“I remember very well,” Randa Slim tells me in another D.C. think-tank office. She’s director of an initiative at the Middle East Institute and a research fellow at the New America Foundation. Slim is a well-known expert on Lebanon and Hezbollah. She’s also Lebanese Shia and grew up in Dahiyeh, where Hezbollah would eventually entrench itself as thoroughly as it did in the south.
“I remember my cousin coming to me and saying, ‘There are these young men who will wear their shrouds before they go to the front lines, fighting the Christians,’” she continues. “I said, ‘What? Wearing their shrouds?’ You know, their kafan, for burial. Their burial shrouds. He said, ‘Yeah, they’re called Hezbollah. They go and fight the Christians.’ This is in Dahiyeh, where we were sitting. I remember exactly the scene. The electricity was cut off, and we were sitting on the balcony. It was summer. It was definitely before the Israeli invasion . . . that was the first time I heard about Hezbollah.”
All my life, I was convinced that Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad were the same thing. The Western narrative that’s coalesced over the years has always maintained that the Islamic Jihad Organization was just a cover for Hezbollah, a name they used to provide themselves with plausible deniability for the terrorist acts they perpetrated against the West. It’s an explanation that makes sense, given both groups’ use of suicide bombings as well as the angry rhetoric they employed against Israel and its American sponsors. Known members of the Islamic Jihad were associated with Hezbollah and would eventually rise high in the militia’s ranks. Some of them still hold influential positions in the organization today.
Also, at the same time as the Islamic Jihad was waging its terror campaign, Hezbollah consolidated a significant amount of power in Lebanon, essentially replacing Amal, the more secular Shia militia, as the representatives of their people. It was assumed that nothing could happen in Dahiyeh or the Shia regions of the Beqaa Valley, both areas where my father was held, without the approval of Hezbollah. My father always believed that to be the case, and he told me that at one point, he was actually imprisoned in one of Hezbollah’s headquarters.
Hezbollah’s responsibility for the Islamic Jihad’s actions is a narrative that goes largely unquestioned these days. Even as the militia expanded into the monolithic political party it is today, the group still can’t escape the legacy of terrorism that has haunted it since the war. And until I started examining the circumstances of my father’s captivity, I didn’t question it either.
But as I would discover, Lebanon’s history is as intricate as its landscape, which shifts from lush valleys to snowcapped mountains to rocky coasts. The truth about what happened to my father would prove complex and elusive, much like the nature of the country that stole so much of his life, and mine.
THEN
February 2003
Clink, clink, clink.
There was a moment when I wasn’t sure what had fallen out of my coat pocket onto the floor of my dormitory common area. Just a few seconds, really. Then realization dawned. Oh, fuck, I thought helplessly. I rushed to grab it, but it had dropped not three feet from my dorm master’s sensible shoes, and she got there first.
“What is this?” she asked, holding up the marijuana pipe. I’m pretty sure she knew what it was, so the question was rhetorical.
I said the first lie that came to my lips. “It’s not mine.”
“Uh-huh. Then whose would it be?” Her skepticism was palpable. I was positive she could smell my terror. Private boarding school teachers have a nose for fear.
“A friend gave it to me. To hold for him. So his parents wouldn’t find it.”
The dorm master raised an eyebrow. “Okay, well, you’ll have to tell me who he is,” she said, but I could see the doubt cross her face. A glimmer of hope. Was it possible I’d be able to bullshit my way out of this? I unleashed the tears.
“This can’t be happening!” I wailed. “I’m graduating in three months! I was just trying to help a friend! Please don’t tell the dean, please . . . I’m supposed to go . . . to NYU . . .” I dissolved in sobs.
The dorm master put a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry, Sulome,” she told me, sounding honestly regretful. “I have to tell the dean, otherwise my job is on the line.”
She shook her head. “It’s a shame, though, it really is. You’re such a smart girl. Why do you have to do this stuff?”
After a long, tearful conversation with the dean and what basically amounted to the Holy Inquisition by a “peer committee” of my schoolmates (three of whom I’d seen getting drunk and high at the last house party someone threw) that ended with a vote to expel me, I asked myself that same question in the passenger seat of my father’s car as my school disappeared behind us. Why do I do this stuff?
I was set to graduate cum laude. I knew because a teacher on the committee all but told me I was next in line. I had just been accepted to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, early decision, no less. I finally had a group of close friends. We weren’t the most popular clique on campus but we weren’t losers either. After I spent two long years nursing an incredibly cliché crush on the football team quarterback (who also starred in all the plays), he finally agreed to put a label on our hurried trysts. I had a boyfriend, albeit a reluctant one. Why did I have to fuck it all up so thoroughly?
My father was furious, of course, but it was this almost befuddled anger that clawed at my heart, as if he walked outside that day expecting snow and was hit by an avalanche. He just looked confused, like he didn’t know who I was or where I had come from. He barely said a word the entire ride back to hell; otherwise known as Athens, Ohio. The only words that came out of his mouth were “I’m not going to tell your mother. You have to tell her.” Mama was in Lebanon for a couple of months, and the thought of calling her to say I’d just been expelled from the school my parents had spent probably $100,000 on at that point made my mouth go bone dry.
