For some of you this may not all be news, but for the sake of the masses as well as my future memory, I realized I needed to do us all a favor and take the time to write, for us.
Since arriving in my permanent site I have been thinking a lot about my future—who I want to be. The whole experience has been unique because I don’t think I have ever mad a five-year plan before in my life, and I think I have created a plan of exactly five years so when 2015 passes, I might be back to not knowing what I’m doing or where I’m going, haha.
Arriving in my current site made me reflect upon my former, and how great it was for me in many respects. The very thing that made it most difficult, the homestay also added to the aspect that made me so comfortable. In that home, it was okay to have been to Israel and it was okay to know Hebrew because I wasn’t the only one. It was also okay to say I identify Jewishly, not that it made me particularly more attractive, but it was a truth that need not be hidden. Here, I have been dancing along many lines of representation.
I no longer have the luxury of living with a family who has expressed itself to be open to the idea of a non-heated discussion of Israel. Though to be fair, it is only with one family member any negativity around the subject has arisen, but unfortunately it is the member of the family with which I am the closest. There are reasons that the PC doesn’t want us to engage in certain discussions, but these conversations were sprung upon me.
This is a very news watching household. Lots of Al-jazeera, which has LOTS of Israel/Gaza coverage. I’m not against the station, their articles I’ve read online [about other topics] in English have been pretty balanced but it is a much different experience to watch the news, and I can’t understand the news yet anyway. It is on the news e v e r y day. Outside of election season, I can’t think of a single-same issue that US news would report on every day. It’s saturating, and tiresome, and kind of intimidating. Being around for the news has made me wish Israel would “stop,” whatever that means, and then immediately regret the sentiment because I don’t actually mean it. Really, I feel I still don’t know enough to argue, and I know that were I start an argument I would be trying to combat too much blind hatred and I would inevitably lose. As a house guest and as a friend of the family I felt like the best option is the keep mute.
I kept mute for weeks. In one conversation I was told that the Holocaust was a myth. I was stunned. Offended. Shocked. This particular brother knew very well what the word myth meant because in his English class they were learning about Greek gods and goddesses at the time which only added insult to injury. But there I was, still very much a guest and I didn’t know what to say. Well… I knew what to say but not how. As an American, that is one of the most offensive things I have ever been told. To deny the Holocaust is bigger than just the hatred of Jews, it is a refusal to see recognize the history of other groups of people that were also systematically categorized, removed from there homes and executed. It’s a denial of world history. To say that it never happened is to offend the legacy of those nations who stood up against Hitler to be ‘humanitarians’ and close their borders to him, it leaves a gaping hole in Polish history (and lots of Europe), it absolves Americans of the shame of not coming sooner and of Argentines for openly accepting high ranking Nazi officials, oh and… besides the deaths themselves, the aspect of history that I find most offensive in its denial is the continual denial of Japanese American history. Yes the Holocaust was a part of World War II, and yes after Pearl Harbor the United States government rounded up the Japanese Americans and put them into labor camps, shoddier than those in Europe but perhaps better fed and without threat of outright death, but the men in those camps were encouraged to fight for America to ‘prove their loyalty’ to a country that was denying them and their families a true existence… and it was the 442nd, a group of Japanese American soldiers, who saved stranded American boys in France and who also liberated Dachau… oh, but in the ‘official’ pictures of the liberation they were staged and showed white troops liberating the camp. No, that’s not what happened. (whoa, that was definitely one of my random ‘forgotten Asian American history’ rants)
Denying the Holocaust is just too offensive for me to really explain how I felt. I basically self-identify as a defender of underdogs, and too many underdogs are again abused when someone says that a travesty in their history, in our history, did not occur. Why do I care so much? Probably because I feel myself to be a member of the underdog squad, but that could be because I feel I was raised to be aware and empathetic—and as such knowing history has been essential to understanding the reason the world is as it is today. I know I have said it before but the thing I care most about is people—identity and conflict and obligatorily history (which is what I wanted to study in Sweden).
A complicated thought that came up in a recent discussion with my friend David is that he, and undeniably many other of my friends, wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for the Holocaust because their (great-)grandparents would have never crossed paths. Denying the Holocaust is… painful to hear, more painful when I lack a voice to protest. But in talking with Mara an explanation she that I have chosen to accept so I can sleep at night is that it probably comes from a general lack of education versus a blind refusal to accept facts.
