Being an Arab American

Sometimes being an Arab just hits different.  Then you realize that you are an American too, and that also hits different.  With a lot of a family back home, in the shit both internal and external that plagues that region, I always feel blessed to have the privilege of living here.  My mother and pops, had they never made that pilgrimage for a better life, damn my life would have taken a different course.  There are nights when I wonder what might have been…my parents are Jordanian, I’m a second-generation immigrant as the wording goes.  Not like I care much for labels and such, but it’s for the sake of conjecture.  My sentences might be ripe with them. 

I’m thirty-two now, a couple years past that third decade.  For whatever reason, hitting thirty seemed to broaden the lenses of my mortality and the morality of those I know and love.  People get older and the natural decline of youth steadily takes away the energy that once existed in my parents, my uncles and aunts, and even in some cousins.  My family is big and I mean big, so I have been accustomed to funerals and grief since I was a kid.  But as life turned, there are friends who didn’t make it either, accidents, illnesses, and even suicides.  Life, and only life, puts everything in perspective.

Back to the point, I apologize, I wander aimlessly sometimes, but had I been born there, I’d likely still be there.  Borders don’t work like they used to.  At my age, I’d probably have been married already, had a few kids and worked a job that would make a forty hour a week minimum wage job here seem like an opportunity of a lifetime. I might have been a religious man, delved into the irrefutable demands of family duties, and maybe, had I been smart enough in school, have a well-paying job though there those are fewer than here, that I could afford vacations and the safety of a good neighborhood.  

I don’t mean to speak ill of my homeland, nor its people.  For a country with so little natural resources to compete in this globalized world, Jordanian remains remarkably resilient, even with Israel’s aggressive expansion next door and an influx of exiles fleeing other places ruined from colonial interests and corruption within.  More so, there exists communities there that don’t exist here, the closeness and connectedness with family, with neighbors and cities, it’s something often more superficial here.  If you ain’t helping, let me peel that shell I need to move on to be me.  Being Arab means me is more than me, but as an extension of a larger family unit.

There is a selfishness here wrought from a litany of possibilities, but it is not necessarily a bad thing.  We have this freedom to express ourselves as individuals, because we got more opportunities to get it right if we fuck it up. This sentiment feels almost unique to being American.  We enjoy the myth of the self-made man, of the redeemed outlaw who changes his ways.  How many stories told make a hero of the wretched and damned?  Our heroines too are plenty, and they are well-documented.  There is a history of women, strong, bold, persecuted and still immovable in their resolve, and this is celebrated and rejoiced, and their accomplishments endure, even as their wars still do too.

Myths like these make us think of our own desires, our own personal legends, as a legendary Brazilian might say.  So, in this, there might be a selfishness that exists that makes the generation between first and second-generation Arabs a little bit at odds with each other.  My uncle used to say Arabs invented Algebra you know?  Al-Jabr­, Arabs are always good at math, so you must be good at math too.  I wish I took that more literally, because we are good at math.  My parents care only about multiplication and how many children I might have; as well as division, we are from this middle-eastern country and not that, we are Christian not Muslim, we are Arab, we are not like those people.  These of course always in references of forbiddance, to keep one from involving oneself with the wrong people, are infecting that one thing that makes you inherently your parents’ child.   They just trying to keep the Arab in you, baby.

In spite of that, Arab parents for the most part, seem intrinsically inclined to embrace the American Dream.  It is why they came here anyway, to achieve that dream, or die trying in achieving that dream for their kids.  Many have suffered heart attacks working too hard, or even bouts of depression trying to fix something unfixable in their children.  Ever entrenched in their perspectives, the perspective and morality of the time capsule from whence they migrated (my parents left Jordan in the 70s), they hold on to the culture they left behind and try to pass it on whatever way to you. I imagine most immigrant children might endure something to the same effect. 

If you can relate it all, then you already know that the cultural intersection of their realities and the realities of American life, however localized and specific they maybe, inevitably lead to friction.  There have been many earthquakes in my life, though I bare most my tremors silently.  I was taught to keep everything in house, internalize and blow off the steam on your own.  Don’t want to make the family look bad, or worst, dysfunctional.  My father has nine siblings and my mother has eight.  Rural life is the life they knew.  Moving to the suburbs of California, the numbers of people, the diversity, they found a home in a place thriving with cultures and communities melded into one another.

I grew up in a small city called La Verne, near the eastern edges of Los Angeles County.  Undoubtedly an affluent community, the district lines ever worked in my favor.  I believe I received a first-rate education at a public school (the shock), and had the luxury of living in a neighborhood devoid of crime and the poorly funded districts that served many other communities that neighbored my hometown.  My high school had a population of 1200 students, everyone or nearly everyone knew each other.  There were not many people of color at my school, and if they were, that stain of Clorox whitewashed most of them.  I grew up with simple smiles and the occasional shaking of the head, for minorities born in such communities learn to digest racist overtones and jokes with a grain of salt.  In the end it made me stronger, though I probably didn’t need to endure it.  The one thing for the future, is at least the dialogue is open, and racist overtones are often dealt with a response.

In youth, I at times resented my heritage.  It seemed more a curse than a blessing, for nearly every friend was ever allowed to do things, or engage in activities, that were strictly forbidden to me.  Where people were allowed to go to parties, to spend the night, go to concerts and ostensibly adult things, my parents honed in on me like those missiles flying over Nablus.  I had no chance to either escape the clutches of my parents’ overbearing arms, nor the character to eschew their outlook entirely.  As an only child, my parents’ responsibilities were inherently mine.  As an Arab, my outward performance, my actions and desires, they represented both my father and mother.  I follow my own path, but the importance of duty has never escaped me.  As my parents were charged with raising me, I have taken seriously my charge with taking care of them.  

This has proved problematic at times, for my being at times has the urge to engage in a wanderlust.  I have always fancied myself a writer, a maker of stories and a transcriber of experiences and the insatiable human spirit.  If the desire to be the traveling Kerouac, a critical man as Orwell, or even a painter of life as was F. Scott, was my sole ambition, my duty ever beckoned me to do otherwise.  I have found myself blurring somewhere between the life my parents want for me, and the life I have fashioned for myself in my own head.  It has at time been a war of attrition, even costing me someone I loved dearly, because of an Arab propensity for mathematics.  Still, I find myself somewhere between believing in the narratives and rituals my parents have left me, and the underlying heart of my own personal legend.  

Jordanian.  American.  I am something in between.  I embrace the opportunities and ideals that have been ingrained in me because I grew up in Southern California, but equally a different set of ideals engraved in me because of my parents’ legacy—these have fashioned a novel sort of person.  There is an entire generation of us flirting with the boundaries that make us America and those that make us Arab.  Whether it is Iraqi, Lebanese, Egyptian, Saudi, Jordanian, or any of the other nations that comprise a group of people that consider themselves Arab, we have been battling our own intersections within borders that both embrace and reject us.  The hardest part was learning what to embrace and what to reject.  As age creeps past the peripheries of my youth, I only hope to delineate the things I wish to accept, and those I wish to do away with.  At least I still stand proud of my heritage, and still there is this longing, that wisp of a whisper that calls when the weather is still and the waves calm, that reveal to me that place I am trying to reach. If we don’t transform, we falter.  It we forget where we came from, we crumble. A metamorphosis is always at stake, without entirely succumbing to Samsa’s fate.