Khadijah

Raja Halwani

I am the youngest of four brothers (and conceived by “mistake,” as my mother was fond of telling me). I was born in Beirut, in 1967. In the Middle East (as in other parts of the world), it is common for middle class and rich people to hire housekeepers—or maids, to use the more common term. My (middle class) family was no exception, and we had our share of housekeepers who tended at the time to be Egyptian or Palestinian. (Things have changed. Now they are mostly from Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh.) When I was seven months old, my mother hired a new woman to be our housekeeper—Khadijah. “Khadija” is the name of the first wife of the prophet Muhammad. The name literally means “a child born prematurely but who survives.” In so surviving despite the odds, the child is blessed or is destined to be a blessing to others.

And thus was Khadijah to me.

She was 19 years old when she came to us, and she took charge of me soon after. Both she and my mother recounted to me several times how this moment of care-taking transition happened. I was apparently a fussy child. On a particularly fussy day, my mother was frustrated with me, trying to get me to eat but with no success. She wanted me to eat so that she could return to her writing (she was a journalist, a writer, and a translator). Khadijah, witnessing the mild chaos, politely asked my mother to give her a shot at getting me fed. My mom agreed. And thus slowly began the process of Khadijah taking charge of me. She raised me, and I ended up being blessed with an additional mother.

Khadijah was Palestinian. She was born in 1948, the year when Israel was established as a state, in the small village of al-Khalisah in the north of Palestine—more specifically, in the “finger” of Palestine, that part of the country that abuts the eastern side of Lebanon. Al-Khalisah does not exist anymore because it was demolished by the Israeli state, and atop its ruins sits the settlement of Qiryat Shemona, established in 1950.

Khadijah, then, was a Palestinian refugee. Her entire family—her parents and her siblings—arrived in Lebanon as refugees in 1948. They were displaced inside Lebanon a number of times, but finally they were settled in a refugee camp in the south of the country, near the village of al-Nabatiyyah, where they lived for a number of years. However, the various wars in the south compelled many Palestinian refugees to keep moving north, so her family had to splinter and to settle in various places. Her mother and one of her sisters and her family eventually settled in the refugee camp of Sabra in Beirut. I do not recall the year when they moved there, but it was probably in the 70s.

She became one of us (as much as a housekeeper can become a family member). She always used to speak of how kind my father was to her. She told me the story of how she used to sit with us in the living room, watching television, but always with her chair just at the entrance of the room, the place of someone who is a second-class citizen, until one day my father asked her to pull her chair up and sit with us. And that was it. I think since that time she always sat with us, in the living room and at the dining table, and wherever we went she went with us, except, of course, for travel outside the country—her Palestinian refugee card meant eternal lockdown.

She used to take every weekend off to go and see her family, but because I had become very attached to her, I would often make a fuss about her leaving. So one time she took me with her to the camp in al-Nabatiyyah. This is one of my earliest memories from my childhood of her, of doing something with her. I must have been 6 or 7. It was definitely before the Lebanese Civil War had started in 1975, for otherwise I could not have gone to the south. And my memory is very fuzzy. I remember her gently pushing me out to play soccer with her nephews outside the little house. I remember her giving me a lunch sandwich of hard boiled eggs, sliced and wrapped in Lebanese bread. But I remember feeling distinctly uncomfortable at having to spend time in such poverty. I remember nagging her, by late afternoon, to return home, to Beirut, to our nice flat.

Then came the civil war, one of the ugliest civil wars in history (but then again, they are all supremely ugly). The fighting continued on and off from 1975 to 1990, when a final ceasefire and peace accord was reached a few months after I had arrived in Syracuse, New York for my graduate studies. My memories of Khadijah are intertwined with my memories of the civil war—the two are inseparable in my mind.

I remember one day (for all the life of me, I cannot remember which year it was, though it must have been before the Israeli invasion in 1982) we were home in Beirut. For some reason I want to say it was a weekend day, and I think I want to say this because I remember everything being eerily quiet, which means that it was either a Saturday or a Sunday. Anyway, a large van drove down our street, announcing through a bullhorn that they were distributing food—grains, rice, and some canned vegetables, I think—to families who needed them. By that time, we were far from being middle class—my father had died in 1975, just before the war started. His financial situation had not been good, and we were struggling to make ends meet. Still, we were in good shape compared to others.

My Mom perked up and asked Khadijah to go down and get some rations. But Khadijah politely declined. She told my mother that we did not need the food and that it is better to leave the ration to someone else. My mother got angry. She said that there was enough for everyone, for sure, and that it would help us save some money. But Khadijah did not budge. She told my mother that if she wanted the food she could go down and get it herself, and that she was not going to do it. My mother went to her room and angrily slammed the door behind her. I then asked Khadijah why we could not get the food. She told me that we have enough and that there were people who needed it more. She told me that it was unfair to them, and greedy for us to take it.

