You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

It occurred to me in that moment to question why, as a man, his bare legs were somehow less troubling than mine. It was a double standard, a shame I had simply accepted until then. In acquiring my gender, I had become offensive.

Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

If my mother was Hamas—unpredictable, impulsive, and frustrated at being stifled—my father was Israel. He’d refuse to meet her most basic needs until she exploded. Then he would point at her and cry, “Look at what a monster she is, what a terror!” But never once did he consider why she had resorted to such extreme tactics, or his role in the matter.

Yet this is the realm, the realm of my mother, in which I consistently forget how to survive.

I admit that in the years since 2003, I’ve begun to expect significantly more when it comes to knowledge about the Middle East. I’m troubled by the number of people who lump all Arabs and Muslims into one large, threatening category, support U.S. intervention in the region under the guise of “spreading democracy,” without any contextual understanding of the situation on the ground, and vote for xenophobic, uninformed candidates who also have limited knowledge of the region.

It is a bizarre and unsettling feeling, to exist in a liminal state between two realms, unable to attain full access to one or the other.

I know that by letting her in when I’m in need, I tie myself to her again, this gaping vulnerability nothing less than the rope.

Baggage. No one ever breaks free from it. Everyone has to figure out how to go on living, to be decent, in spite of it.