Rarely will something as personal as a memoir ably locate the individual experiences of the memoirist within a larger historical context. Too often, we are treated to an inward-looking exploration of a tiny familial or social circle—a narrative which, if not completely oblivious to the ferment raging without, audaciously presumes that regional and global events merit little significance when compared to the writer’s own tribulations. Yet with Teta, Mother, and Me, Jean Said Makdisi comes close to chronicling the modern history of her part of the world through delving into her mother’s and maternal grandmother’s rich and varied lives. And this, even though Makdisi has for years struggled to overcome a gnawing feeling that she falls “outside history,” a fate she cannot escape.
Essentially three memoirs in one, the finished product effectively juxtaposes Makdisi’s recollections of childhood and adulthood with those of her mother (upon whom she impressed the necessity of passing on her reminiscences before it was too late), supplemented by a surprisingly substantial quantity of mainly research-derived information about the life and times of her Teta, or grandmother. This book, which covers Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, spanning the period from the late 19th-century until today, probes the effects of “modernity” on the women of Makdisi’s family. Teta’s life, which straddles the traditional and the modern, provides the basis for many of the author’s observations and criticisms concerning Western missionary schooling, village versus city life, the nuclear family, and even the carving up of the Ottoman Empire by Western colonial powers—in short, modernity, Middle Eastern-style. Sadly, Makdisi’s Teta and mother are both “defeated by modernity,” which, among other affronts, strips them of the matriarchal role to which they would have been entitled in the old system. A desire on Makdisi’s part to investigate the socio-historical reasons for this loss in status occasions a complex reappraisal of the legacy of missionary schools in greater Syria, and their conflicted relationship with their surroundings. Indeed, according to Makdisi, “whether she was aware of it or not, my grandmother was partly formed by the mutual hostility between local and missionary cultures.”
Makdisi’s own conflicted relationship with the Protestant missions makes for one of the most fascinating elements of this book. Though admittedly indebted to the schools and their staff for many of her values, her command of English, and a thorough acquaintance with everything from Western philosophy to music, Makdisi also properly berates these institutions for their puritanical social and sexual views, openly dismissive attitude toward “natives,” and holier-than-thou posturing. Of the schools’ effect on her grandmother, Makdisi writes, “It was the beginning of that alienation from their natural environment that was to dominate not only her life, but also the life of a whole class, a whole segment of the people.”
The historical context of all this should not be overlooked. The missionaries, and the Western colonial powers with which they were sometimes affiliated, created an entirely new caste of people in the Arab countries in which they operated. Divorced from their traditional culture and surroundings, yet never fully accepted by their mentors, who seemingly could not view them in a non-patronizing manner, the new caste came to inhabit the cultural equivalent of “no-man’s-land.” Bereft of the sectarian or ethnic characteristics normally associated with a separate social entity in the Middle East, this educated and worldly class failed to carve out a niche for itself, and gradually came to exemplify a tragic and cruel cultural experiment. Sometimes the tragedy and cruelty can best be seen on a personal level. Jean Said Makdisi is the daughter of an Anglican father and a Southern Baptist mother, both Palestinian. In fact, in 1890, a maternal great-grandfather became the first Arab Protestant minister ordained by the National Evangelical Church in Lebanon, while her maternal grandfather would later become the first Southern Baptist minister in Palestine. How ironic, then, that Southern Baptists should turn out to be such ardent supporters of Zionism, which resulted in the dispossession of Makdisi’s family along with so many others.
The author performs an invaluable historical service in pointing out the biased accounts of “scholars, whose work always seems to be focused on the missionaries and not their local counterparts.” Makdisi demonstrates time and again how, contrary to popular perception, “the impetus for the opening of the schools came from the local people, rather than from the missionaries.” As a woman, Makdisi has another major grievance, for she cannot countenance what she considers “the missionaries’ role in creating a system which repressed, rather than liberated, women.” Yet her attempts to unfavorably compare Western with Islamic mores do not always succeed. For example, heavy-handed imagery of the kind that purports to show that whereas traditional Muslim girls were physically veiled, Christian schoolgirls at missionary schools suffocated under a far more pernicious psychological veil, remains unconvincing. Who is to say that Muslim schoolgirls were not encumbered by two veils, a physical and a psychological, while their Christian counterparts had to contend with only the latter?
Makdisi’s penchant for decidedly scholastic language proves grating at times, especially when contorted verbal gymnastics are employed to avoid using split infinitives, and archaic and needlessly complicated linguistic formulations relied on to convey simple ideas. Length is another irritant; certain sentences are crammed with so much unimportant information interspersed by so many commas that one doesn’t know whether to risk the onset of a headache by reading them again. Detailed inventories and descriptions of household objects, clothes, and cooking methods, while exhaustively researched, prove exhausting to read. Most of the chapter entitled “Homs,” meticulously itemizing the interior of Teta’s childhood home in this Syrian city, comes off as self-consciously quaint. And—in contrast to her mother’s and grandmother’s—there is precious little about Makdisi’s own marriage, even less about her husband, despite whole chapters ostensibly dedicated to discussing her domestic life.
More importantly, Makdisi evinces a troubling ambivalence toward popular political causes (such as the xenophobic Arab nationalism which took hold in 1950s Egypt) of the kind which brought down nothing but disaster and tyranny upon the peoples of the Middle East. This dubious ability to retain a lingering nostalgia for phenomena whose despotic quality she openly acknowledges betrays a deeper ambivalence about the author’s place in the Arab and Islamic worlds. Like her late brother, renowned intellectual Edward Said, Makdisi is at pains to defend Arab and Islamic tradition against Western disparagement, and to identify with oftentimes suspect Arab and Islamic causes. This is despite (or perhaps because of) having been effectively detached from Arab Islamic tradition and culture by Western Christianity, the English language, and “modernity.” Indeed, a reader familiar with Arabic names will be struck by the almost total absence of Muslims from Makdisi’s childhood circle of friends and acquaintances, whether in Palestine, Lebanon, or Egypt.
Yet despite its various lacunae, this book offers an important and critical voice from the “never-never land occupied by the global middle class,” reminding us, above all, that the career called motherhood is good for all times and places. For in more than one respect, Teta, Mother, and Me aims at rehabilitating those “traditional” women of all nationalities whose life’s mission is the raising of family. Indeed, in many ways this book is your Mom’s revenge. If that’s not scary enough, imagine a formidable figure, at once traditional homemaker and accomplished writer, standing in the doorway of her kitchen—spatula in hand—as she bellows incomprehensible commands at you in the guttural Arabic tongue.
Toward the end, the book comes full circle. When Makdisi finds herself in a Washington, D.C. hospital caring for her dying mother, she movingly observes that “We are all each other’s daughters and each other’s mothers. We have all lovingly washed each other’s helpless bodies.”
Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer based in Beirut, Lebanon.
Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
