Brownies and Kalashnikovs Page 15
With the impunity of the conqueror, the French took the liberty of redrawing the maps of its protectorates to serve its economic interests. They took a census of Mount Lebanon which established the Maronite majority that both France and the indigenous Maronite dwellers of the mountain needed as per the new republic’s confessional system of rule that alotted important seats in government according to majority. The French then turned to the map of the Syrian mandate and shifted vital port cities and fertile land out of Syria, added them to Mount Lebanon and called it ‘Greater Lebanon.’ The largely Orthodox Christian and Sunni populations of the Beka’a’ valley and the port cities of Tripoli, Beirut and Sidon awoke one morning to discover they were now the citizens of a ‘Greater Lebanon’ ruled by a Maronite majority.
The response of the new Lebanese citizens, whose political identities had been altered while in the throes of Arab nationalist fervor against these very colonizers, was to immediately begin agitating for a new census that would include their numbers. France ignored the Arab nationalist protesters and declared Lebanon an independent republic in 1926. Once more in 1932, the French took a census that was fiercely boycotted by Arab nationalists, largely Sunni Muslims, which gave the majority to the Maronites. Voila, fait accompli! Or so France thought.
France did yet more tangling of the confessions before the end of its mandate. After overthrowing the Vichy French in 1943, the Free French declared Lebanon an independent nation-state. They magnanimously drew up an unwritten Mithaq al Watani (National Pact), an oral ‘gentlemen’s agreement,’ whereby the Christians promised not to seek foreign (French) protection and agreed to accept Lebanon’s ‘Arab face,’ as long as the Muslims agreed to recognize the independence and legitimacy of the Lebanese state within its 1920 boundaries, and to renounce aspirations for union with Syria. The Republic was officially recognized on November 22, 1943, hastily it seems, as Lebanon’s as yet unwritten constitution remained unwritten and the census remained the Muslim Sunni boycotted 1932 one. Democracy was bequeathed on the favored few. The Republic was, unsurprisingly, a non-starter and eighteen now legally-recognized Lebanese confessions continued to tangle with the Maronites (and each other) for supremacy.
***
It was this pressure-cooker state of affairs that I would step into when I began my education in Beirut in 1965. Twenty-two years after its independence, nothing had changed. The Maronites still dominated the political elite, the disenfranchised Lebanese remained disenfranchised, their poverty on the rise. The one change from 1943 was the presence of impoverished stateless Palestinian refugees, tens of thousands of them who had poured into Lebanon in 1948 across its southern borders, fleeing the violence and killing of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Seventeen years later, they remained crammed in wretched refugee camps that dotted the full length of the country, without permission to enter Lebanon’s civil society, or to return to their villages.
With a powerful Israel on its southern borders with whom it was formally at war and a sister Arab neighbor, Syria, on its eastern and northern borders, which had her own hegemonic designs, this tiny piece of land labeled a democratic republic was slowly but surely unravelling at the seams. Lebanon’s political identity was on the verge of being thrown onto the table of contention once more to be fought over amongst its inhabitants.
BESG Boarding Blues
On the morning of my first day of school, I walked apprehensively through the century-old black wrought-iron gates of the Beirut Evangelical School for Girls in downtown Beirut with my mother at my side. Her cheerful patter of small talk did not match my sullen mood. Down the winding gravel path ahead of us stood the old Ottoman-style villa that housed the school, untouched, it seemed, since the days of the Ottomans. Its exterior was deceivingly beautiful, with red rooftop tiles and an elegant portico. Purple wisteria intertwined around the slender columns of its archways with dark green ivy that continued onward to hug the roughly hewn limestone walls of the villa. Intricate wrought-iron graced two grand windows overlooking two fragrant rose gardens on each side of a surprisingly small entrance, which we now entered.
