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¶ Antoun's Melbourne Upbringing
Anto Nissa is a journalist who grew up in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. His mum and dad had escaped the truly harrowing civil war in Lebanon of the nineteen seventies, and they'd found their way to the strange peace and quiet of the outer Australian burbs. Anto was always conscious, he says, of a sadness in his mother's eyes. Kids tend to notice these things, but are wary of asking too many questions in case you upset your parents or bring them to tears.
in international relations. He worked for a think tank in Washington D C, and he's lived in Lebanon for some years, and after all that he thought he might be ready to know. From his mother, the source of her quiet grief He's written a beautiful family memoir that's called Rebirth a Love Story from the Depths of War. Hi Anton.
Hirited.
¶ Childhood Memories and Identity
What's your earliest memory of your mum Labor from when you were little?
I think the earliest memory I have is me being, I think, four, coming home from kinda. And I just remarked to her that, Oh, I beat all my siblings. I'm the first one home and she's in the kitchen preparing meals, getting ready for everyone to come home. Mum and I had a I think a c very close relationship than the youngest of my family or four. I was the first child that Mum actually got to have full time because she wasn't working full time when she had me.
So we were able to develop a very close bond and yeah, it's it's a memory of our closeness.
What are your memories of Craigie Byrne, the suburb you grew up on as a kid in the eighties and nineties?
In my day it was a semi-rural town, just on the fringes of Melbourne. We were surrounded by farmland, so we weren't connected to any other suburbs. There were creeks we would go yabbying. We used to ride our BMXs down under bridges and creeks and that's what I remember of Craigyburn, but it was predominantly an Anglo town.
And my family were one of the first, I think, non Anglo families to move in. You know, I think there were like three other Lebanese families and a few Italians and Greeks, but not a lot. But in those days, you know, you remember the eighties and the nineties, you know, the way they structured and built suburbs, they built them with courts and crescents and we lived in a beautiful court. It was very homely, everyone got to know each other.
And my parents but they were fresh migrants, they still had that Lebanon in them. And they brought this kind of Lebanese boisterous village life to our court. We had A gate between us and our Anglo neighbor where we would just walk back and forth in between. Like they built it between our houses. We'd have Amazing barbecue, you know, welcome everyone with our cuisine and it became a village. It became a a beautiful little village. And that's my fond memory of Craigman. Did they
Keep you connected to the old culture? Was Arabic spoken at home, that kind of thing?
Our upbringing was very Lebanese. Probably more Lebanese than Australian. But because we lived in that Anglo context, going to school was very Anglo. So we had a bit of both. And that's a virtue of growing up in that environment. But at the same time, and inside the household it was it was very Arabic, it was very Lebanese. You know, our walls were covered either with Cedar trees or with Jesus. So
You mentioned in your book that you sometimes could see a shadow on your mum's face. What was that shadow? What did it look like to you?
Yeah. Um I have this very vivid memory of me being eight years old, just being in my bedroom and just Tragedy in the Civil War. And she was just at the dishes with my sisters just doing her usual thing.
You're eight years old and you're thinking about your mother's tragedy in the Lebanese Civil War. You had that much of it in your head already, I don't.
Pretty much.'Cause it got me out of the bed and I just went to the kitchen. And I just said to her, I'm sorry for your loss. And so she kind of was like taken aback and turned around and just said, Thank you. And I think she appreciated it.
Were there moments when she would occasionally let slip to her? About some of the horrors she'd seen?
Yeah, but very nonchalantly. You know, w there's a moment I think w I was a teenager, I were watching a movie on the partition of India and it was a very gruesome movie and You know, there was a scene where there was this body tied between two vehicles and they drove in separate directions and the person who was tied, their limbs were kind of torn apart. Yeah. And Mum just casually goes, Yeah, yeah, I saw that in the wall.
And there was always these little snippets that would keep coming out. She would say when I became a journalist, Oh you should write my story. It's an interesting story And then lo and behold we got sitting down and she told me everything.
¶ Understanding Mother's World
And what made you think you were ready to hear it?
I was twenty eighteen. I had begun my career as a journalist in twenty eleven in Beirut. I had, you know, almost a decade of experience seeing the context of the world in which she came from and living it, working in it. You know, when I was in Lebanon, it was at the time of the Syrian civil war. I mean I wasn't in Syria when the fighting was happening, but I did do trips to Syria and you know, you saw the ramifications both in Syria and Lebanon of that war. You know, one day I wake up in Beirut
It's a normal city. The next day it's flooded with these displaced children, dirty, working the streets being exploited because their communities have been ravaged in Syria. So it's it's it there's a gradual degradation of society that my family live through. And that's what I wanted to capture.
¶ Mother's Idyllic Pre-War Beirut
What was your mum's neighborhood like in Beirut when she was growing up there?
Even today, you know she'll sit here, she'll tell you her happiest days in her life were her childhood in Beirut. Because it was what I described about The court in Craigyburn. It was this boisterous Loving Very vibrant and very wholesome community. You know, the village life, even in these towns and the outer fringes of Beirut, everyone knows everyone.
