The Story of Chadi: From Teenage Jihadist to Single Gay Dad -- Rant -N- Rave "UNCENSORED" Current Events Forum

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Date Posted: 06:04:14 10/20/21 Wed
Author: Irish Jim
Subject:

The Story of Chadi: From Teenage Jihadist to Single Gay Dad
In reply to: Rateye 's message, "Look Irish Jim, Listen up" on 19:03:06 10/19/21 Tue

$13 for this crap? How did you run across this Rateye?

Summer 2015. I’m on the seafront of Arabia at dusk, for the first time in - how long? Thirty years? A little more. In another life, my father used to bring me here. He would brood at the sea, staring furiously out across the Persian Gulf while his confused young son snuck nervous glances at him, desperate not to become the focus of his anger. I didn’t cry then, but I’m crying now behind these sunglasses, and I’m desperate again, but only to conceal my sadness from my own child. She is standing nearby, quiet and patient, perhaps idly wondering why I’ve brought her to this quiet corner of the Arab world in the warm, fading light. Maybe she’s wondering why I scrambled for my dark glasses and why I’ve been looking away from her for so long. Not many people are walking the promenade in the early evening. And I suspect that if a million people wandered past and glanced at us, and each took a different guess at who we are and what we are doing here, probably none of them would get it right. Where is the girl’s mother? Well, she doesn’t exactly have one - not in the conventional sense. Did my wife leave us? Did she die? No. No wife and none of those things happened. There’s just us. Where are we from? I look Mediterranean, I know. Not terribly Arabic. But again, it’s a hard question. I could say Middle Eastern, the land of my parents, where I spent my adolescence. I endured long, lonely years here in the Gulf, though I feel like a stranger here now. My best answer is that we’re from London, the place where I finally became myself. Ask my daughter, and even though she holds an American passport, she’ll agree - London is definitely our home. Every story nowadays is a ‘journey’: a journey to wealth or fame or joy; a journey out of poverty or obscurity or pain. Whether or not all those tales truly fit the term, a journey is surely the most accurate description for a story like mine. Plot it on a map: it begins in booming West Africa, then lurches unhappily in Arabia and to war-torn Lebanon. It lingers through several tense, dark years in the Hezbollah heartlands, when somehow martyrdom seemed like my best and likeliest move. And then the action moves to rainy Stirling, then mixed-up East London, with an unlikely detour to glorious Roanoke in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Yes, it’s definitely been a journey. And that’s even before you look at the real borders I’ve crossed - the ones between religion and unbelief, the culture of east and west, forbidden sexuality and the natural, liberated kind. Put that all together with the title of this book and you’ll surely begin to get a sense of the background from which I emerged and the life I finally found. I’ve come through war and intolerance and brutality; I’ve hated my very existence and toyed with the idea of death - to myself and, unbelievably, to others; I’ve crossed the world just to become who I am and find what I needed. And often, I had to plot my own route where there were no footprints to follow. Here, briefly distracted from the great joy of my life by memories of old nightmares, I suddenly realise I’m murmuring advice to the little boy I once was as if without my help he still might not make it. Certainly, it was a miracle that he did. At times like this, I can scarcely believe it myself.

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How you ask ?? -- Rateye, 12:34:15 10/20/21 Wed

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