Anan Ameri

First off, I received a copy of this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, and I'm grateful to the publisher for the opportunity to read it.

This was a solid, interesting memoir--Ameri's prose is simplistic but also lets us into her world in such a welcoming way, moving seamlessly between her personal life and activist work and showing (critically) just how intertwined the two are. She doesn't try to explain or rationalize her work on behalf of Palestinians, work she does note that she does alongside Israeli people, and other Jewish people, and I think that is really important in a world where people are often demanded to explain how work for Palestine and Palestinians is not anti-semitic (unreasonably so.) I also learned about number of famous Arab American folks who I didn't know were Arab American (Diane Rehm? James Abourezk???) which was a nice surprise at the end!

I kind of wish I had read Ameri's first book, The Scent of Jasmine; it felt like I had missed some things of the early book, and though I'm sure this is fine on its own, it did raise some questions for me about her earlier life. I guess I will just have to go back and read that! But this was a thoughtful and interesting memoir of an important activist, and I think it's super accessible for folks who would benefit from this kind of history!… (meer)

After a shaky start, this becomes an interesting insight into a Palestinian who follows her heart in coming to the US and, whilst her experiences are necessarily personal, how over time she finds her place in American society.

Ameri, born in Palestine before the Israeli occupation of 1948 and raised in Jordan and subsequently educated in Cairo, writes a second memoir of her life from about 1974 when she was 29.
After a promotional puff of an introduction, Ameri’s first chapter starts well before descending into a cliche ridden summary of the story that she is going to tell. This did not endear itself to me, with statements like “Writing some of them was sometimes painful, but memoirs require transparency and conveying the good, bad and ugly.” The next couple of chapters also do not work for me.
However, after this the storytelling improves, with a visit to Abdeen’s (her first husband) family (although he leaves her there whilst he goes on a hunting trip). This chapter colourfully tells of second generation American Lebanese, whose parents had emigrated to the US in the early twentieth century, but had retained many of their Lebanese customs and foods, with them wanting to pass on their culinary skills to Ameri. This is somewhat comical, as Ameri (and her mother) have no significant culinary skills, as they are “city girls” who just buy food from shops, rather than making bread etc from scratch.
Chapter five discusses marriage and education, with Ameri marrying her first husband at the age of thirty in the US without family, as air travel was so much more unusual and expensive in 1974. Ameri’s mother considered education more important, rewarding Ameri with a treasured family necklace in 1981 when she received her PhD.
Marriage and religion (Muslim) is discussed very briefly in chapter six, where Ameri notes she and her first husband were not from a particularly religious background, but her husband’s mother wanted an Imam for the wedding, but this is not discussed further. A shame, as I wanted to learn some more about this.
The next few chapters interestingly note the differences between the Middle East and Detroit in the 1970’s, with amusing anecdotes about shopping, public transport and driving. Although being frank, Amira comes across as insensitive to Abdeen by being unrealistic about learning English, getting a green card, learning to drive and getting a job. This impatience is not helped when Abdeen pays a volunteer organisation to employ Amira on a research project, without telling Amira. But Amira admits that this experience provides her with the opportunity to make long lasting professional contacts.
“To me, Beirut was home” Ameri writes on page 103 after nine months in the US and following a visit to Jordan and Lebanon. Really, after moving to the US and marrying an American? Ameri puts this down to the Lebanese civil war that started in 1975 and didn’t finish until 1990, and which included Israeli occupation of Lebanon to punish attacks out of Lebanon.
Four years after moving to the US and having become much more politically active for Palestinian rights, Ameri still yearns to return to Jordan (parents’ home), Syria (grandparents’ home) or Lebanon with Abdeen, but to her distress realises that her friends in Jordan are having babies or have moved to other “more lucrative Arabian Gulf states” and the Lebanon she remembers is slipping away due to the civil war. “Uprooted.... The grounds beneath me were shifting.”
As part of Ameri’s description of how she becomes more politically active in the US, she notes that in 1981 the Israeli’s invade Lebanon and commit atrocities, but also steal the library of about 25,000 works from the Palestinian Research Centre in Beirut. Having recently read Burning the Books I appreciated how important such an act was to “disappear” even the historical record of a people. Two thirds through Ameri’s book, we have covered about seven years from 1974.
Visiting New Mexico to raise funds for Palestinian relief, Ameri notes the irony of immigrant Palestinian Americans making a living from selling Native American jewellery, where both peoples had had their land stolen from them.
Never having been to a therapist, or reading another book with them as characters that I remember, I found Ameri’s discussion of her divorce and trying to use therapists to help fascinating, although I am unsure that they helped her significantly.
In 1994 Ameri takes a year’s unpaid sabbatical and visits her mother in Amman, Jordan for three months. With this visit, about twenty years after moving to the US, she realises that she had become much more Americanised than she cared to admit, wanting to live alone, solitude and privacy.
Finally Ameri briefly discusses meeting her second husband and setting up the Arab American National Museum in 2005.

I received a free copy from Librarything early reviewers.… (meer)

A publication review of this book opens with “well-armed Islamist radicals” in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps to perhaps give some background of the issue at the heart of the book…what that shows however is how scarce and vital some voices are in bringing Palestinians’ rights to light (one only has to look at a timeline map of Palestine to know that peace treaties over the years have meant piecemeal occupations)…yet the reviewer thinks “radicals” are the problem…as if the western reader was otherwise on their way to bringing justice to the author’s native country…Ameri selflessly suggests the Arab American experience is no different than the American experience. But it is. Refugees have no choice. Immigrants do. Moreover, Palestinians had their country stolen. They were told “it no longer is.” Literally. In broad daylight. As if land could disappear…Palestinian Americans chose America, but they chose it with no alternative (real or pretend), the way a child chooses their parent by being born, so the Palestinian experience is qualified…..readers are not moviegoers, they read books, they know things….even wolves would point out that wolves don’t burn other wolves with machines, they don’t drop bombs on other wolves and live to balance the budget….maybe reviewers should consider starting with histories of injustices, for example, mass hunger strikes being met with missiles, before presuming to bring the book into accurate context….not enough gets published about this issue, and its discourse ought to be amplified.…

I’ll never forget working online with a group of Palestinian and Arab volunteers on an environmental writing project when we had to interrupt the session because Zionists were dropping bombs and the participants were starting to check in with fellow participants to trace the destruction. Here we were working on an environmental project and the volunteers were losing power because of an air raid…petty…hypocritical…environmental visions…

...from shining sea to shining sea...… (meer)