Everyone is like family to each other. Everyone grows up with each other. She loved after church going down with her friends, having a picnic with I you know a lubner sandwich and a bit of taboul and Some olives and cucumbers in the garden on the riverbank. Like there's these simple pleasures. You know, my my my family were poor. They were poor Maronites.
There were the lower class of the Maronites and that community were lower class Maronites. And even with nothing they found ultimate happiness. And even with the challenges that they lived Still, Mum remembers it as the happiest time of her life.
There's no time to even begin to explain the religious complexities of Lebanon at the time. But how important was the church in the life of the family and the community?
Significant mum was in the choir, Sunday church was a absolute. The town Jiselbasha translates in English to the bridge of the Pasha. An Ottoman governor built this town in the eighteen seventies. And he built this beautiful bridge. And a beautiful garden, which was called the Pasha's Garden. The governor planted then, you know, Indian banyan trees. They just that became huge. One had a trunk so big that they used to perform ad hoc kind of theatre and plays and musicals within the trunk.
And the church was positioned on the riverbank next to the river. It just became this picturesque. little beautiful heartbeat of the town in which everyone hovered around.
¶ Sacrifice and Secret Love
She was fourteen when she was pulled out of school by your grandfather. What kind of work did she have to pick up?
She became a tailor pretty much immediately and she worked long hours. And it was necessary. She's the eldest of her family. And Her working and adding that just a little bit of income to the household meant that the family could start affording a few more niceties. So where she grew up as a child her dad and her family that were living with his family in the same building. So her getting into work enabled them to rent their own place and
It was very special to her father to be able to do that. But then also for things like an actual stove so they don't have to cook on a fire anymore and, you know, even a T V at some points. And their living standards were able to improve because she was contributing that income. But also it meant that her forfeiting her education meant her brothers could have a complete education and her brother ended up going to university.
Then she began, she told you, a secret courtship with a young man named Nicola. Tell me about this guy, Nicola.
I never knew about this. This came out in twenty eighteen.
This was a bombshell, wasn't it?
Yeah, it was it was a huge bombshell for me. that she had a another lover, probably an actual love, to be honest.
How did she talk about this?
She spoke about him with a very fond nostalgia. A fondness that I think can only represent a genuine love that you had for someone else.
Was he good looking? you don't
So he was a coiffeur, which is French for hairdresser. And in Lebanon it's very common and still is common for men It's ironic in Australia we think of hairdressing as a f a feminine profession, but in Lebanon it's actually more of a masculine profession and actually the same case throughout the Arab world. That's why we have in Australia for example so many Iraqi, Syrian and Lebanese barbers. And he had a salon specifically for women's hair in the Jasur. And she started going there.
She tell her parents that she was visiting this man, no? Really? How how is anyone supposed to conduct a courtship if it all has to be done in secret all the time?
¶ Rebellious Romance and Escape
And that's the beauty and the challenge of that's the creativity of trying to navigate through Patreon. I mean I always knew Mum was rebellious because I have a bit of that rebellious instinct in myself. Well, she was telling me her stories, I'm like, Mommy, you were such a a like a badass. Like, yeah, you're providing for the family and you're fulfilling your patriarchal duties, but also in the side you're like, you know what, I'm still gonna enjoy life the best way I can.
And also when you're young and you have those first initial fleeting romances, there's nothing you can s that can stop you.
And you never tell your parents about them anyway.
Absolutely.
So she got a job in his salon then as an apprentice?
Yeah.
What do Father think of that?
i was happy to get moving Yeah.
So what kind of a future was she imagining for herself and Nicola?
Even though she was rebellious, she always adhered to the patriarchal dictates. which were that, you know, she kind of insisted upon him that whatever we do we have to do it according properly. You have to ask for my hand, we have to get married, nothing can happen before that. And being a m a male in that society that that was
Completely understood. There was no trying to get around that. He didn't attempt to do that, at least from her account. But it was skirting around the edges. So her taking up that apprenticeship in the salon was her their way of maintaining this flotation, maintaining this ability to be in each other's presence in a way that society wouldn't frown upon every weekend in the salon.
She told you about this beautiful trip she took with him, and a whole lot of other family members for cover, if you like, or for camouflage up to the Cedars, the mountains in Lebanon. How did she speak about that day?
Every time she speaks about it, her eyes just glow. Uh you know, she was says it's one of the happiest days of my life. Because you also understand, when you're poor in Lebanon, travelling outside of your area is very rare. And so going on these church trips, especially for a woman, a female a young girl to be allowed by her parents to leave the town without them or someone aro around them.
is very rare and the only way she was able to go on this trip was via a church group. Her male brother and cousins had to go and there had to be m male relatives present. And even still she managed to find a way to continue this flotation, this dance with Nicola who went with her on this trip. And then going to the Cedars in the far north and the mountains and the snow, it it's a remarkable trip. for someone who really gets to get out of their world.
¶ Jisl Basha: A Frontline Town
Meanwhile there were tensions rising in her local neighborhood, in Beirut to I mean, we could spend nine hours talking about the intersecting pieces of of this puzzle, but can you just explain like what the primary source of tension was in that neighborhood in particular between the local Maronite Christians and other Christians in the area and the the camp that was there as well, the Palestinian camp.
Right. So Jisidl Basha was on the front line. It was a Christian Maronite town and where the Palestinian refugee camps were set up after the nineteen forty eight Nakbah.
