Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian lawyer and writer of fiction who lives in London. She is the author of the novel Out of It and the editor of We Wrote In Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers.
"Under the Aqueduct" was written following a commission from the curator and writer Akeem Balogun. I met Akeem at a Society of Authors prize-giving event in London in June 2022. He had won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2021 for The Storm, a short story collection, and I was there as a judge of the McKitterick Prize for best first novel by a writer over 40. Akeem became interested in my writing and read all of my short stories, both published and unpublished, as well as my novel, Out of It, and my anthology, We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers. He asked me to write a short piece to be read together with music and animation for the Off the Shelf literary festival in Sheffield that he curated with young creatives: DJs, musicians and animators. My piece was pared with narration by artists Rider Shafique and Georgia Williams and the musician Utah?, with animations by the projectionist Zaron. The final result was a compilation of interpretations other than my own, which transformed and, to my mind, elevated the piece.
Sheffield is famous for its steel and iron industry. The name of the city is still imprinted on many of the drain covers across the Arab world. I recall seeing it in Cairo, Bahrain and Kuwait. I expect there are Sheffield drain covers in Palestine too, but it is a long time since I have been able to visit. The name of the city served as a prompt for the story. The other details for the story come from reports I had been reading on digital surveillance, especially on Israel's Pegasus spyware, along with the confinement of Palestinians, the wall, hunger strikes in prisons, administrative detention and all the other elements of Palestinian realities under illegal Israeli occupation.
Listen to "Under the Aqueduct":
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The simplest way of describing it would be to say that I keep my husband in a box. It is not really a box, more of a cubic pit-like cupboard in the floor. It has a square metal drain cover, which says 'AQUEDUCT' because that is the name of the company who made it. There is a picture of a bridge with three layers of arches, like the Roman one by our coast. Apparently, these covers were made in a town in a valley like this one, except that valley is wet and this one dry. That town no longer has steel, but it is in a better state than ours, that's for sure. They have men for a start.
You'll find these covers everywhere if you look. Glinting grey silver with the large Latin letters AQUEDUCT. The globe is studded with them. The Colonials brought them together with rail tracks, clocktowers and the like. I'm talking here about the beginning of the last century, after the Ottomans, but before the Occupation and the Eye. These are the main historical phases you need to know. Not that we are allowed to talk about them, let alone teach them. They took away our pencils after they closed down the internet.
A justification the Colonizers used for coming here was that they were civilizing our people and our drains. The truth is they were giving away our country, but some of us were too impressed by the other stuff to notice in time. The enemy took over our houses, our lands, our limestone paving stones, our horses and our train stations, leaving us with nothing but door keys and dusty feet.
Here in the valley, when we used to visit the other towns of our people to buy, say lemons or coriander, or sweets, back then we used to call the enemy 'The Occupation Forces.' Now we just say 'The Eye' because there are no people; no forces that we can see—just lenses on drones and walls, in cameras, at the gates, on the hill tops.
They data-rize us 24/7 you see. There are banks of screens in rooms where staff of the enemy, people who can swim in the sea at weekends and ski in the Alps on holiday, watch us as they sip coffee. To them, we are moving data subjects. The Eye feeds them all of us without them even having to move. Sometimes they think about restricting their own personal calorific intake or exercising more. They have sedentary existences now, these army-trained men.
The Eye turns the valley into an X ray show; to them we're the puppets of the Mexican Day of the Dead. Our bones all jangling around like a monochrome Frida Kahlo canvas. Every once in a while they take steps to stop us from moving around as much—shoot a couple of us down in the street for no reason etcetera. You've heard of these stories. They're not reported on much anymore, but they're still happen every now and again.
And reproduction. They hate that. Obviously hard without men, but we're a people who can hunger strike longer and squirrel sperm better than any other. We're known to have attached sperm to the feet of birds and carried it out of the prisons.
But these X-rays, they've changed us women, altered our attitude to our bodies. No one gets changed in the dark, or closes the curtains anymore.
There are also—and I will get off the subject soon, but this could be an unfamiliar phenomenon to you perhaps—body sensors that scan the buildings—they pick up on heat and download our bios from our warmth. I say this just as background as to why my husband has had to be down there under the Aqueduct. It wasn't like a lifestyle choice you know.
