LISA SUHAIR MAJAJ
One evening a number of years ago, at a workshop on racism, I became aware—in one of those moments of realization that is not a definitive falling into place, but instead a slow groundswell of understanding—of the ways in which I experience my identity as not merely complex, but rather an uninterpretable excess.
Workshop participants were asked to group ourselves in the center of the room. As the facilitator called out a series of categories, we crossed to one side of the room or the other, according to our self-identification: white or person of color, heterosexual or lesbian/bisexual, middle/upper-class or working-class, born in the United States or in another country, at least one college-educated parent or parents with no higher education, English as a native language or a second language. Although I am used to thinking of myself in terms of marginality and difference, I found myself, time after time, on the mainstream side of the room. White (as I called myself for lack of a more appropriate category), heterosexual, middle-class, born in the United States to a college-educated parent, a native speaker of English, I seemed to be part of America's presumed majority.
I learned a great deal that night about how much I take for granted those aspects of my life which locate me in a privileged sphere. It is a lesson of which I remain acutely conscious, and for which I am grateful. But looking across the room at the cluster of women representing what American society understands as "other," I was disconcerted by the lack of fit between the definitions offered that evening and my personal reality. Born in the United States, I have nonetheless lived much of my life outside it, in Jordan and Lebanon. My father was college-educated and middle-class, but Palestinian—hardly an identity suggestive of inclusion in main stream American society. I considered myself white: my olive-tinged skin, while an asset in terms of acquiring a ready tan, did not seem a dramatic marker of difference. But I have received enough comments on my skin tone to make me aware that this is not entirely a neutral issue—and as I have learned the history of colonialism in the Arab world, I have come to understand the ways in which even light-skinned Arabs are people of color. Native speaker of English, I grew up alienated from the linguistic medium—Arabic—that swirled around me, living a life in some ways as marginal as that of a non-English speaker in the United States. Although I do not think of myself as having an accent, I have more than once been assumed to be foreign; I speak with an intonation acquired from the British-inflected Jordanian English that delineated my childhood, or from years of the careful enunciation one adopts when addressing non-native speakers. I have been the target of various forms of harassment specifically linked to my Arab identity, from hostile comments to threatening phone calls, racist mail, and destruction of property. I have feared physical assault when wearing something that identifies me as an Arab. And so, standing on the majority side of the room that evening, observing the discrepancy between the facts of my life and the available categories of inclusion and exclusion, I could not help but wonder whether these categories are insufficient, or insufficiently nuanced.
I recognize in this response my reluctance, here in this country which is so large, and which often seems—however inaccurately— so homogenous, to relinquish a sense of my own difference. When I arrived in the United States for graduate school in 1982, I felt oddly invisible. Walking down the crowded streets of Ann Arbor, Michigan I became aware, with a mixture of relief and unease, that no one was looking at me, trying to talk to me, or making comments under their breath. Years of living in Jordan and Lebanon, where my physical appearance, my style of dressing, my manner of walking had all coded me as foreign, had accustomed me to being the object of attention, curiosity, and sometimes harassment. Although in Amman and Beirut I had tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible—walking close to walls, never meeting anyone's eyes—I always knew that people noted, assessed, commented on my presence. Even as I disliked and resented this attention, I grew to expect it. As a girl and woman with little self-confidence, the external gaze, intrusive as it was, perhaps offered the solace of definition: I am seen, therefore I exist. Without that gaze would I still know who I was?
The idea of such dependence upon external definition disturbs me now. I would like to say that I longed not to be defined by the gaze of the other, but to look out upon the world through eyes rooted in the boundaries of my own identity. But it is true that for much of my life I thought if I looked long enough I would find someone to tell me who I am. Turning to the world for some reflection of myself, however, I found only distortion. Perhaps it was asking too much of that younger self of mine, overwhelmed by a sense of my identity's invalidity no matter which culture I entered, to learn the necessary art of self-definition.
And if I had achieved that skill, would I have merely learned more quickly the cost of difference? Being American in the Arab world set me apart in ways I found profoundly disturbing. But I discovered soon enough that being Arab in the United States— worse, being Palestinian—offers little in the way of reassurance. My hopeful belief that moving to the United States would be a homecoming was quickly shaken. Once I claimed a past, spoke my history, told my name, the walls of incomprehension and hostility rose, brick by brick: un-funny "ethnic" jokes, jibes about terrorists and kalashnikovs, about veiled women and camels; or worse, the awkward silences, the hasty shifts to other subjects. Searching for images of my Arab self in American culture I found only unrecognizable stereotypes. In the face of such incomprehension I could say nothing.
