2018

Two Poems by Lina Al-Sharif

Relationship Goals

When on good terms,
my parents debated the prices
of fruits and vegetables.
Love letters were sent in praise
of my father’s excellent choice of
mint leaves and parsley.
Fights were coded in unsavory criticism
of my mum’s punctured marrows and uneconomical
purchases of hard avocados and sour strawberries.
Reconciliations were held over a festive plate
of khobiza with nestling red chilies and puffy bread
after all, they know their onions.

Ghazal: My Mother

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I hold no land dearer than the one of my mother

I roam faraway countries and pray to find a home
but I keep coming back to the map given to me by my mother

I wear the perfume of burnt orange rind and read the future in coal
I whisper my prayer, scream at my children; I become my mother

I close my eyes and hide thinking of running away
my daughter asks why the refugee boy is crying “where’s my mother?”
I buy parsley I never use, cancel plans I never wanted to make
I forget recipes and repeat “curse me” as said by my mother

I chase a few poems after everyone goes to bed
pretend there’s more to me than being a mother
but what’s more than being like my mother?

Outta Here By Patty Somlo

The first time the officer told the boy to drop the bat, the boy began to walk forward. He was just under five feet tall, so the bat may have looked longer than it would have appeared, if held by a boy of greater height. The boy, people in the neighborhood would later comment, had dreamed of becoming a baseball player.

By the second time the officer ordered the boy to drop the bat, the boy had narrowed the distance between them. The officer wasn’t aware that the late afternoon sun had started shooting rays directly into the boy’s dark brown eyes. Traffic had grown heavy on Seventeenth Street, two blocks south of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, where the boy stood clutching his bat in a field infested with weeds and discarded soiled napkins and soda cups, outside an abandoned low-income housing project. The racket caused by cars and trucks passing made it hard for the boy to hear what the officer had been shouting. When the boy looked toward the officer, the bright glare from the sun made his eyes ache and tear, forcing him to drop his gaze.

Still, the boy continued moving toward the officer. Folks in the neighborhood would later claim that even though he had some disabilities – or “challenges,” as some preferred to say – the kid was one of the friendliest and most sociable kids many had ever met. His mother worried about him for all the obvious reasons a parent fears for a child, and especially a special needs kid, but also because he had never learned to keep his distance from strangers, who might do him harm.

The third time the officer ordered the boy to drop the bat, the boy believed he had gotten close enough to hit the ball. He turned slightly to stand sideways and moved his feet eight or so inches apart, the way Billy “the Bomber” Boggs, the famous baseball player who’d grown up in the neighborhood and returned there to live after he retired from the game, showed him several times.

As he lifted the bat, the boy heard a loud cracking sound. No one saw what happened before or after that sound, but a second and third cracking sound followed. The boy was bleeding by then, so heavily it was impossible to see where the blood was coming from, and his short, somewhat pudgy body had fallen, and lay curled practically in the fetal position on the ground.

***
The shooting of DaVon Richards rocked the neighborhood, a principally African American enclave whose tree-lined residential streets fanned out east and west from MLK Boulevard. DaVon Richards, as everyone in the neighborhood knew, could not have hurt a fly. He’d been born fourteen years before with what his mother described as a sweetness almost impossible not to love. His intellectual challenges became more and more apparent as time went on. At first when DaVon went to school, some of the kids, usually boys, made fun of him. In those days, everybody referred to DaVon as slow. But DaVon didn’t realize that he was being bullied and before long, the toughest kids began to look out for him.
In the first hours and days after the white police officer shot and killed DaVon Richards, firing three times, folks in the neighborhood felt numb. The police department claimed that DaVon, a black, intellectually challenged fourteen-year-old, had threatened the officer with a bat that could be used as a weapon. A memorial was started for DaVon with flowers, a handful of toys, including metal trucks, and several baseball gloves. Family, friends and people who lived in the neighborhood gathered in the weedy and trash-strewn field where DaVon had been shot. The media dutifully arrived, along with the mayor, city councilors and the area’s congressional representative. Baptist minister Calvin Butler set up a stage, podium, microphone and sound system, then invited people to come up and share what they remembered about DaVon.

Ali Mansour, who owned the neighborhood’s one convenience store, stood up first. People were surprised to see Mr. Ali, as the older residents called him, crying.

“DaVon came to my store every day,” Ali began, speaking haltingly because he couldn’t stop crying. “He wanted to learn how to use the register, so I showed him.”

Surprisingly, Ali then started to laugh.

“I must have showed him a hundred times,” he said, shaking his head and smiling. “He couldn’t remember how to do it. But he always wanted me to show him, so he could learn again.”

Ali stepped away from the microphone to wipe his eyes. He blew his nose with a light blue handkerchief pulled out of his pocket and then came back to the podium, leaning toward the microphone and saying he was sorry. He stopped crying long enough to explain, “DaVon wanted to learn because he said he planned to open his own store one day.”
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The tributes went on throughout the afternoon and into the night. As speaker after speaker spoke about the loving boy, who unlike most people never complained, got depressed or had a bad word to say about anybody, something became clear to Billy Boggs. In middle age and carrying a hundred pounds more weight than when he’d gone almost overnight from being a poor black kid to a major league, high-salaried baseball player, Billy had long ago lost contact with his two grown kids. He had barely known them when they were growing up because he’d focused nearly all his time and attention on baseball.

A few years back, Billy had started spending time with DaVon, his mother being a good friend and DaVon not having a father around. Sometimes, Billy thought of DaVon as his adopted son. He’d taught DaVon to throw and catch, run and hit the ball. The bat DaVon had been holding at the time of the shooting and failed to drop had been a present from Billy for DaVon’s thirteenth birthday.

The last speaker stepped down. Without thinking, Billy began making his way to the podium. He didn’t have a clue what he wanted to say, but he slid the microphone up to his height and tapped the end to see if it was working.

He looked out at the crowd. The faces were black and brown, white and Asian. So many people had congregated in the field that folks were now spilling out onto the sidewalks. Some even stood across the street.

Billy still didn’t know what he was going to say, but he continued to study the crowd. Then he let himself picture DaVon in his mind, wearing the Giants jersey Billy had given him, the one that had started to get too small.

He could see DaVon, concentrating so hard his forehead had wrinkled up. And then he remembered the thing DaVon nearly always did, whenever Billy sailed an underhanded pitch towards him. Just before DaVon stepped his right foot forward and swung the bat, he mimicked what the play-by-play broadcasters shouted when a ball was hit out of the park. “It’s outta here,” DaVon loved to yell.

The sun had set by the time Billy told that story to the crowd. He let them know that DaVon assumed he would get a home run every time he hit the ball. Billy asked the crowd if they had any idea what knowing DaVon had taught him. Following a few murmured and several shouted responses like, “Love, man,” and “Joy,” Billy answered, “No. It was hope. DaVon Richards taught me about hope.”
***
It only took two weeks for Billy Boggs to raise enough money to build the diamond and buy enough bats, gloves, shoes and uniforms for all the neighborhood kids that wanted to play ball. The city council, with unprecedented speed, helped push through the required permits to have the housing project torn down and that vacant, weedy lot readied to become a new city park.

Billy recruited several police officers to coach in their off-duty hours. He wasn’t naïve enough to believe, as some folks thought, that the DaVon Richards Park and the MLK Bombers would change the world, or even do all that much to address the deep-seated issues that ended up stifling and snuffing out too many young lives.

