August 5, 2008

How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?

Posted by M. Junaid Levesque-Alam at 10:29AM

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Rasha was 19, frightened, and upset. Woken up by government agents in the middle of the night, she and the rest of her family—except two younger brothers born in the U.S.—were hauled off to a holding cell and later to prison for almost three months. Grilled about terrorism and held on immigration charges, she and her mother were often reduced to tears, despondent and depressed.

And then she was released, without much fanfare, along with her father, mother, sister, and elder brother. As the family made its way out of prison, an immigration official handed them a court date and helpfully observed that they were, in fact, eligible to file a residency petition.

Moustafa Bayoumi’s book, How Does It Feel to be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America, depicts the struggles of Arabs who are growing up in the shadow of post-September 11th America and confronting the paradoxical mix of capricious and prejudicial attitudes evinced by its institutions.

An associate professor at Brooklyn College (CUNY), Bayoumi crafts his narratives, drawn from the lives of seven Arab American youth in the Brooklyn area, with careful, considered prose. Wisely, he often maintains a distance from his younger subjects, adding germane facts and historical context to illuminate the stories. Further, he chronicles not only their conflicts, but their successes and their ambivalence in the face of daily frustrations.

A less attuned academic might have taken the opposite route, relegating people’s voices to the periphery of a drawn-out polemic or perfunctory rundown of immigration patterns.

Instead, here we learn of the bonds formed between Rasha and her sister while in jail, the distant state her brother fell into after release, a school petition signed by 200 classmates on the family’s behalf, and a chance encounter with a smug prison official in Times Square.

Bayoumi lavishes attention to detail in all his stories, including that of a Christian Arab Marine coping with mixed feelings about his deployment to Iraq, a Muslim Arab high school student vying for a spot in her school government, a shopkeeper’s son who travels to occupied Palestine to witness the destruction wrought by Israel firsthand, and an enthusiastic journalist with an Al-Jareeza internship on his resume who finds himself unable to get hired.

Readers are not likely to find all the portraits--(“Hasn’t there been enough profiling already?,” Bayoumi wryly notes in the introduction)—equally interesting; one in particular, about a girl shipped off to Iraq by her worried conservative family, is a bit hard to follow.

Still, it is clear that Bayoumi has developed a strong rapport with those whom he writes about, allowing him to capture genuine expressions of hope and anger, including mordant humor. In one scene, he is driving down a street with four young Arab men.

“There’s that new Arab store,” says Akram, the shopkeeper’s son. “Which one?” another asks.

“Everyone stops talking and twists his head around, looking out the window.”

“ ‘Target,’ says Akram.”

When he does engage his subjects, Bayoumi is not afraid to press them. Addressing the former al-Jazeera intern, whose job search “was increasingly a fishing expedition,” he asked why he and his friends spoke interestedly of an FBI recruitment pitch despite their own acknowledgment of the agency’s biases.

“ ‘Look, it’s like this,’ Eyad, a portly young Egyptian, explained to me. He leaned in to the table and put his weight behind his words. ‘Before, they went after the Jews, the Italians, the Irish. And now it’s our turn. Everybody gets their turn. Now it’s just the Muslims.’”

Bayoumi appears unconvinced: “To my ears these young men were living uneasily in an unresolved contradiction,” he wrote, adding that no one invoked civic duty as a reason to sign up. “It was as if the grinding pressure on their generation to succeed at any cost was taking precedence over everything else.”

Bayoumi’s thorough and thoughtful portraits, combined with his judicious observations, make for a timely book. His effort offers us a window into a domain where major media outlets have previously promised much insight but provided only mirrors of their own prejudice.