But I have grown weary of my silence and paranoia; my fear that if I wear a Palestinian emblem, a kaffiyeh, use my few words of Arabic, say my name and where I am from, I will open myself to suspicion or hatred. I am tired of being afraid to speak who I am: American and Palestinian, not merely half of one thing and half of another, but both at once—and in that inexplicable melding that occurs when two cultures come together, not quite either, so that neither American nor Arab find themselves fully reflected in me, nor I in them. Perhaps it should not have surprised me to cross and recross that room of divisions and find myself nowhere.
I was born in 1960, in the small farming community of Hawarden, on Iowa's western border. My mother, Jean Caroline Stoltenberg, in whose hometown I was born, was American, of German descent. From her I take my facial structure and features, the color of my hair, and more: an awkward shyness, a certain naivetÈ, but also a capacity for survival and adaptation that exceeds my own expectations. I learned from her to value both pragmatism and a sense of humor. She liked to say that she was of farming stock, plain but sturdy. Twenty-three years in Jordan did not greatly alter her midwestern style; she met the unfamiliar with the same resolution and forthrightness with which she turned to her daily tasks. Despite her willing adjustment to Middle Eastern life, she never quite relinquished her longing for the seasonal landscapes of her Iowa childhood—summer's lush greenness, the white drifts of winter. Although I experienced her primarily against a Jordanian backdrop, my memories of her evoke midwestern images and echoes: fragrant platters of beef and potatoes, golden cornfields beneath wide, sultry skies, the strident music of crickets chanting at dusk.
My father, Isa Joudeh Majaj, a Palestinian of the generation that had reached young adulthood by the time of Israel's creation from the land of Palestine, was born in Bir Zeit, in what is now the occupied West Bank. From him I take the olive tinge to my skin, the shape of my hands and nose, the texture of my hair, and a tendency toward inarticulate and contradictory emotion. From him, too, I take a certain stubbornness, and what he used to call "Palestinian determination." Named Isa, Arabic for Jesus, by his widowed mother in fulfillment of a vow, my father grew from childhood to adolescence in Jerusalem, that city where so many histories intersect. Although distanced from each other by geographical origin, culture, and more, my parents held in common their respect for the earth and for the people who till it. My father, never quite reconciled to his urban life, spoke longingly of the groves of orange and olive trees, the tomato plants and squash vines, by which Palestinian farmers live. He could identify the crop of a distant field by its merest wisp of green, had learned the secrets of grafting, knew when to plant and when to harvest. His strong attachment to the earth—an emotion I have come to recognize among Palestinians—made me understand his dispossession as a particular form of violence. I associate his life with loss and bitterness, but also with a life-bearing rootedness reminiscent of those olive trees in Jerusalem that date back to the time of Christ, or of jasmine flowering from vines twisted thick as tree trunks.
After a youth punctuated by the devastating events leading up to Israel's creation in 1948, during which he fought against the British and saw relatives lose both homes and lives, my father worked his way to the United States for a college education. In Sioux City, Iowa he attended Morningside College, shovelling mounds of hamburger in the stockyards during school breaks. At a YMCA dance he met my mother, a quiet young woman working as a secretary in a legal firm. A year later the two were married.
I do not know what drew my parents together. My father may have seen and valued in my mother both the shy pliancy cultivated by girls of her generation and the resilience learned in a farming family. Though he seemed to take her strength for granted, he assumed she would mold herself to his delineation. My mother, who by her own account had grown up imbued with visions of true romance, may have seen in my father an exemplar of the tall dark stranger. At their wedding she vowed both to love and to obey. My parents' marriage, complex from its outset, promised the richness of cultural interaction, but bore as well the fruit of much cultural contradiction. It is the complexity and contradictions of their relationship that I have inherited, and that mediate my interactions in the societies, Arab and American, that I claim as birthright, but experience all too often as alienation.
When I was born my mother claimed me in a gesture that in later years I understood to have been quite remarkable. The birth of my older sister three years previously had disappointed my father in his desire for a son and the title "Abu-Tarek," father of Tarek. Forced by his work to be absent before my own birth, he refused to choose a girl's name before he left—hoping, no doubt, that this second child would be a boy, as the first one had not been. I was born, and my mother called me Lisa Ann. But my father asserted his will over my identity from many thousands of miles away. Upon learning of my birth, he sent a telegram congratulating my mother on the arrival of Suhair Suzanne—Suhair, a naming meaning "little star in the night"; Suzanne, an Americanization of the Arabic Sausan what he may have thought would be a cultural compromise. By the time she received the telegram my mother must have had me home, Lisa Ann firmly inscribed in the hospital records. But this did not deter my father, always a stubborn man. On his return I was baptized Suhair Suzanne. In the one picture I possess of the event, I am cradled plumply in the arms of my aunt, indifferent to the saga of fractured identity about to ensue.
