Last month I flew to the Midwest from Washington, D.C. to stay at a small cabin in the woods with my parents, brother and the families of my dad’s brothers and sisters. While some days were spent on the water or exploring tourist traps, the evenings were without fail reserved for cocktail hour followed by dinner and a family bonfire. One night the bonfire talk turned to religion spurred on by my dad. He knew what he was getting himself into with his conservative brother and son and his liberal sister and daughter. During the discussion my brother got up at one point to get a copy of the part of the Koran that talks about the importance of killing in Muslim faith. I said, “Go ahead then.” But he couldn’t deliver. My uncle’s wife said, “I don’t ever want to know anything about those people,” referring to Muslims in general I suppose. I talked about how not everyone of the Muslim faith believes in Jihad and my relatives tried to argue that it is part of their religion so everyone must believe in it. I encouraged them to look at Christians and how everyone has their own interpretation of the bible. Okay maybe I yelled, “DO CHRISTIANS?” They argued that killing is different than how to take communion and with that the conversation moved onto safer ground.
This conversation has stuck with me after the week in the woods and I was frustrated about my relatives behavior. After hearing an interview on NPR with Moustafa Bayoumi about his new Book “How Does it Feel to be a Probem?”, a look at the real lives of seven Arab-Americans and how they are discriminated against, I realized he would be speaking later that night at Politics and Prose, a DC staple on the book tour circuit. My intention was to get to the talk early because I figured the place would be packed. I arrived just as Moustafa was being introduced, but was able to easily find a seat among the 15 or so empty out of the 50 total that were set up.
W.E.B. Du Bois and his book The Souls of Black Folk was an inspiration for the book’s title and also many of the sentiments within. He talked about his desire to help expose discrimination toward Arab Americans with his book which retells the real-life stories of seven Arab-Americans living in Brooklyn. The first reading came from the introduction where Moustafa outlines why he chose Brooklyn, which he sees as a diverse borrough that can be used to tell the story of America in general.
After the introduction, Moustafa gave an overview of each of the seven young people and the stories each individual chapter focuses on. There was the Christian Arab-American soldier who was on his way to training camp the eve of September 11th, 2001; Yasmine, a fifteen year old girl, asked to resign from her position as student council secretary because she didn’t want to attend the school dances due to religious reasons; a girl whose boyfriend was detained and eventually deported for being a spy for Saddam Hussein; the boy who landed an internship with Al-Jezeera only to find later that this actually hurt his job search prospects rather than helped them. After Moustafa had given us a taste of each character and story he read specifically from Yasmine’s the part where she goes to a lawyer about her case which he says he would be happy to take on for a mere $6,000.
Throughout the reading Moustafa was dynamic, knowledgeable and visibly enthusiastic about his subject. People in the audience seemed engaged. The next aisle over there was an older Arab woman with her head down who was crying into a kleenex. I don’t know why she was so sad, but she stayed that way for about half of the presentation.
After 30 minutes of reading, the floor was opened up to Questions and Answers. Most of the questions were relevant, forgiving softballs. Someone asked him to explain why he had chosen youth, another wanted to know about the process of choosing only seven subjects. Nestled in the middle there was a angry, old guy looking to trap the speaker. I don’t know if he was so angry he didn’t judge the audience or maybe he just didn’t care. He asked why Yasmine didn’t participate in the school dance, but as herself. While Moustafa tried to explain that she had proposed an alternative, the man likened the alternative to hiring a typist who can’t type. At this point the crowd all disagreed and someone even told the guy to sit down. He didn’t, though, and went on to his final question of five which was about suicide bombers and how they were bad. As if he was telling us something new. There was an Arab girl to my left and we exchanged “look at this crazy” glances before turning back to the story.
After fielding the last question which asked about the comparison between Arab youth in Europe compared to Arab-American youth, Moustafa talked briefly about the optimism of his book and thus began the signing part of the evening. As I was listening and watching the crowd, I was frustrated for my family that they were not there. Around the bonfire at one point my aunt said, “Oh, what do you have Muslim friends.” “Of course I do,” I replied. The reality that Moustafa is trying to point out happens in my own family; if my family had some personal experience with Muslims outside of the media’s scapegoating, then maybe they would be able to see them as more than just a problem.
