Never Forget to Remember to Never Forget by Auseel Yousefi

An Arab in America I am problematic as an adult, doubly so as a child. I prefer whiskey to water on Wednesday afternoons and, when I am five, handheld Tetris to tutoring on Tuesday mornings. You would think me mentally handicapped from the fact that Mrs. Brenda T. Brown never stops me from abandoning class activities for Auseel activities, which are equally education and far more stimulating. I count to one-hundred two weeks before the rest of the class has mastered it, only because I am allowed the freedom to play number games on the boxy and outdated (even for 2001) computers while my fellow students sit in reading circle. The boys whose clothes fit well, in a way that mine rarely do, struggle with envy (oh, the irony) and ask questions like: “Mrs. Brown, why does Auseel get to play games during reading circle?” Because quite frankly, Mitchell, she knows that nothing can stop me. I’m stubborn, creative enough to make any punishment fit for a child into a wonderland (this includes those punishments that toe ethical lines, the ones that children’s authority figures reach when all else seems hopeless), and most importantly, she knows that the school has requested I not return next year; my mother complies.

It’s not often that kindergarteners are asked to begin attending a different school for disciplinary reasons, and while I’m sure another kid would feel offended, I am relieved to be escaping the sea of white faces that don’t resemble mine. In fact, I don’t see another brown face at Jones Valley Elementary until one fateful Tuesday morning and, not to my surprise, he’s more of a troublemaker than I am. Mrs. Davis cries a secret into Mrs. Brown’s ear from the door of the classroom, interrupting (their) reading time with frantic knocking reminiscent of a persistent Paul Revere, if Paul Revere spread his warning after the British Army had already wiped out his friends and kidnapped his horse. Brenda T. Brown’s expression does not convey colonial shock, or forefather courage in the face of tragedy; she simply walks with a quickness to the television, slightly larger than the computers, to flip it to the news, learning almost immediately that there’s no need. Every channel is as confused as the last, showing only smoke and tall buildings that can’t be anywhere near Jones Valley Elementary School – I would recognize them, like the kids without accents seem to do so well. Under the murmurs and anxious chatting, the sound of stifled crying seems to keep rhythm for the room as teachers proceed into the one classroom in East Wing with a television.

When my family and I returned to America from Yemen, we came on a big plane, where a young, long-haired kind stranger gave me his blanket after I threw up on mine, and I only threw up because a separate and unrelated kind stranger, sympathetic to my fear of flying, kept buying me orange juice. A plane oddly similar to it – with who I can only assume are kind strangers on board – appears on the screen and collides into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Scientifically, I’m not sure which plane was more problematic for the Twin Towers to deal with, but I know that the second plane was worse; it was the one we all saw, the one that made even the most experienced news anchors scream out in shock. The suppressed weeps erupt into wails and sobs among the adults – even the steely-faced Mrs. Brown looks shaken – and in the conversational chaos, I hear a phrase that is invoked often in the hours and years to come: “So-and-so is only X blocks away from the World Trade Center.” I don’t know where my mother is at 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, but I know that the buildings aren’t nearly as plentiful or stunning. For some reason, even with all the X blocks between her and the Twin Towers, I am afraid for my mother. I return to handheld Tetris.

An Arab in Yemen Yemen is a nation rich in sandy deserts and terrorist-infested mountains, and poor in most of the categories a nice country is not poor in. The people of Yemen are also notoriously poor, so poor, in fact, that many of her constituents do not wear deodorant. My memories of sand whipping my face in a marketplace, my grandfather drunkenly trying to convince me to drink from a mother camel’s udder, my grandfather soberly holding me despite the fact that I cracked the windshield of his ’94 Camry with a rock (a common activity for young boys in Yemen), of Al-Qaeda insurgents roaming the neighborhood before nightfall like the predatory dogs Yemenis know to avoid; they are all set against the backdrop of body odor, and when I smell body odor in occasional day-to-day life, I am reminded that I did not put on deodorant that morning and, more importantly, of my impoverished home.

