Dawlat Awad

Dawlat as a young woman posed by the sea.

I felt sure she’d live to one hundred; she was that indomitable. Dawlat Awad came from a family of long-lived people, one of eight siblings. At ninety-one, she was the last to go. We buried my wife’s mother on Tuesday next to her husband.

This will be short, mainly because I don’t know as much about her as I should. She was an extraordinarily private person. Except that she left teaching art in grade school, packed up her painting and knitting and left Egypt quite a while ago, accompanying her husband, bringing their two young children to America. This was well before our country decided we hated immigrants from “shithole” African countries–or at least were polite enough not to admit it. D was six and her brother nine, and their parents worked hard in their adopted country to make a comfortable middle class life for their family.

Back in 1990 thereabouts, D and I were friends just getting to know each other, running after work and talking nights after gym workouts. We shared stories about ourselves at a nearby Thai restaurant she introduced me to.

“You like Thai?”

“Dunno.”

“You like spice?”

Say no more.

D’s boyfriend had told her he’d join us, though he never did. His loss; we had a great conversation. The strongest memory I have of that evening was realizing though she came from such a different culture, a Middle Easterner when I’d known so few, in fundamental ways her values and attitudes felt strikingly familiar. Immigrants with strong family values–I couldn’t help but compare hers with my own family background, while gnawing Thai chili peppers sent from heaven.

In the aftermath of a fractured 16 years marriage, one sad year out after leaving my kids and their mother, I thought I’d reached the point where I was regaining balance living on my own. There’s a poem–of course... I have a theory (justification?) that before entering into a new relationship after a failed one, you might want to get comfortable with who you are–or at least come to terms with yourself. Jumping from one relationship straight into a next merely repeats the same mistakes. It may work for some, but that wasn’t how D and I got started.

As the months passed, I found myself connecting with this woman who knew who she was, was so different from myself, and yet she wasn’t. I remember asking her at one point, can you see yourself ever going back to being Coptic–the religion, the traditions–and she looked at me like I’d lost my marbles. OK, check that off the list.

This was before I’d ever met her mother, who still followed the rules of fasting according to the ancient calendar.

Not so long after we’d begun dating, D invited me to a family dinner at Chez Awad. Her mother was the real deal in a kitchen–and her father as well. Holy crap, I’d landed in paradise. Middle Eastern comfort food might be a way to describe it. I had learned my first cooking lessons from my grandmother, who fixed most of our meals when I was a kid, then married someone whose mother could burn coffee on a cold stove and tried passing it down, so either I learned to cook myself or ate at Pizza Hut nightly. Easy choice.

Early on, D and I were cooking our dinners together. Probably right from the start. D’s townhouse or my condo. She and her brother shared a nice place with a deck for the grill, and a CD player for Dire Straits’ “sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.”

D talked of how her parents lived in the time after Gamal Nasser had wrested the country from the British. Nasser represented the Muslim ascendancy after living as second class citizens in their own country. D’s family were Copts, one of the oldest Christian sects and distinctly a minority in the Arab world. That the British had educated and retained the Copts to help administer their empire probably didn’t help their reputation in the eyes of their Muslim neighbors after the imperialists bailed. Though from all I heard, Dawlat and Anwar fled Egypt less for being persecuted than seeking a better life and better futures for their children–even as they often reminisced about the Egypt of their youths.

Dawlat and Anwar left Egypt in 1969 for the promised land. The entire family landed in New Orleans where Dawlat’s husband, Anwar, had a job lined up. I’m told his youngest sister, already in the country, sponsored them.

By 1969, America as I knew it was collapsing into insanity: Kennedy, King, another Kennedy, and the Vietnam War like a theme song running the while. Southern Baptists distrusted the few Catholics in their midst, the Yanks thought Southerners were backward, California was, in the expression, the downhill coast toward which all the loose marbles rolled. And anyone of draft age was questioning why we were in Southeast Asia.

