I have only witnessed my mother crying three times in my life that I can remember.

The first was the death of her mother at a young 66. The third was the death of her eldest sister—a surrogate mother to her at formative stages—at nearly the same age in 2002. 

The second happened when the bombing campaign of the first Gulf War began. 

I was 16, in my room studying for exams. It must have been January: a cursory web search tells me it was exactly January 17, 1991. It was nighttime, there might have been music playing in my room. I’m not sure what I was studying for. Exams at that time of year always made me anxious and worried. Being the youngest daughter of Middle Eastern immigrants to Canada, education and academic achievement were the only things that counted to my parents. 

My mother was not the sort of person who just barged into my room, ever. But she opened the door, unannounced, declared “They’ve started bombing Baghdad,” and burst into tears.

I’m sure I must have gone downstairs and watched the news coverage of what was happening, complete with all the ridiculous station branding as if what we were watching wasn’t a war but some kind of pageant of American hegemonic force. Which is what it was. 

I had no idea at that point what was in store for me when I returned to school in the following weeks, but I can honestly say it was the beginning of realizing that I was not like these people I had grown up with, thinking they were just like me. Thinking they were reasonable, honest, truth-loving people. Kind and just people. 

I was not like these people I had grown up with, thinking they were just like me

At school, I was a member of a club we called the radio station. It consisted of a DJ booth in the middle of the lobby—where everyone congregated between classes—that had a window, a connection to a PA that could be heard throughout the lobby, and the usual tape deck and turntable. 

Music was one of the express joys of my teenage life. Even though I lived in a city where the good bands rarely stopped to play, I found comrades among other music-loving friends, and the radio station felt like the apotheosis of that love. 

I was a big Cure fan. Knew all their songs. Knew all the meanings of their songs. I was the sort of girl who studied lyrics for meaning, looking for the ones that would help me articulate my own inchoate feelings as I was coming into womanhood, whatever that meant at 16. Looking for something that made me feel less alone. There was a lot of alienation expressed in Cure songs that spoke to me.

One lunchtime after the war began, a member of the radio station played “Killing an Arab” on the PA to a full lobby of students. At a sensitive time, with a school that had a significant Arab population, this asshole was allowed to play this song. Without any objection whatsoever from the clueless administration. 

I banged on the door to the booth, told him to take it off, and he refused. Then I went to our teacher advisor, and told him about this. I don’t remember him doing much about it either, except to express concern that I was so incensed that this ignorant dipshit was allowed to get away with playing a song that at surface was insensitive and grotesquely timed, that he thought maybe I should “talk to someone in counselling about it.” I remember that being the first of several times during this period that teachers expressed concern about me, not that they ever did anything constructive with their concern.

Exhibit A of being treated like a hysterical female for perfectly legitimate views.

I know exactly what “Killing an Arab” is about. I know it’s meant to reference Albert Camus’s famous novel L’Etranger, a novel I’ve read. I know it’s not actually about killing Arabs in the literal sense. But at the surface level, that was the chorus, and it sounded in context like cheering on what was an indiscriminate, mass bombing campaign that would kill and maim innocents. Never mind the fact that so many students at our school were Middle Eastern, and probably not feeling all that great at the time, if they were feeling at all like me.

But of course I was the problem. Because I was the Arab. How dare I object!

Of course I was the problem. Because I was the Arab. How dare I object!

All I can remember feeling during this period was a growing sense of anger. My father was Palestinian, and I had grown up watching him be angry at the TV over the course of the early years of the Israeli state, and its series of equally belligerent Prime Ministers during my childhood and adolescence: Begin, Shamir, Peres, Rabin, Sharon. Nothing was getting any better, anytime soon, and no one in the West seemed to comprehend the situation, or if they did, they were enabling it. The general feeling was “poor Israel,” never mind all that poor Israel was doing to slowly erode the rights and freedoms of Palestinians and usurp whatever land they could. Arabs—and let's be specific, Palestinians—were the filth who had no rights and no choice but to submit.

But 16-year old me, walking the halls of my 1450-strong population high school, feeling increasingly angrier at what I perceived as the complete ignorance and insensitivity of everyone around me to what was happening “over there”—the over there being an intimate part of my internal being—was not hearing your bullshit.

Bullshit like what one of my classmates had the audacity to say to me: that the wholescale butchery taking place in Iraq as we argued in the terrazzo-lined halls of our suburban Canadian high school—butchery that included sanctions on crucial medical supplies and food even prior to the bombing campaign; butchery guaranteed to cause maximum harm to innocents and civilians—was calculated to help stimulate the world economy.

I find myself thinking now: it’s interesting that our lives are worthless except to stimulate your stock markets, your Wall Streets and Bunds. Like we are so many ones and zeros on a ledger.

But as actual, breathing humans? Humans who deserve to live? Humans who suffered for years under Saddam’s regime, a regime I’ll remind you was propped up and kept in place by the US, a condition that’s par for the course in the Mideast. That’s something that Arabs in the Middle East and in the diaspora can never forget. You never forget your own government, your own people, brutalizing you to appease Western interests. And then the West's own bullshit about incursions into supposedly sovereign nations—brutalizing civilians once again—to "spread freedom and democracy" when it suits them.

It’s one of the reasons why “go back to where you came from” is so insulting, because if the West just left us alone to govern ourselves, some of us might never have had to leave. And going back wouldn’t be so fraught.

If the West just left us alone to govern ourselves, we might never have had to leave.

I’m remembering all of this over again, after a year of genocide that we all called genocide months before Western human rights organizations felt compelled to. A gruesomely asymmetrical incursion into a densely populated area that was more like a holding pen for cattle awaiting slaughter than a sovereign nation capable of defending itself. Not a war as the media termed it.

We’ll skip over how easily the Western media found it to run with unverified accounts of mass rape and baby burning from October 7, never pausing for a second but taking Israel at its word. Not taking a person at their word, mind, a state.

I’m going to bracket for a moment that I’m struck by that as a potent emblem of a fascist society. One where the state predominates and steamrolls over all: dissent, international law, human rights, common decency, and respect for life.

I feel myself in much the same state as I was at 16. I’ve struggled over the last year with feeling ill at ease where I am, feeling that I no longer can even vaguely disavow where I come from. I don’t want to. I don’t want to be shut up, called hysterical, or any other names for not wanting Arabs to die for illegitimate western causes. 

Over the past year, I’ve been the one doing the crying. And I feel in my marrow the exact flavour of sorrow that my mother expressed on that night in 1991, when she had to witness the wanton destruction of a part of the world that was still and ever would be a part of herself. Except that she knew why she fled the Middle East, and I sometimes have no idea what I’m doing here. Sometimes I feel such a sense of being out of place that it’s disorienting and painful in a way that is difficult to articulate. I look normal and functioning from the outside, but inside there is nothing but ongoing disquiet and turmoil. 

I feel disconnected from this place I happened to be born in, without a feeling of belonging to it that is profound enough to make me want to stay. I’m not sure there’s anyplace on the earth that I belong, and there are times when I think I’d be better off on another planet, as another life form. One that shows more concern and consideration for their fellow life forms and the planet.

The image above is of my mother, shortly before she turned 16, second from left, and friends of hers from high school, February 1960, Aleppo, Syria.