Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Saturday, October 16, 2004 This is the final installment in a five-part series about my father-in-law.
5. The Ambience of Words
“I may have a new Arabic student,” my father-in-law told us, after dinner. “It’s a woman. She called up other day and said she had heard that I teach. She’s coming next week.” He has one regular student who studies with him each Wednesday, and another student who is “on leave”: he’s a minister who is currently in the Sudan doing relief work.
“Grandpa, how would you explain to someone how to pronounce an ‘ayn’?” M. asked. “Is it different than a glottal stop in Hebrew?
“Oh yes,” he said, “In Arabic you have to open your throat and…” he demonstrated, and asked her to repeat; he demonstrated again, a little smugly; he loves being able to do things that are difficult for us.
M. came into the kitchen where I was cleaning up, frustrated but amused at all the camel-noises they’d been making. An “ayn” appears in the middle of her last name. “Oh, it’s nothing, she whispered, “I’m just trying to learn the right way to pronounce our own freaking name.”
Up until two years ago, my father-in-law was still preaching and conducting services – weddings, memorials - and filling in in the summer for local Unitarian congregations. He was an enormously gifted preacher and public speaker who never spoke from anything but a few notes written on index cards. One Monday he told us, “I lost my train of thought yesterday. I really got mixed up. I don’t think they knew it, but it’s never happened before. It’s time to stop.”
We went with him to his last engagement, in a small, wealthy, rural Vermont town where he had been filling in for a month. He told the congregation it was his last sermon, and preached well, although we could tell he was struggling a bit with his emotions. Although a few of those present had known him for many years, most of them couldn’t have known what an occasion that really was. And few of them, too, knew anything of the journey of his life, from his childhood in Damascus, Syria, listening to folk stories and poetry under the rooftop grapevines of the family house, to preaching in this white upper-crusty, old-money conclave of northern New England.
In his later years he seemed to try to recapture that remembered ambience. His balcony was covered with flowering plants, and he loved to sit there, cracking pumpkin seeds in his teeth, watching his beloved hummingbirds. He grew parsley and green onions for taboulleh, radishes for their hot leaves, tomatoes for their color; and rose geraniums for their scent. Inside the apartment, he read Arabic literature and poetry, and kept up with the press so that he could discuss his favorite subjects: foreign affairs and Middle Eastern politics. I’d watch him during our discussions, as he inveighed against Bush and Blair, incredulous that this man had been born during the Ottoman Empire. As a child in Damascus, he remembers seeing Lawrence of Arabia ride into the city; his grandfather had been present at that famous meeting Lawrence had with the Arab elders and tribal leaders before the Western powers intervened and began to change the map of the Middle East.
An avowed intellectual who keeps a small statue of Socrates next to his chair, he believes that the highest profession is that of philosopher-poet, surrounded by disciples and students, eschewing the needs of the flesh except for food, ideally provided by uncomplaining, attractive wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law. There are many inconsistencies. He’s always been disdainful of games, of sports, of organized leisure, while praising “honest work; in his parlance, “decent” ( as in “they’re very decent people”) is synonymous with “simple and hardworking” and it is both praise and put-down. He holds rather Tolstoyian notions about farming and gardening; the family could barely keep themselves together one Sunday when he waxed eloquent in his sermon about the joys of working in his vegetable garden, which he had gotten other people to plant, weed, harvest and cook from; his pleasure was in “inspecting” it several times each day. Physically he has always been given to frequent napping, and a habit of dropping books, papers and clothes in piles next to his chairs where they lie until someone else picks them up. At 88, he decided to mow his lawn for the first time in his life “just to see what it felt like”. He borrowed a push mower from his brother, took it for two passes across the lawn, and felt the chest pains that precipitated his bypass surgery a week later.
From his armchair, though, and the bed which he says is "heaven", he now conjures the scents and sights and sounds of his youth, and is never happier than when we draw him out and ask him for his memories. He’s spotty about certain recent events and people, but his long-term memory is nearly flawless, and it includes huge quantities of Arabic verse, as well as songs and hymns, that he must have learned by heart seventy, eighty, even ninety years ago. This ability to recite is one manifestation of the vast difference in cultures and time that he's traveled: he grew up in a culture still based on oral tradition and memorization of texts, most notably the Qu'ran. In Christian circles like my father-in-law's family, people memorized and recited scriptural passages, hymns, and the great works of Arab poetry, as well as fables and proverbs.
