Spin
Natacha Yazbeck
The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don’t belong to English
though I belong nowhere else,
if not here
in English.
—GUSTAVO PÉREZ FIRMAT, “BILINGUAL BLUES”
If this was the story it should be, I would tell you how sad little Ali looked in his little red T-shirt when he thought of his family. All the others were killed in the Houla massacre. Syria. I would tell you how we stopped and joked about Barcelona and Real Madrid and he cracked a smile and then we cracked a smile, a little too giddy. I would tell you how for a second the room started spinning and little Ali and his little red T-shirt began to fade, because what kind of people grill a kid on how he hid under his brother’s body and then chuckle because they made little Ali smile. But this is not the story it should be. So few ever are.
“Ali habibi?” (Ali, sweetie?)
He looks up.
“Ali habibi, shou sar maak?” (Ali, sweetie, what happened?)
I would tell you how I got to little Ali habibi, and who made it happen, and why, and how in fact it was from the safety of Turkey that I spoke to him, and how I followed up once, twice, on Ali and then never spoke to him again. How I don’t know where little Ali is now, or if he is still little or still prefers Barca to Real, or if he can sleep at night.
There have been a lot of little Alis since.
I get thanked a lot for my dedication to the little Alis. It is useful when you can talk to them in their own tongue, because it’s like you are one of them. It’s our capital in English, our brand. Our raseed in Arabic. Our capital. We force our own names over little Ali’s and call it a byline.
Sometime in the late nineteenth century, the Khourys board a boat for the United States from what is not yet Lebanon. There is hunger, and there are Ottomans. Like a byline, name is everything, and so the village priest begs the family to leave someone behind so that if they all die at sea, at least the name will not die with them somewhere in the cold greenish waters of the Atlantic. They leave behind Jacob, the littlest.
Jacob grows up and begets Benjamin, who begets Judith, who is a little girl when the British and French troops withdraw from what was almost Lebanon. Judith is dead before she hits forty, leaving behind four children.
There is war again, and the four children in turn board boats departing from what is now a disintegrating Lebanon. Then I am born in New Jersey, to one of the four, almost one hundred years after the Khourys first boarded those boats. A little Arab born in New Jersey to parents displaced by war. This is useful, a handy cliché. Like little Ali.
Beydaa’, like from the poem we read in high school Arabic class, asks where I was born. We’re walking through the Azraq refugee camp in northern Jordan and she’s playing with my bracelets. The safest camp for Syrians in the world, donors tell us, and it is. So safe that little Beydaa’ clings to my gaudy bracelets like a life raft.
“You, where were you born?” She asks twice.
“Amerka.”
“How?” she wants to know. “How were you born in Amerka?” And I do it. I give her false hope, like I’m one of them, because both our mothers named us after great literature even though it’s really us kicking her boat back into the very ocean we washed up from.
Jacob’s sister died at sea. They threw her body into the Atlantic. No one can remember her name.
My uncle, one of Judith’s four orphaned kids, asks if there is something wrong with me. His son is dead, along with his wife and baby boy and their dog. I am belatedly paying my condolences, steely faced, like him, and sitting on temporal fault lines, probably like him, too. I was in Syria when my cousin died, along with his wife and baby boy and their dog, I think. The when is not important. He died in Canada along with his wife and baby boy and dog, suffocated to death trying to escape a fire. A little pile of humans and one dog slumped behind a door.
“My name is on a blacklist at the border,” my ’ammo says as I’m paying my condolences, ergo my name, too, and am I crazy to do this to my mother. Everyone asks in their own way how one could brush off an entire family and its collective inherited anxieties. Except my mother, who understands this world and our complicity in it better than all of us combined.
The week before, or two weeks before, on a Friday in Damascus, we’re drinking tea near the mosque. Waiting. I don’t drink the tea because I am certain I will get sick. I can’t be sure they’ve washed the glasses or boiled the water. This becomes increasingly important as the minutes go by, the small potentially unwashed glass holding the potentially unboiled tea water.
“Drink your tea. It’s good,” the stringer insists.
