How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? by Moustafa Bayoumi

Author:Moustafa Bayoumi [Bayoumi, Moustafa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2009-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

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I FIRST MET LINA in 2006. We made plans over the phone to meet in a Greek café in Bay Ridge one March afternoon. She texted me that she was running late, but after a few minutes there was suddenly this sirocco of a woman in front of me. She came crashing through the door with a friend and led us up to the second floor, where she grabbed a black plastic ashtray at the top of the stairs. Lina’s reasons for meeting here were now apparent to me. “Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked as soon as we were seated. “All Iraqis smoke,” she proclaimed, laughing at her generalization while lighting up.

She is neither tall nor short, with dark brown hair and plump cheeks. She looked at me through colorfully made-up eyes and flashed me bright, friendly smiles as we talked. Energy swirled around her and enveloped the room. I could feel the force of rebellion propelling her, but it soon became clear that her struggles were private battles, more personal than political in nature. For a long time, Lina had been fighting her immigrant parents for her own independence. Hers is a story of class and generational divides that pits parents aspiring to the comforts of suburban living against a daughter who, until she discovers her own Arab and Iraqi dimensions, identifies more with black and Latino culture. To listen to Lina tell the story is to hear a woman describe a life signposted with her own romantic crushes and infatuations, culminating in a grand romance, where, in spite of several failed attempts at love and marriage, she finally prevails.

Lina’s story is all over the place and has enough eccentric detail to make it impossible to generalize to all Iraqi Americans. Yet at the same time politics will never leave you if you are Iraqi. It hangs around in corners and stops you dead in the street. In the circus ride that is Lina’s life, Iraqi politics has always trailed closely behind and occasionally overtakes it. Not only did she move to Iraq under sanctions, but Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait determined her own family’s peregrinations. The two men, both Iraqi, who would later define much of her life came from families that represented completely opposite sides of the Iraqi political spectrum, one affiliated with Saddam’s regime, the other with the opposition, while Lina floated somewhere in an apolitical middle until she eventually figured out who and what she had to be. In the end Lina’s story is about how the personal is political, and it’s about how politics can get very personal, too.

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