Bullet, Paper, Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars

ONE: CHILDHOOD

Ever After

I must have been eight or nine when, on a summer day in the early 1970s, on our way back to Beirut from a visit to our ancestral village of Jibsheet in the south of Lebanon, my family stopped in the coastal city of Saida for a dip in the Mediterranean.

I had been taught how to swim in the Lebanese, carefree sort of way that consists of dropping the child in the water and watching them drown a little, lifting them out and dropping them again, until they have learnt how to float – not exactly a recipe for producing Olympic swimmers but one that seems to work, nonetheless.

We were a rowdy family – seven of us on that day: my parents, three older sisters, infant brother and me – and there was safety in numbers and loving affection. So much so, it took me a while to understand that I was being pulled by a rip into the open sea and that my feeble arms were no match for it. I was a slight child and, in our household, brain rated higher than brawn, a case perhaps of making a virtue out of necessity.

Pride must have played a part in delaying the moment at which to call for help and, when that moment came, I had drifted too far to be heard. I had spent enough time poring over our illustrated atlas to know my travel options.

The nearest land to the west was Cyprus, a country that, although conceivably close, was as foreign as they came, since people there spoke Cypriot, a Greek dialect, rather than Arabic. Besides, I liked clarity on maps and the Cypriots couldn’t seem to make up their minds whether they were Greek or Turkish. This was admittedly rich, coming from a Lebanese, but I would only come to realise this much later in life.

I spoke French, so Monaco, the easternmost point on the Hexagone, was an option in theory but I would have had to overcome the not-inconsiderable difficulty of the Italian boot sticking out into the sea and blocking my way. Besides, even in my most fantasy-prone moments, I knew that Italy, let alone France, was way too far. I could try heading north, up the Syrian coast, past the port city of Laathiqiyya, all the way to Istanbul – which I would ultimately reach because of the way the Turkish landmass turned to the left all of a sudden, as if it had had a change of heart halfway through geological genesis. But then there was the language barrier again. Or I could try aiming south and, provided I stayed clear of Israeli gunboats and the now European-settled Palestinian coast, might reach Cairo or even the Mersa Matrouh resort town, further west – Egyptian landmarks on which I was a self-proclaimed expert through my avid reading of the ‘Five Adventurers’ series of books.

Besides, if I were to reach the Egyptian coast, I could draw on a solid store of expressions I had gleaned from the Egyptian movies that my mother liked to watch. Bahibbik ya Fatma, ana mush adra ya Mahmoud or, a little more dramatically, inte tali’, tali’, tali’ – ‘I hereby divorce thee’. I could no doubt talk my way to the airport and catch a plane back to Beirut, perhaps even in time for dinner.

But if these thoughts had crossed my mind, providing a brief escape from my predicament, the ache in my puny biceps would have brought me back to reality. I was flailing, beating away at the water to stay afloat, but still facing the shore, hoping someone in my family would see me. My voice was already weak from yelling, and I was terrified by the invisible rip dragging me away from everything I had ever known.

And then, just as panic had taken hold, I felt myself being lifted into the air and thrust towards the shore, as if on some small, magical hovercraft. It took me a few moments to understand that my silent saviour was a man who had been swimming out in the sea, saw me struggling and came to my rescue from behind, the V shape of one hand holding me by the underarm, its grip squeezing my tiny ribcage, giving me a wonderful tug to the heart. A few minutes later, he delivered me to my mother’s lap, exchanged a few words with my father, graciously acknowledged the multiple thank-yous of my shocked parents, then dived back into the sea.

I never saw my saviour again and do not recall his face, except for the sketchiest of outlines. But I believed in him, ever after, as I watched him disappear into the sea, my gratitude as great as my earlier terror. I was so awestruck, so exhausted, so speechless with relief that, had he suddenly turned around and said that he was a merman living in the deep ocean and had shot up to the surface when he heard my call for help – some kind of Abdallah of the Sea, straight from a Thousand and One Nights tale; or that he was one of those djinns, mentioned in the Quran, that God had sent in disguise to rescue me; or even that he was an extraordinary human – a knight-in-swimsuit – who just happened to be standing idly on a beach in Limassol, two hundred kilometres away, noticed my struggles and swam all the way to pull me out of the water, in a mountain-coming-to-Mohammad sort of way, I would not have doubted his word for one moment.

