This was to be the summer that my four-year-old daughter finally met her teta (grandma) and other family in Beirut. The various crises in the Middle East had formed a backdrop to my relationship with her baba (daddy) from the start.
In the Spring of 1988, the situation in Lebanon prevented him from attending his father’s funeral. Our honeymoon on Martha’s Vineyard in the Fall of 1993 was punctuated with roadside stops as we listened to reports of the historic agreement brokered by Clinton between Arafat and Peres – and debated what to make of it. Our first year of marriage was spent separated, as he attempted to forge a life in a recovering Beirut.
Later, a U.S. travel ban lent an extra feeling of adventure to my first travels to the country. The summer of 1994, I visited not only Beirut but as far north as Tripoli, as far south as Sidon, as far east as Baalbek. I was met with large banners announcing (in English) that “Hezbollah Welcomes You with His Pioneer Values.” I visited college friends in Ehden, was fed by strangers approached for directions in the Chouf, feasted on figs as the fogs rolled over Sofar, picked almonds in Zahle, toured the grotto at Jeita, the palace at Beiteddine, the temple at Baalbek. In Beirut, my first night, I woke to the intoxicatingly beautiful sound of my first call to prayer. I learned, from an old shopkeeper whose name I never knew, to ask “Fee karaba?” ("Is there electricity?") before deciding whether to head for the elevator or the stairs of my sister-in-law’s flat. I became a de facto auditor of film classes at Beirut College and fixture at the offices of Future TV as I trailed my husband when not studying German at the Goethe Institute in Ras Beirut. I fell in love with a still scarred country.
This summer I was to finally return to Beirut to view her in all her reborn glory. I had yet to see the reconstructed downtown and the homes of friends who had returned from studying in the U.S. to cast their fortunes with that of their native country. It was to be both a reunion and a joyous introduction of my daughter to a grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins she had never met. She had grown more and more excited as the summer passed, anticipating days spent at the beach or in the mountains, impressing teta with her Arabic, catching up with her little friends Nazu and Zayd, being spoiled as only the Lebanese spoil children.
Instead, I have spent these last days teaching lessons about war to a four-year-old. How does one tell a four-year-old that she in fact will not meet teta in Beirut (perhaps will never meet her aging teta) because War has arrived at her teta’s door.
“It is not safe in Lebanon,” she sings in a cheerful voice as she runs about the house with her baby dolls. Her father lived through the Israeli invasion in ‘82 and she, too, will learn of invasion – albeit at a distance. She knows, too, at too early an age, that war and danger have a tendency to beset Arabs.
“Mama,” she announced weeks ago, after an explanation of the war in Iraq, “If war comes here, we will joke and not tell anybody that Baba speaks Arabic.”
About Lebanon, she is more inclined to resilience than deception at present. In reponse to the news that war has made it unsafe for us to join teta in Beirut, she yesterday announced “Peace parade at our house tomorrow!”
I hope to see you there.
Michelle Mason is a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Minnesota.
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