by Sam Farran
Ahmed was asking me what was going on. I remember telling him, the words forming almost in disbelief, that it was my dad, my father, returned home.
As the dark-skinned man broke his grip on grandfather, he picked up Ibtissam and held her in front of him, far in front, at arm’s length, so he could see her well. “You’ve grown so much!”
“And me?” I asked.
“You?” he joked. “Who are you? I don’t know any teenagers.”
“I’m not a teenager. I’m seven. It’s me, Papa. It’s Haisam.”
“Of course,” he said, pretending to wipe away a cloud from in front of his eyes and see me more clearly. He shook my hand, as if I were a man, then pulled me closer. His skin was tanned from working construction in the burgeoning economies of the Gulf, under the unceasing sun there. He hardly appeared to be Lebanese, more Egyptian, or even Saudi. But he certainly sounded Lebanese. He sounded Tebnini. He sounded just as I remembered him, funny and serious all at once, though perhaps a bit more gravelly voiced and tired.
Dad led us all home, and we repeated—or tried to repeat—the same scene for the benefit of grandmother and mom. We tried to make it a surprise, a charade. But my mom and grandmother smoked it right away. Perhaps they heard us laughing as we walked up the hill toward the olive grove. Perhaps they identified him by more than just his face or hands. Maybe his eyes hadn’t changed. Likely his two-year absence didn’t dim their recollections as completely as they blinded our young and cloistered minds. The women rushed in. Ibtissam and I and the other kids were pushed away, but not far, only to the dancing, jittering perimeter, grabbing at the hems of the adults’ robes, their elbows, their hands. Everything was chaos. The noon bells of the church and the dhuhr call to prayer crisscrossed in the air around us, a wingless and bodiless flight. Kisses seemed to fall from the sky. And just as suddenly as that, the women turned to practicalities: What would we eat? How would we rearrange the rooms? When would we have a party to celebrate father’s return and our reunion? How long was he staying and how had he traveled here and how was he feeling and wouldn’t he like to have a seat inside for a minute, maybe some tea, some figs?
Dad hardly let those questions hit the air.
“We’re moving to Libya,” he said. “I’ve got a new job there.”
LIBYA
My dad believed in hard work. How could he not? He’d earned his money through hard work, and most of that money during his Kuwait construction days he sent home to take care of me, and mom, and Hisham, and Ibtissam, and little baby Bassem, who was still not weaned, as well as having some to spare and distribute among parents and brothers and sisters.
I remember my father telling me, when I first started working for him—not in those idyllic tobacco fields with Uncle Ali, which was lovely work, but later, working in a restaurant he opened—that I had it easy. As a kid my age he had walked a day or two south each week to the Israeli port of Haifa. There he wandered the streets with a wooden tray slung from a rope around his neck. He sold odds and ends from that tray: condiments, razor blades, shaving cream. When he’d dispensed with all his supplies, he would walk back to Tebnine, another two days’ journey but this time uphill, back into the Lebanese mountains that kept us safe and sheltered.
That was my dad. Great sense of humor but also as serious as serious can be, and quite a traveler too. He told us we needed to go to Libya to work, but really this was 1968, and the Arabs had just suffered a mighty defeat at the hands of Israel. My dad knew bad things were in store for Lebanon, and he wanted us to get away before they started.
We couldn’t afford tickets for the whole family, so Ibtissam and Hisham remained behind in Tebnine with grandmother, while dad and mom and baby Bassem and I boarded a passenger ship in Beirut and sailed for Alexandria. While Alexandria doesn’t seem too far from Beirut, the weather was nasty that year, and I remember most from the journey the empty, stormy sea, no land anywhere to be seen, and my own constant, hourly rush up narrow, cold stairs from our berth to the railing, where my seasickness gave me plenty of time to watch the Mediterranean’s wine-dark waves roil in the ship’s wake.
