“I’m searching for my roots!”
Nour’s father is Palestinian, he has a Lebanese mother, but he doesn’t speak Arabic. He doesn’t know his mother tongue, I say to myself. I have to make a huge effort to listen to him and respond to his questions, just as I do with Chris. In a few moments that feel like a very long time, he tells me about his family, his life and his American wife and daughter. It seems as though this life of his fatigues him and, using rapid, exuberant words, he wants to hand it over for safekeeping to the first person who’ll listen to him. By chance, I am that person. A woman he just met in an airport. I think, I don’t have space for other people’s lives, my own life’s enough for me. It’s enough that I’m continually attempting to gather my life together, given my overwhelming suspicion that I lack the proper tools. When faced with these thoughts, my body grows restless and I suddenly feel like a combatant preparing for an attack. At that moment, I feel unable to gather myself in one place and one memory; his speech confuses me and makes me more anxious. But I hear myself saying to him, with open sarcasm, “Why bother searching for roots, I can give you as much as you want, a surplus I want to get rid of!”
Why bother to search? I can give you all you want, I have a surplus of roots and I want to be done with them! He wasn’t expecting such an answer. And I don’t think about what I’m saying before this sentence pops out of my mouth. Perhaps it came from a confused, impotent thought that has grown and been nurtured by the travels I’ve been forced to make between Lebanon, Australia and Africa; roots are something that we ourselves re-fabricate and completely modify, just as when we prepare food, we add spices according to our tastes. During the conversation a quick, tense understanding develops naturally between us, from the sentences we exchange and the thin, friendly laughter we generate.
He was born in 1945 in Lebanon and was a boy when he immigrated with his parents to the United States. He returned after their death to get to know his mother’s country. In Beirut he rents a small apartment paid for by the American newspaper for which he’s a correspondent. I cannot go back to Palestine, of course, Nour continues, they destroyed my paternal grandfather’s house there 30 years ago. He used to visit this house in Palestine until 1967, when he could no longer enter. He says that he’s forgotten nearly everything and only remembers the smells of the food, which he feels are always there, nearby. He came back searching for these smells. In America, he cooks for himself and his American friends, whom he invites over to hang out at his house on Saturday nights. He prepares recipes that he learned from his mother and he has many cookbooks from which he’s learned Palestinian and Lebanese recipes.
He tells the story of his family chronologically, as though reading it from a book, as though his memories have no pain attached to them. My memories always spiral when I narrate them. I begin with a story and find myself returning to it. He narrates exotically, as though I myself were foreign to him and he needs to make sure the story follows a chronological progression in order for me to understand it. On the plane, Nour tells me the story of his life. He has a deep need to tell me everything about himself. Intimate conversations are easier when we’re moving from one place to another. Perhaps because he’s in such a state, his words are quickly left behind — they aren’t a heavy burden weighing us down.
On the plane I learn to surrender to my fear to remain relaxed and calm, in total surrender to the possibility of death, to a fear that could swallow me up and not terrify me.
I lean my head against the glass of the airplane’s small window while Nour, who manages to get seated next to me, starts reading a book that he took out of his small suitcase. Its author, Elia Kazan, put much of his life story in it, the story of his Turkish, Greek, Armenian family, the story of their immigration to the United States and a discussion of identity and assimilation. I read the title on its cover: The Arrangement.
Nour opens to a page and starts reading, aloud, a part of the novel in which an old man, nearing death, asks for grapes from Smyrna, or Izmir, grapes that he hasn’t been able to eat since he emigrated from Anatolia. After a long life’s journey, changes, forgetting, adaptation and making a new life — after all this, it seems the only desire left in the father’s memory is for grapes from Smyrna. Nour’s reading penetrates me, his words flow deeply inside of me while I’m somewhere between sleeping and waking on the airplane, trying desperately to remain awake so I can listen to him.
When his words enter my head, they transform into colorful pictures coming from a memory behind forgetfulness — pictures from the day my uncle traveled abroad and from the day we left. His words transform into questions, born of stories told about my family’s emigration. What does our emigration mean, what does it mean to belong to another country and another civilization? We emigrate and build another life and believe that we’ve been saved. But at a certain moment, everything that we have built becomes ruined and we return to a past that we reckoned had disappeared or that we had intentionally forgotten, throwing it somewhere under thick layers of memory.
Idea after idea bores into my head, entering with Nour’s voice; it’s difficult to know if I’m asleep and having these thoughts like dreams or awake and talking to myself. There’s no doubt that I’ve nodded off. I’m warm and happy like a small kitten, especially since for once I don’t have a headache. A chronic pain emigrated with me from Beirut fifteen years ago and has never left.
I wake up in the airplane and a warm feeling of contentment floods through me when I find myself wrapped in the blue woolen blanket that Nour pulled over me while I was sleeping. I take two migraine pills. I started taking them not long before my trip from Lebanon. My medicine is my constant companion; I take it before I even feel the pain. I take it to be sure the pain will not suddenly seize me.
When he asks why I’m returning to Lebanon I tell him that it’s not a “return,” but that I’m coming to reclaim a house that I thought I’d lost. I don’t know why I keep insisting that my return is temporary, that I’m not remaining in Beirut. Do I insist on this to this man whom I hardly know because I fear the passion with which he speaks about his own return? About the Lebanon that he began to rediscover only a year ago? About the place of his father’s birth in Palestine and his family and childhood stories from Lebanon, his mother’s country? I tell him that my stay in Beirut is temporary and that I’ll return home soon. I repeat this to him, perhaps more to convince myself that nothing could change my decision to return to Africa.
Nour returns to search for his roots. As a journalist he may decide where he wants to travel and he’s chosen Lebanon, the country where he spent his childhood before he left for America. As for me, I’ve come to sell the building that I inherited from my parents, then return to Kenya. I’ll be able to sell it only after the displaced people living in it are evicted. I only inherited it because my brother Baha’ was killed. Of course my brother would have been first in line to inherit the house, he was the only man in the family, just like my father Salama before him when he inherited the house from my grandfather Hamza. Baha’ was killed in the beginning of 1978, almost three years after the civil war started in Lebanon. He died when a rocket explosion sent shrapnel flying onto the balcony of the second floor of our house in Zuqaq al-Blat, where he stood. We couldn’t recognize him. They brought a coffin and told our family, “Your son’s inside.” Two days after the burial, young men from the neighborhood found pieces of his limbs hanging from the branches of the few trees that were not also burned in the explosion. The smell of my brother’s burning body remains in the house for a long time. Sometimes I feel as though this smell is still close to me, that since the incident my senses can no longer perceive any other smell. My father was also injured that day, with a head wound. He recovered, but a short time later he started acting strangely. The doctor doesn’t want to remove the piece of shrapnel from his head because of the danger of injuring him further. And as for my mother, she stopped speaking all together. The shock of my brother’s death made her lose the power of speech. When she wants to say something she gestures with her fingers, drawing empty circles in the air. This is how we leave Lebanon for Adelaide, where my uncle went when he emigrated many years before the war. We leave: my incomplete, amputated family made up of an almost insane father, a mother who refuses to speak, and a daughter who is waiting for a man to follow her to Australia, a man whom she’ll never see again after she leaves.