Jasmine and Fire (2 page)

“We’re only moving to America for one year,” my parents had promised my brother and me—and they believed it at the time, or wanted to.

But we didn’t return to Beirut after a year—in fact, we never moved back at all. For a long time after we left, as we made our new home in Texas, I could never quite shake the sense that I’d been torn away against my will. A “Beirut is still home” refrain kept on humming in the back of my head. Year after year after year, there was no off switch in sight.

As time went by, my yearning for Beirut morphed into new shapes. At the beginning it was an aching sense of missing friends and relatives and the city itself, the sights and smells and sounds—the Mediterranean Sea nearby that I could glimpse from my aunt’s apartment upstairs, the smell of juicy crisp-skinned chickens grilling on outdoor rotisserie stands in our neighborhood, even
the angry Arabic slurs taxi drivers would yell out in traffic jams. Eventually I started sensing that my hunger for the city ran deeper than just the familiar people and sensations I missed. When the political situation started calming down every now and then, by the time I reached middle school and high school, I’d pay occasional summer visits to Beirut, usually with my family, and get to bask in all the sensory pleasures. But those short trips were never enough. They only seemed to reinforce a longing I could no longer quite name.

In the States, as one school year gave way to another and we stayed in Houston, part of me still felt unmoored. I was vexed by how much more self-conscious and shy I felt in my new life than I remembered ever being in Beirut. Bit by bit I overcame some of my shyness, and years later I found myself with a happy and successful journalism career and a thriving social life in New York. But even more than two decades after leaving Lebanon, I couldn’t get rid of the quietly nagging sense that I was still the newcomer, a little late to the party—as ridiculous as that seemed after all this time. The feeling would bubble up in small ways. A perceived social slight, or a malicious look from a stranger on the street, or a sense of feeling tongue-tied around new people I’d just met, could take on more meaning than it deserved, reinforcing my insecurity that I was still ultimately an outsider.

I wondered if I was constantly giving off cues that I’m not “one of us,” whatever “us” even means in immigrant America. As I hit my twenties and then my thirties, I was surprised to find myself still escaping to Beirut, in my mind, as a safe haven, whenever some outsider anxiety would ripple to the surface again. It was as if Beirut, my own personal Beirut, still waited, ready at any moment to spring up and rescue me, soothe all the persistent insecurities I
should have shed by now. After all those years, it was still the only place I could instinctively call my true home.

Beirut
wasn’t actually my first home. My very first? A hospital in Urbana, Illinois—where, while I was barely a few minutes old on a freezing March night in the Midwest, my parents decided to call me Salma. They named me after my great-aunt Salma, who was one of the most serene people in our angst-ridden family, beloved by everyone for her easygoing approach to life, for warmly welcoming everyone into her world no matter their religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, or political views, and for her live-and-let-live philosophy, not a hugely common or even comprehensible one in 1970s Lebanon. She also chose to never get married, a daring decision, both then and now, in many cultures around the world—and most certainly in Lebanon.

We moved to Beirut shortly after I turned two. My parents, who were both born and raised in Lebanon, had gone to Illinois together for graduate school, and had me, and then managed to time our return to Beirut for the summer of 1974, only months before the start of a civil war that would last fifteen years.

I was barely two years old, and my name, Salma—“peaceful” in Arabic—already sounded like an ironic joke. My last name, Abdelnour, didn’t quite hit the nail on the head either. It means “worshipper of the light.” The light stands for god. In many Arab names starting with Abdel (worshipper of), the word that comes after it is one of the numerous Arabic synonyms for god: for instance, Karim (generous), Latif (kind), Malik (king). In Lebanon, those names can be Christian or Muslim. My family is mostly Christian—Greek Orthodox on my dad’s side, Presbyterian on my mom’s—although many of us consider ourselves secular, as
I started to also, as soon as I was old enough to understand what that meant.

