The women have always danced until their skin gives out. Barefoot, my aunties lay their heels down for the final song. Their shoes rest under the table with the unclaimed tights someone has taken off. Its flesh belongs to another body of overtax and overburden and oversweat. My cousin will pick it up at the end of the night and laugh about the size of it. But, dancing to gubare requires an unweaving of the body in order to move fast enough. Heels should be nowhere in sight amidst the disarming of plastic-sprayed hair and missing wedding rings, as well as foundation, in a shade far too orange for my cousin, melting onto the timber floor. I should’ve taken my shoes off but I was a timid child. Shirts untuck and faces flush, my uncle grows tired and I don’t remember if my mother was dancing. I cannot remember if she was invited. All I can know for certain is the sensation of my thighs chafing out of sync with the beat, and toes slipping out of my mother’s heels.
As an adult, I recently danced without my shoes for the first time.
A few weeks later, I looked underneath and saw rotting flesh.
I think it’s been there the whole time.
Gubare [goo-ba-reh] is a traditional Assyrian folk dance usually performed towards the end of a party. Complementary to Kurdish and Armenian line dancing, gubare is danced to a tempo between 116 and 126 bpm following a 6/8 time signature. In an open-ended circle, people join pinky fingers and bounce their shoulders as they cross leftwards. It is an act of stepping to the centre together, and then — as I’ve taught it to others — ‘kicking all the way home’ with every lift of the foot. Gubare demands a change in direction after a whole night of dancing to the right. There is no time to ease into the dance once Juliana Jendo’s legendary song starts. In the very first beat, she summons the dancers to quickly find their footing, change direction and choose someone to be resh-d-khigga (literally, head of the dance).
Everything I know about this dance is held in my body’s memory, just like everything I know about Assyrian culture is archived in the same place. I speak Assyrian so perfectly in my dreams that I wonder why it exists fractured when I speak it awake. It must be my body that continues to remember. And so, I perfect my gubare instead. I dream of becoming the best Assyrian dancer in the family. I dream of out-dancing my parents. I dream of impressing my Iraqi-born cousins and of being the most trusted caretaker of this knowledge. I could be the best survivalist of a culture and people who have been persecuted, massacred, chased and expelled from their motherland. For this is where gubare, like all other Assyrian folk dances, emerges from.
Even before waves of Assyrian immigration to the West, Assyrian language and history had been continuously severed by Iranian, Turkish and Iraqi governments, which sought to ethnically and culturally erase the Assyrians. The Assyrian identity itself is splintered between massacres, such as the Sayfo Genocide (1915–23) and the Simele Genocide (1933) by the Ottoman Empire, as well as other imperial forces like ISIS and Arabisation. Traditional written and didactic forms of knowledge have been historically inaccessible to Assyrians amidst the ceaseless suppression of the identity. The knowledge that survives is attached to the living body ― the survival of the Assyrian.
While most of my family do not know how to read or write in Assyrian, they do know how to dance. It was passed down to me at parties. As a child, I didn’t realise how much this dancing could strip of you. Rather, I remember the abundance of layers stacked between my mother’s makeup and another one of my pink chiffon dresses. I remember her sewing and crocheting a chaffeya (a chiffon dance scarf embellished with sequins and bells) to match the colour of her dress. I would watch my mother get ready for her cultural performance. I now know how to put mine on too. I wanted to publish photos of my mother dancing alongside these words but she said she didn’t want to be seen. She wanted to forget. I wonder if we put on all these layers of excess to hide from what is carried in our bodies. Sometimes, I avoid dancing in fear of what else is ruminating inside me. Somewhere along the way, another step was added to the choreography and no one said a word.
My muscle memory knows trauma from generations ago. For a culture that has survived for so long, it happened through invulnerability, isolation and insularity. It happened through a separation of violence between us, the victims, and them, the perpetrators. An Assyrian could never hurt another Assyrian, for self-preservation taught us that we are not the enemy. We are not capable of violence but they are. I hear it is the Muslims, it is the government, it is Saddam Hussein. I hear it is the Muslim men who kidnapped my mother’s nephews. It is the Turkish police who robbed my father. It is Saddam’s son who killed my grandfather’s cousin. So, my family left their homeland. My parents left their trauma scattered between places of hiding and waiting for visas in Iraq, Jordan and Turkey. They gave birth to me in a place far away so I would not suffer their fate.
But my parents carried residual trauma here in their bodies. It took a violent shattering and an imploding of the self to survive and a quietness to keep these wounds hidden in the West. It manifested as other violence, such as neglect, abuse and dysfunction, all of which they tried to keep invisible from their children and community. This is the paradox of a culture with a hush-hush way of dealing with trauma and a simultaneous desire to be seen and recognised. No one wants to be seen, but they still want to dance. I pick up my feet, I look at the soles. My callouses haven’t hardened yet and I wonder how much my feet can handle before they collapse under the weight. The Assyrian dream is one of yearning for a time before violence and loss. I yearn for soft shoulders and clumsy legs. I yearn for sweaty hands and airy feet.
One day, I will feel the lightness in my dance again.
