My father came from Baghdad in 1953, then met and married my mother–a blue-eyed California girl. I’ve always been proud of my father for taking a chance, leaving all he knew to “make it big” by starting his own rental-car business. I’ve also admired my mother’s courage in dating and marrying a man so different from her own French Canadian, conservative father and Protestant, American mother. But they were somehow meant to be. It seemed too unlikely that the two would meet randomly at a polka dance in downtown Los Angeles if it wasn’t willed by God, fate, Allah.
My two older sisters and I grew up between their worlds–Arab and American, Muslim and Christian. We went to mosque and Sunday school. We listened to rock on the radio and the Quran suras my father would pop in the cassette player on the drive to work. In my lunchbox, I carried dolma and Syrian bread one day, peanut butter and jelly the next. On the dolma days, the other kids looked at my meal as though it was shot down from outer space. Little did they know that some 15 years later, pita bread and all types of Middle Eastern food would become part of the American diet, served in malls and beachside boardwalks.
But there was a great divide. Arabs and Muslims were portrayed in movies and on TV as bloodthirsty savages, terrorists, dishonest and hygienically challenged. The terms Arab, Muslim, Iranian were used interchangeably. The stereotypes were fed by a series of Middle East conflicts–Palestine, Iran, Libya, Iraq. There was also the late ’70s oil embargo. Arab came to mean something negative, which seemed absurd to me. It was simply part of who I was, my family, my loved ones.
We were like all the other gangly teenagers in the schoolyard, until someone would ask: “What kind of last name is that?” You knew exactly what they thought from the comment that ensued. Either “Uh-oh, are you packing a bomb?” or “Cool, where is your family from?” The first question I would not answer (they knew all I was packing was my lunch), but I welcomed the latter question, eager to set the record straight and show there was more to the Arab world than what America saw on the nightly news. See, I had visited Iraq when I was 11, and met my father’s whole family for the first time. I sat on the floor in the mornings with my grandma Mahia and rolled cigarettes for the kids to sell at the market. I helped her make that yummy lamb and string-bean stew. In my uncle Ibrahim’s backyard we ate barbecued fish from the Tigris river. We danced to Arabic music with my cousins, before playing our Elton John and teaching them how to dance to rock. A place that had at first seemed alien became so comfortable, so normal.
My newfound pride in who I was would often be challenged in the years to come. There were the anti-Middle Eastern sentiments surrounding the Iranian hostage crisis and, later, the 1991 gulf war. It was awful sitting in traffic, reading bumper stickers on cars in front of me: Iraq: kick their ass, take their gas and our colors don’t run, against the red, white and blue of the American flag. It was as if the whole country was pumped up for a football game, never considering that the bombs we dropped were actually killing people–possibly my family. I could not explain my grief without being labeled anti-American.
For the only time in my life I thanked God for taking my dad away. Three years before the gulf war he died of cancer, seeming to take all the secrets of my Arab heritage with him. My mom struggled to recall his stories from the old country, but she was often at a loss. I looked for clues everywhere–digging up old photos from his school days in Baghdad, reading the Quran, striking up conversations with anyone I thought came from the Middle East. Now I realize that part of the search was to regain a little piece of my dad, and to grapple for security in a world I often feel at odds with. But things have changed. I now feel less lost, less embattled. Maturity frees you from that horrible urge to always fit in. And America’s attitude is changing, too. Arabs and Muslims are now next-door neighbors rather than overseas threats. They are a part of the American picture, and I am, too. With my dad’s wide nose and my mom’s light skin, I am my heritage, both American and Arab, and the beginning of an entirely new culture.
