Brownies and Kalashnikovs Read online

  We crossed the street from the fishermen’s cafés to our destination, Sidon’s only restaurant of repute known as the ‘Istirahah’ or ‘Resthouse.’ ” It was built of large slabs of yellow stone to blend harmoniously with Sidon’s Crusader fortress which was a short distance away surrounded by sea and accessible only by its original drawbridge permanently laid out for visitors. The Citadel, or qala’a as it is called by the Sidonians, was built on remnants of a Phoenician lookout and was still remarkably intact, particularly its lookout perches, witness to many a conqueror’s advance from sea and many a defender’s attempt to repel him.

  We were ushered to a table in the Istirahah so close to the water’s edge that each wave seemed to be stretching out to touch our hands then impishly spraying us with a fine mist of salty sea. Looking out at the seascape, I could trace the winding southern coastal road we had just taken. As the evening sky grew darker, the steady line of traffic transformed the coastal road into an uninterrupted ribbon of light. The sun, now a ball of deep orange, was melting languidly into water as smooth as glass. Sprays of villages nestling in the velvety black folds of the accompanying Chouf hills winked and shone like diamonds. How scenic Lebanon was and how peaceful it looked as it shimmered in the clear night air. However, the feeling of harmony and tranquility that I was enjoying was about to reach an abrupt end as our conversation moved to the political discord that was consuming Lebanon.

  The Passion of Palestine Adnan turned almost immediately to the Palestinian issue and the fedayeens, the militant arm of the Palestinian refugees on Lebanese soil, newly accredited by the 1969 Cairo Accord. Violently averse to bloodshed, I was of the opinion that the negotiating table was preferable to armed resistance. Adnan disagreed. An edge crept into our conversation. Stretches of silence became uncomfortably long, particularly on our drive back to Beirut. “Oh well,” I thought to myself as I stepped into my dorm room, “that’s that.” But I was wrong, personal intrigue and chemistry won out over our political discord and that was definitely not that.

  Not one to pass up the chance to support his argument, Adnan invited me the following morning to accompany him to Ain El Hilweh, the Palestinian refugee camp in Sidon, to visit one of Fatah’s military commanders, a former schoolmate.

  “Ain el Hilweh is as influential in Sidonian society as its fishermen – and they’re allies,” was how he described the camp.

  I felt out of my league as we approached the entrance to the camp. It was with plenty of trepidation that I had accepted the invitation, not understanding Arabic well being the major sticking point. Adnan would not take ‘no’ for an answer: I had to see the facts on the ground before I shaped my opinions. He had a point, but he had also not warned me of the human misery I was about to see, choosing for once to have me see for myself.

  We picked our way through narrow dirt and rock-strewn alleys between rows of ‘houses’ composed of breezeblocks with plastic-covered spaces for windows and corrugated iron rooftops. Notwithstanding the abject poverty indicated by these houses and typical of all homes on the Mediterranean, clothes lines with sparkling white laundry and children’s garments crisscrossed whatever space was not taken up by riots of jasmine, roses, gardenias, and sweet-smelling carnations planted in recycled milk and cooking oil tins. Fat luscious grapes hung from trellises of vines that began at the entrance of one home and continued down the alley on through neighbors’ houses. Astonishingly, there was space for a small vegetable patch adjacent to every home which provided the staples of the Levantine diet, an assortment of mint leaves, parsley, coriander, basil, tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, green beans, garlic and spring onions. Eating is a very serious activity for the Arabs, especially for those from the Fertile Crescent, no matter how poor. Music blared from all directions from diverse radio stations, each competing in volume to drown out the rest. Running around in all of this jumble of humanity, living as best as they could under such dire conditions, were children of all ages doing what children do, eating, arguing, carrying whatever makeshift toy they could salvage, be they dolls’ heads or a single wheel of a bicycle.

  Adnan stopped before a house that looked like all the rest but was guarded by armed youths wearing the trademark kuffiyeh around their shoulders. They shook hands warmly and ushered us in with a lot of fanfare. Adnan was obviously amongst friends. They were, in fact, childhood friends, as the Fatah commander had attended the same school courtesy of the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinian Refugee) that provided scholarships to the Palestinians from the camps. The person we were there to see jumped up from his desk and hugged Adnan.

