A God Who Hates (3 page)

It was the custom for the bride to ride to the bridegroom’s home on a horse led by a member of her family. She would be met by a woman from the bridegroom’s family who would welcome the bridal procession by dancing before it with a bowl of incense on her head. The bride would reward the woman by throwing a few coins into the bowl. My grandfather, without a thought for my grandmother’s feelings, insisted that she carry the bowl and perform the dance before the bridal procession. He forced the woman who bore five of his children to denigrate herself before others in the village for the simple and selfish reason than that he didn’t want the few coins his new bride would toss into the bowl to go to anyone outside the family.

My grandmother swallowed her pride and hid her sadness away to perform the dance. At the end of the wedding ceremony she felt that, although she might have lost her husband, she had at least gained a golden Ottoman pound. Her happiness about even that small triumph was short-lived. At dawn that first day, she awoke to the sound of a gentle knocking at the door of her room. When she spied my grandfather through a crack in the door she was thunderstruck. In a low voice he whispered in her ear, “My bride is still asleep, and I’m here to borrow the golden pound. I promise I’ll give it back to you when we bring in the harvest at the end of the season.”

My grandmother gave him the coin and went back to bed empty-handed, deprived of everything except her sadness. After the wedding, my grandmother was reduced to the status of a servant in her own home. She served my grandfather, his wife, and the ten boys that wife would bear for him. My grandmother accepted this humiliation, swallowed the insult, and worked from dawn till dusk in the house and the fields, all for the sake of her daughters. Some fifty years later my grandfather died without having given my grandmother back her pound. My grandmother died about fifteen years after that, still insisting—as a loyal Muslim wife must—that her husband had been a man of distinction, just as she had when he forced her to solicit a young woman to become his new bride.

A Muslim woman does not usually have the right to choose anything about her life; but in the rare circumstance that she does, that woman does not hesitate for a moment in choosing what suits her, even if she has to pay a price for that choice. When my mother married, my grandmother decided to escape the hell of life with my grandfather and moved in with her brother and his family. Although her life with her brother was little better, she felt that by leaving home she had taken a stand against her husband. After my mother’s marriage, she began to fuss over the children like a broody hen. My father’s five children from his first wife lived with us. I was the fourth of my mother’s eight offspring. When I came into the world I had to compete for a foothold in a house that swarmed with children. Several years after my mother’s marriage, my father asked my grandmother to come and live with us so that she could help my mother with the housework and the children. In the Arab world it is not usual for a woman to live in her son-in-law’s home and my grandmother agreed to my father’s request so as to make a point with her brother just as she had with my grandfather: She could make a choice. Life in our house was different for my grandmother. My father treated my grandmother with respect and seized every opportunity to praise her hard work and her role in raising the children. In his house, my grandmother breathed the fresh air of freedom and showered us with love and tenderness.

My mother was different. She did not share my grandmother’s ability to cast off the effects of her past, and was always a sad, angry, and stubborn woman. My father was dazzled by her youthful beauty as a child is dazzled by a toy. He was about twenty-five years older than she was. She was younger than his eldest daughter. He treated her well, but even this could not bring a smile to my mother’s face. The age difference between them was too great and their betrothal had not been her choice.

My father was a businessman who was respected and well known in the town where we lived. He was a grain merchant who sold the product of crops grown in eastern Syria to buyers in the coastal area. He provided us with a standard of living that many families in our region could not even dream of at the time. His day began at four o’clock in the morning when he would get up and make the morning coffee. Within a few moments the scent of Turkish coffee would pervade every corner of the house. Still half asleep, I would see him approach my mother’s bed and whisper quietly in her ear, “Coffee’s ready, dearest.” But she would thrust him away with a shove and he would go back to his chair on the veranda overlooking the sea, and, on most occasions, drink his coffee alone.

