To My Troll, TwoBlack Jet:

My Mississippi Grandmother, Ida Mae and my Syrian Immigrant Grandfather, Charles
Brooklyn, New York
mid-20th century*

What was that you were saying, again, about President Drumpf's big heart?*

My tiny little mother mind™ wants to know.


Sincerely,

Elizabeth


P.S. After this weekend's hideous anti-Muslim executive orders and the installment of Iago*** in the National Security Council, Drumpf has proved himself to be heartless in addition to incompetent and megalomaniacal. I am not as much scared as enraged, and when I'm enraged, it's best to write. It's hard otherwise to make sense of this man destroying so much in only nine days.







* The picture of my grandmother and grandfather above is one of my favorites. My grandfather was a Christian Syrian from Homs and immigrated to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century with his family. While I realize that were he to do so today, he would actually be admitted to the country because of his religion, but I find it repellent that we, as a country, have gotten to the point where half of us have elected and continue to support a leader who is making a mockery of whatever ideals the country purports to have --  our country is after all, one of ideals and ideas, constantly dynamic and improved and improved. Messy and inclusive. We the people, etc.                                                                                    

**My troll, TwoBlackJet, asked me and other blog readers why we women marched the day after the inauguration and then engaged us in a sometimes amusing but ultimately frustrating conversation on the old blog. You can check it out by scrolling down to the post that has a bunch of comments, but you might want to pour yourself a shot of vodka, light up a joint or put on some music. When you're finished, I recommend a shower or some naked gardening.  If you don't have the time to waste, I'll just tell you that TwoBlackJet insisted that Drumpf has a big heart yet provided no details or examples to explain her/his/its convictions. While I understand it is the intent and nature of the troll to stir things up, I've seen similar comments and invective on conservative websites and social media threads, so I honestly DO want someone to answer these questions without doing what TwoBlackJet did which was to eventually go on a ridiculous personal tirade (provoked, I admit, by a condescending comment I made about her writing style -- a comment for which I made apologies)

***One of the blackest of hearts in Shakespeare is Iago from Othello whom I remember whispering evil things into Othello's ears. While I don't at all believe Drumpf to be an Othello, I do see his consigliere, Bannon, as a sort of Iago, twisting a naive and sick mind to bad. Whatever did happen to Iago, Reader? I can't remember.












#RESIST

My Syrian Relatives, Part 4

Splendor in the Grass

Well, we had quite a brouhaha when I posted earlier about my Syrian relatives. One of my cousins was extremely upset and let loose a personal attack in response to what she and other relatives thought was a shameful depiction of my Syrian grandfather as an angry man. My cousin apologized later, but I made the mistake of not accepting it as graciously as I might have, and my cousin took offense again. I decided that going back and forth on my blog was too upsetting for everyone, so I closed the comments. Thank you to those of you who had such thoughtful, interesting responses to both that post and to the spat as it unfolded. I did not paint a full portrait of my grandfather -- he was, obviously, a complex man and having strong opinions was only one of his characteristics (that I've apparently inherited and that I grapple with almost daily!). I thought this would be understood, but I offended not only my cousins but my dear Uncle Charles, my grandfather's only son. He wrote me a loving message on my Facebook page that I am going to post here. I think you'll get a far richer picture of my grandfather than mine, and also see where I might even get my wicked sense of humor.

Elizabeth ,I hope this does not start a family feud ( Hatfield and Mc Coys ) but i felt i had to respond .My Dad was not an angry Man and was not against Jews or Moslem he worked for many years for a Jewish boss and they were like family he was always invited to all his children's weddings and if you could picture it wore a yomica( spelling is bad ). I went deep sea fishing many times with his Syrian Jewish and Moslem friends out of Sheepshead Bay to the Jersey coast. He had strong feelings ( like you on many subjects ) on what is going on in the Middle East. Remember he lived in the period after World War 1 ,when Britain and France chopped up the area creating new countries out of other peoples land (ex Trans Jordan ) i know its before your time and your interest in the Middle East History while you studied Chinese and cooking might not have existed .loved my Dad and was so proud of how people looked up to him ,coming over for his advise and reading letters from Syria that they received and could not read. I have many good memories of my dad and so does Amy . He loved all his Grandchildren equally and it hurt her and yes your uncle Charles . He showed so much love to my beloved Vivian as well as to all his son in-laws. I remember when we were young my Dad would take us onSunday rides and we would all sing as we rode and i could see the happiness in his eyes. He would try to sing but he only knew a part of a song ( cherrie cherrie be ) an old song it was a happy time. i know Mom went thru times like all married people go thru ( im sure you can relate ) but i remember after all of us left the nest and they lived in a apartment in New Jersey when we would visit them they seemed so happy. He worked with Mom on a assembly line together in a factory and later he worked for a Jewish Lady who owned a candy newspaper store in Danville N.J. and a wonderful relation with her he was so honored that she let him open and close. II am sorry that all you remember is a terrible legacy . I write this with love, and a am blesses to have so many nieices and nephews who i love dearly and they all treat me with so much respect.

