

---

When I return home, it is to a different collective. My partner of five years, Mark, washing dishes at the sink, and my ten-year-old daughter, Stella, pirouetting in the kitchen, no doubt avoiding a chore.

“How was it?” asks Mark.

“I don’t remember,” I say lightly.

Stella pulls me into a dance spin and I, in turn, pull her in for a hug. She’s grown, growing, always growing. Long legs and arms on a short torso, dark curly hair falling over her eyes because her ponytail’s come loose again. She smells like dirt and soap rubbed together, of a kid both looked after and let loose.

“Okay, let go, Mama,” she muffles into my shoulder.

Mark dries his hands and rolls his eyes at us jokingly.

“My turn,” he says as he comes up close to hold me. His words are warm in my ear. “You were safe?”

“I was,” I say to him.

I squeeze him back. He’s tall and fair and foreign, but our relationship has been working like nothing ever has for me before.

Later, when Stella is asleep in a sprawl on her bed and it’s just me and him idling in the living room, I tell him what I’ve been thinking about.

“I think it might be time to take Stella to the shoreline with me.”

Mark stiffens. But he keeps his voice measured.

“She’s your daughter,” he says. “I can’t tell you what to do.”

“You don’t approve,” I say.

“She’s only ten,” he says. “Who could she possibly have to remember? And if there is a loved one to remember, it will be a brutal loss that she witnessed at a young age. Why would you want her to know about it?”

“You don’t know what it’s like,” I say, “to be disconnected from your own history. To not even know which parts you’re disconnected from. It isn’t healthy, Mark.”

“I’m not looking to argue, Ariadne. I just think Stella can wait a couple more years.”

“And you’re saying this as her stepfather or as a therapist?”

“Both.”

A silence flickers under our dimmed lamps.

“All right,” I say. “I’ll wait.”

---

I park my car on the road by the shoreline and get out. There is an eerie stillness in the wind that blows in with the waves. A dozen familiar faces are lined up on the road, all standing in front of their cars, none moving to the beach. The wind sucks at their hair and clothes but they are all, as one, looking in the same direction toward the sea.

Down on the east part of the bay, there is a large military truck, khaki green, canvas, and steel, laden with building materials. And around the truck are maybe seven or eight soldiers building a barbed-wire fence across the sand, a few feet from the tide line. They have big rolls of concrete, which they bury in the sand to hold the metal fence poles up, the wire all snagged and sharp rolling out between each pole. The sound of wind and waves mutes whatever sounds the soldiers are making, though they seem to be in conversation, gesturing this way and that about how best to build this fence, how best to block our access to respite. They pretend not to notice us.

“I heard this might happen.”

Defne, a regular, stands next to me. Her voice is flat. I reach out for her hand and she offers it willingly. I slip my fingers through the thick, wrinkled joints of her own. I feel her silver and gold rings, as immovable as she is.

“Whose military are they?” I ask. I don’t add the obvious “yours or mine” to the question. Here on the shoreline, neither of us have allegiances to any army.

“Does it matter?”

Her voice is brittle with the decades of conflict.

It feels like we are watching a theatrical play. The soldiers are badly dressed for the sand. They slip into the soft, unpredictable mounds, are confused by and kicking at the protected turtle nests. A younger one forgets himself and moves closer to the waves washing up onto the beach. The moment he enters the block-free zone his body contorts in unexpected horror. We can’t hear him scream at first, but his wails grow so frantic they perforate the wind, shrill and frenzied like an abandoned infant’s. He looks too young to be remembering someone he killed himself, and is more likely grieving a loss of his own, but the tenor of his terror is hard to discern. Two of his fellow soldiers reach for his flailing arms and pull him away. He falls to his knees on the dry sand, gasping and flustered.

He looks too young to be remembering someone he killed himself, and is more likely grieving a loss of his own, but the tenor of his terror is hard to discern.

“Cowards,” mutters Defne.

The word ricochets through me and I peel off my clothes down to my swimsuit. I put my mesh water shoes on and walk down toward the sea on the west edge of the bay. It will take the soldiers a couple more hours to build the fence all the way across, and I intend to do what I came here to do. The others follow me down. As if all we needed was one person to begin the familiar trajectory down to the water, to break the spell cast by the interlopers on our beach.

Now the roles have reversed. The soldiers have stopped working and they are staring at us as if we are an ancient chorus harbingering doom. But our show will be different from theirs. It’s been a long time since one of us has panicked in the thrust of grief like the young man did. Our bodies are long accustomed to the acute pain of loss. Each visit has lessened the sheer shock of our remembrance. We enter our memories together, ready to sit in our salt-watered hurt.

