by Randa Jarrar
“He told mom he is writing a sermon for this Friday’s prayers.”
I pictured my brother reading a sermon in the small space, his hand resting on the yellow tape on the floor.
“That’s so sweet,” I said.
“It is not sweet; it is crazy. Please stop him. He will come out of that jail a fanatic!”
“That’ll never happen,” I said. “Don’t you know him at all? He is just finding a way to cope.” I couldn’t tell my father that my brother liked liquor and women too much to become religious.
•
In order to get the government to reverse the deportation, we hired a psychologist to determine the level of hardship my brother’s absence would cause us. By the time the therapist called me, the lawyer had written me an email saying I was the only sane person in my family.
His final court date was March 22. I met my parents in a hotel in the same building as the courthouse. At dinner the night before the hearing, my father couldn’t figure out how to work the pepper shaker, because he always thinks things are much harder than they actually are.
After dinner, we took the elevator up to our rooms. “I’m sick,” my father said. “The therapist gave me my file today. I need help.”
I’d been waiting to hear those words all my life.
My mother, who has always hated therapists because she thinks all people talk about in therapy is what a terrible person she is, interrupted. “I passed the test. The doctor said I was severely depressed. I wanted him to think so! I wanted to prove the hardship!” She smiled and danced around the hotel room.
The morning of the hearing, we all sat in the waiting area with other families. The rows of white plastic chairs faced a wall. It felt like we were all on a plane, being deported. Inside the courtroom, my brother was on a monitor, defending his moral fiber. An hour passed. “Maybe the judge will just let him out after this,” I said.
“That is wishful thinking,” my father said, closing his eyes. Everything had to be like that pepper shaker.
Less than fifteen minutes later, the judge stopped the hearing. “I’ve heard enough,” he said, leafing through dozens of family photos.
He released my brother and reversed the deportation order.
•
But it wasn’t over. I had to map the jail, print out the directions, and sit in the car with my parents as they screamed at each other all the way from D.C., through traffic, across Virginia.
Four hours after we set out, we reached the jail. We parked outside the entrance and waited. My brother’s silhouette appeared against the electric fence. Soon we were embracing him. His hair was shaved close. In the car, he told us stories of the men he’d been living with.
As we approached College Park, my father grew impatient with the printed map and the unfamiliar roads. He ignored my brother’s directions, and soon, we were going the wrong way on a one-way road. After all we’d done, my father jeopardized our lives out of impatience. Or maybe he was determined that he wouldn’t let the government do the destruction for him. In any case, by the time we reached my brother’s apartment, we were all anxious to leave the small prison of the rental car. We stood awkwardly around Raed’s coffee table, reluctant to admit that we got along a lot easier in crisis. A few minutes passed, and we shuffled our feet and said goodbye. My brother waved to us from the doorway, as though we’d just spent the last few hours visiting, and were now heading home.
•
When my brother was four, he broke into a parked Cadillac in our apartment building’s parking lot. He and his best friend hung out in the big American car’s velvety seats and pretended to drive, their short legs dangling high above the floor. A neighbor saw them and brought my brother home. My father yelled all that night. Then he stood up, knowing what he had to do. He would take my brother to the police; he would put him in jail. To teach him a lesson. He would.
“Get ready,” he told my brother.
I watched as my brother went to the front door, bent down, and silently, without the smallest murmur of resistance, strapped on his small leather shoes.
Then he straightened up, looked down the hallway, and waited.
15
BOATERS
For a very long time, I intensely disliked the word naturalized. It made me feel as if my family’s very existence was unnatural, and would only change once they became citizens. I looked up the word to avail myself of this feeling, and I enjoyed the biological definition—that to naturalize a plant was to make sure it could live wild in a land where it was not indigenous. The wild part was the part I adored. We were living wild in America. Until we were not.
•
In April of 2013, I was still in my sexless marriage when the Boston-bomber manhunt began. The image that later surfaced, of the eight-year-old who died, holding a sign that says no more hurting people, is seared indelibly on my memory.
•
“He looks like your son,” my ex said, when they released a photo of the younger Boston bomber. I looked at the photo. My son is darker skinned, but yes, there is a slight resemblance. The eyes, for one. The nose, too.
•
Walking with the Palestinian poet S once through Jersey City, we talked about our historical and present uprootings. She was being kicked out of her apartment after over a decade and a half of living there. In her kitchen, she pointed out of her windows at where the towers used to be. She had seen them burn from where we stood. I have recurring dreams that I will be forced to move from my house. Just last night, I dreamt that people came for me, that I didn’t have time to pack, that I moved to a room with flooded sewage. My mother showed up in the dream in one of her nylon nighties and helped me clean up.
•
I am an American, Chicago-born. Just like Bellow said. I left with my family six weeks after my birth, and we returned thirteen years later. My brother, until a few weeks before Trump’s election, was still a Jordanian citizen—because he could not be a citizen of Palestine, since there is no such state—and a legal U.S. resident. My parents had left my brother and me behind a few years after our immigration and gone back to the Middle East. My entire family is awful with paperwork, so much so that my brother never filed the paperwork he was supposed to file or showed up to the places he was supposed to show up when it was time for him to become a citizen. Consequently, he and I were, until recently, the only ones in our family who were not naturalized.