But as he prepared to swing the bat for the pitch to commemorate the start of the Bombers’ first season and the opening of DaVon Richards Park, Billy Boggs smiled. The bat kissed the ball and Billy watched it sail, over the diamond, past the outfield and beyond.

Billy heard a familiar voice shout, “It’s outta here.” He used the back of his hand to wipe the tears away from the corners of his eyes. Then he looked up, imagining that the ball had just bounced and then stopped on the rough surface of a large and blindingly radiant star.

I Had Never Seen a Dead Man Before By Hedy Habra

Until my father-in-law died that summer in Tucson, Arizona

He seemed to sleep
in his suit and tie,
expressionless,
the color of death freezing
his shrunken features,
almost youthful in his eighties
as if an artist’s pencil
performed a final facelift,
inverting lines
for a last farewell.

I knelt on the velvet
rest in prayer.
thinking of the fig tree
we once planted together,
of how he always
saved the juiciest fig
for me: “Here,” he’d say
“this one’s from your tree…
see how well I care for it?”

∞ ∞

I felt a pang in my chest,
leapt years and years back
to a January morning: a young
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Lower Paradise Road by Sahar Mustfah

She refused to exit the car that her son had borrowed from his white roommate. She was convinced they both smoked marijuana. One year and she barely recognized him with his hair grown out and jeans that hung below his waist.

An apartment on Lower Paradise Road seemed a less auspicious place to start over.

“Yamma, it’s only a street name,” her son said in his loosely slipping Arabic. In one hand, he clutched the classified ads, thick red circles bleeding through the page. It was full of bold-faced words and acronyms she did not understand. In his other hand, he thumbed the screen of his mobile.

The bombing had gutted her school building, her classroom unrecognizable: no traces of desks, or the painted sea mural, or her books, or their laughter. Nothing left to imagine what it had once been.

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Her son leaned against her side of the car and tapped on the windshield with the car key. She could sit in the same spot for hours—she had remained hunched in a bedroom closet for days when the artillery began. But now she would surrender to her impatient son. She adjusted her shayla and unlocked her door.

Upper or Lower Paradise Road. Surely there was some place for her in between.

Untitled by Jenna Hamed

Traditions in carry-on bags/ carried on backs/ now become furnishings/ with unfingered holybooks/ failed wallhangings/ in 1 of 2-familyhome’s livingrooms/

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Fragments of Libya By Nour Naas

The air is hot and heavy when you walk out of the plane and you know that you are finally home because you should not be smelling cigarettes this deep inside the airport, but you do. The windows are big and the sun is pouring inside and it looks like no one ever sweeps the tile floors because what would even be the point? Everyone is carrying sand between their toes through and through. The employees are all wearing sandals, even the ones with guns, and you realize that you have never actually been to an airport like this. You realize that there is only one place that can feel like home, and it is right here, in this liminal space where we are always parting and uniting and making promises and breaking them again and again and again. The security officers and the men at the information desk are slumped against the walls, blowing smoke into the faces of men, women, and children. No one seems to mind it but us. It is our first time back in three years, and our first time back after the civil war, and we are directed into an office where three men are standing in either corner, staring us all up and down. I think it is because we have American passports, that we are brought in for questioning. Mama already told us not to say anything before we even landed. Our accents would give too much away, and we do not know what that would mean for us. So Mama talks, and Jalal and I just stand there and listen. The country has been rattling with violence since the war began, and there are signs of it before we are even outside of the compound. Plainclothes security officers have AKs slung across their shoulders, and there are bullet piercings on the off-white walls and the ceilings. The sense is different now, but it never stops feeling like home. When we head outside, I catch a boy about my age smiling at me, and I look away, but I must have smiled, too. Khali picked us up from the airport and drove us home to Hay al Andalus. On the way, we do not drive past one block without passing a revolutionary mural — murals reminiscent of Omar al Mukhtar, of Libyan resistance against Italian colonialism. In others, Gaddafi’s face is quashed under a boot; red, black, and green fill in quotes in calligraphic script by resistance leaders: we do not surrender, we win or we die. There is even a mural of Che Guevara near the Internet cafe we begin to frequent when the cable at home grows too unreliable for what we are used to.

Hnena and Jdeda are home and Mama is crying again, kissing their hands and their foreheads and caressing their heads, holding them like she is afraid she will never see them again once she leaves, and my heart is so full and it feels like I made it to the place that I have aimlessly been running toward for so long. By some stroke of luck, I am finally home. I have a place here and it is bizarre in the most beautiful way. This agonizing absence of homeland, followed by return, makes me want to feel and smell and hear everything and so I take off my shoes and let my feet sweep the hot sand. I kiss Hnena and Jdeda and I kiss my uncles and smell Khali’s cologne that he probably bought in Rome and I am tickled by their rough mustache against my cheek and I kiss my aunties and we hold each other for a long, long time, until they feel like they have compensated for all the years they were exiled from my life when I am in America. I run up the four flights of stairs with the black railings until I am finally opening the door to get out again and I see the city, a city that looks like everything and everyone was made from the earth. There are construction workers a few houses down, and I am with Sijoud when they wave in our direction and smile. We smile back and return our salutations. I do not feel like I have been away for all this time. It feels like these men working the house, like Hnena and Jdeda, like the boy from the matar, have been holding this story for me, just waiting for my return. I want to stay here forever. I beckon to Sijoud to go for a walk with me, and she seems as excited as I am. We go back downstairs and beg our mothers to let us go out until they finally do. We are only allowed to walk around the block once, then we have to go back inside. Aunty told Mama that a lot of girls have been getting kidnapped since the war ended. There are even gunshots and they come at random times of the day, so I am already grateful for this walk and no one is out now in the neighborhood but I get happy when I see somebody because I am home I am home I am home. And no one is sitting on the block, waiting for me to walk by to ask me where I’m from. Everyone already knows. My hair is curly and frizzy and the humidity is making it bigger like it is a flower that is blooming and that is when one of the men on the street calls me shafshoofa, but I do not mind. I do not even know what it means until my cousin laughs and fills me in.

I love everyone here like we are all family. This is exactly what it feels like. I am imagining my life with him and him and her and them and us and I want Mama to stay here. I want her to tell us that we are not coming back to America. She is talking about the possibility of this happening, and I am already talking about cutting up my passport, of throwing it into the sea. Mama tells me not to make jokes about that. The country is too unreliable, she says. We could be stuck here forever. But I do not miss America. Everything I miss, everything I have missed, I am finally here for. Sammy’s wedding is going to be at the end of August and this is the first family wedding I am going to be here to go to.