On weekend mornings, I gather with the neighborhood children and we take turns playing Tetris in my cousin, Asif’s, bedroom. My family is afforded these luxuries, the sort many Americans take for granted in 2000, because my drunken grandfather is a Senator representing a government propped up by the United States in order to keep my home poor and in their control. I don’t hold it against my grandfather that he drinks, or that he’s complicit in the oppression of our people; he drinks because Americans with secret permission to do so tortured him for two years in a dark room, and he allows the illusion of sovereignty to continue because he’s afraid to remember a time when this truly was the case, before he and his country’s institutions were abused and dissected in a basement. He buys toys for his family instead, for the same reason he drinks: so we might be distracted from the hellscape that is our nation.

We stop going to Asif’s after he joins a Quran study group full of young men who REALLY loved God (I can’t emphasize enough how much these young men love God). Neither my mother nor I remember Asif being particularly religious (the bar for that word is a little higher in the Middle East), and when I ask her why he would leave our family for a God he doesn’t love as much as Tetris and his cousins, she explains:

“This isn’t like America, Auseel. Not everyone gets to go to school, or have doctors, and even work is hard to find for young boys like your cousin. Asif is spending so much time with his new friends because he’s afraid of being trapped here as a victim.”

Years later, when Tetris is an app on my iPhone, she tells me that she, too, almost joined a similar terrorist organization at his age, for fear that she’d be a second-class citizen in a slowly-dying male-dominated nation her entire life. My seventeen year old sensibilities reject this as morally despicable and that night I dream of body odor, the icy barrel of an AK-47, and my mother, weeping in a nation where men have hurt her in ways that theocratic bigots do. When I wake up, I understand. This is the second most terrifying fact to me: to know that in a similar position, I could be the man in the valley who convinces young men to blow themselves up so their mothers can receive the medical treatment they need; that I could be an automatic rifle-wielding authority above the police in a city of my own people, where buildings and hope crumble, never to be repaired; that I could be the boxcutter-concealing hijacker bursting through a skyscraper in the name of vengeance, committed to the idea that the weak cannot prosper in a world where capitalist genocides go unanswered for and oil can take precedence over human life.

I could have been the man who hides his face behind rags and comes down the mountain with his friends, who hide their faces behind rags, to drag families from their homes as the sun sets. I would place them all in a row alongside their neighbors, their knees in the sand, dirt, and clay that is Yemeni earth, and put empty sacks over their heads to evoke a specific sense of terror born from mystery, the kind familiar to a Jones Valley classroom of petrified and confused teachers before the second plane strikes. I would push the cold, steel mouth of an unloaded Kalashnikov rifle against the neck of a small boy, and let my friend shoot a gun beside his innocent head when my count reaches thalatha… itnein… WAHID! to create the illusion that he’s just been killed. These mock executions are common to my city of Ta’izz, just as they are to many mountain towns in the region where terrorists are armed with American guns and American training, and I could have been the executioner that decides who in the row he’ll actually have to shoot in order to maintain the fear that allows him and his friends control. The fact that frightens me most is not that I could be the executioner, but that I am the boy who mistakes the ringing in his ears for the afterlife.

