Arab New York: Politics and Community in the Everyday Lives of Arab Americans by Emily Regan Wills

Author:Emily Regan Wills [Wills, Emily Regan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781479897650
Goodreads: 39971113
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2019-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

Intimate Misrecognitions: Rose’s Boyfriend

The first time I really spoke to Rose was after the first Brooklynat meeting, though we had met before. She sat next to me, still in her school uniform of black jilbab and white hijab, and we chatted pleasantly before the meeting began. When Suleikha arrived, Rose moved to stand, knowing we were friends, but Suleikha motioned her to stay, and sat kitty-corner from us. After the meeting, Rose and Suleikha had some sort of exchange—which might have just been a series of looks—and then Suleikha mentioned that I was here, as “another intellectual,” someone for Rose to tell about her problem. I put on my best impartial-observer face and nodded, said I’d be happy to provide an opinion. Nervously, she agreed, seeming both eager to talk and apprehensive. I followed them back to the office Suleikha shared with another staff member. She locked the door, and Rose sat with her back to it, “because I might need to run away,” she said.

She proceeded to tell me about her boyfriend. “I don’t even know why he’s my boyfriend,” she said. “He just said he was on IM. I don’t know why I went along with it.” He wasn’t a classmate from the Muslim school she attended or a Muslim at all, just someone who knew a friend of hers, who didn’t even live in the neighborhood. Since they had started “dating,” he’d been pushing all of her boundaries. He scrolled through her phone, found pictures of her uncovered, and asked her to take more and send them to him. (She showed me them: posed in front of a mirror, making duck face.) He asked her to write his name on a part of her body and take a picture of it to send him. He wrote suggestive IMs and text messages about how he knew she wanted him. This came to a head recently when, while sitting in the park together, he leaned over her and kissed her. “It was like he raped my mouth,” she said, simultaneously ashamed and pleased to be venting. “When I imagined my first kiss, I always thought it would be with my husband on my wedding night. Truth.” Apparently her displeasure at the kiss led him to break up with her over text message, but then text again two days later trying to arrange for them to get together. She was trying to decide what to do.

I was supportive and said in no uncertain terms that the guy was a putz, that the best thing to do was just cut off all contact—block him on IM and Facebook, don’t answer his calls, just never see him again, since he wasn’t someone she had to see. Without being too didactic—I hoped—I tried to affirm her experience that yes, the transgression of boundaries that she’d experienced was wrong and was not her fault. I avoided using the terms “sexual harassment,” “sexual assault,” and “enthusiastic consent,” though I was certainly thinking them.14

A few minutes later she left the room to take a phone call.

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