Jasmine and Fire

by Salma Abdelnour

  The Beirut simulcast kicks off on an April morning in a bare-bones auditorium called the Sunflower Theater on the city’s southeast side. It’s early on a Saturday—the event is scheduled for eight thirty, but as always in Beirut, nothing starts on time. I wander in at ten to find I’ve missed only the first few minutes, and I sit down to hear an American woman named Gisel Kordestani, Google’s director of new business development for Latin America and Asia-Pacific, give a charismatic talk about the possibilities of Internet activism. She’s followed soon afterward by Fadi Ghandour, the founder and CEO of the Jordan-based shipping company Aramex, who pioneered a program called Ruwwad for Development that teaches entrepreneurialism to disadvantaged Arab youth.

  Over the next couple of hours, I also hear Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh, author of a lyrical book called Palestinian Walks—well reviewed in The New Yorker and The Economist—talk about the rural landscapes he grew up with in Palestine in the early twentieth century, and Lebanese Brazilian director Julia Bacha discuss her recent documentary Budrus, about Palestinian villagers’ nonviolent efforts to resist the takeover of their land. Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, speaks after the lunch break and tells funny stories about her hard time getting past the Israeli checkpoints to make it to the event. An activist named Amal Shahabi, who lives in a Palestinian refugee camp in Sidon, tells of the challenges she faced in opening a center for the elderly and creating educational and social resources for her disabled son and others like him in the camp. Suad Amiry, an architect and a Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiator, closes out the day on a lighter note when she reads excerpts from her hilarious and moving memoir Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries, about the years she spent juggling the stress of life in the Occupied Territories under Ariel Sharon with the challenges of living with her ninety-two-year-old mother-in-law.

  On this day in April, there’s been a sudden heat wave—it’s eighty-five degrees and brutally humid, for spring anyway, much too soon to start in on a long sweltering season. After the event, I look for a taxi outside, and as I walk past condo tower after strip mall after condo tower in this monotonous neighborhood on the east side, I think about the idea of home for refugees—that at some point life in the camps, especially for the second generation, becomes itself a home, if just potentially, ideally, a way station to a more permanent and life-affirming kind of home. But I can see how waiting endlessly until a seemingly hopeless situation improves, until a temporary home is replaced by another refuge, can feel like a waste of a life or at least of years. And here today, as I sat and watched the speakers, some of them from the camps, I saw people who are engaging in their life as it stands now and making a home, even if—with any luck—a temporary one, in conditions the rest of the world might pity or even scorn.

  The TEDx event makes me realize I have no real sense of what the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut are like, or what the families who live there go through. Out of negligence, mixed in with shyness about intruding nosily or cluelessly into other people’s lives, I haven’t yet made an effort to visit. I ask Diana if she would mind taking me along with her sometime. She’s working on some documentaries in the Shatila camp, and she offers to take me one day this spring and introduce me to some of the families she knows who live there.

  Shatila is near the northern edge of Dahieh, Beirut’s enormous mostly Shiite neighborhood, which I’ve also been wanting to get a feel for. Dahieh contains about a third of the total Beirut population, but as with so many parts of Beirut and of Lebanon in general, if you don’t live or work or have family and friends there, you probably rarely if ever go. I’m curious to walk around Dahieh and have also heard there’s great discount shopping there. One overcast and blessedly cool day in April, Shireen and I jump in a service taxi and go. Earlier that day I’d mentioned casually over the phone to an aunt that I was on my way to explore and do some shopping in Dahieh. “Be careful!” she pleaded, and I flinched at her overreaction. Beirutis who’ve never been there predictably look upon the area with fear since much of it is poor and run-down, and there’s Hezbollah signage everywhere; the party built up a strong following there by providing infrastructure like schools, hospitals, and utilities to poor, disenfranchised Shiites who faced discrimination and neglect by the government. But my aunt’s advice is not completely unfounded: if you’re not a local there and you’re acting like a dumb tourist, you might stand out.

