Love Is an Ex-Country Read online

  It has happened before: a person thinks I’m cool with their racism, or, more confusingly, when they find out I’m queer, with their sexism.

  I got back to the car and held my dog and shook.

  •

  Children get their first taste of invisibility before they can even remember. Then, they thrill in magic tricks. A parent can hide and then surprise them with their sudden return. Birthday clowns make coins disappear. Children watch cartoons where a mouse takes a dip in a paint pot that holds invisibility ink. Harry Potter wears a cloak, women in Canada and America and Afghanistan and Lebanon and France wear niqabs, humans are surveilled through closed-circuit video cameras, drones can spy activities from high above and can also strike men dead, or hit a wedding party. Once the wedding party is gone, so are the children. If you kill all the children in one family, you have made invisible all the more Arabs, because now the entire lineage has been erased. Death becomes, as my mother says, a return to that amniotic nothingness.

  •

  To be Arab in America is to be a mouse unwittingly dunked into a paint pot of invisibility ink. It’s not that Arabs don’t exist. It’s that you prefer that they remain invisible unless you can trot out a good one or an especially bad one. It’s against your best interests—I almost wrote “our best interests”! You’ve convinced me that my own erasure is good for me—to allow other Arabs to appear. You say, Arabs are only 1.5 percent of the American population. Why must you hear from them or see them more than 1.5 percent of the time?

  •

  The first magic trick: we are nothing. In the womb, we are invisible to everyone, even to our mothers. Women report intense dreams for weeks before they give birth. For months we carry them, not knowing what they look like, and within them, worlds are already forming, more worlds that we can’t see. Here, I am employing the royal we. For what are mothers if not sovereign?

  •

  A short, incomplete list of ways to make it so that when anyone in America pictures an Arab, that Arab is dead:

  Ensure that their governments do nothing to help them. These governments disappear people; they imprison, torture, and kill. There are many ways they kill—I won’t bore you. You already know all of them.

  Leave gaping vacuums of power in their homelands so that any violent group can plant itself in those vacuums and take over. When this happens, it’s wonderful, because this group then kills the locals for you. When they start killing your own, you now have the perfect excuse to go in and kill them and even more Arabs.

  If Arabs make their way outside of their native lands, it’s imperative that they remain erased. This is done by hoping they’ll stay home. Segregation in housing and land works perfectly this way. When Arabs live next to white people, sometimes they get killed. The men who kill them are wolves, but they are not alone. Not at all.

  Create a trope of what an Arab is. That image is the only one people can see when they think of an Arab that’s alive. Make sure that image is as wildly inaccurate as possible. Make sure it’s someone who is not an Arab, dressed in a costume you create to signal Arabness. Give them eyebrows. A nose you can hang a coat on. Hair everywhere. Culturally inaccurate gowns and headdresses, plus weapons you built or sold to them hanging from their waists. If they don’t use those accessible weapons and instead use what they can source—swords, knives, bombs, airplanes, rocks from the land itself—they are the savage ones.

  Once the trope is created, it functions as a giant subconscious eraser. (For example: An Arab goes on a date with a white American. The Arab tells the white American, “I’m Arab.” The white American says, “Well. You don’t look like an Arab.”)

  The next step is to make it so that Arabs themselves begin saying this to each other. The authentic Arab in their minds is the Arab trope you created. Now, Arabs in Detroit, Paris, Toronto, Palestine, London, Lebanon, Egypt, and many other places will say, “Well. You don’t look like an Arab,” when they see an Arab that doesn’t fit in with what the Arab trope looks like. There is then an enormous deficit of authentic Arabs. In this way, you get Arabs to erase other Arabs.

  See?

  No?

  Well. That’s the point.

