First, I learned that I would never inherit the smooth drape of my grandmother’s skin. Like my father, I would battle hillocks and mounds of acne pushing up against my face well into adulthood.

Second, and more important, I would come to learn that my home was a forest at the edge of the sea.

In the same year, 1998, I moved into a decrepit bungalow situated within the world headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Chennai, India. The sprawling, 260-acre ecological heritage site sits on the mouth of the Adyar River, where its brackish currents swirl into the Bay of Bengal. Punctuated with neoclassical colonial houses, floating trilithon archways, and cantonment-style hostel dwellings for visitors, the international campus of the Society has largely stood unchanged since its inception.

The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian occultist; William Quan Judge, an Irish American lawyer; and Henry Steel Olcott, an American military officer. With visions in their mouths, they raised paeans to universal brotherhood, comparative religion, and the unexplained edicts of nature.

In their quest for self-actualization, they may have seen the face of utopia in the peninsular balminess of South India, worlds away from the industrialized West. Hallucinatory revelations and prophecies were said to have informed Blavatsky’s decision to establish the Society’s headquarters within the teeming sprawl of the Madras Presidency, as the region was known under British control. Perhaps the same tides of providence or fate steered my family toward the Theosophical Society.

Blavatsky’s bungalow. Courtesy of the author.

An ill-timed home renovation and a sudden work project sent my father out of Chennai for the foreseeable future. My maternal grandmother and my mother began to piece together the remnants of his plans, as always. They soon realized that we would have nowhere to stay while our apartment was being pulled apart at the seams.

My mother’s relatives were sparse but reliable. In duress or otherwise, uncles, aunts, and second cousins unfailingly materialized out of the ether when summoned. After my grandfather passed away, his brother—my granduncle—took on the mantle of honorary parent and grandparent to his nieces and nephews, and their children as well.

Half-remembered rumors of conspiracies eddied around my granduncle’s nomadic history. My grandmother ventured that he had spent a few years in West Bengal after his wife’s death over a decade ago, as a mendicant associated with the Ramakrishna Mission. An aunt put an end to that theory, sneering that my granduncle had actually been a toiling bookkeeper in Kolkata, that even he could not escape the drudgery of unpaid bills and unfed mouths. But one fact was indisputable above all else—that he had returned to Chennai as an avowed Theosophist, living and working in the Society ever since.

On a Sunday afternoon, my mother broke the news of our imminent homelessness to him over the phone.

Just come, my granduncle said. I have room.

A week later, we were a tableau of women arrayed at his doorstep—my grandmother, my mother, my teenage self, and my baby sister. On our arrival, we realized that his words were literal: He had prepared a single room for all of us.

The room was cavernous, with a vast, distant ceiling and spectral corners that we could fade into. Four cots topped with gauzy mosquito nets sat along the walls. The only other piece of furniture in the space was a rosewood clotheshorse, more appealing than functional, with its improbable curves and its improbable arches that would not hold a shirt. A banded gecko chirped at us from a high window, as if to say hello.

From that day onward, I was neatly incorporated into my granduncle’s routine. He was a great believer in youngsters, as he termed anyone under the age of 60. Having lived and fought through the Indian Freedom struggle, he believed that the spark to my ennui-dulled youth was the slag of discipline, and so he declared that I would begin the day during brahma muhurta, the hour of creation before sunrise. My mother and my grandmother enthusiastically agreed.

Every morning at 5 a.m., he would wait for me by the front door with his Atlas bicycle. I was always late and always disheveled in my school uniform, a marked contrast to his immaculate presence—from the elaborate folds of his panchakacham veshti that fell down to his ankles just so, to the planes of his kurta, to the swoop of his nose, to his baldpate ringed with silver hair, to his level eyes and level hands.

Good, let’s go, he would say, without a hint of impatience in his voice. Our first stop was always the cannonball tree, a swathe of fragrant, sacred flowers blanketing its trunk in hooded splashes of fleshy oranges and yellows. Nagapushpam, he had pointed out once. The flower that resembles the hood of a snake.

Further on, the pathway was littered with curling knots of rosary-pea pods, their red seeds crunching under our feet. We’d pass by the bodhi tree—hunched over a pond covered in a scrim of pale nymphaea lotuses, grown from a sapling of the tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. At the far edge of the water, a miniature shrine housed a sandstone image of Gautama Buddha, his hands arranged in the dharmachakra mudra—setting into motion the wheels of dharma itself.

Pick two lotuses, my granduncle instructed. Don’t disturb the tadpoles.

We threw ourselves into the bustle of preparing the shrine for its morning rituals—sweeping the floor and around its perimeter, divesting the ceremonial lamp of any residual soot, daubing the sandstone Buddha with a soft cloth. Once done, my granduncle beckoned for the flowers. I handed them to him, and he laid them reverently at the Buddha’s feet. We stood there in silence for about a minute or so. He laughed when I began fidgeting, as if on cue. Okay ma, this is too quiet for youngsters like you.

