Desiree is dead

  ‘Sorry to disturb you so late’ read the text message that flashed on my cell phone screen at about 2 am, ‘but she has passed away’. I never really knew her, she was a girl named Desiree who worked at the same company where I once briefly worked; the company I hated with every strand of my being, the company that treated its employees worse than the Amistad did its cargo. But the company, despicable a place as it is, didn’t kill Desiree, she died while partying at her house with her three siblings and a few of her friends. It was a night like many the Filipina had during her short life when she danced, drank, chatted and laughed with her beloveds, but the chatty alcoholic merriment that has neglected to kill her in the past did so with cruel leisurely deception that night, five nights ago to be exact. After consuming an exuberant amount of alcohol and boogying about tirelessly, Desiree fell and hit her head hard on the floor causing internal hemorrhaging that lasted throughout the night, draining her life down to its last quivering trickle. Desiree briefly regained consciousness after her fall and with a little help from her brother and sisters she managed to walk to her bed where she laid for the remainder of the night until the vivid colors of her life faded into the placid grayness of death.

  Desiree’s brother and two sisters, whom she shared the living space with, were at first completely unalarmed, thinking it was all the effect of overenthusiastic tippling they fell into their own spells of much needed sleep once the party was over and the guests were all gone. As the morning hours rolled and Desiree remained asleep the siblings grew more concerned, not concerned enough, however, to disturb her from what seemed to them a deep peaceful trance. By 2pm the concern reached an unsettling peak, although still they chose to believe that their sister was merely being a sleepyhead who is exhausted from the jubilant bouts of the night before. But that blithe assumption was shattered into little spikes of terror when Desiree’s brother entered her room and saw her body sprawled still on the bed, pinned down motionlessly, a dried up puddle of vomit by her pillow and stiff strips of blood sticking out from her nose. The three siblings wrapped their sister’s body up fast as they could and shuttled her to the hospital in the first taxi they were able to fetch in the scorching afternoon heat, in the flurry of all the horror that was stirring up inside. But by the time they got to the hospital it was too late, the doctor who may as well have been the angel of death told them so. The doctor tried to save Desiree’s life or rather bring it back as the facts had it then, he even kept her under his close personal supervision in an ICU room for nearly two days. A mutual friend of Desiree’s and mine, who was with her almost every step of the way, related these sorrowful events to me and I in turn decided to narrate them to you.

  Desiree and I shared an office with three other people back when I was working at the old company, her desk was a couple of steps away from mine, the sound her revolving chair made every time she would frantically get up to answer the manager’s importunate calls suddenly began to waft in my head as I read the text message that declared the news of her death. But it’s not the weighty merit of our friendship or Desiree’s personal worth that kept her image flickering in my head, Desiree and I barely even spoke to one another, there was nothing substantial about her I could recall as I read the text message; no unforgettable moments or precious memories that could have caused my heart to bleed or my eyes to well up with tears, in fact the only potent memory I have of Desiree is of the time when the rest of us in the office ridiculed her and spoke ill of her behind her back on her first few days as our co-worker. The thought that came to my mind when I learned about Desiree’s death was not that of utter inconsolable sadness at the loss of a dear friend whose lovely temperament I was now at great pains to mentally recast, not of her kindness and grace, not of the unbreakable ties that bound us for surely there were none, it was instead a hollow thought divested of all fondness and grief; a naked, raw and unembellished thought about death, the death that couldn’t spare even the vigor of a 24 year old, the death that could, at any unguarded moment, wrench me the way it did Desiree’s youth.  

  During the days when Desiree was in the intensive care ward fighting for her life, her healthy bereaved friends inundated her’s and each other’s Facebook walls with earnest sorrowful messages of  support, they all wished she could miraculously surmount this mortal impasse, one of them even quoted Paulo Coelho, something about ‘the warrior of light’, what the hell is that? What does Coelho’s insipid imagination know about death? But alas, the messages were of ardent hope from people who really wanted Desiree back, because unlike me, they knew her well; the person that she was. They must have seen her cry a time or two before, they must have witnessed her laughter several times and they may have even been there when that laughter pushed her headfirst onto the oncoming traffic of death across the floor. Even I sent a message to her, I posted it on her Facebook wall, it read ‘I am sending a prayer out to Desiree…’ ah what the hell, what difference does it make now, Desiree is no longer a fighter that could be cheered on into battle by prayer, Desiree is dead.

American Beauty

 

  “And the winner of this year’s Miss America title is…” the host dressed up like Las Vegas boomed excitedly into the microphone then paused to add to an already blistering sense of suspense, a few spry camera sweeps captured a glimpse of the faces in the auditorium brimming with excitement and the view of the pageant hopefuls themselves standing in a dazzling colonnade of color and grace, a spectacular tableau of beauty, splendor and the unappeasable temper of human ambition. I didn’t watch the crowning ceremony, I never watch beauty pageants because I think they demean women and I don’t like to judge a human being unless their person and character are completely known to me. But that’s how I imagined the event unfold when I heard that this year’s Miss America is an Arab American gal named Rima Fakih.

 The news about an Arab American winning a pageant spurred some importunate morning after moans from the American media which seldom depicts an amicably smiling Arab. ‘Beauty Pageant’s political fallout’ read the headline exhibited on Yahoo’s main page with menacing immediacy. Knowing the American cultural mindset I immediately drew my own conclusions, yet despite the mounting sinister reckoning I clicked on the headline in the hope that it may all be about a Janet Jackson Super bowl-style stunt that Fakih may have unwittingly pulled. It wasn’t, although in part the rambling was about some pole dancing videos that Fakih had apparently made to no glory a few years ago, the highest pitch, however, was spared exclusively for the discussion and consequent maligning of Rima Fakih’s ethnic background. Daniel Pipes weighed in his pounds by claiming that the pageant may have been rigged as part of some nefarious affirmative action plan. Debbie Schlussel, a conservative talk radio mad hatter called the new Miss America ‘Miss Hezbollah’ saying that Fakih’s family back in Lebanon maintained ties with the terrorist organization based there. Another radio pundit named Seymour Bigotsrave, a sauna room buddy of Ralph Reid and John Hagee, claimed that he witnessed a first hand account of Fakih French-kissing Mohammed Atta right before he boarded the plane. Ok I made the last one up, but how far away are we from such wide eyed delusions, apparently not that far if you read some of the comments left by some of the article’s readers. ‘What do you expect?’ read one of the comments written by a whole wheat woman probably from a swath in Idaho, ‘our President is a communist’, ‘The contest was fixed, shame’ read another one with that bloated American conviction, ‘The wrong girl won’, ‘I’m never watching another pageant again’, ‘Rima I’ve seen better looking girls at Wal-Mart’, ‘9/11 happened only 9 years ago, Muslims caused this disaster, Islam is a violent criminal system…yet we elect a Muslim president’, ‘Here we have left-wing liberal Democrat political correctness run amuck’, ‘Akhbar allah’. There was a total of four thousand four hundred and forty one comments left at the foot of the article when I last checked, most of which are deeply in favor of a post 9/11 global Islamo-socialist plot to conquer America.

  America is a racist nation, Americans need to wake up, smell the Folgers and face the truth. When I say that America is a racist nation I don’t mean that every American is a racist, my reference is to the average American and by average I don’t mean the American arrived at after totaling the population and dividing it by land area, the average American is the American on the street, the American who dwells in that vast plot of land between the coasts, the Joe six-pack, the Larry the cable guy and the Joe plumber who will only come to fix your house if you are white and evangelical. Americans feel no shame from the paradox they create when they wish for their soldiers to be received with candy and Hallmark cards as they invade Kabul and Baghdad but refuse to accept the fact that a Muslim girl won a ticklish little beauty pageant in Atlantic city, or when they elect a black president for the first time in their history only to lambaste him shortly thereafter and accuse him of facilitating the Islamic takeover of America. Americans are the new Orientalists and like the Flauberts, Chateaubriands and Jaegers of yesteryears, they have arbitrarily assigned themselves the duty of reconstructing and recasting a whole new view of the Arab/Islamic world; a model they’ve schematically sketched without as much as consulting the people whom they seek to represent; the millions of Arabs and Muslims who are always more than willing to speak and present their case, culture and point of view. The Americans with their ‘war on terrorism’ chessboards have categorically presented a picture of the Arab/Islamic world as a wicked den at the nethermost anal point of human civilization crawling with eternal schism and murderous discord, and characterized the Arab/Muslim as a bloodthirsty villainous being impossible to assimilate or accept. Unfortunately this image persists in the database and memory-bank of everything American and it doesn’t look like it’s going away any time soon.     

  Then again it may all just be yet another frothy splash in the sea of the most quarrelsome nation the world has ever known, the place where gossip and wrangling over trifling matters are a national pastime. However, it is not undue to mention that the American mind is credulous and crotchety prone to the most outlandish assertions and beliefs and I’m not even referring to the ineffable mesmerisms of religion. Americans slavishly believe what they see glaring on their TV screens and blaring from their radios, they believe the lie if it’s sonorously mouthed by a patriotic demagogue or melodiously sung by a teenage heartthrob, they believe it if it’s made in America and if it sets them further apart from the rest of the world, they believe it because…they said it. Americans love a controversy and where there isn’t one around they make one. None of this should ever come as a surprise, America has always been the way it is from the Plymouth Rock landing to this very day despite how ardently most Americans believe that they have come a long away. Problems don’t go away or disappear in America, they only quietly retreat into the less visible backgrounds where they seethe and stew before intermittently appearing to foment blind feverish rancor again and again.

