I had a friend of a friend visit, here in London. Both my friends are Italian, among a community of other friends who are mostly Italian. But this visiting friend in particular had an interesting story. It started to unfold when I understood that her grandparents were born and lived in Beirut, to a family of Jews who are originally from Aleppo. It struck me! “So, your grandparents, do they speak Italian or Arabic?” I asked her. “Both,” she replied, “but mainly French by virtue of education, and Arabic. Their Italian is not the best.” Wow, I thought to myself. Here I am again in front of an Italian of Arab origin, in fact syrio-lebanese, or you could say shami, for levantine, since we’re talking about exactly the time that this political distinction came to effect, resulting in the carving of a Lebanon, by the French mainly whose colonial mandate it was under, from Syria then, early 20th century.
In any case, we didn’t draw on any of this history, it was merely in the back of my head as I listened to our friend telling us about this captivating journey that her grandparents went through, having grown up in Beirut and educated in French schools, and how by the late 40s early 50s they had to leave. In my mind, that’s a sorry but familiar story that I’ve heard over and again about Arab Jews finding themselves at the temultuous front of nationalist quasi-post-colonial states and the forming of the formative Arab-Israeli conflict, and having to leave. I grew up on my own father’s stories about his jewish neighbors, and the jewish tradesmen with which his father traded, along of course with copts, as well as other diasporic (European origin) communities that lived in Cairo at the time like the Armenians, the Greeks and the Italians.
Our friend told us about how they first left to Tokyo, where they lived for a while and how the grandfather wrote from there for a Lebanese newspaper. Eventually, seeking to settle after the birth of our friend’s mother, taking advantage of a post-war European scheme to provide residency and citizenship for Jews, they ended up in Italy, which they knew nothing about. My friend, of course, feels assuredly Italian by virtue of this decision, whose timeliness would inform hers and her mother’s upbringing in Milan, this city her grandfather picked on the map and actually made the trip to.
The fact that her grandparents in Milan spoke Arabic and maintained a memory of their past-life in Beirut intrigued me. I asked my friend if she identifies with being Arab at all, she replied “no” straight away. She considered that she had middle eastern origins, because for example the typical food that her grandmother would make for her was kibba and hummus and those dishes, no pasta included. I told her yes those are typical Arabic dishes. She was puzzled and the discussion carried along with our friends. I didn’t manage to ask her how she thinks her grandparents identified themselves. Our discussion bordered into mentioning the Arab Israeli conflict, though without getting into it. I am not sure how my friend, who studied history and journalism in New York and here we are meeting in London, would have weighed on it. I had the sense that she identified with being Jewish, at least as it pertains to her search for stories of her family’s origins.
It was interesting and strange for me. Particularly as it comes in a time where I am personally reckoning with and rediscovering being an Arab, here in London, along with a growing Arab diaspora of friends and colleagues who are spread around cities in europe. In a time as well when an Arab-Muslim migrant crisis is overshadowing Europe, it’s relation both to itself and to the world, and when a cartoon and series of statements by Macron lead to widespread mutual-hate speech and daily lone-wolf terror-crimes are erupting across different cities in Europe. I as an Arab at this present moment bear this weight in my presence here, in people’s perplexed looks, insinuations and misunderstandings. The popular theory goes that as there is no fire without smoke, and as we might not believe in stereotypes, we nevertheless think that there are reasons behind them, and it is to those roots of the stereotype of the Arab male backward and violent jihadi that the perplexed eyes keep looking.
I never really identified as an Arab before. I identified more as an Egyptian who is reconciled with his Arab ethnicity, along with the African and Mediterranean affinities, although I am culturally oriented towards the west, for many reasons. Part of my childhood and all of my travels were in and to the west. Only last February I visited beirut for the first time, and, realizing that it was my first visit to an Arab state other than Egypt, I felt warmly home in it, digested its crises and social malaise. I understood in a novel way what and how it means to be Arab the minute I arrived to the airport and was confronted with the lax but authoritative security officer, I automatically understood how things here are done, even if they speak with a shami accent and seem to be lighter-skinned.
As recently, and I could almost argue that it was by way of peer-pressure, I am feeling in need to reckon as well with how the word Arab echoes, and what it resonates or connotes. And as I spent the past year here in london, half of which under lockdown, and as i suffered from social isolation, estrangement, and an almost medical need for sun, spontaneity, kindness and warmth, I slowly discovered how in fact Arabs are lovely people. They are generally kind and natural, saturated with a high level of corruption and cynicism and usually crushed under the heavy weight of decades-long national and collective crises, very attached to where they come from but also actively dreaming to leave it ‘behind’ to a better place since there’s almost no hope for things to change. Arabs also have a colorful shared cuisine, full of breads, cheeses, olives, vine leaves, hummus, felafel and beans much of which is shared with the southern Mediterranean and other regions. A significant stretch of the Arab geography, is the Fertile Crescent from Palestine-Israel as they border Egypt, tying Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. My visit to Beirut, and more precisely outside of Beirut in Lebanon, I admit, opened my eyes to this tasteful landscape of green hills that Gibran described, bordering arid desert from the back and overseeing a generous stretch of the Mediterranean Sea on the front, with a temperate weather saturated with sun, warmth, and a fertile soil rich with produce, and archaeological remains necessary for understanding how civilization transformed at a certain moment in time around the agricultural revolution, bringing forth writing and scripture, cities, prophets, and god.
This is what my imagination projects if I say that I’m an Arab. I’m not sure if that what my friend understood when I asked her if she identified with her Arab origins.