A self-important usher standing in the foyer of the villa motioned for us to follow her to the boarding facilities. We fell into step behind her, our heels echoing desolately on the large well-worn slabs of black stone that paved a long, wide, dark, and damp corridor. At the end of the seemingly interminable hall, we climbed up a short flight of stairs that led to the living quarters of the boarders. As we stepped into a large hallway lined with rickety single cupboards, we were met by a whirl of red, green and white streamers (colors of the Lebanese flag) fluttering behind girls dashing around in all directions getting ready for the opening assembly. Avoiding their curious glances, I kept my eyes firmly fixed to the floor as we tagged behind the usher. She turned into a small alcove off the main hallway with yet more cupboards against a flimsy wall that obviously had toilets on the other side. “Here is your cupboard,” the usher pointed breezily and turned abruptly on her heels, obviously expecting us to follow her into another room down the hallway of cupboards. “Here is your bed; excuse me, I have to go,” she told me and briskly marched out of the sleeping quarters without a second look back at us.
There, before me, stretched a long tunnel-shaped room painted a sickening gray with tiny barred windows at ceiling level lining one wall. These unattainable slivers of the sky apparently looked out onto the back streets of downtown Beirut judging from the honks of the cars and snippets of salty language from the streets down below. Arranged on both sides of the room, regiment-style, were twenty gray metal frame beds covered in prickly brown blankets. Memories of Dhahran, of my old friends, my old school, its shady green gardens, colorful classrooms and familiar kindred souls rushed into my already homesick heart. With the despair of a convict entering her cell, I threw myself onto my prickly bed with its lumpy pillow, a sobbing crumpled heap of utter misery. My mother could not understand my reaction, “Yallah, Fadia, let’s go unpack your things,” she said, adding firmly, “stop your sniveling.” Her advice went unheeded. While she unpacked, I sat on a small straw stool that was provided for each cupboard owner and wept, uncontrollably engulfed by grief at what was to be my new home for the next three years.
A pretty Chinese girl and a plump, auburn-haired girl walked into the alcove in casual conversation as they moved towards their cupboards that were on either side of mine. I turned my face to the cupboard wall to make it emphatically clear that I was not interested in talking to anyone. But that did not deter the two. “Hi,” the Chinese girl smiled warmly, “I’m Lisa Ting from Taiwan and live in Baghdad.”
The auburn-haired girl turned to me from rummaging deep within her cupboard and flashing a wide gap-toothed smile introduced herself, “My name’s Amber Mohr. ‘Amber,’ after my Palestinian grandmother and Mohr because my father’s German, we live in Jerusalem. Where do you come from?”
Heaving sobs came out of me in response. In gentle concern, they both kneeled on either side of me and patted my shoulders comfortingly. Pausing mid-sob I stole a glance at these two sweet souls who would eventually become two of the best friends I would ever have.
“There you go,” my mother jumped in with visible relief at this nano second of non-wailing, “You’ve made friends already!” And to my horror she stepped out of the alcove and corralled two random girls running past, each wearing a Lebanese flag with the ever-present streamers clutched in their hands. “Come and meet my daughter,” she called to them to my deep mortification, “She’s new and doesn’t know anyone.”
There was a very awkward silence as the captive girls shuffled in, smiling nervously at me, obviously anxious to be somewhere else. I stared at the floor tongue-tied from acute embarrassment but knew I had to say something fast before my mother went through the whole boarding school to make her point that I was in good hands. Apologizing for my puffy red eyes I introduced myself as a Saudi Arabian from Dhahran. The two girls nodding courteously introduced themselves
as old-guard boarders who were, judging by their names, from the Kuwaiti and Bahraini ruling families.
I must have appeared as a puzzling anomaly from the Arabian Peninsula to these two girls with my awkward Arabic (I spoke a heavily American-accented Syrian dialect) and my sneakers. NO ONE wore sneakers in the Middle East in 1965 except laborers, as I would find out soon enough … that same day, in fact. “You’ll get used to it,” they politely reassured me, before dashing off to catch up with the rest of the performers. At this point, Amber and Lisa linked arms with me and suggested escorting me to my classroom. My mother took her cue that this was the best time to leave, kissed me goodbye and turned towards the exit humming softly as she did when she was content, fully convinced that all would be well from now on.