Egypt still smacked of embarrassment and a bit of panic after its failure in the Six Days’ War against Israel. The Israelis had been stopped at the Suez Canal more by diplomatic effort than Egyptian forces. To try to build back his country’s confidence, Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, could be seen and heard everywhere: posters, broadcasts, speaking and putting out policy among the other Arab nations. He was a big man, for sure, but also a man who had just lost and lost badly. So our passage from Alexandria south to Cairo occurred amid a backdrop of propaganda, with us being foreigners, though foreigners of the most unnoticeable sort, fellow Arabs—a bit different, obviously Lebanese, but largely unthreatening.
We spent a few days in Cairo getting our paperwork in order. There we saw, of course, the pyramids but also the Khan al-Khalili Souq, which made my eyes go wide with its richness and the storied, colorful, winding streets. Everything looked like a Friday market, except instead of sun and country greenery and laughter, the Khan al-Khalili was filled with strange scents of spice and glittering bits of glass and bronze and old mashrabiya windows with their deeply latticed shutters, behind which, in my young boy’s mind, a million eyes were watching me from the buildings above. I’d never been somewhere so big, so overflowing with people. Compared to Cairo, even Beirut felt like a village.
When we’d walked through most of the souq, my father turned to me and took my hand. We left mother and Bassem on the street corner, and father led me forward, across a bit of park. There we stopped in front of the great mosque of Hussein.
“Have you prayed before as a man?” he asked me.
“Yes, I have,” I said.
“Good, then you will come with me.”
We took off our shoes and entered the mosque, which is one of the holiest places in the world for Shi’a, because we believe the head of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, is buried there. Truthfully, I had prayed now and again, but in Tebnine it wasn’t a major thing for me. I was still young then. Hills and streets, tobacco picking and slingshots figured much more prominently in my life than prayer or going to the mosque. And also my father had been gone, so I was left to my own devices much more than I should have been, at least when it came to something like prayer. But there, in Cairo with my father, in that huge and holy space, I caught myself just staring about me, taking in the vastness of it, the quietness, how the barefooted men assumed such reverence and how, together, we all took our places and performed the rukaa’a, the prescribed sequence of kneeling, praying, kneeling, rising, and praying, all facing toward Mecca, over and over. It stirred a chord in me, one of belonging and rightness, but also like a whisper in my blood or a connection to something in the air, something more than human: I felt it. For the first time I felt it. This experience, praying in the Hussein Mosque, still remains the most vivid and impactful memory I carry with me of my father. I spent the rest of the day, and maybe longer, maybe even the next few weeks of our new life, in a state of awe and inner quiet.
From Cairo we went overland in a hired car. This was a bit like a bus, except it was just a car into which our four family members, all our luggage, and a whole additional family and its luggage were crammed. I sat on my father’s lap most of the way, with my mom having to deal with baby Bassem, who was still breast-feeding then.
We first spent a year in the eastern city of Derna, right on the water in the only really green and forested part of Libya. Here the mountains spill down to the sea, so the place looks and feels a bit like Lebanon. This helped remove some of the shock of leaving home, though I remember not making many friends, at least not right away.
My dad worked a construction project in Derna for a year, until Libya also stirred with unrest as Muamar Qadafi came into power. Again, and almost as suddenly, father announced we would move—this time to Benghazi, a little further down the Libyan coast, and this time not for a cons
truction job. Dad and mom had decided to open a restaurant.
We lived behind the restaurant in an unfinished apartment building, without even concrete on the floors yet, just dirt. For a bathroom we used the one in the restaurant. And I was put to work, really put to work, for the first time in my life, washing dishes, cleaning, and waiting tables. Our living conditions were harsh, nothing as sweet as the mountains around Tebnine, but otherwise the restaurant turned out to be a resounding success. We were the first to provide Lebanese cooking in Benghazi, a big deal right then because a whole bunch of people had just moved from Syria and Lebanon and Palestine and Jordan. My parents made money hand over fist, enough to allow us not only to travel back to Tebnine a couple times but also to bring back with us to Libya my siblings Hisham and Ibtissam, reuniting all of us.
