Akram is a 21-year-old Palestinian-American with a Caesar haircut and silver wire-framed glasses that give him a serious, almost Roman, look. But Akram is no mirthless senator. He laughs easily and has impressive comic timing along with an equally striking work ethic. At his father's Brooklyn grocery, he labors for sixty-five hours a week during the school year, while also attending college full-time. In the summer he works a full ninety hours a week.
When he's not at work or at school, he's usually flopped out at home, where he lives with his extended family, thirteen of them, in a narrow two-family house in Sunset Park. Exhausted from work and school, he's normally in his room watching television, where he gets absorbed to the point that he can't pull himself away from all the terror talk in the culture. For the last two seasons, his favorite show has been Fox's ticking-bomb terror drama 24, and he never misses an episode. He likes rooting for the "wrong side" and loves to tell me that I'm the spitting image of one of last year's terrorists. He has his own pride in his heritage and his religion, but everywhere he turns - from television shows, movies, news reports, and the occasional customer - the culture is droning on that Islam is to be feared and that Arabs are a problem to be dealt with. Most of the time, he laughs with his friends at these cartoonish representations, but behind the humor is the ache of an identity under siege. And so Akram is looking for a way to redeem his own sense of himself.
This is not a front-page story of violence or rebellion, the responses that we have been programmed to expect by a culture mired in fear, sensationalism, and complacency. It's in fact a far more typical tale of quiet frustration, full of longings for escape and rebirth. Akram wants to be free of the drudgery of his work by moving up and beyond the store, but he also wants to be rid of all the stereotyping and misunderstanding that is floating around like a bad odor. This is his story, about race and class and opportunity, and about trying to figure your way in a world of progressive disenchantment. What do you do when everything and everyone - from teachers to TV - is screaming that you and your culture just don't belong? You have to come up with your own solutions, and Akram has found his answer. He's quitting the United States and heading to Dubai, a newfound land of opportunity, a global oasis of modern wealth done up Arabic style. Dubai. It's the latest Arab-American dream.
******** East Flatbush is a mostly Caribbean neighbourhood that has become a monotonous geography of faith and fast food. It's about 13 kilometres and a world away from New York City's empire of luxury, where the apples are hand-polished and the buildings stretch out into sky. Skyscrapers colonise air and land mountain-size shadows on the ground there, but in East Flatbush the buildings are low and simple, so the sun shines brightly on beaches of concrete. It's a commercially desolate landscape, a neighbourhood of hardworking regular folk who depend heavily on the entrepreneurial immigrant's grocery store.
Mike's Food Center is Akram's family store, and it isn't big but it's clean and has a better selection and cheaper prices than the Korean-owned grocery on the next block. A NY Lotto sign is glowing neon promises in the window. A metal bottle opener is bolted to the outside doorframe. When I walk in and say hello, Akram and Kareem, his younger cousin, will usually yell out a salaam or two until there's a lull in their commerce and we have time to talk. Mike's Food Center is always busy, and almost everyone in the store is black - Jamaican hipsters, Haitian city workers, Barbadian mothers, African-American old-timers - except for the four Arab men - Akram, Kareem, Abdel Salam (Akram's father) and his brother Khalil (Akram's uncle) - working the register or stocking the shelves. The whole week long, customers stream in a constant flow from seven in the morning until eight at night (and six on Sundays), when the lights go out and Akram and his father pull down the metal grate in the day's final t of exhaustion. Tomorrow it starts all over again.
Unlike many of Brooklyn's Muslim youth, Akram didn't become more religious after the terrorist attacks of September 11. He doesn't regularly attend Friday prayers at the mosque. He's usually too busy at the store, and anyway the imam at the nearest mosque is constantly lecturing his mostly Yemeni store-owner congregation about the sins of selling alcohol and pork, ideas that Akram and his cousin find boring, repetitive, and unrealistic. On the other hand, owing to his interactions with his customers, he knows all the countries of the Caribbean, their politics, their foods, and their vernaculars. He's a curious mix that isn't so strange in Brooklyn, equally at home with Arabs, African Americans, and West Indians. He's a 21st century United States American, absorbing and refracting all the ethnicities and histories surrounding him. What he loves most about Brooklyn is this heady human geography. He likes Walt Whitman, and Walt would have liked him.
In many ways the store is what gives Akram this complexity. His gregarious personality comes alive there, endowing Mike's Food Center with a kind of familiarity between owner and customer that strikes me as quite unique. But the immigrant grocery store itself is not uncommon. If you've spent any time in New York City, you've probably been in one of them. These groceries are rungs of commerce for immigrant entrepreneurs that they can step on and hoist themselves up America's economic ladder. Arab-owned grocery stores in New York City number over 2000, most with Palestinian and Yemeni proprietors, making them a central location of Arab-American life in Brooklyn. Sociologists call the entrepreneurs of these stores "middlemen minorities," ethnic businessmen and women who function as intermediaries between inner-city clients and the conglomerates that want to sell them things but don't want to deal with them directly, and Arab Americans are among New York City's most numerous middlemen minorities.
