Jasmine and Fire (17 page)

I can’t see that happening anytime soon, but here’s an encouraging sign: around Beirut lately I’ve seen a few posters that say
SPEAK YOUR LANGUAGE
! in big bold letters. And if that op-ed piece in
Hibr
is any indication, Arabic may be earning some coolness points with the new generation.

Another
son of old family friends comes to Beirut for a visit one November weekend, with his wife and kids. They’re living in Saudi Arabia right now because of his job with a multinational corporation, and one night that weekend they invite me out to a downtown lounge called MyBar with their Beirut friends. As I look for them in the bar, I walk past the stylishly dressed young men and women milling around the glossy, white-walled space—a glamorous but, to my taste, soulless vibe. What can I say? I like dark little pubs so much more, the divey bars cropping up around Hamra, and similar hangouts in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Our crowd that night is mostly Lebanese, a mix of Anglophone and Francophone types, and as we’re standing around a high round table clinking our glasses of wine or whiskey-and-soda, a few in
the group start asking me where I grew up, what I’m doing in Beirut these days. When I reply, in Arabic, that I’ve been living in the States but I’ve just moved back to Lebanon to see if it’s still home, they automatically switch into English. I try to divert the conversation back into Arabic, but no takers. On this night, like so many others, it’s a battle. I feel defeated. Do they just want to show off their English? Or have they decided I’m not Lebanese enough to speak Arabic with?

I’m in a similar situation a few days later. Over drinks with Mirna at a packed pub called Torino in the Gemmayzeh area, I notice she’s wearing a cool strappy leather bracelet, and I compliment her on it. She tells me she bought it at a shop called Ants, a few blocks from my apartment. I stop by the store later in the week to scope out some early Christmas-shopping ideas. I walk in and find what’s essentially a Berkeley head shop: incense burning, strummy sitar music on the sound system, and a wall hung with leather and bead bracelets and necklaces. A few hippie kids are sitting on Indian-print cushions on the floor and chatting in a mix of English and Arabic and French, and what sounds like Armenian, too. I ask a question in Arabic about the price of a bracelet I like, and one guy, curly black hair tumbling to his shoulders, answers me in English. Same when I ask another question, about whether a pendant hanging on the wall comes on a brown instead of a black leather rope. I can’t tell if here at Ants, on this rainy afternoon, I’m in the same kind of language war I was fighting at that downtown bar the other night—or if this guy actually doesn’t speak Arabic well enough to answer me, although he seems to understand it perfectly.

Returning exiles like me must be confusing—not just to ourselves but to everyone. What language to use with us? Many of us
want to speak Arabic and get it back up to speed, but our accent hints that we haven’t lived here in a long time.
How should I communicate with this person?
I imagine a Lebanese thinking.
Is she a real Lebanese, or is she one of those people who is just back for a little visit from the States and can barely speak Arabic anymore?

I’m also starting to notice something funny about my English as the months go by in Beirut. Even though I can sound very American when I want to, I hear myself switching into a kind of Lebanese-accented English at times. In Lebanon, some English words get so Lebanese-ized that they become essentially Arabic.
Sorry
, for instance, becomes
suhrry
, the vowel clipped, the
r
’s rolled. Speaking certain common English words with a Lebanese accent is a halfway point between the two languages, a way of not siding too much with either one, and not sounding too Americanized. I hear myself doing it more and more. I wonder, though: the longer I stay in Beirut and work more Arabicized English words like
suhrry
and
okeh
(instead of
okay
) into my vocab, will I erode my hard-earned American accent? Yes, probably. If you fall into new pronunciation habits, over time they’re bound to stick.

I’m wondering how much I should care about hanging on to my American English, even while I dust off my Lebanese Arabic—and whether I can re-earn my identity as a Lebanese local, linguistically at least, and still hang on to my Americanness. The languages are starting to battle it out in my head, or maybe they’re learning to live together. More and more lately, as I walk down the street, I notice that I’m thinking certain thoughts in Arabic, like
What’s happening to this building? Can I walk through this construction site, or do I have to go around the block?
I haven’t had internal monologues in Arabic since I was a child. But other kinds of thoughts still come more naturally in English.
I need to get home
asap and finish up that assignment
, for instance. Or
Richard, I wish you could be here right now to see this insane billboard
. When I talk to one of my American friends in my head, and talk to myself about certain subjects like work assignments, it’s still always in English. But when I talk to the city, and have imaginary conversations with its streets and buildings and history, I’m surprised to find that I’m starting to address them in Arabic.