•
S said that all of us children of immigrants are terrible with paperwork. I told S that our friend L, who died of breast cancer a few years ago, was good with paperwork. I clarified that L told me she had become better with paperwork after she survived the first bout of cancer. “That’s why she made peace with paperwork,” S says. “She knew she was going to die.”
•
“But Boston isn’t a war zone,” I heard people say in the days of the manhunt, when they were asked to have empathy with Syrians, Palestinians, victims of drone strikes. “Have you been to Boston?” my friend J responded to them. “Every corner of that place is historically a war zone.”
•
I was filing back taxes and looking through my old receipts. I’d moved to Texas briefly before moving to California ten years ago, and I used Mayflower to move. That was the only time anyone in my family had anything to do with anything named Mayflower. We didn’t move to America on the Mayflower; we moved to America on EgyptAir.
•
The last time I took my son to Egypt, he was only eight. I left him for two nights with my mother and went to Cairo to hang out with some writers. One of those writers, a graphic novelist, was arrested last week during a protest. I found out on my Twitter feed in between updates about the Boston bombing. He was my driver during those two days in Cairo, and we commiserated over our children’s other parents, over the awfulness of divorce. I became angry with him later, at a coffee shop, when I’d taken my hair out of a ponytail and he’d said that my hair looked better down. I was hot, I’d sh
outed at him, and you don’t know me. He was released on bail during the days of the manhunt.
•
In 1999, a pilot of an EgyptAir flight let go of the controls and left God to be pilot.
But since God doesn’t know how to fly a 767, everyone on board perished. I was living in Texas, in a family housing unit with my son, then three years old. We were hanging out on the playground with dozens of friends, all of us from different backgrounds. It was the America I had always thought I would live in. When she found out about the flight, a fellow mother, a Latina from a border town, said, “God, those people who cover their heads.” I had stopped sleeping with a man the previous week because he’d said that this woman and her husband were having babies young because they were from Brownsville, a Texas border town.
•
In August of 2001, I moved with my son into a trailer on a little piece of property in a small Texas town outside of Austin. On 9/11, our white landlord came by and strung up a giant American flag. “This is for your protection,” he said, because I’d told some neighbors I was Arab American. Those first nights, I made my son, then almost five, sleep in my room, not in his, which was closer to the main road.
•
The week after the Boston bombing, my son dreamed that he was in a classroom full of people, and his chemistry teacher asked all the Black, Latino, Asian, and white students to stand off to one side, and everyone else to stand to the other.
•
After hanging out with Egyptian writers for two days, my mother brought my son out to Cairo from Alexandria on the train, and we all went to dinner near the Nile. My son and I took a ride in a small canoe after the sun set, a man rowing us through the water. My son asked me if he could leave a wish in the water. I gave him a piece of paper and he scrawled happiness for everyone, folded the piece of paper, and released it in the river.
•
“Boaters,” I’ve heard young Arab Americans call their immigrant parents and their parents’ friends in Dearborn, Michigan. “Ten years in America,” the younger Boston bomber had once tweeted, “I want out.”
When they finally found the bomber, out of all the places he could have hidden in Boston, he was curled up inside a boat.
16
IMAGINING MYSELF IN PALESTINE
When my sister got a job in Ramallah in 2011, teaching music to children, I knew I would want to visit her. I had not been to Palestine since 1993. I had planned to go back in the summer of 1996, but I was pregnant and unmarried. My parents did not want to speak to me, let alone take me with them, in such a shameful condition, to the West Bank. I never went back with family after that. I led my own life. I moved about a dozen times over the following fifteen years—an American nomad. I didn’t want to visit the West Bank and be at the mercy of family. If I ever visited, I would do so independently. When my sister moved to Ramallah she found an apartment of her own, and it had an extra room. It was the perfect time to go. My husband booked my flight, and, thrilled, I told my sister I was coming.
But trouble began weeks before I boarded my flight to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport. I had heard horror stories about a detention area there, dubbed the Arab Room, and in my anxious and neurotic style, I had emailed a dozen people—American academics and artists of Arab, Indian, Jewish, and European descent—and asked them what I was supposed to tell the immigration officers at Ben Gurion once I arrived. They all wanted to know if I was using my American passport, and I assured them that I was. The vast majority told me not to tell the officers I would be staying at my sister’s in Ramallah. They said this would cause trouble, and they offered up the names of friends and family for my use. The generosity of people poured in, and I was advised to say that I was staying with this writer, or that visual artist, or this former IDF soldier—people I had never met, but who had volunteered themselves to be my proxy hosts. A friend of mine, who is a phenomenal photojournalist, gave me her phone number and said to tell the officers I would be staying with her, and I agreed. She told me to prepare for the officers to call her themselves once I gave them her number, as this is something they are known to do.
