Leyla • The Dark, Beautiful Night

In honor of Arab American Heritage Month, the Rev. Canon Leyla King shares a chapter from her book, Daughters of Palestine, A Memoir in Five Generations.

Houston, 2002

In 1948, my grandmother, four months into her marriage to my grandfather, fled Haifa, Palestine, where both of them had grown up and where they had made their new home together. On the day they left, mere weeks before the nakba, my grandparents had hoped to be able to return to their home after the violence calmed down, but of course, they never did. No one in our family has ever been back to the home my grandparents left behind in 1948.

And Grandma told me once that in that moment, she was filled with such depth of fear and loss and anxiety that it was all she could do to hold on to her new husband’s hand for dear life as they boarded the crowded ship that would take them to Beirut. She was four months pregnant with my mother. Grandma says that her faith then was nothing compared to what it became—that she did not trust in God as she should have. Still, I imagine that the only thing that brought her and Grandpa through that moment was the strong Christian faith that I always knew in them.

For many recent decades, scientists believed that a woman is born with all the egg cells she will ever have in her lifetime already within her reproductive organs. If so, then when my grandmother fled Haifa in 1948, with the forming body of my mother inside her

womb, then the beginnings of my own self, my own identity were caught up in that moment, too. I can see myself, the future daughter of the baby who grew in my grandmother’s belly, nestled within that very baby, itself nestled within her mother, like a living set of Russian dolls. I imagine that the loss and fear of that moment somehow seeped into me, and I have been holding it in the core of my being ever since, like my own egg. And that if you break that egg open, there’s this even more hidden part, golden and warm. And that is my faith. It is the faith of my mother and grandmother, and it is the thing that carried us all, one inside the other, through that awful moment, and will carry us through the rest, too.

More recent research suggests that women likely produce new egg cells throughout their reproductive years, which is good news for those who struggle with infertility. But whatever the latest sci-ence says about the biological processes of fertility, we are all products of our ancestors; each of us is the smallest (so far) in our own series of Russian dolls, nestled within others, through whom and by whom we have received the gifts of identity.

Of course, we have to be made aware of these gifts; our eyes have to be opened to them for the abundance of their blessings to be revealed to us. And that wasn’t always the case for me. As a very pale-skinned girl growing up in the suburbs of Houston, I had no idea of the richness of my ancestry.

I remember with searing clarity the first time I learned my own identity.

I must have been fourteen or fifteen years old. I was a freshman in high school, and one day in our social-studies class, we finished up a unit about World War II and the Holocaust with a screening of some film about Anne Frank. The last scene in the movie was one of Anne Frank’s father, who had survived the concentration camp and returned to a new kind of life. In the scene, he stands before a storefront window with a number of televisions all tuned to a news station. The news headline being broadcast is of the creation of the nation-state of Israel, and the implication (as I understood it at the time) was that, in this event, there was some offer of hope or redemption from the horrors that Mr. Frank had suffered at the hands of Nazi brutality.

After school, I met my older sister on the bench outside the band hall where we always waited for my mom to pick us up. The film I had watched earlier in the day must have made an impression, because I started telling Zeyna about it as we sat side by side:

“In the end, though, the Jews got their own homeland!” I told her excitedly. “Isn’t that great?”

Zeyna turned to me with wide eyes and raised her pointer finger at me in the mode of instruction. She spoke slowly and seriously: “Don’t you dare say that to Mom when she gets here.”

I don’t remember what happened after that moment. I imagine that Zeyna must have told me something like, Um, hello? WE ARE PALESTINIAN! I think she had to have given me the briefest of history and identity lessons in the few minutes before Mom’s Buick arrived. But beyond that moment of horror on Zeyna’s face, I have no memory.

Thinking back, I don’t remember hearing—much less using—the words “Palestine” or “Palestinian” in my early childhood at all. We rarely talked about Arabs even. “Arabic” was definitely part of my lingo, and I knew that was what my mom and her family spoke. And we have always been especially close (both emotionally and geographically) to my grandparents and the large and loving web of great-aunts, my great-uncle, and their spouses and children and grandchildren that I grew up around, the extended family that helped to raise me.

But I didn’t know that this family made me different from my peers in any way. I just assumed that everyone had a mom who spoke a second language. I thought everyone saw dozens of cousins and extended family members for a couple of hours on a weekly basis every Sunday after church. It never occurred to me that other people didn’t celebrate major holidays with more than a hundred relatives.

The first time I ever questioned those assumptions was one Sun-day maybe a year or so after the incident with my sister. Zeyna had invited a friend of hers—I think her name was Mary—to church with us that day. And since our extended-family gathering for “coffee” at one of my great-aunts’ houses afterward was a foregone conclusion to our Sunday morning routine, Mary came with us to that, too.

About an hour into it all, we found Mary sitting apart from the rest of us, weeping. If you want to get the attention of a bunch of Arab mothers, sit by yourself and cry. All the aunties came running: “What’s wrong? Habiibti, are you okay? What’s the matter?” they asked.

When she could find space to answer, poor Mary wailed: “I didn’t know families could be like this.  My family doesn’t even get together like this on Thanksgiving! I wish I had a family like yours!”

The existential revelation provided to me by my sister on that day after school, combined with my surprise over Mary’s emotional response to my family’s usual get-together, inspired the beginnings of a deep dive into my own identity. In my final years of high school, I began to ask questions, to listen to my grandmother’s and my aunties’ stories, to retain what I heard, as my grandmother had done before me, her whole life. Frustrated by an inability to hear my elders’ experiences in their native tongue, I studied Arabic in college, taking both semesters—the full extent of courses for the language that my university offered. And in the waning weeks of my last year, with a teaching job secured for the coming fall and a blissfully empty summer before me to fill as I pleased, I called my grandmother and asked her a question:

“Would it be okay with you if we spent some time together this summer?”

“Yes, of course, habiibti,” she replied. “I’d love to see you as often as you can come.”

“But I mean a lot of time, Grandma,” I clarified. “I’d like you to tell me about your life, about growing up in Palestine and fleeing in ’48 and living in Damascus and Beirut and all that stuff. I was thinking I might get one of those little mini tape recorders, and we could talk all morning every day—for as long as it takes—and I would record it all and keep it. And maybe, someday, I might write it all down.”

She was enthusiastic. “Yes, habiibti. Yes, Leylati. That’s a very nice idea. It would be my pleasure.”

And so, here we are, Grandma and me. She sits in her favorite chair in her living room, and I am at one end of the sofa beside her, steaming cups of tea on the side table between us. On my lap is a legal pad of yellow paper that my grandmother found for me among the few remaining items of the printing and stationery shop my grandfather owned until his death two years ago. The mini cassette player in my hand I bought with my own money just last week.

With a bit of a sheepish grin, I press record on the little device and set it down on the table next to my tea. Grandma and I look at each other, and we both start to laugh. I have always loved her laughter. It bubbles up from within her chest, perhaps even from below, from her belly, where her joy lies, where her faith lies, where once even I lay—or at least one half of me—a tiny, microscopic egg within my mother’s womb as she was carried safely within her mother’s womb that day, more than fifty years ago, through trauma and tragedy.

And here we are now, to remember it all together. To keep it for my own children some day, and for their children, too. To retain it.

And so we begin. We start with laughing now.

Click here to order the book and use KING40 for a discount.