I am counting down the days before I can embrace my sisters again, speak Arabic to my compatriots, wear what my bearded, funny neighbor calls conventional clothes, and reassure my family that neither America nor Broadwain—a Moroccan rendering of Bowdoin with touches of the renowned Broadway—is hostile to Arabs. I have come to realize how unready I am for the last of this limitless list of matters, which I will be compelled to address back home. I do not wish to posit a basis for confrontation—American media coverage attends to that daily and impeccably. Rather, I would like to speak my mind with regards to the questions of identity at the crossroads of culture and religion, especially Islam, at Bowdoin.
As a non-practicing Muslim and Arab, there have been many instances of sheer frustration, the kind commonly known as identity crisis. It all came into being with the SAT self-identification section, which was more of an existential conundrum than a census fact sheet, wherein I surrendered to shading in the perfect outline of an empty circle for the equally meaningless option of "other." This option, or actually the absence of any specific option, was for me a marker of my non-existence.
Then there was the baffling memory of my father telling friendly French travelers on a train in Italy—my first voyage abroad—that we were French, too. Indeed, as the September 11 attacks bolstered patriotism in America, it only aggravated matters in the Middle East. My first year, I gaped in admiration and fascination as I witnessed the mechanics of democracy at work at the antipodes of my compatriots' disregard.
Besides the fact that the 2008 presidential election constituted a wish-come-true for many African-Americans, it was the whole debate surrounding this event that genuinely vindicated to me how this nation was fulfilling the values upheld in the Constitution. I could finally challenge my family's assertions back in Africa: America is not merely the so-called accomplice of Israel in the weekly killing of Palestinians or the assailant in search of Texas tea in the territory between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
As I survived winters unseen and settled comfortably in my new cocoon of snowdrifts and essay deadlines, I sought to engage in intellectual conversations with other students about U.S. policies abroad and Islam in this nation, only to notice—in my own tactless manner—the extent to which Bowdoin students were not truly amenable to the discussion of these issues. My seminar, Jews and Arabs in Literature and Film, was emblematic of this sanctioned, if not forced, silence, for a general air of malaise hovered as soon as someone touched on the current state of affairs in the Levant.
I must admit that watching primetime news at home covering the hostilities in the Palestinian territories has imbued my impression of the conflict with a sense of great inequity toward the Arabs. However, after crossing the Atlantic, I came to discover another viewpoint, which at its most moderate stance vindicated the Israeli settlements and at its most extreme spoke of Arabs as terrorists. Beyond such antagonism, both perspectives share an equal tendency to dehumanize the adversary. The Israeli-Palestinian feud has nurtured nothing but the seeds of acrimony that have reached as far west as the furthest Arab country of the Middle East, Morocco.
While yesterday there were a substantial number of Sephardic Jews in the kingdom, many have now fled for fear of escalating hostility. By taking a religion course on Judaism, a Middle East politics class, and another on the Holocaust, I have strived to make sense of such embitterment. However, as the American press reflects the general opinion of many Americans, when will we ever be weary of this stultifying game of mirrors?
There are certain kinds of behaviors I am still striving to explicate to myself. For instance, it was devastating for me to overhear a fellow student say they were "bummed out" by the fact that in Lewiston a severed pig's head had been rolled into a local mosque as if it were no more than bird pooh that had landed on her handbag. In retrospect, this conversation not only helped me refine my understanding of colloquial English, it also attested to how this pressing bone of contention was treated as some kind of inconsequential event within this small town. I wonder at times if this heightened sense of aggravation is not the inevitable consequence of having grown up in a devout and devoted family for whom Arabic, the language of the Koran, and the Koran itself were a patrimony.
Needless to say, when I recall my father's harrowing accounts of the imprisonment of his left-wing classmates in Morocco because of their dissent from the Monarch, I cannot help feeling as if I were just cosseted and coddled on this beautiful campus in New England. But this piece was never meant to be a bleak prognostic.
For as I prepare for a year abroad in Europe, I have been favorably impressed by the consistent efforts of the Muslim Student Association and a fellow student of Armenian descent, who is familiar with Arab music. I enjoy taking part in the efforts of Food Forward with a co-worker who willingly apprises me of the Christian Fellowship, contemplating the Androscoggin with a friend from Mississippi while munching donuts from Frosty's at sunrise after a sleepless night plowing through papers, and simply promenading alone back to East Hall surrounded with the brume ever so pregnant with meaning in Hawthorne's writings.
While away, I will always remind myself that self-questioning is key to this liberal arts education that has ceaselessly inspired me, whether facing the religious fanaticism of fellow Moroccans or the unfamiliarity of many Americans with Islam and Arabic. In retrospect, my father's downright falsehood about our nationality exposes more than mere equivocation; rather it unveils the oppressive reality of having to assume one's identity as a Muslim and Arab. Then again, "identity," as a Christian sage from Lebanon had said, "Is not endowed to us once and for all, but rather constructed and transformed all along our existence."
Thus, I hope that this open letter to my cherished Bowdoin family shall have leastwise shown that it is often our glances that confine the others in their most narrow and constricted identification, yet it is also our glances that can liberate them.
Salma Berrada is a member of the Class of 2012.