Transracialeyes

Everything here resonates so strongly I am hard-pressed to add to what has been so far expressed. As usual, I’ll try and break things down a little bit. I think for me the idea of abandonment has many levels. The first level is purely abstract, and is reflected in most of the mythology we grow up with, i.e., we were so “loved” that we were “given up”, etc. A fellow adoptee from my orphanage was working on the history of the crèche (in French it’s called a “crib”) and the nuns wondered if I could draw an illustration of St. Vincent de Paul finding an abandoned baby on a log, the supposed origins of his vocation. So there’s this purely fictional, imaginary idea of abandonment for me, which now I find repulsive.

There is the corresponding factual idea of abandonment that was revealed to me by the haphazard discovery in this orphanage of a small desk full of index cards, each of which listed the full information of children left off at the orphanage during the years 1970–1975. I was floored—here were addresses, phone numbers, religious affiliation, information for adoptees! Yet I knew that making this known would have them destroyed. It haunts me to this day. The most devastating thing was reading the “reasons for abandonment”. From a prose poem I wrote about the orphanage:

….you will again find a unifying element that brings an otherwise disconnected, disparate group of people together—a devastating event, a tragic happenstance, an infinitely sad vagary of destiny, a culmination of willed derivations pinpointed in one monstrous manifestation—and you will look, and you will read, and you will hold your breath as you read: Child abandoned by parents, child has spina bifida. Child abandoned by the mother at the hospital in Zahorta. Child orphaned on the father’s side, the mother has already placed the eldest in the orphanage’s care. Child abandoned by the mother at the Orthodox Hospital which contacted us. Illegitimate child raised by a woman who has departed for America, and who has left said child, now 11 years old, with her godmother, who hereby abandons her. Child abandoned at the hospital Nôtre Dame du Liban in Jounieh. Child found in Furn esh-Shebbak in front of the door of Mrs. X. Child orphaned on the mother’s side, the father has four other children; cannot care for the fifth. Child orphaned on the father’s side. Child born two months after marriage of parents who hereby abandon him. Mongoloid child abandoned due to his infirmity…. Child abandoned, child abandoned, child abandoned, child abandoned. And you will stop, and you will feel a certain unease as you barely dare read more, you will sense a creeping disquiet as you deny each card its due, as you feel each card’s presence in space marking just another of five hundred odd and sundry ways of abandoning a child.

So you have this actual abandonment taking place, in this case, in the time immediately before and during the early years of the civil war here. Adoptive parents like to point to this and call it an act of “free will”, a “loving decision”, but it is obvious to me, given what I know now, that the collaborative abandonment of children takes place between those in power and those relinquishing their children. Procurement, coercion, relinquishment, and abandonment on both the individual and societal levels all come together under adoption in one complex heinous Verb With No Name, condemnatory of the society that causes it, and unfit for an action attributed to human beings. This is why I think I prefer to say we were “displaced” or “dispossessed”; it removes the active willful agency that doesn’t do justice to the complexity of it all, but allows the anger at the country that would dispossess its own progeny, as described so eloquently in the previous posts.

Getting back to the fictional, there are two levels to it. First is the mythology based on these above instances, which always involves conceptually the idea of safe passage for the child; meaning, the child is “left on a doorstep”, “left at a hospital”; left somewhere s/he would be found—Moses in a basket, as it were. One day the nuns in the orphanage called me on the phone and said they had some information for me. I went to meet with them, and they produced, despite my missing dossier, two slips of paper “attesting” to the fact that I was “abandoned” on the beach at Dbayeh, north of Beirut. When I went to the Dbayeh police station to track down the police report, I was shaken down for 5,000 dollars; I refused to pay. To this day I am convinced that these documents were fabricated to get me “off the case”. Partially because, culturally speaking, it doesn’t make sense, in terms of willfully murdering a child. Partially because the idea of being left to die is too unbearable to consider.

Here I’d like to expand into the flip side of the equation, described above in terms having to do with the social and societal level of things, and to this I would say that we arrived in our adoptive countries pre-abandoned; by this I mean to say that our rejection for racial reasons preceded us, and that we understood this on some subconscious level perhaps, and coupled with a fear of a re-enactment of the original abandonment, actively sought to prevent this from happening in relationships and such by pre-emptively abandoning ourselves. In my personal case, and echoing the above post about growing up in one’s birth culture, I was raised for the first two years of my life in part by an Arab bedouin house servant while we lived in Iran. The rupture here was abrupt when we returned to the States, and perhaps I was too young to emote how I “felt”, I can’t help but think this second abandonment was sensed as well.

Beyond this, for those of us who return to our birth countries, it is more complicated still. I am perhaps lucky, returning as a male to a patriarchal culture, moreso than those of you who return as women to likewise patriarchal cultures. Also, the communal and collective culture (Arab/Levant/Islam) that I’ve come back to hasn’t yet been completely destroyed by globalization and rampant Capitalism. So there is a given cultural and societal equivalent trope of “taking in” the abandoned, as it were, and I benefit from this, thank God. But I acutely feel my abandonment most during the holidays, when everyone retreats to the extended family, like at the end of Ramadan just recently. I think this is where I find myself grouped with the likewise displaced here, migrant workers and the like. At holiday time, we are those “left over”, and so we group together. For everyone who has ever listened to my adoption story, it is these people who intrinsically get it; who without reserve truly adopt me back. For this I’m ever thankful.