Louder and Louder

I haven’t been in the headspace to write these days, so Django has stepped in to bring you up to speed.

My mom and my Pop-Pop (her dad) were yelling at each other when they smelled the smoke.

We were at his place. We’ve been staying here for a while, since he hasn’t been feeling well. Mom rushed over to the balcony to see what was going on, and saw a bunch of people gathered in the street, next to the apartment next door. She tried to go downstairs, and came back a few minutes later, coughing, saying she couldn’t get below the second floor because there was so much smoke. The problem was that Pop-Pop is using a chair with wheels on it to get around. If there was a fire, she’d have to get him and me and Pop-Pop’s dog Luna downstairs. This, clearly, would not be possible.

So she leaned out of the balcony and yelled. Very loudly.

Thirty people looked up.

She yelled at the building manager to call Pop-Pop. The manager’s jaw dropped and he whipped out his phone.

The next day, while we were on our walk, she confronted the other building manager off for not having installed smoke detectors in the building. He tried to protest that “this is not Canada”. She told him off further.

I barely recognize her these days.

My mom was not exactly what you’d call a quiet person before we moved to Lebanon. But she tried to be “kind”. To make people feel comfortable, often at the expense of her own comfort. To give people the benefit of the doubt.

Here, if you give someone the benefit of the doubt, there’s a decent chance they’ll put it in their back pocket, walk in the other direction and sell it for a profit. Especially if they are a man.

When we first arrived and would go for walks, sometimes I’d pee in front of an apartment building or shop, and a man would emerge and yell. Mom was shocked. Why, she’d mutter, in a country where 70% of people smoke and the air quality is “total shit”, would they care about some organic dog pee? Then, one day, she yelled back. She didn’t try to, it just sort of happened.

“WHERE IS HE SUPPOSED TO PEE?” she shouted. “EVERYONE SAYS HE CAN’T PEE HERE OR THERE! HE’S A DOG, FOR GODSAKES!”

The man smiled. Mom smiled back. They shouted a bit back and forth and off we went. I noticed Mom was standing a little taller.

Men talk over women here all the time. They talk at women without asking them any questions. They will explain a thing back to a woman that she has just explained. Mom once sat in a lecture given by a woman with a PhD. After it was over, a man in the audience raised his hand and summarized the entire lecture in his own words. Then he crossed his arms and looked smug.

The lecture was about gender.

from @butterflynattreads

Mom has gotten even louder since Pop-Pop started feeling bad.

She’s raised her voice in the hospital when people were not doing what they should be to care for him. She bugs doctors to call her back. She shoots dirty looks to people who won’t get out of elevators and walk one floor so that a person in a wheelchair can get in.

Even Pop-Pop, who has commanded a room or two in his day, sometimes gets embarrassed.

“You don’t have to get so angry,” he says.

And by the way, he’s stopped saying not to call him Pop-Pop. He even lets me sleep next to him in his bed sometimes. I don’t like going on long walks anymore, because I want to keep an eye on him. Sometimes, my mom has to sing and dance just to get me to go outside to pee.

This is a situation of which I take full advantage.

I, too, must take up space

In Lebanon, Mom has found people to yell with.

Together, they scream about what Israel is doing. They talk over men who try to mansplain. They make time to sit and talk and listen in the middle of a busy day. Before she started driving (during which she is also, often, very loud), her friends drove her places so she could help Pop-Pop. They sent her resources and names of people she wouldn’t have known to find herself. They pulled strings and made calls and got his medical records to cousins and brothers-in-law on different continents to get him taken care of by the right doctors. All the while, they continued to make food and get medicine to the people Israel has displaced.

This is not a place to be small and quiet.

It’s a place where people yell together, which makes space for even more people to yell.

They are starting to learn what I have known all along: when you are loud for the right reasons, you are not shouting over each other.

You are becoming a pack.