I am looking at Khaltu Sharifa and her body is moving like someone is shaking her in a fit of rage. She is not able to drink from her small glass of water without spilling the half of it first, and that is when Mama weeps. Mama told me stories about Khaltu, stories that I have a hard time picturing in my head because the only picture I have is the one that is in front of me now. Who was she before? There is a piano in her house and it feels strange to see this, but I am not sure why. Khaltu has dozens and dozens and dozens of books that decorate the walls of the house. My favorite thing, though, is the painting of Omar al Mukhtar right by the doorway to the living room. Khaltu’s husband left her and her kids. I do not know the whole story, but it makes me sad because Khaltu did not deserve to be left. I stare at her, trying not to stare too long, trying not to stare in the wrong sort of way. Khaltu tells me she loves me for the first time, and my heart goes in a circle. I do not know what or who I am or why or how she loves me, but I am flattered and I want to tell her that I love her, too, but for some reason I do not think that she will believe me. I am spending most of my time there talking to her caretaker, Zaytouneh. She is from Somalia and she speaks English, so we talk. And I ask her lots of questions and we only stop our conversation when it is time for salatul maghrib. Zaytouneh tells me that she is trying to get to Europe. She is trying, but what she really wants is to find her way to America. She says, Libya is not my final destination.
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We leave Khaltu’s house and the sun is so close that it is beating our backs. I look out in the distance because I see water and I think I see rocks too but I’m not sure. Mama laughed the kind of way that you do when you are sad. They are not rocks, it is trash that people dumped on the rocks, sitting for the water to pick it up tonight. A lot of things are different here but it is home. And I am learning how to love it in a different way because you just cannot love Libya in the same way that you did before the war happened, because people changed, the country changed, the landscape changed. I am falling asleep to the sounds of bullets but the gunshots and the fighting is happening so routinely these days that it is impossible for me to be afraid anymore. Hada al haya.
I am sitting on the beach in Khoms biting into the peaches that I washed in the ocean. I am standing tall on the rooftop breathing in the air of Hay al Andalus. I am buying that pink-beige mumtaz brand ice cream from the guy next door and my skin is all sweat and the heat is making it taste better than it probably actually is. I am sitting in al dar al arabiyyeh eating kusksi with usurti and nothing else matters. There is no war, no murder, no refugee camps, no kalashnikovs, no gangs, beyond this moment.

I am here.
We are home.

A Hostile World By Jihan Shaarawi

Part 1: The Eternal Dupes

The Boy’s father sat on his small wicker chair staring at the newspaper that was brought from the capital. The Boy’s parents managed to send The Brother to the capital to join the public university. Every weekend, The Brother took a bus back to the village with tales of the soon-to-be revolution. That day, The Brother brought back news of The Monarch’s supposed diplomatic trip to England where he was spotted spending his days with European models at high-end bars.

“He is spending the people’s money on alcohol and whores! He should be hung in the streets!”

The Father was known in the village for his short temper and quick tongue. A year earlier, The Father told his employer that he was a “slave driving son of a bitch who should go back to England and fuck that sheep that he calls a wife.” The Father disappeared shortly after the incident and was returned, two months later, bloodied, boney, pale, and thrown amongst his neighbor’s apricot trees. After the incident, The Father only spoke his mind at home and sent his children to fight his battles.

When rumors began to spread in the village that the CIA had entered the country in support of the Liberation Officers, The Boy was sent to a nearby village where it was said that there lived a man who taught English to children. On his first day of English class, The Boy’s mother dressed him in his finest clothes, a cotton button down shirt with holes, dress pants that had to be rolled up at the ankles, and leather shoes that flapped when he walked. The Boy’s father licked his palm and used the saliva to contain The Boy’s frizzy curls.

“Listen to me! You speak to your teacher respectfully! Don’t stare at walls when he speaks! Don’t pick your nose! Remember not to mention why you’re really there. Say you want to learn English so you can work on one of the British farms. Don’t you dare mention the CIA!”

The Boy’s mother carefully tucked in his shirt.

“Baba? What’s CIA?”

His father struck him so quickly it almost escaped his mother’s eyes.

“He has the brains of a donkey. You bore me a donkey!”

“Enough! What will the Sheikh think if you bring him a bruised boy?”

The Boy’s mother splashed cold water on his face in an attempt to soothe the blow.

“Stop crying! You’re not a baby anymore!”

They paid The Neighbor 5 silver coins to take The Boy to the next village. The Boy sat on his neighbor’s cart (pulled by a small, weak, donkey) amidst the crates of apricots. Every now and then, when The Neighbor wasn’t looking, he took one and stuffed it in his pockets. It took forty-five minutes to arrive to the village and by then his pockets bulged at odd angles. This village looked identical to The Boy’s village except for the long line of young boys at one of the huts.

“That’s hut,” The Neighbor pointed towards the assembly of boys, “I’ll be back in the afternoon to take you home.”
Every weekday, The Boy travelled to the neighboring village for his English lessons. His malleable brain picked up the language quickly and he was soon teaching his younger sisters. The Father requested The Brother to bring back English newspapers from the capital. They all huddled around The Boy as he read each word carefully. He often made up the sound of a word if he hadn’t learned it yet.

Upon The Monarch’s return from England a huge demonstration was held in front of the palace. The Father decided that there couldn’t be a better time for a family vacation; so they packed some clothes and headed to the capital. They all stayed in the room that The Brother rented with another young man from their village. The Brother was studying engineering at the public university and was poised to be top of his class. He spent most of his days studying in a corner of the room. Every time The Boy passed by him, he glanced at the paper to see what his brother was studying. It was on the second day that The Boy realized that it wasn’t equations that The Brother was scribbling down; he was writing poetry. The Boy waited until The Brother fell asleep to steal the sheets of paper. The next morning he presented the papers to his father.

“I pay good money to have you study in the capital and you spend your days writing poetry? Your comrades are busy protesting and risking their lives and you’re sitting in this room writing rhymes! This is not the time! You know who writes poetry? Rich Europeans. Because their lives are perfect so they have to make up something to keep it interesting. Liberate your country first and then you write poetry.”

The Father lit a match and held it to the papers. In silence, the family watched the pages burn. When the flames had engulfed every word, the father led everyone to get ready for liberation. They needed to be at the square in time to see it all. When they reached the square, The Boy’s father lifted him onto his shoulders.. Crowds of people swarmed out of every side street and with each step it became harder to move. Scattered amongst the crowd were British soldiers on horses. They held rifles in plain sight—as a message to the masses. Students stood in the frontlines of different groups as they spilled in from the streets that snaked into the square. They left The Mother at home with the sisters; a protest was no place for the feminine. The Brother hadn’t spoken a word since his father burned all the pages of poetry. The Father insisted that burning the poetry would be a good opportunity to transition into manhood. He leaned on The Brother’s shoulder as he walked, using him as a cane. He screamed of the injustices done to him in captivity. The Boy had never seen his father so happy. The boys attempted to keep up with the slogans:
“Monarch Monarch of our hearts! May your kingdom fall apart!”
“Our bread is stale, our lives are cheap, go to hell you stupid sheep!”

On the ride back to the village The Boy’s father could not contain his excitement. As each new passenger entered the bus, he retold his story of protest. Some listened in amazement; most ignored him.
“Be careful,” the mother whispered, “you never know who these people are. We can’t afford to lose you again.”
The Father couldn’t care less and for three hours he repeated his story. The father continued his political musing throughout the ride home, on the walk from the bus to the village, yelled them at all his neighbors, and finally through dinner, and the ritualistic post-dinner tea with milk.
“You know, I feel as though this time the British will go back to that hole they call The West!”
The Mother accompanied tea with her nightly card readings. The hearts symbolized love and marriage, clubs were money, diamonds were family and home, and spades symbolized career. The Boy sat in front of his mother waiting for his future to be revealed.

“Split the cards with your left hand”
The Father sat on his chair, slurping his tea.
“You know, they say that the CIA pays two hundred pounds a month for interpreters! Two hundred! Can you imagine?!”
The card formation was made up of 2 spades and 3 clubs. The Mother interrupted The Father’s rambling:
“There will be much change in your family life. This change will show you the path to your career.”
“He will become a politician for the government of tomorrow!”
The Boy gave all his attention to his mother. She stopped her reading and smiled, “my brave boy, my beautiful prince, darling love of my life, I could read you the rest but it doesn’t matter. We all know you will be great. Go to sleep.”