An Arab To identify with my Arabic culture is to walk a tightrope of “moral” laws that do not allow for my sexual preferences, the convictions I hold nearest to myself, or the freedom each person deserves in this life. To identify with my American culture is to sacrifice my most honest sense of self for the sake of a cozier raft to float in. I live on a cultural island, where each grain of sand was a decision I made about the man I want to be, and the only people who know what it feels like to bask in the moonlight at the zenith of this construct are those I allow. Being Arabic is a white man in the gas station asking you where the restroom is while you browse the candy section. Being Arabic, to me, is seeing the shift from excitement to disdain when the Yemeni man at the counter of that same gas station realizes that you don’t follow the tenets he does, or speak about them with the accent he’s native to. Being Arabic is that white man’s daughter fetishizing you at the bar because the one thing her father couldn’t stand was the way brown people like me were allowed to assimilate so readily when he returned from his second tour, and she’d love to get back at him with my melanin. I used to let this fetishization happen, when I decided it was my right to finally benefit from the burden of Yemeni heritage. This worked well until I read a declassified memo from Donald Rumsfeld written days after 9/11, in which he said that while invading Iraq couldn’t be justified by the attacks (being that the two were unrelated), it could be equally effective to “sweep it all together.” Me, my mother, Asif, my grandfather, the executioners in the mountains, the children who broke windshields with rocks for fun; we were the “it” that was all “swept together.” I realized that when these women desired my caramel skin against their pale fantasies, they were dreaming of me as a concept, and when you allow people to consider you a concept, you have allowed them to consider every person similar, a concept.

Here’s the problem with “sweeping” human beings together: it can simplify an incredibly complex situation, as it has in the case of most every racial minority in America at some point. For example, slave-owners comfortably conceptualized African slaves as animals in the 18th and 19th centuries; in 2018, the president of the United States publicly called illegal immigrants animals, as well; in 2001, the American people on both sides of the aisle smashed the Arab people together into a small subset of stereotypes revolving around owning convenience stores or blowing things up, and I have struggled to navigate along the tightrope between the gas stations and explosions. But beyond that, this intellectually lazy form of dehumanization sucks the substance out of the legitimate emotional connection to a serious national tragedy. That is to say, it makes it hard for most Americans to care about 9/11 beyond the two wasted words: Never forget. And what I’ve found is that the extent of this “never forgetting” rarely journeys past the personal experiences of individuals on that fateful Tuesday morning – or much longer, for those who had to endure the unfair loss of loved ones – and into the realm of why the chaos and fire of that day came to be, the decades of international intervention that gave tens of thousands of individuals the means to personally justify murder on a mass scale. Truly, whoever was paid to brand 9/11, specifically those in the slogan department, did this nation a great disfavor. You can’t ask people to never forget something they’ve learned so little about.

And it isn’t as though the answers weren’t out there. I researched Osama Bin Laden aggressively after my nightmare, and discovered that he’d recorded himself explaining the reasons and desired outcomes of 9/11, as well as his own disappointment in the American people. Many radical terrorists have killed masses, and what’s particularly interesting about him is that he went the extra length of writing, video-taping, and sharing a performance review of his victims, which is possibly one of the most or least polite terrorist acts in recent history. A few minutes on the internet, a fraction of the time most of us spend reading tweets and shitty pun-based captions, reveals a sophisticated and long-standing battle between the U.S. and the oppressed peoples of the Middle East, Latin America, and on a greater level, between capitalism-driven globalization and the reactions of deeply misled and often hungry victims.

I feel it’s important for me to clarify that I don’t believe in any sort of justification for slaughtering people en masse; what I do believe in is the responsibility of every American to educate themselves on the actions of their government bodies and the collective power to affect change in culture they wield.

Being Arabic is guilt, because after two decades of this sweeping together, you learn to see the concept and the person as one, even when you’re that person. This guilt has pushed me to self-mutilation on many instances in the form of cigarettes, also known as suicide for procrastinators with commitment issues (I am both), and while my mind knows that I have nothing to apologize for, my skin has told the world otherwise for most of my life. If cutting my wrists and dripping every ounce of brown in my veins onto the streets of Birmingham and Ta’izz meant that those two planes would have landed unharmed, that the prey-become-predators in the mountains would have access to doctors and teachers in the cities and not among extremists in response to a century-long American holocaust, and that veteran fathers could look their daughters in the eyes and tell them that there is no room for hate in their hearts or bedrooms, then I would let the streets of my hometowns run sandy, caramel brown and Alabama crimson with everything I’m told is in me, in hopes that it’d serve a better purpose than it has.