Dinarzad's Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction

Hair, Prayer, and Men

HAIR, PRAYER, AND MEN
LAILA HALABY When Jubayna flies, she always says bismallah ar-rahman arraheem when she takes off and a whisper of thanks when she lands, though she is not, nor has she ever been, either scared of flying or particularly religious. Nor is she at all scared of terrorists, mostly because she doesn’t believe in them. Not like they’re Santa Claus or the Devil, just that there are so few of them that they should be a statistical deviation. It all has to do with whose reality you are working from, and currently, in the U.S. where she happens to be living, terror is the business that is propelling everything along. She counters this with her own war on the War on Terror, by using her American passport and crazy blond hair to blend in. What are they going to do? Put her, a tall blond female attorney, in Guantanamo? Send her back to Jordan? Threaten that if she doesn’t give up some names or whereabouts of sleeper cells that they will tell her parents she left her Republican husband for a Zionist? (Arab humor.) Fear of flying. That is one thing that has increased since September 11: so many more people shaky-scared of flying now that they have another worst-case scenario to worry about. The straw that broke the camel’s back. So to speak. (More Arab humor.) (No, Jubayna has never been on a camel.) In spite of the fact that she’s an Arab, being in an airport, any airport, is still one of her favorite ways to spend a day. (Arabs, Palestinians in particular, have a lot of paradoxes in their lives.) 225 1KALDAS_pages:1KALDAS pages i-72.qxd 8/3/09 2:36 PM Page 225 She loves to watch the different people who find their way into being together: the seasoned travelers right along with the worriers. The worriers are the ones she notices: the people who check their tickets over and over again, go to the bathroom every five minutes, or sit in the bar guzzling away until it’s time for their flights. Some of them actually quiver. Some are fuzzy from the medication they’ve taken so that their anxiety won’t get the better of them in the middle of the airport. Some find a quiet corner in which to meditate or pray or stare or read the same page over and over again. And, after 9/11, some scope out their fellow passengers, searching for potential terrorists. In the new lexicon, terrorist means a suspicious-looking Arab man. (Never a tall, light-skinned woman with curly blond hair.) And since suspicious (and Arab, for that matter) is in the eye of the beholder, it often means any Middle Eastern man. Or woman who wears a head scarf. Or Indian. Or Sikh. Or dark-skinned man with a beard or mustache. Or nervous traveler who is male and foreign. For Jubayna, another Middle Eastern person in an airport or on a plane is a comfort, a familiar face in a sea of often unfamiliar hostility . Sometimes they can share a good joke, a common smile after being randomly checked by the TSA people. Since 9/11, she is the Ralph Nader for Middle Eastern travelers. Whenever there is a Middle Eastern person in the airport, she always checks to see how he or she is being received and readies herself to jump to his or her defense should someone act inappropriately or even just unkindly.
Jubayna (aka Jumana Ziadeh) is one of those Arab women who “doesn’t look Arab.” No giant black eyes blinking through ten-foot lashes, no black Rapunzel hair that reaches her waist, and not a single belly-dancing curve. An Arab girl born without a trace of exotic. 226
LAILA HALABY 1KALDAS_pages:1KALDAS pages i-72.qxd 8/3/09 2:36 PM Page 226 (Exotic is in the eye of the beholder.) Tall. Curveless. Green eyes. Curly blond hair. In America she is often viewed as plain. In Jordan, she was exotic, someone to hoot at from a taxi cab, which is why she developed such a quick tongue, ready to spit out curses as needed. (Very unladylike, according to her mother.) “But look at her nose,” her father would say anytime anyone challenged her Arabness. “Her nose is all Arab.” (Huge, in...