TRUMPET UNIVERSE

My Roots

For the memory of great women in my life, for the strength and pride they passed over through their genes, for their strong presence throughout my life, and before.

My great grandmother

I heard about you from my grandmother Carajet, I saw you in her and felt you in my genes when I needed the strength to migrate and seek a better life for my children.

It was Baalbek, where she lived with her husband and first daughter, her name was Marta Sawaya, her husband was Joseph Farah. The time was around 1895. What circumstances lead them to migrate to America, I do not know. They went on a ship, settled in Buenos Aires in Argentina for few years. There she had Emily and Carajet my two grandmothers, and Labibe their youngest sister and Alexander.  She raised the children and helped generate an income on a sewing machine while her husband worked. When they returned to Lebanon around 1915 Alexander stayed there, the family lost contact with him afterwards. Their father died shortly after their return and soon their eldest sister died while delivering her first born. Their mother was a woman of means with golden hands, sewing, knitting and crocheting, she was good at anything she did and she supported the girls. She was a great woman my grandmother told me. I saw their house when we visited Baalbek with my grandmother, I was eight then, it was beside their great family’s house in the old square of the city, a big house turned government quarters inhabited by priests. I sat by my grandmother on a bench in a big park in Baalbek on that trip, there was water and ducks, little wooden bridges, and I saw my grandmother sadly remembering precious old days.

When Emily and Carajet were thirteen and fifteen, two young Lebanese soldiers in the Turkish army in their twenties roamed around the house, they had their eyes on Emily and Carajet, they asked to visit and proposed to the young girls. The mother’s reply was firm: “Never, as long as I live no Muslim will marry my girls, you have no appreciation for women”. But soon their mother died and my grandmothers ended up marrying my grandfathers.

Emily married Adib Farhat and moved to Beirut and Carajet married Abbas Arab and moved to Tyre. Labibe the youngest, later married and left to America with her husband. Labibe lived a good life but she did not have children. I was a child when I saw her union with my grandmother Carajet and three of their cousins from Baalbek at Alice’s little house, in Ras Alnabaa street in Beirut. It had been forty years since she and my grandmother separated, the ladies were all in their fifties, my grandmother’s sister and three cousins were elegantly dressed with jackets, hats and feathers, shiny handbags, makeup and pointy shoes. The scene was unforgettable; it looked like a scene from a movie. Alice my grandmother’s cousin was married but did not have children, or eyebrows, she drew them with brown eyeliner. Her little one bedroom house was on the first floor of a two story old house, yet it looked rich and lavishly decorated, high bed with posts and a fluffy thick mattress and covers on the end of the room, the floral sofas with colourful crochet cushions, the old Persian rug, the painting and art work and her husband’s picture on the wall in his army suit, and the white lace curtain that hid the little kitchen on the other end of the room. Across from the house door was another door that led to an open balcony right above the street, it was a little smaller than the house, with a low edge that was stacked with plant pots. There was a shiny blue and red wooden policeman on a stick planted in a planter, who waved his arm whenever the wind blew and whenever I passed the street from my uncle’s to my grandfather’s place. Her house was halfway between my grandfather’s house, Adib’Farhat’s and my uncle Salam Arab’s apartment on the fifth floor on the corner of the street.

I have memories etched in that street.

Emily was seventeen when she married Adib Farhat, he came from Al Ansariyeh village, located on a cliff overlooking the sea and stretching on acres of golden wheat stalks that swayed with the wind, vegetation and orchards, half way between Saida and Tyre in South Lebanon.  Al Ansariyeh belongs to Al Farhat, who made up the great majority of the village when my parents took me and my brother when I was seventeen to meet our extended relatives, and to visit my grandfather’s recent grave, with one of his poems engraved on a big stone at the western entrance of the village. My grandfather kept a family tree; Al Ansarieh was named after their original family name Al Ansari. They had relatives in another village half an hour away, called Ansar. My grandfather’s ancestors arrived in Lebanon hundreds of years ago, when they migrated from Najd in Saudi Arabia, they belonged to Bani Taghlib tribe. Before that they were Christians who fled from the Romans in Palestine and settled near Al Madina on the Western coast of Saudi Arabia. Adib had two brothers and two sisters from his mother and his father’s other wife. He was sent by his father to Beirut to study at the American school, against the objections of family members to studying at an Anti Muslim American school. He continued his education and settled in Beirut, he was a poet and a travel writer. He traveled to Europe, among his books is a book that compares between the East and the West and the possibility of their meeting halfway, “The East is East and the West is West and Might Meet”. Another of his books is “From the Inspiration of the Society” And he wrote many poems, I read one poem about mothers in my school book, one for my brother when he was born, and one bereaving my father when he died at thirty three. I remember him a public speaker giving lectures on different cultural occasions, my school among them.

