“AMAL”
Back at the Touqans’ I get the opportunity to talk to another member of the family, Amal. (This is not her real name—she wants to speak anonymously because a friend of hers was recently doxxed and had a job offer rescinded due to her social media posts about Gaza.) Amal graduated from college a few years ago and is now a graduate student at a nearby university. She’s wearing a dark green T-shirt and glasses with translucent frames. Her brown hair is bound in a loose braid, bifurcated by a streak of dark purple dye on the right side.
“Now that you’ve lived somewhere else,” I begin, “what’s it like coming back to Dearborn?”
“I love it and I hate it,” she says. She elaborates that while being gay can be complicated in the often socially conservative community, when she’s away from it she misses the food, she misses her friends and she misses being able to wear her keffiyeh without people eyeing her with suspicion. She has, however, become more visibly queer in recent years, which has made coming home more difficult. “But to be honest,” she says, “ever since this stuff in Palestine, while I might get weird looks because of the way that I dress or the kind of makeup that I wear, or my haircut or the fact that I hold my girlfriend’s hand in public, once they see my Palestine necklace, they don’t care.”
Amal recounts how, when she first left Dearborn for college, her main identity went from being queer to being Arab. And she’s been surprised by the ignorance she encounters about the Middle East in progressive circles. It’s the little things, she says, like when she tells people that her dad is going overseas to Jordan, generally considered one of the safest countries in the region, and they ask, “Is it safe there?”
She’s also bothered by the way people she meets assume that the Arab community is misogynistic. She pauses, considering, and then says, “I want to be honest about maybe the faults of my own community, without giving white people ammo to attack brown people.” Similarly, Amal explains, she dislikes the assumption that most Arabs are anti-American, going on to say that she, partially because of her lighter skin, is often not subjected to such stereotyping.
At this I diverge a little from my prepared questions and ask if she feels like she’s seen as “one of the good ones.” “Yeah, I hate that phrase so much,” she says, explaining how insulting it feels to be complimented on fitting into whiteness. “That just tells me that the way you care for me or love me or respect me is conditioned on how much I’m willing to forgo my cultural identity. And that to me is really sinister.”
“I mentioned it because that’s a phrase that’s often applied to Jews as well,” I explain.
“I was actually going to bring that up. I feel like Arabs are also often accused of dual loyalty,” she says, adding wearily, “We’re not secretly plotting the downfall of America. We’re not all undercover terrorists.”
Amal decries the brutality of police officers in response to pro-Palestine demonstrations on her campus and the apathy from the administration. “My professors don’t give a shit about me,” she says, tearing up, “my classmates don’t give a shit about me.”
When I ask her to describe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in her own words, she doesn’t hesitate. “Seventy-five years of colonial violence,” she begins, “and the West not just turning its face away, but putting their grubby little hands in and endorsing it, and paying for it.”
Mural at Salina Intermediate School in Dearborn. Photographed by the author.
Amal laments being constantly asked, as an Arab, to condemn Hamas, something I’m surprised I don’t hear more during my time in Dearborn. “‘Do you condemn Hamas? Do you condemn Hamas?’ Okay, I’m sorry, but if a state that was backed by the entire world bombed and killed my family, sequestered me off in the largest open-air prison in the entire fucking world—95 percent of the people in Gaza right now are experiencing extreme hunger and famine—I’m a lesbian, bro; I’m not like, ‘I love Hamas.’ But Hamas and these right-wing, reactionary militant groups don’t come out of nowhere.”
As for Biden, she never had any faith in him. Even Bernie Sanders was a supreme disappointment. “They’re all performers.” She bemoans what she sees as apathy or indifference, even contempt, citing Biden’s casting doubt on casualty numbers coming out of Gaza. Moreover, Amal argues, Biden and fellow Democrats talk down to Arab voters, responding to their pleas with dismissive arguments that Trump would be worse.
Amal believes that Biden’s handling of the crisis will cost him dearly, and not just with Arab-American voters, or just in Michigan, but with young voters, Black voters and leftist voters throughout the nation. And not just for his positions on Palestine but on COVID, the Southern border and student loans. The president’s response to Arab Americans in particular—so many of whom are disgusted and frightened by his actions—is anger and attitude, Amal says, “like a petulant toddler.”
She has very clear opinions on what needs to be done to protect Palestinians. “The only solution, I think, is the model of what happened in South Africa. I don’t think the two-state solution works.”
That’s not to say that Jews should be pushed out of the country, she adds, but walls and checkpoints should be dismantled to end apartheid. Most Palestinian leaders, she tells me, are calling for one state where Palestinians are given stewardship of the land. “I’m not exactly sure how it would come about,” she ponders, “but I feel like that’s the solution to bring the occupation to an end.”
Not long after, I’m sitting at the dining room table with Amal and her girlfriend while Mr. T is in the adjacent kitchen. At Zach’s behest, Mr. T is making musakhan, a Palestinian dish of roasted chicken, baked onions and toasted almonds over taboon bread, with copious amounts of sumac. Zach, who is on the couch on the other side of the room with Mrs. T, explains that it’s often considered the national dish of Palestine.
“Can you pass the controller?” asks Mrs. T. It takes me a moment to realize she means the TV remote control. I turn in my seat to look for it, accidentally brushing Mr. T’s Glock G19, which he often leaves on the table. I’d forgotten I was in the Midwest. “No, that’s my controller,” says Mr. T from the kitchen. This is met with a communal eyeroll. I find the remote and hand it to Mrs. T.