{"id":17224,"date":"2026-07-31T15:23:05","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T15:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/house-that-kept-archive-of-our-lives\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T15:23:05","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T15:23:05","slug":"house-that-kept-archive-of-our-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/house-that-kept-archive-of-our-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"The House That Kept the Archive of Our Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
I don’t know when I began to think of the house as an archive. Perhaps when we lost it. Before that, the house seemed something self-evident; a place we return to at the end of the day, where we leave our belongings, and inside which we postpone years of our lives without thinking much about what it stores. We did not count the pictures hung on the walls as an archive, nor the books lined up on the shelves, nor the old letters, nor the toys whose owners grew up and forgot them in the drawers. These things were part of the house, and part of daily life, until the day came when we discovered that the house itself had been keeping us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In wars, demolished houses are counted in numbers. The number of floors is written down, the area of the building, the value of the damage. But no one asks about the libraries that burned, nor about the pictures that vanished, nor about the notebooks of adolescence, nor about the small things that have no material value, yet held an entire lifetime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think of our house in Aynata.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My mother told me that the house was a long dream that began years before I was born. When she married, it was no more than a room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. It was very small, but it carried within it what would later become the home of the whole family. My father was a schoolteacher, and his means were limited, but the house kept growing with us year after year. Stone upon stone, roof upon roof, until it grew large enough for a big family that was itself growing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The house grew out of my father’s and mother’s toil. It was not born spacious as we later knew it; rather, years of work, waiting, and deprivation made it. And when it finally became the dream house they had wanted, the wars, the occupation, and travel had begun to scatter its children across the corners of the earth. Sometimes I feel that the house waited for us a long time. And when it grew wide enough for us all, the country grew too narrow for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe photo shows Nour’s house in the town of Aynata before it was shelled<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
And of all that that house kept, I remember my father’s library more than anything else. It contained thousands of books he had gathered over long years: rare books, memoirs, drawings, and inscriptions on stones. From that library my story with words began. I was thirteen when I first came to know Mikhail Naimy, and when I grew attached to “Al-Talasim” (The Riddles) by Elia Abu Madi. I would reach out my hand to my father’s shelves as if reaching toward another world, wider than the house, the village, and the war. There I began to write my first musings in school notebooks, and to dream of becoming a writer, and of one day gathering those little scraps into a book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mikhail Naimy was not, to me, just a name on a book cover. He was a hidden companion standing over my pages, peering out from between my words, giving me a sense that writing could be another home. I never saw him, but I felt my longing for him and for his literature between my notebooks, as if that small library within my father’s library was opening a door for me to myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I also remember my little stones that I carried from many places; from Cyprus, from Dahr al-Baidar, from Italy, and from distant roads. My mother would laugh and ask me why I always came back home with stones, while I saw them as pieces of time itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I remember the empty perfume bottles that I kept for years. The bottles did not matter to me as much as the scents that remained in them. I would open them after many long years and recover a place, a person, or a moment I thought I had forgotten. The house kept all of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\" The bottles did not matter to me as much as the scents that remained in them \"<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
It also kept things older than me: my mother’s dresses, the old calculating machine she carried with her from Kuwait, my father’s radio, the harissa pots that grew old along with us, and the work tools that bore the traces of his hands and his toil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I dreamed of one day gathering these things in a small caf\u00e9 that resembled a museum of memory. A place that would hold the old books, the tools, the pictures, and the belongings whose value no one knows but their owners. But the entire archive vanished all at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As I write now, I feel that I am apologizing to my father more than I am mourning the house. I apologize because we were unable to save his library. Because his books, his memoirs, and his belongings, which he had cared for over long years, turned to ashes. And I apologize because a house that he and my mother built with the patience of a whole lifetime has nothing left of it but what we carry in our memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In another house, my friend Fatima Khanafar was building a different archive. She was not gathering books or stones. She was gathering life itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She kept her wedding dress, a rose from the wedding, and letters written by friends and relatives on the wedding day. She kept photos of her daughter Zeinab month by month since her birth, and the small gifts, and the things that seem ordinary to whoever sees them from the outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everything was preserved in its place. She used to say that the house was not luxurious, but it carried a comfort that resembled its owners. Everyone who enters it feels that it is a real home, not merely a space to live in. But what pains her most today is not what she kept for herself, but what she was keeping for the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the children. For the days that had not yet come. She imagined that she would one day sit with her daughter and open those little boxes for her; the pictures, the letters, and the things that made up her life. Then the house vanished. And she says that her daughter used to ask during the displacement: “Why don’t we sleep in our home like the rest of the people?” A young child’s question that was far bigger than her age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even Hussein, her child who was born in a time of war, later stood before the rubble that he had known only from stories. His father wrote of him that he stood “before the door he never crossed,” as if something of the house’s memory had reached him before he even saw it.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe photo shows Fatima Khanafar’s house after it was bulldozed in the town of Aynata<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
This is how you discover that houses do not keep the memory of those who lived in them only, but also keep the memory of those who were going to come after them. As for Nour Nammar from Aynata, she was something like a guardian of small memories. She sometimes laughs as she talks about herself, then says a sentence that sums up everything: “I am a box.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She kept almost everything: the old toys, the pictures, the school notebooks, the letters, the small bracelets, and the papers that friends leave behind at the end of the school year. She even kept chocolate wrappers if they were tied to a memory she loved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And when she talks about the house, she does not talk about the walls first. She talks about the living room that she turned into her own world. There were the novels, the notebooks, the drawings, the colors, and the poems she had written over long years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She says she would return on every visit to Lebanon to check on the boxes in which she had stored her memories since childhood. She wanted to keep them all. Then come the sentences that recur in her speech in different forms:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I wanted to hand them down to my daughter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To show her where her mother grew up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To give her her old toys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To dress her in some of the things I had kept from her childhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To open the albums and the pictures for her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the house vanished before that could happen.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nour says: “My house did not fall alone; my heart fell with it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then she adds what resembles the conclusion echoed in many homes that lost their archive all at once:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“A new house can be built, the stone can be replaced. But no one can bring back a single picture of a little girl who was once you.. Today I think of the homes we lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of my father and mother’s house, of Fatima’s house.. and of Nour’s house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Three different houses, and three different archives, but the loss is one. For the house is not only the walls that surround us. The house is the place where life quietly accumulates, year after year, without our noticing. And when the house is bulldozed, the stones are not the only thing that vanishes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Part of the memory vanishes with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Part of childhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And part of those we once were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the same question remains suspended over the rubble:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How can the archive of an entire lifetime vanish in a single moment? And how do we preserve our memory when the place that used to preserve it vanishes?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don’t know when I began to think of the house as an archive. Perhaps when we lost it. Before that, the house seemed something self-evident; a place we return to at the end of the day, where we leave our belongings, and inside which we postpone years of our lives without thinking much about what it stores. We did not count the pictures hung on the walls as an archive, nor the books lined up on the shelves, nor the old letters, nor the toys whose owners grew up and forgot them in the drawers. These things were part of the house, and part of daily life, until the day came when we discovered that the house itself had been keeping us. In wars, demolished houses are counted in numbers. The number of floors is written down, the area of the building, the value of the damage. But no one asks about the libraries that burned, nor about the pictures that vanished, nor about the notebooks of adolescence, nor about the small things that have no material value, yet held an entire lifetime. I think of our house in