When Doniece Derani sweeps the floor of the Gypsy House, a Capitol Hill cafe, the Tibetan mandala tattooed on her shoulder moves faster than usual with the rhythm of the red broom. These are not ordinary times.
“Everybody’s in Lebanon,” she says, cellphone cradled to her ear.
“My cousin, he sent his wife and little baby over there, and now they’re stuck.”
These days, many concerned friends call to ask if the Derani family in Lebanon is OK. Recently her mother, Nomie, answered the phone and launched into Arabic, explaining the situation to a friend from Morocco.
When Nomie and her husband, Jamel, immigrated to Colorado a few decades ago, they left their entire family behind in Lebanon: brothers, sisters, cousins, parents, grandparents.
Today, about 200 relatives still live in Tyre. Other family members, like Doniece’s cousins, who’d later immigrated to Canada, happened to be visiting relatives in Tyre when the bombs began to fall. On this Tuesday morning, as Doniece talks with her friends about the violence in the Middle East, the broom slows to a stop.
“Isn’t that horrible, dude?”
Local hipsters know Doniece and her twin sister, Dena, as the 31-year-old owners of the Gypsy House, a multicultural scene with a Rastafarian vibe, a spiritual crossroads of music, poetry and the ancient art of tarot.
They inherited tarot skills from their paternal grandmother, Hayat, the “bassara” of Tyre, a fortuneteller so famous that people traveled from distant cities just for the magic of her visions, which she inherited from her mother, Zanat.
But when Lebanon became international news, concerned Gypsy House denizens wanted the twins to peer into the past, divulging such details as where, exactly, their family lived.
“Tyre?” said one woman, clutching iced chai. “That’s in the Old Testament.”
Ancient Tyre was legendary for its seafarers, shrewd Phoenicians who – having discovered the North Star – were the first to use it to navigate oceans, creating trade colonies in Carthage, Spain, Sicily and Sardinia.
Another customer, drinking Turkish coffee at a yellow table decoupaged with poetry, stared at a newspaper photo of a Lebanese girl, bandaged and bloodied at a hospital in Tyre. At her side hovered Nomie, heart pounding.
“That’s my mother’s city,” explained Dena.
The injured child looks exactly like Nomie’s niece, visiting Tyre from Canada. For all they knew, it could be their relative; all efforts to phone family in Tyre had been unsuccessful.
Finally, Dena decided to instant message a man she met in Beirut, gave him her family’s phone number, and asked if he could get through inside Lebanon. Soon, he instant messaged good news: He’d made contact.
Eventually, Nomie was able to speak with her sister. Still, she remains anxious. Her family is not like the evacuating foreigners, or the thousands of Lebanese now refugees in Syria.
“They refuse to leave their homes,” she says.
When she makes fruit smoothies at the Gypsy House, she remembers her childhood when her family owned the only coffee shop in Tyre, and she made fruit drinks from apricots, apples and lemons from the orchards behind their villa.
She remembers sea breezes perfumed with orange blossoms, how everyone still spoke French and how no one locked their doors, ever.
“Still part of me is there,” she says.
Her worry manifests in tiny things, like putting too much honey in the baklava that she bakes for the cafe, because she’s focused on family in Tyre, like 98-year- old Amina, who drinks a daily cup of olive oil to keep skin smooth and joints free of arthritis.
Nomie came to Colorado as a young bride in an arranged marriage. Cousins always had married cousins in her wealthy family, an ancestral lineage dating centuries to the founding of Tyre.
“We’re Phoenicians,” says Dena with pride. “I don’t consider myself an Arab. I feel the Arabs conquered us.”
Mother and daughters are both traditional and untraditional, each in their own way.
Born Muslim, Nomie converted to Christianity and tried to educate her children in traditional Lebanese culture. With the twins, this didn’t work too well.
Raised Christian, middle-class in Morrison, they’re now metaphysical mystics who disavow monotheism, their spiritual views as eclectic as the wanderings of their Phoenician ancestors.
“Jah works in mysterious ways,” reads a Rastafarian sign in their cafe, which has a small turquoise bookcase crammed with everything from Buddhism to the Kabbalah, where statues of the Hindu god Ganesha mix with myriad Eygptian goddesses.
“We are all one collective soul,” says Dena, whose long dangly earrings bear the image of Bob Marley. “The whole universe is just one entity, and we are part of that. I just believe in one love. I don’t believe you’re Jewish or Muslim, because religion is manmade. It’s just there to separate us all.
“All religions say the same thing. Believe in the Most High, or the Great Spirit, as the Native Americans say. Love one another. If you hurt someone else, you’re just hurting yourself.”
When the twins get too upset by the violence, they seek refuge in the sacred caves of Idaho Springs, quieting their minds with ancient rituals. Like their Phoenician ancestors, they revere matriarchal spirituality, nature and the land.
“Lebanon is a magical place,” says Dena. “It’s not like it’s my country. It’s earth, point blank, period. It belongs to us all.”
Next week: A tale from a Jewish family in Denver with relatives in Israel.
Staff writer Colleen O’Connor can be reached at 303-820-1083 or at coconnor@denverpost.com.
