The Summer of 1982
A blasé looking blonde stared at me from the front cover of an old Elle magazine. She posed in profile wearing a strapless, tightly-laced red dress, staring defiantly at the viewer. I couldn’t decide if I was intrigued or turned off by the lusty gaze. I picked up the magazine. It was the only reading material I could find at the Al-Kindi Boutique in Dubai, where I was working as a shop assistant. It was my first job. I had just turned fifteen. I’d been hired to help my mother in the business my father and uncle had ventured into a few years earlier. They’d named the shop after an Arab Muslim philosopher with zero interest in fashion. It was their way of asserting, yet again, their commitment to promoting the greatness of Arab civilization.¹
To kill time, I flipped through the glistening magazine page by page. I was bored. Very bored. It was 12:30 p.m. and no one had stopped by to see the latest arrivals from Paris and Milan! The row of silky dresses hanging on the stand behind me had not been touched since morning. The two racks with linen trousers and colorful summery blouses stood still, opposite to the arabesque-looking arched changing booths.
It bewildered me that a university graduate with a major in political science like my mother had agreed to work in such a place. “I can finally pay for my favorite face cream without having to ask your father for pocket money,” she explained when asked why she came here to work three hours a day, four days a week.
I sighed and looked up at the shop window. Two slim white mannequins stood idly, one in a colorful evening organza dress, the other in a navy-blue tailored suit. I saw mirages shimmering over the street outside, all the way to the Deira creek; the black asphalt pavement seemed to be melting, its vapor rippling into the air. The temperature outside hovered at 110 degrees — and then there was the humidity. I was grateful for the buzzing AC keeping me, and the dresses, from wilting.
I glanced back at the pages of Elle magazine. I still had another twenty minutes before my mother closed the boutique for lunch. I skimmed through the images of women in plissé skirts, shoulder padded jackets, and flamboyant taffeta dresses. I tried to imagine myself in an austere Chanel suit, with a nice handbag to go with it, but that felt unoriginal. I preferred a sleeveless, flowy, white dress that a brunette model had on; she was leaning against a beautiful sailboat tied to a pier, the clear turquoise sea behind her, a few seagulls flying above. She looked free, light, a big smile expanding the length of her rosy lips as she looked towards the crisp blue sky. What caught my attention was not which designer made the dress, but the three words that stood in at the top of the page: London-Paris-New York.
I was fixated on these three names. I longed to visit each one of them. I fantasized about the freedom I’d have, the beauty I would see, the opportunities I could pursue. I couldn’t wait to be out of Dubai and experience life elsewhere. I couldn’t wait to get away from this boredom mixed with stagnancy, from the suspense delineated by war, yet another war.
It was summer of 1982. Israel had launched a major assault on the PLO and the people of Lebanon. It started in June of 1967, at the end of my school year. I was supposed to go to Beirut to undertake the Brevet exams, the qualifying test for entering high school. By mid-June, it was clear that the war would drag on. The Brevet exams were suspended, our annual summer holiday to Italy canceled.
In early June, though, I had been excited and relieved to have finished middle school. I wanted to organize an end of year party. My schoolmates were also looking forward to it, especially since boys and girls would be invited, unlike other households where fathers would not allow their daughters to invite male schoolmates. My parents were considered different; my father danced with my friends to the beat of disco music, despite his big belly and being close to fifty. He made funny jokes and riddles, which he pulled out of his magical head. He made everyone feel comfortable, while my mother fed my friends her famous pizza, the best in town, authentically Italian.
“When shall we have our annual end of school party, baba?” I asked my father at the breakfast table, just as the radio news hour was over. “This coming Thursday or next Thursday?”
“What?” he asked in a stupefied tone, about to dip a piece of pita in olive oil. “How can you think of having a party when there is a war ravaging Lebanon?”
“But we always have a party at the end of the year!” I said, surprised by his consternation.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Why?” I asked, still confused by his strong reaction.
“Leila, people are dying every day in Lebanon. The Israeli army is heading towards Beirut, destroying everything along the way.”
“It is horrible what is happening in Lebanon,” I tried to explain. “But many of my friends do not want to think about the war. Esmeralda said she is scared and wants to forget about it. Others asked me again about the party. Besides,” I continued to make my case, “we worked hard for our Brevet exams and deserve a celebration.”
“What do you mean?” my father said, his tone turning angry. “You want to listen to music and dance while children are orphaned and houses are demolished?”
“Having a party is a way of saying that we are defiant, that life goes on. I think it can help people forget the pain.” I was trying to be an assertive teenager, unaware of how provocative I was. “Besides, there is not much we can do from here.”
