Meeting Mr. Habib
By Joyce Chediac
Have you met Mr. Habib?
Mr. Habib, his wife and son are the only people of color in the blockbuster movie hit “Father of the Bride II.” Many people have met him.
They do not like him.
Mr. Habib is very rich. He wears a shiny suit. He flashes a phony smile. He talks in a thick Middle Eastern accent. Mr. Habib smokes cigarettes with his thumb and forefinger, then puts them out on other people’s lawns.
Mrs. Habib does not speak; Mr. Habib speaks for her. When she tries to speak he yells at her. His son does not even try to speak.
Steve Martin, the movie’s hero, is the opposite of Mr. Habib. Martin is a loving husband and concerned, protective father. Martin wants to sell his house. Habib buys it, but flaunts his wealth by casually opening his wallet and taking out an extra $15,000, in cash, if Martin will leave behind a set of china fancied by Mrs. Habib.
Our hero Steve Martin returns the day after the sale, anxious to buy back the house. He is stunned and overjoyed to learn that his wife is pregnant. Martin wants to raise the child in his family home.
Mr. Habib is cold. His face reveals no understanding of family feelings. But his eyes do light up when talk turns to cold cash. Mr. Habib does sell Martin back his house, after extorting an extra $100,000.
Comic actor Eugene Levy, who plays Mr. Habib, creates a thoroughly repulsive character in only four minutes of screen time. Levy’s Mr. Habib smacks of the racist stereotyping of Jewish people a few decades ago—“unscrupulous, cruel and shrewd,” in the words of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). This group is negotiating with Disney Studios, which made the film, to change the Habib character in the video version.
“The character of Mr. Habib serves to dehumanize Arabs and justify anti-Arab racism, especially in the absence of a balancing positive Arab character in the film” the ADC says. Even the Arabic spoken is gibberish, like the mock Spanish and phony “Indian” in western movies of yesteryear.
This Mr. Habib is a cardboard character, an easy foil to make Steve Martin look good. He is a cheap shot, if you will, playing into anti-Arab racism.
But there is a real Mr. Habib. Who is he? Would you like him?
He is not the TV or movie construct. Not the “terrorist,” the rich sheik, the camel jockey.
He may be called Akmed, Ali, Mustafa, Ibramim, Iskandar, Edward, George. Maybe he is Mohammad and tells you to call him Mike. Maybe he doesn’t tell you his name.
He is tall, short, fat, thin, black, white and every color in-between. He usually has a mustache.
I have seen Mr. Habib in Manhattan at the end of the workday. He wheels a hot dog pushcart down 38th Street toward 10th Avenue, with bib circles of sweat staining his shirt. He is returning it where he rented it early that morning. Habib worked for two hours to clean and set up the cart, now he must work to clean and take the food serving equipment apart, four hours of work without pay, without selling one frank.
Maybe you bought a hot dog from his cart standing by Central Park, the Empire State Building, the Veterans Center. You got your frank with mustard, or salsa and onions, whatever your pleasure. Maybe you got annoyed at Mr. Habib because he got the soda wrong.
David Letterman and Jay Leno have met Mr. Habib. The two late night TV comics compete with each other over who can tell the funniest joke about Mr. Habib, the New York cab driver who doesn’t speak much English.
Did Letterman ever point out that Mr. Habib works long and lonely hours, has no benefits, and supports a family on about $17,000 a year?
Did Leno, who does a “Beyondo” clairvoyant routine, get enough insight to see that Mr. Habib may have been an engineer or teacher back home? That he is only here because deteriorating economic conditions made life unbearable? That these conditions may have been caused by some action of the U.S. government, like the Gulf War, which displaced five million people?
Sometimes Mr. Habib takes a break at 10 a.m. on Sunday, the very worst time to be driving a taxi. He parks near the gas station at 10th Avenue and 23rd Street, one of the few places in Manhattan where a cabby can take a leak, make a call, get a stretch during his 12 or 15 hour shift.
Sometimes he walks a few doors down to the Khiber Kibob Restaurant, a tiny place where he can get his own soul food meal of curried goat and roti. Sitting here, feeling good to be out of the cab, maybe the tastes of home recall to him the smells, the lighting of home. Maybe the memories of less humiliating times fill the heart while the food fills the stomach. All this costs $4.95, not exactly in the price league of our cardboard Mr. Habib, who on a whim pulls out $15,000 for china set.
Maybe you’ve met Mr. Habib and just don’t know it.
