Jasmine and Fire (7 page)

Back on those languid September weekends in Houston, it hadn’t registered yet that as much as I looked forward to the Labor Day parties at the pool—the balmy air that reminded me of summer in Beirut, and the exciting junky soft drinks and snacks, even if those fake-cheese nachos didn’t quite measure up to the grilled halloum sandwiches of summers past—the days I’d cherished even more were over forever. No more afternoons at the sprawling Coral Beach club in Beirut, gazing at the glamorous women in bikini tops that clasped together with gold rings or slinky silver chains in the middle, jumping around with Samir and our cousins in the white-capped Mediterranean waves. We’d always get
to stay out late on the lounge chairs with our parents and family friends and their kids, watching the grown-ups smoke cigarettes, drink cold beers in frosty mugs, and crack pumpkin seeds, their hands moving nervously back and forth, mouth to ashtray, talking about things I didn’t understand: the Phalange and PLO militias, and Israel and America and Syria. Whether the cease-fire this week would last. Whether we’d all have to leave this place soon, and maybe for good.

Here on my balcony in Beirut, many long years after those Labor Day parties and Coral Beach days, I’m overhearing a vigorous debate between two men on the street below—but it’s not about politics; they’re arguing over a parking space, which is in fact a crumbling patch of sidewalk—as I try to finish my editing assignment for a local university’s English-language alumni magazine. I’d lined up this regular gig two years ago after seeing a listing for it on a freelance editorial jobs site. The staff members in the university’s U.S. office who had hired me were glad, I suppose, to have found an American-educated editor who also happened to be from Beirut. For the current issue, the editors had promised to start e-mailing me the articles to work on two weeks ago, but I didn’t get most of them until last night, Friday at midnight, and the edits are due Monday.

It’s just as well that the articles came in only now. I’m in a better work mode than I was a couple of weeks ago, when I was still feeling moody and shaken up by the move. It may be Labor Day weekend across the Atlantic, but I’m in Beirut, and it’s not a holiday here. Anyway, freelancers’ work patterns never coincide with the rest of the world’s concept of a vacation, or a weekend, or bedtime. That’s both the pro and the con of freelance life, as I discovered
when I left the corporate world. Freelancers work almost all the time—well, if we’re lucky. But also if we’re lucky, we work whenever we want.

Right now I need the work—for the money, yes, but also for the sanity and the reality check. At some point in my adult life, I realized work is a drug that can blow me past emotional tornadoes. By work, I don’t mean any old job (although sometimes just about any distraction will do). I mean the kind of work I love and always have: writing and editing.

Apparently I’ve always been fascinated by the alphabet and language. As a one-year-old in Urbana, Illinois, I’d point to the K on the K-mart sign when my parents drove me by it, and then I’d see the same shape on the Special K box and yell with excitement. Pleasures came so easily then, a box of cereal and a store sign bringing heaps of delight. I kept up my crush on English letters and words when we moved back to Lebanon, even though my parents enrolled me in a French-focused curriculum at my Beirut elementary school. But I picked up more English from TV and from relatives who mixed English and Arabic into their sentences, Beirut style. When we landed in Houston and I started fourth grade there, the principal insisted on putting me in the lowest-level English class in my tracked school, since I was transferring directly from Lebanon and, like my parents, I had a thick Arabic accent. But much to my parents’ smug satisfaction—after they’d failed to convince the principal that I could handle a more challenging level—my English teacher called them a couple of weeks into the semester to say I was in the wrong class. Within weeks I’d moved through the intermediate levels and landed in the highest section. Still, I was desperately shy and felt myself a misfit, my accent heavy with Arabic lilts. My classmates were friendly to
me but constantly pointed out my foreignness: “You talk funny. Where do you come from again?”

I was pretty good at grammar and spelling from the start, and I won the fourth- and fifth-grade spelling bees at school. But my accent needed work, a lot of it. All through the rest of elementary school and junior high, I listened carefully and tried to copy American pronunciations, though I stopped short of Texan ones: I insisted on saying “What time is it?” as I heard it on TV, instead of “What tam is it?” But some words passed me by, into my twenties and probably still now. I pronounced pizza
peedza
until I was twenty-seven, when a boyfriend in New York said, one day when he was annoyed with me about something else, “There’s no d in that word. It’s
peetza
, not
peedza
.”

