Leave to Remain Read online

  LEAVE TO REMAIN

  A Memoir

  Abbas El-Zein

  About Untapped

  Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

  Supported by funding from state and territory libraries, philanthropists and the Australian Research Council, Untapped is identifying Australia’s culturally important lost books, digitising them, and promoting them to new generations of readers. As well as providing access to lost books and a new source of revenue for their writers, the Untapped collaboration is supporting new research into the economic value of authors’ reversion rights and book promotion by libraries, and the relationship between library lending and digital book sales. The results will feed into public policy discussions about how we can better support Australian authors, readers and culture.

  See untapped.org.au for more information, including a full list of project partners and rediscovered books.

  Readers are reminded that these books are products of their time. Some may contain language or reflect views that might now be found offensive or inappropriate.

  For Ali and Sami

  who will make sense of the past

  For Ann

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One · Origins and Departures

  Sun Struck

  Secret Connections

  The Making of Family Trees

  Festivals of Grief

  Time’s Arrow

  Quest for an Indian King

  Narcissus Blind

  Leave to Remain

  Mutilation Street

  Part Two · Unhappy Returns

  Sacred Thresholds

  Amnesiac Alleys

  Reading between the Lanes

  Sluggish Countdown to War

  The Galactic Mind

  My Knights in Armour

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Now that I come to think of it, how tawdry and tumid they looked, those jellylike pictures, projected upon the damp linen screen (moisture was supposed to make them blossom more richly), but, on the other hand, what loveliness the glass slides as such revealed when simply held between finger and thumb and raised to the light—translucent miniatures, pocket wonderlands, neat little worlds of hushed luminous hues! In later years, I rediscovered the same precise and silent beauty at the radiant bottom of a microscope’s magic shaft. In the glass of a slide, meant for projection, a landscape was reduced, and this fired one’s fancy; under the microscope, an insect’s organ was magnified for cool study. There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.

  Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

  Besides which, seduced by tea and ravished by oranges, poisoned by stories and bewitched by poems, he drained to the lees the first half of his life, which has now become just dream and illusions.

  Zhang Dai, Self-Obituary

  What if trauma memoirists are viewed... as asserting their speech, as, that is, becoming lyrical subjects of trauma?

  Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography—Trauma and Testimony

  Part One

  Origins and Departures

  Sun Struck

  A few weeks before I was born in the district of Haret Hreik, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, an old lady knocked on the door of our little apartment and asked my mother whether she was the wife of my father, the government employee Hassan El-Zein. The woman, wrapped up in the traditional black Shia robe, introduced herself as a neighbour who lived down the street and said that she had had a dream the night before, during which a holy man had asked her to tell my pregnant mother that she would be giving birth to a baby boy and that she had better call him Abbas, after the martyred son of Imam Ali. The ‘prophecy’ came true.

  My grandfather travelled all the way from the South, as soon as he heard the news. This was 1963 and the eighty-kilometre trip took up a good chunk of the day. God had been generous enough to grant him a boy, but would not fork out more than two and a half kilos of progeny. Excited and alarmed, he urged my mother to supplement her own breastfeeding with ‘something more nutritious’, powdered milk or suchlike, to keep me alive.

  One day, our maid put me to sleep on a grown-up’s bed—I was six or seven months old—walked out of the room and, when she returned to check on me, discovered that I had rolled over to the edge, had fallen off and was lying motionless on the floor. Believing that I had died and that she was to blame, she ran away, never to return. I, on the other hand, must have been asleep all along, because when my mother walked into the bedroom and picked me up, my eyes opened and a big yawn scrunched up my tiny face.

  With a first name colonised so firmly by the first two letters of the alphabet, I was destined to be on top of the class list. Whenever the last name was used for sorting, I found myself sliding all the way down the register because my family name was spelt Zein—the pretentious El usually deemed a cumbersome accessory by school administrators. Swaying between the beginning and the end of the student roll, I would develop a predilection for the middle position, a chronic dislike for the edge. Yet I would find myself pulled towards extremes, as if by a natural law of physics that was as entrenched in my persona as my first and last names. All too often, I would live above my emotional means and my life would prove to be unsuitable for my constitution.

  ·

  I grew up in a loving house, in the care of my doting mother and three sisters, Hiam, Fatima and Maha. My older brother Jihad, eleven years my senior, must have resented my arrival. I was an undeserving rival, having come so late and turned out to be so slight compared to the daring teenager who was already having shouting matches with his father.

  By the time I turned seven, man had not long walked on the moon, the Vietnam war was raging, the nuclear non-proliferation treaty had been signed, the entire Egyptian air force had been wiped out in a few minutes, and we had lost the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and Sinai in six days in 1967, a historical record by all accounts, rivalled only by the Netherlands falling to the Germans over breakfast, twenty-seven years earlier. Abdul Nasser had resigned, only to be brought back to power by popular demand. The world—that safe, delicious mix of distant feuds, Egyptian dramas, American sitcoms, household bickering, endless play and the chocolate cakes that my mother made—had an unmistakably festive quality to it.