My mother, however, must have been stronger-willed than anyone expected. She acquiesced to the baptism, but her dutiful letters to the relatives in Jordan relate news of baby Lisa Suhair, with "Lisa" crossed out by her own pen. This marvelously subversive gesture allowed her to appear to abide by my father's wishes while still wedging her own claims in. And somehow her persistence won out. My earliest memories are of myself as Lisa: birthday cards and baby books all confirm it. Even my father only called me Suhair to tease me. But if my mother claimed victory in the colloquial, his was the legal victory. Both passport and birth certificate identified me as Suhair Suzanne, presaging a schism of worlds which would widen steadily as I grew.
When my sister and I were still very young, my parents moved first to Lebanon, then to Jordan. My father had had much difficulty finding work in the midwestern United States: people were suspicious of foreigners, and frequently anti-Semitic, and he was often assumed to be a Jew. Moving to the west coast did not greatly improve his opportunities. Finally, however, he was hired by a moving and packing firm that sent him to Beirut. From there we moved to Amman, where his mother and brother then lived. By my fourth birthday we were settled in the small stone house, in what is now thought of as "old" Amman, where we were to live for the next twenty years.
Despite the semblance of rootedness this move to Jordan offered, my childhood was permeated with the ambience of exile. If to my mother "home" was thousands of miles away, beyond the Atlantic, to my father it was tantalizingly close, yet maddeningly unattainable—just across the Jordan River. My early years were marked by a constant sense of displacement, the unsettling quality of which determined much of my personal ambivalence and sense of confusion, as well as a certain flexibility I have come to value. I learned at an early age that there is always more than one way of doing things, but that this increased my awareness of cultural relativity has often meant a more complicated, and painful, existence. I learned to live as if in a transitional state, waiting always for the time that we would go to Palestine, to the United States, to a place where I would belong. But trips to Iowa and to Jerusalem taught me that once I got there, "home" slipped away inexplicably, materializing again just beyond reach. If a sense of rootedness was what gave life meaning, as my parents' individual efforts to ward off alienation implied, this meaning seemed able to assume full import only in the imagination.
The world of my growing-up years consisted of intersecting cultural spheres that often harmonized, but more frequently, particularly as my sister and I grew older, clashed. Home provided, naturally enough, the site of both the greatest cultural intermingling and the most intense contradiction. My mother worked, despite my father's objections, at the American Community School in Amman from the time I entered kindergarten until several years before her death in 1986. Though in later years she began to articulate the independence she had muted for years, for most of her married life she acquiesced to a hierarchical structuring of family codes. Al though the prime agent of my sister's and my own socialization, my mother transmitted to us largely those lessons of my father's choosing. But my father's failure to fully explain his assumptions often resulted in a gap in the cultural translation from Arab to American. Thus, only after I had been away at college for some time did I explicitly learn that I should never go out except in large groups—a rule at the heart of which was a ban upon interactions with men. But such expectations hardly needed to be spelled out. My restricted upbringing and my own desire to maintain familial harmony had resulted in such an effective internalization of my father's expectations, most of which had to do with the maintenance of honor, that I lived them out almost unconsciously.
Looking back on our family life from the perspective of a painfully won feminism, the gender dynamics pervading our house hold seem unambiguously problematic. In addressing them, how ever, I find myself becoming defensive, wanting to preserve my deep-rooted family loyalties, however conflicted. I had learned to understand my relationship to others through the medium of Arab cultural norms filtered through an uneven Americanization. My childhood was permeated by the lesson, incessantly reinforced, that family is not just vital to self, but is so inherent that family and self are in a sense one and the same. I am more familiar than I would choose to be with the constrictions implicit in such celebration of family ties. But the mesh of familial expectations stressed in Arab culture provided a sense of security not readily apparent in my experience of American relationships, with their emphasis on individualism. However restrictively articulated, the stable definitions of self available in my childhood context held a certain appeal for me, caught as I was in a confusion of cultures.
