Memories of my Father on Father's Day: Lessons and Values
By Nizar Hashem Farsakh, Arab America Ambassador Blogger
On this Father’s Day, I invoke my father’s memory the way he would have liked me to, through stories. As I celebrate his legacy, I think not only of the lessons he taught me and values he instilled in me, but also of the special way he did it. I remember every Friday, as we walked back to our car from the Friday Prayers, he would ask me: “So, what did you think of the sermon?” It was a big question for ten-year-old me, but I was too young to appreciate its significance, let alone its profound impact. In response I said that it was too long, or that I liked the recital; my father would nod or add his own thoughts. Yet, only much later in my adulthood did I truly grasp what my father was ingraining in me. He was nurturing my individuality, my sense of worth, and my intellectual freedom. I developed a healthy skepticism of authority, learning that just because someone is speaking from a pulpit, doesn’t mean we have to take their speech at face value. That evolved into an acutely critical mind that dissects arguments to their minute details. So much so that my friends in college used to call me: “Nizar Ta3leeqa” (i.e. Nizar the Commentator) as I had a comment for any and everything said.
However, my fondest memories of my father was probably when I was seven or eight. I remember he would come back from work in the afternoon,change into comfortable clothes and tell me to lay down next to him in bed. Father told me fascinating stories of olive groves, rolling hills, and shepherd flutes, entrancing those under its spell into an improvised Dabke (the Levant’s quintessential folkloric dance).
Palestine to me was a magical place. A place where people were simple and dreams were big. Father’s dream was going back to Palestine, for in the 1980s, we were in Dubai. My father was born and raised in Bir Zeit, but like many Palestinians of his generation, he had to go to Kuwait in search of opportunities right after high school.
By the mid-1950s, Father had saved enough money to go to Germany, become an engineer, and return back to work on the Yarmook dam in Jordan. The 1967 war erupted while he was in Jordan, but unfortunately, he wasn’t allowed back in Palestine.
The Israeli authorities allowed his sister to enter, but not him. Needless to say, he was deeply disheartened by the forced exile, yet more determined to return. He ended up moving from Jordan to Kuwait, then settling in Dubai. I was born in 1974 and by 1980, the sails of my father’s engineering business had caught wind. He could finally provide us with a safe, sheltered, and comfortable living.
Father’s success was mostly attributed to his reputation of integrity and a can-do attitude. Yet, his longing for Palestine never waned. I remember so many dinner conversations where my father’s friends would argue with him over his dream of going back to Palestine one day. They thought he was crazy. They would tell him: “You were an armed militant, you’re blacklisted in three countries, so how on earth will you ever be able to go back?” Those skeptics never made a dent in my father’s resolve. You see, back in 1963, he had purchased a plot of land on the western outskirts of Bir Zeit overlooking Yafa, 30 miles to the west.
Father took my mother there and promised her that one day he will build her a house on that serene hill. And indeed, in 1994, a few weeks after the PLO entered Jericho, my father, the incorrigible optimist, was in Bir Zeit holding his sister in his arms. We visited several times after that, and then decided to move there in 1999. The dreamer did build “the promised house” after all, and we were actually living in it by 2001. I lived with my parents for ten years in that “promised house”, shadowing my father in family visits, weddings, funerals, and all the other communal duties Arab societies are so famous (or infamous) for. Finally, in 2012, his body gave in to cancer. We spent the next three days receiving condolences and
taking care of the last duty we owed him, running the funeral the way he wanted us to.
It was on that third day of receiving condolences when I realized why my father wanted me to shadow him for all those years. It was about making him proud that I knew what to do during these three days.
I felt it deep in my heart that he would be proud of me knowing how to receive condolences properly and to know that he would want his body to be laid next to his mother’s in the old cemetery. It was in the “promised house” where he wanted those family members and friends to pay their respects and serve them Qidreh, (one of his favorite dishes). It was in the “promised house” where I stood upright, giving a firm handshake, and knowing how to respond to the hundreds of people whose lives he had touched. It was a surreal and serene realization.
We often hear about life’s paradoxes. Well, to me, this was one of them. I had been next to my dad for over 35 years in total, but only at his funeral did I get what he was saying and doing. It’s so Arab, and it’s so beautiful.