9 Wise Mentors, Rough Waters

No matter how hard I tried to fit in at school, I constantly felt rejected. I responded by not wanting to have anything to do with white Anglo-Christian Canada. I wanted to be Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim, even though I did not understand what that really meant. At home, I felt pressure from my parents to hold onto my past and the history and customs of my people. I was an emotional powder keg, and the spark that lit the fuse was the First Gulf War. After 9/11, I remember seeing non-Muslims come to the mosque with flowers. That never happened in 1990.

Furthermore, I struggled with Islam. Not with my faith per se, but with the definition of Islam that my parents saw, which was largely cultural and had little to do with Islam as a religion. Many of my friends and I were unsure of what Islam did and did not allow us to do in a Canadian cultural context. For instance, dating felt foreign—wrong and sinful. We often wondered whether we might end up burning in hell for doing things that non-Muslim kids did. A lot of our frustration came out through fighting. Looking back, I can see that it was a constant battle for immigrant parents to try to raise their kids within their culture but also within the reality of Canadian norms. Those parents who had endured ghurba (exile) and all that went with it now had to battle with their kids, who faced their own inherited displacement.

After the Byron incident and our reprisal, I felt I had some kind of stupid tough guy image to maintain. It became cool to be bad and I enjoyed the attention, even though I did not feel good about what I was doing. For the first time, I felt accepted and felt like I belonged. Younger kids at the school looked up to me, so I continued to behave in ways I now regret.

Our attack at O’Leary High sparked fears that things would get worse, and that the cycle of violence would continue. Community police officers and Arab community leaders organized a large meeting at O’Leary to call for a truce. We were sitting on one side of the hall, and Byron and the other skaters were on the other side, with the police and Uncle Yazan in the middle. The police officer started to talk: “We want to end this fight here and now because if you guys don’t, it will get worse, and we will have to lay charges.” I remember my friend Majid saying to Byron, “You are lucky. If I had found you that day, I would have smashed your face in.”

Another fight almost broke out, but Uncle Yazan, whom we all looked up to and respected, intervened. His baritone voiced grabbed our attention. “Sit down and don’t make any more wise-ass comments like that,” he said.

At the end of the session, Byron and I apologized and shook hands. I was embarrassed about my part, an embarrassment I still feel today. I wish I could say it was all over, and that I stopped getting into fights, but it wasn’t. I continued to get into scraps, with my own people too. One afternoon in Home Economics class, Bashar and I were talking about the Gulf War and got into an argument over who would come out victorious, Saddam or the United States. Bashar felt, as I and many others in the community did, that a defeat for Saddam was a defeat for Palestinians. But to egg me on, he said, “America is going to win and destroy Saddam.”

We started punching each other in the middle of the class. This led to another suspension.

We were right, after all. Saddam lost the war, and the Palestinians in Kuwait lost their refuge. Palestinians had arrived in Kuwait in three different waves—in 1948, 1967, and 1975. By 1990, Kuwait, a country of only about two million, was full of Palestinian workers. The national demographics were threatened, and the expulsion began. In 1991, after Kuwait’s liberation from Iraqi invasion, 300,000 Palestinian were expelled. Things have come full circle since then. During the uprisings of 2021, Kuwait has taken one of the most patriotic stands with the Palestinian people and has imposed a fine and a prison sentence of ten years for any Kuwaiti who actively supports Israel.

At the time of the Gulf War, I was a teenager, and I knew about the struggles my grandfather, my parents, and my family had endured simply to survive and resist oppression. With the expulsions happening in Kuwait, it seemed as though my father and uncles were reliving their own exile. Every time something like this happened, my father and my uncles felt like it was another strike at our people. It seemed like those who left during the seven-month occupation would never return to Kuwait. Kuwaiti officials suggested that the Palestinians could move to Jordan. It was always the same dilemma: Where do we go, where do we belong? It is something I struggle with to this day, this search for a place to call home and put down roots.

For as far back as I could remember, my parents had struggled with their marriage and with their relationship to us children. My father was always on the road as a travelling salesman, so we barely saw him or bonded with him. I know he has a good heart and is very, very generous, and very forgiving. I also know that he enjoyed hanging out with his friends more than with his family. I never remember him taking us on a vacation or taking me with him on his sales trips. I used to beg him to take me with him while he travelled, but he never did. My mom is a kind, forgiving, and loving person who has never harmed anyone. She avoids confrontation wherever possible and is always ready to help others. She is also conservative and very spiritual and religious. Growing up, we watched the combination of their personalities build into a disaster.

