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"HOW'S JOYA?"
Beirut to Haverford, 2006-7
After the $700, eight-hour taxi ride
from Beirut to Damascus last August 12, the Israeli-shelled truck
wrecks on the battered roads, the bridges dangling like tinker-toy
shards, Hezbollah fighters in civilian rags brandishing Glocks and
Sig-Sauers and popping crazily at Israeli Defense Force surveillance
planes droning above them, Joya Manasseh, her mom Jocelyne and her
16 year-old brother Philip, finally cleared customs. Then they climbed
the steps to the Middle Eastern Airlines flight to take them to
Paris.
She should have been relieved, happy to leave Lebanon
and the Shia war...her dad Tony, a financial adviser (and writer
on the war), had gotten the family out during a cease-fire day brokered
on the Israeli side by Condi Rice. After the awful news photos of
villages like Qana , where 28 Lebanese civilians, 16 of them children,
had been bombed to death, world opinion abruptly switched from sympathy
for Israel – which had lost two soldiers to kidnapping and
five more trying to rescue them from Hezbollah – to horror
at its “overreaction.” On July 12, when Israel’s
massive retaliation began, normal life across all of Lebanon evaporated.
Eventually, 1,200 people were killed by bombs and groundfire; electrical
and water services were destroyed; 975,000 Lebanese and 300,000
Israelis were displaced; the Beirut airport and harbor closed; and
much of southern Lebanon was polluted with unexploded cluster bombs,
which seemed designed to turn ordinary Lebanese against Hezbollah,
Syria and Iran, the Shia sources of Israel’s fury. For bringing
all this down on people who still remembered the destruction of
Beirut in the first Israeli occupation 25 years ago...
But climbing into the Middle Eastern jet, Joya couldn’t
breathe. She kept seeing whorls of fire. Bloody pools on shrapneled
macadam. Dead animals. Worse, the human corpses and sheep carcasses,
when they began to bloat, started to seem indistinguishable –
obscene caricatures of life...and then a kind of guilt would hit.
For getting out. For losing focus.
Joya had been in Paris’ Orly airport before,
en route to New York, where her uncles lived, but she’d never
gotten to the Rive Droit shops and the Left Bank clubs that an 18
year-old ordinarily thinks about. Now, Jocelyne tried to get her
interested, while they waited in a hotel near the Champs D’Elysee
to arrange for visas and an Air France flight to New York. Her brother
kept watching the war on plasma, and her mom kept telling him to
turn it off. Tony was still in Beirut. So was Jocelyne’s mother
Agnes, living relatively safely in the mountains outside Beirut,
in the village of Baabdat. That was where the family had gone when
the bombing became intense.
Joya’s best friends, Natasha Ghantous, Soraya
Tabet and Randa Eid, all from the same comfortable Beirut neighborhood,
also had family houses in the mountains, and they’d try to
keep in touch via cell. But reception was poor, and frustrating,
and the girls would all end up crying. Joya’s girlfriends
hadn’t wanted her to leave. They’d all just graduated
from College Louise Wegmann, “a good French school”
and “much more strict than here,” and “had made
plans for all that we’d do all summer and next year too,”
Joya said. It would have been their first year of college together...
When Tony first mentioned that the family should take
advantage of its Quaker roots (“We’ve been Quaker for
three generations,” Joya declares), she was horrified at the
thought of leaving: “My friends are like sisters.
Even when we moved to Baabdat when the war started, I missed our
house in Beirut. I missed my bathroom, my bedroom, all my things...”
Even though she couldn’t sleep, anticipating the IDF bombers
rolling in at 4 a.m. to begin blasting Beirut airport and the Shia
neighborhoods and outlying villages where Hezbollah fired Katyusha
rockets from, she wanted to stay. At 18, it’s hard to leave
your country and friends, even with your family...By 6 a.m. when
the roaring usually stopped, the sort of long moaning whistles followed
by whumps!; the little fearsome pauses between; the thrum
of the engines; the white and black smoke and eddies of screaming
– was it real? – scratching against the windows...you
couldn’t tell what was there and what was in your head, Beirut
was so far away – even with that, she’d wanted to go
home. So that later, in France, when Tony’d call Paris from
Lebanon, and talk to Jocelyne and Philip, he’d always ask:
“How’s Joya?” And sometimes she’d beg him
even then, to let her come back.
*
Joya Manasseh arrived at Haverford the week before
school started late last August. Dean Kannerstein and Associate
Dean Donna Mancini, who handles International Academic Programs
from her office in Chase, arranged her status as a “guest
student” — like the many LSU and Tulane transfers displaced
by Katrina a year-and-a half ago. Kannerstein actually met Joya’s
plane at Philly International and ferried her out to the Main Line:
“They were sooo nice, but I was like freaking out!”
There was no one around. She didn’t know anybody.