And there were two camps.
One camp was inside Jasil Basha and it was a br it was a smaller camp. And they were primarily Palestinian Christians. And in a Christian setting they assimilated pretty easily. The major camp not too far was Dal Zatar, and Talazatar was the most prominent Palestinian PLO camp and stronghold prior to the nineteen seventy five war. It was heavily armed, there were sixty thousand, and they were mostly Muslim.
I mean the Palestinian Christians and the the Palestinian Muslims were on the same page with regards to their struggle. They all wanted to go home back to Palestine and so they were very committed to whatever efforts were taking place to that end. So they're all supportive of the PLO at the time.
That meant they intersected with the local community in different ways and at different points.
So I mean there were there were men from the Palestinian camp who worked with my grandfather, who was a painter and would go on jobs with him. So there was intersection in the community. There were mixed marriages already happening. Mum's neighbour was a Palestinian Christian woman.
Her family lived in the camp, but she married a Lebanese police officer and they lived next door. I mean also Lebanese and Palestinians are pretty much the same people. We are the same people. So these intersections were happening prior to colonialism and then were happening after. The borders came in and so forth.
But this is where Jesus was positioned and so when tensions were rising in the country over the presence of the PLO and Yasser Arafat and the heavy arms they had and the operations they were carrying out against Israel from the south and from Lebanese territory With primarily right wing Christian political class that dominated the country and the government and that was more aligned to the West and more aligned to Israel. There were tensions bubbling.
Sort of like a state within a state?
Yeah. I mean we can't go into three hours, but there's so much more. We're simplifying it to this specific geographical area.
¶ Civil War Erupts: April 1975
Indeed, and that'cause that's what your mother was seeing at the time. So april thirteenth, nineteen seventy five. Civil War breaks out in Lebanon. Your mum was in church on the morning of Sunday, April thirteenth, nineteen seventy five. What did she tell you happened that morning?
Well, it was like any other day. I mean there were kind of like gradual episodes of violence happening prior to that day. And so everyone thought that okay, whatever, and another shooting, someone got killed, let's move on. And they were at church and it was after the Mass that it became aware of the gravity of the situation because it wasn't just any shooting, it was an attack on the phalangist leader. And the phalangist were the primary, prominent, most powerful, fascistic according to some.
They names from the Spanish fascists, yeah.
They yep. They were inspired by the Spanish phalanges. The phalanges came into being in the nineteen thirties, and I think this is important for listeners to understand, outside of the West in the nineteen thirties, as far as the Arab world and other kind of regions were concerned The Germans were investing heavily in trying to market themselves as like, you know, where the actual real deal from Europe.
And there was a lot of affinity the f fascistic politics that was coming out of Germany was popular in certain corners and it was inspiring for a lot of these political classes who wanted to emulate a lot of what the Nazi party was trying was achieving and the
It was going on in Japan, it was going on in India, it was going on all over the place. I was reading how the founder of the Philanges Pierre Jamal went to the Berlin Olympics and went, Wow, this is what we need. We need order in Lebanon above everything else. We need order.
Yeah. They looked at the Germans now. So This is going on in the background. And that's how kind of like fascism seeped into the Maronite community in Lebanon. And ironically they were aligned to the French, which doesn't make a sense. But anyway.
Let's not try too hard at this point. What what really counts though is some men with guns showed up in the the church on this morning.
Yeah, they burst in because there was an attempted assassination on their leader and several of his bodyguards were killed. And then a few hours later the massacre happened the famous bus massacre in Ainarmene in Beirut, which marked the beginning of the civil war in which Twenty plus Palestinians were gunned down.
How quickly did that neighborhood change?
¶ Life Under Occupation
Immediately. And I asked Mum about this like immediately. Because they were sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks. You know, you have the Palestinian camp in the Jisid and you had Telezazad, which is the most powerful Palestinian camp.
So you have a Maronite Christian enclave right next to a Palestinian camp, which has got Palestinian Christians and another one of largely of Palestinian Muslims. So all hell breaks loose. What form does that take? Roadblocks? Checkpoints?
Yeah, well the initial thing that that Imam Rem members is that Palestinian militiamen came into the Jazid, but they weren't from the Jissud camp. So they clearly came in from the Telazar camp. But they essentially took control over Jesus Basha. They took control over it. And so our family were kind of under PLO occupation.
for that first bit of the war and they lived under that occupation. So that included, yes, checkpoints around the perimeters going into the Jisid. That's how the militias asserted their dominance over a neighborhood. They would set checkpoints and they would control who would come in and out. They would control what kind of goods would come in and out. And the absurdity of this whole scenario was that The PLO had taken over.
Mum's town, which was a Maronite Christian town, across the bridge, across the river were the phalangists who were shouting this Christian town because the PLO were occupying it. It just it it this is how absurd this whole war started.
Your mum lost her job.
It was burnt down.
So that they become kind of like prisoners in their own.
Yeah. That was a difficult period, you know, especially when you're someone like mum who loves being around people, loves being around her friends, to be stuck in the house and not being able to go anywhere.
And when she was able to walk out. What did the neighborhood look like after a couple of weeks of this?
