The Epic of the Ancient Family

My mother had told me all these stories before I was even born. That is how deep the bond between us ran-threaded through the ages. She believed in every word of those tales with the fullness of her being. That's why she insisted on passing down every detail to me, so that they might become part of my own formation. She read them to me-even when her words became a blur of murmurs-from the earliest months of her pregnancy, long before my heart or mind had formed enough to grasp their meanings.

Later, once I became aware of the world, I realized that she had heard these tales from her mother, who had in turn received them from her mother, and so on, in a chain of matrilineal transmission stretching back through generations. I learned as well that the stories themselves-and the characters populating them-were first imagined by a man named 'Awwam (It literally means the swimmer or floater). It was said he suffered from a persistent stutter, perhaps the result of a troubled childhood. And yet, through some higher grace-which I've never been able to rationalize-he became, by the end of his life, the most important storyteller the world had ever known.

These mythic tales were memorized by mothers, read aloud by grandmothers to their daughters, whispered through the centuries, just as they were once whispered into my grandmother's ear-and then into my mother's. It literally means the swimmer or floater