Her English is good, but she’s more comfortable in Lebanese
and French. (When I asked her how she was doing she’d sometimes
reply in French: “ce qui ne te detruit pas te rend plus
fort”—“what doesn’t destroy you makes
you stronger.”) The green swards of Haverford were beautifully
empty. The freshman class was yet to show up. Joya wandered, tried
to settle into Barclay, talked on her cell phone to her mom and
brother, tried to plan her course of study: Political Science with
an emphasis, naturally, on the Middle East. Edward Webb teaches
her main class, and was able to fill her in on context: The Shia
War within Islam is a fundamentalist reaction to Western influence
which began in T.E. Lawrence’s time, and has spread recently
to pit poor and disenfranchised Muslims (Shia) against the more
contemporary, “westernized” Sunni Muslims (and in Lebanon,
Christian Arabs). Organizations like Al Queda and the Taliban, Hezbollah
and Hamas, in concert with the governments of Syria and Iran, among
others, fund and arm independent militias and splinter groups such
as the Mahdi Army in Iraq . Regional plans to destabilize Lebanon,
Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Pakistan and Afghanistan, are based on free-floating,
ever-changing coalitions, that aren’t necessarily orchestrated
by Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, as the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld
axis used to spin it; therefore they’re difficult to address
by conventional warfare – as the American debacles in Iraq
and Afghanistan are showing.
Lebanon, with its traditionally strong Christian population,
perpetually in conflict with fundamentalist militants, who’d
been using the southern part of the country to attack Israel since
long before the 1982 war, had largely failed to control militancy
within its borders. Having lost out in Israel/Palestine and in Jordan
to the IDF and the late King Hussein’s forces, Yassir Arafat’s
PLO had moved its operations to southern Lebanon. With Arafat’s
rout there in 1982, the post-modern phase of Lebanon’s political
ordeal began. Christian Arabs allied with Western Europe and the
U.S. were facing off with Shia fundamentalists. Many were bombed
and assassinated, most recently and significantly Lebanese Prime
Minister Rafik Hariri and 22 others in Beirut, two years ago, and
Lebanese Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel, last November: “You
could see it was getting worse,” Joya remembers now, “but
you hoped it would stabilize...even when the recent trouble began,
they would close the schools for a week, but then open again...the
electricity would go off and on, but you sort of pretended it would
be all right...”
In Haverford, she tried to cope. She’d visit
her uncles in New York, where she could taste true Lebanese food
again – “real tabouli salad with tomatoes and onions,
real falafels – the ones at the DC are trying, but
they’re not supposed to be green inside...”
Philip had an easier time adjusting to the high school
he’d transferred to (he’s 17 now): “He’s
a little macho, you know, ‘Whaddaya so upset about?’
– a boy thing.” Jocelyne moved around, visiting family
and friends. Tony stayed in Beirut for a while, tending to business.
After most Israeli troops withdrew by last October, it wasn’t
as dangerous, but in November, he’d come to the States, too,
writing and lecturing here about the situation at home.
Joya talked with Natasha, Soraya and Randa as often
as she could. When she got the blues, her roommate Julia Bravin
tried to cheer her up: “Sometimes, I was just impossible,”
she admits. “I’d just bawl like a baby. I was making
plans to go back to Beirut for Christmas break. At first, my father
was against it. But he left it up to me. He said ‘You know
it’s expensive, especially since we’ll all have to go
back...You’re not traveling alone. And it could be dangerous.
You never know what’s going to happen there. What if they
close the airport again? Do you remember that taxi ride?’
“Of course, I’ll never forget it. It was
the scariest thing I’ve ever done. And a girl I knew had been
riding in her car when one of those Hezbollah crazies stopped her.
He wanted to see her papers. He had a gun! What if she’d
had like a Christian name? In Lebanon, you can tell by the given
names whether you’re Christian, Shia or whatever...Thank God
he let her go! She had a Shia name...Before, when I was little,
Muslims and Christians got along, but it’s dangerous now.”
When Joya told her friends she might not be able to visit, they
all began wailing. They wanted to see her so badly. No one in her
family seemed anxious to make the trip, she explained, but they
wouldn’t let her rest. Finally she went to her dad again.
“I’ve explained it all to you,”
he said. “I leave the decision to you.”
But Joya knew Jocelyne really wanted to see Agnes,
and that maybe Tony was testing, to see how she’d react. She
told him she’d thought it over, and still wanted to go home.
*
Beirut was “working,” but bizarre. Hezbollah,
trying to pressure the Christian moderates, had filled the place
with “wild” Shia and others, whole families of country
poor who were living in tents with their animals around them in
the chic downtown streets, cooking on fires and giving fierce looks
when you walked by in jeans and sunglasses, window-shopping. The
men never threatened you, but ne pouvait se vanter d’etre
propre – they couldn’t brag of being clean, either.
It got to the point where Joya felt most comfortable at home, or
with her friends’ families. As it turned out, her parents
and brother were more easy in Beirut than she was: “We had
a good time, it was great to see each other [friends] again, but
Lebanon is changing. It’s already different from when I left.”
“Do you think you’ll go back?” I
asked. She paused:
“It was very hard to leave. My friends acted
like I was betraying them by not just staying...
“But it’s different now, like I said.
I don’t know what will happen.
“I love my home, but we just don’t know
now...”
— John Lombardi
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