Thanks for that, Uncle Charles, and I apologize for hurting you. (As for the potential family feud, I know for a fact that my cousins are far better armed and better shots than I'd ever be, so I'm keeping my distance from here on out!)

My Syrian Grandfather

Here is my Syrian grandfather and his family, in the early part of the twentieth century. I don't know whether they had left Syria, yet. My grandfather Charles is the young man on the far left, in the back row. I have always been enamored of the woman on the right's wasp waist. I believe she might be my Aunt Hafeezah, remembered for her plastic-covered furniture, dusty hard candies and wet kisses. My grandfather immigrated to the United States in 1907. I am told that he was very handsome, then, so handsome that as a lifeguard on Coney Island, he was picked to be an extra in a Valentino film. He died when I was sixteen, so my memories of him are not clouded. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes-- a lot -- even after lung cancer and the removal of part of his lung. He had strong and often angry views, would holler about them with his children (my mother and my aunts and uncle). He was loud, cursed in Arabic (in fact, the only Arabic word I know is shit, pronounced a guttural cutta). He pushed meat through a meat grinder attached to the kitchen table, grew eggplants and string beans in a backyard garden and called me Rosalita because I looked like the other side, my father, the Italian Catholic who married his youngest daughter.

This is a picture of my Mississippi grandmother and her family. My grandmother, Ida Mae, is the little one in the front, shielding her eyes from the sun. She grew up on a cotton farm in the Delta. All of her brothers had Biblical names, and I believe the baby in her mother's arms is my Aunt Bessy Lucille who married a man named Artie when they were around fourteen years old. Aunt Bessy and Uncle Artie were married for nearly seventy years, I think, and I remember they were always holding hands. My grandmother died when I was around 38 years old and she was 92. She was tall and graceful, soft-spoken and dear, the definition of a lady. She told us stories in her soft southern accent, stories of growing up in the south, how she was bitten by a snake, how her brother cut the spot, sucked the blood out and then ran through the fields to get her father. She had pale blue eyes, suffered from macular degeneration in her old age, had a tinkly, gentle laugh.

So, this man

met this girl

when he was a traveling salesman, peddling lingerie in the south. He married my grandmother when she was eighteen years old and took her back to Brooklyn, where she lived with him and his mother, at first. Ida Mae learned how to speak Arabic, cook Arabic food and then raised five children in a tiny brownstone in Brooklyn. When I asked her many years later why she'd married Grandpa when she was so young, she told me Well, honey, he was tall, dark and foreign.

I'm telling you this story now because I can't get them out of my mind these days, particularly as I watch and listen and read about the conflagration in Syria. I am one-quarter Syrian. That quarter is from the city of Homs which has been in the news of late as one of the tinder boxes of the civil war there. My grandfather Charles was a Christian Arab who fled persecution with his family more than a century ago, and he never let us forget whose side he was on, barking his views from the Barcalounger he seemed to be reclined in for my entire childhood. Israel, Palestine, Jews, Muslims, Christians -- these were words I heard over and over on those weekends my cousins and I ran through the house and outside to the garden, or sat and colored while our grandmother shaped raw lamb into kibbeh and our aunts and uncle argued.

I don't know what to think about the whole thing other than it's a fucking (there's really no other word) tragedy of a colossal scale. Pure madness. All of it. I can't say I feel comforted to see President Obama sitting grimly next to John McCain as they collude on how to persuade our legislature to vote that we strike Syria. I can't say that I agree with them. I don't see the sense of bombing as punishment. I can't say I feel neutral, either, when I read of hundreds of thousands of people brutally murdered, citizens of one country killing one other barbarically and millions displaced, wandering.

I remember the fighting and yelling in my own extended family, though, over what seems like the same old shit.

Pure madness. All of it.

I don't know if I have any relatives in Syria, but I imagine someone whose blood and genes I share is running around there, throwing rocks or bombs or fleeing with her children to neighboring countries or even receiving the gas meant to kill from her own government.

I don't know what to think.

غائط
(Arabic for shit)