Mourning and Melancholy

It’s been my experience that Palestinians (at least, Sawahrah, people from Beit Sahour) take weddings and funerals very seriously. Wedding preparations go on for months. There can be up to 6 different wedding-related celebrations per one couple. In short, my people throw down. Unfortunately, there are no weddings during my visit. Instead, much worse, there is a funeral.  My Ammo Anise (precise relationship is confusing) was 86 years old. He married 3 times, fathered 13 children. His body crossed the jisr midday, and was buried in a family plot in the evening. He was shorter than my grandfather, but with the same wily eyes I associate with the Shomali clan.

Since receiving the news of his passing, the family has been caught up in the obligations of the dead. Like weddings, funerals are events unto themselves, with elaborate stages of mourning. Before the burial, mourners spend all day at the deceased’s home, women in one space and men in the other. Though now this tradition is observed because homes are seldom large enough to house all the grievers at once, I think it originated because of some standard gender assumptions: namely, that women’s grief would be huge and crazy, while men, more reserved, would be uncomfortable with these displays of emotion.

During this vigil, mourners bring nonperishable goods to the family’s home, and the family (extended, at this point) serves coffee, tea, cacao with milk, and a soft sweet bread to the visitors. I’ve been to two of these vigils, both held in my parent’s home here in Palestine. For both of these, the women mourned indoors, and the men set up chairs under the dahlias in our front yard. First, for my grandfather, Seedo Farid when I was 10. Seedo Farid was a tall, graceful man who built houses and farmed olive and fackoose fields (cucumber’s more chill cousin). I can’t say I know much about his personality; I only spent time with him thrice before my family moved to Palestine, and by then his health had deteriorated significantly alongside his mental acuity. I remember he favored my cousins, because they lived here. I remember he called me “Kendu” instead of “Mejdu.” I remember trying to catch his lanky frame once, when he attempted to walk from his bed to the Veranda without aid, and was betrayed by those limbs. I couldn’t stop him from falling, but I was tall enough to hold his torso up after he dropped to his knees, my arms under his until someone came to help.

My father came from America from the funeral, and though I knew I needed to be sad, I was ecstatic for my father’s arrival. We had just moved home, and I missed him fiercely. I’ve always been sweet on him, I guess. My father cried as he walked the dirt road from the taxi to my Uncle’s house; he wept openly in the arms of his brothers, my mother. As it has done ever since that day, my father’s tears undid me. He’s gentle, sentimental perhaps to a fault. Selfishly, I want him to be less so, because I can’t bear how distraught he becomes, because I can’t bear how often I’ve been responsible for that sadness.

We sat through a second vigil for my Ammo Fouad, my father’s oldest brother, when I was 13.  For the second, my sister Lemma and I worked kitchen duty, washing Turkish coffee cups only to see them sent out again within minutes. In the corner of the room sat bags of rice, coffee, and sugar. On top of them sat Tony, my sister’s then boyfriend, ignoring the gender separation. He was there, ostensibly, to help and he did, by lightening the mood, mockingly washing out coffee cups with a flick of his thumb.

The vigil persists until the viewing, and picks up again after the burial, for three more days. This third day, il thalith, engenders a church service. You are surrounded, in some cases, for a week, as nearly every person in the city comes to express their grief. On the seventh day, il saba3, a memorial is held. When my granfather and uncle died, we held both these separately. Now, for Ammo Anise, they are being condensed into a day. Both out of a lax of custom, and because of his advanced age and full life. There is one final memorial service, al arbi3een, 40 days after the death. I found out recently that you can decrease the number of days until this service, and therefore break the family’s public mourning period. You simply subtract the number of children the person has had from 40. So for Ammo Anise, the 40 becomes 27. I had a full on laughing fit when I heard about this. It’s so bizarre.

Even if the events are over, the mourning period demands a certain deference. When Ammo Fouad died, we didn’t turn on the TV or radio for 40 days. We didn’t go to celebrations of any sort: weddings, birthdays, baptisms, for a year. At Christmas we didn’t decorate. Mostly, these extreme measures are ignored today. But when someone dies young, you’ll find the traditions resurrected. When Ammo died, we were all so bereft we did it willingly. Well, as willingly as a young girl can when she is informed her birthday party is off.

Ammo Fouad’s death shocked us. We all wept. Hugely, to befit the size of his character, his heart. He was a UN representative who worked in the Congo at the time of his death. He was loud and vulgar, but charmingly so. He knew just how far to push a joke, a person. He smoked Rothman’s, at least a pack a day. Drank whiskey on the rocks hours before his death. My aunt says he knew it was coming and insisted he go out doing what he loved. Every death in my life since then has been shadowed by Ammo Fouad’s. Each new death rekindling an older grief.

