Dear Libya,
I wonder how many times love has been expressed in your kitchens without ever being spoken aloud.
How many mothers have quietly placed the best piece of meat on their child’s plate, pretending they didn’t want it themselves? How many grandmothers have spent an entire morning preparing a meal, only to insist, when thanked, that it was nothing? How many times have we been told to eat a little more, to stay a little longer, to take something home with us, even when we promise we are full?
And how many of us have been loved in these small, ordinary ways without ever realising it?
There is a particular kind of tenderness that lives in a Libyan kitchen. It is not always quiet or gentle. Sometimes it is loud, impatient, interrupted by conversation and the clattering of pots. Sometimes it sounds like someone calling you to come and eat for the third time. Sometimes it is a grandmother scolding you for getting in the way, only to pull you closer a moment later and ask you to taste the sauce.
But beneath it all is a love so familiar that we scarcely think to call it love at all.
I think of the kitchens I have known, and how much of life has unfolded in them.
The mornings when someone puts the kettle on before the rest of the house has woken. The afternoons when the kitchen fills with relatives who have come for a short visit and somehow stay until dinner. The conversations that begin with an ordinary question and wander through family stories, old disagreements and memories that everybody remembers slightly differently.
Someone laughs. Someone interrupts. Someone insists that isn’t how it happened.
All the while, a pot is simmering on the stove.
And years later, it is difficult to remember the conversation without remembering the smell of whatever was cooking.
I have always loved watching my grandmother cook.
There is something remarkable about the certainty of her movements. The way she reaches for ingredients without looking, measures spices with the palm of her hand and knows when something is ready by the way it smells.
You ask how much to add, hoping to write everything down.
She tells you a little.
You ask how much a little is.
She looks at you as though you have asked the most ridiculous question in the world.
And you laugh, because somewhere in her mind there must be a recipe, a perfect arrangement of measurements and timings, but she has never needed to put any of it into words.
So you watch her hands instead.
The hands that have kneaded dough, rolled delicate strands of pasta, poured countless glasses of tea and prepared meals for people she loves. Hands that seem to remember things long after the need for instructions has disappeared.
And you begin to understand that learning to cook from someone is not quite the same as following a recipe.
It is learning when to be patient. When to trust your instincts. When to add a little more water, or leave something alone for another minute. It is listening to the stories that emerge between one instruction and the next.
Sometimes, it is simply having another afternoon together.
A daughter watching her mother. A granddaughter standing on her toes to see into a pot. The same movements repeated in kitchens separated by decades, by changing cities, by houses that no longer exists.
We call these things traditions, but I think they are also a form of inheritance.
Not the kind we can place in a box or divide among relatives, but something that quietly becomes part of who we are.
Perhaps we prepare a dish the way our grandmother taught us, never knowing that she learned it from a woman who lived a century before. Perhaps we repeat a small gesture without noticing, a particular way of folding dough, a preference for cinnamon, the habit of tasting a sauce twice before deciding it is ready.
And somewhere in these tiny details, a little of someone’s life survives.
I find myself wondering about the kitchens of our great-grandmothers.
Whether they sang while they cooked, laughed at the same things we do, or ever imagined that the meals they prepared would outlive the kitchens in which they were made.
That something prepared in a kitchen in Tripoli, Benghazi, Musrata might one day be recreated in London, Paris or a city on the other side of the world.
That a grandchild might carry the fragrance of home into a place they themselves would never see.
There is something almost magical about that thought.
The idea that a country can travel without moving.
That it can exist in a little jar of spices tucked into a suitcase, in a handwritten recipe folded between the pages of a notebook, in the first sip of tea poured for an unexpected visitor.
And perhaps this is why food can make us homesick in ways that photographs cannot.
A photograph asks us to look back.
A familiar taste, somehow, brings the past into the present.
You can be standing in a kitchen thousands of miles from Libya, surrounded by the sounds of a city that has never felt entirely like yours, and suddenly the scent of onions softening in a pot can make the distance between two countries feel impossibly small.
For a moment, you remember.
A table crowded with plates. The sound of someone calling from another room. Relatives speaking over one another. A grandmother insisting you have barely eaten, even though she has already filled your plate twice.
You remember the ordinary things.
And perhaps those are the memories that stay with us longest.
Not always the weddings or the celebrations, but the afternoons we barely noticed while they were happening.
The meals we hurried through because we had somewhere else to be.
The conversations we only half listened to.
The moments when someone called us into the kitchen and we complained because we were busy doing absolutely nothing.
Nobody tells you that the sound of your grandmother calling everyone to dinner might one day become more precious than the photographs you carefully saved.
And so we grow older, and we begin to understand things that once escaped us.
