Jasmine and Fire (16 page)

As I eat, I pull out my map again to double-check that I’m following the right side streets that will take me straight into Sanayeh. It seems strange that I’ve been to the neighborhood around the park but never strolled inside the garden itself—but going to parks isn’t a big part of Beirut life, and it certainly wasn’t when I was growing up here during the war. A man comes up to me and says in English, pointing to the building behind him and surely thinking I’m a tourist, “This is the Aresco Building. What are you looking for?” I reply, in Arabic,
“Wein al Sanayeh?”
Where’s Sanayeh? He’s probably never seen this before. A Lebanese with a map, looking for a park. Or maybe he has. Maybe this happens now in Beirut, a city that keeps slowly drawing homesick exiles back, in the thousands, then tens and hundreds of thousands, since the war ended, to rediscover a city they’d left mostly unexplored during the war. Maybe, like me, they come back with a visitor’s eye, to see not just their old neighborhood but the rest of the city, too, and the parts that have been rebuilt or are unrecognizable now, or were never before traversed by routines, habits, necessities.

The park is nearly empty on this Monday morning. It’s a rectangular garden bounded by four streets, and about the size of a soccer field. There’s a round empty stone fountain in the middle, creaky wooden benches with peeling green paint, and everywhere patches of landscaping—olive trees, pines, geraniums, palm trees, pink and yellow lantana flowers. It’s tropical and green yet rundown, with mounds of dry dirt all over. One condo building along the edge of the park is like a vertical garden, its balconies
tumbling with jasmine bushes and moss-green plants that look like tiny weeping willows. The Sanayeh Garden reminds me of Washington Square Park in Manhattan, especially in its state of partial landscaping, partial neglect, and its old men playing backgammon or chess on the benches. A similar scene here. I sit and look out onto the expensive apartment buildings surrounding the park, adjacent to more down-at-the-heel buildings now occupied by poorer Shiite families who migrated to the neighborhood from southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs during the war and in the various periods of conflict or tension since then. A few veiled women push their baby strollers past me. A stray orange cat scurries along. I feel the sun on my face and zone out. It’s nice here, though the weekday quiet is a little ominous. An hour later I’m retracing my steps home.

My mother’s cousin Sami and his wife, Najwa, live on my street, and they invite me to lunch a few days later. They’re both Quakers, and since childhood I’ve found them pleasantly laid back, soothing to be around. Their cook Fahimeh serves us a soup called
hrisseh
, made with slow-braised lamb so soft it shreds in tender threads into the soup, its broth thickened with ground wheat and generously flavored with garlic. Soul medicine. As we linger at the table, dipping pieces of pita bread into a bowl of
dibs kharoub
—sweet, thick carob molasses mixed with tahini and a fixture on many Beirut tables—I tell them about my visit to the Sanayeh Garden the other day. After lunch Sami opens the curtain in the dining room and shows me two baby birds nesting in a crevice in the rocky windowsill outside: “There are almost no trees left in Beirut. Look at what happens.”

The birds get me thinking about nature as home. We all, people and animals, try to make do in our habitats. In a war-torn
country like Lebanon, through the conflict, through the constantly shifting cityscape, through the decimation of nature, the people who’ve never left and the people who’ve come back try to make do. Those birds on Sami and Najwa’s windowsill are doing what they can. They’re typical Beirutis, making the best of a compromised situation.

In Beirut, the idea that both animals and people need healthy trees and fresh air to thrive—not just buildings and roads—seems to have gotten lost along the way. But the city does have a few public green patches besides the Sanayeh and the small open section of the Horsh al-Sanawbar. The Evangelical church downtown has a jasmine-filled vest-pocket park connecting it to the adjacent National Conservatory of Music. The development company Solidere, created by the late prime minister Rafik Hariri to rebuild parts of downtown, has added tiny gardens along the medians in the major roads that pour into the city center and is building a park on a stretch of landfill along the waterfront. The pest-management company Boecker has put in tiny flower beds in scattered spots around town, including some along the median at one end of Bliss, the street that forms the southern border of the AUB campus. But among the flowers, the company has also planted ugly, self-defeating signs nearly as big as the gardens themselves:
BOECKER LOVES BEIRUT
. Thanks, Boecker.

