Meeting my Homeland
Rayan Harake
I stood beside my mother and little sister as an employee at the airport insisted a paper was incorrect. We should have gotten a certified copy of a certain family document, but my mother had a normal copy instead. She says, in her best English mixed with Portuguese (both languages that the employee spoke), that it is my father who had prepared all the papers, and that he would have gotten the right one had he been informed. As the discussion isn’t moving forward, the employee looks at me, the eldest of the two sisters – neither of whom is veiled like their mother – and asks me in clear Portuguese:
“Is this your mother?”
I freeze.
I had been given life, brought up and lived with this woman – my mother – for the whole 10 years of my life, and this guy just randomly walks up to me and asks me if she is my mother. After a few seconds of extreme discomfort on my end, coupled with my mother’s impatient looks, I hesitantly say that “yes, she is my mother.” The employee, though a bit reluctant, agrees to let us continue our trip. As we walk away from the stand, my mother, who is extremely irritated with me, goes on about how I couldn’t answer a simple question, and how much trouble I could have caused.
Our last plane on our long trip from Brazil to Lebanon is set to take off from Milano. Here, I see real snow for the first time in my life – just outside an airport glass door – but never get near enough to touch it. As we wait for the plane, my mother gets chit chatty with another woman who is also heading to Lebanon. To my surprise, this woman is not veiled. I had somehow assumed everyone in Lebanon is a good religious Muslim – as opposed to the secular Christian Brazilians, who are never good enough in the eyes of my father, and whom we were never allowed to have relationships with outside of school.
The only Lebanese TV channel I had ever watched while in Brazil was an Islamic one, where all women who made an appearance were veiled. Growing up, I had understood that we – religious Muslims – were very different from the other Brazilians. We ate differently, spoke differently, and had our own way of living. We established relationships with other religious Muslims in the diaspora, but not with Brazilians. For me, Lebanon was supposed to be the place where my ‘kind’ existed in abundance – where it was the norm to be like me. While I hadn’t arrived yet, meeting an unveiled Lebanese woman at the airport was the first challenge to the conception I had of my homeland.
It turned out, however, that being aware of Lebanese cultural diversity is not that crucial for the 10-year-old me. After all, for a long period of time yet to come, everyone around me will indeed be the same as I am.
We are welcomed at the Lebanese airport by extended family – numerous aunts and cousins, all hugging and crying. The most important thing for me, however, is that I finally get to reunite with my two older sisters. They were sent to Lebanon two years earlier to live with my grandmother, because they were getting bigger, and it’s not good for a girl to grow up in a place like Brazil. It was a departure that left a hole in my heart.
At first, we are a bit shy when we meet. Now they are bigger than when I last saw them, are veiled, and are no longer talking to each other in Portuguese like we always did, but in Arabic instead.
We, the newcomers, also move to my grandmother’s house. We are not yet prepared to rent our own house – the house where we are all supposed to live together when my father finishes his business in Brazil and comes to join us. My father will take quite some time to finally catch up to us – a time that will allow me to have the closest thing to a normal childhood.
My first few days are full of family visits. My mother hasn’t been to Lebanon since before I was born. My sisters teach me some bad words in Arabic so that I get a good kickstart in the local language. Nothing too serious: ‘Hmar’ – donkey – to say that someone is stupid, ‘Hayawan’ – animal – used as a general insult. My Arabic is okay since that’s the language I grew up speaking at home, but I was limited to my parent’s vocabulary, and they were rather polite.
My sisters don’t only have moderately bad words to teach. They also listen to music, and it doesn’t seem like the others – grandmother or mother – care much about it. I am soon singing all kinds of songs, from Nancy Ajram to Evanescence. My grandmother watches Islamic and other channels: It becomes normal on weekends to watch a show hosting a number of singers and actors, or a political satire featuring some inappropriate jokes, or even a beauty pageant.
But mostly, when left to watch TV to my liking, I will choose Disney. We were allowed to watch cartoons back in Brazil, but there used to be ones that my father definitely didn’t like, and we could only watch them when he wasn’t around. Pokémon and Digimon were okay, Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z were not. Here in Lebanon, I can watch Kim Possible, Brandy and Mr. Whiskers, Zack and Cody, and even Hannah Montana when it started airing.
