The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Michigan in Color
8 — Wednesday, January 12, 2022 

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In high school when I was struggling with 
my sexuality, my future always looked blurry. 
Whenever I would think about my late 20s and 
30s, I had no idea what my romantic life would 
look like. Everything was in the air. Would I 
ever come out? Would my family accept me? 
Would I ever be comfortable with who I am? 
Growing up as a closeted bisexual, I never 
really believed in love. I remember seeing 
Instagram posts in high school with captions 
writing about how in love the pictured people 
were, and I would ask myself how 16- and 
17-year-olds could possibly know what love is. 
Looking back, I was just entertaining a very 
naive perception I had of others in love. I was 
jealous of everyone else dating and finding 
love interests; I wanted to be “normal” and 
easily find a partner, but that wasn’t my reality. 
Though I knew most of my friends would be 
accepting, I wasn’t ready to come out and was 
far from the idea of pursuing a relationship.

Though I dated girls when I was young, I 
knew that these relationships wouldn’t last. 
These romances were short-lived and made 
me feel better about myself. Yes, I knew I was 
gay, but these relationships were experiences 
that society and heteronormativity forced me 
to have. I didn’t come to terms with my sexual-
ity until the middle of high school. Before then, 
I only had experiences with girls and hadn’t 
yet developed an attraction for guys. As these 
relationships ended and as I got older, I had to 
come to terms with who I was and “explore” a 
new side of myself I couldn’t ignore. 
In an attempt to explore my identity, I 
(unfortunately) downloaded Grindr, a “social 
media” app for gay men. As a 19-year-old 
newly-out person, I wanted to check out this 
community and what it had to offer. Though 
I wasn’t on the app to find love, it was a very 
… informative experience on what hook-up 
culture was like in the community. I had only 
come out a couple of months prior and was 
ready to check out this side of my sexuality, but 
I was definitely not trying to find love — espe-
cially through Grindr. 

After being on the app for a couple of 
months, I met a guy who was different from 
the others I’d met. We had only met each other 
twice when I realized there was a connection 
that I had never experienced before. The sec-
ond time we met, we stayed up late into the 
night and talked for hours — constantly find-
ing things we had in common. Whether it was 
finally being able to experience what straight 
people often take for granted, or simply being 
happy that I was able to express romantic 
emotions, I was excited to feel normal in the 
privacy of my apartment, free from society’s 
judgment. 
During this time, I was sharing a one-bed-
room apartment with a roommate who ended 
up moving out, giving me and my new roman-
tic interest the opportunity to spend a lot more 
time with one other. He would come over, we 
would make dinner, drink wine and watch a 
movie. Back then, this was the only thing that 
was getting me through my Zoom classes and 
feelings of isolation in my lonely apartment. 
It was an experience that was so exciting and 
new. When he was over, everything felt so 

normal — something I never thought I would 
experience.
Little did I know back then that I was fall-
ing in love. These moments felt so normal yet 
were the most exciting times of my daily life. If 
someone would’ve told me a year earlier that I 
would have someone I loved, I would’ve never 
believed them. 
Soon, these exciting dinner moments 
turned into an everyday thing. He slowly 

began to bring his things into my apartment. 
His toothbrush and contact holder for just-in-
case situations ended up next to mine in my 
bathroom. Then came an extra day’s worth of 
clothes in his backpack, followed by his next 
day’s worth of Zoom school work, and all of a 
sudden his wardrobe was sharing what was 
now our closet. 

I think about death daily. It might be 
morbid, but meditating on the grand-
est mystery of our existence gives me 
a certain kind of comfort that you can’t 
get from anywhere else. 
Our modern American culture has 
no time for pondering or praying. No 
time for meditation. No time to imag-
ine. There is no time for the mystical 
when we’re trapped on an egotistical 
carousel of capital accumulation and 
exploitation. We have been condi-
tioned to spend our lives in service 
to our senses, entertaining ourselves 
with an excess of foods to eat, alco-
hol to drink, drugs to use, clothes to 
wear and media to mindlessly indulge 
in. And if we’re not doing that, we’re 
wearily working ourselves, intermina-
bly in pursuit of a comfortable career 
to uphold these luxurious lifestyles. 
What this way of living doesn’t entail 

