Last Summer In Lebanon
Written by Albert Samaha
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Lamb on the Roof
On my final night in Lebanon, I attend a party thrown in my honor at a big house in the mountains.
By the time guests trickle onto the rooftop patio, the lamb has been roasting for five hours and the sun is low over the Mediterranean, painting a crimson band above the darkening sea. Beirut’s skyline chisels through the haze, a silhouette drenched in amber, the latest shape of an ancient metropolis. Across the millennia, empire after empire left their marks, from Egyptian dynasties to French colonizers, building upon layers of ruins – all drawn to an oasis stretching from sea to mountains, rich with Cedar and coastline, at the crossroads of trade routes and in the crosshairs of holy wars. Beirut’s silhouette never stays the same for long. I stare like I’m trying to memorize the sight, chugging a glass of red wine to dull my nerves, hoping to look nonchalant, just over here helplessly consumed by beauty and certainly not dodging the introductions that await me the moment I turn around.
Everyone at the party greets one another with casual affection, a dance of cheek kisses and catch-up questions. Servers chop the meat and wrap heaping portions in markouk that soaks up the dripping juices. I savor each bite, turning over the tender bursts of earthy spices as if chewing slower will extend the night.
I try to stay present. I enter the fray. I introduce myself to a woman who has just arrived. Though Arabic swirls around us, I address her in English, with an American accent washed in California chill. My skin tone is at least a shade darker than nearly everyone else in attendance, and nearly everyone else is at least a decade older or younger than 34-year-old me. While the other men pair white or navy dress shirts with dark jeans or brown slacks, capped off with leather loafers, I strut around in a floral teal button-down, army green chinos, and white Air Max 90s. I am an obvious visitor.
How could it be then, she says, that I look so familiar? She asks if I’ve been to Lebanon before. No, I reply, this is my first visit. She studies my face like she’s examining a puzzle.
“So then I guess the big question,” she says, “is how do you know our esteemed host Fahim?”
It should be an easy question, one I’ve had plenty of time to ponder. Yet the words refuse to roll off my tongue. I know him as a man I have always admired, a mythic figure since my earliest memories, a charismatic jetsetter I saw occasionally when I was a kid, more frequently the older I got. After waiting more than 30 years to visit his homeland, I travelled to Lebanon to better understand the secrets he carried, embarking on a road trip to excavate mysteries that shaped me. I let loose a meek chuckle to lighten the weight of my answer.
“Fahim,” I say, “is my dad.”
She reciprocates my laugh, then waits for the punchline because she thinks I’m joking. She probes my face for any indication of irony. Maybe it’s my eyes, long and downturned, inherited from my father, that drive home the point. Her face blossoms into a flower of embarrassment. I instantly feel bad and almost apologize, before reminding myself that I have nothing to apologize for.
“Oh,” I say playfully, feigning shock, “nobody told you?”
We bust up in unison and clink glasses. She looks at me with a million questions piling up behind her lips but no clue where to start. Before she can say anything, a few more guests join us, curious to know what we’re laughing about. I take a fortifying sip of wine and introduce myself.
Credit: Albert Samaha
Secrets
My plane lands in Beirut near midnight in July 2023, three weeks before the rooftop lamb party. The airport is nearly empty, and most of the passengers are citizens, so the line for foreigners is short.
Lebanon is far from the tourist destination it used to be. The country is four years deep into an economic crisis that sent inflation soaring, wiping out 98% of the currency’s value. Banks set withdrawal limits so low that some people storm in with guns, demanding money that belongs to them. Refugees from Syria and Palestine form a growing class of disenfranchised residents. Power outages leave much of the country without electricity for most of the day. Political dysfunction has left the government without a president. The U.S. State Department issues a level 3 warning to “avoid travel due to serious risks to safety and security.” My dad suggested I delay the trip until a more comfortable period, but it seemed just as possible that this was as comfortable as it was going to get in Lebanon for a while.
He greets me at the curb with a bear hug and an expression of incredulous joy that stretches the seams of his seen-it-all poise. Though his luscious hair has more white than gray and his belly presses eagerly against the light blue polo tucked into his jeans, he swaggers around with youthful energy, tossing my bag in the trunk, grinning like he’s won a contest, a tousle of chest hair peeking over his collar.
“How was your flight?” he says. “Are you hungry?”
“I can’t believe I’m actually here,” I say, skipping straight to sentimentality. “Did you think this day would ever come?”
“I had not a single doubt,” he says cheerfully, patting my back.
The boulevard curves through a corridor of white cinderblock towers with balconies, around mosques, churches, and gas stations with blank signs where the prices are supposed to be, past refugee camps with drooping laundry lines, the Shiite part of town, the Sunni part of town, the part for Christians with low-incomes, the part for Christians with high-incomes, the restaurants that cook up the best shawarmas in the city.
Within minutes, all that is below us, receding into twinkling miniature as we ascend Mount Lebanon. Thickets of cedar and pine line a bumpy road gnarled with switchbacks. Upon reaching a wrought iron fence laced with barbed wire and thick vegetation, the car turns into a driveway, and for the first time, I catch sight of my father’s home, the setting for the parallel life of my fantasies.
My parents met on an airplane in 1984, somewhere over Saudi Arabia between Jeddah and Riyadh. She was a flight attendant from Manila; he, an engineer from Beirut. Both 24, they fell into a whirlwind romance and got married in Las Vegas.
My dad didn’t mention the nuptials to anyone in his family, a proud clan of judges, executives, and doctors at the top of Lebanon’s social hierarchy: aristocratic Christians descended from the Phoenicians who settled on the land when it was still called Canaan 5,000 years ago. His parents rejected the possibility of the family’s eldest son ending up with a humble flight attendant from a Third World country most known to them for exporting housekeepers and laborers. My mom vowed to prove to my dad’s family that they had underestimated her.
My parents traveled around the world together but never lived together. My dad moved to Paris. My mom joined her mother and siblings who’d migrated to California. When I was born there in 1989, my parents followed in the Lebanese tradition of naming their firstborn son after his paternal grandfather, a man who had no idea that I existed.
My dad visited us a few times a year. I associated his absence with the privilege I was benefiting from: as I understood it, he rarely visited because he was always out on globe-trotting business trips. I felt grateful for his work ethic. Among my cousins in the Bay Area, I was the spoiled one, thanks to his financial support. My mom was free to help me with homework and flush with resources to supply me with a steady stream of toys.
The circumstances of my parents’ separation never seemed distressing to me because my mom never seemed distressed. She confronted the situation casually, with cheeky mischief. Whenever I’d speak to my dad on the phone, she’d whisper to me to ask him when I could finally meet my paternal grandparents. He’d reply with vague timelines like, “One day.”
Rather than dwell in potential resentments, my mom spun the facts into a vehicle for motivation. Like a coach pinning newspaper clippings onto the locker room bulletin board, my mom declared, “Let’s show his family what kind of child a Filipino flight attendant can raise.” Every effort was infused with greater purpose. I wasn’t pursuing good grades just for the sake of being an obedient child but to defend my mother’s honor.
My parents divorced when I was 11, ending any lingering hope that we might become a conventional nuclear family. My dad continued to send monthly child support payments that covered our needs, and my mom continued to speak highly of him. She described him as charming, brilliant, capable of bending the universe to his will. He spoke six languages, a swashbuckling entrepreneur with a dashing mustache and roaring laugh. He swam in the Mediterranean, sailed across a string of Polynesian islands, and convened with presidents to discuss renewable energy projects. He dressed modestly, in short sleeves and tassel loafers, and abstained from watches, rings, and necklaces. He loomed like a dazzling constellation, an eternal presence visible to me in ephemeral radiance, but I knew little beyond the lore.
For the first decade of my life, I thought I was “half French,” as my mom put it, proud that I had a father living in Paris. She pronounced my name as my dad did, in the French way, with the “T” silent – Al-bear. Only when I probed a bit deeper for a family tree assignment in fifth grade did she inform me that my dad was born, raised, and schooled in Lebanon, where his parents still lived. To help me get in touch with that side of my heritage, she learned to prepare dishes with labneh and za’atar.