My father stopped, his bread soaked in za'atar, and looked up at me. His small brown eyes stared at me full of anger and pain. “I cannot believe it,” he said. “How can you be so selfish and inconsiderate, you, whom I have always thought of as mature? Even your younger brother would know better than to ask for such an outrageous thing.”
That hurt. Abid was considered the difficult child, not me. “Abid, too, is for the party,” I dug in further.
“So, I take it that these people who are dying in Lebanon are not your people, they mean nothing to you, they are below your level,” he blasted, refusing to look at me. “How disgusted I am by you!” He swallowed his piece of bread and stormed out of the kitchen.
“Leila, you need to go to school,” came my mother’s voice. I looked at her stupefied, feeling a lump in my stomach. I was totally taken aback by the vehemence of my father’s reaction, petrified by his anger and how much I had disappointed him.
I took my backpack, feeling shaken, and walked to school that day, crying. When I saw Rula, my best friend and neighbor, I told her what my father had said to me. “Ma’lesh, bit hun,” (take it easy, it will get better) she said, as she hugged me. She was Palestinian too, I thought, but her father had not said anything like what my father said.
I did not have an end of school party that year. Instead, I spent the rest of the summer trying to make sense of that incident at the kitchen table, of my father’s disappointment, of the war that erupted far away and within me. I did not know how to make sense of the war in Lebanon, of Israeli tanks advancing toward Beirut, warships encircling the liberal Arab capital by sea, and daily explosions I saw on TV. I did not know what I could do apart from fasting Ramadan — which had started in the third week of the war — forfeiting the money for our canceled summer vacation and Eid’s celebration to our brethren in Beirut, and praying to God.
“Why isn’t the Syrian army intervening to help the Palestinian fighters?” I asked one night as we watched the news, bewildered that no Arab countries sought to stop the Israeli onslaught, despite all that my uncle Awni had told me about the inevitability of Arab solidarity.
“Because Arab leaders care more about keeping their thrones than saving their brethren,” my father answered bitterly. “They are cowards.”
“This American peace plan of Philip Habib is a ploy,” I remember my uncle saying. “It is a way to complete the job the Israelis could not finish.”
“What do you mean?”
“Defeating the PLO by forcing them to leave Beirut after eighty-eight days of siege,” explained my father.
“Why are these PLO fighters shooting in the air?” I asked when I saw men holding Uzis, boarding ships out of Beirut’s port at the end of August. “What is there to celebrate?”
“That they are still alive. They are the only fighters who stood up to Israel and defended the Arab nation while the whole world watched.” I glimpsed the tears in my father’s eyes as Arafat, kufieh around his head, climbed the stairs of the Greek ship taking him to Tunis. Arafat held his hand high above his shoulder, with the “V” sign for victory. It seemed absurd to me in view of the colossal defeat. Only later did I realize it was his way of saying that we –– Palestinians — are still standing.
It was difficult to make sense of the war, of the defeat in and around me, living one thousand miles away in confined air conditioned spaces smelling of boredom and alienation. I tried to keep busy by creating a new routine, one demarcated by hearing the radio newscast in the morning, going to “work” at Al-Kindi boutique until lunch time, watching more news, and learning German in the afternoons. It was my father’s contribution to keeping me and my brother busy that summer: two hours each day he taught us new German words about weather and medicine, how to conjugate verbs, and when to decline dative and accusative. It felt particularly absurd to be learning such a cold language in such a hot desert, but I did not mind being distracted by learning the language my parents spoke to each other ever since they met in Munich.
I hated the summer of 1982. I hated the despair of June, the smoldering humidity of July, the helplessness of August. I hated the deep sense of being out of place, of having no place. I hated Dubai. I hated the war. There was no iPhone to escape to, no iPad to play with and hide from the world. I found solace in The Stranger by Camus. The excruciating heat and endless desert at the edge of that Algerian town which Camus described resembled the emptiness in front of my house, the one encircling my Garhoud neighborhood, the two sides of the road to the school. The sense of entrapment between two unspoken worlds spoke to me. I felt the alienation the Stranger experienced, which I could not yet articulate in my own words.
The only real distraction was the 1982 World Cup Soccer Championship unfolding in Spain. Watching the world soccer matches was a special family tradition, the only time we were allowed to eat dinner in front of the T.V. We always cheered for any Arab team until no one was left to play, and then debated whether Brazil, Italy, or Germany deserved our support. That World Cup of 1982 was particularly exciting because it was the first time that two Arab teams — Algeria and Egypt — made it to Madrid. Algeria managed to defeat West Germany, a leading soccer champion. That win positioned Algeria to make the semi-finals, were it not for the West German-Austrian match. After each scoring a goal in the first ten minutes, West Germany and Austria kept swinging the ball around for the remaining eighty minutes. Neither tried to win or score again, blocking Algeria from being among the four finalists. My brothers, cousins, and I were dismayed at how the West, with its support of Israel, conspired against the Arabs. We were angry at yet another defeat, one that we could perhaps better understand than the one taking place in Lebanon.
