The new millennium was a year and nine months later than expected, and it took everyone by surprise. I was a kid living in the outer suburbs of Perth, just home from school, sprinting up our worn, carpeted, stairs to be the first to tell my older sister the news, running circles in the hallway outside her room like a dog chasing its tail. Adrenalin was coursing through me. Something epic in scale, an alien landing or a political revolution, had occurred. Disaster doesn’t register with children. There’s no concept of death and consequences, no historical knowledge to compare to modern life, no world outside your own.
I used to work at my parents’ deli on Saturdays, and school holidays. A pudgy, doe-eyed, nine-year-old child standing on phone books at the cash register, selling fried chicken and porn to blue collar workers from the docks. There, I overheard a revolving door of my divorced, middle-aged coworkers, reeking of cigarettes, telling stories that flushed my ears red. Whenever my parents were away, they slithered closer and cajoled explanations out of me. We’re Italian, Christian, I don’t know, sorry, I always responded, diligently reciting the lies I’d been taught to memorize. There was growing suspicion in the neighborhood that we were Muslim and if I didn’t help dispel the rumors, so I learned, we’d keep losing business.
Dishonesty became a form of protection. I carried it to the curious teachers at school, and to the few friends I had, and to everyone else outside the small net of families we socialized with on weekends, enacting Islam quietly, behind closed doors. Christmas plans were bluffed on the spot in small talk at the store. If pork was ever served, I disappeared into the bathroom. Playdates were planned for any home other than my own. I ordered my father to park two streets away when he picked me up and I sprinted past the crowds after school to his car, scared that someone would see his thick mustache and dark sunken eyes, and connect the dots. When questions arose, I was Chilean or Maori or Indian or Spanish. Anything less threatening than Afghan.
The difference at that age between terrorist and Muslim was negligible, especially in a part of the world that is overwhelmingly white. The American thirst for vengeance quickly created image types of the enemy that I internalized: Middle Eastern, male, often bearded, with multi-suffixed names and a burning hatred of America. The hunt for Saddam Hussein was called “a pursuit of democratic freedoms,” never mind the civilian casualties and orphaned children. The torture of Ali Shallal al-Qaisi and countless others at the hands of US soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison was “payback.” Cave video correspondence was starting to appear in video games and television, displaying the bloodthirsty terrorist from the perspective of a first-person shooter. The terrorist running, towards the gun, or away from it.
Worse than mugshots, these image types were grainy portals into the collective projection of brazen evil. In the War on Terror—a disciplinary and global exercise in racialized impunity—every aggression levied against Muslims was “preemptive self-defense.” Buried under my dishonesty was the latent shame of being publicly unveiled. I learned to wriggle around the truth, to construct convincing alternative origin stories. The part of my identity where faith and culture lived was a threat. To be explicit about which God I prayed to was a form of endangerment. It was terrifying to think that the image types of the men on the news bared any resemblance to my relatives. I implicated myself in the violence, in every suicide bombing, terrorist attack, and kidnapping I saw on the news.
Soon, thick, dark bristles were coating my upper lip and my voice broke, marking my transition out of innocence. We had just immigrated to America and I was now even more answerable for the actions of other Muslims. I fought this association nail and foot. I read Christopher Hitchens out loud to my mortified mother. I blasted Ani DiFranco from my room in the basement. I took black spray paint to the walls of religious sites in the middle of the night with my punk friends. I told anyone who’d listen that I was an atheist now, that I’d left the bigotry of organized religion behind.
In my junior year of high school I worked for the school newspaper, first as a staff writer and then as editor of the opinion section. The articles I was commissioning and the column I wrote every month laid bare American political and economic realities that still make me livid. Stories on gun control, abortion, Occupy Wall Street, inequality, the military budget, and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. To me, these were the positions of the American left and, yet, to my peers, these ideas were intractable from my heritage and Islamic-sounding name. My politics weren’t borne from a home-grown resistance but rather from an alien worldview that needed to be exorcised by “go back to where you came from.” I didn’t choose to identify as Muslim or not; my identity was projected upon me. Indeed, my incessant outfit changes had no effect—America was dressing me in its anxiety of Islam, whether I liked it or not.
Iranian-Canadian social theorist and philosopher Brian Massumi speaks to this in his essay “Fear (The Spectrum Said)”:
In March 2002, with much pomp, the Bush administration’s new Department of Homeland Security introduced its color-coded terror alert system: green, “low”; blue, “guarded”; yellow, “elevated”; orange, “high”; red, “severe.” The nation has danced ever since between yellow and orange. Life has restlessly settled, to all appearances permanently, on the redward end of the spectrum, the blue-greens of tranquility a thing of the past. “Safe” doesn’t even merit a hue. Safe, it would seem, has fallen off the spectrum of perception. Insecurity, the spectrum says, is the new normal.
Living constantly on “the redward end of the spectrum,” breeds a kind of frantic paranoia in society, but it also has that effect on individuals. We are constantly anticipating threat to neutralize threat. This is the logic behind many of the disciplinary strategies implemented in the aftermath of 9/11, including intensifying surveillance and carceral initiatives under the War on Terror’s directive.
The “Muslim threat” was so insidious because the danger of infiltration was already underway. Muslims were boarding airplanes every day, writing prescriptions, staffing bodegas, and walking down the street, just like everybody else.
