Some days after December 17, 2010, I sat in front of a black, plastic PC monitor. It was marked with laminated white signs: Social Studies Lab. Glossy pieces of paper turned anti-theft protection.
I don’t remember what I was supposed to be doing. Probably working on a research paper for U.S. History. Whatever it was, I wasn’t doing it.
Instead, I was reading the news.
I don’t remember the headline. Or the source. All have is a foggy memory of a stock photo featuring a tank and a fire in some barren desert.
Tunisia was on fire, they said.
I was just some girl. Seventeen-years-old, feeling suffocated by the town where I’d spent nearly my entire life. Desperate for the world. Or desperate for what I thought the world would give me.
Sometime between 7th grade and the start of high school, I’d traded in novels–some dogeared with love; some shiny, new teen fiction tucked inside the covers of other ~cooler~ books– for stacks of history texts and biographies.
Looking at my bookshelf now, they seem a strange combination of voices and perspectives. Looking at their dust covers then, I saw but two words: middle and east.
There’s Tamim Ansary whose reflection on America and Afghanistan post 9/11 is still one of my most treasured used-book-store finds, but whose Afghani origin falls outside the part of the Middle East that I’ve come to know well.
There’s Geraldine Brooks’ Nine Parts of Desire which I read over and over again the summer after my sophomore year of high school. I felt so enlightened then but I wonder if that enlightenment wasn’t tinged with a bit of orientalism. I should revisit it.
There’s even a Hirsi-Ali book that I only made it two chapters into. It still sits on the shelf though, a reminder of how malleable a brain desperate for knowledge of something else can be.
I was a used-book-store parasite.
Anyway.
Tunisia was on fire. And Tunisia fit perfectly between those words middle and east that littered my shelves.
I didn’t know who Ben Ali was. I didn’t know the political or economic landscape of Tunisia. I didn’t know anything. The only mention of Tunisia I’d ever heard in school was: “Oh Carthage was where Tunisia is now.” And my books overwhelmingly focused on the lands to Egypt’s east.
The Gulf glittered with the excess of the Emirates and the shrapnel of American bombs in Iraq. But Tunisia? I knew nothing.
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And as I read, the fire with which Bouazizi lit first himself and then an entire nation began to ignite protests in other countries. My attention turned quickly from Tunisia to Egypt to Algeria to Yemen to Iraq to Libya to Lebanon to Jordan to Bahrain.
I wish I could get back into my 17-year-old brain. I don’t know what I actually knew. I don’t know what I just thought I knew because I read the news every day. I don’t know if I realized how different Tunisia was from Egypt was from Bahrain.
I could think critically about western institutions. I could solidly argue that democracy in its western form shouldn’t–and couldn’t–be plopped down like McDonalds on every Cairo street corner. But I still wonder exactly what I knew.
Those high school years are weird, you know? You think you know it all.
Only five years later and the cynic condescends the idealist she was.
Only five years later.
It feels like centuries.
In those five years, a lot happened. NATO bombed Libya. Tunisia had elections. So did Egypt who also had another revolution which feels more like a reversion. Syria shouted freedom. Assad responded with chemicals. The kings of Morocco and Jordan sit happily on their thrones while their people stare across borders at the heavy price of the fight for freedom.
And at that macro level, all seems lost. Everything is broken.
But in those five years, I changed a lot too. I went from the girl who was chasing the glint of something new–of something scary–a girl who romanticized the turmoil and heartache of lands and hearts she didn’t understand. To the girl whose life is so much fuller thanks to the people who come from the lands in her old books.
My Arab friends, both in the U.S. and abroad, have taught me to love out loud. They’ve taught me to stuff the faces of guests full of food and dance ‘til you can’t feel your feet. They’ve taught me that laughter and another cup of tea are much more important than being on time to a meeting.
They’ve taught me to celebrate our differences and revel in our similarities.
Without learning the differences, I would live a life empty of mint tea and knafa (really a horrid thought). And without learning of the similarities I’d forget how much we all want this to work. This life. This world. We all want it.
The world’s problems are daunting. But if we each can commit to spending the next five years learning and growing in the company of people of all different backgrounds, we’ll find a lot of hope.
Thank you, to everyone who helped me grow, I owe you a cup of syrupy mint tea.
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