1 Fleeing and Frozen

“We really would like to thank you for all this hospitality and the warm welcome and all the staff—we felt ourselves at home and we felt ourselves highly respected,” Kevork Jamkossian, one of the first Syrian refugees to arrive in Canada on 11 December 2015, told Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“Welcome home,” the new prime minister replied.

It was not always like that. Not for everybody. For Palestinians, “home” is a complicated term, and hospitality is not the first Canadian character trait I think of when I try to describe my experience of growing up Muslim in Canada.

Snow was falling in southwest Calgary as the afternoon light began to fade that December evening in 2013. Soon it would time for the maghrib prayer. My father and I were sitting at my brother’s kitchen table, snacking on a bowl of chips and chatting before dinner. I looked over at my father.

“Yaba, remember when you made me stand outside Al-Rashid Mosque with a gun?”

“Yes, of course. I don’t think I will ever forget that time.” He spoke in Arabic, as he always has to his children. It was his small way of protecting his heritage and his new home in his adopted country, Canada. “Of course I remember. I said, ‘Here is your weapon.’”

I, too, remember that day. My father had handed me an unloaded twenty-dollar pellet gun and left me at the doors of Al-Rashid Mosque, the oldest mosque in his new country. There I stood on a December evening in 1990, a frightened thirteen-year-old Palestinian boy holding a gun in this welcoming home the prime minister and Kevork Jamkossian had spoken about. I paced in and out of the double doors. Trying to stay visible. Trying to stay warm. I should not have been there at all. I was a teenager trying to discover how I fit into this world, a child who suddenly found himself thrown into an adult world. I still had to learn that adulthood comes early in Palestine, and that my teenage fears were trivial by comparison to what I witnessed when I visited Palestine a few years later. But that night, this terrifying and violent world was still new to me. I was not afraid of someone attacking the mosque as much as I was worried that people might question me and that I would not know how to respond, or that the police might find the gun. I felt confused but ready to defend my community at all costs.

As my father and I chatted, it struck me that more than two decades had passed since the First Persian Gulf War of 1990–91, when the chaos George W. Bush unleashed with the American invasion of Iraq became the pretext under which Canadians had joined an international coalition to defeat Saddam Hussein after Iraq had invaded neighbouring Kuwait. It was the first time Canadian troops had seen active duty in many years, and many people were proud to be part of this international coalition. As a child at the time of the Gulf War, I did not understand all the nuances the adults were discussing, but with the unerring acumen of youth, I understood what mattered and felt the ramifications to my core: Saddam was Muslim and an Arab. I was Muslim and an Arab. In the minds of other teenagers at school, that made me the target. In this battle between the United States of America and Saddam Hussein, I became the enemy, and there was no place for me and my family in these self-involved displays of Canadian patriotic spirit.

Islam and living our faith were important to my mother when we were children, and it still is. She taught us how to pray and memorize parts of the Qur’an. When we moved to Jordan for a few years, my family lived conservatively and devoutly. When we moved backed to Canada in 1988 and I started Grade 6, I felt the culture shock and struggled to fit in. I continued to pray but did so less and less often. By Grade 8 I had stopped praying altogether because it wasn’t cool. No one among my friends at school prayed except when they were at the mosque, and I did not want to be the odd one out among them when I already felt ostracized from other communities in Edmonton. Slowly, I grew apart from my faith, but I continued to lie to my mother when she asked about my faith, telling her that I prayed regularly. Perhaps my own alienation from my faith and my culture, and my desire to fit into the broader community in Edmonton, contributed to my shock at how badly Muslims were treated when the Gulf War broke out in 1990. The only way I knew how to respond to the hatred I saw and felt was to emphasize who I am, a Palestinian Muslim. My embrace of this identity was also inspired by Yazan Haymour, the president of the Canadian Arab Friendship Association, who taught us to be proud of being Arab and to acknowledge our many achievements throughout history. And so began a slow and troubled journey back to my faith and into my sense of being Arab in this world.

Although my father believed in God, he was not especially religious. But he was angry. For my father, meeting at the mosque with other families was the thing to do for the community at the time. So the mosque became part of our lives. The imam of our mosque had spoken out in opposition to Canada’s participation in the war, and now the mosque—a symbol of our struggle to arrive, worship, and belong in this self-proudly multicultural country—had been vandalized. Spray paint trickled ominously down the pristine white walls, and everyone wondered whether the mosque would be the target of further attacks. No one had called on the community to defend the mosque, yet I was pressed into duty. My father had never been politically minded and did not get involved in politics all that often, but he did support the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. This war affected him and people he knew personally, and the only way he knew to show his support and to feel like he was doing something to assist his people in a time of need was to make me stand out in the cold and dark with an unloaded Canadian Tire pellet gun. And he expected me not to snivel, get angry, or beg to go home.