I have come to understand the pressures that governed my life not as an innate characteristic of Arab culture, but as a particular, and gendered, product of cross-cultural interactions. In my experience, male children of mixed marriages are often able to claim both the rights of Arab men and an indefinable freedom usually attributed to western identity. Although the cultural mix imposes its burdens, a boy's situatedness between Arab and American identities is not debilitating. But for girls, relegated to the mother's sphere, the implications of a western identity in an Arab context can be so problematic that claustrophobic familial restrictions are often the result. Although modesty is required of all girls, those with American blood are at particular risk and must be doubly protected, so that there is neither opportunity nor basis for gossip.
As a child, however, I was aware only that being Arab, even in part, mandated a profound rejection of any self-definition that contradicted the claims of familial bonds. When I wished, as an adult, to marry a non-Arab man against my father's wishes, and engaged in a bitter, painful attempt to do so without irrevocably severing family ties, some friends seemed unable to understand why I would not rebel simply and cleanly, claiming my life and my feminist principles on my own terms. But to do so would have meant the abrogation not just of emotional connections, but of my very identity. Such absolute definitions make it extremely difficult for those of us caught between cultures to challenge restrictive cultural codes: without the security of being able to first lay full claim to the identity one rejects, rebellion becomes precarious and difficult.
Although I lived in an Arabic-speaking country, in my private world English was the main language of communication. My Arab relatives (who had all, except for my grandmother, learned English at school) wished to make my mother welcome by speaking her language, and wished as well to practice their skills in English—the use of which, in a residue of colonialism, still constitutes a mark of status in Jordan. Though I learned "kitchen Arabic" quite early, and could speak with my grandmother on an elementary level, I never became proficient in the language that should have been mine from childhood. This lack resulted in my isolation from the culture in which I lived. I was unable to follow conversations in family gatherings when people did not speak English. I could not under stand Arabic television shows or news broadcasts, was unable to speak to storekeepers or passersby, or to develop friendships with Arab children. As a result I remained trapped in a cultural insularity—articulated through the American school, American church, and American friends constituting my world—which now mortifies me. My father's habit of speaking only English at home played a large part in this deficiency; it seems never to have occurred to him that my sister and I would not pick up Arabic. Perhaps he thought that language skills ran in the blood. Indeed, during my college years he once sent me an article in Arabic, and was surprised and dismayed at my inability to read it: he had expected me to be literate in his language.
These linguistic deficiencies, though partly self-willed, have come to haunt me. I mourned with particular potency when my grandmother died shortly after I started studying Arabic for the specific purpose of communicating with her more meaningfully. As a child I had received occasional Arabic lessons from a relative at home and during special lunch-hour classes at school. During my teens and early twenties, embarrassed by the limitations of monolingualism, I took various courses in spoken and written Arabic. Despite my efforts, however, I retained little of what I learned, and my father, perhaps taking my knowledge for granted, offered little reinforcement. During bursts of enthusiasm or guilt I would ask him to speak Arabic to me on a daily basis. But such resolutions rarely lasted. He was too busy and too impatient for my faltering efforts, and I must have harbored more internal resistance to learning Arabic than I then realized.
Similarly, my father seemed to believe that knowledge of Palestinian history was a blood inheritance. I therefore had only my personal experience of events such as the Six Day War, or Black September, and a basic awareness of key dates—1948, 1967, 1970, 1973—guide me through this history that so defined my father's life, and my own.* Only when challenged by my college peers in Lebanon did I begin to educate myself about my Palestinian background, a task that assumed more urgency when I moved to the United States. Indeed, in a pattern that continues to repeat itself, I have come to understand myself primarily in oppositional contexts: in Jordan I learned the ways in which I am American, while in the United States I discovered the ways in which I am Arab.
Though my father's cultural codes regulated everything from the length of my hair to the friends I was permitted to visit, the surface texture of my life was indisputably American. I grew up reading Mother Goose, singing "Home on the Range," reciting "The Ride of Paul Revere," and drawing pictures of Pilgrims and Indians, Christmas trees and Santa Clauses, Valentines and Easter bunnies. At school I learned the standard colonialist narrative of white Pilgrims settling an empty new land, struggling bravely against savage Indians. Yet into this world came many Arab elements. My relatives would fill the house with their Palestinian dialect, the men arguing in loud voices, slamming the tric trac stones on the board, while the women chatted on the veranda or in the kitchen. Although my mother took advantage of my father's frequent business trips to serve meatloaf and potatoes, the plain American food she craved, much of the food we ate was Arabic: I grew up on yakhni and mahshi, wara'dawali cook these dishes when they lived in the and ma'aloubi. My father had taught my mother to United States: hungry for the food of his childhood, he was willing to enter the kitchen to teach her the art of rolling grape leaves or hollowing squash. In Jordan my grandmother took over her culinary education, the two of them communicating through hand gestures and my mother's broken Arabic.
