THIS POST IS NOT FOR REPRODUCTION OR REPUBLISHING.
Must have been around the turn of the century, maybe the 15th century...the medieval ages of Ze Lebanon - despite its shining flashy modern stylish plastic...it's mass production of sun dried bullshit, elevated into monuments of reverence...
Never really liked Ze Lebanese, apart from a handful, like one handful, it's a small country with a small people...each Lebanese is one big fish in a tiny putrid pond...and boy does it stink.
Don't get me wrong, the country itself is beautiful, well sort of - sea, mountains, tall pine trees and the occasional good plate of hummus and falafel, but then Ze Lebanese are not the inventors of any of it --some they inherited from way back and the rest - nature, belongs to God alone.
I am not too sure how this had come about - it just popped in my head and I remember it all too well...I am not sure why it has resurfaced to my memory, I who had believed it to be long dead and well buried...
Yes it was in Ze Lebanon, somewhere outside its ravaged, trying hard to revamp itself capital...a capital torn apart by the same mass producers of sun dried bullshit.
Yes it was there, somewhere South...
Why have the dead re-surfaced ? They have nothing more to tell me, they said it all ...but maybe I have something to tell them, because I have not said it all...as a matter of fact I had said very little...and now they will hear it just as it was and just as it is supposed to be. I owe it to myself, having given it my best shots in Ze Lebanon...
She greeted me, with a solemn look, dressed in black...it must have been Ashura, I heard much shouting and chest and head beatings on my way to the village...some village lost in the 15th century...
I assumed she wore black because she was mourning Ashura - I paid no attention, these things were unimportant to me...
After all half of my family was married to their sect. It was never an issue, we never thought along those lines...
But now in retrospect, it seems that they did all along...maybe not so in Iraq, not before 2003, and definitely not before 1991...but not so in Ze Lebanon, they are still ideological virgins refusing to sleep except with the ideologically turbaned ones...this I later found out...
I was unaware of the extent of their clan, tribe, sect-like mentality...later on I discovered how Jewish-like they were, are...
Later it made all the more sense why the Jews, politics confounded, were supporters of the Shiites in Iraq....they belonged to the same tribe...they belonged to the same closed system of caste and sect, they shared a common complex, a common inferiority/superiority complex, a common paranoia, a common neurosis of persecution that they would relieve themselves from and absolve by either self flagellation, self tormenting and lamentations or by inflicting their own mental sickness, their mental disease and lash it out on others...
But first I had to experience it, first hand...a preliminary taste of it, virgin like, in Ze Lebanon at the turn of the 15th century... and only later on, have a full taste of it, in Iraq ...but by then I had lost my (ideological) virginity...
Yes, it must have been in this village, that looked so peaceful when everyone was asleep...that looked so peaceful when the electricity would go out and all would fall back into silence, except maybe for an odd gasoline lamp or an old candle burning in the obscurity to the sound of crickets...
It could have been a pleasant village to stay longer in...maybe set up some form of residence...grow a couple of roots, un pied à terre in the Lebanese hills...had it not been for the black...the black clad women...and what they hid beneath their veils...
She opened the door, and stood there...a bulky round faced woman, with small narrow piercing eyes. I felt his hand on the small of my back pushing me through...as if to tell me "greet her respectfully, in awe, just the way I do..." I put my hand out and seeing that she did not take it, I moved closer and gave her the traditional two kisses on the cheek...her cheeks felt cold, despite the Summer heat...
So it's you, she said...
Yes it is me I replied...
You chose well... she added - referring to her son...
By then, I was not sure anymore, if I had chosen well...by then I knew in my heart of hearts that it was a big mistake...a monumental error, but what I had not known is that it was just a foretaste of what was to unfold later on in my life...
Step in with your right foot - she said, it was almost like an order...and she looked down at my feet making sure I followed her orders...I stepped in with my left.
I entered the living room, it was parsimoniously furnished, all the shutters were down - we keep them down, we don't want the neighbors prying she said...we are well known in the village. The place felt like a tomb...is this where I was going to be eventually buried, I thought to myself...
She disappeared for a long time, as if to mull over her next steps...her next "domesticate her into her place" steps...
He took on the voice of his mother, and said with firmness - go and change, you should have never worn this dress, your arms are bare...
This time I was taken aback...I had not foreseen this coming...there was nothing in the time that I knew him that indicated any of this....
I am fine in this dress
Go and change
Later, there's no one around here, now
I guess I was hoping that someone be around here now, a savior of some sort...
