I Will Not EXPLAIN
30 Days of Arab Voices 2024
For years, I’ve been explaining.
As a child, I explained out of necessity. Instinctively.
Every day…..often multiple times a day.
“What are you eating? What’s hummus? Looks weird.”
Or..”what do you mean you’re fasting? Are you sure that’s healthy?”
Or, “why can’t you spend the night?”
Or, “do Muslims have to wear that thing on their head?”
I explained. Carefully. Politely. As if it was my job.
I was in my junior year of high school when I “explained” my world, for the first time, to a large group. The entire school, in fact. It started as an English assignment. I presented on the topic of “Muslim Representation in the Media.” I pulled together headlines and statistics; talked about who Muslims were and what we looked like. And then, I showed a scene from a popular movie at the time called “Not Without My Daughter,” about a loving, Iranian father who turns into a child abducting fundamentalist as soon as he returns to Iran to visit his family. My English teacher at the time watched in amazement. I had presented something that, to me, was obvious. Every day, I noticed how Muslims and Arabs were being depicted in the news or in the movies because it was so far from my own lived experience. And it was everywhere. The racist tropes of the 1980s and 1990s were not subtle.
When I finished the presentation, I knew I had not only aced the assignment, I knew I had schooled my teacher. I was making an impact, shaping a mind. She immediately asked if I could give the same presentation to the entire school. Of course I could. That was my job. Or so I believed.
I eventually became a journalist because I wanted to help people in the U.S. understand my world. My different worlds.
I grew up as the daughter of Syrian immigrants to the U.S. At first, our community was made up of mostly Syrian families. But as we grew older and interacted with the world outside our communities– and as my parents fielded our questions about our hyphenated world – our communities expanded and changed. Our mostly Syrian community soon came to include Lebanese and Palestinian families and activists. My parents came from Shi’a families from Damascus (there are only a handful of those in the first place.) So when we asked questions about Sunni and Shi’a, my mother took us on a tour of mosques to meet different Muslim groups. Soon, we added an Iraqi, Shi’a community to our mix. One of my best friends, when I was a kid, came from that community.
But we didn’t settle there. New questions and new phases in life led us to explore even further. Soon, we made decisions, as a family, about which groups we wanted to spend more time with. Eventually, we landed in a mosque that felt perfect for us. It didn’t ascribe to any sects of schools of thought. They were Muslim, not Sunni or Shi’a. It was ethnically diverse. Muslim women were leaders. And they identified as both Muslim AND American. This mosque was one of the first mosques I ever encountered to proudly embrace its Americanness.
Throughout all these phases, politics was never optional. My identity was political. It felt like a prerequisite to being Arab and Muslim in America. When your identity and faith are described as part of the “axis of evil,” you have no choice. Whether you liked it or not.
Over time, the leaders of the mosque became role-models for me. Whenever anything happened in the news that had to do with Muslims, or Arabs, it was the leaders of my mosque that were on local or even National television fielding people’s questions. Salman Rushdie. The Gulf War. The first and second intifadas. The downing of an airline over Lockerbie, Scotland. Racist caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad and death threats. September 11. The war in Iraq. And on and on. And, always, Palestine. They appeared on CNN, Fox News; they were quoted in major newspapers across the countries and wrote their own op-eds. At the time, I felt like at least we were being represented. They were filling the void.
But it wasn’t until I met someone who would become one of my closest friends that I realized there was a community that I had not been exposed to growing up. A community that I had so much to learn from. The Black Muslim community. Black Muslims understood this country in a way we did not. They had lived it. They knew it went beyond explanations. They understood the systemic issue at hand. They understood it because it was their story, their lived experience.
By being in community with my Black Muslim friends, by understanding the systemic racism that this country has been built upon, I began to understand that the storytelling we needed was not one of explaining. A colonized mind explains. A colonized mind tries to justify its existence. A colonized mind will never be able to tell an authentic story of resistance, because they're always speaking to an audience that starts with a different premise, a different set of facts, a different narrative. A premise where we must prove our self worth, our humanity. And that is not something that can be proved.
