Mazmiz

A personal essay by Mona Ghuneim: "I credit the mezzeh on that humid summer evening in Cyprus to my eventual birth."

This essay appeared in our most recent issue, Volume 16.1.

My father perfected the art of nibbling. Mazmiz. “To nibble.” From the Arabic verb mazmiz comes mezzeh. Known in the West as an array of small plates of Mediterranean dips and dishes: appetizers, amuse-bouches, tapas. But to me, it’s just normal food. I credit the mezzeh on that humid summer evening in Cyprus to my eventual birth. To my siblings’ births before me and later to our children’s births and perhaps one day our children’s children’s births. The eternal mezzeh. Small shared plates of Mediterranean food items that can be eaten alone or as a selection of dishes before a main course or even as a main course. Traditionally, the mezzeh precedes a meal of grilled meats called mashawe. The mashawe sometimes arrives on skewers, pieces of chicken or lamb (at times beef but never pork) sandwiched between crisply grilled vegetables. But often, like that evening in Limassol when my mother and father first met at an alfresco table filled with their colleagues from the BBC, the mezzeh is enough. My mother was hungry. It was her first week working in the library of the BBC World Service satellite office. She'd stayed down in the basement, shy and wanting to make a good impression, skipping lunch most days. My father, a journalist who worked upstairs and would have had little reason to ever go to the basement library himself because there was always a worker who could do that for him, ate slowly, calmly, delicately savoring each bite. With the mezzeh, he drank arak, the Arabic word for an anise-flavored spirit he favored with a Mediterranean meal. My father had been in Cyprus longer than my mother by then, but he never quite mastered Greek like she had. In fact, she spoke both of the island’s languages.

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“Another arak,” my father asks the waiter as he comes by for a new drink order. My mother sits across from him, next to her girlfriend who invited her out for this particular evening. They wear colorful flowered dresses, fashionable in the early 1950s, and drink gin and tonics.

“It’s called ouzo here,” the waiter reminds my father in Greek. My mother smiles. She knows Greek well. A rescue ship waiting in the port of Smyrna took her grandmother, mother, and three of her mother’s siblings to Greece in 1922, saving them from the flames of genocide. My mother learned the language of the mythical gods from her mother. My father picked up Greek words and phrases during his time in Cyprus but forgets them later in Lebanon. But he does not forget my mother.

She has heard of this Palestinian man who came to Cyprus via Jordan after the Nakba and was making a name for himself as an Arabic-language broadcaster with BBC radio. His name had been mentioned in circles at work, but she hadn’t expected to meet him. If she is impressed, she does not say so. Instead, she looks at the mezzeh dishes before them on the table and asks him in Arabic: Ya oustaz, she says, calling him sir because she does not know him yet. "Are you going to finish that plate of hummus?”

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Hummus: At Whole Foods, I am bewildered by a line of “hummus” options that are not technically hummus. Black bean, roasted pepper, cauliflower, beets, corn, mushroom, zucchini, chocolate. Purees, pastes, pâtés, dips, sauces, and spreads. That’s what they are. Hummus is hummus. Chickpeas. Look it up in Al Mawrid, my father always told me when I didn’t know what an Arabic word meant. It didn’t seem to matter that I could not really read the script, so how was I to look it up? The Arabic-English dictionary was a puzzle I never mastered, but we became friends as my parents insisted Arabic be spoken at home, and words we didn’t know the meaning of could be found in Al Mawrad. Hummus is chickpea, the dictionary says. A distinct taste. But I inherently knew that.

Babaghannouj: By the time I get home from school, the smell has permeated every room of our house in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. Even the bathroom smells like burnt eggplant. I know my mother is making babaghannouj. It will be part of my father’s nightly ritual of nibbling on appetizers and sipping Scotch. Because arak is harder to come by now. The charred purple blob sits strategically atop the back burner of the gas stove. I can still smell the fire. Black flakes cover the stovetop. I am about eleven years old and don’t yet feel the need to compulsively wipe the flakes off and clean the surface. Olive oil, lemon, garlic, salt, a potato peeler, and a large white bowl with a wooden pestle that made the journey from Beirut in my mother’s suitcase to sit beside the stove. The accoutrements wait. The eggplant will be peeled, smushed, and mixed into a paste when my mother comes back from picking my brother up from detention. My mouth forms an evil little smile. Take that, I think, loving the idea of that vegetable being mashed to bits. It’s unbelievable how many ways eggplant can be eaten in the Middle East, and my mother has brought all the recipes with her in her head. I am certain that the leftover babaghannouj will be spread onto pita bread the next day as a sandwich for my lunch. My friends at school will have peanut butter and jelly or grilled cheese on squared bread. I’ll have the funny-smelling, strange-colored foreign paste on circular bread. My relationship with eggplant will be a long and complicated one. But eventually I will grow to love it the way my father did.