Does Having Hope Mean Giving Up the Fight?

There are men coming towards us holding flaming torches.

A Syrian family is gathered inside the house—specifically, my friend Jasmine’s parents, sisters, brother, and kids. The rest of us are standing outside the front door.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” someone whispers.

The rest of us nod our heads in agreement.

As the men get closer, we see that one of them is carrying a giant bouquet of roses. His smile is so enormous it takes up most of his face.

There’s something to be said about meeting your future in-laws while holding fire.

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We are at Jasmine’s sister Leyla’s engagement party.

Leyla is behind this door, grinning anxiously in a tea-length lace gown. The groom and his family enter. Everyone cheers. The women ululate.

We sit down in a circle with the soon-to-be-newlyweds at the head of the room on two upholstered chairs, under an arch of flowers.

There’s an awkward silence.

Leyla stands up, her voice shaking, and makes introductions of everyone on her side. The groom introduces his parents, sisters, their partners, and his torch-bearing friends. We stare at each other for another minute.

Then someone yells, “Let’s eat!”

There’s a roar of laughter, and we leap, relieved, towards a table that’s heaped high with the food of my people.

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Okay, technically they’re not “my” people.

My dad is half-Lebanese, born and raised in Beirut. I grew up eating Lebanese food, hearing stories about Lebanon, looking at photos of Lebanon on the slide projector, with a hoard of Lebanese uncles, aunts, and cousins, most of them unrelated to me by blood. I felt more Lebanese than anything else, but, also, for lack of a better description, like I wasn’t allowed to be.

I didn’t speak the language. And I sure as shit don’t look the part.

next to dad, plotting future adventures

I got to know Jasmine when I moved to Turkey, 6 years after she and her family came here from Syria with only the clothes on their backs. They adopted me immediately. They fed me and invited me to family events. Jasmine’s dad, thrilled to have someone he can speak French with, addresses me as “Madame”.

“Madame,” he asked, when I was looking for a place to rent in Fethiye, “why don’t you live with us?”

“Us” was seven people living, in a 3-bedroom house.

And he was being serious.

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When Turkey opened its borders to refugees fleeing the massacres in Syria, they came in the millions.

But these days, anti-Arab racism here is as common as bread. Violence against Syrians is the norm. They’re blamed for the failing economy. They’re associated with the rise of Muslim conservatism in a country that was once far more secular. Some Turkish people, even on the far left, are not protesting the genocide in Palestine because of this.

I’ve had taxi drivers chat cheerfully with me until they see Jasmine waiting for me, and then change tone completely.

“Where is your friend from?” they ask.

I’ve seen the way she’s been treated by employers and shopkeepers.

I’ve heard about a Turkish person telling a restaurant owner that a family of Egyptians should consider themselves lucky to be allowed inside.

I know a Syrian boy who, after he and his brother were threatened by some other local boys for something they didn’t do, fled the country. He’s in a children’s refugee camp in Cyprus now, alone. He’s 13 years old.

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To be able to observe this and not experience it is a position of privilege.

But I am unable, especially since October, to stop thinking about it.

And my go-tos—12-step meetings, outreach calls, meditation—haven’t been helping at all. In fact, these past months, I’ve been struggling with how to apply recovery or the dharma to the crumbling world we live in. Millions people are being murdered while world leaders look on, and I’m supposed to live and let live? How do I take a billionaire-funded war machine “one day at a time”? How do I “sit still and watch the thoughts” while children are being starved and tortured for the benefit of capitalism?

a selection of classic 12-step slogans

I’m sure this will offend someone, but every time I tried to let go and let god, I’d think:

Shouldn’t god be fucking doing something about this?

By no means am I belittling recovery or meditation. Those slogans keep people alive, especially when they’re just getting sober off drugs and alcohol. Learning to befriend our minds and understand that our thoughts aren’t real can be a first step to sanity. You can’t help change a system before you’re okay.

But as someone a few years into journeys of recovery and the dharma, my thoughts are in a permanent state of hopelessness and despair. I criticize, rant, complain. Someone comments that I live in a beautiful place, and I respond with a long list of all its problems, political issues, sexism, racism.

It’s not that I shouldn’t be thinking about those things. I’ve just forgotten how to consider anything else.

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Back to the engagement party.

You know, a celebration of love and togetherness.

My plate is filled with homemade baba ghanoush and tabbouleh, and some tiny sandwiches that are more delicious than sandwiches should be allowed to be. (“They’re called ‘Bucket of the Rich Man’, Jasmine told me, as we gazed respectfully at the spread.)

I’m sitting with another dear friend. Together, we look around the room.

“Well, isn’t this amazing,” she says, quietly.

She’s not talking about the food.

She’s talking about the two families who are hugging, shaking hands, clapping each other’s shoulders.

She’s talking about how Jasmine’s sister Leyla, a Syrian woman, is about to marry a Turkish man.

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How easily I forget why I do all this stuff. All the recovery, the therapy, the meditation—is because my brain is wired to have a negative bias. Because I can find the worst possible scenario to any situation, zero in on it, and believe it’s already happening before a second has passed.

There are legitimate reasons for this. But also, this is something I can pray on. I can hand over my cynicism. I can take my certainty of impending doom one day at a time. I can ask for help to believe that violence, greed and hatred are not the laws of gravity.

To remember that having hope doesn’t mean giving up the fight.

I can turn my focus, at least some of the time, to the millions who have been marching in the streets for over 6 months. To the protestors blocking weapons factories and ships. To those shouting and raising funds on social media. To the doctors volunteering their services to the people of Palestine. To the hope and generosity Palestinians show us, over and over, despite having every reason not to.

As my brother reminded me:

“It’s not about applying your recovery to what’s happening. It’s about applying it to how you think about what’s happening.”

Or as the Rogue One reminds us:

Those rebellions are happening every day, and right in front of my face.

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The bride and the groom’s Syrian and Turkish fathers dance together in the middle of the living room.

The women from both families are nestled side by side, some in hijabs, some not, sharing photos.

One friend asks how to congratulate the bride’s father in French. Another asks how to do so in Arabic.

And my beloved Jasmine, who wakes up every day in this country and all its suspicions of her… whose husband is resting in the next room as he battles stage 3 cancer and can’t eat solid foods… who is raising kids and taking care of aging parents and trying to earn a living… who continues to be one of the most generous, kindest people I have ever known… beams like the happiest person on planet earth.

She ululates, and it echoes throughout the room.

All the siblings and their partners start to dance the dabke.

Someone grabs my hand and drags me along at the end of the line.

And I try my best to keep up.