Brownies and Kalashnikovs Read online

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  Bingo and Beatlemania The Arab–American divide in our family life became particularly acute after I hit puberty. Suddenly all the rules changed dramatically for me. Dances, get-togethers, beach parties, and boy guests became strictly and unarguably off bounds in the new code of conduct sternly dictated by my uncompromising father who offered no explanation other than that I was a Muslim Saudi daughter. It was a very anxiety-provoking situation as I had no other Saudi girl to hash matters out with to better understand why such strict surveillance was so necessary. These were children I had grown up with and now I was to behave formally with them. It didn’t help that my puberty was ahead of my American girlfriends and well ahead that of the American boys. My reaction to this untenable situation was that I, as a Saudi daughter, and I as an Americanized Saudi teenager, became two different people. I was one person at home and someone else the moment I stepped outside the door. Much distress went into the dual teenage lifestyle that I led but the desire to associate freely with my peers was stronger than staying locked up at home just because my father said so. The line separating one nation from the other was always clear to me while I was growing up in Dhahran but I was not clear where I stood with respect to that line. Pretending to study overnight with my friends, I went to school dances in Abqaiq and Ras Tanura, and beach parties at Aramco’s yacht club and one Bingo night at the American Air Base overlooking Dhahran. By ‘one Bingo night’ I mean one Bingo night.

  When Barbara invited me to join her and her parents to play Bingo, I said yes happily despite knowing how serious my breech of conduct was by going there. Playing Bingo at the American Air Base teeming with lonely young American men in uniform was forbidden by my father in no uncertain terms. Outside of loving the game and the anticipation of getting the number that would allow me to shout “Bingo!” I wanted to see the forbidden territory for myself. In the euphoria of crossing a red line and without telling Barbara or her parents of the breach I was committing, I dared Barbara to wear lipstick, a very big dare for us at our tender age of twelve. Barbara ran into her mother’s room and returned with the brightest color of her mother’s collection and we slathered it on. Pursing our lips self consciously, we ignored her parents’ smirks as we clambered eagerly into the car to head out to the air base, a fifteen minute drive away. Giddy with anticipation, we horseplayed in the back seat of the car. In between bounces, I snuck a glance in the rear view window to make sure all was clear only to lock eyes with my father driving behind us. Barbara and her parents, oblivious of what had just transpired, continued with their bantering chatter as we turned off into the direction of the Air Base, giving my father precise information of exactly where I was going. My mouth went dry and my stomach did flip-flops, not from feelings of guilt at what I had done, but at getting caught. The evening suddenly lost its luster and began to drag on as I replayed the scenario of my father’s grim face over and over. Neither the Bingo game nor my winning first prize that gave me stage center as I received it from a smiling Air Force officer could redeem the evening for me. When I returned home, I prepared myself for the worst and a long lecture on morals and lying to one’s parents. To my shock, I found out that his anger was not because of the Bingo but at my lipstick that had been so bright that he saw it clearly through the rear view window. From that day on I stopped playing Bingo as it gave me anxiety attacks and going to Barbara’s house was added to my father’s increasingly lengthening list of forbiddens.

  Matters became astronomically worse at home after I succumbed to Beatlemania. Their singular four/four beat in music, mop tops, and cheekiness catapulted me into hopeless, boundless, shameless love. I was smitten and smitten to the point of insanity with John, Paul, George and Ringo, who lived in my head where ever I went and whatever I did. The day that their first movie ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ came to our theater I couldn’t sleep from excitement. My friends and I had formed a fan club for the Beatles and had named ourselves after our favorite Beatle. Jeanette Rebold was John, Pat McDonald was Paul, Cheryl Congleton was Ringo and I was George. On the day of the movie, appropriately attired in Beatle costumes and Beatle haircuts, we were driven to the movie theater by my father who was, predictably, having serious issues over my Beatlemania. I had never displayed such overt teenage antics before and he was convinced that I was going to become a ‘wild woman’ during the movie. I was very relieved that he had not forbidden me outright from seeing the movie, but I had no way of knowing what he actually had in store for me. To my deep and utter mortification, my father not only got out of the car to walk us to the ticket stand but bought a ticket for himself as well, becoming the only adult in the movie theater. He unsmilingly and resolutely sat between me and my dismayed friends to make sure I did not get out of control. I don’t recall anything from the movie except my father’s sharp eyes on me rather than on the screen. After ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ I took my Beatlemania underground along with my other western idiosyncrasies.

