Under the global olive tree
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Ghassan Hage
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Ghassan Hage's biography and other articles by this writer
After a diversion in a genre of grassroots social theorising with his work Identitées Meurtrières, Amin Maalouf comes back to us with what he does best: historically grounded story-telling. In Origines (Bernard Grasset), published in French this year, he once again exhibits his virtuoso skills of infusing life, emotions and personalised drama into what could be, in other hands, nothing more than bland historical documents.
This time, however, his personal emotions are stitched to the historical documents he breathes life into. They are his family archives. This is a family that, more so than any national or regional locality, constitutes to him the most permanent ground of identification he has. The book is really two interwoven stories in one. It is first of all the tale of his grandparents: a voyage through their collective and individual struggles to lead viable lives in the Lebanese Mountain, Beirut, the United States and Cuba. But it is also Maalouf's own story, researching and investigating this tale. He shares with us the manner in which he interrogates, deciphers and sweats over documents and the way he physically follows the routes and tracks they open up before him, leading him into a transnational voyage of discovery of his own; the delight at finding a name in the migratory records of Ellis Island or the indescribable elation at coming across a surviving but previously unknown close relative in Cuba.
Along the way, Maalouf makes his family archives yield many historical, social and cultural insights into the lives of "his people": from the varieties of ways they came to relate to the transformation of the Ottoman Empire to their more intimate manners and habits. For example, noting the usage of "with renown intelligence" to describe an ancestor in a document, Maalouf points out that "the very fact of saying ‘with renown intelligence' is here a coded way of saying ‘illiterate'... My people often express themselves this way; when they are reluctant to expose the failings of a relative; they conceal them under forms of praise that actually hint at them". (p67) In another instance, criticising his grandfather's endless desire for recognition and material possessions, Maalouf comments – in a strangely mixed-up but still powerfully critical metaphor – that he had a "thirst the like of which is only experienced by those who have never eaten their fill". "This is not in itself a damning reproach," he tells us, "or if it is, it can be equally directed at myself, my compatriots and many others like us." Good critical social commentary is always like this. It does not necessarily tell us anything new. It just gives words to what is always "kind of known" but remains hidden or unexpressed: what the anthropologist Michael Taussig has referred to as "public secrets".
Despite such insights and the many themes and historical processes it covers, the book remains above all a masterful description of the formation of the late 19th-century transnational immigrant Lebanese families and of the social worlds they created and inhabited. As he is looking for his grandfather's tomb in the village, someone reminds him that in this village, like in many others, families do not find themselves buried together in one cemetery.
Here every family has one son buried in Beirut, one son in Egypt, another in Argentina or Brazil or Mexico, and some others in Australia or the US. Our lot is to be as dispersed in death as we have been in life. (p36)
And it is precisely this state of transnational familial dispersal in life and death that Maalouf captures best.
The bloody civil war of 1860 had accelerated people's migration from the villages to Beirut and beyond. What was prior to the war a timid desire on the part of those who had already benefited from a Western education to move beyond the narrow confines of the Lebanese Mountain was now a fully fledged mass migratory movement. As Maalouf relates:
My future grandparent stayed in Beirut for three years, a city he came to cherish, and where he will return to live on a number of occasions throughout his life. The city was then in full expansion; a development accelerated by the massacres of 1860. Many people who, up till now, dozed lazily in their Mountain villages, thinking themselves protected of the ferocity of the world, have experienced in those events a sudden awakening. The most audacious chose to go beyond the seas – it was the start of an immense migratory movement that was hardly ever interrupted since. First, in the direction of Egypt and Constantinople, then further and further afar, towards the United States, Brazil and the totality of the American continent as well as Australia. The less adventurous – often those encumbered with a family – were content to "go down" from their village towards the harbor city, which bit by bit, began to have the allure of a metropolis. (p82)
There is a funny and revealing passage in the book where the author portrays his grandfather, a man educated in an American-initiated Protestant school, delivering a speech about the virtues of the English language, "the most necessary of all those that one can study".
This was not only because "books in English contain, let there be no doubt, innumerable forms of knowledge, in all domains, which is not the case of other languages" but, more importantly, because "the poor among us just as much as the rich will have to leave to the United States or towards Australia, if not immediately, at least in the near future, for reasons no one ignores."
And so the grandfather ends up exclaiming: "Long live the English-speaking countries! Long live English!" (p70)
"I force myself not to smile hearing these pathetic and incongruous exclamations," says Maalouf – with a hint of francophone chauvinism. But, as he goes on to note, the speech reveals the extent to which the necessity of leaving was already becoming a taken-for-granted fact in the Mountain: "To leave or not to leave" very quickly became then, and has remained so today, the Mountain's "to be or not to be".