One of my happiest memories of him is of his return from a long journey at his usual dawn hour, when he would run to his family and wake us all up shouting, “Come on out, and bring bags with you!” We would run outside, pushing and shoving, and then race to the grain truck that stood blocking the street in front of our house. The driver would help us carry in the bags full of sweets, fruit, and vegetables. In the melon and watermelon season, we would compete to see who could carry the most.

My father spent very little time at home. He would leave in the morning before sunrise and come home after dark. In his absence my grandmother reigned supreme. Our town suffered from a shortage of schools. To solve this problem, each school had two shifts of pupils. On Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays, the girls went to school from seven in the morning until noon, while the boys started their school day at half past twelve and studied until five o’clock in the evening. This arrangement was reversed on the remaining three school days, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, when the boys started school in the mornings, while the girls studied in the afternoons. On the days I went to school in the afternoon I would accompany my grandmother to the local market in the early morning to buy the day’s necessities.

My grandmother’s village, where she lived until the day she left her brother’s house for my father’s, is about seven miles away from the town where we lived. For twenty years after the day she left it, she never set foot there again. I remember the first time she went back after those twenty years, to attend the funeral of one of her sisters. My grandmother clearly loved the village she grew up in, but she had an astonishing capacity for concealing her feelings. Occasionally, I would get a glimpse of these emotions when I accompanied her on her morning excursions to the market in our own town.

Near the market there was a bus station and taxi rank where people gathered to wait for transport to the surrounding villages. In one of the corners stood a kiosk that sold falafel sandwiches, plates of hummus, and fava beans. It was owned by a relative of my grandmother’s who came from the same village as she did. My grandmother loved falafel and she would make straight for the kiosk every morning. Then she would begin to chat with her relative Muhammad the falafel seller and embark upon a long conversation with him, in the course of which he would inform her of every incident, large and small, which had occurred in her village. The time my grandmother spent in these conversations with Muhammad gave me some of my most precious moments.

That rubbish bin behind Muhammad’s kiosk was the first school I graduated from. Muhammad would wrap the falafel sandwiches in pages torn from magazines, books, and newspapers that he bought for a trifling sum from people who had finished reading them. Behind the kiosk was the bottom half of a large barrel that was used for rubbish, and Muhammad’s customers would throw their sandwich wrappings into it when they had finished eating.

While my grandmother was busy talking, I would sneak up to the barrel and climb onto the stone wall that ran alongside it. Then I would bend over, inclining my skinny body until I could reach inside and pick out the pages. I would scrape the remains of the sesame paste and falafel off them, smooth them flat, then fold them carefully and hide them in my pockets and underneath my jacket to read later. I would continue retrieving those pages that were precious to me until I heard my grandmother’s voice shouting, “Where have you got to, you little monkey? Playing in the rubbish? What a dirty little girl!” Then she would give me the rest of her sandwich and I would devour it inspired by the thought of the damp papers filling my pockets. Those visits to Muhammad’s falafel stand gave me my first access to the contents of the free Lebanese press and, consequently, the European and French newspapers it replicated. At the end of the 1960s when I was growing up, the Arabic newspaper market was dominated by the free Lebanese press. This was especially true of Syria. The freedom I saw being exercised in that press system inspired me. The newspaper pages I retrieved from Muhammad’s rubbish bin represented a freedom of thought and expression largely unknown in the Arabic world and they made me bold, made me look for the truth in all things.

On Fridays, our day off, I would spend most of the day copying the pages I had found into a special exercise book that I kept after I had thrown the dirty bits of paper into the waste-basket. Not a week passed without my discovering pages from one newspaper or another. The
Reader’s Digest,
in its Arabic-language version
Al-Mukhtar,
was the only object of my search that did not find its way into Muhammad’s barrel. Unfortunately, its small pages could not be wrapped around the sandwiches. As a result, buying
Reader’s Digest
mercilessly devoured two weeks’ pocket money every month, but I didn’t mind. What I found there was more than worth the drain on my allowance.

