Disappearing act

 

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a week, but also most of my life. It’s about the disappearing act of moving to a place like Congo.

My mom and dad moved here when they were a young, artistic couple, with a toddler. Mom is French and at the time was a trendy young thing, a trained soprano singer, singing along with Maria Callas vinyls. Dad was an artist, a fantastic photographer, grad of Stanford’s French lit department with a thesis on absurdist theater. They left a pretty cool lifestyle to move to Kinshasa in 1981, shutting the door to that life. We lived in Limete, for the first years. A dusty, bustling, populous “Cité” neighborhood, and we had a busted-up sky-blue Renault R4 (4 standing for 4 horse-power) that usually broke down on the way to my primary school.

I have no concept of what it was for them, and honestly, if I ask them, the troopers ususally chuckle and shrug. That was 28 years ago. They’ve lived through birthing a kid in a Kinshasa hospital, raising two kids into adulthood through 2 countries, 4 kinasorta wars, 2 evacuations, one in an Israeli military plane and one in a French tank. A TANK. Dad spent 4 months under fire during a full-blown war, running out of food to the point where he was rationing himself a limited number of almonds a day, and to the point where his dogs ate grass. He lived through bombs falling inside the house, alone, being robbed and nearly attacked on a daily basis, driving out into the forest with a carfull of possessions. He was almost executed by a doped-up rebel. So, honestly, when your kid asks you “what did it feel like when you first moved here?” you just drop and roll, chuckle and shrug.

I do have to say…I remember one thing very vividly about moving to Mobutu’s Zaire in the 80’s: the first thing people would tell you, and this is engraved in my mind is:

“If you run someone over, don’t stop. The mob will beat you to death. If you run someone over, drive away, as fast as you can.”

That’s not something you forget, even if you’re five years old when you hear it said. And for all of its alarmist, over-dramatizing undertones, that shit was REAL. And it still is, although DRC-Zaire was and always will be more more violent than Congo.  I remember being a kid and seeing a guy beat to death for having stolen someone. I assume he was beaten to death by the mob, but I didn’t stay and watch, I was whisked away as it started.

The only thing I can say is that Zaire in the 80’s and 90’s was not what living here is like now. No phone lines, no internet, no email, no cell phones, and snail mail was literally delivered at a snail’s pace if it was not confiscated or censored, or just plain lost.

One time, we got a letter in the mail that was six years late.

We lived in complete isolation from our previous life, and mom and dad kept in touch only with family. They lost touch with every single other person, only to get back in touch, decades later, and be greeted as if they had returned from the dead, which of course, in a sense, they had.

It’s obviously not the same now, but there is something that happens, when you’re in a place like Congo and your friends know how far it is: you lose touch gradually, almost imperceptibly. It’s a fact of distance, it’s a fact of isolation, it’s a fact of life far away from your friends. It just happens. One day, months or years after you’re there, you realize…hey, I used to know this person, whatever happened to them?

I know what you’re going to say…Facebook is AWESOME for exactly this!

I just don’t do that. I deleted my account a couple of months ago, and haven’t regretted it. I didn’t feel that the type of “keeping in touch” that Facebook was providing me was worth the junk, the neverending trivial applications, the getting showered with information you can do nothing with, the constant buzzing of information that you have to prioritize and sort through, and the generally shallow level of communication. It wasn’t cutting it for me, so I deleted it from my life, and have not gone back on that decision, but I do miss out on some things. And I’ve caused quite a disappearing act of my own. :-)

Conversation with dad

This is a conversation I had with dad yesterday afternoon:

Me: I almost just caused an accident and it wasn’t even my fault.

Dad: What do you mean?

Me: I was waiting on the side of the road to cross over, and there was a taxi, a mini-bus and a white guy in a pickup truck. I was minding my own business and I was going to wait for them to go by, but the cab just slammed on the brakes, and the minibus decided to accelerate and take him over on the left, but then saw me and slammed on his brake and got wedged at an angle behind the cab. Then the white dude almost ran into the minibus.

Dad: What happened?

Me: So I just crossed! It was such a mess. So, I was thinking.

Dad: About what?

Me: Well…when you’re in the States, if you’re not working, you basically spend your time eating and thinking about food or shopping or thinking about stuff to buy and here you can’t do any of that stuff, so you have to figure out other stuff to do.

Dad: You can do that stuff.

Me: Not really…where’s Borders or a nice sit-down coffee shop?

Dad: No, now you can’t talk about Borders. Books is what I buy when I go to the States and then I stash them in my room and read them slowly.

Me: Exactly. That’s what I’m talking about.

Dad: Basically here, you have two strategies. The Electricity Strategy and the Candle Strategy. You have the stuff you can do when there is power, like watching a movie, following tennis or listening to the news, getting on the internet. And then you have the Candle Strategy where you have your books and your accumulated newspapers, your Sudoku, and you have to be perfectly happy doing both.

