AMIRA HURRIYA
I am a proud Southerner. Everything I know and love comes from the South. I love the humidity, the sound of cicadas singing in the summer, and my mother’s drawl. I love the magnolias and I love the way each area of our region has its own flavor and twang of what Southern-ness means. I love the way eastern Tennessee/Kentucky/West Virginia Appalachian bluegrass shares kinship with Southwest Louisiana Cajun banjo playing and Zydeco, its next-door neighbor. I love how barbecue specifics are a religion, and how I, as a Memphian, know you couldn’t dare compare our smoked ribs and spicy-and-sweet goodness to Carolina’s vinegar-based specialty or to Texas’s acclaimed no-sauce mandate.
But it’s not just the accents, food, and music that define the South. Nor is the South solely defined by the dark and tragic history of these lands, contrary to what the rest of the country and world might think. While this history remains and is seen in every single aspect of our present, the South is also defined by the Black and indigenous revolutionary power that has survived the onslaught of white supremacy, fascism, and settler colonialism over centuries. The Black freedom struggle, in particular, was a defining factor of the Old South and continues to be part of what many movement workers claim as the pro-Black, pro-immigrant, pro-queer, pro-worker New South.
Being from Memphis, where Martin Luther King was assassinated after boldly supporting the Black sanitation workers’ strike, I was made fully aware that to live on this land meant that I needed to inherit the responsibility of the Black freedom struggle. My place as a non-Black daughter of this land, and daughter of the diaspora of another land, meant that I needed to learn from the freedom fighters that came before, and work to put the lessons they left for us into practice for the rest of my life. It meant that I needed to see Black freedom as central to all freedom, and in particular, Palestinian freedom.
Aside from being a Southerner, I am also a very proud Palestinian. My lineage comes from freedom fighters on all sides. My paternal grandfather Hussein was a high-ranking leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) who, I was told, had a mafia-like persona and wielded power in the refugee camps of Amman, Jordan, where our family was displaced. My maternal grandfather was a white Methodist minister, active in the civil rights movement in Nashville, and a leader on the board of one of the first intentionally integrated (and later, one of the first pro-LGBTQ) churches in the city. Their church and our family were active in supporting the civil rights struggle locally in many ways that I am still learning about to this day. He did this through his understanding and practice of liberation theology. He did it with humility, grace—always behind the scenes.
My mother, who inherited her father’s care and love for the people, has been an activist her entire life and is often regarded as a “movement mother” in Memphis. Throughout her nearly seventy years of life, her work has spanned from organizing against building nuclear power plants in rural Tennessee, to protesting the Vietnam War, to teaching public school for nearly fifteen years, to serving as one of the key Palestine solidarity organizers in Memphis, to founding and leading a Memphis mutual aid collective for migrants traveling through the city. She is also a forty-three-year practicing Buddhist, who raised me, not only to fight for social revolution but also, as we call it in our community, “human revolution”—the transformation of our internal karma hand-in-hand with the karma of the world around us. The Buddhist community I was raised in was predominantly Black, Japanese, and white, and also very queer. My neighborhood was also a historically queer neighborhood in Memphis and the South. I am proud to have been raised by lesbian, gay, and bisexual uncles and aunties who taught me to be as free as I desired, and to do it with a fighting spirit.
My father is Palestinian, born in (ever-expanding) exile. Our family comes from the village of Bayt Jubreen (meaning house of the powerful), which was outside al-Khalil (Hebron). In terms of its legacy of resistance, this area is geographically, linguistically, culturally, and also politically, often seen as the Palestinian equivalent of the U.S. South. Six months after the Nakba of May 1948, our village was bombed by the Israeli military in Operation Yoav, which led to massacres in the town’s center and a mass exodus of all survivors, including my family.
They were first exiled to Aida refugee camp and, years later, exiled again to Dheisheh refugee camp, where my father was born. Then, during the 1967 War, my father and sixteen of his brothers and sisters were displaced for the final time to al-Wihdat refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, where they have remained ever since. My grandparents, rest in power, died there in exile in 2008. After more than fifty years, I was the first of my entire family to be able to return to Palestine. It was one of the greatest honors of my life, and I can’t wait to develop a deeper relationship to our land.