is an engagement beyond what can 
only be perceived with our five senses 
or understood by an interim intellect. 
We all know these subjective, short-
lived sources of pleasure that we pride 
and provide ourselves with are always 
transient 
sources 
of 
gratification, 
yet we fill our days and nights chas-
ing them, woefully missing out on the 
bliss that comes from connecting to 
the divine, the eternal absolute, which 
lasts forever. 
A friend of mine once said that our 
relationship to death informs our rela-
tionship to all endings in life. Or, as 
American author Steve Bouma-Pre-
diger puts it, our “eschatology shapes 
(our) ethics.” Our attitude toward the 
ending of a day, a season, a year, an 
era, a class, a club, a project, a semes-
ter, a friendship, a romance, a piece of 
art, everything in our lives is a direct 
reflection of our attitude toward the 
end of our life — and what lies beyond. 

Since 1978, “Orientalism,” by late Pal-
estinian-American 
academic 
Edward 
Said, has served as the basis for many 
academic courses focused on West Asia 
and North Africa. Widely considered one 
of the first works of postcolonial theory, 
it describes the West’s misperception 
and misrepresentation of the “Orient” 
— a term used by Westerners to identify 
Africa, Asia and their inhabitants in an 
exoticized and often disparaging way. 
But despite challenging Western aca-
demia and creating positive shifts within 
it, Said’s work also has major shortcom-
ings that must be recognized, specifically 
regarding the narratives of indigenous 
minority groups in West Asia and North 
Africa. 
In “Orientalism,” Said describes the 
West’s harmful tendency of generalizing 
the “Orient” as one region with indis-
tinct societies, cultures, structures and 
other qualities. This is most often done 

through art, as architectural styles and 
stereotypical clothing from one particu-
lar region appear in pieces meant to rep-
resent a completely different place. The 
generalization of different people groups 
and regions creates a false image of them, 
as their distinctiveness is erased. Fur-
ther highlighting Orientalism’s harm-
ful impacts, Said states, “the Orient and 
Islam have a kind of extra-real, phenom-
enologically reduced status that puts 
them out of reach of everyone except the 
Western expert. From the beginning of 
Western speculation about the Orient, 

the one thing the Orient could not do was 
to represent itself.”
Everything Said stated regarding 
Western notions of Africa and Asia holds 
true. However, the irony behind Said’s 
argument lies in his own flawed concep-
tion of West Asia and North Africa. When 
describing the region, Said employs the 
terms “Arab World” and “Islamic World.” 
He often uses them interchangeably, fail-
ing to underscore the difference between 
the two. Noting this distinction is essen-
tial when challenging Western notions, 
which regard Arabs and Muslims synony-
mously despite one being an ethnic group 
and another being a religious group. 
Furthermore, not only did he employ 
the terms with minimal distinction, he 
also used them to represent a region with 
many non-Arab and non-Muslim identi-
ties. Minority groups such as Imazighen 
and Kurds typically do not fit the former 
category, those such as Arab Christians 
do not fit the latter, and others such as 
Armenians, Assyrians, Mandaeans and 
Yazidis fit neither of them. Nevertheless, 
they all natively reside in West Asia or 

North Africa, which Said mainly identi-
fies with Arabs and Muslims. Uncoinci-
dentally, the groups in the last category 
have faced the most erasure throughout 
history because not only are they mis-
understood by Westerners, but they are 
also misunderstood by the larger, typi-
cally Arab and/or Muslim groups from 
the same region. Using the terms “Arab 
World” and “Islamic World” further 
contributes to this erasure, as they fail 
to capture the diversity of the region by 
assigning it to a single identity. 
Said’s disregard for minority groups in 

