Syria, Somalia, and Soccer

On a warm Friday evening, most of the lights were out at the Coffman Union bookstore on the U of M campus. In the back, though (the place is the size of a department store), a hundred chairs were set up and people milled about, greeting one another and conversing in English, Arabic, and Somali. Some of the women were covered; most, however, weren’t. In typical Arab fashion, the scheduled program started a little bit late.

Kathryn Haddad eventually stepped to the podium. “Welcome, everybody, to the release of the eighteenth edition of Mizna, the United States’ only Arab-American literary journal.”

Mizna began in Minneapolis in 1999 as the brainchild of Haddad, a playwright who is also the journal’s director. These days, it’s in libraries and universities all over the country and the world, and has received honors from the Utne Reader and Pushcart Press.
Between the program’s opening, a moment of silence for the wars in the Middle East, its closing, coffee and sweets, and a peaceful Minnesota evening, there were readings from Mizna’s new issue. The inspiration for the material fell between those disparate worlds, too.

The crowd members’ diversity, shared equally among Arab-Americans, African-Americans, and European-Americans, was rather unique for a literary event in Minnesota. The third of these groups was primarily middle-aged and seemed mostly indifferent to fashion, favoring instead practical clothing, canvas bags, and pins with messages. At least three pre-program discussions were fueled by loathing for the current administration. The Arab-Americans and the African-Americans, who were mostly Somali, appeared, in general, more professional in their style and less overtly liberal.

The first reader, Ahmed Yusuf, was Somali, which seemed slightly incongruous given Mizna’s focus. “We struggled with that for a while,” said Haddad after the event, “but we eventually decided to include anyone who can speak to the Arab-American community.” Yusuf’s sing-song delivery of a story about an underdog soccer team from a blighted Somali town addressed sport, rivalries, and war-induced poverty—subjects that would surely have resonated in most Middle Eastern countries. Yusuf rolled his r’s just like an Arab, so delicately that even if he had spoken about raids, interrogations, and external rendition, the inattentive would easily have been lulled into thinking his words were almost sweet. They’re not, of course, and politics were understandably at the heart of many of the other featured readings.

The subject matter wasn’t all the expected politics, however; the readings didn’t always begin and end with a pro-Palestine stance and anti-Bush rants. Poet and playwright Ismail Khalidi was born in Lebanon but grew up in Chicago. In the two poems he read, he directed the same vitriol toward “Chicago’s finest” as he did toward the occupiers of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. While the first arrested him on the way to sunrise prayers and barked ignorant orders, the second “stripped Gaza of their pride and ego.” Khalidi questioned the motivations of the police with as much heartache as he questioned Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet, about a proper response in the face of Israeli occupation.

Brooke Anthony, a volunteer at KFAI radio, read two poems inspired by news coverage of the war in Iraq. She looked every bit the longtime activist behind the podium, a woman opposed to war on general peace-loving principle. As a native-English speaker, she didn’t quite pronounce the names in her poem correctly—the kh in Khayat sounded like a straight hard k, not a soft, gentle, throat-clearing sort of kh. And the r in Ibrahim didn’t roll as charmingly as Ahmed Yusuf’s r’s. In a way, through her imperfect language, Anthony showed that the American cultural struggle to blend aspects of ourselves isn’t restricted to newcomers.

Amid all the strife and difference, this blending, as individuals and as Americans, is at its sweetest when there is a recognizable common ground. Mazen Halabi, who was born in Syria and now works as a software consultant in Fridley, approached the podium with the humble grin of someone who more often reads to his children than to a crowd. His voice gaining in confidence, he told a story of his childhood in Damascus. With the tale’s adolescent humor and grumpy sandwich vendors, Halabi painted a picture that didn’t sound much different from that of a Minnesotan childhood’s—until a friend was taken away by secret police working for the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad. But then, grieving mothers are common to stories from all over, too.

Amid Somali soccer matches, the Chicago police, the anti-war movement, and the secret police, the topic of a poem by P.A. Pashubin, a Polish-American, stood out. She compared the plant purslane to Republicans. While it’s considered a garden weed in this country, several pairs of Arab eyes lit up as she passed around samples of the leafy culprit. “I know this,” one man said. “This is baqli, we use it in fatoush.” The traditional salad of Lebanon, fatoush is served at every important meal. What is viewed as pernicious here is regarded as delicious in a country somewhere else in the world, and as the purslane made the rounds, that typically contradictory notion was not so much reconciled as recognized.


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