Me: That’s a good strategy.

Familiar doesn’t make you belong

It’s interesting being back after the last few years I’ve had. The last time I was home was in 2005, four years ago, after I left Israel where I’d lived for two and a half years at the Baha’i World Center. I was on my way to Paris.

I would be in Paris for a year and a half, working for a small Baha’i non-profit, dedicated to developing public information resources in communities throughout Europe. Living in Paris would turn out not to be what I had hoped. I had envisioned it being a classy, successful, artistically rich, sensory stimulating experience. In the end, I was unemployed for a year before I found a job, I lived in a nice neighborhood but wasn’t able to transition into a different kind of job. The artistic bit was true enough, but it’s not enough to live on, and I never found a community of like-minded people, and never really made very close friends. Things just weren’t what I had hoped, and I wasn’t enjoying myself. It became old fast.

So I moved to Pasadena, and got a job working for Disney for the next two and a half years. I had envisioned myself in video games making a career for myself, but my imagination didn’t carry me much further than where I currently was. I soon realized I wasn’t cut out for corporate America, and there wasn’t any room it in for me either, so there was no love lost there. In the meantime, I sort of grew attached to Los Angeles.

The sprawling city, the diverse population, the strange Angelino version of Congostyle that I came to appreciate, all were things that made living there an OK experience.

I’ve never belonged in any of the places I’ve lived, no matter how much I loved them or how well I came to know them. Not Israel, not France, not the US, not Haifa, not Paris, not Pasadena  or LA. None of them ever felt like home, which is why even now, when I’ve been gone from the continent for more than half my life, I still answer the “where are you from” question with “I’m from Congo” because, quite simply, it’s the only small, dusty, difficult to like part of this planet that this girl can walk on and not need any explanations for. Everything is second nature to me, and it’s such a weird experience.

Pasadena is undeniably the nicest place I’ve ever lived in my life, with its flowering purple jacarandas, trash pickup every Tuesday, no bugs and hardly any flies, tree-lined streets, paved roads, grassy sidewalks with flowers planted in rows, clean buildings, glossy storefronts, well maintained apartments, people who pick up their dog’s shit, electricity and running water, no bad smells EVER. 

Even if I now know the city like the back of my hand, even now that I can take the freeways to cross the city in less time than it would take to take the streets, familiar doesn’t make you belong. In the end, where you are from is not a matter of choice, it just is.

No one needs to understand or validate it for you, it’s just an internal feeling, and you’re lucky if you know where that place is. Some people come to it later in life, some people never find it, some people never question it, some people never have to wonder. Regardless of where you’re from, I think that it’s obvious to people where your home is from how you speak of it, how you represent it in your art, drawing, writing or photography. There is something to be said about experiencing and sharing something totally foreign to you, because you look at it with fresh eyes, but the way you speak about the place you know the best is the one time I feel you will really get people to connect with you. For me, when I write about Congo, it’s so familiar that the words spill out and I end up sharing my journey, baring my soul with each window I offer on the country and people that molded me.

There are so many theories on identity. Marguerite Yourcenar, a giant of French literature famously once said “ma patrie, c’est les livres”, claiming her identity, and sense of belonging in books. I agree with her, that each person finds their belonging in a place or thing of their chosing, but for many people, the place of your childhood and formative years are often  a very powerful cornerstone of their identity. That’s why I never really found another place to belong to.

being home

Even the hellish travel experience is no damper on how nice it is to be home. They paved the roads of Pointe-Noire which was a major shocker to me. Most of the streets were dirt roads before, and lots of them were dirt roads covered in thick layers of sand–we’re by the ocean.

There are even gas stations WITH CONVENIENCE STORES. That kind of freaked me out a little.

Mom and dad are great, as usual. Nic is having a good time, getting funny tee shirts made and placing orders for various crafty things to bring back. The dog is very cute and very tiny. I already taught him how to sit. I’ve managed to sleep soundly and dream, and remember my dreams, something that I’ve never been able to do outside of Congo. With the exception of Trinidad…I don’t remember my dreams in America, and when I do, they’re usually extremely boring.

The school looks great, all the classrooms are painted in different colors, some  lemon  yellow, some pistacchio green. There is a mural in the cafeteria that is of Tintin and Milou “at the International School of The Stars”, which rocks.

Traces of the fire are gone for good, which is so great.

I had my first saka-saka and grilled fish, oseille and fanta juice last night. Foooooooood. And now I really feel like I’m home. Everything is so normal. Home is so far for me and so hard to get to, I forget what it really feels like to be at home, but now that I’m here, struggling on this ancient keyboard, waiting for the infinitesimal delay between the key stroke and the letter appearing on the taped up screen, being very careful not to jiggle the entirely taped up computer tower lest I lose my internet connection–that just happened a half hour ago–now I remember what it’s like. Everything here is normal, even the crazy stuff that happens that make your har rise up on your neck in anger or your toes curl up in your shoes.