My dad’s annual visits gave me a glimpse into the life his labors had earned him. He’d sweep in, on short notice, for a single day of lavish, loving indulgence. He’d buy me the most expensive Lego set at the store and bring me along to spend a night at a fancy hotel with bellhops, embroidered furnishings, and room service menus. Before heading off to the airport, he’d hand me an envelope of cash.
The older I got, the more I yearned to impress him. When he took me to the Ronald Reagan Museum, I rattled off facts I’d learned in class about tax cuts shrinking the social safety net. During a wine-tasting excursion, I confidently described hints of plum and fig even though every glass seemed to taste the same. He packed our time together with dense doses of fatherly tutelage, often dispensed over extravagant meals — whiskey aperitifs followed by bottles of high-priced Bordeaux, plump shrimps and fresh oysters for the first course, then lobster tails and filet mignons. He ordered his steaks rare, smoked Cuban cigars, and turned the music up when he drove so he could sing loudly to Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, and the Beatles.
Being my father’s secret child was no wedge but adhesive, infusing our meetings with furtive thrill. I bestowed myself with the esteem of an exiled prince, a glorious fugitive waiting for the right moment to burst into the scene and shatter the royal court’s understanding of reality.
After I moved to New York City for a newspaper job in my early twenties, we began spending more time together because his business endeavors took him to the East Coast several times a year. He introduced me to his wife, Kimberly, an American engineer from New England. The more time I spent with my dad, the harder it was to ignore my curiosity about the alternate life I never lived. What if I had grown up under my father’s roof? Would I have spoken more languages? Learned to sail? Developed a sense for the intricacies of fine wine? Shadowed him as an apprentice? Inherited more of his traits? It was an uncomfortable thought, seeking impossible answers.
Then, one December evening in 2014, when I was 25, I met him in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, where we sat on plush velvet chairs, sipping Jack Daniels beneath the golden glow of a crystal chandelier while jazz hummed in the background. An hour or two into our conversation, my dad paused, shifted in his seat, his face turning serious, and said, “There is something I want to tell you.”
I raised my eyebrows in casual inquiry, unprepared for what was coming.
“You have sisters,” he said. “Four sisters.”
It took a few seconds for my brain to absorb the message. The words echoed in my mind, the room around us collapsed into a blur, and a sobering rush of blood sent my heart thumping inside my ears. I could see my dad tensely awaiting my reaction, could sense every ounce of careful consideration he had poured into this moment, could feel my eyes blinking and my mouth agape, stumbling for a cinematic response worthy of this life-altering shock.
As it dawned on me that the hypothetical childhood of my imagination was no fantasy after all but rather the ongoing experience of four girls who shared my blood, the splash of surprise quickly evaporated into a rumbling, urgent desire to know everything.
He pulled out his phone to show me photos. Tia was 12, Chloe 11, Bella 9, Maïa 7. I repeated their names out loud in an effort to memorize them. Born while I was a sports-obsessed teenager growing up in suburban Sacramento with my mom, they lived in Beirut with my dad and his wife, who took them on family vacations to see Alaskan glaciers from the deck of a cruise ship, stroll along the Great Wall of China, ride camels in the dunes outside Dubai. A whisper of envy slithered through me.
I had a million questions. I started with the obvious one. Did they know about me? They didn’t. He wasn’t ready to tell them yet, but he planned to once they were older. Why did he decide to tell me now? He just didn’t want to keep the secret from me any longer. Would I ever meet them? Yes, one day, definitely, though he couldn't say when.
It didn’t occur to me to ask where they were at that very moment. Only years later would I learn that while I was in the lobby unpacking this momentous news, my four sisters were asleep in a room somewhere upstairs in that hotel.
Credit: Albert Samaha
The Sisters
Five years later, my father told them they had a brother.
“Mom’s pregnant?!”
“No, no — an older brother.”
It was the last day of 2019, dinner time in Beirut, early afternoon in Brooklyn, where I was. His wife Kimberly had persuaded him that their daughters should know. My eldest sister, Tia, would attend college in Boston the following fall. With the rest of the family in Beirut, I would be the relative living closest to her. How might she react if she were to later learn that she’d had an American brother just four hours away by train?
My sisters received the news with an instant burst of curiosity. Their impulse was not to condemn our father or pelt him with questions, but to talk to me. At their urging, he called me to ask if I was free for a video chat.
Squeezing into the screen, my sisters waved, tears in their eyes, faces open with wonder, voices electric with excitement. We all kept saying how good it was to meet and how we would make plans to get together when they were on Easter break. Maybe in Beirut, maybe in Paris.
The pandemic erased our hopes of meeting that spring. Over the next few months, as my country barreled through ground-shaking protests toward a terrifying presidential election, their country faced its own escalating troubles. Fuel shortages drew backlogs of cars at gas stations. To power a generator through the rolling blackouts, my dad bought gasoline off the black market at rates high enough to turn him uncharacteristically anxious about expenses. After an explosion at the port of Beirut ripped through the city, damaging the house, displacing 300,000 people, and killing 218, the situation became too much to bear for many who could afford to leave. My dad and Kimberly decided to bring the family to the U.S. to ride out the summer in the relative tranquility of a country I feared was teetering toward violent collapse.
My sisters met me for the first time in August 2020 at a hotel lobby in the suburbs outside Boston. They were all teenagers and cool as hell, moving with an airy confidence in their loose sweaters and scuffed Vans, braiding Arabic, French, and English, sometimes all in the same breath.
We all wore masks, so it was hard to gauge their reactions at the inaugural sight of their 31-year-old American brother. Their hugs felt warm but formal. None of us seemed to know what to say. Where to begin when we had everything to catch up on?
I probed my mind for something profound, some witty observation that would confirm I was a big brother with wisdom they could trust. Instead, my sisters broke the silence.
“You’re so much taller than papa!” said Tia.
“Aw, papa, you look so tiny!” Bella added.
Being an only child had been a core element of my formative identity, fueling independence as well as self-absorption, instilling in me an aggrandized sense of my own unique, special distinction. That paradigm, powered by three decades of inertia, crashed into the immovable reality staring back at me. It was far too surreal for any anxieties to sprout. Gazing into eyes that looked so much like mine, I could feel only sheer whimsy, like I was witnessing a magic trick. An invigorating rush of solidarity coursed through me.
My sisters piled into my rental car. My dad and Kimberly got into a separate one. The itinerary was a week-long trip across New England for my sisters and me to spend time together, locked in a car with nothing but free days and open roads ahead of us. The route would loop through Maine, stopping along the way at a string of energy plants my dad and Kimberly owned before circling back to Boston, where we’d help Tia move into her dorm for her first semester of college.
My sisters had existed in my mind as an amorphous collective. Behind each name was an entire identity to learn from scratch, all four at once. Scanning their faces in the rearview mirror, I addressed them as a group, like a stage performer working a crowd. “So how y’all doing?” “How was everybody’s flight?” “What have you guys been up to this summer?” It made for choppy and dull conversation.
Sensing I had no idea how to moderate any sort of productive icebreaker discussion, Bella suggested a game: someone would propose a category, and we’d go around naming our favorite: color, movie, celebrity, animal, school subject, hobby. Every data point helped me distinguish my sisters as individuals. I learned that Bella wanted to live by the beach, maybe in Rio de Janeiro, and Maïa craved a bustling metropolis, maybe Berlin. Imagining what roles each of us would have if we started a company together, I learned that even though Tia is the oldest, she prefers to create rather than lead and that Chloe’s aggressive determination would serve her well as our chief executive. To underscore this point, Tia recounted the time at school when Chloe punched a boy in the face for saying something mean to her older sister.
Slowly, I sketched a working draft. Maia, 13, played soccer, adored Lionel Messi, made robots for her school’s engineering club, and exuded wisdom beyond her years, uttering sophisticated queries as she gazed out the window, like, “Why do those Trump flags have to be so big?” Bella, 15, was a K-Pop super fan with magnetic energy and an instinct for breaking awkward silences with a spot-on British accent that made everybody laugh. Chloe, 17, threw epic parties, regularly got in trouble for breaking curfew, and carried a keen social awareness that reminded her to translate for me anytime the conversation veered into Arabic or French. Tia, 18, was a sharp-witted homebody who wielded a fierce moral compass and deadpan skepticism that often pushed against the family tradition of prioritizing work.