Eventually, the paranoia took its psychological toll on the community. The same forms of social disciplining enacted upon Muslims by the state were being levied laterally between community members, and within my own family. I think of how an an innocuous Instagram story of me dancing at a club in Australia last year traveled to my parents in America by way of my judgmental cousins in Germany. Or celebrating 4th of July to fulfill the duty of the grateful refugee, an archetype author Dina Nayeri riffs on with her new book.
Paranoia sets us into motion against one another for the American project; in pursuit of a phantom sense of respectability before the camera captures any alleged wrongdoing. The fear of militancy and radicalization is one that every Muslim in America ritually assuages, both between one another, and to society at large. In their groundbreaking essay “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots,” Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai explain how “…the terrorist has become both a monster to be quarantined and an individual to be corrected.” The terrorist-monster is, at once, chasing, and being chased; transnational and depositing a suspicious looking backpack at the train station; headless yet scrutinizing from beneath our beds; savage but frighteningly intelligent; psychologically wounded and weaponized.
I learned, at some point, that it doesn’t matter what I believe. By virtue of my name, my family, and my culture, people like me are the involuntary subjects of the War on Terror, and suspicion of our behavior is warranted by the state. Puar and Rai go on to explain how American vengeance registers most severely in the sexual exploit of revealing or creating a fag out of the terrorist-monster, “the US state, having experienced a castration and penetration of its capitalist masculinity, offers up narratives of emasculation as appropriate punishment for bin Laden, brown-skinned folks, and men in turbans.” (126). For me to embody a brown-skinned faggotry, then, is a victory for the American project, and functions to delegitimize my relationship with Islam. Both struggling against this and leaning into it orient me in motion, driven one way or another by the momentum of paranoia. Faggotry forfeits my cultural authenticity, yet I am uniquely violent should I ever get angry.
When my family fled the Soviet invasion in the 80s, they had a sense of themselves before the War on Terror attributed today’s stigma and culpability to Islamic cultural traditions and beliefs. Raised in various diasporas, I’ll never know what that feels like. My parents remember the orchards and the mountains and the creeks before decades of conflict and poverty razed whole regions of home to the ground. My sister remembers streets, filled with cousins teeming out of rooms, holding sweet desserts, leaving a trail of crumbs in their wake. I’ll simply never know any of this.
When I’m asked about Afghanistan, I want to answer truthfully but, still, the complications of honesty plague me. My emotions writhe and thrash. Even wearing peeran tombon and a grown-out beard, a trip to Afghanistan could expose me to people hostile to my queerness, to those who reject my take on Islam, and even those who resent the privilege of my literary aspirations.
The irony is that I’d have the most trouble rinsing myself of America. I live here again now, after a seven-year stint in Australia. Most of my family and diaspora are here and my accent surrenders all of this when I speak. I am university-educated and middle class. The people who remain in Afghanistan today are poor, profiting from the violence, or otherwise unable to leave. To be a writer and a poet in Afghanistan today is to resign oneself to the fate of class immobility. Many there hold Americans accountable for the country’s decades-long instability. A video showing US Marines urinating on dead Taliban insurgents went viral in 2012, the same year copies of the Quran were burned at Bagram Air Base and a US Army sergeant admitted to murdering sixteen Afghan civilians, including nine children. The military history of the United States is full of entitled and poorly executed interventions, and many Afghans are aware that the American government caused much of the harm it later tried to solve. I wonder what it would mean to return to a homeland I’ve never visited, brandishing the nationality of a country linked to so much violence. What kind of paranoia would I travel there with: of being kidnapped by the Taliban, shot to death by an American soldier, rejected by my relatives, illegible to my kin?
For many Muslim refugees, it is more accurate to refer to fleeing violence and entering an existing diaspora than settling in America per se—a matter of necessity and belonging, rather than a specific choice to access the promised land. Motion is the index: Osama bin Laden pursued across the Federally Administered Tribal Area between Pakistan and Afghanistan; Muslim women running from their abusive husbands, emboldening, as Gayatri Spivak says, “white men saving brown women from brown men”; a brown kid from Perth trying to shake violent stereotypes, even the ones true to his experience; my parents moving between Australia and America looking for the greener pastures in their memories of home. The Muslim remains in motion today, dodging bullets at a mosque in Christchurch, and a family home in North Carolina, detention centers in western China, and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.
There are now people born after 9/11 in the military, who grew up exclusively in the aftermath of the Twin Towers, who absorbed the cultural psyche of fear and none of the real-time scramble for information, eyes glued to televisions in bars, kitchens, classrooms, across America and the world. To them, Kabul, Baghdad, and Damascus host the ruins of ancient civilizations; to their grandparents, these cities could have been tourist destinations.
Increasingly, I wonder if motion is a form of punishment. I was chased into identifying more with the villains in cartoons than the superheroes, and I made a home for myself in that identity. I’m afraid of stillness, of total transparency, of what I’d find if I stopped running for once in my life. I don’t know what scraps of identity are left when they aren’t threatened or threatening, or shape-shifting as a form of protection. My body is the knob of the terror alert system, moving closer to red, and carrying the contagion of urgency along with me.
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Rumpus original art by David Dodd Lee.