 What is to become of the Arab American community in light of all this heat, how are they to continue living in the rough and tumble of such an unending war, how much longer are they expected to resist the fray of American vengeance and hate for. Perhaps the solution available is one that no one is willing to recognize or be at ease with any time soon, relax Mr. Pipes I’m not about to suggest a violent solution. The Arab American community needs to withdraw farther back into its enclave to redraw the authenticity of its Arabness and emphasize the strain that ties it with the rest of the Arab world. While in this period of isolation the Arab American community needs to focus on its own strengths and deal with its own weaknesses as a community existing within a larger predominantly alien culture. It needs to prove to itself and the rest of America that it is indeed a strong, highly productive, law abiding and self-sufficient community able to exemplarily project its own values and tradition. It needs to introduce to the American society a horde of learned, efficient, erudite and technologically savvy individuals who are proud of being who they are. It needs to cultivate within itself a sense of social urgency and vigilance that will enable it to properly address the challenging issues and calumnious attacks against its character as they arise. The Arab Americans have a lesson to learn from their Semitic cousins who have for centuries adopted a strategy of enclavism to remarkable success; planning, thriving and wielding an enormous influence on the host society’s mainstream without ever fully emerging from their seemingly marginal backstage role. The Arab American community and all other immigrant Arab communities for that matter need to build a more potent and influential identity by developing sagacious lobby groups and broad-based advocacy campaigns that will project the manner, interest and aspiration of the Arab against the insurmountable odds.

Life on the fat lane

 

 

  Karima use to be fat, but she is fat no more, instead she is now simply bloated with an obsession. She watches all of MBC’s imported weight-loss programs, the re-runs too. She took to heart the culinary advice of ‘western media’ well-wishers and replaced boiled eggs and hummus with Quaker bars for breakfast. On her way to the perfect form Karima has idealized the newly emergent pantheon of Arab female singers dressed to kill on satellite T.V. stations. Karima is on a roll, not the cream-filled kind, but the good roll, the kind that transforms a woman’s body from a Karima to a Rachel Ray to a Kate Moss state in no time.

 

  Who wants to be Kate moss? The answer to this question is the same answer one might give to the question of who likes short shorts. Without having to go to the docks, the Middle Eastern female population (now wholeheartedly into short shorts) has begun importing the Western ideal of beauty. As if the Arabs are not dependant enough on western goods and technology they now have to jostle their women into this mincing mix. Ten years ago weight-loss concepts were unheard of in the greater Mid-East, Arab men were content with marrying skinny girls only to watch them grow fat before their own eyes. To many of these men this was actually a good return on investment, much like the cow-breeder who labors to feed his cows in order for him to feast his eyes on the sight of them getting fatter and juicier. This analogy is not meant to be a vitriolic critique of the Arab woman’s overweight issue, in fact, there is no Arab woman overweight issue, at least not in the ‘Richard Simmons’ sense. Men in Arabia have always liked the blubbery mode of existence of their women, a woman that is deprecated as fat in a country such as the US is what men in a country like Morocco call ‘a real woman’. Ten years ago there was no need for an Arab couple to have a heart to heart conversation in which a man would say something like “hey woman you better replace your shawarma dinner with falafel or else I’m gonna leave your fat ass for a skinnier muzza”. An Arab man coming home from work would not say upon entering the house “hey honey look what I got you; a watermelon, some new detergent and…tata… a Jane Fonda workout video”.

 

  It is not the Arab men who are directly importing these weight-loss fantasies, however, it is the women, the men are simply enjoying the by-products of these imports in the way of the scantly dressed blonde women workout videos and the music clips showing asses in all shades of color. The women are indeed the prime demographic target of this campaign. I am not alluding to any grand conspiracy theories about west polluting east, we have our own home-made pollutants thank you very much, but what is worth mentioning here is the fact that the west has managed to intersperse doses of its home-brewed weight-loss tonic into various parts of the world (like the Middle East) that previously didn’t give a dog’s doodoo about issues such as weight-loss or gain. The west’s superiority in producing the inanimate has now become evident in its production of the animate as well; just like the Arab men are striving to own a BMW or a Cadillac the women are now aspiring to possess replicas of the ‘Angelina Jolie’ look. The dangers of the latter objective, however, are far more obvious, because the craving for Angelina’s body is usually accompanied by a sick and twisted mania that has already trapped in its clutches thousands of western women; a fixation predicated on the woman’s constant desire to be someone other than who she already is, an insurmountable need to measure self-worth through the standards of others and an ambivalent desire for a woman to have her cake and puke it too.

