Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt - Peacekeepers Daughter: A Middle East Memoir

2021

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Thistledown Press Ltd.

P.O. Box 30105 Westview Saskatoon, SK S7L 7M6

www.thistledownpress.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Peacekeepers daughter : a memoir / by Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt.

Names: Bellehumeur-Allatt, Tanya, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana 20210186720 | ISBN 9781771872164 (softcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Bellehumeur-Allatt, Tanya Childhood and youth. | LCSH: Children of military personnel Lebanon Biography. | LCSH: Children of military personnel Israel Biography. | LCSH: Children of military personnel Canada Biography. | LCSH: French-Canadians Lebanon Biography. | LCSH: French-Canadians Israel Biography. | LCSH: Lebanon History Israeli intervention, 19821985 Personal narratives. | LCGFT: Autobiographies. | CGFT: Personal narratives.

Classification: LCC DS87.53 .B45 2021 | DDC 956.05/2092 dc23

Cover design by David Drummond

Printed and bound in Canada

The following material was previously published in different form: Carrying War in subTerrain, Surprise in carte blanche, Beirut Bombing in EVENT and Best Canadian Essays 2015, Witness in Prairie Fire, Taking Possession in The New Quarterly, From Damascus to Beirut in Prairie Fire.

THE USES OF SORROW from Thirst by Mary Oliver, published by Beacon Press, Boston Copyright 2004 by Mary Oliver, used herewith by permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, Inc.

Quotation from William Goldings Lord of the Flies used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

CALVIN AND HOBBES 1987 Watterson. Reprinted with permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. All rights reserved.

Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts, SK Arts, and the government of Canada for its publishing program.

For Brian, for always believing.

Et pour Maman, qui na jamais cess de croire.

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

MARY OLIVER

NORTH HATLEY, QUEBEC DECEMBER 2015

Here, I say, this is for you. I hand my brother a copy of Best Canadian Essays 2015 and hold my breath as I watch him read the first few paragraphs. My piece, Beirut Bombing, is set during the year we spent as a family in the Middle East, at the centre of a war. As he reads, I recall the muezzins call to prayer mingled with the vibrations of shelling in the Lebanon Mountains.

Reading your work takes me right back, Maman pipes up from behind the kitchen counter, where shes preparing the cheese platter for our Christmas brunch. I can picture the fabric of our couch in our Beirut apartment: brown, with red stripes and little black dots on top. The brown was the same shade as the leather on the door.

A bulletproof door as thick as a mattress, I say from the adjoining room.

Etienne looks me full in the face. How can you remember so many details?

I kept a journal. My friend Claires mother gave it to me for my twelfth birthday, a few weeks before we left Canada, in August 1982. Write everything down, shed said. One day, youll write a book about it. I still have that journal from 198283, with its pages full of round, childish script the voice of the twelve-year-old girl whose childhood ended when the war began.

Sometimes people cant remember a thing about the events that marked them, but I remember small details from the year I was twelve, when we moved from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, to Israel, and then Lebanon. Its as if someone pressed the pause button and a frame got stuck on the screen.

Still, for the longest time, in the mythology of my family, our year in the Middle East was my fathers story. He was the hero at its centre, the reason wed landed in Beirut at the height of the civil war. At family gatherings, whenever the story came up, he was the one to tell it. My brother Etienne, Maman, and I were secondary, supporting characters. It took me many years to realize it was my story too.

Now, my father deaf in one ear, a firing range injury sits quietly while the rest of us talk. I can see it perfectly, Maman says. Our mahogany dining room table in Beirut had a strip of mirror down the middle. She arranges devilled eggs on a china plate. Fancy, but highly impractical. I was constantly removing smudges.

The furniture would travel across the carpet when the shelling got bad, Etienne says. Wed have to rearrange it in the morning, before going to school.

Etiennes twelve-year-old son looks up from his video game, then studies the living room carpet as if it holds a secret.

Remember the envoy from the Canadian government? Etienne imitates the man, a nervous tic jerking his face sideways. I can still see him with his hand on the doorknob, saying How can you live like this? He was practically in tears.

He left halfway through dinner. Maman laughs. I wanted him to stay for dessert, but he was too petrified to eat.

Etienne runs his fingers over the open book in his hand as if reading Braille. I wish Id kept a journal.

Hes forgotten how he hated school, hated to write. It was years later, well into his twenties, that he studied journalism at Ryerson. Growing up, we were opposites. He was the athlete and the extrovert; I was the intellectual who took refuge in books.

You sketched, I say.

I remember torn pages laid out on the dining room table. An eyeball that was also a picture of the Earth, with its continents and oceans drawn in coloured pencil behind the pupil and iris. To the side of the globe a large wound gaped open, with blood spurting off the page. Next to it, people lay on their backs, their faces distorted into screaming holes. Under them were other bodies, mangled and twisted into strange positions. Blood everywhere. Over the nightmarish scene hovered a huge pair of disembodied eyes, partly obscured by cumulus clouds.

I told Maman to read herself as a character. I hope my voice sounds light and cheerful. Youll need to do the same.