One of our stops was for a business meeting our dad had with the owner of a company he worked with. The office was a massive cabin with a vast collection of taxidermy: a black bear, a vulture with spread wings, lunging bobcats, moose heads with massive antlers.
My sisters and I wandered the rooms, exchanging jokes that mocked the absurd chauvinism on display. It was light-hearted fun until we stumbled into a room with a shelf holding a signed Make America Great Again cap next to a signed photo of the 45th president. My sisters turned ashen. I was touched by their outrage.
When we met the owner a few minutes later, he described his ambition to one day build the tallest flagpole in the world to fly the biggest American flag ever stitched. Seeking to enlighten this audience of foreigners — he hadn’t heard my American accent — he lectured on the country’s ills, from the athlete Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem to the protesters “trying to destroy our history.” Sitting beside me, Chloe typed a message on her phone, discreetly showing me her screen beneath the table: “he’s Republican, right?” We all kept our faces straight, but once we were back in the car, my sisters let loose their horror, peppering me with questions. Maïa asked, “Was he talking about the statues people are taking down?” Tia asked, “Do people really talk like that here?” Bella asked, “Why are there so many American flags?”
It was a fortunate turn of events. Rather than continue our exchange of biographical facts, my sisters and I had no choice but to instead break down what the hell had just happened in there. No longer discussing the past, we were collectively examining the present, free and giddy, fully immersed in a shared experience.
We loosened up. Bella’s phone filled the car speakers with Aya Nakamura and Burna Boy as we exchanged theories about our respective countries. While I unloaded my disillusionment with America’s failure to atone for its original sins, my sisters expressed their proud love for Lebanon.
They were part of a hopeful generation, born into a period of national rebuilding after the civil war that ended in 1990. When Hezbollah battled Israel in Lebanon for 34 days in 2006, my sisters were still too young to remember their family fleeing to Paris until the ceasefire. They only had memories of peace.
They described Lebanon as a paradise. Its sunsets were the most beautiful in the world, its fruits the sweetest, its people chic and friendly. In the winter, they went skiing on powdery slopes in the morning, then in the afternoon, drove 40 minutes to swim in the sea. In the summer, they watched sunsets from the palm-lined Cornish and stayed out late dancing amid the strobe lights of a nightclub inside a refurbished bunker. On special occasions, they slow-roasted a lamb on the roof.
“You have to visit,” Chloe said. “You’ll never want to leave.”
Our father wanted everything to be perfect for my first visit, and that was far from the case then or anytime after. That fall, the family returned to Lebanon, where the economic situation continued to deteriorate. The following summer, my dad and Kim decided that the family should decamp to the U.S. indefinitely. Chloe joined Tia in Boston for college. Bella and Maïa enrolled at a high school in South Carolina, where their maternal grandmother had retired. They wondered if high school in America would be like in the movies.
My sisters returned to Lebanon for winter and summer breaks, calling for me to join them, but our dad kept holding off on my visit, hoping that the country would stabilize, awaiting some turning point that seemed ever more distant, until eventually he conceded that maybe there would never be a perfect time, so July 2023 would have to do.
Credit: Albert Samaha
The Palace
My first few mornings in the house my sisters grew up in, I don’t know where to sit.
My sisters go about their usual summer routines. Tia goes to an exercise class. Chloe, Bella, and Maïa sleep in until early afternoon. With a book in one hand and an espresso in the other, I wander aimlessly through the house, which leans into an ancient Roman aesthetic – spiral marble staircase up its spine, limestone boulders embedded with LED lights in the backyard, white columns along the exterior. I pause to consider each possible seating location: the multitude of couches in the living room, the leather recliner in the TV room, the cushy barstools in the kitchen, the dusty cushions in the sunroom, the swinging wicker seats by the pool, or perhaps the high-backed dining room chairs where my sisters were sitting four years ago when our father told them that I existed.
To enrich my visit, my father has organized a series of family road trips to historical sites around the country, a journey through time to help me understand my roots. Lebanon is small enough that any point on the map is no more than a few hours’ drive from Beirut, so the plan is that we’ll wake early on each tour day and return home each evening, hitting attractions in nearly a dozen cities within a week, a rigorous program that doesn’t appeal to my sisters. Away in the U.S. during the school year, they miss their childhood friends and favor a looser agenda, more forgiving of late nights and easy mornings.
On the morning of our first road trip, I languidly stroll into the kitchen with plenty of time to spare before our scheduled 9 a.m. departure. Feeling relaxed in the quiet morning, I munch on a ham and emmental pita sandwich and ease into a book, losing myself in the pages.
Without warning, my dad bursts in with a look of urgency. It’s past 9 o’clock, my sisters are nowhere to be found, and the tour guide has just arrived, he reports. Tia hasn’t yet returned from her Pilates class. The others are in bed. My dad hasn’t even showered yet. There’s no way the family will be ready for at least another half hour.
“Can you tell your sisters to hurry up and then host the tour guide?” he says. “Bring her to the patio and make her coffee.”
I spring into action, banging on doors with one hand, trying not to spill the espresso cup in the other. I welcome the guide, a former archeologist named Georgette, make conversation, check on my sisters, who are barely rolling out of bed, and then return to the patio, savoring a taste of the life I once could only imagine.
We hit the road an hour behind schedule. Following the ridge of the mountain, we head southeast from Beirut beneath a canopy of evergreens. My sisters are brimming with energy, clattering the ice in their plastic coffee cups, pointing out Porsches and Aston Martins crawling through the jittery congestion, expounding on the steely assurance required of drivers in Lebanon.
We arrive at the Beiteddine Palace during the hottest part of the afternoon. My sisters have no shortage of questions for Georgette as we stroll below sandstone arches, through hallways decorated with mosaics, and into high-ceilinged rooms with dark paneled walls, white marble floors, and colorful silk cushions.
Bashir Shihab II, the emir who constructed the extravagant estate in the early 19th Century, schemed to overthrow the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled over Lebanon for 300 years. He designed the palace for intrigue: Fountains in meeting rooms to drown out the whispers, false cabinets that opened to walls to deceive thieves. In furtive meetings, he discussed his plans with Napoleon III, who carried on France’s long-standing alliance with Maronite Christians in Lebanon. But apparently, he wasn’t careful enough because the Ottomans caught wind of his plot. He fled to London in exile, and the Ottomans held on for another eight decades.
The palace became one of the country’s top tourist destinations, with a majestic courtyard and a garden overlooking the valley. We traverse its open-air walkways in an arid heat that leaves everyone flush and damp. My sisters propose ice cream. A branch of their favorite ice cream shop is just a few miles away along the narrow mountain road. They recommend I order the ashta, a national specialty: milk ice cream cloaked in pistachio crumbles. I agree without hesitation. Bella’s smile suddenly twists into a serious glare.
“What happens if you don’t like the flavor?” she says.
I think long and hard before responding, wary of squandering this test of character. With the half-hearted conviction of an actor reading his lines for the first time, I mutter: “I’ll smash it in your face.”
“Right answer!” she says, extending her arm for a high-five.
It’s incremental progress in my education on the finer points of becoming a big brother, which requires developing a tolerance for conflict. As a vehement people-pleaser who seeks validation through the approval of others, I’m always going with the flow, down for whatever. My sisters, on the other hand, defend their ground loudly and persistently, slugging it out through strained voices and slammed doors, a practice that shocked my sensitive spirit when I first witnessed it while visiting them in South Carolina in the summer of 2020, shortly after they landed in a cozy cul-de-sac dripping with Spanish Moss.
One afternoon, Chloe and Bella got into a fight. The dispute started when Chloe borrowed one of Bella’s belts without asking. My sisters always shared their clothes back home in Beirut, but they were living out of suitcases now, and scarcity complicated the protocol. Tensions escalated into shouts, audible from downstairs, where my dad and Kimberly were preparing to host a small gathering. Then Bella scurried into the living room sobbing and reported that Chloe had punched her in the head.