But Emily was miserable with Adib, her mother was right. He cherished his freedom above all and he was stingy. She was lonely with three children, Fouad my father, Salwa his sister, and Hafez his youngest brother. My grandfather admired her and the suits she made him by hand but he remarried twice after marrying her, he had one child from each of the other wives. My grandmother Asma told me that their uncle left them a will, the husbands were informed, Abbas did not need the inheritance and did not bother to tell his wife, but Adib received a good share and built a three story building in Ras Alnabaa Street in Beirut. Emily died in an old people’s home after years of suffering. I saw her once, I was ten at the time. I went to visit her with my mother, aunt and grandmother at the Makased Hospital where she had been for a while. She lay in a big ward with curtains separating the beds, her eyes revealed sadness and lots of bitterness; she was less aware of our presence.  

Carajet Married Abbas Arab at fifteen and moved to Tyre in south Lebanon. He was the son of the Mayor, had a sister and two brothers from his mother and father’s other wife. After his father’s death he inherited the Mayor position at a young age and brought Carajet - whom he gave the Muslim name Asma - to a life that she said was like a princess’s fairy tale, until he remarried 12 years later. It was his mother’s wish that he marries his young cousin, perhaps to keep the “mayor prestige” in the family, from time to time my grandmother heard ill comments like “the Christian pig”.

I spent with her most of my childhood and she was always around while I grew up. My father was her nephew, I was doubly related to her compared to her other grandchildren, and my mother’s tough circumstances after my father’s death brought us closer together. I spent time in her company; heard few old tales and little stories that I memorized and was always happy to hear again, especially when there were other cousins to listen, Like Emlein and her husband Haj Taramain. I asked her many questions and knew many details about her life and ours. In my early years she took me with her whenever she visited my uncles and aunts houses, between Tripoli, Beirut and Saida. We rode trains to Tripoli from the station at the big square in Beirut, and sometimes horse carts in Saida. They had a narrow bench facing the two seater covered bench in the back, I sat there with my brother Adib when he was with us, but I was her full time companion. I mostly remember my uncle Salam’s house in Ras Alnabaa in Beirut, her main station and mine when I was three. We sat on the round balcony on the fifth floor overlooking Ras Alnabaa Street, the bakery down in the building at the opposite corner, sent delicious fresh bread and my favourite Manakeesh scents in the early morning. I shared her morning coffee in my tiny white porcelain coffee pot and saucer, I had it with biscuits. I used to mix her jars contents together in the kitchen she told me, and sew little towels and fabrics together on her sewing machine, it was an old black Singer with a swinging rocket like bobbin, and a foot motor that pedalled like old cars. I did that she said, when she was busy or sleeping. But she laughed that it was ok to mix the rice and lentils together, she could make me my favourite Mjadara dish with that. Years later she had her own little house beside our house.

I took her presence for granted, until the day she was very sick and almost died from food poisoning with few of the students in Aunt Mariam’s summer school, because they ate contaminated liver. I was twelve at the time, later when I remembered that incident I felt lucky that she stayed and enriched my life the way she did.  She died after I had my daughter Abir, she told me the next I will have is Fadi, just like the poster I had in my bedroom before I got married. It had a girl with light curly hair bending to fix her younger brother’s pants, who had darker hair. They were in an open green meadow fenced by long narrow trees. She was five and he was three, their names were written on the bottom of the poster: Abir and Fadi. On her last night we had Labneh and Kaak together on the balcony and my brother Adib took her last and best picture, it reflected her living spirit and still does, in the living room at my family’s house.  

During her marriage to Abbas, she had nine children, two of her eldest died as infants, a boy and a girl. She remembered Daad the girl a lot. The others were four boys and three girls. She enjoyed a good life.  Abbas took good care of her, he was loving and proud of her and he spent lavishly, unlike Adib whom I was told was obsessed with turning light switches off, and he even stamped the top of the flour bag to check if anyone used it when he was away! Abbas brought Asma boxes of shoes from Beirut to choose from, and took her from time to time to visit her sister Emily in Beirut in his car, that ran on a pedalling foot engine and took five hours to cross 70 kilometres. But it was the only car in Tyre at that time. His duties as a mayor brought lots of people to their house, including villagers who sometimes benefited from my grandmother’s homemade eye drops, something she learned from her mother. She was loved and appreciated. Tyre had two parts, the majority was the Muslim part and the minority was the Christian part by the port.

Abbas remarried after the twelve fairy tale years and the days saw tension as he grew fond with his new wife and abandoned Asma. The two wives lived in separate houses, not close to each other. My grandfather’s mother said after they saw a significant decrease in wealth, that was the provision of the Christian. Asma found herself in need of money, she made dresses. My mother was her father`s most favourite she said, he told her that she looked like his mother, but the least favourite was the youngest boy Hisham, I remember my grandmother telling me a weird story about his torture at the hands of his father and his wife. He was accused of doing something wrong by his father’s wife, his father was in need of teaching the five year old a lesson, he uncovered his behind, heated skewers and branded him on his behind while his wife kept a hot supply ready for him. My grandmother cried when she recalled that incident. And on the day of his father’s death, my uncle celebrated. When we gathered at his house every Eid, all his seventeen children with their kids that later reached forty nine, except for Hisham and Asma, he asked why Asma did not come with tears in his eyes.

The tension kept rising. Abbas’s wife accused Asma of stealing her ring, and he beat Asma in front of her. She told me she saw the  sign through her tears “Never think that Allah is unaware of what the transgressors do”, written in light on the wall that night. She said that God revenged to her, and in few days who accused her of steeling the ring, her finger turned black and shrank. Asma decided to leave to Beirut, Abbas supported her decision but not financially and he sent her his children to study in Beirut. When he came to check on his children he brought their mother with him, left some money barely enough for them. She spent days and nights on her sewing machine; my mother told me she saw her nose many times burst in bleeding. She taught girls sewing in return for cleaning her house and made dresses for money. She checked on her sister who was sick and my father visited them. Around 1945 she sent the eldest son Isam to Belgium to study Law there. Soon afterwards she sent Mariam the eldest daughter to Spain to study History, Husam to Germany to study Electronic Engineering, and Hisham to Spain to study Medicine. I remember when Hisham left on a big ship from Beirut’s port to Spain. And the day he came back years later with his pretty wife Maria. Ilham the youngest girl married early and left to Africa, that left the middle ones my mother Kitam and Uncle Salam with her and Hisham for a while. Salam got a job in a Bank in Beirut later and married early, and my mother had a story with her cousin Fouad my Father. When I was thirteen one summer, on the way up to the mountain in the school bus, my mother stopped there and showed me their old house in Beirut. It was a big house on the corner of a street with barred windows in Al Arees area. It witnessed for many years the growing days of my aunts and uncles, their leaving to start their lives one by one, their mother’s heroic struggle to raise them and educate them, the intimate friendship between my father and his best friend my uncle Husam, and the love story between my father and my mother with all its dreams and tensions.      

27/12/2007

My parents

Asma was still living in Tyre, when her young nephew Fouad dropped by during a school trip to Tyre’s ruins to meet his cousins. It was love from the first sight. Kitam dreamed of him until they met again after few years when they moved to Beirut. He was handsome and poetic. Some deep turbulence and restlessness put the two together, something like Khalil Jubran’s Breaking Wings or the Rebelling Spirits.

Fouad grew up in a house where his father was busy with his trips, books, poetry, social life and affairs. His mother was lonely and angry. It must have been her mother’s warning that haunted her most of her days, but she found no way out. She fell to depression and was placed in a hospital. That atmosphere must have shaped my father’s personality. I heard from my mother, her mother and his father that he was responsible, affectionate, sensitive, polite, and had a deep sorrow in his soul. He took good care of his sister and younger brother and always visited his mother who had been away in the hospital for a long time. His Father brought them a relative from the village to cook and take care of the three of them, him, his sister Salwa and younger brother Hafiz and Kamal their half brother. My grandfather lived on the third floor and rented the ground floor to Al Amlieh as storage for books. The children lived on the second floor. My grandfather told me that my father would stand up every time his father entered the room, he insisted to walk him up to his apartment on the third floor every time he left; he had tears when he said he was his best son. My grandmother said he was an angel.

Kitam described their house by the sea to me; it was close to Tyre’s south western edge of the Roman ruins, very close to where her grave is now, beside her mother’s. The house had steep stairs without a rail that lead to the upper floor; houses in those days had high ceilings. She said her room had a tall window overlooking the sea and the white sands that separated them.

