"Il Shagra"

 

When I was growing up, people called me “il shagra,” which is Arabic, Kuwaiti to be more precise, for “blonde one.” But I have brown hair, dark brown eyes and thick brown eyebrows. Having a Palestinian mother confused everybody, because apparently I’m racially ambiguous; even amongst Arabs, my people. It just goes to show you how susceptible people are to classify based on physicality. Something I assume we do subconsciously.

 

My father used to tell me stories about everything—how Lulwah, my name, stood for the smallest pearl in the world, the one that merchants traded to build Kuwait, how his family descended from Iraq, how Iraq invaded Kuwait, how we are all pieces of each other. My mother used to tell me stories about the disputed Holy Land, how beautiful she remembers it was, and how you can run the world and never find a bottle of olive oil as pure as Jerusalem’s. She would prepare hot bread with cubes of white cheese and asked my sister and I to eat it with our eyes closed. Eliminating a sense heightens another, and so, we recognized Palestine through food. Between my Arab Muslim cultures, I was receiving an American education, influenced by Western values, ideologies and all. It was a scramble, a self-created culture; the one I could relate to.

 

A part of me always wanted to come to America to experience that… “TV land,” and to discover if perhaps, I belonged there instead. Eventually, I moved to New York City for Grad school, and one of the first things I realized was that I confused people. Questions like, “Are you from Argentina?” “Are you from Israel?” Again. A non-hijab wearing, hip-hop blasting, bacon eating woman could never be linked to the Arab, Muslim world, could she?

 

So many identity-filled notions press my mind. Why do labels come with such a solid stigma? How could I be an actual liberal, Arab, Muslim woman without being a rebel? I figured I should to terms with being misrepresented while holding such loaded labels high, and instead, fight to modernize my own faith while using it to identify myself to the rest of the world.

 

We are divided by borders and we are placed in boxes. But when we choose to leave, to immigrate and migrate elsewhere, which box do we fit in? Why do we choose migration, and what comes of it? You see, I knew early on that I was blessed with a multicultural perspective, one that teaches me the appreciation of every culture just as my own. Here’s the thing, there are a lot of ‘me’ out there. The ones that choose to pick up and take this subculture elsewhere. The ones that live to alter the definitions of the words ‘media,’ ‘Islam,’ and ‘women.’ We’re just harder to find, in a sense, a minority.