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- Herausgeber: Garnet Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Providing an account of a Saudi woman's painful journey from naive Aramcon girl to life as a resident of a war-torn capital city, this book provides fresh insight into two very different Middle Eastern worlds about which so little is known by those living outside the region.
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Seitenzahl: 539
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Brownies and Kalashnikovs
A Saudi Woman’s Memoir of American Arabia and Wartime Beirut
Fadia Basrawi
SOUTH STREET PRESS
www.garnetpublishing.co.uk
Acknowledgements
A large part of the raison d’être for this book has come from my life as the daughter of Fahmi Basrawi and Muzayyan Kotob as they faced life in the brave new world of an all-American Aramco in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia without losing their identities; and as the daughter-in-law of Salaheddine Khayyat and Munira Fawaz as they faced civil war in Lebanon without compromising their integrity or love for their country.One day in 2003, I casually mentioned that I was thinking of writing a memoir to my husband Adnan and five children: Munira, Amer, Ghassan, Yasmine and Rola (ages ranging from 31 to 25). No sooner were the words out of my mouth than this manuscript was dug up from my bottom drawer and my nose stuck firmly to the grindstone.
With the willing enlistment of Munira’s husband Heiko, they all took precious time away from their various jobs and studies to edit my book very, very candidly. Despite our ‘frank’ editing sessions that usually ended with me in time-outs and my toddler grandson Nessim as the only common focus of affection, I am indebted to them for insisting on ‘getting it right.’ Thank you my family for your unwavering faith in the potential of my story.
I am equally grateful to my dear friend, Vonnie Nasr, for doing what she does best: ‘saying it like it is’ as she reviewed and re-reviewed my book in its various stages over the past three years.
My publishers South Street Press were notable in their patience with my slow progress as one failed deadline followed another while war, peace and war once more in Lebanon took their toll on my concentration. To them and to all who have touched my life indirectly or directly in large and small ways, I thank them.
PART I ARAMCOLAND
1 Desert Suburbia – Desert Kingdom
The Saudi Airlines Boeing 707 banked to the left and began its descent to Dhahran International Airport. I peered out of the airplane’s window to catch the flickering orange-yellow flares that dotted the sea of red sand below. They said home to me, these flares that defined the skyscape of Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. From above they winked and glowed so prettily in the oncoming dusk … on the ground they filled the air around us with a nauseating stench of rotten eggs … pungent testimony of Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth that kept the industrialized world so well-oiled and so well-heeled.
A flurry of traffic suddenly crowded the airplane’s aisle as the Saudi women on the flight, clad in the season’s light summer attire, disappeared into the bathroom and reappeared incognito enshrouded from head to toe in voluminous black abayas. Glancing briefly at the mounds of black that now occupied the seats around me, I turned quickly back to the window to hide my anger at this enforced double standard of veiling.
We touched ground. I was home for the summer of 1970 from my sophomore year of university in Beirut. At the exit from the airplane’s cool interior, I paused to inhale a fortifying deep gulp of oxygen before plunging into the airless furnace of Saudi Arabia’s summer. I’d lived here most of my life but had yet to become inured to that first initial blast of roasting heat and humidity. Clutching my green Saudi passport tightly, uncovered by abaya or veil, I headed towards the Saudi Arab ‘nationals’ passport sector, bypassing a long winding line of ‘non-nationals,’ largely from the third world. I felt a wave of empathy with them as they waited with resignation for the airport official to ask them the most inane questions just because he could. My being a Saudi Arabian female traveling alone did not make my entrance into Saudi Arabia, or exit for that matter, much easier.
The passports officer, dark and scrawny with a pointed scraggly beard, stared dourly at my uncovered head. His censorious eyes darted over the giant square buckle in my short hair, psychedelic orange tunic, low slung leather belt, white bell bottoms, and leaned forward to continue on down to my red cork platform sandals. Lifting his frizzy eyebrows, he asked derisively, “You are a Saudi?”
I rolled my eyes and with an exaggerated sigh, pointedly nudged my passport closer in his direction. He scrutinized my photo-less passport closely to check if I was from the ‘first tier’ of Saudis, i.e. those born from a Saudi Arabian father, or second tier, i.e. those who had been naturalized.
“Really?” he said, answering my silence sarcastically. “And from Medina al Munawara? You don’t look Saudi Arab!” he spat, throwing the holiness of the city at my uncovered face. I rose to the bait.
“Yes I do … I am a Hijazi.”“Why don’t you speak the dialect? Eh? Eh? You sound Syrian. Answer me. What kind of a Hijazi are you?”
I lost my struggle to contain my temper and pounded the counter defiantly, “IT IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. YOUR JOB IS TO STAMP MY PASSPORT.”
His voice rose into an enraged squeal, “Woman, SHUT UP!”Well, I’d come this far and I wasn’t about to back down: “No, YOU shut up!”
In the split second that the officer’s face froze in confusion between shock and fury, my father grasped the situation from where he was standing behind the barrier. He spoke briefly to the police officer next to him and materialized between us, smiling his famous smile. He was a television celebrity in the Eastern province due in large part to his good looks and that smile.
“How are you? I’m Fahmi Basrawi,” he greeted the passports officer in lilting Hijazi Arabic, shaking his hand. Caught mid-sneer, the passports officer hastily passed his hand over his face in embarrassment.
“Fahmi Basrawi?” he croaked as he gaped at my father, the perfect image of modern Saudi elegance with his clipped moustache, immaculate white thobe and gold cufflinks, his white ghutra flipped neatly over the agal, falling in picture-perfect alignment down the other side of his face. Delicately clearing his throat, the flustered officer continued in what he hoped was a more mellifluous tone of voice.
“This is your daughter?” he asked, then added with an ingratiating grin, “I would never have guessed … actually, yes, now that you mention it … I do see the resemblance. I simply was doing my job but your daughter misunderstood me.”
“Hah!” I threw in with all the indignant fury I could muster. My father, continuing to smile, firmly took me by the arm and walked us away from the passports division. As we rounded the corner, the smile disappeared.
“Do we have to go through this every time?” he exploded in exasperation, shelving his charm for people other than me.
We drove away from the airport in an uncomfortable silence. My relationship with my father was a strained one. We had never been able to reach a middle point where we could see eye to eye on life matters and my education abroad was not making it any easier.
