Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine
If ever you’re feeling lonely, there is Ghassan Zeineddine’s Dearborn. This collection of short stories is woven together into an inter-generational visit with beloveds. The author transported me to Dearborn, Michigan to catch up with people whom I’ve never met, but yet, know so well. I recommend the trip.
Who among us hasn’t talked with the reformed friend who quit cursing, or heard about the distrustful (for Reasons) money hoarder who finds creative places to stash cash? Which of us single parents hasn’t had to find a new way forward while fighting off The Patriarchy and stifling urges to over-caretake our fledglings beyond the day they can fly? And who of us artists hasn’t doubted our work and struggled to keep going anyway? The way the author renders a deeply closeted gender non-conforming person brought me to trauma-integrating tears: Zeineddine illustrates the complexity of a character pushing past her/his/their fears and requisite lies to be seen at last, in the love of an habibti, as an habibti.
Pages turned quickly until I deliberately began pacing, as if wanting to savor a rakweh of coffee with Ka’ak. I don’t want some books to end. Not only do the characters come so very alive on the page, also the town seems to spring into 3-D. Each story is situated so specifically and relative to one another that, one night while reading, I imagined I could jump in my car and drive to Warren Avenue for a Halal Burger. My construction of the map of this Detroit suburb proves the strength in connective tissue of the author’s storytelling and showers my brain with dopamine.
As a child, I remember overhearing Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw all report terror in Lebanon from evening news broadcasts in the 1980s. Those were also the days when I was told that thing called propaganda was something that happens in other countries. I certainly did not hear how so many folks escaping that violence landed, as people often have, in a US company town in need of workers. (ahem! Springfield, OH!). Throughout my read of Dearborn, I looked up Bint Jbeil and Beirut on my maps app and flipped through images online trying to orient to whence my friends had come, the places they long for, the places their children do not know.
As a person who walks with the manufactured ease granted by a US’er’s white-body privilege, it is important for me to read stories of communities marginalized by this entirely rigged set-up we all have inherited. We are all US’ers on stolen land, and I sincerely wish to nurture the knowledge and compassion required to be a non-violent neighbor and somehow steer this dilapidated ship towards the dignity of justice.
I hope, whatever your positionality, you will too.
