New book ‘Carryout’ illuminates life in a Midwestern Arab diaspora

Throughout literary history, it’s been said that you have to leave a place in order to truly see it — to understand what’s there, and what binds a community together. James Baldwin often said it of America. T.S. Eliot expressed the idea in his poetry. And Joan Didion explored California from a distance in her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 

For writer Hasan Dudar, it also turned out to be true. 

In 2011, Dudar had just moved across the country from Toledo, Ohio, to attend UC Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism. For the first time, he was feeling homesick. 

“Not being there, I was really missing the place,” he says. “I felt a kind of nostalgia that I hadn’t felt before.”

In his writing classes at Berkeley, both at the journalism school and in the English department, Dudar began looking to his own life for story ideas. He’d grown up in a close-knit community of Arab and Muslim immigrants and refugees — Lebanese, Palestinians, Syrians, Egyptians, Iraqis and their American-born families — who were building lives in Toledo’s working-class neighborhoods. The cousins and aunts and uncles who surrounded him, and the colorful cast of regulars who moved in and out of his parents’ corner store — or “carryout,” as it’s called in the Midwest — suddenly became more vivid. 

“I think that’s when I discovered my material,” he says. “It felt important.” 

After graduation, Dudar moved back to Toledo. He got a gig as a reporter at the daily newspaper The Toledo Blade, where he led a project documenting the city’s Arab communities. And he spent time with his dad, who’d been sick with cancer. As friends and family visited, stopping by the house for tea or Arabic coffee and a chat, Dudar took it all in. 

“I felt like I could see it all again with fresh eyes,” says Dudar. “Everyone was so sincere, so themselves — I’ve always found a lot of beauty in that. That time, being able to spend those last few years with my dad, was such a gift.” 

From that period came Dudar’s first book, Carryout. It’s a collection of linked stories that begins in the 1970s and follows the fictional Idilbi family over several decades as they struggle to make a home in Toledo. Most stories are narrated by one of the five family members: parents Salma, a Lebanese refugee fleeing the war in Beirut, and Ziad, a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, and their American-born children, Mustafa, Nawal and Walid.

Throughout, the characters are forced to find their way in a place that never feels completely their own. They all develop their own means of survival, of getting by and pushing against a society that can feel claustrophobic and hostile against the backdrop of 9/11 and the Iraq War. Nobody is perfect, or even wants to be. The characters feel real. 

Ziad is tight-lipped about his past, refusing to discuss it even when his youngest son, Walid, pleads with him to tell him something — anything — about who he was before his life in Toledo. A brooding poet and aspiring writer whose voice we hear most often, Walid avoids conflict and heartbreak, while his older brother, Mustafa, meets the world head-on, defiant and willing to get bruised along the way. Salma is practical and headstrong, prepared to set aside right and wrong to keep the family afloat. And Nawal, the only daughter, often feels left behind or ignored, longing for a friend or companion of her own.

“There’s this idea that you immigrate, things get better and you come of age and come into yourself,” says Dudar. “And I don’t know — is that even the truth for people who have been here all their lives, generation after generation?”

We meet other people, too: a young college student pushed by her cousin to remove the bump from her nose, feeling both disturbed and gratified as she gazes at her new face; a man from Ziad’s past who hints at Ziad’s heroism leading up to the Lebanese Civil War; an Arab widowed matriarch buying up properties around town and angling for the Idilbis’ store; and a self-righteous newspaper publisher who’s perhaps the loneliest character of all.

While Carryout draws on Dudar’s lifelong experience in Toledo — including long hours in his family’s store and drives with his “fearless explorer” mother to all corners of the city — it took more than a decade to write. Dudar wanted every story and character to feel genuine, asking himself: “Does this feel like a true action, a true word, a true line of dialogue?”

He often began with a vague image or feeling of life in Toledo, then waited for the rest of the story to emerge. As details came into focus, he built the story around them, always letting the characters lead the way. “I was interested in what kind of life and personalities come from these circumstances,” says Dudar. “I just went with whatever felt true and sincere to these characters.”  

In seeing the characters through both their own narration and others’ perspectives, their portraits become multidimensional, like a mosaic that catches light differently from every angle.

“I like the idea of people telling other people’s stories, because it’s natural, it’s how life is,” Dudar says. “We can’t get inside someone else’s head, but they can still leave an impression on us. In a community like that, somebody might have a really good opinion about a person and another might have a completely different one, and both may be true.”

At its core, Carryout is about home — the homes that are left behind and the new ones that are built from scratch. Early in the book, when Ziad decides that Toledo is where he and Salma should settle, he thinks with a kind of melancholy resolve, “… we’d finally mark our borders and agree it was time to make a life, even if it wasn’t the one we had hoped for.” From there, the question of home lingers: Was this finally their home, or would it always feel, in some sense, temporary?

“These characters are definitely searching for the answer,” says Dudar, “and I’m not sure they find it, to be honest.”

In the end, no one’s storyline is tied in a bow; each remains opaque and incomplete. Ziad is growing sicker with cancer, and Walid feels their time running out. He continues to probe about his father’s past, hoping that by knowing more about his father, he’ll know more about himself. But Ziad doesn’t see the value in it. Instead, he’s determined to enjoy the few moments he has left.

As Ziad sits with Walid on a sunny afternoon, eating a Chick-fil-A sandwich, he relishes every bite with a quiet reverence. He looks up, past his son, and asks in the book’s final line: “Is that enough? Or do you want more?”