Brownies and Kalashnikovs Page 4
The eldest and prettiest of her sisters, she loved the feminine accoutrements of clothes, perfume, and make-up so much, it bordered on narcissism. She wore what made her happy, exposing her plump white arms and legs against the summer heat, never coming to terms with the abaya. On the rare occasions when we were growing up when she had to wear the abaya, she would hike it up so high to avoid tripping on it that in my father’s bemused words, “it defeated its purpose.” My father gave up on the hope she would pick up his Hijazi accent and succumbed to speaking the Syrian dialect at home, so naturally we grew up speaking it too. She never mastered the English language during the four decades of my father’s employment in Aramco, mainly due to her lack of interest in becoming absorbed into her new surroundings, content to pick what Americanisms she felt were strategic to her existence in Dhahran, and making them Syrian. The ‘Happy Birthday’ song for parties she insisted on throwing for us even though it was not the usual custom in Damascus (or Saudi Arabia) became ‘Hebby Birsdek is too yoo.’ Our birthdays were never complete without her rendering a joyful solo.
Unable to fill her home with the usual flowers, herbs and greenery that abounded in Damascene homes, my mother filled the rooms of our prefabricated duplex with assortments of plastic flowers, large and small of all colors imaginable and unimaginable. She learned to make shaklit ships (Chocolate Chip cookies) and shaklit kek (chocolate cake) as chewy and rich as the Americans next door. With her green thumb, my mother discovered the one indoor plant that thrived in the shady, artificially cooled homes of Dhahran, the coleus, a shade-loving velvety leafy plant that she nurtured into a vibrant richly variegated bushel-sized shrub from mere rooted cuttings and won first prize for her entry, annually, in the annual Women’s Group houseplants competition. She fed us our favorite cereal that she knew as kornaflek which we ate with thawed milk from ‘Minute Maid’ frozen milk cans imported from the United States. Never a particularly enthusiastic cook, she took a strong liking to Swanson’s TV dinners which were all the rage when we were growing up, complete with the accompanying ‘TV table’ while, naturally, we watched TV. Although she never could eat the stuff herself, she learned to make teenus berrer (peanut butter) and jelly sandwiches on white toast bread sliced diagonally down the middle. From the day she discovered the wonder of non-iron American ‘drip dry’ material, we were dressed in clothes made in nothing else. She didn’t speak the language but that didn’t mean she couldn’t catch the drift in our chatter when we thought we were undercover by speaking American. A well placed sherrub (shut-up) with pursed lips and a knowing sidelong glance reduced us to helpless laughter and put a temporary halt to our snide commentaries.
My mother’s learning experience of how Americans functioned was more often than not derived from discomfiting encounters. A particular habit she developed a horrified aversion to was their firm handshakes. One burly Texan had sent her to the emergency ward after grasping her hand in an enthusiastic Texan handshake that crushed her fingers. In Middle Eastern culture, when a man shakes hands with a woman, it’s barely a touch of the fingers and both the woman’s hand and the man’s remain limp. Along with distaste for their handshakes in my mother’s learning curve vis-à-vis American habits was the Americans’ manner of feeding their guests. She was exposed to it in the first week of her life in Dhahran at a dinner for the new Saudi employees and their wives. Whatever the hostess offered her, my mother had demurred politely in the Middle Eastern tradition of waiting for the hostess to insist. In the American tradition, the American hostess had not insisted, accepted her ‘no’ and moved on to the next guest leaving my mother to return home starving and insulted. Her mantra to us as we were growing up was:
“Never say ‘no’ to Americans, they’ll believe you.” ***
Within our household, my parents interacted and brought us up in the traditional, authoritarian manner of most households in the Arab world. My argument with the passports officer was a disquieting show of an independence of will that my father had never encouraged us to have. His word had always been non-negotiable and we acquiesced to his rule without question. My mother never encouraged us to do otherwise no matter how arbitrary or unfair we perceived his edicts. But my father’s censure was not strong enough to stem our rapid Americanization. As we partook in all the rites of passage of any American youngster which included Valentine’s Day card counts, Easter egg hunts and sleepless slumber parties, we became immersed in a western culture which our parents did not understand or accept and we drifted into uncharted waters where our parents could not guide us. This created tense relations between our parents and ourselves as we developed a vision of the world around us not in line with theirs.