It was a hot afternoon in August when the doorbell rang at my house. A slap of dry heat hit me when I opened the door. It was my uncle Awni coming to have his afternoon coffee with my father. I led him into the sitting room and went to call my father, before joining my siblings in the TV room. It did not take long to hear my uncle call my name.
“Yes, Amou, “shou fi?” (What is the matter?) I asked when I came in, realizing that I should have put the coffee kettle on the burner before going upstairs.
“Oh, nothing,” he said as he looked up at me, a matchbox in his hand. “Just want to ask you how you are doing, how your summer is going?”
“Booooring.”
“Haven’t you enjoyed the World Cup?”
“Ya, sort of,” I answered casually, “but it is long over. Let me go prepare coffee for you and my father,” I added as I started to walk towards the kitchen
“Wait. I have something to ask you,” said my uncle, stopping in my tracks.
“Itfadal” (go ahead).
“Can you tell me what you care most about? What is the issue that you consider most important to you today, the major struggle of your life, let us say?”
“What do you mean?” I said, taken aback by the strange question. I looked also at my father, sitting to the right in his favorite armchair, facing the AC.
“Tell us what you care most about, what would you fight for?” said my uncle, looking soberly at me from behind his thick square glasses, his eyes somehow red.
“I don’t know!”
“Try,” said my father, looking at me from the side of his broad hairy shoulders showing from under his sleeveless summery pajama.
“I don’t know,” I said, scratching my head, feeling out of place as if in front of a tribunal.
“Just give it a try,” insisted my father again, his msbaha, sandalwood prayer beads in hand, rolling it one bead at a time.
“I don’t know!” I answered, still perplexed at what I was supposed to say.
“Come on, give it a try,” my uncle pushed further, nudging closer to the edge of the seat, as if he was about to stand or spring.
“Ah… What would I say? I don’t know,” I said. “Probably the question of women’s emancipation in the Arab world.” I was surprised myself to have said that.
A silence followed. My father lifted his chin and looked up at me sardonically, his fingers no longer moving the beads of his msbaha. “So, I take it that the people dying in Beirut do not mean much to you, are not your cause!”
“What?” My heart fell.
“Well, Leila,” he said, his sarcastic tone full of bitterness as he slammed the msbaha onto the armchair. “You failed the exam again, and with flying colors!”
I was shocked. My eyes welled with tears. I had not been aware of being given an exam for which I was, obviously, unprepared. “Why are you saying this? What do you want from me?” I asked, my voice trembling. “Haram Alek. Have mercy on me! Leave me alone!” I said and ran to my room.
I cried a lot that day. I had been caught off guard and felt accused. Something was being asked of me, an important expectation that I did not meet. I felt shame, failure, and loss. I did not know what it was. It felt deeply unfair. “Why did they ask me? Why not ask their sons what they care most about in life?” I asked my mother while sitting in her kitchen an hour later, drying my tears. “How should I know what the most urgent cause is in my life?” I blew my nose again. “And what is wrong with believing in the women’s cause in the first place?” I added, looking at her, holding the wet handkerchief in my hand. She had a cigarette in her mouth while stirring the ragout she was preparing for lunch the next day. She smiled affectionately but did not answer me. I had to figure it out alone.
I hated that summer of 1982. I hated it from the bottom of my heart. I no longer knew who I was or who I was supposed to be. I could not accept my father’s accusation, but I could not let go of it. I could not bear my father’s disappointment and its unfairness.
Thinking of that incident today, I see how it has marked my effort to define myself as a Palestinian. Attack was often my father’s preferred strategy of defense. It was the shield with which he protected his image as the tough, responsible, caring, and impenetrable patriarch. I realized years later that my father was defending himself against a deep sense of failure and loss. It must have felt excruciating to be sitting helplessly in Dubai. Forty-eight years old, with four kids, my father probably felt guilty for being safe while his brethren were fighting a war, his war or our war, I don’t know which to call it.
It took me some time to understand that my father, that summer of 1982, subjected me to an exam I was bound to fail because he was scared that he might be flunking it himself. My answer to him and my uncle had pained them so deeply because they feared they were failing to make their children ‘true’ Palestinians. I do not think they conceived of any other image of Palestine besides their own, the one tied to a return to the native land in which they were born. They could not imagine what Palestine might mean to us, or how else to be Palestinians, other than how they felt about it and their commitment to return.