Kitam was growing up in Tyre, seeing her mother’s struggle with her children, her troubles with her husband and his wife and living away from her family. She must have been caught up between her mixed feelings towards her father’s extra affection, that he bestowed especially on her of all his many children; he took her with him on his business trips to Palestine, he told her she was dear to him because she looked like his mother, he bought her his favourite black juice sous, and he was angry when she refused to drink it, very angry she said that he hit his head on the wooden light post. She must have been caught up between that and her mother’s extra attention towards Mariam, her older sister. Mariam was outspoken, stubborn and demanding, she was number one. She was called years later by her brothers and sisters “Napoleon”. She was the president of Al Zahraa women organization in Beirut when she was twenty, and was an established public speaker. Kitam was a poetic dreamer. Seven years separated them.

That first meeting with Fouad was arranged by heaven. The romantic love grew with the long months and the distance that separated the two troubled spirits. Mariam followed Isam to Beirut to study. Later when my grandmother moved to Beirut with the rest of the children, the love story between Kitam and Fouad witnessed some trouble. Their common diary given to me by Kitam in Spain during a summer holiday in 1999, disclosed some form of turbulence in the relationship. The Diary was started by Kitam, first portion dated September 1953. That was two years before their marriage but few years after they met. My father’s writing is in most of the pages, it is deep love but filled with regrets, and he sounded desperate at times! Kitam’s writing looks like professional calligraphy, but that’s it, I am sure very few people can decipher it. She was a troubled romantic. The note book is 33 pages. After the first five pages written by her on three different days in September 1953, with numbers inserted between brackets on different sections of the diary, then on page five Fouad answered to her writing. The numbers between brackets were his and he commented on them one by one. I felt a great love with a great turbulence between the two. I was shocked to see the similarity between my handwriting and my father’s, and that we used the same style with paragraphs, the margin distance and the three stars separating the paragraphs. And I felt a great love for him.     

Some of Kitam’s words that I could decipher,

Who should I call on! And who should I ask for help! My God, and he could not find among his creation other than me to carry life’s burdens and the earth’s hardship. Or my beloved and I was but created alone. My beloved! .. Whom I have anticipated in him every smiling hope. My beloved who had shown me life a barren dessert instead of the green oasis that I buried with my hopes. He has the right to his jealousy, and jealousy stems from love. Though I can consider it jealousy no more, but I consider it moodiness and hatred, as if I am a lamb about to fall under its weights. Easy my love, for this is not my intention in life. And I was not created to be a burden unto anybody, how then on you. You are my support in life, and the reason for my stay. You are the blamed, for in your hand is your cure and in it is your ailment ......................... 

My favourite piece written by my father was on page 12.

***

The Lake of Restlessness

In the warm stillness that embraces this amazed night, I went on contemplating the silence of this pale nature, which resembles in my imagination, a pretty face I worship, and the day looked farfetched.

Nature is immersed in its dreaming deep sleep, as if it were a great tomb, and the smell of death is regenerating from it, as it does from me when I recall my beloved’s beautiful image.

And me  ..  me myself  ..  I crave death. And feel that I am fading bit by bit and disintegrating. And I almost sink and rot in the lake of restlessness.

Death .. What is death? ..  It is a past being revived and a present fading  ..  ..  It is a youth renewing, it is the return ..  ..  The fast sudden return to that first base, where our lives were born! ..

 It is then a greater life, waving with its wings ...  to our little life and calling on it.

Then what for is fear?!  .. Come, come death .. .. And embrace me to your comfortable chest ..  And carry me to my beloved, for my soul has bored of stagnation, and stillness and rotting in the lake of restlessness..  ..  ..

***

As I read those lines, I felt that it was my destiny to seek the meaning of life after death, as if I was walking steps that were drawn in heaven and were preserved in my genes through my father.

Kitam and Fouad got married in 1955, they left to Egypt for their honeymoon. Fouad had a job at Beirut’s airport, as a watch officer at the watch tower. I heard from relatives that they were like love birds, and when seen together they looked like celebrities. She was very chic with her fifty’s suits and dresses, and he looked great with his pilot suit and hat. They used to go to the officer’s club and he brought her two maids. He brought his ill mother shortly after their marriage to live with them. My brother Adib was born on Wednesday March 14, 1956. The earth shook for his birth, the hospital was evacuated my mother told me. He is a Pieces and a Monkey in the Chinese Zodiac, the best of both zodiac signs. And he is a very special brother. I was born on Monday the 25^th of March 1957, I am an Aries and a Rooster, I am many things but above all I am a trendsetter.