Here and now, in the wake of so many lost loved ones, my father’s sadness cloaks the house again. He will not observe the mourning traditions as he did for his brother, but he will carry the added heaviness daily. And for him, we’ll carry it as well. Here and now, in the land my father wishes to buried, we all step a little more softly.

gilded girlhood memories

My mother’s house (a designation my father finds troubling) has two living rooms. Many Arab homes have this more formal space, used to entertain guests, or generally indicate a family’s wealth. When we were little, my mother took this second space very seriously, perhaps because our means were meager at the time.  The Salon (as it was called) occupied the largest room of the house. My grandfather, my father’s father, built this house, and the Salon is one of its most elegant elements: the outer wall is rounded, and features four windows. There is a separate entrance to it from the Veranda (porch/balcony). It’s capacious interior held all of our birthday dances, as well as the pre-ceremony wedding celebration for my sister Lubnah. I see myself in that room as I was at 14, 14 or so years ago. I am wearing a short pastel floral dress with a fitted bodice, a skirt that flares out. The sweetheart neckline is laced white, my tan shoulders a stark contrast. My body is the body of what I imagine is an “average” 14-year-old girl: tiny waist, small shapely breasts, trim arms and calves. As anyone here could tell you, I was a vision, an angel, a toy doll.

The round room (what I have really always thought of as the ballroom) is no longer the Salon. Stripped of its grandeur, the ballroom feels naked and lonely to me. Inside the dancing ghosts of that girl and her family and friends trip over a broken coffee table, a storage cabinet, three twin size foam mattresses no longer in use. Now the Salon is a boxy room with one window off the side of the informal living room. It’s become a utilitarian space for guest overflow, a rare occurrence these days, where everyone is too busy getting by to visit, and we are all grown up, too big for birthday dances. I can’t say I miss the Salon’s opulence, but I miss what it seemed to symbolize. The celebration of my sister’s marriage (she remains the most stunning bride I’ve ever seen), the ignorant happiness of my girlhood.

To employ what by now is probably an obvious metaphor, I can’t help but feel about my body like I do the ballroom. Here I am, creeping up on 28, and my body can’t begin to approximate the girlish version of myself. I don’t miss that girl’s insecurities, for even then I was told I was too fat, and I believed. I don’t miss how she took her peer’s cruelty as her due. I don’t miss how she played down her intelligence as to not overstep boundaries with her friends. Still though, amidst all that tension, I was beautiful in a way I will never again be. Wasn’t I? Dredging it up, I can’t exactly recall. I don’t remember feeling pretty, but I remember being called fat. I ran with the popular kids, had a boyfriend five years older than me. Surely that means something?

When I greet folks who haven’t seen me in the last ten years, when my weight really increased, and I became officially, undeniably fat, they are shocked to see the body I have now. Some of them comment on it.  Lubnah’s mother in law, for example, told me to lay of the Kanafa (a kind of pastry) my first night here, so I wouldn’t get fat. When I told her it was a little late for that, she replied that I could still lose some weight during my trip. Hadn’t I been a beauty queen before, she said? She was so hopeful, I found myself bereft of a reply. Some say nothing, though I can see the surprise in their faces. Maybe they too are nostalgic for a better, thinner me. A more beautiful me. A more Arab me?

My fatness combined with my nose ring, I’m guessing, nail the final coffin in my foreignness. Or perhaps more broadly, my apparent lack of concern about my fatness combined with the way I present my body (piercings and cleavage included) indicate that I am no longer “bint al balad”, a daughter of the country. But then, I never was: our family was always the American family. It bolstered my adolescent popularity, marked me as an exotic entity. Even strangers can read it. I walk down the street with my niece, and can hear people speaking about us, speculating in Arabic about our origins, my dress, my nose ring. I speak to shop owners in fluent Arabic, pronouncing all its unique sounds, and they are befuddled. They ask if I am from the Arabs in Israel, and I reply I am from the Arabs in America.

Truthfully, being here takes me back to my girlishness, all that hope and fear but bottled in a much larger body. Standing in front of familiar strangers, I gather my will against their memory of my body, my identity, try to remember and be myself as I am, faltering enough to grant them psychic access. Being in the ballroom makes me long for the intimacies I shared with my friends and classmates of yesteryear, intimacies that distance and neglect on all our behalves have left dry and wilted. Standing in the shadow of my sister’s marriage, and the heteronormativity that’s as everyday as the occupation, makes me long for the girl who knew she wanted a husband, and children, a nice Arab life in this lovely Arab town. I find myself wondering about Rami J, what he’s doing, if he’s married. I shake the ghosts, as best I can, reconfiguring my body into its strength, its modest beauty. I think of the many rewarding, life altering friendships I have, and know that I am lucky to be shaped and blessed by the traces of those former connections. I tell myself that if I do run into Rami, I will at least kiss him this time. Both the girl and her contemporary deserve as much.