From the Archive: Brown Like Mud

For the Love of: Palestine

The piece below was originally published in a similar form in Carve Magazine in 2022 in print. That feels like a very long time ago, especially now as Palestine is, once again, trying to survive the most brutal violence. I believe this writing and these feelings deserve another round of attention.

---

Between the ages of twelve and fourteen I became obsessed with doodling—specifically, doodling human eyes. Large and small eyeballs covered my homework assignments, notes, and textbooks––they even made their way up my arms. It was always one eye, often with freakishly large lashes and an occasional eyebrow. 

They were blue. Always blue.

At first, I started drawing one particular person’s eyes. His name was Hunter. He had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. Ask any of my childhood friends and they would chuckle and call my obsession with Hunter borderline creepy. It was. But I was less interested in him as a person, a strange boy who never talked much and wore the same Captain Marvel t-shirt to middle school. Every. Single. Day. Rather, I was obsessed with his blue eyes, which at any moment, depending on the light, changed from blue to green. Sometimes, if the sun hit his face just right, they would transform into a light hazel speckled with flecks of gold. Sitting outside of school, watching Hunter’s eyes transform when the sun hit his face, was the closest I came to experiencing magic. 

I wanted so badly to be magical.

My eyes are brown. They’ve always been brown, and, when light hits them, it becomes even more clear that they are still brown. Brown like mud, I used to mumble to myself whenever someone would compliment my big brown eyes. I never understood why anyone would think generic unchanging eye color was interesting or even pretty. The song “Brown Eyed Girl” never made me feel any different, either. Van Morrison is an idiot.

It wasn’t until a decade after Hunter and I went our separate ways that I read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I consumed this book in one sitting, completely enthralled by a character who was also heartbroken over not having blue eyes. Of course, Pecola wants blue eyes, I thought. We all do. I nodded the whole time while reading that book and I never once came up for air to question why. But it’s very clear to me now––all of those years I thought I was drawing Hunter’s eyes; in reality, I was drawing myself into whiteness.

I was born wanting. Like Pecola, I wanted nothing more than to be blue-eyed, white, and clean. The truth is, I felt dirty and ashamed in my skin, as if my olive skin tone had accumulated like layers of hardened dirt from an unknown crime I had committed in another lifetime. My desire to be white was intuitive, natural. It came to me as naturally as the sensation of swallowing. You never know how or when your body learns to respond to that extra pool of saliva building up in your mouth. But, it does, and it does so easily and willingly. I easily and willingly swallowed my inferiority.

If life were a race, which it is often framed to be, I knew that I was not given the same head start as my white friends in middle-to-upper-class San Francisco. I often felt I had to earn my way into being accepted, while my white friends seemed to glide right through the finish line of acceptance.

This is not a socioeconomic observation; I am simply trying to say that in a classroom of rowdy eight-year-old children, mostly white, I may have giggled along with whatever shenanigans the other kids were bold enough to pull off, but I never dared cross the line, myself. But this didn’t matter. I was always the one scolded and pulled to the back of the classroom for being too loud, too distracting, too much, when I had never even opened my mouth. On some eight-year-old level, I knew I was wearing the wrong skin.

However, it wasn’t just my skin color that was wrong. When anyone asked where my family was from, my answer always stumped them. According to most maps and history books, my family and I do not exist. I’m Palestinian-American. My grandparents on both sides were born and raised in Ramallah and Jaffa, and after or just before 1948, they escaped and left their homes due to the imminent threat of encroaching Israeli soldiers. 

I could never figure out how to reconcile the stories I heard about my family fleeing their beloved home. Stories about my teta hurriedly grabbing only her gold bracelets, the same gold bracelets I wear on my wrists today, the morning her family was tipped off that Israeli soldiers were headed toward Jaffa. I’m told the coffee was still hot on the table by the time soldiers arrived as my grandmother and her family quietly fled to safety in Egypt. Politicians, like Newt Gingrich, dismissed these lived experiences when he pronounced in 2011 that Palestinians were “invented” people who could have chosen to live somewhere else. But there never was anywhere else for my family before 1948.