I saw a guy yesterday paint rims with silver paint out of a tin-can that used to contain food. He was giving rims a fresh coat of paint.

The taxi that drove us around Brazzaville remembered my dad by name because he gave him a ride a couple of years ago.

Everything is awesome. Having a great time. Happy as a clam. I think I get to teach a couple of classes to the elementary school kids next week. I’m thinking of reading The Little Prince to them or getting them to do some arts and crafts.

Traveling Zeins

Me and my darling uncle circa 1980

My uncle Cherif (dad’s brother) is an amazing soccer coach, and as a true Zein, travels constantly. This last couple of months, he’s been in Yosemite, Italy, France, Arizona, Costa Rica, Texas, and just called me this morning to catch up, since we haven’t talked in a couple of weeks, even though he lives in Pasadena too.

Turns out, he’s going to be in Paris on the exact same day that Nic, mom and I fly back from Congo, so we’re planning a few fun-filled days…

And I get to try out my full-fledged “walking tour of Paris” with his 36 soccer-playing kids in his Under-12 team!!! HOW FUN!

Fun photos from Oregon!

Ok…so now for some light stuff.

Still Nic’s photos. I only raided or “recycled” (as Bassi Baba is likely to point out ;-) a few of them. The rest is here, it’s worth a detour…I’ve left out some pretty crazy stuff.

First off..I’d like to say. Oregon is BEAUTIFUL. I looooooooveed it! It was my first time really appreciating it and seeing this much of it. We usually stayed so little and this time…stayed a whole four days! :-0

When we arrived, the first thing we saw when we walked through the doors of the Medford airport was of course my grandmother, so happy to see us, screaming for joy and kissing us and just bursting with happiness. That was the best arrival I’ve ever had and the warmest welcome.

The SECOND thing I saw was my mind’s picture of what an “Oregonian” is. And I realize there is a bit of prejudice involved, but it was confirmed to me by Oregonians. So I don’t feel so bad about it.

The wife of a friend of the family was waiting for her husband who arrived in the same flight as us and she was wearing a fleece sweater, a warm fuzzy scarf, and had coffee in a paper-cup. I just always imagined that’s what Oregonians looked like! So I blurted out something like “thanks for looking so Oregonian!” and she just howled. Then I realized I was so tired that my “filter” for filtering stupidity had just turned off and I’d actually said that. oooops….

This is in Ashland, Nic and I playing around with feathers from one of those Renaissance stores…he looks demented. As usual.

Ashland has a fancy Shakespeare festival sometime I think in the Spring, I’m too lazy to check online to give exact dates. It’s very well known though and the city is very artsy, extremely pretty. There’s a stream that runs through it (the WHOLE city was flooded in 1997, the river overflowed and ran through the streets, it was pretty dramatic, there were pictures in lots of storefronts where the damage was most severe).

The city center is quaint now and a little yuppie-ish. Stores with custom-made jewelry, art boutiques-specialty stores that corner the market in super-expensive rare-wood furniture that costs thousands of dollars, vegetarian organic restaurants, fancy expensive clothes…

Honestly, Ashland felt less like a real town and more like the Oregonian set of a TV series…like Gilmore girls meet Northern Exposure meet Desperate Housewives.

I KNOW it sounds awful when I say it that way, and that’s not my intention. It was a lovely little town. But the reality is that it is a place where a lot of wealthy people come to retire, and it has a big festival once a year, and it had that feeling of being almost like a stage or a set, that get used once in a while and the rest of the time retain the vibe of being set up to be used at a later date…

It almost felt like I’m describing the Oregonian variant of a Southern California town! hahaha…..

That, and everyone just seemed to be walking and talking “in character”. They were playing the part of the Oregonian townsfolk, wearing North Face and other expensive looking winter clothing and comfortable shoes, muted dark greens and yellow rain proof parkas, long hair and beards, knitted caps…

But aside from that, the randomness of the signs, and the price of the real estate (houses in the park area at the mouth of the town ranged from $300, 000 to $2.9 million), the oh-so-perfectness of everything from the flowerbeds to the details on the storefronts and the sidewalks, the people playing along so perfectly, even the ducks were on cue…

Here are a few pictures of the randomness…

The sign (which should really be an emblem for my blog) at the entrance of Lithia park (silly name, doesn’t it just SOUND like a Wisteria Lane name??) for the duckies that are wading around in the pond:

(too bad I can’t post up the video Nic took of the ducks landing in the pond. DOZENS of them just landing on after a short flight, it was HILARIOUS!)

And this, which has to be my tied with the couch as my favorite photo of the whole trip:

isn’t it just too absurd? I LOVE this photo so much. Nic’s got such an eye.

