Hadha Baladuna

Arab American Narratives of Boundary and Belonging

Ghassan Zeineddine, Nabeel Abraham, Sally Howell, Ghassan Zeineddine, Nabeel Abraham, Sally Howell

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780814349267
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Named a Michigan Notable Book for 2023!Gold Medal Winner in the Midwest Independent Publisher Awards!Next Generation Indie Book Award Winner!Eric Hoffer Book Award Winner!Society of Midland Authors Award Winner!2023 Arab American Book Award Winner!Hadha Baladuna ("this is our country") is the first work of creative nonfiction in the field of Arab American literature that focuses entirely on the Arab diaspora in Metro Detroit, an area with the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the US. Narratives move from a young Lebanese man in the early 1920s peddling his wares along country roads to an aspiring Iraqi-Lebanese poet who turns to the music of Tupac Shakur for inspiration. The anthology then pivots to experiences growing up Arab American in Detroit and Dearborn, capturing the cultural vibrancy of urban neighborhoods and dramatizing the complexity of what it means to be Arab, particularly from the vantage point of biracial writers. Included in these works is a fearless account of domestic and sexual abuse and a story of a woman who comes to terms with her queer identity in a community that is not entirely accepting. The anthology concludes with explorations of political activism dating back to the 1960s and Dearborn's shifting demographic landscape.Hadha Baladuna: Arab American Narratives of Boundary and Belonging contains stories of immigration and exile by following newcomers' attempts to assimilate into American society. Editors Ghassan Zeineddine, Nabeel Abraham, and Sally Howell have assembled a cast of emerging and established writers from a wide array of communities, including cultural heritages originating from Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Yemen. The strong pattern in Arab Detroit today is to oppose marginalization through avid participation in almost every form of American identity-making. This engaged stance is not a byproduct of culture, but a new way of thinking about the US in relation to one's homeland.

An Atlas of Homes

Ghassan Zeineddine

The First to Leave

At twenty years old, my great-grandfather Assad Ali Al-Awar left Mount Lebanon for São Paulo, Brazil, in 1920. Raised in the Druze village of Qornayel, he hoped to put the trauma of his adolescence behind him. A few years earlier, as soldiers fought and died in Europe during the First World War, a terrible famine struck the Levant. The sky turned black with locusts. Crops wilted and springs dried out. People began eating their mules, donkeys, and horses. They ate rats and wild dogs and chewed on boiled leather. Cholera and typhus spread throughout the land. The dead were piled on the roads and later collected by municipal carts and buried in mass graves.

The Allied forces had imposed a blockade on the eastern Mediterranean to prevent supplies from reaching the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Greater Syria. The blockade decimated the economy; matters grew worse when Jamal Pasha, commander of the Ottoman forces in the region and known as “The Butcher,” enforced his own blockade on Mount Lebanon. By the end of the famine in 1918, the death count was over 100,000. For Assad, the horror of those days would prove inescapable.

Villagers had been immigrating to the Americas since the late nineteenth century, and some of Assad’s relatives had settled in São Paulo. Before boarding the steamship, the Lotus, in Beirut’s harbor, he visited a fortune-teller in the souks downtown near Martyrs’ Square, who read his future in the coffee grounds of a demitasse cup and predicted that he wouldn’t live beyond his seventies. Comforted by the belief that he had over fifty years left on earth to achieve something in his life, he boarded the Lotus and three weeks later arrived in São Paulo. But São Paulo didn’t sing to him, or he failed to learn the lyrics to its song, and nine months later he tried his luck in North America. He was accompanied by two relatives from Qornayel, Ramzi Sabra and Najeeb Sabra. The three young men arrived at Ellis Island on January 8, 1921, not speaking a word of English. According to the Weather Bureau, the average temperature that day was forty-one degrees. I imagine my great-grandfather standing, all five feet and seven inches of him, on the island carrying a leather valise, the tail end of his overcoat flapping in the bitter wind, his black hair ruffled like the ocean. What I know from family stories is that he held a cardboard sign that read: West Virginia. Before leaving São Paulo, he had been told there was work in the coal mines of West Virginia, and that a few Druze families lived in the southeastern towns of the state. Someone on the boat had written those two words for him on the piece of cardboard.

On Ellis Island, my great-grandfather’s name was altered at Customs to Assod Allie, and he’d soon be nicknamed Ollie. He ate his first hot dog and crossed into Manhattan, where he flashed his sign at passersby. He and his relatives were directed to Grand Central Station. Several hours later, they hopped off the train in Welch, West Virginia.

Assad or Assod Allie or Ollie never ended up working in the mines. Like so many immigrants who had come before and during his time, he became a peddler and relied on the language of commerce to communicate with Americans. He stuffed a satchel and a suitcase with wares and walked up and down mountain roads and in the depths of valleys, along rivers and around lakes, and across the way into neighboring mining towns. He was at the mercy of the weather, which often left him sunburned or drenched with rain.

