Strings of lights sparkle in the meat smoke around a pavilion at VFW Post 92, and under its roof are about forty people ignoring a Western Pennsylvania rainstorm. VFWs evoke a certain kind of small-town, small-budget community space, usually with a lingering staleness: the mingled dust of the WWII, Korean War, and Vietnam War eras in collective rural American memory. At this one, a father and young son throw a football in the wet grass, and the whole tableau is pure Americana except for a single incongruous object. The origin of the smoke is a raised trough of hot coals as long as my childhood bedroom.
An elder cousin of mine greets my mother with a clash of bangles and an embrace. “You know who to see to get your kebab,” she says, and sweeps her arm at the pavilion’s kitchen, where three women distribute raw lamb cubes on skewers the size and seriousness of rapiers. A dozen people are grilling theirs over the coal trough already. In a blouse and jewelry, I’ve overdressed; in their shorts and jeans, my father and mother have not. I guess I thought, somehow, that this summer picnic, which has been going on for about 110 years minus a COVID hiatus, would involve more ceremony.
Here, assimilation is on the menu. Twenty-five dollars gets you a good kebab, corn on the cob, loubyie, sheet cake, and your favorite canned soda. In other post-industrial towns around the country, but mostly on the East Coast, similar picnics happen during these summer months. Syrian, Armenian, Ukrainian, and other communities celebrate old connections and ancestral food a century after their Christianity and proximity to Europe’s fringes earned them a provisional entry into America’s tilted racial labyrinth.
I am forty-one years old and this is my first time going. I grew up wanting to be anywhere but at home. I wanted to be somewhere it was okay to date women, normal to be a writer—somewhere I could, oddly enough, separate myself from a community that my ancestors had spent their lives assimilating into. I stopped going to church in college, though I’m at once fiercely proud of being culturally Eastern Orthodox. I carry around, like a hateful little brochure, an awareness that the Church’s position on homosexuality is that it is a sin and that marriage equality is an abomination, despite a 2018 survey that found almost sixty percent of Eastern Orthodox Christians supporting it.
I’m also new here because I left Pennsylvania while my grandparents were still alive. They held our family together with their own reunions and holiday gatherings. But when they died, we gathered less and drifted apart. My parents returned to the church that my mother’s family had helped found almost a hundred years ago, and they also returned to traditions like this one to keep in touch with people she’s known since childhood. “The Syrian picnic was the high point of summer!” my mother exclaimed, hyping it so I’d finally go. By the Standard 8 film reel of children practicing Arabic dance moves at the 1954 picnic, I don’t doubt her.
I call it the “ancestor picnic” to friends and outsiders for fun, but the truth is more complex. My relatives—Kanaans and Bitars—came from a village called Bazbina which lies near modern-day Lebanon’s northern border, though all of it was called Greater Syria under the Ottoman empire. During World War I, many men fled from this region to avoid conscription, traveling to American industrial towns like New Kensington and Arnold, near Pittsburgh, to seek industrial jobs that would later pay for wives and children to immigrate. On both ends of this migration were—and still are—a mostly stable constellation of families that have been part of one another’s lives for centuries. This is not uncommon. They formed churches, in many cases led by priests whose forefathers had also served as the village priests, generation after generation. In America, these new churches were hubs for men’s clubs, youth organizations, and women’s societies that kept the old glue in place while parishioners otherwise worked for white bosses, spoke English in the stores, and sent their children to public schools to learn the same curriculum as the children of locals and other immigrant communities. They learned English mostly from their children’s homework. With each generation, however, the glue gets thinner, and the number of groups within this network has dwindled. The Bazbina picnic, once an all-men’s affair, has blurred into the general Syrian picnic open to anyone in the church who will still come.
It’s not quite a religious thing, but not quite a secular one either. It’s Sunday, so a cousin asks another family member about the priest’s sermon—did it run long again this week? I fish around in the coolers for a root beer, just to give my hands something to do.
I hoped I would feel an instant sense of belonging, given that the roots beneath us burrow from this old steel town all the way back to that hillside village in Greater Syria, circa 1910, with all the attendant mythology of a complex, multi-family history. I had grown up to the smell of incense in a marvelous, shimmering church whose first altar was consecrated by Saint Raphael of Brooklyn. Among us are stories about searching for a habitable place in America’s racist hierarchy—the time my great-aunt was barred from Girl Scouts for being too dark-skinned, the time my godmother was bullied for her combination of light skin and tight-curly hair. Amusing stories, too, like the first time my jiddo was sent to buy gouda cheese from an outraged Italian grocer (It’s all good-a cheese!). Embedded in these stories is the glorification of homes—he called his house Kamelot, which he announced with a hand-painted camel sign, though he had never seen one in the flesh. He had simply admired the 1960s Lerner and Loewe musical that echoed heroic tales of Arab chivalry like the ones serialized in the 1930s’ Syrian World magazine. This history forms my DNA and the foundation of my personal imagination, yet a neurotic part of me looks around at all these assimilated second- and third-generation Arabs and decides that everyone belongs except me.
