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Anwar
F. Accawi
I was raised in a tiny hamlet, about a day's walk from Sidon, a coastal city in the south of Lebanon. It was a pre-industrial self-sufficient village with about a hundred people. There were none of the modern amenities that we take for granted today. In fact, there wasn't even a road in or out of the village. We walked everywhere we had to go or we rode our little donkeys and mules. Then, World War II brought the outside world to us; or rather we were thrust into the 20th century by the war. The radio, the telephone, the car and all that comes with being modern rushed into my world like a flood and changed everything. They blew to bits what had been the existing order for ages. The radio was particularly powerful in bringing about radical changes to our community. Unfortunately, it had to be my father who would be responsible for that because he was the one that brought the first radio to Magdaluna when he came home at the end of the war. He was an interpreter in the British army. He had learned English in a Presbyterian missionary school and the British used him as a translator here and there in the Middle East. He met my mother in Syria. She was living in Qamishly, a border town between Syria and Turkey. Fuad and Nazira were married in 1942. I was born a year later and shortly after, my mother and I were sent to Lebanon to live with Grandma Mariam in her village, Magdaluna.
My memories of the
village are very vivid. Something kicked in and by the age of four I became
very aware of what was happening around me. I woke up, and it has been quite
a ride since. I went to a one-room school in the village until we moved
to Sidon in 1950. In Sidon I went to a private school for three years and
then moved on to an American missionary school (Gerard Institute) until
I finished high school in 1962. In 1965 I won a scholarship and I came to
North Carolina. I studied at Warren Wilson College until 1969. Married a
beautiful woman from Tennessee and went back to teach in Lebanon, where
we stayed until 1975. Our two children, Fuad, and Gulnar (Juli), were born
in Lebanon. We had to flee to the USA in 1975 when the civil war broke out.
When the kids were in middle school, my wife asked me to write something
about my childhood for them to read. I did, and the kids loved those stories.
One day, a friend, who taught medieval history in the evening school at
the University of Tennessee, happened to see on my desk a copy of a story
I had finished. He encouraged me to send it off to a publisher, which I
eventually did. “The Telephone” was published in a magazine
called The Sun. That was in 1996. In 1998, “The Telephone”
made it into Houghton Mifflin's Best American Essays. After
“The Telephone” came out, different publishers got interested
in my writing. That led to the publishing of a collection of essays The
Boy from The tower of the Moon by Beacon Press in 1999.
In the last few years
I have lectured on writing at a number of clubs and institutions around
the country. Here
is a list of what I have done so far:
-- “The
Camera” Homeworks: A Bicentennial Anthology of Tennessee Writers,
1996
-- “The
Telephone” The Sun, A Magazine of Ideas (August,
1997)
-- “The
Cave” The Sun, (February, 1999)
-- “The
Madman” The Sun (April, 1999)
-- “The
Radio” DoubletTake (Spring, 1999)
-- “The
Telephone” The Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin,
1998)
-- “The
Telephone” Canadian Content, 4th Edition (Harcourt
Brace of Canada, 2000)
-- “The
Telephone” A Civil Word (Addison Wesley Longman,
2002)
--
The
Boy from the Tower Of the Moon (Beacon Press, Boston, MA,
May, 1999)
--A translation of my
book, titled Drengurinn i Manaturni, has appeared in Icelandic
(Mal Og Menning, publisher, 2001)
-- “The
House by the Road” The Mossy Creek Reader (Center
for Appalachian Studies, Carson Newman College, summer, 2002)
-- “Fear”
Now and Then (East Tennessee State University, May, 2002)
--“Plastic”
the Sewanee Review (fall, 2004)
-- “Father
Joseph” appeared in Now and Then (spring, 2003)
--“High on the
Highway” Now and Then (sping/summer, 2003)
-- “French
Fries” Mizna (vol. 2, 2004)
-- “Unbreakable
Wonder” Harper’s magazine (September, 2005)
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