being an arab: the five stages of grief

by husam samir khalil zakharia

Grief has reserved at least half a year in any given person’s calendar. From Mogadishu to Buenos Aires to Waco Texas humanity has gone through heartache, sorrow, anguish and depression for ever and ever.

A-Rabs are no exception (surprise!). There’s a method to our madness, and it can be conveniently explained by using the pop-psychology template:

The Fives Stages of Grief

Stage 1: Denial

In a compilation of renowned Palestinian folk-author Ghassan Kanafani’s stories, a refugee child spends a school night in Lebanon wrenching streams of shameful tears from his face after his father confirms his deepest 7-year-old nightmare to be true: He is Palestinian. The most immediate effect of racism includes the sudden onset of crippling shame. It rushes to your mind, visualizing the only Arabs you see on TV who—sweating from animalistic rage—hold nothing but guns in their palms and don’t speak words; only crazy screaming to invoke the rage of a scary God.

“So you’re an A-Rab??” your peers constantly ask you. And defensive rejection of your identity rushes through your mind for at least a second: I’m a hairy animal? I’m the human version of desert vermin?
Fuck that.

“You’re A-Rab?”

“Naw foo, I’m Egyptian…”

I’m not Egyptian, and I know this well enough by now. I’m a grown kid, and I’ve been reminded (in one way or another) that I was Palestinian every day since I came out of the womb. I just needed an unstudied pariah, a quick fix, an association with a proud empire. Frantically looking for alternatives to your own identity is tiring.

“That’s right son, you can call me King Tut-Bust-a-Nut! Whaaaaaaat?”

Humor is a part of denial. It gives you a funny lie to hide behind; A dope evasion; a swift verbal assault that drops misconceptions once and for all, leaving my peers with smiles on their faces and a reminder that no matter I’m from, I’m making a presence.

I talked big about Palestine: the grit and stone walls were all real, but like any good myth, the truthful elements were never the focus.

Who am I kidding? I’m not Egyptian; I’m not Babylonian or Phoenician or even anything really. I have a vague occupational identity called a “hawiyah”—which I’ve never been able to translate exactly—and no citizenship. My passport might as well read “Never Never Land.”
But I flaunted it. When I got home, I was never proud of my culture in a real way. I was ashamed.

Stage 2: Anger

How can you expect an Arab not to be angry? When I woke up on September 11th, I didn’t even double-take. I figure my parents were watching the same ‘ol thing: smoking buildings and people wishing they never existed. Same old shit. Every fucking morning.

Palestinians go through September 11th at least once a month. But everyone expects us to dance with hookah pipes and entertain their children on flying carpets with Genies? Jafar from Aladdin is our Sambo.

No!

You cannot have the colorful and interesting parts of my culture without a heavy dose of the twisted metal scraps and lethally gaseous blazes my people breath daily.

I’m not a clown. I’m not here to entertain your jejune conclusions about my people and their mystical traditions. I’d rather kick it with the other kids who you oppress, the other kids whose ancestors you killed and ravaged and “had your way with.”
You expect me not to be angry and upset? How do you expect a person to react to being scared and intimidated into putting your flag in front of their home? Don’t you ever try and teach me that brown skinned people were ever inferior. You teach me that the Arawaks ran arms open towards Columbus—their savior, but you don’t tell us how wealthy European treasure-seekers set the Native American populations ablaze, how they burned and pillaged and spread disease.

How “unemployment” became imposed on them and while Wal Mart’s $6.10-per-hour wage is non-negotiable because they don’t allow people to unionize; the sub-standard pay drops to $4.20 near Indian Reservations. (Greg Palest)

Public school didn’t teach us that “manifest destiny” was a euphemism for “mass indigenous graves and tragedy.” Similarly, our schools teach us that the Zionists arrived in Palestine to a “land without a people for a people without a land.”

I’ve had teachers sit there and antagonize me, telling me that Palestine and the Palestinians simply don’t exist. Did you just tell me that I’m not people?

We’re taught that the Arabs, led by Sharif Hussein helped Europe during World War 1, but not that General McMahon made his false promises while the Sikes-Picot agreement split the Arab world up between European imperialist countries. Wiping a people out is a plan for you. It’s no coincidence that brown folks are dropping violently into deliberate graves.