My parents had decided to move to Ohio around the time I was turning fourteen. My father had experienced a sudden urge to become Old McDonald and buy a farm. He got a job teaching at Ohio University in Athens, and we moved right before I started eighth grade—probably the worst time in a teenager’s life to find oneself in a place where everyone at school has known each other since kindergarten. Also, I had very little in common with my peers there. I had lived in about six countries by then and traveled to many others. Many of my classmates hadn’t even left the state, and I’m pretty sure they thought I was really weird for talking about Lebanon or Cyprus or any of the other places I’d been.
I was also at the tail end of an incredibly awkward phase. I decided right before we moved to cut all my hair off again, and frizzy Arab-girl hair does not look good in a pixie cut. It mostly just grew out instead of down. I still wore glasses because my mother wouldn’t let me get contact lenses, acne abruptly grew to be a concern, and as if that weren’t bad enough, I had a mouthful of braces. A late bloomer, I still had the body of a child. Overall, like most teenagers, I was in a hurry to grow up and felt like a complete alien in my own skin.
Typical adolescence stuff, right? But there was the added weirdness of literally everyone knowing who my father was and our family’s strange history. Since Dad was teaching journalism at the university and it was a small town, word spread quickly. Kids at school would ask me about it, but their curiosity seemed detached, as if they were examining some strange species of animal at a zoo. Let’s just say it didn’t make me any cooler, just more out of place.
Although I had no idea how to talk to boys, I also had no idea how to say no to them, so after a rather unpleasant make-out session at a party, I suddenly had a reputation for being slutty. Few kids in my grade showed any interest in being friends with me, and I was completely fucking miserable at school.
Then there was my home life. My parents were fighting more and more, and I started acting out in earnest. Screaming matches became a daily occurrence. My mother seemed to think forbidding me to do any of the thing
s other girls my age did—wear makeup or dresses above the knee, watch R-rated movies—would trap me safely in my childhood forever. I understand now that she was just trying to keep me protected, in her dysfunctional way. But at the time, it felt like her strictness was nothing more than pure spite. My punishments seemed way out of proportion to my misdeeds—I was constantly being grounded for weeks at a time, and she would still give me the cold shoulder for what seemed like relatively minor infractions. As her criticisms and nagging became almost compulsive, I began to feel like everything about me displeased her, and started to believe somewhere inside me that I was disgusting right down to my core.
As for Dad, he remained remote and brusque for the most part, and our interactions became almost entirely limited to my shrieks and his bellows. I was a stubborn girl, and angry at what felt like his lack of concern for me. Subconsciously, I knew I’d get his attention by being sullen and talking back to him, which always got results, albeit negative ones. I think I just wanted to feel as though I mattered enough for him to become emotional about me, even if that emotion was fury. He once told me, “Sulome, you’re the only person who can infuriate me to the point of rage.” I remember being strangely comforted by this.
Finally, there was the lawsuit. Sometime after we moved to Athens, my family sued Iran for sponsoring the terrorists who kidnapped Dad. The legislation that allowed American victims of terrorism to sue governments proven to have sponsored the groups that victimized them was relatively recent. I remember testifying in court and crying when I recounted how I used to ask God for them to take my father back, because he was so damaged after he came home. It was the first time I had really thought or talked about how my father’s captivity affected me. My parents and I actually filed three separate lawsuits, and when I was fifteen years old, I was awarded somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 million in frozen Iranian assets held in the United States, after taxes and lawyers’ fees.
All my money went straight to a trust fund, of course, but my parents collectively received settlements of around $40 million, and our lives abruptly changed. We had never been poor, but not particularly rich either, and it was great in many ways—we could suddenly afford all the things we wanted. But Dad didn’t handle the money well. He started to throw it around in public and became what I saw at the time as pompous and arrogant. Our fights increased in frequency. My mother adopted the opposite stance and grew disapproving and judgmental of his spending habits. She would also constantly harangue him about the fact that he was putting on a lot of weight. The distance between them grew ever wider, and they would often end up screaming at each other as much as they yelled at me.
Looking back, I realize why they reacted so differently to our newfound wealth. My father grew up dirt-poor in upstate New York, a region I’ve heard called the Kentucky of the East Coast. His dad was a chicken farmer and a truck driver, and their large family—Dad was one of six kids—lived on very little for much of his childhood. He left home at seventeen and built a successful career as a journalist through sheer force of will and his vast, lightning-quick intelligence. Because he was raised with nothing in a culture that prized wealth and rampant consumption, he wanted everything, and he suddenly had the means to buy it. So he did.
Mama grew up dirt-poor as well, but in Beirut during a horrific civil war. She was raised scrimping and saving as her family struggled to eke out a living under the most dire of circumstances. During the tremendous uncertainty of war, she never knew how long money would last, especially when my grandmother was constantly spending whatever they had to feed her gambling addiction. To this day, despite the millions she’s managed to hold on to while my father’s wealth is gone, the woman still refuses to spend more than forty dollars on an item of clothing and has shopped at T.J.Maxx for as long as I’ve known her. When I was a child, instead of name-brand cereals like Lucky Charms or Cookie Crisp or whatever the other kids ate, we had to get the giant bags of knockoff brands like Charms O’Luck and Crispy Cookies.
