Reaction

On the interact board of Chowk.com, Ras Siddique, responded to a response of mine on an article by Azmat Tanauli called A New Role. (Parts of my original response that Ras looks at are in quotes):

Date Posted: Dec-3-01 2:0:12 EST Reply #: 28

Ras Siddiqui

RE: Reply #: 26 Zehra wrote:

"this article made me sick.

how can you so despotically declare that the clear choice is option number three (educating americans about islam and muslims)?"

I would not go that far Zehra. Wisdom does come with age, and this is the most reasonable path available.

You added later:

"anyway, it seems really superficial and fake to be all smiling and model minority when some white guy is yelling at you in new jersey for no reason other than the fact that you look a certain way, and you are expected to smile when you would rather tell him where to stick his big fat ugly head."

Very genuine feeling that we I hope will see in article form on CHOWK soon. We need honest reaction to the events AFTER 9/11 here.

Ras



I'm looking at this call for an honest reaction and thinking how I am just unable to write. I've wanted to so that I can finally get it all out of my system. They way it all makes me sick. Both sides, all sides of it.

I can't sleep at night. When I do sleep, I don't want to wake up. I've stopped reading the papers. First I stopped reading the papers but would look at the action shot photographs of Bush, Blair, Powell, Rumsfeld and the rag tag afghan armies of either side. They looked like such a collage of nightmares so I had to stop that as well. I've stopped watching television. What scares me is that the rest of American is glued to their television sets, listening to every Tom, Dick and Harry give their specialized, and expert opinions. I've found ways to get out of conversations that have anything to do with Afghanistan. For days I could see nothing rational around me except Robert Fisk. He seems so far removed though from my every day reality that even his yelling and screaming comes across now as a television salesman on mute. Bulging eyes and an image that looks at me for a few seconds then fades into a commercial for Survivor.

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Tempers are short and people are sick. The air is not healthy but the government and the city will not say so. The job market from its dip has taken a nose dive and people are getting desperate. FEMA and the Red Cross are still beaurocratic and ask for stacks of paperwork from widows, orphans and the homeless. High School students are displaced (normally traveling two hours by subway to get to school everyday is not unusual in this city, blown up school houses however, are a different story) but now have great stories for the college applications essays. People in offices think they are going mad. This madness is in direct correlation to an irrational strive for normalcy that their President and Mayor have repeatedly asked for. It would be unpatriotic to not come to work, go home, have dinner, see the world self combust on the evening news before the weather report, go to bed, get up, go to work, write a memo…



John, a house mate of mine who is half Japanese and half Hungarian, 4 days after the attack would look at me and Kiran, another housemate of mine and grin. Internment camp he would say and we would all laugh since we live in NYC and it's a big city with thinking metropolitan people. I don't feel terrorized here. A 2 hour ride from me where my parents live in suburban New Jersey however every single Blockbuster and major movie store had run out of all their copies of The Siege. According to my father, Muslims in suburbia were renting them out to feed their own fears. After a while cable television broadcasting and Dan Rather were enough. Early November has had 2 hour documentaries on USA and TNT on the lives of M. Atta et al. In interviews with neighbours, grocery store owners near by and the local petrol pump attendant we learn that the hijackers lived in a cute little well-to-do suburban town, they sometimes spoke to their neighbours, they traveled only with their own kind and in groups. They are described in fact as the epitome of a suburban desi. The filming, editing and voice over, though make it more like the suburban desi in the twilight zone. Eerie music, shady backgrounds, foreshadowing sentences before the commercial break and all. Could the instructor who taught Mohd Atta how to fly ever know the consequences of his actions? We'll hear from him and others when we return.

I was horrified when I saw this on television. My parents like other Americans are watching TV all the time. Their neighbours are like the nice people we saw on TV.

I've stopped going to see my parents. New Jersey and other places like it (imagine the mid-west: the horror, the horror) in this country scare the shit out of me.



An email to a friend on an issue I struggle with but had to confront, though not comprehensively or coherently post 9/11.

To : Asohan Amarasingham

From: Zehra Rizvi.

Han, good to hear from you….all is well on this end.

School, work etc. are getting back to normal…whatever that's supposed to mean these days J

I realized something that was somewhat upsetting. No one has been looking at me funny or making remarks or anything like that at all...whereas it is happening to all my desi friends. They are expecting it as well since most of them are not legally in the country or just here on visas. I am walking down the streets and meeting people with a confidence that these guys don't have because I know that I am an American. That's upsetting because I've tried not to be. I lived in Pakistan for seven years and not once did I forget or was I allowed to forget that I wasn't a Pakistani and that I was indeed an American. I didn't grow up with this pressure to do extraordinarily well in school in order to have a chance to leave Pakistan or look at other families around me packing up and leaving and wondering what would happen to me or have to stand in lines at the American embassy for days on end…

I didn't want to be American but I couldn't be anything else.

and when all hell breaks loose it hits me sitting in a subway that if anyone even looks at me funny or lifts a finger questioning me or who I am, it'll break my heart. because when it comes down to it, an American I am and this is just how it is. I mean, fuck man, it's the only identity I really have to hold onto any longer. And even that hold is yet again, tenuous. NYC is the only place that I want to call home. It's the only place where I feel comfortable in all my skins.

Does that make sense? I'm having a hard time communicating this to other people. and its interesting because its hitting my friends for the first time that I am an American and how my experience in all of this is just on a completely different level and perspective even though we share a skin color and first impression prejudices.

Pick up a phone once in a while and call.

Love,

Zehra.



Han understood what I meant. As an American of Sri Lankan descent he grapples with the same. Our skin color and names put our nationalities into question here and 'back home' it's our accents. The NYTimes today (12/5) had the story on the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. They describe him as an eccentric young man who Rumsfeld is hesitant to call a traitor or terrorist. Lindh's story comes under several different captions. No one is sure how to categorize him. Some media is calling him a traitor, others headline him :"U.S.Citizen's Saga". If Han or I went over to fight with the Taliban, the new and shiny military tribunal would be out in a second. Our interviews would not be on CNN or on the evening news. The headlines would not read U.S Citizen's Saga, it would read "Terrorists Breeding In Your Gentrified Neighbourhood of Ft. Greene, Brooklyn." Our parents would not be nameless and location-less finding us a lawyers, they would be mobbed and possibly in jail with us. And you tell me this is not a war of the West. Vs the East. To that, I raise my glass in a hearty salute to utter bullshit.



I live in NYC, one sister lives in D.C, one works in Syria and Rajistan. My parents are active members of their Shia'a community in southern New Jersey where they have lived for the last 20 + years. Is it any wonder or surprise that the FBI came knocking one fine Sunday morning at 10 AM? My father enjoyed the visit thoroughly, he thought it all very funny. My mother did not. Only the day before she heard how a 55 year old Pakistani man died under INS detention in jail. You are an American citizen, they can't do anything to you Amee, I say to her. She looks at me wearily. If they want to, nothing will stop them from taking your father away. They have absolutely no reason to, I tell my mother, but that doesn't comfort her. My mother is reliving the political agony of Karachi they thought they had left behind when they left in the early 90's. As one Pakistani quoted in the NYTimes said, "In my country, its never good when the authorities come knocking on your door". They are knocking on every Muslim door though. My parents, probably were not the only ones asked if their children would like to join the FBI. Amee was probably the only one though who looked mortally offended and told them her daughters were not into spying and lying.

Bush, evil incarnate, passed the anti-terrorism bill, Amee tells me, getting more and more animated as she talks about how any one of us could be picked up at any given moment. Don't talk to people. Don't say anything to them about the war, about Osama or about anything, she tells me. I tell her to get out of Jersey before she completely loses it. I am unable to see why any brown skinned person is living in anything but a city these days.

She is convinced, however, that the world is coming to an end. She called me again today with yet another sign that the end is near. December 5th and its going to be 70 F degrees. Along with a bunker, I think she is going to start building an ark in the backyard. They are preparing for anything and everything under the American sun. In such confusing and horrible times, I can't find it in me to talk to them rationally about anything. How do you tell a woman who is afraid to go shopping because she wears hijab that she has unalienable rights as a citizen? How do you tell her something like that when she is yelled at, stared at, honked at and verbally abused post 9/11 on a daily basis? You don't. You just listen to her talk and try to keep your own sanity intact by not dreaming about it every night.

You sleep, you wake up, you go to work.