The Kindergarten Years

I have no memory of this event but, once my mother mentions it to me in passing as an adult, I start seeing it with unwelcome clarity.

I am led by my father out of our apartment, into the lift, through the gate, down the narrow street, under an overcast sky, watched over by buildings on both sides. We are crossing the fifty metres or so towards the street junction where the school bus picks up kids. I am sobbing and, when I see the bus waiting, I break into hysterical screams, drag my feet, and try to turn around and run the other way but fail to free my hand from my father’s grip. I know my mother can hear me, up on the third floor, perhaps even see me if she’s on the balcony. Unlike in Isaac’s tale, there is no last-moment reprieve for me – God is not testing anyone’s faith on this occasion. Only a dumb-mute giant of a building, my father’s unyielding hand and this brick of an ache crushing my ribcage. Every morning, Sisyphus-like. Until, one day, the memory fades out of my consciousness and settles into my bones: until, that is, I become the forgetting of it.

Manaal

Manaal is a formal Arabic word which doubles up as a female first name. The word is most encountered in the expression naalat manaalaha, literally ‘she earned what she wanted’, but more generally ‘she fulfilled her wish’ (or naala mannalahu for a male subject).

But manaal is not the same as rhughba (desire), mashee’a or umnia (wish) or haaja (need). It comes from the root word naala, for earned or acquired. That is, manaal refers to desire but only if it’s been satisfied. Although it can be used in a negative sentence – she has not fulfilled her wish – it retains its prevalent sense of desire achieved.

The English word ‘earnings’, though formally similar because it comes from ‘earn’ and indicates something already in one’s possession, is a wholly inadequate translation: the Arabic manaal does not carry the slightest pecuniary connotation. Manaal’s closest synonyms in Arabic are maraad and mubtagha, both of which mean ‘that which one wants’ but without any implication that the desiring subject has acquired it. Unlike manaal.

Someone, somewhere, once had the brilliant insight that a desire fulfilled is of a separate kind, of a different nature, to its more generic counterparts, and deserves an exquisite little word of its own.

I Dream of Jeannie

One of the picture books of Alf Layla wa Layla, the Thousand and One Nights, that I read when I was a child had a drawing of Shahrazaad wearing light-blue garments, a veil hanging from the bridge of her nose, a diaphanous scarf covering her hair and the back of her neck, a long-sleeved midriff top leaving her cleavage uncovered and a pair of ‘harem’ pants gathered at the ankles. The closest to this image I remember seeing elsewhere – either before or after my first encounter with this picture book, I am not sure – was in the American sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, in which the very blond Barbara Eden plays a charming djinn who falls in love with an astronaut played by Larry Hagman, in a very American suburban setting.

In my picture book, Shahrazaad was sitting on a carpeted floor with her legs bent to one side, her back straight, beside the front leg of a divan where King Shahrayaar was lying. Shahrayaar had a rounded face with a curly beard, an embroidered turban worn slightly askew, and a shock of hair falling over his broad forehead. He was staring at Shahrazaad with fascination: the expression could have been a smile or a grimace. The two faces were uncomfortably close, their gazes locked, while a bunch of grapes dangled, neglected, from Shahrayaar’s hand. The picture left me in no doubt as to which of the two wielded more power. But Shahrayaar’s power appeared to have been temporarily suspended by something Shahrazaad had done.

A scene from sitcom I Dream of Jeannie.

Turning the page and reading the frame tale of Alf Layla, I understood what the picture meant: every night, Shahrazaad, a shrewd storyteller, entertained the king with a new story that she left unresolved until the next day. This she did in order to distract the king, seduce him and ultimately convince him to spare her, for he’d intended to kill her. Shahrayaar and his brother Shahzamaan had been stung by the unfaithfulness of their wives, and the king had since been in the habit of deflowering and killing the virgins that his vizier brought to him.