By 1992, the cracks in my parents’ relationship had become chasms and my own outbursts in and out of school did not help to settle our family’s lives. To escape the chaos of life in Edmonton and to be away from my father, my mother decided to move to Montréal for a year to be near her sister. She took me and my bothers with her, hoping that removing us from that environment would help settle us. I was fifteen at the time. We flew to Toronto and planned to take the train to Montréal the next day. We wandered with our suitcases around the cavernous lobby of the Royal York Hotel next to Union Station. My mom could not afford the $300 for a room, and we planned to wait overnight in the hotel lobby. My brothers and sister were getting restless. They were exhausted from the flight and needed to rest.

We had been sitting on the couches, surrounded by our bags, for about two hours when a white woman who worked at the hotel approached my mom. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes, we are fine,” my mom replied. “We are waiting for the train. We will be leaving in the morning.”

The woman asked my mom if she was a single mother. My mom nodded, wondering why she would ask such a strange question. The woman then asked if she could speak to my mother in private. My mom agreed and they walked to the woman’s office, which was near the lobby of the hotel. I watched through the doorway as the lady sat behind her office desk at a computer terminal, with my mother sitting on opposite side. I could not hear what she was saying and was too young to read her body language. All I remember is that my mother was crying when she left the office. I wondered what the woman had said that had made my mother cry. Then I saw two sets of keys in her hands and realized they were tears of happiness. The woman had given us two free rooms for the six of us!

Then I, too, wanted to cry, and I felt my body fill with hope that God was with her and was helping us. How good it felt, as the oldest, to put one of those sets of keys into the door lock of a hotel room. Once inside, it felt like we had stepped into a dream with fancy décor and pillows everywhere. We kids jumped on the beds and eventually fell asleep to rest for the next leg of our journey. We even received a courtesy wake-up call the next morning, and staff to help us with our baggage. I wish to this day that I could find that woman to thank her for what she did for my mother, and to tell her that my mother has paid that gift forward in her own way, too.

My mother has given back that generosity many times over. To this day, my mother helps people. I remember in my second year at university I went to visit her in Richmond, BC, where she had rented a small basement suite. One night, she asked me and my brother Belal to sleep on the couch so that she could let an abused woman who needed shelter stay in our room. I may have been a troubled youth, but I have learned from her, and I try to live by similar values.

The train ride to Montréal seemed to go by very quickly after the long flight and a good night’s rest. When we arrived, my aunt and uncle picked us up at the train station. Having no place of our own, we stayed with them for a couple of weeks. As the house was very cramped, I decided to ride the bus and look for a place to live. One day, I stumbled on a three-bedroom apartment for $700 a month in Saint-Laurent, near the Côte-Vertu subway stop. It was in an area with a high concentration of Arabs, called Al-Mukhayyam, which means “the refugee camp.” I told my mom about it when I got home, and she came to look at it with me the next day. She signed the lease right away. She then arranged for the boxes containing our possessions to be shipped from Edmonton. When the boxes arrived, they filled the new space with a mountain of cardboard that gradually disappeared as we unpacked and restarted our lives.

I started Grade 10 at Émile Legault Secondary, where the students came from a variety of backgrounds, and the student body included Arabs, Muslims, Christians, and Lebanese. As an expression of my style and identity, I wore my black and white Palestinian keffiyeh to school.

One day, I was approached by three guys. They pushed me against my locker and spoke loudly in French, which I struggled to understand. Then they switched to Arabic. They wanted me to take off my keffiyeh, and they were quite blunt about it—that much was clear regardless of the language they chose to speak. I hated being outnumbered like this. I did not comply, but fortunately a mutual friend turned up at that moment to stick up for me, and nothing more serious happened to me.

One of our neighbours, a Lebanese girl named Lilian, and I had become friends soon after we had moved into the apartment in Al-Mukhayyam. I would walk home with her after school every day and I learned later that the guys who had roughed me up were Lebanese Christians, and did not like Palestinians, especially not Palestinian Muslim boys, hanging around Lilian.

Later that year, I was getting a caricature drawn of myself at the harbourfront. I was staring at it intently, trying to decide if it really looked like me, and whether the artist had captured the “real me” under the exaggeration. When I looked up, I saw two guys trying to pick up girls. I knew they were Lebanese, but they were wearing necklace chains with the Star of David on them. Curious, I asked if they were Jewish.

