And I have another memory, of us in Sydney. The move to Australia had not
been an easy one to make. Being middle-aged, you struggled to find a good
job, and it took you time to adapt to life in such a different culture. You felt
so proud when you succeeded in buying your own house in Sydney,
surrounded by a large plot of land that you tended daily. We had taken the
decision to return to Lebanon however. My mother had adapted less easily
to the exile that Australia had become. Though born there, my mother had
been an "agnabiah" or westerner in Egypt, a foreigner again in Lebanon, and
she was an "immigrant" in Australia. That had been one label too many for
her, and she yearned for Lebanon where a lot of her friends from Egypt had
gone. I remember you were working on the flowers in the backyard. You
stopped briefly and hunched your shoulders. Tears streamed down your
face. You were embarrassed to be seen crying by me. It was the first time. I
hugged you, and you held me tight. I never knew why you cried. Was the
prospect of being uprooted yet again too onerous? Your vulnerability cut me
to the quick, and I stopped being a little girl that day.
Even though you had left Egypt 30 years before, you never shed your Shami
Egyptian accent. The Lebanese dialect was superimposed on that, but never
supplanted it. As a child in Lebanon I tried so hard to forget Egyptian
Arabic. I wanted desperately to be like my classmates, to speak accentless
Lebanese like them. Eventually I succeeded. It wasn't until I went back to
Egypt for the first time 37 years later that I realized I had never lost the
language of my early years. It was there, waiting to be needed to be used.
I have always had to transact with "otherness": My Greek family and my
language when with them, my Arab heritage and the dialects inherent to it,
my physical appearance, which belies the stereotypes associated with my
Levantine roots, and my mother tongue being English while having comfort
zones in several other languages, depending on the community and
circumstances where I find myself… My coloring has always been
problematic to me: the first thing people see is a blond with fair skin and
light eyes. I remember riding the tram with my mother in Alexandria and
having people stare at me at a time when anti-western animosity was
widespread. I remember having to spend two weeks at home during the „67
war for fear that I may be mistaken for an American. And I remember the
humiliation of, and revolt at, being urged to hide my Lebanese roots in
Australia by passing myself off as French, aided by my coloring and
knowledge of the language.
We have been challenged by exile all our lives. Soon after we returned from
Australia to Lebanon, the civil war broke out. We took a decision as a family
that we would not abandon our home. Coming to live in Lebanon and
constructing a home for the fourth time had been a deliberate choice. We
would not accept to be driven away by circumstance again. So it was that
our family remained in Beirut throughout the 17 years of horror that were
the Lebanese war. Although we were Christians, we continued living in what