But even food was a marker of both integration and conflict. To my father's dismay, I learned from my mother to hate yogurt, a staple of Middle Eastern diets. He took this as a form of betrayal. Holidays became arenas for suppressed cultural battles, as my father insisted that my mother prepare time-consuming pots of rolled grape leaves and stuffed squash in addition to the turkey and mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce; or that she dispense with the bread stuffing and substitute an Arabic filling of rice, lamb meat, and pine nuts. For periods of my childhood, having two cultural backgrounds seemed merely to mean more variety from which to choose, like the holiday dinners with two complete menus on the table. I learned to like both cuisines, and to this day crave the potent garlic, the distinctive cinnamon and allspice of the Arabic dishes I rarely, for lack of time, make. But early on I learned that cultures, like flavors, often clash. And my sister and I, occupying through our very existence the point of tension where my mother's and father's worlds met, often provided the ground for this conflict.
Moving through childhood between the insular worlds of school and home, I remained constantly aware of the ways in which I was different. My relatively light skin and hair, while failing to grant me entrance to the blond, blue-eyed company of "real" Americans, set me apart from my Arab neighbors. There must have been some difference about me more elusive than that, however for despite the fact that I knew Arabs with skin or hair lighter than my own, when I walked down the street I would hear the murmurs: ajnabi, foreigner. Even my body language marked me. When I was in my teens an Arab man once told me he would recognize my walk from blocks away. "You don't walk like an Arab girl," he said. "You take long steps; there's a bounce to your stride."
Instead of taking offense at what was in fact a criticism of my lack of "femininity," I hopefully interpreted this description to mean that perhaps I was, after all, American. I still clung to some shred of that old longing to be as confidently unambiguous as the diplomat kids who rode the Embassy bus, their lunchboxes filled with commissary treats—Oreos, Hershey bars—that we "locals" could never obtain. I wanted an American life like the ones I read about in the books I helped my mother unpack for the school library each year, the odor of glue and paper filling me with longing. I wanted an American father who would come home for dinner at 6 p.m., allow me to sleep over at friends' houses, speak unaccented English and never misuse a colloquialism; who would be other than what he indisputably was—a Palestinian. As a child I convinced myself that we lived in Jordan by mistake, and that soon we would return to the United States, where I would become my true self: American, whole. I wanted to believe that my confusion and fragmentation were merely temporary.
Meanwhile, I searched for someone to explain me to myself. I knew that Arabs—my relatives as much as neighbors and shop keepers and strangers—thought me foreign, while "real" Americans thought me foreign as well. I knew, too, the subtle hierarchies implicit in these assessments. At school the social order was clear: Embassy Americans, then non-Embassy Americans, and finally those of us with mixed blood, whose claim to the insular world of overseas Americans was at best partial. At the interdenominational church we attended, my mother and sister and I fielded the solicitude of missionaries who never quite believed that my father was not Muslim. When, after exhausting the resources of the American school, I transferred to a Jordanian high school offering courses in English, I learned that there too I was an outsider. My father's name didn't change the fact that I couldn't speak Arabic, lacked the cultural subtleties into which an Arab girl would have been socialized, and as an American female had automatically suspect morals.
I see now how orientalist representations of the Arab world find echoes in occidentalist perceptions of the west. When I walked down the streets of Amman I was categorized as foreign, female; a target of curiosity and harassment. My appearance alone in public and my foreignness seemed to suggest sexual availability; whispers of charmoota, prostitute, echoed in my burning ears. The insidious touch of young men's hands on my body pursued me, their eyes taunting me in mock innocence when I whirled to confront them. Once, when a young man crowded me against a wall, brushing my hips with his hand as he passed, I cried out wildly and swung my bag at him. But he advanced threateningly toward me, shouting angrily at my effrontery. If I had spoken Arabic to him he might have retreated in shame. Because I did not he must have seen me simply as a foreign woman, flaunting a sexuality unmediated by the protection of men, the uncles and brothers and cousins whom an Arab woman would be assumed to have.
