Leave to Remain Page 3
As a young woman in the 1950s, she had turned down many suitors whom she had considered to be socially beneath her, only to end up unmarried, something, we suspected, she had come to regret. She had gone on a pilgrimage to Najaf, Karbala, Samarra and Baghdad—her sister had married an Iraqi man and had moved to Baghdad—and had since dreamt of leaving the village and living in Iraq for good. She told us about the palm trees overlooking the Tigris, the exquisite gardens in the houses of Baghdad, the delicious dates in its markets and the soft, flour-coated candies called mannussama, heaven’s gift. When in the mood, she mimicked the Iraqi accent for a laugh.
Long after she died, I could picture her black-robed silhouette standing at the doorstep of the house, unable to leave, waiting for an escape that she must have known would never come. She was a deeply believing woman and I had a sense in which the silent street in front of the house had been transformed by her gaze, as though it had become the image of her broken dreams and the site of her catharsis. The word Sakeena itself—quietness or serenity, of a spiritual or metaphysical nature—evoked in my mind this moment of peaceful acquisition, which carried both triumph and resignation, the unhappy victory of those who finally come to terms with their fate.
·
The highest branches of the fig tree were visible from the courtyard of the house, where we usually gathered for afternoon tea. The children listened while the adults gossiped and talked politics, literature and history, from Arab revivalism and the limits of poetic licence to the latest on parliamentary elections, Palestine and the October war of 1973—the outcome of which I could never make out since we seemed to have both won and lost it. While social upheavals were being forecast, political regimes were being changed and another round of tea was being served, my mind would wander off. The distance separating me from the worlds conjured up in the conversation would dawn on me and fill me with regret. If men spoke about these matters, it was because they understood them. I could hardly wait to be in their shoes, able to speak about the world from knowledge. Language was a climax of experience, as far as I was concerned.
But if the spoken word was a ritual that grownups performed, the written word was more of a mystery to me. It came without a voice and without a face and, although it lasted longer than the spoken word and had somewhat more authority by virtue of being printed, the absence of its author diminished its effect. A poem, I had been told by my literature teacher, only came to life when read aloud or recited to others. The voice and the face of the speaker were just as important as the words. Besides, writing was done at one remove from the world, it required reflection and not much by way of courage.
But it wasn’t only in books that I had come across the facelessness of words. Over the last six or seven years of his life, my grandfather’s eyesight seriously declined. He would have us, his grandchildren, read the newspapers aloud to him. More often, he would rely on the radio, usually the Arabic program of the BBC World Service, to keep in touch with the world. Lying in bed in the darkness of his austere bedroom, he would turn up the volume if the news happened to be about Palestine or Iraq, where he had lived for eight years. On his bedside cabinet lay his silver clippers, their blades activated by a nifty squeezing mechanism, his Kolynos toothpaste tube and his cream-coloured spittoon—objects the likes of which I would never see again after his death; they would become forever associated in my mind with the frail body of a man whose gentleness and unassuming authority I loved deeply from an early age.
Often, he would forget to turn off the radio before going to sleep and, at every hour, the newsreader would make a drawn-out announcement in anticipation of news-time: ‘Hounaa Lan-Dan’—‘This is London’—pronouncing the last word in two distinct, ringing syllables, followed by the Big Ben chimes which would fill up the house. That this was plainly not London but Jibsheet made me smile—and someone in the house once yelled back at the newsreader, ‘Hounaa Jibsheet. Could someone turn the damn radio off?’ But the newsreader’s dogged blindness to place was a little unsettling too. The sightless, supine body listening to a faceless voice was too much to bear: my grandfather could not have been further from Beirut, Baghdad and Damascus, let alone London, a place he had never seen.
When, many years later, I first went to England—circling Parliament House, walking through the old streets of Oxford and admiring the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral—I liked to think that I was the conduit of my grandfather’s gaze. When I saw Big Ben in London, part of me could not quite accept that it existed in its own right and that it was not an artifice of the newsreader’s steely voice. Had someone approached me near Parliament House or Westminster Cathedral and claimed to be the owner of the famous voice—the face behind the words—I would have lent him a believing ear and the world would have made more sense to me.
My paternal grandfather, Sheikh Ali, in the late 1970s.
·
Figs were a luxury fruit. Not because they were expensive or hard to produce. Quite the contrary. Figs, like the pomegranates which grew in the house’s garden, were not in high demand, had little commercial value and were not often encountered on the fruit stalls in the city where we lived. My mother sometimes made a jam out of them—a sticky brown paste, dotted with white seeds, that we chewed with bread.
Pomegranates carried more mystery than figs because of the rush of translucent grains when we snapped one open. It was more like a small treasure box than a fruit. We gobbled some of the grains and savoured others. We chewed at the soft, pinkish envelope and were rewarded with the hard, crispy seed. Apples and oranges were a regular part of our diet—just what the word ‘fruit’ brought to mind. Lemons—another product of the house’s garden—were a flavour rather than a fruit, which seemed to crop up in every dish on the dining table. Loquats made a brief appearance on mobile fruit carts in the city and, by the time they reappeared exactly a year later, we had almost forgotten what they were like—soft and juicy under their thick skin.
