We have literally moved more times than my twenty-five years. Wrapping fragile china in newspapers and the anxiety of moving house are as familiar as the cool openness of airports. We’re a family that is never far from packing tape and boxes. Which, though an unsettling way to grow up, gave me the advantage of having lived for years in my country of origin, experiencing Ramadan amidst the hustle and bustle of a large extended family, and getting acquainted with the Ramadan siesta, sleeping the afternoons away on mattresses with the wooden shutters closed except for a chink allowing a single ray of sunlight into the room. My family went through this cycle of immigration, living abroad, and returning – and then we repeated it. This year, many grandmothers will stop asking that question, as families and friends we have known over the years are returning in a homeward bound wave to Libya after over two decades abroad, planning on building their lives there now that Gaddafi is gone. Along with my glass of tea and almonds, I would get the chiding question: ”When are you all coming home?” This was the wisdom offered by elderly women, full of life and wrinkles, who commandeered the tea ceremony in my grandmother’s home. Otherwise, we have been living “barra” as people say in Libya – abroad, in the diaspora, or, to translate barra literally, “outside.” There is a proverb I heard constantly growing up: “Ya bani fi gheir bladak, la leik wa la li awladak” – you who builds in a country not your own, it is not yours and it won’t be for your children. So far in my life, I’ve lived in two countries in the Arab world where Ramadan announces itself with neon lights, empty streets at sunset and everyone staying up till dawn. They proved irresistible, the perfect suhur snack. One night though, I discovered a bowl of freshly-picked smultron in the fridge – smultron being the tiny wild strawberries that grow everywhere in Sweden and abundantly in our garden. That is hardly enough time to fit in two meals, so I tend to skip the “Scamble for Suhur,” which occurs at about 2 am in our home. Where we live, there were about four hours of night on the first day of Ramadan. Though the summer is short, the days are long: in the north, the sun never sets. But even I will admit summers here are special, as everything seems to burst into exuberant life, Mother Nature in a hurry to her work done before the cold weather returns. This is something that tends to make people question my sanity. I like the long dark winter months in Sweden. Nothing says summer in Sweden like smultron.
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