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（I Childhood）
By Evelyn Shakir
At Home and Away: Thirteen Takes on Growing Up Arab in America
1
It’s my experience that Arabs and psychiatrists are natural enemies. One says, “Family first.” The other says, “Only neurotics call home every day.” Another difference is that Arabs don’t want to hear a word about psychiatry It hurts their ears. “Ooft,” they say. “What’s this craziness!” But psychiatrists are eager to pry into Arab psyches— expecting to find a house of horrors. Each group calls the other bonkers.
My mother and father were immigrants from Lebanon. I was born in the United States. In the eighties, when Americans were being kidnapped in Beirut, a therapist explained to me the source of my unhappiness: “Your family is holding you hostage,” she said. She was being clever. She was pleased with herself.
2
My Uncle Yusuf a gentle man, loved America but hated Catholics, Democrats, and Jews. Mention the pope to him, he’d come close to spitting. Jews, of course, were the usurpers, planting themselves on Arab land. Which also explained his venom toward Democrats and Harry Truman, in particular, who’d waited all of 11 minutes before saying yes when Jews in Palestine declared themselves a state.
My Uncle Yusuf loved his suburban garden. He grew vegetables for his wife, and flowers for the joy of it. Flashy blooms—dahlias, giant chrysanthemums, and ruffled peonies. He cradled their heads in his huge hands. He cooed to them like a lover. Their enemies were his enemies. He picked off Japanese beedes with his bare fingers and drowned them in a can of kerosene. He called them “Trumans.”
My Uncle Yusuf loved me. One day when it was just the two of us in his car, he asked the standard question. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” To be funny, I said, “President.” He said, “Why not?” A window in my mind flew open. I began to think things I’d never thought before.
3
To American diplomats who urged Truman to hold off on recognizing Israel, he cited the wishes of American Jews: “I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”
On a Christmas show back in the fifties, Perry Como croons carols on TV but also works in Jewish folk songs. My father, passing through the living room, overhears. “Jews!” he explodes. “Do they control everything?” I go into my bedroom and slam the door. Only years after he died did I begin to understand what it felt like for my father to be an Arab in the United States, reminded in every editorial, on every channel, that on matters that mattered, he could have no political voice.
Good that he didn’t live to see ‘67 and Israel’s six-day blitzkrieg against Syria and Egypt, when newsmen and even comics on American TV gloated openly at Israel’s victory when Arabs were mocked pitilessly.
4
The early seventies. Palestinians are hijacking airliners and planting bombs. After one horrific attack, I’m on a bus, riding through a Boston neighborhood where Syrians and Lebanese have lived for decades. An old man climbs on. He is drunk and disheveled. “Oh, Arabs,” he cries out in Arabic, swaying from one overhead strap to another. His tears spill. “Oh, brothers, what have you done!” The driver, who has understood nothing, mutters an ethnic epithet and puts him off the bus.
5
My father’s best fishing buddy was Mr. Rosenfield who sold silk ties and held his pants up with suspenders. Before dawn on a Saturday his black Pontiac would drive down our street, and my father, who’d been at the window watching for headlights, would flick off the porch light and be out the door. Gear loaded, the two were off for the day, out after white perch and striped bass—freshwater fish. Forget the sea. Cape Cod had 365 bodies of water, my father claimed, a new one for each day of the year. When they arrived at their special spot, the sun just rising, the morning mist still on the lake, they spread out along the shore in opposite directions. Mirror images. Clumsy figures in waist-high fishermen’s boots, wading cautiously into water. Product of shted or mountain, neither man knew how to swim. But they knew rule number one: don’t talk, don’t call out, don’t scare the fish.
At noon, under a fringe of trees, they unrolled a patchwork blanket of wool remnants my mother had pieced together on her sewing machine. Pulled out sandwiches wrapped in wax paper (fried eggplant for my father, something that smelled of fish for Mr. Rosenfield), hard-boiled eggs, whole tomatoes they bit into like apples, thermoses of sweetened black coffee, cinnamon buns picked up the day before from a favorite bakery. Afterwards, my father puffing on his pipe, Me Rosenfield on his cigarette, they relaxed into conversation. What did they talk about then, this Arab and this Jew? Rods and reels, maybe. Lures and live bait. Irish politicians.
