Reborn in the USA: An Immigrant & Poet's Story (who also happens to be Muslim)

Reborn in the USA: An Immigrant & Poet's Story (who also happens to be Muslim)
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Born and raised in Cairo, Egypt I came to realize, at the age 32, that I could not live, love and create there, any longer. I required new air and it was, finally, time to dare and take a leap... I would, later, notify only a handful of family and friends of ‘this audacious, purifying, elemental move’ - to borrow the words of poet, Philip Larkin, from his Poetry of Departures.

But, first, I attempted to articulate this terrifying-liberating position to my boss at the United Nations (UNESCO) where I’d worked for nearly a decade. It’s not you, I respectfully suggested, it’s me. I need to move on. In turn, I appreciated his gracious unwillingness to immediately accept my resignation, his insistence to think it over, as well as his generous offer for a promotion.

Still I, politely, insisted that I needed to get out while I could and see if I might live differently. I felt I had, at least, a few books within me, fluttering wildly against the bars and, if I did not act, now, I might never be able to set them free. Hard to describe this crucial turning point, in prose. In a poem I wrote, after the fact, I managed to put it this way:

Dawning

There are hours when every thing creaks/ when chairs stretch their arms, tables their legs/ and closets crack their backs, incautiously

Fed up with the polite fantasy/ of having to stay in one place/ and stick to their stations

Humans too, at work, or in love/ know such aches and growing pains/ when inner furnishings defiantly shift

As decisively, and imperceptibly, as a continent/ some thing will give, croak or come undone/ so that everything else must be reconsidered

One restless dawn, unable to suppress the itch/ of wanderlust, with a heavy door left ajar/ semi-deliberately, and a new light teasing in

Some piece of immobility will finally quit/ suddenly nimble on wooden limbs as fast as a horse, fleeing the stable.

It dawned on me how utterly destabilizing this leap of faith was, and that it meant leaving behind the security of everything I knew: work, family, friends, familiarity. Yet, there was a woman I cared for at the other end (isn’t it always a matter of the heart, where seemingly-mad decisions are involved) and I had made up my mind to return to the United States, where I’d gone to college a decade earlier and met said lady friend.

Even though my lawyers, stateside, warned me it was a long shot, less than a year after applying for an artist visa, I was very lucky to be granted one for Aliens of Extraordinary Ability (O1) - which made me feel a little like ET, and that the tip of my index finger might glow when I write.

In retrospect, I realize how especially fortunate I was to be bestowed this honor, considering that I was a young, single, Muslim, Arab male —a combination regarded with increasing suspicion, unfortunately. Counting my blessings, I came to accept that I had also found a new Home and, feeling more confident, I proposed to my college friend within the year, who had patiently, loyally been by my side all along.

Nearly 11 years have passed since this fateful move. In all this time, I have not mustered the courage to visit Egypt. I watched, with my heart in my mouth, the rise and fall of the Arab Spring, as we collectively struggled for liberation and rebirth. Considering the dashed hopes of Egypt’s heroic 2011 people’s uprising , from this great distance, I admit that I found it demoralizing to see many of our once fearless freedom-fighters experience revolution-fatigue and allow themselves to become desensitized to the current military propaganda machine.

Over time, I’ve come to regard my beloved Cairo as a joyous child whose confidence has been shaken by repeated scolding and attempts at molding. We’re not quite ourselves at the moment, I tell myself, and are battling for our souls.

I remind myself that we’re just experiencing what the French would call, un mauvais quart d’heure (a bad quarter of an hour, or a brief unpleasant experience). Something, I suspect, many in Trump’s America might relate to. Our unfortunate present moment does not define us; we’re better than this fear and loathing. The lengthening shadow of violence and intolerance that we are witnessing — in the Middle East, in Europe, in the Divided States of America — is just a hiccup in time, viewed in the context of humanity’s long illustrious history. And, when my spirits sag, I am buoyed up by the noble Arabic slogan that circulated following our Egyptian Revolution: ‘Despair is betrayal, and Hope a responsibility’

Examining my own present moment I recognize, with gratitude and wonder, how one seemingly unavoidable shift (from one continent to another) presented me with a new world of unforeseen possibilities. At 43, I find myself happily married for 9 years and, incredibly, with 6 critically-acclaimed books of poetry and prose to my name. Mysterious thing, Art, how if one is faithful to it (and fortunate), in time, it can alter the artist and recreate them in its own image.

Upon further reflection, I am beginning to better appreciate the significance of having been raised in an Egyptian culture—where proverbs were viewed as both common utterance and a sort of magical invocation. I grew up with grandmothers, maternal and paternal who, at times, spoke almost exclusively in pithy sayings: a string of maxims, sing-songy, witty-wise remarks, for every occasion.

Also, being half-Lebanese, meant that Gibran Khalil Gibran, celebrated poet and philosopher, was an early and inescapable influence. I even suspect that matters of literary heritage might have been written in blood, since I was named after my paternal grandfather (Yahia Lababidi), a musician and poet who passed away long before I was born, yet bequeathed me a love of song, intravenously. When, in my late teens, I found that I could unburden myself in verse and epigrams I felt that, for the first time, I was truly beginning to earn my name.

Lately, I feel another sort of calling, and sense of renewed purpose, in contemplating my momentous immigration to the United States. In this age of short attention spans and shot concentrations, there seems to be in the US, at least, a Renaissance of Aphorisms (pithy observation that contains a general truth) - something that I would never have imagined when I first started writing these brief arts — anachronistically, I felt — over 20 years ago. Recently, for example, I had the distinct honor to be featured in the first book of modern American aphorists, Short Flights (Schaffner Press, 2015) alongside some of this country’s finest thinkers and poets.

Living in America at a historical moment when there is mounting mistrust and murderous ignorance directed towards immigrants and, more specifically, the “Arab/Muslim world”, I also feel a kind of responsibility for my writing to serve as witness, protest as well as a kind of bridge, or peace offering, addressing our shared humanity. One way of doing this is to try and communicate through my brief meditations the great peace and beauty found in Sufism, the mystical branch of a little understood, much-maligned faith: Islam. “Ah, to be one of them! One of the poets whose song helps close the wound rather than open it!” —Juan Ramón Jiménez

Last year, marked a kind of mid-life achievement for me, as a person and artist: 23 years of my marveling, questing and helplessly confessing in verse were bound in one book, and published by Press 53. The launch of Balancing Acts: New & Selected Poems (1993-2015) surpassed all my expectations, in Spring, when it debuted at #1 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases, under Middle Eastern poetry, ahead of heroes of mine, such as Rumi and Gibran. I had achieved far more than I imagined, when I made this decisive leap. Now, it’s dawning on me that everything accomplished, thus far, is mere apprenticeship and the real work might just be beginning...

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot