The Arab man must not be angry. He cannot exhibit the full range of interiority that defines a life. He is given two exits from personhood: 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. He must humanise himself. Words are measured, inflections softened, entire lines of thought abandoned before they are spoken. He bites his tongue and defangs his teeth. He surrenders his rifle, the real and imaginary. We see only his tears and never his spit. How cruel life has been to our Arab man. 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.
So— Write this down at the top of the first page: I do not hate people, Nor do I assault anyone. But if I am made hungry, I will eat the flesh of my rapist. Beware—beware of my hunger, And of my anger.
إذنْ سجِّل.. برأسِ الصفحةِ الأولى أنا لا أكرهُ الناسَ ولا أسطو على أحدٍ ولكنّي.. إذا ما جعتُ آكلُ لحمَ مغتصبي حذارِ.. حذارِ.. من جوعي !! ومن غضبي
from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem Identity Card (“سجّل أنا عربي”)
حسّيت بكل كلمة
MashAllah, as a Muslim and Arab woman I felt this in my bones. Especially living in the west at any given time were looked at as the enemy and have to over analyze our reactions, speech, attire and tone. In hindsight to ensure not only our safety but the social norms of our society. We’re either placed on a pedestal for keeping calm or pushed off for being too much of who we are vs who we shouldn’t be. And as a Muslim who wears the hijab, anything I say or do is the set example and is what is looked at by a non Muslim as what Muslims as a whole represent. So there is so much and many things to account for. Yet when I’m not in the states and I’m in a Muslim majority county a huge weight is lifted, your looked at as belonging, everyone looks and things like you, you aren’t alone or alienated. You can just breathe knowing in a way you’re truly free.