That night there was three short knocks on the door, barely audible. The Mother was a light sleeper and they woke her instantly. She shook her husband awake.

“Someone is knocking on the door.”

The Father jolted awake.

“What time is it?”

He fumbled through his small pile of possessions until he found his watch; 1:45 am. The knocking picked up energy.

“Do you think it’s the officers? Do you think one of the people on the bus said something? Why don’t you ever stay quiet? These children need you!”

“Shut up woman. If they were the officers they wouldn’t need to knock.”
The father slipped on a robe and opened the door. The outside darkness covered the face of the visitor. The father’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and he made out the figure of a young student, an acquaintance of The Brother. His shirt was covered in dried blood.

The Boy woke up two minutes before the knock on the door. He felt a chill from the open window and it woke him. When he heard his parent’s frantic voices he crawled on his belly to where they sat. His mother held her head in her hands as she slid slowly to the ground. The student, whom he recognized from the demonstration, attempted to sip the cup of tea but his unsteady hands wouldn’t allow it. His father was stoic. The Boy watched The Father rise out of the chair, walk towards the open door, and out to the fields. The Boy abandoned his hiding place and ran after him. No one in the room noticed his presence. The Boy used his arms to protect himself from the cold as he observed his father, on his knees beside the wall separating his field from the neighbors. Rotten apricots fallen from the neighboring trees surrounded him. His father picked them up one by one and threw them as far as he could. Threw them towards the British plantation; threw them towards the capital.

Theme 2: Conspiracy

“Bend down and spread your cheeks”

The Lieutenant flipped the switch of his flashlight and aimed the light into the exposed anuses of the prospective cadets. The building was large and discolored. The plot of land once housed the most loyal of The Monarch’s followers, but upon The Liberator’s command it was torn down and turned into The Military Academy. In the eight years since The Monarch was overthrown, The Academy doubled in applications. The Liberator filled the youth with the hope of nationalism.

After his brother’s death, The Boy soon decided that he would abandon his father’s dreams of CIA and become The Cadet. His father died shortly after The Brother’s death. The people in the village whispered that, because of his inability to deal with the older brother’s death, he slowly killed himself by slipping poison into his own tea every night.

“Died of a broken heart,” his mother always said, followed with a sigh.

When he announced his decision to become a Cadet he was met with the approval of all but his mother.

“Nationalism is a tricky disease, my son.”

The Mother’s words couldn’t sway him. He made the decision the day his father labored through his last breath.

“Stand straight and put your pants back on.”

The Cadet did as he was told without hesitation. The Lieutenant walked in front of the line of recruits.

“If you’ve made it this far that means you are now Cadets in the esteemed Academy. Our Liberator tore down the symbols of oppression that plagued our beautiful country and built strong, new, and reliable walls. You are the generation who will keep our Liberator’s vision alive through the decades. In your hands lies the hope of the future. Never again will we let our nation fall into the hands of an oppressor and never again will we remain silent.”
The Lieutenant stopped in front of The Cadet.

“Lift your arms over your head.”
The Cadet did as he was told.
“You’re skinny. What does your father do?”
“He’s dead, sir.”
“What did he do before he died?”
“He was a farmer, sir.”
“Very good. Very good. Farmers are the souls of our nation. How did he die?”
“He died of a broken heart after the oppressors killed my brothers.”
“Yes. Tragic. Why are you here Cadet?
“To make sure the population of this wonderful nation is never oppressed again.”
“Perfect. I like your energy.”
The Cadet’s new routine woke him at 6:00 am. They ran for one hour, followed by two hours of standing in formation. Those who fainted or complained of the heat were forced to run for another hour. The Cadet never complained of the heat. The Lieutenant attributed it to his pure farmer blood. After formation, they were served breakfast. Usually beans but sometimes in winter they were given lentil soup. This was followed by General Command and Staff courses. They were served dinner at 7pm and given a free hour. At 8 pm all Cadets were expected to be in their bunks.
It was during the free hour between dinner and bunk time that The Cadet developed a new method of entertainment for his comrades. Using his mother’s technique of card reading, he would predict his fellow cadet’s futures. One evening The Cadet’s bunkmate, decided to test the truthfulness of The Cadet’s skills. The Cadet revealed a future full of love for his bunkmate.

“Alright, I’m slightly impressed. But if you really are as good as you say tell me what my girlfriend’s name is.”
The bunkmate was unaware that he had a tendency to whisper her name in his sleep.
The Cadet paused for moment, for dramatic effect and then spoke her name. This caused a stir in The Cadet’s unit and he soon became known as the master of cards. It was a few days later when one of The Lieutenant’s lower ranking officers came for him.

“Where is the cadet with the cards?!”

All fingers lead to The Cadet.
“Follow me, The Lieutenant wants to see you. ”
The Cadet raced through all the scenarios in his head. Since the ouster of The Monarch, gambling had been declared illegal. Perhaps, The Lieutenant thought he was encouraging the rise of gambling, thus calling for the disrespect and—ultimately—the rise against The Liberator! He knocked softly on the newly painted door.
“Come in!”

With a click of his heel and an exposed palm, he saluted The Lieutenant. The room was painted a dull grey-green and contained one brown desk, two wooden chairs for guests, one leather chair for The Lieutenant, and one portrait of the Liberator hanging high over The Lieutenant’s head. The Lieutenant fanned himself with a nationalist magazine, “The Capital Weekly”.

“Sit down.”

The Lieutenant waited until The Cadet was settled to continue talking.
“I hear stories that you’re quite the fortune teller.”
“We only do it for fun, sir. It’s nothing serious, sir.”
“No need to make excuses.”
The Lieutenant opened his desk drawer and revealed a deck of cards. He pushed them in front of The Cadet. In silence, The Cadet stared at the deck.
“Go on. Show me my future.”
The Cadet scanned The Lieutenant’s face for signs of sarcasm or anger. There were none.
“Ok. Please separate the deck into two piles using your left hand.”
The Lieutenant followed his orders.
“Pick out fifteen cards using your left hand.”
The Cadet laid out the cards in the formation his mother taught him. All the Aces were drawn.
“I see money. Lots of money. There’s money in every aspect of your life. You see, the club symbolizes money. It’s crossed here with the jack who could symbolize you or maybe a male relative. It’s also crossed here with the diamonds so there is money involved with your home and family.”
“Very good Cadet. Very good. Go back to work now. “
Two weeks later The Cadet was called back into the office. Before he could salute The Lieutenant interrupted him, “Come in. Close the door. Sit Down.”
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“What did you see in my cards last time you were here?”
“Money?”
“Do you know what happened to me?”
“No sir.”
“Last night someone broke into my house. They took everything. All my money. All my wife’s jewelry.”
“I’m- I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell if the money was coming in or out.”
The Lieutenant opened the drawer of his desk and pulled out the deck, “tell me what you see.”
It was from then on that The Lieutenant revealed his secrets to The Cadet. Confiding in his fortuneteller, he told him of all the plans. He told him of the foreign hands waiting to sabotage the nation. He told him of the former supporters of The Monarch who waited in small European towns for their chance to rise again.

