5. Clotheslines

New York is a mighty city. It contains three times the population of Syria from al-ʿArīsh to the Taurus Mountains and from the sea to the desert.[27] A man accustomed to open space cannot enjoy life in the cage of twentieth-century civilization. Many elderly men brought to New York regretted their coming. They sat in a corner of the apartment, lamented their fate, and cursed the hour in which they had reached a country that, despite all its grandeur, did not equal their hopes and imaginings.

To an old-fashioned son of Syria, riding a donkey to the pond, walking to the vineyard through dust and mud, and sleeping on the meadow at noon while the sun’s rays set inanimate matter ablaze are lovelier than standing on Broadway, where streetcars, automobiles, and carriages crowd together and passersby turn this way and that in search of a gap through which they can reach their destination safely.

A hut of branches standing in the vineyard is lovelier for sleep than a bed in a house into which the sun does not enter for one minute of the year. Sitting at the window of a Syrian house, where the gaze stretches for miles over hills and valleys, is lovelier than the fifty-eight stories of the Woolworth Building.[28] The qumbāz, in which a man may sit as he pleases—cross-legged or squatting, now reclining, now stretched at full length, without anything pulling at his calves, thighs, or knees—is lovelier and gentler than bondage in the chains of trousers.[29]

Uncle Abū Ghānim kept writing to his sons in New York and pressing them to bring him over. Although they were prospering in business, they saw no reason to do so. They hoped to return home and rejoin him once they had collected enough money to spare them the hardships of life. But he persisted until they agreed to send for him, saying they would spend a few years together and then all go home if he did not like life in America.

On his way to New York, Uncle Abū Ghānim contemplated America’s grandeur as his imagination drew it from all he had heard. He hoped only to arrive safely; if he died a week later, it would not matter, for he would have achieved his wish and visited paradise. From the moment he arrived, however, he began to feel that his imagination had deceived him. He could find no trace in New York of the country he had pictured. Within days he felt a powerful aversion to America’s grandeur and an immense longing for his village, empty of every mark of civilization.

Uncle Abū Ghānim did not work in New York; his sons had no need of their elderly father’s labor. From the day he arrived, their only concern was his happiness, comfort, and distraction from homesickness. Whenever one of them had a free moment, he took his father to one of New York’s spectacles, parks, or great museums to entertain him and raise his spirits. Surely, the son thought, his father must admire the grandeur and immensity he saw. These sights would occupy his mind and thoughts until he no longer remembered the village and the homeland.

Yet in all the immense wonders of invention, manufacture, and history upon which his eyes fell, Uncle Abū Ghānim saw nothing astonishing. When he walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and saw the great steamships passing beneath it, the endless trains, the streetcars coupled together, and the racing carriages, he told the son accompanying him that the little bridge over the irrigation ditch on the road to the vineyard was lovelier than all of this. A single scoop of that stream’s water was better than everything in America, and washing one’s feet in its cold current delighted the soul more than all this magnificence and grandeur.

When another son brought him back from Bronx Park on the elevated railway, the son asked what he thought of the train. His stomach rising and falling, head spinning, and soul ready to expire, the old man answered that the donkey he used to ride from his village to the next was more beautiful in his eyes than all America’s trains and carriages.

When his sons insisted that he put on a collar and knot a tie so that they could attend church, the poor old man nearly wept with rage. He spared neither America nor its churches his curses, nor his fate and delusion his maledictions and blasphemies.

“What kind of life do you lead in this hellish country? Back there is the land of rest: no tie around the neck, no knot on the throat, no chains at the waist, no shackles on the legs. Ah, my country! If time would only let me return and live one week beneath its sky, then let me die—my eye would be satisfied, and I could die content.”

Uncle Abū Ghānim’s complaints continued for about a year. His hatred of everything in America increased by the day, while his sons spent whatever they could to entertain him and lift the cares crowding his head. They tried in vain to erase what had been printed on the pages of his brain: everything grand in America was unremarkable, while Syria’s simplicity and freedom from monuments of greatness made it the Garden of Delight.

Uncle Abū Ghānim became proverbial as the man who found nothing in America to admire. Whenever he sat with people at an evening gathering or a visit, he spent the time debating that everything in our country was lovelier and its counterpart here neither wonderful nor great. A muleteer’s mule was better than a twentieth-century train; the bridge over the irrigation ditch was lovelier than Brooklyn Bridge; the vineyard road sweeter than Fifth Avenue; the goat pasture more charming than Central Park; sleep beneath the oak more restful than sleep in the White House. So ran the arguments of a man past sixty, whose country—however much he might once have complained of it—had become everything in his life, indeed life itself.

For this reason, his conversations became entertainment. Listeners laughed at his comparisons between Syria’s simple condition and America’s landmarks and inventions. Never once did he concede that anything in America was marvelous, with a single exception.

It happened at a crowded evening gathering. At the end, after he had finished diminishing the value of every great American object and invention, one of those present asked, “Uncle Abū Ghānim, for God’s sake tell us: in all America, have you seen nothing that amazes you?”

Uncle Abū Ghānim closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them, nodded slowly twice, cleared his throat, adjusted his seat, and opened his mouth.

“In everything I have seen in this country, only one thing has baffled me: the clotheslines. I have seen washing hung on lines from one house to another across a great distance. How did the laundress manage to hang the things there? I could not solve it. I said to myself, walking a rope is no easy matter. Besides, the line is too weak to carry a woman holding clothes to hang. Suppose she can grip the line with one hand and move to the middle—how can she hang the washing and fasten it to the rope with only the other hand? That is what baffled me. That is what amazed me!”[30]

There is no need to describe what happened among the listeners after Uncle Abū Ghānim spoke. The host began begging them to lower their voices, lest the police come upstairs and reprimand them for the noise. When the company had eaten its fill of laughter, Uncle Abū Ghānim resumed:

“By God, I am returning home this year. I shall make the boys use all our money to buy clothesline in America. We can sell it at immense profit in every Syrian city.”

Someone answered, “But you must also buy the hands that hang the washing on those lines.”

NOTES

[27] The geographical formula imagines Syria broadly: al-ʿArīsh lies in northern Sinai; the Taurus range forms the northern boundary of the historical Syrian region; the Mediterranean and the Syrian Desert mark west and east.
[28] The Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway opened in 1913. It was commonly described as fifty-five stories, but some contemporary methods counted fifty-eight; Haddad gives fifty-eight.
[29] A qumbāz is a long, loose Levantine robe, usually worn over trousers. Haddad contrasts its freedom of movement with the fitted Western suit.
[30] Tenement clotheslines were commonly run between buildings on pulleys, allowing laundry to be clipped on from a window and then drawn outward. Abū Ghānim imagines that the laundress must walk the line.