Some of the difference in the way they handled the money was cultural and personality-driven, of course. My mother has the traditional Lebanese trait of thriftiness and financial savvy, and she is by nature a careful, calculating person. Dad’s very American consumerism, as well as his impulsivity and inability to think long term—traits I inherited—made it easy for him to spend thoughtlessly, almost compulsively. But I see now that much of their conflict was rooted in their respective upbringings, and it’s a sad thought. It reminds me of a bitter little poem by Philip Larkin:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
In many ways, my parents’ families and childhood environments dictated the rest of their lives. I live in constant terror of the same thing happening to me.
At the very least, you’d think the money would have earned me some popularity at school, but Athens is a poverty-stricken town, at least for people not associated with the university. Most of the kids seemed to think of me as a snotty little rich girl, and their envy led to much nastiness and shit-talking. I was snubbed even more frequently for my nice things and the impressive mansion my parents decided to build atop a hill right outside the town.
I suppose it’s no surprise that I quickly discovered alcohol and pot. Right before I began high school, I realized my unhappy awkwardness was much less immediate when I was drunk or high. Unfortunately, my mother had an uncanny knack for catching me every single time I snuck a drink or a joint, which just cemented my idea of her as an implacable archenemy I had to constantly outwit. One particularly unpleasant incident took place in the middle of ninth grade, and over fifteen years later, I still cringe at it.
I had managed to get a role in a school play, which was very exciting to me, as I had recently decided I wanted to become an actress. I finally had a best friend, a pretty, popular girl named Jessica who was dating one of the cool, artsy older boys in the play—increasing my popularity quotient by association. A bunch of senior boys offered to give us a ride home one night, and they lit up a joint on our way to my house. I took a couple of puffs and felt fine, but Mama was all over me as soon as I walked in the door.
“Why are you late?” she asked suspiciously.
“I don’t know, Mom; they took forever to leave.”
She sniffed at my clothes. “You’ve been smoking pot.”
“No! I swear, I wouldn’t do that. I mean, how dumb would that be, smoking right before I came home?” I prayed my stupidity would save me.
My mother was unmoved by my protestations. “You’re high, Sulome. Tell me who you were with. What were these boys’ names?”
Hours of screaming and begging ensued, but she eventually managed to pry their names out of me, and the next day, my father called up the parents of each senior boy and told them their son had been giving marijuana to a freshman girl. After that, I was a pariah. Kids practically spat at me in the hallway, and I heard “narc” and “tattletale” whispered as I scurried to class, trying desperately to avoid their glares. I became quietly, profoundly depressed, and even started cutting at my wrists from time to time, just because I couldn’t stand the pain of my own existence and needed release from it somehow.
Another rather horrific incident cemented my conviction that I had to leave Athens. Sometime after the pot affair, I was finally released from my three-month home incarceration. Jessica’s mother was going out of town, so she was throwing a party, and I managed to talk Mama into letting me sleep over at her house. The party was huge, and all the cool kids were in attendance. I started drinking early, enjoying the way the alcohol lubricated my conversation, made it easier to loosen up and tell jokes or show my personality in a way I was too self-conscious to do sober. At some point, a partygoer broke out a bottle of 151-proof liquor, and after a couple of shots of that, the rest of the night went mostly black.
I do remem
ber puking violently, and someone saying, “We need to call her parents. She might have alcohol poisoning.” I was unceremoniously deposited on the front step of Jessica’s house at my parents’ feet and they took me to the hospital, where I had my stomach pumped. After that, we were all in agreement that it would be best if I enrolled in a boarding school about three hours away, near Cleveland. I was dying to get away from both the town and my parents, so off I went.
At boarding school, the braces and glasses were quickly discarded. I grew into my body and became more attractive, confident, and socially adept. I discovered my sexuality got me attention and approval from boys, something I had started to desperately crave—though it came with its share of mean-spirited gossip. But I had real friends for the first time in what felt like years. I was challenged by and excelled at the school’s rigorous curriculum. In other words, I found some self-confidence and a small piece of happiness that was just mine, and I held it close.
Until I was kicked out, of course. Then I had to go back to Athens and finish my last three months of high school in disgrace. That’s when things really started to go south. Athens is a quiet, boring place to be a teenager, and there’s a significant amount of drug abuse. My boyfriend at boarding school had broken up with me hours after I was expelled and I found myself in a place I hated, with barely any friends. The empty place in me grew canyon wide. I needed something to fill it and was soon dabbling in harder substances; cocaine became my favorite way to erase my misery. Luckily, NYU didn’t withdraw my acceptance, so I was still off to New York in the fall, which was a light at the end of the tunnel. But I would often find myself doing lines off the toilet lid in the school restroom or running around town with some guy, rolling on Ecstasy. My parents seemed to just give up and let me do what I wanted, which was both painful and exhilarating.
The Hostage's Daughter Page 6