  My brother Hekmat, six years younger than me, was the final addition to our family and, by the time he turned one and started waddling around the house, our three small bedrooms were teeming with bodies, noise and furniture. I slept in crowded beds, tucked in between siblings, and learnt how to do my homework amid cacophonous family gatherings. Short on space at eye level, it was not long before I discovered the most amazing maps in the patterns of our large carpets. I turned them into battlefields, intricate road networks, deserts and cities extending from my mother’s high-heels all the way to my sister’s skewed toenails, always keeping a wise distance from my father’s shiny black moccasins.

  The grown-ups chatted, laughed, pumped nicotine up into the air and tossed the dice onto the wooden backgammon set, keeping up a staccato of cracking sounds and yelling the exquisite Turkish names of dice combinations—shesh besh, hab yek, dabash. I would empty their cigarette packs, stuff them with plastic soldiers and drive them across the battlefields, from o
ne end of the room to the other. East clashed with West as armies of red-and-white Marlboro, blue Gitanes, yellow Camel and white Kent fought over the Persian carpet under lines of smoke rising from ashtrays, and turned the living room into a smouldering city whose destruction would not sap its spirit. Delightful battles, the outcome of which I alone decided, raged for a good hour of the day and, until the age of twelve when lead bullets would pierce through our wooden shutters and real bombs would start exploding in our street, the only history that mattered was the one I played out in my mind.

  ·

  Skinny boys with eyeglasses had a hard time in Beirut. Family acquaintances instructed me to eat more and neighbours inquired about my health. Up until my early twenties when I finally started putting on weight, the subject of my thin self came up in passing, usually condescending, asides. ‘You’ve lost weight, haven’t you?’ was the mantra I heard often. My mother was convinced that I was undernourished, despite all the morsels of bread that she delivered in person into my mouth.

  ‘Baadak d’eef. You’re still weak,’ she would exclaim, as if she had expected me to turn chubby by sheer will. The Lebanese dialect and, undoubtedly, the Lebanese psyche did not distinguish between ‘skinny’ and ‘weak’—a fact that did not play in my favour when it came to school bullies. By the time I turned fourteen, I knew that my body was a far cry from the tanned, muscular ideal upheld by my peers and the grown-ups around me. Since manliness required, among other things, a manifest lack of interest in one’s appearance, I kept my anxieties mostly to myself.

  Yet, following a Lebanese beachside tradition, I tried a few times to give myself a suntan that would change my fortunes overnight and would bring to their knees the most hard-to-get girls—the Mays and Mireilles of the world who walked around expecting the trees to gasp in admiration and I, my eyes secretly following them in the schoolyard, utterly surprised that the trees didn’t.

  But to add insult to genetic injury, my skin was so white, I could only make it a shade darker by exposing it to the sun for six hours at a time, an act of self-mutilation of which my family, with the exception of my father, seemed to approve. As my pain became unbearable in the night and on the following day, advice was sought from doctors, neighbours and, on one occasion, some passers-by who, alerted by my sobbing, offered a home-made cure for which they were thanked then quickly dismissed. But as my mother and I discovered, little could be done besides keeping the damaged skin cool and moist. As I lay in bed, prey to day-long spasms of pain, I knew that I was giving birth to stillborn selves which, much like the cells between the old and the new layers of skin, would only survive a few notional seconds.

  Ever since I experienced the tyranny of the tan on the beaches of Beirut, the sun’s hand has been hanging over my neck. I am now in my mid forties—married with children, perfectly secure about my appearance—but I feel that glowing hand every time I walk out on the street in summer and instinctively run for shade.

  ·

  My father was the man who made the big decisions in our house, such as how much pocket money I was given each day, the kind of briefcase I could buy at the start of the school year and, over the weekend, whether we stayed at home or went to the beach in our white Peugeot 404, with its vertical rear lights, yellow high beam and the boot’s silver knob which, one day, I finally succeeded in clicking open, all by myself, full of pride, despite my sister Maha—who carried her age advantage of three years with decisive authority—sneering at the insignificance of the event. My father was the tall, impeccably dressed man who picked me up from school when the school bus was out of service and who took me by the hand to the dazzling shops of Mazraa to buy new clothes on the eve of the Eid festivities.

  My father exercised his power over me wordlessly. He offered no explanation for his actions even when, a month into year 3, he summoned me from the classroom, in the middle of a lesson at the Lycée Verdun, and drove me to a new school, Grand Lycée, on the other side of town, for no obvious reason. (The new school was closer to our house and, as I worked out much later, I must have been admitted after the term had started.) My father cut a God-like, if inscrutable, figure, in stark contrast to the Quranic God who came across as an articulate, benevolent and, at times, threatening divinity.