I sipped my coffee silently, felt it like mud stuck in my throat, I gulped the glass of water, the only freshness available...
The mother hardly spoke, she looked as if she was attending a funeral...my white printed dress contrasted with her black...the son was silent too. Someone, something must have died...
Take her to her bedroom - he complied.
The floor cracked, the walls were thin, and the door hardly closed...it had to stay open...at least a little...enough for...
The bedroom, what a bedroom. -- a double bed and that's it. I looked at the double bed, bare, surrounded by nothing, it looked like a hospital room for two, more like a large bunk bed in a prison cell...
I was taken by this strong urge to wash myself...I had already taken a shower a couple of hours earlier, but I need to step into water...into something alive...
I went back to the bedroom, opened the shutters and looked at the green hills, I spotted an Israeli plane hovering above -- a common occurrence, it left a white trail of smoke as if it was inscribing something in Hebrew in the sky above, next to God...
Further down, I saw a well, and kids playing around it...they were catching beetles, tying its legs and flying it around like colored kites...
I sat on the bed, held my head in my hands and started pondering a way out...like a prisoner examining every crack in the prison's wall and devising a way of escape...
It was time for lunch, I was hungry, I needed nourishment, any live food, anything to pacify that hollow pit in my stomach...
I walked towards the kitchen, I overheard her say to him :
Is that all you could come up with after all these years of absence, a Sunni ! A Jew would have been easier on me...
I froze mid way...he said nothing.
His brothers were married to foreigners, one was French, the other American, none of them converted to Islam, none of them spoke Arabic or even tried to learn it, and none of them wanted to visit that dump of a country called Ze Lebanon...
I remember meeting one of his brothers - he was like a poodle with his Western wife...she ordered him about like a dog, like a donkey, and he loved it...maybe she reminded him of his mother...without the black...
I pretended I heard nothing...after all I was cut off from the world in this black village, adorned with pictures of turbaned creeps and black and yellow flags...
I guess my mistake I was born a Sunni instead of a Jew in that village of South Lebanon.
I could hardly swallow anything...the hollow pit in my stomach felt suddenly full...filled with ze Lebanese sun dried shit from the South...
I needed to kill time...the day seemed so long, again like in a prisoner's cell...and again like a prisoner I killed time, by forcing myself to sleep...that was my last escape...my last resort...
After sunset, it must have been 7 or 8 pm, he nudges me...
Wake up, my mother wants you
Give me time to change
No, she wants you now.
I was wearing some white cotton slacks and a t.shirt...the slacks were slightly transparent, so was the t.shirt. After all I was in "my" bedroom...
I dragged myself out of bed, as if going to an interrogation session...it was hot and humid and I felt my throat scorching dry, as if I had just crossed the desert...
The sparely furnished living room was pitch black, another electricity cut, and the shutters were still down...I saw nothing, except her black shadow...
Her voice sounded different though...she sounded a little nicer...the kind of nice that gives goose bumps, the kind of slimy nice...
Come and sit her dear - she said,
I could not see her face, but I felt as if she was feigning a smile through clenched teeth...
Here where ? I see nothing, it's too dark...
I felt his grip on my wrist leading me to a chair, a plastic chair...
There was total silence...I felt fear gripping me, gripping my legs, my stomach...I sat in that chair, held on to it, placed my feet firmly on the floor, and breathed deeply...waiting for my final verdict...
Suddenly, a neon lamp, operated by batteries, was flashed at me...the first thing I noticed is that the tacky white plastic chair was placed in the center of the room...and I was sitting on it...
I rubbed my eyes from the intensity of the light, I had just gotten out of bed, my hair was all over the place, my clothes see through, and there was this light flashing on me...
Then I heard her imperious mtawleh voice (accent from South Lebanon)
Here she is, have a look at her...
I heard a few giggles coming from the far end of the room...another battery operated lamp was lit, and I saw a circle of women, there must have been around 20 of them, seated around me, but far away, and here I was in the center, in the middle...on that white plastic interrogation chair.
They were all veiled, all dressed in black, apart from one or two, who wore colored veils. I remember one, it was a dirty beige with bottle green flowers, as tacky at the chair I was seated on...
Every single cousin, aunt, relative, neighbor came to check me out -- check that Sunni...
A strange calm fell over me, the calm of the dead..I looked around me and saw the sneering faces...I understood then, that this was all planned in advance ...to humiliate me and make sure I never set foot in South Lebanon ever again...
Years passed...the same happened all over again, but on a much grander and uglier scale...everything was planned to make sure I never set foot in Iraq, ever again....