  Ottomanesque Summers: Damascus and Alexandria My identification with the Americans was never due to any lack of contact with the Arab world; I knew it well. We visited my parents’ Arab friends in the nearby towns of Al Khobar and Dammam. While my friends went with their families to Europe and the United States for their summer vacations, I went with mine to visit relatives in Damascus in Syria, and Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt. Now I realize how fortunate I was to have seen that part of the Arab world before it crumbled under the burden of the Arab–Israeli conflicts and various dictatorships. But those were not my feelings then, although I did enjoy the change of pace I experienced during our summer holiday visits.

  We often began our summers in Damascus at my grandparents’ house, a beautiful white ground floor home with high ceilings, sunlit rooms and black and white marble checkered floors. The house looked out onto an open porch and a small fragrant rose garden enclosed by a black wrought iron fence. It was in a wide plaza known as the Ra’eess (the leader) in reference to the Presidential Palace that was located just across the plaza from our house. To us as children, having the Presidential offices so near was a nuisance because of the guards that stood at attention round the clock, creating a headache for my young aunts who were banished from the front porch by my conservative uncles.

  Damascus during the fifties and early sixties was a beautiful, clean, spacious city with wide boulevards and airy three-storied apartment buildings designed by architects from Italy. Sweet-smelling trees shaded the sidewalks, and the entrance to every home had a front garden that wafted the fragrant scents of the Levantine flora onto the passerby. A large green park, the ‘Sibki,’ boasted a man-made lake filled with ducks and swans. Located in the center of the city, Sibki Park divided the residential areas of the city from the center of the city with its ancient covered markets, the largest of which was Suq El Hamidiyeh built by the Ottoman Sultan Abdel Hamid in the nineteenth century. The suq was lined with tiny shops traditionally handed down from father to son. Salesmen stood at the door to their shops and called out to potential customers to buy their wares of iridescent damask silks, handmade mosaic boxes, embroidered tablecloths, towels, spices, 21 karat gold jewelry, satin bed sheets and risqué underwear for brides to be. Branching off from the main covered suq was a maze of sinewy crowded paths lined with intricately designed Ottoman and Mamluk era homes, their occupants hidden from the public eye behind thick wooden doors with heavy brass knockers in the shape of gargoyles and colored glass windows with tightly latticed wooden shutters. So entwined were the pathways and homes, that one exceedingly narrow and crooked lane had the name: ‘where the monkey lost her son.’

  Our favorite quarter of the suq was the one devoted to slippers of all shapes, sizes, and colors. They hung in multitudes of overlapping pairs attached by invisible wire on poles leaning on the sides of the shops’ doors. How the salesmen were able to reach out with their metal hooks and deftly pull out the exact model and size of the desired slipper from the folds of slippers without a moment’s hesita
tion was a mystery that we spent endless hours trying to unravel. Along the worn cobblestones under the soaring arched roof of the suq, vendors adroitly wielded their cumbersome wooden three-wheeled carts alongside puttering mopeds and men on shrilly tinkling bicycles covered with brightly colored feathers. We inched our way slowly through crowds of pedestrians from one shop to the other, we elbowed the pushing and pinching males in the crowd and we patiently endured our aunts’ endless haggling deemed absolutely necessary before any exchange of money and wares took place because we knew that we would eventually reach our main destination: the suq’s Arabic ice cream parlor.