“Why should I keep my mouth shut when he didn’t shut his mouth?” I blurted, still smarting from the passports official’s disrespect. Keeping his eyes rigidly on the road ahead, my father did not answer leaving my outburst to dangle awkwardly in the prickly air between us. I settled back resignedly in my seat and turned to stare at the drab desert landscape, rusty billboards and the odd nondescript cement block building slipping by. I had not expected my father to engage in any sort of critical dialogue with me. He was a Saudi senior staff employee of Aramco (formerly Arabian American Oil Company – Saudi Aramco today), the largest oil company in the world, and his long years there had effectively sealed his mouth and any independent form of thought that he may have had as a young Hijazi. Born in Medina in 1922 when it was under the Hashemite Sherif Hussein’s Kingdom of Hijaz, he was ten years old when Saudi Arabia (and everyone in it) was internationally recognized by the world community as the property of King ‘Abdel ‘Aziz Ibn Al Sa’ud. He rarely mentioned that period of politics in his life, or any politics for that matter.
Turning left, we approached Dhahran through an arched gateway emblazoned with “Go in Safety,” in Arabic and English, Aramco’s ‘Arc de Triomphe.’ We slowed down at the Main Gate, a brick and glass guard post that continuously crackled with disembodied voices over a shortwave radio. Manned by a joint patrol of Saudi police and Aramcon Saudi security guards, it was the only point of entry into Dhahran, and only permitted to Aramco’s ‘Senior Staff.’ Everybody else, particularly Saudis, could not enter this ‘Forbidden City’ except through invitation. The host had to personally meet his guests with Aramco ID in hand, stating name, rank and serial number and introduce them to the guards who wrote their names down on the Aramcon host’s file.
Juma’a, the head security officer, gave my father a smart salute and a wide grin then peered into the car to give me a warm welcome for my safe arrival. He had known me since early childhood and a kindred feeling existed between us. I was five when my father and a few other Saudi employees were singled out by Aramco to live the ‘American Dream’ in Dhahran. My father was given due esteem for his senior staff status by the Arab labor, particularly those Saudis who did the grunt work for Aramco.
Aramco’s three oil towns, Dhahran, Ras Tanura and Abqaiq, were so insular that American employees and other Westerners could work for ‘the Company’ as it was popularly known, for up to thirty years within their barbed wire perimeter fences and not make the acquaintance of a single Saudi Arab or learn a single Arabic word, save for politically correct terminologies such as “sadiqi” (my friend), “shukran” (thank you), “inshallah” (God willing), “bukra” (tomorrow) and “ahlan wa sahlan” (welcome) … useful words of greeting for the annual functions held for Saudi Arab and American employees. Such barriers between Saudi and American helped keep a lid on unchecked Saudi voices that might want answers to bothersome questions such as “Who owns what in the oil production process?” and “Where are the profits going?”
We drove into Dhahran past the Oil Exhibit, Aramco’s Public Relations showpiece where my father worked as an assistant manager. Turning right, we continued on down Main Street, a wide asphalt lane with cement sidewalks lined with sheltering banyan trees, mature palm trees and pink flowering oleander bushes. Single story homes with shingled roofs and well-tended gardens stood in square blocks along both sides of the road. Not a muttawa’a (enforcers of Wahhabi Puritanism) in sight. Sounds of laughter and music drifted from the ‘efficiencies’ (single bedroom studios) on Seventh Street where the unmarried Aramco employees resided in U-shaped blocks that shared a common square grass space. The singles’ housing was positioned a safe enough distance away from family housing in Dhahran’s lay-out. Many of Aramco’s American employees harked from the ‘Bible Belt’ of the American Midwest and did not approve of the liberal values of some of the unattached young employees. These Puritan Christian Americans were cut from the same cloth of religious fundamentalism as the Wahhabi Muslims in control of Saudi Arabia. But within Aramco’s oil towns, islands of exception at the heart of the Kingdom’s oil industry, the freedom of ‘to each his own’ was conveniently granted.
At last, to both my silent relief and my father’s, we reached home: 4595-B, a duplex marked by a towering acacia tree that distinguished it from the others in the row of identical houses on Fourth Street. I ran inside to greet my mother. As I hugged Mama and kissed her soft cheeks, now flushed pink from preparing dinner in my honor, my sister and two brothers tumbled out of their rooms to greet me along with our pampered Siamese cat, TC, named after the American cartoon character, Top Cat. It felt good to be home.
Mama had prepared my favorite food: deep dish macaroni, roast chicken basted in lemon and saffron, samboosak (fried puffs of ground meat and onions basted in pomegranate sauce) and, for dessert, apple pie. Our dinner table sounded like a translation center as my sister Fatin, my brothers Ghassan and Marwan and I chattered in American, switched to Arabic with our mother and spoke a mixture of both languages with our father, whom we addressed as ‘Baba.’ But this evening, Baba was in no mood for conversation. He was still carrying the black cloud that had perched over him since my tiff with the passports official. His unreceptive brooding did not keep Mama from smiling sweetly at me, frequently reaching out to pat my hair as if to make sure that I was truly, physically there. Just twenty years older than I was, we were beginning to be mistaken for sisters as I grew into my adult self. Not that there was any striking resemblance. Where she was petite and plump, I was tall and broad shouldered, where she had the irregular features, full cheeks and round face of the Damascenes, I had the regular features, high cheek bones and almond-shaped eyes of my father who traced his ancestors to the Sa’adoun tribe of Southern Iraq. Out of my siblings, I was the closest in appearance to my father but the farthest in character.
After the dinner table was cleared, Fatin, Ghassan, Marwan and I piled into the compact bedroom my sister and I shared, a pink four-byfour-meter room with white frilly curtains, two standard wooden desks, an American bunk bed and a Persian carpet spread over tan linoleum tiles. I plopped contentedly into an easy chair by the large window that looked out onto our back yard, now awash with light from the corner street lamp. Just beneath our window was the shared bane of us all and of TC, a large cage filled with a dozen parakeets that kept up an unalleviated prattle as long as there was light. Thankfully they were under a canvas for the night, allowing us welcome peace and quiet. Beyond the parakeets’ cage was my mother’s pride and joy, her garden, a profusion of marigolds, petunias and periwinkles that nodded gently in the night air around a plush dark green lawn. The proverbial white picket fence with matching gate enclosed our pastoral patch of nature. Daily at the first streak of dawn, Mama donned a floppy cloth hat and raced with the sun to feed, weed, and water her flowers, happily singing off key to herself while she lovingly nurtured every bloom, “ya wardati, ya wardati …” (my flowers).
