29 October 2007
Review
BEIRUT: A father admonishes his rebellious daughter for interrupting his stories with her smart-alecky questions. Another daughter casually mentions a romance to her father, who from then on refuses her phone calls and burns her letters. A third daughter sits begrudgingly at a kitchen table, listening to her relatives repeat their oft-told stories of immigration and adjustment, until they strike an unexpected taboo and reveal a long-buried account of intra-family molestation.
The 10 stories collected in Evelyn Shakir's "Remember Me to Lebanon: Stories of Lebanese Women in America" deal primarily with the difficulties women historically endured as first- and second-generation immigrants from Lebanon to the US.
Shakir's characters grapple with maintaining old world appearances of chastity and honor and experiencing new world realities of self-reliance and sexual freedom. They struggle with the knowledge that to be born female is to bring sadness to their families. They fret over which fashions best express their femininity - prim and proper or, several of these stories being set in the 1960s and 1970s, loose and liberal with beads, tie-dies, daisy chains and sandals.
They fight, most illuminatingly, with men who treat them as exotic as other, even if those men are also the descendents of Lebanese emigres. Throughout, they agonize over whether or not to marry within the tribe, whether or not to marry blonde Irish or Dutch foreigners seemingly so at odds with their customs, indeed whether or not to marry at all. More cloyingly, they deliberate over whether or not to eat chocolate bars, when to pierce their ears and how to keep up their looks.
"Remember Me to Lebanon," published this year by Syracuse University Press, is Shakir's second book in the same vein. Her first, "Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the United States," was published in 1997, the culmination of 10 years of research.
Shakir is herself the daughter of Lebanese immigrants. She studied at Wellesley, Harvard and Boston University, taught literature at Bentley College and now lives in West Roxbury. As such, both "Bint Arab" and "Remember Me to Lebanon" are particularly imbued with the Lebanese-American experience as it unfolded in Boston's South End and through the activities of what was once called the Lebanese-Syrian Ladies' Aid Society.
For "Bint Arab," Shakir collected copious interviews with mostly Lebanese and Palestinian women and their daughters. She also incorporated her own mother's story into a study of migration, its consequences and its occasional malcontents, from the early 19th century through the late 20th century. Her work in this and previous endeavors earned her recognition as a pioneer in the scholarship of Arab-American literature.
"Remember Me to Lebanon," however, rests uneasily between fact and fiction, between oral histories recorded for sociological purposes and acts of an unfettered imagination. Shakir's preface condenses the many waves of migration from Lebanon to the US, from the 1870s to the present day, into a page and a half. Her acknowledgments thank scores of people for their stories and their contributions to the book's veracity. The flap copy asserts the "agile humor and emotional truth" of Shakir's narratives.
Yet it remains difficult to determine what exactly one is reading here. Selections such as "The Story of Young Ali" and "Oh, Lebanon," both set within relative proximity to the present, capture the frustrations of young women living on their own, seeking educations and careers, and grappling with family elders who prefer them obedient and silent rather than hardworking and forthright.
"Oh, Lebanon" in particular has the arc of short fiction, structured by narrative suspense and a final plot twist. The story "House Calls" orchestrates one brilliant surprise in the discovery of old letters. But elsewhere, the action falls flat, restricted as it is to table talk and straightforward recollection and lives that go nowhere.
"Remember Me to Lebanon" also puts forth a certain speech pattern that is, for this reader at least, both hokey and unlikely. It begins with the story "Remember Vaughn Monroe?" and carries through "Power Play," "Name Calling," "Not Like Today" and "The Trial," characters who speak in "folks" and "fellas" and "gals," who construct their verbs as "I got me" this and "I got me" that. Where are we? Clearly in past times, but geographically the accent is unclear. Shakir's book is an interesting account of immigrants in America, one that may complement the rich literary history of, say, the Irish and Italian experiences in the US. It also provides a compelling account for readers in Lebanon, explaining, for example, why the offspring of those who migrated never learned Arabic and opted for assimilation over the strict preservation of their culture. In terms of general interest audiences, "Remember Me to Lebanon" is most suitable to young adult reading lists.
Evelyn Shakir's "Remember Me to Lebanon: Stories of Lebanese Women in America" is published by Syracuse University Press