She had a crush on a Palestinian doctor who was a relative of hers (a cousin of a cousin, I think). His name was Muhammad. He used to work in Shatila Hospital, which used to be a badly equipped hospital that served the inhabitants of the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and of the surrounding areas. It admitted whoever needed help, really. He used to visit our apartment often. They would sit and smoke and talk and drink. I must have sensed something was going on between them, even though Khadijah never told me (I was too young, and she was too socially conservative to tell me), because I felt jealous of him and I felt afraid that he would take her away from me. I insisted on staying up as long as I could, just to make sure that everything was on the up-and-up. I eventually succumbed to sleep on the sofa in the living room with them. He then suddenly stopped coming to our house. I didn’t know why, and only later, after I had grown up, did Khidjah tell me the reason. She said that one night they had started kissing and that he told her that her style of kissing was indicative of her sexual experience, that it was too advanced to befit a decent woman. Apparently he had slapped her and called her a name. She kicked him out. He was not part of her life after that, which was hard for her for many reasons. He turned out to be disappointing. But she also lost someone whom she had hoped to be with, to marry. After all, it was just a matter of time before I grew up and left her also.

I remember another incident very clearly. It was during a very difficult time of the war, though, again, I don’t remember which year. I want to say that it was during the Israeli invasion of 1982, because we had left our apartment and temporarily moved into my brother’s house in another neighborhood in Beirut, which was a safer neighborhood than ours. But since the only time we moved out of our apartment was to flee Israeli bombardment, it must have been during the invasion of 1982. I must have just turned 14. But it does not matter when. I remember this: during one night there was tremendous fighting and bombardment. We had slept in the hallway of the building, where the elevator is, just outside the apartment of my brother, because this was the safest area given that it was surrounded by the largest number of walls (the more walls a shell has to penetrate, the safer the room). We had slept in the hallway not because we were in immediate danger, not because the neighborhood was being shelled, but because so many other neighborhoods were being shelled and we could hear everything and I was terrified. So we slept in the hallway so that I could relax. (I think it was only Khadijah and me who were there; I think my mother was in Amman, Jordan, but I am not sure.)

Apparently, during the night our old neighborhood had been subjected to some heavy bombardment. So in the morning, Khadijah told me to return to our apartment and check on our neighbor who used to live on the fifth floor, three floors above us. She told me to make sure not to leave our neighbor alone and to bring her back with me. The morning was calm (mornings usually were) but, of course, the shelling could have started again any minute. I was shivering with fear. I started to protest that it was dangerous. But she insisted. “Be brave. Just go, bring her, and come back.” I did. I ran to the old apartment (it was a 20-minute run) in the humid heat of Beirut. I found our neighbor and insisted that she return with me, which she did. I think she stayed with us for a couple of nights, after which things calmed down a bit and she returned to her home, where she wanted to be, danger be damned.

But perhaps my most poignant memory is of one evening in September of 1982. It was at the end of the massacres of the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, when the Israeli army had surrounded the camps and allowed Christian militias to enter them and kill Palestinians and Lebanese in cold blood. For four days and three nights, the massacres went on. The Israeli army fired night bombs in the sky so as to illuminate the nights, so that the Phalangists could continue killing without hindrance. Those were terrible days. Beirut was under the control of the Israeli army, we had no water, no power. We lived those nights by the light of the candles.

I was 14 years old. I used to volunteer with the Red Cross. I returned home one night after the massacres had ended.  The Red Cross and Red Crescent were then allowed into the camps. It must have been around 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., because it was quite dark. I entered the apartment and Khadijah was sitting in the dark, in the living room, smoking, and listening to the radio, with the constant stream of news flashes and updates. I could hear her crying. She asked me, “Do you know anything about my mother and my sister?” I said that I didn’t. I did not know what to do other than go to the bathroom and rub myself clean with a damp cloth. Her mother, her sister, and all her sister’s children were dead, along with thousands of others. I couldn’t tell her that; maybe I should have.

I have not been a good child to her. When I started college four years later, in 1986, I met my first regular boyfriend (up until then it was only sexual encounters, mostly furtive, in the underground gay culture of Beirut). I was not out at all, of course, but Khadijah found out that I was gay. She was disappointed, but I am not sure whether in me or in herself. Either way, the revelation put a distance between us, a distance that we could never bridge. She loved me nonetheless. But I had bigger plans. I wanted to move in with my boyfriend, which I did. My visits to the house became less and less regular. I saw her less and less. And my mother and she saw less and less reason for them to cohabit, so she left.

She found herself a “nice” little apartment in the camp of Shatila, in a set of new apartments built by UNRWA to help the refugees. She had applied for one and been accepted. By then I had moved to the United States and started my graduate studies. I saw her the first two years I went back. She would insist on making me my favorite dish, Mughrabiyyah with chicken, a dish of round pieces of couscous, with chickpeas, onions, and a ton of spices. It would be very hot in her tiny apartment, made even hotter by the hours of cooking. I would sit and eat, feeling sweaty and uncomfortable, trying to make conversation, to recount to her my life in the United States, deciding which details to omit and which details to keep.

We corresponded. She would write me a letter every two or three months, and I would do the same. She had to have heart surgery. They put a pacemaker in her chest. Three years later, she died of heart failure. She died alone.