Despite such experiences, early in my teens I claimed walking as a mark of my individuality. Determined to assert my difference since I could not eradicate it, I walked everywhere, consciously lengthening my stride and walking with a freedom of motion I longed to extend to the rest of my life. Walking offered a means both of setting myself off from and of confronting the Arab culture that I felt threatened to overwhelm me. I wanted to insist that I was "other" than these people whose language I barely spoke, even though they were my relatives; that I was American—as was, for that matter, my father. Lacking an understanding of his history, I remained oblivious to his awareness of his American citizenship as a bitter acquiescence to the realities of international politics and the denial of Palestinian identity. Instead, I clung to markers of our mutual Americanness. Didn't we cross the bridge to the West Bank with the foreigners, in air-conditioned comfort, instead of on the suffocatingly hot "Arab" side, where Palestinians returning to the Occupied Territories had to strip naked and send their shoes and suitcases to be x-rayed? Didn't we go to the Fourth of July picnics and Christmas bazaars? Weren't we as good as other Americans?
While my father shared my anger at being marginalized in the American community, he did not appreciate my attempts to reject his heritage. Despite his esteem for certain aspects of American culture—his fondness of small midwestern towns, his fascination with technological gadgetry, his admiration of the American work ethic—as I grew older he grew ever more disapproving of my efforts to identify as an American. Although he had left much of my sister's and my own upbringing to my mother, he had assumed that we would arrived at adolescence as model Arab girls: when we did not he was puzzled and annoyed. As walking became a measure of my independence, it became as well a measure of our conflict of wills. He did not like my "wandering in the streets"; it was not "becoming," and it threatened his own honor. I stole away for walks, therefore, during the drowsy hours after the heavy midday meal when most people, my father included, were either at work or at siesta. Walking in the early afternoon, especially during the summer months, accentuated my difference from the Jordanian culture I had deter mined to resist. A young woman walking quickly and alone through still, hot streets, past drowsy guards and bored shopkeepers, presented an anomaly: Arab girls, I had been told both subtly and explicitly, did not do such things—a fact that pleased me.
As my sister and I entered the "dangerous age," when our reputations were increasingly at stake and a wrong move would brand us as "loose," my father grew more and more rigid in his efforts to regulate our self-definitions. Our options in life were spelled out in terms of whom we would be permitted to marry. A Palestinian Christian, I knew, was the preferred choice. But even a Palestinian Muslim, my father said—though I did not quite believe him, conscious of the crucial significance of religious distinctions in the Middle East—would be better than a Jordanian. (I think of Black September, the days spent below window level, the nights of guns and mortars, my grandmother's house burned after soldiers learned of my cousins' political affiliations, the horror of Palestinian families massacred in their homes by the Jordanian army, and I begin to understand.) To marry an American, or Britisher, or Canadian was out of the question. Westerners, I heard repeatedly, had no morals, no respect for family, no sense of honor—an opinion that seemed to derive in part from observations of real cultural differences between Arabs and westerners, in part from the weekly episodes of Peyton Place and other English-language programs aired on Jordan television. (I have been asked by Arabs whether Americans really get divorced six or seven times, abandon their elderly parents, and are all wealthy. And I have been asked by Americans whether Arabs really ride camels to work, live in tents, and have never seen planes or hospitals.) Though I now appreciate the difficult balance my father sought to maintain in his identity as a Christian Palestinian in Muslim Jordan, between the American characteristics he had embraced after years in the United States and the cultural requirements of Jordanian society, at the time I experienced his expectations as unreasonable and contradictory. Most difficult to accept was the implicit portrayal of my mother's American identity as a misfortune for which we all, she included, had to compensate. On constant trial to prove my virtue and held to a far stricter standard of behavior than my Arab cousins, I both resented and felt compelled to undertake the ongoing task of proving that I wasn't, in fact, American.
In my experience cultural marginality has been among the most painful of alienations. My childhood desire, often desperate, was not so much to be a particular nationality, to be American or Arab, but to be wholly one thing or another: to be something that I and the rest of the world could understand, categorize, label, predict. Although I spent years struggling to define my personal politics of location, I remained situated somewhere between Arab and American cultures—never quite rooted in either, always con strained by both. My sense of liminality grew as I became more aware of the rigid nature of definitions: Arab culture simultaneously claimed and excluded me, while the American identity I longed for retreated inexorably from my grasp.
My experiences in the United States in many ways reinforced this sense of exclusion. Upon arriving in Michigan for graduate school, after four years at the American University of Beirut during which both my American and Palestinian identities had been inevitably politicized, I yearned, yet again, for the simplicity of belonging. Consciously drawing as little attention as possible to my name, my family, my background, I avoided Middle Eastern organizations, and made no Arab friends at all. A few days after my arrival in the United States, when a man asked me provocatively why I wore a "map of Israel" around my neck, I answered briefly that it was a map of historic Palestine and then retreated from his attempts to draw me into debate, shrinking deep into a cocoon of silence.
"Passing demands a desire to become invisible," writes Michelle Cliff. "A ghost-life. An ignorance of connections."** While the incidents that first made me afraid to reveal myself in the United States were minor—pointed questions, sidelong glances, awkward silences—they were enough to thrust me firmly back into a desire for invisibility. I sought anonymity, as if trying to erode the connections that had brought me, juncture by juncture, to where and who I was, the product of histories I could no more undo than could undo my bone structure.
But passing, as I was to learn, wreaks implicit violence upon the lived reality of our experiences. "Passing demands quiet," Cliff warns. "And from that quiet—silence." I have learned to understand silence as something insidious. As a child, lost between the contradictory demands of the worlds I moved between, I claimed silence as a tool of survival; I honed it still further in my American context. What I did not then realize was that silence, with time, atrophies the voice—a loss with such grave consequences that it is a form of dispossession. Silence made it possible for me to blend into my surroundings, chameleon-like; it enabled me to absorb without self-revelation what I needed to know. But its implications were disastrous. Silence wrapped itself around my limbs like cotton wool, wound itself into my ears and eyes, filled my mouth and muffled my throat. I do not know at what point I began to choke. Perhaps there was never a single incident, just a slow deposition of sediment over time. Until one day, retching, I spat out some unnameable substance. And I attempted to speak.
By this time I was beginning to claim the tools of feminism. In Beirut I had pored over a copy of The Feminine Mystique, startled by the wave of recognition it evoked. Later, graduate school exposed me to the analytical training and the affirmation of voice that I had been lacking. Although I eventually discovered its cultural insensibilities, American feminism enabled me to begin interrogating the entanglement of gender and culture in a search for my own definitions. While much in my experience had tempted me to reject Arab culture as misogynist, my growing awareness of the ways in which my experiences represented not Arab culture per se, but a conflicted interaction between Arab and American, led me to explore my Palestinian background for positive symbols, not just nationalistic but gendered, on which to draw for identification and strength.
This exploration reinforced my acute awareness of the representation and misrepresentation of Arab culture in the United States. There are ways in which Palestinian women escape the typical stereotypes of Arab women exotic, sensualized, victimized—only to be laden with the more male-coded, or perhaps merely generic, images of irrational terrorists and pathetic refugees. But none of these images reflect the Arab women I know: my widowed Palestinian grandmother, who raised three boys and buried two girls, raising two grandchildren as well after their mother was killed by a Zionist group's bomb, whose strength and independence people still speak of with awe; or my Lebanese aunt, a skilled nurse who ran a Jerusalem hospital ward for years, raised four children, gracefully met the social requirements of her husband's busy political and medical careers, and now directs a center for disabled children. My increasing anger at the portrayal of the Middle East as a chaotic realm outside the boundaries of rational Western comprehension, and a slowly developing confidence in my own political and cultural knowledge, came together with my burgeoning feminism to make possible an articulation that, although tentative, was more empowering than anything I had experienced.
At some point I began to feel anger. At the jokes about kalashnikovs in my backpack, grenades in my purse. At the sheer amazement of a woman who asked my mother, "But why did you marry a terrorist?" At an acquaintance's incredulous look when I spoke of Arab feminism. At the comments that it must be dangerous to live in Jordan "because of all the terrorism." At the college professor who did not believe that Arabs could be Christians. At the knowledge that when I posted announcements of Arab cultural events on campus they would be torn down moments later. At the look of shock and dismay, quickly masked, on the face of a new acquaintance just learning of my Palestinian background. At the startled response of someone who, having assumed my Arab name to be my spouse's, learned that I chose to keep an Arab name. At the conversations in which I am forced to explain that Palestinians do indeed exist; that they claim a long history in Palestine.
And with the anger has come fear. Of the unknown person in my apartment building who intercepted packages I had ordered from an Arab-American organization, strewing their contents, de faced with obscenities, at my door. Of the hostility of airport security personnel once they know my destination or origin point: the overly thorough searches, the insistent questions. Of the anonymous person who dialed my home after I was interviewed by my local paper, shouting "Death to Palestinians!" Of the unsigned, racist mail. Of the mysterious hit-and-run driver who smashed my car as it was parked on a quiet residential street, a Palestine emblem clearly visible through the window of the car door.