  The ice cream parlor was a large cavernous room furnished with rickety white Formica tables and bamboo chairs scattered around the room in no particular arrangement. Its white plaster walls were bare, save for two large sepia portraits of the owner’s father and grandfather strung up high near the ceiling, the men identical in their red fezzes and stern mustachioed faces. At the parlor’s entrance, four hefty men bent over four giant vats, prepared the Levantine ice cream, drumming a staccato beat with long sticks in light-hearted harmony as they pounded milk, sugar, and miskeh (gum Arabic) into a rich, smooth and chewy consistency. We tapped our table to their rhythmic beats as we waited for our treat. At long last our ice creams arrived, rising in delectable pristine white curls in engraved glass bowls, covered with generous sprinkles of crushed pistachios and crystallized rose petals.

  There was plenty to see and plenty to do in Damascus and the city flowed easily. Tradition and hierarchy played a very strong role amongst the established Damascene families, largely middle class merchant families who anchored the economic and social network. Each religious denomination lived without any visible rancor vis-à-vis the others. All the inhabitants of the city were Damascene and Syrian before they were Jews, Christian, or Muslim. That of course applied to the cities. The countryside, on the other hand, was a different story. There lived Syria’s ‘miserables,’ the peasants, who subsisted in subhuman conditions without water, electricity, roads or schools. Amongst them were the Alawites, worshippers of Ali, the Prophet’s grandson. Branded as a cult by the largely feudal urban Sunni leadership, they were shunted out of the fabric of Syrian existence along with the other non-urban groups.

  One morning in 1958 during our summer holiday, I walked out to the front porch to show off my brand new hula hoop to the neighbors when I noticed a giant new flag draped along the length of the Presidential Palace. “We are now part of the United Arab Republic,” Uncle Hisham, my mother’s youngest brother, informed me excitedly. “We are one Arab people with Egypt. Gamal Abdel Nasser will restore Palestine and our dignity and honor; he is an Arab Nationalist of the first caliber who will lead us Arabs in our fight for our right to be free of all types of occupation.” I was seven, too young to grasp the politics but old enough to notice a significant change surrounding the Presidential Palace. Large cheering crowds gathered daily to hear speeches glorifying the UAR union and many Important Visitors came and went that summer, led by shrieking sirens. It was all very exciting, although the enthusiasm of the women of Damascus for the UAR dampened somewhat after large groups of free-spirited young Egyptian ladies, university exchange students, poured into Damascus and marched through the high street around the corner from my grandparent’s house, laughing and singing exuberantly “We want unity with Syrian husbands.”

  Stirring songs were written in praise of the United Arab Republic and Gamal Abdel Nasser. My favorite song was the one that included my Aunt Firdoss as part of the chorus of the Ain Shams University in Cairo in a song lauding Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal and the building of the High Dam of Aswan in defiance of the West. Who Gamal Abdel Nasser was didn’t make much difference to me at that age of course but I was content with the happiness of my aunts and uncles. The music and lyrics still remain a moving and nostalgic memory of the hope that captured the hearts and aspirations of that first emerging post-colonial generation.

  Three years later, in 1961, the hula hoop rage was still going strong, but the United Arab Republic was through. A group of young Alawite officers seized power in a bloodless coup that brought an Alawite into the presidency. Predictably, relations with the Sunni leader of the Arab world, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, cooled and the giant UAR flag was taken down amidst cheering and clapping crowds. The Alawites overran the established Damascene society with a vengeance. Damascus was flooded with Alawite peasants clamoring for work through their Alawite connections in the government. Nine years later in 1970, the Alawites were officially recognized as legitimate Muslims through Presidential decree after one of the Alawite officers who had toppled the Sunni leadership in 1961, Hafez Asad, seized power in another bloodless coup. He would reign over Syria for thirty years and successfully steer Syrian politics away from the Sunni-dominated Pan-Arab leadership. The Alawitecontrolled Baathist regime was rife with corruption and nepotism that triggered a serious drain of money and brains out of Syria, bringing its vibrant economy to a standstill. My mother’s family began to drop their voices to a whisper at the mere mention of the Baathists even within the walls of their homes after Sunni relatives and friends began to disappear as they left the mosque after Friday noon prayers. All those who chose to question the Ba’athists ended up in jail or dead, including the two thinkers, Michel Aflaq, a Christian Orthodox, and Salah Bitar, a Sunni Muslim, who had developed the Ba’ath ideology in Beirut’s cafés in 1943.