TC hopped onto my lap and curled into a furry ball, purring softly. I looked affectionately at my younger siblings crowded on the bottom bunk bed. Fatin, a year my junior, was groaning about her upcoming A-Levels in England in preparation for medical school. Since the age of six, her passion had been to study medicine and nothing was going to stop her. The groaning was a smoke screen. Tiny but muscular, her physique reflected her tough inner self. With her light brown hair pulled back into an efficient pony tail that further pronounced the roundness of her face and the decidedly upward slant of her hazel eyes, Fatin was so unlike me in size, looks and character that no one ever guessed our relationship. The Chinese in England repeatedly mistook her for a compatriot and berated her indignantly for not speaking her native tongue. Ghassan on the other hand was obviously my brother. He was in the UK as well, attending Lord Mayor Treloar College for the handicapped as he suffered from cerebral palsy. But that had not kept him from returning with a full-fledged Beatles haircut, his glossy pitch black hair flopping fashionably over his smooth olive-skinned forehead. He was triumphantly relating a successfully weathered storm with my father over his hairstyle which brought about a worried expression on Marwan’s face, a Beatles fan as well but far less confrontational. Marwan, the youngest, at fourteen, was due to graduate from ninth grade at Dhahran Senior Staff School in another week. He was joining Fatin and Ghassan in England to study for his GCEs at summer’s end at Bryanston School for Boys. Marwan’s copper-colored hair, freckled button nose and white skin had almost resulted in my father being carted off for kidnapping at Cairo Airport in 1960.
At Cairo Airport, a guard had noted Marwan’s coloring and his American prattle and had asked him if he was Irish. Marwan was four years old at the time, spoke very little Arabic and did not understand the guard’s Egyptian dialect. But he had nodded politely in response and that was apparently enough proof that Marwan was Irish. Anyway, the guard had not found it credible that this American speaking, foreignlooking child could be the biological son of this Saudi Arabian man with black hair and moustache. But perhaps more to the point, Egypt was not happy with the politics of Saudi Arabia that year. As my father was getting our passports stamped, he suddenly found himself surrounded by security guards accusing him loudly of child kidnapping and pandemonium broke out. We began to cry, my mother yelled and everyone in Cairo Airport came rushing to catch the action. My mother’s blond brother, Khalo Adnan, who was studying Agriculture at ‘Ain Shams University in Cairo, was trotted out from the reception sector to show where Marwan got his fair looks from, but all to no avail. The security guards were not going to be budged from their accusation. We suffered several noisy and exhausting hours in the airport until Amti (Aunt) Bahija, my father’s sister who lived in Cairo in palatial style, contacted friends in the right places, and only then was the confusion finally sorted out.
Now Marwan was regaling us with impersonations of Mama during yet another clash with Aramco’s long-suffering personnel department over her accusations of shoddy workmanship in the maintenance of our bungalow (Marwan was the shanghaied interpreter with the Filipino clerks). I knew I could count on shared feelings of outrage at the insolence of the Dhahran Airport passports officer towards me away from Baba’s unsympathetic ears. Our father wanted us educated but unaltered, an impossible task. Politics and demands for civil reforms in Lebanon where I had been studying for the past five years were influencing my perception of Saudi Arabia and Aramco. I was eager to discuss my changing views of the world with my siblings and tell them about my new Lebanese boyfriend, Adnan, a young journalist for the influential Lebanese newspaper, An Nahar.
I smiled inwardly as Fatin and Ghassan interrupted one another amidst loud laughter at the confusion they’d cause after disclosing their real nationality to new English acquaintances and then watch them politely and discreetly attempt to adjust to the Saudi Arab rather than the American they had thought they were talking to. I was having the same responses in Lebanon but with a lot less hilarity. Neither the United States nor Saudi Arabia was particularly popular in Beirut against the ever-present turmoil of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that defined everyone’s identity and politics.
My siblings and I were Saudi by virtue of having been born to a Saudi father and that’s where Saudi Arabia stopped in defining us. Without ever stepping foot in the United States of America, we had developed into a new breed of the American colonized while living on Saudi Arabian soil: Saudi in name and as American as the Americans in everything else, we called ourselves ‘Aramcons.’ Circumstance alone would pull only me into an Arab awakening while my siblings would remain firmly as American as the apple pie we had just eaten for dessert. Eventually we would inhabit two separate worlds at extreme odds with one another…
Desert Dust to Desert GoldDhahran began as a dusty collection of makeshift tents and palm tree frond huts in 1933 to house American oil men of the California Arabian Standard Oil Company, Aramco’s forerunner. Even then the oil camp was, as it remains today, the largest American enclave in the Middle East, despite a homesick American’s plaintive song:
‘Home no more in Dhahran Where the Arabs and Bedouins play Where a shamal always blows And God only knows What causes a White man to stay?’1
The answer to his question is ‘oil’ of course. The Americans had begun searching for oil in Saudi Arabia in the early 1930s in spite of Great Britain’s firm conviction that the Eastern Province did not have enough oil to be worth the trouble. Doggedly, the first American geologists followed old camel trails and crisscrossed the desert many times over in Ford V8 touring cars and a Fairchild monoplane, certain that they would strike oil. Expectedly, these trips created quite a stir amongst the locals as Nassir Al-Ajmi, a Saudi who rose to become an Aramco CEO, wrote in his autobiographical book, Legacy of a Lifetime. Describing his first contact with cars and foreigners as a child in a nomadic camp on the edge of the Ghawar field, the world’s largest oil field, he wrote:
“The first time that I saw a vehicle was a frightening experience. I was playing with other children next to our encampment when we heard a strange noise. We saw an odd-looking thing rushing towards us with a cloud of dust behind it. We ran as fast as our legs could carry us and hid inside the tents. As we peeked through the holes to observe the noisy, strange-looking creature, we noticed two or three, unfamiliar looking people wearing funny clothes and deep plates or funneled pots over their heads! It was an exploration party asking for water and seeking directions.”2
The American geologists finally struck oil in the Eastern Province on March 3, 1938 in Dammam Well No.7. When the well spurted its first 1,585 barrels of oil, Saudi Arabia formally became an oil-producing country and when profits from Saudi oil shot up from $2.8 million in 1944 to $114 million in 1949, the United States slid into dependency on foreign oil in its quest for global supremacy. Aramco’s three tented oil camps were rapidly upgraded to eventually become America’s largest settlements across the globe, outsizing those in Manila, Shanghai and Panama.