That was my escape signal, clear as a shot, and I would yell my goodbyes as I ran around the pond. My granduncle would continue his morning rituals and ablutions at the Bharata Samaj Hindu temple elsewhere on the Society’s campus, and then volunteer his services at whatever office sought his assistance for the day—the in-house printing press, the bookshop, or the garden department.

Banyan tree at the Theosophical Society. Courtesy of the author.

I used this slim packet of time to explore the Society on my own. At the Zoroastrian temple, I would whisper good morning against the ears of a pair of Assyrian winged lamassu with bearded faces. I passed the great banyan tree that continued to live and breathe across its aerial-root-sprawl of 40,000 square feet, thriving willfully even after its original trunk was destroyed in a cyclone. At the forking dirt road, I took the path on the left, through an orange copse of silk-cotton trees, past chambers that housed guests and nascent Theosophist seekers from all over the world. Another mud fork took me deeper into the forest, through a thicket of copperpods with their yellow plumes and along the Adyar River, as packs of robber crabs skittered into the estuary.

At last, I would reach a tiny gate, flush against a stone wall that opened out to the bay.

The gate’s watchman had been informed through the Society’s inimitable network that I was not to be questioned. This gate will always be open for you ma, he said one day. I know whose paethi, whose granddaughter, you are. On hearing the watchman’s words, I realized that my granduncle had quietly retraced the topography of our relationship, drawing our family closer together even as he moved, ever aloof, outside the domestic bounds that roped around the rest of us. The word paethi bumped against my throat as I stood on the empty shore. Sunlight surged across the waves: It was time to head to school.

Days and months melted into each other. I craved the frenetic blur of the city—cram schools and festivals and dance recitals, afternoons at the beach with friends, sneaking into concerts on the Indian Institute of Technology’s campus, or even just watching cable television, which had not made its way through the Society’s gates.

And yet. It had also been a struggle to keep up with my classmates, with their shifting gauges of popularity that were mostly elusive to me. Every night, as I lay beneath the translucent folds of the mosquito net, the ineffable sounds of the nocturnal jungle and the Adyar River rippling under it all, I took refuge in the comforting mantle of the Society’s forested darkness.

One morning, my granduncle pointed to the cannonball tree. It had begun to spew a profusion of perfectly spherical fruits. Picking up a grayish-brown orb from the ground, he cracked it open. Its flesh was cloudy and whorled with deep blues, the color of nightfall. It smells very bad, but it is antibacterial, he said. It is medicine.

The fourth president of the Theosophical Society, Curuppumullage Jinarājadāsa of Sri Lanka, wrote, “Just as an individual organism is one unit in a larger group, so also is the life within each organism a unit in a larger group called a group-soul.” My 14-year-old self would have scoffed at the notion of a group-soul. But in that eyelet of time, with the graying murk of dawn and the smelly cannonball fruit and the form of my granduncle silhouetted against the trees, it seemed as though Jinarājadāsa had been right.

Perhaps I was on the threshold of something immense, a pieced-together whole—even if just for a moment.

The post My Adolescence in an Attempted Utopia appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This must be a publishing glitch of some type, I tell myself. Maybe someone spilled a bottle of ink across where I should have been. When I start to trace my pictures across the school years spanning grades four through seven, however, I realize this is no error but a recurring constant. It is, in fact, my unibrow—my decidedly Arab unibrow.

Somewhere around the age of 12, I vaguely remember arguing with my mother about severing my one eyebrow into two. She indicated that I was too young to be dealing with such things, to which I would whine back with my characteristic pre-teen, “Whyyy?” What were these “things” she referred to? Was she trying to spare me the frequent expenses associated with weekly visits to the eyebrow lady at the nearby salon? Was she trying to make sure I stayed fairly unattractive for as long as possible? Whatever her reason, I refused to settle, and continued to press my case with a passion befitting the Great Schism of 1054 . Laying the foundation for my future career as a lawyer, I settled my first case, getting my mother to accept a narrow separation of my two brows. With a small hint of a pair of eyebrows to face my remaining middle school days, I now had a little less to furrow about.

While this story of one young Arab girl’s struggle to tear her eyebrow asunder may sound like a recap from a recent Keeping Up with the Kardashians episode, the unibrow symbolizes something more than an obsession with personal aesthetics. My brow(s) were a symbol of my constant struggle to understand my cultural identity. Here I was an all-American kid growing up in Northern Virginia—the varsity cheerleader, the honor student, and later the sorority girl at the big football university. But I possessed this distinguishing feature that set me apart from my peers. I was so much of the same, and yet I was so different. Was I Lebanese? Was I American? Could I be a Lebanese-American? Or should I be an American-Lebanese?