The radio songs that I loved early in my life were not sung by the popular Arab singers that my parents listened to such as Shadia or Sabah or Um Kulthoum, but rather songs sung by Ricky Nelson, Bobby Darin and country singer Johnny Cash on Aramco’s radio station. My siblings and I dropped everything to watch ‘Rawhide,’ ‘I Love Lucy,’ ‘Ozzie and Harriet,’ ‘the Ed Sullivan Show,’ and ‘Howdy Doody’ and surreptitiously turned the television off and tiptoed away when any Arabic-speaking program came on screen before our father spotted it and forced us to remain seated.
We discovered the magic of comics and secretly began compiling towers of Wonder Woman, Archie and Superman collections, reading them with flashlights under our blankets after we were sure the parents were asleep. Comics then were the equivalent of today’s video games, a children’s subculture we did not want to be excluded from. However, to our father, they were the equivalent of the devil’s scripture. He banned them from the house. We went ahead and collected them anyway, making sure they were stashed out of sight. He would eventually uncover the stashes and then all hell would break loose.
My father was an obedient employee of Aramco who never exposed his anti-American grouses publicly but allowed his pent-up anger at the daily marginalizing he suffered under his American bosses to explode at our expense in the kingdom of his own home. One afternoon after school, I opened the back screen door to our house and heard the sounds of a thrashing. My father had come home early and discovered Marwan and Ghassan swimming in a pool of comics. I cringed as I heard the painful sound of our comics getting torn in half and backed quietly out of the house to leap across the alley in two swift jumps to my best friend, Candy Riley’s house. Ghassan and Marwan had already gone through their spanking, there was no reason why I should offer my neck like a lamb led to slaughter.
Our father thought this would effectively halt the Americanization that was steadily taking over our lives. But of course he was very wrong. We simply waited for a grace period and started new collections once again. Our Arabic language and our Arabness were fast becoming pointless irritants in our young Aramcon lives. Our parents were unable to give us a role model in our Arab world that we could emulate, but we had plenty in our American one. We began to dream, behave and speak exactly as our American peers did.
The differences between our parents and those of our American friends began to embarrass us. Although my mother was committed to our education, particularly my sister’s and mine, and had been instrumental in sneaking her two younger sisters into school, opening the way for them to go on to university degrees, we were discomfited by her lack of education. She had only reached fourth grade when her illiterate mother decided there was no longer any need for further education now that she could read and write and had pulled her out of school to help at home. My gentle, peace-loving and devout grandfather who doted on my mother tried to get his emotionally unstable wife’s edict reversed but eventually acquiesced for the sake of peace and harmony within the house. Such details did not matter to us during our childhood years, we were only aware that she was never a brownies’ troop leader, room mother or a PTA member. She turned our side yard into a chicken coop so we could eat fresh eggs and brought about complaints from the neighbors because our rooster was keeping them up all night. My father, who wasn’t particu
larly crazy about people, loved animals and half of our front yard was taken over by hutches for rabbits that multiplied in runaway numbers. We began to give them away as birthday presents until they too were banned after the Dhahran municipality discovered that they were gnawing away at the birthday recipients’ bungalows’ foundations. In the informality that is prevalent in Levantine societies, my mother befriended the Saudi bus drivers and they spent the trip gossiping about the Americans while we hid at the far end of the bus putting as much distance as possible between us.