When Abdel Salam, Akram's father, departed his West Bank village of el-Bireh and landed in Brooklyn, he was 17 years old. Having left his family's farming life and the ugliness of the Israeli occupation behind him, he arrived nearly penniless in the United States, holding little education and even less money. Bewildered by his new life, Abdel Salam did what every lost immigrant does: he sought out his own kind. In the hardscrabble days of the early Seventies, he trundled his way out to the concrete sidewalks of Atlantic Avenue and began working in the same traditions that Arab immigrants to New York had followed since late Ottoman times in the United States. Abdel Salam peddled whatever he could get his hands on. He bought clothes and costume jewellery wholesale and sold them at retail prices around the neighbourhood and all over the city. It was a hard, tenuous existence. Once, when he had nothing left to sell and only dust in his pocket, he picked up a stray cat and walked into a pizzeria in Brooklyn. With a smile and some sweet talk, he convinced the man behind the counter that the cat was a purebred Egyptian and worth two dollars and two pies. Maybe the Italian took pity on the poor Palestinian man, but it didn't matter. This was the best sale and the tastiest pizza of his life. He left peddling behind, and over the next 11 years Abdel Salam worked in other Arab grocery stores around the city and saved every penny he earned. He shared an impossibly small studio apartment with six other men, where they lived one on top of the other, rotating occupancy between shifts of work. He sent money home and spent nothing superfluously, until he and his brother Khalil, who had followed him to Brooklyn the year after he arrived, had saved enough to make the move from worker to owner. The two brothers found out that another Palestinian friend from el-Bireh was selling his store in East Flatbush.
Abdel Salam had come to this country with nothing, and a generation later he was sharing a successful store with his brother and their two sons. The store is now paying for Akram's education, and he will be the first in his immediate family to graduate with a college degree. In America's recurring immigrant saga, Abdel Salam's success with Mike's Food Center is not just an accomplishment of American proportions, it's textbook American dream. But it's no longer enough for Akram, nor does his life in the United States satisfy him any longer. He's looking for a way out. When he first told me of his plans to move abroad, I asked him why he didn't want to stay here anymore, and in answer he deliberately paraphrased a line from a Countee Cullen poem: "What's America to me?" he said, raising an eyebrow.
******* Akram had told me in the past about his salad days during high school and how they'd been disrupted, especially by the terrorist attacks of September 11. He attended Brooklyn's Edward R Murrow High School, one of New York City's speciality schools for gifted children. You have to earn your enrolment based on your prior excellence, and you can "major" in a programme at Murrow by concentrating your few elective courses in different areas. Akram majored in English and social studies.
Murrow had its own political geography of race and ethnicity, divided by floor and by lockers. The second floor belonged to the Hispanics. The Asian kids hung out next to the library. The Goths squatted in the first-floor lobby and were eyed derisively down the long hall by the well-dressed Italian kids. The third floor was split in a détente between the Russians and the African Americans. When Akram was at Murrow, there weren't that many Arabs in the school, so they didn't have their own space. Anyway, being Arab, you could fit in with almost any nationality, he explained. He opted for the third floor, which was the most multi-ethnic group in the school, including Russian kids, Hispanics, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, Pakistanis, Blacks, Arabs and Jews. It was precisely this heterogeneity, the lack of identity politics, that drew Akram here from the beginning. Among the third floor crew, he was known as the funny guy, always cracking jokes in class, never taking himself too seriously. In the currency of high school, comedy pays, and Akram was rich. His humour was rarely rude and often infectious. It riffed off the clichés and stupidities of what other people said. It was his way of getting along with students, teachers, deans, and security staff alike. Still, ethnicity was a fact of life at Murrow, and Akram wore his Palestinian roots on his shoulders, most notably with his keffiyah (also called a hatta). For Palestinian kids in American high schools, their keffiyahs matter. Unlike other kids, they don't have a country to lay claim to so they hold tightly to their symbols. "Some people have do-rags," Akram said. "We have our hattas."
The hatta had elicited comments beforehand. Once, when he was a junior, one of his English teachers passed him in the stairwell while his hatta was on his shoulders. She stopped above him, peered down at the scarf, and spat out questions to him. "What does that mean?" she said. "You hate all Jews?" He was stupefied. "Nah. It's not like that," he said. "It's just traditional!" He resented the idea that the hatta - and by association his culture and ethnic origin - could be interpreted as hatred. He resented the fact that the teacher thought he hated anybody just because of that person's religion. He resented her.
