jamelah.net

These days, it seems that everyone is an expert on the Middle East, but when I was a kid, and people still asked “What are you?” to find out what specific concotion of racial background made my skin brown, and I said “Arab,” the response I typically got was “Oh, from Saudi Arabia?” I would explain, no, from Yemen, which 100% of the time got “Where’s that?” as a response.

My point, other than yes, people really do ask “What are you?” is that nobody knew where Yemen is for most of my life. In fact, many people had never heard of Yemen until it was a joke in Friends, when Chandler tells Janice that he is moving there to get away from her and then haaaahahah he has to move to Yemen, though really, how many of those people who quoted that joke at me actually knew where Yemen was, as opposed to being people who would say “Oh, where Chandler moved, 15 Yemen Road, Yemen?” as though that definitely explained where an entire Arab nation was?

When did everybody learn where Yemen is? I couldn’t tell you, but I do know that folks know where it is today, because the United States is currently bombing it. Not as part of a war declared by Congress as the Constitution requires, but rather as part of an apparent good ol’ boy network that President Biden has with Israel to protect shipping? I guess? This differentiates the current bombing of Yemen by the current US president from the past bombings of Yemen by past US presidents because this one is In The News, but please know that the United States has a decades-old tradition of blowing Yemen up.

Thanks, Obama.

So, who are the Yemenis? I don’t believe in speaking about a group of people as though they were a monolith, and besides, I suppose it’s time to write a little something about how there is nothing that causes me more Impostor Syndrome than talking about my ethnicity. This is a thing that I don’t think I’ve ever written about, because it never crossed my mind as a topic of discussion or interest, and it still may not be. But it is something that I have been tossing around in my own mind for a long time, and I guess for my own sake I should get it out of my head and… somewhere else. Yes, the Internet seems like the healthiest option, for sure.

While I do truly understand that there is no barrier to entry when it comes to ethnicity aside from, you know, having an ethnicity, I also, at least as an adult, haven’t really felt comfortable claiming Arabness as my own. Not because I am not easily identifiable by TSA agents who would like to pull me aside for some extra screening, because I most assuredly am, but because nobody taught me any recipes, and my knowledge of the language is spotty and I don’t remember any songs. Though I can watch a TikTok by an Arab creator and recognize cultural things sometimes, like “Aha, yes, this is a thing my dad used to do,” I don’t always get everything.

My parents, who split up when I was two, based on factors that I will never truly understand, decided that I would be raised Christian. (Someday maybe I’ll get into how being the child of an Arab Muslim raised in the world of conservative Christian evangelicalism is a headfuck at best, but that’s for another time.) While religion is not a prerequisite for anything — there are Arab Christians and Jews and nonreligious Arabs, etc. — all of my Arab relatives are Muslim. (And though I was raised Christian, I wouldn’t say that’s what I believe today. I don’t have a name for what I believe, really. Mostly I believe in trees.)

My dad was not a good dad in any traditional sense. I have written much about how our relationship was largely a failure, and maybe you’ve read it, and maybe you haven’t, but the bottom line is that we loved each other but ultimately didn’t relate to each other.

I have almost never felt a sense of belonging with my family — my mom’s family or my dad’s family — and it’s not anyone’s fault, per se, but I have always been aware of being… not just one of the guys, you know?

An aside:

Many years ago, I was taking a class taught by my favorite professor, and the class was called Four American Poets. The poets were Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Adrienne Rich, and it was the first time I’d encountered Rich, but I have continued to read her on a fairly regular basis ever since being a 19-year-old in an English class. One of the poems that I read for class, and have read many times since, is “Prospective Immigrants Please Note” which always made me think of questions I wished I could ask my dad but, I’m sorry to say, I never did. I’m really trying not to be a bummer today, but I think I’m failing. Anyway, the poem:

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself makes no promises.

It is only a door.

“Prospective Immigrants Please Note” By Adrienne Rich

When I was a kid, after my parents split up, my mom had a boyfriend named Steve — actually Mohammed, but he had everybody call him Steve — who was a monumental man. I don’t know if he was actually huge or if he was like… your childhood elementary school, which seems enormous until you see it again when you’re an adult and then you realize it’s normal-sized. He was gregarious and loud, in personality and maybe also the sound of his voice, although this many years later, my memory can’t conjure it.

My mom and Steve were a couple for several years, until I was about 11 or so, and we spent a lot of weekends together, the three of us in the small house I lived in with my mom, or the three of us + other Yemeni immigrant men in the house on Elm Street.

The house on Elm Street was an old house, though it was missing many of the curlicues that belong to a Victorian; I would guess today that it was probably built in the early 1900s. (Just looked it up and it was built in 1902.) It had an enormous dark wood staircase that went on seemingly forever, turning at the landing and going on forever more. It would be great for making a dramatic entrance, for sure. I never made any dramatic entrances.

Steve lived there with at least three or four other guys, who all worked together at a nearby foundry. He drove a Chevy Nova that had been tan, but we hand-painted it baby blue, or maybe sky blue and he installed a custom horn in it. It played “Jingle Bells” and every time he would drive away, he would hit the horn when he was halfway down the street. The clown horn sound in the rhythm of “jingle bells, jingle bells”, is such a goofy memory.

The inside of the house smelled like cumin and cigarette smoke, but I think everywhere in the 80s smelled like cigarette smoke? It was on a corner lot and there was a vegetable garden and a pretty big yard and I feel like I was always playing outside because it was always summer. I have one photo that might’ve been taken there. It is of me and my dad:

My dad would come by sometimes, though not often, and looking back at that fact through the lens of adulthood, it makes sense, honestly. Sometimes he would pick me up and take me to a donut shop called Dutch Uncle and have a donut (me) and some coffee (him) and talk for awhile before he’d take me back.

Not pictured: the windmill.

I learned the Arabic that I’ve forgotten and the songs I don’t remember and the food I never got the recipes for because I was a little kid and it’s not like anyone was using recipes anyway when I was in the house on Elm Street. I don’t know how many years we went there on the weekends, and I can’t remember much that’s concrete, but through the haze of time, it is the place where I had the most fun when I was a kid.

My mom and Steve broke up, for reasons that I never knew and it wasn’t my business, and he moved to New York and I have no idea what wound up happening to him, if he is still alive, even. All of this sort of got memory-holed, and now I’m left with not much, which isn’t great, honestly, but it’s not like I can go back in time and tell myself to pay more attention so that when I’m in my middle age and trying to piece together what being an Arab means to me I have something to go on. I wish I had paid more attention, but the thing about being a kid is that you never believe that anything will ever run out, especially not your chances.

I imagined when I started writing that this was going to go in a pretty different direction than where I have brought myself, and that’s okay. Not everything has to go according to plan. I guess I just want to say that when I hear on the news that we’re calling Yemenis terrorists now, and not all of them today, but I’m not new here and I know how this goes, I think of this instead:

When I was a kid in the house on Elm Street, Steve and I used to play a game, where one of us would say “In 1919 when we had the yellow car…” and then we would make up increasingly ridiculous things that would go in or on the car — how many doors (300!), how many dogs or cats or ladies in hats were inside (a million!), did it look like a banana (yes!) — until we couldn’t think of anything else and we would laugh. Making up the yellow car is probably one of the first attempts at storytelling I ever did, and if I don’t have much else that’s tangible, I will always at least have words.