From a world leader retreating from an unwinnable foreign war (Emperor Hadrian, circa 117 A.D.) to the false promise of automation in the workplace (1950s America), the stories we published provided key context that headline news and hot takes missed. Our favorite essays of the year covered a great deal of territory, from climate change in California and a tragedy in Lebanon to the work of immoral artists and the literature of dentistry. But what we think they all have in common is that, in one way or another, they help us see the world and our place in it anew.

Here are the dozen essays (well, OK, 11 essays and one collection!) that Zócalo’s staff chose to highlight as 2021 comes to a close:

America’s Anti-Chinese Bigotry Has a Very Old Stench

Illustration by Be Boggs.

Almost exactly a year after the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in the U.S., The Smell of Risk author Hsuan L. Hsu explored how American scientists, doctors, and public health officials, as well as historians and novelists, stigmatized “Chinese air” beginning in the 19th century. Hsu demonstrates how these racist, damaging olfactory narratives originated to target the earliest Chinese immigrants to the U.S.—and why it’s no surprise that they remain pervasive today.

Look Away

In 1978, Adam Smyer’s junior high chorus performed “Dixie” at the annual school pageant. Of the couple of hundred people in attendance, “only my mother complained,” recalled the Knucklehead author and attorney. Drawing a parallel to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Smyer meditates on why it’s not the Nazis, but rather the “not-sees” who may be our biggest existential threat.

The 20th-Century Rise of the Confederate Soybean

Why did the varieties of soybeans grown in the American South suddenly acquire the names of Confederate generals nearly 100 years after the Civil War’s end? This story, from University of Pennsylvania historian and Magic Bean author Matthew Roth, reveals how the USDA spent decades catering to white farmers, which resulted in a more unequal agricultural landscape that persists today.

The Fires California Grieves—And Needs

It may be counterintuitive, but the hugely damaging California wildfires of the past few years prove that California needs more fire. Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a fire advisor in Northern California, reflects on the lessons the fires Native Californians set before cultural burning was criminalized can teach us about fighting today’s megafires, and why every flame holds a story of loss and renewal.

The author’s favorite hometown swimming hole, on the South Fork Trinity River in Forest Glen, California, after last year’s devastating August Complex fire. Courtesy of Lenya Quinn-Davidson.

Where I Go: The Poet Sits in the Dentist’s Chair

“Did you know there’s a rich and under-loved canon of periodontic literature?” asks poet and Wabash College English professor Derek Mong. In this entry from our “Where I Go” series, Mong investigates why he transforms his trips to the dentist’s chair into lectures on books and poetry about teeth—from Edgar Allen Poe and Elizabeth Bishop to Zadie Smith and Valeria Luiselli.

Where I Go: My Small, Queer Corner of the Internet

When he moved from Venezuela to Madrid in 2019, journalist José González Vargas thought he might be able to find the LGBTQ+ community that had eluded him. He did, but not at the bars and bookstores he expected. Rather, once the world locked down, the online platform Discord offered him a space where labels didn’t matter and he could just be himself.

The United States Didn’t Really Begin Until 1848

Gold miners in El Dorado, California, circa 1848. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Forget the hackneyed debate between the New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Trump administration’s 1776 report on when American history begins. “Much like a party that only truly starts when the coolest kid saunters in, today’s United States—antically ambitious, deliriously diverse, violently war-mongering, maniacally money-grubbing, and kaleidoscopically cruel—did not really get rolling until California arrived in 1848,” argues Connecting California columnist Joe Mathews.

Lebanon’s Other Explosion

In August 2020, the world’s attention turned to Lebanon in the wake of the horrific Beirut port explosion. Almost a year later, Beirut-based editor Abby Sewell found herself covering another deadly explosion; this time, the world didn’t pay attention, leaving Sewell wondering what it means to try to tell stories that make a difference when you’re writing for an indifferent audience.

After 150 Years, Is L.A. Ready to Remember the Chinese Massacre?

For most of his life, former L.A. City Council member Michael Woo had never heard of the largest massacre of Chinese in California history, which took place on October 24, 1871. In the first essay of Zócalo’s new Mellon Foundation-supported inquiry, “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?,” Woo asked why this chapter of history wasn’t widely spoken about, and how a public memorial might help the city finally start to reckon with its racist past.

