When Magic Failed: A Memoir of a Lebanese Childhood, Caught Between East and West

Abstract

The Mediterranean, wrote Coco Chanel’s biographer Paul Morand, is a “Sea of Wonders,” a crossroads of civilizations, a rebellion against deserts and the nomad’s gloom, an epic history of the house of stone soaring above the sheepskin-hut, a symphony of vineyards burrowing deeply into an ancient native soil standing sentry against hasty harvests of barbarian hordes on horseback. In sum, the Mediterranean in Morand’s telling is a “majestic liquid affirmation of life” in the face of endless relentless droughts; a place where “all of history’s deposits, fractures, and reckonings dwell for safekeeping, rootedness, and meaning.” Without the Mediterranean, stressed Morand, planet earth would not have bragging rights about its multiple disparate continents, and “nothing on it would distinguish an Africa from a Europe, or an Asia from an Africa, all while a local departmental train would be linking Marseilles to Algiers . . . and the faithful from Jerusalem would be making pilgrimage to Rome on foot, without even getting their feet wet.” It is on the Lebanese shores of this Mediterranean, on the southern hilltop hamlet of Arnoun near the Israeli border, that Fouad Ajami was born and came of age. It is this “sea of wonders” and the majestic highlands that wade into it – like one plunges into a baptismal basin – that raised young Fouad, tickled his palate, nourished his instincts, fired his imagination, and later set him on a promontory awaiting the lure of America. His senses lulled by songs of cicadas mingling with fragrances of citrus and forest pines, Fouad’s young eyes were rivetted to the holy waters of his Mediterranean, which was redolent with sounds of fishermen, the trances of sailors, and the echoes of the music of vernal giggles diluted by tears that were carried on the boats of departures and exiles. “Lebanon is a place that one leaves more often than one might settle into” goes an oft-repeated Lebanese adage. Like their Phoenician ancestors, “the fountainhead of the Lebanese people’s fortunes had always lain beyond the seas, always at the other edge of the world.” Fouad Ajami’s destiny might have been linked to that ancestral predilection and mode of being. Whether from the shoreline in Tyre, or on a perch in Arnoun, the Mediterranean always beckoned him, swayed him, lured him into its embrace. Even when he lay soundly asleep at night, the sea seemed always to have been enveloping his imagination and speaking to his yearnings. A place of repose, Fouad’s Mediterranean was also a passageway and a crossroads that carried on its waves the old wrinkles of humanity, just like in his later years he would bear on his forehead a “magical” Middle East, which he would nimbly unravel and demystify. A subtle interpreter of the “Arab condition” Ajami’s life’s work was an act of defiance as well as of discovery of “peoples” and “self” alike. He wrote not only of the Arabs’ predicaments, but also of their potential and salvation as if he were composing his own life-story. Looking to America and succumbing to its enticement, he left Lebanon at a young age to chase after the dreams and