Arab Past, American Present: My Family’s Invisible History
“The family legacy included silence as a way to belong.”
In the years my grandparents lived in their rambling, Spanish-style house in Southern California, they kept a Koran and a prayer rug in their bedroom hidden behind an ornate armchair. The chair, from Damascus, stood in one corner, grandly unused, its cushions upholstered in silk and the walnut frame set with mother-of-pearl. I never saw my grandparents use the Koran or the prayer rug. By the time I was born, they had fallen away from their practice of Islam.





The house and its garden was all my grandparents seemed to need. Even when their sons left home and the days were gone when my uncles and their friends emptied my grandfather’s pantry, consuming elliptical loaves of bread and fat braids of fresh cheese, the pattern of life in the rambling house was the same.




Fiction and essays in the O. Henry Prize Stories 2018, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA (Notable, Best American Essays 2016), Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, The Rumpus, The Millions, Nimrod International, and others. Prose editor at the museum of americana, staff contributor @LitStack. Follow her on Twitter at @lauren_alwan www.laurenalwan.com
Enter your email address to receive notifications for author Lauren Alwan
Success!
Confirmation link sent to your email to add you to notification list for author Lauren Alwan
More by this author
Searching for Family History in My Grandmother’s Embroidery
Together, the photograph and the needlework clearly told a story, one beyond any we knew.
Why My Father Could Not Embrace His Name
From his youth until late in life he was able to “pass,” his heritage all but invisible until he mentioned his name.
“Are You Really Sisters?”
The only means for talking about our mixed heritage was the ‘adorable’ contrast between ‘the girls,’ as we were called: one light, one dark; same parents, different skin.
More in this series
A Map of Lost Things: On Family, Grief, and the Meaning of Home
“A body always returns to the place that shaped it.”
Searching for the Internment Camp Where My Father Was Held
The phrase used was “barbed wire fever”—what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
Writing Letters to Mao
What does it mean to experience a history of trauma and blood in ephemeralities, in residue?