Well it was a ghost town. So the this is where the class divide becomes more acute. Because the people in the Jissid who were able to leave because they had another family home in the mountains, or they could go live somewhere else, far from Beirut, they all left. The ones who didn't have access to that, the poorest of the poor, so happened to be my family.
Had no choice but to stay and had to suffer the consequences of the war. And there was a fissure even within the family because my grandfather's brothers left. And no one really knew that they left. And they kind of left my mum's family behind.
And this is where there's these finer frictions because you're dealing with the moment. You have shells falling, you have bullets whizzing, you can't get food supplies, you can't get you're dealing with daily pressures and you've also been kind of abandoned because some people have left and You're stuck behind and it cre creates this divide between those who fled and those who had had to sit there and experience the war.
So when Mum were able was able to get out, she kind of saw that A, the main strip of as just said, where all the shops were, the bakery, the grocers, the the hairdresser that was burnt down. It was a ghost town, most people fled, and then in those absent buildings you had snipers set up all over the place, keeping an eye on every movement.
It must have had a feeling of unreality to it for her. Was there a part of your mum or part of your family that just couldn't quite grasp what was happening at the time?
I think the primary instinct in that setting is survival mode. There's no moment to reflect, there's no moment to analyse. There's barely a moment to strategize. And that was what my grandfather's trying to do was strategize his way around with with the other patriarchs who are lingering and loitering, how do we get around this? How do we manage the situation?
¶ The Absurdity of Sniper Fire
It's more like what am I gonna do in the next three minutes?
Exactly. For my grandmother and my mum, they went out with the snipers watching them because they needed to get supplies. There was no it was that or starve in their houses. I mean, how else were they gonna get food?
So their daily plan was like, okay, we've got to go out. There's gonna be snipers on us. How do we navigate this? And there's a moment where mum and my grandmother were walking across the bridge. It was a rainy day. My grandmother brought an umbrella and there was gunfire on the bridge.
And
They both freaked out. And Mum's like, It's the umbrella. They think it's a gun. Throw that umbrella. And my grandmother's like, What if it rains? And like she's like, who cares if it rains? And she yanked the umbrella out of my grandmother's hands and just threw it into the river. And just that's it. And the gunfire stopped.
That's the other thing, you know, there's and that's and that's like when you speak to people who suffer war, especially Lebanese and Palestinians and Syrians, they always come back with humor and I always find that humor is a way also for them to kind of cope. with the tragedies that they're dealing with. It's a coping mechanism.
¶ The Tragic Death of Suad
Well then we have moved to this other moment now, which feels like a threshold moment. In your mum's story here, which is the fate of a woman called Suad, who was one of your mum's neighbours. How kind had she been to your mum's family?
I'm gonna get Tyri recounting this one. This was one of the tough stories that I had to write about because Suad represented, I think, the kindness and the warmth that comes with that kind of maternal Lebanese matriarch, just a bush on those outer kind of town suburbs, were surrounded by groves, so a lot of fruit trees, different kinds of fruits, citrus, orange, lemon, as well as obviously olive and suad.
had a lot of that. She had several of these groves and she would always kind of like hand out the fruits to the poorer ones who didn't have access to this land. And my family were one of the poorer ones who didn't have land to grow their own fruit. And so it was a routine, it was a friendship that she developed with the poorer women to kind of go and hand out these fruits to the surrounding families. And at the time during the war when all these families, including my own,
were struggling just to get the bare minimum to survive, especially with food, she would walk in with whatever she could gather. And it was almost as if like she was the mother of the orchids. And she was snipered. Um she was shot in the square and her body was left for several days.
Why was it left there?
I it's it's men. It's men when they have guns. It transforms them. It gives them power. And you've got to remember these men who have these guns are also from these poor communities. So they've never had power. And as soon as you give them this power in their hands They feel invincible and when they're hiding in the shadows of tall buildings as snipers and no one can see them except God. There's an invincibility to that power.
can shoot down a woman with a basket of fruit and vegetables.
Yeah.
With impunity. Yeah. So she's left there for two days. It was just too hard to retrieve her body because of that.
They tried every time they would approach, uh I'm talking about my grandfather and various other, you know, men. Each time they tried to approach the body there was gunfire, warning them not to approach. And it had to be through back channel negotiations, reactivating some of those past relationships with old friends and colleagues in the Palestinian camp. Who ended up helping to get that body retrieved?
I spoke with the great British author, the novelist Martin Amos, and he he talked about these moments in history when he says his phrase was when the death really gets going. That's what I felt when I read about th the death of this blameless, kind, courageous woman, her being shot in the square and no one being able to even get close to it for two days. You've seen this yourself.
¶ War's Deceptive, Self-Perpetuating Logic
Death almost has a kind of an undertow or logic of its own that seems to exist almost independently of the humans that are enacting it.
It became clear as I got further and further into the story that It all just started to kind of morph on its own and live on its own. And it was funny'cause I a friend of mine who's Palestinian read the book and shot me a text afterwards being like, I can't believe the PLO did that. And then I said, A war war takes a mind of its own. And
I think that that that's very evident in my family story. It was a case of just war and death and violence and power just taking hold of the situation taking hold of the communities, taking hold of the men, taking hold of the women. Irrespective of ideology, irrespective of politics, and I think that's one thread line that you can kind of pick out of a lot of wars and conflicts, that at some stage it doesn't matter anymore who's fighting who.
