I, The Divine

~ ~ ~

Why runners make lousy communists. In a word, individuality. It’s the one characteristic all runners, as different as they are, seem to share. Stick with it. Push yourself. Keep running. And you’ll never lose that wonderful sense of individuality you now enjoy. Right, comrade?

The first time I saw the advertisement for running shoes, I cut it out and push-pinned it above my desk. That was in 1984 (it appeared at the Los Angeles Olympic games) and I was considering divorcing my second husband.

That wonderful sense of individuality.

I always tried to walk a path unbeaten by others, to touch the untouched. I moved from the land of conformism to the land of individualism. I moved from a country that ostracized its nonconformists to one more tolerant and more hypocritical. I moved from Lebanon to the United States.

The myth of the rugged individualist is integral to the American psyche. Most Americans, native and naturalized, consider themselves admirers, or at least indulgent, of individualists. I was no exception. It was only recently that I had begun to recognize the hypocrisy. As an American once wrote: Except in a few well-publicized instances (enough to lend credence to the iconography painted on the walls of the media), the rigorous practice of rugged individualism usually leads to poverty, ostracism and disgrace. The rugged individualist is too often mistaken for the misfit, the maverick, the spoilsport, the sore thumb.

I am the daughter of a Lebanese man and an American woman, a fairly brief marriage. My mother, in a burst of independence, arrived in Lebanon to study at the American University of Beirut. She was a free spirit, did what she pleased. Like many foreigners who landed on Lebanese shores with dreams of conquest, she was swallowed whole. She fell in love with my father, got married, and had to subdue any sense of individuality she may have had in order to fit in, to conform to what was expected of her. I say may have had because at times I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a façade covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not?

Americans landed in Beirut in droves, getting off their cruise ships and TWA flights, wanting a taste of the Middle East without actually having to soil their shoes. Beirut obliged. It gave them a taste all right, but only a taste. The city hid its Arabic soul and presented the world a Western veneer. Life described Beirut as “a kind of Las Vegas-Riviera-St. Moritz flavored with spices of Araby.” But not too spicy.

They bought trinkets in the cute souqs built especially for them, but they spent their big money buying Christian Dior gowns in downtown stores. They bought hookahs and backgammon tables as proof of their having been in Arabia, as vindication. They visited quaint Arabic restaurants, but their main meals were the imported steaks and lobsters at the cafés trottoirs.

We are special, they said. We are different. When they went to the Ba’albak festival, they chose to see Ella Fitzgerald, never Umm Kalthoum.

So did I. I hated Umm Kalthoum. I wanted to identify with only my American half. I wanted to be special. I could not envision how to be Lebanese and keep any sense of individuality. Lebanese culture was all consuming. Only recently have I begun to realize that like my city, my American patina covers an Arab soul. These days I avoid Umm Kalthoum, but not because I hate her. I avoid her because every time I hear that Egyptian bitch, I cry hysterically.

I have been blessed with many curses in my life, not the least of which was being born half Lebanese and half American. Throughout my life, these contradictory parts battled endlessly, clashed, never coming to a satisfactory conclusion. I shuffled ad nauseam between the need to assert my individuality and the need to belong to my clan, being terrified of loneliness and terrorized of losing myself in relationships. I was the black sheep of my family, yet an essential part of it.

In 1988, I cut out a story from the New York Times about members of a high school football team in Hoboken who ambushed a solitary runner and beat him senseless, leaving him in a decaying ditch, shoeless.