Transcript

I Pass · Letter to America

0:00
SPEAKER_00: In 2001, we went to Cairo from New York for a wedding.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: I hadn't been back for a number of years, and I was very excited to be introducing my wife and young kids to more of my friends and their families.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: My parents and sister were with me as well, and it made the whole trip kind of a reunion.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: I found myself talking to many friends, merchants, hotel employees, and even cab drivers with enough Arabic on my part to create a bond and enough English on theirs to pick up something I had never heard before.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: Genuine anger towards the US due to the Gulf War, the sanctions, and the suffering of Iraqi civilians since.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: I was in a cab, back to our hotel.
0:42
SPEAKER_00: The driver and I chatted about current events.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: He said they allow premature babies to die by not allowing them to buy incubators.
0:51
SPEAKER_00: He dropped me at the hotel and got out of the car before I could pay.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: He told the doorman to look after me, that I was one of them.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: He refused to take my money.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: When we were living in Cairo in the eighties, there was a day when we heard small arms fire from nearby.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: A few rounds, then nothing.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: The kids who'd never heard that before questioned.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: The ones who knew?
1:17
SPEAKER_00: They'd been in Iran, Lebanon, or Turkey.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: On the first Monday after my return, a close Jewish American colleague who knew I was Middle Eastern, asked for my impressions of what she called the Arab Street, and I said I can't speak for anyone but myself in my conversations, but I feel like we're part of the problem again.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: I think people could come after us for what we're doing.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: It was September tenth.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: Middle aged man with salt and pepper hair, light skin, the body language of belonging.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: People make assumptions about my beliefs that match theirs, and speak openly to me as if I can obviously relate, even when I can't.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: I'm a genealogical mishmash of northern European, eastern Mediterranean, and sprinklings of many, many others.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: And yet, I look the part.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: A wasp, without bona fides to support the claim.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: Except my appearance.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: On almost every measure in the US or Turkey, people round up for me.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: I don't fear the police.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: I can walk almost anywhere at night.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: I get the table without a reservation, the interviews, the jobs, the lease.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: I pass.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: On a trip to Cape Town, I was on my way to a conference, and the driver shared with me his experience since the end of apartheid.
2:33
SPEAKER_00: In short, his observation was that since Mandela, the place had gone down the tubes.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: I was blindsided, struggling to understand why a man who in America would have been seen as black was telling me that the end of apartheid in South Africa had ruined the place.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: It took a while for both of us to recognize what I was missing.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: He did not identify as black.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: He identified as cape colored, and his lived experience during apartheid was privileged by his mixed race status, a status that he lost with the end of the regime.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: He could not understand why I could not understand.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: He was genuinely confused.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: So was I.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: I still don't really understand and feel kind of guilty by association that he'd assume I would.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: Another cab, another continent, the driver from Munich to Fuschel, the one who spent August on the Alm.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: I asked her about the schools in Austria, curious about what they might be doing right, or at least differently.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: She raved about the system and its curriculum, and then told me that recently, an influx of immigrants was straining the system with people who didn't even speak German.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: I probed, assuming these migrants were from other parts of the EU.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: She sneered and told me no, not Europeans.
3:50
SPEAKER_00: Turks.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: I winced on my Turkish inside, and probed with questions on the outside.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: Curious to hear the perspective of this kind woman and her unkind words.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: It's something I do, sometimes consciously, sometimes not.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: I let people believe what they want.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: I like to feel like I belong, but I also like to hear the things said out loud that I suspected, but can't believe I'm hearing.
4:16
SPEAKER_00: I could interject, I don't.
4:19
SPEAKER_00: If I did, they'd stop talking.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: And I want to hear the rest.
4:24
SPEAKER_00: In her mind, I was one of them.
4:27
SPEAKER_00: She would never have thought of me as one of them.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: More recently, in Istanbul, I was chatting with a merchant, and he was asking me about how I spoke English so fluently.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: An unintended very welcome compliment about the fluency of my Turkish.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: We talked about languages we spoke, and he mentioned that he spoke Turkish, Arabic, and Kurdish.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: I told him I spoke a bit of Arabic myself, and we exchanged a few salutations.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: Then I observed that I didn't speak a single word of Kurdish and wondered out loud why that was.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: There was a long pause, and then an amused smile crossed his face.
5:06
SPEAKER_00: On the way home, we sat down for a cup of coffee with our local pharmacist, Sunam.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: She's a friend of the family who knew my grandmother, and saw pictures of my kids in grandma's purse decades ago, before we even met.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: Now she lives in my parents' neighborhood and has treated my kids too.
5:24
SPEAKER_00: Four generations of care, cups of coffee, and conversation.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: She enthusiastically introduced us to a neighbor who spoke English, thinking we'd click, so my wife and I chatted with her for a bit, after our host, who doesn't speak English, got back to work.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: The neighbor was telling us about how much she loved living in the US, and how sad she had been to leave.
5:47
SPEAKER_00: But that things were changing, and that on her last trip to Miami, she was appalled that people were talking to her in Spanish.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: Why don't they speak English?
5:57
SPEAKER_00: she asked rhetorically.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: She looked for our affirmation.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: After all, weren't we one of them?
6:05
SPEAKER_00: Instead of commenting directly, I shared my recent conversation with the merchant about speaking multiple languages.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: After sharing the anecdote, I repeated my unanswered question.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: Why all the English and French sprinkled through Turkish conversations like this one?
6:22
SPEAKER_00: But not a word of Arabic or Kurdish.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: She took a sip of her coffee.
6:27
SPEAKER_00: We politely exchanged pleasantries and parted.
6:31
SPEAKER_00: This is Handalin in Sahel, Egypt.