was known as Muslim West Beirut, secure in our community of friends and
neighbors, regardless of their sectarian backgrounds.
Whenever I think of the war, I am struck by its paradoxes. Amid the
madness and terror of those terrible years were moments of purpose and
productivity that I have never experienced since. We were intensely alive,
each day an adventure, a challenge, a gift. I became a teacher and then a
school principal. For 17 years we kept the school open in the face of
shelling, kidnapping, and the destruction of everything around us. We
huddled together in the bomb shelters, the children studied by candle-light,
and the next morning we were all at school. The children came smiling each
morning and we were there for them. I was kidnapped once, threatened at
gun point another time, and yet I never questioned my being there. The
esprit de corps that existed among the teachers of all sects and backgrounds
was a warm and precious thing. We never understood the war. My only
means of dealing with it was to write poems to express anger, loss,
desolation and incomprehension. These poems and our childhood pictures
were the only possessions I worried about when, away on a trip to the US, I
saw our street in flames on CNN. But Beirut survived, a "battered, paranoid,
schizophrenic city," as I wrote in one of my poems. It stood, shell shocked
and dignified in its dementia, tenacious in its refusal to be partitioned.
And so it is that my grandparents' exile 100 years before came full circle,
and the various identities we assumed on the journey blended into a
multicultural fabric informed by tenacity and resilience.
As I write, my daughter is watching a French children's program on
television. She is most comfortable in French and English and slips happily
into Arabic when, for instance, she is playing 'hableh' (jumping rope) with
her playmates. Like me she has blond hair and green eyes. She is assuming
her otherness already.
Like you, and your mother before you, I want a good life for my child. I want
to give her the gifts you gave me: the belief in myself as a woman
unencumbered by expectations and limits, and in the fundamental decency
of people who choose to become who they are and do not fit unquestioningly
into the ethnic, national or sectarian slots they were born into. Most of all, I
want to pass on the gift of security that can be found even in uncertainty.
And so I don my various lives and selves like a cloak that embraces my
otherness, and hope that your grandchild will revel in the possibilities that
lie in the future because of the past.
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