Home. It is a word that haunts me. My father was six months old when the Israeli Defense Forces swept into Lydda, Palestine, in July 1948. As the New Yorker reported in October 2013, Yitzak Rabin, the deputy commander of Operation Danny (the code name for the capture of Ramle and Lydda), gave clear instructions: “The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.” Lydda. My father’s home. The home of his parents and his grandparents. The home that he would never know. As the IDF swept into town, some residents remained. Others fled. My grandfather Mahmoud, my grandma Nima, and eight of their nine children were among those who fled to the Arab front lines. One son, Darwish, chose to stay and fight and rejoined the family later. My grandparents had heard that the Arab Legion was waiting at the end of the road in Barfiliya to provide shelter and supplies to the people who made it there. But one hot summer night along the way, facing exhaustion, thirst, hunger, and uncertainty, my grandmother had a terrible decision to make. She was a large woman, and strong, but this was too much for her. Hoping someone else would find him and care for him, she wrapped her baby son in a blanket and left him under a tree.

Ten long minutes later, she panicked. She sent two of her other sons, Faisal and Saleh, back to get the infant—screaming at them, gasping that they must go. Now. Quickly. The baby was soon back in her aching arms, his dark eyes looking up at her. She held him close, and the journey continued.

My father would grow up in the El-Hussein refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, where he eventually became a pharmacy assistant and used his knowledge of medicines to serve people from the camp. As an adult, he would trade the hills of Jordan and Palestine for the plains of Alberta, Canada. In Alberta, thousands of miles away from the places of his birth and childhood, he would become part of another displaced Arab Muslim community. It was a place where his Jordanian pharmaceutical diploma was of no use. His pharmacist’s hands became worn and tough in a cement factory; then he worked as a travelling salesman. As an immigrant to a country founded on displacement, my father again became a success at serving people.

All families have their standard jokes and stories that help them stick together even in the face of adversity. According to one of our family stories, when my grandmother sent Faisal and Saleh back to rescue the infant she had abandoned, they accidentally picked up the wrong child. To this day, if my dad’s behaviour seems erratic or his character flawed—like when someone asks why he isn’t as devout as the rest of his family—someone is bound to tell that story.

Now, in 2013, my father and I were sitting at the kitchen table in Calgary. I had come from Saudi Arabia, where I was working at that time, to be at this family reunion, along with my wife, who was expecting our third child, and our two daughters. I gazed out the frosted window of my brother’s home and watched my children playing with their cousins in the snow. I thought of the children growing up under Israeli occupation. My Canadian nieces and nephews might be called “little terrorists” by angry whites, but they were relatively secure. They did not have to grow up too soon, like so many Palestinian children in the occupied territories of East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, where lethal encounters are as commonplace as walking to school. Their parents did not have to sneak out at night to try to find food, running and hiding, risking being shot or captured, while their families waited locked inside their homes, praying for them to come back alive.

Dinner was a time when everyone could get together and share stories. My father and I tucked into the feast before us, tearing off pieces of flatbread—the tastiest way to scoop up a piece of kabab and a dollop of hummus—while we listened to the conversations and stories happening around the table. Across the array of aromatic dishes, recipes passed down among family members along with the stories of our survival, I looked at my father and uncles who had grown up in a camp. Not much meat to scoop up there, I thought. With that body memory of hunger, how do they experience eating now?

At times in our family history, food—real food—was only a distant memory. That hunger, not only for nourishment but also for some measure of stability, has never left my father. Anyone who goes to his place for dinner must stay until they have gained ten pounds, and he will weigh them. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but I can feel how he is trying to compensate for previous imbalances by piling the food onto your plate. My brothers and sister and I have asked him about his difficult childhood. Tears well up in his eyes as he tells us, “I wish I could have been a better father, but I grew up in a camp and didn’t know any better.”

I have an old photo of myself with him on the couch. Over the course of many moves around the world, the photo has been buried in a box I can’t find, but I only need to close my eyes to see it: In the photo, I’m sporting a young man’s beard and I have my arm around him. But the composition of the photo looks forced—he is sitting in the corner, not smiling, shrinking away even as my arm extends to link us. After enduring as much hardship as he had while growing up, it was difficult for him to express things. All the same, he had agreed to let me record his stories during this visit, and I sat listening to him.

Some stories I had already heard, and, as he shared more, I realized that my father was not alone in these stories. They were the stories of my family. They were Palestinian stories—stories of displacement, separation, and sacrifice, and of solidarity and survival.