For my first trip back, my mom dressed me. New clothes, starchy. I was jumping out of my skin with excitement, and the last thing I wanted was to be bound up in fancy clothes. But when my father called me into his bedroom, I understood better the reason why I had to wear not only a shirt and tie but also a tailored jacket.
He handed me a belt that looked strangely lumpy. I didn’t have too much experience with belts, with formal clothes. But still something looked wrong.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A belt.”
“I know,” I said, taking it and trying to put its fat end through the loops at my waist. The belt wouldn’t fit, not easily. “But what’s on it?”
“Packages.”
He explained that Qadafi wouldn’t let more than one hundred lira leave the country at any one time and that he wouldn’t let Lebanese people keep their savings in a bank either. So we had no choice but to smuggle it out of the country, back to our family in Lebanon. It was just a larger version of Hussein and me sharing our tobacco-stringing money with our siblings.
The scheme worked perfectly. I passed through customs with hardly a glance, both in Tripoli’s airport and in Beirut. I should have been nervous, but I wasn’t. I just felt fortunate not to have to take a boat back to Lebanon and risk seasickness again. And also the idea of all that money just made me think of the Friday market and how, instead of buying a few ice creams and popguns, I’d be able to set up as a merchant myself, selling rubies and diamonds and all the best spices, opening my own Khan al-Khalili. Of course, I would be the hero all over again, quick to resume my place at the head of the gang.
Though Tebnine has always remained in my heart (and even now I’ve bought my cousin Khalil’s old house and am refurbishing it for my retirement), my story only rarely intersects with it again. Sure, I made those trips back, and many more even during the bad parts of Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s, but my life went a different direction. I hit a fork in the road almost immediately on my return to Libya from that first money-laden trip, for I realized then why my parent’s restaurant had done so well: the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Black September that year had seen King Hussein of Jordan kick the PLO leadership out of his country. They fled to Lebanon and Syria, reestablishing headquarters there. But they also set up a training camp in Benghazi. After the regular rush on Fridays, my parents would close the restaurant down to our normal customers, and a couple of big buses of young men—hungry young men, polite young men—would come. I served them their food. They ate, and they joked, and they did all the normal things done by normal twenty-something kids. I liked them.
“How old are you, boy?” one of them asked, putting his hand on my shoulder when I delivered a big bowl of tabbouleh to his table.
“Ten.”
“What do you think of Palestine?”
“I love it.”
“Good boy.”
The chatter of the other PLO trainees had not stopped. But this man and I seemed frozen in place, with everything else eddying around us. I could see my mom out of the corner of my eye, beckoning to my father from the kitchen, not looking at me, not worried. Everything was normal. But I was stuck there, mesmerized. The man had green eyes, nothing abnormal for a Palestinian or a Syrian, but he did not blink. And he had a line on his face like he had been cut by a very fine razor blade. It made me think of my father when he was a child, selling those razors on foot in Haifa port.
“Would you like to learn to shoot?”
“I know how to shoot.” I pantomimed the action of my slingshot, a bird falling from the sky.
The man laughed. “No,” he said. “Guns.”
I shook my head no, but then, ever so slowly, the side-to-side no motion changed to an up-and-down nod, like I was spinning, dazed.
“Next week then,” he said. “I’ll come for you on Thursday night, and we’ll bring you back when we come here Friday after prayers. An overnight adventure!”
I got nervous then. I stood a bit straighter, didn’t answer him directly, turned away, and half-ran back into the kitchen. I didn’t say anything to anyone about this encounter, but, as I sat on a sack of rice, I saw my mother look from me to the young fedayeen member, and then back again. Her eyes were filled with worry.
CHAPTER 2
A NEW AMERICAN
THE NEXT DAY we unpacked the jar where my parents stored the spare money, rented another car (this time not shared), and drove around the long bay that connects Benghazi with Tripoli, the capital of Libya, several hours away. My parents barely spoke the whole way. They just said we were going on a vacation. And that’s exactly how it seemed: off to the biggest city in Libya, off—maybe—to the beach. Indeed, we checked into a hotel in a nice part of Tripoli and had a good dinner, and we children felt our hopes rise in expectation of enjoying the coming day.