“How do you begin teaching Arabic to someone?” M. asked. She has studied more of the language than any of us, and readily testifies to how difficult it is.
“I begin by trying to explain the ambience of the words,” he said. We all looked perplexed. “You see,” he said, “every word in Arabic is surrounded by meaning; it refers to a whole constellation of experiences that are particular to that world, to that way of life…All of that is contained within the language.”
“Take the word ‘happiness’,” M. said.
“What is happiness to an Arab?” he countered. “That is where you have to start. You have to see the desert, smell the bougainvillea…” He shut his eyes and began to recite two couplets in Arabic; it was beautiful.
“al Moutanabbi,” he said, opening his eyes. He raised his hand and punctuated each noun in the air as he translated:
Horses, and nights, and the desert know me – and the sword, the spear, paper, and the pen.
“Wonderful!” He shook his head, smiling with pleasure. “He was quite the fellow. A great poet, and a warrior too. His caravan was attacked by bandits and he was going to flee, but one of his companions reminded him of these lines he had written, and challenged him.” He growled, shaking the words like a rabbit in the jaws of a wolf: “‘Aren’t you also a fighter who praised the sword and the spear?’ So he rode into the battle – and was killed.” He grinned, and shrugged: c'est la vie.
He shut his eyes and recited the Arabic again. I watched the bones of his thinning face move as he spoke; his voice was a strong as ever, and his silken white hair curled at the back of his neck. The three of us exchanged astonished glances. For us, the remarkable moment was becoming fixed in time and space and memory - but he was flying, gone somewhere we'd never been.
Thursday, October 14, 2004 This is part four of a series of posts about my 95-year-old father-in-law.
4. Of Books and Authors
“Don’t mention my book to him,” I told M. as we were getting ready to leave our house that evening. She and I had just spent much of the afternoon “talking writing”, down to the nitty-gritty of paragraphs that she plucked out of my manuscript as she so generously read it.
“Why not?” she asked.
“He doesn’t approve of the subject,” I said.
“You’re kidding!”
“No, really. He thinks it’s awful, so I don’t talk about it. I don’t think he knows I’m writing it, although some of his friends at the home know, because they're Episcopalians. We can talk about your book instead.” She raised her eyebrows, but we left it at that.
When my father-in-law retired from his long career as a teacher of Arabic and Middle Eastern studies, he continued his work as a minister but devoted himself more and more to writing. During the next two decades, starting about when I first met him, he wrote three full-length books: a life of Jesus, of Moses, and of Mohammad. They were all “creative non-fiction”, and written in a style somewhere between the flowery prose of a native Arabic storyteller, and a scholarly work of theology. And they were creative and decidedly unconventional, rather than religious, based on his extensive knowledge of the Middle East and his imaginative speculations about what the "real" life of these figures - all of whom he admires irrevently but ardently - might have been like. As a result, neither the popular book market nor the religious press would touch them. This was the greatest disappointment of my father-in-law’s life. For one thing, he didn't understand how the publishing market worked in the modern western world, nor would he listen to the advice of editors, agents, other writers. He had expected, I think, to make a big splash once he finally wrote down the ideas that had regaled generations of adoring pupils and Unitarian parishioners, but it wasn’t to be. He kept writing until he was 92 or so, and to this day, his dream is to get his major works published – but he is generous enough to want others to be successful, especially his granddaughter.
Before dinner, he grilled her about her work. How was it going? Did she work on her writing everyday? How was she supporting herself? She surreptitiously rolled her eyes at us before telling him that she had some free-lance writing work that paid the bills; sensing that more information was needed, she even told him how much she charged per hour. Later that evening she said she hadn’t known what to say: “He thinks I’m irresponsible, doesn’t he? So I told him I had free-lance work that pays a lot – he doesn’t know I’ve only billed one week's worth all year!”
“Great!” he said. “That’s a lot per hour! So you must be doing all right.” M. shot us a helpless glance. “And your writing is going well.”
“It really is. I think I’m actually going to finish it, finally.”
“Terr-ific! I always thought we had a book in the family.”
“Beth has a book.” Oh-oh. M. screwed up her face in apology. I waved my hand, signalling her it was all right.