Another thing I’m noticing is that when I say my name out loud here—for instance, when I call ahead to book a taxi—I sound out my full first and last names even when the taxi dispatcher needs only my first name. In the States, it often takes forever to spell out my last name on the phone, and for transactions when I don’t need it, I avoid it altogether. Here I feel a strange new kind of pleasure when I say my whole name, Salma ‘Abdelnour, with its hard guttural
‘A
.
Abdelnour
is a fairly common last name in Lebanon, and saying it out loud, Arabic sounds and all, makes me feel I belong here, that I’m owning my Lebaneseness, my Arabness. It’s a relief after living in the States for so long, and after feeling, for as far back as I can remember, that my name is too foreign, too cumbersome.

Despite
my American-versus-Arabic struggles, there’s no doubt I’ve been looking forward to Thanksgiving, this quintessentially American holiday. Finally, the third week of November arrives, but first there’s another big holiday: Lebanese Independence Day. On November 22, 1943, Lebanon officially won its freedom from France, and from that year on, Lebanon has celebrated its independence on that day.

Some obvious jokes to be made here, of course. This is a country that, while technically independent for nearly seven decades
now, has hosted an ongoing series of invading forces, essentially a continuation of what the ancient Romans, Egyptians, Crusaders, and Ottomans started when they marched through this land over the past half-dozen millennia. We’ve had the American Marines in 1958 and again in 1982–84, and Israel in 1982 and again in 2006, not to mention Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon for twenty-two years until 2000. And there was also, of course, the Syrian occupation of 1990–2005, which ended after the Independence Intifada (aka the Cedar Revolution) in Beirut, triggered by the assassination of the vocally anti-Syria ex–prime minister Hariri in 2005. Although that year marked the official ouster of Syria from Lebanon, Syria still manages to keep its fingers in Lebanon’s messy political cake mix.

Independence Day here isn’t celebrated with quite the same gusto as, say, Fourth of July in the States or Bastille Day in France. Usually employees around Lebanon get the day off, the government throws a military parade downtown, and that’s about it. As I was waking up today, I heard the sounds of the military parade in the distance—a series of gunshots, part of the traditional twenty-one-gun salute. But this time I was ready for the noises, wasn’t startled by them as I was on that September night when I heard seemingly random fireworks and thought shells were raining on my neighborhood all over again.

I spend Independence Day morning making an apple cake from a recipe Zeina gave me. Earlier this week my mother’s cousin Ramzi, always laughing and boyishly upbeat, had stopped by to drop off a big bag of red apples from the orchards near where he lives, in the town of Roumieh, a half hour from Beirut. I’ve been munching on them all week. But there are still about a dozen left, and in a phone chat with Zeina, she tells me about an apple cake
she likes to make that uses up loads of apples. So I give it a try, stirring in brown sugar with vanilla, eggs, oil, flour, baking soda, more than a dozen sliced apples, and walnuts, and spicing it with cinnamon and allspice; the recipe is easy and quick. I try a bite as soon as I pull the puffy brown cake out of the countertop convection oven, wanting to taste it all gooey and hot before I let it cool. The apples have a nice chunkiness and sweet-tart taste, and the spices give the cake a subtle tingle.

Funny that on this morning, Lebanese Independence Day, I’m baking something that reminds me of American apple pie—although the apples themselves are Lebanese, and the allspice is a mostly Middle Eastern seasoning. And funny too that an hour later, when my mom’s cousin (and Ramzi’s brother) Sami and his wife, Najwa, call to invite me over again for lunch, we eat the breaded veal filet called
escalope
along with French fries, Western specialties popular in Lebanon. Fahimeh, their longtime Lebanese cook, makes both particularly well. One could almost say that escalope and French fries, called
batata miklieh
here, have honorary Lebanese citizenship by now. We’ve essentially adopted both and made them our own, especially fries, which come with almost every sandwich order and even sometimes show up as part of a meze.