Maybe I’ve been gone too long, been walled out by differences that are one bridge too far, as well as political estrangements and an ever-shifting sense of home. My wife is in the Coast Guard, and we move a lot. Community has come to feel distant, so much so that this homecoming creates a kind of double vision.
These families have stoked briquettes and roasted sweating kebabs together for a century. Meanwhile, America has wrestled with Arab identity, when it has thought of Arabs at all. Although America is thinking of Palestinians more often lately than I ever thought possible, the wave of anti-Arab sentiment that followed 9/11 was, for me, the burr that stuck—the mainstream Islamophobia, of course, but also seeing so many people from my home support the bombing of Iraq, and in Palestine, the building of walls and settlements. Attempting to end violence with more violence is a human failing, but one that in our country is somehow glorified as a sign of freedom. Once you hear the vacuous silence at the center of this idea, it’s one you can’t un-hear. I spent almost fifteen years writing my novel, The Skin and Its Girl, as a way of obsessing about it. In doing so, I also realized that home is a place you can’t un-leave.
I have tried to understand something of my community-of-origin’s exact political reasoning. What is the appeal of neoliberalism, if those bombs fall on your motherland? Why give so much leeway to a country that calls itself bountiful yet is always stingy about who deserves a seat at the picnic table? The tension has historically centered on race, global origin, and citizenship; the legal thought that produced the Fourteenth Amendment made a place for later, broader protections. Alongside that evolution, the people in my community—and many like it—inherited and internalized a message to assimilate as much as possible and never criticize America. It was a survival message, a way of dashing clear of the white supremacy that controlled the country’s institutions. If there were ever an unofficial poet laureate of Lebanese Americans, it was Khalil Gibran (b. 1883, Lebanon; d. 1931, New York), whose “Message to Young Americans of Syrian Origin” urged pride in your heritage while being a model citizen in the U.S. Yet these standards are set not just by a constitution, but by neighbors who surveil your habits, judge your outfits, and critique the smells coming from your kitchen.
Interpreted, middle-class assimilation meant my grandfather Nagy stopped his education so he could help his younger siblings out of poverty: he enlisted in the Army during World War II, and spent his working life in the Allegheny Ludlum steel mill, speaking Arabic only with his mother and elder relatives. One generation down, the pressure to fit in to America’s comfortable middle classes took a subtler form. I see it in my mother’s sense of humor, which draws on the limitless font of things that can be out of place inside a home: a crooked toilet in our rented townhouse, a sleeve of Sweet Tarts nestled among oranges in the fruit bowl. The remarks come out as observations—which, in threadbare situations, I often hear as criticisms—yet they are meant to be funny. Sarcasm, as a family communication strategy, holds a keen awareness of the gap between how things look versus how they feel. I ruminate on these tics often, how the generations have inherited a certain particularity about self-presentation and environment. Always this exhausting attention on the distance between two realities.
In 2001, I was twenty, about to move to Portland to pursue my own kind of life, while carrying the privilege of assimilation that I had just begun to suspect was fragile. It wasn’t just because I was the first in my immediate family to both attend college and then pursue a career in the arts, though this often felt like tightrope-walking without a net. As the U.S. obliterated one Iraqi city after another, I couldn’t stand to listen to the punditry anymore, as it was reeled off by friends who were as white as I looked. Some hunger in my veins led me to the people I wanted instead: a Palestinian American girlfriend, even when it meant playing straight for her parents; a gay Iraqi neighbor and his boyfriend downstairs, so he could play us his Ghada Shbeir and Rima Khcheich albums until after midnight. I made a sort of office of the nearby Lebanese restaurant, working at a table by a U.S.-flag-papered window so often the Palestinian manager stopped charging me for some of my meals. I never asked whether it was because he respected that I was working so hard or because I’d started to look like a stray.
I’ve come to think of assimilation as a process by which you stop hearing certain silences. Arab immigrants spent their early decades fighting for what protections they could argue in court. Case by case, they resisted their inclusion in codified anti-Asian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Black statutes; they escaped these identities and left the systemic racism intact. Today this position outlives the now-obsolete laws, informing attitudes toward the Muslim Arab migration wave that followed later in the twentieth century. It shapes and perpetuates a bullshit hierarchy of belonging while continuing to elevate an ideal of American homogeneity. Even though Orthodox Archbishop Iakovos marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma to model solidarity against racism, his example was one I learned about later in life, after I’d stopped going to church. “We are white,” said plenty of Arab Americans after 9/11, and again as Syrians fled ISIS and President Assad’s forces, and again during the Trump administration’s Muslim bans. Yet no matter how hard some people argue that we should shut the door behind us, the court history stands. It reveals much about the legal fiction of whiteness and the etherizing power of life in the mainstream.