 

It doesn’t take much for one to discern the catastrophic impact that the weight-loss obsession had on western societies, from bulimia and anorexia to the Dr. Phil studio visits less than perfect women in western societies have been culturally coerced to vent (whether physically or mentally) their antipathy towards self-image. The obsession with weight loss has been so severe in western countries such as the US to the extent that it compelled an entire society to alter the way it looks at the concept of corpulence, such societies (where fatness is most foul) have resorted to the use of terminologies such as ‘PHAT’, full-figure or voluptuous to paper over the ignominy of calling someone fat. I  always thought that a backward society’s greatest strength lies in its flexible ability to observe the more advanced societies and learn from their cultural debacles, the backward Arab societies will be damned if they decide to pedantically espouse the traditions of the western standard of beauty after seeing time and again the detrimental effects that such norms can have. The modern Arab woman today bears a resemblance to an infant with an underdeveloped schema, failing to recognize herself in the mirror of the native society and constantly struggling to find meaning and worth through a new razzle-dazzle lens. 

 

   The most conspicuous signs of the social renovation that the Middle East has undergone recently are the commercial billboards that have sprung up like wild bushes on city streets, billboards displaying the anthropomorphic images of the new standard; larger than life size icons of perfectly shaped western women selling style and grace, something for the sweaty, hijab-wearing and overweight Arab woman to learn from and emulate, ‘Step aside Fatima and take your hands off your husband’s shlong, Jennifer is here’. Just in case the ideals of the western standard fail to invade the Arab household, its scent and fashion sense definitely will. Now more than ever Arab women are driven to consume more cosmetics not just to simply look or smell a certain way but rather to fit into a greater medium of a more meaningful existence.

 

  ‘well they did a study to find out what foods are best for losing weight, and it turns out that a normal diet supplemented by chocolate éclairs eaten three times a day is perfect’

                                                                                    

                                                                                 Neil Postman, Technopoly

 

  Above and beyond the weight-loss obsession itself there stands an autocratic and systematic order that is constantly endeavoring to establish itself as the one unquestionable and non-refutable standard whose followers are right, intelligent and beautiful and its opponents garrulous, fat and stupid. The imported western standard of beauty comes intact with an indispensable scientific and technological peripheral that acts as a protective shell guarding it from doubt and disbelief, a scientific carapace designed by ‘a’ panel of experts who labor assiduously to make the standard and all of its applications absolutely believable. The single most notable role of these experts is to create labels such as ‘scientifically proven’ or ‘use as directed’ , labels that we later use as flares to light up our way in the darkness of our own confusion and self-hatred. The effectiveness of the technological and scientific shield depends on it being a standard in and of itself. The new science or scientism mentioned in Neil Postman’s ‘Technopoly’ is indeed a religion and a belief system that is absolutely essential to follow and impossible to rebut, the science referred to in this context is not the science of Galen and Copernicus that helped bring the world out of darkness but rather a mere quasi-scientific scheme of proclamations and diagnosis that is frivolous in essence but very addictive in nature. People have to believe beyond a reasonable doubt and without questioning the scientific sources of information that eating three éclairs a day or spreading tomato ketchup on their belly will help them lose weight or grow more brain cells.

 

  No one can deny the importance of being healthy, most religions, societies and worldviews are in support of keeping fit and staying healthy, yet obsessing with keeping fit is a completely different story. It is one thing for someone to want to be fit and another to make being fit and beautiful a yardstick that measures self-worth and social aptitude. Women today don’t simply want to look like Jennifer Aniston and Lindsay Lohan, they want to be them, they want to surgically alter their appearances to keep up with them, and they want to track the news of when their babies and court dates are due. The obsession with being fit has now grown into an obsession with the images and the media that sell the obsession to us in the first place; the billboard signs and ‘The Insider’ celebrity news. The introduction of the western standard of beauty to the Middle East has cracked open a Pandora’s Box of social prurience that the Arab culture is not yet accustomed to, keeping fit will not be possible without the constant pumping of J.Lo’s images into the airwaves to remind women of who they need to emulate and to remind the men of what their spouses should look like. I don’t believe that the risqué images of an underdressed pop singer or the R rated scenes in a movie are bad for society, we all need a little bit of ‘ShowTime after-hours’ on our T.V. just as much as we need spice on our plates, but for us to stock up on the spice when we don’t have any food is…well…stupid. The advent of the brazen western standard of beauty in the Middle East has inadvertently placed the cart before the horse; it has empowered Arabs with the freedom to be fit and semi-nude before acquainting them with the most rudimentary forms of freedom like liberty from tyranny and freedom of speech. The west has reached to where it is now after centuries of pre and post renaissance reformation and struggle, the Arabs, on the other hand, while still in social and political darkness are jumping spots to focus more on nurturing a sassy female population than on establishing good governance, they are in effect placing more emphasis on ‘don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me’ than on ‘I have a dream’.