Traveling light -– with just one burden on my passport

Flying back home to Paris from Stockholm with KLM, I was reading the FT’s Sporting Life column by Simon Kuper, a journalist born in Uganda, and who lived in Holland, Germany, England and the US. I had intentionally left my laptop back home in Paris; a cure for my web-addicted eyes. On my way to Stockholm Saturday morning, I had happily snatched, as usual, a copy of the Financial Times Weekend Edition—eye candy for any news-hooked mind on holiday.

A few months earlier, I had been admitted for an MBA at the University of Chicago Graduate School Business. In my opinion, that was my most self-gratifying achievement to date. Yet, the cherry on top was served to me a couple of months after my admission, when I received a certain email from Rosemarie Martinelli, the Director of Admissions at the GSB. She was writing to tell me I was one of four applicants she had selected out of the MBA admits this year, to write a bunch of articles to the Financial Times over the next two years. She was wondering whether I was interested by that opportunity.

Did I say yes?... I jubilated. I, an Arabic native speaker—although “hexalingual”—born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, was being offered a fragment of the limelight in the international journalism scene. I, the product of a child who only dreamed once of writing novels and sharing ideas with the world, was being offered the chance to do just that—yet, on a golden tribune. Did I say yes? Actually, I remember very well I did not sleep before 4 in the morning the night I got Ms. Martinelli’s proposal. That’s how much I was excited. Ms. Martinelli got my email reply the same night of course, with ample thanks and swanky words of appreciation and excitement. Now it was all going to come down to one decision from FT’s Business Education Editor, Della Bradshaw. She was supposed to contact all four of us from the GSB for a screening to choose one name to be printed under an article in FT’s MBA Diaries. And as I write this on a plane, I know that this is far from being true—yet.

Actually, twenty two days on from Ms Martinelli’s email, I am still waiting for Ms Bradshaw to call or contact me. However, as each day passes, and although I try not to think about it too much, I constantly fail in my denial. In those thoughts marinating in the background of my mind, “waiting for that phone call” has been lurking dead in the center. And day by day, I feel the chances of being contacted winding down from slim to none; but just today, an old fear resurfaced and started haunting my mind again.

Is it because of where I come from? Or is it just because of my name? Is it because of that same “stain” haunting my life again? The same one that makes me get random-checked almost every time at US airports? The same one that makes people in the West turn in their seats whenever they read or hear it? Is that it again? Is it?

I can’t frankly say, and although I try to follow most advice given to me by well educated people on how to deal with it—i.e. be cool and smile—well, it rarely works. Talk is easy but, to be honest, the burden is a heavy one to carry around the world today.

The name is “Jihad”. Born in a catholic family in war-torn Beirut, my grand father, a self-proclaimed savant, decided it would be wiser to give me a “neutral” first name (i.e. a name that was neither Christian nor Muslim). He believed it would protect me from what was know as “execution on identification”—a barbaric technique of vengeance used by most sides of the conflict during the Lebanese civil war. It consisted of detaining people at random checkpoints, asking for their religion (that used to show also on the old Lebanese ID) and kidnap them to be executed shortly after if they turned out not to have the same religion as the militiaman in charge. Consequently, “Jihad”, a fundamentally Arabic word meaning “internal struggle”, and a neutral first name in multi-confessional Lebanon, had also become a very common given name among the newborns of Christians in Beirut of the 70’s and 80’s.

That was all good until the “mudjahideens”—fanatic volunteer-warriors who have adopted the “Islamic Jihad” to defend the “Nation of Islam” around the world had sprung to the foreground of the world’s attention. And ever since, and as the “loyal” brothers keep aggressively “defending” their cause against the “demonic” West, I have been paying the price in the naturally non-Arabic speaking Western parts of the world, where there is little understanding of the Levant’s co-existing and confusingly mixed cultures.

