The New Jews

All this war talk has managed to do something that I thought was long behind me. It’s made me ask a question that I haven’t asked myself since I was at least twenty-one. In this world, where Muslims are the new Jews, where Pakistanis are terrorists, visa cheaters and total bastards, What am I?

The first time I ever had to consider this question was when I came back to Pakistan at the age of five years and one month old, and was put into an American school because my parents felt it would make for an easier transition. Up until that moment, I had never considered myself any nationality. I was simply a kid like everyone else at Mrs. Hall’s Montessori School. But the first day of school, as I stood shyly on the playground and contemplated whether I wanted to join the kids playing hopscotch or ring-around-the-rosy, I was asked, by both American children and Pakistani ones, who heard my American accent and saw my brown skin, “What are you?”

It was the first time I realized there was something to this thing about being either “American” or “Pakistani”, that they were more than words, they were markers, labels, ways of identifying you and putting you in boxes that most people were never able to climb out of for the rest of their lives. For many years I struggled with that question, trying out different permutations and combinations – I was a Pakistani body with an American soul; I was an Eastern soul with a Western mind; I was half and half, or neither (In truth I am a Pakistani with a Pakistani passport, which doesn’t leave much room for argument, thankfully). Finally I came to the eventual conclusion that I was a Pakistani who had lived some years in America, and that was all there was to it.

The same question was raised many years later when I was in college; people were still a bit confused by the accent and the skin, but by then were more used to the idea of people who traveled the world, crossed boundaries, and had absorbed a bit of both into their bodies and souls. It was easy to be this and something else, or something-American, or even just foreign student, and if that didn’t suit you, then you could always fall back on your religion, which I did with gusto. It was a relief to say, “I’m Muslim” and gain the instant recognition while bypassing the more troublesome issue of explaining history, geographical locations, latitude and longitude.

Coming back to Pakistan has always been the same; people listen to me speak and ask me, “Do you live here? Where are you from?” (My favorite question was, “Are you Persian?” when I joined a language course recently) This morning I was on the phone to my credit card company in America, getting a bill paid by phone. “Are you in service there?” asked the woman on the phone. It made me laugh, the idea that I was an American in military service here in Pakistan: an interesting mistake to make, I thought.

But the brouhaha surrounding 9/11, and the fallout that Pakistanis have suffered; INS registration, and the fact that all of Al-Qaeda seems to be hanging out in a neighborhood near me – and now the peak, the gathering head of the storm that is going to be Gulf War II (Clone of the Attack), brings up that question all over again, with a sickening immediacy that goes far beyond simple déjà vu: What are you?

This time the question means so much more. What are you? is not a friendly query anymore; it’s an accusation, an inquisition. Are you a terrorist? Are you an extremist? Are you with us or against us? Are you on our side? Are you a lunatic? Are you a liar?

More. Do you support Bin Laden? Do you support America? Are you in favor of Musharraf? Are you in favor of the Taliban? Are you an oppressed woman? Do you wear a burqa? Do you wish my kind and I were dead? Do you like killing yourselves and killing innocent civilians? Will you use the nuclear bomb?

And yet more. Why have you not spoken out against your government? Why do you spread trouble throughout the world? Why have you kept quiet while your people were ruining our lives? Are you going to do something to hurt me? Does your religion really encourage suicide bombings, violence, destruction of Israel and America? Are you in support of democracy and freedom, or do you support ignorance and oppression?

The knee-jerk reaction to this question comes even without the unspoken questions that now echo in all our minds, since 9/11, since those planes smashed into those buildings and changed all of our lives forever. I’m not a terrorist. I’m peaceful. I won’t hurt you. I just want to live my life. I want the same things that you do. We twist ourselves into knots, keep ourselves awake at night thinking of responses to questions that we imagine the world is asking us, before they even ask them, or sometimes they never do.

Honestly, I’m not that interested. I don’t take part in protest marches. I can’t be bothered to sign those online petitions that people keep sending me, because I feel that to do this is to say to them that I’m ashamed of something, that I have something to answer for. I really don’t. And if I don’t, then why should I act as though I’ve committed a crime and have to atone for it in a politically correct way?

But they force me to question myself, to worry about who I am and what I believe in by their insistent demands that I see myself the way they see me. They want me to understand how frightened they are, how the firefighters’ children cried when their fathers didn’t come home, how they worry about anthrax and sarin and ricin and all the rest of the chemicals that their companies sold quietly to Iraq for years. I and all my compatriots have suddenly been forced to reevaluate ourselves, to stare at our eyes in mirrors late at night and look for genes of hatred that they claim are embedded in our DNA. We are forced to turn ourselves into the villains that they so desperately seek, just so that we can all take our roles in this play, this danse macabre that demands full compliance from its actors, directors, and audience, whether we all want to go see this show or not.

And above all, when people ask, “What are you?” it always feels they don’t want me to say “I’m Pakistani”, or “I’m Muslim”, or all the rest of it. They are only asking me this because they want me to say, “It’s all my fault”. It’s all my fault, by virtue of what I am, that Western lives are in danger, that they no longer feel secure, that the world is a more dangerous place, and so on and so forth. They think that asking that question will make them feel a little bit better; it distances them from the mess that they themselves have helped to create by their quiet compliance and their blind trust in crooks and politicians.

Blame the other, blame your mother, blame anyone but yourselves, and pull your blankets a little tighter over yourselves at night. Then sleep a dreamless sleep, where we are on the other side of the world, kept out by your Maignot Lines, your Hadrian’s Walls, your INS regulations and your racial profiling. We, the new Jews, know full well what we are, what you want us to be, and, I fear, where you want us to go.