My parents came to the United States in 1989, near the end of the Lebanese civil war. We made our big American debut in the most dramatic way: with my pregnant mother going into labor with my younger sister on the flight over. I grew up in a middle-class home in an affluent D.C. suburb, filled with the aroma of chicken shawarma, adorned with Lebanese artisanal decor, and set to the sounds of Arabic satellite TV. I had mostly white friends, many of whom had never traveled overseas before and couldn’t point to Lebanon on a map.

September 11th didn’t help. It created the appearance of a conflict between my being Lebanese (aka Arab) and being American. The ensuing war on terror thrust me into the business of constantly seeking to correct misunderstandings about the Arab and Muslim worlds (starting with the fact that the two aren’t synonymous). I often found myself clarifying, rather defensively, that I was a Lebanese Christian, though there is obviously nothing dishonorable about being a Muslim.

In the days following 9/11, my parents were very uneasy about how to respond to the backlash from Americans to the Arab world. “If anyone asks you where you are from, you tell them you are a Phoenician,” my father told us. This struck me as rather ludicrous, as I knew from school that the Phoenicians, who did in fact thrive in the Eastern Mediterranean at one point, had been a dead civilization for approximately three millenia. And it’s not like we’d moved in from Arizona.

Looking back on that moment now, I realize how concerned my parents must have been about our social environment. Suddenly every Arab became a threat to national security, portrayed as a potential suicide bomber, jihadist, or extremist. I would often get asked whether all the women in Lebanon were covered—as in covered in a hijab or burqa (which, if you have been to downtown Beirut, a party town if there ever was one, you know to be a preposterous question). I shared with everyone the fact that Lebanon was made up of a near perfect split between Muslims and Christians. Regardless of my efforts to champion the Arab identity, after 9/11, it definitely seemed wise to skirt around my feelings on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to avoid taking a stance on the Iraq/Afghanistan war, and to keep my mouth shut when the term “terrorist” was used casually in conversation to describe individuals wearing cultural head dresses. In an effort to avoid making waves, I would let plenty of stereotypes and jokes roll off my back.

This wasn’t always easy, given that I grew up immersed in my Lebanese-Greek Orthodox background. Not only did I grow up listening and watching Arabic satellite TV, but my parents spoke Arabic to my two sisters and me, we lived within a half-mile of nearly all of my mother’s five siblings and their children (our Thanksgiving table was set for 35), and we celebrated “our Easter” weeks after everyone else’s Easter and Spring Break had come and gone.

When my classmates were off at summer camp or some Caribbean vacation, my family and I were bound for at least five weeks at my grandmother’s home in northern Lebanon. I would spend my Arabian days and nights swimming in saltwater pools, gorging on homemade hummus and baaklava, and belly-dancing on the beaches of Byblos. For my parents, these trips were about going back home—not just to see their families, but to reengage with their own culture. I enjoyed these trips, but I never found that I could naturally fit in. I spent most of those vacations trying to hide my horrible American accent and settling on speaking Arabish—a mix of Arabic and English—and exhibiting a clear discomfort with the more glottal phrases. I couldn’t tell my cousins about the cool bar and bat mitzvahs I attended the year I turned 13, because “friends” and “Jewish” did not fit grammatically into the same Arabic sentence. I also could not grasp why I had to refrain from saying or doing certain things because they reflected poorly on my family. I was far too enamored with my American sense of autonomy to settle on these seemingly antiquated societal expectations.

This was the problem with my cultural unibrow: When my two sides confronted one another, things got, well, hairy. It always seemed that I was too Lebanese to be American, but also too American to be Lebanese. Trying to reconcile the two formed an unnatural union. Just as with my ever-converging set of eyebrows, it was much easier to deal with both sides when they were kept apart. I would throw on my Lebanese tarboosh and become the foreign femme in situations when I wanted to connect with others in a way that felt important, like when I traveled overseas, or when I met other foreigners, or when I wanted to challenge my American friends to remember that the world did not consist of the United States alone. Conversely, I’d slip on my baseball cap to remind myself that America had given me a life of opportunity, friends, education, and the proverbial freedoms and mobility I wouldn’t have had back in Lebanon. I wore either of my two sides when convenient, which did little to reconcile the cultural identity crisis I tried to keep at bay for so long.

My job these days entails focusing on Middle Eastern affairs and U.S. foreign policy, so I have managed to turn my personal effort at reconciling my two identities into my professional preoccupation as well. And there’s never a dull moment in this arena: Soon after settling into this work, the Middle East began its latest spiral into chaos, with the military coup in Egypt and Syria’s civil war and chemical warfare controversies.

