Arab American Identities Theme Analysis

Bayoumi emphasizes and attempts to circumvent the dangerous American assumption that all Arabs and Muslims are somehow the same. His subjects come from a variety of national backgrounds and identify to varying degrees with their nations; the label “Arab” does not fully capture any of their identities any more than the label “American” does. Ultimately, Bayoumi shows not only how the youths he profiles actively define their identities in complex ways, only some of which depend on the places where they and their parents have lived, but also how all identity is complex and all labels are imprecise.

American discourse flattens Arabs and Muslims into a uniform category based on stereotypes. Americans tend to use the words “Arab” and “Muslim” interchangeably but forget the vast differences between them: “Arab” is an ethnic identification and “Muslim” a religious one, the “Arab world” is not the same thing as the “Middle East,” the majority of Muslims are not Arab, and the majority of American Arabs are not Muslim. American Arabs also come from dozens of countries with distinct cultural traditions and political histories (and American Muslims from an even wider variety of places). The American notion of “Arab” or “Muslim” usually refers to people from Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia, and the Levant, in addition to Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (whose majority populations are not ethnically Arab). Yet Bayoumi’s subjects often see their families’ complex stories reduced to this category of the “Muslim Arab” (with “terrorist” often implied). Sade, Sami, and Akram hear their peers cheer that the American military should kill “those Arabs,” all Iraqis, and the ambiguous “them.”

Bayoumi’s subjects actually define themselves in a variety of ways, through a variety of labels that demonstrate the diversity often effaced by the American insistence on the simple categories “Arab” and “Muslim.” Omar and Akram grow up scarcely identifying with their Palestinian heritage, but it becomes much more central to their concepts of self after they visit Palestine. Omar decides to have a traditional Palestinian wedding because, “since we have no country […] the only thing we have is our identity.” Akram decides to move to Dubai to learn Arabic and connect more deeply with his culture. Neither of them is particularly religious, however. In contrast, Rami is also a Palestinian American Muslim, but his religious identity is far more important to him than his national one. (Contrary to stereotypes, he and his friends Ezzat and Mohammad are far more religious than their immigrant parents.) Rasha and Lina’s identities depend centrally on the violence in their countries of origin, which they fled to come to the United States. After the Iraq War, Lina and her husband Laith realize that their identity is tied to a version of their country that no longer exists. Bayoumi’s subjects have other identities besides their Arab ones as well: Omar is half-Chilean, spent five years living in Chile in his childhood, and speaks fluent Spanish. Yasmin is both Egyptian and Filipina but identifies primarily with her religion; Sami is Egyptian, Palestinian, and Christian, but identifies most of all with New York City. In the limited American imagination of Muslims and Arabs, these varied identities are often erased.

The people Bayoumi profiles also identify as American, which they often find difficult to reconcile with their various Arab identities. They succeed not by balancing loyalties or choosing one side or the other, but by integrating their Arabness and Americanness, which become two parts of their more complex identities. Rasha adores the freedom of expression she gets in the United States (but never had in Syria) and retains the “hard fragility” of “a pessimist brimming with humanist hope,” despite her horror at being detained by the government. Akram loves Brooklyn’s incredible diversity, yet also decides to leave the United States for Dubai because he sees the racism and essentialism that form the flipside of America’s incredible capacity for tolerance. Bayoumi emphasizes this split: the United States tends to either exalt Arabs as “exceptional assimilated immigrant[s]” or vilify them as “violent fundamentalist[s], with very little room in between.” Sami’s tattoo elegantly captures the way he combines his Arab and American identities: the memorial light beams that illuminate where the Twin Towers stood every September 11 after the attack, with the words “always remembered, never forgotten” in Arabic. It shows his simultaneous love for the United States, devastation by the September 11 attacks, and Arab pride.

Ultimately, Bayoumi suggests that it is impossible to understand people through a label because people are not born into a box. Rami, who dedicates his life to building cultural understanding in America and teaching Muslims to live more benevolently, has far more in common with a Christian pastor than he does with Akram, a fellow Palestinian Muslim, who decides to leave America for a place that readily accepts him. When someone primarily describes someone else as “Arab” or “Muslim,” identity—which is really a kind of tool for grouping similar experiences—is being conflated with essence. Bayoumi aims to remedy this with portraits that do not claim to show the entirety of the Arab or Muslim American experience, but rather point to certain continuities and differences among the variety of such experiences.