“She is borrowed,” he said, affectionately but decisively. That was all right; it’s always been clear to me that in this family (and that generation) blood rules all: children are children, and the people they marry, no matter how much you might like them, are something else. “And besides,” he added, “she doesn’t talk to me about it. She thinks I don’t approve.” Another helpless glance from M. “But you will make us all proud,” he said to her.
She went into the study to retrieve the last pages of his manuscript. He turned to us and quietly pronounced his verdict, with a pleased face: “I think she’s really coming along.” I cut up an apple and two oranges and split each doughnut into four pieces, and put them all on a plate with a bunch of grapes. My father-in-law, who loves sweets but is rigorous about following his diet since he was diagnosed with diabetes, selected a couple of orange sections.
The manuscript that was printing was a long story (“It’s a novella, Grandpa”) written about ten years ago as a semi-autobiographical memoir and social commentary. He had “lost” it in his computer and my husband had “found” it for him the week before; he wanted to give it to another resident who had expressed interest. Our niece walked toward her grandfather, holding out the pages.
I spent a chunk of the afternoon, following lunch with my father-in-law (ohmigod - I had brought lunch, but he insisted we help him eat food out of his refrigerator - so far I haven't had to call 911), at the eye doctor. Now my pupils are recovering just enough so that I can see the screen.
I had been having more and more trouble with my contact lenses (I've worn contacts since 1974) and had consequently been wearing my glasses more frequently. Some of that was due to being in the city, where it's less trouble and more comfortable to wear glasses, but mostly due to all the computer work and long hours of writing. But the more I wore my glasses, the worse my vision got as my corneas changed shape back to "normal" - whatever that would be after all these years of lens wear. In fact it was so bad and my eyes hurt so much I was worried something else was wrong. But no - the doctor reassured me that there's no medical problem, just an optical one, including an astigmatism that the lenses had completely masked. And I got to see a fabulous computer map of my corneas, courtesy of a far-out corneal topography machine that I'd never been subjected to before...and listen to an entertaining Terry Gross interview with Howard Dean while my pupils dilated.
But it's back to glasses only for me, for quite a while: two new pairs, for distance and reading, until things settle down. Funny - it used to be a vanity issue for me. Now I'm just dying to be comfortable and able to work.
In the study, the printer began turning out pages. I said that dinner was ready, and everyone settled into a chair with their plates of food – the only “dining” table has been a repository for books, papers, mail, and photographs as long as my father-in-law has lived in his apartment; we didn’t even consider clearing it off. For a while nobody spoke; we were all hungry. “Does he like wara einab?” my father-in-law asked me, for the hundredth time, nodding in his son’s direction.
“Nooo,” I said.
He shook his head. ‘Does he like mujadarra?”
Again, no. But M. spoke up. “I love it, Grandpa. I eat it all the time.” He immediately brightened, and waved his fork in the air. “I love it!” he exclaimed. “For some reason that’s all I want to eat these days.” He made a face and growled: “They don’t know how to cook anything downstairs. It’s all tasteless and overcooked. I told them, ‘Why don’t you go to the Chinese restaurant and see how they cook vegetables?’ It doesn’t take a PhD. But did they do it? No.” A big shrug and another wave of the fork, dismissing the thought. “But mujadarra! Ah! I make it every few days and eat it with bread. It’s so wonderful! Have I told you the story about how I started to love mujadarra?”
“Yes,” I said, “You’ve told us, but probably M. hasn’t heard it.” In fact he tells us this story almost every week, in conjunction with telling us how he has lost his appetite and the food in the home is tasteless, but this time we heard not only the core but an embellished version around it. Mujadarra is a simple, peasant dish made of lentils and rice cooked together, with fried onions.
“When I was a boy I had been sent from Damascus to boarding school in Beirut, and as part of my studies, when I was about fifteen, I was sent by one of my teachers to a village near the border with Palestine.”
He was born in 1911, so this would have been about 1926.
My job was to teach some English to the children in that village. They were Shia Muslims, and the imam of the village refused to allow any girls to go to the school. So the boys were taught by the regular schoolmaster and the girls were taught privately by a woman missionary. I helped teach the boys. There was a beautiful crusader castle nearby, overlooking the sea, and I took them up to it and taught them about what it was and who the crusaders had been.”
J. and I had never heard any of this – neither the Shia part, nor the crusader castle part. This would have been in what is present-day southern Lebanon, where there has historically been a large Shia population. He may have been talking about Beaufort Castle, one of the most famous of the crusader castles, built in 1139 and largely destroyed by the retreating Israeli Occupying Forces in May, 2000, despite the pleas of the Lebanese prime minister.
