History | Cultural Glimpse

May 28, 2013

A Better Way to Celebrate Memorial Day

Memorial Day was first established in 1868 in order to honor the soldiers who had fallen during the Civil War. Cities all around the United States hold their own ceremonies on the last Monday in May, but unfortunately, many tend to forget what Memorial Day truly means.

In 2000, a National Moment of Remembrance was passed, asking all Americans to take a moment of silence to honor and respect the dead soldiers, regardless of what they may be doing, and simply observe a moment of silence, or say a prayer.

Personally, I feel that is too little an effort to show respect to the soldiers who have died in wars or in the service of their country. What if instead, we had veterans in every park, book store, mall, school, even in restaurants and family barbecues and picnics, to share with us their stories of war, thus keeping alive the spirits of the dead soldiers whose stories are buried with them?

Let us not only remember the dead soldiers through our veterans, but to also learn a thing or two in the process. Who knows? Maybe in learning something, we could prevent having more dead soldiers in the future.

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April 10, 2013

From Paris to Sterling Heights

Last Tuesday, I was visited by three people who were so French, they caused my mind to wander to and linger in Paris. This Tuesday, my mind has returned home, so I will write about my hometown of 20 years, Sterling Heights, the fourth largest city in Michigan.

A little over sixty years ago Sterling Heights was a rural Michigan township with a population of 4,000. It was organized in 1835, two years before Michigan became a state, and it was originally called JeffersonTownship. The name was changed to Sterling in 1838. Some say the community was named for Azariah W. Sterling, a settler; others say it was named for Sterling, New York. By the 1880s, the township had become thirty-six square miles of well-developed and prosperous farms, with a mere 1,000 residents. Today the population is nearly 130,000.

Prior to 1784 there is little written history about the area that is now Sterling Heights because the Indian tribes who lived in villages along the ClintonRiver or came through here on hunting expeditions did not keep written records. The first white settlers along the Clinton were captives of the Chippewas who had been freed or escaped after years of wandering with the tribes.

Sterling Heights was ranked the sixth safest city in the U.S. in 2006 and currently boasts more movie screens than any other Michigan City.The August 2006 issue of Money magazine listed Sterling Heights as No. 19 on its list of the 90 “Best Small Cities” to live in.

Another attraction? Eminem lived here briefly between 2000 and 2001. And a phenomenon? After twenty years of living in this city and over ten years of living in nearby neighborhoods, I can still screw up directions to get to certain places.

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January 26, 2013

Greektown and the Auto Show

Over twenty years ago, when I was a student at Wayne State University, my friends and I frequented Pegasus in Greektown. We loved their traditional Greek cuisine and music, the staff who mostly had a Greek or Arab accent, the open kitchen and cozy atmosphere and the periodic shouts of “Opa!” and the flame that we worried would catch our long Mediterranean hair.

But Greektown was not always Greek. In the 1830s, German immigrants settled in that area. Little by little they began moving out and in the 1880s Greek immigrants began taking their place. By the 1920s, the area was becoming primarily commercial rather than residential, and the Greek residents began moving out. Yet their restaurants, stores, and coffeehouses stayed put. In 1960 the Greektown neighborhood was reduced to one block, beside it the big Greek Orthodox Church that was founded in 1910.

After I had kids, I just couldn’t get to Pegasus as easily as when I was single. I think I might have gone without a genuine Greek dinner for a period of two years. Luckily, that hasn’t been the case for over a year now. Yesterday was one of those special nights where not only did I enjoy a dinner at Pegasus but I also got to go to the Detroit Auto Show for the first time in my 32 years living in Michigan.

The first auto show was held in Detroit in 1907 at Beller’s Beer Garden at Riverside Park and since then annually except 1943-1952. It was renamed the North American International Auto Show in 1989. Since 1965, it has been held at Cobo Center where it occupies nearly 1 million square feet of floor space.

We took the People Mover, an automated system that encircles downtown Detroit, to Cobo Center. It was packed with people trying to get to the Auto Show. Last time we rode it on a Sunday afternoon it was empty. The Mover costs $12 million annually in city and state subsidies to run. In fiscal year 1999-2000 the city was spending $3 for every $0.50 rider fare, according to The Detroit News. The system was designed to move up to 15 million riders a year. In 2008 it served approximately 2 million riders. I wish it was always as busy as it was yesterday – like the transportation systems in cities like New York.

The car show was a wonderful new experience for me, despite not having a big interest in cars. My brother said that the show has come a long ways since he last attended over ten years ago. Who knows – maybe one day all the corrupt people will be gone and Detroit will be at its peak once again!

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January 14, 2013

Baby Showers

My daughter with her godmother, who is also my niece and my goddaughter and who is obviously expecting a baby

My niece and goddaughter, who is also my daughter’s godmother, had her baby shower today (it’s not as confusing as it sounds). For a number of family members, this was the first baby shower they had ever attended. Myself, I’ve only gone to two, even though I am an aunt to some 30 + nieces and nephews and a great aunt to eleven or more (not sure). Some of the family members did not understand this ritual as in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Victorian Era, celebrations took place after the birth of the baby.

The modern baby shower started after WWII during the baby boom era and evolved with the consumer ideology of 1950s and 1960s. They not only served an economic function by providing the mother-to-be and her home with material goods that lessened the financial burden of infant care, but purchased “things” also emerged as the principle whereby women make themselves into mothers. The shower basically serves to teach the woman into the special behaviors associated with her new role in society.