My feelings about religion, that it’s best enjoyed quietly or ignored completely, are not widely shared in Lebanon and never have been. In the mid-1970s, after we moved from Illinois to Beirut, I was soon enrolled in my school, on a campus that sloped downhill to the Mediterranean coast—its lawns thick with clover and yellow buttercups, or
houmayda
as we called them, edible lemony flowers that my schoolmates and I would munch on while sprawled on the grass at recess, Beirut’s downtown skyline in the distance. I started noticing that for many people at school, it seemed to matter a lot whether your family was Christian or Muslim. Kids who were barely old enough to know what religion even was began asking each other “Are you Christian or Muslim?” At the time, I didn’t understand why some of my classmates were interrogating one another about this.
Who cares? Can’t we just climb the jungle gym and race to the bottom of the hill, all the way down to the edge of the sea?

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my family was ensconced in a utopian little bubble, feeling very much in our element in the religiously mixed sector of Beirut called Ras Beirut. That part of the city, which includes our Hamra neighborhood and a few adjacent districts, is known for its historic commitment to peaceful coexistence among the sects—one of the very few areas in all of Lebanon, as I’d later learn, that had so far managed (and still mostly does) to pull this off.

As the Christian-Muslim tensions started to escalate all over Lebanon in the mid-1970s, my family’s and Ras Beirut’s ideals came to involve a willful oblivion to the reality that was about to rip our country apart. Our close friends, my parents’ and mine,
were a mixed group of Protestants and Greek Orthodox and Maronite Catholics and Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Druze, pretty much all of Lebanon’s major and minor religious groups—by this point Lebanon had unfortunately lost most of its Jewish population to emigration—and none of us considered our religious identities primary. It was like having brown or blond or red hair. You were born with it, and once you were old enough to care, you could embrace or change or ignore it.

For my parents and our like-minded relatives and family friends, a world in which religious identity was primary and the source of all political and social power was too disturbing to imagine. But that was the world we did in fact live in. And that world was blowing up into a billion blood-drenched shards.

So in the summer before my fourth-grade year, we—my parents and brother and myself—packed up to leave the country. That was by then the sixth year of the conflict, which had started with two explosive incidents among Christians and Muslims in the Beirut suburbs in April 1975 and hemorrhaged into a full-on civil war that killed 150,000 civilians by the time it ended a decade and a half later. But even from the start of the war, Lebanese Christians and Muslims were divided among themselves, too, each sect splintered off into dozens of factions, and each faction with its own armed militia and ideas about how to run Lebanon, as well as its own position on what to do about the Israeli-Palestinian issue that was now Lebanon’s problem, too. The Palestinian Liberation Organization, created in the wake of the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the exile of Palestinians into neighboring Arab countries, was by then operating mainly out of Beirut and launching attacks on Israel from Lebanese soil, attacks that were met with extensive military counterattacks from Israel. Syria and the
United States and various Western and Arab powers also had their hands in the mess and were trying either to resolve or to profit from, usually both, the chaos in Lebanon.

Being Abdelnours, aka worshippers of the light, we packed up to flee sunny Beirut for sunny Houston, Texas, another land of hot sweaty summers and piercing sunlight. My father had easily found a job there through his brother, my uncle Kamal, who’d left Lebanon with his wife and kids years before we did and was able to get Dad’s work visa and our green cards sorted out quickly. This was well before 9/11. There wasn’t as much fuss about Arab immigration in the United States back then.

As I launched into a series of fearsome tantrums in the weeks leading up to our departure, I was too busy sulking about our move to admit to my parents that I was intrigued by the idea, planted in my head by a few of my more pop-culture-savvy Beirut classmates, that in Texas I could maybe discover who shot J.R.—a question that then preoccupied the international audience of the popular TV show
Dallas
. But mostly I felt sorry for myself, having to leave my school friends and cousins and everything I knew behind, even if my parents kept saying it would only be for one year.