Aramco’s three oil camps were landmarks of social and horticultural engineering in 1950s Saudi Arabia. Their streets and sidewalks were paved; trees, flowers and green grass grew in abundance everywhere. Each of the three communities had its own library, golf course, clay tennis court, bowling alley, yacht club, horseback riding stables and Olympicsized swimming pool. All were Saudi Arabia’s firsts, as were the electricity grid, central air conditioning, and fresh desalinated drinking water. In no other region of Saudi Arabia could anyone (particularly Saudis) go to movies, dance on a moonlit patio to live music played by a popular American band, or listen to celebrated pianists perform the works of Mozart or Chopin. Dhahran even made a mention in the New York Times in 1956, where it was described as an American community transplanted to the Arabian Desert complete with weekend gardeners, women’s clubs, PTAs, television and brightly lit, air-conditioned homes, each with their own yards and hedges. Such mundane details about Dhahran deemed worthy of mentioning by the reporter underlined in bold red the backwardness of the rest of the country. Well-known scholars such as historian Arnold Toynbee, Arabist H. St. John Philby, and anthropologist Margaret Mead accepted Aramco’s invitations to give lectures to members of the community. All three also gave warnings of an eventual backlash against Aramco’s stiff segregation policy from the rest of the country, but their warnings fell on ears that were not ready to listen.
In the Dhahran that we grew up in, women wore shorts and liquor flowed freely. We bought our food from the company’s ‘commissary’ that sold all things American, including pork products. We moved freely from one area of Dhahran to another on bikes and roller skates, hopped on and off the free bus service driven by Shi’a Saudis that the Americans (and we) were taught to call ‘sadiqi’ (my friend). While everyone living outside Aramco’s towns drank brackish water, we drank fresh desalinated water from our taps. Cold water fountains were stationed in all the public places of the camp complete with envelope paper cups and salt tablet dispensers to combat the intense heat. We camped out with our scout troops on Aramco’s private beach, Half Moon Bay. We competed at American football and basketball with Abqaiq and Ras Tanura. Our swimming pool area, ruled by a stern Indian lifeguard named John, had the air of a resort spa with its reclining sun chairs, and piped-in ‘muzak’ that ranged from country and western to classical to rock, never Arabic. My Catholic classmates attended Catechism, went to confession with a residing Catholic priest, and to Sunday school, which was actually on a Friday. That day of the week was the one non-negotiable where the line was drawn between Aramco and Saudi Arabia. Friday, the Muslim holy day, resolutely remained as the only day when everything closed down and all Muslim men attended prayer in the mosque, even in Aramco.
My siblings and I addressed one another by the American mispronunciation of our names. I was ‘Fudgie’ short for ‘Fadjyah,’ Fatin was ‘Faahttn,’ Ghassan was ‘Gussaaaan’ and Marwan was ‘Moe.’ Growing up, we entered Brownies and Cub Scouts and graduated to Boy and Girl Scouts of America. On Halloween we went trick-or-treating with our friends dressed up as ‘G.I. Joe’ and ‘Cinderella.’ I joined the cheerleaders for one of Dhahran School’s American Football teams, the ‘Bears,’ Marwan played catcher for the ‘Orioles,’ Dhahran’s Little League Baseball team and Fatin was the star gymnast of Dhahran School on the rings. We hung out with our friends in the pool hall in the Recreation area in the center of Dhahran. There was a ‘Teen Canteen’ set up especially for young teenage Aramcons replete with a jukebox, soda fountain and a Filipino barman we all called ‘Mike.’ A short walk away was the ‘Snack Bar’ where we ate super-size grilled hamburgers and caramel sundaes prepared and served by Hussein and Ali, Shi’a Saudi Arab personnel, from the neighboring Al Hasa oasis towns of Qatif and Hofuf.
On every American Independence Day, July 4th, Dhahran held a parade led by baton twirling, mini-skirted majorettes and a spiffily costumed brass band which included my sister on the clarinet at one point. Two Eagle scouts carried the American and Saudi Arabian flags as they led troops of Brownies, Cub Scouts and Boy and Girl Scouts. Floats draped with pretty girls in sun dresses rolled past clapping crowds followed by Americans on spirited Arabian horses and elementary school children dressed as Cowboys and Indians. To the rat-tat-tat of the drums and the blare of the trumpets, the parade moved triumphantly down King’s Road on to the County Fair spread out in Dhahran’s Recreation area. There we wolfed down hot dog buns smothered in relish and ketchup and washed them down with root beer. We bought rides on laconic camels, paying the outstretched hand of their equally laconic Bedouin owners before embarking. Then there were three-legged races and donkey races to join, and bakery contests to nibble from. We placed bets on races of tiny green turtles fished out from the water canals of the Al Hasa oasis that sported numbers on their miniscule backs. By day’s end, with our prize turtles still racing round in circles in a bowl of water, we were more than ready for a sound night’s sleep as we dragged our bulging stomachs and our booty home.
My siblings and I led the rarified life of coddled westerners in one of the harshest of terrains on the face of this earth – except when the deadly shamals struck. Nature is the great equalizer and the shamal winds, deadly northeast sandstorms, forcibly drove this home. One such unannounced shamal struck during English class when I was in sixth grade while we were in the grips of the poem ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allen Poe. As we sat in spellbound silence listening to Miss Mathews’ dramatic repetition of the raven’s “Nevermore” we became aware of a different kind of silence. An eerie red light had stealthily permeated the air outside the classroom’s windows blotting out the sun amidst a deathly stillness. The playground and sky and distant desert horizon had disappeared without a trace into the opaqueness of the red glow and it was as though we were suddenly drifting alone in space. Miss Mathews dropped her book mid-“Nevermore” and walked rapidly to the window. As she stared at the unfolding scene outside, she underwent an astonishing transformation from a stodgy school marm into an excited youthful woman,
“Drop your books and pick up a pen and paper,” she ordered us in breathless anticipation. “This class is going to be dedicated to the shamal. We are about to be amongst the few, other than the Bedouins, to witness a shamal’s birth.”