Growing up in the post-9/11 world with revolution and war consuming the Middle East, being an Arab-American may seem one of the more anomalous of hyphenated identities. However, settling on being just an Arab or just an American would discount half of me. There is much beauty in being from both the Middle East and the United States, and so I will persist in dealing with my proverbial unibrow, trying to clean up that fuzzy middle area. But now that the unibrow has overgrown into other areas of my life, it looks like I’ll need a bigger set of tweezers.

The post Unibrow Battles and Growing Up Lebanese appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Not that it happened to me, or anything.

From the age of eight to 13, I attended Camp Taconic, a posh Jewish sleep-away in the Berkshires. My parents sent me to Taconic because it had everything I should want: tennis courts, canoes, horseback rides, swim lessons, ceramics–the works. The other campers were exactly the sort of kids my parents wanted me to meet. My years there made me a champion of Jewish Geography, a game that’s based on linking, with as few degrees of separation as possible, one Jew to any other. Years after learning how to shoot a bow and arrow and how to make a bed, I sometimes think the real lesson of camp is that it’s a small world for well-heeled New York Jews.

I should have fit in. My dad took the train into Manhattan, my mom had a good dermatologist, and my family went to synagogue three times a year. But even on first contact with my fellow campers, I could tell I was a little off. As an eight-year-old at Shea Stadium boarding the bus for my first summer at camp, I had on sweatpants; everyone else wore matching outfits. The night we arrived, my camp mates each ate a serving of spaghetti with meat sauce. I ate three.

I was a year younger than the rest of the girls in my cabin, and the nine-year-olds were naturally cooler. It didn’t help my status when I asked Julia Jaffe how to spell the word “if.” (It was for a letter I was writing my parents. Relevant sentence: “If you don’t let me get a puppy, I won’t come home.”)

Everything at camp revolved around the bell–the wake-up bell, the breakfast bell, the activity bell, the break bell. At breakfast, I ate three bowls of prepackaged cereal before laying into pancakes or eggs. Cleanup followed. (Most campers, including me, had limited experience with dust, so sweeping was a fun new game.) Another bell led us to Morning Sing at the Playhouse, where we belted out John Denver songs. Then there were announcements, usually about auditions or sports meets. Bells rang in morning activities, lunch, the end of rest hour (during which we were made to write letters home twice a week) and the start of milk and cookies, three more activity blocks, dinner, an evening activity, and then bed. Back at our cabins, we received a piece of fruit, brushed our teeth, and went to sleep.

There was a lot to do at Camp Taconic. When I was eight, I loved hiking, so I got to hike. When I was 10, I was into softball, so I got to play softball. By 13, I loved roller hockey, and I got to play it every day. What more could a girl want–except other girls to love these things as well? Instead, an almost 1950s-like segregation of the sexes reigned over camp activities. Boys played sports, and girls did crafts. I came to camp with rollerblades while the rest of the girls brought accessories, like a spray bottle with a fan attached to the top, personalized in bubble letters. I would have, too, but I didn’t even know where this stuff came from.

At 13, I returned to camp to find that all my bunkmates had grown breasts. I remained flat as a boy from navel to neck–and continued to dress as if the sole purpose of clothing were to shield my body from mustard. My cabin mates liked their new breasts, and, concerned about my lack of them, became amateur endocrinologists. One of the Laurens in my cabin checked in throughout the summer on my pubic hair situation. She was buxom and dark–mad with her newfound power. She had two boyfriends, one at home and one at camp, and reveled in her adult-sized bras and need to shave her legs daily. Today I remember that Lauren was buxom and dark at 11 and that she changed clothes in the bathroom every morning and every night. Perhaps she’d been as jealous of my shapelessness at 11 as I was of her shapeliness at 13. But there’s no sense of universality at 13.

At the end of every summer, everyone got maudlin. I never cried, because I was never sad to be going home. Still, I kept returning to Camp Taconic, because it was the easy thing to do. It was only after my summer as a flat-chested 13 year-old that I finally admitted I didn’t fit in.

Before my friend’s wedding, we had to fill out questionnaires about our favorite candy, favorite summer activity, and nickname. I never had a nickname at Camp Taconic, though not for lack of trying. When I was 13, I dreamed up a series of events based around a counselor’s late arrival that would result in my becoming Rebecca “In the Shower” Aronauer. Needless to say, this nickname did not catch on.

In the questionnaire I saw my chance to be Rebecca “In the Shower” Aronauer at last. As I anticipated, none of my fellow wedding guests understood why I wanted my nickname to be about hygiene. But they accepted it was something I found funny, and that was enough.

I suppose I might be softening on camp after all these years. And it’s true that I don’t think sleep-away camp is a bad thing. But camp doesn’t like outliers; it doesn’t give you a place to be different. So I wouldn’t choose to send my kids to Camp Taconic. Besides, I could never afford it.

Rebecca Aronauer is a writer living in Denver. Her website is rebeccaaronauer.com.

*Photo courtesy of Peter Blanchard.

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