24. American Civilization

When Abū Rājī Filfil left Syria for America, he resolved never to return. He sold all his property and furniture and took his family—Umm Rājī and two sons—to “the people’s country.”

For men like Abū Rājī, the people’s country means America. Syria is not a country fit for people in their eyes, because America possesses freedom and wealth, whereas their own land is a country of humiliation and torpor.

And so it was. Abū Rājī bade farewell to his country for the people’s country, without regretting his abandonment of the homeland. He comforted himself with hopes and sought to reach America in order to merge into its civilized people. In his view, the people of Syria were, as we have said, nothing but humiliated and inert. Neither the homeland, nor its gods, nor its history or theirs possessed a single atom of his esteem or love.

Yet scarcely had he reached New York and completed one month there when the verse reversed itself. In his eyes America became a black slave, its civilization ranked below African barbarism, and its inhabitants were the least tasteful and intelligent people on earth.[85]

The reason was that in New York he saw nothing that pleased his fancy, conformed to his taste and customs, or agreed with what he had previously imagined America to be. Upon arrival he lived in a house the sun did not enter once in a year. By chance, the weather during his first month in New York was exceedingly bad, and not a day passed when the threads of rain ceased. His spirit contracted. His hatred of America increased swiftly from day to day. He bloodied his fingers with regret, but the hour for regret had passed.

Nothing he saw in America pleased him. He did not even feel at ease near his relatives. Whenever he looked at one and saw him clean-shaven, he recoiled from conversation and disdained to gaze upon his face. If by chance one of them let slip an English word, Abū Rājī insulted him and spoke harshly, supposing the offender meant to mock him because he himself did not know a letter of English.

Many things happened to Abū Rājī that led to his great hatred of America. At that point his own land became the people’s country, while America was nothing but the country of cattle.

Among these incidents was the following. One day he had spread his mat upon the landing of his building’s fire escape. He sat cross-legged with the hookah hose in his mouth, drawing and blowing out its smoke, while his thoughts wandered through space and settled nowhere.[86] Suddenly a voice came from the window through which he had stepped onto the landing. His train of thought stopped at once. He looked toward the window and saw a policeman raising his club and threatening to strike him. Abū Rājī sprang up, lifted his hookah, and carried it inside.

The policeman seized him and shook him several times, sending the hookah’s bowl flying to the floor. Abū Rājī did not understand a word he said. At first he assumed the officer had mistaken him for someone else, since he had done nothing monstrous, but his ignorance of the language left him no means to prove his innocence. Some Syrians entered and explained to the officer that Abū Rājī was a poor, simple man newly arrived from home who did not know the rules of life. The policeman’s heart softened; he departed and left Abū Rājī alone.

Abū Rājī was utterly bewildered. Once the policeman had gone, he poured curses and blasphemies upon him, at a loss over what had happened and unaware of his offense. The Syrians who had followed the policeman told him that a coal from the hookah had fallen between the iron bars onto the officer’s head.

Another day Abū Rājī went to Castle Garden, the seaside park near Washington Street.[87] He brought his lunch and walked across the grass until he reached a tree, beneath which he sat to eat. A guard came running toward him and drove him from the garden with shoves and kicks. The poor man’s food remained behind, so he had to return home to eat. It was a meal mixed with the poison of death, for the incident had made a mighty impression upon his soul.

One Sunday several neighbors took him to the Bronx Zoo to look at the animals. He admired the spectacle and was astonished by the beauty of the buildings made as homes for filthy beasts, while he, a son of Adam, lived in a house inferior to the pig’s dwelling in that garden. But his good fortune did not remain complete. As he marveled at the sight of the elephant and its trunk, he threw the animal a piece of bread he had in his pocket. A keeper saw him and arrested him. The matter did not end until his companions paid the fine on his behalf. Do not ask what came out of Abū Rājī’s mouth afterward.