Can We Still Bump n’ Grind to R. Kelly?

Wellesley College philosopher and Drawing the Line author Erich Hatala Matthes suggests an alternative to “cancel culture”: engaging with the work of immoral artists as a way of clarifying our emotions. “The artwork,” writes Matthes, “provides a lens for reflecting on our feelings, and perhaps the promise of sorting them out.”

What Can We Learn From the Failings of William Mulholland?

“When I read about the crimes of history, I rail against the wrongness of the thinking, the backwards, shortsighted cruelty,” writes author Kendra Atleework, who lives and writes in the part of California William Mulholland drained dry. Her meditation on Mulholland’s crimes exonerates nobody: “I, too, exist within the sticky sap of an era. The things I hold to be self-evident and undeniable may, in time, be proven false and denied.”

How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?

In January 2021, on the same day as President Biden’s inauguration, Zócalo began publishing a group of essays about why, from Japan and Germany to the American South, societies around the world struggle to acknowledge the crimes they committed—and persist in repeating them all over again. We published too many wonderful pieces to single any out, and we’re looking forward to turning to this question throughout 2022 and into 2023, now with the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick.

The post Our Favorite Essays of 2021 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Not the horrific August 4, 2020 Beirut port explosion, when a warehouse full of ammonium nitrate exploded, killing more than 200 and generating shock and sympathy around the world. Recently, that explosion made it back into the headlines when a protest over the investigation into its causes provoked deadly street clashes.

I’m talking about a different explosion, which took place on August 15, 2021 and killed more than 30 men and injured dozens more in a village in the neglected northern district of Akkar as they filled up plastic canisters with gasoline. You’ve probably never heard about that explosion. Few have, outside of Lebanon.

Had it happened at another time, or in another place, the Akkar disaster probably would have been international news. Maybe it went largely unnoticed because the blast coincided with the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or perhaps the silence surrounding was inevitable. The first time a disaster happens, it’s news; when disasters become the norm, people stop paying attention.

Still, for the victims living through such events, the pain is no less. And for a journalist, it presents an existential dilemma. Most of us got into this business with the idea that telling stories will make a difference. How do you keep on when you know that it won’t?

I was in Beirut during the 2020 port explosion. Like many others there, I threw myself into frenetic action telling stories of pain and of hope, of so many ordinary people jumping in to help search for victims, clear rubble, and find housing for those who were displaced. Outside of Lebanon, too, people leaped to action. Hundreds of millions of dollars of aid flowed in, and teams of international experts flew in to investigate the cause of the blast.

For half a century the country had been repeatedly demolished—first by war, then by corruption, negligence, and political infighting, culminating, in 2019, in one of the most dramatic economic crashes in modern history. Now, with the world’s eyes upon them, Lebanon’s prime minister and cabinet resigned. For a time, it seemed that the explosion might be the catalyst that would finally turn the country around.

Of course, that didn’t happen. Various political factions soon began bickering, holding up the formation of a new government. International aid dried up. The country’s economic crisis reached a dystopian level as the value of the lira, officially pegged at 1,500 LBP to 1 USD, plunged from a black market exchange rate of 8,000 LBP to 1 USD at the time of the explosion to 20,000 LBP to 1 USD by August 2021.

Fuel imports, along with medicine and some food, remained partially subsidized by the central bank to protect the population from the worst effects of the devaluation. But a shortage of foreign currency, along with rampant smuggling of fuel and other subsidized imports to Syria, resulted in severe shortages of fuel, medicine, and even bread that has gotten progressively worse over the past six months.

The situation in Akkar, about three hours’ drive north of the capital, was even worse than in Beirut. The largely agricultural district had always been isolated and impoverished; by mid-August 2021, its gas stations had been closed for weeks. To get to work and ensure electricity at home, people were relying on expensive, poor quality, black market fuel, sold in plastic jugs on the side of the road. Lebanon’s cash-strapped power utility provides only a few hours of electricity a day, and diesel generators fill in the gap.