It took my friend constantly asking me why we responded to certain questions for me to completely understand this. You can not explain to those who want to silence and discredit your narrative. We have known this for decades. We have seen our acts of protest, our acts of resistance, our stories, our mere existence described as terrorism or anti-semitic or undemocratic or un-American.
On Tuesday evening, the month of Ramadan came to an end. Every day during Ramadan, as I broke my fast with a single date, I thought about the people in Palestine and Yemen and Sudan and Congo whose hunger had not been alleviated at the end of the day. I struggled to sleep, every night, thinking about Gaza and and the genocide taking place in plain sight, with the full support of the U.S. government and so many people in this country. No explaining in the world can get people to understand that our lives matter. Our women and children matter. That our men matter. Our blood either matters or does not. To so many in this country, it does not.
So I leave you with this poem. I am not a poet. But this poem came to me in those sleepless nights. This Ramadan, I reaffirmed something that I had learned many years ago, from my friend Intisar Rabb. I will no longer explain. It is not my job. I will be. I will resist. And I will tell my story, our story. Fully. For me. For us.
I will no longer explain.
I am the daughter of Syrian
Immigrants
Raised in Los Angeles
A world away
Far and between
Who will continue to dream
No
To Act
To Yearn
To work
For a better world
A better day.
But I will not explain.
I am a we
A descendent of us
A movement
That will protect and nourish and raise
A collective whole
Above the noise and clamor of hate and derision and greed
and lies that tells us
We do not matter.
That tell us
It is all about the singular
Me,
pulled up by some imagined boot straps
To succeed
In a race
That we want no part of,
With empty letters
That fill resumes
Only to ignore
Our Sick
Our Elderly
Our Bereft
The Weak
So that
In the end
We walk
Alone.
I am a part of us
That will not sleep
That will not rest
Until every Black boy
Every Muslim girl
Every Latinx Afro Native son and daughter is safe
And sound
Asleep
In their bed
Their breath
Rising and falling
Like a sweet lullaby
That soothes
The hearts
Of every mother and father
In every corner of these vast occupied
lands.
I will not explain
Because
I am not the sick one.
I am not the one who does not see.
The one who does not want to see
Who does not hear
Who does not feel
The tears
The cries
The unseen images
And empty words
On deserted newscasts
I will not explain
Or close my eyes
To feel only the numbness of
Shopping malls
And video games
The scrolling
Trolling
And ticktocking
Of cursory pundits and celebrity names.
I will not explain
To be put on the defensive
To prove
That we bleed
We love
We reel
We need to heal.
I will reflect
I will resist
I will reclaim
I will reframe.
I will stand
I will be.
We are together
A whole
A single breath
Started by our ancestors
Our Tetas and Jiddos
Who shaped our stories
With love and hope and laughter
Who told us we will never be alone
As long as we know
Us.
As long as we know
Our Voices
We will be strong
As long as we know
Our Name
We will be loud
As long as we know
Our Legacy
We will be clear.
We will not have to say never again
Because we know never again
Is Now.
We know never again
Will be too late.
Because
We are more than an instant.
We are
A continuation of a
A lineage
Of hope
Of pain
Of love
That waxes and wanes with every birth pang and every last breath
In a line
That tells our story.
My story.
My line
That stretches from the gardens of Babylon to the deserts of Damascus and the hills of Lebanon and Los Angeles.
My mother died on October 7
To join the other souls
That rose
Too early
Across the oceans and the seas
Awaiting us
Above the darkness of this world.
I am my mother.
Her first and last breath.
That filled me
And shaped me
And showed me how
To resist
And be.
I will not explain.
I will feel
With every Gazan
Mother
Father
Daughter
Son
Who left us
Too soon
To rise up
To say
Collectively
We are one
We are one
Inna ll’llah
Wa inna Ilayhi Raji'un.
To you we belong
And to you we will return
We are your light
Your love
Your community
That shines through the darkness.
We are one.
We are love.
I will not explain.