My journalistic attempts started around the time when I was still teaching myself to say
whurrever
instead of
whatt’ever
. Back in fifth grade, feeling an early urge to write and get something in print, I’d tried to enlist my brother to help start a newsletter for our Houston suburb, tackling such breaking-news topics as the history of the pencil, and why cicadas spin around on driveways and make that bulletlike
ratatatat
sound. But I ended up writing the whole newsletter myself, when neither Samir nor any of our neighborhood pals could be enticed to take on reporting assignments in exchange for a few pennies. I’d promised them all that we’d split the profits from our ten-cent cover price. But strangely, I had no takers. Journalism was clearly not for them. I seemed hopelessly drawn even from age ten to a life of writing and research, and thinking up ideas that would make interesting stories for myself or other writers, and editing stories to make them fit for print—and accepting pay that often barely tops zero. A perfect candidate for journalism, marching gleefully off to the slaughter.

The urge persisted, so I signed up for my high school newspaper staff, writing features and editing the op-ed section there. Then in college I joined UC Berkeley’s student paper,
The Daily Californian
, my freshman year. I learned to report news stories covering the campus and the region. (The city of Berkeley didn’t have its own newspaper at the time and relied, somewhat absurdly, on the
Daily Cal
.) I also reviewed film and music events and spent a year as co-editor of the arts section and another as opinion-page
Daily Cal
that not only convinced me to pursue a career in journalism but also gave me my first real soaking in the ferocious political debates on the Middle East.

As
Daily Cal
op-ed editor, I dove right into the raging campus wars over Israel and the Palestinians. I received hate mail from members of the Jewish student organization Hillel when I published a student or faculty member’s plea for Palestinian sovereignty and an end to the cruelties of the occupation, and hate mail from Arab students when I published another contributor’s defense of an Israeli policy. I tried to give equal space to both sides, or thought I did, but most likely I didn’t, since my sympathies, along with those of some of my lefty Jewish friends in college, bent toward Palestinian liberation and freedom from the tyrannies of the occupation. In the op-ed section, I was aiming to create a space for lively, even-keeled argument among students and faculty on all issues, but most of the submissions I got at the time seemed to center on the Middle East. I enjoyed the challenge of moderating a vigorous debate among those who criticized Israel and those who sympathized with its policies. Those discussions, or sometimes heated arguments, have continued into my adult life, whether with friends, boyfriends, co-workers, or relatives.

That college op-ed gig might have been, in its way, not just a crash course on Middle East politics but also an outlet for my very Lebanese argumentative tendencies—and an early preparation for my move back to Beirut. People here are by and large compulsive debaters—about politics, yes, and about everything else, too. In a taxi they might argue about which road the driver is taking, and in a restaurant about the dressing on the tabbouleh, and at a wedding about the bride’s hairstyle. And at some point in any given day, they’re going to argue about politics.

In the States, as gridlocked as Congress gets and as infuriating and slow as it can be to get badly needed policies passed, it’s possible to get through a day without smacking head-on into the dysfunctions, small and large, of daily life. In Lebanon, not so possible. On an average day in a service taxi—aka a
serveece
, a cheap cab that acts like a bus and follows a predetermined route, picking up multiple passengers along the way—you’re likely to hear something like this from your driver or a fellow rider:

“Kiss ikht hal dawleh.”
Goddamn this government. Actually the remark involves a slur about female anatomy, but it gets lost in translation—perhaps for the better.

The response might be
“Yikrhib beita,”
may its house get wrecked, a common Arabic yell of exasperation.

Sometimes the conversation heats up, as several people in the service taxi—or in the grocery store, or at the dry cleaner—agree on a topic and get more specific with the bashing: for instance “Can we just hear the results of the UN tribunal already, and be done with it?” Or “Who does Hezbollah think it is?” Other times there’s an awkward silence, and it’s clear that not everyone is on the same
lingering tensions between and among Christians and Muslims, Sunnis and Shiites, and with an ever-addled government that never seems to govern, it’s rare for politics not to make at least a brief appearance in a conversation. Now and then I jump into the fray, and other times I just want to say
“Khalas, intawash’d!”
Enough—my ears are ringing!

As I’m
plowing through my editing assignment, I can hear the Ramadan call to prayer echoing from a mosque nearby. This is the third week of the annual Muslim month of fasting, and the celebrations that mark the end of the fast will be starting soon. During the upcoming Eid al-Fitr holiday, families and friends close out Ramadan by getting together for festive dinners, which, like Christmas or Easter feasts, can run from the cozy and casual to the lavish and showy.