They laughed and said, “No, we are Christian Lebanese—but more girls talk to us when we say we are Jewish.”

I thought of my own attempts at disguising my identity. I would sometimes say that I was Spanish, and some people thought so anyway, because of how similar Househ and José sound. Sometimes, I realized then, it was simply too much trouble being Arab, or Palestinian, regardless of whether you were Muslim or Christian. And I thought again of the boys who had roughed me up, wondering why Arabs could not simply let other Arabs be.

The year in Montréal sped by and I was just settling in nicely when my mother announced that we were returning to Edmonton. My father had come to Montréal to visit and, I realize now, to woo my mother into returning to Edmonton. I remember he made it seem like he had lots of money to spend on things like a rented car. He even went to the local mosque and brought some people over to show my mom that he had changed. He told her how he had changed and made promises about how everything would be great. He is a salesman, after all, and knows how to be a showman when he needs to be. My mom was reluctant, but she genuinely loved my father, so we packed up our apartment and moved back to Edmonton.

Initially, my mom moved back in with my father. I had grown accustomed to not living under my father’s thumb, and it felt awkward to be back under his authority. Soon the old, familiar tensions that had driven us to Montréal returned, and my mom moved out again, taking my siblings with her to Vancouver. I chose to stay in Edmonton and live independently. A year older and much wiser for the insights I had gained while in Montréal, I calmed down after moving out of my father’s house again and began spending more time with people like Uncle Yazan at the Canadian Arab Friendship Association. For me, he remains one of the most intelligent and dynamic people in the Arab community in Edmonton. Uncle Yazan is both an idealist and a realist. He believed then, as he still does, that Muslims and Arabs are the best of people and are making a beneficial contribution to Canadian society. When we were growing up, he wanted to show us young people how we could contribute in positive ways. He wanted us to be proud of who we were and to discover the many contributions Arabs have made to the world through the centuries in areas like medicine, ethics, and philosophy. He wanted us to know that we did not need to feel ashamed of being Muslim and to look to those examples of Arabs who contributed to the world, not to the hoodlums we saw on television and in the often rougher, crime-ridden communities of northeast Edmonton. Uncle Yazan always respected the youth. He would stand up and shake our hands when he saw us, and he knew how to talk to us at our level. He was generous, paying for things and never wanting anything in return. But more than that, he taught us to love ourselves and where we came from. He would share snippets of Arabic history with us, including the contributions Arabs had made to the arts and sciences: Ibn Sina (known to the west as Avicenna) in medicine, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in scientific and religious ethics, or Al-Ghazali (Algazel) in algebra. He told us that there were twenty-two Arabic countries and over a billion Muslims in the world at that time—in 2015, the Pew Research Center estimated there were close to 1.8 billion Muslims, or 24 percent of the world’s population. Just like Uncle Faisal, my honorary uncle, Yazan Haymour, was always available when I needed support.

I went to Uncle Yazan with my personal, and sometimes even trivial, problems. When my parents were splitting up, I lived with my father. One day, I went to visit my mother and noticed she was wearing earrings. It may seem like a small thing, but my dad had a phobia of earrings and objected to anyone wearing them around him. When my mom wore them at home, I knew she was doing it just to antagonize him, and it upset me. I went to Uncle Yazan crying about how my mother wore earrings at home. Uncle Yazan calmed me down and smiled.

“It is okay, Mowafa,” he said. “It is a natural reaction to now being set free from your father. It is just a phase, and they will get back together.” He was not always right, but he knew how to make me feel better.

As teens, we would tell him, “These girls love us, Uncle Yazan.”

“Of course they do, of course they do,” he’d reply. “The Arabs are the most handsome people in the world.”

He made us believe it. We clung to this belief, especially since we never heard it anywhere else. Like many teenage guys, we thought about girls constantly, even as we were overprotective of our sisters. Uncle Yazan understood how high school students were often thinking about things other than studies and homework and he took our concerns seriously. We all appreciated that.

Failure to keep a family and marriage together represented the defeat of our Palestinian nation, now fragmented as well, and my parents were the only Palestinian couple I knew who were splitting up. I was on edge and didn’t entirely understand why. The hardest question to face in our small community was, “How are your parents doing, Mowafa?” The reality contained in this question, that others knew about the collapse my parents were enduring, hurt as much as the racism I faced every day.

