Writing and Family History

We make our way up the narrow mountain road in a taxi cab filled with cigarette smoke. Arabic songs sneak in between radio static as Jano talks of a civil war that ended 22 years earlier. The way his voice tightens and his English becomes more reckless it seems like 22 days.  “Good friend, he died there,” my guide points to a patch of grass beside a roadside shrine to the Blessed Mary. “Inside my arms, habibi.” He shakes his head and doesn’t even slow down. My stomach turns.  The sound of cicadas and church bells in the distance. Beirut breathes below us. A tapestry of bullet holes decorates sporadic buildings. The compromised infrastructure collapses on a regular basis. But we are in the mountains now, and far from the detritus of civil war. Here, all that falls are pine cones softly from cedars. And hearts when they remember.

It was March 2012, and these were the words I wrote in my journal as I sipped black, Turkish coffee over breakfast in a hotel in Hamara. I had arrived in Lebanon earlier that week, and the day before I found my way to a small mountain village called Aarbaniyee, the village where my great-grandparents were from.I am certainly not the first writer to set out on a journey with the intention of self-discovery. Authors have travelled in pursuit of their inspiration and material for centuries. In order to fully embrace myself as both a woman and an artist, I needed to travel alone to the country of my paternal relatives. So, I bought a plane ticket.

A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Traveller

In 2012, I was not entirely happy. At 26, I was waitressing and finishing graduate school, but I often felt frustrated that I hadn’t accomplished more professionally. I was weighed down with massive amounts of student loan debt and I only had a few minor publications. I was a tire stuck in mud—spinning fast but getting nowhere.Although during this time I often paid for gasoline with the spare change I found in my car, I decided to take my tax return and make the trip I’d been longing to take. I was working on a novel based on my father’s family and the Lebanese-American experience in the early 1950s. However, I realized there was so much I didn’t really understand about my own heritage. I had never even been to Lebanon.I believed that spending time in Lebanon wasn’t only about seeing the beautiful country I’d heard so many stories about, but it was about learning who I was and where I am from. And in order to enrich my writing, whether fiction or non-fiction projects, I needed to set out on this adventure. 

A Portrait of the Lebanese Writer as a Young American

To understand what it means to be a Lebanese-American writer, one must first understand what it means to be Lebanese. I had to look at the bullet holes that pocked buildings in the city of Beirut. I needed to pull baseball-sized oranges and lemons from low-hanging trees. I needed to see black cedars twisted against the gilded dusk like broken silhouettes. I had to taste freshly baked menooshe with its zatar spices that danced on my tongue like beautiful words. I had to lose myself in the labyrinthine cobblestone streets of Byblos, a Lebanese city once claimed by Phoenicians, Romans, Crusaders, and Turks.

A writer’s knowledge of life and, perhaps most importantly, of oneself leaks into her work, dances to life in the stories she creates.

As Dante was guided by Virgil through the hereafter, I, too, was guided on my journey. A trinity of guides served as my Virgil: Joseph, the elderly cab driver; Jano, the distant cousin; and Marwan, the erudite salesman. These three men taught me respectively the importance of religion, history, and language—the trifecta of Lebanese values.In his rundown cab, Joseph drove me on winding roads that pierced the bosom of Mt. Lebanon. We visited small stone churches and larger, ornate basilicas that housed remains of venerated priests and Catholic saints. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the Sisters of St. Joseph’s chanting in Arabic against the mantra of crickets.I remember Joseph had taken me to the shrine of the Blessed Rafka, or, St. Rebecca. Here, deep in the mountains and Maronite Catholic terrain of the country, Joseph made a small purchase—a purchase that would seem to most Americans rather insignificant. The cabbie bought a plastic, purple beaded bracelet blessed by the Sisters and presented it to me as a gift. This man who is considered very poor by Lebanese standards insisted on buying a present for me. As he hooked the delicate bracelet on my wrist, Joseph said, “Never forget your home, and never ever forget God.”The faith of this cab driver was perhaps one of the most beautiful things I saw in Lebanon. In the Catholic mountains with their roadside shrines and Harissa (a towering white statue of Our Lady of Lebanon from which one can see almost the entire country) and in the mosques and the muezzin’s call to prayer that rang through the streets and corners of Beirut proper five times a day, this kind of religious piety ran through the blood of all the Lebanese I came across.Jano assumed the role of my second guide. He was my distant cousin, a man I didn’t know prior to this trip, who greeted me as if I were his long lost daughter and insisted he would be my father while I was in Lebanon, who explained our country’s richly textured past. The prominently displayed machine guns by his bed and in the hallway of his home were not so distant emblems of the country’s civil war.The 15-year war between the Catholic and Muslim sectors of the population claimed many Lebanese lives and several close family members and friends of Jano. Tears flooded his brown eyes as he pointed toward building carcasses and a tapestry of bullet holes, as he indicated the exact spot in the road where his best friend slumped over and died as a result of a gunshot wound. These events officially ended 22 years ago; but for Jano, they remain as fresh as if it was 22 days.Marwan was the third and final guide. I knew this Lebanese salesman for exactly six hours, and these six hours irrevocably shaped not just my story but my writing. Marwan was friend and driver of Father Hayek, an elderly priest who had known my father’s family for many years. I spent my last full day in Lebanon in the city of Byblos with these two men.

