Against the Broad Paint Brush: An Ode to ‘Middle Eastern’ Diversity

I. Rida Mahmood

To the living mural they call the ‘Middle East’:

To name you one color is to mute the palette.

You bled the cry

that birthed the first breath

split the silence

foretold the rapture to come.

Your countless voices rise like heat from stone

now pressed down

by strokes in dust

drawn by cold hands

hands unmoved by your dead

hands You will outlast.

1988: Snips and Snaps
My five-year-old self leaves the Shabra (produce market) with my parents, my dad pushing the cart, my two-year-old brother riding along, his golden-brown hair catching the searing Kuwaiti sun. We load the day’s bounty into the trunk of our 1985 Chevrolet Monte Carlo and head toward Sultan Center in Fahaheel.

At a stall, an Indian worker clicks a pair of scissors open and shut, waving them at me like a playful toy. He grins; I giggle. The sound of metal becomes our conversation:

not my Levantine Arabic,

not the local Khaleeji,

not my teacher’s Masri,

not his likely Hindi, his perhaps Punjabi, his maybe Tamil, or his possible Malayalam,

just the snip-snip between us, sharp enough to slice through the silence.

Read the full essay here:
https://iridamahmood.substack.com/p/a...