I’m more aware of Ramadan traditions now—the daily fasting schedule, the Eid al-Fitr dinners—than I was during my childhood in Beirut. Arguably I wasn’t consciously aware of much, culturally speaking, back then, other than Tintin and Asterix books and
Grendizer
, a
Transformers
-like Japanese cartoon that Samir and I would watch on TV. But one of the effects of the civil war was that many Lebanese, Christians and Muslims, felt their religious identities embattled and so deepened them; now religious celebrations, even around my comparatively secular and diverse district of Ras Beirut, seem more prominent than they used to be.

The war also reaffirmed, in some cases more strictly than others, the distinct Christian and Muslim parts of town—the Muslim west, the Christian east. Even though our neighborhood remained mostly an exception, it’s become increasingly Muslim in head count, with more Shiites migrating from the suburbs and
joining the Sunni Muslims and Protestants and Greek Orthodox and other sects already there.

I’m glad I arrived in Beirut in time for Ramadan; I’ve been hoping to experience more of it this year than I’ve had a chance to in the past. During the fasting month, I’ve been noticing that the Corniche, the promenade that runs east–west along Beirut’s Mediterranean coastline, gets even more crowded with pedestrians in the late evenings. It’s a lively scene: at night, after breaking the fast with the daily
iftar
dinner, people of all ages stroll along the Corniche, some women wearing veils or hijabs and others not, and little kids stay up giddily way past their normal bedtime. Muslim families, and young men smoking
argilehs
—the local word for hookahs—and groups of women friends, and children and teenagers tagging along with parents and relatives, often socialize after dinner, then have another meal just before they go to bed, so they can better cope with the long fast the next day: no food or water is permitted from dawn until sundown during Ramadan.

My mother’s friend Umayma, who looks in photos from her twenties and thirties eerily like the glamorous, gamine-chic Jean Seberg in the Godard film
Breathless
, calls me one day just before the end of Ramadan to invite me to a special iftar feast for Eid al-Fitr at her home in Ras Beirut. At these dinners, families and friends gather and eat a series of specific dishes served in a set order. My mother has been telling me that Umayma is a great cook, and I’m thrilled to be invited. Umayma and my mother have known each other their whole lives. They met in elementary school in Beirut in the 1950s, at the Ahliah, a then-groundbreaking school run by my mother’s aunt Wadad Cortas. The school still exists on the same spot in Beirut’s old Jewish quarter of Wadi Abu Jamil, and in its heyday, it brought together kids of all classes, religions,
and countries from around the Arab world: Muslims, Christians, Jews, and other sects. Umayma, a Sunni, and my mom, a Presbyterian, became best friends when they were ten and have stayed close ever since. Umayma’s brother Ziad was also my dad’s college classmate, and my parents first met at the siblings’ home.

I walk into Umayma and her husband Nasser’s apartment on the night of the Eid iftar to find a roomful of people, some of them old friends of my parents, plus my mother’s cousins Huda and Afaf, who’ve known Umayma since their school days—all in all a lively, mixed group of Muslims and Christians. I’ve known many of the dozen or so people in the room since my childhood though I haven’t seen some in decades, and my initial shyness on walking in fades when they greet me enthusiastically, wanting to know how my Beirut life is going so far.

Umayma passes around a traditional Ramadan date-juice drink called
jellab
and glasses of an apricot nectar called
amareddin
. Then we gather at the table for dinner. First comes soup, which Umayma explains to me is always a first course at iftar meals since it warms the insides and preps the stomach for eating dinner after a full day of fasting. The soup is often lentil, but tonight it’s creamy asparagus bisque, from a recipe that Umayma’s sister-in-law and my parents’ dear friend Bushra, also an exceptional cook, has improvised for the occasion from the in-season asparagus. Then comes
fattoush
, a minty bread salad that combines tomatoes, herbs, and bits of fried pita with a dressing spiked with the extra-tangy sumac spice that’s popular in Lebanon and a favorite of mine; then the main course:
kibbeh arnabieh
, lamb meatballs stuffed with sweet caramelized onions and fried pine nuts, in a sauce made with tahini and the bitter-tart juice of local bou sfeir oranges. It’s not a light dish by any stretch, but I’ve
always loved its mix of sweet and sour flavors, crunchy and saucy textures. Along with the kibbeh, Umayma serves another dish I adore,
tiss’ye
, made of layers of warm chickpeas topped with garlic-spiked yogurt, sautéed pine nuts, and fried-pita croutons similar to the ones in fattoush salad. Bushra helped make the dish, and I remember how my mother once told me Bushra won the heart of her husband, Ziad, by making him an exquisite tiss’ye during their courtship.