I lift the cup and let the steam fog up my glasses. I don’t drink. As soon as the bottom of the glass touches the saucer—a clink you could hear distinctly, the square is so quiet—we hear it, me and the stringer who we did not byline, maybe for his own safety and maybe in part also because that’s what we do. Hurriye (freedom). It sounds like a cliché. Another American motion picture, like Ziad Rahbani would say, before the playwright, too, lost it.
In the months to come, it will be war.
We move, straight across toward the beautiful mosque. My glasses are still slightly fogged. Men in pants and button-down shirts with batons drag a man wearing a red T-shirt, facedown on the concrete, leaving a trail of blood a darker red than his shirt. His black hair is gelled into a deep side part. He got up this morning and took his shower and shaved and gelled his hair to the side. And decided on the red T-shirt.
Then another is being dragged facedown, then two more, then more. I think someone spots us, because the stringer has shoved me into one of the alleys that wind around the mosque and we keep moving.
Days later, near the border, law enforcement politely locks us in a room for the better part of a day for having come to town without “license.” They then proceed to beat the crap out of our photographer—another stringer who’s a pillar of our bureau—and the driver. I watch. Because that’s what we do. We watch. The photographer looks straight at me, silently warning me to keep my mouth shut. I try to say something. I decide instead to keep my mouth shut. They never touch me.
The photographer is religious. A devout Muslim father of two who drags me from my mattress to sleep in his room, closer to him, for my own safety. A brother. The kind we patronize with our benevolent cultural relativism. He doesn’t want anyone to know, so we don’t tell anyone. We don’t tell anyone, and we don’t write about it, and we don’t byline our stories, and we are driven back to Damascus by the now-silent driver.
In Damascus, around the time my cousin is dying with his wife and baby boy and the dog in Canada, I accidentally call Michel Samaha, former Lebanese minister and friend of the Assads. There’s a number scribbled on a piece of paper on my desk. I assume, wrongly, that my boss has finally secured a Syrian SIM card. I instead dial Michel Samaha. I call my boss to wail about what I’ve done. He says to meet him and Michel Samaha at 12:30 a.m. in the lobby of a hotel. Shortly before 1:00 a.m. at the hotel, I spot a foreign correspondent for a TV network just leaving a meeting with him, a man with a south-of-Beirut beach club tan and good hair who somehow looks even less human in real life.
Michel Samaha will soon be arrested in Lebanon for plotting bombings, but now, at the hotel, he’s just noticed my name and taken a liking to me because he knows my ’ammo, the one whose son has just died, from the party, the Kataeb or Phalange or however you call them in English, back in the day. This is how we get an interview the next day, because he knows my boss. He knows my uncle. I don’t say much. I particularly keep my mouth shut on the subject of the party and its history. Our history. My history. Now is not the time, as they say back home. It’s never really been the time.
In Bahrain, at the start of the 2011 protests, the imam asks me if I’m related to Sheikh Mohammad Yazbek of the other party, Hezbollah. Lebanon is very small, I say, and we are all family one way or another. The imam takes us to the interview we have been trying to secure, and after a couple of hours of questions—as always, both asking and being asked—I ask for a T-shirt to take home to my friend, a Baghdad correspondent who has asked for the protester T-shirt from Bahrain. A European journalist, who was also at the interview taking notes, looks at me, wide-eyed, and gives a little gasp to indicate, I suppose, that I am not being professional. That it is unprofessional to carry the personal over into the professional. That she has no clue what the man actually said, other than what I or the photographer have translated for her, is lost on her. I’ve since stopped translating, both voluntarily and/or upon command. I’m told I’m not so collegial anymore. Dictatorships are built on likability. Likability matters.
I told Beydaa’ I was born in Amerka. I took a boat once when I was little, going toward war and not away from it. It worked out fine. Safe passage, as they say. I don’t remember any of it, no matter how hard I try, but it was the summer of 1985. The question of what in New Jersey would make war seem the better option for a twentysomething-year-old woman and her child remains unanswered. I’ve stopped asking.
