Out of the tirade of questions that 2020 hurled at me, there was one in particular that stuck, like a blowdart landing on my forehead, benumbing my mind: What does it really mean to live away from home? What does it mean to live away from a home that is, by many accounts, ‘troubled’?
Many writers before me—writers better qualified than myself, including Edward Said and Edwidge Danticat—have unwrapped the flesh of this dilemma, dissected its heart, anatomized and categorized and labelled the emotions that define it (nostalgia? melancholia? shuttling? itch? disaster?) Yet experiencing these emotions first-hand—especially during a year defined by mortality, distance, and stasis—compels me to put fingers to keypad and add another line to the ever-growing corpus of texts that deal with the choice of fleeing a troubled home.
Leaving troubled homes is an instinct, but it is also a rational calculation. If evolution is our goal as a species, moving someplace where we can not just survive, but achieve—build; grow; and do better—makes absolute sense. So why is it that leaving a home that is troubled so much harder than leaving a home that isn’t?
In This is Who I Am, the latest play by award-winning Palestinian playwright Amir Nizar Zuabi, a young man cooks with his father on Zoom. He is in California. His father, in Palestine. Together, they attempt to make his deceased mother’s recipe of spinach-filled pastries. Father and son are both hurting from the mother’s absence. The recipe is a stand-in for the past they all shared, for the intimacy and connection that comes with sharing a home, of living together, of growing up or growing old together. The problem is—pandemic aside—the son has no intention of returning. The father feels abandoned.
The online play, which had its world premiere last December, was performed live on Zoom for the entirety of its run. The setting is supremely naturalistic—who hasn’t spent hours talking to their parents over video call in the past year?—and the premise of a father and son cooking together allows Zuabi to infuse this digital interaction with those extra elements that are lost in virtual meetings: the smells and tastes of family life. The synchronicity that the recipe imposes on the two men—now add the flour, now let the yeast rise, now put it in the oven for 20 minutes—is an ingenious way for the audience to see all the ways in which father and son are actually not in sync.
The two men’s treatment of the recipe’s instructions is indicative of their divergent attitudes to life. The son (played by Youssof Sultani) measures quantities with teaspoons and cups, precisely; while the father (played by Ramsey Faragallah with a keen attention to the timing of eye rolls and gestures) improvises, eyeballing the amount of flour, olive oil, and salt that goes into the mixture. When the time comes to add lukewarm water to the yeast, the father rebels: “I hate lukewarm! It’s a compromise!”
The son, who resents the kind of masculinity embodied by his father—a hero in his Palestinian community, after spending almost two years in prison for punching a young Israeli soldier that (accidentally it turns out) shoved his pregnant wife during a home search—seeks exactly that “compromise”. Only he calls it level-headedness, contentment, a chance at happiness free from “fear and angry men”. A curator, the son “want[s] to he surrounded by beauty and not the tools of survival”.
The price he pays to be “surrounded by beauty” is living away from the ancient lands of Palestine and making a home in the comparatively new world of the US. It’s worth pointing out here that Los Angeles, the chosen home of the son, is itself the stage of multiple narratives of survival—homelessness, police brutality, food insecurity—but because of his status as an outsider, the son doesn’t have to carry those particular burdens on his back. One person’s paradise is another person’s hell. You want to like the son, you get his grievance. But there is something disinterested in his attitude—it may be the tech-bro look, a baseball cap worn backwards and a front-zip hoodie casually open?—that rubs you the wrong way, like it does his father.
Jokingly fighting over the quality of the olive oil that his son is using in the recipe (“it’s bio-organic, from California”) the father admonishes him: “What kind of memories do your olive trees have?” For the father, value comes from memory, even if that memory is a heavy one: if there is no reminiscence bearing down on the soil that nurtures you, there is no life, there is no history. The son duly replies that the olive trees in California have no memory: “None. None at all. That’s why I like it.”
Repudiating ancestral and familial memories is an unintended consequence of fleeing ‘troubled’ places. In the words of the son: “Where you hear memories, I hear death. I hear fear and an endless cycle of blood.” The demands that a ‘troubled’ home places on you are not negligible. In a war zone, the demands are physical. You must be ready to sacrifice everything, including your life. In the context of a drawn-out, yet frozen conflict, like the one on the island of Cyprus, my home country, the demands are mostly mental: Remember! You must remember! Keep fighting for places you never knew! It’s your responsibility to keep the struggle alive!
