Notes From an Arab on Surviving Trump

Here, I am worried about my family members losing Medicaid and loved ones losing jobs. I’m a professor, and academia feels like a sinking ship.

Still, I am sleeping, eating, going to the gym, doing my work — I am surviving. I am not panicking, nor am I shocked.

I am — as ever — in survival mode.

I have known for some time not to believe in the world order that is currently crumbling. It is hard to believe in a world that has marked you and your people for death. I built an internal safehouse from the ​“liberal rules-based international order” as a child while watching 24/7 coverage of the second intifada play in our living room, while watching Muhammad al-Durrah’s father cover his son’s body with his own. Those days — I was 11 — I had a recurring nightmare: The Israel Defense Forces show up to our house in mid-Missouri and line us up for execution. Selfishly, I beg them to take me first.

I built an extension to my safehouse when those planes flew into those towers; suddenly, we were on voluntary house arrest, afraid to wander to the grocery store or go to school. I fortified the window after every ignorant question, after every racist slur screamed at me and my hijab, after a guy spit on us, after every ​“random” check at the airport. I stayed in the safehouse during the FBI’s regular visits to our mosque, when they incarcerated our friends for sending food to their families. I built a steel gate around my safehouse when I watched this country — the only country whose name I ever bore — kill two hundred thousand Afghans and a million Iraqis.

“We should nuke the Middle East and start over,” one classmate joked to me in college. For a moment, in 2011, I ventured outside and took a deep breath of hope as my people took to the streets. I destroyed the veranda when the Spring turned into a nightmare of coups and wars, as I watched yet more of my family members face exile and displacement.

I found that my safehouse was in a neighborhood full of other people marked for disposal. I drank in tomes of Black, Indigenous and Chicano liberation history and theory. I came to see myself as a worker of the world. I learned to identify first and foremost with the margins of this empire, with the people for whom there was neither American dream nor American promise.

If the evil of this place is just now catching up with your own life, you have probably been one of the more fortunate. But it doesn’t matter when you come to see this world for what it is; what matters is that you do. A country built on genocide and enslavement — a country that has refused any real repair for either— that’s a country for whom no one has ever really been sacred. Changing this country has to start there, with an acknowledgement that America has never been great.

Many are lamenting a lost past of liberalism while failing to see that its security and stability were always partial, always built on the toil of invisible victims. We cannot build change on liberal nostalgia. It was liberal nostalgia that lost the election in November. Instead of building altars to a past that never existed, let’s build safehouses with and for one another. Out of the wreckage of the old world, let’s build a modality of care over profit — care for ourselves, for each other, for our planet. Let’s find each other and build our own power. The Earth belongs to all of us. Let’s take it back.