  “This is Fadia Basrawi,” Adnan introduced me, “she’s Saudi Arab and lives in the American oil town of Dhahran and is interested to know more about your armed struggle for Palestine.”

  I listened carefully to the plight of the Palestinian refugees from the young Fatah commander’s perspective:

  “Whichever way you look at our situation, we are the victims. The squalor you are seeing here is not how these people used to live in their homeland. Granted they were poor, but they lived in historically well-established villages that went back many centuries with land handed down from father to son. We are asked to sit in these camps and wait and wait and wait to return to our homes. We saw the result of waiting in 1967. No one will help the Palestinians except the Palestinians themselves. Our young men are strong, healthy and filled with the desire to regain the identity and self-respect that we have been robbed of and death is nothing compared to the life we’re living. We are not leftists or rightists or communists, just hardworking Palestinians who have lost their land and dignity. In these camps there is no light at the end of the tunnel. In our armed struggle, there is.”

  ***

  A new and fascinating window into Lebanon’s political scene opened for me through my introduction to the staff of the An Nahar newspaper. Adnan was a journalist for the widely-read An Nahar while he worked on his MBA at AUB and lectured on labor rights and business at the Lebanese University. Many of our dates ended at An Nahar, where he was on a first-name basis with everyone beginning from the first floor where the telephone operators worked, on up to the sixth floor where the publisher of the newspaper, an icon of the Lebanese intelligentsia, Ghassan Tueni, had his offices.

  Its prime mover and shaker was Michel Abu Jaoude, the editor-inchief of the newspaper, unsurpassed amongst the now nearly extinct breed of influential opinion-editorial Arab journalists. Michel’s acerbic column was anticipated every morning and discussed widely throughout the Arab world. Everyone who cared about the events of the day had to know what Michel thought. He had taken a strong liking to Adnan and the door to his office was always held wide open for our visits. There, in his office, we spent long fascinating soirées as everyone who was anyone or wanted to be someone in the Arab world streamed into his office to hash over matters of the moment, giving Michel grist for his column and the An Nahar cartoonist, Pierre Sadek, inspiration for his lampoon of the day. Michel’s regular visitors were men like Yasser Arafat, Kamal Nasser, Fatah’s urbane spokesman, the worldly journalist Eric Rouleau, all of Lebanon’s future warlords that included Kamal Jumblatt, his son, Walid Jumblatt (who was interning at the An Nahar printing quarters in the basement), Camille Chamoun and his sons Dory and Dany, Pierre Gemayel and his sons Amin and Bashir, the Edde clan including Pierre and Raymond … the list went on and on. All of these men needed Michel’s good graces far more than he needed theirs. In that period of Beirut’s history, the written word had far-reaching clout and very few minds could rise to match his dry wit and keen insight into Lebanese politics and politicians.

  ***

  Michel Abu Jaoude’s office was where we were heading after my arrival from Dhahran. I had speedily dumped my luggage in my room and jumped into Adnan’s tiny Honda, a stark innovation from the giant wing-tipped gasoline guzzling American cars of the sixties. We drove up to An Nahar’s headquarters, a large square featureless cement-block building dat
ing to the fifties. As we walked towards Michel Abu Jaoude’s office, a colleague of Adnan’s, Farid Sa’ab, popped out of his office door with dramatic flourish for a quick exchange of stanzas for Qatar’s national anthem. Qatar’s anthem was an ongoing work in progress between them. Michel greeted us at the door to his office with a wide grin that curved slightly down at the edges, lending him a rakish cynical touch.

  “Ahlan wa Sahlan (welcome), to our Saudi friend. So any signs of revolution yet?” he asked me, half jokingly.

  Michel had absolutely no faith in the governing abilities of any of the desert statelet rulers that had cropped up in the Arabian Desert, reserving the biggest portion of his scorn for the Al Sa’uds. His office was filled with visitors seated in casual array except for one politician, Pierre Edde, who sat ramrod straight in his chair and gave us a brief self-important smile in greeting. Michel launched into his usual free-association conversation.