Stunned and alarmed, I sprung into action. With the other adults occupied in the kitchen and Tia away in college, the situation clearly called for a big brother’s intervention.
“That’s hella fucked up!” I said to Bella. “Are you okay?”
We marched upstairs to confront Chloe.
“Yo, what the hell?” I said. “You can’t be hitting your sister like that. That’s unacceptable!”
“I’m sorry I hit you,” Chloe said calmly. “She shouldn’t have been acting dumb!”
With a tone of stern diplomacy, I called for each of them to explain what was upsetting them, one at a time. “Bella, what do you want Chloe to know about how you feel?” I said. “Chloe, how do you feel about what Bella just said?” I was locked in, listening keenly, hand on my chin, head cocked, eyes intense, channeling my deepest reservoirs of hard-won wisdom. “Don’t interrupt,” I chided when one cut off the other. “Let her finish. Then you can give your side.”
The temperature dropped almost instantly. No more shouting or crying. A credit to my conflict resolution acuity, I concluded. I suppressed the smile trying to break out on my face, to keep from seeming smug. This wasn’t about me. I was just glad to help. That’s what big brothers are for. With everybody chilled out, I asked them to reflect on what it was about this particular incident that sparked such an explosive clash.
“What do you mean?” said Chloe.
“That’s always how it is,” said Bella.
It was then I realized they had been humoring me. What accelerated their reconciliation wasn’t my guidance but their unified effort to make me feel like I was helping. They had been resolving fights like that on their own for years before I entered the picture.
During those weeks in South Carolina, I struggled to identify how I could serve my sisters as a big brother who had until recently been an only child. I leaned on what I felt was the surest offering: I would lead by example. I woke up early to write. My dad would pat me on the shoulder as he passed my chair, asking if I was hungry or needed anything. If anyone spoke too loudly, he’d shush them. “Calme! Albert is trying to work.”
One evening, over a crab dinner at a waterfront restaurant, Chloe and Bella sought my support in lobbying our dad for a later curfew now that they were well into their teens. They proposed midnight, up from 10 p.m. Before I could utter a word, my dad pointed out that when I was their age, I was rising at six each morning to work out on my own before class because I was so dedicated to my football ambitions that I’d convinced my coach to give me a key to the weight room.
“I don’t even care about football, but what was important was that he was passionate and dedicated,” my dad said. “What time were you going to bed?”
I didn’t know whether to defend my dad’s parental policy or back my sisters’ proposal. In hindsight, the answer is obvious, but at the time, I tried to equivocate. I explained that in those years of athletic devotion, I didn’t drink or party and usually was asleep by 10 or 11, but occasionally, I’d stay out past midnight because my mom never set a curfew.
“She didn’t need to because you were disciplined,” my dad said.
Voice rising in booming conviction, he went on to describe how the habits I’d developed as a teenager set me on a path to success. My heart blushed, my chest puffed, and my smile beamed as he rattled off my accolades. I was so hypnotized under the spell of fatherly praise that I didn’t notice the tears streaming down Chloe’s face until she spoke up in a cracked voice to ask our dad why he had to be so hard on them. I felt awful.
In my eyes, my dad exuded a luster that burnished his habits, tastes, and decisions. My distance preserved a pristine image. My sisters, though, saw him in full.
They saw that he could be unsympathetically demanding, quick to express disappointment, and disdainful of emotional vulnerability. He had an unflattering tendency to over-explain, occasionally repeating a version of what you just said back to you as if he was teaching you something. When my dad ordered indulgently at restaurants in the presence of my sisters, they raised objections.
“Papa, that’s way too much,” Tia said.
“We’re not gonna eat all that,” Chloe said.
“Why do you always get the whole menu?” Maïa said.
“You can always get more later if you’re still hungry,” Bella said.
It was disorienting to witness my sisters resist our father’s impulses, drawing attention to blemishes that never caught my eye. Those lavish childhood days with my dad left me craving more, yet here were my sisters, blessed with daily access to such excesses, calling for less.
During the Lebanon tours, my sisters tune out when our dad unleashes his lectures on the country’s history, which typically go longer than Georgette’s tidy snippets. I’m totally into the lectures. I tell my sisters that the scene reminds me of a trip to Paris my mom and I took in 2005 when I was 16. My dad joined us on a tour of the city in a crowded van. He spoke freely from the back of the vehicle, adding his own annotations to the guide’s narration, at one point correcting a mistaken statement that confused Orson Wells for Oscar Wilde. The moment stuck with me as an example of my father’s brilliance, but the novelty of his imposing intellect has worn off for my sisters, who have witnessed such incidents with painstaking regularity.
“Oh my God – cringe!” Tia says. “Classic papa.”
Credit: Albert Samaha
Khenchara
Slinking through Beirut’s morning traffic amid a symphony of horns, Georgette points out that the airport was a sleek, airy architectural marvel when it first opened in 1954 but has since fallen into disrepair. The haphazardly constructed apartments around it, she observes, went up illegally during the civil war to house people whose homes had been destroyed. Before then, a string of beaches occupied the land.
“The war never ended,” she says. “War is more than violence.”
Because everybody is trying to avoid more war, she explains, everybody is trying to please everybody, and nobody ends up satisfied, so there is an equality that way. Lebanon officially recognizes 18 religious sects, most of them tied to a political party. Government positions are distributed based on affiliation: the president must be Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister Sunni Muslim, the head of parliament Shiite Muslim. The whole country teeters on a precarious cooperation aimed at keeping the peace amid conflicts swirling around its borders. “We are walking with the flow of the river,” Georgette says.
At the National History Museum, artifacts dating to 3,000 BC outline a history at the intersection of colliding empires. On this fertile strip between mountains and sea, Phoenicians collectively invested in shared ships to export their stocks of Cedar, purple dye, silk, lemon, olive oil, and precious metal artifacts. Masters of shipbuilding and navigation, Phoenician traders ventured into the deepest reaches of the Mediterranean, inspiring them to invent the phonetic alphabet to help them communicate around their known world. They supplied the wood Egypt used to build riverboats, and when the Egyptians started building pyramids, the Phoenicians brought over expert Maltese stone masons to consult on the projects. Yet they disclosed nothing about how to find Malta amid the vast sea.
With no military, secrecy was a critical weapon. To keep their legendary ships far from the eyes of empires that might try to replicate them, the Phoenicians established offshore trading posts to warehouse cargo. They adopted the customs, clothing, and religion of whatever trading partner they visited – tactics passed on through generations. Contracted by the Egyptians to explore uncharted waters around 500 BC, Phoenicians became the first known travelers to circumnavigate Africa. The sailors intentionally delayed their return in hopes that the Egyptians would lose interest in the project and they could keep the route and its treasures for themselves. When they did finally return, they spun horror stories to discourage fellow travelers, describing blood-thirsty monsters, mountains of fire, and savage tribes.
Over the centuries, the coastal land along Mount Lebanon fell under the occupation of Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Moors, Crusaders, Malmuks, Ottomans, and French before Lebanon attained independence in 1943. It’s that history that infuses Georgette with faith in the country’s future. Lebanese people, she says, are well-versed in the art of survival.
“Thank you for being so hopeful,” my dad says, “because everybody in this van loves Lebanon.”
For as far back as he knows, his family lived in Khenchara, on the cool highlands overlooking Beirut. Samaha wealth traces to ancestors who sold wagons to Roman armies expanding the empire’s dominion around the time of Christ. Our ancestors in the 11th Century provided lodging to the Christian Crusaders on a campaign to reclaim territory that had fallen under Islamic rule. In the 18th Century, Ottoman nobles and European monarchs draped their bodies with silk produced from worms our ancestors farmed across Khenchara’s sloping forests. Our secret to success was no secret at all: we had sided with whoever had the most money to spend, building wealth by serving the needs of world powers.
“You learn to get along with everybody,” my dad says, “and you know they will not last long, so you collaborate until they disappear.”