Such actions inscribe their subjects within a singular, predetermined identity, and often elicit responses validating precisely this identity. However, such exclusionary identification remains, finally, untenable. During the Gulf War a radio commentator proclaimed, "In war there are no hyphenated Americans, just Americans and non-Americans." It is a familiar, and chilling, sentiment: Japanese Americans in particular can speak to its implications. But what is to become of those of us in-between, those of us who are neither "just" Americans, nor "just" non-Americans? I could say that I opposed the Gulf War as a human being first, as an American second, and only third as a Palestinian. But in fact my identities cannot be so neatly divided. I am never just an American, any more than I am just a Palestinian. Yet I am not therefore any less of an American, or less of a Palestinian. As I was rarely given the choice in the Middle East to claim or not claim my American identity, so I am not often given the choice in my American context to be or not to be Palestinian. At best I can attempt to pass, suppressing my identity and resorting to silence. And when this strategy fails—or when I reject it—then I am forced to take responsibility for both American and Palestinian histories in their contradictory entireties—histories articulated through idealism, but resorting too often to violence. And in so doing I come to a fuller understanding of the contradictions, the excesses, which spill over the neat boundaries within which I am often expected to, and sometimes long to, reside.
It has taken personal loss to bring me to a fuller understanding of the connections and contradictions forming the warp and weft of my experience. The devastation I experienced at my parents' deaths, at the foreclosing of their attempts to negotiate difference in their lives together, compels me to claim and validate their legacy—the textured fabric of my own life. I look in the mirror and recognize their mingled features in my own; I lift my hair and note the curl, the color bequeathed by their mixed genes. My skin, lighter now since my years away from the strong sun of Jordan and Lebanon, retains the faint tinge of olive that set me apart from my white-skinned playmates even in babyhood. Tata Olga, my Palestinian grandmother, used to lament my propensity to stay in the sun. "You'll never find a husband, dark like this," she would scold, speaking the words of internalized racism and sexism. But I search now for color in my life. On the shelf above my desk I keep a card depicting a small Maldivian girl whose richly hued skin, deep brown eyes, and dark, unkempt hair compel me with their beauty. The Lebanese-American poet who gave me this card recently adopted a vibrant Guatemalan child; the girl in the picture reminds me of his daughter. She reminds me as well of a group of Maldivian students from American University of Beirut whose embracing presence and steady endurance during our exodus from Lebanon sustained and comforted me. And she brings to mind all the small girls growing up in a world where women are less valued than men, dark skin less valued than light skin, poor people less valued than wealthy people, non-western cultures less valued than western cultures.
She reminds me, too, that it is through a willing encounter with difference that we come to a fuller realization of ourselves. I possess no representative photograph of a Palestinian-American, no non-personal touchstone of my mixed heritage. And despite my longing for such tokens, perhaps they are unnecessary. Although I remain acutely aware of the importance of communal symbols in affirming individual and group consciousness, I find glimmers of myself in people I do not recognize, in faces that share with mine only questions. No closed circle of family or tribe or culture reflects from the Maldivian girl's eyes. She looks slightly away from the camera, her gaze directed wistfully at something just over my left shoulder, something I cannot see and that she may not be able to claim. The card identifies her as Laila, from a Maldive fishing family, noting that Maldivians are a mix of Arab, Singhalese, and Malaysian: there are, after all, some connections between us. But I cannot intercept her gaze. Laila looks steadily beyond me, light planing her pensive face. Whatever she sees remains unspoken. I look at her often, remembering how much I do not know.
Like my parents, I am grounded in both history and alienation. But if it is true that we are ideologically determined, it is also true that our choices allow us a measure of resistance against the larger patterns that map us, a measure of self-creation. Constructed and reconstructed, always historically situated, identities embody the demarcation of possibilities at particular junctures. I claim the identity "Arab-American" not as a heritage passed from generation to generation, but rather as an on-going negotiation of difference. My parents articulated their relationship oppositionally, assumptions colliding as they confronted each other's cultural boundaries. Child of their contradictions, I seek to transform that conflict into a constant motion testing the lines that encircle and embrace me, protect and imprison me. I am caught within a web: lines fade and reappear, forming intricate patterns, a maze. I live at borders that are always overdetermined, constantly shifting. Gripped by the logic of translation, I still long to find my reflection on either side of the cultural divide. But the infinitely more complex web of music beckons, speaking beyond translation. Who can say how this will end?
* The state of Israel was established in 1948, dispossessing 750,000 Palestinians, more than 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of the land that became Israel. The Six Day War of 1967 resulted in Israel's seizure of land from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria. During Black September of 1970 the Jordanian army killed thousands of Palestinians; militants who were not killed or captured fled to Lebanon. In 1973 war again broke out, this time between Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq.
** Michelle Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1980), 5.
Reference: Food For Our Grandmothers, edited by Joanna Kadi, South End Press-Boston, MA, 1994.