On the afternoon of August 14, the Lebanese Army found a tanker full of illegally stored gasoline and diesel on the property of a businessman in Tleil, a village along the small highway that climbs up from the district capital of Halba to the mountains above. The fuel was likely intended to be smuggled to Syria or sold on the local black market. The army confiscated the bulk of it but left a few thousand liters at the site, for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Photograph courtesy of Abby Sewell

Witnesses told me that late in the evening, soldiers at the scene gave in to the pleading of a few desperate locals who asked to fill up canisters. Word spread and soon hundreds of people arrived, hoping to get a couple of gallons. Chaos and fights broke out, someone lit a lighter, and the tanker exploded. While the government has not released an official death tally, a local activist who has been coordinating aid for victims’ families told me the count has now reached 36. Dozens more were injured, overwhelming the country’s already struggling hospitals.

The gasoline crisis also prevented most Beirut-based journalists, myself included, from immediately getting to the scene. Days prior, Lebanon’s central bank had announced plans to end its subsidy for fuel imports, signaling a potential fivefold increase in prices at the pump. Most gas stations promptly closed. Station owners blamed supply issues, but people I spoke to assumed that they were, in fact, hoarding supply and waiting for prices to increase.

On the day of the Akkar explosion, every gas station in Beirut was closed. I waited in line for five hours to get fuel the next day, when some stations opened up. I waited another seven hours to be able to return for a second reporting trip later in the week.

The stories I wrote about the explosion touched me deeply. I have a personal connection to Akkar. When I first arrived in Lebanon around five years ago, I spent three months volunteering with Syrian refugees in a village not far from the site of the explosion. The explosion victims I met reminded me of people I had encountered back then.

The soldier I watched sink to his knees, sobbing outside the hospital where his badly burned brother was taken, could have been any of the soldiers I sat beside, day after day, on the minibuses that run from villages in Akkar to the cities of Tripoli and Beirut. Another soldier, in a hospital bed in Tripoli, whispered to me hoarsely, “My father died. He was next to me.” His features were obscured by bandages, but I will never forget the look in his eyes. It was the look of someone who no longer cares if he lives or dies.

The disfigured 15-year-old Syrian boy could have been one of the children I used to help with their French homework. The Syrian woman whose husband died in the blast, leaving her with four young children and pregnant with a fifth, could have been one of my students’ mothers. On cold winter nights, we would drink tea next to the diesel-fueled stoves that warmed their makeshift homes. This winter, how will they get the diesel?

When I wrote victims’ stories and only a handful of people in Lebanon and even fewer outside reacted, perhaps I felt a small sliver of the despair and bitterness people of the area experience all the time. “Here in Akkar, no one thinks about us,” Marwan al-Cheikh told me, as we sat on the veranda at the home of his brother, Fadi al-Cheikh, overlooking idyllic rolling hills. Fadi, a retired soldier turned farmer, had been killed in the blast.

That week after the explosion was the first time in five years of reporting in Lebanon that I felt burned out. Why should I go through all this trouble, putting people through the pain of recounting their tragic stories, putting myself through the pain of listening to them, if in the end no one cared?

For me, the Akkar explosion encapsulates nearly all the factors that have destroyed Lebanon: the currency’s collapse, the fuel crisis, black market networks and the corruption and political patronage that allow them to go unchecked, and the absence of the state, particularly in areas outside the orbit of Beirut. It also underlines the miserable state of the Lebanese Army. Many killed and injured in the blast were off-duty soldiers who, like the rest of the crowd, desperately needed gas. A soldier’s monthly salary, now worth less than 100 USD, barely covers the cost of transportation to report to duty.

Today, several people have been arrested in connection with the Akkar explosion, but there has been no official accounting for what happened. Victims’ families have gotten assistance from charitable groups and from political parties looking to shore up influence, but have yet to receive compensation from the state.

Lebanon finally has a government, but its mission is now overshadowed by the threat of more political violence. The electricity supply has, if anything, gotten worse. Fuel shortages have waned slightly, though I suspect black market profiteers will find a way to make sure that shortages, and the resulting profits, persist.

The struggle will continue. In the end, all I know how to do is to keep on telling stories and hope that somewhere, eventually, someone will care.

