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Arab American Author Encourages Global View of Tragedy
Alia Malek, author and civil rights lawyer, came to UT on Tuesday to discuss her first book, “A Country Called Amreeka,” which contains American and overseas oral histories post-9/11.
The Issues Committee, a branch of the Central Program Council, sponsored the event. Maggie Hanna, a double major in political science and BCMB and committee member, said that Malek wanted to give “an” Arabic experience, not “the” Arabic experience, because there is a lot of diversity in the Middle East.
“As we commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11, avoid the temptation to be particularly chauvinist or jingoist,” Malek said. “Instead, just sort of solemnly look at what it has meant and beyond just the immediate impact that people felt. Look at the experience and impact that it had on folks that are not that much like them (you) but are American nonetheless, and really also consider what it has meant for the rest of the world.”
Non-Arab-Americans quickly formed opinions on the Arab people after the attacks. Layla Husain, junior in Spanish, believes there was a mixed perspective.
“You find some people who are really looking for the truth and wanting to learn about who Arab-Americans are and Muslims in general, so those people are generally very understanding. But you do have those who will believe anything they hear and when they see very biased media, they’ll just kind of follow that. It can be really problematic because obviously a lot of the reports you see on TV and things you hear on the radio tend to show Arab-Americans and Muslims in a negative light, and they tend to be associated with terrorism,” Husain said.
This mixed perspective is starting to change in response to the recent revolutions. Malek believes that they have “injected a positive representation of Arabs.” Although, she doesn’t believe that it “undoes everything that has happened in the last six or plus years.”
Husain thinks that the revolutions are “a starting point for people to begin seeing the commonalities between Arabs and Americans. We’re all people, and we all want the same rights and the same freedom.”
“I think recently, with the revolutions and the changes going on, it’s starting to be more positive,” Hanna said. “I think people are learning more about it just because it (has) been in the news, so people are wanting to find out things about it. And I think the more people learn about it, the more that they’ll have a positive perspective because usually, when there’s a negative perspective about things, it’s more ignorance about a subject, not necessarily just that it’s a bad thing.”
A contributing factor to the revolutions is the rapid expansion of social media. Madison Hammett, junior in anthropology, believes that this expansion is connecting the youth of Arab and American cultures.
“I think younger Americans are looking with a more open view whereas we used to look at them like an ‘other,’” Hammett said. “Now we can say, ‘Look. They’re on Facebook and they’re on Twitter,’ so they’re a lot more like us than we used to say.”
“There’s a famous poem by Gil Scott-Heron, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,’” Malek said. “In this case, the revolution was televised, and I think that made it feel a lot more personal, a lot closer to people who (are) really far away from these places.”
Steele Gamble
The Daily Beacon