Our father adored our mother and us she said, he was always taking care of us. He kept his camera always ready, he was a professional photographer and he used to develop the pictures at home. His job had day shifts and night shifts in alternating weeks. On June 1957 he was called for extra night shifts because of construction work in the tower. One June night he did not come back home, he fell off the unfenced stairs at the tower in the early morning hours. His eye glasses were shattered and my mother’s life for a long time; she heard the door bell ring at the time of his coming back from work for many days. She was in shock for a long time.

After that we moved with our grandmother and Uncle Salam. I remember grandmother’s house in Burj Al Barajneh, it was a gloomy house. It had stairs inside the hallway that separated the upper floor residents from downstairs. She sent us me and my brother to school one day. I was three at the time and my brother four. We sat on separate desks in the same classroom, the teacher asked everyone to open their hands on the desk as soon as she entered the classroom, and went from desk to desk slapping the open hands with her ruler! We did not go back.

I had many memories, sharp ones from such an early time. I was with my grandmother a lot. We moved to Saida later and lived close to aunt Mariam’s house with our grandmother, then we moved to a house with Uncle Salam across from Doha school. Our mother was teaching at Doha school then. Before that we were living in Doha school’s dormitory, our mother was teaching and staying in the dormitory with the resident children whose families lived abroad in the Gulf and Africa mostly. I remember the place and the old lady Um Lutfi who took care of me then and my mother’s two friends, and I remember my brother telling me that there are Jennies living under the school’s playground, he told me to put my ear on the ground and listen, and I saw weird creatures that looked like humans. The women were wearing wide skirts red and green, they wore little head scarves and had markings on their chins and had dark faces, and I heard the banging of their little brass pots. There were men washing at long sinks and cooking in big pots. That sight haunted me, but years later I found out that the school’s kitchen was there, under the playground.

My uncle Salam moved from the house across from Doha school to Beirut because of his job at the bank and he got married. Aunt Mariam was married and had two boys and was living is Saida by the sea with her husband Salah El Baba, few buildings down was aunt Maqbuleh’s house, Grandfather Abbas’s sister. Uncle Isam had been in Tripoli with his wife Jeannine and their two daughters for a while. Uncles Husam and Hisham and aunt Ilham were still away then. I spent time with my grandmother at my uncle Salam’s house, his wife Shahnaz was always nice and I liked her cooking. I went with my grandmother to see a play in Ras Al Nabaa street, few blocks down the street in the opposite direction to my grandfather’s house. Her tears were falling during the play.

Then I found myself alone at my grandfather’s house, I was four then. I slept at my grandfather’s apartment on the third floor, my room was beside his bedroom. It had windows overlooking the little alley that branched from the main street, but the window was high. I made up my bed as soon as I woke up, and he liked that, he was very organized. He woke me up for school, after I washed my face and dressed up, he took me to his room, brushed my hair and put few drops on my cheeks from perfume bottles on his dresser. They were five, all the same but different sizes, the perfume was really nice. For many years I liked perfumes but only at fifty I found that one, Ysatis from Givenchy is as close as it can get. I found it when I was choosing a perfume for my daughter in law Jacky as a Christmas gift. I have a feeling that it triggered all those old memories. When I told my daughter Abir, when we were in her car about how close this perfume is to the one my grandfather used to put on my cheeks before I went to school, she said that I should write those memories, that it will be a record for them and their children. After my grandfather put the perfume on my cheeks he gave me a spoon of the disgusting castor oil! Put my Scholl boots on, he tightened the lace well and corrected the way I stand by hammering lightly my shoes outwards at the front. Then we had breakfast in the dining room, it had a long table with eight chairs and an old dresser with a carved long mirror, the fridge was in the corner by the little balcony that connected the dining room and the kitchen. He always kept my favourite apricot jam available. Two girls or maids came to take me to Al Amlieh school, we walked and they collected two more kids on the way, one boy lived across from Alice’s house, he was always late and screaming when his mom washed his face. The school was big, the gate was huge, and I felt utterly lonely. When I came back I went to the second floor to my Uncle Kamal’s house, his wife Ruqaya had lunch ready for me. And I watched TV with them. They were watching an Arabic movie once, there was a handsome officer who hid in a big bamboo laundry basket, Ruqaya and her sister Ramziye that visited often told me that was my father. My father’s picture was on the wall in my grandfather’s living room. I spent a year there, my brother came once but he only stayed for few days, and I missed him a lot.