Part 3: Forbidden Fruit

It was with The Lieutenant’s trust that The Cadet went on to become a Lieutenant himself, a First Lieutenant, Captain, a Lieutenant Colonel, and finally The Colonel of the ninth regiment. All this was achieved in the span of ten short years using minimal bribery and almost no torture. As the youngest of his rank, The Colonel compensated his age with seriousness and a large mustache.

The former Lieutenant, now The General Major, held his eighteenth annual “Liberator’s Officers Celebration of Freedom, the Nation, and Justice: in Honor of the Martyrs of the Liberator’s Liberation of the Nation from the Anti-liberation Tyrant” banquet. It was there that The Colonel managed to charm The Ministers of Interior, Exterior, and Culture into marrying his younger sisters. The Colonel’s family was thus promptly moved out of the village hut and into villas that once belonged to The Monarch’s aristocracy.

The eighteenth banquet marked the first year in which The Liberator could not attend. His wife claimed he was in “poor health”. The General Major laughed loudly, “Poor health! The man is an unstoppable machine! Not even the CIA could bring him down. Though, as we all know, they tried and failed.”
The guests sipped their imported alcohol and nodded knowingly. It was during this moment of great admiration for The Liberator (and his inability to die) that The Colonel entered, family in tow. The General Major beamed with joy.
“My boy! My cadet! My fortune-teller! Our honored and esteemed Colonel! Come! Come! Have a whiskey! Juice for the women of course.”

Ever the extrovert, The Minister of Interior left his wife’s side (without a hint of hesitation) in order to catch up with The Liberator’s cousin’s daughter. The Minister of Exterior, the more introverted of the group, rejected the whiskey and settled for water and a corner of the room with his wife silent by his side. The Minister of Culture was not present.

“My Dear! Where is your husband?! How I miss his gracious and cultured presence at my banquets!”

“I’m afraid there’s a soccer match today. He couldn’t miss it.”

The large room, covered in beige marble, surrounded by peeling wallpaper with a flowery pattern, was furnished entirely in Baroque style. Tassels hung from extravagant blue armchairs, a large dark wooden dining table stood in the center of the room with carved figures running down its leg, and a crystal chandelier with a lime green tint illuminated the grand hall of the mansion. The Colonel sat upright in one of the armchairs. He watched his sisters socialize with a world that was once exclusively his. His mother, whom he still lived with, was at the buffet table loading her plate with tiny sandwiches. He squirmed at the sight of her gluttony, at the thought of her cracked and overworked hands tainting the golden, fluffy, smooth surfaces of the miniature food. It was at that moment, as one sister scolded her husband’s wandering eye, another silently sipped her guava juice, the youngest flirted with the high-ranking Generals, and his mother filled her mouth to the brim with bread, when The Colonel began to feel that he needed a mate. He spent the last ten years living almost as a hermit, obsessed with rising in the ranks.
Twirling his mustache he surveyed the room. Most females in attendance were the wives and daughters of his colleagues, untouchables. The only remaining women were the embarrassing creatures he called his family. The whiskey warmed his insides and he began to doze off.

“Would you like more, sir?”

A young servant lowered her eyes as he snapped back to reality. She looked young. She couldn’t be older than twenty. The Colonel didn’t care much for age; all he could see were her eyes. They were blue. He had never seen a servant with blue eyes. He licked his mustache as he allowed himself to take in all of her body.

“Sir, another drink?”

The Colonel did something he hadn’t done in years: he smiled.

“Yes.”

The girl poured him a glass and with a quick smile she moved on to the next military man. The Colonel, reeling from the encounter, zigzagged to The General Major.
“Who is that servant girl?”
“She’s mine. I hired her after The Field Marshal’s wife found herself enraged with jealousy and kicked her out. Some peasant girl I believe.”
“I will marry her. Please arrange it.”

The General Major, in a fit of hysterical laughter, spilled the remains of his whiskey on The Younger Sister’s dress. The Younger Sister, who had been allowing The General Major to pour whiskey into her guava juice all night, giggled in ecstasy.

“My boy, she’s just a peasant girl. You’re too good for her.”

“You forget that I was once a peasant boy.”

“Different times my Colonel. Different times. But I suppose we could train her as we did you. The only problem would be her age.”

“Change the birth certificate?”

The General Major caressed the youngest sister’s arm and gazed with longing at her chest. He waved The Colonel off.
“Yes yes! Easily done! Come here tomorrow night and we’ll arrange it.”
The Colonel, in a drunken stupor of lust, searched for the servant girl amongst the guests. She reminded him of the girls he grew up with in his village. Their simplicity always attracted him. She was nowhere to be seen. The Colonel pushed through the crowd of Ministers and Generals until he reached the kitchen. At the counter stood the girl, her loose black outfit covered every inch of her body and a light black cloth hung loosely around her head allowing soft strands of her dark hair to fall out. At the sound of The Colonel’s entrance, she turned.

“More Whiskey?”

“No. You. I want you.’

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re coming home with me tonight.”

“Is The General Major exchanging me for another girl?”

“You’re my wife now.”

The Colonel lunged towards the counter in an attempt to wrap his arms around the helpless child. She screamed and ran towards the hall; he pursued. The sight of the hall stopped the lovers in their tracks. All the guests stood in silence, staring at the grand entrance. The Field Marshal was reading from a paper.
“ -It is with deepest regrets that we announce the death of our Liberator, our savior, and our nation’s father,”
The sisters screamed in despair and fainted into their husband’s arms, the youngest into The General Major’s. The Ministers and Generals began to silently pray into their whiskey glasses. The Colonel reached towards the servant girl as she tried to use this opportunity to escape. He pressed her head into his chest, she tried to pull away, but he pressed her head tighter against his chest.

Part 4: Disaffection

Report For the Beloved People of the Nation on National Salvation and the Incident of the Fundamentalist Attacks on the Beloved Nation:

We, the cabinet of the military council, hereby issue this report to clarify and create an honest and transparent account on what transpired on the 14th day of April.
Since the death of our beloved Liberator the nation has found itself infested by the disease of fundamentalism. These fundamentalists spoke in the name of religion when, in fact, they merely used religion to topple the pillar of the state. As we all know, the nature of their hate and violence began shortly after the death of The Liberator when they decried The Successor’s ascension to power. They used the Western ideal of ‘Democracy’ to accuse our dear Successor of being an unworthy father of our nation. They gathered in squares and chanted. This, being an innocent act, was allowed to flourish due to the kindness of The Successor’s heart. He, being aware that they were simply mourning the death of our most distinguished and revered Liberator. The events that took place are almost too tragic to write. However, it must be mentioned that these poor fundamentalists brought it upon themselves.
Who are these fundamentalists and how can you spot them?

They are usually in groups and disguise themselves as students or hardworking men and women. They claim to be thinkers and artists, yet are never seen at any of the national theatre events nor do they participate in the annual “Portrait of the Nation” award.

Why must we be wary of them?

Using the same rhetoric as the English who colonized our nation, these fundamentalists use ‘liberal’ ideals that go against this so-called “religion” they follow. If they were truly pious people they would understand that the Successor has been blessed by God’s will. How can these pious people not recognize salvation?
What happened?