Although my family got out of Lebanon in the nick of time, before the situation got even more vicious in the following months and years, a great many families had it much worse than we did: they stayed through the war longer, suffered deaths or terrible injuries or severe depressions or suicides. Our family left Beirut intact and plopped ourselves down in the middle of green suburban Houston to attempt to pick up where we’d left off. My brother, Samir, six at the time and already a dedicated sports lover, transferred his hobby to Houston and became addicted to baseball and
American football; my mother, Mariana, who had left her job at the UN to raise Samir and me, continued for the time being as a stay-at-home mom in Houston; and my father, Jamal, constitutionally mellow—a trait in short supply back in Beirut and among most of our relatives—had been a civil engineer in Lebanon but, in his new incarnation, became a vice president at the Houston branch of an international real estate development firm, working alongside my uncle Kamal.

As for me? Well, the Beirut me that I’d known so far—gregarious around my inseparable group of school friends, and deeply attached to a slew of cousins my age—instantly gave way to the new Houston me: an awkward, out-of-place kid. In Houston I tried, unsuccessfully I imagine, to pass as a normal suburban Texas girl playing kickball in the yard. But I was frustrated by my poor acting skills and subsequent sense of bumbling foreignness. Still, that was as bad as things got for a while.

It took some years before I realized that, no matter how much time kept going by, I could never quite shake the sense that something was off inside. And that, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t figure out how to feel at home again anywhere.

But what did
home
mean anyway? What was I looking for, especially as time went on and my life in Beirut disappeared deeper into the past? Was it a less uneasy fit with the world around me? Or some other nebulous feeling I craved but still couldn’t name?

Whatever it was, I had a hunch that at “home,” I wouldn’t always need to explain myself, my name, my culture, my past—even if the questions were often friendly. Or even if no one was asking me to explain anything, I wouldn’t be wondering quietly if they looked at me a little differently or suspiciously. I wouldn’t always be the one with the mysterious, interesting background.
Interesting could get oppressive, especially when the part of the world I came from remained endlessly complicated and messy, and its people, let’s be honest, not always so well loved worldwide.

But another question nagged at me, too: Was I just being a wimp about this outsider business? After all, millions of people on earth have left home, kept a foot in two different cultures, and managed to live their lives well enough, balancing the two halves of their world. No such level-headed solutions for me, apparently. As the years have gone by, I’ve had trouble switching off a certain split-screen vision: If the United States and Lebanon are two parallel universes, two possible and potentially viable places for me to call home and play out my life in, was I choosing and living in the right one? Even though I’d come a long way by now from the shy new foreign girl hiding in the outfield during kickball games, and had built a compelling life in New York, I couldn’t stop wrestling with the questions: Should I stay, or should I try once more to live out my life in Lebanon? Could I, after so many years, ever really go back, ever find “home” there again?

I could
name plenty of reasons not to move back. Despite my fond memories, the place I once called home had come to feel increasingly distant over the years, foreign even. I wondered if, since we left, Lebanon had gone through profound changes that I couldn’t tap in to just by passing through on my occasional visits. Surely it couldn’t be the same place, after the long and punishing war, and after millions of Lebanese had escaped to safer havens all over the world, many thousands returning years later with new ideas and ventures. Obviously I, too, had changed and grown in the decades since I left. And now that I had built momentum in
my journalism career in New York, I wasn’t sure packing up and leaving was a brilliant idea. Not to mention that Lebanon’s political situation had never fully stabilized after the war and was once again looking shaky.

And then there was the small matter of my love life. I’d recently restarted a romance in New York with a guy named Richard, an on-again off-again flame. I couldn’t tell if the relationship was going anywhere this time, but I did know I liked him a lot. We’d first met a few summers ago through mutual friends, and I was attracted to him from the start—his warmth and quick wit, his dark blue eyes and floppy brown hair, his hilarious impersonations. He’d pursued me hard when we initially met that summer, then gotten cold feet a few months later. We soon got back together, but I broke things off myself weeks later, convinced he was still just playing around. Fast-forward a few years, and we’d found our way back to dating again, somewhat casually, over the past months, just as my Beirut plans were beginning to take shape. By that point I had already promised myself I’d commit to one exploratory year in Beirut, for starters, and had begun putting the word out for a subletter for my Manhattan apartment.