Perhaps the small brown man who buses your dishes at the corner coffee shop is Mr. Habib from Yemen. Maybe you thought he was Latin. That might be just fine with him. When you glance in his direction he doesn’t meet your eye. He is afraid to get to know Americans. He does not have a green card and does not want to take any chances.
Did you notice that he always seems to be in the restaurant, no matter what time you are there? Young Yemenis without papers have little choice but to work at below minimum wage, 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week bussing dishes or lifting boxes in supermarkets. They can survive only by living dormitory style, 10 young men to a tiny apartment.
This Mr. Habib lives for the day every 2 or 3 years when he can afford to go home with a big splash, bring presents for all. But then he must return to the loneliness of his dormitory and a life elbow deep in other people’s table scraps.
Mr. Habib may be the Lebanese merchant who runs the candy store where you buy your daily paper. He may be polite, courteous. His nationality may not seem important to you, and you man not ask.
And he may not volunteer it, not wanting to look for trouble. After all, it was just the other day (Sunday, Feb. 18) that he handed you the Daily News with the 3-inch high type reading: “NY Nuke threat: Probe reveals FBI fear of Iranian Terror Scheme.” When such headlines appear, every person who could be described as “Middle Eastern-Looking” feels the racist shock waves. Maybe you would stop talking to him, stop coming to his shop, or even physically attack him if you know he was Arab, he thinks.
Dena is eight years old. He is an active kid, always in motion. He met Mr. Habib in May 1991. So did his mom, Sara, who is my friend. They are not likely to forget.
Mr. Habib’s real name was Mr. Khader. He lost half his large family, his wife and all his daughters, when the Pentagon bombed the Al-Amriyah shelter in Baghdad during the Gulf War. Afterwards, Mr. Khader traveled to New York to testify at an international tribunal convened to investigate U.s. war crimes during that war.
Testimony by an American fact-finding team, contained in “War Crimes: A report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq” (Maisonneuve Press, Washington 1992) gives their impression of what happened to Mr. Khader’s community:
“We visited Al-Amriyah shelter that was destroyed by two bombs in February 1991. You could smell death inside and envision the terror and panic of people unable to get out. One side of the shelter was a school, on the other a supermarket. Estimates of those killed on the night it was bombed—the majority of them women and children—range as high as 1,500 people. Only 11 survived, many of them severely burned.
“All through the surrounding completely residential neighborhood banners were hung outside of homes listing family members who died. One banner named 17 dead. We met in their homes with surviving family members who seemed to be still in shock. Once school had resumed, some classes had lost half their students. Outside the shelter, women still mourned at the gates for loved ones whose bodies had never been recovered or identified.
“The Bush administration and media had said they thought this was a military bunker. Anyone spending five honest minutes in this neighborhood would know that this was untrue. Many expressed to us that this was a deliberate bombing to terrorize the population.”
I was there on Feb. 29, 1009, when Mr. Khader described the Al-Amriyah bombing before 1,000 people and media from around the world. In a calm and measured voice, he just told what happened, what he and his community lost. He was a gentle and dignified man with a private grief. The impact of his words were made all the more moving by his quiet demeanor.
Mr. Khader was swamped by international media as he stepped off the stage, but not, I noticed, by U.S. media. While Japanese and German networks climbed over each other to position their microphones, the major U.s. networks had not even come to the tribunal. Mr. Khader’s quote was not solicited by the New York Times.
Dena and his mom were close by. Sara, with Dena in tow, volunteered to assist Mr. Khader, to chauffer him, take him to receptions. But somehow the rules got switched. Mr. Khader became Sara’s assistant and 3-year-old Dena’s caregiver. When the three were together, Dena could most often be found in Mr. Khader’s arms. They became attached at the hip, so to speak.
When Sara drove Mr. Khader to the airport for his return trip, it was hard for him and Dena to part. Mr. Khader was returning to a country with food and water shortages, and clearly needed all his resources. Yet this Iraqi man insisted on buying Dena a gift. It was a toy Pan Am jet, which, purchased at the airport, cost ten times more than in a discount toy store.
Dena still has the plane, along with a post card, a letter, and warm memories of Mr. Khader. Sara still tells how one small boy helped ease the unspoken and unspeakable pain of one dignified man. And how this man, so generous in spirit, was able to accept comfort and healing from a child living under the very government that took his own children from him.
The story of Dena, Sara and Mr. Khader is the true story of a real Mr. Habib and his interaction with an American family. But no big-time producers have lined up to buy the film rights.