It all just morphs into its own, becomes its own cycle. Now those men, what grievances were they holding on to that might have been weaponized to get them to the point where they're shooting down a an old lady with a basket of fruit and veggies? And I think about my own uncle. Because my grandfather tried his best to be apolitical, to stay out of the fight, resisting all sides, because on at that occasion they were trying to recruit whatever able bodied male to fight in their militias.
And he was gunned down for being apolitical. And then his sons were filled with such rage that they ended up falling into the very thing that my grandfather tried to keep them away from. They ended up fighting for the phalanges. Who knows what they did. They won't speak up about it. But it all just takes on a life of its own. And as you're saying, once it kicks off, it's very hard to stop and it happens so quickly.
¶ Nicola's Disappearance and Lost Hope
Before the fighting broke out, we were talking about how she'd been having this secret affair with this Crofeur, this handsome hairdresser named Nicolda, was he around at this point? Is she still able to see him or has he disappeared?
No, he disappeared. So he didn't live in Jasil Basha, he lived in another bigger suburb which was in Beirut called uh Asharafiye. And when the war started it was impossible for anyone to come and go. So she had no news. This is also the nineteen seventies, there's no internet, there's no mobile phones. So she lost contact with him for several months for a while. And that also naughty her.
Because her plans were just abruptly just torn to shreds. You know, she was on the verge of getting married. They were saving to get a place together. They were saving to take that step. She had met his mother, which is the obviously a huge Step, he was preparing to meet her parents. They were almost there. And in these traditional societies, women and men choosing who they want to marry is not very
Comments.
Right. And so I felt like Mum got the jackpot. She's like, I know I have to marry someone soon and I'm gonna marry someone that I love. That's huge. And it was taken away.
¶ Grandfather's Fateful Return
The family managed to escape up into the mountains for a bit, but then your grandfather wanted to bring the family back home into that incredibly dangerous neighborhood. Can you fathom his thinking on this? Why he wanted to bring them out of safety and back into back to the the family home?
This has been a subject of debate in Australia and the family reflects on it. And my grandmother would still assert, you know, I tried to get him if only he just listened to me and went where I told him to go, none of this would have happened. And I so a part of this was me trying to understand his thinking and when mum was telling me more of his story and the fact that, you know, he was the youngest of his brothers.
And he was one who felt a sense of pride when he finally was able to afford and rent his own place and then get his own belongings and improve his living standards. And especially in these societies where male honour is everything and defines a man.
Well man it was his castle he wanted to return to and defend.
Absolutely. It wasn't just a couch, it wasn't just a house. It was his honour. He was defending his honour. He was defending what he had built for years trying to get to that point. And when they returned to Beirut My uncle had tonsillitis and getting medicine was impossible. And My grandmother was obviously very distraught at seeing her son essentially decaying from illness. And so she with mum dared again to venture out and try to get out of Digitsid to get some support.
And she did. They ended up getting my uncle out of the Jissid while there was a brief period of a ceasefire. They left him somewhere to get some care in another neighborhood. But then when the war resumes he was stuck outside. The family were kind of stuck inside. And then another brief pause, they were able to go out, get him
They went through the PLO checkpoint and the men manning that checkpoint kind of had a look at my uncle and were like, Why are you what's going on here? Why are you guys moving in and out so much? And you've got to remember, when the war is on, every man who was able to carry a gun they suspected of being a militant. And The eyes of the militants in Justribasha were firmly and squarely on Right.
Yeah. And your mother had brothers and were some of them of what you might be called fighting age in the eyes of some of these these men?
So my the eldest boy is two years younger than mum. So mum I think this this stage is like nineteen. Okay. So he's seventeen. He's very much able bodied to be fighting a war.
So did people come to the house to try and drag it into the wall?
So at first it was they came and threatened and assaulted my grandfather in the middle of the night. Yeah, essentially. And then after that
Evening.
But there were still channels of communication. So, you know, my grandfather's friend and neighbour was in constant communication with some people amongst the Palestinians in the Palestinian camp who were kind of making sure there's a line of communication to know what's going on.
¶ Grandfather's Murder and Layla's Promise
And Mum just remembers he went out to speak to the patriarchs to find out the latest news and then he came back and just bawled his eyes out and it was just shattering for the family to see him break down like that. And Mum's like, What's wrong? What's going on? And he's like, Just make sure you take care of everyone and the family. So he was forewarned that he was going to get killed before he got killed. And It was a cold winter's day.
Two bullets come through the door and he just screams out, Mama Mamma And it's that first instinct. This is a grown man and is crying out for his mum, who's not even there. And he just collapses to the ground and there they're you know, those his final words, crying out for his mum. And so my mum rushed to him, held his head in her lap, and the way she c she recalls and recounts it, it's she looked into his eyes and his eyes were telling her, you know, keep your promise, look after this family.
And that's the end of my grandfather.
¶ Family's Aftermath and Nicola's End
So this meant the family moved out of the apartment and went a little further out to another suburb. And then your mum's brother, your uncle, disappeared. He went looking for vengeance.
Yeah.