Figs, on the other hand, were just an occasional pleasure. True, there was something wild about the way a fig opened itself up as it ripened, revealing the texture of its seed bed, before drying up and dying as if, aware of the passage of time and desperate to be picked and eaten, it had given up the subtle game of seduction.
I must have been eleven or twelve years old when—on the roof of the house, my back to the Mediterranean, in the early hours of a summer afternoon, when all the other household members were having their siesta yet again, the air had gone eerily still under the scorching sun and I thought God Himself must have closed his eyes and turned his face away from the earth—a cousin of mine, Khaled, told me a story about how children came into the world.
I listened with intense interest and some detachment, as if it was all a basic lesson in biology, which of course it was. But when my friend pointed out that the rules of copulation and reproduction he had just described applied to my own father and mother, I took offence and my heart sank. The story suddenly became disturbingly intimate and implausibly dirty. The idea that we all started off as ‘milk’ coming out of a certain organ of a man’s body was distasteful and undoubtedly more than I could bear. If my informant hadn’t been a trustworthy friend and a close relative, three years my senior, and if I hadn’t known that he was fond of my parents and had always shown them due respect, I would have dismissed his account out of hand.
I looked at Khaled, incredulous, desperate for a mitigating follow-up of some kind. We walked in silence the length of the terrace, to and fro.
‘Those who do it must love each other,’ he finally said, unconvincingly. ‘Otherwise, it wouldn’t work.’
I was hardly listening by then. I had moved an inch on the emotional spectrum and my mute resentment was now directed at my parents. I felt betrayed by them. How could they have allowed the sanctity of our house to be sullied in this way?
Khaled’s last-ditch attempt at salvaging my innocence was even more wide of the mark. ‘Maybe I’m wrong,’ he said desperately. ‘Maybe your parents did not do it this way.’
What I was left with was the question of why they did such a thing in the first place. Somehow the word ‘pleasure’, although used by my informant, did not register on my mental screen. ‘Pleasure’ was about eating the chocolate cake that my mother made, having a cool cloth placed over my face in summer, jumping into the pool after a game of soccer, riding my bike downhill at high speed. I would not have used the word pleasure to describe the mix of guilt, release and confusion that the few ejaculations I had experienced gave me. Pleasure, as far as I was concerned, did not involve body organs below the waist.
I could not view my mother in the same way again. For a few days, I became suspicious of her slightest move in the evening. When she turned off the light and slipped under the sheets—at the village, she and the children slept in one room and my father in another—I tried to keep myself awake. How long would it be before she joined my father under the cover of darkness? Did she always wait for us to go to sleep? But I would never find out because I would quickly doze off. I would open my eyes in the morning and find that she was in bed. Or was it, back in bed? The world did not yield its secrets easily.
In the garden of the house in Jibsheet.
From left: my mother, myself, my sister Fatima, my great-aunt Sakeena, along with close relatives. Second and third from right are my cousin Khaled and my sister Hiam.
Festivals of Grief
In the late afternoon, as the sun relented and the streets of Nabatieh cooled down, the reciter’s voice flooded the playground. The townsfolk had converged on the soccer pitch. I moved among clusters of young men who hung around the goalpost or sat on the fence, their legs dangling, their eyes lost between the gravity of the events and their own light-heartedness, their inc
urable flippancy. Women, in unabashedly colourful frocks, the heads of some covered casually with a scarf, others tossing their hennaed hair with excitement as they whispered into a companion’s ear, looked on from the balconies of the dull two-storey buildings which formed a wider fence around the pitch.
Elderly women, in black silk shirts, black skirts and white head-covers knotted at the neck, were gathered in the front yard of an older house. While some sat quietly, others swayed gently right and left, sobbing and wiping their tears with handkerchiefs. A plump three-year-old in red shorts waddled through the front door into the courtyard, shoeless and topless, and stared at a handbag lying on the floor next to a chair.
A tired, bleached-asphalt road separated the buildings from the walls of the playground and branched out at the four corners of the oblong field into other parts of the small town. The Hussaynya, with its cream-coloured stone walls and black steel window-guards, was much busier than usual. The traffic had been diverted, and the road had disappeared under the feet of men, women and children who stood close to each other, their shadows mingling in strange shapes. Something had descended upon the town—a ritual of grief from long ago, a heady mix of history and mythology, a tyrannical form of remembering that spread like a vice and colonised the town’s sense of here and now.
But the streets were still there, patient, eternal, biding their time. To the south and south-east lay the market place and lower Nabatieh, to the north rose the white hill of the Al-Bayyad quarter, while in the east stood the municipal town hall. Today was the ninth day. Tomorrow, the streets would paint the men in different colours, disgorging them in exalted processions.
