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January 12, 2022 - Image 8

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

SO WE CAN STAY TOGETHER

STAY SAFE
MASK UP

GET BOOSTED

Learn more about getting a booster shot:
campusblueprint.umich.edu/vaccine

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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