The fundamentalists finally revealed their true nature and attempted to attack the state. Using concealed weapons and makeshift tear gas; they spontaneously attacked our brave young policemen. The state had no other option but to act quickly! Gunmen climbed on the roofs of civilian houses and were prepared to shoot anyone on the ground. So we were obligated to send the tanks in. They also had three bombs hidden in residential buildings! Thankfully the state was there to defuse them. Many have accused the state of using excessive force. However, I’m certain the judiciary will understand this need on the state’s part to maintain justice and liberty. Tragically fifty-three fundamentalists perished in the events that unfolded. Many were trampled in the stampede that their own colleagues created. Some were even used as human shields by their more cowardly counterparts! These deaths were not a result of the state’s violence, as some would suggest, but negligence on the part of the fundamentalists. The remaining threats were apprehended and sent to an undisclosed location. There, our young Lieutenants in training will interrogate them and, if God wills it, we shall have a safe and healthy state.

Thank you and May God and The Successor bless you,

The former Colonel of the ninth regiment, Interim Field Marshal.

Part 5: Charade of Doom

After the Incident report was signed, the former Field Marshal was asked to retire and The Colonel took over. They say this new Field Marshal is a man of integrity, not afraid to make decisions and take charge. When asked what should be done with protestors, the then Colonel’s answer was “make them disappear.” This gained the respect and admiration of all his colleagues and it was unanimous that he must be the new Field Marshal.

The Field Marshal leaned on his dark wooden desk. A portrait of The Successor hung above his head. It was only a year into his time as Field Marshal that the generals and ministers filed into his office one day. They locked the door behind them and all vowed secrecy. They filled him in on the plan, they told him the reasons, the necessity of it. In one short hour they planned the execution of The Successor, promising the Field Marshal that if he went along with their plan he would be named the new Leader of the nation.

The plan was executed quickly and flawlessly. The Field Marshal received the news from a young lieutenant.
“The Successor has been shot at the national parade. Fundamentalists have been apprehended.”
The Field Marshal stood, and with no hesitation, began walking down the hall. The young lieutenant (a nephew from the youngest sister) walked at his heel.

“Boy, you’re sweating on my boots. Go home to your mother and tell her to buy a pretty dress.”

The Field Marshal’s villa was larger than anything he could have imagined as a boy. The halls were surrounded with doors, all leading to dark rooms that smelled of dust and cleaning product. They only used half the rooms in the house. He passed the kitchen where his wife slaved away making meals, though he brought her dozens of servants. He climbed up the wooden stairs. He passed his daughter’s room, where once he found a boy with a hand under his daughter’s blouse. That boy was later sentenced to six months in prison for indecent exposure. He passed his son’s room where once he found a boy with his hand down his son’s pants. That boy was later sentenced to six years in jail for debauchery. He finally reached the room at the far end of the second floor hallway, his mother’s room.
His mother had gone deaf and blind in her old age. They say her blindness was caused by the venom of a snake that the CIA planted in her garden. They say she went deaf because the CIA planted a bug in her ear in order to spy on her son. They say The Field Marshal, ever the hero of the nation, stabbed her ears.
The Field Marshal opened the door to her room. It creaked. She sat in her usual spot in the middle of the king sized bed. His mother, who never adjusted to a life of luxury, threw out the furniture she didn’t need. All that remained was the bed, the side table and a closet. Every time The Field Marshal walked into the room he remembered her imperfection, his embarrassment at her peasant manners, her inability to change. Immobility and excessive card reading caused her to develop a hump. Yet, even her hump lacked perfection, it was slightly off center. Her hands ran over a deck of cards as she split them with her left hand. He moved slowly so he wouldn’t startle her. He sat near her; the mattress sank and creaked under his weight.

“Who’s there? Don’t hurt me! Don’t you know who my son is?”

The Field Marshal edged towards her and ran his fingers over hers, their signal that it was him and not a
fundamentalist. She smiled and felt his hands.

“My boy! My beautiful, powerful, wonderful boy! Let me read your fortune!”

“We had him murdered. Do you know what this means?”

“My delightful little Cadet! How I love you!”

“This means that I will be the new father of the nation. I can finally be what your husband could never dream to be.”
She ran her hands over the cards frantically.

“I feel hearts in these cards. You will find love! Love everywhere! It crosses over with diamonds! This love will give you wealth! Oh my brilliant Colonel! You will take over our amazing nation!”

The Field Marshal looked at the cards, there were no hearts to be seen. He stroked his mother’s hair.

“I can’t wait until you die. The last piece of my youth will die with you.”

“Oh my boy! My darling Cadet! My brave soldier! My adored Colonel! My revered Field Marshal! Our nation’s beloved Dictator!”

His mother wept for her love and devotion to her son and thus for her love and devotion to the nation. The Field Marshal picked up a bowl of soup left on the side table and fed his weeping mother.
They say the CIA filled the mother’s soup with miniscule amounts of arsenic until she finally died, taking his memories of innocent youth with her.

GREAT COAL BEDS OF SOME WORLD By Glenn Shaheen

The sky is blue where blue was ash and soot,
another fire is beamed from screen to air.
We learn of it and gasp and choke. On foot
we rush to learn of darkness from the stare

of actors in some film. Yes, we got jokes,
the politicians desperately inept,
so why’d we want the show to end? The croaks
that seep in to our shade are frogs at best,
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but get real, they’re frogs. The soot is raining,
that ought to put an end to fires that burst
from clickbait. I’m good, I’m entertaining,

I’m good at entertaining. Lovely chumps,
what suckers, we keep begging for more lumps.

Lugha by Hanan Issa

An assured composition,
the confident guttural ‘gh’,
haloed,
the nur of Allah’s language

eviscerates fruitless scratchings,
plaiting words of Welsh or French,
inept,
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A wounded bird,
its upward basking curtailed,
flailing,
I implore with my patchwork tongue.

^[1] Arabic word meaning ‘language’

The House Between Two Rivers by Christina Yoseph

Recently, my girlfriend and I met up with our two closest friends from law school to catch up over drinks and pizza. She and I left school after completing our first year, so when the four of us get together, our conversations usually abide by a similar format: how is school going for them, how is life going for us, and what drama have each of us missed out on between hangouts?

Because we’re all nonwhite and of varying socioeconomic backgrounds, related topics likewise arise. On this particular Friday night, our friend Doug, who is given to discussing the ways in which his socioeconomic background has shaped the person he is today, went into greater detail on the subject. In describing the false comradery his peers sometimes attempt to forge with him simply by virtue of their shared Asian-ness, Doug said, “They’re rich but because their parents were working class back in the day, they think they know what it’s like—well, I’m still living it.”

When we all get together, we talk about white folks and their ignorance. Doing so seems natural because we’re all children of diaspora. Doug’s parents are from Vietnam. Our other friend Chase’s parents are from the Philippines. My girlfriend and I are each mixed-white: her mother is from the Philippines; my father is from Iraq. We bond over our brownness. We are alike, yes. But we are also not, and in more ways than I had taken care to analyze up until that point—because we had all gone to the same school, because we all dressed the same, and, in many ways, because we all looked similar on the outside.

Aside from the fact that almost no American-born person perceives me as Asian, Doug’s comment applied perfectly to me. I had heard, read, and engaged in countless dialogues with friends of color about colorism, but this was different. Yes, skin color was very much a factor in Doug’s economic background.

But there were so many other factors influencing his family’s status, their inability to move up in the ranks of a society that classifies Asian folks, in one fell swoop and in all their cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity, the “model minority.” His parents emigrated from Southeast Asia. His mother struggles with mental illness that she never received help with, and his father is a veteran dealing with the fallout of his service in the Vietnam War.

