Jasmine and Fire

  Early Praise for

  JASMINE and FIRE

  A Food & Wine Reading List Pick

  An Afar Magazine Summer Reading Pick

  “Jasmine and Fire takes readers on an unforgettable journey to home, family, and identity. Along the way we’re also treated to glorious meals, political analysis, and some stirring reflections on the nature of becoming a global citizen. Salma Abdelnour is a wonderful host to a region that so many readers long to understand and connect with on a newer, more profoundly meaningful level.”

  —DIANA ABU-JABER, author of

  Birds of Paradise and The Language of Baklava

  “Salma Abdelnour captures the flavors of Beirut—the familiar mixed with the exotic—in her yearlong search to rediscover her culture, with recipes that will let you experience the sublime flavors of Lebanese cooking … no matter where you are.”

  —DAVID LEBOVITZ, author of The Sweet Life in Paris

  “This is a sweet, heartfelt book by a writer who finds herself both insider and outsider at the same time. Salma Abdelnour beautifully evokes the mood of the city she left as a child and the memories brought back by its wonderful food. A delicious read!”

  —MOIRA HODGSON, author of

  It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

  “A year in Beirut allows Salma Abdelnour to ponder everything from family and love to loneliness, home, and the strategy necessary to consume several extraordinary meals in one day. Frank, contemplative, and confiding, Jasmine and Fire makes for a delicious and absorbing investigation of a fascinating place.”

  —MICHELLE WILDGEN, author of

  You’re Not You and But Not for Long

  “Salma Abdelnour writes with grace, intelligence, and wit about what it means, in this day and age, to call a place home. Jasmine and Fire gives readers the lucky chance to follow this foodie writer on a raconteur’s movable feast from Houston to New York to Beirut and back again. This is the perfect summer book for vacations virtual and real. Just be sure to pack a snack—you don’t want to read this book hungry.”

  —VERONICA CHAMBERS, author of

  The Joy of Doing Things Badly and Mama’s Girl

  A few names and identifying details in this book have been changed to protect people’s privacy, and various episodes have been edited down for brevity or clarity.

  Copyright © 2012 by Salma Abdelnour

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Broadway Paperbacks, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Broadway Paperbacks and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Abdelnour, Salma.

  Jasmine and fire : a bittersweet year in Beirut / Salma Abdelnour. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Abdelnour, Salma. 2. Abdelnour, Salma—Homes and haunts—Lebanon—Beirut. 3. Lebanese Americans—Lebanon—Beirut—Biography. 4. Beirut (Lebanon)—Biography. 5. Beirut (Lebanon)—Description and travel. 6. Beirut (Lebanon)—Social life and customs. 7. Lebanese Americans—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 8. Moving, Household. 9. Transnationalism. 10. New York (N.Y.)—Biography. I. Title.

  DS89.B4A23 2011

  956.92’50453092—dc23

  [B] 2011050266

  eISBN: 978-0-307-88595-1

  COVER DESIGN BY LAURA KLYNSTRA

  COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY ZUBIN SHROFF

  v3.1

  To Jamal, Mariana, and Samir

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  Epilogue

  Recipes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

  —Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

  Yes you can.

  Or anyway, I did.

  Just as everything in my New York life was miraculously clicking all at once, and for the first time ever—work I loved, an apartment I adored, friends I cherished, a romance I’d rekindled—I decided to move back to Beirut. Messed-up, bombed-out, dysfunctional, infuriating, bewitching, baffling, beautiful Beirut. My home. The city I loved deeply, madly, more than any other, and could never manage to shake from my mind.

  I’d been longing for Beirut, in a profound and nagging way, ever since my family escaped when I was in elementary school, in 1981, at the height of the Lebanese civil war. In those years, bombs were ripping through the city day and night, wrecking buildings in our neighborhood, drastically disrupting and destroying lives all around. I’d been living with my parents and little brother in an apartment in Beirut’s bohemian Hamra neighborhood, a tangle of lively streets packed with coffee shops, bakeries, bars, eclectic stores, and every kind of restaurant imaginable—sprawling Lebanese cafés, take-out shawarma stands, French bistros, Italian pizzerias, American burger joints, even a Swiss fondue place. Our condo building, full of aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived upstairs and downstairs and popped in regularly for spontaneous visits, was a short walk uphill from the beach and steps from a beautifully landscaped university campus. Just down the street was the private elementary school my brother, Samir, and I went to, the International College, a rigorous but relatively liberal establishment where many of our family friends, as well as expat families from around the world, also sent their kids.

  I’d been happy at school at the time and had a close crew of coed classmates I looked forward to seeing every day. But like all other schools in Beirut in those years, mine was constantly suspending classes for weeks in a row whenever the bombs fell too close by. On one day I’ll never forget, violent skirmishes exploded right outside the school building, and everyone in the classrooms had to run to the hallways to crouch down, away from the windows, until we could be safely evacuated that evening. In those years, the night was usually scarier than the daytime; that’s when opposing militias would shell each other from rooftops around the city and often dangerously close to our building. I’d run and hide under my bed, terrified we were going to get blown up, too. “No, no, don’t worry,” my parents would always say, although I realize now they were just as afraid as I was.