I think we docked at the same port Judith’s kids had departed from. We spent the summer in the mountains up north, where Jacob begot Judith and Assad’s troops would later burn their home—my home, maybe—to the ground. Sometime later in 1985, my mother and I drove through the mountains of Lebanon, across the border to Syria, Assad’s Syria, and waited there. Then we flew back to Newark. I don’t know the details. I don’t remember it ever happening. I didn’t see Syria again for more than two decades.
Aylan Kurdi was wearing a red T-shirt when he washed up dead on a beach in Turkey. The world saw Aylan Kurdi, age three, after he was dead. Only for a moment, but still, we saw. And we felt good about ourselves for having seen Aylan Kurdi, Syrian, Kurdish, age three. Aylan was kind of light skinned and not uncomfortably skinny. Also, you couldn’t see his face, which is always useful, to not see the eyes. Yemenis are generally very skinny and generally, although not exclusively, browner and therefore much more difficult to see. Perhaps it’s not that no one sees them so much as no one really looks at them, with their skinny dead babies.
Another Yemeni baby died today. More than one, and in this case “baby” is inaccurate. This one was either a fetus or a preemie, but you couldn’t tell for sure from the picture. It might have been expelled from its mother’s womb. We really try to figure it out but we can’t tell. Do you call a body an “it,” anyway? We do, in our air-conditioned newsroom.
The photo was deemed too graphic to publish, so I will describe it here. There’s no need for a graphic-content warning because it’s just words. Nice and linear and concise and in English. I don’t know the baby’s name, because the baby might not have had a name because the baby might not have been born, and anyway it’s bad luck to say the name before birth.
The baby is as small as the medic’s outstretched hands. It fits neatly into the palms of his outstretched hands, except for the nubby little arms, which flap down from the fleshy part of his palms. The baby is burned to what would be described as a crisp. The little burned arm nubs are exceptionally flappy. It is a burned, flappy little Yemeni almost-human, small enough to fit in the outstretched palms of the medic’s hands. The nubs flap behind my eyelids every night for a week.
We don’t publish the picture. It’s too graphic, and people are too sensitive. Those of us who count as people, with sensibilities.
At a bar in Beirut once, right after the war—the 2006 one—a photographer is tacking his pictures of a burning Eiffel Tower to the wall. Torino, the tiny bar with the red lights. He tells me about hostile environment training, and about how it’s not whether you make the right decision, it’s how fast you can make decisions. Good journalists decide on the spot. I can’t decide anything on the spot. What’s real and what’s not real and what this story is actually about, and what’s mine and what’s been forced into me and what my tongue is and if I even have one. Outside the field, I can’t decide anything at all, on the spot or in hindsight. If I am in love and whether I hate my work and should I explode or just give up. The photographer writes the name of a woman down on the back of one of his burning Eiffel Tower Polaroids. Two years later, that woman becomes my first bureau chief, through no connection to the photographer. Life is strange that way.
The bartender at Torino begs me to make peace with my father, whom no one has seen in years. He is handsome, and intelligent, and patient, the bartender with the messenger bag. He brings levity to life. Connection to a city, a world, that was never really mine. Years spent coming to accept that I don’t know what it’s like to sleep in the malja’ (bomb shelter), and I don’t know what it’s like to get stuck at school for a week because your parents can’t cross over, and I don’t know what it’s like to pee in a Nido can, are soon over. I can’t stomach the powdered milk or the sight of the red Nido can. All it takes is fifteen minutes as a journalist in Syria for the narrative to shift. Now I know more. Fifteen minutes for their entire childhoods.
The bartender is part Syrian, long estranged from an abusive Lebanese father. When his father died, he cried for days at his grave. He asked him out loud for forgiveness.
“Don’t wait until you’re at his grave.”
I buried my father a long time ago, I remind him, and I don’t need forgiveness. But I do. I need forgiveness. Every day. Because complicit does not begin to describe it. To write from, and in, that same pipeline that disfigured my people, my history, my land, my family, to write in the very language and for the very people who did it, which is also your language and who are also your people, and to do it so that you are liked, so that you are tagged, to be popular because your brand is your currency. To sell out every minute of every day, and to be thanked for your part in our very disfiguration. To be willingly complicit in this, in the fact that my tax dollars fund the wheels on the planes bombing the babies of my people. I need forgiveness every day. I need it, from little Ali and Beydaa’, because this job is really ultimately all about us and our needs. Because when I stepped away for a minute, to leave our world and go back to school, it was like someone had turned the lights out and I was just standing there, in the dark, waiting for an end to something that was already dead.
