The last fight we ever had, my father and I, occurred on a night in May 2021 on the eve of his first chemo treatment. At this point in our story, I was a new mother, and he was a year and a half from his death. To treat his stage four prostate cancer, he had been given a series of experimental hormone treatments, which had put him in a sort of male menopause and which had just begun to fail. This last fight of ours also happened to fall right in the middle of that previous siege of Gaza (before the more recent one none of us will ever forget), which itself resulted in the destruction of 40 schools and four hospitals.
That night in May, we were in the rented ranch house in Arizona, the one with the broken dishwasher and the blue pool slide that had not been functional for decades, the house with its view of the sky and faint hint of the McDowell mountains. Though my father had lived in Palestine, Syria, Kuwait and Italy, he had fled to the Sonoran Desert after going bankrupt in New York in the early 1990s and loved the dramatic landscapes of the west with a fealty he had for nowhere else. Whereas I missed New York like a lover. I felt unmoored, restless. Exiled.
For a few months, we had been living under one roof – my father, mother and I, but also my partner and our one-year-old daughter. My parents had nearly gone bankrupt for a second time, and after giving birth during the pandemic, and the diagnosis of my father’s cancer, I had lost my job. Resultingly, I promised my father we – my partner and I – would try to make a life for ourselves in the desert. We could all support one other. Besides, I wanted to make him happy.
And we did try. We gave up our beloved New York City apartment – I remember looking obsessively at its Zillow listing and sobbing when it was taken down, knowing that some other lucky person would soon be closing the wood shutters on the windows of our old bedroom every night. We tried for all of four months. But this was the night our trying ended. The following day, we would be gone, back to New York on a red eye.
My father was nervous on this night. He was hours away from his first round of chemo. And we were talking about Gaza. He could never turn the news off, no matter the occasion, no matter the hour. From the moment he woke up, he would have his Arabic coffee while watching the news. Sometimes I wished he was the sort of person who could throw himself into another activity, like birdwatching or taking photographs of the stars. The closest he got to a hobby was his long night drives, which he said consoled him as an ex-cabby. But what he did on his drives was listen to more news. Consuming the news, particularly from the Middle East, possessed him, enraged him, ate him alive.
Often I thought: but wouldn’t he be happier if he could just forget? Though he had become an American citizen in the 1980s, he never quite adapted to that particularly American ability to turn a blind eye to the world.
It was late, my daughter was asleep, and we were all on the patio, smoking, talking about Gaza, talking about Gaza again. I must have opened my phone to look at something, out of boredom or habit, I don’t know. Scrolling down through my feed, I said something mindlessly, aloud: “Looks like people finally believe Palestinian lives matter.”
My father’s face took on the countenance of someone stabbed.
I didn’t ask why. I didn’t have the space to accommodate his upset. I had a child of my own now. Already, I had felt as if I had given up my home, my life, for him. He was moody, sick all the time. It revolts me now to remember that sometimes I even felt impatient with his dying.
“That’s not funny,” he said finally.
I explained exasperatedly that I hadn’t meant it to be funny. After all, this night in May 2021 was a year after the George Floyd protests. I was recalling a flashback: the year before, I sent a friend a photo of an IDF soldier kneeling on the neck of a Palestinian in a keffiyeh beside a photo of Derek Chauvin doing the same as he murdered Floyd. She had responded that “this feels a little ‘All Lives Matter’”. My father had similarly misunderstood me.
“Come on,” I said. “You know what I meant.”
My father said then: “You talk like you’ve forgotten you’re a Palestinian, too. Perhaps you have.”
I thought I knew what he was really saying. I thought he was castigating my partner J again, this white man with whom I had a child but to whom I was still not married, who was sleeping under his roof (as long as my father was alive, it was always his roof no matter who paid the rent). In recent weeks, J had come to represent everything that was wrong with America, everything that was wrong with the west. My father had begun to ask me: does your boyfriend not understand how to treat an Arab gentleman? (J’s biggest offense: he ate bacon with his breakfast.)
I can’t remember what I said next. Surely, I was already drunk. I was often in those days, the days leading up to my father’s death, and afterward too. How else could I face the end of my favorite person? Maybe I said: “Whatever, Frank Leone.”