We realise how much time goes into caring for another person. How much thought lies behind remembering someone’s favourite meal. How much tenderness exists in the simple act of preparing something for people who may never stop to consider how long it took.
I think about the countless hours our mothers and grandmothers have spent in kitchens, making food that disappears from the table in minutes.
And how, despite knowing this, they continue to do it.
For Ramadan evenings when the table is laid before the Athan. For Fridays when the family gathers and no one seems to agree on what time lunch should be. For weddings, unexpected visitors, children returning home and relatives who insist they are only stopping by for tea.
There is a kind of devotion in that repetition.
Not the dramatic sort we read about in novels, but something quieter, something woven so thoroughly into everyday life that we often overlook it.
The devotion of knowing how someone takes their tea.
Of remembering that they prefer a little more spice.
Of saving them the part of a dish they like best.
Of noticing that they have hardly eaten, even when everyone else is too distracted to notice.
There are so many ways of saying I love you without ever saying the words.
And I think, Libya, that your kitchens have always understood this.
I love the generosity that surrounds our food.
The way guests are welcomed with something to eat before they have even settled into their seats. The way a visit that was supposed to last ten minutes becomes an entire afternoon. The way someone announces there is nothing prepared, only for the table to begin filling with dishes a few moments later.
I love the affectionate arguments over whose cooking is better.
The grandmother who believes nobody makes a dish quite like she does. The aunt who quietly disagrees. The mother who insists she learned everything from her own mother, only to admit she has changed half the recipe.
And I love that everyone is equally certain that their way is the correct one.
Pride in the things we have inherited. In the flavours that make a place recognisable. In the knowledge that has travelled between generations without ever needing to be formally recorded.
And when I think of Libya, I wish more people could know this side of you.
The Libya that exists beyond the stories told in headlines.
The Libya of crowded kitchens, open doors and neighbours sending plates of food across the street. Of families gathering around a dish of bazeen, hands reaching for bread, tea being poured long after everyone promised they were leaving.
The Libya where food is rarely just about hunger.
I would never pretend that a country can be understood entirely through its food. There is too much history, too much complexity, too much sorrow and beauty for that.
But I believe the way people care for one another tells us something important about the places they call home.
And there is so much care in the ordinary rituals of a Libyan household.
Perhaps that is why I feel increasingly protective of them.
Because the older I become, the more I realise how easily the smallest things can disappear.
A recipe nobody thought to write down.
An expression that disappears from everyday conversation.
A way of preparing something that belonged to one person, and vanished when there was no longer anyone to ask.
It is strange to realise that the people who seem to know everything will not always be the ones we turn to for answers.
And perhaps that is why I want to listen more closely.
To ask questions, even the silly ones.
To write down the measurements, even when I’m told there aren’t any.
To stand beside someone in the kitchen a little longer, even when I think I already know what they are going to do.
Not because I expect to remember every detail, but because I am beginning to understand what it means to be taught something with love.
And I hope that, years from now, there will be another generation asking those same questions.
A child standing beside a mother or grandmother, impatiently waiting to taste something.
Someone being told to add a little more of this, or not quite so much of that.
Someone laughing because the instructions make absolutely no sense.
And slowly, without realising it, learning a language that has been spoken in our kitchens for generations.
I hope they find their way into unfamiliar kitchens, onto new tables and into the lives of people who may never have set foot in Libya
I hope they are prepared imperfectly at first, with too much of one thing and not enough of another, until eventually they begin to taste like something familiar.
And I hope that when someone asks where a dish comes from, we tell them more than its name.
We tell them about the people who taught us to make it. About the homes in which we first tasted it. About the stories that unfolded while it was being prepared.
Because a recipe can tell someone how to make a meal, but it cannot tell them what that meal has meant to the people who loved it.
Only we can do that.
So, Libya, when I think of the language of love, I do not always think of poetry or grand declarations.
Sometimes, I think of a kitchen in the middle of the afternoon.
Of sunlight falling across a table. Of flour scattered over a wooden board. Of a pot quietly simmering on the stove and someone reaching for another plate because an unexpected guest has arrived.
I think of a grandmother whose hands know things that words cannot quite explain.
I think of all the meals prepared before us, and all the people who made them.
And I wonder how many of them knew that, long after the plates were cleared and the kitchens fell quiet, their love would still be travelling.
Across generations.
Across borders.
Into homes they would never see.
Love, it seems, has a way of outliving the moment in which it was given.
And somewhere, in a kitchen not so different from the ones we remember, someone is preparing a meal for somebody they love.
They may never call it anything more than dinner.
But perhaps, one day, the person sitting at that table will understand.
They were being loved all along.
With love,
Letters to Libya