The blue-eyed photographer and I are in Riyadh, backstage at the 2018 Arab Fashion Week. It’s my increasingly not-so-secret ambition to ditch journalism, ditch academia, and become an aesthetician like my aunt, the youngest of the four whom Judith left behind. Except I hate social media, which apparently is career suicide for both journalists and makeup artists.
Cameras are banned at this fashion week. We’ve smuggled our cameras in beneath the abayas, and in one large backpack, thanks to the Italian charm of the blue-eyed photographer. Blue eyes go a long, long way where we’re from. Toni said it all in 1969, and there’s not much to add.
My sister gifts me a bracelet engraved by hand with a line from Beloved, but I cannot wear it and I never wear it, and I make no secret of it. “Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother,” it reads, which is what I always tell her, but I’m old, not grown, and not a mother. I cannot bear the sight of the beautiful silver words. So I leave it on the nightstand at my mother’s house for her to wear, except she doesn’t because my sister had it made especially for me. So it just sits there, looking at me every time I spend the night in my childhood bed, acutely aware that I’m nowhere near motherhood.
“Did you check your phone?” The photographer’s blue eyes look up from the lens, red with anger. Grief. I’ve seen that look. I check my phone. Abdullah al-Qadry is dead. Our stringer. Husband, son, father of a baby. Nearly decapitated in Yemen. Thankfully, someone later says, not on assignment for us. Thankfully.
In Philly, years earlier, my cousin calls me one January afternoon and asks if I’ve checked my Facebook. I never want to check my Facebook. “Did you at least read the Times today?” But I stopped reading the English news the minute I stepped away from the field. Exasperated, she tells me Leila is dead, Leila Alaoui, an al-Qaeda bullet in Burkina Faso. Two weeks after I last saw her in Beirut.
I left the field once, for almost five years, because I didn’t understand anything anymore, and because at heart I have always suspected I’m not really a journalist. I can’t remember most of the five years. The fog hasn’t really ever lifted. I try to explain to my therapist that it’s not trauma, or post-trauma, or post-traumatic stress, although it’s probably a disorder, that the mind can actually bear this world. Maybe we are always a little bit depressed. Maybe sometimes it’s not just war. It’s the rest of the world that leaves you traumatized.
And maybe there is no possible way to tell the stories we should. To pretend they are something other than stories. I am waiting to go to Yemen, but you don’t have to go anywhere anymore to be covering your beat. Plenty of great work gets done from a distance, my boss reminds me, and we need that distance. Because we’re not far enough away.
Ali Abdullah Saleh is killed and Sana’a collapses, again. Our stringers are trapped. Again.
I call a contact, a dear friend, to make sure she is okay. For the first time in a year, she loses it. She saw a child scoop water up from the side of the road and drink it because people can’t afford to buy water. A camp for the internally displaced—who, if their ports weren’t under blockade, would have boarded boats and turned into refugees, but for now they are IDPs, internally displaced persons—is bombed. A boat of Ethiopian and Somali refugees is spotted by the Yemeni coast guard, so the smugglers throw people into the water, and probably stomp on their heads to keep them down. Another boat capsizes. She loses it. The next month, when we meet in person, she thanks me for my dedication, which took the form of using my phone, paid for by my company, from an air-conditioned flat in a high-rise in Dubai. She thanks me for my stories.
I don’t know where little Ali and Beydaa’ are now, but Mazhar is dead and Abdullah is dead and Leila is dead and Baraa is dead. My cousin Joe is dead, and Ramzi is also my cousin and he is also dead. Mohammed has no eyes or left arm anymore, and the other Mohammed is in jail.
I am in Dubai now, and my business card says I cover Yemen. I am in Dubai now, being thanked for caring, and six years after little Ali put on his little red T-shirt that morning, the room starts its lilting, comforting spin again.