You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

Author:Zaina Arafat
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948226516
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2020-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

10

ON DAY 13, THE GROUP TURNED ON ME. THEY’D BEEN EXCHANGING glances across our semicircle all morning. “Something feels off,” I said. “Is everything okay?”

Again the group exchanged looks; Greg nodded in Molly’s direction and she was silently deemed the spokeswoman. “We’re tired of your condescending attitude,” she said, crossing her arms with forced conviction.

“What condescending attitude?”

“You know, how you get all frustrated when we don’t know something, like about the Middle East.”

The night before, the van driver had agreed to let us stop at Pizza Hut on the way back to the Ledge after the meeting. We’d all piled into a red vinyl booth and grabbed for slices when the pie arrived. “Now,” Greg said, folding a pepperoni slice in half, “the Palestinians have no legitimate claim on Jerusalem, right? Because that’s what Alex says.”

It turned out that after we went back to our rooms at night, Alex had been giving Greg lectures in Arab-Israeli affairs. A self-proclaimed Zionist, he came at the issue from a different vantage point than I did, to say the least. A few days earlier he’d asked if I was planning to do an H.I.T. list on Israel. “I thought about it,” I told him, though really I hadn’t. “But I’ve got too many people I’d like to do first.”

“Alex says that you’re so pissed off all the time because you think you’re entitled to the land,” Greg continued, “but that the Torah promised it to his people.”

I could tell Greg was being extra incendiary just to get a reaction. And possibly because a day earlier I’d told him I wouldn’t be offering any more blow jobs—I was going to start following the rules, I was paying enough to be here, after all. Either way, his effort to annoy me was working. Then Molly jumped in. “Wait, so where’s Palestine, again? Is it next to Afghanistan?”

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. My expectation is in some ways hypocritical, as I myself have displayed a great lack of political and cultural knowledge in the Middle East. In moments of fury my mother has suggested I write a book called The Way It Should Be for Everybody but Me. I’ve fumbled in Arab countries many times, and in Egypt I once inadvertently bought a one-humped camel.

I was visiting Cairo with my mother at the time. For all the summers that I’d spent in the Middle East, I hadn’t really visited any of the landmarks that people travel specifically to see. Every year I said I would sightsee the next year, I would visit Petra, Wadi

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