The post Lebanon’s Other Explosion appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Those horns, and the relentless sensory assault they constitute, are among the features that define my experience of this city that has somehow become home. As a Beirut resident for three years before the quarantine, I found that every time I returned to the Lebanese capital after a visit elsewhere it would take me a few days to readjust to the onslaught of noise you experience as you walk down the street.

The taxis, an ad-hoc cavalry of battered ’80s-era Mercedes, normally slow to a crawl and honk insistently every time a driver spots someone on the sidewalk, regarding every pedestrian as a potential fare. I would consider this sort of behavior to be the precursor to a sexual harassment incident in a U.S. city—so when I was new to Beirut, I would tense up. Eventually the honking became nonthreatening background noise, to be dismissed with a head tilt and click of the tongue.

The taxis did not disappear from the streets after the quarantine order, but their numbers thinned—especially after the government limited the days that cars can be on the road based on their license numbers. Before the coronavirus, Beirut was not a place where traffic regulations—or most regulations—meant much, but fear of the virus briefly amended the social contract. In those first weeks of the lockdown, the taxi drivers, like the rest of the city, appeared dazed and subdued. The streets were strangely silent, but not entirely: for the first time, I could hear the chirping of birds.

Before coronavirus, Beirut was many things, but it was never subdued. There was a constant nervous energy, an electric current that you always felt was ready to blow—and sometimes did.

The most dramatic outburst during my tenure in the city came on October 17, 2019. Pent-up frustration—over the country’s deteriorating economic situation, its electricity shortages, its decades of corruption, and its sectarian political parties that had competed for their pieces of the pie since the end of the civil war, until the pie was gone—came to a head when the government proposed new taxes. These new levies included the now-infamous “WhatsApp tax” on internet-based calling services, which most Lebanese rely on for communications because regular phone calls and texts are prohibitively expensive.

At 7 p.m. that October evening, I finished my shift at the downtown office of the local English-language newspaper where I was still working at the time, even though the publication was two months behind on paying our salaries. On my way home, I passed by a small group of protesters in Riad al Solh Square, where they were outnumbered by the line of riot police guarding the nearby Parliament building and the seat of the Prime Minister. The protesters weren’t chanting. They were simply standing, and waiting.

I stopped to interview a couple of the protesters and continued on my way. I had an appointment to meet the man who I was going to fall in love with, a Palestinian journalist. We had met before as friends; this would be our first official date. We sat in a café in Manara, next to the sea, and drank tea, oblivious to what was going on elsewhere.

Later, we walked up toward Hamra and stopped into Abou Elie’s, a smoky hole-in-the-wall known as “the communist bar,” to have a glass of arak. We were the only ones at Abou Elie’s that night, which was strange. The bartender told us that the protests had swelled over the past couple of hours. The bar’s usual patrons had left to join the beginning of what would be dubbed the October Revolution.

As the numbers in the streets grew, the protest turned into a night of rage. Protesters smashed storefront windows in the pristine downtown district, normally considered out of reach to all but a wealthy few, and blocked roads with burning tires and overturned dumpsters. Watching the pandemonium unfold via Twitter and WhatsApp messages, my friend and I asked each other if we should go down to document it. Perhaps we are bad journalists, but at the time it seemed more important to drink arak and talk until midnight. By the time we left Abou Elie’s the streets were empty, lit by the remaining embers of torched tires and construction debris.

The next morning, and for the months before COVID-19 made “social distancing” a popular phrase, it felt like all of humanity was cramming into the squares. There was anger, but also joy. It was as if everyone in this often-fragmented society had been waiting for a reason to be squashed together by the hundreds and thousands, shouting, singing, and holding discussions that went on for hours.

By the time the first coronavirus case surfaced in Lebanon in late February, the numbers in the streets had dwindled, and divisions had emerged in what had at first been a unified cry for change. The lira’s value had plummeted, and the economic desperation in the country grew. The protests, while smaller, had become increasingly aggressive; the security forces’ response grew more violent. Even before the pandemic’s arrival, hospitals struggled to get medical supplies, which had to be imported using dollars that had become scarce and expensive.