This self-realization goes beyond simply knowing your culture. This understanding extends to acknowledging all the nuances, the idiosyncrasies, the foibles, and the talents that make up who we are as people.

After dropping Father Hayek off for the evening, Marwan drove me the 40 minutes back to my hotel in Hamara. During that car ride, Marwan did not just talk about his personal history as a salesman and former business owner, but he asked meaningful questions about my own place and purpose. He was especially intrigued by the admission that I was a writer. He pointed out that as a Lebanese-American writer I had a responsibility to myself, my people, and both my countries to live up to my identity.“You are not Lebanese and you are not American. You are Lebanese American. That is something else entirely.” Marwan’s lofty words filled me like the smell of narghile smoke in the marketplace. I had not considered this before. Through my writing, he went on to explain, it was my duty to be a true Lebanese-American writer.“Marwan, what does it mean to be a Lebanese-American writer? I’m not sure I know how to do that.” I asked.“You need to appreciate the rhythm, the music of the Arabic language and bring it into your English words. That is one of the most important elements of Lebanese literature and, therefore, Lebanese life.” He spoke slowly, with deliberation. “Read the great Gibran. He will show you.”

What does it mean to be a Lebanese-American Writer?

Kahlil Gibran was a Lebanese man who lived in and adopted America as his home. This prolific writer’s deep love for the United States was expressed in a message he wrote specifically for young Americans of Middle Eastern descent. In To Young Americans of Syrian Origin, Gibran articulates self-reflectively, “Here I am, a youth, a young tree whose roots were plucked from the hills of Lebanon, yet I am deeply rooted here, and I would be fruitful.”It is through the writer’s words that he creates a consciousness that is neither distinctly Lebanese nor American, but rather, timeless. The author’s unique identity enables him to understand and write about humanity in a way that transcends a Lebanese, American, or a hyphenated identity. It is Gibran’s appreciation for basic English that allows him to transcribe the rhythm and natural lyricism of Arabic into his writings. His dual identity and, correspondingly, his multilingualism significantly affect his ability to create prose.Gibran came to love his adopted home, and he identified himself as Lebanese American. My paternal family came from Lebanon, but I was born and raised in Connecticut. While I grew up enjoying the food and traditions of my Lebanese relatives, I had never seen the famous cedars of my ancestors' country except for the lone cedar tree that lingered in the backyard of my grandmother’s house, its limbs twisted with age and its scent barely discernible from the tang of rotting apples that surrounded it.

It is only when we are honest with ourselves that we can truly be honest in our writing.

And yet, according to patrilineage, I, too, could identify myself as Lebanese American. Choosing to write a novel that is based on the experience of my grandparents and great-grandparents also means that I am writing on a subject that will further establish me as Lebanese American.

Identity & Creation: The Inextricable Connection

The essence of creation is originality. And what is it to create but to transcribe one’s identity onto a page, infuse it into one’s characters? A writer’s knowledge of life and, perhaps most importantly, of oneself leaks into her work, dances to life in the stories she creates.Milan Kundera writes, “a novel uncovers what is hidden in each of us.” Whether we are the writer or the reader, our identity and our life experience help us relate to others and to the world. I could not write about my Lebanese grandfather without first experiencing what it really means to be Lebanese. I would not be capable of achieving my potential as a writer without first understanding who I am as a person, regardless of the content of my work.This self-realization goes beyond simply knowing your culture. This understanding extends to acknowledging all the nuances, the idiosyncrasies, the foibles, and the talents that make up who we are as people. It is only when we are honest with ourselves that we can truly be honest in our writing.Through my experience of travelling to Lebanon, I achieved a self-awareness that had previously eluded me. Meeting new people, taking in sights and sounds and smells that were at once foreign and familiar allowed me to distill the essence of myself. Self-realization born of travelling to a home you’ve never known before yet somehow still belong to is a life and craft-changing experience.