Problems, however, don’t vanish with the tap of a gavel. The anxieties persist, which I can see more clearly when I think of the Supreme Court victories that permitted me to legally marry my wife in 2013. Barely a decade later, the threat of federal and state reversals remains real because the underlying bigotry is still real. My wife and I were each raised in first-generation immigrant families—hers Mexican, mine Syrian-Lebanese—and we each feel pressure to excel, in our careers and relationships, because there is an inculcated anxiety that others are watching and will judge not only us for our failures, but will extend their judgments to queer couples in general.
Our national life still rests on an uneasy downward slant, and we are still suspended on a taut line that runs between the opposing poles of Khalil Gibran’s advice—Have pride, but also: Be model citizens. And the tension humming in that line is always, Don’t bring the rest of us down. This tension, heard against the silence I can’t un-hear, is ever more maddening when whole Arab cities are collapsing under American-made bombs.
The Syrian picnic has survived so long, I think, because there needs to be a quiet place. A place of rest from these tensions. The contents of the picnic table here at the VFW shelter—as well as that of my family recipe box—offer a few good examples of how the past remains present even as the superficial details change with time and circumstance.
Shish kebab is easy on the American tongue, both as food to eat and syllables to describe it. Any Arabic speaker from the old country will understand my family’s pronunciation today.
However, loubyie, green beans stewed with tomatoes and onion, are referred to here simply as “the beans.”
Next on the table is a foil pan of rice, chopped noodles, and orzo browned in clarified butter. I actually don’t know what we call it except “the rice”—one of those forgetting seeds has taken root—but the ingredients are familiar. The recipe card probably calls for Uncle Ben’s rice (rebranded as Ben’s Original after the BLM protests of 2020). The brand preference has something to do with desiring a grain that is bland and very white. Everyone here calls the red sauce on top “yukna,” a word that still sort of sounds like its Arabic ancestor, yakhneh, meaning stew—stewed tomatoes and onions, usually.
There is Arabic salad: tomato, cucumber, vegetable oil, salt, pepper, and what my mother’s generation and mine calls “nutnay.” The Arabic word for mint is na’na’, but those hard glottal stops have gone to seed in the Pittsburgh accent.
And then the sheet cake. I’d hoped for baklava, which is the word I use in the world, but here I can just use the home-word “baklayway,” my family’s slight transformation of the Lebanese-dialect ba’lawa.
With my flimsy paper plate overloaded, I take a seat with my parents and three generations of distant cousins. And here, the picnic’s real flavor emerges. No explanations are needed. I ask about their last trip to Lebanon and Syria, since this branch of the family has actually visited the old country, thanks to a better financial situation and enough remembered Arabic.
“It’s just a village,” says my cousin. He talks about how he’d muttered the language, speaking to people bashfully because our American community doesn’t use Arabic anymore. He said the homes were “older places” where women made kibbee in an area in the back, frying it over an outdoor stove. “Pretty different way of cooking it, but it tastes just the same.”
Where all did they visit? My cousin answers, “Bazbina. Damascus.” He waves his hand. “It was before all that mess. Palmyra, before it got flattened by those ISIS people.”
The reference to yet another war feels not-quite-right for the setting. Sawing the lamb into smaller pieces, we get into the matter that brought me here. I ask about relatives who died before I knew them, and for the first time my questions feel more open-ended, seeing them not just as relations but as whole people. These elder cousins have fuller memories of the immigrant generation, whereas my mother and her siblings were very young when their grandmother, my great-grandmother, died of a heart attack. One of these elders says of her, “Maryam was a strong woman. Very good, very ethical. She worked as a maintenance person and took an interest in my education when no one else did. She always compared my grades to the son of the woman she worked with.”
And about another one of the church elders who had just passed: “She had to be tough,” my cousin said, in reference to her starting a catering business after being widowed. “She walked to the YMCA every day. She was so competitive. She’d say, ‘Look me! Look how strong! You lift twenty, I lift fifty!”
These strong women and men of the community become three-dimensional as more voices join the talk, adding new angles and perspectives. Flashes of color are dimmed by frustrating gaps. Soon the questions are flying between everyone amid the empty plates, answers interrupted with more questions, memories, and facts. The family tree gets reconstructed on this annual cycle, this brief fever of comfort. It’s a forgetting—not of the past, but of the present.
