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  Half Moon Bay

  One Friday that summer of 1970 found my sister, brothers and I milling around the house like caged animals. Our parents had gone to Jeddah for a few days and we were housebound. There was little to do in Dhahran, and even less in Al Khobar, especially with the lack of an adult male to drive us anywhere. After making the ninth round of the house, Fatin suddenly burst out, “What the heck, let’s go to Half Moon Bay!” We stopped in our tracks, all three of us, and stared at Fatin, while thinking the unthinkable. Half Moon Bay was the usual Friday spot for our outings, a beautiful curved expanse of soft sand and sea in the form of a half moon surrounded by towering sand dunes that plunged straight into the Persian Gulf. There was nothing more exhiliarating than climbing to the top of the highest dune then falling to our sides with eyes tightly shut and rolling down the dune’s sharp steep edge, slowly at first then gaining momentum and rolling faster and faster, all the while collecting sand in our hair and ears until we fell into the Gulf ’s deep warm waters that languorously enveloped us without a splash.

  “Yes!” we all chorused, and jumped to action for our foray into the untried world of woman drivers.

  We ran to Marwan’s cupboard and pulled out his thobe and red checkered ghutra that he wore for official photos for various IDs and Fatin, the only one who could drive, slipped into them. She folded the ghutra into a massive pile on her head pulling it low over her forehead so as to shadow her face without obliterating her eyes. She got my mother’s kohl pencil and smeared it on her face to give the impression of a day old beard. Then we opened cupboards and the refrigerator and piled our picnic food and drinks into a cooler. We were ready to go. With Ghassan in the front seat and Marwan and me in the back, Fatin turned the ignition and we were off in the direction of the Main Gate, our first obstacle. The duty guards knew our car, knew us, and knew that our father was in Jeddah. As we approached the gate, we all stopped talking at the same time, then realized that this would be our undoing so we threw words around as if in deep conversation, passed by Juma’a, the head guard, with a casual wave and continued on into territory forbidden to women drivers. The exhilaration one feels at such successfully accomplished steps of defiance can only be understood by those who are denied the freedom to choose.

  We clapped, whooped, sang, and bounced jubilantly as Fatin drove ecstatic with the freedom of the wheel on to Half Moon Bay, half an hour’s drive away. Just before the turn off from the main road to the beach as Fatin slowed down at a traffic light, a pick-up truck piled with Saudi laborers standing in the back slowed down alongside. We stared doggedly ahead, hearts pounding as the laborers stared at us for lack of anything else to do. Suddenly as the light turned green, loud shouts emanated from the men in the back gesturing wildly in our direction as they grasped who was driving. Fatin stepped on the gas and sped towards the safety of the beach. Total chaos engulfed the laborers, for the one who had uncovered Fatin’s disguise had almost fallen out of the truck and was being hauled back on by the edge of his thobe while he continued to shout frantically, “It’s a woman! It’s a woman! She’s driving! I saw her face!” But it was too late for any chase as we were now on Aramco property, where no unauthorized man or beast could breathe.

  It would be a beach trip to remember because our travails against Saudi repression were not going to stop at that incident. At the beach site, we gaily set out our picnic and Fatin and Marwan, the two sporty members of the family, began a competitive game of badminton while Ghassan and I wandered off for a walk by the sea. Ghassan, as I have mentioned, is handicapped with a neuromuscular disease which has robbed him of the ability to control his movements. Of an incredibly high intelligence, my brother is trapped in the worst hell any man can endure and his illness has no cure. Within Dhahran, he grew up with as normal a life as his physical limitations allowed. The Arabs and Americans in Aramco who watched him grow up became his surrogate extended family and in many cases were far more understanding than my parents, who found it difficult to accept his debilitating handicap. My mother would insist when asked about her son that “Nothing is wrong with Ghassan; he just has a sore foot that is not allowing him to walk properly.” This was absorbed by Ghassan who would attempt to do what others with normal bodies did, often injuring himself in the process. Unfortunately, the emergency ward became very familiar with my brother and his frequent visits. It was taken in everyone’s stride and in many cases humor, as his accidents thankfully were not that serious. On his trips to doctors in Europe and the United States, he had winked at many a waiter as he left the premises supported by us, with the quip “Don’t worry, I’m driving.” But in the Middle East at that point in time, it was not customary for handicapped people to move freely in public and the attention he received was not always empathetic.

  As we walked and talked, we did not notice that we had moved beyond the protective boundaries of Half Moon Bay until a young Saudi man appeared before us. From the sneer on his face and the manner of his dress, we realized that we were about to become victims of his ignorance. This young man came from the schools under the Wahhabiimposed anti-modernist religious curriculum that was turning many otherwise decent and kind young men into rigid reactionaries filled with guilt, anger and frustration at modern-day moral ‘corruption.’ They became narrow-minded bullies against those they perceived as outside Wahhabi acceptable norms of behavior. We stopped and turned to go back but it was too late. The Saudi turned to his friends a distance away, “Hey come quickly and look at this crazy drunk!”

  Boundless fury at this offensive comment shot through me, catapulting me into a blind rage in the taunting Saudi’s direction, along with Ghassan who ran furiously behind me with his arms and legs flailing. Then we set upon the shocked young man with a viciousness we never knew we possessed. Before his clan could catch up with him (where we would have faced serious trouble), a Saudi Arab family who had been nervously watching the interaction, jumped to disperse the mob which was poised to set upon my brother and me. By the time Marwan and Fatin arrived, we were separated and safely reduced to exchanging curses. Ghassan, with his unbridled strength, had left our abuser with a bloody nose and I had left him with enough scratches to keep us in his memory far longer than he would have wished. Once more I was faced with the disastrous fallout that the lack of a well-rounded education had on the impressionable young: what befell those exposed to an education that was ‘memorized and repeated’ from a curriculum filled with religious xenophobic zealotry.

  On the last day of my summer vacation, both Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Arab nationalist hero, and my grandfather, my mother’s hero, died from heart attacks. I walked into the kitchen that afternoon to find my mother sobbing loudly, telephone receiver in hand, dressed incongruously in a brightly-colored striped dress. The gaily striped dress would remain imprinted indelibly in my mind’s eye because after that I would never see the gaiety reflected in that striped dress that had previously come so naturally to my mother. She had been the apple of her father’s eye and now he was dead and she was so far away. During our childhood summer visits to Damascus, she transformed magically from a harried mother into a laughing mischievous fun-loving school girl the moment she stepped into her doting father’s house. She was the center of all attention and she could do no wrong. Pulling rank as the eldest sister, she would cheerfully dump us and all the woes of running a household onto her far more serious younger sisters. After her father’s death, she would attempt to replace his adoring attention and wise advice with my father, but he was far too angry and judgmental to give that sort of unconditional love. Hope was erased from her life from that day forward, as she never found a replacement for those two heroes who had helped define her life: her father and Gamal Abdel Nasser.

  I boarded the MEA flight back to Beirut in a cloud of sadness. The summer of 1970 had ended on a somber note both within and without our home, as troubling events shed a pall of impending doom and gloom over most of the Arab world. Hafez Asad, an Alawi, had assumed the dicta
tor’s chair over Syria in a bloodless coup and had turned his attention against the Arab nationalist Sunni Arabs rather than Israel. Iraq’s governing council had experienced an American-supported purge by Saddam Hussein who took the dictator’s chair and immediately turned his attention against Syria rather than Israel in a war of attrition and assassinations governed by the finer details of their almost identical but opposed Baathist ideology. Meanwhile, Beirut’s Arab nationalists were becoming louder and more vociferous in their anger with the anti-Palestinian politics of the Maronite establishment. Both sides grew increasingly polarized in Lebanon after the Arab League signed the Cairo Accord in 1969, which gave unprecedented privileges to fight Israel from Lebanese territory. My sophomore year’s classes at university in 1969 had been erratic as strikes and daily demonstrations had been staged in impassioned support of the Palestinian cause and of civil rights for the disenfranchised of Lebanon.

