Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade

Going Places

239 On the morning of September 11, 2001, from the shoreline of the Jersey City neighborhood I lived in, I watched the World Trade Center buildings collapse, engulfing the streets below with billowing clouds of debris. I was scheduled to teach my first class that day as a full-time faculty member at a college in Queens. I’d been living in New York City for seven years, and I had visited the World Trade Center only once, and only the ground floor, to buy discounted tickets to a Broadway show. I never made it to the observation deck of what was once the world’s tallest man-made structure. A few weeks after the start of the semester I admitted this to my students, most of whom were lifelong New Yorkers. To my astonishment, I discovered that nearly all of them hadn’t been to the now-gone skyscraper either. Or the Statue of Liberty, or Ellis Island. Only a handful had taken the subway to the Bronx to watch a Yankee game. Even fewer had spent any time in Grand Central Station, except to transfer between trains. I asked if they’d been to the Met, or MoMA, or the Guggenheim, or the American Museum of Natural History. What about the 42nd Street Library? Almost to a student, they answered no. “Okay,” I said. “Visit a landmark.” The course I was teaching was an introduction to creative writing. In addition to visiting a site, I required they write something related to their visit—a poem, a story, or a scene. One of my students, Mohammed, who was shy and quiet, asked me to suggest a place to go. “Have you gone up to the Empire State Building?” He shook his head. “Go there.” Going Places Hayan Charara 240 Hayan Charara The destruction of the World Trade Center returned to the Empire State Building its status as the city’s tallest skyscraper. Mohammed went there, paid the admission fee, and rode the elevator to the eighty-sixth-floor observatory , which offers visitors 360-degree panoramic views of Manhattan and the surrounding landscape. On a clear day, a person can see as far as eighty miles out. After a short while, Mohammed sat down and began collecting his thoughts in a notebook. Within minutes, two men approached him. One talked while the other stood watch. “What are you doing?” Mohammed looked up but didn’t answer. “What are you doing?” “Excuse me?” The man repeated himself, this time deliberately stopping between each word. “What . . . are . . . you . . . doing?” “I’m writing.” “What are you writing?” “Notes.” “Notes?” The two men looked at each other, and then back at Mohammed. “What are your notes for?” Across the country, numerous acts of violence had been committed against Arabs and Muslims and against people who “looked” Arab or Muslim. The number of attacks on business owners and employees alone were astounding . I took note of these over the others because my father used to run a grocery store in Detroit. On September 11, a man in Palos Heights, Illinois, attacked a Moroccan gas station attendant with the blunt end of a machete. On September 12, in Gary, Indiana, a man wearing a ski mask fired a high-powered assault rifle at Hassan Awdah, who survived because of the bulletproof glass behind which he worked. That same day, on Long Island, New York, a man with a pellet gun made threats to a gas station attendant who he believed was of Middle Eastern descent. Nearby in Brooklyn, less than twenty-four hours later, on September 13, an Arab grocer was threatened with violence by one of his grocery suppliers . That same day, in Salt Lake City, a man tried to set fire to a Pakistani family business. On September 15, in San Gabriel, California, Adel Karas, 48 years old, of Egyptian descent, was shot and killed. The FBI investigated his murder as a hate crime. That same day, in Mesa, Arizona, Frank Silva Roque gunned down a gas station owner, Balbir Singh Sodhi, because he mistook him for Going Places 241 an Arab. After killing him, Roque shot at another man who was Lebanese, and then he fired at the home of an Afghan family. Also on that day, in Dallas , Waqar Hasan was found shot to death in his grocery store. Nearly a week after the attacks, on September 17, an Afghan...