Justine van Engen

I am an Arab American. I don’t always label myself that plainly. I was born in Saudi Arabia to Palestinian parents but was educated in the United States, an identity which is both more generic and far more complicated than that encapsulated in the words “Arab American.”

I had the optimism of an immigrant, believing that slipping the clasps of one’s personal history was a matter of will.
I cannot remember a time when I was especially enthused about my ethnicity. I treated it like the old sweatshirt one wears after hours. It was familiar and essentially my own, but clearly it was not fit for public consumption.
All I ever wanted was to be able to say the American Pledge of Allegiance without raising any eyebrows. I doubt that there has ever been someone so eager as I was to melt into the melting pot.

That is not to say that I was particularly successful in my plan. I was still called a “raghead” and a “camel jockey,” and indeed worse. I was always going to be in love with the messy crowd of relatives of mine spanning the globe.
I was always going to cling to the details of my own story.
However, as I grew older and learned that captaining my destiny had a strategic element, the identity I crafted had fewer and fewer geographical references. I was a little flattered to be mistaken for something else. Latina? Italian? Jewish? Maybe.
As far as ethnic identity was concerned, I was consistently checking the box marked “other.”

I was an American woman with an American husband and with American children. That’s all that mattered. That was true to me nearly 10 years ago when my country was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. The people who elected to turn commercial airplanes into bombs were as foreign to me as they were to any of my neighbors. The tall man with a beard was not someone with whom I would have anything in common.
However, it is precisely that event which pointed out the hypocrisy of my position to me. If Osama bin Laden was an Arab and I was not, then it was no wonder that the world would become more hostile to Arabs.

If the venomous men he controlled were the only voices the world heard, then the Arabic language would only contain killing words.
I started to speak. When my husband’s mother asked whether I knew any terrorists, I simply answered, “No. Do you?” I spoke up when Arabs were maligned – at first from the perspective of an advocate for human diversity and then later as a physical manifestation of the punch line’s absence of truth.

I learned to defend what was entirely defensible and to condemn what deserved condemnation. I had to speak even when my voice trembled and my words felt like they would break my mouth. Whatever it means to be an Arab, I am part of that identity. Whoever else claims to speak for us all, I speak for myself and for every other loving, peaceful person who left a rich history behind for the promise of a future here. I am everything I have here and everything I brought with me.

I am not ashamed to have been born in the same country as that man. I am not embarrassed to have the same history as he did. There is no particular soil which breeds the sort of poison which fed his heart. There is nothing which binds our souls together. We began as two points with a common origin and then moved in opposite directions, anchored equally to the same patch of space.
And now he is dead. Everything that he will ever do has been done. The world will judge his life in its completion. And I am still here, a small and persistent reminder of everything he tried to defeat but could not. I am one of many.
Justine van Engen has lived in the Washington, DC metropolitan area for over 25 years and in Reston, Virginia for nearly 10 of those years. She is the “About Town” columnist for Reston Patch. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and American University, and wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.