•
I’d been so afraid of facing the guards at the airport that I had a difficult time imagining the rest of my trip. I would try to picture myself walking around Ramallah with my sister, or attending a concert, or visiting my aunts, or seeing the separation wall, or staying at the American Colony Hotel for an evening, and I would draw a blank. There was a wall there, too, between my thoughts and Palestine.
•
Growing up, my Palestinian identity was mostly tied to my father. He was the Palestinian in the family, and when we went back to the West Bank it was to see his brothers and sisters and parents. We always entered Palestine through Amman, crossing the Allenby Bridge over the River Jordan and waiting in endless inspection lines. I remember these trips dragging on through morning and midday and well into the afternoon. My father would sit quietly, and when I complained, my Egyptian mother would tell me that the Israelis made it difficult for us to cross into the West Bank. She told me that they wanted us to give up, that they would prefer we never go back. “We must not let them win,” she’d said. My relationship with my Palestinian identity was cemented when I enrolled in a PLO-sponsored girls’ camp as a tween. We learned nationalistic songs and dances and created visual art that reflected our understanding of the occupation. After my family and I moved to America in 1991, my Palestinian identity shifted again, and I began to see myself as an Arab American. My father’s fiery rants on Palestine died out when Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by a Jewish Israeli extremist. I remember my father weeping in our American wood-paneled den. He said that Rabin had been the Palestinians’ last chance.
There weren’t, as far as I could see, any other Arabs boarding US Airways flight 796 to Tel Aviv. On the airplane, I found myself surrounded by Christian missionaries and Evangelicals and observant Jewish men. The group across the aisle had their Bibles out, the man sitting next to me read from a miniature Torah, and as the flight took off, I found myself reciting a verse from the Quran, almost against my will. All the praying was contagious.
I spoke to no one on the plane, and no one spoke to me.
As we descended into Israel, the blue Mediterranean floated by below us. We saw the shore of Tel Aviv, and the buildings along it. An American teenager sitting in front of me started shouting, “It’s so pretty! It’s so pretty!” She wouldn’t have any trouble clearing passport control, I was sure.
When we landed, everyone on the plane clapped, something I thought only Lebanese people did, and I smiled. I turned on my phone and called my sister and let her know I had arrived, and that I would call her on the other side of customs and immigration. I was only an hour away from her. I took a deep breath and did something superstitious, as I tend to do when I am feeling powerless and anxious. I flipped to a random page in my passport, hoping to find meaning and reassurance in it. On the page I flipped to was a picture of an old steamship, presumably in the shadow of Ellis Island. I found the image inspiring, calming, and I felt ready to face customs.
I had deleted anything on my personal website critical of Israel, which amounted to about 160 posts. I had deleted the section in my Wikipedia entry that said that I was a Palestinian writer. It had been unsettling, deleting my Palestinian-ness in order to go back to Palestine. I had been told that the Israeli officers might confiscate my phone and read my Facebook posts and Twitter feed, so I temporarily deactivated my Facebook account and locked my tweets. The entire endeavor left me feeling erased.
I had read an article about the hundreds of activists that had flown into Ben Gurion Airport in July of 2011. They had all been detained over the weekend and then flown back to their countries of origin. Only one of them had made it through. When she was asked how she managed it, she said that she chose the “smiliest” immigration officer and stood in her line. So, when I entered the immigration hall, I did the same. The agent I chose was blonde and
young, and her line was moving the fastest. I stood, waited, and tried to relax.
There was only one person in the line in front of me, but the woman officer went to the back of her booth and a young bearded man took her place. He did not seem “smiley” at all. I considered switching lanes, but I knew I would look suspicious. So I waited.
When it was my turn, I gave the officer my blue American passport. As he scanned it, I noticed that he had unbelievably long lashes. He thumbed through the pages, and I was afraid of what he would make of the Lebanese stamp. He asked me what my purpose was for visiting Israel. I told him it was my spring break and I had come to visit friends. He asked me where I was staying. I did as I’d been told and said I was staying in Jerusalem, with the photojournalist. He picked up a black telephone. When he hung up, he told me to go wait in the room in the corner. I asked him if I could have my passport back, and he said no. I asked him when I would be getting my passport back, and he didn’t answer. He only repeated that I needed to go to the room in the corner.
I crossed the immigration hall diagonally and entered the Arab Room. Sitting in the room and waiting were a young Arab man and an older Arab woman in hijab; two Black men in African garb, one of whom was holding an iPad; two middle-aged Arab women in hijab; one dark-haired Tunisian American woman in a long skirt; one woman in a Whitney Houston T-shirt, her hair gathered up in a turban; and one dark-skinned Arab woman in a pantsuit. It was readily transparent that we had all been racially profiled. A young man joined us and got on his phone. I heard him saying, “No, they just finished questioning me. I’m half-Egyptian. I should be out soon.” I got up and told the woman guard at the door that I needed to go to the bathroom, and she nodded. When I came back to the room, I sat down and took out a magazine, reading as calmly as I could. About twenty minutes passed before a redhead, who couldn’t have been older than nineteen, summoned me down the hallway. I followed him to an office where a few brown men were answering questions. The redhead asked me to take a seat and swiped my passport through at his station.