  3

  BUSHED

  In April of 2018, I found myself launched into the middle of a free-speech war between the racist “alt-right” and what they view as Liberal America. I had traveled to Tunisia to attend the Tunisian Book Fair, which had invited me to present my work. The fair was held in a small convention hall, and though every event, panel, and bookseller was indoors, there was a metal ashtray stand outside almost every bookstall. I had a sore throat and walked through the smoky stalls, picking up books in Arabic. One stall carried rainbow-colored Qurans, delightfully queer in their brightly colored pages. Another boasted large poster maps of Africa. I bought an Egyptian novel and walked up the stone stairs to the second floor, where the panels, talk, and presentations were taking place, and entered a heavily attended room.

  The panel was on disabled writers and readers, specifically addressing the needs and concerns of the visually impaired. Two of the speakers onstage identified as blind. One wore her sunglasses and a cane and spoke in a quick Tunisian accent—Arabic, French, dialect—that I didn’t understand. This was true of all Tunisians. They understood me, because I speak Arabic in an Egyptian dialect, and so much of television and film comes out of Egypt. So in conversation they would kindly adapt their dialects so that I could understand. Things wouldn’t be as easy for me at the book fair, and I was prepared. I took a seat, chewed a cough drop, and tried my best to decipher what was being said.

  Soon, a visually impaired man joined the stage and spoke at length. At some point, another blind man stood up and asked a question at the microphone. A few minutes later, not happy with the answer, he stood up, shouted at the man onstage, and huffed out of the hall. At least seven other men did the same, following him. All the men held walking sticks and wore sunglasses.

  I got out of my seat and followed the men to see what had happened. When I got outside, they were all smoking cigarettes and shouting, blowing off steam. I asked one of them what happened, and he said that the man onstage was an elitist who silenced them and pretended to speak for all blind writers in Tunisia. Soon, the men were escorted back into the hall by a book fair volunteer, who assured them that they would have a chance to share their opinions.

  I was staying in a hotel right on Bourguiba Avenue, where the Arab Spring had begun seven years earlier. The avenue is not wide by American standards—really, what is?—but it features a pedestrian central lane, where people of all ages strolled, with trees and bushes planted on either side of the street. The night I’d arrived, there was a Palestinian right-of-return festival being held near my hotel, in a tent that had been erected in the central pedestrian lane. For hours, I heard Mohammed Assaf’s rendition of the Palestinian resistance song “Raise Your Keffiyeh Up High” blaring up into my window. Tunisians love Palestinians, and it was strange to be in a country that so openly displayed this love.

  To be Palestinian is often to be silenced, erased, demonized, vilified, and monstrosized. In America, Palestinians are terrorists, mooslems, ugly, violent, fetishized, traumatized. In much of the Middle East, they are an old problem during a time when there is an ongoing new problem, that of Syrian refugees. In Tunisia, where the PLO was exiled after Israel’s war in Lebanon in 1982, Palestinians are celebrated and exalted.

  •

  My throat got more and more sore after the book fair. I stayed in bed for forty-eight hours, ordering a spicy local soup through room service three times a day.

  On the third day, I woke up feeling much better.

  I wore a floral dress and placed my camera on a window ledge, set its timer, and jumped on the bed to get a shot of myself in midair. I was facing the street where thousands of marchers had walked, fighting for their freedom. I hadn’t jumped on a bed since I was a child, or maybe since my own son was a child. I jumped and jumped and
jumped until I broke the bed.

  I had broken beds fucking before. Always broken beds with another person there. But now I was breaking beds alone. I could do it now all by myself.

  When I got back on the floor and inspected the crushed wooden slats, I saw where my body had freely bounced up. I was no longer ill, and I felt free.

  •

  The taxi driver who took me to Sidi Bou Said said the streets were filled with police because the president was traveling through the area. This president had won with only 55 percent of the votes. I told him this was unlike Egypt, which had a president who’d claimed 90 percent of the votes. Egyptians are not like us, he said. We are a much smaller country, and much angrier. I agreed with him, and I offered my admiration. Soon, we were by the sea, and the area surrounding us reminded me of Alexandria in the eighties, directly after Sadat’s rule and before Mubarak had pilfered and plundered the country to shit.