It seems suddenly okay to watch all these things. If my father had been present, we would have been much more careful with what was on TV. Back in Brazil, we used to rent DVDs of Hollywood movies when they came out, which to me seemed to be the worst idea. My father would get extremely uncomfortable with the faintest innuendo – sexual or not – that might appear on the screen, and assume sexual meanings behind the slightest gesture, and from there go on in an ‘Astaghfirullah’ rant, accompanied by fast forwarding through the scene.
When it wasn’t sexual, it was the emotions: Any kind of emotion displayed on the screen would invoke in my father the need to mock it. He made fun of lovers showing affection to each other, of family members talking about feelings – anything that was slightly emotional was to be ridiculed. Through his mocking, he tried to send the following message to us: Actors act as though emotions are real, and we, the naïve watchers, might end up thinking emotions are real. So we should mock them to show we are not fooled by their act.
My 10-year-old self will grow up, read more and search more, and diagnose her father as having a Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
My narcissist father approached many life events with extreme intensity. Anything related to our health or bodies was very uncomfortable for him, so he would either ignore it all together, or make the hugest deal possible out of it.
Going to the dentist was terrorizing for me: we weren’t allowed to feel (or at least) express pain. The slightest groan would make him extremely tense; he would assure us that there is no pain and that we need to stop faking it. Occasionally, the dentist would get fed up with him. “She is a small girl,” he would say. “It’s normal to feel pain.”
Up to a point in my childhood, I believed that everybody who said they had a headache was faking it for attention. I thought it was a thing that we were all ‘in’ on, and that we played along with the person faking it just to be polite. I don’t recall having a headache, and my father must have made fun of headaches at some point, so it made sense for me that they weren’t real. During my first year of school in Lebanon, I almost told a classmate to stop faking her headache because she was embarrassing herself.
As I start getting used to my new environment, I consult my older sister, Fatima, for cues on how to behave. Back when we were in Brazil, she was always slightly more opinionated and challenged my father. She would sometimes refuse to do things that he wanted, like when he obliged us to eat honey sandwiches that were ‘good for our health’ and tasted horrible.
Here in Lebanon, as I implicitly realize that some things I know about life are wrong, she seemed like the perfect guide to normalcy. She had, after all, spent two years here adjusting to the normalcy herself. I would usually adopt all her opinions on music/people/shows as I was unable to formulate my own. A movie I was once watching with her had an emotional scene. I started to make fun of the characters, and she immediately shot me a disgusted look. For a moment, it made me think that perhaps what I was doing is wrong; perhaps it is not normal to make fun of other people’s emotions. It will take time, however, for my toxic mindset to recede.
***
About two months after my arrival, my mother goes with relatives on a religious trip to Damascus, Syria, to the Shrine of Sayyida Zainab (as), which many Lebanese Shias are accustomed to doing from time to time. I don’t have the required identity papers so I can’t go with her. At this point, I am not in school yet – I arrived in Lebanon about three months before the end of the school year and would need to wait till the close of the upcoming summer vacation to join a Lebanese school.
Like all visitors that return from the Shrines, my mother comes back with stories about what they saw; about the other visitors, the Syrians and the Iraqis, the Iranians and the Pakistanis. She also brings along two sets of hijabs for me from Souk Al-Hamidiyah – a famous Souk lying next to the Sayyidah Ruqayyah (as) Mosque, a definitive stopping point for anyone visiting Sayyida Zainab (as).
I am ten years old, and Shia girls are supposed to wear hijabs by nine. My parents (or more specifically, my father) didn’t think it was a good idea to wear one back in Brazil because of what the others might say. There isn’t that much of a Muslim presence in the city I grew up in; my mother would get looks whenever she was out of the house. The other Muslims we knew were predominantly Sunni, and Sunni girls are supposed to wear hijabs when they hit puberty.
I am ecstatic about the new hijabs. I wear one the next day when I go down to the small yard in front of the building to play with my little sister. I normally prefer to stay indoors and watch cartoons, but my spoiled little five-year-old sister always got her way, and I was obliged to play with her in the yard as she wasn’t allowed to go there alone. Today however I wasn’t annoyed. My sisters will be coming through the yard from school, and I want them to see me wearing a hijab. They come from afar, and start laughing as they approach; I had put it on the wrong way. When we are back inside, my sister teaches me the proper way to wear it.
My grandmother is a very social and hospitable woman. Friends and family love to visit her; never did a week pass without a major visit from a group of relatives. My teenage cousins can be counted as additional residents – they live nearby and normally come spend the day at my grandmother’s, especially now that we are there too. My sisters and I are always veiled inside the house because one of the boy cousins could be there at any given time – not that we mind.
