In the Garden of Gethsemane, a lamp

The olive oil is my mother-in-law’s idea. She shows up at our door toting a shopping bag overflowing with a housedress, towels and an orange plastic tub. She’s here to give our newborn her first bath⎯despite my repeated objections. 

It’s scorching. Mid-July in desert Kuwait and we haven’t left our apartment since we came home from the hospital. The flat reeks of newborn baby: soured milk, spoiled diapers, unwashed dishes and pure, unadulterated joy. Our infant daughter, Safyre, is a pink-toned, mewling week of days, flakes of afterbirth shedding onto the living room rug. I cannot put her down, cannot sleep or stop thinking about how fragile she seems. At night, she sleeps in a pod wedged between my husband and me. I wake every few hours to feed her or check that she is still breathing. She is life in miniature and I am unsure of everything. Is she getting enough milk? Is she warm enough? Cool enough? Sleeping too much? Peeing enough? Everything is a question mark. I do not trust certainty. Of all things, bathing seems unnecessary at the moment. Surely it can wait until she’s older? But my mother-in-law thinks otherwise. She is a nurse by training and carries the practicality of her profession on her shoulders. She says, It is time, and I’m sent to fill the portable bath with warm water. While I’m gone, she slips into the house dress and arranges a fresh onesie for the baby on the bed. On the floor, she’s splayed a faded green bath mat and plops down upon it, towels and baby wash at the ready. 

“Bring a bottle of olive oil from the kitchen, please,” she asks. 

“What?” I pause, certain I’ve misheard her. 

“Olive oil. It’s beautiful for babies’ skin. I’ll massage her first and then bathe her. She’ll love it.” 

“My daughter is not a salad to be drizzled upon. What are you talking about?” I want to shout but Safyre’s dozing in my arms. 

“Hand me the baby,” my mother-in-law commands. She’s seated on the bathmat, legs stretched out together in front of her. I hesitate. “What do you think? I’ll drop her?” she chuckles. “Jamie darling, don’t worry.”

I want to tell her no. Take my child into another room and close the door. 

But I am alone in this country, in this house. Married to a foreigner, living in a foreign land, navigating several cultures at once and a first-time mom. I do not trust her but neither do I trust my own judgment. I have no idea what I’m doing. 

“Let’s bathe her in the sink,” I suggest. 

But my mother-in-law dismisses this idea with a wave of her hand. She is not a woman to be denied. She takes the baby and undresses her. I go to the kitchen and return with a bottle of my favorite extra virgin. Light and translucent, it sings of green apples and sunshine with a slight peppery edge. The scent makes me hungry for thick Iranian bread, still warm from the kiln, dipped into a shallow bowl of the clear, golden liquid. 

* * *

Olive trees are not flash. They do not sweep in graceful curves like the willow. Nor arch and sway like majestic, statuesque palms. They do not blossom into glorious pink petals like the cherry nor scent the air like the reliable, fragrant evergreen. Olive trees stunt and twist and gnarl. It’s easy to dismiss them, to not even notice the rows and rows of olive orchards when driving around the countryside in places like Greece or Jordan or Turkey. They are unaesthetic, utilitarian. They are the ugly ducklings of trees.

But they are also my favorite story of survival, a story of flourishing. 

Olea europaea are thought to be some of the oldest trees on the planet, with cultivation starting as far back as 6,000 years ago. Today, there are an estimated 865 million olive trees around the world and hundreds of varieties. Most people couldn’t pick one out of a forest, certainly not in the United States. Yet olive trees connect us to the ancients, to our forebears and to the moment when humanity spilled out across the western world. They are legacy. Like the cave paintings in Lascaux, the cuneiform tablets in Sumeria or the stone tools dug up from the Olduvai Gorge, olive oil connects us to our past, our cultural and culinary history. They grow hardy and stubborn, conquering wild, barren landscapes, in climates harsh and unwelcoming⎯fruiting against all odds. 

The green drupe is ripe and fruity, luscious and oily. Perfect mashed and spread on toast or sliced and mixed with salad. The oil itself is light and summery. Drizzled over fresh greens, hummus, focaccia dough, roasted garlic. Edible in a thousand ways⎯dribbled over soups, meat or veggies, mixed with za’atar, dipped with a crust of bread, a cucumber slice, or alone in a clean shallow dish, licked from the tip of your finger.

Olive trees are a gift to humankind. All the monotheistic religions consider the oil from olives sacred and it has long been used in sacraments and confirmations and even in the anointing of kings and queens. In Judaism, the Menorah is lit during Hanukkah with olive oil, the glowing liquid symbolizing light, peace and the inner beauty of the soul. In Islam, the Holy Quran imbues olive trees with blessed powers. 

“Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The example of His light is like a niche within which is a lamp, the lamp is within glass, the glass as if it were a pearly [white] star lit from [the oil of] a blessed olive tree, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil would almost glow even if untouched by fire….” – Surah al-Noor 24:35

In Christianity, chrism rites including confirmations, baptisms and holy orders are performed using perfumed olive oil. The night before his arrest by the Sanhedrin, Jesus himself sought refuge in the lush Garden of Gethsemane. The word gethsemane derives from an Aramaic word, Gaḏ-Šmānê, which means ‘olive press’. Olive trees stand in this garden even today, thousand-year monuments testifying to Biblical history, to the succor they’ve offered humanity for centuries.