Alf Layla was a book of fairy tales, with a female hero, to sit alongside Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Leila and the Wolf, and Le Petit Poucet. It was full of delightful stories such as Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

Or so I thought. In truth, while my abridged and highly sanitised book offered itself as fairy tales for children, I would find out later that this was far from an apt description of Alf Layla. As it happened, Shahrazaad was having sex with the king every night before sharing her stories; her sister Duniazaad was there with them all along, ‘under the bed’ according to one version of the story, not quite a ménage à trois but almost; and the often violent and sometimes sexually explicit stories told by Shahrazaad were not for the faint-hearted and certainly not intended for children. Watching Jeannie again as an adult, there is no doubting the sexual intent of the sitcom too. From the first episode of the first season, seduction, adultery and bare female skin figure prominently, as well as, inevitably, that form of American narcissism which has foreign women falling over themselves for the white male hero (Jeannie routinely calls her man ‘master’).

I suspect that even as a seven- or eight-year-old I must have reacted sexually to Jeannie without knowing it. After all, it was around that time, or perhaps not long after, that I had my first erection, triggered by an Arabic-language Batman comic, one in which the main villain was Batwoman, whose gleaming leather attire, curvaceous form and exaggeratedly almond-shaped eyes had awoken something perplexingly pleasurable in me.

Lexicon of Love

Arabic speakers are spoilt for choice when it comes to expressions of love. At least twenty-five Arabic words for different shades of love, affection and love-induced states of mind are in common usage, by my count. The actual number is said to be somewhere between fifty and one hundred, if formal Arabic words, less encountered in day-to-day speech, are included.

hub, hawaa, gharaam, walaa, hanaan, shaghaf, kalaf, shawq, walah, tatayyum, haneen …

No two words have the same meaning, and the vocabulary maps out a range of emotions, moods and relationships with the beloved, while conveying myriad kinds of love – sensual, carnal or chaste, profane or divine, joyful or melancholy.

From love as tenderness (atf or sababa), forlornness (wajd) or feelings of warmth towards someone (wod), through chaste (eeffa), eternal (rasseess) or unrequited (lajaa) love, to adulation (oshq), infatuation (wallah) and passionate love (hiaam). Love that leaves us burning is huraaq and love that stings is lathgh. There is suppressed love (kamad), love as joy and enjoyment (miqqa), love as peaceful surrender (istikana), love as intimacy (oulf) and love as seduction (foutoun). There is of course love as intercourse (nikah) and love as eroticism and licentiousness (ibahi). There is a word too for the prestige that a man draws from loving, and being in the company of, women (tashbeeb). Shawq has been likened to the Greek ‘eros’, ‘insofar as it was taken [by the mystic Muhyieddeen Ibn Arabi] as a fundamental driving force within human life, art, and thought’.

The word jawa refers to the alternating states of hope and despondency that a lover endures. Love that leaves us terrified and transfigured is wahl, while sabwa denotes nymph love and love for a younger person – it comes from the root words sabi for boy and sabia for girl. Some words have dual meanings, one of which works to reinforce the other: jounoun is both madness and love-as-madness – hence the famous Majnoun of Leila, also known as Qays. Lathaa is the way a flame audibly climbs up and consumes a dry piece of bark, but also means scorching love; halaak is extinction as well as fatal love.

In a surviving compendium of around 7,000 books from tenth-century Baghdad – called Kitabu’l Fahrast, compiled by Abu al-Faraj Ibn al-Nadeem, and providing a snapshot of medieval Arabo-Islamic literature – ‘no less than a hundred (are about) love’.

I don’t recall as a child ever hearing my mother or father, uncles or aunts, sisters or brothers, telling me ‘I love you’; neither was I expected to say it. In the world in which I grew up, only lovers on TV or cinema screens said those words to each other. But I never felt the need for such direct assertion, because I never doubted that my family loved me. Love was conveyed to me in little gestures, subtle dispositions, and dozens of other words – habibi (my dear or my love), omri (my life), rouhi (my soul), albee (my heart).

When addressing her children, my mother would routinely add ti’borni