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| Al Jazeera building in Doha, Qatar. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Lebanon Mosque (Photo credit: Côte d’Azur) |
If any reader of
this blog does not yet have access to Al Jazeera television, I would advise them to lay down the $2.50 a
month that it costs so they can take advantage of some excellent programmes.
Not only does the station give a
somewhat different perspective on the affairs of the world, but it also
produces some wonderful documentary films on all sorts of subjects. Most of their subjects are from
non-European countries; many of them deal with problems suffered by people in
poor countries; but the quality of the work is first-rate, and the freshness of
perspective notable in almost every case.
Just today I saw a moving programme called “Beirut Buenos Aires
Beirut,” that was screened in a series called Al Jazeera World. The film was
made by a man called Hernan Belen, about a handsome 37-year-old woman from
Argentina, Graciela, who started to ask questions
about what happened to the great-grandfather, Mohammed Moussa Haithan, who, having emigrated to South America from Lebanon
many years before and raised a family, suddenly after the death of his
wife, left his children all behind to return to his Lebanese home,
seldom to be heard from again.
First she went to the archives to
look for any immigrant who might have been recorded as an arriving ship
passenger at around 1900, but was told that Arabs in those days were not
regarded as favorable immigrants, and the curator was not surprised to find there
was no record of his arrival, since so many documents had been trashed. She had
been given some letters by her grandmother, family letters written to her great-grandfather
in Arabic, and carefully guarded these many years, and now she took them to an
Arabic-speaking scholar who translated them for her. One of them was from her
grandfather’s sister, Carine, chiding him for never writing to his family in
Lebanon with news of his fate in Argentina. From such an inconclusive search
she was far from satisfied, and decided, to the astonishment of her family, to
go to Lebanon to see if she could connect with members of their family still
living there. She was worried that she
did not have a precise address for her grandfather, but her elders told her that
in those Lebanese villages, “everybody knows everybody.”
I want to add to this narrative
--- to interrupt it, if you like --- that I was caught up in this story because
she was explaining a sequence of events that my own family had experienced,
although long before I was conscious of it or even interested in it. My own
grandfather, as a boy of 22, had arrived in the south of the South Island of
New Zealand in 1878 from County Antrim in northern Ireland, and like the young
Lebanese in Argentina had married and started a family. He was an early pioneer
in that sparsely-populated part of the country, set up a business as a coach
driver, and unfortunately died when my father was 10, leaving his Scottish-born
wife alone to carry on his business, and even to set up a new one, as a funeral
director. I knew none of the details of my grandfather’s life until many years
later when my nephew, a successful businesssman, researched my grandfather's life for a book
he was writing about his own experiences in business. In that indifference to
family history I suppose I am typical of many descendants of the brave
ancestors who have sallied out around the world in the last 200 years
I read somewhere that there are
500,000,000 of us, we people whose forebears left their homes in search of
better opportunities in new countries, so we are quite a brotherhood and
sisterhood, taken all in all.
Graciela, the Argentine woman heroine
of this film, knew from her grandfather’s rare letters that he had settled in a
southern Lebanese village called Kfar Kila. And once arrived in the country she
was fortunate to find an Arabic-speaking friend from Buenos Aires who was
visiting, like herself, and whose knowledge of the language eased her search
considerably. He discovered that they would need a military permit to allow
them to enter the region in which this village was situated, and later they
found out they not only needed the general permit, but detailed permits,
one for every place they intended to
visit.
Arrived in the village, they
inquired of two men standing in front of a house for directions to the mayor. When
they elaborated on their mission, the man said he lived in the house her
grandfather had occupied, so he took them there. When she saw the windows
before which her grandfather used to sit and smoke shisha (whatever that is),
she wanted to sit there and imagine the scene from years before.
The man said he knew the family
of her grandfather’s widow, and he took them to meet Carine’s son, Habib.
Carine had been killed in 1948 by the Israelis, even before the grandfather had returned to Lebanon. Her son
said he had never met his mother, and when
Graciela produced Carine’s letter to her brother, Carine’s son seemed overwhelmingly moved, because this was
the only memento he had of his mother. They gathered, this large Lebanese
family, for a photo with this woman from Argentina, and Graciela remarked that
here they were, many thousands of miles apart, speaking different languages,
with different cultures, yet all members of the same family. It was a truly
moving conclusion to the film.
I have to confess I really don’t
have that overwhelming connection to family, that seems so typical of Middle Easterners, and perhaps
especially of Arabs. In fact, on a visit to New Zeaand some years ago some
people I had never seen, never even heard of before, travelled quite a distance
to come and see me, and I couldn’t help wondering why they bothered. But I
guess in these two attitudes we discover a dichotomy that illustrates something
about the immigrant diaspora. Most of us, I guess, eventually settle into our
new country and culture, and more or less forget about the country of their
origins. My father was one of those who longed for the country of origin:
although born in New Zealand, and living all of his life there, he nevertheless
dreamed always of going on a visit to what he insisted on calling “the home
country”. And eventually he went, back to Britain, back to Northern Ireland,
and he found an aunt whose acquaintance he was delighted to make. We have found
since, thanks to a distant relative who lives somewhere in Canada, that my
grandfather had a brother who, like him, emigrated, but this one came to North
America. Apparently, neither brother
bothered writing home. The descendant who discovered this connection has since
visited New Zealand and introduced himself to many members of the rather large
clan of Richardsons who have descended from my grandfather.
For myself, I have lived a
different sort of life: I left New Zeaand with my wife at the age of 22,
travelled the world, had a family, a truly nuclear family wholly dependent on
each other, since we had no extended family within many thousands of miles. And
I can’t say I have ever felt homesick for the old country, New Zealand, or for the
family I left behind there.
As migration increases in these
modern times, this question of the attitudes of immigrants to their newly-found
societies is still a matter of intense controversy. In fact, it is to be read
about in the newspapers every day right at this moment, as the Quebec government
is in the process of introducing a so-called Charter of Quebec Values, which
would forbid the wearing of any religious symbols, such as the hibab, the
kirpan, the turban and so on.The French government has been going through the
same process, arguing that conformity to the customs of the host nation must be
respected by those who choose to come and live among them.
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