  Because Beirut is still Balkanized in many ways, its neighborhoods mostly inhabited by one sect or the other, certain insular-minded locals can get paranoid and wary of outsiders wandering aimlessly around their neighborhood. If you’re a Muslim and especially if you happen to be wearing a head scarf, you’ll likely be made to feel uncomfortable in certain conservative Christian neighborhoods in the city and will often be prevented from buying or even renting property there. If you’re Christian, or even if you’re Muslim but not Shiite, you may feel uncomfortable in parts of Dahieh. But Shireen and I figured that if we dressed modestly—jeans and a long-sleeve top—we’d be fine. The service taxi drops us off in the middle of Dahieh, in front of a minimall selling everything from furniture to cosmetics to toys, but we decide to walk around outside instead of going in.

  The streets here are wider than in Hamra, less tightly jammed, but the buildings, some of them shabby-looking especially after multiple wars, their balconies surrounded by faded curtains meant to keep out the sun, remind me of some run-down parts of my own neighborhood. There’s a smattering of pedestrians on the sidewalks, and street vendors push wheelbarrows piled with vegetables or the sesame bread kaak. I notice a few other local women shopping along the street and not wearing head scarves. After a failed attempt to find a restaurant called Buns and Guns we’d heard about that opened here a few years ago—a kitschy fast-food spot with militia-themed decor and menus shaped like missiles—we learn it closed recently. We spend the afternoon taking a leisurely stroll along the sidewalks, stopping at housewares shops and produce stands and buying good-quality discount-priced kitchen items—a mortar and pestle for Shireen, stacking bowls for myself. We stop in at a fancy pastry shop to buy some atayef, the small pancakes I love, stuffed with crushed walnuts and the clotted-cream-style filling called ashta, for half the price of what they’d run at a similar store in Achrafieh or even Hamra.

  In New York, I’m always dreaming up plans to see parts of the city I don’t know yet, and after more than a decade there, I still haven’t spent enough time getting to know the Bronx, or Staten Island, or Queens. But sometimes the right mood, the right weather, or the right companion translates into instant motivation for adventure or a new angle on the city. Same in Beirut: my frames of reference have always been Ras Beirut and Achrafieh mostly, but as with any neighborhood in any city, staying there gets both stifling and myopic. I try to force myself to get out of my comfort zone, whether just to stroll or to go to a party or a cultural event, to get a lens on the rest of the city. Post–civil war, Beirut is wide open again, at least in theory. The militia-patrolled Green Line dividing east and west Beirut is gone, and the you stay on your side and I stay on mine mindset has loosened, even if it still lives on for some. There’s no reason not to see the full stretch and scope of the city, even if it’s uncomfortable sometimes in unfamiliar neighborhoods, even if the locals pick up on the I’m not from here signs flashing on your face.

  I remind myself: Be respectful, modest, and friendly, stimulate the economy a little, and don’t be an ass. The usual rules. It’s hard for me to feel at home in a city if I can’t poke around in the corners and take it all in, maybe not all at once but as a goal—and if I can’t do my minuscule part to keep it from ghettoizing itself.

  Suddenly it’s near the end of April, and—flashback to pre-Thanksgiving—I’m wondering if I’ll land an Easter invitation. I may not consider myself religious, but Easter is a huge deal in Lebanon; it’s called Eid al-Kebir here, the big holiday. Jesus’s purported rising from the dead on that day involves muc
h more celebration and dressed-up churchgoing and ceremony in Lebanon than it does among Christians in the States. Every candy store, pastry shop, and supermarket in Lebanon’s Christian or mixed areas is festooned with Easter chocolates and decorations for weeks ahead of time, and plans for big family gatherings are made early and slaved over.

  Just when I’m resigning myself to spending the holiday alone, I get two tempting lunch invitations, one from my mom’s cousin Nadim and his Armenian wife, Asdghik, a terrific cook, and one from my great-uncle Cecil. He’ll be visiting from London for Easter, spending the holiday at his country house in the southern town of Marjeyoun with his daughter Zelfa, who’d come to Beirut with him and her family back in September. Since I don’t get to see them much, I accept the invite.

  I’ve been curious to see the Marjeyoun house. Cecil has invited my parents and me to go in summers past, ever since the Israeli occupation of the south ended in May 2000 and going to Marjeyoun became less of an ordeal. But the timing never worked out for me during any of my rushed minivacations to Lebanon.

