SUMAC

During my first-ever year of school in 1986, I consciously decided that I was going to be a bully.

I thought that it was something I could easily put on, like a shirt, and if I didn’t like it, I could just put it away and forget it happened. And, to be fair, I guess the best time to try being a bully is when you’re in kindergarten. School’s for experimentation, right?

At that point in time, living was confusing to me. I was meek, which adults saw as “quiet,” which they equated to “good.” The truth was that I actually had all of these feelings, really big ones, but I couldn’t figure out where to put them or how to articulate them. And I got praised a lot for being “good” because I was “quiet” and that seemed to be the only correct thing I managed to do; I wasn’t about to mess that sweet gig up.

My family was brimming with Anger, and because I didn’t know any better, I thought people in general were full of rage all the time.

How do I explain this?

The household consisted of my parents, my grandparents, my adopted-sister-who-was- technically-my-cousin, and my uncle. All of these family members felt like they were in their own, personal bubbles of Anger. We were like a Venn diagram that only overlapped occasionally. In the times we did intersect, it was usually not very pleasant. My adopted sister took care of me the most when I was young but, as she was young herself, she resented it, and her Anger could launch an aircraft most of the time. My mom was emotionally checked out and often snapped over the impatience of having to answer my little-kid questions, and my dad’s rage was abysmal and alcohol-fueled. I remember poking around in my uncle’s room more than actually seeing my uncle, and the grandparents – I remember teta and sido’s voices very well but I can’t remember their laughs – not a single giggle. I barely remember their smiles.

This is the part where I say: Therapy is great and if I had my way, therapy would fall from the sky.

I had a lot of moments where I ran off and entertained myself after trying to engage with an angry adult: “Oh, they’re mad again, I’ll go poke at the tchotchkes in the entertaining room.”

Maybe I should explain the entertaining room.

The Internet tells me that the Arabic word for this is majlis, though I don’t remember calling it anything but the “front room.” It wasn’t the living room – we had a separate one of those. If we had guests over, we met them in the front room, which was full of the nice sofas and fake flowers and gossamer curtains and apparently important objects in cabinets. Things like little handmade figures of Arab men throwing pottery and intricate ornamental plates of St. George. We had an old photo of a relative hanging there, in traditional dress. I don’t know who she was, but I wish I at least had a scan of that photo. We had an arjileh just in case a guest felt like smoking it. And we had ostentatious crystalline free-standing ashtrays with crystal teardrops that I loved pulling off and holding in the sunlight.

Anyway, when we didn’t have guests, people didn’t go in that room, so I’d often sit in there and slowly, happily destroy stuff when I wanted to stay away from the negative vibes.

I was surprisingly level-headed about the whole thing, despite being very much a kid otherwise. For example, it took me ages to understand the concept of peeing before leaving the house so as not to desperately look for a bathroom every time I was outside, but I had always deeply sensed the Anger that stewed in our house and methodically knew that it came in waves, just like crummy weather – nothing to do except get out of the way and distract myself.

I can’t remember when I learned what Palestine was and who Palestinians are. I suppose it’s kind of a silly thing to say, since most people don’t ask themselves when they realized they were Italian or the like. I realize I’m wording it this way for these reasons:

● We lived in the United States

● I lived with my grandparents

● My grandparents were very Palestinian

● They were not happy living in the United States

● I had cultural whiplash every time I walked outside our door

The sorrow and rage I felt were so palpable that I sensed something bad had happened, but the Nakba was not explained to me, nor was my family’s particular heartbreak. I almost felt like the Anger was a boat I was thrown into and wherever I landed was its will.

I wasn’t a particularly angry kid myself, but I was pretty good at reading a room and since I only had my family as an example, it looked like if I wanted to be more in control, I needed Anger, and bullies seem like they’re angry all the time. It was a pretty logical idea, ironically very Vulcan-like if not for the emotion involved.

To my great cultural benefit, I watched a lot of cartoons on Saturday mornings and prided myself on waking up at 4 A.M. (!!!) to have the living room all to myself so I could sit with my nose pressed up to the TV screen for some asinine reason. My viewing diet was absolute garbage, but those shows had some prime, stereotypical examples of how a bully should behave, from which I hung my temporary persona. As a kid who was also, shall we say, easily teased in school, I knew that if my bullying days were to be at all successful, I needed to choose a target. And this is how I became the bully to a specific classmate named Keith for a few months.

Long story short: I didn’t like doing it.

To be honest, I believe the worst thing I did was grab Keith by the front of his shirt once in a pseudo-menacing way, and the rest of the time I kept repeating, “Keith, beef, the big fat leaf,” and I thought I was really zinging him good. These aren’t the worst things in the world to do, but I still feel bad about them to this day.

I went into it thinking that the big bubble of nameless Anger I was constantly around would be enough to fuel me into being at least a pretty decent bully if I put my mind to it, but I didn’t feel more in control of myself and it didn’t dispel the Anger. It was just extra, tiresome work for me to pretend to be a Saturday-morning cartoon.

I obviously, eventually, did learn more about the Nakba, which contextualized these rudderless feelings. And I’m just me, some jerk writing a story. I’ll never understand how they felt, especially my grandparents, who seemed the most lost of all. But the Anger can be passed down like the tchotchkes in the entertaining room, with their histories left to my imagination as I picked at their details with my fingers. Like all generational trauma. We are survivors and it’s something to be proud of; I hope we can find a future where we continue to openly give a voice to our traumas and live as freely and authentically as we can, no matter the shape that takes.

As we continue to navigate a world that has dehumanized us for so long, we are in a position to bolster our own humanity and live for our future. We have the gift of experience. And, similarly to how I see my traumas to be a sign of strength, I see the same in all Palestinian trauma (then, now). We will be OK – no matter how hard the world tries to say otherwise.