I am rooted, but  I flow.
Virginia Woolf, the Waves. 

I should have gone, too, and stayed a nomad, once and forever, until … Now, maybe it’s too late. Deserts are made to be crossed, not to be buried in. scrutinizing the infinite has never made it move. The infinite does not come to you. you have to go to it to save yourself. Otherwise, it roots you where you are and suffocates you.
Malika Mokeddem, The Forbidden Woman. 

All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit in with the world of my parents and four sisters. Whether this was because I constantly misread my part or because of some deep flaw in my being I could not tell for most of my early life. 
Edward Said.

I am always writing with an accent.
Rosi Braidotti, Writing as a Nomadic Subject. 

Growing up away from my grandparents’ house meant driving a total of eight hours every weekend to visit. My father drove the same stretch of rural highway so many thousands of times you stop seeing it: kilometer markers and exit signs, signs that declare we are in the territory of roaming camels, the constant appearance of radio antennas yawning in and out of heat fogs. The scenery becomes more desolate; a dramatic change as we journey from lush green landscape to vast expanses of sand and rocky outcrops. Going through the dusty gravel road nauseated me. I preferred to lie down in the car, sandwiched between my brother and my sister. Eyes on the partially rolled down window, observing the change in the once-brilliant blue sky that is now taking a yellowish tint as dust and sand particles become suspended in the air.

My grandparent’s house was always filled with people. Not just my father and his seven siblings, each with their spouses and collection of children, but also people unrelated to us, visitors, my uncles’ friends and their kids. I always thought how interesting it is that I am related to this many people I hardly know at all. I couldn’t name all of my cousins even if I tried.

Three things excited me most when at my grandparents’: baby goats, grandmother’s stories, and the rugs she made, or rather the way she made them. My grandmother loved to make her own rugs. A special ritual unfolded each time she prepared to embark on the traditional art of rug-making. My grandmother is a revered matriarch, and her rituals were steeped in tradition. She would rise before the sun on the morning of rug creation, her room, adorned with colorful textiles and intricate tapestries, felt like a sanctuary of Algerian culture. The air was heavy with the scent of incense and the faint aroma of brewed mint tea.

 My grandma’s oversized beige dress, worn out and cherished, was a central element of her ritual. The dress was filled with little black flowery patterns, each one a statement to the countless hours spent crafting rugs and blankets for her children. The fabric had been kissed by the desert winds, sun-bleached, softened by years of use. It was special to her, you can feel it. she believed the dress held a piece of her ancestors, the generation of women who had come before her, and wearing it was like inviting them to join her in her creative journey.

Her materials are in front of her. She had a vision for the rug that would blend the vibrant colors of the desert and the intricate patterns she learned over the years. She started with a blank canvas –a sturdy loom made of wood and iron. This loom was a faithful companion of hers, standing in her humble house like an old friend. Talking to her behind bars of fiber felt like talking with a sacred person. She carefully selected the wool for her rug. The wool was rich and varied in color, from earthly browns to deep reds and vibrant blues. With a practiced hand, she spun the wool into long, thin threads, ensuring they were of uniform thickness. This would be the foundation of her rug. As she worked, the rhythm of her spinning wheel was like a heartbeat, a steady and comforting presence in her small workshop. She attached the threads to the top and bottom beams, creating a taut horizontal canvas. The loom resembled an intricate web, a structure that would hold her design. She started with boarders, carefully knotting each thread into place, working row by row. One knot at a time, her fingers danced with precision. Where the lines and shapes start and end are based solely on instinct, a knowledge given to her by her mother and grandmother. The colors blended harmoniously as the patterns told stories of her past, of all the places she had been and the people she had met. The desert winds and the brilliant Algerian sun all found their place in her rug. I observed her carefully, diligently, silently.

Grandmother’s popular stories revolved around the time they were nomads, Granddad and her, moving from one place to another, riding across the desert, traveling with herds of cattle and goats. As she wove, she would begin to share her stories, tales passed down through generations, a living tapestry of her people’s history and culture. Her voice was a melodic river, carrying with it the wisdom that came from a lifetime of experience. With every knot she tied, and every stitch she made, her words flowed like poetry, filling the room with a sense of wonder.

But my questions seem to interrupt this state of being, bringing her back, with every word I utter, to a reality she doesn’t seem to accept or like. “If you moved around so often, then where are we from? What is our origin?” I asked Grandmother. This question rubbed her the wrong way, touched a nerve deep within her heart. As my words hung in the air, her face tightened, and her eyes flashed with fury. With a voice that quivered with both anger and sorrow, she replied: “child, our origins are woven into the very fabric of this desert. We are the children of sand and wind, born from the ancient tribes that have roamed dunes for generations beyond counting, our roots run deep, deeper than the wells we dig, our heritage is etched in the lines of our hands and our stories are whispered in the desert’s silence. We don’t belong to a specific place, that’s selfish, we belong to the very essence of movement and adaptation. We don’t possess the land, it possesses us. It cradles us in its ever-changing embrace, and we, in turn, become part of it, part of its grains of sand that shift and scatter with the wind.”

At that time, her answer didn’t make any sense to me. I couldn’t decide if I felt sad or angry or confused. Why my friends could talk about their genealogy, how they can trace their family tree back to many generations, why they have written records of their ancestors and I don’t. I can’t do that because there are no written records dating back to even one generation. Everything is carried orally, which seems to fade away with time. Is this the result of being born to a people whose culture isn’t obsessed with writing? That is the most nonsensical bullshit of an answer. I know it is the result of belonging to a people ravaged by colonialism where the French kept a record of themselves in the exotic Sahara to entertain their white souls, destroying records and distorting the image of a people who refuse to stay in any community. The whole thing made me want to scream and cry but I don’t want her to notice. I bite the inside of my cheek instead.