(someone beheaded Lincoln; a donation was made to replace his head this Fall but Nic and I think that once it’s replaced, someone is just going to bat it down again)

Oh and here’s my tie for favorite picture of the trip. This couch was just sitting there in the middle of a field at the entrance fo the town off the exit of the 5 Highway North (yeah, the same one we have down here that is congested all day):

family history

Little stroll down Zein family history lane… :)

First time I saw a picture of our old family home in Egypt! (My grandma’s brother is a little boy in white shorts on the steps in the entrance, but you can’t see it very clearly…)

This is a photo of My grandma and her first husband Fawzi and Cherif as a cute little baby (he was “cute” but still a force of nature):

Mamie Bahia as a young woman (in her twenties, I think she already had my father by then, sometime in the mid fifties, living in Morocco): (isn’t she BEAAAAAUTIFUL???)

This is Mamie Bahia and Earleta O’Neal (was Flemming): they were two original Baha’i pioneers to Spanish Morocco in 1954! They’ve known each other for fifty years! Earleta and her husband Jerry made it to Medford all the way from Las Vegas, it was SO wonderful to meet them!

These last three pictures are of my grandmother’s pilgrimage to Israel in 1976 with my parents who had just been married a year or two. Those of you in Haifa will recognize familiar faces!

Mamie Bahia and the second Japanese Baha’i, Saichiro Fujita (he became a Baha’i in California in 1905); he lived the end of his life in Haifa, Israel:

This is a photo of Mamie with Mr. Ali Nakhjavani and Mr. Fujita; Mr. Nakhjavani who until recently served on the Universal House of Justice lived a long time in Africa, and was one of the founding members of the Baha’i community in Uganda in 1951 (my parents loved them so dearly, they named me after his lovely wife, Violette):

Mamie Bahia and Mr. Hooper Dunbar! :-) (Mr. Dunbar is an American Baha’i who pioneered to Central America and is an accomplished painter, and is still currently serving on the international governing body of the Baha’i Faith in Haifa:

Family pictures

So here are some family photos, courtesy, as always, of the family photogapher, Nic.

(thanks, man…)

This has to be my favorite, of Mamie Bahia and her two boys, Kamal (my dad) on the left and Cherif:

Mamie and Nic:

Three generation of Zein women:

Here are a couple of family shots in Ashland (home of the Shakespeare festival):

And finally a shot of the Congo Zeins at one AM in Denny’s (the “real” America as dad likes to say; diners and breakfast food in the middle of the night…only in the USA…):

Oregon festivities

We’re all in Oregon, celebrating Mamie’s birthday which is TODAY!

My grandma (Mamie Bahia) and my crazy wonderful uncle Cherif:

(picture by Dennis)

Eighty years ago, she was born on the fifth floor of a wooden building in Port-Said, Egypt, the daughter of Ali Saad El Dine Husayn Safwan, of Lebanon (he owned orange groves along the coast of Palestine–now Israel–all the way up to Haifa on Mount Carmel even) and Esmat Ibrahim Ali of Egypt (daughter of one of the first Egyptian Baha’is).

Mamie married Fawzi Zayn El Abedin Ismail Hamadani, a fine arts professor and amazing painter, and had two lovely sons, Kamal (my Sudoku mastermind super-hero dad) and Cherif (a.k.a. “El Rey Arabe” and soccer coach/salsa dancer extraordinaire). Their move to the US after fifteen years of Baha’i pioneering in Spanish Morocco and Tunisia broadened their educational opportunities and shortened their last name (to “Zein”).

After the sad passing of Fawzi in Glendale, California, Mamie married Dennis Garden (they *both* hyphenated their names after the marriage, isn’t that cool? They are now Mr. & Mrs. Zein-Garden). Dennis is also, coincidentally, an amazing artist…Anyway, they left the sunny climes of Southern California for Oregon ten years ago and now live in a beautiful house, artistic from floor to ceiling. You know…I think my grandmother is the only person I know who has had TWO thirty-year marriages in her life…incredible, isn’t it?

We’re having so much fun, eating, talking, staying indoors from the “cold” and drinking tea, giving gifts, laughing, looking at slides from the last 30 years of our family life spanning four continents, playing Yahtzee (our family game) and getting ready for the bash tomorrow.

Pictures forthcoming…at some point…gotta go…tea calls.

Sudoku art

Believe me, you’ve never seen Sudoku like this.

Dad has been a fan for years and he is unbeatable.

He does the super-hard master-mind fiendish ones and has developed a very unique system of deduction based on logic and aided by symbology. For all you who’ve read the Da Vinci Code, this is a whole other ballgame.

I just love how he fills out the grids in ink and colors them in.

All the photos are courtesy of Nic…you can view the whole slideshow here, but here are my favorite samples: