The Arab Man Must Not Be Angry
The Arab man must not be angry. He must not exhibit the full range of interiority that defines a life. He is pressed into a narrow script. Either he is a casualty to be mourned in abstraction, or he is a threat to be feared in caricature. There is very little room in between for a person who can think, argue, resent, remember, or demand.
In the telling of his oppression, he is permitted visibility only under strict conditions. If he is to be seen, he must be legible at a glance. His history should be easily compressible into a headline or absorbable between advertisements. His complexity is too much of a defiance. His contradiction is a liability. He is half a man.
His anger is familiar to us only as a fiction. Boundless and irrational. His allegiances opaque but dangerous. He does not speak in full sentences, only in insinuations, in coarse, raised voices, in the background noise of breaking news. His existence justifies preemption. His silence confirms suspicion. He is not asked what he has lived through, only what he might do.
The alternative is containment, martyrdom, victimhood. Here, he is permitted to appear as long as he arrives diminished. He must recount his losses without tracing their architecture. He must describe destruction without naming its authors. Expulsions, exiles, dispossession, erasure, occupation, annihilation, infanticide, humiliation, desecration, heartache, bereavement, orphanhood, imprisonment, surveillance, theft, plunder, thirst, deprivation, torture, famine, poverty, isolation, fragmentation, defeatism, coercion, blackmail, sacrifice, and the slow attrition of living. His grief is acceptable only when it floats, unanchored from politics, from interests, from histories, as though it emerged miraculously rather than from decisions made in rooms far away. If he is analytical, he is suspect. If he is vengeful, he is disqualified. The acceptable register is sorrow. Steady, sterile sorrow.
I wonder if this is because the anger of the Arab man is particularly loud. Consequential. It suggests that he has made connections, that he has drawn conclusions that extend beyond his own body. It implies that he might speak not only of loss, but of responsibility. And responsibility is precisely what must remain obscured. So his anger is redirected or pathologised. If it cannot be contained, it is used against him.
So a negotiation takes place within our Arab man. Words are measured, inflections softened, entire lines of thought abandoned before they are spoken. He is not allowed the full range of contradiction that defines a life. He cannot be both wounded and accusatory, both grieving and analytical, both a victim of violence and capable of it.
But of course, he is.