I HAVE RECENTLY FINISHED FOUR YEARS OF INTENSIVE RESEARCH examining the lives of two Lebanese transnational families originating in two very different Lebanese villages and each differently spread across the globe. During that time, I have taken two to three around-the-world trips a year as I spent a week here and a week there with family members in the Lebanese villages, in London and Paris, in Venezuela, in Philadelphia and Boston, and in Sydney and Melbourne. I wanted to get as intimate as possible an idea of how these Lebanese families, spread as they are around the globe, actually maintain an emotional and a practical sense of themselves as a family. Reading Maalouf at the end of such a research and sharing his subtle insights into the Lebanese diasporic condition was for me immensely rewarding. As a reader, I was immensely grateful. As a researcher I was also jealous ... particularly because of the "suitcase".
The "suitcase" is crucial to the unfolding of the story told in Origines. When he begins to get seriously curious about the life of his grandfather, Maalouf's mother comes to him with a few letters written by his great uncle. She casually informs him that there is a suitcase full of them, along with photos, newspaper cuttings, notebooks. "A suitcase full of documents? At our house!" Maalouf cannot believe his luck. Nor can I.
The immigrants and the villagers of the Lebanese Mountain have a very poor record in keeping their past correspondence when compared with other immigrants of the time. This has greatly affected our capacity to establish a decent social history of Lebanese immigration, despite some very good efforts by historians such as Akram Khater in the US or curators such Alissar Chidiac at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum. This lack of written documentation is partly explained, of course, by the relatively low level of literacy among the immigrants. But I think that there is also a lack of desire, and consequently a lack of a tradition, of "keeping" as such. In her work, Inalienable Possessions (University of California Press, 1992), the anthropologist Annette Weiner examines what she calls the paradox of keeping-while-giving that governs the norms of reciprocity among many modern and tribal people. She shows the importance of "what is kept" for the process of collective identity formation. From such a perspective, this Lebanese inability to keep might well be a symptom of the often deeply traumatic identity crisis that the inhabitants of this land have suffered from, and continue to suffer from, in a region defined by continuously stunted and shifting boundaries of national, social and emotional attachment. This inability to keep might also be symptomatic of the related trauma of immigration itself, and the inability, or unwillingness, of the migrant to fully identify with the often painful realities it involves.
But Maalouf has his suitcase and as he goes through it document by document, our knowledge of and insights into the dramas of migration go on multiplying. Why does one brother leave while another stays? Why does one settle successfully while the other finds migration unbearable? It cannot be a matter of class background, which they both share. It can, however, be a question of social formation, of character and of social dispositions. Such was the case of Maalouf's grandfather Botros and his brother. Gebrayel, less educated and less reflexive, throws himself into the migratory adventure without asking too many questions. Botros, on the other hand, having gone through a better period of schooling and having developed a very early sense of purpose as an educator, asks too many questions and hesitates. In some ways, because of his hesitation, his initial desire to migrate grows stronger and his grandson, 100 years or so later, easily reads through his hesitance and the many excuses he is giving his brother for not going.
I have read and re-read these paragraphs ... I have the impression of hearing the voice of this grandfather I've never known, his voice at the time when he was still young, wondering how not to waste his life, and if it was reasonable to stay in the country, or honorable to leave it; these are questions I had to ask myself three quarters of a century later, though in very different circumstances ... But were they really that different? From this land people emigrated since time immemorial for the same reasons; and with the same feelings of remorse. (p91)
Maalouf sees in Botros someone who really wanted to go, who was envious of his brother Gebrayel for having gone, but who did not dare make the ultimate move and who was tying himself with all sort of moral arguments to justify his indecision. (p92)
In fact Botros was quite right to be hesitant. Or, one could say, his hesitance was itself an indication of his unpreparedness to make the migratory move. As it turned out, his voyage to join his brother in Cuba was a disaster. The proud professor, the poet, always a bit of a dandy, found himself subjected to humiliating searches by the Cuban Seguridad, then quarantined and treated like cattle... finally making it into Cuba to sleep in his brother's attic. (p98) He quickly returns to the Lebanese Mountain.
"No doubt he was not made for migration, after all," says Maalouf of his grandfather. And, he continues:
The emigrant has to be prepared to swallow every day his ration of humiliation, he has to accept that life treats him informally (il doit accepter que la vie le tutoie), that it pats him on the shoulder and the stomach with excessive familiarity. (p99)