  For the trip there on Easter Sunday, I’ve hitched a ride with Kamal and Nour; they’re also invited down for the holiday. The drive takes us through Sidon, an ancient port town with a busy souk and modern buildings rising up in the shadow of Crusader castle ruins, and then farther south, into a gradually more mountainous and green, more sparsely populated, stunningly beautiful part of Lebanon. The towns thin out, dotted here and there along hillsides, the winding road curving around and through mountain passes, with herds of goats bleating as we drive by, valleys planted with wheat in the near distance, snow capped Mount Hermon way out beyond, and crumbling Beaufort Castle, a strategic site for the Crusaders in the twelfth century, perched on a mountaintop a few kilometers away. Trucks pass us in the opposite direction, swerving by on the hairpin cliffside roads. Every time, somehow, both cars make it in one piece, barely skirting past each other and managing, amazingly, not to tumble off.

  When we reach the outskirts of Marjeyoun, we’re stopped at a military checkpoint. Because this volatile part of Lebanon is so close to the Israeli border and is heavily patrolled by the Lebanese army and UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, visitors must have Lebanese identity cards or other documents granting entry. NO FOREIGNERS, says a sign above the checkpoint. Luckily I’m spared a huge headache since my Lebanese ID card, the one I applied for back in November, finally came through two weeks ago.

  We pull into Cecil’s street, and he greets us at the front gate. As we park the car and get out, I’m struck by the loveliness and charm of the old one-story stone house, on a tree-lined lane just off Marjeyoun’s small central souk. Cecil restored the house decades ago, after it was neglected for years when his parents died. A garden that leads up from the front gate to the door and wraps around the side of the house is alive with flowering rose and jasmine and geranium bushes, planted in between tall pine trees. It’s heaven here, so serene, and the scent of flowers everywhere instantly calms any nerves rattled by the harrowing roads.

  We all gather on the terrace out back, sitting on antique white wrought-iron chairs, drinking freshly squeezed blood-orange juice and catching up before lunch. Cecil, dapper in his tweed jacket, dark purple tie, and wispy white hair, leans over and says that like me, he too had at one point long ago decided to look for home in Lebanon. He had grown up in England, his parents having emigrated there in the late nineteenth century, but after he finished graduate school at Oxford, he decided to restore his parents’ old house here and rebuild his family’s roots in Marjeyoun.

  His mother’s family used to farm the land in Ibl, a town nearby, also part of the greater Marjeyoun area; its name means “valley of springs.” Cecil tells me the region has a rare and long-standing mixed-sect population of Sunnis, Shiites, Druze, and Christians, mostly Orthodox. Cecil’s grandfather, a Protestant, had converted from Greek Orthodox during the nineteenth century, when American missionaries were spreading through Lebanon.

  Zelfa calls us to lunch, a feast of roast lamb with roasted caramelized squash, onions, and beets; foul bi zeit, freshly shucked broad beans stewed in olive oil and garlic, which Cecil made; various eggplant dishes including baba ghanoush and the lemony salad called raheb; rice studded with pistachios and golden raisins; and thick, tart yogurt made from local goats. For dessert, there’s traditional Easter maamoul, powdered-sugar-dusted cookies stuffed with crushed pistachios or dates.

  I guess I’ve gone on a few too many times today about how smitten I am with this house. “It’s your house, too,” Cecil insists, “since it belonged to your great-grandfather”—and he and Zelfa suggest I stay the night and join them the next day for an Easter Monday lunch at their neighbors’ house. Before I’ve fully thought it over and said yes, Zelfa has already made up my bed, a four-poster queen size in the guest room, which has its own balcony shaded by mulberry trees. I sleep nine hours straight that night and wake up to birdsong. Beirut feels like a continent away.

  Cecil’s house is rustic, its high whitewashed walls mostly empty but hung with a few paintings by Iraqi artists from the 1950s, an interest his late wife, Furugh, had in that period. With an antique crystal chandelier and all the artisan-sewn striped-silk cushions strewn about, the effect is of subtle style, a sharp eye lurking behind an overall sparseness. Next door at their neighbors’ house the following day is a different scene altogether: ornate Persian rugs, lots of embroidered textiles and sofas and cushions, the shelves brimming with pottery and antiques, a display of wealth. The house is packed with at least forty people today, and as I enter with Cecil and Zelfa, we’re led into the side room, a traditional chamber in Arab houses called a liwan, furnished with a U-shaped banquette. A dozen men are sitting and chatting and fingering their worry beads, including the local Orthodox priest in his full black robe and chains hung with big silver crosses. We shake each man’s hand, one by one, saying “al massih qam,” Christ has risen, the Easter greeting, and Cecil stays in the liwan as Zelfa and I walk out to meet other guests.