I am not in there long when someone grips hold of my arm to pull me out of the water. I stumble and fall, the pebbles scratch up against my body, and my head hits a rock, hard. Water goes up my nose as I am dragged, a thumb is pressed ruthlessly into me. I can hear someone screaming but it’s not me; maybe it’s the person dragging me. The screams stop and I am beached on the dry land catching my breath. The sand is sore on my skinned knees. I touch blood dripping from the back of my head. Around me are more of my peers, lying stricken on the sand, each of us shocked back into blockage, gulping air and coughing. The soldiers surround us, their black laced boots ugly and wet. They are shouting.

“What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?”

I can see now, from up close, that they’re not military. They’re police special forces. Their logo is emblazoned on their camo-shirts. I spit grit out of my mouth. One of the men in our party yells back at them.

“You have no business taking us out of the sea. This is our right, we are allowed freedom of movement.”

The young policeman who’d been in the water just moments earlier is here, too, and his terror of us and the shoreline is clear to all. His eyes are wide and rolling, he keeps fumbling at his baton.

“You’re heretics!” he shouts. “This is not of God. You are engaging in devilry. The shoreline is where the devil lives. I saw it. I saw it.”

If he wasn’t armed, if my head wasn’t aching, I would laugh.

One of his colleagues tries to calm him, and behind them I see Defne rising from the ground and determinedly walking back to the sea. Others rise and follow. They look like Nereids, I think, with the sun emblazoned behind them, the sand granules on their wet bodies glittering. But the young policeman has lost himself to his fear; he escapes his colleague’s platitudes and instead runs after Defne to stop her. His baton comes out, once, twice, against Defne’s head and I see Defne fall, the fall of someone who won’t get up again, and I see others tackling the man to the ground, I see more batons come out against the bare, lovely bodies of my friends, and all the while I think, will this memory be erased, can I hold it, please, please, don’t let me lose it don’t let me lose Defne don’t let me lose this shoreline too.

---

I get home and the memory of what has happened down at the shoreline is still fresh, but I know it is only a matter of time before a block is placed on it. I try to tell Mark as much as I can but I mostly weep, my head throbbing around the sting of my open wound, and he brooks no discussion but takes me straight to the hospital.

In the waiting room I scream-whisper at him, “Mark, don’t let me forget it, don’t let me. Write it down for me, I have to remember it, to remember her, Defne, I have to.”

The writing-down of a memory about to be blocked isn’t allowed. We know this. But Mark sees my despair and ultimately has no compunctions about breaking the laws of a country he does not belong to. He finds pen and paper and takes me to the quietest spot he can find. He turns on the audio recording on his phone.

“Go,” he whispers.

I spit my words out, repeat myself, backtrack, try to remember the faces of the policemen, but Mark keeps me focused on the people I was with, the people I am worried I have lost, their names and how they fell. It takes half an hour and my name has been called by triage twice now. I ask Mark “Is it done?” And he says yes. He takes photographs of his notes and then uploads the audio and the images to the cloud, sends them to friends abroad. He marks the subject line with “for safekeeping” and I am struck by how absurd that phrase is, how today I was reminded that we can keep nothing safe or safely.

---

A week passes. I remember nothing despite the pain pulsing in my head. I was away from home and I fell and hit my head and now have short-term memory loss. The nurses looked tired when they told me this. The doctor was nowhere to be found.

Stella is at school today and I’m home, editing a client’s latest report, rewriting entire sentences to make them make sense. And Mark walks in, his face so serious it looks like someone has died.

“What happened?” I ask.

He’s wordless, just pulls up his laptop, opens his email. There’s a message from a friend of his from abroad, Mette. She lives in Copenhagen. I vaguely remember that she does something like humanitarian law. I lean toward the screen to read her missive.

Dear Mark,

It’s been a year now since you sent me the first email of horrors. It was a recording of Ariadne, speaking about the violent loss of her ex, of Stella’s father. You had gone down to the beach with her and she remembered it all, told you everything. You stood in the sea with her looking for a 3G signal so you could upload the recording and send it to me. When I called you the next day you had no memory of it. I didn’t press you. I was concerned that if I forced you to remember against the power of the memory blockers I may cause you permanent damage. Besides, Stella’s father’s death was six years ago now. It seemed too long ago to be worth upsetting you. I did ask you to stop going to the beach. I made up some scientific-sounding research that proved it could be bad for you. I think it convinced you, but not Ariadne.

