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 Read more at MichiganDaily.com Read more at MichiganDaily.com