The visits to my grandparents diminished over the years, but not my interest in knowing my origins, where I belonged. The image of my grandmother making rugs gilded my memory like those patterns she made on those rugs. Her words haunted me and I don’t know why I became fixated on the idea of a boarded home, a physical, non-changeable place one can return to. I subscribed to the literature of homelessness and exile and belonging, but nothing seemed to figure out my thorny state of unbelonging. On the contrary, it made it worse. Nomadism, the thing I have been intentionally avoiding, runs in my blood. Nomadism is not a symptom of psychic displacement as experienced by the exiled and migrant subjects who chose a place and made it their home. Nomads distribute themselves across open space, rather than dividing up land for settlement purposes. It runs in my blood.

As a granddaughter of nomads, belonging and home, slipped away from me and refused to anchor because they are anchored to nothing. What is home then? Do I carry a map inside myself to guide me home or is home itself carried within me? I looked for home, for belonging in other places, people, and feelings yet it persistently perpetuated the illusion of the return. Where to go? My grandmother did not suffer from homelessness. She suffered from the attachment to a single land. My questions brought her to this reality, interrupting her time-travel through rug-making to other worlds, border-less frontier. She assigned each fiber with a story and tucked it carefully, creating a mosaic of life’s experiences, a richly textured Bedouin carpet carefully hand-sewn with the fine threads of memory.

Why can’t I be like grandmother? Why am I resisting my faith? Belonging is not in my blood… My mother says I tend to overcomplicate things. Maybe I do. Maybe that’s why I change my home décor so often. Seeing the sofa in the same place makes me anxious. Are these concepts that I cling to so much nothing but mere fictions that one can construct and deconstruct? The idea seemed appealing. Soothing. It became more appealing when I read the works of the Algerian writer Malika Mokeddem.

Malika is one of those writers whose characters struggle to find a place in new surroundings and can’t readjust to their original place. Most of her female characters share the same pattern: a crisis that arises from a detachment that they have to maintain between themselves and their place of origin, the motherland. Besides their nomadic characters and imagery, Mokeddem’s novels demonstrate a language usage that is a kind of “nomadism or journey into language”. Through this journey into language, she pays homage to her nomadic ancestors by which she means a continuity of history and community invoked in the storytelling tradition of her ancestors who kept their tribal identities through narration. She created multiple places and identities through her characters, a state of in-betweenness that permits her to adapt wherever she goes. She tells Yoland Helm in an interview:

 Cet entre-deux m’a saisie tellement tôt que j’ai cette identité mêlée. Vraiment, on ne peut pas me scinder en deux. Il n’y a pas une couche algérienne, une couche française. Ça fait partie de moi ; je suis une Algérienne francophone. […] Je suis en adéquation avec moi-même, c’est-à-dire que je suis les deux à la fois: pas deux moitiés juxtaposées ou accolées mais c’est intimement imbriqué en moi.

[This in-betweenness has seized me so early that I have this mixed identity. Actually, you cannot split me into two. There is not an Algerian layer, a French layer. It is part of me; I am a francophone Algerian. […] I am in harmony with myself; i.e. I am both at the same time: not two juxtaposed or contiguous halves but two intimately intertwined parts].

I have never thought about it this way. Partially because my problem isn’t an oscillation between a mother-country and another land. My problem is less complex and more chaotic, emblematical of the deleuzo-gattarian rhizomatic thinking. This botanical term, the rhizome, refers to a bulb with horizontal roots and shoots that connect it with other bulbs. Deleuze and Guattari use it as an alternative to the root metaphor of identity. The rhizome, in their view “has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills”. The rhizome resists chronology, “favoring a nomadic system of growth and propagation”. This means that rhizomatic thinking deterritorializes any ties between identity and territory. This means all my attempts in trying to find an origin as in a specific place, a place of belonging is a territory doomed in nothingness. It is in my blood.

What is then, to embrace a nomadic identity, to be detached from everything and nothing? Nomads possess a sense of spatial mobility that offers them the assurance of several portable homes, an elevated sense of consciousness. This means the idea of a permanent origin can only be conceived in terms of constant negotiation and displacement. Belonging becomes to borrow Bakhtin's word, a chronotope in which both space and time are reduced to a degree zero, allowing it to be replaced by multiple places, multiple homes, wherever that is. In other words, the concept of home loses its relevance and becomes a mental invention. As Stuart Hall puts it:

“Identity has many imagined “homes” […]; it has many different ways of “being at home” – since it conceives of individuals as capable of drawing on different maps of meaning and locating them in different geographies at one and the same time – but it is not tied to one, particular place.”

As daughter of the desert, the granddaughter of Bedouin nomads, belonging isn’t in my blood but rather synonymous with emptying out the self in an exuberantly discontinuous way. Child of sand and wind. Child of the desert, a multi-layered topography that doesn’t permit itself to be the sign of rootedness but it permits and encourages a wide variety of itineraries of discovery. Discoveries that I can only conquer through writing, through inhabiting language, out-maneuvering it but never controlling it. Being nomadic is not as glamorous as it may sound, it’s history tattooed on my body. One may be empowered and adorned by it, or be scarred and wounded by it.