He was beginning his senior year at Murrow in 2001. Summer break had just ended, and his classes weren't even in the swing of things yet. That terrible morning, when the world's eyes turned with shock to Manhattan, was a beautiful Tuesday day free of humidity and full of sunshine. He was already at school, in the halls between periods. He was heading to one of his English classes when people in the hall started repeating the news that an aeroplane had crashed into the World Trade Center. The class he was going to was called Magical Realism.
It's a joke, he thought. But by the time he sat down in the classroom, he realised that the unbelievable was true. The teacher had pulled out a stereo and placed it on top of his desk, and they all sat quietly in their places for the duration of the hour. Finally, the class ended, and in the weird silence that had overtaken the school, Akram walked down the hall, dazed like the rest of his peers, to his next class. It was also an English class called Person-to-Person. The students here were mostly sophomores and juniors, with only a few seniors like Akram in attendance. Since it was a new school year, he didn't yet know the other kids in this class, nor had he had a class with Mrs Dachs, the middle-aged teacher. But Mrs Dachs was in distress. She said she couldn't teach and pretend that everything was normal. Instead she wanted the students to talk out their reactions. "I want to hear your feelings about it," she said.
But what Akram heard began to scare and repel him. "We should go over there and bomb them," one boy said. Another suggested the same thing, with the variation of "kill them" instead of "bomb them." Where "there" was was never really clear, but this continued for a while, and Akram was stunned into silence. "I'm just sitting in my chair, you know," he said. "I'm the funny guy. I'm always happy. But just hearing what they said, I thought, wow, man! The people 'over there'-Afghanistan? the Middle East? - they had nothing to do with it!"
Akram had already travelled several times "over there". He had gone to the Palestinian territories six or seven times, always as a kid and with his mother. He started thinking about what the other students were saying and then about the kids in Palestine whom he'd met. "They are kids just like us. They might dress differently than us, but they still like to watch the same cartoons that we do," he said. The comments continued in this vein until, in the middle of the discussion in his Person-to-Person class, Akram could hold it back no longer. He started to cry.
"I'm a sensitive guy," he said in all seriousness. "I don't mind telling you." The class stopped talking. Mrs. Dachs saw his tears, and nobody moved. She said nothing, just silently walked up to him and hugged him in front of the class. "Everyone's looking at me like, 'Why's he crying?'" he said. "And I told them, 'These people had nothing to do with it. Why are you saying these things?'" It was a new school year in a new class full of new people. "They didn't know I was Arab," he said. "They did not know."
The store was safe. Nothing terrible happened there. It wasn't like the newsstand in the Bronx, where the Yemeni owner was beaten with a bottle by three men who were yelling, "You Arabs get out of my neighbourhood. We hate Arabs. This is war." At Mike's Food Center, customers came in to ask if everything was fine. They offered help. Akram's father later told me that he believes that was because he's been in the neighbourhood for so long, that most of the customers know him, that he has watched their children grow up, from buying sweets at the register to visiting their families when they return from college. In reality, luck probably also played a role, but it certainly is true that Mike's Food Center is deeply and warmly embedded in the neighbourhood. During the week of September 11, several people popped their heads in the door. "If you need anything, Mike," they would say without making a purchase, "just say the word".
Edward R Murrow High School closed down for the rest of the week after September 11, and class resumed on Monday. That morning Akram was hanging out in the third-floor hallway when one of the English teachers, Mr Ross, passed him and his crew. Just as the English teacher before had done, Ross stopped and glared at the boys. "Where are your scarves now?" he said, challenging the boys. "You're scared to wear them." Akram felt that the comments were directed to him. "The scarf isn't scary," he replied defensively. "It's a traditional garment."
That night he couldn't stop thinking about what Ross had said. His brain raced between school, the Middle East, Ground Zero, and back to school. He tossed and turned in his bed. By the next morning, before he left home, he had come up with a plan. He looked around his house and found five different hattat. Away from the eyes of his parents, he folded them up carefully and placed them in his school bag. When he got to school, he called his friends over and handed them out. His cousin took one. A Pakistani friend put one over his head. Two Yemeni friends draped them over their shoulders. They waited in the hallway for Ross while Akram practised what he was going to say to the teacher. "Who's scared now? No one's scared here," he was whispering. But before Ross showed up, Annie, a security guard at the school, spotted them, five boys wearing Arab headdresses in the hallway, and she blew up. "You know what's going on now!" she yelled at Akram. "Why are you doing this?" And they began arguing and screaming at one another in the hallway. Akram didn't know what had got into him, why the confrontations, the confusions, the anger, but he exploded. "Really, I'm the funny guy," he said later. Annie continued to yell at him, and he yelled back, and the scene was getting bigger and more unmanageable. Panama, another security guard, and one whom Akram considered a friend, showed up and walked up to the boy. Panama placed his huge bulk in front of him and pushed him back. "Relax, man," he said. "Relax." But Akram couldn't. He started yelling "Bin Laden didn't do it! Bin Laden didn't do it!" Annie was yelling back at him the whole time, but his own voice was so loud in his ears that he couldn't hear a thing she was saying. Panama grabbed Akram and took him downstairs to the dean's office, where he explained to the dean what had happened while Akram was silent. By now Akram wasn't yelling anymore. "Bin Laden didn't do it," he told the dean quietly when asked what was going on. The dean sensibly replied that they weren't there to discuss who did and who didn't do what. The whole room fell silent while the dean thumbed the hatta for a while. Then he asked Akram, "Who told you to bring these in?" "Speak to your staff about what they tell us," Akram spit back. He felt lonely and wounded and confused. He stayed in the dean's office for the rest of the period, until the dean was sure he had calmed down enough to be sent back to his classroom. Later that day Akram handed off the hattat to some of the girls in his crew, two Bangladeshis and a Filipina. They laughed while they put them on, and someone snapped a picture. That photo made it into the yearbook. "I had just turned 17," Akram told me, laughing and sighing. The blender ground loudly in the coffee shop while he looked away with half a smile on his lips. "The funny thing is," he said, "before September 11, I had never even heard of Osama bin Laden."