When the government announced a countrywide lockdown beginning March 15, no one debated about it harming the economy, because the economy had already collapsed. Everyone seemed to agree that the country could not bear a public health crisis. When the quarantine order came, there was a sense of resignation and, perhaps, relief. After months of anti-government demonstrations in the central squares, people retreated to their neighborhoods and family villages.

I had been planning to travel to the U.S. in early April, and then to the wedding of close friends in Oaxaca, Mexico. But the wedding was postponed, and the Beirut airport was closed anyway. I could have gotten on an American embassy-chartered flight to Dallas or Miami for $2,500, but I wasn’t interested. After tweeting about this decision to stay put, I made an appearance in a CNN story about Americans refusing repatriation because they felt safer in Lebanon, which briefly turned me into a minor local celebrity. At the time, I was flippant about my lack of desire to return to the States, but as the weeks went on, I began to wonder when, actually, it would be safe to go back, and what my country would look like when I did. I watched from a distance as the number of U.S. deaths shot up and reports surfaced of shortages in masks, gloves, and ventilators, and of people hoarding toilet paper and lining up to buy guns.

A view of the Corniche, Beirut, Lebanon. Photo by Abby Sewell.

Before the virus, when Lebanese people learned that I was American, they used to ask, “Why would you come here? Everyone here wants to go to America.” Now, when people hear that I’m from the U.S., they ask if my parents are safe. (They’re fine; thank God).

In my neighborhood in Beirut, economic crisis notwithstanding, the pharmacy never ran out of masks and the stores never ran out food, or even toilet paper. Thanks to the majority Muslim population in my part of the city, toilet paper was never going to be a major concern, since most bathrooms are equipped with a shatafa, a handheld bidet sprayer. The gun stores I’ve passed since the beginning of the quarantine have all closed, and no one was complaining about it (although I’m sure that anyone who really wanted a firearm could still get one). The hospitals didn’t run out of ventilators or ICU beds, and, somehow, the number of COVID-19 cases—and COVID-19 deaths—crept up only gradually. Reported deaths have reached 26 as I write this.

“We don’t really know why, but the situation is under control,” a friend who works at the American University of Beirut Medical Center told me.

It has been a relief that one thing has remained under control. As the quarantine reached its second month, the lira continued its freefall. From the official rate of 1,507 lira to the dollar, it reached 4,000 to the dollar on the black market. Prices for goods doubled and tripled; those who were still getting a salary lost more than half of its value. People with money in the banks couldn’t get it out. People without money slid into destitution. While the streets remained largely empty, the increasing number of beggars was striking. With no significant safety net to offset the forced unemployment, people despaired, and regulations became insignificant once again. And perhaps the enforced isolation, which runs totally counter to Lebanese culture, had become too much to bear on top of everything else.

On April 24, the first day of Ramadan, I visited Tripoli—a notoriously disenfranchised working-class city on the northern coast dubbed the “bride of the revolution” for its massive protests since October—for a reporting trip. The souks were bustling. In one sweets shop, a fight nearly broke out between men jostling for their place in line. Economic anxiety far trumped fears of the virus. “We’re not afraid of the corona. We’re afraid of becoming Venezuela,” one shop owner told me.

In Beirut, even before the government officially began to relax restrictions at the end of April, municipal police officers had largely stopped shooing stray pedestrians off the Corniche, the seaside walkway that used to be full of families, joggers, vendors, and fishermen. Army trucks were no longer stopping cars out driving after curfew. In the Mar Elias Palestinian camp, volunteers still stand guard at the entrance to take the temperatures of entering residents and visitors, but after iftar, people come down to the street and sit in a circle, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

And the protesters returned to the streets, with much of their anger now focused on the banks. Some wore masks, but social distancing quickly went out the window. On one of the first nights of renewed protests, in front of the Central Bank in Hamra, I watched uneasily from the edge of the crowd as a group of young men chanted, “We don’t care about corona! Riad Salameh is corona!” They were referring to the embattled Central Bank chief. Security forces futilely threatened them with tickets, for violating the 8 p.m. curfew order.

In the days that followed, demonstrators began to lob Molotov cocktails at bank offices. In Tripoli, a young demonstrator was killed in a clash with the Army. In a particularly poignant video widely shared on social media, as police scuffled with a group of protesters blocking the highway in the Beirut suburb of Jal el Dib, a protester shouted into an officer’s face, “I’m hungry!”

“I’m hungrier than you!” the officer shouted back.

Today, the number of taxis on the street is still smaller than before the virus hit, but they have resumed honking. The last time I stopped a cab was during the first few days of the quarantine, to interview the driver for a story about workers who couldn’t afford to stop during the lockdown. He told me that the cost of gas was often more than the fares he collected from the few riders he picked up. But he kept it up because he didn’t have another option.

I felt guilty for stopping him, taking his time, and potentially putting him at risk—even though I was talking to him from outside the passenger side window and wearing a mask (he wasn’t). When we finished the interview, I tried to give him the equivalent of a fare, but he wouldn’t take it.

The post A Letter From Beirut, Where the Taxis Have Resumed Honking appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

After Sunday mass in the village church, a fellow volunteer, Samer—Syrian, Orthodox Christian—and I were escorted to the high-ceilinged sitting room of the priest’s spacious quarters next door. A group of men wearing suits and smoking cigarettes—village notables and friends of the priest—had been invited to join us. They greeted us amiably and invited us to sit.

The priest, or Abuna—an honorific meaning “Our Father” in Arabic—eventually emerged from an interior room, also in a suit, and bearing a pot of strong coffee, and commenced to smoke a cigarette. After we had dispensed the usual pleasantries, he asked me the “American” question that, prior to the election, I heard frequently. “Inti ma Trump walla Clinton?” (“Are you with Trump or Clinton?”) “Akeed mu ma Trump,” I said. “Huwweh majnoon.” (“Of course not with Trump. He is crazy.”)

Abuna did not visibly react to my remark, but he and his friends launched into a spirited discussion in Arabic, which I only partially followed. Afterward, Samer told me that they had been opining that immigration was ruining America and that Trump would set things straight.

The conversation echoed others I had been privy to, focused on tensions around immigration in Akkar, a remote district in northeastern Lebanon on the Syrian border. A common complaint here is that the Syrians are taking jobs and hogging resources provided by the government and international aid organizations. Some Lebanese Christians I spoke with also told me they view the primarily Sunni Muslim refugees as a demographic threat. Lebanon has refused to hold a census since 1932 lest the findings upset the precarious balance in its political system, which parcels out its top leadership posts based on religion.

Clearly Abuna and his friends saw in Trump someone they believed would be sympathetic to their plight. Fortunately, our political differences did not prevent Abuna from granting my English class his seal of approval.

Bqarlza is tucked away in the hills of Akkar. The occasional army helicopters overhead are a reminder of the war next door, but the village itself is sleepy, surrounded by the olive groves that drive much of its economy. If you changed its language and the architecture, the Maronite Christian enclave could easily pass for a small Texas town. The streets outside of Bqarzla are littered with shell casings and sometimes bird carcasses left by the local men who go out shooting every morning before dawn. Young people hang out at a couple of pool halls and a pizza shop. The neighbors take note of whether you went to church on Sunday.

The backdrop of many conversations I’ve had is a contentious history between Lebanon and Syria that dates back at least as far as 1976, the beginning of Syria’s three-decade occupation of Lebanon, shortly after the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war. There remains a complicated and sometimes fluid map of loyalties for and against the Syrian regime in the Lebanese political system and society.

Perhaps because I am an American, perhaps because there is a sense of recognition across complicated political landscapes, these conversations frequently come back around to the U.S. election. Local Lebanese acquaintances in Akkar told me before the election that they liked Trump because he is a zelameh (real man) or that they didn’t like either Trump or Clinton, but at least Trump would be something different. I might have heard the same things in any number of small towns back home.

A week before the U.S. presidential election, the Lebanese parliament settled on their own new president after a two-year standoff, and the battery of celebratory gunshots turned the streets of Akkar into a mock war zone. As supporters of Lebanese president-elect Michel Aoun commenced their jarring festivities, I was driving home from teaching a remedial French class to Syrian kids.