On the Sunday following this incident, they took Abū Rājī to the museum, where precious objects and works of art were displayed.[88] It was as though they had taken him merely to see the grandeur of the building and the garden surrounding it, for the antiquities inside did not appeal to him. No wonder: he knew nothing about the arts. When one of his companions told him that a picture hanging on display might cost tens of thousands of dollars, Abū Rājī shook his head and swore mighty oaths that he would not buy it for five cents. He laughed at American minds, accused them of foolishness, and reproached them for stupidity and levity.

His friends enjoyed his judgment of matters beyond the boundaries of his understanding and wished to tease him. They began debating the subject and exaggerating the pictures’ importance, while he measured out abuse for the limited understanding of Americans, who “burst themselves” over trivial things.

While he mocked, listened, and answered all at once, his right hand entered his pocket and brought out his tobacco tin. Without his mind observing what his hands were doing, he rolled a cigarette and placed it in his mouth. His left hand entered his other pocket and brought out a match. He continued talking to his friends as they pressed him and he laughed at the Americans. None of them noticed what Abū Rājī was about to do because they were so delighted by his amusing conversation.

His right hand took the match from its sister and reached toward the wall, which was covered in splendid artistic paint. To the painters’ skill it added a red line in the middle of the wall, two cubits long. Scarcely had Abū Rājī lit his cigarette with the match when his friends returned to their senses. They saw what he had done, pulled him outside at once with terrified hearts, and denied him the satisfaction of explaining what had happened for fear that their deed would be discovered. Instead they hurried to the train and returned home.

These were some of the things that happened to Abū Rājī in America. They printed upon his brain the belief that, despite wearing hats and European suits and speaking English, America’s inhabitants possessed nothing of civilization or intelligence; and that despite the failures of security and the lack of activity in our country, it was more civilized and its people more intelligent than all the peoples of the earth. Accordingly, before Abū Rājī had completed three years, he took his family back to his village in Lebanon. There he purified his mind and cleared his thoughts of dreams of emigration and assimilation into the civilized peoples of the West.

A year after Abū Rājī returned home, one of his countrymen came back from America. He had been among the friends who took Abū Rājī to the New York museum. After returning Abū Rājī’s greeting at his house, the visitor entered, treading upon the carpet without removing his shoes at the threshold. Throughout the visit Abū Rājī’s eyes remained aimed at his guest’s feet. He tried to conceal his secret as long as he could, but in the end the matter betrayed him.

He said gently, “The custom of not removing one’s shoes is current in America, but it has not become current in our country, because shoes soil the carpet.”

“Yes, you are right,” the guest answered. “But you can clean a carpet with a broom or something else, and cleaning it costs you no more than a minute and a little effort. Yet it seems to me that you have forgotten the line you printed on one wall of the art museum in New York, when you dragged that enormous mark across it with a match to light your cigarette. Do you not suppose that erasing the trace of that line cost the museum’s owners more than the price of your carpet?”

Abū Rājī answered with a measure of contempt: “Yes, in America everything costs money. If shame and modesty did not prevent them, they would charge one another for air. Seeing the limits of their minds and returning home cost me my old house, the orchard, and the furniture. But praise be to God: we saw the things called American civilization—and what a civilization it is!”

NOTES

[85] This sentence reproduces the story’s historical language and its racial hierarchy; the translation does not endorse it. Haddad makes Abū Rājī swing from uncritical worship of America to an equally uncritical contempt for it.
[86] Crowded Syrian immigrant households in lower Manhattan used fire escapes as semi-domestic outdoor space. City rules and fire-safety concerns restricted such uses; the immediate offense here, however, is a live coal falling on the policeman.
[87] Castle Garden, at the Battery near the foot of Washington Street, was by this date the New York Aquarium and a public park. Haddad uses the older immigrant name for the site.
[88] The description most likely refers to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park, though Haddad does not name it. The red line is made by striking the match against a painted interior wall.