Do you know if he found it?
I asked him when I was researching for this this story in this book. Uh he wouldn't open up about it. All all we know is what my mum saw, which was several months later he returned to the house, unrecognizable to my grandmother, his mother. War, black marks, smears, fatigues, disheveled And that's all we know what happened in those few months where he disappeared and came back looking like a emaciated militant.
We don't know.
Meanwhile, your mum's cousin, who joined the phalangists, showed up. Yeah, the their apartment, wearing fatigues and camouflage and Boastfulness and military success. What kind of reaction did that get from your mum?
He did come in boasting and gloating of you know, killing and we're winning and we're doing this and we're doing that. And I th for me this kind of highlights the real Schism, the gender schism, I think. Because I think war was very much the domain of men. Politics was a domain of men. And the women like my mum and my grandmother were just as bystanders and just had to suck it all up. And so she responded with a very stern
response which was like, What are you talking about? What are you talking about? You come in here gloating about killing and death. Can you not see what we're living like? Did you not know that my grandfather got killed? Who are you talking about when you're talking about killing and death?
She was presenting the civilian perspective. Like the death that you are gloating about is a death that we have suffered and we are experiencing. We have been displaced from our home. You come into our displaced home. So the Civilians are just trying to make do and they're suffering along the way and you have someone coming in gloating about the wall as if it's a wonderful thing.
And it was just this clash of experiences. His experience was one of fighting, her experience was one of suffering, and that came to a head. And I also want to emphasise this is happening within a Christian Maronite household. And I think it's really important to understand that when we kind of ascribe to certain groups, oh, you know, the Maronites here, the Muslims here, the Palestinians there
It kinda gives us the impression that they're all on the same page. No, no. And it's not never the case. Inside these households there are these fierce arguments and these fierce debates that also rupture families. Not everyone is on the same page. Not everyone wants to suffer.
So Layla's now got this responsibility. Your mum's got this responsibility, but she's found a way to actually bring some financial independence to to your family under these extraordinary conditions. How did she do that?
Fortune came her way her old boss found her again. She started doing work in the area, just makeshift work, tailoring and making helping people dresses. But she started getting a reputation because people started to like her work in the area. And then next thing you know, she's back at working at the factory in Jasud Basha, she was getting lifts by the boss from the area she was in to the textile warehouse.
I thought that she made a really good bit of money making a wedding dress and it's like weddings are still going on in the middle of a civil war, aren't they? Yeah.
People are living their lives as best as they can. And also the intensity of fighting varied between area to area. So Mum was on the front line. Not every neighborhood was the front line. So there were other neighborhoods that were getting the intermittent episodes of violence.
But not with the same intensity. So it could afford people the ability to navigate what was happening around them. Civil wars are often done with varying levels of intensities and also varying levels of where they're actually being fought.
Now we were talking earlier about how she'd lost contact with her secret paramour, Nicola, that they'd been planning to get married. How did he manage to come back into her life again at this point?
She sought him out, she wanted him back in her life. And so she ran into one of her old friends who knew about this liaison, who had connections to Nicola. and was able to reestablish his connection. So he had been back in Ashrafiya where he was living.
Had he been fighting?
Yes, he divulged to Mom that he'd been finding. She was pretty clear. She was like, I can't have two heartbreaks, I just lost my dad. Either you stop fighting or we don't get married.
And did he promise?
Yeah. He promised to give it up. Whether it did or not, I'm not sure really sure between the times in which they saw each other, but yeah, he promised to give up.
And what happened when she finally could broach this secret engagement to her mother? What did your grandmother say?
Yeah, of course I I I knew that you were having this relationship with this man. You can't hide these things from a mother, even though it might not be obvious that I'm aware of what's going on with you.
She hadn't told your mother's father?
Yeah, and that's I think a beautiful thing of female solidarity within the household of I'm gonna let my daughter experience these things'cause I know what she's going through. And she allowed it under her maternal watchful gaze.
And then one day she was due to meet Nicola, but he didn't come.
She was sitting on the balcony of her apartment, and his best friend, which she knew, was downstairs waving at her to come down. And she was like, It revealed to her that Nicola he had been killed in a shell. And that was the end for mum. That's that's two blows in a matter of months. She she lost all hope, all everything. She walked around for hours.
She was walking everywhere and nowhere. I think secretly she probably just wanted a shell to land on her and just put her out of her misery. And then she returned home. And my grandmother's like, What the hell? You just you're you're like all soaked in rain and what's going on? And Mumma's like, you know, he's gone and
My grandmother had been such a s a strong woman after my grandfather died. She had not shed a tear in front of her kids. She knew she wa she had to be the force for them. She remained strong. She pulled them out, she pulled them together, and it was the first time that she broke down that my mum saw and was just like the mutual grievance, they drowned in it together. And they sat on the balcony
For hours into the night they didn't say a word. That's when mum started smoking. And I always badger mum about smoking. I didn't know this is when her smoking started. And they just stared into the distance and
¶ The Secret Meadow and A New Life
Your mum told you that she created a kind of a meadow in her mind. What did she say about this meadow in her mind where she could escape to?
Well we do that, don't we? We we create things in our minds of what life should be. And for Mum, there was a secret meadow where there wasn't a war where she had married Nicola and they had their life that they were meant to have. Where her father wasn't killed.