My father was the first member of our family to leave the refugee camp, emigrating to the United States in the 1980s. A hustler and a felon, he did odd jobs and changed his identity often. He was dark skinned and charming; wearing an old leather jacket and always with a cigarette in hand, he often referred to himself as the Palestinian Sylvester Stallone. He was also a very damaged person who suffered from mental illness and was extremely abusive to my mother, my sister, and me for many years. Domestic violence defined most of my childhood, and I grew up in and outside of shelters, on the run, and in hiding in family friends’ basements. Somehow, we managed to escape his wrath when I was seven, and my mother resiliently raised us with feminist values, to defy death and injustice at all costs. In some ways, I saw more of that fighting Palestinian spirit in my mother than I did in my father, who, in contrast, I saw eaten alive by oppression. We left him twenty years ago. I have not seen him since.
My Palestinian identity is not a part of me; it is the whole me. My Southern identity is not a part of me; it is the whole me. Even being raised mostly by my mother, I’ve always been reminded of who I was. Whether it was my Muslim identity and experiences at the Islamic school I attended through much of my childhood; or my father’s combination of Southernized broken English and Palestinian Arabic that I grew up speaking; or my mother’s constantly reminding me of the powerful land and people I come from, I was always conscious of what it meant to be a Palestinian. Even though it’s possible that I may never be able to see my larger family again, I know, every time I look down at my brown-olive skin, where I come from.
This does not mean I wasn’t questioned or told who I was—on the contrary. Because of my brown skin tone, big curly hair, and feminine presentation, I was often seen as Latinx. People never believed, because of stereotypes they had in their heads about our culture, that I could be an Arab woman, since I didn’t wear a hijab. A crop-top-wearing, nose-pierced Palestinian? No way. As for my queerness, it was equally questioned. Most people decided to see me based on their own narratives, which had nothing to do with me.
Amira, hours after visiting Palestine for the first time, and being the first person in her family to return home in over 50 years, March 2014
Photo courtesy of the author
My queer “half” sister (same mother, different father), eleven years older than I, often protected me from my father’s abuse. She was cool, goth, always dressed in black, and bisexual. Growing up around her and her friends, and growing up in a queer Buddhist community and queer neighborhood, were all huge influences on me. At school and around my friends, I felt like a freak for knowing that I had crushes on girls, but in my community outside school, I was reminded that there was a precedent. I may not have known other young kids who felt this way, but I knew people all around me outside of school who did. I couldn’t be that much of a freak, could I? Were there other young brown girls who also felt this way? Was I the only one?
Secretly, I knew I was queer from the age of seven. The first time I realized it was when I was playing Barbies during a sleepover, and I tried to kiss my best friend, a young Syrian girl who went to my Islamic school. To escape the shame I would feel if she potentially told on me, I ran to her mother to tell on her first. The need for my silence and secrecy around my desires was only verified by the shame I saw my friend experience with her parents and my father. Thankfully, my sexuality was a nonissue with my mother, but I continued to deny it to my friends in high school, who were all straight.
However, it wasn’t until college that I came into my full self, when I realized I could be bi—loving women, men, and people of all genders (and no genders), rather than being forced to “choose a side.” The binaries I grew up escaping hit a new high, when I realized that I identified as nonbinary, and that what I had attached to “womanhood” was actually what it meant to be a femme in the radically politicized sense of the word. It had nothing to do with being either a “man” or “woman.” I could be neither, all of it, something in between—but in all ways an extremely extra, always doin’-the-most, crop-top and lipstick wearing, nonbinary Palestinian femme.
So what is my identity? I’m a working class, Palestinian, queer, Buddhist, socialist, Southerner. I exist in no binaries. I’m all of it and then some. Satsumas and sumac, cicadas and cardamom, Fairuz and the Staple Singers, Ella Baker and Ghassan Kanafani-taught, banjos and ouds, cowgirl boots and tatreez, porch swings and the call to prayer, and in all ways, steadfast—or sumud.