A Levantine Lament
I grew up an immigrant in England; speaking English in an English-speaking world. Mine was an education in uniform singularity. Yet the gift of English kept on giving. It won me places at good English schools, endowed me with a top-notch education at two of the world’s best universities; off of that I embarked on a career in journalism. Using my English-writing skills I reported fascinating stories from many parts of the world for a reputable broadcasting company and several famous publications. As an articulate, native speaker of English, I snagged a second career as a private diplomat.
A life time of good fortune and remarkable experiences: What more could I want?
I wanted to recover the multiple sources of my identity. For the English language also made me a prisoner of a kind; it walled me off from the languages of my fabulously diverse Greek, Italian, Jewish and Arab family heritage. It bracketed and defined the experiences they had through the lens of the English-speaking world. As much as English was a gift, it was also a halter on understanding my family’s origins.
My family grew up in the Levantine world that thrived in the Middle East from the mid-19th century until the middle of the 20th century. This world ended with a bang in 1956 because of the Suez Crisis, the year before I was born.
For a century before then, my Greek and Italian forbears thrived in Egypt and Palestine. As migrants from Europe they benefited from the privileges granted to foreigners under Ottoman rule. My Italian forbears built businesses in cotton and then ceramics; they managed essential services – my great grandfather was manager of the Cairo Post Office. On the Greek side, they served the church in the Holy Land, living in caves and rebuilding sacred monasteries. My grandfather was a manager for the Palestine Railways
The European powers that supplanted the Ottomans maintained these arcane and unequal privileges but were less tolerant. My family was interned during World War Two for being Italian in British-ruled Egypt; as Greeks from Palestine they were forced to leave the country of their birth because of British-inspired partition in 1948. As they dispersed back to Europe as refugees, some family members were persecuted to death for being Jews; others were made to feel less than equal in the countries they were forced to take refuge in.
It’s ironic that my family’s native European domicile turned out to be a source of persecution and prejudice. That’s certainly not something I would have expected to reflect on given the war and violence that plagues the Middle East today.
Yet, in the Levantine world of my parent’s era, identity was moveable and inter-changeable; members of my family wandered in and out of occidental and oriental cultural settings with remarkable ease, as if they were just different rooms in the same familiar house. There were only a few languages that mattered: French and Arabic in Egypt; Greek and Arabic in Palestine. To my shame, I speak none of these languages properly. I grew up feeling robbed of an understanding of their multi-faceted world.
As an infant I was brought to the Middle East to be shown off to my father’s Palestinian school friends-turned revolutionaries. Later I spent stifling summers in Greece cooped up in the small apartment in central Athens my grandparents had bought after arriving as refugees form the Middle East in 1954. Every available nook and cranny of that place was decorated with artifacts from their world in Palestine. I grew up with their culinary longings for the past: Their cooking was Arab. I enjoyed the bitter taste of zaatar on pita bread and the creamy labneh my grandfather lovingly prepared every morning; the coffee was suffused with cardamoms, as it is in the Arab world. We enjoyed late night desserts at a nearby Lebanese patisserie.
Yet whilst my senses absorbed all the tastes, the smells and the sounds of this lost world, I was deaf to the nuances and meaning of its language. I never fully understood the stories told about the family around the table. When my Greek and Italian uncles swore in Arabic, it sounded like a car back-firing even if I felt complicit in my understanding of what they meant.
Trapped in the conforming singularity of the English-speaking world, I was deprived of the ability to pass fluidly from one identity to another, ranging from the occident to the orient. I did not have the accent, to paraphrase the Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, that sounded as if I could have come from anywhere. The English language, my passport to a successful career, also served as a pebble in my shoes as I embarked on a journey in search of my past.
Over the many years that I have travelled through the ruins of the world my parents were forced to leave. I felt a deep affinity for the culture and manners of the Middle East, but was deaf to its meaning.
Just after leaving school in England in the mid-1970s, I spent some months in Cairo after leaving school, grappling with the glottal complexities of Egyptian colloquial Arabic at the university where my father had studied thirty years earlier. I was overcome with joy when I learned to reproduce the sounds I grew up listening to. I began to discover things that seemed instinctively familiar and made friends, just as my father had. They might have been life-long had I not been snatched back by the English-speaking world to continue with my education.
The decade of the 1980s was the high-water mark of what I was taught to refer to as the ‘developed world.’ Coddled by financial and institutional security, I partook in commentary on the ‘developing world’ from my privileged perch at the BBC in London. I took for granted that I was on the inside looking out, yet my family were as much outsiders looking in. They were lucky to have found refuge in the post-imperial bomb-shelter, avoiding sectarian strife and nationalist madness in the modern Middle East. This geographical expression, with its liminal, somewhat menacing connotation, strikes me as odd since it was a region so central a part of my family’s milieu, with Europe on the fringe.
Michael Vatikiotis is the author of Lives Between the Lines: A Journey in Search of the Lost Levant.
