Q & A
David Johnson, Research Editor at San Francisco magazine, chats with Alia about A Country Called Amreeka: Arab Roots, American Stories.
Q: How did you come to write the book?
Growing up, I always wanted to have a book that was some sort of reflection of Arab Americans. After 9/11, it became glaringly obvious how huge that vacuum was. I was a lawyer at the time, and in some ways I kept thinking somebody else would do it. By the time I got to Columbia Journalism School, four years after 9/11, nobody had.
Q: So is it fair to say you became a journalist to write this book?
I went to journalism school wanting to bring new voices into the fold. I wanted to expose the stories of persons who we don’t often hear, or don’t hear in our own voices.
Q: Why did you pick the title “Amreeka,” the formal Arabic word for America?
I liked the fact that the word “Amreeka” sounds and looks a lot like America but it has its different twist. The book is American history, first and foremost, but with a twist. It reinserts Arab Americans in their rightful place, as part of the greater American immigrant narrative.
Q: What is your own family background?
I’m a first generation Arab American. Both my parents emigrated from Syria, though my father’s family is originally Lebanese. My dad came over in 1969 to help fill a doctor shortage and settled in Baltimore. I came over with my mom from Damascus in 1974—she was pregnant with me. I was born and raised in Charm City, and thus was born an American. They became naturalized citizens several years later.
Q: How did you avoid going into medicine and come to pursue law instead?
It’s funny. In Syria, you take your college entrance exam that determines what field you will go into. The highest scoring kids end up going to the medical school, the next highest, I believe, end up going to pharmacy school, and after that is engineering and so forth. Basically, the remedial kids tend to go to law and business. So for people back in Syria, it wasn’t that prestigious that I went to law school.
Q: What did your family think when you decided to pursue law?
My parents were Americanized enough that they thought it was acceptably stable. The immigrant experience is so tenuous. My father showed up here with the money that he had in his pocket, not knowing a soul.
Q: What did they say when you decided to leave law to become a journalist?
It wasn’t a decision my dad would have made. Though my mom was a pharmacist by training, she wrote poetry and short stories herself and always understood why I was interested in it. When I went to Syria as an adult, people told me how talented a writer my mom was.
Q: You once worked for the Justice Department. What did you do there, and how did it influence the book?
I was a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division. Enforcing the civil rights laws from the inside, I saw the awesome power that they had in transforming American society. I don’t want to overemphasize the importance of laws, but the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were watershed moments in American history. As I learned more about the history of those laws, I discovered the 1965 Immigration Act was part of them. Watching those laws used on behalf of other groups and helping them actualize their rights as Americans always stayed as a cornerstone in my mind.
Q: Is this why the book begins in Birmingham, Alabama, around the time of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church?
The book picks these pivotal moments in Arab American history and shows how an Arab American experienced it. I knew that the book had to start in Alabama. Even though the Supreme Court had decided segregation was unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, in 1963, segregation was still alive and kicking. The impetus to pass a federal civil rights law with real teeth occurred with the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. And as I said, those national laws of 1964 and 1965 fundamentally changed both America and Amreeka. I wanted to show what both Amreeka and America were like before these radical legislative changes. I knew that Birmingham had this well established Lebanese and Syrian community, four or five generations old at that point, and so I started casting about.
Q: How did you find Ed Salem, the Birmingham restaurant owner and local celebrity who forms the basis of the first chapter?
I got a tip from Diane McWhorter, who wrote the seminal book on Birmingham. She told me that in her research of the FBI files on the bombing, she found out that one of the suspects had had dinner at Salem’s restaurant the night before. I looked into who Ed Salem was and found out he was this huge football player at Alabama. When I found out that he was the star of the first game of the Iron Bowl of the modern era, I thought, it can’t get much more American than that.
Q: Yet even he doesn’t fully succeed in integrating, does he?
Since the Arab-American experience of that time was one of assimilation, I wanted to show the boundaries and limits of assimilation. In that racially binary phase of American history, you were either black or white. Arab Americans weren’t blacks so we kind of by default ended up in the white category. You can see particularly clearly in places as stratified as the South, that it was a very limited whiteness. But there were echoes of that experience throughout the U.S.
Q: You sometimes compare the Arab-American experience with that of Italian Americans. How do they differ?
The naturalization law in the United States up until the ‘50s, was the same as it had been since the late 18th century. To become a naturalized American citizen, you had to prove that you were a free white man. The law went unenforced until the Nativism of the early 20th century. When immigrants petitioned for naturalization, the government actually took a position: it didn’t oppose Italian Americans, but it did oppose the naturalization of what we would call Arab Americans, on the grounds that these people were not white. I think the fact that the United States government opposed them in every case gave a very solemn message that there was something problematic if you’re Lebanese or Syrian or Palestinian.
Q: What about more recent times?
There is something in the American consciousness that Arab is foreign, that being Arab and American isn’t one and the same, that they are diametrically opposed, or that there’s something very new about Arab Americans. We understand Italian Americans to be our neighbors; we understand them to be all kinds of people. The gangster thing was not the only thing that informed our understanding of Italians. But that wasn’t the case for Arab Americans. There wasn’t someone on TV doing Arab cooking for mainstream America. We didn’t understand the Arabness of people in our culture who are Middle Eastern, such as Danny Thomas, or Casey Kasem, or Jamie Farr on “M*A*S*H,” for example. What’s more American than the show “M*A*S*H”? People don’t understand that Jamie Farr is an Arab American because it wasn’t part of the character, but everyone knows that James Galdolfini is Italian American because he’s playing one.
Q: Hasn’t the political turmoil of the Middle East and its coverage in the media played a central role?
You can kind of look at how the stereotype of an Arab has evolved over time. Before 1948, before there was this territorial conflict, think of Valentino as the sheik—this sex-thirsty, hooked-nose, anti-Semitic caricature, this idea of the shady easterner who moves among us. After the founding of the state of Israel, that caricature starts to evolve. The only representations of Arabs that we had in the media were the violence committed by people in the name of a political conflict.
For me, personally, I felt like every time Arafat was on the news, I did feel like, oh God, this is all Americans see. I felt implicated by every single thing that he did or said, because I wasn’t on TV, Arab Americans weren’t on TV, being a regular Arab American family. “The Cosby Show” was a huge thing on how people’s perceptions of African Americans changed. Well, we never had “The Mohammed Show.”
Q: What are some of your other memories of growing up in those cultural circumstances?
I remember in 1991 during the Gulf War, my dad had decided to grow a mustache. He never had a mustache before, and he had it during the Gulf War. He doesn’t really look like Saddam Hussein, but there was just something very ominously Middle Eastern about him with that look. And I remember trying to get my dad to not speak, because he had an accent, or to speak as loudly, as American-ly, and as Baltimore-ingly as possible.
Q: You’ve spent time in the Middle East yourself. What did you do there?
On the eve of the second invasion of Iraq, I moved to Lebanon to work for a legal aid office for asylum-seeking refugees. I had always wanted to live in Beirut, which is really one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I was asked by the Lebanese American University to design and teach intro to human rights. And Rami Khoury, who at that time was the editor-in-chief of the Daily Star, asked me to consider writing pieces for the paper. That column turned into many columns. It was there that I saw the power of words. I was kind of overwhelmed by how much reach you could have by writing.
Q: Did you learn anything about your own identity?
There’s nothing like moving to the Middle East to be reminded how American you are. This ability to have hybrid identities and be many things is a privilege of being American. I’m not purely Lebanese or Syrian. I’m not purely Middle Eastern. It definitely shaped my parents, and it shaped me. But I still feel that my story is only possible in the U.S.