6
Riding the bus to work or waiting for the fish to bite, my father must often have dreamed of home. That would be Zahle, a good-sized town in a fertile patch of Lebanon set down between two mountain ranges. Born in the 1880s, an émigré by 1901, he thought well all his life of anybody—himself included—who had roots there. It went beyond a natural attachment. As late as 1960, an historian could write that people from Zahle “exhibit an intense, almost fanatic pride in family, status, and in place of origin.” It drove my mother crazy: “These men from Zahle, who do they think they are!”
The Zahlawi, explained the historian, has a personal relationship with God and with the saints, whom he approaches “as he would an equal.” That sounded right to me. America might snub them, hold them of no account, but it never occurred to my father, my uncle, and their cousins that they were not in excellent standing with the Almighty;
Standing among their own kind mattered, too. The Zahlawi men I knew demanded respect and were quick to take offense. (“She asked me how many eggs did I want for breakfast,” my uncle Jiryes sputtered. “I was a guest in her house, and she was counting eggs.”) Like boys in the ‘hood, they thought rep was everything. In the old country, their ancestors—those they chose to remember, those whose framed photos hung over the divan—had been abaday who galloped through town and down hillside, ready for battle should anyone dis them or their clan. But honor also demanded that, however much or little they had, Zahlawis give without stint to kinsmen, guests, and others under their protection. In America, the sons still harbored that obsession. The grandiose gesture was what they lived by; the open hand was their family crest. When the offering plate came round, heavy with coins, they tossed in dollar bills. When wedding invitations arrived, they didn’t stoop to Mixmasters or pressure cookers. Hand-embroidered linens were more their style; brass trays from Tripoli, designs hammered by master craftsmen; end tables from Damascus, inlaid with rosewood, olivewood, and alabaster.
My father ran a one-man printing press, turning out invoices, stationery, ad books, and volumes of Arabic poetry. It was the poetry he cared about. Which may be why he never got ahead. But he handed out what he could, basins of tomatoes and string beans and blackberries from his garden. In the coffee shop, he slapped away any hand that reached for the check.
Recently in Boston a young Lebanese cabbie picked me up at the airport. It turned out he was from Zahle and thrilled that I had connections there, too. I told him my father’s surname. “A small fkmily” he said, “but respectable.” I told him my grandmother’s maiden name. “A very good fkmily,” he said. At my door, he made the grand gesture. “Auntie, pay whatever you wish.” If I’d played by the rules of his game, he would have made out like a bandit and I would have walked into my house a princess, a queen. When I fell short, he shook his head sadly. Did he write home about me? Did he send word: “In America, how the children of the Zahlawi are fallen!”
My brother saw the advantage in keeping to the old ways. As a little boy, he refused to help weed the garden. “It’s below my dignity,” he explained. That’s when my mother knew to her frustration, that her son was more Zahlawi than her husband. Physical labor, a necessity for most immigrants in America but among the abaday in Zahle a source of shame. “ A Zahlawi,” one of their own has said, “is so proud that, if he bought something and it had to be put in a bag, he would hire a servant to carry it.”
But when I needed a typewriter for college, my father found one downtown and lugged it home after work, on the subway and then on the bus and then down the street to our house. Though by then he was 70. “No,” I said after I’d pecked out a few letters. “I want larger type.”
7
My parents could not get anything right:
Couldn’t talk right. Beoble, they sometimes said when tired, stymied by the letter p. Or else they overcompensated. pumper.
Couldn’t eat right: okra, eggplant, bulgur, and yogurt—my mother made her own. Bread with pockets. Hummus and tabouli. “Don’t put that stuff in my lunch box,” I said.
Went to the wrong church. Not Catholic, not Protestant, not even Jewish. “Huh?” the kids said when I said, “Orthodox.”
Were too old. One parent over 40 when I was born, the other over 50. “Is this your granddaughter?” the saleslady said.
Smoked, drank. Miss Young, my fifth grade teacher, said those were things the better class of people didn’t do.
Were eccentric. My father had a bald head and a Groucho mustache that strangers stared at. And an inch-long nail on the little finger of one hand—back home, a sign of aristocracy. My mother, odd in her own way had a job. Miss Ybung said that was wrong for a married lady. And then it got worse. In April that year, my mother rented a storefront a quarter mile from school and installed two banks of sewing machines, some Singer, some Wilcox and Gibbs, all second-hand. She was going into business for herself just like a man.