  In addition to Hafez Asad, Saddam Hussein, and the Cairo Accord, King Hussein of Jordan had added his lethal ingredient to the seething pot of Lebanon’s confessional confrontations. My mother had called me in horror early one morning mid-summer to hear the news of King Hussein’s attack on the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Fearing for his throne, he had ordered his Bedouin National Guard to oust Yasser Arafat’s militant arm of Fatah from Jordan in what turned into a bloodbath known as Black September where Palestinian militants and civilian refugees were slaughtered alike by the undiscerning Bedouin guards. The Palestinian militants who survived the onslaught were cleared out of Jordan and joined Palestinian militants from Syria and Egypt in a one-way pass into Lebanon.

  As the MEA flight took off, I silently bade farewell to Saudi Arabia’s burning flares and reflected on what awaited me in a Beirut plunged partially in mourning and partially in celebration over Gamal Abdel Nasser’s death. I mulled over the five tough years of Lebanese acclimatization I had endured since 1965, the year I had left Dhahran for Beirut to continue my education.

  PART II

  HEARTLAND

  7

  Lebanon: My Past, My Future

  The day of reckoning for my thoroughly American upbringing came on my graduation day in 1965. Aramco schools stopped at ninth grade and the graduating students went abroad for the remainder of their education. Where could I go to continue my education? I was graduating from Dhahran School fully versed in all things American and nothing Arab. Up to this point my parents had succeeded in keeping me within the rules of decorum of an Arab Muslim daughter, so a co-ed boarding school in Europe or America, where most of my friends were going, was not even an option. Local schools, too, were out of question. Apart from their weak level of education, I had only an elementary-school-level grasp of the Arabic language. Frantically my parents began to search for a school where I could both continue my education in English and stay within Arab mores and values while I was away from their watchful eyes. Their choice landed on the Beirut Evangelical School for Girls (BESG). Relatively nearby, it had an English-language-based curriculum, and more importantly it was a strict all-girls boarding school.

  I was unhappy with their decision. I did not want to go to Lebanon. Beirut was a city that I found confusing. Our relatives there were distant cousins of my father’s whom we were not particularly close to, nor did they find our Americanization amusing. It was not a place that I had many fond memories of.

  My first introduction to Beirut had been in my infancy. I was just six months old when my father began his orientation year at the American University of Beirut in 1951. From our five year stay I remember most clearly our last day in Beirut in 1956, and my last day of kindergarten at the Al Huda School.

  My school was conveniently around the corner from our apartment on Hamra Street, a modest yellow one-story building with a tiny dusty courtyard, where my father dropped me off daily on his way to AUB. My kindergarten class was in a large square room that was also used for all the levels of elementary school in different time slots. We sat on benches, two to a desk and even at that tender young age spent most of our time copying lessons from the blackboard and memorizing poems. Those who didn’t recite well were given a public slap on the wrist and banished to the corner. My last day at the Al Huda School was befittingly reflective of the school’s ethos. I spent the better part of it with my face to the wall because I was impolite to the principal. She had smacked my sister for being late to return to class after recess and I had called the principal a donkey for doing so. My last farewell to Beirut did not go any smoother. In the stress and commotion of kissing everyone goodbye including the neighbors and grocer, and of getting tons of luggage and four children into the car, we drove away without Fatin. We discovered her absence only when we glanced back through the rear window to have a last look at our aunts and uncles and saw her jumping up and down, frantically waving from the sidewalk.

  The images of Beirut that came to my mind’s eye were swirls of bright lights and noise caught up in hot humid air. It was a cacophony of traffic-jammed streets, where everyone drove with their horns, curses and hairpin misses of other cars … people on balconies carried out animated conversations with friends down below, radios blared, vendors called out their wares, roosters crowed, donkeys brayed, and street dogs barked relentlessly. It was a city that did not sleep. The night air would resonate with raucous symphonies of crickets and the clatter and chatter of people on the streets until the early hours of dawn. There came a brief respite of calm as the night players went to bed only to be replaced by those who got up with the sun.