  The small sea village where I had rented a house was cobblestoned pathways and alley cats by the dozens. Every building was painted white, with borders, wooden shutters, doors, and window frames a shade between azure and cobalt blue. Some of the doors were yellow. The mosque at the end of the street where I was staying was under construction, and four men worked at its minaret, smoking cigarettes and shouting to one another. The other end of the street was an alley, and at the end of the alley was a cemetery, a large olive tree, and a drop down to the sea. To the north of this was a lighthouse, which I didn’t notice until much later that night, when I was on the rental’s rooftop and saw its light flashing brightly in intervals.

  •

  I walked down to a cliffside café that served tea and hookahs. On the way, women and children gawked. In America, where half the population is fat, there are many regions where such microaggressions occur, but as a smaller fat, or someone whose body still fits in store-bought clothes, most comments I receive in person are positive, remarking on my personal style. Americans are usually polite unless I’m in an airport, where the transitory nature of the setting gives tacit permission for men to openly stare at women’s breasts and bodies. In the Middle East and Europe, fatphobia runs on the surface, and there is no polite code around it. The obsession with thinness is heightened with the obsession of policing bodies in general, and women’s bodies most particularly.

  This obsession is most probably, in my opinion, imported from Europe and North America, where women’s bodies are controlled and influenced by hegemonic capitalism. Imagine people all across the western Northern Hemisphere waking up in the morning and believing that they don’t need anything to be beautiful but their own selves. The ensuing market crash would make our financial systems unviable. As a person who identifies as femme, I don’t mean to invalidate some people’s need for makeup and clothing that better helps them identify, celebrate, and move through the world as women.

  In Egypt, obesity is at 62 percent, and yet it is socially acceptable to greet friends and family and coworkers with “Hello! Have you gained/lost weight?” A remark on another person’s size is normalized.

  A list of other things that are normalized: police brutality, military rule, dictatorships or ceaseless presidential terms, corruption, job and housing discrimination, criminalization of premarital sex, and the dominance of patriarchal and white supremacist beauty ideals. It is very difficult to love oneself and to love one another under such conditions.

  In the sea village in Tunisia, women elbowed each other and glanced at me and laughed. I expected this, as I’d experienced it in France, and also in Lebanon. It is worth noting that Lebanon and Tunisia have both been colonized and occupied by the French.

  I approached two women in their late sixties who had laughed at me and asked them what it was about me that was funny. I did this as an anthropologist, curious more than angry. They wouldn’t respond. I asked again, saying, is it my clothes, or is it my size, or both? The women’s husbands finally said, “Bahia.” I asked them what that meant, and they said, “You are beautiful.” I hadn’t expected that.

  Men in Tunisia were kind to me. None harassed me, which was different from Egypt, where street harassment is pervasive and dangerous. In the evening, I went to dinner at a traditional restaurant. In the entrance of the restaurant was a shrine to Nelson Mandela: a framed photo of him in Tunisia, a large bouquet of flowers beneath it, and a plaque commemorating his contributions to humanity written in both Arabic and French.

  I sat in the dining area and ordered myself some fish tajine and local wine. The wine logo was a bunch of grapes in the shape of Africa. I didn’t want to ever go back to America.

  Later that night, I walked back to the house rental, and stray orange and white cats followed me almost all the way up the cobbled streets home. The mosque at the end of the street was quiet. Three men walked a few yards behind me and I felt completely safe.

  When I got into bed, I decided to check the news on Twitter before I drifted off to sleep. I saw that the Women’s March account, as well as a few other accounts, tweeted that Barbara Bush, George W. Bush’s mother, had died. What shocked me about the tweets was their veneration of the matriarch, some hoping she would rest in power. She had lived in power. A few days after this, during her funeral, two Secret Service men would stay by her coffin’s side. She was safe, even in death.

