Hikayat al Bahr

My family is indebted to the Sea. Bound to her.

My great-grandfather, Ahmed Mousa Albahri, was born in a small, ancient Canaanite fishing village 24 kilometers south of Haifa called Tantura, Palestine, during the rule of the Ottoman Empire—a village perched over the sea, elevated on a low limestone hill overlooking two small bays and four lush, teardrop-shaped islands: Fallutiyeh, Shaddadieh, Iamar, and Hamam nestled in a sleepy turquoise lagoon.

Beneath the shallow surface, fresh water springs bubble forth through the saltwater. It is there that a groom’s ceremonial bath takes place in preparation for his wedding day. His family and friends lead him into the water, sing to him, and bathe him. The sea is the medium of transformation for our men, carrying them from boyhood into manhood—a liminal element that decides fate and passage. Any man who drowns and survives to tell his children is a man chosen for a great destiny. His lungs are kissed by salt, purified, and he breathes a new life, born from the great womb of the Mediterranean, our first mother. Now he is blessed with two mothers who watch over him. 

My great-great-grandfather Musa and his brother Issa were skilled fishermen. The people of Tantura gifted our family the name Albahri, and they became known as the Albahri brothers who fished the seas. Musa married Mariam in Tantura, and together they were blessed with three daughters—Sabina, Thuljah, and Manwah—and one son, Ahmed.

My great-grandfather Ahmed grew up swimming with his friends between the islands while his father fished nearby. I grew up listening to their stories—great tales told by my father and uncles, men who revered them and their resilience. I call these oral narrations Hikayat al Bahr: the stories passed down by the men in my family, brined with joy, redemption, transformation, and survival. Through generations, we have inherited, upheld, and proudly passed on our fishing traditions. 

One tale is told more than any other at our table. 

It is the story of the day Jiddo Ahmed, swimming with his friends near the islands, encountered a great rusted-orange octopus. She entangled her long tentacles around his boyish body, latching her suckers into his skin, fusing them together as one. She submerged him beneath the waves and pulled him down like an anchor. My father describes her as massive and powerful, a highly intelligent being that roamed the Mediterranean, a skilled hunter, and a protective mother. 

Jiddo Ahmed’s friends managed to drag his limp, lifeless body back toward the shore, she still attached to him. The boys struggled under the weight of both bodies, fighting to keep his head above water. Villagers ran towards the shore and attempted to separate him from her grasp, but she held on relentlessly until they were forced to pour boiling water over them both. Only then did she finally release him and retreat back into the sea.

For our people, this was not an accident but written. 

The Canaanites believed in the ancient god Yamm, who represents chaos—an untamed natural force that can give and take life and demands submission. Palestinian fishermen know this law well. The only force I have seen my father bow to, and he is indeed a proud Sayad (fishermen). We love and revere the sea deeply, and with that love comes fear—fear of her untamed beauty and her power to pull us under. As proud as we are, we respect this great force that humbles us and reminds us of our fragile mortality.

Jiddo Ahmed lay unconscious and was pronounced deceased by the people of Tantura. The Sheikh of Tantura, a man from Beit Hindi who became his mentor and father figure after the Spanish Flu of 1918 that made him an orphan and wiped out his family, prepared his janazah. They cleansed his skin, wrapped him in white gauze, and prepared to bury him in the cemetery alongside his parents and three sisters.

My father tells me that Jiddo Ahmed miraculously opened his eyes moments before his burial and rose from the dead.

Had he been buried that day, our family line would have been forever severed. Ahmed was the last surviving member of his family after the pandemic that swept through Palestine.

It was the sea that took his life and returned it to him, rebirthing him from a mere boy into a young man. 

It was the same sea that later swept him away from the port of Haifa during the Nakba in 1948, harboring him for a lifetime in exile. He was violently ethnically cleansed from his land and driven into the sea at gunpoint by the Haganah alongside his wife, Fatima, and their four children. My grandfather Mousa, who was seventeen at the time, would later tell us that their boat was one of the last to leave Haifa. That night, a brutal storm brewed over the Mediterranean and capsized their lives. The mother was merciful enough to deliver him to Cyprus.

Years later, it was again the sea that carried my grandfather Mousa Albahri from Lebanon to Qatar on a labor boat named Jumanah, a name he would later gift to my elder sister, meaning silver pearl of the sea—a name later desecrated and taken from her in her youth by fanatic Zionists after she refused to condemn the resistance in a public forum at her university. 

If you sit at the Albahri table on a sweltering summer evening, after a long day under the sun that has blushed and stained our cheeks red, you will find batata hara doused in garlic, olive oil, and green chilies, fried fresh-caught fish, drenched in tenderly squeezed hamud, and a bowl of coarse sea salt that my father and I bicker over.

“Ya Amani! Where is the salt?” as he points his large Poseidon finger to the corner of his placemat where it disappeared from his sight. 

We pinch it, grind it between our fingers, and sprinkle it over our lives, supplementing our exile from the shores of Tantura—our beloved home, our throne. 

I watch my two-year-old nephew Kenaan lean over the table and pinch the shards of salt between his fingers, press them to his lips, and glance up at me cheekily, his great blue-green swells for eyes. His iconic bahri ears peek out from his curly waves, and he gives out a giggle and glances around the corner with his big eyes to see if his mother is watching. He peers back at me, and pinches a second breath of sea to his lips…his only inheritance.

“Walahhhh…you are a barhi boy arent youuu”, I whisper as I pinch his dimpled cheeky little face and press my forehead against his as we dissolve and fizzle into sea foam that bubbles and that pops against our laughter.