Dove's Eye View

Birthday 2009

Leila in madcap reds
Originally uploaded by bedouina

I hosted a Mad Hatter's tea in our garden today: colorful food, mismatched dishes, table linens and clothes. Instead of a hat I wore my wig! Idyllic weather, good times with family and friends.

I am very glad to see 47, and I am glad I'm so much better off than I was a year ago.

Click through to Flickr to see the rest of the photos, including shots of my husband, mother, brother and my children.

The menu was mostly inspired by Mark Bittman's instantly famous list of 101 simple salads.

Summer Vacation

We're having a good time hanging around Northern California, within two hours' drive of our home. River road along the levees to Sacramento, day trip to Point Reyes National Seashore, poking around Benicia State Recreation Area beach.

Point Reyes National Seashore

We also drove along the Sacramento River levee system to visit the city of Sacramento, staying on the waterfront for a night.

Keep on enjoying your summer, everybody, and stay cool and serene!

What I'm Doing This Summer

I've been silent for a while on this blog. At VONA writing workshop earlier in the summer*, I decided to focus on my novel completely, and let go of non-fiction, including the blog, for the time being.

Writer and teacher ZZ Packer encouraged me to keep this novel big. Add back all the generations and wars I'd trimmed away this spring. Because of her encouragement, and with the enthusiastic assent of Carolina De Robertis, I gathered the folders above: several years' worth of work. This picture taken three weeks ago.

Pulling through it all, sorting it out into chronological order, deleting duplications, I came up with this  folder:

And now this week I've mapped out all the places where I need to fill in narrative holes. 314 pages at the moment, with at least another 75 to write. Then the work of rewriting again.

I'm also reading: Garcia Marquez' memoir; his novel Of Love and Other Demons; Madame Bovary; Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer; Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis; Burn by Black Artemis (met her at VONA, she's so cool, smart and funny. A genre fiction writer and political activist) and many more.

Less time on the internet means more time to think, read, listen and write.

Thank you to my darling cousins George (Abu-Adib) and Nabila, who call to check up on me, making sure I'm still working on the book. I certainly am! George, I'm even going to give one of the characters some Alexandre Dumas to read.

*Hey look at the VONA link! That's me in the red turban, face partially obscured! I'm sitting between two of my buddies from the first week. Tony Khalife, the Lebanese-American musician, is on my left.

Ain el Helweh Lives

New York journalist Philip Weiss  had his eyes opened about Israel's occupation of Palestine a few years ago, and now blogs events from a Jewish anti-Zionist perspective. He even went to Gaza earlier this summer to witness for himself.

Today he reports on his reaction to Sacha Baron Cohen's latest movie, and he remembers what I wrote about Ain el Helweh:

Mondoweiss: inside 'Bruno,' a glimpse of the Nakba.

Thank you, Phil, for remembering Ain el Helweh's traumas, rather than laughing along with a useless comic. Some of us never forget what Israel has done to our neighbors. As Mahmoud Darwish said, and As'ad Abu-Khalil repeats daily, "All that you have done to our people is written in notebooks."

I am honored that my digital notebook page has entered the memory of those who have never set foot in Ain el Helweh.

If you are new to this blog, please note that I own a bit of property in Ain el Helweh, inherited from my grandfather. The Lebanese government asked my family to host Palestinian refugees there during the Nakba of 1948, "for two weeks." We began receiving 12 Lebanese lira a year rent at that time, which is now less than a dollar. The land is worth a great deal more than that. The saga of our suit for compensation would make a latter-day Dickens tale of lawyers, wars, and bureaucracy.

Since I grew up visiting Ain el Helweh and even attended school on its doorstep, I have always felt that the suffering of its residents was my personal business. These people are my neighbors, however unwilling their tenancy. They deserve to be remembered. They deserve justice.

They do not deserve the derision of clueless Westerners.