With the somber mood of the raven’s “Never more” still upon us, and the unexpected change that our English teacher had undergone, we entered a surreal world as the shamal unfolded before us. The red glow deepened to shades of darker red and increased in its opaqueness as the air filled with particles of dust each bringing in its own shade of desert sand, much like the gathering of soldiers before the battle. Stirring swathes of deep yellow began to glide amongst the motionless multihued flecks of red-tinted sand. When the last of the red glow disappeared into the deep yellow, Nature gave the signal for battle. Unearthly screaming howls of the shamal’s angry winds shattered the silence, attacking our window panes in a barrage of wildly swirling grains of sands that had turned into tiny but deadly spears capable of choking the uninitiated. The shamal was not stopped by the physical barriers of our classroom and we began to feel the sand crunching between our teeth and becoming embedded all over our bodies, ears, noses and hair. As we bent over our papers writing feverishly we stole surreptitious glances at our transfixed English teacher who remained standing spellbound at the window until the school bell jangled her back to earth.
The lighter side of living in the desert was the unmitigated joy we felt when it rained. On the rare days that rain fell, the neighborhoods in Dhahran rushed out, adult and child alike, into the streets to revel at this miracle of nature. We hopped onto our bikes pedaling furiously for the pleasure of swooshing through the wet rivulets running down the streets while the adults square danced in the puddles. We twirled in circles like mesmerized dervishes, arms spread out, our faces eagerly turned up to the sky to catch each fat globule of water before it fell to the ground.
The desert rain fell like a symphony, its raindrops falling softly and almost hesitantly at first, one followed by another gaining in momentum, falling faster and faster, reaching a crescendo to deep rolling thunder and diagonal streaks of lightning, then ceasing as abruptly as it began, leaving very soaked Aramcons to drift back to their homes wearing big smiles on their faces.
Across the street from our house was a baseball diamond complete with bleachers where family and friends watched the young players strike in or strike out. Beyond the baseball diamond was a vast circular expanse of soft grass for American football games and track meets. With its close proximity to us, we developed a sense of propriety over it, a spacious green playground where we flew our kites and perfected our somersaults with our next-door neighbors, Candy, Crystal and Kelly Riley. We often pitched a tent in its midst for sleepovers where, snug in our sleeping bags, we spent the night talking and singling out our favorite constellations. Sleep would finally overtake us as we gazed in silent wonder at the Milky Way that cascaded in a spectacular explosion of celestial glitter across Arabia’s infinite ink black sky.
I could see our ‘green playground’ from where I sat next to my bedroom window stroking TC. The full moon appeared on the horizon, a golden benevolent smiling face, so bright that it outshone the myriads of stars covering the desert sky. For me, well into university, Beirut was already outshining Dhahran much as the moon outside my bedroom window dimmed the stars. With Marwan’s graduation we would all have formally moved out of Dhahran. It would gradually recede out of our lives as we moved on to different points of orientation in the unfolding years ahead. I had come home that summer of 1970 with more questions than answers about my life in Dhahran and my Saudi Arabian identity … fourteen years since the morning I had stood before my first grade classroom facing American children for the first time in my young life.
2 Brave New World: Growing Up ‘Aramcon’
The year was 1956 and I was five years old, one year younger than my American classmates. My father had just completed his degree in Public Relations at the American University of Beirut on an Aramco scholarship that had promoted him to Senior Staff, making us one of the first three Saudi Arabian families ever to move into the American oil camp of Dhahran.
We had arrived in Dhahran from Beirut a week before school began on a TWA caravelle, TWA then functioning as Saudi Arabia’s official airline. As the plane rolled slowly to a stop, the first image we caught of Saudi Arabia from our airplane window was of our father waving to us just a few meters away on the tarmac. Behind him was a dusty hangar with a fat propeller airplane inside and a second hangar, open at both ends, with a long table running down its middle. We headed towards the open-ended hangar where we were ordered to stop at the long table with our luggage. Unsmiling Saudi customs officials rifled rough shod through our belongings, pausing significantly over our mother’s lingerie. Once the guards were satisfied that we had nothing contraband, they grunted, “Seeru!” (Leave).
We walked out of the shed to meet the desert for the first time in our young lives. There it lay before us under shimmering waves of steaming air, uninterrupted stretches of toneless beige that extended flatly in all directions to the distant horizon save for one single slash of black: the asphalt road that led to Dhahran. Our first introduction to our homeland’s topography was anticlimactically aggravating. Scorching sand, mixed with broken shards of miniscule seashells, slipped into our brand new shoes and chafed our feet through our socks as we trudged to the car. Our shuffling feet kicked up swirls of dust that settled into our eyes and coated our sticky cheeks.
My father was in excellent spirits that day of our arrival as he drove us to our new home in a red Ford stamped with the Aramco insignia. I tried to absorb the strange town that we were driving into: a town that had no apartment buildings, no traffic, no loudly honking cars, no vegetable vendors calling out their wares, no shoppers and no shops, no families out on the streets, not a sound of human life as I knew it in Beirut. All we saw were identical one-story houses, one row after the next, with fenced-in gardens. We drove up to our new home, a grey, square house with white windows with a pointed grey shingled roof and a garden surrounded by a thick dark green hedge. There was one other identical house next to it and a long cement sidewalk that stretched alongside empty plots of sand in both directions.
“Our street is still new,” my father explained. “More houses will come and our neighborhood will soon look like the rest.”
As we eagerly crowded through the garden gate, we brushed past the hedge’s tiny white flowers releasing their sickly sweet perfume into the hot humid air. Our new home’s front yard, side yard and back yard were disappointingly little more than fenced-in desert, punctuated by wilted clumps of grass watered by a lone, desperately twirling sprinkler.
We dashed into our new home up three white wooden steps leading to a swinging screen door that slammed shut behind us with a loud clap. We caught our breath when we found ourselves standing directly in the living room. In the homes we knew in Beirut and in Damascus, the living rooms contained the fanciest furniture and ornaments of the house, and were strictly off limits to us, their doors opening only for special guests. Our Dhahran living room was a far cry from any living room we knew. It was a plain rectangular room with taupe colored walls and carpet. Four armchairs of polished wood with taupe colored cushions stood stiffly around a low polished wood rectangular table. Two metallic standing lamps with white conical lampshades shed triangles of light over the rigid seating arrangement. Everything in our new home, Baba told Mama, belonged to Aramco. We explored our new bedrooms, three small square rooms with one window each shaded by white venetian blinds. Each room had a built in cupboard, two single beds, and a circular glass ceiling light fixture.
My mother was delighted with the kitchen and its large white oven, large white refrigerator, large white washing machine, and large white cupboards filled with pots, pans, glassware, and cutlery. I knelt to touch the strange floor tiles (linoleum) that muffled the sound of our running feet, having only experienced echoing ceramic and terrazzo tiles in Beirut. We reveled in the marked coolness of our new home, meeting central air conditioning for the first time in our young lives. In Beirut, an open window was all that had been needed to cool a room.
We adjusted to our new home easily (age was a helpful factor) while Mama took longer to fully appreciate the hassle-free conveniences of an American home. Damascene kitchens smelled of babboor gaz (Bunsen burners) used for cooking that needed to be pumped and lit at the same time. Dry goods stored in burlap bags in the mezzanine attic above the kitchen needed to be hauled down. Vegetables were bought from roving vendors who advertised their wares in catchy throaty cries such as “Assabee’ al bubboo ya khiar” (cucumbers like a baby’s fingers) as they trundled past on colorful heavily laden wooden carts. The fresh vegetables then needed to be sorted and cleaned preferably in gossip sessions with the next door neighbor and any visiting friend or relative, before being placed in a copper pot on the noisy Bunsen burner for a labor-intensive slow-cooked meal. Meat came daily from the butcher around the corner who strung freshly killed and skinned sheep and cows at the entrance to his shop. Chicken came from another nearby vendor who killed the daily quota on a large marble slab with a single swipe of the curved blade of his knife. For seasoning, herbs were clipped from terracotta pots that stood in a row outside the kitchen window. And after the meal was eaten and fully digested, water was boiled in large aluminum vats for washing the dishes, the kitchen floor was scrubbed clean with a straw broom and soap and water and then mopped dry by a handheld cloth.
There would be none of that in my mother’s new modern, efficient suburban life.
***
On the morning of my first day of school, I jumped out of bed eagerly and ran to the clothes I had laid out on the chair from the night before. I was the kind of child who loved school. I carefully slipped the crisp white cotton pique dress over my head, and tied the sash loosely behind my back. Then I sat on the bed and pulled on a brand new pair of lightly woven white cotton socks that folded twice at the ankle. I was told that they were called ‘bobby socks’ by Mrs. James, the wife of the school principal, a kindly lady who had helped my mother find my ‘first day of school’ clothes. She had called the black and white shoes that I was now slipping my feet into ‘saddle shoes.’ I painstakingly knotted the shoelaces into a ‘rabbit ears’ bow while I repeated the names of the American socks and shoes to myself, ‘bpaah-pbee sux,’ ‘saa-dell shoo.’ Finally I pulled on a light pink sweater and fussed with the sleeves until they stopped just below my elbow.
Ready.
Now I was dressed like every other girl I had seen in Dhahran. After a quick breakfast, I clambered onto a chair in front of the bathroom mirror to observe closely how my mother fashioned my bangs with a wet fine toothed comb into a small crescent at the side of my forehead, a hairstyle I never left the house without. Satisfied with my image, I ran out and hopped into the car with my father for the short ride to school. He had already prepared me for what I should expect: “Lots and lots of Americans, who spoke no Arabic,” a concept difficult to absorb. How could they not speak Arabic? Everyone in my world up till now spoke Arabic. The children lived in Saudi Arabia, therefore they must speak Arabic. “Now tell me what you know in English,” he asked me as we drove to school. “Hell-lloo, koot-pye, bpaah-pbee sux, saa-dell shoo, wan-tooo-sree-forrr-fife,” I recited breathlessly, quickly exhausting my American vocabulary.
We parked the car and climbed a short flight of steps to the school, a sprawling modern building with glass facades and brick walls in the midst of well-tended squares of green grass and palm trees. We walked into a large airy reception area straight on through to the office of the principal, Mr. Vincent James, a good-humored, grey-haired bear of a man with a laughing smile. Mr. James stood up and clasping my hand playfully, boomed cheerfully in fluent Arabic, “Ahlan wa sahlan, Fadia!” (Welcome). Then placing my hand in the crook of his elbow with a grand flourish, he turned to my father while winking at me, “You stay here Fahmi; Fadia’s too big to have her father take her to class,” and we walked off arm in arm, our heels clicking softly on the polished linoleum tiles of a long hallway with walls painted a soft vanilla color and smelling vaguely of the same disinfectant my mother used in our bathroom.
“Hena (here), Fadia,” Mr. James and I were standing, still arm in arm, before a colorful, light-filled room with large windows shaded by venetian blinds across one wall. Drawings, pictures, and a large green blackboard filled the remaining walls. Big and small lines (the English alphabet) were printed on a banner that circled the classroom near the ceiling, stopping before what I would learn was the flag of the United States of America. Children seated at small wooden desks in tidy rows turned in unison to stare unblinkingly at me. Hopping up from behind her desk, my teacher came forward and kneeled smilingly at me, eye level. Tall and willowy with short auburn hair and wispy bangs that emphasized her big green eyes, I found her even prettier than my mother.
“Marhaba (hello), Fadia,” she told me, “Ana ismi (my name is) Miss Thornton.” Then turning to the class she announced, “Children, Fadia Basrawi is from Saudi Arabia.” Fifteen children-who-spoke-onlyAmerican chimed “Hell-lloo, Faaadiiiaaa” in one breath. Mr. James laughed, stroked my head affectionately and with a “Ma’a al Salamah” (Goodbye) left the room. I turned to Miss Thornton and told her in Arabic that I spoke no English but she just kept on smiling. I tugged at her skirt urgently and repeated my words, fighting a rising wave of alarm. This time she shook her head slowly. I realized with a sinking heart that she did not speak Arabic; those Arabic words she had greeted me with were all that she knew. Suddenly I felt bereft of Mr. James’ comforting presence. A petrifying sense of alienation crept over me and my heart began to beat so hard, I was afraid it was going to jump out of my chest. Unaware of the panic rising within me, Miss Thornton gently took my hand and led me to a desk in the front row, pulled out a chair, and motioned for me to sit down. Looking around at the silent wideeyed children in my class, I made another frightening discovery. Not a single child in the classroom had black hair! They were a sea of blondehaired heads with delicate features and no visible eyebrows. Although I had inherited my mother’s fair skin, I was still so different from everyone else. Saddle shoes and bobby socks did not make me one of them.
My panic stricken eyes lit on one very, very skinny girl with a wild mop of bright orange hair, tiny eyes, bright red thin lips, a long neck and chalk white skin covered by so many freckles, they touched one another. I had never seen any one so skinny or so freckled in my life. The unsuspecting orange-haired girl became the trigger for my meltdown. I burst into loud terrified sobs. All fifteen children jumped up from their chairs to comfort me as first graders tend to do when faced with the degree of unhappiness I was suffering. Unfortunately, the first to reach me was the carrot top and this had the effect of making me react like a trapped cat. Miss Thornton stepped in swiftly and hauled me and my wildly flailing arms and legs onto her lap and held me closely to her with my back to the class while she rocked me gently back and forth, soothingly patting my back .When my tears and sobs finally subsided, I slid down slowly from the safety of Miss Thornton’s lap but kept my fingers tightly entwined around the edge of her skirt for the rest of the day.
The classroom was a treasure-trove of fascinating new things I had neither seen nor touched before. Fat brightly colored wax crayons that smelled good enough to bite, thick white paste that I was so tempted to taste and small scissors with blunted edges that fit perfectly in my hand, all of which I was unable to explore fully as I needed to both keep a tight grip on Miss Thornton’s skirt and a close lookout for the orange-haired girl. By day’s end, under the gentle persuasion of my teacher, I was ready to approach the carrot top and give her a very tentative hug.
Several weeks into first grade, I broke the code of the English language when I deciphered my first three words in the first grade reader about Dick, Jane, and Sally and their dog Spot, Oh! Oh! Oh! And what joy that gave to Miss Thornton. She applauded happily and asked me to stand in front of the class where I proudly read out my Oh! Oh! Oh! They all clapped gamely following Miss Thornton’s cue. I left school that day with my reader and waited impatiently for my father to come home to read it to him. “Bravo, Fadia” he smiled, “We’ll have to start you on Arabic.” He arranged for a good friend of his, Mr. Suleiman Rubayi’, to come in daily to give me Arabic lessons across the hall from my classroom.
Everything about Mr. Rubayi’ was dark and serious. He was short, with thick black eye brows, a bushy black mustache and deep shadows that circled his mournful dark eyes. He sat on a swivel chair, I on a child chair in a room little larger than a broom closet. While I stared fixedly at him as he methodically picked at every hair of his mustache from one end to the other, he intoned each Arabic letter with its vowel accent followed by a word beginning with that letter which I repeated after him in a sing song voice, committing the words and letters to memory. This was the traditional rote method of teaching the Arabic language.
I internalized this rote method of ‘memorize and repeat’ and an idea came to my head that maybe I would understand Americans better by mirroring their movements and repeating their words. I loved Miss Thornton very much and I was desperate that she remained as proud of me as she had been the day that I had read my first words. So I focused on the sweetest and smartest girl in class, Nayna Lee Rees, a plump, smiling, round-faced girl with honest brown eyes, rosy cheeks, straight brown hair and short bangs as my role model. Nayna was fun, always had the right answer to the teacher’s question and all the other children in the classroom wanted to be her best friend. Whatever Nayna did, I did. If she sharpened her pencil, I did too. If she put one foot across the other under the desk, I did too. If she took out her crayons to draw, I did too. What I grasped from her words, I repeated softly to myself.
One morning, Miss Thornton called me to her and asked me to move my desk next to Nayna’s. She had caught on to the childish reasoning behind my obsessive copying act and had secretly designated Nayna as “Teacher’s-little-helper-to-Fadia-because-she’s-new.” Being the thoughtful girl she was, Nayna kept her secret with Miss Thornton. I only found out how my cover was blown many years later during a summer job at Dhahran School from Miss Kant, my second grade teacher when she reminisced about my early days there. “Fadia,” she had greeted me affectionately, “Now that you’re grown, I can tell you that Miss Thornton and I worked together with that sweet little girl Nayna to help you adjust to your new world!” I never forgot Miss Thornton’s humane approach to education and when it was time to choose a major for my university degree, I decided on Child Development and Sociology to better understand what a child needs to face the world on the right footing. What could have been a permanently scarring experience in the tender years of my early childhood was turned into an empowering one by Miss Thornton’s intuitive grasp of a frightened child’s world.
I wish I could say the same about all the teachers in Dhahran School. Unfortunately, my sister Fatin had a horrific kindergarten experience after she too went through the same copying-what-others-are-doing act. Indeed, she almost flunked kindergarten due to her teacher, Miss Waldish, who misconstrued her inability to speak American or act like one as a learning disability. Fatin was saved from permanent impairment of her self image by an enthusiastic ex-Green Berets science and gymnastics teacher, Mr. Goellnor, who spoke Arabic as well as the Arabs. Well-built with a grey-haired buzz cut and a long tattoo of an anchor on his forearm, Mr. Goellnor was beloved by everyone both young and old … beloved enough to endure listening to his WWII stories of battle in the Pacific theater many times over. He noted Fatin’s gymnastic talents and turned her into Dhahran School’s star gymnast. Unluckily for Fatin, her training stopped after she graduated from Dhahran School as physical education for girls in Saudi Arabia is forbidden by royal decree to this day.