  I was angry—as every woman of color in America is. The matriarch of a war family had passed at the age of ninety-two, and when, years before, reporters had asked her about her son’s impending war in Iraq, and the deaths that would inevitably occur as a consequence to that war, Barbara Bush’s response had been as follows: “Why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” In a way, she had spoken ill of the dead before they were even dead by saying they weren’t worth a momentary thought. Before this comment, she had dragged Anita Hill, saying that she didn’t believe she had been sexually harassed or that Clarence Thomas was a predator. And years after the Iraq comment, she called Black evacuees in Houston, who were seeking refuge from the horrors of Katrina, lucky to be living in better circumstances than what “they’re used to.” She even went so far as to say that their presence in Texas was frightening. “It’s scary,” she had said.

  Because I was angry at the media’s positive, hagiographic representation of her, and that women were tweeting their support of her, even in death, I took to my own account and mimicked the praiseful format I was seeing surrounding her death. I wrote: “Barbara Bush is a smart, generous, and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. Fuck outta here with your nice words.”

  To further explain my point, I reiterated my beliefs in a way that mirrored W. Bush’s 9/11-era rhetoric: he had said that Americans were either with the government or against it, against terrorists or with them. So I wrote, “You are either with these genocidal pieces of shit or against them. It’s really that simple.” And the majority of (white) America proved to me that they were with genocide.

  America is an amnesiac.

  To be a woman in America, a mother, and a descendent of North Africans and West Asians is to be the opposite of an amnesiac. It is to be reminded in your bones, your muscles, and the twisted strands of your DNA, every moment of every day, of war, of fear, of expulsion, of discrimination, and of others’ fear, dehumanization, and murder, of you and of people like you.

  •

  Within minutes, white supremacist tweeters had forwarded my tweet to Ben Shapiro, who then directed his thousands of followers to attack me. And they did. When I thought I was in conversation with other women activists, I became suddenly in conversation with white nationalists and trolls. It was late night in Tunisia, and it seemed like a few minutes later, it was late morning.

  I was running on adrenaline and Mandela shrines and local wine and freedom.

  When a troll found out that I taught at Fresno State, he said I should be fired. Others echoed this sentiment. I wanted to make sure that people reading my timeline knew that I knew my rights: that tenure
would protect me from being fired. Later, I would also remember that my First Amendment rights were the actual thing that was protecting me from losing my job, since I work at a state institution. Soon, incensed by what I said about being protected by tenure, trolls said I had “bragged” and “taunted” them, and they released my work email and phone number, and then my department chair’s number. I intervened. I didn’t want my phone to ring off the hook and bother my colleagues in the neighboring rooms. I didn’t want my department chair, a kind woman nearing retirement age who is into Hot Topic and pop culture, to be assaulted with calls and trolls. So I tweeted that folks angry with my tweet should contact the university president, whose salary is four times the salary of my chair, and whose office is, I believed at the time, better equipped to deal with calls. The president was a person of color who had encouraged his faculty to Be Bold (that was his slogan). I truly believed that he would protect me.

  Soon, I received a surprising email from my dean, whom I admired, policing my tone, and telling me to find more constructive ways to talk about these events, claiming that my private tweets are not really private because I represent my department wherever I go. This was a shock to me since I was on medical leave at the time, resulting from anxiety and panic attacks I’d had on the job. I had expected my dean to protect me, too.

  Trolls began saying I would need a lawyer soon, and that I was too fat and poor to be able to afford one. In addition, they said, I was too ugly for anyone to care what I had to say—this while they were actively caring about what I had to say. And they said that I would lose writing opportunities for what I’d said and how I’d said it. Amazed at the level of vitriol directed at me, I tweeted out my salary, which can be easily found online since it is public. By doing this, trolls said, I was “boasting.”

  More hate mail began to pour into my university inbox. The responses all featured, in one way or another, commentary on my appearance, specifically, of my body.