Olives as blessing, as grant, as light are one of the few areas where all agree. Even the ancient Greeks wrapped their myths around twisted olive trunks and grew their heroes on their fruity bearings. Athens is named after Athena, daughter of Zeus, because she offered the city an olive tree where her rival, Poseidon offered only water. 

* * *

I silo myself. Erect boundaries impenetrable as a matter of course. I left my own family in the US years ago. I love them still—but at arm’s length. Our childhood consisted of relentless moving from place to place. Nomadic wanderers. A fugitive family. So we grew up destined to grow apart. Isolated. Homeless. Nothing to keep us tethered together. When my father, the source of our wandering, died, we fractured. I traveled the farthest away. Moving to New York City, then Austin, and eventually abroad, to tiny, oil-rich Kuwait. 

With each move, I grew more distant, more self-contained. I embraced my American individualism⎯so revered and practical. I read Emerson, underlined Thoreau and kept myself closed off from others. I worked long hours and on off days, read or slept in or parked myself in seaside coffee shops, notebook and pen, a computer and café latte. Community was something others did. I read. Hemingway and Stein in Paris; Steinbeck in the Salinas Valley and Ginzburg in the UK. I carried Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare onto the plane to Kuwait, certain I wouldn’t find it there, unaware of the irony. 

Kuwait was simply the next stop in my solo adventures. I didn’t plan on staying long, a few years surveying the region and then on to the next thing. Loneliness, I accepted, was the cost of exploring. I sought what I had in childhood, wandering, adventure, travel. But this time I would follow a path of my own making: Kuwait, UAE, Egypt, Lebanon, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan and maybe Saudi Arabia. I’d fallen in love with the Arab world and wanted to walk its streets. 

Enter the cliché. My life becomes a love story when all this time I thought it a travelogue. I meet a guy. Brown eyes and gentle hands. A heart generous and giving. Voice rich and deep but also soft and caressing. What would this mean? Could I stay in Kuwait? Build a life here? Marriage seemed more alien than the arid desert, the sandy coastline, the Arab culture I’d come to investigate. Marriage meant settling down, intertwining, an entangling of his blood with mine. American woman, awkward, a loner. His Indian family. I didn’t understand why he told them everything. I didn’t understand chapati, jani, his mother’s rhythmic English, her questioning of me.

From the beginning, his family interacted and connected in ways I couldn’t decipher. Enoch Robinson in Winesburgh, Ohio, “dismissed the essence of things and played with the realities.” I dismissed the daily calls of mother-son-sister-brother, focusing instead on the disagreements. I dismissed love in favor of quiet. They consulted each other. Family WhatsApp chats. Shared jokes and stories. I wasn’t ready for sharing and opening what I had closed off. I wasn’t eager for in-laws or their involvement in our life, in our choices, with our baby. 

* * *

My mother-in-law towers for an Indian woman, almost regal in her bearing and wears her long, dark hair braided and slung over her left shoulder. I watch as she rests my daughter’s head against her knobby knees. This is a woman I barely know, who let’s face it, I’ve resisted knowing. Yet at this moment, she seems like a goddess to me. Demeter anointing Persephone with life-giving ambrosia. She sits straight, her legs forming a platform, and lays my naked child facedown and lengthwise, along her thighs. Naked hands, naked skin. Skin-to-skin. Life-to-life. We are women, all in a line, from the first mitochondrial Eve until this baby girl splayed across her grandmother’s lap. 

I almost cry; it hurts so much to see someone else tending my child.

* * *

In the Rahmi Koç Museum in Istanbul, we find the model of a classic olive press tucked into a large room at the back, behind the Harry Potter car, bicycles, tricycles and a penny-farthing. A series of photographs and placards explain the process step by step: a generator set up to power the machine; long thick wires run a circuit around a turntable that stirs the olives in a giant green bucket; two massive millstones suspended from a mechanical arm hover above and when turned, crush the ripe drupe of the olive to a pulp; a spout at the bottom allows the oil to drain; clear glass jars are positioned beneath to collect the thick liquid. 

The exhibit acknowledges one of the most important of humanity’s innovations: extracting life and sustenance from nature. Farming civilized us. Or at least it should have. Could have. Farming ended roving bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers and created the conditions for communities. There is an understanding between plants and us, between cultivation and civilization, between surviving and thriving. We need each other – plants and humans – intimately. 

Olive trees are central to that pact. 

Modern olive oil contains about 120 calories per tablespoon. The omega fat in olive oil added a substantial heft to the ancients’ diets, sustaining entire civilizations through famine and drought, through wars and plagues. We flourished, in part, thanks to the olive. Our cultures, our religions, our entire history (or at least that of the Western and western Asian worlds) is knotted up with the hardwood trunk and silver-green leaves of the stunted olive tree. We are interconnected, complex communities in great part due to farming, to cultivation of plants like the unpretentious olive tree. 