You want us to bow our heads and pretend that flying carpets can take us far enough away to ignore the black clouds that surround our villages? You got somethin’ else comin’ quick.

Stage 3: Bargaining

I’m an Arab, true, but think about it for a minute corporate America... Me and you have a future.

Oh yeah, think about it. You’ve been selling Type 2 diabetes, black and carbonated to everyone on earth, why not make a buck off the Fertile Crescent?
Hey Mr. CEO of Philip Morris, I’m an Arab man, and like Kanye West said: “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.” It didn’t take me long to figure out that this government doesn’t want you selling your nicotine-packed, rat-poisoned, cancer-inducing tobacco sticks to the proud citizens of this healthy nation, so go on: sell a pack of Marlboros to 8-year-olds in Gaza for dirt cheap. There are no regulations there. No pesty English-speakers to call you out on your mass capitalist poison spreading scheme. Prices and packages are a compromise: Your health to us is dirt cheap, so while we sponsor elaborate “Truth” commercials in the states, we can make a killing off of making a killing off of killers. And I can help.

Hey now, the Bible came from my lands. We’re not too different, you and I, so how about this… I’ll be quiet about my politics, in fact, I won’t even tell you about them. I’ll smile at you every time I see you at work, and I’ll try to never raise my voice. I’ll even invite you over to my home from time to time and try to impress you by treating my grandma’s embroidery like an Ikea Original and keep you amused with an entertaining “hookah” session. I’ll work for you and make excuses for the fact that your tax money is digging our graves while I pay more of it than you do. Just let me study business and law in your Universities so I can make your businesses seem legal. Let me buy your products and keep your economy going and tend to the liquor stores you’d rather not worry about that way you keep all brown and foreign folks in a contained space so you can keep an eye on us while we kill each other.

What a deal!

Stage 4: Depression

If you ask my mom about me as a kid in America, she’ll be like: “Oh Husami was such a bad boy in elementary school!”

It’s true, I got called into the disciplinary office a lot. At the time it seemed like the end of the world; the horror of waiting for my yobs to come home while I launched a fruitless campaign of trying to convince moms not to snitch me out. Stinging buttcheeks wasn’t the coolest way to end an evening.

In retrospect, this is all a normal dynamic, but the principle’s office itself was a different story. I spent a lot of time talking about “my country,” prompted by an incident where me and my buddies made bean-shooters out of a 2-litter Coca-Cola bottle and some balloons.

“Is it violent in your country?” they’d ask me “do you think about guns a lot?”

Shit, as far as I knew, yes. Yes it is a violent place. And that’s what I told them. What that had to do with a couple snot-nosed kids and a bean shooter, I still can’t tell you.

“Do your parents teach you that guns are okay?”

I’d be happy if they just allowed me to watch Power Rangers…

“Here, draw a picture of your country,” “What do you see in this ink blot?” “It’s okay, sweetie, we’re here for you…”

Can’t I just go back to class with a detention like everyone else?

No. I was an Arab kid. I was a FOB, Fresh Off the Boat and my parents had thick accents. My mind was infected with violence and “kids will be kids,” didn’t cut it. Arabic kids will be terrorist kids if your elementary school teacher doesn’t save you from your own hateful race.

And guess what the nauseatingly sweet school psychiatrist told my folks when they asked what my problem was? Depression.

Ha.

Stage 5: Acceptance

I just want to let the liars and thieves know that even though I sit behind a laptop and slap a keyboard around with Microsoft Word from time to time, that’s not a reason to not be scared of me.

You should be terrified, because these phony five stages of grief to me are just as defunct as so many of the other lies and myths I’ve been force fed since I was a kid. I’m the mildest example of my Arab age-range.

There’s youths killin’, whose art projects involve chemicals meeting explosively. I got lucky, so consider this a warning: I’ll hold this vile of ammonia and watch it diffuse slowly into your nostrils, into the cracks between your brain flaps, slowly driving you insane until you realize what you’ve done to us.

My terms of acceptance: None.

This shit is unacceptable.

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Husam Samir Khalil Zakharia is a third year undergraduate student at UC Berkeley.