Writing my Bi-Cultural Girlhood Memoir of Growing up in the Middle East: Dancing Into the Light

Writing my bi-cultural girlhood memoir of growing up in the Middle East:

Dancing Into the Light

 I was once asked why I didn’t write a bi-cultural memoir, since my fiction involved exotic settings in the Middle East and colorful characters I had known intimately growing up. My response was that I still felt too young to offer wisdom of any real value for a memoir, which I then regarded as a retrospective of one’s entire life. But as I read memoirs that are also accounts of a particular segment of an author’s life, I was inspired to plunge in.

I decided to explore my attraction to dance, which I’d passionately taken up in mid-life. I never had any long-term formal dance training as a child living in the Middle East in the 50s and 60s where dance schools were not readily available. But my American mother enrolled me in dance classes for expat children whenever possible, so I acquired the basics of ballet and tap. I was hooked. More important, my family, and many of our acquaintances, danced socially, so dancing was a big part of adult get-togethers as I grew up. My Arab father loved Latin music. Having taken ballroom dance classes during college in the United States, he was a superb dancer. He taught me to cha-cha, rumba, and samba to his favorite tunes, including the Caribbean music of Harry Belafonte.

My memoir began to delve into the pull dancing always had on me, as well as my attraction to people who dance, especially men who move to Latin and Caribbean music with the casual grace my father did. I knew that the allure of men who swayed their hips and twirled me with the facility he had was rooted in my earliest dance memories with him, along with my joyful memories of childhood. It was visceral. Maybe Oedipal. It was an obsession that begged to be explored. I now had a theme for a memoir.

 With the working title of “Dancing to Harry Belafonte” I juxtaposed my present-day dancing—I teach Argentine tango and Latin social dancing—with my childhood memories, interspersing my life as a writer and dancer in Virginia with flashbacks to my early life in the Middle East. I got to page 50. When I showed it to my writers group they were charmed, but commented that the flashbacks were too confusing. Why not write it more linear, concentrate on my childhood and move toward my adult self?

At first this idea seemed lackluster. I wanted to explore that magnetism dancing had on me, that I’ll die if I can’t get up and dance to that song I’d often feel in a club or party, especially when that song happened to be a Caribbean tune or—no surprise here—a Harry Belafonte song. I’d melt.  Why did this happen? Why didn’t it seem to affect other people the same way it did me? I needed to find out.

I started anew, at the beginning of my conscious awareness of dancing with my parents at the age of four in Tehran where my father was posted for two years, then later in Kuwait, where he worked for an oil company and where I spent my formative years. As I wrote, the memoir became the story of my parents—a young Palestinian man from Jerusalem who had come to the United States to college in 1947 and met my mother, a Southern belle from Tennessee, in Washington DC. I wrote of their marriage in 1951 and of their posting in exotic Tehran several years later among a community of adventure-loving expats during the time of the Shah.

I wrote of our subsequent move to Kuwait, then a small sheikhdom of scattered towns and villages dotting the Persian Gulf, before it grew into the mega oil-rich nation it is today. I wrote of the heat and the blue-green sea of Kuwait, of my Arabic school in the village of fishermen whose daughters I went to school with. I learned Arabic in that school, my village classmates were among the first generation of Kuwaiti girls to be educated. I wrote of my father’s Palestinian family in Jerusalem where I spent months each summer when it was a part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and of Honolulu, where my Tennessee grandparents moved and where we visited each summer on home-leave. There, I learned to dance the hula.

I wrote of the tragic deaths of my baby brother from a heart ailment, and of my mother a year later, when I was eleven, from cancer.  In all of the sadness my father and I endured, the dancing with my father and our friends in Kuwait lifted me and gave us merciful moments of joy at a time of unspeakable grief. The memoir became a story of human resilience and of the warmth and love of both my father’s Arab and my mother’s American families that guided me forward.

It became a story of my parents’ love for one another and their ability to sew a rich life blending two opposite cultures, enabling me to feel both Arab and American and at ease in both identities. The dance theme is the thread that binds my story, how dance buoyed us during that difficult time. It’s a story of how we process and come to terms with loss.  Brief scenes in the present show me learning and teaching dance—belly dancing, hula, Latin dancing, tango—but the book also documents a way of life in Iran and Kuwait that no longer exists due to the extraordinarily rapid historical change in the brief span of a few decades.

Dancing Into the Light shows how the resilience of youth and the love of both my Arab and American family helped me overcome grief and move into the light of living joyfully again. My initial question of attraction to men who dance became apparent as I wrote, surprising me with all the details that the writing began to bring forth. The memoir encompasses the world of my life during that unique time in the Middle East. It is, I feel, far richer as a result than the narrower, psychological angle I had initially set out to undertake.  Writing this memoir has been a compassionate way of going home. There will be opportunities to tackle other themes in future memoirs. For now, I was happy to let this book lead me where it wanted.     

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Kathryn K. Abdul-Baki was born in Washington D.C. to an Arab father and an American mother. She grew up in Iran, Kuwait, Beirut, and Jerusalem where she attended Arabic, British, and American schools. She attended the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, has a BA in journalism from George Washington University in Washington D.C., and an MA in creative writing from George Mason University, Virginia. As an astute observer of two distinct cultures, she has published five works of fiction, some of which have been taught at universities in multicultural literature, women’s studies, and Arab studies departments. She is the recipient of the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award for short fiction. Abdul-Baki has three grown children and resides with her husband in McLean, Virginia. Find out more about her at www.KathrynAbdulbaki.com.

Dancing into the Light: An Arab American Girlhood in the Middle East
by Kathryn Abdul-Baki 

Set against the backdrop of the early American presence in Iran under the Shah, and the burgeoning years of Kuwait’s early oil boom, Dancing into the Light is Kathryn Abdul-Baki’s memoir of growing up within both the expatriate Western communities and the larger Middle Eastern society of Kuwait and Jerusalem. Hers is a story of belonging to two vastly different cultures and finding her place within both, and the search to find the inherent harmony in worlds at odds with each other. She is already caught in both the joys of and the struggle to be both Arab and American, yet not fully either, when her young life of promise is disrupted by tragedy. But instead of derailing her life, her mother’s death opens the door to deeper love and support from other places within Kathryn’s family.

Dancing into the Light is a story of love, loss, and renewal, and of overcoming devastating early trauma through music, dancing, and the love and devotion of strong American and Arab women.

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Category: On Writing