The family survived every empire, growing richer until early in the 20th Century. In the end, it wasn’t a conqueror that stripped away the family’s land. My dad doesn’t know the details, only that his grandfather’s brothers got into a dispute over their inheritance and sold off everything to spite one another.
His father didn’t like to talk about it. Motivated to restore the family’s standing, my paternal grandfather studied law in Beirut, became a judge, and instilled an intense work ethic in my dad and his siblings. The eldest among his generation, my dad embraced his duty to carry forward the family name. As a child, he woke at 4:45 each morning to prepare for the school day, spent his evenings studying, and earned top marks in his class.
In those years, Lebanon thrived under the world order imposed by the Allies after World War II. Visiting Europeans called Beirut the “Paris of the Middle East” because of its elegant culinary scene, vibrant nightlife, and cosmopolitan cultural exchanges. The city offered Eastern exoticism to people from the West, who brought old colonizer money, and Western indulgences to people from the East, who brought new oil money.
My dad was 15 when war broke out. Lebanon’s place on the map left it vulnerable to the conflicts sweeping the region. Just south was Palestine, which the Allies partitioned into two states, forming Israel in 1948 to provide a sanctuary for Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust. Disputes over the land sparked armed conflicts. Displaced Palestinians, including members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, moved to Lebanon, making it a target for Israeli military raids. Like those Phoenician ancestors, Lebanon didn’t have much of a military to protect people from foreign incursions, so militias sprouted up. In 1975, a Christian militia attacked a bus carrying Palestinians to a refugee camp, igniting a cycle of violence that spiraled into war.
One morning, a recruiter approached my dad at a billiard hall, calling on him to join the front. “Don’t be a wuss,” my dad remembers the man saying in Arabic. “You won’t be respected in the neighborhood if you stay back.” Returning home that afternoon, he told his father he was going to sign up. His father warned him against risking his life for someone else’s cause and advised him to prioritize his family’s interests. “If you go out, leave the key because you won’t be coming back,” his father said.
Many of his friends joined the local militia. He saw them aiming their rifles over the barricade blocking the road at the edge of their neighborhood. They ridiculed him for staying back. For weeks, he avoided them. Once, a group of Christian extremists beat him up for declining to volunteer. But the price he paid for opting out seemed reasonable once people he knew started dying. He’d learn about their fate at school, their desk empty, a solemn announcement at the start of class.
The war was so ever-present, he says, that he doesn’t remember feeling much fear in those years. Traumas became normalized. Bombs approached too fast to think. Instinct offered the best chance for survival. “You try to go for cover; what can I tell you?” he says. “You lived with that.”
The Palestinian Liberation Organization kidnapped one of his engineering professors at the American University of Beirut and assassinated the university president. My dad didn’t plan to stay in the country once he had his degree. He attended graduate school in the U.S., then started a company in Saudi Arabia. Wielding a private plane and an affable demeanor, he smuggled bibles and liquor into Riyadh and hosted parties where high-ranking officials felt comfortable getting drunk enough to puke.
He was away when the bombs stopped dropping. Georgette, though, remembers that moment vividly. She was a teenager living with her family in their basement. News of the sudden peace mystified her. “After 15 years, one day, we woke up, and the war was finished,” she says. “We didn’t understand.”
Even then, my dad had no desire to plant his career in Lebanon. “It’s a better place to live than to work,” he says. “I decided not to be dependent on this country.”
He moved to Paris, worked nearly all waking hours, and barely slept, motivated to protect everyone he loved from the forces outside his control. The more resources he could accumulate, the more contingencies he could account for. Money didn’t promise happiness but resilience.
After the family’s vacation home had been bombed during the civil war, my dad helped his parents buy another one lower down the mountain, bigger than the last, designed to fit three generations across a labyrinth of wings. My sisters spent their summers there with cousins, aunties, and uncles.
Then, just before Christmas in 2018, my dad’s father fell while preparing for bed. His body was getting too frail to maneuver through the sprawling property, so my dad moved his parents into a high-rise apartment in downtown Beirut with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the waterfront. His parents and his sister were there when the ammonium nitrate at the port exploded, blasting through the glass, shrouding floor and furniture in debris. One person in the building died. My dad’s sister was hospitalized with severe lacerations. His parents lost part of their vision and suffered psychological traumas that left them withdrawn. He moved them into another apartment.
Ever since his parents moved out of the big summer house, it has sat empty. My dad hopes to sell it. By the time I visit, it feels frozen in time. With the shutters drawn, the interior is cavernous and haunting. Old magazines remain stacked on coffee tables. Fake plants remain at the center of the round dining table. Paintings and family photos hang from walls. In the foyer, a Christmas tree stands, an eerie reminder of a time when the house was filled with joy.
The economic crisis squashed any chance of somebody buying the house. “Who can afford it now?” my dad says.
Now, those who can afford property look elsewhere. Billboards around Beirut promote vacation homes abroad. “Are you getting the most out of your Greek investment?” Money that flows out rarely comes back.
My dad has kept his money in European banks, but few in Lebanon are as fortunate. After the 2020 explosion, many of my sisters’ classmates stayed in the country. Inflation dissolved their parents’ savings, flushing some out of retirement and back into the workforce. They couldn’t afford to leave. All through that school year, on long phone calls catching up with friends, my sisters fielded curious questions about their experience in the world’s richest nation.
“Is the fast food really better than it is here?”
“What’s Target like?”
“What do people there think of Lebanon?”
Some of their American classmates had never heard of Lebanon. My sisters grew accustomed to reciting the basic facts.
“And when you tell them, they have a bunch of questions,” Bella recounted. “Are you Muslim? Do you wear bulletproof vests? Do you take camels to school?”
One teacher mocked Maia’s accent, mimicking it like a caricature. An “All Lives Matter” sign hung in a hallway. With voices shaking in horror, my sisters described history teachers who professed that slavery wasn’t the primary cause of America’s Civil War.
Even our father, an enthusiast of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, expressed disappointment within months of the family settling into the U.S. The loud and stubborn support for Trump erased his trust in the American electorate. The government’s reluctant response to combatting COVID undermined his confidence in American civic institutions. The racial justice protests sparked a research binge. “It is like slavery has never ended,” he said one day, newly awakened to the persistence of American oppression. He said he felt a fear deeper than any he’d felt during Lebanon’s civil war the first time he got a text message from my sisters’ high school informing him that the campus was in lockdown while police inspected a tip about a suspected firearm.
My sisters aren’t sure where they want to live after college. Tia, the closest to having to make the decision, finds it hard to imagine setting her adulthood in Lebanon.
On the other hand, if she doesn’t raise her kids in Lebanon, “They wouldn’t know how to live in survival mode,” she says one morning at breakfast. “But do I want them to live in survival mode?”
She’s under no illusions about America. Kids who grow up in the U.S. suffer their own traumas. But at least there, she says, she doesn’t have to worry about the electricity going out or the money becoming worthless. In Lebanon, she continues, there is not even a president.
“I get to go back and live in that more chill vibe,” she says. “American government system is fucked up, but it still provides in a way. Lebanese government doesn't even exist.”
“Even with all the shit,” our dad says of his homeland, “it’s the best place in the world.”
One evening, my dad takes me to Khenchara. Our last name is still everywhere in the town. My dad shows me how to recognize the Arabic letters. Samaha grocery, Samaha barbershop, Samaha shoe store. Gray stone homes with red-tiled roofs dot the slopes with 19th Century elegance. A welcome sign at the edge of the forest reads, in French, “One of the most beautiful villages in Lebanon.”
“All of this land was ours,” he says, gesturing at the cedars and pines around us.
Once my dad was grown and rich in the early ‘90s, he bought a big house in Khenchara overlooking the sea, thinking it would be a nice surprise for his father, a testament to the familial resurrection he orchestrated.
But his father ordered him to sell it, preferring to avoid any reminder of what the family used to have. My dad has rarely been back to the town since then, and while driving me through its narrow, sloping roads, he hesitatingly admits that he’s gotten us lost. Somewhere in the middle of the town his ancestors owned for generations, he pulls over to ask someone for directions.