  But despite the horrors of life in Lebanon during the war, I remember feeling mostly content, in the way children can be when they don’t understand much, and when they’re surrounded by friends and family and all kinds of simple pleasures: a slumber party with cousins, a day at the beach during a cease-fire, a pistachio ice cream cone, a weekend playdate with a favorite classmate. The only evidence I have now that the good parts outweighed the bad, to my young mind anyway, is that I refused to leave Lebanon when my parents decided it was time to flee. At least I tried, as best I could, to say, “Nope, we’re staying put.”

  “We’re only moving to America for one year,” my parents had promised my brother and me—and they believed it at the time, or wanted to.

  But we didn’t return to Beirut after a year—in fact, we never moved back at all. For a long time after we left, as we made our new home in Texas, I could never quite shake the sen
se that I’d been torn away against my will. A “Beirut is still home” refrain kept on humming in the back of my head. Year after year after year, there was no off switch in sight.

  As time went by, my yearning for Beirut morphed into new shapes. At the beginning it was an aching sense of missing friends and relatives and the city itself, the sights and smells and sounds—the Mediterranean Sea nearby that I could glimpse from my aunt’s apartment upstairs, the smell of juicy crisp-skinned chickens grilling on outdoor rotisserie stands in our neighborhood, even the angry Arabic slurs taxi drivers would yell out in traffic jams. Eventually I started sensing that my hunger for the city ran deeper than just the familiar people and sensations I missed. When the political situation started calming down every now and then, by the time I reached middle school and high school, I’d pay occasional summer visits to Beirut, usually with my family, and get to bask in all the sensory pleasures. But those short trips were never enough. They only seemed to reinforce a longing I could no longer quite name.

  In the States, as one school year gave way to another and we stayed in Houston, part of me still felt unmoored. I was vexed by how much more self-conscious and shy I felt in my new life than I remembered ever being in Beirut. Bit by bit I overcame some of my shyness, and years later I found myself with a happy and successful journalism career and a thriving social life in New York. But even more than two decades after leaving Lebanon, I couldn’t get rid of the quietly nagging sense that I was still the newcomer, a little late to the party—as ridiculous as that seemed after all this time. The feeling would bubble up in small ways. A perceived social slight, or a malicious look from a stranger on the street, or a sense of feeling tongue-tied around new people I’d just met, could take on more meaning than it deserved, reinforcing my insecurity that I was still ultimately an outsider.

  I wondered if I was constantly giving off cues that I’m not “one of us,” whatever “us” even means in immigrant America. As I hit my twenties and then my thirties, I was surprised to find myself still escaping to Beirut, in my mind, as a safe haven, whenever some outsider anxiety would ripple to the surface again. It was as if Beirut, my own personal Beirut, still waited, ready at any moment to spring up and rescue me, soothe all the persistent insecurities I should have shed by now. After all those years, it was still the only place I could instinctively call my true home.

  Beirut wasn’t actually my first home. My very first? A hospital in Urbana, Illinois—where, while I was barely a few minutes old on a freezing March night in the Midwest, my parents decided to call me Salma. They named me after my great-aunt Salma, who was one of the most serene people in our angst-ridden family, beloved by everyone for her easygoing approach to life, for warmly welcoming everyone into her world no matter their religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, or political views, and for her live-and-let-live philosophy, not a hugely common or even comprehensible one in 1970s Lebanon. She also chose to never get married, a daring decision, both then and now, in many cultures around the world—and most certainly in Lebanon.

  We moved to Beirut shortly after I turned two. My parents, who were both born and raised in Lebanon, had gone to Illinois together for graduate school, and had me, and then managed to time our return to Beirut for the summer of 1974, only months before the start of a civil war that would last fifteen years.

  I was barely two years old, and my name, Salma—“peaceful” in Arabic—already sounded like an ironic joke. My last name, Abdelnour, didn’t quite hit the nail on the head either. It means “worshipper of the light.” The light stands for god. In many Arab names starting with Abdel (worshipper of), the word that comes after it is one of the numerous Arabic synonyms for god: for instance, Karim (generous), Latif (kind), Malik (king). In Lebanon, those names can be Christian or Muslim. My family is mostly Christian—Greek Orthodox on my dad’s side, Presbyterian on my mom’s—although many of us consider ourselves secular, as I started to also, as soon as I was old enough to understand what that meant.

