Ashroft Hates Me

I never thought this piece would be à propos again, but here we are with IE picking up people, dissent becoming dangerous, and who knows what all else awaits us around the corner.

I performed this as a spoken word piece for So Say We All in San Diego in a grant-funded show called "My Democracy," a joint project with the Central Library in 2012.

I'm turning it into an artist book at some point, but right now, I am royally pissed. The US I grew up in is fast fading, and something malevolent is taking its place.

The Enemy Alien Act is not new. At least for me, it isn't. Maybe for you it is. This act was invoked to intern Japanese and Japanese Americans. More than 40% of the internees were US citizens. Non-citizen Italians and Germans were also affected by this act.

I often see things front and back through history and sometimes my own experiences. For example, I hear echoes of Argentina's Dirty War right now (more in another post), and it disturbs me to no end.

This was my response 10 years after 9/11.

If Ashcroft were still the Attorney General, I'm sure he would still hate me.

Ashcroft Hates Me

I woke up one day and discovered I was married to the wrong man. It was the day after 9/11. I thought surely, we’d have nothing to fear. We would weather the coming storm.

There are times when you are just wrong about basically everything.

I was SO wrong.

And we would feel betrayed over and over and over again by the country of my birth.

My Moroccan husband, a recently minted Arab American, was born on the 4th of July, which didn’t seem to count for much on 9/12. Most people thought he was joking- some asked him if he hated the US. I don’t hate the US, he said, just its foreign policy.

There would be an icy, spreading silence.

Someone said, you should be a good American and shut him up before something happens to him.

On television, in conversations, terrorist and Arab are becoming synonymous. Neighbors are encouraged to “keep an eye out for suspicious behavior.”

After 9/11, I put on Mozart.

A neighbor tells my husband, “Your wife has some nerve playing that damn Muslim music.” “It’s not Arabic,” he says. It’s Latin and it’s the Requiem for the Dead.”

He closes the windows and says sadly, “We’ll have to be careful when we call the family or listen to music.”

Thanks to the Patriot Act, our calls overseas trip the surveillance mechanism, and calls in Arabic get recorded. In the coming months, we will learn what it means to watch your words, to un-perform who you are. There comes a moment when we are afraid to cook the Moroccan and French food we love- afraid the smell of the spices, unknown in our mostly White section of Normal Heights, in San Diego will create problems with our neighbors, some of whom are getting into their ex-military status extra good. At the conservative local news station where I work, the reporters are working on the angle that the alleged hijackers lived in San Diego. When I hand the morning anchor a pronunciation sheet to help him with the Arabic names he is mangling on air, he casually tosses it. - How do YOU know this?

Someone half-whispers- I think her husband’s an Arab or something. I no longer tell my "colleagues" I lived in Morocco, working as a journalist.

Move the syllables around, and it could be someone else’s name in San Diego. Someone else whom neighbors would call the FBI on. Someone else some hopped up “patriot” might try to beat the shit out of.

My husband’s name means “servant of the Almighty.” He wants to change it to Bill.

The US Attorney General is planning camps for Americans and permanent residents classified as “enemy aliens”- stripping them of their rights and plunging them into indefinite internment.

Suddenly, I am drop-kicked back 60 years to Executive Order 9066, the order that removed the Japanese and Japanese Americans from their homes and lives and stuck them in some god-forsaken place to wait out the war surrounded by broken dreams and unbroken barbed wire.

I have the wrong family history. This is no paragraph in some book. My Italian grandparents, too, were classified as enemy aliens. They were lucky. They got to stay on their farm.

Their Japanese neighbors did not. Just before they left, the neighbor asked my grandfather to keep their things in his barn because their house might get looted during their absence. Their American son never got to be valedictorian; their fields lay fallow that year.

When they returned, years later, everything they owned was still in that barn. In gratitude, they gave my grandfather a table, the same table my family has eaten around all my life.

Sixty years later, as the same plans are being dusted off, former internees are speaking up. In San Francisco, Kiku Funabiki tells a reporter, "If anybody should be there for the Arab-American community, it's me.''

I have seldom been so grateful to someone I will probably never meet.

And now, we may be about to become major players in Internment: The Sequel.

The US Invades Afghanistan. My husband starts to drink more than normal.

At work, in the neighborhood, there’s talk of “the enemy.” Co-workers think nuking the entire Middle East would be a good idea.

They’re not joking.

It’s the new normal.

It’s unnerving when you look in the mirror and realize- they’re talking about YOU.

Every day is 9/12, and we are at constant orange alert, nationally and personally.

The skin I am in begins to crawl.

The US invades Iraq.

My husband has the first of what will be several breakdowns.

Over and over again, I have to edit video of people who look like my friends and family getting blown to bits, rousted by US soldiers, bundled into trucks to be tortured somewhere else.