I tried imagining what it might have been for foreigners to find themselves in this miasma of a culture. Except that they had just left another miasma, so did it feel familiar? Though it took guts. If at forty-something, I’d have picked up my tent pegs and dragged my boys to, oh let’s say Patagonia, in my mind that would have been about as drastic. I hear the condors down that way pick your bones clean.

Did they both agree migrating from Egypt was a good idea? Did Dawlat, the faithful wife, dutifully follow her husband, Anwar, leaving her family behind? I’ve been asking myself the question for a while, though watching her over the years, my vote is she was at least half the reason they migrated. They needed to give up their lives and move so their children might thrive. Anwar was the dreamer and Dawlat the steadfast one–she reminded me of my grandmother. The woman was strong as steel.

Anwar had a job to go to every morning, confronting the usual people with dislikes of funny accents (unlike their own southern drawls), and Dawlat needed to make a home for her family. I wonder, did they ever visit the music venues down by the French Quarter?

I don’t know how much English either child had been taught in Egypt, particularly since this was D’s first school year. And the Louisiana education system wasn’t the world’s best, competing with Mississippi and South Carolina for last place in the country’s educational lottery. So D and her brother had to learn the language on the fly. Toward the end of her life, Dawlat would be carrying on a conversation only to finish a sentence or an expression in Arabic. D understood her mother’s Arabic, though she rarely herself spoke it. I once asked D to pronounce her family name, and she was laughing in tears while I failed miserably at working out the vowel sounds. Only two syllables and I failed at both.

I wondered whether it bothered Dawlat that her children became so thoroughly Americanized they left Egypt behind along with their Coptic culture. Of course, had D remained more the Egyptian daughter, she and I probably would have never connected any deeper than casual friends.

Sunday dinners at the Awads involved the television turned full volume to a favorite Middle Eastern soap opera. I first learned of the Egyptian singer, Umm Kulthum watching grainy recordings from the 60s of her singing. Umm Kulthum, known as the ‘Star of the East,’ had the greatest voice in Egypt. I had it on the best of authorities.

One Sunday D and I went for dinner. Previously, D had prepared them we were engaged to be married. She’d prepared her mother. In the old country, fathers reigned as lord and master in their own homes. The patriarch was even known to select suitable husbands for a daughter, though by then I knew D was having none of it–and I suspected her mother was complicit in resisting as well. Nevertheless, I was expected to ask for his approval–in truth we wanted both their blessings.

Anwar asked me to sit in the living room. It was as formal an interview as I’ve been through. While preparing dinner, Dawlat stepped out from the kitchen to listen. Anwar, the Egyptian patriarch, challenged me that night: why did you leave your first wife, and what about your children? The underlying question being why wouldn’t you leave my daughter in time? Fair enough. I answered truthfully, and as for my sons, they were simply part of my life and that wasn’t going to change. Something about the quiet way Dawlat listened to the proceedings, it seemed she’d already blessed us–or I hoped she had.

When Dawlat met my son, Ryan, he went about his usual way of charming her. He ate what he was served, and was happy for it. Ryan–did I know him? She didn’t hide the fact that his death was hard for her.

Dawlat was a professional seamstress when D and her brother were growing up. She made a living for a number of years working out of a storefront in the Del Ray section of Alexandria. D’s wedding dress was Dawlat’s own creation, beaded, embroidered and borrowing from different dress patterns. They chose the material together, a light cream silk. It was gorgeous, and nothing D could have ever found in a shop. She’s kept it preserved ever since.

Before the wedding - Dawlat helps my niece, Susan. photo by Cathy Summers, 1994

Ryan and his cousin, Susan photo by Cathy Summers, 1994

At the wedding, Dawlat, Dahlia and Anwar - photo by Cathy Summers, 1994

Once we married, and D moved into my condo, we both were concerned living so close to her parents. From Annandale to Springfield, cross over Little River Turnpike and you were there. D’s father liked keeping tabs on his family–but Dawlat wasn’t one to intrude. I suspect she kept him in check. In any case, they came only when invited–the perfect in-laws.