  My feelings about religion, that it’s best enjoyed quietly or ignored completely, are not widely shared in Lebanon and never have been. In the mid-1970s, after we moved from Illinois to Beirut, I was soon enrolled in my school, on a campus that sloped downhill to the Mediterranean coast—its lawns thick with clover and yellow buttercups, or houmayda as we called them, edible lemony flowers that my schoolmates and I would munch on while sprawled on the grass at recess, Beirut’s downtown skyline in the distance. I started noticing that for many people at school, it seemed to matter a lot whether your family was Christian or Muslim. Kids who were barely old enough to know what religion even was began asking each other “Are you Christian or Muslim?” At the time, I didn’t understand why some of my classmates were interrogating one another about this. Who cares? Can’t we just climb the jungle gym and race to the bottom of the hill, all the way down to the edge of the sea?

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but my family was ensconced in a utopian little bubble, feeling very much in our element in the religiously mixed sector of Beirut called Ras Beirut. That part of the city, which includes our Hamra neighborhood and a few adjacent districts, is known for its historic commitment to peaceful coexistence among the sects—one of the very few areas in all of Lebanon, as I’d later learn, that had so far managed (and still mostly does) to pull this off.

  As the Christian-Muslim tensions started to escalate all over Lebanon in the mid-1970s, my family’s and Ras Beirut’s ideals came to involve a willful oblivion to the reality that was about to rip our country apart. Our close friends, my parents’ and mine, were a mixed group of Protestants and Greek Orthodox and Maronite Catholics and Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Druze, pretty much all of Lebanon’s major and minor religious groups—by this point Lebanon had unfortunately lost most of its Jewish population to emigration—and none of us considered our religious identities primary. It was like having brown or blond or red hair. You were born with it, and once you were old enough to care, you could embrace or change or ignore it.

  For my parents and our like-minded relatives and family friends, a world in which religious identity was primary and the source of all political and social power was too disturbing to imagine. But that was the world we did in fact live in. And that world was blowing up into a billion blood-drenched shards.

  So in the summer before my fourth-grade year, we—my parents and brother and myself—packed up to leave the country. That was by then the sixth year of the conflict, which had started with two explosive incidents among Christians and Muslims in the Beirut suburbs in April 1975 and hemorrhaged into a full-on civil war that killed 150,000 civilians by the time it ended a decade and a half later. But even from the start of the war, Lebanese Christians and Muslims were divided among themselves, too, each sect splintered off into dozens of factions, and each faction with its own armed militia and ideas about how to run Lebanon, as well as its own position on what to do about the Israeli-Palestinian issue that was now Lebanon’s problem, too. The Palestinian Liberation Organization, created in the wake of the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the exile of Palestinians into neighboring Arab countries, was by then operating mainly out of Beirut and launching attacks on Israel from Lebanese soil, attacks that were met with extensive military counterattacks from Israel. Syria and the United States and various Western and Arab powers also had their hands in the mess and were trying either to resolve or to profit from, usually both, the chaos in Lebanon.

  Being Abdelnours, aka worshippers of the light, we packed up to flee sunny Beirut for sunny Houston, Texas, another land of hot sweaty summers and piercing sunlight. My father had easily found a job there through his brother, my uncle Kamal, who’d left Lebanon with his wife and kids years before we did and was able to get Dad’s work visa and our green cards sorted out quickly. This was well before 9/11. There wasn’t as much fuss about Arab immigration in the United States back then.

  As I launched into a series of fearsome tantrums in the weeks leading up t
o our departure, I was too busy sulking about our move to admit to my parents that I was intrigued by the idea, planted in my head by a few of my more pop-culture-savvy Beirut classmates, that in Texas I could maybe discover who shot J.R.—a question that then preoccupied the international audience of the popular TV show Dallas. But mostly I felt sorry for myself, having to leave my school friends and cousins and everything I knew behind, even if my parents kept saying it would only be for one year.

  Although my family got out of Lebanon in the nick of time, before the situation got even more vicious in the following months and years, a great many families had it much worse than we did: they stayed through the war longer, suffered deaths or terrible injuries or severe depressions or suicides. Our family left Beirut intact and plopped ourselves down in the middle of green suburban Houston to attempt to pick up where we’d left off. My brother, Samir, six at the time and already a dedicated sports lover, transferred his hobby to Houston and became addicted to baseball and American football; my mother, Mariana, who had left her job at the UN to raise Samir and me, continued for the time being as a stay-at-home mom in Houston; and my father, Jamal, constitutionally mellow—a trait in short supply back in Beirut and among most of our relatives—had been a civil engineer in Lebanon but, in his new incarnation, became a vice president at the Houston branch of an international real estate development firm, working alongside my uncle Kamal.

  As for me? Well, the Beirut me that I’d known so far—gregarious around my inseparable group of school friends, and deeply attached to a slew of cousins my age—instantly gave way to the new Houston me: an awkward, out-of-place kid. In Houston I tried, unsuccessfully I imagine, to pass as a normal suburban Texas girl playing kickball in the yard. But I was frustrated by my poor acting skills and subsequent sense of bumbling foreignness. Still, that was as bad as things got for a while.