Persiflage & Paroxysm

My family and I seem destined to witness our country’s most critical and terrifying historical junctures. I was not in Lebanon on October 13, 1990, but I was most certainly there on September 22, 1988. That was the day when the outgoing President Amin Gemayel, whose term ended that day, was left with no choice except one of three: constitutional vacuum, accepting a government dominated by Syrian allies, or appointing the military council headed by General Michel Aoun, the army commander, as interim government. He chose the third option.   I remember that year, it was my final year of high school, or should have been at least. I was a student at Eastwood College, Mansourieh, I was living in Lebanon with my mother while my father lived and worked in the UAE and visited occasionally. That year’s Independence Day celebrations at our school was unlike any other. Red and white flags were everywhere. In the assembly hall we all gathered for a speech by our school principle followed by stu...

I really hate Antiques Road Show (UK). Every time I watch it triggers something, an anger I never thought I had that comes screaming and rocketing out of me from a deep dark place in my soul. “Why do these English have all this great stuff they inherited from great great grandfathers? We don’t have anything like that!” Envy, poisonous envy wells up as I covet each and every bauble and trinket that arrived to British shores from China or South America or India of Polynesia. Why do I care so much? Why does it affect me so?    It’s because all our heirlooms, our trinkets and baubles, our family hoard of meaningless objects, a family’s history of acquisition, was all lost. Not once, not twice, but over and over and over again, from Germans occupying our family home in Nazareth to turn it into an HQ in 1915, to the Nakba of 1948 when so much was left behind in my father’s family’s Haifa apartment lost forever, to the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war when what little was brought over from...