by Randa Jarrar
Here, I offer a sample:
May 1
to rjarrar
How did you get so fat?
Apr 20
to rjarrar
You’re an unhinged vengeful camel CUNT:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/04/20/bush-hating-fresno-state-professor-passes-out-fake-number-floods-crisis-hotline-with-calls.html
I hope you get criminally prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Justice system. You belong in a G’tmo cell with the other Islamic terrorists.
Speaking of which, I owe them an apology because I just saw a picture of you. You definitely wouldn’t make it as their sex slave. You’re so obese and ugly you’d make a freight train take a dirt road!
Have fun in prison, cunt!
May 1
to rjarrar
Barbara Bush was a woman of Grace and compassion you on the other hand are fat Arab Pig you may not think you’re going to get fired but I wouldn’t bet that you won’t wind up Underground you’re a disgrace and should be punished appropriately
April 30
to rjarrar
Aren’t you a rancid fat whale of a cunt! Hope you get AIDS sucking one of those white dicks you speak of. But I can’t imagine any white man going anywhere near your smelly fucking fat ass! I can’t wait until you fucking die bitch . . . i might make a special trip just to take a shit on your grave! Looks like you one or two Twinkies away from it fatty!
That women writers and thinkers and leaders receive death threats and are critiqued for their appearance rather than their arguments is nothing new. But my son and my sister and my brother also received death threats. Of all the email I received at my work address, I received 880 messages that included a racial epithet and/or a suggestion for me to die. All because Barbara Bush’s passing conjured, for me, the pain and suffering that the Bush dynasty has caused, whether it be through oil deals, enactments of laws that lead to the suffering of Black Americans, prison investments, or the bombing of Afghanis and Iraqis and the continuous theft of their resources.
Yet the only First Lady we have, as a culture, been allowed to malign viciously was our only Black First Lady. Regardless of what I think of her and her husband’s policies in the Middle East, it was beautiful when American children could actually see Black people in a position of supreme power. But the beauty ended there. When trolls said I would never say anything so impolite about Michelle Obama, they were wrong. But anything I say to criticize her won’t be racist.
Out of all the emails that I received, a majority forecast my impending death. If I wasn’t going to die from a bullet, they argued, I would die because my own body would kill me.
For three years before this incident, I had been writing this book about my body, about the ways in which women are held to impossible standards—their bodies expected to adhere to Eurocentric, thin beauty ideals. Women are supposed to carry and birth children, but they are not supposed to talk about the sex they had to get them there. Queer mothers and people who can carry children and choose their own routes to parenthood are silenced or made invisible. And as I write this, there is fear that Roe v. Wade will be overturned. America hates its women. And America wants to own its women.
I actually admit I got fat from eating poorly while being poor, being genetically predisposed to diabetes and retaining adipose tissue, and being so lazy and tired after writing books and raising my child alone that I didn’t exercise. In fact, I ate. That shouldn’t be in the past tense. I eat.
And I also write what I like. And say what I like. And fuck whomever I like.
•
When I woke up the next day, I learned that someone had released my home address in California and my personal phone number. I believed this was utter madness, so I searched for twenty-four-hour crisis hotlines, for trolls and angry people to call, since I believed that attendants at a crisis hotline were a lot more equipped to receive angry, unhinged phone calls than I was. And I was right. Everyone who called got through. The director of the center said that no one who needed help was blocked from reaching a counselor.
And yet, when trolls discovered that I had shared a crisis hotline rather than my own phone number, they became even more enraged. Until this day, there are people online who find this to be an offense punishable by death. I have literally received death threats over this.
What followed was surreal. Many times, I wondered if I was on acid, or in a strange, lucid dream. Major American newspapers, as well as the UK’s Guardian and Daily Mail, repeated what trolls had written: that I was a racist for calling Barbara Bush a racist; that I had flaunted my tenure and taunted my opponents; and that I was disgusting, embarrassing, and impolite.
I watched, amazed, as TV news anchors repeated this. But the part that amazed me was how often they repeated what I had written: that Barbara Bush was “a smart, generous, and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. Fuck outta here with your nice words.” I’d look at another news piece, and again, the anchor would repeat, “Barbara Bush was a smart, generous, and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal.” Fox & Friends said, “Barbara Bush was a smart, generous, and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal.”
The message I wanted out in the world was out in the world. It may have been heavily framed as disgusting and controversial, but it was out there.
In a way, we had won.
I kept a low profile as soon as I got back to the States, aching for the freedom I’d experienced just two years earlier, a woman and a dog driving cross-country.
4
TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, 2016
In 2016, after leaving the awfulness of Arizona, I stayed in New Mexico for a week, in the countryside outside of Santa Fe. One morning, I woke to the news of fifty dead in Florida. Fifty gay people. Murdered.
A few minutes later: that the shooter was Muslim.
A little while after that: he identified with ISIS.
A few hours after that: he was gay and went to the club often.
I visited a plundered Native site, gave respects, prayed, and cried.