So now, while others get stopped and searched for having a 200 ml tube in their carry-on, or for triggering the alarms of metal detectors, I get stopped and searched for weapons and “strange” material just for having… the wrong name on my passport. And while scores of other applicants worry about their GMAT, resumes, essays or even their TOEFL score, I have to pray as hard as I can—with my little religious and Cartesian heart—that my application material don’t fall in the hands of an evaluator with more subjectivity than professionally advised, and less sympathy towards Arabs-with-an-eye-browsing-first-name than the bare usual.

I wonder if it would please the world if I do like I did in Paris, where, for 2 years as a web technology consultant, I went by the name of “Julian” to make sure I don’t bump into a poorly thought question by a little educated person. It was an amusing two year experience lived “undercover” à la James Bond.

Another nationality with another brand new “common” first name could fix all that, I know. And what a relief it would be to me from this tiring meaningless and almost daily predicament. But knowing myself, I think I have become that which I was named for: a “struggler” for all righteous causes. So I think I’ll end up sticking to the non-conventional and harder path to get the message through: instead of changing my identity to hide who I am and what I represent, I choose to enlighten and evangelize people, rather than keeping them in their dark comfort zone.

---

*This article was sent to Ms Bradshaw, only to learn a day later through Ms Martinelli that somebody else was chosen to be the Chicago correspondant to the FT. I wasn't contacted by Ms. Bradshaw until a couple of week after that... with nothing but a short regret letter...

To hell with it -- I'll just become CEO of the Economist...

stumbling to bed

I am beyond exhausted.
I can feel every part of me ache. Each in its own neural flavor.
If every neuron was a light, my body would have now looked like a glittering Christmas tree... and how I miss those. Distant fragments of a past life.

Days are long in the summers of Paris. But my aching body just can't wait for the night to throw its dark veil on the city of lights.

My feet are worn out of eurotrotting. Soon all this will pass.. and my vagabond shoes will find their new playground on a new continent.

Off to sleep in broad daylight.

Bonne nuit.

~

in limbo

And when I want to write, my hands are not there ..

When I can write, my mind is gone.. and my attention blown to smithereens.

[Play]

I took a walk with another dear friend of mine,

Down from the Sâcré Coeur de Montmartre,

To the Gare du Nord where he had a train to catch..

From a majestic site above, down to a cradle of poverty and filth.

I walked with him to his train..

Then I was back on my way home..

I felt weird. I was hungry. I was empty.

I walked slow. My eyes were kind of blurry.

Soundwaves came vaguely and made no sense.

I was invisible. And the world alien through my lens.

Hmmm.. this was meant to be prose.

And obviously _ verses _

Is all my mind can now propose…

Sometimes, you stroll above the ground not feeling your lazy feet

Fail to dodge an army of cold eyeballs – wondering who they were

Walk on down streets of uncertainty – searching for yourself

In a city where you live – she doesn’t know who you are

Look at those people around you – faceless strangers

Feel the tickling smells of filth – foiling your breath

Your reflection in a mirror – but see another one

Think of a fading family – a nostalgic burden

Where are you going? Where are you going?

Where are you… ?

Are you going?

Are you?

Who?

When my fingers are ready to listen… my mind is gone.

When my ideas turf in, I am no longer present; I am alone.

The sounds of the world flush through my mind.

But my memory is asleep and my eyes are blind.

I talk like a zombie - I lie, I act, I pretend.

I am not here. Not here. I deceive, I blend.

These white eyeballs are tired pink.

Ivory teeth soaked in coffee black.

Rotating chairs and driving seats,

Have stabbed daggers down my back.

Keep looking for you in every hopeful look

In every flowery scene, in every romantic book

Time is running out, but my heart is dead stuck

Searching for an other you before it turns to rock.

I set my sails just after you – the eye of my perfect desires,

I keep creating, you, every time a new face, with all new fires.

And everything I do, everytime I wake up, every hurdle I jump,

Is my way of composing the unique inevitable path - that will show you up.

I may never find you, meet you, smell you, know you.

But I’ll teach myself, I promise, to keep my heart alert,

And determined to find you – and possess - and free - and adorn you.

~