Washington Post
Aug 28 2014
On growing up in Ferguson and Palestine
By Naomi Shihab Nye , Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
grew up in Ferguson, Mo. No one ever heard of it, unless you lived
elsewhere in St. Louis County.
Then my family moved to Palestine – my father’s first home. A friend
says, “Your parents really picked the garden spots.”
In Ferguson, an invisible line separated white and black communities.
In Jerusalem, a no-man’s land separated people, designated by barbed
wire.
* * *
My father and his family became refugees in 1948, when the state of
Israel was created. They lost everything but their lives and memories.
Disenfranchised Palestinians ended up in refugee camps or scattered
around the world. My dad found himself in Kansas, then moved to
Missouri with his American bride. He seemed a little shell-shocked
when I was a child.
Ferguson was a leafy green historic suburb with a gracious red brick
elementary school called Central. I loved that school, attending
kindergarten through sixth grade there. All my classmates were white,
of various derivations – Italians, French-Canadians, etc. My father
was the only Arab in Ferguson. But he ran for the school board and
won.
At 12, I took a berry-picking job on “Missouri’s oldest organic farm”
in Ferguson. I wanted the job because I had noticed that the other
berry-pickers were all black boys. I’d always been curious about the
kids living right down the road whom we hardly ever got to see.
We had contests to see who could pick the most in the searing
humidity. I had obliterated Ferguson’s “line.” I felt a secret pride.
My mom often warned, “Be your best self.” This seemed odd.
It would be 1968 before the Supreme Court ordered U.S. states to
dismantle segregated school systems and Ferguson began mixing it up.
We were gone by then.
* * *
In 1966, my father took our family to the West Bank. I was the only
non-Armenian attending the ancient Armenian school in Jerusalem’s Old
City. It was fine to be “the other” for a change, but I wished we
could have Jewish friends too. And I wished the Jewish Israelis we
weren’t seeing across that line could know the families of Palestine
as we did, sharing their humble parties under blossoming almond trees.
Our father said that, when he was a boy, Jews and Arabs had been
mixed together, neighbors. Now there was power and domination at
stake.
Dominate – to exercise control over. Black kids in streets. Thousands
of Palestinian families.
In 1967, with the Six Day War brewing, my family left Jerusalem. We
settled in San Antonio, a majority Latino city, which felt like a
relief. White and black people were minorities. There weren’t any
lines. Maybe in the air, and in history. But people kept crossing
them.
My father, a newspaper journalist, eventually left San Antonio for
another paper, I ended up attending college here and have remained
until now. We have our first African American female mayor in history.
Back in Israel/Palestine, nothing improved for the Palestinians and
they were always blamed for it. A gigantic ominous “Separation Wall”
was built. Americans elected a half-and-half president twice, which
gave many of us great hope.
Summer 2014, the news exploded.
Massacres in Gaza – not the first time – people who looked exactly
like our Arab families. Regular people. Kids. Sleeping kids. No tanks,
no army, no due process of any kind, but they were blasted out of
their lives.
Was anyone civilized? A Jewish friend sent me a one-word message that
he seemed to be sending out to everyone he knew: STOP!
What could we do?
Of course, we wished Hamas would stop sending reckless rockets into
Israel, provoking oversized responses. Why didn’t the news examine
those back stories more? Oppression makes people do desperate things.
I am frankly surprised the entire Palestinian population hasn’t gone
crazy. If the U.S. can’t see that Palestinians have been mightily
oppressed since 1948, they really are not interested in looking, are
they? And we keep sending weapons and money to Israel, pretending we’d
prefer peace.
We send weapons to Ferguson, too.
After unarmed teenager Michael Brown was shot, quiet old Ferguson took
over the news. Citizens marching, chest placards, “I’M A MAN TOO”
“DON’T SHOOT.” It’s easy to see how delusions of equality in Ferguson
– where a white officer might raise a gun against an unarmed black kid
– are simply wrong.
Why is that harder for people to see about Gaza?
People in Gaza actually sent messages of solidarity to Ferguson –
Internet petitions signed by Gazan citizens. I thought I was
hallucinating. What if they could all march together? 1.8 million
Gazans would really clog old Florissant Avenue.
To my knowledge, Israelis have never yet been called militants by the
American press, even when they blast whole families to oblivion. It’s
just “defense.” A newscaster described Ferguson as “a series of stings
and hurts.” Try the open-air prison enclave of Gaza for stings and
hurts.
On the news, a Kuwaiti running a Ferguson grocery says his store has
been looted. I think, “He’s the Arab there now.”
Things will change again in Ferguson. Historic inequities in that
community will be reexamined, no one will be able to pretend they
don’t exist. But will we examine them in other communities too?
Will things change for Gaza? If they don’t, this nightmare of worst
selves will keep happening and happening. Look, it already has. And
what gets better? Will the United States ever speak out in solidarity
with scores of exhausted people burying their dead, staring up with
stunned eyes, mystified?
From: A. Papazian
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/28/on-growing-up-in-ferguson-and-gaza/