Then I united again with my mother and brother at five when our mother got married, and we lived on the third floor in a three story building, between Almakased and Doha schools by the sea. Leila and May my sisters were born there. I took the bus to Al Tafawok school, I was moved to a higher grade during the year because I was good but I did not like it. I hated lunch time. I called father Kamal to pick me up when I came back from school, because of the little dark room under the stairs at the entrance. It looked like the little room at the centre of aunt Maqbuleh`s house, that room had intense darkness, it echoed an ancient mysterious era. I had a friend two buildings down the street, her name was Amira. We moved later inside Saida close to Aunt Mariam and her husband uncle Salah’s school. Our mother taught there and I went to school with my brother, I enjoyed his company even though he was silent most of the time.

Grandmother was moving from house to house at her children’s, but she always checked on us.  From since I was four we spent the summers in the mountains, our parents rented a house close to Uncle Salah’s summer school. I enjoyed those summers, each year at a different location. We went on trips and to movies with the school kids, among them friends from my classroom. We saw Hercules, Sound of music and some other movies. I enjoyed the walks by the steep pine tree valleys, the foggy days, the cool breeze and the cousin’s gatherings. It was times we all played monopoly games, and me and my cousin Randa shared old German folklore stories from the Green Group books. The images from those summers and the books were there to stay. The sleeping princess, the princess with the swan brothers who were cursed by a spell by their step mother, and she had to knit for them sweaters from thorns before the sunsets on a set day. The prince and his sister that turned to rocks by the water fountain, the three dogs with big eyes, Tom Thumb, and Ghoul stories. It was our little group of selected cousins those summers that I kept from the early family memories. It was Randa and Radwa, Aunt Ilham’s daughters and Adie their brother, Mira and Nada Uncle Isam’s daughters who visited from Tripoli from time to time, and I visited them often with my grandmother, and Khaldoun and Mazen Aunt Mariam’s boys, and me and my brother Adib, we were all the same age.        

The last house we spent a summer at was in Btikhnay near Falougha, it was in the valley under the school. Across the street was a flat hill covered with pine trees, the hill separated two parallel streets, a long narrow island that witnessed some of the school’s summer activities. Few hundred meters up the road was a tiles factoy, after it was a supermarket with ice cream freezers, we always stopped there during our school trips walking to Falougha. The school was three stories, on the second floor was aunt Mariam’s house. Their big balcony at the corner of the building witnessed the cousin’s meetings and gatherings at the monopoly. Our house had a big open cement yard by the kitchen, our mother kept big potato bags by the kitchen, always made us our favourite French fries platters. There was a small water pool and a small barbeque where we used to barbeque pine cones and crush their seeds, after we picked them with a long metal hook from the close by steep valley. There were Gypsies living in the valley, they had tents and Mercedes cars. We went on many school trips and family picnics. No where I visited later matched the beauty of those spots. Lebanon was a piece of Heaven.     

In my childhood after my father’s death, I lived wandering with my grandmother sometimes away from my mother and brother, until I was five when my mother got married and I lived with them. When I was six my sister Leila was born, a year later our sister May was born, years later my brother Firas arrived. My mother used to teach at my Aunt’s school and come back at four in the afternoon to take care of five children. My step father used to teach and bring back home papers to mark. My grandmother always checked on us and when we moved to the fourth and last house after our mother got married, my grandmother moved beside us. She was always around and witnessed my mother’s years of struggle, which resemble her years when she moved to Beirut. When my little brother Firas was born my mother quit teaching. She raised him through her suffering with kidney stones and the dealing with some relatives. My grandmother’s presence may have eased her suffering and it may be that some residue from the past had nevertheless set them apart. We as humans always wish to go back to re-evaluate circumstances and close relatives, that is because of habit we do not see our shortcomings and their sacrifices until we leave the scene and check it from a distance. When we know it is usually late, and that is the way with life. That was my feeling after my grandmother’s death. How much I wished I had told her how much I loved her, I wished if she knew that I always looked up to her, that I appreciated her more with time. Her story lived with me and was a torch lighting my conscience and belief in God’s justice.

Those early years, the years of journeying with my grandmother etched feelings of migration in my soul. I loved my grandmother and never knew the secret of my closeness to her for many years. She was my Godmother from the world of spirit. And I loved my brother but he was always away during our early years, and my mother, it seems that she was born for a life of struggle. I carried from my childhood the traces of thither, attachment and extreme protection towards my children.

27/12/2007

1^st of Ramadan 1429