Fragment No. 43

...with Myrna Maakaron

Where I was born and raised, in Lebanon, there’s not a single house, no matter how humble, that doesn’t have at least one carpet. Carpets filled churches, mosques and homes alike, and they were an essential part of our everyday lives. In summer times, we would remove them as part of a ritual, one I grew up with. It wasn’t just about cleaning. It was about care, tradition and family. We would move all the furniture out of the room and once the carpets were free of dust and fresh, we used to scatter small naphthalene balls, hoping to protect them from insects. Then we’d roll up those carpets carefully, cover them with bed sheets, and wrap them in plastic to keep them safe until winter. It was always a moment filled with joy and laughter. Moments I’ll always cherish. And my mother’s voice, forever in my memory, warning us:

"Do not touch the naphthalene. Don’t put it in your mouth." 

As a child, I would often tune out the adults as they discussed politics, the next war or gossiped about neighbors. Instead, my eyes would drift to the carpets, to their bright colors, sophisticated patterns, vibrant flowers, graceful birds and swirling arabesques. I imagined the stories woven into each thread.

Who had crafted them? 

Who had chosen the colors, and why?

What secret journeys had these carpets witnessed?

Each one seemed to hold a mystery, a fragment of a life, a moment in time.

Carpets are woven time.

Each thread holds the past, the present, and even the future, all knotted together in a vivid dance. The carpets I remember were not simply objects but were records of life.

In their threads, I could see the laughter and arguments of family dinners, the fears of wars, the joyful nights with grandma and even the shadows of those who left us too soon. The carpets absorbed it all: the echoes of old songs and silly TV shows, the soft footsteps of children running around, the comforting scent of times spent together and the warmth of home. They held within them, in each thread, the pulse of a family and the weight of memories. Carpets are somehow a previous version of photographs.

Summer passed, and the dragon carpet weighed heavily on my mind, its presence amplified by the chaos of the world and the quiet unrest within. I turned 50 then, a milestone that felt like just another day. War still raged in Lebanon and I was far from home, away from family, friends and the sea. What did turning 50 even mean, when the world around me was so fractured and my own life felt torn by a different kind of war in Germany?

On August 30, 2024, I sat alone, weighed down by a deep longing for home. At last, I decided to open the box. It felt like unwrapping a long-awaited birthday gift.

Inside, I found the fragile carpet fragment and nestled within its fibres, a tiny insect. I like to believe it was a butterfly, a sign from the spirit of the dragon woven into the design. But it wasn’t. It was a moth, happily feeding on the small piece of carpet, hidden in the dark wooden box. Perhaps it had come from Jasmin’s garden, where this fragment had once rested among the colorful, falling leaves before being sent to me. I walked slowly holding the carpet with the moth perched on top, moving very carefully towards the window. I wasn’t quite in the mood  to welcome a family of moths into my home. Gently, I let it fly out of the window, then quickly sprayed the carpet with the sanitizer I’d kept from the Covid days. Just thirty seconds later, a wave of guilt washed over me. I wondered if I had destroyed the fragment by spraying it, but, luckily, it survived the moth, and me.

This specific fragment and most particularly the #43 comes exactly from the center of a much larger and unique carpet. It comes from the heart where the emotions, the stories, the secrets and the memories are stored. At least that’s how I like to imagine it. This Caucasian dragon carpet, over 300 years old, has a history far beyond mine.

Yet, in so many ways, its journey mirrors my own and perhaps even yours. As I looked at this fragment of carpet it did stir something deep within me. The first thought that came to me was of wounds. Though it is a small piece, it carries a universe of meaning. I contemplate the fragment not as something broken, but as something that has endured. There is a kind of beauty that only comes through destruction. The world tries to convince us that something broken is worthless, but this carpet shows otherwise. We are not our perfect parts but our imperfect ones. It is in our scars that we uncover our truest beauty and the most profound way to connect with others.

Like all of us, this carpet, is a tapestry of contradictions: it has its colorful parts, its wounded parts, its destroyed parts, its beautiful parts and its erased ones. It survived the ravages of war and became a testament to loss, survival, resilience and hope.

It carries its scars with pride, just as we do. The scars of this carpet remind me of the one I bear on my own skin. The one from a bomb that cut through me, splitting a part of my body in two. Like the blank part of this carpet my body has a missing part too.

This white empty space no longer holds a pattern, a design or a memory. But that blank space, that stillness, it’s something we must all learn to imagine. That is the space that we could create for healing. 

Growing up during the war, constantly forced to flee, I often wondered what I would save first if our home were to burn like the dragon carpet because of an incendiary bomb. Without hesitation, it was always the family photos. Fortunately, our home was never consumed by fire, but I had to leave it and move to Europe. No matter where I went, though, I always carried the photographs of family and friends with me. Those photographs, as the Caucasian carpet, carry more than just images; they hold the stories, identities, and deep connections to a past that shapes who we are.

Losing them would feel like losing an irreplaceable piece of myself, the tangible link to my ancestors and the stories that have defined us for generations. Preserving these images became something far greater than a simple act of remembering or carrying home, with me, wherever I went but it became an act of cultural resistance. A way to ensure that the stories of those who came before us, and the history they lived,would never be lost to time.

In the second picture, I chose to fill the blank of the #43 fragment also with the most important humans in my life, today: Lilly and Theo.

This photo, always within my sight, carries the marks of time but it still radiates love in its purest forms and also a profound gratitude for these two beautiful souls. There is a profound connection between a mother and her children, one that transcends time, distance, and words. Motherhood is a landscape of contradictions too, moments of unimaginable joy and heart-wrenching sorrow. I’ve walked both sides of it, trending the fine line between hope and despair. I’ve been a single mother, raising my children alone. Yet, through all of this, I’ve come to understand something profound: a mother’s love does not demand recognition to exist. It’s not a love that waits for gratitude or acknowledgment. It’s a love that endures in silence, that holds steady through rejection and pain.

It bends with the winds of hardship, but it never breaks.