•
To take my mind off things, I swiped right on every human on Tinder. Matching with none of the women, I decided to go on a date with H, who had been messaging me nonstop. He took me to the central square to look at the Don Diego de Vargas statue. We stood in front of it and he told me the colonial history of the city. He said that every year, the town does a reenactment of the violence and of the parade the Spaniards put on after recapturing the city and murdering Natives in 1692. He told me that although he was part Pueblo, he once took part in that reenactment parade by playing de Vargas himself, on a horse, in costume. He didn’t seem too ashamed, which I noticed. I asked him if he ever thought about the twelve years that the Pueblo resisted the Spaniards in the region. He didn’t say anything, and he walked me to a spot he said Pueblos congregated in to plan their resistance. The sun was setting red and blue and the place where we stood felt like fire.
H was a handsome, assured-looking man, and he was insecure and eager. I was excited.
He told stories about his parents. My mother was a revolutionary, he said, my father just liked to get laid. He told the stories exquisitely, slowly. He was so good that I never felt trapped when he started a new one right as he was finishing the one before it. We acted chic about our divorcé-ness. His wife had left him for a man who owned a tanning-salon empire. I had heard so many stories like this from male friends. I told H that I knew a man whose wife left him for her yoga instructor. How could someone make a choice so clichéd? Money, he said. After that I got to experience being Shahrayar, a spoiled king, while he Shahrazaded me around Santa Fe. He showed me the irrigation ditches around the land-grant homes, told me he was Spanish, argued with me about whether he was white—he wasn’t—and when I asked him what it was that made him want to marry his last wife, he stopped, then said, I just wanted someone to love me. Then he told me that he was about
to say the whitest white-guy thing ever uttered, so I prepared myself. He said, She was the kind of woman Bono would have called up to the stage with him. Wow, I said.
He drove fast, to a hill overlooking all of Santa Fe. We walked around and found a bench and sat there together, our hands on each other until we came.
•
A day later, I drove away, south, away from Northern New Mexico to Truth or Consequences. Every few miles a sign would announce that I was leaving a reservation.
Now leaving Santo Domingo Reservation.
Now leaving San Felipe Reservation.
Now leaving Isleta Reservation.
Reservations all named after Spanish conquerors, genocidal.
•
The drive was less than four hours long. I arrived in Truth or Consequences in the hazy afternoon, the sun beating down and blanching the sidewalks, sending heat off the asphalt. I checked into my motel and the attendant told me that the room I was staying in had been floated, along with the rest of the row house, down from Elephant Butte Lake in the early twentieth century. After she left I washed my hands in the sink, and the walk from sink to bed was wobbly, as if the wood plank floors were still over water. I curled up with my dog on the bed and slept for a long time.
When I came to, I read a list of the dead—they were calling it the Pulse nightclub shooting.
All three days I was in Truth or Consequences, I soaked in a mineral hot tub. I cried and floated and felt an intense loneliness—not solitude at all, just plain painful. And from there, I drove to Texas, crossed the border, parked my car at the El Paso airport, and flew to Minneapolis. There, I attended an Arab American literary conference I had spent the past year helping organize. I lived all week with Arab Americans and Muslims, so many of us queer, dancing, talking about art. I’m so proud of us. I need us. I love us. I wish we could spend our whole lives in celebration, communion, checking on each other, loving each other, being free.
•
The day after the conference, I had a night argeeleh at the Sphynx Café in Minneapolis with the Palestinian poet S and her friend, a Lakota poet. We sat on the sidewalk and the sky was purple and the rain came down and didn’t drench us. I pretended to be a m’allemah, a neighborhood bosslady thug, legendary in Egypt, and I spat a monologue loudly. An Egyptian man, just breaking his fast and smoking a cigarette, rounded the corner and came to our table, looking terrified. I told him I was pretending. A few minutes later, he came back, this time right up to where we sat, and I asked him if he was scared of me. I knew he was. He said, Never. I never get scared. S and I laughed and laughed.
•
I flew back to El Paso from Minneapolis. From El Paso, I drove to Marfa. I was surprised to see that Texas had its own border patrol agents, and at the checkpoint, they asked me if I was a U.S. citizen. I said yes. They let me through. In my bra, a half-smoked joint. My happy fat Arab heart.
5
WEST TEXAS, 2016
In Marfa, one of the women writers staying at the Lannan Foundation flipped over on her bicycle and had someone drive her to my house. He knocked on the door and shouted, “Your friend is in the car and needs your help.” I came out to find her biting down on a bloody towel. “My fucking teeth got knocked out,” she said, and I helped her get in my car and gave her a pack of ice.
We drove to the nearest dental-emergency place, a trailer thirty miles east. We passed a giant border patrol blimp and I tried to distract my friend, who had done terrifying journalism work and was now obviously too vulnerable and battered by the actual fucking soil of Texas.
In the trailer, my friend allowed me, someone she didn’t know very well, to care for her. I took deep breaths and promised myself after each one that I wanted to get better at letting others love me.
•
A week later, I kept that promise to myself, and I invited my friends E and A, old neighbors from Austin, to come visit me. I delighted at the sight of them in my driveway, the two of them gorgeous and smiling. Together we drove to the Marfa thrift store, where we saw three confederate flags in a vase. I asked the cashier, an ex–New Yorker, why they had them. He said they were donated and that we could have them for free because he knew we would destroy them. We put them in the trunk, then took them to a field and destroyed them. We wanted to set them on fire but the desert was dry.
•
In the morning, we drove fifty-four miles through the high desert out to Balmorhea State Park, home to the world’s biggest spring-fed natural pool. There, we each received citations for drinking beer by the water. Other people were drinking out of koozies, or hiding their liquor in the cooler. We were drinking openly and Officer Teel did not like that. I argued with him for half an hour, but he just gave me an additional note on my citation for “language.” He categorized me as white. I told him I was not white. He asked what I was. I told him. He put me down as white anyway. The pool was full of small fish and catfish. We left as soon as Officer Teel was gone.
At night, we made shadow puppets in front of the Catholic church in town and I rang the church bell and thanked the nun for her service to Jesus. I pissed on a fire hydrant. We disturbed a man named Bill, a visual artist, and he let us into his studio. We climbed up to the roof and climbed back down. Thank you, Mother! I screamed at the sky, the black void.
This is where Giant was filmed, everyone here will tell you. I had never seen the film, but I came to learn that it was James Dean’s last role before his untimely death. The film featured Mexican and Mexican American actors and was made in 1955. A group of local actors who were children in the film held a panel the day after my friends left town and talked about their experiences. They were elderly now. The West Texas desert felt powerful, the kind of female deity that we forget can exist: She’s mean. She’s boiling with anger. She killed Scalia right here just this past February.
It took me a week to find weed. I had flown out of California with some in my carry-on, which I’ve been told by a friend’s attorney husband is completely legal, but I’d smoked it all with the women who were in town for the Lannan Residency. I went to a weirdo bar that served bad pizza but was literally the only place to get food in town since all the grocery stores were closed and it was a Tuesday.
At the weirdo bar I met a couple: she, fifty-two, he, twenty-seven. They sold me the rest of their weed but only after they asked if they could fuck me in the bathroom. I said no, but when they asked for my number, I relented, because I wanted to stay in touch in case I needed more weed or got horny down the road. That turned out to be a huge mistake, since he wouldn’t stop calling, and later, she left me a three-minute voicemail about her feelings about it. I hid out in the house I was renting.
•
Two weeks into my stay in West Texas, I began receiving messages from L, a young Egyptian Muslim woman living in the Midwest. She was in her twenties and living with her parents, and her father was abusing her mother.
I’d met L at a liberal arts college in Ohio months earlier, and we had clicked. She told me, in a faculty lounge with a cheap piano in the corner, that her parents had given her an “American” name so she could fit in, but that instead, she was hypervisible in her hijab. In Egypt, no one thinks of her as Arab, because of her name. In America, no one thinks of her as American, because of her hijab.
Our messages were short, clipped. She was feeling guilty, blaming herself for the abuse. I tried to help without sounding clueless, privileged. At some point, she told me she didn’t want to call shelters or social workers who will give her white-women solutions. She said, “This isn’t just abusive. This is Egyptian.”
She said she had a hard time sleeping. That she’d been sitting in her closet, with the door closed, for privacy. That through the day and night, she could hear her mother wailing. L went from telling me her mother would never agree to go to a shelter to writing and saying that her mother was ready to move out.
I reminded her that she was over eighteen and had the right to live wherever s
he wanted. She responded that, while that sounded nice, how would she afford it? Here, L’s problems all intersected: she was the daughter of an Arab immigrant, she was Muslim, she was a woman, she was young. Her future, she said, appeared dim. She corrected herself: “I cannot even see my future at all.”
Two days later, she wrote to me and said she called the police. She said her mother was screaming and she couldn’t stand by anymore. She was afraid to call the police on her dark-skinned Muslim father, but she felt she had no choice. When they arrived, they removed him from the house and promised L and her mother shelter. A few hours later, they said there was no shelter available to house her disabled sister. That night, the police allowed L’s father back into the house.
Now L felt like a traitor, an untrustworthy and worthless person. I assured her she was not, that she was brave to report her father. She asked me, “How can a person call the police on her own father?” I told her, “The same way there can be a person who frightens and abuses their own daughter.”
6
LOVE IS BODYSOME
My body was small; then it was not. That is the story almost all of us have about our bodies. At some point, we were infants, and, because we were fed and swaddled and because we slept, we grew. Our cells multiplied. We stretched. We expanded. I was the height I would always be by the time I was eleven. That is also when I began menstruating. My mother sat with me on my Ikea bed and told me I was a woman now. I didn’t own any bras then.
We had a Quran in our house in Kuwait when I was growing up, but I rarely saw anyone reading it. In my house, adults read diet books. Adults followed diets ritualistically.
My mother had a large ass. I knew this because when she sat at the piano bench to teach music, children pointed at her ass and laughed. I knew this because my father told her she had a fat ass. I knew this because she sometimes walked around our apartment naked, her dimpled ass smiling, the apron of her belly flap forming a soft W under her belly button.