My Syrian Relatives

Those are my Syrian relatives who immigrated from Homs in the early part of the twentieth century. My grandfather is the second from the left, one hand on his mother's shoulder. Grandpa was a tough guy, smoked packs and packs of cigarettes, cursed in Arabic and called me Rosalita because I looked more Italian than Syrian.

I think about my Syrian relatives whenever I read about the chaos and tragedy of Syria. I imagine people with the same blood as mine are running through the streets or away. Like everyone, I am struck dumb by the constant stream of photos of the millions of desperate refugees, particularly the one of the little boy, face-down in the sand at the water's edge. What do we do in the face of such madness? What do we even think? I can't look away. I can't not think about it. I wish that I could do something about it.

I don't believe in borders, in walls and nations, to tell you the truth. I feel no pride as an American, but rather fortunate, lucky to be here and not Syria. Lucky, not proud. I admire the actions of Germany and Iceland who have announced programs to take these refugees. I wish that I could offer my home to a refugee, but how do I do that? How do we do that? I live in America where the ruling class can't figure out a proper immigration policy, where a leading candidate for president wants to build a giant wall at the border to keep people out, where people complain about illegals getting an education or a driver's license or food stamps. I'm an American and complicit. I'm also Syrian, and I want to do something.

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)

Carpet Stores, Nightmares, Wallets and Cranes

My Facebook friends know that my voting place on Tuesday was a local Middle Eastern carpet store. I got a lot of funny comments when I posted the photo below. If you look below that grand carpet hanging from the ceiling on the left, you'll see some fellow citizens at the voting booths. It cracked me up that I was voting in a Middle Eastern carpet store, but I refrained from expressing the irony.

When I walked back to my car after voting, nervous and hyped up, I saw this on a wall in an alley:

I had just gotten off the phone with my dear friend whose sister is dying of cancer, and  I had mentioned in one way or another how weird it is to live one's life when such things are happening, to make coffee, to chat about one's day, to vote in a Middle Eastern carpet shop in Los Angeles, CA. Then, I looked up at the sun in the brilliant blue sky behind these fantastic cranes on the corner of Wilshire and La Brea. I actually love construction sites and cranes, in particular. There's something magical about them, like ballet, maybe, or an angular spider's web.

I had another nightmare the night before I voted about losing my wallet, although this time I was in college, trying to register for my classes. I woke up suddenly, sweating with my heart pounding, and felt near elation as the realization dawned that it was only a dream.  I'm always struck by how trivial the content of dreams can be and how weighted their interpretation. When I snapped this photo, I was sitting in my car, waiting for one of the boys to finish their football practice. I think I look Middle Eastern, which I am, a bit, having a grandfather from Syria, which leads me back to the carpet store where I voted and the end of this post.