Who am I at this banquet? At the moment, just a voice in the cacophony. A cousin sets her hand on my forearm and repeats my questions loudly, making up for my too-soft voice. The flurry feels better than the initial awkwardness that came from caution and difference, my worry that the span of my one lifetime would be the final inch too far that made any return impossible. A theme of my writing is this idea of a too-late arrival to oneself, the illusion of not having been here all along. It takes this much to see how false that idea is—belied by a good meal to coax the stories out, the citrus and salt eroding the borders between self and other. It’s not merely a sating of my weary longing to just be normal, but it also nourishes me with examples of forebears who lifted each other up when the status quo would have kept them down.
To be an Arab American, especially two or more generations down, is to feel fragmented on the question of identity. Most of my life, I have not felt anything-enough to belong anywhere. As a result, community is still not my first or even my third answer to any problem.
We part with hugs. We straggle back to minivans and compact SUVs dotting the huge grid of VFW parking spaces. Our slight disorientation and reluctance to leave will wear off as soon as we accelerate out of the lot, and anyone driving past would think our gathering had been any other function. I reflect that this is what an un-policed Arab identity looks like—nearly transparent in a county whose demographics are 94% white. (The 2020 Census did not provide a category for Arab or Middle Eastern descent, but recategorizing our local community wouldn’t dent the huge Caucasian majority here.) Blending in, minding your own business, these are a kind of safety. The picnic’s aging population and diffuse atmosphere suggest a cost to that safety, a gradual dilution. Where are the people my age and younger? How much longer will this tradition survive? But some grace is owed: our ancestors’ sacrifice is unfathomable to the generation whose survival depended on it. Our comfort is proof of their success. This is the irony of such sacrifices, requiring an active—even activist—approach to memory.
Two years after the picnic, this approach to memory continues to drive my work. In the first days after October 7, during the early stages of what would become Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza, it also gave me absolute clarity in using my public events to speak up for Palestine. I was on book tour in Iowa that week, doing a lineup of solo events. Each evening before delivering my rewritten remarks, I took a full-body breath and reminded myself that my great-grandmother didn’t bend her back over a janitor’s mop for all those years for me to forget where I came from, or to forget my conscience. Silence is a poisonous luxury.
Lately, my heart flinches while reading a particular genre of writing that has become ubiquitous since spring: the GoFundMe narratives shared by Palestinians trying to get their families out of Gaza. They are literal pleas for their lives—a brother who is a swimmer, a mother who entered school for a bachelor’s degree at thirty-seven because she loves learning, an uncle who needs his medication, an aunt who has lost half of her siblings, survivors of so many specific massacres. Who are we, how empty must we seem to our Gazan kin, if we are assumed to need proof of innocence before we’ll offer help? As Hala Alyan wrote early in the bombardment, “Why must Palestinians audition for empathy?” The bigotries—both overt and silent—that our ancestors sacrificed so much to protect us from are still active today. It is enough to make a whole picnic go to ash in our mouths, thinking of these millions who are conditionally alive, wearing the potential of their own ghosts as close as their skin.
Heritage isn’t supposed to embalm an authentic earlier generation, but rather, reaffirm that our living bodies and our cultural knowledge are powerful today. We’re up. It’s our turn. The first thing our little church did after the October Gaza invasion was start a collection—any immigrant knows the value of no-strings cash, sent home in a flash. Yet after a generation or two in America, that idea tends to stall, muddled up with the classism of offering feel-good charity and the transactional nature of safety, when you have the money to meet your own needs rather than calling for help from a network of tight, reciprocal relationships. So many of my Palestinian American peers have remarked that they are not in Gaza right now only because their grandparents walked north instead of south after the Nakba. Have we second- and third-generation immigrants forgotten our own families’ almosts? Can we afford to? Heritage calls us to risk more than we think we can, and then to remember how to fall back on one another. I’m saying: speak up, speak among ourselves about now as well as then.
A picnic doesn’t have to be about—or only about—holding on to history. Rituals like these reaffirm the truth that the past is still pumping in our veins. There aren’t so many years between a 1920s America that raised the barriers to nonwhite immigrants and a 2020s America that sits up howling whenever candidates run a dog-whistle campaign. Allegiance is in the slivers too, such as the narrow space between two kitchens across time. In one, my grandfather is penning out a recipe card for farina in his thready, deliberate cursive. In my kitchen forty years later, I hesitate over an open bag of sugar and check my iPhone’s picture of that same card. Our days are still tied together across time by shared blood and feeling, and also by the desire to feed the people we love, because we all still live in the same world that leaves us with such hungers.
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Rumpus original artwork by Liam Golden
