My grandmother’s name was Munawar, the Arabic word for “illuminated” or “bright light” Her embraces were the full-body kind. She had a massive sectional couch that snaked around her living room, big enough for her six children and their children. Islam was peaceful and kind—except when it came to eggplant, she cooked it and grilled it with garlic-yogurt sauce. Like Jiddo Riyad, Taytay was a devout Muslim, but she did things her own way.
When I was old enough to be helpful, around eight or nine years old, Taytay started taking me to the market. The markets were outside, with rows of produce vendors lined up along a narrow path of dusty concrete. We called them duu-Do, Arabic for “knock knock,” because of the way they looked like a mortar and pestle. We had our own language for lots of things, including how to cook, and how to shop for vegetables, she says. She says she loved watching how she barter and charm, the way she knew when to push and when to walk away.
In 1964, a decade before I was born, the Ba’ath Party had taken control of the Syrian government, along with everything else in the country: the military, the banks, the schools, and the factories. As the owner of a clothing factory that employed hundreds of people, my grandfather was targeted by the leaders of the new regime. He refused to hand over his factory to the government. After two of his brothers were arrested and his factory finally seized, Jiddo Suheil accepted that if he didn’t leave his beloved country, he would certainly die there.
My grandmother took me to Beirut, Lebanon, when her father suffered a stroke while he was there on business. Lebanon was on the brink of a civil war between Muslims and Christians in 1975. My mother stayed up all night, listening to the thundering noises and rocking me on her chest, her heart pounding fast against her tiny face. But the violence my grandfather narrowly escaped would ultimately follow him in the end, she says. “The resting heart rate of the region is one hundred beats a minute. When that’s all you just get used to it, you’d die.”.
Jiddo Riyad and his wife gave me outrageous gifts, a piano I didn’t know how to play, a red Mercedes long before I even had a license. He was alive, but in a much different way than before. Half of his body was paralyzed, and the other weak and feeble. His pale blue eyes became dark and brooding. He occupied his chair in his grandparents’ living room like a sentry, where sometimes he would play a piece of chess with us, or grunt if we put our feet on the couch.
When I was eight, my grandmother took me to a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan. The camps were supposed to be temporary, but instead they have become permanent settlements. “Don’t ever think people are beneath you,” my grandmother told me, “Don’t think they’re beneath you”. The camps have been set up decades before, when Israel was created, when thousands of Palestinians were forced to leave their homes, many with no place to go. “I had never seen anything like it, not in real life and not on TV. I never wanted to disappoint my grandson,” she says.
The kids were the same age as me, but each wore the same uniform of ill-fitting hand-me-down clothes. The dirt pitch and the well-loved soccer field was also my escape, the ball my security blanket. The game eventually petered out after a couple kids left and then a few more wandered off. The rest of us stood in a circle and passed around a beat-up jug of water, holding it above our lips and letting it splash into our mouths.