********** One day in 2005, Akram struck up a conversation with a customer who was buying his groceries at the store. This man had served in the military during the Korean War and had stayed in that peninsula country after the war for a few years to teach English. He told Akram about his experiences and about the opportunities available to English teachers who want to go abroad. This started Akram thinking, and he began looking up teaching English on the internet. He found a programme in Prague that certified teachers. He looked into the countries that were calling for English teachers. Japan was listed, along with several other countries in Asia. Eastern Europe and the republics of the former Soviet Union needed English teachers. Brazil captivated him for a moment, but one place stood out from all the others: Dubai. Dubai is the new American dream for many Arab-American youth.
The most American of all the Arab lands, Dubai also holds the attraction for Akram of being a place where he can get in touch with his Arab past, make a living, and learn about himself. This is also the case with his friends. Whenever they start discussing it, Akram and his friends speak glowingly of the emirate in near-mythic terms. They talk about how Dubai has built a ski resort in the middle of the scorching desert (a picture of it is the screen saver on Akram's computer) and erected a hotel that charges $1,400 (Dh 5,141) a night for its simplest room. "We were talking about it at the store," Akram explained. "One customer said that he'd just sleep outside the hotel for that kind of money. Yeah, but that's $500," Akram joked. "By this time next year, I'll be there. I'll be settled," he continued. "Insha'Allah." God willing. Dubai is an Arab city glittering with similar kinds of gleam and glory that America did for Arab immigrants a generation ago. After I asked him why Dubai, Akram told me, "It's important that it's an Arab place. I know the language, and now I want to learn the culture even more. I was thinking about going to Brazil, someplace exotic, but I'll get closer to the Middle East. I'll get closer to Islam. I want to learn how to read and write Arabic. I'm 21 years old, and I can't read Arabic. I'll have that time to learn, to pass it down."
For Palestinian Americans like Akram, it is even less surprising that Dubai has its enticements. Akram's friends go back to Lebanon, to Syria, to Egypt routinely and for extended visits. His Yemeni friends return sometimes for years at a time. But in the West Bank, you are lucky if you get a three-month tourist visa. You have to deal with constant border closures and the insecurity of the situation. Residency is difficult, if not impossible. Dubai, with its attraction to Palestinian Americans, is another footnote in the continuing epic tragedy of Palestinian dispossession. It's also a place that will gain from America's loss. Akram is a funny, talented, and thoughtful young man who works incredibly hard. He's quick and versatile, sensitive and empathetic, a global and local citizen of the United States and the planet. The world is his oyster, really, and it's important to emphasise that leaving is his choice, not something forced onto him. It is done with clear eyes and not a hint of self-pity. And when Akram makes a decision, he follows through with it. His parents are familiar with his resolute will, especially after he bought a motorcycle to cut down on travel time between the store and school, and they have accepted his choice, hoping that he will return before too long, which he very well might. "If you're going to do this," his father said, "do this in the Middle East." But the point is why he has opted to leave for Dubai, to reverse the geography of his father's American dream. "I've been rereading Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes," he told me. "Without being so grand, they (the McCourt family) were worse in America than they were in Ireland. We're becoming like that. I find myself becoming like that, more and more miserable, in a sense," he said. "I'm tired of it. I love the diversity of this country, I really do, but the whole politics and the whole . . ." He paused, looking for the right word. He settled on "everything." He took an exasperated breath before continuing his thought, paraphrasing Langston Hughes this time. "America's not America anymore to me."
Moustafa Bayoumi is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College and is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader. Adapted from How does it feel to be a problem: Being young and Arab in America, forthcoming from the Penguin Press © Moustafa Bayoumi 2008