Gradually, with time, I did begin to fall into the rhythm of life as a boarding student in BESG and came, albeit grudgingly, to accept my new lifestyle. Amber, Lisa, and a pair of identical Yugoslavian twins, Maria and Helena Jankovic, who sang moving accapello duets of Paul Anka’s ‘I’m Mr. Lonely,’ became my close friends and a loyal buffer group against the initial hostility to my Americanized manners that I would receive from Arab students throughout my first year in BESG. As chance would have it, I had stepped into the part of Lebanon that was gripped by intense anti-American sentiments due to American foreign policy viewed widely as unfairly slanted in Israel’s favor. In Lebanon, I quickly discovered that anyone who was old enough to walk and talk had strong opinions about politics, which naturally included each and every girl of my new school. ALL things American screamed pro-Zionist to everyone around me and that doomed me to acutely embarrassing moments of mistaken identity. I needed to utter no more than a word to provoke anyone within listening range to whirl around and glare belligerently at me as though I had just declared an intentional act of war. To make a painful story of my entrée into Lebanese politics short, let me just say that I learned to speak the Lebanese dialect and shed what Americanisms I could very, very quickly. From that year of 1965 on, I joined the Arabs of my generation in having Zionism, Arab politics, oil, religion, the United States of America, and war as the ever-present parameters around the life choices that we would make. Sadly, those parameters would still be there well into our children’s adult lives.
***
Our daily schedule in boarding school began at six in the morning with one of the numerous unmarried boarding teachers zealously ringing a bell at the doorway of our dormitory. We were expected to put our feet immediately to the ground, with the knowledge that the icy cold tiles would jolt us awake. We were then expected to make our beds and remain standing next to them for inspection by our headmistress, Miss Jureidini. The headmistress, alone, would have been enough to jolt any of us awake. She was a crusty old spinster straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. Her face, ugly to begin with, was further marred by a stroke she’d had that held one side immobilized while the healthy half remained in a perpetual sneer. The sneering half I quickly discovered was far more preferable than her smile.
It was instant dislike between us when we met and would remain so until the end of my days at BESG. Her job was constant surveillance of the girls under her charge to make sure no one was enjoying the youth she had obviously never enjoyed. We had lights out at nine when everyone was to fall immediately to sleep without any more talking … a tall and impossible order for a roomful of teenage girls. It usually transpired that after the exhausted teacher on duty finished her ranting and raving to get us to follow orders, she’d leave and we would continue our gabfest. At this point we knew that the headmistress would soon be on her way to catch us in the act of disobedience because other than their thankless job of waking us up and putting us to sleep, the boarding teachers served as Miss Jureidini’s eyes and ears. And we knew that Miss Jureidini, sporting three curlers in her balding head, wrapped in her pink woolly chamber robe and carrying a flashlight to highlight any potential culprit, would be tiptoeing towards our dorm room in fluffy pink bedroom slippers to muffle her steps. But we also knew that she was always accompanied by her terrier, Teetee (a dog even the dog lovers amongst us grew to hate), whose nails would scratch loudly on the ceramic tile floor heralding their imminent arrival well before their entrance into our dormitory. She never caught a single girl awake.
Not that I never got into trouble with the dour headmistress. By nature, I was outspoken on matters that I didn’t find fair and there were plenty of her rules that I did not agree with. My outspokenness angered Miss Jureidini, who came to see me as a rabble-rouser out to challenge her authority (she was right). Her punishment was to find some excuse to banish me on a weekly basis for a time-out in the sick room across the hall from her office where I was to sit and think about my bad behavior. Whatever exams or assignments I would have for the day were to be graded as zero. Fortunately, she was one of the few bad apples in the school. My teachers and classmates were very sympathetic and there would never be exams or assignments for me to miss on the day of my solitary confinement.