  God deployed mercy and harsh punishment in equal measure. His all-seeing ability was a little disconcerting, and the young believer pinned great hope on his merciful qualities—rendered in a wealth of Arabic synonyms spread all over the holy book. God was best approached with a grown-up, because children needed guidance about how to behave so as to please Him. And my father, who had sent me to a French secular school for a good private education that did not cost the earth and was always ready to help me with my homework, had also taken my religious instruction upon himself. He answered my questions about virtue, sin and the afterlife. He introduced me to the Quran and told me about the superiority of its language which no human could possibly emulate. He reminded me of God’s injunction, Iqra’, Read or Recite, the first divine word the prophet had heard, a prophet who did not know how to read or write. In the beginning was the word, but the journey for the believer began with the act of reciting.

  My own attempts at reading the Quran from cover to cover always failed, thwarted by the length of the earlier chapters, the madynias, which offered no persistent narrative thread I could hang on to. Instead, I kept returning to the smaller chapters, towards the end of the book, the beautiful makkyas which told the reader about the making of the world, judgment day and the intricacies of belief. That the shorter chapters generated a better return on my time investment—since my father rewarded me with a silver coin every time I memorised a chapter—must have had some influence on my curricular preferences.

  My father taught me how to perform the daily prayer, how to make my ablutions, how to be a good Muslim and all the rituals of purity that went with it. Never approach the Quran except with pure thoughts and a clean body. If a piece of bread falls on the floor, kiss it twice and touch it with your forehead, because bread is a gift from God. Always wash china and cutlery with soap and running water to ensure it is clean. Say the faatiha, the opening verses of the Quran, to thwart evil before a journey. Never leave your shoes on the floor upside down because showing the soles of your shoes to God is disrespectful...

  While the prayers required some effort to perform, the other, simpler rituals quickly became second nature. They were an intrinsic part of the cosmic world in which I lived, signs of submission, in the most benign sense of the word, a submission of one’s fears and metaphysical angst to a higher divinity, a contract between the believing child and God, whereby the former is granted peace of mind in return for little more than belief and a formal exercise of rituals. No one in their right mind, I had thought, would refuse such a trade, even if it made me wonder why it was that God needed the belief of his creatures in the first place.

  When, a few years later, I rebelled against my father, against God and other childhood beliefs, the rituals—transformed into bodily habits, a physical mode of engagement with the world—would prove far more enduring than the worldview that had carried them to me. To this day, of little faith though I am, I flick any shoe I find upside down back into the right position and I wash dishes under a stream of running water rather than by soaking them in a sink. I don’t invoke the faatiha anymore, but I never fail to say a protective ‘Allah’, instinctively, loudly, when I see someone on the street about to trip or fall down.

  The reading injunction was the trigger for an act of self-inscription by the child, of writing a mode of being into oneself. While this mode of being is subsequently transformed and has nothing irreversible about it, it cannot be erased by the mere will of the later mortal. The word, which was in the beginning, is also what remains in the end.

  My father, my three sisters (left to right, Maha, Hiam and Fatima) and myself.

  ·

  At the end of the first round of the civil war in 1976, many students had missed
a whole year at school and I found myself on the same benches as boys who were one or two years older than I was. For three years, I was tormented by a group of older boys and taunted on account of my name—with its rural, Shia connotation—my thick eyeglasses and my far-from-stocky constitution. None of this would have happened, of course, had I not opened a window of opportunity for my tormentors by failing to be assertive, a skill I would have to learn over the next few years as a matter of survival.

  The rules of the school playground were crude enough. There was an economy of a sort, or so it seemed, which meant that A’s virility had to come at the expense of B’s. It was as if there was a finite amount of virility going around and everyone was trying to grab their share. The timid were a goldmine of manhood; bullying was a plundering process.

  The problem was that I did not know that I was being bullied. The word for bullying did not exist in Arabic or French. I had learnt that words were brutally effective—that with my vocal cords, I could bring the weight of social norms to bear upon any individual of whom I disapproved. But no linguistic luxuries were available to the bullied in Lebanese. By contrast, a wealth of expressions were at hand to describe various forms of ‘weakness’.

  And if the words did not exist—if ‘bullying’, that is, was not readily recognised as a social ill or a pathological relationship which reflected on both parties—the only narrative available to me was that of the bully: I had only myself to blame. Shame and self-hate followed as I internalised my own persecution. Society offered no escape, excoriating instead those who could not stand up for themselves.

  Bullied, picked on, tormented, taunted... Recovery—which started for me at the age of sixteen when I first put up my fists and proudly ripped off the shirt of one of the bullies during midday recess, next to the sandwich kiosk, under the eyes of other students—was made of such linguistic therapy. I first came across the words in English. They had a technical ring to them, as if they had been uttered by a physician who had just diagnosed me out of my misery, delivering me from my solitude by pronouncing my suffering to be not so much an illness inside me, but a disease that belonged to the world.