Even my mother’s obsession with greenery had its downside for us. Saudi Arabia’s geography butted in to remind us physically where we were on the globe, particularly disgustingly when the locusts attacked. Every year for most of my childhood in Dhahran we experienced the terror of the locust attacks. Chilling warnings of their pending invasion were broadcast repeatedly to all of Dhahran’s inhabitants well ahead of their expected landing date, creating a general hysterical build-up amongst the Aramcons. Typical to my mother, her hysterical build-up was exponentially more than the norm at the thought of the inevitable demise of her beloved plants and flowers. Not one to take assault sitting down she requisitioned us on the blighted day of attack into a very unwilling locust combat unit arming us with pillow cases in a desperate bid to fight a quixotic battle to save her garden. All very well for her: she had no fear of insects!
As soon as the ominous buzz that always presaged the locusts’ imminent attack became audible, my mother would begin to both cry and pray that the locusts would switch course mid-flight, while we waited cowering with disgust inside the house, hoping against hopes that her prayers would touch base. But it never happened. In a final deafening roar, a thick black sheet of starving locusts dropped from the sky over Dhahran. Running outside with banshee yells to hide our terror, we frantically waved sheets and pillow cases at the solid wall of insects descending onto our front yard with very little effect. The locusts covered every square inch of terrain, crawling and flying, as they denuded every tree, bush and flower under their repulsive legs. The sky disappeared as wave after wave landed, covering everything stationary with their stinking yellow goo. In a few minutes it was all over, the locusts taking off as suddenly as they arrived. We would collapse in defeated exhaustion, still gripping our useless pillowcases, in a garden that had turned into a lifeless brown wasteland covered with dead locusts and beheaded flower stems, our acacia tree stark and nude in its skinned limbs, our grass no more, the ensuing silence as deafening and terrifying as the locust attack.
Politics and Pain Another major way in which our home differed markedly from our American friends’ was that the noise decibel within our home was incrementally louder, whether in discussions between parent and child or the absence in American homes of loud radio newscasts at the break of dawn. Ever since I could remember, we awoke to the solemn newscasts turned up to the highest volume from Sawt al Arab min al Qahira (Voice of the Arabs from Cairo). The ‘Voice of the Arabs’ kept my mother informed and she in turn kept us up to date on all the developments of ‘our’ war with Israel. As a young child I resented having to endure listening to such painful events in my world, envying my friends who could blithely play with their dolls without worrying about enemy attacks in their lives.
My earliest awareness of the Palestinians and their cause was through eavesdropping on a visit by a newly arrived Palestinian friend of my father’s in 1957. I had politely greeted Mr. Shafiq, who was a delightful looking man with light brown hair that waved in ripples, rosy cheeks, a blonde mustache and a very sweet smile. He had asked me about school and I had described my day to him including the ‘Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.’ Not wanting to be any more different than I already was, I had been dutifully parroting the ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ with the rest of my classmates every morning, with my hand on my heart to the American flag on the upper corner of our classroom wall.
“Fahmi?” Mr. Shafiq turned to my father, his sweet smile suddenly gone, “Are you aware of this? And is there a Saudi Arabian flag in that classroom?”
There wasn’t. A deep silence suddenly blanketed the room. I felt sorry for my father who was very, very embarrassed by my disclosure. Only with the firm promise that this would stop would Mr. Shafiq get off the case that had obviously disturbed him so much. Then with a smile, my father told me I could leave now. I did, but remained playing in the room next door, wanting to hear Mr. Shafiq’s stories; he seemed so fascinating and animated.
As I dressed my doll and admiringly combed her long blonde hair, I caught snippets of the conversation next door as Mr.Shafiq described his forced exodus from Palestine, still a very fresh gash in his heart. I put down my doll and edged closer to the door when I heard the words, “the Palestinian Deir Yassin village massacre in 1948.” Mr. Shafiq’s voice rose to a loud, tense level as he spoke about the Zionist terrorist group, Irgun, and I caught his shouted words “… the screams, explosions, gunpowder, blood, and smoke as the Irgun attacked Deir Yassin … unarmed villagers were ordered into a square, lined up against the wall and shot … a nine-months-pregnant woman had her belly sliced open with a butcher knife, her sister tried to extricate the baby from the dead woman’s womb and was killed on the spot … a sixteen-year-old watched a terrorist with a sword slice a neighbor from head to toe … trapped villagers tried to flee, but the terrorists tracked them down with guns and hand grenades, finishing them off with knives … when the blood curdling screams faded away Deir Yassin was a smoldering ruin …” Mr. Shafiq was interrupted by a bloodcurdling scream coming from me in the room next to theirs as I vividly constructed the imagery of the pregnant woman’s belly being sliced open with her baby inside. Rushing to me, Mr. Shafiq was distraught by my terror, but did not try to deny what I had heard, the cause was far too important to him to erase it in such a cavalier manner. He apologized to me, young as I was, for the horror his words had caused me but all he could sincerely hope for was that I would never experience the terror that Palestinian children my age were experiencing.