  “I was just discussing with my dear friend Pierre here how transforming money can be with respect to our people. Take for example, humor. Have you noticed how hilarious any joke coming from the mouth of a rich man is to its listeners? … without being funny? As for the poor man who has nothing in his pocket, how his jokes always fall flat, no matter how witty? Tsk.tsk.tsk. The same you’ll agree applies to fashion. You have a politician who turns up in grease-spotted ties like Mr. Pierre Edde here,” and he motioned to the startled gentleman, “sycophants will ooh and aah about the grease spots on his tie and it’ll become all the rage. While Mr. Nobody there (who had mercifully just left the room) spends his salary on the latest trend of the moment and no one cares … Ah, the magic wand of social climbing in our zuama–controlled politics.12

  Everyone was welcome to visit Michel Abu Jaoude for a first visit but any subsequent visits were strictly filtered according to Michel’s whim. Michel did not suffer fools lightly. If such a perceived fool made the unfortunate mistake of a repeat visit, Michel, ever the gentleman, would hop out from behind his desk and enthusiastically greet the persona non grata, smiling broadly. Before the yet oblivious guest had a chance to sit down, Michel would link arms with him and escort him casually to the elevator, pat his arm with a “so lovely of you to pass by, you shouldn’t have troubled yourself,” then reach into the elevator and press the ground floor button before the elevator doors closed on the mystified almost-guest. Thankfully, we never had anything but kind words upon our entrance.

  In 1970, Lebanon was a delightful place to be young and in love. Many of our evenings were spent carousing along the long coastal highway that hugged both the Mediterranean coast and Lebanon. The gentle hills of the south remained visible from the northern coastal road and the commanding peaks of Mount Lebanon remained visible from the southern coastal road. Hundreds of romantic restaurants dotted the country whether in the cool pine-laden breeze of the mountains, or along the seashore on the rocky beach of the northern coastal highway where we wined and dined, walked and talked, and I learned to skip pebbles across the water. ‘Faisal’s’ remained our favorite hangout under the hegemony of Amin, who brought us what we wanted without waiting for our order, then leaned on our table for brief gossip sessions full of small witty asides invariably about his rival, Anwar.

  ***

  Breaking all the Rules My first meeting with Adnan’s parents was totally impromptu. Hana, Fatin, and I were walking into the neighborhood bakery one Sunday morning for a Lebanese breakfast of manakeesh13, when a car suddenly screeched to a halt next to us and Adnan waved from its window. He had ‘happened’ to be driving his Honda by our dormitory in BCW and had just spotted us. We embarrassedly exchanged quick pleasantries as traffic began to pile up behind his car and politely refused his invitation to go for a short spin. His reponse was to step out of his car and refuse to budge despite the increasingly strident traffic pileup unless we accepted his invitation. So we got in, feeling awkward in our casual weekend dress and with Hana in her bedroom slippers. In those days, casual clothes were worn only at home, never in public; we had felt free to slip out to the bakery as it was just around the corner from our dorm. Adnan started the car and sped off heading south. Our hearts sank when we discovered that we were on our way to Sidon to meet his mother. “She’ll prepare a breakfast like you’ve never seen,” was his cheerful answer to our panicked pleas to return us to our bakery.

  Adnan’s mother, Munira Fawaz, known as Im Bashar, could be heard welcoming her son even before opening the front door, having recognized his special ring. She didn’t miss a beat upon seeing him surrounded by three very casually dressed girls that she was meeting for the first time. “Ahlan wa sahlan,” she greeted us warmly, “Welcome, welcome, come in, come in.” Although relatively small in stature, Im Bashar gave an aura of being much larger than her physique suggested with her strong features, broad capable shoulders and long thick gray hair tied back in a casual bun. She ushered us into the living room, seated us and gazed at us with large chocolate brown eyes that missed nothing. Those eyes now lit on me, “And, are you Adnan’s colleague?” As I stammered and stuttered in response, she cast a sidelong glance at Adnan and winked. She had immediately picked out the girl her son had wanted her to meet. And that was vintage Im Bashar … generous, playful, disarming, candid and immeasurably sharp.With an infectious laugh that shook her belly, she led us to the dining room where she had prepared breakfast fit for a king, the king being her son. Sunday was the day that Adnan never scheduled anything except seeing his mother, and his mother, of course, would never have had it any other way … a custom we would carry on whenever we were in proximity with one another for the rest of Im Bashar’s long life.