See, I don't think we do know that unless we've lived in extremists like your mother has. I don't think many of us need to make that necessarily in our minds, do we? Unless we're met with terrible catastrophe.
Yeah. When life is on a trajectory and then you're suddenly altered off course. And that's what war does, it alters everything, it takes you off course if it doesn't end your life. But I would argue I think Life did end for Mum. You know, she lost who she was and everything she was and everything that was going to be, and started a new life, and that's you know why the book's called Rebirth. But the secret meadow, you know, it's
It's where dreams still live on. It's where the heart still lives on. You know, when death happens, the love doesn't extinguish with it. It lingers and has to go somewhere. It wasn't just a an imagination in the mind, it was a space in the heart that she's always carried.
Her grandmother came by for a visit. With a cup of coffee. To read the coffee grinds. What did the grandmother see in those coffee grinds for your mother's future?
I'm always superstitious about these things, you know, but
I actually think they're a frame to bring out a deep sense of intuition actually. I just think you focus your mind on the this thing
Yeah.
And the intuition can then run rampant a bit.
Yeah, absolutely. Mum had been for months in depression and despair. There were suitors coming knocking at her door and she was rejecting every single one of them. She said she lost hope in marriage. She lost hope in everything. And and then my great grandmother was just, you know, picking up a cup and being like, you know, I think someone's gonna come and take you far away and you're gonna get married and it's gonna happen.
And my mum just dismissed it. If m my great grandmother was proven right, my mum had to make her a new dress. And lo and behold, there was an accessory store where she used to buy some accessories for her materials. And they had a nephew who had recently migrated to Australia a few years prior.
And this is standard in our Lebanese community. The men who migrate go back to the homeland to find a wife. And again, it's not like you choose who you marry, it's whoever the families think, you know what, it's a good fit. It's pragmatic. Exactly. And so For my dad to be, the pragmatism for him was he wanted to find a nice bride to take back to Australia. For mum, her pragmatism was that it was a way out. It was a way out.
And she had a r a a really kind of powerful moment with my grandmother, her mother. You know, her mother's not happy about this. And she's pleading with her. She's like, Why are you gonna marry someone on the other side of the world? You're gonna be far away from me. You're leaving me, you're What the hell?
It was actually your grandmother's fault, if you ask me.
What's that?
Well, she she read it. Maybe she made it happen somehow in the in the coffee kit.
My great grandmother did that.
It's your great grandmother's fault then, that's what I mean.
Yeah, exactly. But yeah, my grandmother wasn't on on board with this, largely because she was gonna be left alone by her right hand woman, which was my mum.
She had to leave your mum. She had to live.
You know, uh upon reflection, you know, I asked Mum afterwards after I wrote this. And I asked her, how was your relationship like with data in Australia afterwards? And she's like it never got back to that same closeness that we had. Largely because also her mother in law, my grandmother on my dad's side, played also a huge intr instrumental role and built a relationship with mum. And my grandmother had all the younger siblings
to take care of and try and transition to Australia and make sure they got settled and so there was that element to it. But I I also asked Mum because when I was writing this I was like Mum, it was clear she didn't want you to l abandon her. And do you feel like she felt that you abandoned her by just marrying this guy who just rocked up out of nowhere?
Getting on a plane and just disappearing and leaving her in the midst of war. And more stuff happened to my family. Like my grandmother got injured by shrapnel. They got displaced again. These are experiences that my mum didn't have'cause she left and went to Australia and she was the eldest. She was earning money.
'Cause the wars never really ended in Lebanon, has it?
Kept going.
In one form or another.
Yeah. So, you know, I asked Mum, do you think, you know, my grandmother felt like you kind of burned her because you left her at the hour of need? And Mum always maintains, I didn't leave. I created a path for them. to escape because if I didn't escape we all would have been stuck there and who knows what would have happened.
if we had to live out the entire civil war without a a man at the house to help us through. And lo and behold it took several years, but everyone ended up migrating to Australia because Mum made that decision to move.
¶ Legacy of Sacrifice and Voice
You're coming to the world Mm. You grew up in Craggy Burn in peace and prosperity and stability. You're a very educated man. You've not known horror, not in Australia in any case. You've not had all those things. Is your mum's life was kind of knocked over like a whole pile of bricks, wasn't it? But then she sort of turned herself in a bridge for you and your and your family to walk across. Is that is that a fair thing to say?
It is a fair thing to say and It's also I think a an a very important note and lesson to learn from all of this stuff. It doesn't always end with calamity and often it doesn't end with calamity. Tragedy happens but it's not the end. and new paths open that you wouldn't have discovered. They're not always the worst paths in the world. Mum didn't get the life that she lived. She sacrificed tremendously.
But then new paths open. She still ended up having a family and she paved the way for her children to take on new adventures. Of course the trauma comes with that, but there's also everything that you said. There's a stability, there's the ability to get educated, there's this ability now to articulate and share the stories that our family have gone through.
And in the face of all the wickedness of those men with guns, that's your mum, there's a sanity there in spite of all that. Yeah. And in the end it prevailed, didn't it? Or is that just me being too am I am I just grasping for something up upbeat here?
