In late September of 2001, I was awakened by the sounds of sirens. My roommate, who was an EMT, awoke also, and identified the sirens as police and fire, but not ambulance. We lived in the downtown area of a mid-sized urban center, so sirens were nothing new. These were rather close, though, and it was a bit disquieting. After a few minutes, however, we shrugged our shoulders and went back to bed.
In the morning, I told David I was walking down to the corner store to buy some cigarettes. The walks had almost become a ritual; in the mornings, I walked down to buy cigarettes, and in the evenings, David walked down to buy beer. I jounced down the stairs to the sidewalk, walked down two blocks, and rounded the corner.
There, where David had bought beer for us not ten hours earlier, stood a blackened, twisted heap of concrete blocks and charred wood. I think I just stood there stupidly for a few minutes, staring, until my half-somnabulant mind connected the sirens of the night before with the wreckage in front of me.
You see, this store -- where David and I spent a great deal of our spare cash on our vices -- was run by two brothers, Mo and Yasir. They were Persian (not Iranian; they become furious when they were called Iranian). And at some point during the night, someone had fire-bombed their store.
Because Mo and Yasir had dark skin.
Because Mo and Yasir had funny accents.
Because Mo and Yasir were Muslim in a time when it was not safe to be a Muslim in America.
It had to be said in old ladies' language
It had to be said in American headlines
For the past seven years, my country has lived in a state of fear. It has been used to control us and to manipulate us; to bankrupt us financially and morally; and to end the lives of over four thousand of our countrymen, as well as the lives of possibly millions of others.
But the fear that is blared at us from newspaper headlines, cable news chyrons, and overpaid pundits is a sort of generalized fear: "Be afraid! Scary brown-skinned people! But, hey, don't let that stop you from buying that 40-inch plasma television along with your duct tape and plastic sheeting."
There are those among us, however, for whom the fear which our governmental handlers have whipped up is not general; it is immediate, and it is dangerous.
It had to be moaned over factory foghorns
It had to be chattered on car radio news broadcasts
It had to be screamed in the kitchen
It had to be yelled in the basement where uncles were fighting
Mo and Yasir are American citizens. They emigrated to the U.S. when Mo was twelve and Yasir was fourteen, and both men were in the mid-thirties when their store was destroyed. They were married and had children. They were staples to the neighborhood, offering credit to the poor in our community who couldn't afford groceries, offering advice to people just moving into the neighborhood, loaning gardening equipment and even Yasir's pickup on one occasion.
I remember one evening, as I was stopping by on my way to my night class, I was standing in line behind an elderly woman in a worn houserobe and slippers. She was purchasing several cans of wet cat food. Yasir was behind the counter, and he chatted in a friendly manner while he rang up and bagged the woman's purchases. He bid her have a good afternoon and, as she turned to leave the store, motioned silently for me to wait for a moment.
As soon as the woman left the store, he raised his voice and called to his eldest son, a boy of about fifteen, who was in the back. When his son came out, Yasir told him, "Ms. So-and-so just bought cat food again. You know what to do." Then he turned to me, rang up my purchases, and began chatting with me about my classes and how David was liking his new job.
It happened that I exited the store at the same time as Yasir's son. He was carrying two armfuls of groceries. When I asked, Yasir's son explained that the woman didn't have a cat. There were times when the cat food was all she could afford to eat. So whenever she came in to buy cat food, Yasir or Mo would send one of the older boys to surreptitiously drop off a couple bags of groceries on the woman's porch.
It had to be howled on the streets by newsboys to bus conductors
It had to be foghorned into New York harbor
It had to echo onto hard hats
It had to turn up the volume in university ballrooms
After the attacks on September 11, hate crimes directed at Mo and Yasir and at their store began. Bricks through the front windows. "Die fucking ragheads" spray-painted on the outside walls. Threatening phone calls. Mo was stoic about it, but I saw the anger seething behind Yasir's eyes. They never talked about it, but Yasir's sons were more open-mouthed, expressing rage and bewilderment at this treatment. "I'm a goddamned American," Yasir's eldest son told me a few days before the fire-bombing. "Who the fuck are these people to tell me I'm not?"
It had to be written in library books, footnoted
It had to be in the headlines of the Times and Le Monde
It had to be barked on TV
It had to be heard in alleys through ballroom doors
After the fire-bombing, the city had the remains of the corner store demolished. Using the insurance money and their own savings, Mo and Yasir bought a closed market in a different part of downtown and tried to rebuild. Due to the distance, I saw them less frequently, but I went by every chance I could, even to just buy a soda and bullshit about the university sports teams.
You see, Mo and Yasir are Americans; real Americans. They left their home, their extended family, their culture, to come to this land and forge a new existence for themselves. And when faced with the lowest dregs of our society, the blind irrational hatred which was fanned by our talking heads and (God forgive us) our own government, they responded with tenacity, forgiveness, and strength.
It had to be played on wire services
It had to be bells ringing
Comedians stopped dead in the middle of a joke in Las Vegas
And every two weeks, one of Yasir's sons would carry two armfuls of groceries twelve blocks.
And after making sure no one was watching, he would carefully deposit them on the porch of a certain elderly woman, and silently steal back to the store.
quotes from "Hadda Been Playin' on the Jukebox" by Ginsberg