Whether he intended it to or not, Doug’s comment acted as a mirror for me. In recent years, I have begun to consider—and needlessly dissect—the economic struggles of my parents and my grandparents. I have gone so far as to mistakenly attribute, if only partially, my inability to fit in with some of my former friends, who’d descended from several generations of well-to-do white folks, to these struggles.

Moreover, this dissection has confusingly coincided with my inability to suppress painful yet critical realities that have informed my identity: my American-facing upbringing has been more white-coded than it has anything else. For example, although my parents guarded me ferociously against school bullies, they were each conspicuously hands-off when it came to the taunting I was subjected to by my white classmates post-9/11.

My father’s side of the family, in many ways, fits the ideal immigrant narrative nearly to a T: Christian, hardworking, and constantly vocalizing their gratitude for the country that gave them a chance at a better life. While they do not favor Republican politicians who push Islamophobic agendas (a phenomenon far more common in the Assyrian American community than I was once comfortable admitting), their relationship to politics in the United States is complicated. In Iraq, they were a religious minority, and although they live in America, they still feel connected to their community back home, and to their complex relationship with a religious majority the U.S. has branded the enemy.

In short, my family’s desire to seamlessly blend into the fabric of America has rendered them apolitical in certain ways—particularly because it has required that they differentiate themselves from a religion whose adherents we in the U.S. consider inherently dangerous.

I believe it is this unique condition upon which my family’s assimilation has been predicated that has prevented us from engaging in meaningful discussions about our individual experiences with xenophobia, though I am certain I am not the only one who has experienced it—especially considering my brother and I are the only ones on our dad’s side who are “mixed.” In fact, en route Greece in 2006, my parents, brother, and I were subjected to a lengthy TSA inspection. When I brought this up with my mother a few weeks ago, she couldn’t quite remember the incident.

My mother was raised by a family to whom adopting and abiding by American customs was imperative. Her father is a racist, and although she works harder than anyone I know to challenge the toxic beliefs she was taught, my grandfather was an abusive and controlling man, and many of his prejudices made their way into her ideas about the world.

I was, at first, offended by what I had initially interpreted as her refusal to acknowledge a memory which was so vivid and shitty to me for the nonsensical way in which it crystallized my state of otherness: the agents had searched my belongings in an effort to determine whether I was carrying anything dangerous aboard—to determine whether I, at age fifteen, travelling with my white mother, was dangerous.

But then, I realized that this experience for my mother hadn’t been sandwiched by other disorienting moments of xenophobia. This moment wasn’t even about her. And because my mother and I have always been so close, it was easy for both of us to ignore the ways in which xenophobia affected me, because I was of her. She could pretend that ugly things like white American suspicion of American-born, part-nonwhite folks like myself didn’t apply to me, because I came from her, and she and I were cut from the same cloth, and being viewed with contempt or suspicion simply for being had never been her experience, so how could it ever have been, or ever possibly be, mine?

Being so close with my mother while simultaneously nurturing this unspoken part of my lived experience because it is uncomfortable, because it is what separates us, has created a painful disconnect in our relationship. I think it has been more comfortable for my mother because it does not disrupt the course of the conservative American way of living she was raised to believe is proper.

However, she and I have been talking about these experiences, about our differences, and about the lack of understanding that has permeated not only our relationship, but her upbringing, and she is exceptional in her willingness to open her mind and to embark on a mountainous journey of learning and unlearning, all on her own, despite the chorus of naysayers by whom she is surrounded.

Last year, when I told her about how my Trump-supporting coworker said she “understood” that Americans don’t want people from my dad’s country coming to the United States because “they’re the ones doing most of the bombings,” my mother suggested I complain to HR and management or quit after seeing how unhappy I was with the hostile work environment.

My father’s reaction, on the other hand, was silence. Certainly a thoughtful one, but silence nonetheless. While I had raged about my coworker’s comment—and about other such comments made throughout the office in the aftermath of the election—my father’s reaction to my experience was subdued and made me feel a bit like I was howling my frustrations into a void. However, the sensation was not new to me, because I had long been aware of the vast differences between our experiences with otherness.

Internally, my family has abided by its culturally conservative traditions, inherent to which, on both sides, are religion; my father’s side of the family is Assyrian, and my mother’s, Greek Orthodox Christian. Though I am in my late twenties, bringing a male partner as a guest to a family function on my father’s side is still out of the question (marriage would need to seriously be on the table).

My being in a queer relationship, then, is, to put it mildly, out of the question on both sides. Although the United States lags far behind dozens of countries when it comes to the acceptance of queerness, both of my parents’ ethno-religious backgrounds are still significantly less forgiving.

For a time, I opted to dis-identify with my Assyrian heritage. This is due to the fact that—to put it lightly—I don’t get along with my dad. My issues with my father are deeply personal and I will not explain them here. My unhealthy relationship with my father has long served as a source of insecurity for me when it comes to my Assyrian heritage: because he is cut from the same cloth as his family, and from their community of friends, I am not close with them either.

The nonexistence of my relationship with my father and his family has often made me feel stateless. This feeling has been compounded by the fact that there is often pressure on the children of diaspora to offer family members unconditional acceptance, love, and understanding under the basic premise that “sticking together” is crucial to our survival.

What gets left out of this equation, however, are important relational nuances, such as abuse, and the ways in which it is coded (for example, along the lines of gender and sexuality). And while some might choose to forgive family members who impose abuses of that nature upon them, I am absolutely against the concept of pressuring others to do the same for the sake of preserving one’s heritage. In short, I do not believe that one has to compromise their own psychic survival in order to maintain their cultural and ethnic ties. That being said, while I am not by any means close with my Assyrian family, I have valued learning about our history.

Before my grandparents brought my father and his siblings to the U.S., they were wealthy. When they did arrive here, the adjustment, which involved a lengthy financial struggle, a severe climate change (from Baghdad to San Francisco), and a loss of community, led to my grandmother’s developing mental health issues that to this day have, unfortunately, gone untreated. Eventually, however, they recovered financially and became economically stable, with my grandfather making a living for their family as a wine and spirits salesperson.

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At first, I had trouble wrapping my mind around this concept; admittedly, I was skeptical, as questions about racial profiling by the cops and Homeland Security percolated through my head. It took learning about the foundations of our country and understanding that they have not been eradicated, but rather, that they have merely mutated to disguise themselves as examples of “progress” for me to grasp the what hooks was saying.

The successful employment of money-making schemes—like our country’s private prison system and unilateral wars that begin and end with our invasion of countries in the Global South—requires know-how on the parts of our country’s wealthiest members (such as the heads of arms dealing companies, for example) when it comes to choosing scapegoats. Members of our country’s white majority who do not stand to profit off of these systems are nonetheless determined to see that genocide is done to these scapegoats, either through incarceration, deportation, or murder. They subscribe to the patriotic rallying cry, Keep our country safe! (read: white).

The point is, my failure to understand the reality of hooks’ claim—instead willfully conflating my brownness with that of my friends’, whatever our economic backgrounds—equated to my trying to force a square peg into a round hole. When my brown friends made comments about my seeming white, my liking white things, or my not being a real brown person, I felt an infuriating mixture of confusion and anger which only ever distilled down to resentment, because I couldn’t understand where their resentment was coming from. They all knew that I was white, yes, but they also knew that I was Assyrian.