  Within ten seconds, we’re surrounded. Everyone wants to ask Zelfa about Skandar, her eighteen-year-old son who has starred in all three Narnia movies, the most recent released just months ago.

  “My kids have watched The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at least a dozen times. My daughter has the biggest crush on your son. Is Skandar here this weekend?” one woman asks Zelfa in Arabic.

  “No, he’s spending Easter in England this year.”

  “When is he coming to Marjeyoun?”

  “He was just down here on a visit with university friends a few weeks ago, but they’ve left.”

  “Dommage!” Too bad!

  With promises of signed photos made all around, and perhaps even some face time with Skandar on his next Marjeyoun trip, Zelfa grabs my wrist, and we head toward the Easter table. The priest emerges from the liwan, gathers the guests around, and says an Easter blessing, then “Sahtain,” or “bon appétit.”

  For this, my second holiday feast, the table is spread with a whole roasted lamb, and an enormous stack of the stuffed grape leaves called warak bi inab, and of stuffed lamb intestines known as fawaregh, piled high into a huge cake. There are also multiple platters of freekeh, roasted green wheat topped with cinnamon-scented chicken; rice-and-meat-stuffed zucchini called koussa mehshi, ladled with goat yogurt; and bowls of tabbouleh and fattoush salad. It’s an incredible spread, and well worth having stayed in town overnight.

  In the early evening, I hitch a ride with some of Zelfa and Cecil’s neighbors back to Beirut. We stop along the way to buy fruits and vegetables from a vendor by the side of the road, and I pick up a bunch of the small sweet bananas grown in the orchards outside Sidon, and a bag of the loquats, called askadinia, that are in season now and taste like juicy orange candy. A perfect top-off to one of the best Easters I’ve had, and not just one this year but two. Just as at Thanksgiving, I’d been convinced I’d spend the holiday alone but then lucked into invites to multip
le celebrations—and I feel as grateful as ever for my people’s love of food, feasts, and any occasion to live it up.

  Back in Beirut, I’m feeling, not for the first time, bloated and overfed. I could probably live off the double Easter feast for weeks, like a camel. But before the month is out, I read about an obscure local holiday in a book called The Rural Taste of Lebanon, and I can’t resist investigating. Apparently on the last Wednesday of April every year, some Beirutis celebrate the day the Prophet Job healed himself by jumping into the sea, and they do so by picnicking on the beach, swimming, flying kites, and sharing a dessert called moufattaka, a sweet, sticky rice and turmeric cake that’s labor intensive to make, befitting Job.

  The celebration apparently tends to happen mostly in the vicinity of Ras Beirut, among the Greek Orthodox and Sunni communities there—and most visibly in a beach section called Ramlet el Bayda. It strikes me as oddly specific that the holiday involves one particular Christian and one Muslim sect, and one corner of the city.

  My mother grew up around Orthodox and Sunnis in Ras Beirut; maybe she’ll know something. I call her and find she’s heard of urb’it Ayoub (the Wednesday of Job), but she’s never heard of any such picnic celebration, or of eating moufattaka in honor of Job. She asks Umayma, who has heard that people sometimes picnic and fly kites on that day. But no one else I ask has heard of this holiday.

  I must get to the bottom of it. On the urb’it Ayoub day, I go to a pastry shop called Makari, which I’d heard is known for its moufattaka. I walk in to find that indeed, the shop is selling platters of moufattaka for the special day, and plates of it are sitting on every surface in sight. No other pastries are available today at the shop. So far so good. But when I buy a small moufattaka and head to Ramlet el Bayda, I find only a few scattered people on the beach. No kites. No moufattaka anywhere, as far as I can tell. There are a few groups of sunbathers scattered on towels on the sand, some smoking argilehs or playing cards, but no noticeable picnics in sight.