Journey to Libyan Roots

I found the 29th issue of Hi magazine at the bottom of a drawer in our new temporary residence yesterday. This is the same Hi magazine which was discontinued, the one whose demise was celebrated in flippant ‘hi and bye’ fashion. US cant with an Arabic slant. Radio Sawa and Al Hurra, the magazine version.

Well, suffering from a dearth of reading material not study-related, I read it straight through. Such a betrayal of my principles. But on the last page, there was the compensation of a Libyan’s account of her ‘Journey to her Roots.’

Laila Al-Taib, a Libyan born in California, begins her story in stilted Arabic with a stilted joke. I don’t know whether this is a translated account or in her own original words. It’s impossible to tell. The whole magazine has this odd disjointed air, as though a high school student with little to no Arabic had pedantically looked up every word and put down its exact meaning irrespective of context.

In the first few lines she notes her witty question to a passport-less friend: would he prefer her Libyan passport or her American one? Very coyly, she comments “Of course, he didn’t have to answer a question like that.”

Right from the beginning of Laila’s story, the language exasperates, but this is quickly overshadowed by crimes of greater magnitude. Upon arriving in Libya, she spent, as she says, a marathon-like 5 days meeting over a 100 relatives she had never set eyes on before who received her ‘warmly’ and ‘enthusiastically’ and in accordance with clichés.

Journeys back involve different experiences. I know people who have never visited Libya but have a hazy, romantic notion of a warm country full of simple people and little alleys and spices and markets and innumerable family members, every one of them embarrassingly friendly and welcoming. And there are people who have grown up without a connection to their country but come back when they are older to visit, briefly, in the summer, acknowledging that they would never live in this country of their ‘roots’. For them Libya seems to be a matter of sun, sand, beaches, summer resorts and the huge family gatherings at these resorts. And when one year, there’s less of the gathering, because everyone’s busy with their own mundane lives, “something is wrong with Libya this year”, as though Libya is itself a summer resort.

Those like Laila Al-Taib who take a possibly once in a lifetime epic journey seem to feel the need for this journey to be related to invoke the ‘rootedness’ the journey was supposed to instil. From the enthusiastic recounting, the trip home often seem to be equivalent to stepping into a cultural museum with a tourist-shop tacked on, to collect memories of roots and a suitcase-full of mementos.

It reminded me of endless books which recount such journeys back right at the end as a befitting conclusion to troubled hybrid thoughts.

It’s the essentialism of that which irritates, the notion that as soon as you step onto the land and see a relative’s face, everything’s sorted out. Roots unearthed. And if you spot a camel you have found your inner Arab.

Laila Al-Taiba’s one page ‘Story’ of her trip to Libya is just a little note on a non-Arabic-speaking Arab’s journey to her roots, and her pride in and gratitude for her American passport. It’s hardly intended as a biography. But I still find myself a little disgruntled by the clichés involved in being swept swiftly past 100 warm and loving faceless relatives in 5 days and half a sentence, for a paragraph detailing the eating of ice-cream and the dipping of toes in the Mediterannean and finally, a note on the uselessness of three years studying Arabic at university level in deciphering the Libyan dialect.

On Leila’s return, she produces her Libyan passport and gets strange looks which she interprets as “if she’s Arab why doesn’t she speak Arabic?” Her American passport, on the other end, gets a nod and a cursory security check. As an endnote, Leila thanks her lucky stars she has two passports, and that she is free to choose which one to use to get “the treatment [she] wants” depending on where she is in the world.