Aynata. My mother told me that the house was a long dream that began years before I was born. When she married, it was no more than a room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. It was very small, but it carried within it what would later become the home of the whole family. My father was a schoolteacher, and his means were limited, but the house kept growing with us year after year. Stone upon stone, roof upon roof, until it grew large enough for a big family that was itself growing. The house grew out of my father’s and mother’s toil. It was not born spacious as we later knew it; rather, years of work, waiting, and deprivation made it. And when it finally became the dream house they had wanted, the wars, the occupation, and travel had begun to scatter its children across the corners of the earth. Sometimes I feel that the house waited for us a long time. And when it grew wide enough for us all, the country grew too narrow for us. And of all that that house kept, I remember my father’s library more than anything else. It contained thousands of books he had gathered over long years: rare books, memoirs, drawings, and inscriptions on stones. From that library my story with words began. I was thirteen when I first came to know Mikhail Naimy, and when I grew attached to “Al-Talasim” (The Riddles) by Elia Abu Madi. I would reach out my hand to my father’s shelves as if reaching toward another world, wider than the house, the village, and the war. There I began to write my first musings in school notebooks, and to dream of becoming a writer, and of one day gathering those little scraps into a book. Mikhail Naimy was not, to me, just a name on a book cover. He was a hidden companion standing over my pages, peering out from between my words, giving me a sense that writing could be another home. I never saw him, but I felt my longing for him and for his literature between my notebooks, as if that small library within my father’s library was opening a door for me to myself. And I also remember my little stones that I carried from many places; from Cyprus, from Dahr al-Baidar, from Italy, and from distant roads. My mother would laugh and ask me why I always came back home with stones, while I saw them as pieces of time itself. And I remember the empty perfume bottles that I kept for years. The bottles did not matter to me as much as the scents that remained in them. I would open them after many long years and recover a place, a person, or a moment I thought I had forgotten. The house kept all of that. ” The bottles did not matter to me as much as the scents that remained in them ” It also kept things older than me: my mother’s dresses, the old calculating machine she carried with her from Kuwait, my father’s radio, the harissa pots that grew old along with us, and the work tools that bore the traces of his hands and his toil. I dreamed of one day gathering these things in a small caf\u00e9 that resembled a museum of memory. A place that would hold the old books, the tools, the pictures, and the belongings whose value no one knows but their owners. But the entire archive vanished all at once. As I write now, I feel that I am apologizing to my father more than I am mourning the house. I apologize because we were unable to save his library. Because his books, his memoirs, and his belongings, which he had cared for over long years, turned to ashes. And I apologize because a house that he and my mother built with the patience of a whole lifetime has nothing left of it but what we carry in our memory. In another house, my friend Fatima Khanafar was building a different archive. She was not gathering books or stones. She was gathering life itself. She kept her wedding dress, a rose from the wedding, and letters written by friends and relatives on the wedding day. She kept photos of her daughter Zeinab month by month since her birth, and the small gifts, and the things that seem ordinary to whoever sees them from the outside. Everything was preserved in its place. She used to say that the house was not luxurious, but it carried a comfort that resembled its owners. Everyone who enters it feels that it is a real home, not merely a space to live in. But what pains her most today is not what she kept for herself, but what she was keeping for the future. For<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":17172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[340],"tags":[422],"class_list":["post-17224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-silat_wassel-en"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":7}},"rttpg_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/11-07.jpg",2048,900,false],"landscape":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/11-07.jpg",2048,900,false],"portraits":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/11-07.jpg",2048,900,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/11-07-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/11-07-300x132.jpg",300,132,true],"large":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/11-07-1024x450.jpg",1024,450,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/11-07-1536x675.jpg",1536,675,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/11-07.jpg",2048,900,false]},"rttpg_author":{"display_name":"\u0632\u064a\u0646\u0628 \u0646\u0645\u0631","author_link":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/author\/zeinab-nemer\/"},"rttpg_comment":0,"rttpg_category":"Blog<\/a>","rttpg_excerpt":"I don’t know when I began to think of the house as an archive. Perhaps when we lost it. Before that, the house seemed something self-evident; a place we return to at the end of the day, where we leave our belongings, and inside which we postpone years of our lives without thinking much about…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17224\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/WhatsApp-Image-2026-07-30-at-3.20.50-PM-1.jpeg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/WhatsApp-Image-2026-07-30-at-3.20.37-PM-576x1024.jpeg\")