Clotheslines

Khalil AbuSharekh

In our household, clotheslines were a constant source of conflict. Sometimes, my mom asked me to fix them and make them more organized. Other times, they stirred up arguments with my father, leading him to take out his frustration on us, often ending in a beating.

It took me years to understand that my mother’s obsession with the clotheslines wasn’t just about tidiness. It was her way of pushing back against the chaos of our home in the Beach Camp. And why would she love that house?

It was a one-story structure built from random, uneven walls. It shared one of these thin walls—barely twenty centimeters thick—with the neighbors. We were so close to them that we could be part of their casual conversations, and they could join ours from behind the wall.

The rooftop was a patchwork of metal sheets, later replaced with asbestos, a so-called improvement over the metal. In summer, the roof trapped unbearable heat, and in winter, it might as well have not been there at all. Yet, I loved it. In winter, the sound of raindrops on the metal roof created a symphony. It was even fun predicting where the leaks would appear each time it rained. I always seemed to forget by the time the next winter came, scrambling to place buckets under the dripping spots as if I were playing a game with god. If water leaked onto the TV, I moved it. If it leaked onto my bed, well, there was no bed. Just a mattress. I’d carry it to a dry spot between two or three buckets.

February turned the rooftop into a stage. That was mating season for the neighborhood cats, and the males fought for dominance. What was once a symphony of rain became a horror soundtrack of growls and screeches against the backdrop of poorly painted, zigzagging white asbestos sheets.

But in summer, the house transformed. We had a small yard in the middle of the house, an open space where the sky became our roof. This yard was our living room, filled with the refreshing, salty Mediterranean breeze. On long summer nights, we sat under the stars, surrounded by worn-out windows and doors that seemed tired after standing there for decades.

My mother never blamed anyone for our circumstances. But this house was built the way her mother-in-law, Yousra, wanted it, a fragmented memory of the home Yousra had left behind in Majdal. A collective memory compressed into a tent in a refugee camp. My mother was born in the camp and had no idea what a home should look or feel like. She was simply tired. Tired of the sand in the middle of the house, tired of decaying alongside those old doors and windows in that miserable-looking place.

All she wanted was for the clotheslines near the front door to look neat and organized. For her, they were small things she could control. Like the front door, which gave guests their first impression of our home.

In 1999, we demolished the old house and started building a new one. A concrete structure with storefronts on the street level and an apartment above. We only had a fraction of the money needed, but we borrowed, took loans, and built the bare bones of a house. A concrete floor with a concrete rooftop. It was a dream come true for my mom.

I didn’t understand why everything was built the way it was, but it wasn’t my place to ask questions, especially since my grandmother was no longer there to defend her house.

We had no doors or windows. In winter, we covered the empty window frames with plastic sheets to keep from freezing in our new concrete house. Paint colors were a distant thought; there were just rough brick walls, no tiles, raw concrete everywhere my eyes landed.

From 1999 onward, little by little, we installed windows, painted walls, and tiled floors. By 2004, we installed the last door for the last room.

During those five years, my mother never once mentioned the clotheslines. She didn’t ask me, my father, or any of my brothers to install them. The ones she put up herself were ugly and disorganized, sagging low and tangled. Yet I never heard her complain. She seemed content, quietly doing the laundry and hanging clothes on those worn-out, messy lines.

Every few years, she managed to convince one of my brothers to add another story, each building their own apartment, until the house grew into a four-story building.

Then, my sister sent me pictures of the house, shattered into fragments of concrete. When I saw the house reduced to rubble, I felt something I never expected: relief.

I hope my mother never reads these words. I know how much they would hurt her. But my feeling was a reaction to the constant, unsettling sense that what happened to us was never normal to begin with. Building a modern, cold-looking house was just a way of normalizing the deformed, temporary life of the camp. Normalizing the shattering and compression of our identities and histories.

We built a proper, structured house, but I felt we were fractured on the inside. I wanted to salvage my interior first, before covering things up with a façade of lofty, soulless concrete. Yet this story is not about me. This story is about my mother’s clotheslines.

I called her recently, and she was elated because a ceasefire seemed within reach. I was happy because she was happy. I asked her if she had considered moving back to stay with me in Houston or with one of my brothers in Belgium. She told me many things had bothered her in the first build, and now she was returning to fix those issues in the new one. She spoke about the things she didn’t like in my house and the things she did, including the big open space with big windows. But she would prefer privacy, the dishwasher, a laundry room, and a larger living room with fewer bedrooms.

Then she said, “If you want to get me a present for the new house, buy me a dryer.”