Occasionally, my grandmother sends me to get her something from the market. I usually get 500 L.L. for shopping, so I happily go for her. On one such occasion, as I go down the stairs and am about to start crossing the yard, I see one of my cousins, Hussein, coming from the other end. It instantly hits me that I forgot to wear my hijab. I had started wearing it just a week or two before – but I take it very seriously. I immediately start running up the three flights of stairs, and frantically knock on the apartment door for someone to open it before my cousin catches up and sees me without it again.
My family members would laugh at that story later on, especially when my cousin – no older than 15 – tells it from his perspective: “I was just coming into the yard, and Zeinab had left the building. When she saw me, she put her hands on her head with a sheer look of terror” – and that would be the part that draws the most laughs.
I had a cousin who was very lax about her hijab. She would never wear it at home, even if other cousins were there. If she needed to cross from a bedroom to the kitchen – which forced her to pass by the living room entrance (where boy cousins would be sitting), she would scream beforehand, “DON’T LOOK,” and then proceed on her way without a care in the world.
***
When the new school year started, I was placed in fifth grade. The school that I would be attending is extremely different from the one I was in back in Brazil. I go in there for the first time with my mother to enroll; we enter from the gate into an open space with concrete walls, and a small building – the school – in the middle. I wonder where the playground is and realize later I was standing in it.
It is a very small, undeveloped school (chosen by my mother mostly because we can’t afford a better one) – however still representative of the Lebanese schooling system. There are only three other children enrolled with me in fifth grade. I speak Arabic, and I have learned the letters, but I can’t read very well. My Arabic teacher gets frustrated in our first class because I, a fifth grader, can’t read a sentence properly. The school tells my mother that if I start falling behind other students, I would need to be placed in a lower grade. In less than a month I am reading fluently, and for the rest of the year I would come out on top of the (4-student) class every month.
School in Lebanon is different in many ways. First, there is the whole ‘periods’ system. Back in Brazil, we never got a definitive title for what we were currently learning. We used to change classes for English and Spanish, but other than that we spent the rest of the time in our class with our teacher, who taught us everything from language to math, without making an announcement whenever we were moving from one subject to another. We had one copybook that we used for almost everything, and I don’t remember having to study much beyond doing daily homework.
In my current school, however, we have a timetable. The bell will ring at the end of each period signaling the end of a class and the start of a new one – and teachers will switch between classes because each subject has its own teacher. No matter how much material we need to cover, each subject is given the same allotted time, and we have to be careful to bring along the correct book and copybook for it. What happens if we forget one? It is the job of the principal to come to class and scold the student that didn’t bring the proper book/notebook for the subject – a very common occurrence.
A normal discussion topic on the school grounds is heavy bags: The set of books and notebooks required by the daily timetable would result in bags too heavy for children to carry. Another would be the time spent studying. I – someone who loved memorizing and was good at mathematics and science – would spend no less than three hours a day studying. I was a perfectionist, I made sure I memorized everything word for word to recite it back as though I was reading it – endless repetition would get me there. We were given a lot of things to memorize: Arabic poems, English auto-dictations (memorizing a paragraph in English, and spilling it out word for word onto paper, which was supposed to improve our English skills), passages from history, geography, and civil education.
I became the exemplary student who could recite everything by heart, who would come with completely solved math and science homework. The school system seemed to be built only for children who have the utmost perfectionist drive – which ironically, in my case, came from an unhealthy place; I grew up with a father who would only praise us if we were the best of the best.
Comparing my current school system with my older one would become a frequent mental exercise. Back in Brazil, I never had to prepare a bag full of content for the next school day. We only had one notebook that would come and leave with us. Any homework we needed to do was copied and glued to that one notebook. Books weren’t used that much – but when they were, they were fetched from a closet in the classroom. No one ever wasted time on scolding a child for a missing notebook; no parent worried that their children would have back problems.
A student never came out on “top of the class.” We were evaluated qualitatively with letters for performance. Here, they were obsessed with marking down the students sequentially from the 1st to 12th or 15th.
Back in my old school, no one spent an hour trying to memorize a paragraph word for word. I still remember facts from history classes I took in fourth grade in Brazil, but nothing from the endless passages about Babylonians and Egyptians and Greeks that I could recite by heart when I first studied them.
Like many other aspects of Lebanese governance, whoever is in charge of the education system in Lebanon doesn’t believe in the need to come up with a system that is more progressive, efficient, and less bureaucratic for everyone involved.