Every few years, I watched the Ashura ceremony, the commemoration of the death of Imam Hussein, son of Imam Ali, in 680 AD and, as a teenager, I brought along friends and acted as a guide to what had been a remote part of Lebanon that many Lebanese had never seen—not least because of the state of semi-permanent war between the Israeli army and Palestinian guerrillas. Hussein’s handful of followers had been besieged and slaughtered by the army of Yazeed, son of Muawya, in Karbala, on the banks of the Euphrates in the south of Iraq. Ali and Muawya had belonged to different clans and had fallen out in a protracted succession dispute that followed the death of the prophet Muhammad. The clash crystallised into a schism between two streams of Islam—Sunnism, or mainstream Islam, and Shiism, from Shia, or followers of Ali. As early as a few years after the death of Hussein, his Iraqi followers in Koufa vented their guilt at having failed to come to his rescue by conducting processions of grief, penitence, even deliberate military suicide.
Once a year, Nabatieh, a ten-minute drive from my ancestral village of Jibsheet, dedicated itself to Ashura, and was the only town in Lebanon to do so with such zeal. An event which happened over one thousand three hundred years ago, in a faraway desert, would descend on the town—banners, processions, theatrical re-enactment—and occupy the minds of its inhabitants for ten consecutive days. In the run-up to the tenth day, in numerous households, mosques and hussaynyas, men sobbed and women beat their chests softly as they listened, once again, to the mournful story.
They heard how Ali Al-Akbar, son of Hussein, expired in his father’s lap, the handsome Al-Qassem died on his wedding day and the brave fighter Al-Abbas, Imam Ali’s son and Hussein’s half-brother, broke through the siege and rode back to his thirsty companions with a bucket of water dangling from his left arm, his right shoulder a blood-dripping stump. Hussein himself, we were reminded time and again, had sought martyrdom rather than a compromise that would run against his religious principles. It was Hassiba, the uncontested diva of Ashura, who for a long time recounted the story to a vast audience of men and women. Already an old woman when I was in my teens, she would stand on a raised platform in the main square of Nabatieh and plaintively intone the day’s events. Her diminutive figure never quite matched her far-reaching voice.
To many of the more urbanised Shia, Ashura was akin to an eccentric family member whom your friends found interesting but you felt a little embarrassed about. My grandfather—who lived in the rural South for most of his life—betrayed no embarrassment but had little more than contempt for the ritual, which he saw as yet another way in which tradition kept a stranglehold over the minds of his fellow Southerners. Shia clerics disagreed about the ritual, especially the blood-letting part. Some condoned it while others condemned it as un-Islamic and uncivilised. One of the theories about its genesis had it that the ritual was an adaptation of Middle-Ages Christian processions in Spain, taken eastward by returning traders, first to the Caucasus, then to Persia and the Levant.
Passion play of Ashura in Nabatieh, 2000.
·
On the eve of the tenth day, with electricity cut off because of chronically unreliable supply and nothing but dense moonlight to go by, bare-chested youths, some in long white sailors’ pants, others in blue jeans, roamed the backstreets of the town in groups of twenty or so, beating their chests in unison with the palms of their hands to the cry of HAYDAR Haydar HAYDAR Haydar. The pitch of their voices rose and fell, with one cry answering the previous one, one exclamation confirming the other. The effect was dramatic, as if the same cry was coming from different quarters of the town and building up into a unity of purpose, a gathering of the community’s will towards an act of collective faith. The sound of thumping travelled far. When I sat in a café in town, I could hear the men approaching from a distance, their gentle cries heralds of catastrophes to come. Bloodless, shadowy in the moonlight, they steeled themselves for the redness that would flood their lives the next day. Haydar was another name for Imam Ali, a nickname around which the young men were building an intimacy of soul and body.
At eight o’clock on the morning of the tenth day, the playground was abuzz with an expectant crowd. The sun was still mild and a breeze rustled the trees. Men and women from the surrounding villages and from the southern suburbs of Beirut were converging on the town to participate in the ceremonies as actors or spectators or beaters. Black flags of mourning hung off electricity poles and the metallic spikes of the cemetery fence. Banners were raised on the roofs of buildings with defiant messages: The blood of Hussein will not have been spilled in vain and There is no youth but Ali and no sword but his own.
Spectators looked towards the Hussaynya for a glimpse of the preparations or a sign of the first beaters. A stage had been erected on the eastern side of the soccer pitch and covered in black felt, with horses and men performing the passion play, re-enacting the events of Karbala.
Suddenly, the head of the first procession appeared. A bearded man, dressed in a white cloak hanging from his shoulders down to his waist, briskly descended the few steps of the Hussaynya, holding a sabre with a silver guard, tapping his partly shaved head with the flat side of the sword and crying out HAYDAR Haydar. He was followed by a small group of men repeating the words in chorus. They moved around the pitch, into the backstreets of the town centre, through the edge of the Al-Bayyad quarter, then back to the Hussaynya. The crowd parted to make way for them.
But before the men of the first procession were seen again on the pitch, a second batch came out of the Hussaynya: a bigger procession of around twenty men, all wearing their white shrouds, their hair tainted with moist scarlet, their foreheads smeared with blood. These men were more agitated than those of the first procession. Blood trickled down, like a weak but steady fountain, from a small cut in their skull carefully made with a razor blade over a spot where the hair had been shaved off. Some tapped their head with the flat side of a sword. Others thumped their left shoulder with their right fist or raised two hands above their head then brought them down heavily on their chest. A radio-cassette attached to a speaker scratched out a tune: