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Habibi: An Arab Childhood
By Ray Hanania My mom wanted me to be a doctor or a grocer, but I never realized that I would someday grow up to be an Arab. My father, George Hanna Hanania, was born in Jerusalem, the son of a traveling merchant. After he came here in the twenties, he didn't forget his Arab heritage, but he didn't wear it like a chip on his shoulder, either. Dad believed that 'blending in' was the key to a successful life here. Racism and bigotry were forms of ignorance, he would say. Americans fear the unknown; to win them over, you had to become their friend. As easy as it is to hate a stranger, it's hard to hate a friend. My mother, Georgette, was the daughter of a Bethlehem tailor. Their marriage was arranged. Dad was about 45 and mom was 21. They met about one month before the wedding. Dad insisted that all his children be given American-sounding names. I was named after a doctor in South Shore hospital. As my mother remembered it, she was still under sedation when she heard the nurse paging "Dr. Raymond! Dr. Raymond" on the intercom system. "Doctor" was one of the few words mom knew in English at the time. I grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. In fact, many Arabs I knew grew up in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, because Arabs and Jews actually have much in common. And were it not for the Arab-Israeli wars, we would have had a fine existence together, eating the same foods, sharing the same ties to biblical history (my last name is a Hebrew word that means "God has been Gracious"), and boasting the same kind of overbearing mothers. My own mother didn't suffer as loudly as some, but coming from a poor village, she was incredibly frugal. When I would complain, Mom would say "Ya Habibi" (My love) and remind me about the little refugee children in Palestine who lived in tents with no food or clothing. So when the other guys were all wearing Gants with "Lucky Loops," I went around dressed in Goldblatt's bargain-basement plaids. "Labels can't keep you warm, ya habibi," mom would say. When my friends sported ducktail haircuts, my hair was cut in a kitchen by Mom. "Why spend $3.50 when I can cut it just as good?" She cut it "just as good" until I was 25. And when I outgrew my shoes, Mom took a knife and cut the leather from the front so that my wool-socked toes would stick out. "The sole is still good," she'd say, smiling. "Ya habibi, there are kids running around barefoot in Falusteen !" Looking down at my feet, I envied them. Arab mothers are great cooks, and Mom was no exception. The food was hot and spicy, and there was always enough of it for 20 people. A typical dinner consisted of humos, garbanzo beans mixed with a sesame paste called tahina; felafil, deep fried bean cakes; tabouleh, salads of diced tomato, cucumber, parsley, and cracked wheat; and labaneh, yogurt that was poured on nearly everything. Everything was stuffed, from green peppers to zucchini. I loved it all, except for one- thing--okra, the Arab equivalent of spinach. No vegetable got wrapped in a napkin or shoved behind a refrigerator faster than okra. Arabs put it in their rice, stews, salads, and dips. Although my mom always denied it, I'm convinced she used to sneak it into our milk shakes. My favorite was wariq duwally -- boiled grape leaves stuffed with cooked rice and lamb and then wrapped like little cigars. Mom kept boxes of plastic bags in the trunk of the car and would make dad pull over every time we drove by a grapevine in a forest preserve or park. She would march us out and we would start picking the leaves and stuffing them into our bags. Stripped vines along any roadside are a pretty sure sign that you are entering an Arab neighborhood. Of course, if you see women wearing babushkas across their faces instead of over their heads, that's another good sign. Every time I invited a friend over for dinner, Mom would cook wariq duwally. My friends would tell everyone at school the next day that mom made them eat "little pieces of shit." My friends didn't have much trouble figuring out that I was a little different. They always wanted to know what my nationality was. "Cereal," I would reply. I thought I was saying "Syrian." As far as my friends were concerned, I was a Jew, like them. They nicknamed me "Herman," and went out of their way to make me a part of their lives. I spent my early teens hanging around the JCC and Mel Markon's original deli nearby sipping chocolate phosphates. The Hananias were the first Arab family to apply for membership at the Henry Hart Jewish Community Center at 91st and Jeffery Avenue. I don't remember why it didn't work. One time I even made a guest appearance at the local Hebrew school across the street. My friends thought it would give the Rabbi a real jolt to see an Arab sitting in the back of the class. "Are you Falusteeni?" the rabbi asked in Hebrew. "I am an American, Rabbi," I responded meekly. He knew I was an Arab before I did. The best of any teen's life is supposed to be that summer between eighth grade graduation and high school. It would have been that way for me if the Arabs and Israelis hadn't picked the month of my graduation from Joseph Warren Elementary school -- June 1967 -- to begin what would become the Arab world's most humiliating defeat. Israel's armies raced across the Sinai, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights, captured Jerusalem, and crushed Arab pride. All in six days. It put an unavoidable spotlight on my heritage. The humiliation was on TV, in the movies, in the newspapers, in magazines, and in school. Time magazine published Arab jokes. You couldn't turn on a television set without hearing about the celebrations in the Jewish community, and the humiliation of the Arabs. At school, classes were recessed for 15 minutes each morning during the war so that Jewish students could collect money for the United Jewish Appeal. There I was, a Palestinian Arab carrying a canister with a picture of Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser (whom the Jewish children knew more about than I did) , his hand reaching across the caption, "Give to the United Jewish Appeal." "Hey, Herman, whose side are you on?" one of my Jewish friends asked. "The Arabs' or the Israelis?" All I could think about was that scene in Exodus where the Arab who was friendly to the Jews was killed by his own people. Like so many people, I learned about being an Arab from the movies. The movie Exodus was the American textbook on the subject. The Arab was the villain, of course. Unshaven and dark skinned, he wore a dress, a towel on his head, and a rope around his waist, and he murdered children ruthlessly. He had a mustache and he looked like one of my uncles. In fact, almost every TV or Hollywood Arab terrorist looks like some uncle or aunt or cousin of mine. The scene where Fred Dryer (of TV's Hunter) pounces on a gaggle of terrorists in the movie Death Before Dishonor looks like an assault on a Hanania family reunion. Bowen High school and its large minority student body, located on the other side of the viaduct, couldn't have come at a better time. Concerns I had about being accepted were overshadowed by the general fear of the Spanish Lords and the Latin Kings. By 1970, Arabs had stopped living in Jewish neighborhoods. Most of my Jewish friends moved north to Skokie and Niles. We moved to the Southwest Side where half of the city's Arab population lives. The hardest part of high school was finding a girl to go out with who satisfied my mom. She always wanted me to marry an Arab girl. I would have, but Arab parents never let you date their daughters. Of course, I could never satisfy the parents of my non-Arab girlfriends either. I'm just what every Irish Catholic father wanted for his daughter, a scrawny-looking, dark-skinned Arab. After graduation, I went to Northern Illinois University, where I signed up for pre-med classes and where I heard I was the first Arab ever to survive fraternity rush. My Theta Chi pledge father gave me a paddle addressed "To the Arab from the Jew!" After two years as social chairman, with all-night parties and poor grades, I dropped out and joined the Air Force ... five months before the start of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. My drill instructor in basic training ragged me about being a "Sand nigger." "You're too gawd-damn dark to be a honky," he barked, " and too light to be a nigga! So what the hey-all are you?" I spent two years as a medic answering the big question: "If we go to the Middle East to kick some Arab ass, whose side are you gonna be on, Hanya-han-yana?" The nightmare scene from Exodus kept popping up in my mind. My best friends in the service were Jews -- because while Americans hated "Ay-rabs," they seemed to hate Jews, too) They just hated me more. When the war ended, I got married--though not to an Arab woman. (In fact, I got divorced and I married a second time.) Both times we had typical Arab weddings. The men and the women did variations of belly dances, arms waving, hips swaying, and Arabia music wailing. Much of the time, the Arab men danced among themselves. It's a macho thing. You can see similarities between Arab and Jewish culture at a wedding like this. The Jewish national dance, the Horah, and the Palestinian national dance, the Debka, look exactly alike ... a frenzied combination of a conga line and the hokey-pokey. I signed up at the University of Illinois in Chicago and changed my major from pre- med to Middle East studies. If there is any place in this world that needs a United Nations Emergency Peace Keeping Force, it's at the U. of I. Arab and Jewish students there are at war. That's where my political education as an Arab really began. Someone at the college obviously had a sense of humor because when they assigned campus activity rooms, they put the Organization of Arab Students in one room, Hillel (the Jewish student group) two rooms away, and the student newspaper, The Illini, in a room in the middIe. The goal of both sides was to win the support of the American students. What neither side realized was that the American students just didn't care. The Jewish students would try to do it by organizing festivals recognizing Israel's independence every May. They'd hold rallies at the Circle Forum, where they would sing folk songs, hold candlelight vigils, recite poetry, hold hands and dance, and eat "Israeli foods" like wariq duwally, felafil, and humos. The Arab students would do it by organizing "Palestine Day" protests -- marking the day the Israelis tookover Palestine -- and surrounding the Jewish students. They waved placards written in Arabic, chanted Marxist slogans, embraced weird organizations, and slung angry epithets at the Jewish students. The Arabs let their anger and emotions overcome their logic: to this day, Arab activists in Chicago prefer demonstrations at the Daley Plaza to more successful means of appealing to Americans. I was elected president of the Organization of Arab Students my first year there, and I led my share of protests. I remember one in particular. About 50 of us marched from the Civic Center to the Israeli consulate on Wacker Drive--with a 30-man police escort! When it was over, I used the bullhorn to facetiously thank the police for escorting us. The protest committee reprimanded me. A cop came up and shook my hand. One month later, another Arab student claimed I was "communicating with the Zionists," a capital offense. I was "too American" and I couldn't speak Arabic. OAS dumped me as president. I signed up for Arabic classes. The Arabs sat on one side, the Jews sat on the other side, and the "other" students sat in the middle. The teacher was an Iraqi Jew who had a peculiar sense of humor, I thought. Nearly every one of his tests included the one question that no Arab student could ever answer correctly: "What is the capitol of Israel?" the teacher would ask with a smile. All the Arabs grumbled and wrote "Tel Aviv." The answer that got you a passing grade was the answer that started five Middle East wars. "Jerusalem is the capitol of Israel," the teacher would say in English and then repeat in Arabic, "Urshalimu, asimatu Israelah." There was no such sentence in the Arabic language! Before I Ieft school, I was elected spokesman for the Arab-American Congress for Palestine, a citywide organization. I also started -- in 1976 -- Chicago's first English - language Arab newspaper, The Middle Eastern Voice. Both gave me access to public forums to espouse my views. They also helped attract the attention of the FBI. FBI agents interviewed my neighbors, my friends, some teachers and a few relatives for more than two years. It upset me. What right did they have to investigate me? What had I done wrong? Later, I got a copy of their report. It began by suggesting that I was involved in terrorism, and ended 12 pages later saying I was just a person concerned with "bettering my community." It was nice to see they drew the distinction. Arabs are among the most superstitious people in the world. You will see wooden camels, mother-of-pearl backgammon (tawlah) boards, and even a hookah (arjilah) in an Arab home. But, you will rarely see a seashell. It's bad luck--an animal lost its home. Caged birds are bad luck, too. You think that in their cages they are singing about love, peace, and harmony? They are singing curses at you for locking them up. But a bird flying around in your house is a symbol of good fortune. Just don't kill it. Don't hang philodendrons in the house. They symbolize the devil's tears. Don't roll your hands around and over each other in rapid motion. It is a symbol of death. I could deal with most of the superstitions. But I drew the line when I bought my first home. Mom suggested we bring it good luck ... by cutting a pigeon's throat on the front porch. Everyone did it in al-Balad ("old country") she said. "We could always kill a chicken, ya habibi, in the backyard if you are ashamed." "Shu malak?" she'd ask in Arabic. "What's the matter with you?" We finally settled on a Greek Orthodox priest ... to bless the house, that is. In the late 1970s, I was invited by Irv Kupcinet to appear on a TV forum with Abba Eban, Israel's most eloquent former foreign minister. While Eban was trying to explain the economic union between Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, I looked at the camera with puppy eyes, and appealed directly to American sympathies. Eban was born "Aubrey Solomon" in Cape Town, South Africa. My dad was born in Jerusalem. "How come you can go to Jerusalem anytime you want and become a citizen of Israel, and I can't?" I asked. Eban was very understanding. He told me he would be happy to take me to Jerusalem. I responded, what about the other three million Ray Hananias? Can they come, too? Kup, who later became a good friend, was not as understanding. When he asked me what it was that I hoped for myself, I said that when I died, I wanted to be buried in Jerusalem. "I'm sure we can accommodate that request," Kup said, smiling. When I told Kup later that my daughter's middle name was Haifa, in memory of a Palestinian port city, he wrote me a short note saying he hoped I had a son, whom he was sure I would name Jerusalem. My parents never understood why I wanted to be a journalist. To them and to most Arabs, journalists are ranked below janitors, undertakers, and Israeli soldiers, in that order. None are held in high esteem. Arabs dislike reporters. That's because there is no such thing as true journalism in the Middle East. Arabs hate to admit it, but journalists in the Arab world are synonymous with political hacks, government shills employed by government-controlled newspapers and television and radio stations that are filled with government-controlled propaganda, high with emotion and nearly always wrong. While the Arabs have stringent controls over their media, so do the Israelis, who impose harsh censorship on the Arab press. They frequently jail Arab reporters, another reason to stay out of the business. But Milton Rakove, a Jewish political science professor at Circle, liked my writings and took me under his wing. I studied with him for several years and eventually became a City Hall reporter and political columnist for The Southtown Economist newspapers. "Isn't it better to be a terrorist at City Hall than a terrorist in the Middle East?" Rakove asked. Actually, though, I don't know which is more dangerous, ducking bullets between sand dunes or dodging Jane Byrne's barbs. I've been called a "camel jockey" only once at City Hall, by a North Side alderman angry with stories I did on his zoning deals. Jane Byrne didn't seem to care about my ethnicity. To her, I was just plain old "scum." It's odd, I suppose, that I ended up covering politics. As a group, Arab-Americans hate going to the polls. My mentor, Milton Rakove, understood that being pro-Arab was bad politics, and in his book, Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers, he wrote that aspiring politicians "can always support Israel safely. That may alienate the Arabs, but how many Arabs vote in the city anyway?" Who would Arab Americans vote for if they did want to vote? For years at Democratic and Republican conventions, the issue was not which candidate supported Israel, but which candidate supported Israel more. It was only recently that Jesse Jackson taught the Arab-American community something everyone else already knew: that influence does not start at the top; it starts at the bottom. And, as my father taught me long ago, so does racism. |