After Mr. Khader testified at the tribunal, he went home to others who would sit with his grief, and theirs. He went back to a community that knew his pain and would whisper “habib.”
In Arabic, “habib” is more than a name. It is a term of endearment—habib, ya habibi, ya habiba—beloved, sweetheart, dear friend, my child. Mr. Khader might have called Dena “habib.”
What happens if “habib” urns from an endearment into an embarrassing word in an odd, shameful language?
What if the truth is never told? What if it is ridiculed, demeaned or ignored? What if it is burned out of the head, turned to dust before the telling?
There is another Mr. Habib.
He was born in 1920 and grew up near Lynchberg, VA, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
He was named “taft” after the U.S. president. Underneath, of course, there was the Arab nickname—Toffy (Tofiq back in the snowy mountains of northern Lebanon).
His Lebanese father, a traveling salesman of dry goods, changed the family name (Chediac) because some people thought that when he introduced himself, he was saying “shit. So this boy’s last name became “Betries.”
Taft Betries’s father was away much of the time. Taft was raised mostly by his mother, a peasant woman back home, who spoke her love to him in Arabic. She cooked the old country foods and kept an adobe stove behind the house to bake flat bread.
Taft’s city of origin—Lynchberg, VA—also birthed the miscegenation laws forbidding intermarriage between white and Black people. Taft arrived on this earth shortly after bigots tried to deny Arab- and Greek—Americans the right to vote, claiming they were ‘not white.” Chinese people were not allowed to live in Taft’s city. They were driven out of town. There were just two kinds of people in Lynchberg, white and Black. How did Taft fit in?
This boy had no Arab community to give him strength. There was just one other Lebanese family in town. They called themselves the Thomases. I do not know their Arab name.
After World War II, when Taft was in his 20s, the Betrieses and the Thomases moved north to Brooklyn, NY. Not to the Arab community and around Atlantic Avenue. They settled in Sunset Park, among the Irish and the Italians. These two families were workers. They drove buses, hammered shoes.
Taft became a printer. He married a fair woman from the nearby Norwegian immigrant community and had a family. He seemed to get more joy and pride from his lighter kids, the ones who didn’t have hair like his.
When I knew Taft he was a tall, wiry man with café-au-lait skin, kinky hair and a huge hook of a nose. I am told that, like Dena, he was always moving as a child. But by the time I came to know him, that motion had ossified into a rigidity of jaw and limb.
His hands were large, well shaped and expressive. Printers ink outlined them, seeping under the nails, into the cuticles, highlighting every joint. I photographed those hands once, surprised that he let me, because he didn’t permit much interaction. Maybe I caught him in a rare good mood.
But I think his hands embarrassed him. He fared others might think the imbedded ink, his pride of occupation, was dirt. I say this because he had a habit of sitting with his arms folded, hands tucked under his arms and out of sight. Funny, I copied this position.
Taft Betries (Tofiq Chediac) was my father. A man of double identity. One was good and American, the other secret and Arab.
He wouldn’t speak that funny language of his childhood, and refused point black to teach it to his kids. “What do you want to know that for?”
When Arabs were ridiculed and demeaned in the papers or movies as stupid, sneaky, greedy, child-like, terrorist, or camel jockeys, Taft didn’t question it.
Than what was he?
This brown-skinned man with the kinky hair would sit across the dinner table from me and tell me, “I’m not Arab. Arabs are Black. We’re white. I’m Lebanese, not Arab.”
The ridicule, humiliation and hatred heaped on him as an Arab and a brown man were either denied or swallowed. But blows denied still bruise. And insults swallowed turn to bile eating the gut, overflowing and splashing out as rage. Each year left Taft Betries more silent, bitter and withdrawn.
My father dies at 57. They said it was a phlebitis that went to his heart, but I think it was more.
Racism kills in many ways.
There are the ovens and firing squads of the Nazis. There is the rope, torch and club of the Ku Klux Klan. There is the whistle and bang of the twin bombs dropped n Al-Amriyah.
But there is also the slow poisoning of the spirit, the deadly numbing of the heart, reducing the most profound and personal experiences to dirt, ash, or even worse, nothing at all.
Mr. Habib must have his voice. He is entitled to his truth. And others deserve to know what really happens to him.
Taft Betries, Tofiq Chediac, ya habibi, Mr. Habib—this telling is for you.
Posted 10/1/01
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