He later moved to the town of Princeton and worked at a diner on Main Street called the Virginia Café, and when he had saved enough money, he purchased the diner and the apartment above it. He developed a taste for beer and bowler hats. He wore three-piece suits and patent leather shoes. When he was feeling homesick, he visited the homes of the Druze families, who were also from Mount Lebanon, and joined them for picnics and gatherings at Lake Shawnee. All that was missing in his life was a wife, so he returned to Qornayel to find one.

“Villagers thought he looka funny in the bowler hat,” my grandmother told me on an autumn afternoon in 2007 in her apartment in Washington, DC. She spoke English with an accent thick as honey. “Nobody in town wore a bowler hat.”

Assad fell for Hafiza Al-Awar, who was considered one of the prettiest women in the village. He spotted her, black hair flowing down her back, walking down the road holding hands with a young girl. She had high cheekbones and a round face. When he called on her and asked for her hand, she didn’t think twice about his bowler hat. He was coming from America, which meant he had money. And she was a single mother. Hafiza’s first husband had sailed to Argentina in search of fortune, promising to send for her and their daughter, Wasila, in six months. He never sent word, and Hafiza was left to support herself and Wasila by working at the silk factory in the nearby town of Hammana. In the early morning, she strapped Wasila, who was deaf, to her back and walked three miles to the factory, where for hours she sat at a long wooden table among other village women and sifted through cocoons by the light of kerosene lamps. Toward dusk she walked the three miles home with Wasila on her back. She quickly accepted Assad’s proposal, which was made with one condition: she’d have to leave Wasila behind. In a decision that still haunts my family, Hafiza left Wasila with relatives and journeyed with Assad to America.

Assad went to bed every night wearing one of his wife’s nylons over his head to keep his hair slicked back. In the morning he rose with a perfect hairdo. After breakfast, he walked down a flight of stairs to the Virginia Café and began to work, and in the afternoon Hafiza joined him to help grill hamburgers. She gave birth to two daughters a year apart: Sally and Geneva, the latter my teta. Assad had insisted on Western names.

By 1938, when my teta was two, Assad had been in America for seventeen years, and he was still terrified to venture down the street after sunset. There were signs hung on storefront windows that read: No Blacks and No Dogs, No Jews. Assad feared that whoever hung the signs wouldn’t hesitate to lynch an Arab. This wasn’t an environment he wanted his daughters to grow up in. He also preferred they think and speak in Arabic. And so, he decided that his wife and daughters would live in Lebanon while he remained in Princeton. He’d build them a limestone house in Qornayel and send them money every month. That year he relocated his family to the village, keeping them with relatives while their house was being built. Hafiza was thrilled to return to Lebanon, as she had detested rural life in America, though she’d miss her morning cup of coffee with two glazed donuts and licking custard ice cream from a cone.

In Qornayel, Teta (a.k.a. Geneva) became known as Inaam and her older sister as Souad. On the day Assad was to return to America, Teta clung to his leg. She was too young to understand that she wouldn’t see him again until the following summer. “I’m going out to buy apples,” he told her. “I’ll be right back.”

On November 18, 1942, Assad, already in his forties, enrolled in the army to fight the Nazis, only he was never sent to Europe. Instead, he became a member of the Army Civilian Service. For years a portrait of him in a military cap and suit hung in Teta’s apartment. In the photograph his angular face is posed for combat. Teta called him a war hero.

Assad eventually sold the Virginia Café and returned to Qornayel to live out the remainder of his life. Since alcohol wasn’t served in the village, he walked down to Hammana to drink Almaza beer at the café in the main square. True to the fortune-teller’s prediction, he never reached his eightieth birthday. He died at seventy-eight on November 15, 1978, two years before I was born.

A century has passed since Assad first stepped foot in America. Unbeknownst to him, he left his descendants on an interminable search for home.

From the Mountains to Washington, DC

Teta returned to Princeton as a twenty-two-year-old mother of three girls in 1959. She had been raised in Qornayel, longing for the summers when her father visited from America. At seventeen, her mother, Hafiza, pressured her into marrying her first cousin, Touffic Al-Awar, who was from Qornayel and worked the terraced fields of the village. His hands were big and callused, and he smelled of the earth. When Touffic struggled to support his family, which included my mother and her younger sisters, Teta suggested they live in Princeton, where her father Assad was still running the Virginia Café and could help Touffic find a better paying job. They could live with him in the apartment above the diner. Touffic agreed, and the young family of five set off for West Virginia. It wasn’t the pull of America that had tugged at Teta, for she had no memories of her country of birth. She simply wanted to be closer to her father.

Touffic worked alongside Assad at the Virginia Café while Teta raised their daughters. My mother and her sisters began to learn how to speak and read in English. But Teta wasn’t happy in her marriage, and three years later, when my mother was eight, she divorced Touffic. Feeling sorry for him (and also respecting their family connection), Assad sent him south to North Carolina, where my great-grandfather had a good friend who owned a restaurant in the small town of Snow Hill and needed help around the place.