  We watched Damascus turn into a sad, gray, crumbling city. ***

  The second part of our summers was spent in Egypt until King Sa’ud and Gamal Abdel Nasser stopped being friends after they differed on who should have the upper hand in control over Yemen in 1962. Post 1962, Cairo and Alexandria dropped off our summer itinerary. Until that year, we spent happy fun-filled summers switching from the long drawl of the Syrian dialect to the clipped musical staccato of the Egyptian one. I remember the Cairo of my childhood days as a sparkling city filled with colorful people and laughter. The only place that didn’t have much laughter was the large echoing marble expanse of my father’s sister’s penthouse overlooking the Nile River. Amti Bahija had been married off at the age of thirteen to a man thirty-five years her senior, Saleh Mehdi Qal’aji, an Iraqi from Baghdad. He had fought with Ibn Jiluwi and Ibn Sa’ud back in the early days of Saudi Arabia’s conquest and had been instrumental in setting up both the police and charity network for the new kingdom. A grateful King ‘Abdel ‘Aziz had told him, “I’m a simple Bedouin who does not bequeath aristocratic titles such as Bek or Basha, I will endow you with what I perceive you to be, the title of Mosleh (Benefactor).”

  Saleh Mehdi Mosleh’s efforts were further rewarded by Ibn Sa’ud with the position of Hijaz’s General Director of Customs and a lavish lifestyle in Cairo. Amti Bahija was his trophy wife. She grew into a beautiful but intensely unhappy woman, the emotional scars of an early marriage and immense wealth permanently etched on her hard-faced persona. Our entrance at her door said it all. Nubian servants dressed in long kaftans bowed silently as they ushered us to Amti Bahija, visible from the entrance door across the interminable stretch of the entrée. Dressed in the height of fashion, seated in an ornate velvet armchair with legs crossed, she laconically blew smoke rings from her cigarette (a favorite pastime of hers) while she waited silently for us to approach her. We never stayed longer than it took for my father to pay his respects to his eldest sister and his mother then continued on to the highlight of our summer in Alexandria to visit my mother’s grandmother.

  My great-grandmother, Marie Haddad, was a dear white-haired Maronite Christian from Deir al Qamar in Lebanon (which was a part of the Ottoman-ruled Bilad el Sham when she was born). She had met my great-grandfather, Mohammed Hammoud, while living with her family in Alexandria and he was a merchant from the Lebanese port city of Sidon, passing through in the days of borderless existence and trade between the major cities of the Ottoman Empire. They had a daughter and a son but their marriage
did not last and she returned to her family in Alexandria where she owned her own apartment. For reasons no one could quite explain, their son Joseph went with his mother and their daughter, my grandmother Yisr, stayed behind with her father in Sidon. My grandmother lived a lonely life after she was abandoned to relatives by her father after his remarriage until my grandfather, Hamdi Kotob, a distant relative and merchant from Damascus, asked for her hand in marriage. She was thirteen and he was twenty years her senior, but she couldn’t have found a gentler and kinder man for a husband.

  Our trip to Alexandria was as exciting as our stay there. We traveled from Cairo to Alexandria by steam locomotive with wooden seats that were only a suggestion of how many passengers were to occupy the carriage. We squeezed into our wooden seats among loud jostling good-natured crowds of peasants carrying their farm produce on their heads in large oblong straw baskets, clasping wire cages filled with hens and roosters clucking up a storm and accompanied of course by many, many children who spent the trip climbing over everybody. Policemen were stationed at the doors of the train with the unenviable task of keeping off the hens and roosters, all in vain of course. The cages that were taken away at the door were quickly handed to their owners by relatives bidding them farewell through the windows of the train as it pulled away. We swayed rhythmically from side to side as the train clattered down the track through wide expanses of cotton fields that stretched as far as the eye could see. Dotting the fields of green and white were the fellahin, peasant men and women, some bent over, others spreading seeds in wide circular sprays that glinted briefly in the golden rays of the sun before settling into the mystical soil of the Nile Delta.