However, the following morning we were all—Hisham, Ibtissam, me, mom, dad, and Bassem—hustled into our very best clothes before daybreak. We left the hotel without eating breakfast and went to stand on the street, five or six people ahead of us, in a line that grew and grew as dawn started to shed a honey-colored light over the faces of Tripoli’s white-washed facades.
I asked where we were. My mom avoided the question, just telling me that we were in line. She meant for me to drop the question, but I persisted. She waved a hand at me, demanding silence, and we kept our places, queuing along the street.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We’re in line,” mom said.
“But where?”
“Hush.”
When the line had grown to half a hundred people, a window opened, and a guard came out from a door I hadn’t noticed in the high, spike-topped wall. This guard was the biggest human I’d ever seen, seven feet tall I thought. He had blonde hair and very white horselike teeth. He was dressed in an immaculate, deep blue uniform with red stripes on the legs as well as medals and insignia everywhere on his chest and along his high starched collar. The sun shone on him, and the medals and insignia caught its light, reflecting it back at me in a blinding kaleidoscope. This man held a rifle over one shoulder, smartly and confidently, and he squared his corners, turning at right angles, sharp in all his movements as he stepped into position beside the doorway, there to bring the rifle’s buttstock crashing down beside his foot before he seemed to freeze in place, standing there statue still.
Just like in the Hussein Mosque, I found myself transfixed, not wanting to enter the gate in the wall as the line crept forward and my father pulled me into the US Embassy. This was my first sight of a US Marine, this guard at the embassy in Tripoli, and—not surprising at all for a boy my age, though certainly a unique thing for a Lebanese boy—the experience of him, his regal bearing, his professionalism, stood out to me as something aspirational. The mosque had been spiritual and profound. The young man from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had felt more like home, like a friend. But the Marine—though he did nothing in particular, nothing different from what he had been trained to do, nothing different from the things a thousand other Marines do at embassies every day, even now, the world over—my ten-year-old brain fixated on him. I had a firs
t inkling not of the person I was meant to become (all my heritage and upbringing should have predisposed me to life as a harvester of tobacco or, if I yearned for something exotic, to follow the beckoning of that fedayeen) but of something even more special—the freedom to imagine a different and better future.
We’d all heard plenty about America. Who hadn’t? But this first direct experience, at the very moment when I was ripest to be influenced, changed me completely.
AMERICA
The rest of that visit to the embassy and to Tripoli blurs together in my mind. Overwhelmed by the image of that Marine beside the gate, all other memories seem dim and washed out. Only that tall figure in his uniform remains clear. And I can trace one of the most fateful moments in my life back to that experience, the outcome of a hundred little decisions adding up over decades and bringing me back to that place, there by the embassy gate.
We got our visas to America within a few short days. This was made easier and smoother because our history in America goes back to 1916, with my great-grandfather Ahmed Hamzey Fawaz, who arrived in 1916. He was part of the first wave of Lebanese immigrants to America, the same batch that included the poet Kahlil Gibran. Then my mother’s father, Fares Ahmed Fawaz, arrived in 1924 and went to high school here, later marrying my step-grandmother, Najla. So, in fact, my family had been American for two generations already, and we had contacts there, a history, a landing pad to help us adjust. This was the key that opened the door for us. My uncle, Robert Hamzey, son of Fares Ahmed Fawaz and Najla, sponsored my mother’s immigration.
In 1971 we took a Scandinavian Airlines flight to New York City. To a ten-year-old this flight seemed to take forever, but unlike when we moved to Libya, our whole family remained together. My mother and father had been able to save the equivalent of somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000 from the restaurant, squirreling it away in pots and mattresses back in Lebanon after smuggling it out of Libya any way we could. This was a good amount of money back in the 1970s. It gave us a head start and allowed us to begin our time in America with a house, a car, and some of the essentials we kids needed for school or that my parents needed for work.