You sent me another recording, some eight months later, about a patient you were concerned about. She hadn’t turned up to her sessions and had told you she was worried that her work would get her killed. I called you again. Again, you had no memory of sending me your recording. Again, I didn’t push, though I extrapolated what had happened.

But last week you sent me something too close for comfort. Ariadne speaking of witnessing a murder that very day, on the beach. Ariadne injured so badly she was lucky to be alive. I’m sending it back to you. I don’t know if you will be able to listen to it. I don’t know how the block works, if it will even allow you to read and retain this email. But Mark, make no mistake. Ariadne is probably under surveillance now. Your family is no longer safe. You need to leave. You know my family will always welcome you here. I will buy you your tickets in an instant. Please say yes, Mark. Please tell Ariadne to say yes. We can keep you safe. We can help. Come to Copenhagen.

—METTE

I stare. I move the cursor to open the recording attached in the email.

“Don’t,” says Mark. “It doesn’t work. It just sounds like scramble and it gives you a migraine.”

I ignore him and press Play. I hear my voice, in tears, for a split second.

“Don’t let me forget—” And then it turns into a muddle of screeches and high-pitched buzzings that scream as if the dead are drilling through my head. I hurriedly push the laptop away from me. Mark reaches out to save it from tumbling onto the floor and turns the volume off.

My head is vibrating with pain but from the inside out. I touch the healing wound on the back of my skull. How did I get it? I wonder. Was I bludgeoned? Who tried to kill me? My pain and fear careen into fury and anger. Who tried to kill me? I will find them. I will force them to speak the truth to me until their teeth are ground down to dust from fighting against their own memory blocker.

“Ariadne, we should leave here,” says Mark.

“Not until we uncover what these monsters have done to me,” I say.

I can’t believe he wants to leave, when we should stay and fight.

“I’m not doing this,” he says. “I’m not staying here to watch you die and not even have the dignity to remember it. I’m not looking after Stella without her mother, without even the full memory of her mother.”

His words are like corrective lenses to my rage. But everything in me wants to reject them.

“We can shame them. We can ask Mette to send the recordings to international media—”

“We can do that when we are far away from here. Somewhere where we have the right to memory. Somewhere where you will not be imprisoned or worse.”

I will not leave my beach, my sea, my home, my olive groves, my clementines, my friends, my chaos of singing muezzins and priests.

I cannot. I will not leave my beach, my sea, my home, my olive groves, my clementines, my friends, my chaos of singing muezzins and priests. I will not leave it for the cold, smooth-edged, organized towns of Scandinavia. I cannot, I say to myself. I cannot. And then I cry, long wrenching sobs pulsating with goodbye and grief and loss because I know that I will leave. That Mark is right. That by the end of the week, he and Stella and I will be on a plane. That my life has endured as much chaos and violence as it was able and that the only option now is to stay and die or leave and thrive.

Mark is already replying to Mette. He is already booking our tickets. He is already calling our friends to tell them that we are leaving. He is looking around our house to see what we need.

“Can I go to the beach one last time?” I beg.

“No,” he says. “No. We will go to a multitude of other beaches in our life. But I will not let you go where you were injured.”

Less than ten days later, we arrive in Copenhagen, never to return home again.

And just like that an entire part of my self is brought back into memory, and another part, the part that belongs, is ablated.

---

Our friends in Copenhagen are friendly and caring enough. It takes us months to accustom ourselves to the influx of violent memories. Some arrive piecemeal, others in one long shock of body horror that resembles a panic attack, only more immersive.

It is most upsetting to watch Stella remember her father. She was so young when she lost him that it is hard for her to understand if what she remembers is something from a childhood now fully unblocked or just her own mind playing tricks. She asks me for details, asks me to witness with her, asks me for confirmation. I answer as best I can, grateful that she was, at least, not present when he was shot, clean through the head, in the car seat next to me. Grateful, at least, that she has been spared both that memory and its reemergence.

I can tell that I have remembered his death over and over again. My body responds to it with a knowing, expectant grief. This was the work I did in my sea. It is different to hold the memory now in my every day, in my every breath, but I am not run ragged by it. It has been under process. Unlike the memory of Defne’s death, which still hangs raw and bloody in me. I wake from nightmares. Sometimes I wake from them and realize I wasn’t even sleeping, just standing in Mette’s kitchen trying to make coffee or buttering toast and I am stiff, unable to move.