Through the
Reader’s Digest
I learned about the United States, the country of Uncle Sam. Up to that point, I imagined the United States as existing on a planet quite different from the one I inhabited. In its pages I first encountered the Statue of Liberty and, in the early years of my life, tried to assume her personality. I imagined that if I were that woman, the very first thing I would do would be to put a smile on my mother’s face and write a ferocious letter to my grandfather, finally telling him off for the despicable way in which he treated my grandmother. I won’t deny, though, that my initial reaction toward this statue was a feeling of envy. Why could she carry a torch in one hand and a book in the other and stand haughtily in public view without fear or embarrassment, and I couldn’t? My whole life, both then and now, has been an attempt to answer that question.

I saw this statue of a woman who was my rival and whose enthusiasm for books I imagined matched my own for the first time from the window of a Pan American plane which bore me through the skies over New York as I arrived from Frankfurt on December 25, 1988. My heart leapt for joy at the sight of her and my envy evaporated at once, to be replaced, I don’t know from where, by a sense of security and triumph. I had a six-hour wait at New York airport before I could board the plane to Los Angeles where my husband would be waiting for me. On the flight from New York to Los Angeles I wrote a letter to my grandfather, by then already in his grave, in which I vented my anger toward him; by the time my feet touched the ground of Los Angeles I felt that my load had been lightened, even though I was unable to put a smile on my grandmother’s face.

In a country like mine, oppressed people feel as if fate is against them. It wasn’t just men who were the enemy of my mother, my grandmother, and every other woman in the country. Women usually also blamed fate for their ill luck and on June 14, 1967—the tenth day of the cease-fire on the Syrian-Israeli front in the Six-Day War—fate came knocking at our door. My father went to eastern Syria to bring back a load of grain and never came home. It was nighttime and there was no traffic on the road. On the six-hundred-mile journey, for some reason I have never been able to discover, his truck overturned in a deep ravine in the mountain range between coastal and central Syria. My father bled for hours. A military truck came down that road bringing the body of a Syrian soldier home to his village in the mountains. The driver saw my father’s truck lying overturned in the gully and stopped at once. He took my father and his driver to the hospital in the town nearby. The driver survived, but my father died from an internal hemorrhage.

My father’s death turned our lives upside down. My mother was in her early thirties and had lost the little sense she had left to her. My half-brother, my father’s only son from his first wife, intervened and took the place of my father in our lives. He was, like my father, affectionate and warmhearted, and he showered us with kindness. He took over the running of my father’s business and struggled to maintain a good standard of living for both our family and his own—for he was already the father of six children.

My experience of life in his house was the thing that began to form my political beliefs. My brother was a member of the Syrian National Party, and this fact was largely responsible for his indifference toward Islam. He wasn’t against it, but he wasn’t for it, either! One of the items on the party agenda was the struggle for Arab unity and the creation of a single Arab nation irrespective of religious allegiance. The Islamists regarded this as a threat to Islam, which strives to create a single nation founded on religious adherence to comprise all Muslims, Arab and non-Arab. The unseen struggle between these two opposing camps caused supporters of the National Party to adopt a covertly hostile attitude toward religion in general and Islam in particular, freeing them from the constraints of Muslim teaching.

My brother never openly showed his dislike of the Islamists, but, as I said, he did not care for them. He was well aware that Islam was the burial ground of any attempt to move the Arab-speaking countries forward toward progress. His political position helped broaden the way he thought about things and it subsequently affected the way he treated me as his sister and as a woman. He respected my opinions from the start, and allowed me a greater degree of freedom than most Muslim women in the region could ever dream of knowing.

Oddly, it was my grandmother—the woman whom I idolized—who tried hardest to persuade me of the truth of the traditional image of women as creatures unfit to look after themselves. Encouraged by her, each of my young brothers attempted to take control of my life and assume the role of protective male toward me. But their wishes frequently conflicted with those of my half-brother, who wanted me to enjoy a relatively large degree of freedom. As he was the eldest, their desires took second place to his. He often intervened on my behalf to protect me from their aggressive behavior and their attempts to exert authority over me.