  Lebanon’s mountain resorts were just as brash and gaudy as its capital, the difference being better weather and scenery. The resorts were full of casinos crowded with singers and belly dancers at every turn of their congested sidewalks. Open-air family restaurants stood side by side with bars and nightclubs, whose heavy doors remained ever so slightly ajar, beckoning tantalizingly into the mysterious dim interiors within.

  Beirut was markedly different from every other Arab city in its audacious, chaotic, free-form way of life. Ceaselessly changing shape and color in an ever-turning kaleidoscope, it was a stark contrast to the silent, sterile, artificial world of Dhahran. It would be only with time that I would come to love this tiny, complex country as I began to realize it was so much more than wine, women and song, as layer upon layer of history, culture, passion and collective pain peeled away before me.

  Judging from Lebanon’s history, I was but a drop in the sea of those drawn by this land’s siren song. Draped full length along the balmy eastern Mediterranean Sea, Lebanon lies at the crossroads to Europe, Asia, and Africa. Two soaring mountain ranges run its full length in parallel from north to south, setting Lebanon permanently apart from the austere Arabian Desert beyond. Lebanon’s name comes from the word leban, Aramaic for white … the white of Lebanon’s snow-covered mountains, home to the Lebanese Cedar tree, the evergreen Cedrus Libanica, a symbol of eternity closely entwined with the country’s long history.

  Through a fluke of nature, this tiny corner of the Levant was destined to be continuously buffeted as a geo-strategic pawn while East fought West in power struggles over trade routes that passed through it, creating as much suffering for its inhabitants as it did riches. Natural deep-sea ports, fertile soil and four seasons allowed its inhabitants a singularly sybaritic lifestyle as far back as 5000 BC, a lifestyle so beguiling that many would-be conquerors were fooled into judging this land of seemingly perpetually partying people to be an easy victory. Again and again, invading armies in both ancient and modern times would find this smiling land of ‘milk and honey’ (as Lebanon is so poetically described in the Bible) transform overnight into the dark and treacherous land of ‘shifting quicksand.’

  The names of some of these ambitious but thwarted conquerors are carved in what must be one of the oldest forms of graffiti on the gray limestone banks of the Dog River (so-called because of the yapping sound it makes as it rushes down from the melting ice and snow of the towering mountain tops).
There, on the walls of the jagged cliffs that plunge dramatically into the river on its way to the sea, is an intriguing list of “I was heres,” who stopped for a brief respite at what continues to be a prime picnic spot today. It was here that Egypt’s Ramses II (reign 1304–1237 BC) carved his name into the stone walls of the cliff on his way to buy cedar to scaffold the great Abu Simbel. Hittites, Assyrians, Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans, French and English commanders added their names in vertical succession to those before them who had attempted to possess an enticing part of this geography and failed.

  At each ebb and flow of occupiers, the area’s demography and boundaries changed, leaving war on its soil as the only constant. With all this incoming and outgoing traffic of armies marching into the welcoming arms of some segments of the population and being marched out in disgrace by others, the inhabitants were inevitably influenced ethnically, religiously, and ideologically, creating an imperfect mosaic of humanity, beautiful in each of its parts, yet sadly flawed as a harmonious whole. Tragically, these insoluble, diverse pieces would carry on marching towards further confrontation with one another into modern-day Lebanon, as each attempted to impose the face they believed Lebanon should wear, ultimately bringing the house down both upon themselves and their enemies.

  ***

  Modern Lebanon’s problems began on the first day of its modern history. It was borne out of the Sykes-Picot agreement of May 16, 1915 that left the lion’s share of the Ottoman Bilad al Sham territories under the mandate of France and Britain. The ink of the agreement was barely dry before the two powers set feverishly to work to offset the control of the other over the area’s trade and oil routes. Britain had a headstart on France with its Palestinian protectorate’s major port cities of Haifa and Acca to transport its trade and oil to the west. France’s mandates, Mount Lebanon and Syria, on the other hand did not benefit her trade interests as they stood. Mount Lebanon had the Maronite majority France needed to turn it into a supportive Christian enclave, but no sea outlet to turn it into a viable trading partner, while Syria had major port cities but a population that was virulently anti-colonialist.