Somewhat better, I guess. In one of my time/calendar lessons at the dar chebab, I tried to insert the fun fact (you know how much I love fun facts :) ) of the addition of July and August into the calendar and found out that my students did not know who Julius (or Augustus) Caesar were… and in a later lesson discussing exile came up, I learned only a very few knew who Napoleon was. UMMM. Okay, I know in the U.S. we learn very Eurocentric history, but this country was ruled by France… is educated in the French style, speaks French(!) and they don’t know who Napoleon is?! They asked me if Julius Caesar was American! It was definitely difficult to suspend my disbelief… we’re sososo very close to where it all happened! I guess I am/was not forgiving enough. For me, Morocco is in the center of the world and as such they should know everything, haha, but I guess that is a burdensome expectation for anyone.
The tensions came to head at critical time period in my life. As I was a new arrival in a place where holidays were inhibiting my ability to start my work I found myself with a lot of time to reflect on my own life and the first meditations I had were about my relationship with Judaism. In my geographical isolation from the world and from other Jews I was beginning to feel… not alone, per se, but culturally separated.
I am surrounded by people who kind of look like me, sort of… but I have never felt a real separation from the ‘black’ experience, mostly because I feel like for most of my life I haven’t been that connected to it, at least not in the mainstream sort of way. Much to my chagrin, I’ve nearly had my ‘black card’ revoked countless times. Bitches. In fact, I usually feel more black, whatever that means, when I am abroad, and never so affectionately received, and comfortable with my own being, than when I was in the Ivory Coast. But Ivorians are culturally black and express feelings of pan-“black” pride and unity, whereas here (in the south anyway) most of the people who look “black” are more likely to identify culturally as Berber. And that’s not a problem. It’s interesting and kind of cool and it makes me want to know more about who the Berbers actually are.
But on Thanksgiving I had one of those bittersweet sort of realizations that makes you slow down for a minute. I was at a PCVs (peace corps volunteer) house who is also black and also reps the east coast and during our dinner with other volunteers, one of her young (black) Berber neighbors came over and kept us company and ate with us. I couldn’t speak with her because she didn’t speak Darija [yes, many people here [in the south] don’t speak either national language] and my friend could speak with her because of all she endured to get into the PC and she was taught the Berber language Tashlheet instead of Darija. Though I am by no means a stranger to the reality of the legacy of slavery, on that day I was struck silent for many a moment as I stole glances of the girl whose company we were sharing. Why shouldn’t we have been able to speak to each other? For all we know, we all have similar origins somewhere south of here, and yet two of us were born across the sea and there is no common language between the three of us. What a damn shame. Or is the real shame that none of us can even tell you where that place of origin is? Or is the real shame that educated people still ask for that mythical place of origin as though we could provide an answer from our own collected family histories because they never fully grasped the legacy of slavery, the erasure of history and culture? One volunteer asked the volunteer who I was visiting (on two separate occasions) if in her place of assignment she was going to try to find “her roots.”
Blackness is complicated… and weird. In most of the countries I have visited in Africa, the Americas and Europe I have been (mis)taken for a native and only in Asia (Turkey and Kazakhstan) did I ever really feel as though my history was distinctly and necessarily variant. In Greece I felt a little bit of the novelty status but in a kind of flattering way, if such a thing could be said. And Israel, well Israel was indifferent, but… that’s Israel’s charm. It’s kind of indifferent to everyone. Though I absolutely love discussing race, this is a special revelation to me because until this week I never thought about how I had been perceived across the board. Turkey was hard for me because that was the first time I had been to a place where people treated me differently, not necessarily badly… but as though I were from outside of the society. In all of my travels before, I never stood out—and that is what I never put words to before. I looked like I could have been a native of every other country, a minority, sure, but a native nonetheless. I had dwelt on the Turkish response to my presence, that I was uncomfortable and felt I received undue attention, instead of taking the time to ponder why I was so ‘unique’ in Turkey or why I had never experienced such treatment before. It was an epiphany.
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I guess the simple conclusion that I failed to write so many months ago should have been something like this:
In a land where the stars shine brightly every night, the biggest irony is that the name given to me, Nejma, means ‘star.’ Sometimes the most obvious things are ‘hidden’ in plain sight.
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