his works on West Asia and North Africa 
has contributed to misconceptions by 
majority groups from the region. Many 
fail to understand that “Orientalism” was 
written from an occidental perspective, 
meaning its target audience was West-
ern, mainly white, readers, not minorities 
native to the region. When minorities dis-
cuss the marginalization, discrimination 
and oppression their groups have under-
gone in their homelands, many members 
of majority groups use arguments from 
“Orientalism” and similar works against 
them. For example, many will deny the 
distinct identities of minorities, accusing 
them of having their identities influenced 
by the West’s negative perceptions of 
Arabs and Muslims. Ignorant responses 
as such add to the irony, as minorities 
were not just affected by Orientalism 
like their majority counterparts, but also 
impacted by it to a greater degree due to 
the lack of knowledge and active erasure 
of their identities in the first place.
In particular, the case of the Assyrians 
provides a classic example of a minority 
group enduring oppression and misrep-
resentation from both Westerners and 
regional groups. As an ethnic minority 
that mainly practices Christianity, Assyr-
ians have faced persecution for their eth-
nic and religious identities throughout 
history. Subsequent wars, ethnic cleans-
ing and religious persecution in recent 
years have uprooted Assyrians from 
their indigenous homeland — regions 
of northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, 
northwestern Iran and northeastern 
Syria. Today, the overwhelming major-
ity of them live in the West, where they 
continue to face a lack of representation. 
In southeast Michigan, for example, 
Assyrians who mainly identify with their 
religious affiliation, Chaldean Catho-
lic — an identification used as a conse-
quence of the issues at hand — comprise 
a community of 160,000 people, possibly 
greater than the number of Assyrians 
currently in Iraq, which stands at as little 
as 142,000. For reference, approximately 
500,000 Assyrians reside in the U.S.
One would expect more information 
to be available about such a large group 
in the diaspora, but to Assyrians this 
absence is not surprising. Much of the 
information about Assyrians online is 
inaccurate or deliberately divisive due to 
long-lasting impacts of ethnic repression 
in their home nations and Orientalist nar-
ratives pushed by Western missionaries.

There’s no mistake. They’re home.
Children, even those with just an 
ounce of sneakiness, look for cues to 
alert them of when their parents arrive 
home. The sound of gravel being uni-
formly crunched by wheels can serve 
as a signal to hide any evidence of the 
candy we overindulged in or a sign to 
abruptly turn off video game consoles. 
One source of stimuli I seldom missed 
was a distinct blend of scents. Usually 
generated from the manual labor jobs 
my parents are employed in, this lin-
gering concoction of smells could only 
be achieved over the span of several 
hours, the duration required for grease, 
gasoline and sweat to slowly embed 
themselves between individual cotton 
fibers. 
These aforementioned scents would 
arrive 
at 
two 
intervals 
clustered 
around the late evening, which is often 
when I’d either be reading about cur-
rent events or completing homework. 
The former activity was a favorite 
pastime of mine. I was a gluttonous 
inquisitor that consistently consumed 

articles through Business Insider and 
Bloomberg (prior to the existence of 
their paywalls). Regardless, I’d bury 
my attention into textbooks or digi-
tal screens as my parents attempted 
to decompress after an arduous day 
of work. This exact scenario unfolded 
over countless evenings throughout 
high school. Our household’s seeming-
ly mundane routine proved to be trans-
formative with each passing day, as I 
was becoming more embedded in dif-
ferent environments, like speech and 
debate club and eventually college, and 
drifting further away from the spaces 
my parents are left behind in.
Social class has outsized influence 
over the connections a person forms 
based on physical and relational prox-
imity, and these connections serve as 
important conduits for a wide spectrum 
of knowledge. Sociologists often refer 
to these concepts as social and cul-
tural capital respectively. The advent 
of the Internet, and the tools and ser-
vices that have followed, like Coursera 
and Google’s search engine, have often 
been promoted as great equalizers of 
information and opportunity. 

Self-acceptance through love

Endings as beginnings
“Orientalism” and minority groups in West Asia 
and North Africa

The information bubble of my 
working class family

Design by Rita Sayegh/MiC

Courtesy of Neil Joseph Nakkash/MiC

HUGO QUINTANA
MiC Columnist

KARIS CLARK
MiC Columnist

NEIL JOSEPH NAKKASH
MiC Columnist

GUSTAVO SACRAMENTO
MiC Columnist

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Read more at MichiganDaily.com
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