States of Survival
A Conversation with Etaf Rum
By Bareerah Y. Ghani
My identity is complicated, says Etaf Rum.
We’re talking over Zoom, connecting after three months – the last we spoke was for an interview about her latest novel, Evil Eye. Etaf has a Black sweatshirt on with an imprint that says, Books & Beans, the name of the bookstore she owns in North Carolina. And as she speaks, she is confident, a warm glow on her face (I think, from the light in her soul, obviously!). Nothing in her demeanor suggests she had once felt like a demure, uneasy immigrant.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Etaf is not an immigrant and yet, she tells me, “I didn’t feel like an American. I didn’t fit in. My home was very much Arab. I felt the alienation my parents felt.”
Etaf’s parents are Palestinian immigrants. Products of refugee camps, they grew up in poverty and violence as a result of the Nakba. Her father came to the US at nineteen, then later brought her mother to Brooklyn, where they raised nine children – six daughters and three sons, with Etaf being the eldest. They barely spoke English, and felt othered and alienated. In an attempt to protect their sense of belonging, they instilled in their home the culture they brought from Palestine, limiting their children’s exposure to American culture.
I understand this typical immigrant phenomenon: you believe you cannot be in two places at once. You cannot belong to two places. You are either American, or Other. I think about the children of immigrants I have known – my friends and cousins, born and raised in the US by parents who have lived a significant portion of their lives in another country, immersed in another culture.
Etaf was enrolled in an Islamic school, and wore a uniform where the hijab brought stares from strangers. She said it was natural that she felt isolated from the world outside her home. This was further amplified when, in 2000, young Etaf watched twelve-year-old Muhammad Durrah get shot on TV during protests and crossfire between the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) and Palestinian security forces in Gaza, as his father tried to protect the child. Etaf realized, “He just got murdered on television, and nothing happened, only because he was Palestinian.”
Etaf’s characters are Palestinian immigrants, much like her parents who arrived in the US not because of the American Dream, but because they didn’t have a choice.
“My parents were denied the privilege of a home. They were denied the privilege of a country,” Etaf says. “My grandfather was a child when he and his parents were taken out of their house at gunpoint. Their olive trees were burned, he watched kids being thrown in ovens, burned alive.”
I feel my throat tighten. I cannot imagine the horror, the trauma of having your home taken from you, being uprooted without warning, with nowhere to go.
“We’re the only people in the world who aren’t allowed to enter our own country,” says the father of Etaf’s protagonist in Evil Eye. That has stuck with me since I read the novel and I think about it often – the dialogue, the sentiment, the (in)ability to go back home.
It occurs to me that in all these years I have never once referred to myself as an immigrant, even though I’ve moved twice – first, to my birth country Canada and then to the States. This is strange and yet, quite accurate. I am not an immigrant, I can’t be an immigrant because I have a land and a home – not one but two, in fact – that continue to exist even as I live away. I have the privilege to return, the privilege to create another home, away from home. Etaf’s parents have never had that.
“For my parents this country has been a place of survival,” Etaf says. “It’s not a true place of safety, especially now more than ever. We are living in a land that has no problem saying and proving that our lives truly do not matter. The sad part about it is that [my parents] know that they are just temporarily here to survive and that it's gonna be – it has been and unfortunately still is for them – a life of severe unease.”
For Etaf’s parents, there is only the dream of returning home, knowing that it will never happen. Her grandfather harbored the same hope until his last breath.
“He lived and died in exile,” Etaf adds.
Her words sit on my chest. I feel the heaviness even more because lately, I’ve been waking up with an ache that I only express to myself in private – I want to go home, I whisper to myself as I empty the dishwasher, brew my morning coffee. Then I let the words dissolve in my mouth as I move to my desk to begin the day’s work. Inadvertently, in my novel-in-progress I recreate the yellow living room wall that stands in my parents’ home in Karachi, reimagine my dadi’s aura in my characters, the smell of her room lingering in my senses as I write to the background of ghazals my Baba sings, recalling the hum of the Tanpura that resounds incessantly from his study room, as I spend many afternoons attempting to replicate my Ammi’s chicken curry, relishing the heat of the stove that reminds me of my parents’ warm dining room. I have a home to return to physically and yet, I am desperately clinging to the little things, trying to preserve parts of it in the new home I’ve made with my husband. This attempt at preservation, this longing for home is unusual and unexpected. I’ve shared a turbulent relationship with Karachi, the city where I was raised. The city made me feel visible as a body and simultaneously invisible as a person, hyper aware and ashamed of the space I took.
Etaf, it turns out, understands the sentiment. “I felt powerless growing up as a woman,” she says. Her parents’ trauma of displacement, of living in refugee camps led them to acquire a scarcity mindset. “They really saw us as a burden they had to pass along to a suitor, to a man. I didn't really think of myself as someone that was ever allowed to take up space both as a woman and as a person, because in the country that I lived in, I didn't feel like I belonged. And then, even within the subset of my community, I also didn't feel like I was worthy because of my gender.”
Hard relate, I think as Etaf shares how her adolescent choices, even basic ones such as thinking about what major to pursue in college, were governed by the questions: “What will make sense as a mother? What will make sense as a wife?”
These are questions that plague Etaf’s female protagonists too. Like both of us, they want to belong to their communities, to the world they've grown up in, but somehow, they are outliers because they want agency as a person, the privilege of having an identity. Somehow, what they want – what we want – is too much. And it is in contending with our shame over what we want that we somehow convince ourselves that our desires and needs are not important.
“I had grown up primed for ‘this is what you need to do to get love’. So even though my caregivers were not giving me the space, the love and the basic rights that we speak of, I still wanted so badly to please them, and so I never even considered what it was that I wanted.”
In a family and culture that sees your gender before they see you as a person, it is expected and almost inevitable that women like Etaf and myself become people pleasers, eager to prove our worth, one way or another. For me, this meant overachieving academically to justify not being married off. For Etaf, it meant succumbing to the pressure of an arranged marriage at nineteen. I know we are only two in the millions of other women of color who shrink themselves trying to fit in their communities, trying to belong because the outside world, the land that we live on, already sees us as Alien, Terrorist, Other.
“We're children of exile,” Etaf says. “We don't even have a self.”
To people-please is a way to acquire acceptance. To people-please is a state of survival. There is only one path to freedom and agency, and it comes at the cost of exile.
“My parents didn't talk to me for six years. They disowned me,” Etaf says as she goes on to narrate that after nine long years of consistent people-pleasing, she fought for a divorce. By that time, she had become a mother of two and realized, “If I stayed in [that] marriage I [was] going to pass on this trauma to my children. I [had] to respect myself before I could teach my children to respect themselves. I had to learn that I am my only home.”
It is only when we detach from the expectations of our communities, from our need to please them, that we begin showing up authentically for ourselves.
“It's very hard, isolating,” Etaf says as she expresses her grief and loneliness over having lost communities she thought she needed to belong to. Then she adds, “[But] when you know yourself, and you're at home with you, it becomes easier for you to find other people like you. That's how we start to slowly integrate into more spaces that feel more true to us.
"So belonging is not about place or culture, it's about energy,” I say, in a light-bulb-moment.
“Exactly. It's about feeling safe in your body,” Etaf says, smiling.
I nod because I understand. Trauma has a way of making you dissociate. Feel less like a person inside a body and more like a hazy idea, floating, uprooted. To reclaim your body, be at ease within yourself, we have to feel and acknowledge all of our emotions and honor them.
To heal ourselves, we must acknowledge our pain. It only makes sense then, that to heal others, we must acknowledge their trauma. Recognize the wound, the injustice, through art and expression. Give voice to those rendered mute. Push back against the fear of exile, against censorship and cancel culture. For ourselves, and others marginalized and oppressed.
Because you cannot amass silence and be on the side of justice.
You cannot be in two places at once.
You are either in a state of survival or the fight for liberation.
You are either American, or Other.
Bareerah Y. Ghani is a Canadian-Pakistani writer, editor, and educator based in Northern Virginia. You can find her writing at www.bareerahghani.com and follow her on Instagram @bareerah_ghani.
Etaf Rum is a Palestinian American novelist and New York Times best-selling author of A Woman is No Man and Evil Eye.
