Art of Language Lesson 05 Memoir Examples

Lesson 05 Memoir Examples

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EXAMPLES FROM YOUR READING TODAY

Pick out something to read for the table.

E: Pick out a small paragraph from “The Red Keep.”

H: Pick out a small paragraph from your magazine reading about the Olympics.

W: Pick out a small paragraph from Tim Tebow’s memoir.

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WORDS

E: memoir AND nomad

H: hinterland AND treacherous

W: connotation AND succor

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MEMOIR EXAMPLE

We’ll read this memoir excerpt together. It is about HOME.

It is also long — but stay with me, and be ready to answer these questions:

1 — What is Anthony Shadid remembering?

2 — What is the thing that is at the CENTER of his remembering?

3 — How does Anthony Shadid talk about TIME in this passage? Is his remembering about now, about the past, or about both? How?

House of Stone

By ANTHONY SHADID

THE America that drew my family was 7,000 miles from where they started, in old Marjayoun, in what is now Lebanon.

My aunts and uncles, grandparents and great-grandparents, were part of a century-long wave of migration that occurred as the Ottoman Empire crumbled, then fell, around the time of World War I. In the hinterland of what was then part of Greater Syria, the war marked years of violent anarchy that made bloodshed casual. Disease was rife. So was famine. Hundreds of thousands starved in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and beyond. My family’s region was not spared. A survey of 182 villages in the area showed that a fourth of the homes withered into wartime ruin, and more than a third of the people who had inhabited them had died.

This horrific decade and its aftermath provoked villagers — including my family — to abandon their homes for locations ranging from South America to West Africa to Australia, as well as a few neighborhoods in Oklahoma City and Wichita, Kan.

The mountain roads and voyages in steerage that my aunts, grandparents and great-grandparents traveled to get here were treacherous. But the hardest were those first miles from home, away from faces that would no longer be familiar. By the time we arrived in New York or Texas or Oklahoma, or wherever, much was lost.

“Your first discovery when you travel,” wrote Elizabeth Hardwick, “is that you do not exist.” In other words, it is not just the others who have been left behind; it is all of you that is known. Gone is the power or punishment of your family name, the hard-earned reputations of forebears, no longer familiar to anyone in this new place.

In Arabic, the word “bayt” translates literally as house, but its connotations resonate beyond rooms and walls, summoning longings gathered about family and home. In the Middle East, bayt is sacred. Empires fall. Nations topple. Borders may shift. Old loyalties may dissolve or, without warning, be altered. Home, whether it be structure or familiar ground, is finally the identity that does not fade.

Though my family left Marjayoun long ago, the house built by my great-grandfather Isber Samara remained. It was a place to look back to, the anchor, all that was left there.

In 2006, war came to Lebanon, and Israelis entered Marjayoun on a grim August Thursday. I wondered whether Isber’s home would be wrecked. I went to Marjayoun and, when I reached the long-abandoned house, discovered that an Israeli rocket had partially destroyed the second floor. I made a promise to myself: I would reclaim our home that makes a statement to my family, separated or united: Remember the past. Remember Marjayoun. Remember who you are.

It took years to honor that promise. I remarried and was blessed with the birth of a second child, my son, Malik. During this time, the house was rebuilt and was ready for us in 2009.

I continued to report from the Middle East, and in 2011 my dispatches were filled with hope as the Arab Spring swept to one jubilant climax in Egypt in February.

One month later, I found myself in a town in Libya whose name I had never previously bothered to remember. Soldiers for a government crumbling but still forceful had taken me and three fellow journalists captive at a makeshift checkpoint. Soldiers trained their guns on us, beat us, stripped us of everything in our pockets, forced us to lie facedown.

“Shoot them,” a solder said calmly in Arabic.

As I lay motionless on the ground, I sensed something familiar, a feeling I recalled from Ramallah, where, years before, I had lain under a cemetery-gray sky, waiting to die from a bullet wound in my back. I recalled it from Qana in 2006, where the people had cried, “Slowly, slowly!” as Lebanese soldiers, Red Cross workers and volunteers dug with hoes, shovels and their bare hands, searching for pieces of lost lives. … I remembered it in Marjayoun, where I came upon my family’s house on a hill whose grandeur had given way to insult. It was emptiness, aridity, hopelessness, the antithesis of creation, imagination.

In Tripoli, shortly before Turkish diplomats negotiated our release and drove us from Libya, we sat in a lavish office as an urbane Foreign Ministry official chatted with us. His small talk suggested embarrassment, and I forgot everything he said, save a few words he quoted to my colleague in idiomatic British English.

They were two lines from a poem by William Butler Yeats: “Those that I fight I do not hate/Those that I guard I do not love.”

I hated him, though. I hated what this had cost. I wanted to go home, and naturally I went to Marjayoun with my new wife and infant son. There had been no question of where we would go after my release from Libya.

When they arrived in Marjayoun, the forefathers of Isber Samara carried with them the nomadic ways of the Houran and the Bedouin residents. Their possessions were few, but each family was said to have brought the wooden mihbaj, to prepare their coffee, and the iron saj, to bake their bread. The very sound of grinding coffee was considered an invitation to anyone and everyone to come. Stay, it suggested. Seek shelter.

I thought of this as I returned to Marjayoun: I thought of what was lost and what might somehow return. I thought of desert wanderers of different faiths and creeds offering aid and succor to one another as they crossed the steppe. I thought of what was, and I thought of the promise of the Arab Spring and what had once more, at last, been imagined.

At Isber’s I walked beside the house’s stone, passing the two most ancient olive trees, still standing from the day my grandmother said goodbye. In my mind’s eye, I saw my daughter, who would soon arrive, suddenly grown, beside these trees and the words that I would one day teach her, words that would take her back to Isber’s world, where the Litani River runs, over Marjayoun, over what was once our land.

I imagined the meals cooked, the dresses sewn, the pillows stitched, the farewells that had taken place here in this house. I thought of the houses empty around me and considered the work, the care of the stonemasons and artisans who left parts of their hopes and beliefs in this place. I saw myself arriving convinced of what I knew and never imagining this place could actually be mine.

This is bayt. This is what we imagine. This is home.

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DISCUSSION about House of Stone

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Our questions about time spent in France:

QUESTION 01 – Write about a time when you experienced God?

QUESTION 02 – What are the similarities between your life here in France and your life in Falls Church?

QUESTION 03 – What are the differences between your life here in France and your life in Falls Church?

 

BRAINSTORMING LIST

PLACES

Cave painting cave

chateau castle walk

canoeing

the bathroom

to the river to swim

blackberry picking

school

Medieval festival in Belves

down the trail

take the trash

the hamlet of Langlade and picked up plums and mint

took the hike in to the cornfield

went to the cave with the big fire pit

bolongarie

casino grocery

Cro Bique

 

PEOPLE AND ANIMALS

Galas the dog

the Millers and the Lambles and the two boys from the Lake District

 

airplanes overhead, fighter jets, heliocopters, hot air balloons

twenty feet from deck

 

put on 26 articles of clothing

 

hot, when Eli put on 26 pairs of clothing

Fictionary

WIFI

 

the Olympics on French television

the Magician

 

Mini Mondo game

 

splinters from the patio

picnic table

 

the airplanes

the cicadas

cars

washing machine – “the airplane”

the bells

rooster crowing

dogs barking

cows baying