Later, when I read the work of Edward Said and Jack Shaheen, I learned that my experience—and these films—are not the exception. Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2001) looked at nearly 1,000 films and found only a dozen that depicted Arabs in a complex or positive way. Watching television, it was more of the same. I secretly loved the wrestler “The Iron Sheik,” who wore a keffiyah, robe, neat mustache, and played the heel. He was Iranian, actually, but he was as good as Arab to me (shout-out to my Iranian brothers and sisters). When he palled around with the Russian Nikolai Volkoff, I thought of the Russians as odd comrades. Of course, The Iron Sheik played the heel. Whenever the crowd began to jeer him—or anyone—I felt something churn in me. Some kind of fire ignited in my head. I was drawn to the one who was hated. Whether the person was black or brown or queer or just strange, I wanted to stand beside them.
Occasionally, hanging out with my dad watching TV, he’d proudly point his finger at a visage or a voice and reveal their secret identity: “Casey Kasem: he’s one of the brothers!” “Ralph Nader: good Lebanese boy!” “Helen Thomas: one of the sisters!” I would feel invited into a secret world, where some people passing as normal were secretly Arab. Like us. Apparently, even my pants had some secret Arab origins: “It’s pronounced Hajjar, not Haggar!” (Marwa Helal reminds me that the Egyptian dialect would say otherwise; there isn’t Arabic, but Arabics!)
The negative representations confused and vexed me, since the Arabs in our father’s family—mostly congregating around 290 Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights—were ridiculously hospitable and overwhelmingly demonstrative. By the end of any visit, I was so stuffed with food and love and hugs that I could barely move from the couch after meals. Which was fine, since every Lebanese goodbye, as we came to call them, would take at least an hour and involve kissing and hugging and saying goodbye in at least three rooms (kitchen, living room, at the door) and one last time outside. Of course, life in an Arab household meant more than that; the attendant squabbles, judgments, and drama of every family were very much present. But the warp and weft of the fabric of human life is so entirely absent from the depictions of Arabs in America, that every representation feels instantly political and freighted with sinister meanings. The political, Deleuze and Guattari once wrote, stains every utterance. That’s unfortunate for all concerned—both Arabs and non-Arabs alike.