On our return to Edmonton from Montréal, I attended Queen Elizabeth High School, which had a large population of Arab students. The Arabs students took to hanging out in big groups, partly to avoid getting beaten up by racist whites. The fights we got into now were more violent than they had been in junior high at Dickinsfield, and sometimes involved knives and sticks, and we needed to protect ourselves. Yet there was something about being part of a big group that tempted us to abuse our collective power. We could see that some of the students were afraid of us, and we enjoyed watching them treat us with a sort of fake deference. Since many of the Arab students at Queen Elizabeth were of Lebanese descent, other students soon started referring to the group I hung out with collectively as “Lebs.”

Many Arab kids took advantage of the newfound reputation we enjoyed as part of the Lebs, and very soon younger Arab kids no longer hung out with us because we were a cultural safety net. Now it was just about status, about feeling powerful. Quite a few Lebs got into the local bar scene, which was pretty violent, and some of them got into crime and drugs. After a while, it became embarrassing to be identified as a Leb because it meant you were a hoodlum. All the same, it gave us a sense of belonging in a school environment that often consciously alienated us.

By the time I was in Grade 11, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service started to take an interest in me. It was Uncle Yazan who told me about this. He said it was because I encouraged some of the younger students, who looked up to me, to wear the Palestinian keffiyeh. I had also given them stick-on temporary tattoos of the Palestinian flag, an idea I’d come up with after watching the Mexican gang movie Blood In, Blood Out. He wasn’t trying to frighten me, but I was really scared. Ever since the Gulf War, I’d heard about people being targeted and interrogated by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the RCMP. The Canadian Arab Federation responded by producing and distributing a series of know-your-rights pamphlets among Arab communities in the city as a precautionary measure. I’d read one titled “When CSIS Calls,” and it scared me to think that a powerful organization like CSIS would think to come after a high school student. Did they have a whole file on me? Had they been following me, taking photos, and making notes? Had they tapped our phone? I didn’t know, and neither did Uncle Yazan—he just knew that I was being investigated. Knowing that I was under intelligence scrutiny made me feel even more unwelcome.

Someone who added to my sense of alienation was Constable Case Model, a police officer stationed at Queen Elizabeth High School. One day at the police station, a few of us were waiting for the release of our friend Nader, who was being questioned about a fight that had taken place at Northgate Bus Terminal. Constable Case Model saw me. “What are you Lebs doing here? Were you in another fight again? Why don’t you find something better to do, like drive a cab or something?”

I had always found it frustrating that people called me a “Leb” despite the fact that I made a point of asserting publicly that I was Palestinian. But Constable Case Model had done more than jus that. He had not only made a racist generalization, but he also implied that we were inferior and had limited potential. I wish I had filed a complaint against him, but I was a sixteen-year-old who didn’t yet know you could do these things.

It often seemed as though all white people were against us, but there was one who reached out to our community. While in high school, I met Mr. Dennis Koch through my friend Jihad. As the teacher liaison, Mr. Koch’s role at the school had to do with career development and counselling. He didn’t seem popular with the other teachers. He was the kind of guy one suspects ended up sitting alone in the teachers’ lounge. Dennis Koch was unique. He worked with the Arab community and with CAFA in a way we were not used to and seemed to know and to understand both worlds. He was one of the few white people I can recall from my youth who saw us as human beings. He treated us with respect, was a great listener, and always had memorable advice, like “Working hard is fine, but working smart is better.”

Somehow, through Dennis Koch, and through CAFA and its youth group, we found ways to deal with our issues and to work with those few police officers, counsellors, and teachers who seemed to want to help. With their involvement, school violence was reduced significantly, but unfortunately the racist attitudes lingered. There did not seem any way racism could be eliminated without painting everyone white—and even then, some people would still notice the paint and point to the difference.

It was after the Gulf War, when many Arab youth were involved in fights and petty crime, and Mr. Koch, together with Uncle Yazan at CAFA, created a youth club called Harmony in the Halls to combat violence within our school. My friends Chadi, Nidal, Marwan, and I started attending Harmony in the Halls events and even got a Harmony in the Halls award for being peacemakers in the school. It was quite a change from being branded a troublemaker. Slowly, my mind turned from causing trouble to thinking about my future and going to university. I left the rowdy crew behind and began to get my life back into shape, even though some called me and my friends who were also trying to clean up their acts rats for leaving the rebellious life. But we had matured and had decided to focus on something that we considered more important.