Credit: Albert Samaha
Sidon and Tyre
For most of the ride south to Sidon, a coastal city so old it appears in the Book of Genesis, my sisters sleep in the back of the van. A late night out with friends left them all but incapacitated through the morning.
Out the window, olive fields crisscross the foothills rolling toward the sea, banana groves droop across lush green plains, date palms line the coast like sentries. I resist the temptation to wake my sisters when the Sea Castle ruins come into view, rising from the water on a small island at the end of a limestone causeway. One of its towers and parts of its walls still stand, revealing a pastiche of architectural styles accumulated over centuries of conquests. The Phoenicians had built a temple on the island, before the Crusaders built a fortress over it in the 13th Century to defend Sidon against Islamic kingdoms expanding across the Holy Land. The fortress changed hands several times, damaged and renovated across several wars, passing through the Mamluk Sultanate, then the Ottomans. Each new overlord added its distinctive touch, leaving impressions that withstood the next occupation. Threads of Christian and Muslim traditions tangle into a knot in Sidon. Jesus had preached in Sidon, and the Apostle Paul had spread the gospel there, a visit memorialized with a shrine in Sidon’s oldest district, which bears an aesthetic that harkens to medieval Arab culture. Bella remarks that the city’s labyrinthine alleys remind her of the Disney movie Aladdin, a folktale popularized during a period when the Middle East was at the forefront of innovations in medicine, math, and literature.
We trek through dimly lit tunnels and corridors draped with drying laundry. Electric wires run across the walls like vines. We peruse a spice market, tour a soap factory, and wander an art gallery inside an old bathhouse, tromping for hours over the cobblestones. By the time we make it back to the van, faces are lined with fatigue. My sisters curl into their seats, returning to slumber, in no hurry for us to reach our next stop.
South of Sidon, en route to Tyre, the region’s most bustling commercial port 3,000 years ago, we pass through a military checkpoint. Young soldiers with bored faces wave us through with their machine guns. All along the road, Palestinian flags hang from windows. People build wherever they can to accommodate the influx of refugees. Hastily constructed apartments sit beside the ruins of an ancient Roman cemetery. The sun shines directly overhead when we arrive.
Tia and Maïa want to stay in the car but relent at our dad’s insistence. They drag behind the rest of the group, frowning, arms crossed. I march at the front of the pack, snapping selfies, enthralled.
Rows and rows of crumbling walls stretch as far as I can see. A towering arch offers the only wisp of shade. No ropes, signs, or authorities restrict access anywhere. The Indiana Jones theme song plays in my head, an old habit from a childhood infatuation with the movies. I clamber over chipped stone bricks like a swashbuckling archaeologist who pilfers artifacts to sell to American museums. Lizards zip underfoot. Cobwebs stretch over crevices like translucent patches. If Indiana Jones was still in the business of smuggling antiquities in the late ‘70s, his adventures might have taken him to Lebanon, where the civil war ushered in a boomtime for the looting of historical objects. Bombs dropping all around, threatening to vaporize a priceless relic, you can imagine Indy justifying his theft as he skips through a dusty hail of rubble shouting, “It belongs in a museum!” Among the trafficked items was a 2,300-year-old marble bull’s head, excavated in Sidon in 1967 and stolen from Lebanese government storage in 1981, before ending up in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which returned it in 2017. Ruins, though, are much harder to move.
When the Byzantines took over the land, rather than build their own cemetery, they simply used the one the Romans had left, like an inheritance. They laid their marble tiles over Roman mosaics. They scrawled their symbols over Roman etchings on the stone sarcophagi. They replaced the Roman corpses with their own. Why start from scratch when the admirable Romans had already shown the way? The Byzantines sought to don the costume of the great empire, imitating rather than advancing.
I take in the scene with wonder, trying to visualize what once stood – and who. Did anyone in the highest branches of my family tree walk these pathways, build these walls, get buried in these tombs? Did any of my ancestors take part in the resistance against Alexander the Great, who besieged Tyre for seven months before it fell in 332 BC? The conqueror was so angry about the time and casualties he’d lost in the endeavor that he massacred thousands of Tyrian civilians – a cautionary tale on the risk of challenging an empire. Is there any possibility that ancient horror story could be the origin of a family philosophy passed down through the ages, generations of fathers imparting their stern wisdom onto sons hungry to please them?
The vastness of the past swallows me into its infinite belly. Growing up, I knew almost nothing about Lebanon’s history and could draw no connections to the immemorial fates that spawned my existence. Now, I imagine a sinuous Cedar root burrowing through time from the California suburbs of my youth, the newest of new worlds, to the Phoenician civilization that built the oldest walls I have ever touched. Of all the times and places and families I could have been born into, here I am among the most privileged circumstances in the grand scale of human civilization. Have I made the most of those blessings? Done enough to uplift others, seek personal fulfillment, cultivate meaningful bonds, and soak up every day with mindfulness and gratitude? Maaan, of course not. Not even close. But today, I tell myself, today is all that I can control, and today I will move with purpose. Today, I will pull myself out of my own head and engage in the present with all the attention a scarce resource deserves.
Beyond the cemetery, the Romans built an enormous hippodrome for chariot racing, the biggest one outside Rome. Parts of its grandstands still stand, magnificently imposing. I ask my sisters if they want to climb up.
“No,” Tia and Maïa say instantaneously. I suck my teeth and shoot them a side-eye.
While I climb to the top, my sisters wait in the shaded hollow beneath. The ruins get more majestic as we make our way to the coast: the contours of an ancient bathhouse against the backdrop of a sparkling sea. But much as I try to keep my eyes on that splendor, they keep veering back to Tia and Maïa, who are slouching, fanning themselves, scrolling their phones. Tia complains about the heat. Maïa complains that we aren’t going home yet.
The final stop of the day, up the mountain, is at a church built beside a cave where the Virgin Mary was said to camp while Jesus preached in Sidon. The compound includes a bell tower boasting a panoramic view of southern Lebanon.
When I announce that I am going to climb it, Tia reminds me that she has a Pilates class that evening, and we are already running behind, and it will take me too long to reach the top. I ignore her and bound off. Perched amid the heavens, sweaty and out of breath and feeling like a champ, I take my sweet time savoring the sight. I look down to wave at my sisters but I don’t see them. Only when I hear the pattering footsteps do I realize they’re sprinting up the spiral staircase behind me.
Credit: Albert Samaha
Baalbek
Growing up, I never heard much about the Phoenicians. I can recall occasional mentions during Bible readings at church, but nothing juicy enough to hold my attention. As far as I knew, the Phoenicians were a footnote — supporting cast to immortal legacies but never center stage themselves.
Phoenician diasporas settled around the Mediterranean ring, making homes on Crete, Malta, and Sardinia. Some found security on the northernmost tip of Africa, ensconced on a coastal highland shielded between cliffs and mountains. Fertile soil and rich mineral deposits surrounded them. Their city stood at the center of trade routes between European and Arab kingdoms, and controlled the bottleneck of trade with African kingdoms. Every commodity on the market passed through Carthage. Its residents had found the perfect place. They invested in building rather than moving. Sprawling estates sprung up. More Phoenicians flowed in, many from Sidon and Tyre, bringing their wealth with them, fleeing the subjugation of Babylonian and Persian empires. Carthage grew to become the grandest Phoenician city in history.
Of course, the grander the city, the more urgent the need to protect it. The greater the comfort, the more desperate the need to fund it. Carthage developed a formidable military. First it warded off competitors in the trade market. Then it began to conquer, across North Africa and up the Iberian peninsula, unfurling what would come to be known as the Punic Empire. The general and statesman Hannibal led the charge, challenging the Roman empire for regional supremacy. With an army that included an elephant cavalry, he marched across Europe, planning to take Rome.
But the Roman empire foiled those plans by invading Carthage first. The Romans wiped the grand city off the map, leaving nothing but smoldering rubble. No written records in Carthage would survive. But what exactly happened to them is a mystery. It might have been the Romans who destroyed them, seeking to erase their enemy’s history like conquerors tend to do. Or the records might have all been gone by the time they arrived. Some historians theorize that fleeing Phoenicians burned everything they couldn’t fit into their boats, to keep the Romans from learning their ways.