Despite his love for Teta, Assad discouraged her from raising her daughters in America, let alone as a single mother. Lebanon was safer, he told her. He’d help pay her bills. She returned to Qornayel with her girls, and when she could afford to travel, she visited her father over the summers. On one such visit, she met an older man at a Lebanese gathering named Ameen David, who was in town for the weekend. An immigrant, he was tall and slim and wore an impeccable suit. White hair frosted the sides of his bald head. He owned a popular restaurant and nightclub called the Blue Mirror Grill on Fourteenth Street in downtown Washington, DC, having made his start as a peddler in Saint Louis, Missouri. He was also divorced with three grown children and was intent on remarrying. Teta was in her early thirties and looked much younger than her age. Ameen David (in our family, we refer to him by his full name) thought Teta was beautiful, and he proposed to her. She declined. She had three girls to care for, and in any case, she was headed back to Lebanon. That December, Ameen David flew to Lebanon to propose to Teta again. He promised to pay her girls’ way through school and university if she agreed to marry him. This time, Teta accepted, and she put her girls in boarding school at the Beirut Evangelical School for Girls (BESG). Like her mother Hafiza, she gave up her children to move to America, a decision that she’d never recover from.

Teta lived with Ameen David in a three-story brick house with a red-tile roof on Fessenden Avenue in northwest Washington, DC. Meanwhile, my mother and her sisters lived for the next several years at boarding school. Their school uniform consisted of a gray gilet over a white shirt, a gray skirt, and black or dark brown shoes. Bright colors were strictly prohibited, including colored hairbands and clips. Students sang hymns every morning in the school chapel, followed by a full day of classes. Although the teachers refrained from whacking students with rods or rulers, they reveled in an authoritarian style of teaching that frightened the poor girls. But it was the fierce Ms. Jureidini, head of the boarding department, who the girls feared the most. A short and plump woman, she stormed into the dormitory hall after lights out and marched between the rows of beds, panning her flashlight across the sleeping girls and those awake and holding their breath, making sure everyone was accounted for.

My mother completed most of her schooling at BESG before enrolling in the American University of Beirut (AUB). Her sisters couldn’t bear the boarding school for any longer and joined Teta in DC. As a university student in the early ’70s, Mom lived in the female dormitory. The wooded campus overlooked the sea and a soccer pitch known as the green field. On the weekends she and her Egyptian roommate frequented the movie theaters and cafés in Hamra, a bustling neighborhood above the campus.

But when civil war broke out in the spring of 1975, Mom spent the entire summer in Qornayel to escape the fighting in Beirut. Like most, she believed that after a few weeks a ceasefire would be called and the warring militias would clear their barricades from the streets and the masked snipers would withdraw from rooftops. The fighting intensified, and Beirut was divided down the middle by an imaginary green line that cut the city in halves: Muslim West and Christian East. The administration at AUB canceled the fall semester and informed students that classes would resume in January.

Mom spent the rest of autumn in Qornyel, anxious to return to her life in Beirut. She lived with her grandparents, Assad and Hafiza, and learned how to crochet.

“It took me a month to make a table cover,” she told me. “I had nothing else to do.”

Teta was in DC, catering to the needs of Ameen David, who was in his early eighties. She was petrified that Mom would be killed in the civil war and begged her to come to America. Not one to disobey her mother, Mom left Lebanon in December. On the day before her departure, she visited her dormitory at AUB to say goodbye to friends, but the dorm was empty.

She lived the following year in DC, completing her undergraduate studies at George Washington University. She was miserable.

“I never got to say goodbye to my friends in Beirut,” she said.

A year later, she married my father, a civil engineer who hailed from a village neighboring Qornayel, and followed him to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Born in the USA

I was born blue in DC. I gasped for breath as the doctor uncoiled the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. Once my lungs filled with air, Mom said I let loose a shattering cry that was louder than the howling of the jackals she had grown up listening to on sleepless nights in Qornayel. I spent the first two months of my life in the house on Fessenden Avenue. In November 1980, Mom and my sister Jana and I flew to Jeddah, where my father was waiting for us.

Unlike most Lebanese expats and foreigners who lived in gated compounds and did as they pleased within the confines of their concrete walls—I used to picture pool parties where half-naked men and women swam together and French kissed—we lived in a ground floor flat among the locals. I grew up playing soccer in the evenings with the neighborhood kids in the front courtyard, imagining myself as Diego Maradona as I dribbled between defenders. The monotone colors of Jeddah defined my childhood palette: the soft yellow of streetlights, the thick white of the walls, the beige of the desert sands. It rarely rained—once or twice a year—and when it did, I ran outside and looked up at the sky, raindrops exploding on my face like revelations.

Mom was obligated to wear an abaya over her clothes when we left the flat. As Dad drove, I scoped out the streets for lovers. I was in search of a kiss on the lips, which I had seen in the Betamax films my parents played at home. Mom would instruct me to close my eyes whenever a kiss appeared in a film, but I stared wide-eyed, entranced. I never found kissers on the street, let alone a couple holding hands, because public displays of affection were punishable by law. The mutaween, religious police, drove around in Toyota pickups prowling the streets for offenders. We heard rumors about them—bearded men in red headscarves and billowing white robes—whacking offenders with batons and whisking them away in their truck beds to prison.

Jana and I attended the Continental International School, which was run by Brits as imperious as their colonialist ancestors. Our friends were all in...