Like the Eid, our three-day festivities that follow a month of fasting and prayer during Ramadan, Thanksgiving, a day when Americans give thanks for the abundance in their lives, is an occasion for family and friends to gather, commune and, well, gorge.
This was my twenty-eighth consecutive Thanksgiving in Washington, which this time around fell in the middle of the Eid (as it often does) and let me tell you this: continents may drift, the center may not hold, all that glitters in our lives may turn out not to be gold, and reality’s terrible disappointments may continue to dog us, but in this household both the Eid and Thanksgiving remain a constant - a time when this old geezer of a columnist reflects on exile, the old country he left behind in his mid-teens and, above all, the point of all his wanderings around the world, from Australia, where he grew up, to the United States where, after all these years, he is still trying to figure out what it means to be Arab and American at the same time.
To be sure, mine is not a unique experience. Like their famed ancestor Ben Battuta, millions of Arabs in this generation have left their homelands to explore others. Alas, that exhausts these folks’ resemblance to someone as heroic, adventurous and intellectually inquisitive. These days you find them all over Europe, there not to explore but to escape - escape a world that, after more than half a century of independence, has failed to provide its people with job opportunities, political freedoms and social justice.
Then you have those other Arabs, talented intellectuals, scientists, technocrats and researchers, representing their countries’ social capital, as it were, who continue to lift anchor and sail to ports where, absent a patronage system in society, individuals of limited gifts are not over-praised and over-rewarded, while those of singular accomplishments are often ignored and assailed. At times they sail away equally to escape an intolerant milieu that will have their voices silenced when raised, and their heads hit when lifted at every turn.
Then you have diaspora Palestinians, who carry an even heavier cargo on their backs as they wander the earth in search of greener pastures. Their pressing existential problem? It can be conveyed with a few strokes of a pen on that paper napkin on one’s Eid/Thanksgiving dinner table: Their patrimony is now occupied by another people.
And when you ask your Jewish friends, liberals one and all, about the injustice of it, they flash those historical equations and political buzz terms at you, like a magician’s deck of cards, to justify the notion that a Jew from Brooklyn, Moscow or Kiev has more right to live, say, in Haifa than you do — the town whence you and your ancestors hail, and whence countless generations of Palestinians had had their immemorial reflexes and twists of feeling shaped.
Yes, I never cease to ask the question, around this time every year, “Why am I here?” Sure, I am comfortable being American, for there’s no other country in the world as welcoming of those who want to be of it as the United States. But in the end, there always lurks that yearning in you for the old sod, an inward preoccupation compounded by a sense, that sneaks up on you at unguarded moments, that you are an outsider. An outsider can master a culture and its language as a rider masters his mount, but he rarely becomes one with its undefined, rhythmic motion.
When I was young - as in very young and still imbued with the moral optimism of youth, living in the Australian outback — I pictured myself as Holden Caulfield, standing in the field of rye, catching Palestinians and other Arabs who didn’t know where they were going, catching them before they fell. I knew that I was, like J.D. Salinger’s character in “Catcher in the Rye,” crazy too.
This year, as I again engaged myself in self-address, about my estrangement from my roots, my abandonment of confidence in the stabilities and expressive authority of modern Arab civilization, I pictured myself instead as Mr. Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now,” wiping his brow and muttering, “Oh, the horror, the horror!”
For exiles, you see, even the Eid and Thanksgiving are a time to reflect on one’s morbid fate.