In the olive groves and empty lots in and around Bqarzla, Syrians live in scattered clusters of tents provided by the UNHCR, known in English as the United Nations’ Refugee Agency. Many of them, although registered as refugees, are not legally authorized to be in the country, leaving them in a tenuous position and largely restricted from traveling and working. For a couple of months in the fall most of them work the olive harvest, a brief bright spot before winter comes, the work dries up, and the rainy season tests the soundness of the plywood and plastic sheets reinforcing their makeshift homes.

From UNHCR, they get basic assistance with food and shelter. From the Lebanese government, they get the right to send their children to the local public school, which is largely abandoned by the Lebanese who send their children to private schools if they can scrape together the funds. NGOs like the one I volunteer with fill in some of the gaps, including supplemental classes to help children who are struggling in Lebanese schools.

In an English class I was teaching at one of the informal refugee camps the week before the election, we practiced saying what we did and didn’t like. Several of my Syrian students listed Trump among their dislikes, along with flies and traffic.

Mohammed, a quiet teenager from Aleppo with an easy smile, echoed my assessment of then-candidate Trump: “Huwweh majnoon.” (“He is crazy”).

The night before the U.S. presidential election, Samer and I dropped by one of the refugee camps in the olive groves outside of Bqarzla. We sat on the floor and drank black tea and mate with a group of young refugees from Hama.

It was cold and windy outside, but inside the tent, the family had set up their sobia, a wood burning stove, and the small room was soon warm enough that I took off my jacket. We didn’t talk about the election or the war in Syria. The next morning, I stared at the television in a stupor as Trump made his acceptance speech, interrupted briefly by one of Lebanon’s frequent power outages. I suddenly felt very far from home.

During the next day’s adult English class with the refugees, I joked that I needed to look for a husband from Canada.

“Why not Syria?” they joked back. “There are no problems there.”

The post An American in Lebanon Encounters Trump Supporters Far From Home appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This must be a publishing glitch of some type, I tell myself. Maybe someone spilled a bottle of ink across where I should have been. When I start to trace my pictures across the school years spanning grades four through seven, however, I realize this is no error but a recurring constant. It is, in fact, my unibrow—my decidedly Arab unibrow.

Somewhere around the age of 12, I vaguely remember arguing with my mother about severing my one eyebrow into two. She indicated that I was too young to be dealing with such things, to which I would whine back with my characteristic pre-teen, “Whyyy?” What were these “things” she referred to? Was she trying to spare me the frequent expenses associated with weekly visits to the eyebrow lady at the nearby salon? Was she trying to make sure I stayed fairly unattractive for as long as possible? Whatever her reason, I refused to settle, and continued to press my case with a passion befitting the Great Schism of 1054 . Laying the foundation for my future career as a lawyer, I settled my first case, getting my mother to accept a narrow separation of my two brows. With a small hint of a pair of eyebrows to face my remaining middle school days, I now had a little less to furrow about.

While this story of one young Arab girl’s struggle to tear her eyebrow asunder may sound like a recap from a recent Keeping Up with the Kardashians episode, the unibrow symbolizes something more than an obsession with personal aesthetics. My brow(s) were a symbol of my constant struggle to understand my cultural identity. Here I was an all-American kid growing up in Northern Virginia—the varsity cheerleader, the honor student, and later the sorority girl at the big football university. But I possessed this distinguishing feature that set me apart from my peers. I was so much of the same, and yet I was so different. Was I Lebanese? Was I American? Could I be a Lebanese-American? Or should I be an American-Lebanese?

My parents came to the United States in 1989, near the end of the Lebanese civil war. We made our big American debut in the most dramatic way: with my pregnant mother going into labor with my younger sister on the flight over. I grew up in a middle-class home in an affluent D.C. suburb, filled with the aroma of chicken shawarma, adorned with Lebanese artisanal decor, and set to the sounds of Arabic satellite TV. I had mostly white friends, many of whom had never traveled overseas before and couldn’t point to Lebanon on a map.

September 11th didn’t help. It created the appearance of a conflict between my being Lebanese (aka Arab) and being American. The ensuing war on terror thrust me into the business of constantly seeking to correct misunderstandings about the Arab and Muslim worlds (starting with the fact that the two aren’t synonymous). I often found myself clarifying, rather defensively, that I was a Lebanese Christian, though there is obviously nothing dishonorable about being a Muslim.