I abruptly stopped sharing where my family was from the morning of 9/11. The Twin Towers fell before we were awake on the West Coast. That morning in my third-grade classroom we sat in a circle and discussed what was happening. One girl raised her hand and told the teacher she “knew” who did it. My teacher politely asked her what she knew. “They did it,” she said, pointing to me and my cousin.

After circle time, I pulled my teacher aside and, as if I were the teacher and she the student, explained to her that, from then on, my cousin and I would not share our background. We would tell people we were from South America. People in South America were the right kind of brown in California, right? Countries in South America were found on maps, every map in fact, and they were never described as cockroaches or apes or worse, this new word, terrorists. I don’t remember when I first heard these words used to describe Arabs or Palestinians in particular. Again, like swallowing inferiority, they came to me naturally. The sound of the news was a constant companion in my grandparents’ homes. Perhaps it was there that I absorbed this language and these associations. Regardless, my teacher silently nodded at my instructions and never once encouraged my cousin and me to operate differently. 

During car rides to school, my Dad equipped my siblings and me with a simple statement to disarm those who questioned if our being Palestinian was equivalent to anti-Semitism—“You attribute to me a prejudice to which I do not subscribe.” I’ve had this line ingrained in me for over two decades. I’ve never been bold enough to use it, but I silently whisper it to myself whenever someone becomes offended or scared after they learn I’m Palestinian. Which is often. I remember friends’ parents shifting into cold and rude adults when they learned that their kids were hanging out with an Arab, let alone a Palestinian. My siblings, cousins, and I were victims of this time and time again. Kids would explain to us that their parents wouldn’t allow them to be friends with “camel jockeys.” I’ve unknowingly offended people numerous times in my adult life, especially at bars when men hit on me only to learn that I am not a Persian Jewish girl that they can take home but, a Palestinian. “Excuse me?” one man blurted, “so, you hate Jews or something?” I’ve been pressed to give a political opinion at dinner tables, questioned about my American patriotism after 9/11, and was once silenced when a coworker’s husband triumphantly stated that, “The Roman Empire took over land and expanded? Didn’t they? Why can’t Israel do the same? Isn’t that why wars are fought in the first place?”

Like my grandparents who, after their arrival in San Francisco, stopped speaking Arabic for fear of being seen as a danger to their neighbors, I, too, assimilated in whatever way necessary to survive. I lied for a very long time about my Palestinian heritage. Sometimes I still catch myself lying. To this day, I test before sharing the full truth of my background. I’ll say I’m Middle Eastern; it sounds so much softer and less threatening than Arab or Palestinian. Depending on the reaction, I may tell the whole truth. But it’s rare.

When Hunter left me for high school, I took matters into my own hands and tried to recreate the magic in myself that I saw in his eyes. I began to research what it would take for my eyes to change color. Was it something that could happen in puberty—like a growth spurt? I knew that newborns’ eyes often change color. Was it possible that my thirteen-year-old eyes were still in that newborn phase of development? Even when I dreamed, I dreamed about my eyes being blue. Everything would glow: My skin, my hair, even my belongings would shimmer with a freshness that suggested that they were new and not hand-me-downs from my siblings and cousins. My life was more beautiful and rich when examined through my blue eyes, as if I were looking through a prism and seeing the full spectrum of colors for the first time. The color wheel never revealed itself to me through my brown eyes—everything remained in their fixed positions, myself included.

In those dreams, I would study myself in the mirror and examine my new exterior. A rush of joy and wonder would wash over me. With freshly minted blue eyes: I knew I was free, that I had made it somehow. I was capable of greatness because I now looked the part. When I woke up, I would smile in anticipation of what awaited. But when I looked in the mirror, my heart would sink and break all over again. My eyes were still mud-brown. Over the years, my obsession shifted. I was forced to accept that my eye color would never change, so I began to dive into what I could change about myself. While watching teen dramas, I would analyze how the girls wore their makeup to make their eyes appear larger, more doe-like, and their skin iridescent and pale. I bought shades of champagne-colored eyeshadows to lighten my lids and make them appear just as strangely translucent as theirs. Perhaps if I complimented my eyes with various shades of nudes and pinks, a different color than just brown would appear. 

I didn’t stop there.