Of Arabs and AmericansAs Aramcon-bred Saudi Arabians functioning in the world at large, my siblings and I often found ourselves between a rock and a hard place as we tried hard to fit in both the Saudi Arabian and American circles. During fourth grade I gave up trying to look like my blonde-haired, blue-eyed American classmates particularly after an unfortunate experience with the fashionable hoop crinoline petticoat craze that pushed the circle skirts of our frilly dresses almost straight out and with me straight up when I sat down one morning in class, exposing my frilly pink underwear. I decided to adopt the more infallible persona of an avowed tomboy, climbing trees, chasing boys in the playground and hitting them, racing bikes with them and winning … in short anything a boy boasted he could do, I learned to do better.
Our neighborhood had the proverbial neighborhood bully, Bobby, who was, as is usually the case with bullies, bigger, older and less furnished in the brain department than the rest of us. What he had was bulk, a gruff harsh voice and an ability to throw rocks with deadly precision. Fed up with his swagger and checkpoints that interrupted our roller skate swoops down a smooth cement alley in our block, my friends and I decided to take Bobby up on this much bragged about talent. We prepared our barracks and waited in ambush for him when he passed by on his prized Schwinn bike – as he did every afternoon after school. Whoooosh! Pingggg! The first stone flicked off of his handlebars. With a roar of anger, he looked behind him and saw us clapping and cheering and taunting him. He threw his bike aside, ran to the side of the road, picked up a sizeable stone and threatened to bash our brains in. Our answer was a lot of loud laughter. In the heat of the moment, I unwisely jumped out from behind our protective barracks, threw another stone and yelled that he wouldn’t dare hit girls. My last words were “You can’t hit me, you can’t hit me,” and he did, with that huge stone on the back of my head leaving a lasting memory of him both physically and mentally.
“Take that you dirty Arab!” he yelled as the stone hit its target.Head wounds are often a lot more spectacular than serious with all the blood that gushes out. Bobby froze at the sight of my bloodied head, terrified at what he had just done. He began to cry and apologize but we were not in the mood to let him off so easily. My friends took me bleeding and howling to my house. My father grimly wrapped a huge towel around my head and rushed me to the emergency ward. I exited from the hospital with a satisfyingly large white bandage encircling my head which I wore martyr-like to school the next morning. What was to come was far more dramatic than what typically should have ended as a standard rite of passage of tangling with the school bully.
I was the daughter of one of ten Saudi Arab senior staff employees out of three thousand American senior staff employees. Bobby was the son of the Head of Security of Dhahran who was responsible for peace and harmony within the community. My father was not going to let this incident pass unnoticed and immediately filed a complaint through a Palestinian lawyer friend with red lines underscoring the ‘dirty Arab’ slur. Suddenly the company was faced with a very awkward public relations debacle. A flurry of damage control swirled dizzyingly around me, embarrassing me to no end. In another world, I would have been just another elementary schooler clearing out a space in the school’s hierarchy. But in the Aramco world, I became as fragile as a porcelain doll that must remain untouched for the continuity of the peaceful mask of Aramco’s Saudi-American ‘partnership.’
On my first day of injury, my teacher, Miss Danforth, walked into class, and looking sympathetically at me pointed out to the class how important it was to be fair and polite with people like me who were ‘different.’ This heaped more discomfort on me than my stitches. I looked down at my desk bright red with embarrassment, refusing to look up or answer any questions. I truly wished the earth would open up and swallow me. The whole idea behind my scuffle with Bobby had been to become a toughie and fit in with the popular crowd. What was I to do with all of this patronizing pity pouring all over me, separating me from everything I wanted so desperately to belong to? The boy’s father showed up at our house the following evening with his son in tow. Bobby, red faced and dressed in formal clothing which included a bow tie, solemnly apologized to me while looking at his feet almost in tears, his swagger vanished. All of you have been nine years old at one time and you can imagine the intense awkwardness that both Bobby and I suffered as we faced one another under the daunting pressure of both of our fathers.
The incident passed and we ended up becoming fast friends. But I was left with the niggling unease of always wondering if I was being treated nicely because I deserved it or because I was the Saudi Arabian token in Aramco’s school. In my childish attempt to be one of the crowd I had come up against the invisible line of demarcation that defined who I was to everyone in Aramco: not American.
***
Aramcon Mama … Syrian StyleIt was no easy task to live in such an all-American community for my mother either. Until she came to Dhahran, she had never met a foreigner. She took the easy way by choosing to do what every Syrian does when they leave Syria … remain Syrian to the core: unbending, unchanging, and unyielding. My mother, Muzzayyan Kotob, was a Damascene beauty with amber eyes, a rosy complexion, glossy black hair and skin so soft and translucent that the slightest pressure left glaring marks.
The eldest and prettiest of her sisters, she loved the feminine accoutrements of clothes, perfume, and make-up so much, it bordered on narcissism. She wore what made her happy, exposing her plump white arms and legs against the summer heat, never coming to terms with the abaya. On the rare occasions when we were growing up when she had to wear the abaya, she would hike it up so high to avoid tripping on it that in my father’s bemused words, “it defeated its purpose.” My father gave up on the hope she would pick up his Hijazi accent and succumbed to speaking the Syrian dialect at home, so naturally we grew up speaking it too. She never mastered the English language during the four decades of my father’s employment in Aramco, mainly due to her lack of interest in becoming absorbed into her new surroundings, content to pick what Americanisms she felt were strategic to her existence in Dhahran, and making them Syrian. The ‘Happy Birthday’ song for parties she insisted on throwing for us even though it was not the usual custom in Damascus (or Saudi Arabia) became ‘Hebby Birsdek is too yoo.’ Our birthdays were never complete without her rendering a joyful solo.
Unable to fill her home with the usual flowers, herbs and greenery that abounded in Damascene homes, my mother filled the rooms of our prefabricated duplex with assortments of plastic flowers, large and small of all colors imaginable and unimaginable. She learned to make shaklit ships (Chocolate Chip cookies) and shaklit kek (chocolate cake) as chewy and rich as the Americans next door. With her green thumb, my mother discovered the one indoor plant that thrived in the shady, artificially cooled homes of Dhahran, the coleus, a shade-loving velvety leafy plant that she nurtured into a vibrant richly variegated bushel-sized shrub from mere rooted cuttings and won first prize for her entry, annually, in the annual Women’s Group houseplants competition. She fed us our favorite cereal that she knew as kornaflek
