Having said that I would try to avoid all of the imperial nonsense of much international writing, I must digress for just one moment to respectfully extol the wonders of Lebanese food. It's just a fact that Lebanese food is amazingly good. Everyone knows this. But it is even more amazingly outstanding for those of us who are lactose intolerant, vegetarian-leaning, with a committed sweet tooth. I am learning the wonders of manakish, the thin vegetable or meat pies that are roasted in brick ovens. These thin pies melt in our mouth and burst with the flavors of lemon and thyme. They can be found everywhere in our neighborhood. Street food in Beirut consists of flat breads warmed on large, half-spherical cast iron skillets. The bread is cooked and then smothered with fillings like shwarma, vegetables, or a variety of cheeses like halloum or lebnah.
Lebanese sweets are ornate, delicate, and intricately constructed. It would be too easy to call these treats, baklava, because they are so much more. They lack the stickiness and bulk of U.S. versions. Tiny pastry bird's nests are assembled from paper-thin dough which are then filled with pistachios, honey, and rose water. Layered bite-sized pastries have different nut, honey, and fruit-essence combinations, each with distinct flavors and textures. The bakeries have huge varieties of sweets, usually presented in towering pyramids reaching three to five feet in height.
Produce in groceries and in farmer's markets are inexpensive and excellent. While we lean toward organic produce, we've noticed that much of the non-organic produce is also local and regional, and just tastes better than conventional produce in the U.S.
Our stomachs, while enjoying the new food, have been in rebellion against the new bacteria in Lebanese water. We were warned about "Beirut belly" and now some of us have been afflicted. I've been spared at this point, in part because I caught the Palestinian version just a few months ago and may have developed some resistance.
As I have come to Lebanon to teach and study U.S./Middle East relations, I should mention something about my sense of U.S. culture in Lebanon. We might conceive of U.S. culture via the ubiquitous golden arches, KFC's, Hardee's, Krispy Kreme's etc. Or, we might think of the ways that U.S. music, art, aesthetics circulate abroad. Or, we might think about U.S. policies, international relations, imperial interventions in the region, etc. For now, I'm thinking about Stan Smith, the U.S. tennis champ who won two grand-slam tournaments in the 1970s and who, along with Bob Lutz, had an illustrious doubles career. If you're not familiar with Stan the tennis player, you are likely familiar with the Stan Smith Adidas tennis shoe. Throughout the 1980s, the all white leather-with green heel, tennis shoe was my favorite, not only because of matters of comfort but because they were the coolest. But, like all consumer products, the Stan Smith shoe went out of production, as consumers moved to more high-tech shoes made of durable, yet breathable, nylon.
Today, while shopping for back-to-school shoes with the kids, I was pleased to see my old Stan Smith Adidas on sale in a Beirut shoe store presented, not as a nostalgic retro-item, but as a legitimate new shoe. It was at this moment that I realized that the cafe in which we had just had snacks played the greatest U.S. pop hits from the 1980s. I was totally unprepared for the ways that Beirut would allow me to relive my teenage years (thankfully I haven't found any acid-washed jeans). We purchased some Van's for the kids.
"American culture" is not just something that radiates out from the United States, but is also something that is simulated outside the United States and, in the process, made into something new. It circulates globally and gets resignified -- given new meanings -- in new contexts. I don't claim to know what Stan Smith means in Beirut, it likely means something I will never know. The same can be said of jazz music, which seems ubiquitous in Beirut (in advertising, on the radio, in clubs with names like Harlem).
If certain products here gain new meaning through translation, we've learned that some products mean the same things regardless of context and language. While we walked passed an upscale Western hotel on Hamra street today, a valet for the hotel looked at us and said, with a big smile, "the united color's of Benetton!" It was an innocent comment, but one that suggests ways that Benetton's multiculturalism had traveled globally. I don't yet know enough about racial thinking in Lebanon to understand what a mixed-race or "blended" family means here.
The kids are doing things here that they've never been able to do the U.S. They leave the house on their own to play in a playground. They play with neighbor boys who come over to our house to gawk at the dogs. They dive to the bottom of the sea with their goggles and poke at sea life. This is not typical here; it is, rather, the sort of life made available in a protected and guarded bubble that is an American University in Beirut.
And yet, the boys are also missing friends and familiar things in Albuquerque. Rather than relishing a different sort of cultural life, they seem outraged that drivers here go through red-lights, that moped's drive on the side-walk, and that taxi drivers honk regularly at them (because they are making themselves available to us). We've tried to convince the boys that people do things differently in different places and that this is an opportunity to see something that's different than what we know. But to them, certain behaviors that in Albuquerque would be "illegal" (like running a red light) are just plain outrageous. Period. It's amazing to see the extent to which they've developed identities as law abiding citizens, even before age 10. I wonder at what age cultural relativism develops.
Next week more photos and a description of the first week of school for the boys.