I have no problem with giving escalope and fries honorary Lebanese status. I like almost any food when it tastes great. I may make part of my living as a food writer, but I’m not a food snob. I do wonder, though, about the local cuisine giving way to more cosmopolitan competitors. Here in Beirut, the hot new restaurants are almost always French, or Italian, or Japanese, or even American, with occasional exceptions. As much as the Lebanese profess to be proud of their cuisine, and to forever miss their mother’s cooking, and as much as they teach their housekeepers to prepare
the recipes they grew up with, when Beirutis go out to dinner or to impress, it’s very often at a foreign restaurant.

Of course, it’s easy for me to say all this when I’ve essentially just arrived back in Lebanon and haven’t been eating Lebanese food at home nonstop my entire life. But I wonder if Lebanese people’s feelings for the local cuisine, whether they crave it constantly or whether they’ll take almost any other food as long as it’s foreign, have to do with how much they personally love or resent life here, and how much they forgive or hate Lebanon for what it is or what it’s become: whether pride in the country’s ancient heritage, cultural complexity, and close-knit family life, for instance, trumps hatred of its depressing political scene, slumped economy, and seeming inability to get its act together. Do our eating choices, I wonder, represent an underlying passion for and vote of confidence in Lebanon—or an urge to escape at any chance possible?

Unlike
escalope and French fries, my own national origins are Lebanese all the way through—but lately my paperwork is out of date. I need to renew my Lebanese identity card so I can travel all over the country without risking getting in trouble at checkpoints in certain restricted areas. Right now I have a temporary Lebanese ID paper called an
ikhraj qaid
, which I use as a supplement to my American passport to get past immigration at the airport (otherwise I’d need a visa to be in Lebanon longer than three months) and as a just-in-case document I carry around in the event I’m asked for ID at a checkpoint. But the ikhraj qaid just expired, and it’s time to get it replaced, as well as apply for my real national identity card. For that I have to go up to Aley, a village in the Mount Lebanon range forty-five minutes southwest of Beirut, where my father’s side of the family comes from and where
all their descendants must, by law, continue to register births and deaths and marriages and divorces in person. Very old-school.

Josette drives me to Aley on a gray November morning and tells me to brace myself for a series of interminable waits in bureaucratic office after office. Once the forms are filled out in Aley, it can take months, even years, to receive the ID card. It took both my mother and my uncle Kamal, who were born and raised in Lebanon, several years to get their ID card renewals completed and sent to them. But incredibly, Uncle Kamal’s American wife Diane, New York born and raised, whom he met and married while she was a year-abroad student in Beirut in the 1960s, recently received her renewed Lebanese national ID just two months after she applied for it in Aley. Classic. Fair-haired Westerners in Lebanon? Roll out the red carpet.

The whole identity card routine is almost comic in its hyper-bureaucracy—except that it’s also a giant pain in the ass. Josette and I spend a half hour trying to find a parking spot along one of Aley’s tight streets on this busy weekday morning, and finally we find one a ten-minute walk from the center of town. As we stroll toward the municipal building, I reminisce about childhood weekends in Aley visiting my grandparents during lulls in the shelling, when I’d play on the swings of their rooftop terrace and pick honeysuckle. My grandfather Jiddo Gibran always seemed so calm and Buddha-like, smiling as he’d hand Samir and me pieces of
kurbane
, a sweet briochelike bread traditionally eaten by Orthodox churchgoers on Sundays—and Teta Alyce was always more high-strung, worried, but loving as a grandmother and a wonderful cook.

Sadly there’s no time today to lollygag along the Aley streets, now home to strings of terraced restaurants and shiny new hotels
along with the dusty old shops and squat stone buildings overlooking the tree-lined mountains and valleys. Josette and I walk into the small, traffic-snarled center of town and climb up the stairs of the municipal headquarters and into the office of the lieutenant mayor of Aley. Dignified-looking in his gray suit and gray hair, he peeks out from behind a cluster of government workers milling around his desk, stacks of papers in hand, and greets us. He remembers Josette, who is always driving one family member or the other up here to do the ID renewals. He offers us coffee, and after the obligatory “how’s the family doing?” chat, he sends us to another office so I can fill out some papers. One of his assistants accompanies us, a short, stressed-looking man who fast-walks through the corridors, his dress-shoe heels clicking along the tiled floors.