Since
the reading last month for the Horsh al-Sanawbar book, I’ve been going to other evening events—lectures at AUB or nearby, given by academics, filmmakers, musicians, architects, or other speakers from Beirut or abroad—on nights when I’ve had no plans and haven’t felt like staying home to read or watch a movie. One weeknight this month I attend a talk about graphic
design by an American speaker in town from Brooklyn. I’m intrigued by the sound of it—the topic is the link between design and social activism—but unfortunately the lecture turns out to be crashingly dull and vague. At the end, I decide to raise my hand and ask a question. The speaker has said over and over how much he believes in “designing in the public interest” but never bothered to explain what that means. I’m feeling a little shy about asking the question, but I push myself to do it, figuring there’s a solid chance I’m not the only one wondering what he was talking about. He seems glad to see a hand up; at least someone was listening.

As he answers, explaining how strong graphic design can play a role in influencing opinions and social activism, I realize that besides wanting to hear his reply, I’d also had an urge to signal with my question—in my American-accented English—
Hi, I’m American, too
. I’ve been feeling a shot of homesickness lately when I’ve overheard strangers in cafés saying they’re from New York, or Americans chatting together on the sidewalk or within earshot of me, as I’d heard a few people in the row behind me doing at the lecture tonight. Part of me wants to say,
I’m one of you!

At the same time, I’ve also been having the opposite impulse: the more I live here, the more I realize how much I enjoy speaking Arabic, finding my groove in it again, and learning all the new idioms and slang. Richard once said to me when I was trying to teach him a few Arabic phrases, “I love how emphatic Arabic sounds. So satisfying.”

It’s true, Arabic vowels are extra-enunciated, and at the same time there’s a singsong lilt to the language, even more pronounced in certain regional accents. You can almost chew on the words.
The language is a mouth workout, perfectly designed for powerful opinions and towering romance and profound melancholy and noisy anger and explosive punch lines.

Since I got here, I’ve been badly wanting to sound like a native-speaking Lebanese again, not just like the typical emigrant who left during the war and never quite got her Arabic back 100 percent.

But it can be hard at times to practice Arabic in Beirut; the language issue is tortured here. Nearly everyone is bilingual or trilingual (almost always with French or English), but instead of treating their second and third languages as extra tools for navigating the world, many Beirutis treat English or French as their primary language even if they’ve never lived overseas. Walk into any swank restaurant or boutique or modern office in Beirut, and you’re likely to be greeted in French or English first. Try to switch the conversation to Arabic, whether you’re Lebanese or not, and you’ll sense a resistance. That’s less true in rural villages around Lebanon, or at working-class-run venues in the city like street food stands, or with taxi drivers—situations where Arabic is usually spoken first and often exclusively. But in many contexts all over Beirut, the French-or-English-first habit dominates.

“The Lebanese are trained from birth to leave Lebanon,” my cousin Karim, the political scientist, says to me when I bring up the language issue with him. It’s no wonder why: the employment situation in Lebanon is almost always bleak, not to mention the constant political instability. Companies around the world are now more equipped than local ones to hire educated graduates from Lebanon’s best universities and pay them decent salaries. There are other reasons, too, for the country’s outward gaze:
Lebanon’s cosmopolitan legacy dates back to ancient Rome, when it was a crossroads for traders and travelers from Europe, Asia, and all over the globe. The country’s recent past as a French colony is not so easily forgotten, either. Speaking multiple languages fluently, most commonly French and English, has a long history around here.

I can understand why the Lebanese want to practice and even show off our fluency in multiple languages, no doubt hard-earned while living or studying abroad for years during the war or going to an American- or French-run school in Lebanon. And I probably sound like a hypocrite when I get annoyed with the Lebanese for defaulting to French or English, since I’m still more comfortable in English myself. Sure, I do keep trying to override my English impulse and speak Arabic here, but I admit I’m proud of my English fluency and I sometimes get lazy with Arabic. Also, since I’ve had the chance to live in the United States for most of my life, I have zero moral high ground compared to fellow Lebanese who’ve spent most or all of their lives in Lebanon, and lived through the entire war here, and who want to prove that they can function in the bigger, more prosperous world.