We expect baby Jude in March and we still have some 25 nieces and nephews to marry off.

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January 9, 2013

Gone With the Wind

While cleaning the house and folding the laundry, I first watched a movie, The Words, and then a documentary about Margaret Mitchell who wrote my favorite book.

The first non textbook I ever read was Gone with the Wind, in Arabic. I was nine years old, had recently left my birth country of Iraq and was living in Amman, Jordan with my family. We were awaiting a Visa to enter the United States. I loved Gone with the Wind because despite my young age and eastern cultural background, I connected and fell in love with Scarlett O’Hara and the other characters which resembled my tribe. Seeing my attachment to this story, my siblings took me to the movie theater for the first time in my life where I watched a black and white version of Gone with the Wind, subtitled in Arabic. The book and film was my first impression of America. I thought I would come here and see “the South” as it was described by Margaret Mitchell. Well, I was in for a big surprise. Michigan in 1981 was not Georgia in the 1800’s. Still, this became the pattern in my life – being inspired by western storytellers while writing about the land, culture and descendants of Iraq.

Earlier this year, I read Gone with the Wind for the third time. I saw it with completely different eyes. This time around, I saw the politics of war that I’d missed as a child. Some of the most memorable quotes were:

Ashley Wilkes: “Most of the miseries of the world were caused by wars. And when the wars were over no one ever knew what they were about.”

Rhett Butler: “All wars are fought for money. All other reasons men go to war are just false reasons, pretexts and empty words fed to them by stay at home orators.”

I guess we either do not want to learn our lesson, are too lazy to find other solutions, or war is just too good a thing to pass up.

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January 6, 2013

Prophet Muhammed’s Promise to St. Catherine

I had a meeting Saturday afternoon with a friend producer about a film project we’re currently working on. I told him about my experience at the masjid and he said that people have created so many divisions when really we are all cousins who stem from Prophet Abraham and today. He said that, if Prophet Muhammad or Jesus saw what we were doing to each other, they would turn around and go back into their graves.

“All this fighting is not about religion,” he said. “It’s about real estate.”

He said quite a few interesting things, some of which I knew, that Jesus and all the prophets are revered in the Quran and Mary is the only woman’s name mentioned. Surah 19, one of the longest chapters in the Quran, carries the title “Maryam: Mary.” One thing I never heard is the story of the document that Prophet Muhammed wrote to St. Catherine’s Monastery, the world’s oldest continuously inhabited monastery which is located at the foot of Mt. Sinai in Egypt. The document that Prophet Muhammed wrote is hung inside the monastery along with its other manuscripts, which are outnumbered only by the Vatican library.

The Promise to St. Catherine:

“This is a message from Muhammad ibn Abdullah, as a covenant to those who adopt Christianity, near and far, we are with them. Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens; and by Allah! I hold out against anything that displeases them.

No compulsion is to be on them. Neither are their judges to be removed from their jobs nor their monks from their monasteries. No one is to destroy a house of their religion, to damage it, or to carry anything from it to the Muslims’ houses. Should anyone take any of these, he would spoil God’s covenant and disobey His Prophet. Verily, they are my allies and have my secure charter against all that they hate. No one is to force them to travel or to oblige them to fight.

The Muslims are to fight for them. If a female Christian is married to a Muslim, it is not to take place without her approval. She is not to be prevented from visiting her church to pray. Their churches are to be respected. They are neither to be prevented from repairing them nor the sacredness of their covenants. No one of the nation (Muslims) is to disobey the covenant till the Last Day (end of the world).”

Well, off to church I go now.

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January 4, 2013

Mesopotamian Forum for Art and Culture

The Minaret of Samarra

Mesopotamian Forum for Art and Culture held its monthly meeting today at Abu Nawas. My husband said he’d watch the kids so I happily prepared dinner, tidied up the house and then lo and behold, my daughter decided to throw a tantrum because her dad couldn’t take her to the dollar store. I tried everything to pacify her frustrations, even considered not going to the meeting, but she kept at it until she knocked onto our beige rug the bowl of curry stew I was feeding her brother. That got me to quickly change clothes, grab my purse and head out the door!

MFAC was established in February 2012, and since that very short time, they’ve held five successful events, two of which I had the honor of participating in. Today’s meeting was to establish the New Year’s activities. On their agenda are lectures on story-telling, poetry readings, theatrical plays, cinema and an art gallery. Nabil Roumaya, one of the founders of MFAC once said to me, “We want to ignite the cultural awareness that was once present in Iraq in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.”

Civilization was born in ancient Mesopotamia over 7,000 years ago. That is where writing, astronomy and science were invented. The first school, law, literature, map of the world, and the idea of dividing time and space into a multiple of 60’s started in this historic land. The first writer in recorded history was Enheduanna, a woman from ancient Iraq. She lived, composed, and taught roughly 2,000 years before Aristotle. Man’s most important invention, the wheel, was devised in Mesopotamia, as was plumbing, the plow and the sailboat. Like other Iraqi-American organizations in Michigan, MFAC, which consists of a number of distinguished artists, writers and intellectuals, attempts to shine light on a culture that only small groups of people know about.

When I returned home, my daughter apologized for her earlier behavior and my son threw a couple of tantrums because I wouldn’t let him play with the butter knives.

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Category: History