Fw: Counterpunch:"Do People Know How Much We Hurt?"
laurence
This is a gripping piece written by Najla Said, daughter of the late
Edward Said. Having met Najla several times, I had realized that she had
inherited her father's beautiful features and elegant frame, after
reading this piece it becomes obvious that that is not all she has
inherited from him. A remarkable young woman.
S.
July 22-23, 2006
*Do People Know How Much We Hurt? *
*By NAJLA SAID*
*http://www.counterpunch.org/said07222006.html*
How do I even start this? How do I write about my Beirut? My heartbreak,
my home, my safety, my loss. again.
I suppose I just start.
I have experienced true terror a handful of times. The first was in
1983. The first time I evacuated Beirut. We had gone to visit my jiddo
Emile, my teta Hilda, as we did every summer. Just after we arrived,the
airport was shut down, Israeli soldiers were everywhere, the mountains
were filling with smoke. We spent the next week in the staircase of our
building as shells fell around us. My brother Wadie was almost hit by
shrapnel.
My father, Edward, was in Switzerland. He knew we were in danger. I had
no idea he wasn’t with us because he was Palestinian. I didn’t
understand. Although I was born in 1974, I never knew about the war
until the summer of ’82 -- the first summer we didn’t go. The summer we
spent in Illinois. I did cartwheels in the living room trying to get
Mommy and Daddy’s attention. But all they did was watch the news and eat
nuts and look worried. I wish I’d known how my Mommy’s heart was
breaking. I know now.
We got on the boat and fled to Cyprus leaving my family behind. The boat
was filled with pilgrims going to Mecca. I didn’t know what they were. I
didn’t understand. I didn’t know Muslim or Christian or Jew. I didn’t
know anything. I knew fear and I knew confusion. I knew the sound of
bombs. An inexplicable sound if you haven’t felt it before, for it is a
sound you feel and not a sound you hear. It is TERRIFYING. Your body
shakes. You feel helpless and you cry, that’s what happens. No sound
effect can really replicate what it feels like when they’re real.
I never thought I’d hear that sound again. I went into my Mommy’s bed
the night before we left. I was scared. The balcony door was open
because there was no A.C., no electricity. As the curtains fluttered
behind me I shivered and shook in my non-existent sleep. I felt the
breeze behind my back and knew for certain the bombs would get me as I
lay there vulnerable. But I was frozen in terror. Shivering and shaking,
teeth chattering.
I wanted to move to the other side, switch places with Mommy, have her
wrap her arms around me and keep me safe -- but then she would feel the
bombs on her back, I reasoned, and she would die. I can’t lose mommy, I
thought. I’d rather die than lose Mommy. I’m so so so scared.
I wrote about that experience and it got me into Princeton. Wadie, my
brother, did too. I didn’t see Beirut again till 1992. I was 18. It was
awful, destroyed. Where were the beaches, the fruits, the vegetables,
the clean water, the fun, the bikinis, the people the joy? I remember
feeling like I had walked into a cobweb-ridden home, frozen in time. I
cried.
Each year after, though, I went back. It got better and better. It
became home again. All the things I loved: the cucumbers and apricots
and watermelon and sunshine and beaches and laughter and love and warmth
and family and perseverance and resilience and strength and beauty and
joy. They were there, and they continued to come back, along with the
people who had fled, stronger than ever, year after year.
The most wonderful summer ever was twenty years after the scary escape.
In 2003: Mommy, Daddy, me, Wadie, his wife Jennifer, all of us were in
Beirut laughing, playing fighting, eating, drinking, beaching -- being a
family. Back home. My parents originally fell in love in Beirut. In the
late 60s/early70s. In fact, Daddy who is so so so revered as a “great
arab,” actually rediscovered the Middle East he had lost as a child
through Lebanon, through Mommy, who is, as I love to say, 3000% Lebanese.
And so we buried Daddy there, 4 months later. In Brummana, in the
mountains next to Jiddo’s home. In the Quaker family cemetery. That’s
where he wanted to be.
It was terror that came back to me when Daddy died, and, oddly,
beautifully, it was Lebanon that saved me from it. It was the same
quaking shaking shivering feeling I had had in the bed with mommy 20
years earlier. When Jenn walked into my bedroom and said we were going
“to go say goodbye” I fell to the ground with the same feeling I had
then, in Beirut, in ‘83, convulsing shaking crying gasping.
But the beauty was that when Daddy died, Lebanon became what I had. All
I had. My safety, security, my home, my family, my everything. My good
times, my laughter, my healing, my wholeness, my fun. My roots. My
security...That’s the only word I can write.
And now this summer. Evacuated again. Throwing up shaking fearing,
hurting crying. Again. And again the feeling I keep having is that
terror. That terror that I had twice before. The feeling that it’s gone,
it’s over.
You summon your courage, your optimism, your humor -- the things that
people love you for -- you decide that tomorrow Beirut will be back,
that you will see Daddy again (oh how I kept turning my brain away from
thoughts of him when he died -- it was too difficult to fathom the
reality) the idea that you will never see something or someone you love
again is unbelievably terrifying when you know really that it’s over,
it’s gone and it’s getting worse every day.
And now I’m here in an internet cafe in Damascus. And what now? This is
what I think of when I think of Arab terror. My terror. Our terror. Do
people know how much we hurt?
/*Najla Said* is a founding member of Nibras, the Arab-American theatre
collective, whose inaugural production, Sajjil (Record) won best
ensemble production at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival.
Najla is an actress, comedian, and writer whose work has appeared in
such publications as Mizna, an Arab-American Literary Journal, and HEEB
magazine. She trained at The Shakespeare Lab at the Public Theatre and
The Actors Center in New York, and graduated magna cum laude from
Princeton University with a degree in comparative literature and a
certificate in Theatre and Dance. This spring she won ecstatic reviews
for her starring role in the Seattle Repertory Theatre’s presentation of
Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire. She can be reached through
//najl...@gmail.com/ <mailto:najl...@gmail.com>