Maybe because I don't it's there's always a price and there's a cost. So mum moved to Australia, it's true. But then her her family still endured the war for X amount of years before they could migrate to Australia and was several years before she saw her mother again. And again, you know, my grandmother got Injured with shrapnel, they were displaced for a year and lived in a school. One of the neighbors got killed by a shell.
So the horrors still continued for the people who stayed behind, even though Mum made the sane decision of being like, This is our ticket outta here. It's gonna take a while. There's gonna be some pain, but we have to do it. Also she's very young. She's Twenty years old. And she's going to the other side of the world or speaking a language she has no idea. Like, it's remarkable.
And what about you, Aunt? Your mum and your dad having brought you up in Australia to keep you safe from all that. As a journalist, you've returned to that world. You've reported on the war in Syria and associated conflicts. Why have you been drawn back to that, in all honesty?
I think it was to inquire and investigate our own trauma. But I didn't know that from the beginning. I had always been drawn to Lebanon and the region, partly because I grew up in this. very highly politicized setting in the household and in the family and also because there were festering wounds that I
I felt like were just the motivator to wanting to understand a bit more. But I never kind of pieced it early on in my career, my family story, with the events that I was reporting on and covering.
Really? You've not made that connection?
Not overtly, because when you're a journalist and you're on the ground you're dealing with what's at hand or what's in front of you.
But you need to question your motivations all the time, don't you? When you're doing that. Like why am I drawn to a war? Is a big question to ask.
Well the motivations in those early days was trying to do the best you could to kind of help tell the stories honestly as best as they could. And maybe that came from the fact that I knew the honest stories of our tragedy. And the honest stories of the Lebanese Civil War that have never really been shared openly. And so my attempt was to try and tell war stories through a humane lens, through a human lens.
That amplified the people who suffered the most because those stories are never told. And yes, obviously there is a clear correlation with that. But then you know, when I went to DC and I worked at the Middle East Institute and I was in the think tank world and I was in the policy setting, the foreign policy blob of D C You know, you try to maintain that distance, that analytical distance.
Right. And I can talk to you on this show as an expert in this matter and we could have a completely different conversation about the history of this war and instead we've talked about your mother's history, which is so so powerful. I just wonder what you made of that, hearing people talk about these things From the view of thirty thousand feet and the contrast between that and the human reality of war.
I learned that soon after I got to D C that the people who are making decisions for policies that impact the region Don't really have any idea the impact that it has on the region and the people that have to live there.
You know, we're talking at you know, at policy level, analytical level, you're talking in terms of statistics, you're talking in terms of studies, you're talking with diplomats and UN bodies and heavyweights and everything is at a at a managerial level. And Absent in this entire discussion, entire industry, was the people.
The people who are at the center of all this, at the center of these decisions, it doesn't really factor into the policy development. Because that's what think tanks are. They develop policies that end up going into mainstream and becoming actual policy. And so that's why I left because I felt like I was dealing with the region as an abstract
like thing that was just like another policy. You know, the State Department in the US has desks for all corners of the world. There's a Middle East desk. There's a in the Middle East desk is a Syria file and a Lebanon file. There's a Latin American desk, there's a Asia Pacific desk, and there's a two, three people who work on Australia. Like it's they're so far removed for them. It's a job. It's a job.
But it's not just a job. There are millions of people who live there and have to deal with the consequences of these decisions. And it was after I had that experience in DC, on top of living in the region, that I just came home and I wanted to share our human story. And that's when I sat down with mum.
You wrote about how your mum worked for years as a tailor in Lebanon, but you've done a bit of mending with this yourself, I think. Do you feel you've mended something by trying to Tell your mother's story in its fullness, the truth of it.
Part of this was a family archive because one thing that always troubled me when I went to Beto to research this. I wanted to see where he was buried, my grandfather. And I was expecting the Western treatment. You know, you go to a cemetery, there's a plaque, there's a name.
And there's somewhere to commemorate the person. Um so I went to the church in Jusil Bashah, the priest walked me around to the where the cemetery that they had. It wasn't a cemetery It's a shaft that opens and underneath bodies are thrown. And I said, Excuse me Like there's nothing. There's Stuad's bodies in there. My grandfather's bodies in there. Who knows how many were killed and were thrown in there.
There's no plaque, there's no name, these people are nameless. And for me it was just Oh my God, this is my my grandfather, this is our family name and there's no memory of him. existing except in maybe the church record where he got baptized.
But even his burial, there's not even a marker for that. And so and that's the other thing about wars. You know, when you have piles and piles of bodies, what do you do with them? You can't give them each a their own standalone cemetery. As a journalist, as a writer, there was no way I was you know, spent my career writing people's stories. There was no way I couldn't write my own.
Anton, it's been amazing speaking with you. What an extraordinary story. Thank you very much for sharing it and all its pain and beauty and everything else. Thank you so much. Thank you. Anton, this book is called Rebirth a Love Story from the Depths of War.
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Today's conversation with Untum Issa was made on the lands of the Gadigal people. The producer was Becky Morris, the executive producer is Eliza Kirsch. I'm Richard Feidler. Thanks for listening.
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with Richard Feidler. For more conversations episodes, head to ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
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