The Phoenicians quietly dispersed into the flow of history, never again striving for empire, leaving no monuments but a lineage of practices and virtues. The Romans, on the other hand, were loud about their presence. Constructing awe-inspiring monuments at the farthest reaches of their empire was a flex of power.
Hundreds of miles from Rome, in the Phoenician town of Baalbek, the Romans built their biggest house of worship, the Temple of Jupiter.
Getting to Baalbek from Beirut means crossing the mountains and into the Beqaa Valley, a vast plain near the Syrian border, a 90-minute drive to Damascus. Sheep cluster across yellowing fields. Dotting the flatlands, squat cinder block homes with tarpaulin curtains and aluminum roofs weighed down with tires. Military checkpoints get more frequent the further east we travel.
The majestic ruins rise into view like a city on the horizon. There is plenty of space to wander, nothing like the dense crowds at the Colosseum in Rome or the Parthenon in Athens, where rows of spectators jostle for selfies behind ropes and railings. Here in Baalbek, you can pose for photos leaning against columns older than the Bible.
There isn’t much left of the Temple of Jupiter, but its ornate Corinthian columns soar like skyscrapers. Better preserved and still standing: the adjacent Temple of Bacchus, where locals conducted fertility rituals in a colossal room decorated with intricate carvings honoring the god of wine, ecstasy, and growth. Those temples were part of a sprawling complex that now exists as one of the most well-preserved examples of Imperial Roman architecture in the world.
“Aren’t you shocked Lebanon isn’t a tourist place?” Chloe says. “It’s fucking amazing.”
After hours exploring every inch of the site, I fall asleep within seconds of returning to the car, blissful.
I awake to raised voices. An argument. Tomorrow, we’re scheduled to go to Byblos, the oldest Phoenician city, but my sisters propose that we go to the beach instead of another long, hot historical tour. I have only two more days left on my trip and still haven’t gone to any beach.
The tenor intensifies gradually as the voices compete for airtime, spiraling into shouts. Maïa and Tia lead the way. Chloe, balancing a laptop on her knees, chimes in support while typing up a work project. Bella, registering her agreement but preferring to sit out the battle, pops in her earbuds and retreats into her phone screen.
I pretend to still be asleep, willing to accept whatever decision the others land on. But Georgette isn’t as familiar with our family’s conflict-resolution rhythm. What has become routine for me has startled her into intervention.
Family time is important, she interjects, screeching to a halt the cacophony of voices. She says that she wishes she could spend time with her father, who is dead. She starts to cry. Chloe ceases clattering on her keyboard. Maïa slouches in her seat as if trying to disappear.
“We know it’s important,” Tia says tenderly.
“Thank you for sharing that, Georgette,” my dad says.
A respectful silence descends over the van like a cold mist. Nothing but the rumble of the engine, the tires rattling on the road, the hum of the air conditioner. And then, out of nowhere, a hearty chuckle smashes through the stillness like a bomb.
Heads whip around, all eyes on Bella. But her face is glued to her phone. Chloe elbows her in the ribs. Bella looks up, confused, completely unaware. She removes an earbud.
“What the fuck, Bella?” Tia whispers.
“What?”
As soon as we get home, my sisters and I huddle in the kitchen. As the mortifying details reach Bella’s ears, her face flushes red. She begins writing an apology note to Georgette. We all agree we can’t end the tours on that note, so going to the beach tomorrow is out of the question. We can go to the beach the day after.
Credit: Albert Samaha
Byblos
When tomorrow comes, my sisters are up early and ready to go before Georgette arrives. Bella apologizes profusely. Tia compliments Georgette’s earrings. Maïa expresses her excitement to adventure through the seaside ruins of the city where the phonetic alphabet was invented. Chloe thanks Georgette for putting up with our family.
We hit the road to Byblos in high spirits, bumping music from Bella’s phone, reflecting on the memories we’ve accumulated together over three years. I rattle off some of my favorites: jet skiing with Maia in Miami, scampering around San Francisco’s Pier 39 with Bella, bringing Chloe to a Brooklyn house party, staying up late in Boston with Tia talking about her philosophy class. Good times, I say, always good times. Our laughter tumbles out with the lurching roar of crashing waves.
Then out of nowhere Maïa asks, “When have you been the most annoyed with us, Albert?”
The question pops my mellow thought bubble. Out of stunned reflex, lacking the wherewithal to conjure some cute deflection, I answer transparently.
“Like two days ago,” I deadpan. “When we went to Tyre.”
I recount that it took every ounce of restraint to keep me from telling Maïa and Tia to shut the fuck up when they were complaining.
“Why didn’t you?” Chloe says. “You should have. They were so annoying.”
“Haram, Albert, you’re too nice,” Bella says.
And then when we got home from Tyre that evening, I continue, all four of them had dinner without me, a spontaneous gathering that took place while I was swimming in the backyard. Our dad cooked steaks and fries, and by the time I got to the kitchen, my steak was waiting, but they had eaten all the fries.
“I was hella salty,” I say. “That’s probably the maddest I’ve been at y’all.”
“Really?” says Tia. “You seemed totally normal!”
“You’re so bad at getting mad,” Maïa says. “You need to learn from us.”
I never got angry at them because I feared them getting upset at me. I made it nearly three years avoiding their ire before my streak shattered in May, two months before my Lebanon trip, when we gathered to celebrate my birthday with a long weekend in the French Riviera, my first proper family vacation with all my sisters.
I arrived with Tia and Chloe on a balmy afternoon in Nice. At the airport, I saw on my phone that our hotel was less than a mile away. It was a gorgeous day, with clear skies and a merciful sun. I suggested we walk rather than take a cab. Chloe supported the proposal. Tia didn’t but accepted the vote.
We’d walked less than five minutes when I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. This was no leisurely stroll down sculpted promenades but an excursion along a barren road, across a highway overpass, through a concrete terrain that offered few sights and no shade. The sound of my sisters’ rolling suitcases filled me with embarrassment. Tia trailed far behind, making no effort to hide her frustration, asking every few minutes how much further we had to go. “Almost there,” I kept saying, praying I was right. We were all drenched in sweat when we checked in. Tia headed straight to her room without another word. I hated it.
But now Chloe and Tia can’t stop laughing about it. Never before had they seen me so vulnerable, so shaken. Never before had I been anything less than the sterling standard who made everybody proud. Never before had I gotten on their nerves. To Tia, that afternoon in Nice marked a turning point.
“That was some real sibling behavior, Albert,” she says.
Forging a relationship with my sisters, I aspired to perform as a pristine version of myself. But my sisters tore away at the facade.
In their efforts to get to know me, they asked many questions about the details of my life. The least I could offer them, I figured, was an honest accounting of whatever lessons I’d picked up along the way. But recounting that plot was a heavier exercise than I anticipated, revealing the chilling gap between who I was and who I wanted to tell them I was.
No, I didn’t really cook, but I hoped to learn, even though I kept putting it off. Yes, I’d had serious romantic relationships, but my insecurities restricted my capacity for honest commitment, leaving a track record littered with infidelity, neglect, and callous avoidance of hard conversations. Questions about my friendships provoked reflections on how slow I am to respond to texts, my failures to identify the needs of others, my general inconsistency. Questions about my routine unearthed my chronic alarm clock snoozing, my late starts to long days that perpetuated cycles of grinding to exhaustion. Questions about how I decompressed raised a mirror to my excessive consumption of intoxicants. Questions about what I would say to my younger self forced me to confront the delusions propelling lifestyle decisions I made every day.
I had infused my professional pursuits with the sacred purpose of honoring my mother, but was this merely a convenient mask to cloak an altruistic sheen over egotistical ambitions? Was I truly putting in long hours for her? Or to imitate an idealized vision of my father? He had modeled a traditional brand of masculinity, one that elevates the role of provider into a benevolent martyr, toiling away to serve others, performing duties so critical as to excuse any deficiency. The origin story I’d carried since birth cast my secret child status as the root of my superpowers. But had I failed to register the damages I’d suffered, generational traumas I’d unknowingly internalized?