But even for those that aren’t forced to flee because of a violent event such as a war or a natural disaster, the difficulty of leaving a ‘troubled’ home also derives from the kinds of assumptions, or deductions, that you consciously or unconsciously make in order to justify a protracted stay abroad. This is especially tricky if you come from what I call 'an ambivalently-troubled’ country, one that isn’t ravaged by war but is torn apart by corruption, nepotism, and a general lack of prospects. The counterargument goes: There’s corruption everywhere, so why would you feed another country’s corruption instead of staying here, where you know its guises best? Yes, indeed, there are no jobs, but your family is here, you have an apartment for free, your friends are all having babies, wouldn’t it be easier, etc. All are valid arguments.
There are multiple sources of anxiety at play here. First off, defining your home, the place that gave birth to you, and where you were born, as ‘troubled’, is a major source of guilt. You are adopting a language you despise. Perhaps you are the troubled one. Perhaps you had unrealistic expectations. Why can everyone else live with it? What’s wrong with you?
Second, there is the sense that you have abandoned many people that have shaped you into who you are. Many times these are the people that you most want—or need—to be in your life. What a contradiction. To live elsewhere means that your timeline moves on without them, theirs without you, and close convergences of the two become rarer, and more fleeting, as the years go by. As you grow more bitter about the shortcomings of the ‘troubled’ place you left—one of the perverse ways you keep a connection to it—you find that that bitterness is also a measure of the distance between you and them. They chose to stay, after all. What is the matter with you?
Third, you suffer from an irrational urge that one can only describe as some kind of pathology: you keep nagging yourself with the question of where it is that you actually make a life. This can happen even after buying an apartment in your adoptive home, getting permanent residency, and becoming established in your chosen career path. Cognitive dissonance: you forget that you are already living! You’ve made up your mind, you just don’t want to admit it. This incessant looking-forward, like stubborn leaves turning towards a sun that’s always too far away, is what stops you from looking down at the roots you have already sprouted. Whenever you try to tug them, they snag on the little pebbles you set there to help the water flow and help them grow. Replanting is not as simple as you’d thought it would be.
The paradox of this whole situation is, that if your home wasn’t ‘troubled’, you would be extremely confident about your choice to make a life somewhere else. You’d trumpet it at dinner parties and over drinks with new acquaintances (pre-COVID). It wouldn’t be this monster of an existential question, creeping into your brain at the end of each workday, when you’ve finally put away your laptop and are snuggling on the couch with your partner trying to relax. If ‘back home’ was just a good old regular place, you wouldn’t worry that you’d miss some major news, some life-changing event that could affect your loved ones—and yourself—as you were deeply sleeping, even peacefully dreaming, in a time zone hours behind.
There is a special type of agony that comes with living away from a place that is bleeding. You want to tend to the wounds, you want to apply pressure, find a tourniquet, suture it, fold it gently under layers of gauze and wait impatiently while it heals. You want to live to see that moment when it finally turns into what you think happy, functioning places ought to be like. In the meantime, you pursue a life in places that you think are joyous and carefree; places that are better at—at least—projecting that illusion; places where you haven’t peeked behind the curtain, yet.
What may take some time to sink in—and what the son in This is Who I Am doesn’t quite realize—is that the act of escape alone does not hold the key to happiness. Greek Egyptian poet C. P. Cavafy had it right when he wrote that, wherever you go, your ‘city will always pursue you’. A similar sentiment is echoed in a Cypriot proverb: ‘ο τόπος εν ο άνθρωπος, τζι ο άνθρωπος εν ο τόπος‘ (‘people are places and places are people’). The only attitude that could approximate a solution to the ‘troubled home’ conundrum comes from within. It’s found in what Amir Nizar Zuabi offers as the legacy of the deceased mother in the climax of his play. What made the mother “the real hero” of the family was her ability to shield herself from the infectious, contagious bitterness of conflict and political stalemate, “the humiliation and hate of oppression” that permeates the everyday of her family and community in Palestine. Her resistance was the most profound because it took the shape of happiness, no matter what.
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This is Who I Am was presented by PlayCo and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, in Association with American Repertory Theater, Guthrie Theater, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival in December 2020 and early January 2021. You can read more about it here.