D’s mother called one Saturday. “Butz jumped the fence, and he’s still chained!” This was the husky we’d met across their backyard fence who’d run to the fence slapping paws on the top rail to say ‘hi’. He’d been living a lonely life in the backyard and now was chained to his doghouse. Since we were living in a two bedroom condo, in a brief discussion with Dawlat and Anwar, they agreed to keep the dog until we had a house with a yard of our own.

We met the neighbor, asked if the dog was happy, he said no, nor was his wife who was afraid of him–ridiculous, but there it was. Shortly after, we were given his lead, his harness and took him for a run. We ran three miles at most, and he was the consummate athlete, trotting confidently like he’d done this his whole life. That first year, Butz lived with Dawlat and Anwar, and we ran the boy as often as we ran ourselves.

As a starter dog for newbies, Butz was a model husky, overlooking the night he jumped their fence to roam the neighborhood to be picked up by a patrolling policeman who recognized him, opened the squad car’s back door and offered him a lift. No collar at the time, so he got a free ride to the pound. Thus we learned about huskies.

Afterwards, nights he slept inside with the Awads. Dawlat loved his companionship. Once we bought the house on Stoneybrae, he’d sleep on our back deck come sleet or snow, curled up on his chair, raising his head occasionally to see if we were still inside. He’d lived his life outside and never changed.

Butz was our first husky, and I credit Dawlat for bringing him–and the ones who came after–into our lives. Without them, life would have been more empty. And without her?

I would not have claimed to love Middle Eastern food prior–disinterested more accurately described my opinion until sitting at their small dining room table. They both cooked. Anwar loved to grill, and Dawlat did the rest. Grape leaves done with lamb, grape leaves with cabbage, equally laden with garlic, baked rockfish the same. She did a version of fried rice–rice with onion–you could eat as a meal by itself. Another was her spanakopita. Given the quantities she’d lay out, Sundays were filling. Oh, and her baklava…

But first, we need to address seafood. My spouse is a lover of all that comes from the sea. She was born into a family of seafood lovers. Don’t give the table a pile of steamed crabs unless everyone there is willing to work just as hard. She has memories of picnics at the beach with her mother–in Alexandria, the original city so named. And her birthplace.

Six years ago when we finally got to Athens, and after when we sailed to Istanbul, I was already so well cultured, Middle Eastern food-wise. Athens had seen better days and Istanbul was thriving. But the food was an education in both those ancient places.

Dawlat took up knitting again. I teased her no doubt, and she said ‘show me something and I’ll copy it.” I lent her a well-loved cable sweater bought in Ireland that I still wear when it’s frigid. I should frame both–the cream colored original and the blue denim version she knitted–with each and every different cable stitch replicated.

In this modern time of plague, the funeral chapel that normally held twice the number was set with only 20 chairs. The local Coptic bishop had known Dawlat and Anwar since he first came from Egypt; he offered the local Coptic church Dawlat and Anwar helped found. He’d officiated at her husband’s funeral. Given time, we could have so easily persuaded people scattered across the country to fly back, drive back, to come mourn with us. The legion who loved her would have come without hesitation. We asked them not to come–too risky for air travel. One makes these kinds of choices in the midst of a plague. Our own friends asked to come, and we said the same thing, “We’re alive and love you all.”

Human intelligence, along with our social abilities have been keys to the species’ success, yet we’re fools to be proud. More we should be grateful. Every night we should remember the ones who’ve gone before, those who brought us here. We stand because they once cared enough to help us learn to walk. The gift of life is only meant to be handed down, and we need to believe it is enough.

Dawlat’s funeral was modest, if with more flowers than the room could hold.

Dawlat A. Awad, March 13, 1929–September 3, 2020