In the days following 9/11, my parents were very uneasy about how to respond to the backlash from Americans to the Arab world. “If anyone asks you where you are from, you tell them you are a Phoenician,” my father told us. This struck me as rather ludicrous, as I knew from school that the Phoenicians, who did in fact thrive in the Eastern Mediterranean at one point, had been a dead civilization for approximately three millenia. And it’s not like we’d moved in from Arizona.

Looking back on that moment now, I realize how concerned my parents must have been about our social environment. Suddenly every Arab became a threat to national security, portrayed as a potential suicide bomber, jihadist, or extremist. I would often get asked whether all the women in Lebanon were covered—as in covered in a hijab or burqa (which, if you have been to downtown Beirut, a party town if there ever was one, you know to be a preposterous question). I shared with everyone the fact that Lebanon was made up of a near perfect split between Muslims and Christians. Regardless of my efforts to champion the Arab identity, after 9/11, it definitely seemed wise to skirt around my feelings on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to avoid taking a stance on the Iraq/Afghanistan war, and to keep my mouth shut when the term “terrorist” was used casually in conversation to describe individuals wearing cultural head dresses. In an effort to avoid making waves, I would let plenty of stereotypes and jokes roll off my back.

This wasn’t always easy, given that I grew up immersed in my Lebanese-Greek Orthodox background. Not only did I grow up listening and watching Arabic satellite TV, but my parents spoke Arabic to my two sisters and me, we lived within a half-mile of nearly all of my mother’s five siblings and their children (our Thanksgiving table was set for 35), and we celebrated “our Easter” weeks after everyone else’s Easter and Spring Break had come and gone.

When my classmates were off at summer camp or some Caribbean vacation, my family and I were bound for at least five weeks at my grandmother’s home in northern Lebanon. I would spend my Arabian days and nights swimming in saltwater pools, gorging on homemade hummus and baaklava, and belly-dancing on the beaches of Byblos. For my parents, these trips were about going back home—not just to see their families, but to reengage with their own culture. I enjoyed these trips, but I never found that I could naturally fit in. I spent most of those vacations trying to hide my horrible American accent and settling on speaking Arabish—a mix of Arabic and English—and exhibiting a clear discomfort with the more glottal phrases. I couldn’t tell my cousins about the cool bar and bat mitzvahs I attended the year I turned 13, because “friends” and “Jewish” did not fit grammatically into the same Arabic sentence. I also could not grasp why I had to refrain from saying or doing certain things because they reflected poorly on my family. I was far too enamored with my American sense of autonomy to settle on these seemingly antiquated societal expectations.

This was the problem with my cultural unibrow: When my two sides confronted one another, things got, well, hairy. It always seemed that I was too Lebanese to be American, but also too American to be Lebanese. Trying to reconcile the two formed an unnatural union. Just as with my ever-converging set of eyebrows, it was much easier to deal with both sides when they were kept apart. I would throw on my Lebanese tarboosh and become the foreign femme in situations when I wanted to connect with others in a way that felt important, like when I traveled overseas, or when I met other foreigners, or when I wanted to challenge my American friends to remember that the world did not consist of the United States alone. Conversely, I’d slip on my baseball cap to remind myself that America had given me a life of opportunity, friends, education, and the proverbial freedoms and mobility I wouldn’t have had back in Lebanon. I wore either of my two sides when convenient, which did little to reconcile the cultural identity crisis I tried to keep at bay for so long.

My job these days entails focusing on Middle Eastern affairs and U.S. foreign policy, so I have managed to turn my personal effort at reconciling my two identities into my professional preoccupation as well. And there’s never a dull moment in this arena: Soon after settling into this work, the Middle East began its latest spiral into chaos, with the military coup in Egypt and Syria’s civil war and chemical warfare controversies.

Growing up in the post-9/11 world with revolution and war consuming the Middle East, being an Arab-American may seem one of the more anomalous of hyphenated identities. However, settling on being just an Arab or just an American would discount half of me. There is much beauty in being from both the Middle East and the United States, and so I will persist in dealing with my proverbial unibrow, trying to clean up that fuzzy middle area. But now that the unibrow has overgrown into other areas of my life, it looks like I’ll need a bigger set of tweezers.

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