My work as a journalist crowded my emotional and mental bandwidth, leaving little space for anything or anyone else. I didn’t bother to consider how my habits disrupted my relationships with people I cared about because I had never allowed myself to admit that anything my father did caused me any harm. I turned out great! I carried no resentment! Swear to God! If I had no problem with my own father’s negligence, why would anyone take issue with mine?
I wasn’t sure how to express all that to my sisters. I was only beginning to work through those reflections. And that was okay. They didn’t need me to guide them. They just wanted to know me. But that couldn’t happen unless I knew myself.
In the months and years after I first met them in the summer of 2020, I embarked on a journey to unlearn the hardwiring that had stifled my aspirations into a single-minded chase for professional accomplishments. When the world opened back up the following year, I entered a nomadic period aimed at expanding my vision, exploring curiosities that had laid dormant. With a duffel bag and a backpack, I hopscotched around for weeks and months at a time, cashing in a bulk of my savings, swinging back to Brooklyn just long enough to hit up the barbershop and change out my clothes for the next season. I found myself drawn to beaches. Staring up at the sky while floating in the waters off Mexico, Greece, Martinique, the Philippines, I felt a tightness slowly releasing from my body. Without the manufactured urgency of professional tasks prodding at my mind, I found it easier to stay present. It’s not that I stopped working – I still had to pay the bills. But its role in my headspace was shrinking, opening space for other reflections, endeavors, ambitions. I fell in love with swimming. I started meditating. I finally got a therapist. I sought out a view of the sunset no matter where I was. I moved a little slower, a little looser.
I arrived in Lebanon three years into a healing process I knew would last much longer, with no end in sight. Every evening after our road trips, I dipped into the pool and watched the sky turn orange, lavender, cobalt. Why couldn’t I always feel this peace? The tranquility that filled my heart brought along a heat that burned like a potent medicine. Only for so long could I resist admitting to myself that this strange sensation coursing through me was, in fact, the backlog of resentment I had suppressed at every turn – through the childhood tears every time my father departed, through the foreclosure of my mom’s house, through the low-wage jobs that stressed her out, through my gritted teeth every time my father said he was proud of me for now being able to financially support her.
For so long, I had run from those feelings because I couldn’t bear to confront them alone. My mom had long ago found peace in how her relationship with my dad played out, “according to God’s plan,” as she put it, and I feared resurfacing the Catholic guilt she once carried about the divorce. Now, more than two decades removed from that marriage, she had moved on with her life, but I could not because my dad was still a part of mine.
On that May birthday weekend in the French Riviera, somewhere on the road between Nice and Monaco, my sisters and our dad argued in fast-paced French about where to go for lunch. We were running behind schedule, everybody a little flustered. My dad asked my opinion on the matter. From the blank look on my face, he could tell that I had failed to keep up with the conversation.
“You still don’t speak French after all this time,” he snapped in a harsh hiss that caught me off guard with its sting.
My face blushed with shame. My mouth seared with a taste for retaliation, but I couldn’t quite squeeze out the snarky counter that came to mind: “I wonder why.” Instead, I dismissed those uncomfortable emotions and tried to formulate a soft, polite statement about needing to practice the language more.
Before I could get any words out, though, my sisters leaped to my defense.
“Oh my God, papa,” Tia said, “why do you have to be so mean?”
“That’s so messed up, papa,” Maïa said. “He didn’t even do anything.”
“Haram, Albert,” Bella said. “Don’t listen to him.”
“Your French is really good, Albert,” Chloe said.
My eyes welled. A wave of gratitude washed over me. The mythic figure had cemented in my mind for so long that I didn’t know how to navigate the gauntlet of my father’s imperfections. But my sisters were experts. Their support steeled me. I felt an interior wall crumble, my spirit opening up to a haunted landscape of emotions that no longer frightened me. And weeks later in Lebanon, floating in that pool under a canopy of dazzling constellations every night, I let those feelings flow through me, freeing me from their grip as they drifted away like steam into the night sky.
In Byblos, at a seafood restaurant overlooking a harbor lively with boats, we plan out my final day in Lebanon: beach in the morning; then in the evening, a party in my honor, a lamb roast on the rooftop patio. More than 50 friends of the family are invited. Most will be meeting me for the first time. Some will be learning about my existence.
Back from Byblos that evening, my dad joins me in the pool. We swim a few laps, then lounge in the shallow end, arms resting on the cement ledge, chilled beer bottles in reach. He says he’s excited for everyone to meet me tomorrow. He says he’s grateful for how my mom raised me. He says he’s so happy that I’m here.
“Are you having a fun time?” he says.
“Ahhh,” I exhale, leaning my head back. “I could do this every day.”
“You are home,” he says. “It is better than a hotel. And at the end, you do not have a bill.”
Credit: Albert Samaha
Dancing on the Roof
The morning of my last day in Lebanon, we’re supposed to go to the beach. But then Tia feels sick, and Chloe has to finish a work project. The plan disintegrates. Next time, we say. All the more reason for me to return to Lebanon as soon as possible.
We don’t know the bombs will drop in three months, and keep on dropping through the next year. In frantic phone calls with friends back home, my sisters will hear the terrifying roar of explosions. The bombs will drop in Beirut on buildings I gazed at from the rooftop patio. The bombs will drop in Sidon, destroying neighborhoods on land Jesus once walked, and in Tyre, wiping out the apartment buildings with the Palestinian flags. The bombs will drop in Baalbek, reaching the parking lot across the street from the illustrious Roman ruins. Some residents will flee into the ruins in hopes the Israeli military will refrain from wiping out Lebanon’s most prominent historical attractions. The bombs will drop in Byblos, adding a devastating new chapter to one of the world’s oldest cities. The bombs will kill more than 4,000 people across the country.
But on that last night in Lebanon in the summer of 2023, there is only joy on the rooftop patio. Word quickly spreads about who I am, and before the sun has sunk behind the sea, every guest has approached me to introduce themselves – teachers at my sisters’ old school, parents of their classmates, longtime friends of my dad, people who call themselves a part of the family, though none of the guests are blood. Over the course of my trip, I don’t meet any of my dad’s siblings, nor his parents. Those relatives never warmed to my existence, and my dad says he doesn’t want to expose me to their coldness.
The family I joined is the family around me on the rooftop, telling me stories about my dad, handing me glasses of arak, asking about my experiences in their country, embracing me into the warm folds of their community. Disco bumps. Drinks splash. The moon, big and bright.
“Albert, are you ready for papa to embarrass you?” Tia says.
She points over my shoulder. I turn, and with a million guesses, I never would have imagined what I am about to see. There’s my dad dancing without his shirt, jubilant, arms raised, clapping, spinning in slow rotation, hair flapping in the warm air.
He doesn’t have much rhythm but doesn’t seem to care. For so long I aspired to emulate an idealized image of this man, an impossible standard that set me on an unsustainable course. What I can offer my sisters isn’t a false model of perfection but a big brother who embraces the hard, messy road toward personal growth.
Released from old illusions, I see my father as he is, shaped by his own history. As the mythic reverence fades, a rush of tenderness fills its place. Watching him dance, I feel a love that makes space for resentments, disagreements, accountability, forgiveness. His knees bounce with enthusiasm. His hips sway stiffly. Two of his friends join him shirtless. Others circle around them, cheering. Then, he turns on his heel and saunters toward us.
“Papa, no! No!” says Tia, who knows what’s coming because she has been here many times.
But before I can think to move, our dad grabs our hands, pulling us onto the dance floor, corralling Chloe and Bella and Maïa on the way until the six of us are holding hands in a line, dancing a dance they’ve danced a million times. I don’t know the steps, but my sisters guide me through.
Albert Samaha is an award-winning journalist at the Washington Post and author of two books. "Concepcion" was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2021. "Never Ran, Never Will" was winner of the New York Society Library’s 2018 Hornblower Award, a finalist for the 2019 PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award, and adapted into the Netflix docuseries "We Are: The Brooklyn Saints." He has received a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant and a New America Fellowship.