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Lina
A young Palestinian Chilean American college graduate who cannot find a job, which frightens him because, without one, he will not be able to marry Nadine, the Palestinian girl on whom he has set his sights. Passionate about improving American media and interested in becoming a war correspondent, he interns at a community television station and then the United Nations office of Qatari media giant Al Jazeera. Although his boss loves him and the internship goes marvelously, he realizes that he has a scarce chance of finding another media job as an Arab with the name of an Arab media organization on his résumé. After applying for almost 1,000 jobs, including (reluctantly) for translator positions at the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration, he still has no prospects at the end of Bayoumi’s portrait and does not know whether he will be able to marry Nadine. His sense of hopelessness, uncertainty, and powerless shows the insidious and cyclical nature of contemporary discrimination against Arabs and Muslims—Omar’s prospective employers, it seems, never take him seriously because they cannot get past the identity his résumé signals, just as so many Americans cannot push back the veil of stereotype to see the humanity and complex experiences of Arabs and Muslims in the United States.
Omar Quotes in How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?
The How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? quotes below are all either spoken by Omar or refer to Omar. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Omar
Quotes
“But look, Omar,” she said. “I'm a friend of your family. And just for the future, I'd like to warn you.” She paused. “This,” she said, pointing to the line on his résumé that Omar was most proud of, his work at Al Jazeera, “this could work against you in the future. Especially if you want to get work with people who feel threatened by the whole Arab thing.”
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“Look. It's like this,” Eyad, a portly young Egyptian, explained to me. He leaned in to the table and put his weight behind his words. “Before, they went after the Jews, the Italians, the Irish. And now it's our turn. Everybody gets their turn. Now it's just the Muslims.” He leaned back. To my ears these young men were living uneasily in an unresolved contradiction.
They acknowledged that the rights of Muslims were being unfairly trampled on, but they were seduced by the lure of owning a marketable skill (the Arabic language) that was currently in high demand. What they didn't voice was the idea that the culture of the FBI would be changed by their contributions to the Bureau or that civic participation was calling them to serve. They saw an open avenue, wide and empty of traffic, to a job, a profession, a career. It was as if the grinding pressure on their generation to succeed at any cost was taking precedence over everything else.
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Omar Quotes in How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?
The How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? quotes below are all either spoken by Omar or refer to Omar. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Omar
Quotes
“But look, Omar,” she said. “I'm a friend of your family. And just for the future, I'd like to warn you.” She paused. “This,” she said, pointing to the line on his résumé that Omar was most proud of, his work at Al Jazeera, “this could work against you in the future. Especially if you want to get work with people who feel threatened by the whole Arab thing.”
Related Characters:
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
“Look. It's like this,” Eyad, a portly young Egyptian, explained to me. He leaned in to the table and put his weight behind his words. “Before, they went after the Jews, the Italians, the Irish. And now it's our turn. Everybody gets their turn. Now it's just the Muslims.” He leaned back. To my ears these young men were living uneasily in an unresolved contradiction.
They acknowledged that the rights of Muslims were being unfairly trampled on, but they were seduced by the lure of owning a marketable skill (the Arabic language) that was currently in high demand. What they didn't voice was the idea that the culture of the FBI would be changed by their contributions to the Bureau or that civic participation was calling them to serve. They saw an open avenue, wide and empty of traffic, to a job, a profession, a career. It was as if the grinding pressure on their generation to succeed at any cost was taking precedence over everything else.
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