With the exception of the presence of the Saudi flag in the classrooms after my father followed up on his promise to Mr. Shafiq and complained to the administration, Dhahran Senior Staff School treated us much as the company dealt with its Arab employees … as mirages … there, but not really there. We did not study the geography or history of Arabia nor the beauty of the Arabic word, nor the history behind the Muslim civilization. I had no idea who the Ummayyads, Abbasids or Fatimids were or what Salaheddine el-Ayyubi or Harun al Rashid did or where. I barely knew the facts surrounding our prophet. But I did learn that “in fourteen hundred and ninety two Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” what went on during the Boston Tea Party, the contents of the Declaration of Independence, how to build a log cabin and furnish it, the hardships of the pioneers on the Oregon Trail, the location and history of all fifty states in America, and the names and life histories of each and every one of the Presidents of the United States of America. We were as excited as our friends over the election of John F. Kennedy and at his picture perfect family. My mother was happy for different reasons, carrying the eternal hope that a new American President meant new hope for the Arabs in the Arab–Israeli conflict.
In 1963, a handsome new teacher from North Carolina, Mr. Allen, arrived fresh from the United States to teach us history. History immediately became a favorite subject for us girls, as we all developed an unabashed crush on Mr. Allen. His soft southern drawl and intensity of purpose in the classroom brought American politics alive to our seventh grade class. We learned about the burgeoning American Black’s civil rights movement and Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a Dream’ speech. But closest to Mr. Allen’s heart was the difference between Democrats and Republicans and how much better in his view, Democrats were. John F. Kennedy was his hero.
One morning we entered class to find Mr. Allen slumped in his chair, his head on his desk, crying unashamedly. He had just learned about JFK’s assassin
ation. Our class settled into shocked silence as we looked wordlessly to one another for help. What does a seventh grader do when their favorite male teacher is crying his heart out? We began to cry too, silent tears rolled down our cheeks, boys and girls. Gathering his papers without looking up, Mr. Allen walked out of the classroom not saying a word. It was the last time we would see him. The next day, he flew out of Dhahran with his wife and two children for his annual leave, leaving us with a substitute teacher who didn’t hold a candle to our beloved Mr. Allen. Tragically, on his way back, his MEA flight crashed, ten minutes from Dhahran International Airport into the Persian Gulf, taking a large number of Aramco employees and their families with it. We lost friends and teachers, my father lost his boss, and Saudi Arab parents lost children studying in Beirut.
It was a solemn time for Dhahran as we mourned Mr. Allen, the MEA victims and JFK. Serious political upheavals were shaking the Middle East that year which I was oblivious to and frankly did not identify with. There were major upheavals such as Baathist coups in Iraq and Syria which brought about a serious halt to democratic development to date within two powerful Arab countries and just next door, a proxy war had broken out between Egypt and Saudi Arabia in Yemen’s civil war as American foreign policy weighed in heavily behind the Al Sa’uds as the replacement for Egypt’s socialist-minded President Gamal Abdel Nasser for leadership of the Arab world. I didn’t even register the power struggle that was paralyzing Saudi Arabia for kingship between Sa’ud and Faysal right on the homefront. I took no notice of these historic events. They were Arab events. In my heavily blinkered world, it was infinitely more ‘cool’ to be American than Arab in Dhahran of Saudi Arabia.