  We were winding down our visit with a final cup of coffee when Adnan’s father walked into the living room, a serene, patrician, silverhaired gentleman with noble features and expressive eyes of blue-green very similar to Adnan’s. Abu Bashar was quieter than Im Bashar but conveyed the same largesse of spirit, humor and intellect. I was already familiar with Adnan’s parents from stories he had relayed to me that were always brimming with reverent awe and affection. It was an informal manner in which I met my future parents-in-law but then, they were not ceremonial people by any means so it wouldn’t have made sense to meet them any other way.

  I was curious about Adnan’s parents’ input about Lebanon’s independence from the French, and now was as good a time as any to ask them. Im Bashar was non-committal, “I didn’t hear about it until much later, nothing changed for us and the men who were involved in this independence charade have less than stellar patriotic commitments.” Abu Bashar, seated across from us with his arms folded across his chest began to laugh silently at his wife’s sour take on the much touted Independence Day.

  “She’s right,” he said still laughing. “No one took any of the brouhaha seriously. There was no written constitution, and the census was the one the French had cooked up so the Maronites would stay the most powerful. We knew how flawed the ‘National Pact’ was demographically and that it did not reflect the reality of the Lebanese population, that it was unsustainable and that it would be only a matter of years before everything fell apart.”

  Adnan’s father, Mohammad Salaheddine Khayyat or ‘Salah’ for short, was born in Sidon in 1902, a Syrian subject of the Bilad al Sham province of the Ottoman Empire. He had attended an Ottoman nursery school briefly and his formidable memory retained the Ottoman nursery rhymes they had taught him. He could still recite the rhymes, with a twinkle in his eyes and a suppressed smile and all the accompanying arm waving. By the time he reached middle school, the Ottomans were weakening and his devoutly religious father enrolled him in an Arab Sunni Muslim school. There, the first seeds of the secular Arab nationalist fervor were implanted in his young heart when his school took its young students to the streets to march against the Ottoman Empire for the independence of the Arab provinces during the Arab Revolt. This would be the beginning of many such protests. He would go on to march against the Sykes-Picot agreement that left the p
romised dream of an independent Arab nation no more than a dream, and once, twice and many times more against the Balfour declaration that legitimized the Zionists’ presence on Palestinian land. During his law school years in Damascus, where he studied the Napoleonic Code in French under the French mandate, my father-in-law joined the new breed of secular thinkers and activists in the Arab world leading the Pan-Arab movement as it marched in protest after protest against the European Powers and their designs to control the Levant. He and men of his caliber never met the carving up of the Middle East with resignation or defeat. This ardor for the Arab dream that gripped him in his youth would not diminish until his final breath.

  Ironically enough, Arab nationalism was of the making of the colonizers themselves in their strategy to destabilize the Ottoman Empire’s firm hold on its geo-strategic Arab provinces. The Europeans were aware that gaining control over the inhabitants of this area would not be the piece of cake the Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula had been. With a rich history of political intrigue, the Levantines were nobody’s fools. So the Western Powers played on the Arabs’ dreams for self-determination. What could be more potent a challenge to the as yet uncontested guardianship over Islamic culture and political dogma held by the Ottomans with respect to the Arabs than an awakening of the Arab dream for independence? And what could be more powerful a tool to push this dream forward than the Arabic language, which held its speakers and readers spellbound by its depth and breadth of description? Arabic was a complex language that could capture in a word the most ephemeral nuances of life, nuances as fleeting as the fluttery shadow of eyelashes on a cheek (reef ). Helpfully, the Europeans stimulated the publishing industry to encourage the revival of Arabic literature. Once the printed books spread throughout the Arab world the beauty and power of the Arabic word turned it into a lethal weapon of subliminal sabotage against the Ottomans as it touched readers far and wide, creating a massive wave of passionate Arab nationalism. This wave did challenge the Ottoman’s authority, but to the dismay of the mandate powers, did not crest with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. On the contrary, it emerged as a powerful political phenomenon in the Middle East and turned the colonizers into the enemy.