The talk of “quarantining” Arab and Muslim Americans gets louder. The president speaks of how “they” hate “our” freedoms. “You’re either with us or against us, he says.

My husband thinks people are watching him, he progressively becomes more paranoid. Dead Iraqis haunt his dreams- a sense of repudiation by his new country haunts his days.

And I become hyper-vigilant, listening between the lines, worrying about how this might go down.

Canada looks good, but Mexico is closer…

After we invade Iraq, I am frisked for the first time in my life at an American airport.

I am not a Happy Citizen. And so I acquire the wrong attitude. I get frisked EVERY time I travel.

EVERY time.

Random?

It’s usually me, the hippy backpacker, and some Brown guy.

I talk back.

In a private room? Are you KIDDING? “Frisk me IN public,” I snarl, “so THEY can see MY tax dollars at work. “

Sometimes I barely make my plane, but I don’t care. I am now a member of a growing, bitter club.

Random, my ass.

A poll shows that up to 44% of Americans fear and dislike Islam and Muslims. I already dislike and fear my government.

When the images of Abu Ghraib start to come out, the Sports reporters find it funny.

I feel sick.

I know what’s coming.

I’ve studied occupation.

My husband has another breakdown- he starts talking to himself- in Arabic.

A friend of his convinces him to apply to be an interpreter in Iraq.

I am livid.

I KNOW what has happened to US interpreters there. Some have been killed by “friendly fire.” Their families have been hung out to dry by the companies that hired them. In particular, by the one he wants to apply for.

I beg.

I plead.

I run out of tears.

He goes to D.C. anyway but doesn’t get the job.

I am both relieved and livid.

I know in my heart of hearts I will NEVER forgive the person who talked him into this. As of this reading, I have yet to do so.

I know I never will.

I will carry this my whole life.

I do not forgive betrayal easily.

Local activists are silenced, Arab and Muslim men are called up by Homeland Security in San Diego, and disappeared into black ops places in New York.

I am living in an Americanized version of Argentina, circa 1978.

And I start to think about what my grandfather did for his neighbors.

And so, I am not quiet.

I am not the “good” citizen.

At work, I am a subversive editor. I make sure footage of terrified Iraqi children makes it into the war reports. When I remind one producer that it is our obligation to show what happens to civilians, he calls me:

"un-American."

I tell him my great-uncle did not immigrate to this country, fight in WWI, and get gassed for him to talk to me like that. Taken aback, he just stares at me.

When I watch Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11- I find myself sobbing uncontrollably- not for 9/11, but for 9/12. – the post 9/12 rogue nation that I have helped create - manufacturing consent with every war story I edit, even subversively.

I hate myself.

My husband has one final breakdown and files for divorce.

On our 10th wedding anniversary, alone, in the airport, the ticket counter agent loudly and happily announces I am on the no-fly list,

- Oh my god- this is it. I look around.

- People are listening, then taking a step back. I think, screw it.

- I will not cower. - I WILL not be shamed into submission. - What have I got to lose?

I suppress the urge to strangle this manicured monster on the other side of the counter- to scream at her, damn it, Bitch- what do you mean I am on some fucking no fly list?

I struggle to keep a civil tongue. I look the agent straight in the eye.

Oh, really. And would you mind telling me exactly WHY I am on your no-fly list and WHO put me there?

Nope, she says cheerfully. I am afraid I can’t tell you that.

Well, I say. Then FIND someone who CAN.

Miss Ticket Counter goes in the back to talk to someone, and it turns out there has been....

A.

MISTAKE.

I am lucky, I find out later.

Thousands of people, even the late Senator Ted Kennedy are put on the no–fly list. Nobody knows by whom or why.

No one will EVER know.

Because

It’s

Classified…

I remember my grandfather and that table.

And I remember that in the years of living dangerously in a democracy in a coma, you have the obligation to speak up for those who cannot.

I may reside in a rogue nation, but I don’t have to take it lying down.

In my suitcase now travels the following:

One 5 by 7 card

Text:

This travel container has been carefully curated for your viewing pleasure. Each item has been meticulously chosen and arranged for maximum interest. We thank you for your participation and hope you have enjoyed the experience. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to improve, enhance, or heighten this interaction for you. See reverse of this form for the comments section.

The form would always be slightly askew.

I start freelancing for the progressive press. I write about a dead soldier’s father who carries medicine to Iraq, about Latinos on the border who must add photos of their dead soldier girls and boys to the family altar for Dia de los Muertos. My stories go international.

I quit the station.

And I put into practice the lessons I learned sitting at my grandfather’s table:

Democracy cannot hear our voices if we stay silent.

Sixty years after my grandparents were declared enemies of the state and their neighbors sent to internment camps, ten years after Democracy was bullied into a coma,

I, their American granddaughter,

not Ashcroft’s model 9/12 citizen,

along with many people better than I,

have risen up like a lion.

And I can sit at my grandfather’s table,

I hope,

redeemed.