what is the a-Rab?

Whether they’re tanning some olive-oil hides on their kids for coming home with “American values” of selfishness, kicking locally-respected adages from behind a cash register at the corner store, smokin’ a J with Harold and Kumar while they laugh and exchange “token foreign kid” stories, sitting in trial with their heads in their hands weeping over false accusations of bogus bomb threats, or cheering white activists on from behind a TV screen as they take beatings from a hauntingly familiar police force over Iraq war protests, this publication says:

“Respect us: We yield our own knowledge and culture and aren’t ashamed to serve a cause forged in another land.”

The a-Rab is everyone recklessly slapped with a criminal label September 12th 2001; the folks who were already suspected and rejected: the dark-skinned and coarse, the multilingual with heavy scorned accents, the Muslims who pray to the East, the Arabs who sip heavily distilled grape alcohol, the Palestinians who forgot how to weep, the politically conscious, those who reject the system and won’t accept its idea of good manners.

We are not talking in terms of citizenship or ethnicity. We are speaking in terms of the cultural mainstream and in terms of what passes as “American.” In this country, they tell you who you need to be, and when you try to suggest your own alternative (that is, to create your own identity), you are abused.

"Narrative is the specific form taken by written history to counter the permanence of vision... Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change, the likelihood that modernity and contemporaneity will finally overtake 'classical' civilizations; above all, it asserts that the domination of reality by vision is no more than a will to power, a will to truth and interpretation, and not an objective condition of history. Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision; it violates the serene Apollonian fictions asserted by vision." -- Edward Said in Orientalism

They would like you to be the happy Arab immigrant who is subsumed by the system, makes an art out of brown-nosing to beat all of those other foreign medical graduates in the residency programs, and becomes a well-off professional by: abandoning your political beliefs--your political consciousness!, your voice, and your relevance to society. This is what it takes to be an “American” Arab and not an a-Rab.

This castration of identity has been called by many a (European) visionary Assimilation. They heap praise on Assimilation as the way to overcome racial prejudice and discrimination, the way we can become a community with one identity that recognizes everything we hold in common. As attractive as the idea might seem, the truth is that every identity is defined by what it is not, and every community that adopts such an identity will inevitably clash with other identities, and will exclude them.

That means that Assimilation as we know it is the opposite of community, of inclusion, of equality. You have to follow their 12 step program to becoming an American, not yours. If you don’t ditch your politics (“Gee, Mo, it makes me uncomfortable when you talk about Palestine--can’t you ever just sit back, relax, and enjoy yourself? Let’s go to Habibi’s!”) or change your supposedly savage culture, you fail. You lose the game, and then they have the audacity to tell you that you can’t expect to have any respect or access to politics unless you change course, buy a pretty suit, lose the accent, and change your name to Worthington.

If you don’t follow the religion of Assimilation, you are excluded and rejected: your very right to speak is challenged. Who hasn’t been asked to love it or leave it? There is no true pluralism in this society, and the democracy practiced has more in common with an elitist and exclusive country club for Richard Cory’s than it does the democracy they would like you to believe you have.

Some of us have fallen for the Assimilation myth, it is true. The Arab American Institute for example has compiled a list of “famous Arab-Americans” to prove that it really does work, it really is possible for the White Man to love an a-Rab. But is there anybody who will say that General John Abizaid, known for his leadership in the occupation of Iraq, or Queen Noor, known for her and her husbands’ “moderate” politics, are a-Rabs? If these people were to walk unguarded through the streets of Baghdad: would they be celebrated or hunted?

We need only look at their subservient politics to understand why they are “famous Arab-Americans.” It should be called imitation, not assimilation. An Arab is not necessarily an a-Rab, and the fact that a rich Queen in Jordan is accepted in American high society is not very re-assuring for the friendly man who owns the corner store, goes by Gus, and puts up flags on the 4th to make up for the color of his skin and the subtle slips of tongue that give him away every time.

This is the a-Rab, and this is our narrative. We are here to tell our stories, ourselves, with our voices. We are transforming a democracy of corporations that speak in jingles and brand names into a democracy of humans who speak with stories and passion. We are here to provide a radical and alternative a-Rab perspective. We won’t “work within the system,” until it works for us, but hell, we might use it. This is the a-Rab, and this is a project of self-determination, in every sense of the word.