Then when my teaching stint was over, I took the train back home to Damascus. I didn’t have any food, and I was very hungry. In the same car, across from me, was a peasant family – a woman and her three children. She took out a package and unwrapped it; it was their lunch, and it was mujadarra. Nothing had ever smelled so good! I watched them eat it, and I got hungrier and hungrier for mujadarra, but of course I couldn’t ask them for any.
When I got home my mother asked me, as she always did, what I’d like her to cook for me. I immediately said, “Mujadarra!” She was shocked, because mujadarra was the food of the poor – we didn’t eat it in our house. But I was insistent. “I’m dying for mujadarra!” I said. So she made it for me, and I’ve loved it ever since.
I only remember my Armenian mother-in-law, who also maintained a fairly aristocratic kitchen, making it once, and it was really delicious. But this peasant dish is what my father-in-law craves now.
A less classical spelling of the dish is megadarra. Claudia Roden, in her original Book of Middle Eastern Food (Penguin) writes:
"Here is a modern version of a medieval dish called mujadarra, described by al-Baghdadi as a dish of the poor, and still known as Esau’s favorite… In fact, it is such a great favorite that although it is said to be for misers, it is a compliment to serve it."
"An aunt of mine used to present it regularly to guests with the comment, ‘Excuse the food of the poor!’ – to which the unanimous reply always was, ‘Keep your food of kings and give us megadarra every day!’"
Before we left our own house that evening, M. had said, “You have to help me. My whole history of coming to New England have been these visits where I always tried to do the right thing, but where it would become clear to me that I wasn’t doing the right thing. I always felt like there was some unwritten expectation about what a granddaughter was supposed to do, or how she was supposed to act, but it never got communicated to me. I was supposed to just know my role – but how? How was I supposed to find out? Even now, I have no idea. And it makes my stomach hurt to think about it.”
We laughed, ruefully. “Join the club,” J. said. “That’s the story of my life.”
J. and I have spent more hours discussing this than I can count. What we’ve come to realize is that it’s partly the story of being born into an immigrant family. There are so many unwritten cultural ways and expectations and roles that the parents have brought with them, but the children, growing up here, know nothing about. These things aren’t communicated by the parents or the surrounding native culture, since (as in this case) it may no longer be present, while at the same time the parents are encouraging their children to assimilate. When the native language isn’t taught, another potential key to unlocking the mysteries is unavailable. Yet, the parents continue to have values and expectations that were based on how they grew up. So what the children get are mixed messages, and feelings that, no matter what, they aren’t doing the right thing. What was the key? Where could they find the decoder ring?
It’s sometimes nearly impossible for the parents to articulate the gap, even when confronted. Only in recent years, by asking probing questions, and especially by becoming friends with people from the Middle East, have we begun to unlock the code, to translate the hieroglyphs. For example, my husband started wearing a beard when he was young. His parents, especially his father, hated it. At the time, my husband had thought it was because of the general distaste for “hippies”. But later on – much later – he learned that Muslims in the native country generally wore beards and Christians rarely did; it was one way to distinguish between the religions. His father admitted, only this year, that he had an instinctive reaction against beards because they were worn by the mullahs, and he had had some unhappy encounters, as a child, with mullahs. The time span between his unhappy encounters, and the explanation to my husband, was probably eighty years.
By the same token, these Christian parents had been raised in a society which was largely Muslim and they shared many of the same values and ideas. They had a lifelong aversion to alcohol, and criticized people who drank it. My mother-in-law rarely allowed her neck and arms to show, and was constantly commenting about the immodesty of young American women, to the point where I was careful about what I wore in her presence. My father-in-law astounded us by telling us, not long ago, that his mother always “covered” when she went out into the street – meaning that she wore a veil or scarf over her hair. “Everyone did in those days, Christians and Muslims,” he told us, shrugging. “It was just what you did.”
It was a revelation to finally understand, through knowing Muslim friends and coming to understand Islam much better, that many of my husband’s family’s values and reactions, which had seemed so incomprehensible to their young American children, had been shaped by their immersion in a Muslim society. In a rare moment of unguardedness, my father-in-law said, not entirely joking, “If you speak Arabic, you are Muslim.”
