Naneh’s Hands in the Pennington Kitchen

Bibi, Naneh, and Khan Naneh- Tehran:long time ago

These days, whenever the “Mara” within me — the army of darkness, doubt, and despair in the Buddha’s spiritual journeys — comes to visit, I consciously turn toward Bibi, Naneh, Khan Naneh, and Khajeh Naneh. All of them have imprinted the duality of my inner woman into my ancestral genes. Naneh, my grandmother, and Bibi, my mother’s aunt, were both simple, goofy¹, and authentic. Khan Naneh, my father’s mother — my mother’s paternal grandmother — and Khajeh Naneh, Naneh’s own mother, were bold, entrepreneurial, and people-minded women.

Naneh visits me most often in times of mourning, when the women of my lineage guide me into the safe corner of the kitchen². Among all my ancestral women, she embodies the grief for losses that a gender-blind society either cannot see or refuses to acknowledge. Her mourning was the raw, instinctive, authentic grief of a primal mother — for children who were stillborn or who died in their earliest years from illness. Out of her eleven pregnancies — she was a child bride — seven ended with a stillbirth or a death soon after. For others, the loss of children was “normal.” For her… only God knows what it meant. What is certain is that her grief ran so deep and so instinctively that she could carry the mourning of all mother-ancestors who had lost children, replaying it in her own body.

Since 2017, the Pennington Kitchen³ — a basement space in an old brownstone⁴ in Union Square⁵, Manhattan⁶ — had, for three years, become my safe haven. There, Naneh would manifest in me, her presence mingling with my tear-filled eyes and the heat rising from the stove. Sometimes I felt that my own hands, while cooking, were her bony hands, struggling in the same rhythm.

Those tears at the stove, grieving for children who never saw the world or who died within a few short years from sickness and the absence of doctors; her retreat into the kitchen to hide her sorrow; the excuses she offered my mother — then a little girl watching quietly from the doorway — I could feel all of it in my own body.

It was as if the sorrows of all the women before me had lived again in her, been reloaded, and then traveled — invisibly — into my trembling hands and solitary tears. In that same kitchen, it took me years to understand why it feels so profoundly like my safe place.

Notes

¹ Goofy: A little clumsy, simple-hearted, endearing, and unpretentious, usually with a friendly, affectionate tone rather than an insulting one.

² According to epigenetic studies, traces of trauma can be passed down from generation to generation. How our ancestors live within us is one of the subjects I focus on.

³ Pennington Kitchen: The kitchen of an old boarding house in a brownstone building, which became my safe haven.

⁴ Brownstone: A historic urban house with a reddish-brown stone façade, common in 19th-century New York, typically narrow and multi-storied.

⁵ Union Square: A well-known square and neighborhood in Manhattan, famous for its local markets, cultural events, and public gatherings.

⁶ Manhattan: One of New York City’s five boroughs, and its cultural, economic, and artistic center.