Mark does what he can. Mette, her husband, and their two college-aged children do what they can too. We have been told multiple times that we can stay in their home as long as we need. But I can hear Mark and Mette talking about Denmark’s zero-asylum-seeker policy. The rise of the right-wing party here. They talk of other options, like Canada or the USA, or me and Mark marrying, Mark adopting Stella as his own. Sometimes they ask me what I think. I reply thoughtfully, I remain engaged, but I am not sure I will ever be truly present again.

And then there is the anger and the rage and the strategizing. I send the recordings to journalists and editors across the world. They reply, eager to take up our cause. I have lawyers from all over calling to see if I want representation in international courts. Mette helps me navigate through most of the legal things. I appreciate her fierceness, how she does not waste time pitying me, how she does not mince her words to spare my feelings. She respects me and expects me to know my situation better than anyone else.

But then the turn comes that I should have foreseen but I did not. Stella comes home one day from the school she is enrolled in, where she is having trouble making friends even though she never had such troubles in the past. She tells me she’s been online for months now, has made social media accounts without my permission. She’s been talking to other kids like her. Refugees, she calls them and herself. I cringe at this. She tells me there is a weekend-long event, in Brussels, for refugee families like ours, from countries that employ memory blockers. That we’ve been invited. She wants to go.

When she is asleep I tell the others. They think it’s a good idea. I think that it’s not something I can do. I cry through the soft Danish bedsheets and pillowcases all night. Forever cushioned in memories and foreign fabrics, never able to return home. Mark lets me grieve but he doesn’t let me refuse Stella. He says Stella and I should go to Brussels. And so I pack. I steady myself. And together, my daughter and I leave to meet more people like us.

---

It is raining in Brussels. It feels like it is always raining everywhere in continental Europe. I don’t understand how people live here without the sun. Stella and I enter an enormous conference space that looks more like a ballroom. It is teeming with people. There is a long table covered in food and drink. We are given name tags and shown where the people from each country have been designated to sit, if we so wish. We stand, a little overwhelmed, not yet moving to our designation. Stella is excited. She can barely stand in one place, pivoting on her toes and then her heels looking for the kids she found on social media.

Someone comes barreling into her shrieking, “Stella!” and tackles her with a big hug. It’s a teenage girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old. She’s wearing a brightly patterned hijab, a long-sleeve shirt, and jeans. “Sara!” Stella shrieks back. They hug and break apart and laugh and cry and hug again. They barely say any words. I can’t help but laugh, too, at their unmarred joy and love. Mark was right that Stella needed this. I can see in her face that she feels like she is allowed to grieve here, with kids her age who understand her. Sara pulls her toward a group of kids who are sitting on the floor yelling joyously at each other and playing games. Stella looks back at me and I nod. I smile. I am, genuinely, happy that she has found this for herself.

Mark said I needed this, too, but I’m not yet convinced. I make my way toward my people. I don’t know who or what to expect there. It seems like many of them already know one another. They are talking, laughing, making jokes. I stand there awkwardly. I see that some of them are reading my name tag. It is only then that I realize that I might be famous. That every one of my people who lives in exile has probably heard the recording of me recounting Defne’s death, as it went viral through the media.

The first person to approach me is a young man, who thanks me. And then his voice cracks. He tells me he lost his parents, didn’t know what had happened to them. That his uncle and aunt who lived abroad sent for him. And that the shock of remembering how his parents died led to him to depression and ideation for years. Hearing my voice, he says, reminded him that he wasn’t alone. We are tied together in the horror of our losses.

I don’t know what to say. I stutter something about not having considered anyone in that moment other than my own selfish anguish but I am glad that it provided him with some solace.

A woman approaches. She is older, hair silvered, carries a weight and confidence to her even though she is shorter than me. There is something about her that is familiar, like home, like an aunt from childhood.

“Ariadne,” she says, as if she’s known me my whole life. She reaches for my face and cups my cheek in her hand. There are rings on her fingers. Gold and silver. I reach my hand up to pull her hand away, to look at it.

“For months now I thought about reaching out,” she says. “And then I saw your name on the list. I thought it might be better in person. To talk about her in person.”

“About Defne,” I say, slowly realizing who this woman might be.

“She was my sister,” says the woman simply.

I feel the sea bursting my heart open. It rushes through me. I hold hands with Defne’s sister. She holds hands with me. Together it feels as though we are holding the sea, and Defne, her life and her death. We hold the place of shifting sands and waters where she would go to remember. We remember for her.