To see where we started and know it for the first time

Rym Ghazal / Single in the city

• Last Updated: November 18. 2009 8:50PM UAE / November 18. 2009 4:50PM GMT

A faded photo of an attractive man in an army uniform winking at the camera as he shows off his pink Cadillac, a fragile and yellowed edition of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace with notes scribbled in the margins, a worn-out pair of children’s ballerina shoes and a child’s suede sack holding 10 heavy gold coins with Pope John Paul II’s face printed upon them. These were just some of the ancestral treasures I dug up over the past year.

A group of us made a pact to revisit our family’s past by going through our family’s things”, and discussing with each other the “hidden treasures” we found along the way.

To understand who you are and where you are going in your own life, it’s essential to follow some of the clues left behind by those in your family who have come before you. It’s even more important when you have family members you have always heard about but never had the chance to meet. Their every item helps you to communicate with them or at least to understand a little better who they were.

One of my friends in the UAE is looking for “that tree” where her grandfather was supposed to have carved his profession of love for her grandmother with a knife just moments after their chance encounter outside a desert village. It seems most of the stories of our families and ancestors, from their courtship to their travels to their battles and living in war zones, are much more colourful and intense than anything in our lives today. OK, so there is a chance stories get romanticised over time. But what is wrong with that?

I have always had a soft spot for antiques and old photos and the stories they tell. The photo I mentioned earlier is of my flamboyant Arab grandfather, who drove to the Syrian-Lebanese border with his recently purchased pink Cadillac convertible to hang out with his comrades. He died before I could meet him, and he is one of those family members that I always identify with, based on the tales I hear of his “adventures”.

Besides being a general, he was always caught doing something out of the ordinary, such as “dancing in the fountain” with my much younger grandmother, playing basketball in the middle of a busy market with boys half his age, and turning every other conversation, sometimes very serious political ones, into a theatrical production of poetry and tap dancing. I found clues into this man’s life in one of his childhood houses – others were destroyed during one of the wars – that helped me understand how he had dared to be different. I now cherish everything I have found of his, from a sketch book to funky Fedora hats, to an old Quran that he would carry with him everywhere and can be seen in that photo inside the pink Cadillac. Through these I am able to know him, if only for a moment.

The Tolstoy book actually belonged to my father, whose childhood bedroom I rummaged through for days when I was able to access a closed-up family home in the mountains. It was delightful to find out that he was as much of a reader and, well, “geek” as I was in my childhood. His favourite books were carefully preserved though they appeared to have been read tens of times. He might not have been a teenager when he marked this as “interesting”: “The progress of humanity, arising from an innumerable multitude of individual wills, is continuous in its motion.”

I found so many things, from boy scout medals to sport trophies to posters of his favourite actress, Raquel Welch, in skimpy outfits. Of course, he was annoyed that I found this, among his other childhood possessions. “These things are private and some of them are painful to see again,” my father told me.

My mother’s childhood items reflect a more gentle nature than my father’s, such as her ballerina shoes, some dried-up floral arrangements carefully stowed away, and dresses she used to sew and dress her dolls in. I also found some of the love letters my parents exchanged, and yes, they were those sentimental floral handwritten types you see in movies. I can’t imagine my very serious father drawing a heart with a pencil. He, of course, denies doing so despite the evidence in my hands – blackmail is another possible benefit of finding your family’s treasures.

Given how we, the new generation, don’t live in the same place anymore, there is less chance of us leaving a mark behind. Every time we move, we lose something as we do so. I know I have packed up boxes of my things in three different continents. My children will have to dig harder and travel further to find any of my hidden treasures. Maybe that will make them all the more valuable.

rghazal@thenational.ae