We Could All Use a Little Break

Like you, I left home to get an education. Thirty-­something years ago, I was accepted by Harvard and a local organization offered to pay for the whole caboodle, a full eating-drinking-sleeping-studying scholarship, the prestige of which earned me my family’s blessing. Leave, leave, young man, God be with you—leave and return to us with untold riches and a smidgen of culture to edify. I left that country, left my mother; I wanted to, and also like you, I surprised everyone by not returning even though I knew I wouldn’t from the start. I transitioned in college; I changed from a depressed person to an angry one. The humiliations of my childhood—the don’t-do-this, the boys-don’t-do-that, the you-must-try-to-be-normal—all those sticks and twigs, dry kindling, burst into a furious bonfire. Everything was my family’s fault, of course it was. My cracked cup ranneth over with molten rage that no saucer could contain. My calls home became more obstreperous and less frequent. My side of the conversation consisted of various permutations of “I hate you, I loathe you, you never respected me, you never understood me, I’m unhappy and you made me so, I demand justice, I despise you.” Anger was the shape of my breath, outrage the sound of my voice. I cultivated indignation like a hothouse orchid. My mother kept insisting I follow her rules: I should do this, I couldn’t do that, I shouldn’t think I was going to get away with whatever. She made sure to explain that I was giving the whole family a bad name, that they would be ridiculed because of me and my actions and the way I was choosing to live my life.

I had been a teenager during the age of rage and carpet-­bombing and obliteration, the age of Baader-Meinhof, Kissinger, and the rejectionist factions of the PLO. I learned much. I knew how to encase my rampant heart in iron and plod ahead, and when I left home I most certainly did. I wasted much then. Profligate, that was me, shedding many a weight, many a burden, the heaviest my past. I gave up all its chains. I wooed amnesia. In the Arabic-speaking world, dissidents and agitators attempted to discard the colonial past, and in America, I forswore the family name. I became the continuous revolution, unshackled from bourgeois constraints, living in the present. Lot’s wife was a cowardly weakling. I was no prophet’s wife. Don’t look back in anger or in sorrow. I galloped forward, focusing on the lure of the mechanical rabbit before me.

Mistakes were made. I was rebelling against my mother and could not voice it eloquently. She used many choice expletives addressing me, and I finally called her a whore. The decision to cut me off, though, was not hers alone. Both Firas and my sister, Aida, led the charge and killed me off. Firas was the one who delivered the news: “You are dead to us.”

In many ways, the betrayal by my siblings hurt more than that by my parents, and no wound was deeper than Mazen’s silence. The years when he did not speak to me were the worst. Mazen, my Mazen. I could not believe that he had abandoned me. We were supposed to be inseparable. All my memories included him. The earliest and brightest, indelible, was of my following him. He walked the corridor of our apartment up and down, dragging a red fire truck on a string. He told me to follow him and pretend to cover my ears while he imitated a siren: “Waa-woo, waa-woo, waa-woo.” I must have been three, if that. That was the oldest memory I had, and he was with me. If he wanted a rupture, I was willing. I was strong. I immured my heart.

The family wanted a break, so I made it official. I changed my name legally. I would not return. I disappeared in that country of unremitting reinvention. I thought I would never ever forgive charming Mazen, but of course I did. He’s a slippery fellow, isn’t he, and cunning?