More than half of them had initially asked, Syrian? before I’d explained that no, this was different. I thought, You don’t even know what I am and you’re telling me what I’m not? Many of them didn’t speak a lick of their own native tongues—and true, I barely speak my own, but I fought my insecurity over my lack of fluency with regularity, reminding myself that it was the result of my parents not sharing a common language, that I was shy growing up, and that learning a language as an adult is hard enough as it is, let alone one that is practically dead. It drove me even crazier when folks who were similarly light-skinned or ambiguous—or even white-passing!—made these sorts of comments. What the fuck? I would think. You and I are not different. But in reality, we were. We are.

Before my family and I moved to our Pleasantville-like neighborhood, we were living in a smaller, lower-income town. Nonetheless, my brother and I wanted for nothing, and as far as I knew, my childhood was the stuff dreams were made of. All the adults on our street were friends; so were the children. We had block parties regularly, and there was a true sense of community. I was a child living in an idyllic, multicultural neighborhood. And because of this, the differences in skin color between my childhood friends and I didn’t matter.

But once I changed schools, they did. Because I was new, and because I was a question mark—not only not white but unfamiliar for my not-whiteness—my new brown classmates and I didn’t seem to have much in common. I was, however, excited to find out that we liked a lot of the same music. Like me, they had grown up watching shows like 106 & Park. Every once in a while, one of us would get excited because the other was singing a song that the other liked. Otherwise, we really just didn’t have much in common.

Admittedly, most of the music I’ve become meaningfully attached to throughout my life has been introduced to me by someone that was important to me at some point. While I do hold dear some of the songs and artists people from my past have shared with me— because I see music as a reflection of one’s personal growth, which necessarily includes their community—my music tastes have evolved significantly. For example, because I grew up listening to hip hop and R&B exclusively with my closest childhood friend, the combination of (mostly) losing touch with her over time and having no friends who listened to such music resulted in my listening to it far less as I aged.

I eventually made a friend in junior high whose music interests skewed “alternative,” and it was through her that I was inducted into the overwhelmingly white punk rock community. At the time, I was barely a teenager, and I didn’t perceive the music I listened to through the lens of skin color. I liked my new friend, and she was the only one I had, and I liked the music she liked. It was new to me. And no one I was hanging out with in Pleasantville liked the music that I grew up listening to. Looking back, this switcheroo in my taste in music made sense—though some of the albums I grew up listening to remained fixtures on my playlist.

My tastes simply changed as a result of my environment. I was suddenly surrounded by mostly white kids whose parents had evidently filled their heads with shitty ideas about folks who didn’t look precisely like them. The music I listened to and the cable television shows I watched as a teenager, for example, are the results of my upper-middle class upbringing which, despite by no means being reserved for white folks, I see now are white-coded. But being a member of a minority that was foreign even to the other brown children rendered me even stranger to the white children.

However, I wasn’t properly assimilated into my own family, on either side, either. I was truly an island. But I didn’t want to be. Enter my “white girl music,” introduced to me by my white friends. Nonetheless, I felt it spoke only to me, to my complex brown girl feelings, and to my experience of feeling isolated in my brownness while coming of age in a white world. TV was my best friend, providing me with all the refuge I needed as I learned to make sense of my family’s abrupt and drastic ascendance into the upper-middle class.

Even when some of my brown friends from my hometown and I reunited in high school, they were no longer interested in my friendship: I had officially and sufficiently whitened up. Even though I was perfectly happy with my new friends, it stung, and I couldn’t understand what had changed in two short years; although we had ceased to correspond via phone and email nearly as regularly as time went one, we had once been so close. I’d expected them to be as excited to see me as I was to see them. Throughout high school, I witnessed them maintain their friendships with each other and expand their peer group, never making an effort to include me. The sting became a dull ache that was increasingly anchored in a nagging curiosity: What happened? But eventually, it all made sense.

My being called a white girl is in part a reference to my having light-skin, my being white-passing, and my being mixed-white. But it is also largely, I believe, a reference to the socioeconomic class from which my family and I hail, and the ways in which I carry myself.
I am not, never have been, and will likely never have to be familiar with so many of the institutional barriers that have been erected before some people of color at every turn when it comes to attempting advancement in our capitalistic society. The discrimination I have faced in relation to my nonwhiteness has not come in the shape of institutional and therefore capitalistic barriers, but rather, for the most part, in the form of completely manageable micro-aggressions.

I erred in living first, by believing that these micro-aggressions put me on the same plane of experience as my light-skinned peers simply by virtue of the fact that our skin tones were similar, and second, by becoming resentful when I felt judged by them because I felt entitled to spaces that were theirs despite my undeniable class privilege.

I am well-aware that racism and xenophobia do not come with one-size-fits-all approaches: dominant classes have come up with coded language and systems, for example, that apply to specific cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. In other words, I am not saying that the xenophobia I experience—whose undercurrent is that Middle Eastern and North African folks, particularly if they are Muslim, are dangerous simply by virtue of their national origins—is the same as that an East Asian person might experience.

In this way, of course, it is possible that not all of the folks who have deemed me white could have understood my experience of being othered, just as I could not have understood theirs. However, I did not want to share my experience with them, because, again, I felt as though they were judging me, positioning me as a member of the dominant class.

My partner told me about a song called “Don’t Call Me White,” which is basically what I was screaming in my head whenever I felt that way. I was screaming, Do you know how people fucking see me? But truth be told, I really don’t know how people see me. A lot of the time when I look at myself in the mirror, I don’t know how I see me. It’s a strange sensation, because for a time, I felt secure in my nonwhiteness, in my “mixed”-ness, in my me-ness.

But my lack of understanding as to exactly why I wasn’t the same as my peers—why our brownness didn’t magically render our experiences unequivocally identical—and my failure to examine the resentment it cultivated, separated me from my own experience with nonwhiteness. I had rushed out of my vaguely country, inland bubble and straight into drawing a false equivalency between myself and my peers solely based on our skin color—and the result was a lack of clarity. Eventually, I begun to feel that I had only ever been imposing on the identities I had once claimed as my own.

I was angry at not ever having had anyone to share my shitty experiences with—not even within my own family. And now, brown people were making me feel like I was white. I guess if I’d realized sooner that they were perhaps taking note of more than my skin color, I would have let my guard down—and engaged in a much-needed release of this resentment—much sooner than I did. What I learned eventually was an invaluable lesson: in order to see yourself, you have to see—perhaps not first, but simultaneously—more than just yourself.

Earlier this year, I wrote a personal essay while I was still in the thick of my resentment over feeling excluded from communities of color. Reading back on it, my bitterness jumps right off the page. But I don’t cringe as much as I’d expect to while reading it, because navigating white America—particularly without any frame of reference for how to claim agency over one’s diasporic and queer identities—is tricky as fuck.

I am grateful for the loved ones I do have, like my mother, my friends, and my partner. I am always learning from them, and they, from me. They trust me enough to mine my own experiences and to independently evolve my ways of thinking. They care for me enough to extend their patience to me when I am growing, even when I take my sweet time doing so—though they may not have had the same luxury.

Whether Doug intended his comment to resonate with me or not, it undoubtedly sent me into a tailspin of self-reflection. And although I don’t know if I will tell him so, I do know his words have changed the way I interact with others, even if this change is barely perceptible. His remark catalyzed somewhat of an epiphany for me, and I can only wonder how my externalized lack of perspective has grated others, and for how long.

One thing is for sure: if my friends and loved ones can be soft with me, then I can be soft with me, and with them too.