* * *

Community means connection in a way I’ve never known until coming to Kuwait. The Arab Gulf is a multicultural miasma of mostly Arabs and Asians with smaller populations of Africans, Americans, Australians, Europeans and other nationalities. But it is no melting pot. Most communities are separate and divided along national lines. Within each group, however, is a deference for and dedication to family ties that seems unusual, even quaint to an American like me. Families in Kuwait are large, extended, tightly interconnected and critical to survival. Consanguineous marriage remains common and even among expatriates, extended families often live in multigenerational homes, run multigenerational family-owned businesses and gather frequently to reaffirm bonds and share news, successes and failures. 

Such gatherings center around food and in Kuwait, the food is multicultural too. Kuwait’s cuisine, for instance, borrows extensively from Indian cuisine with the two most popular meat and rice dishes—machboos and biryani—sharing several similarities. Another ubiquitous menu item is hummus, a popular Levantine and North African appetizer made of mashed chickpeas, tahini, garlic, lemon and the ubiquitous olive oil. For breakfast, my Indian husband swamps his hummus with extra virgin olive oil and scoops it up with quboos, the local Arabic flatbread popular in Kuwait. Our children will learn to do the same. 

* * *

My mother-in-law has lived a long and often hard-fought life. She came to Kuwait in 1972 from India and has lived her entire adult life in this Arab country. She worked in Kuwait’s hospitals both before and after the Iraqi invasion, has seen horrors unspeakable and kindnesses unbelievable. She tells us none of her stories. 

Instead her long fingers strip my daughter naked as she whispers in a mixture of Konkani, Kannada, and the street language of Mangalore known as Tulu. I have no idea what she’s saying but her soft voice and the confidence with which she holds my daughter relaxes me. Soft afternoon light slants into the room from the single window. It streaks across the tile floor, creating a path of tranquility from my mother-in-law to my daughter to me and for a moment, I feel the connection. Her blood is my blood, her life entwined with mine and she bulldozes along in her duty caring for us, whether I welcome the ministrations or not. Earlier in the week she’d offered to massage me as well, showing up with six massive jars of dark, viscous olive oils with various infusions of herbs and spices, all meant for a ‘new mother’s body’. I politely declined, horrified by the idea of such intimacy.

On her grandmother’s lap, my daughter coos, her eyes shining and luminescent, reflected in the gleaming olive oil on her skin. She smiles that soft baby smile and my heart melts. My mother-in-law gentles the oil into her skin, using the palm of her hand to knead the warmed drops up and down chubby arms and legs, across her tiny back. She even massages the oil into the thick clump of Safyre’s dark hair, thumbing the oil into her temples and miniature ear lobes. Her fingers whorl across newborn skin, releasing the tension and stress surely accumulated in her first week of life. With each motion, the tension drains from me. I lean against my husband’s shoulders, my breathing slows. He takes my hand. 

There is a familiarity to this scene and I’m transported to my own childhood, to the quiet afternoons when my mother bathed my younger siblings in the bathroom sink, me standing by, towel and onesie at the ready. Sudden tears come and I’m embarrassed, warmed by the sun and deeply relieved. I realize now, my mother-in-law has come to rescue me.

She reaches again for the bottle of olive oil and pours a coin-sized dollop into her palm and then rubs her hands together until it warms. The sweet fragrance fills the room. She tenderly repeats the head-to-toe massage, palpating in smooth circles the muscles of Safyre’s back, legs and arms and even the soft pads of her tiny toes.

My daughter won’t remember this massage, the loving pressure of her grandmother’s hands stroking her naked back. She won’t recall the soothing scent of the olive oil or the warm bath that follows. But she will carry with her now and hopefully always, a piece of the serenity of this moment, the connection to her grandmother, to me, and to all of humanity. 

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Scrappy olive trees struggle for survival on the roadside and in the parks. Even in tough, semi-arid Kuwait, olive trees thrive. Few bear fruit. This is possibly due to a lack of fresh water and the 124F+ summer heat. Or maybe because most are species elaeagnus angustifolia, wild olive trees imported from Russia, which don’t fruit as easily. Their silverberry leaves and aromatic flowers flitter all over Kuwait and are thought to symbolize healing, peace and fertility. 

Olive trees remind me of a community of women, working together in spirited determination and against the odds, enduring, thriving, creating kinship and cooperation and family. Creating hope for the future—all things I didn’t realize I had been looking for and needed. 

There is one at the end of the road by my house. In August, I carry bottles of water and pour it over the roots in the dark of night. I don’t know if what I’m doing helps or makes any difference at all. Perhaps the olive tree would survive regardless. Still I think of this as my responsibility, some small way of contributing to the survival of future generations. Olive trees may also one day carry us forward into our future, surviving even the worst of a changing world, global warming and humanity’s still irresponsible exploitation of the earth. Where other plants and vegetation perish, where soils deplenish and populations starve, olive trees feed the flame of hope and survival. Fat and forest, satisfaction and someday. 

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