{"id":5802,"date":"2021-11-15T01:45:59","date_gmt":"2021-11-14T23:45:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=5802"},"modified":"2022-12-17T11:04:58","modified_gmt":"2022-12-17T09:04:58","slug":"burning-forests-burning-nations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/burning-forests-burning-nations\/","title":{"rendered":"Burning Forests, Burning Nations"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Lytton, British Columbia burned to the ground during the wildfires of 2021, with the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Canada (photo Canadian Press\/Darrel Dyck).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/h4>\n

Hadani Ditmars<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

It is hot, like most mornings this month, as I awaken to the smell of burning forests.<\/p>\n

I look out my window at the freighters in the harbor, and head to the sea to escape the heat and acrid air. On the rocky Pacific beach where I\u2019ve swum since childhood, I meet an old man, ocean bathing with his friends. His face looks kind and somehow familiar as he smiles at me.<\/p>\n

\u201cHello,\u201d he says and I return the greeting. We introduce ourselves. His name is Yusuf, and he is from Istanbul. He comes here daily, he says, just like he used to swim \u201cat home in the Bosporus.\u201d He came here in the \u201860s, he tells me, to work in the cherry orchards of the Okanagan<\/a>, in the arid interior of my province with rolling ochre hills, currently plagued by wildfires<\/a>, that looks just like parts of Turkey and Syria. He stayed, and never went back. Now he is one of over 100,000 Turks living in Canada, and almost 10,000 in British Columbia<\/a>, with most living near Vancouver, where Turkish Airlines has just started direct flights to Istanbul. Now both of our nations<\/a> are burning<\/a>, with forest fires devouring land<\/a>, homes, and memories.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour face,\u201d he smiles, gesturing with his wizened hands at the cheekbones and olive skin I inherited from my Syrian Christian ancestors who fled Ottoman rule in what is now Lebanon for safer shores, settling in Canada in 1906. \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d<\/p>\n

He asks in a friendly way, as if we could be kin, not in the way pale strangers ask me at bus stops on cold winter mornings, unsmiling, or the way border guards question me almost everywhere. He asks because even though, according to the DNA police at 23 and Me, I am only \u201c30% Levantine\u201d and \u201c40% Anglo-Irish,\u201d it\u2019s the Middle Eastern genes that have triumphed. Although, I muse as I sink into the bracing Pacific salt water, perhaps it\u2019s those other ancestors that make me have a low tolerance for heat and the ability to swim in cold water for hours.<\/p>\n

So, I tell him the story, there in the sea. The one about the ancestors making their way from their village of Qaraoun, with rolling ochre hills and cherry orchards<\/a> and Ottoman police<\/a>, to Port Said in Egypt; the one about the women and children being on the freighter to America already, and the young men rowing out under the cover of darkness, and only one of them making it to the top of the rope ladder, before the Turkish gunboat came by. I tell the tale of the shipping strike in Marseilles and the three months they were stranded there, taking time for a pilgrimage to Lourdes before heading out to sea again and landing on Ellis Island, where their Turkish passport was stamped \u201cAsiatic.\u201d A few years later, as relations soured between the British and Ottoman empires, anti-Asian exclusion laws would have prevented them from entering North America.<\/p>\n

\"\"
The author’s great grandparents, the Mussalem family, in Winnipeg, Canada, 1906 (courtesy Hadani Ditmars).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I show Yusuf on my phone the family photo from 1906 in Winnipeg, where my great grandparents, young newlyweds,\u00a0 hold hands, and their first-born son George, wears a toddler\u2019s fez and holds a toy gun. I recount how they eventually arrived in a Northwest Coast Canadian fishing village called Prince Rupert. I tell Yusuf about the store they opened and their kindness to the First Nations people, at a time when apartheid-like conditions reigned, with \u201cwhites only\u201d signs hanging outside of shops and movie theatres, and how they were adopted by a Haida Indian chief.<\/p>\n

I tell him all this quickly, easily, the story spilling out as Yusuf and his friends listen intently, exchanging glances and words in their native language, before Yusuf says, \u201cNice story. You have Turkish face.\u201d His friends all agree. I remember an old boyfriend, now lost in some other sea, some other life, who once visited Istanbul with another woman, but brought me back gifts: a copper bowl and a white linen cloth from a hammam that I still treasure. He couldn\u2019t help it, he said. \u201cYour face was everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

I return from my revery to these home shores as Yusuf tells me to be \u201csafe out there in the sea,\u201d from whatever hidden dangers might lurk beneath its gleaming green surface.<\/p>\n

I bid Yusuf goodbye, and put my phone in a special sealed container, rolled up into my \u201cswim buddy,\u201d the inflatable buoy attached to my waist meant to shield me from aquatic harm, and dive in.<\/p>\n