The Ramadan Rebellion
I was never particularly religious. Both of my parents were hazy about the finer points of Islam. They were Muslim because they were born Muslim. The Qur’an was memorized and repeated ad verbatim, not necessarily internalized. My father prayed five times a day, fasted during Ramadan, went on the Hajj, drank alcohol and ate pork. My mother didn’t pray five times a day and never wore the head scarf. At the same time, she didn’t drink alcohol or eat pork. I was in the same category vis-à-vis being a Muslim; I was born that way. So when Ramadan came around, I was relieved to be away from under my father’s watchful eye and relished not having to fast. My father had been very strict about fasting and we did not want to get on his bad side (this included my mother, who wasn’t too keen on fasting either), so as far as he knew when we gathered around the Iftar table, we were all ‘breaking our fast.’ That was my ambivalent attitude towards being a Muslim until the Beirut Evangelical School for Girls gave me and my Muslim co-boarders a whole new perspective with respect to our Islamic identity.
Miss Jureidini gathered the Muslim boarders in a private meeting on the first day of Ramadan and informed us that fasting was not allowed amongst the boarding students because it was bad for our health. Suddenly fasting took on a whole new meaning, one of self worth. We gave a resounding and unanimous “NO!” completely taking the headmistress by surprise, because it was school policy that Muslim boarders did not fast in Ramadan. We held a meeting amongst ourselves to discuss our next move. “What was she thinking?” we asked one another angrily. “Did she really think that any of us would accept? How did she think she had that kind of authority?” We were a group of ten Muslim girls and our ringleader Khairiyeh Rehaimi from Jeddah was a very devout Saudi Arabian girl, who unlike me, knew her religion and followed its strictures faithfully and with conviction. As boarding students we were obliged to go attend chapel, which we had accepted with grace. But here we drew the line. We were not about to melt into the woodwork with respect to our right to choose to fast or not to fast.
That evening, we went obediently to dinner at the usual hour although it was not the hour of breaking our fast. The headmistress smirked victoriously at our meek entrance into the dining hall. We sat down at our places after grace was said, waited for the helpers to serve the food into our plates, then on cue turned our full plates upside down in joint protest onto the tablecloth in full view of the teachers’ table just behind us. Everyone froze. Not a clink or clank of cutlery was heard, not even the tiniest whisper. The head cook, eyes flashing daggers at us, folded her arms across her massive chest and named each and every one of our group scattered across the dining hall at different tables. Miss Jureidini was apoplectic and screamed in a shrill voice shaking with rage, “Get out of here! Go to my office at once. Shame! Shame on all of you!”
We didn’t care. On the contrary, we were elated at seeing her fury. She had no problem in disrespecting us and our religion; why should we be any different? Miss
Jureidini marched into her office, gave us what she thought was a withering stare and threatened us with expulsion. We smiled back silently (I personally really, really, relished the idea) except for Khairiyeh who was not going to allow the Evangelists to get the upper hand as far as respect for her religion was concerned. Khairiyeh immediately called her father to relay this infringement on our Muslim rights. The following morning, Khairiyeh’s father called the principal. He was going to raise the case with the King and ask him to pass a decree forbidding Saudi Arabs from attending any evangelical schools in Lebanon. The Saudi Arab students formed the majority of boarding students in Lebanese schools, and Khairiyeh’s father hit the winning number by hitting at their pockets. We fasted the whole month of Ramadan in triumph, albeit a hungry one as none of the delicacies of the Iftar tables of our homes were prepared by the head cook, who didn’t waste much love on us. But we had won and that was all that counted that Ramadan.
Beguiling Beirut
The positioning of our dorm room provided sources of amusement that were not included in the glitzy brochure our parents had pored over. The windowless walls of our dormitory blocked out the sights of the seedy back streets of downtown Beirut, but did not block out the sounds. Every night, titters would ripple up and down the rows of beds, as our virginal ears would hear loud bargaining between prostitutes and their prospective customers in the streets below. Occasionally, drunken brawls would break out well into the night punctuated by the sound of beer bottles shattering to the ground, instantly followed by loud sirens of police cars and culminating with angry curses from men and women being unceremoniously bundled off to the precinct. This was certainly not part of the education our parents had had in mind.