***
My father’s name was Sami Abdul-Fattah Al-Assadi. But often he wore another name, and that name was Frank Leone. I don’t know its origin story, only that he liked the name because it was Italian and he had lived as a young man in Florence, where he had gone to study engineering (and as he told it, had had to drop out of university when his father’s funds dried up after the 1967 war). Leone means lion, as does Assad, which our Arabic name comes from. Never as Sami but as Frank Leone, he wrote enraged missives to the New York Times op-ed page almost daily. In certain parts of Phoenix, the poor, white parts, he introduced himself as Frank, and when people asked about his accent, he said he was from Rome.
Frank Leone was my father’s alter ego. His pseudonym. I wonder if he does not go by that name in the afterlife. In the year after 9/11, he threatened to change his name legally to Frank Leone. Frank Leone was even the original working title of the novel Paradiso 17, which I have just published and was inspired by his life.
But Frank Leone was also his way of temporarily extracting himself from his Palestinian-ness, a quality which was not just a nationality but the defining reality of his entire life. He was only five in the Nakba of 1948. That spring, when my father left his ancestral home in Safad on foot, alongside his mother, his newborn brother and three other siblings (his own father had stayed behind to fight), he didn’t know he would never see it again. Legend has it, their old stone home atop Jebel Kanan had stood since the 16th century.
The loss of Palestine was his first memory of this world. Yet, when he introduced himself as Frank Leone, he had a certain light in his eyes. He became the sort of guy who might even birdwatch or astro-gaze or play golf or smoke cigars. The sort of guy who could temporarily forget.
Anyway, on that night in May 2021, after whatever I had said, maybe it really was “Whatever, Frank Leone,” maybe he even threw something at me, toward me. I had held up a mirror he didn’t want to see. It got ugly, quickly.
My mother had to hold him back though he couldn’t have hurt me, or anyone. It was pathetic. He was so thin and so weak. The man was dying. He had stage four cancer.
Still there was no going back now. He was disowning me and I was disowning him and I was already on that plane. The idea struck me even as I screamed: I would not spend his final days with him. He had given me the perfect excuse. Who could blame me now for abandoning my dying, eternally exiled father for my home, for the city I loved? Just listen to him, he was saying unforgivable things to his one and only daughter.
Of course, only now do I see that my father had been right. Because it wasn’t funny what I said. It wasn’t a thing to tease about so casually, so lightly. Because people didn’t believe Palestinian lives mattered then. And people still don’t believe Palestinian lives matter now. If they did, why would people rather debate the use of the word genocide than acknowledge an actual genocide of a people, including thousands and thousands of its children?
But my father knew all this already. I’m just catching up.
When I think of this night even now, I feel as if I’ve hit the iceberg again. And my ship begins to sink. Because this night eclipses the rest of my remorse for the numerous things I said or didn’t say over the long course of my relationship with my father. I’m recalled to that Amy Hempel story, the famous one, In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried, in which the narrator, in the end, flees her dying friend. As she does it, she imagines herself afterward shimmering, lustful, full of life, dancing in a Malibu bar. But what happens instead is that she is for ever haunted.
That night, in the midst of the last siege on Gaza my father would live to see, on the precipice of his final year, on the verge of a chemo journey that would result in nothing but unbearable suffering, as he wasted away, fell incessantly, suffered a ceaseless pain which would spread from his back to his jaw until he could no longer eat or speak, I hadn’t tried to comfort him.
Instead, I stole inside. Ripped my daughter from her crib. Threw her things, my things into a bag. Yelled at J to pack as he said, repeatedly, “Just calm down, calm down.” And now everyone was crying, especially my baby, and we were on the way to the airport for the first flight out of the desert. I couldn’t wait. It was getting too hot. It didn’t matter that what I was doing might kill my father more quickly. I didn’t look back, didn’t say goodbye. I wanted to return to my city in May, in springtime, my favorite season. I wanted to smell it. Hear the music in its streets. Unlike my father, I could go home.
He had always wanted me to present as a “real American”. He had even quit speaking Arabic to me as a child, falsely believing that my English would be better off without it. And what an American I had become. On that night, I really believed I could just fly up and out of his beloved desert, that I wouldn’t be haunted by what I had left in my wake. Except I am still, even as I write these words. Even though weeks later we were reconciled. Even though we never fought again from that night on until his dying day.
I should have known, American that I am, as I gazed out of the window seat from that plane upon all that spectral land between the roaring cities we built in pretense, in harried flight from our terrible past, that nothing we ever do stays buried.
Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi is published in the US by Penguin Random House; it’s out in the UK via HarperCollins on Thursday