The enemy took over our houses, our lands, our limestone paving stones, our horses and our train stations, leaving us with nothing but door keys and dusty feet.
- Selma Dabbagh
We lined his box before he went in it. It's covered in a fabric that is part natural, part synthetic. We were trying to emulate an asbestos mesh, but without books or computers, it was a bungled, haphazard improvisation. The end result—which I must say has served us well this past couple of years—is woven of wools and flax with pins buried deep so that they don't scratch him. Don't laugh but we thought his body heat would spread through the pins and look less like a body and more like a water tank, for example. Whenever I find a scrap of fabric, particularly a soft one—a Lyocell or an old cotton—I get to work weaving another layer. He says soon there'll be no space for him to move down there. He'll be all padded out.
There is no point getting antsy about all the big picture political stuff. I've seen agitation destroy more people than I care to mention. I'm more interested in talking about my husband, if you don't mind.
I was boastful when I married him. That has to be said. The evil eye was most displeased. I ululated with old women and danced with the young men; knees high—my feet flying around with my hair.
But you should've seen him back then. Now he is pale and his skin is clammy and soft from being in the dark, but ya-aa was he something. Fine. He was fine. To start with his hands are broad and his fingers are perfectly proportioned; too short to be a concert pianist, too long for a blacksmith. His nose goes back to the Greeks, or the Phoenicians, or maybe our leader of independence, the Kurd Salah ed Din, or the Canaanites or Egyptians?
The point is he was fine, fine. He still is. It is just that we can't risk him coming out and the last time I tried to join him down there, the pins tore at our backs, the lining came down and we both got too panicked. How can a man perform in a situation like that?
They carried out the engagement in the spring when the men were out and about in town. Back then, he used to have such a way about him. His walk. There were still some men left, many were in prison or working on the lands and factories beyond the wall, but none came close to him. How I loved watching him stride through our crowded city thinking he is mine, that body is mine, that mind is mine, those lips, those arms. I didn't like the other women admiring. I get insecure. Who wouldn't be with such a man and when there were so few? I even willed the women to become lovers with each other so they would keep their eyes off my husband.
But you can't alter other people's desires, no matter how powerful you are. It's only the Eye who doesn't know that.
Those days, even though the occupation was on, it wasn't as cold, as cruel as it is now and we were confident that we were about to overthrow that way of subsisting. I would wake up and think, 'but he is mine and this house is mine and who could ever want anything more?' We'd spend most of our nights trying to find different ways of keeping as much of our skin connected as possible. No one approved of how happy I was, but who was I to care when I had the rest of my life with him?
Sweat and smells and the ends of fingers and tongues and juices and hair. Those were good nights. Eternal, ancient, holy, rich, fertile, breathless.
He could be the only one left now, but if there were others, how would I know? We have learnt to keep secrets even from each other.
That is what I tell him when he asks, that there might be other men in the valley somewhere. It keeps his spirits up. Hope is as important down there as food, water, stories.
I do tease him that he's old fashioned like that, only seeing the future and change as coming from men. I tell him he is like our enemy, thinking that because men made this mess, only they can solve it. That if you remove the men, you remove the danger. He says, so solve it then, my wife, my love, my heart, my soul. Get us out of this mess.
But when it comes to the day to day, I should say that I know him so well now, that I just need to lift the cover, to feel what kind of a mood he'll be in. If he pretends he hasn't noticed that I've lifted the lid, then I know that the solitude has eaten at him and he'll start criticizing everything about me; my hairstyle, my clothes, the state of the potted plants, the dirt on the window panes. It's only natural that he gets jealous. I have a space he can only dream of now. A whole room with a window and a bed I can be horizontal on. It's too much for him to see these things that he can't get out of that pit to explore.
But if he looks up at me as the lid comes off, I know we're going to be okay. His face will glow up at me he will announce: 'Anarchy is Shorthand for an Eternal Now! It's Our Chance to Restart the Clock. Let's do it, shall we?'
And then I know our time together will be a blissful one where we breed our future together through the touch of our fingertips.
© Selma Dabbagh 2022