I began to wear a lighter-toned foundation that mismatched my olive-tone. By covering my summer tan, my eyes would look different, my eyebrows would be less bold and bushy, and my skin would glow and prove, once and for all, that I, too, was full of grace, beauty, and magic. I also attempted to dye my hair. I chose to dye just one portion of my head, the crown. This was an unfortunate decision. In order to alter the color of dark brown hair one must use bleach. Using the hair bleach in my cabinet meant for lightening the five o’clock shadow growing over my upper lip, a tell-tale sign that this operation was bound to fail, I plopped the white bleach onto the very top of my head, right on my middle part where my raven roots grew. 

I wanted my hair to appear lighter in the exact place of its origin; perhaps then I could fool people into believing that I, too, was born lighter. The result was a deep amber-tinted patch that cast an irregular pattern down my middle part and made me look more leopard-like than anything else.

This desire to change was not only self-induced; it felt expected. When I was six years old, I stood in front of the ballet barre, staring at myself and the other young ballerinas, analyzing all the ways I didn’t look like them, but should. They were lean, long, and, most importantly, white with blue eyes.

All their limbs extended past mine. Their movements were light and elegant. Mine were awkward and heavy. I was sure this must have been due to my lack of whiteness and my stupid brown eyes. I knew I was different not only because of what the mirror showed me but also because my teacher insisted on pointing out various physical features of mine that I could not control. I had acquired the nickname Peanut for my apparently funny ballet form. The nickname Cashew would have made far more sense with my overly arched back, jutting childish belly, and large bottom. 

“Peanut, tuck!” my ballet teacher yelled every time my bottom stuck out too far. The other girls’ bottoms were non-existent and hollowed the moment François told us all to tuck. But no matter how hard I tried to tuck, my bottom still stuck out.

One foot away from the mirror, staring at ourselves and each other in a neat tightly-packed line, was when I noticed my lips. They were big. Shamefully big. My bottom lip drooped from heaviness, creating a shadow in the middle of my chin like a bruise. While the rest of the girls focused on practicing relevés, I practiced tucking in more parts that I was ashamed of, including that big bottom lip that hung too low. I squeezed my lips together so they morphed into two thin parallel lines, just like the lips of the girl next to me. I would remain looking like a Muppet for the rest of class, hoping others would notice all the work I had done to look just like them—all the work I had done to belong. 

I’m ashamed of not only how hard I tried to be white but, also, how hard I fought to hide my family history. In my four years in college, I wore my gold necklace with my name written in Arabic; after I graduated, I took it off. At the time, it felt too dangerous––I was scared of being shot dead on a subway platform, scared that my gold slanted-Arabic pendant would enrage someone. Regardless of how hard I try to come to terms with my enabling others’ prejudices to define me, I know there are still people whom I should fear, people who continue to see me as political baggage, or worse … someone who doesn’t belong.

I imagine that belonging would feel easy. I imagine it would feel like never questioning systems and why institutions are the way they are. I imagine it would mean never questioning myself. 

I imagine it wouldn’t mean waking up thinking about friends who’ve laughed when I’ve told them I feel like I don’t belong. I imagine it wouldn’t be a friend saying, “I thought you would end up with a white guy, like all of us, but maybe you’re supposed to be with someone different.” I imagine it wouldn’t mean having to explain why I often feel on edge. 

I imagine belonging means always having had a good night’s rest. 

At times, growing up in diverse cities like San Francisco and New York has me believing that my diversity is to be celebrated, that what I’m imagining is simply that—my imagination. But I can’t help coming back to one nagging memory from high school that tells me otherwise: that diversity is only accepted and celebrated conditionally. 

I was a senior sitting in my AP U.S. History course when a beloved teacher started sharing a story about his metal hip and the hassle of getting through airport security. This teacher always told amusing anecdotes, ones that would have the whole class enraptured by his various voices and outlandish physical comedy. This time was no different as he shared with our class how he often joked with the TSA about having to go through airport security as a white man. 

“Come on,” he mused, throwing his hands up in the air as if a police officer had requested he do so. “It’s not like I’m one of these brown men wearing turbans in the airport. Those are the real terrorists to watch out for.”