That my father was so outraged because the issue of women’s liberation occurred to me before the liberation of Palestine made me feel like a traitor. To him it seemed I didn’t get it. How could womens’ concerns supersede Palestinian freedom? How could Palestinian women be free when every Palestinian, man or woman, is either under occupation or in exile? In his view, my generation was simply supposed to carry the torch, to work on liberating Palestine as he and his brother did in so many ways. He probably expected a boy, a man, to carry this torch. Yet, he posed the questions and expected the right answer from me. It was to me that they extended the torch.
Without realizing it at the time, I decided to take up my father’s challenge. I do not know why I did not simply reject it and refuse a war he no longer knew how to win. I wanted to retake the “test” and prove him wrong. But I needed first to figure out what it meant to be Palestinian while living in exile. After all, I hadn’t been born in the land of figs and olives.
I realized that summer of 1982 that being Palestinian entailed more than just learning, at the age of five, to declare my love to God, Palestine, and then Mama wa Baba (in that order). It meant something more than memorizing Biladi, Biladi, Fath Thawra al A’Adi, the Palestinian national anthem by the age of seven, and mastering the Palestinian Dabkeh dance by twelve. The images on TV of the PLO fighters, of destroyed houses, of children’s faces covered in dust from the rubble, had already started to teach to me that Palestine was not simply the mulberry tree in my grandmother’s garden or having cousins with whom I could play with among terraced olive groves for hours. It was more than carefully embroidered Palestinian cushions collected over the course of an exilic life, or the golden pendent with the map of Palestine that I was given for one of my birthdays to wear on my necklace. Palestine also defined a community to which I belonged without having met most of its people, an imagined community long before I found the term in Benedict Anderson. It is belonging to a group of people continuously targeted, exiled, dispersed but always defiant, seeking freedom and justice.
Three weeks later, in mid-September, I switched on the radio in my mother’s green Fiat as we were driving back from Al-Kindi. I heard the first reports about the Sabra and Shatila massacre. On the evening news, I saw the first pictures of corpses stacked on top of each other, flies hovering over their bloodstained trousers and shirts in front of ransacked houses. The reporters who entered the camp, which the Lebanese phalangist militias ransacked as the Israeli army watched, seemed not to know what to do with wailing women, stupefied men, petrified children. For the next two days, all I did was listen to and watch live reports of children, my age and younger, who survived under their parents’ corpses, cases of rape, and families made refugees for the third time. I felt outraged, impotent, and scared.
The magnitude of this massacre of Palestinians, the first to be shown on television worldwide, though not the first in our history, created an outrage strong enough that the government of Sharjah, the city next to Dubai, allowed people to protest Israeli crimes. As soon as I heard about it, I told my father I wanted to take part. The demonstration against Israeli war crimes was to include women and children only: no men, or boys over fifteen years old were allowed: it was to be a strictly humanitarian act, as the Emirati authorities did not want things to take a political turn.
My father dropped me at the roundabout near the newly-built Sharjah souk to participate in the March Against Israeli War Crimes. Soft sand dunes flanked the sides of the newly asphalted road that connected to another roundabout, maybe one mile away. The sun was leaning towards the end of the horizon, covered in a haze of humidity, as I walked out of the car towards a congregation of people. Some women were wearing the local long black coats, others were without headscarves. A few were carrying banners with pictures of the massacre. Others held posters written in Arabic, saying “Protect our Children,” “Long Live Palestine,” “UN: Where Are You?” I spotted a few police cars, probably brought in to prevent any clashes. Or maybe to make sure that women did not steer away from the defined route.
I walked with everyone else from one roundabout to the other and back. As we chanted, I felt good being part of the collective, expressing our pent-up anger. But I could not escape a profound feeling of disempowerment: the only protest of a massacre permitted us in an oil producing Gulf state was for a group of women to march through two empty intersections. There was no press to witness us, no journalists to interview any of the participants, not a single article about the event in the newspaper the next day. As I chanted “Stop the Massacre, Stop the Crime,” I glimpsed my father, his arms folded leaning against our car, silently watching alongside a group of other men, their faces austere, defeated and sad.
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¹ He is considered particularly important for his synthesis, adaptation and promotion of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy in the Muslim world. (Abboud, Tony, Al-Kindi : the father of Arab philosophy, Rosen Pub. Group.2006), Klein-Frank, F. Al-Kindi. In Leaman, O & Nasr, H (2001). History of Islamic Philosophy. London: Routledge.)
Leila Farsakh is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She researches the political economy of development, with specific focus on the Middle East region and the Arab/Israeli conflict. She is author of Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation, editor of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization beyond Partition, and coeditor of The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond.