Featured Poem: Exit Plan by Diana Abu-Jaber
posted on: Feb 3, 2017
Award-winning Arab American author, Diana Abu-Jaber, pens this special poem for Arab America. It is about an Arab American’s struggle with identity in the current political climate. She encourages readers to fully embrace their heritage and religion, even in the face of threatening behaviors.
Diana Abu-Jaber was born in New York to a Jordanian father and American mother. She is an author and professor at Portland State University.
BY: Diana Abu-Jaber/Contributing Writer
It’s that time again.
I feel it in the air.
The old identity resurfacing
like a lost wedding band:
Flying While Arab.
I’m not Muslim, I don’t wear a veil.
Doesn’t matter.
That box is big, it contains multitudes.
I’d almost forgotten you, Flying While Arab.
After eight years of a kind of calm.
Eight years of feeling like who you think you are is who you are,
Now that old creature, Flying-While-Arab, exhales from the crack in the mirror.
Mishapen creature, nearly forgotten.
The “random checks,”
The searched luggage.
The arms-out, legs-apart,
The I’m going to pat your pockets now.
That time we were held for hours in the “back” at the Canadian border.
That time we were held for hours in the “back” at the Miami airport.
Once again, they’ll be saying who we are.
When someone tacked threats on my office door,
My friends begged:
Change your name, why not change it?
Why don’t I change it?
Just a lost daughter, among a nation of lost daughters,
Claimed by a name I didn’t make.
My Bedouin relatives were born under a burning moon on a scoured desert.
The moon there is bright as a knuckle. It bites like teeth.
The moon scours us down to essence, leaves us shining, undeniable. If you’ve forgotten who you are, you have to go to torn up, wild places like this,
The empty quarters, the silent spaces.
I was raised in my mother’s Catholicism
And I asked my father:
Didn’t that hurt you?
No, he said.
Because people who believe
They belong to one family of faith.
Faith in what, Dad?
Oh, he said, faith in the animals,
Faith in the green world
In the pointed stars
And in the spaces between the stars.
Faith holds the question, he said.
What’s the question, dad?
It’s the question, he said.
When you have faith
You embrace the question,
Live inside of it.
Even,
you love it.
*
Listen,
In the stillest part of the desert,
Far from the moon,
from the wind and the horses and the night
There is a place far away from question and answer,
Far from you and me,
There is a seed.
Every time they get you wrong, there is a seed,
Every name that is hidden, there is a seed.
Every word unspoken, there is a seed.
The seeds are bitter,
And they are sharp,
They grow in eyes and throats.
They grow even in sand under the moon.
Eat them and you may die,
But scatter them,
Wide and high,
And they will call down the rain.