Nonetheless, it’s hard not to sense that many Lebanese are also running from Arabic, in a desperate bid to sound and feel Euro or American. The habit of avoiding Arabic in daily life feels to me like a sneaky, insidious sort of shame, an elevation of a borrowed identity over a Lebanese one. It’s as if we’re saying
Hey, the world doesn’t like Arabs much, but listen, we’re not Arabs!

The other day I was reading a Lebanese news and culture website that was going on about how most Lebanese, allegedly something like 80 percent, are not Arabs but Phoenicians, descendants of a legendary, ingenious seafaring people who lived
along this part of the Mediterranean coast from the fifteenth century
B.C.
and invented the alphabet. The Phoenicians are now considered by most historians to be just another name for the various Canaanite tribes who lived along this coast but were never unified as one tribe.

The Lebanese, however, especially the country’s more historically West-leaning Christians, have always been enthusiastic about the Phoenician bit. Maybe a little too enthusiastic. Then again, that’s no big surprise. There’s a long history of Arab rejectionism in Lebanon. The country was carved out from the historic Bilad al Sham, or Greater Syria, region in part as a home for the Maronite Christians, who considered themselves distinct from the Arabs. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the mutually beneficial relationship that the Maronites, living in the area then called Mount Lebanon, had been cultivating with France—the French protected the Maronites from persecution in exchange for a competitive foothold in the coveted eastern Mediterranean—resulted in a homeland for them and eventually in the nation of Lebanon.

In Wadad Cortas’s memoir
A World I Loved
, she explains that for a number of years after World War I—from 1929 to 1943, when Lebanon was run as a French colony—most schools around Lebanon taught French and forbade Arabic, thanks to a calculated strategy by the French administration to instill a love of France and to erode any budding nationalist feelings in students. A tried and true colonial tactic, it worked beautifully in Lebanon. The effects have trickled down through the decades: French-speaking Lebanese parents continue the tradition by sending their kids to French-focused schools where Arabic is essentially a second language. And many of them speak mostly French at home, too.
These days there are also many American-run schools that teach primarily in English. Although those schools are aimed in part at the American kids of expat parents working in Lebanon, they’re also filled with Lebanese kids who grow up speaking American-inflected English not just at school but at home, too.

Ironically it’s my American friends in New York who most seem to love the sound of Arabic, and who keep asking me to speak it around them and teach it to them, and who listen in when I talk to my parents on the phone, even when it’s in our typically Lebanese, half-Arabic-half-English mishmash.

“Hi,
keefik? Shoo akhbarik?
” Hi, how are you? What’s new?

As proud as I am now that I’m getting comfortable again with my Arabic, I still have a long way to go before I can say I fully speak the language—my language. That’s because Arabic isn’t just caught in a schizophrenic battle with French and English in Lebanon; it’s also splintered into so many regional dialects that people living in different Arab countries, even sometimes in different towns or neighborhoods in the same country, are often speaking what can sound like different languages. For instance, my Arabic is specifically the Lebanese dialect. Had my family stayed in Lebanon throughout my school years, or had I studied Arabic on my own in the States, I would have learned the formal version of the language, called classical or modern standard (
fus’ha
in Arabic), which is understood all over the Arab world, taught in schools, and used on TV news, in official speeches, and in literature. But now when I listen to or try to read formal Arabic, I strain to understand it fully, stumbling over words I’m not used to.

The other day I saw a funny article in a Beirut student-run newspaper called
Hibr
, which prints its stories in both English and Arabic. The piece was by a young Lebanese guy who was
lamenting his generation’s increasing escape from Arabic and lack of interest in learning the formal fus’ha. He decided to write his rant in Lebanese-dialect Arabic, which is weird to see in print. It’s like writing for a Texan audience and using
y’all
instead of
you
. I understood every word of his piece, so rare for me when reading Arabic text, which is virtually always written in the more formal version. The student writer’s point was that if the formal fus’ha is scaring off Lebanese youth, and they’re not learning it so well in school, why not just embrace writing in
darej
(the local dialect) instead, since at least we’d be hanging on to some version of our language.