In my dreams, Nadine loves me. She writes me long letters full of passion about ideas. She is honest, she tells me how she feels about me, even the critical things, so I have the chance to apologize, or try to change. She gives me a chance. Or, on good nights, she just accepts me for who I am. She laughs, she is strong and she loves herself very much. She gives to the people she wants to give to, she runs and plays and works and smiles and writes me letters. She makes phone calls to me on my birthday. She hasn't forgotten about me or changed her mind or turned her back.
In my dreams I can tell Nadine exactly how I feel, angry and loving, and she listens without swallowing my anger or spitting it back at me. She hears me, and we talk it out. We might not agree, and she may be angry, too, but we don't leave each other. We joke around and eat dinner and understand each other better than we did before any confrontation.
Yes, in my dreams, Nadine loves me.

Dear Nadine, I would send this to you if I didn't know you would return it unopened.
Dear Nadine, what are the ways that I failed you?
Which is worse, that I couldn't hear you, or that I couldn't speak?

It was during the gulf war that you told me that you never knew I was part Arab. We had known each other for eight years. Since I had studied Hebrew in High School, and since most Semitic people in south Florida are Jewish, you had assumed I was a Jew. It was not who I was mistaken for that threw me, but how long I had remained unseen.
What does it say about our friendship, or about my identity and my silence around it, that you did not know about this part of me? In some ways, I can't blame you for not knowing. Most people can't guess my ethnicity by looking at me, possibly because I don't wear embroidered scarves or ululate regularly. There are others who find my ethnic identity quite handy. When they make mental lists of their ÒFriends and Acquaintances of Color,Ó they can squeeze me in. ÒWell, there's Mary, she's half Arab.Ó They score extra points in politically correct circles, since Arabs are harder to find than some other people of color, and in vogue since the Intifadah.
How other Arabs see me is another story. ÒShe looks like your wife,Ó I remember a man telling my father in Palestine. ÒYour other children are more Syrian, more Oriental.Ó I do have a lot of my mother's Irish in me. I'm a pretty even combination, actually, but I could look Greek. Or ÒSpanish.Ó Or Turkish. Or Jewish. Or Irish. Or.... I think the most important part of my identity, when I meet other Arabs, after we've bonded momentarily in our shared heritage and I've tried out my few tentative words of Arabic, is the American part. Arab American Irish American Female American Lesbian American. I may revise this opinion later. Identity is fluid, you know.
How other people see me isn't necessarily how I see myself. If it were I'd have an identity crisis every time I started a conversation. But other peoples' perceptions do influence how we see ourselves, because we end up being treated with varying degrees of respect (or disrespect) based on things like race, calss, gender, sexual orientation, you know what I mean. So if I sometimes don't feel like a ÒrealÓ Arab, it is partly because I am not seen as one. I have been taught, not by my family but mostly by media images, that an Arab woman is The Other: exotic, somehow cloistered and sexual at the same time, the victim of a sexist Arab culture, veiled, speaking in an incomprehensible language. My response had always been, ÒThat isn't me!Ó In some ways it makes no sense that I would have this image come to mind when I hear the words ÒArab womanÓ if all my life I have known real people who were Arab women who were none of the mysterious entities I was taught they should be. But while we're on the subject of mysterious entities, I certainly never saw images of Arab lesbians in the media. Even other lesbians suggested that queer Arabs didn't exist, Arab culture being so sexist it had suppressed them all.
It's true you didn't know me, Nadine, but I hardly know myself.

But this kind of thing is very familiar to you, isn't it?ÊAmerica is not hospitable to young Black immigrant women, and the only thing warm about Miami is the sun. I remember you standing under a tree in the park, throwing stones at the birds above your head. ÒThis is what society has done to me,ÓÊyou said, smiling cynically. You wanted to harden your heart to protect yourself from all the anger directed at you. I hope you still have soft places, Nadine. I hope you were only pretending to be hard. I remember the way you cried when you told me about a pet you had as a child, that had been killed on a road in Jamaica. I remember when you sat in my apartment crying while you read Frederick Douglas. The memory of you crying comforts me, and the only reason I can think of for this is that it means you are still alive inside.

Dear Nadine, I would call you in Jamaica if you didn't always have your sister say ÒShe's asleepÓ when I called.
Dear Nadine, why did you leave me?
Which is worse, that you couldn't see me, or that you couldn't speak?

Sometimes I wonder if it was my queerness that scared you away. My friends who met you and swear by their Ògay-darÓ insisted you were a lesbian underneath your declarations of asexuality. Was it your own queerness that scared you? Was it that you saw ÒgayÓ as a ÒWhite thing?Ó
When I came out to you, you sent a long letter about the unnaturalness of it all, and you told me you were crying as you wrote, because you saw homosexuality as a sign of the problems in the world today. I had been ready to lose your friendship when I came out to you. Recovery brought honesty into my life in a way that made it impossible for me to lie by omission. But you stayed, and we talked, and I thought we would know each other for a long time.
But while I had been able to make the big statements, I was unable to tell you the daily truths about my life, and I feel I put distance between us before you even moved back home. When you told me you were joining the Nation of Islam, I wrote to you with the same kind of confusion you had vented when I came out. ÊYou never wrote back. The biggest question for both of us, about all of it-- THE STATE OF THE WORLD TODAY-- was ÒWhy.Ó I can be angry at you for never really knowing me, but I never really knew you eitu either. And we are both responsible for these losses. For not listening, for not seeing, for not speaking our minds.
Maybe we should, on some level, forgive ourselves our silences, because we were never taught to speak, and generations of our people have had silence beaten into us. Black people. Lesbians. Women. Arabs. Irish. Mixed race people. Beaten.
And neither one of us should be held responsible for the context of our relationship. A light-skinned Irish/Arab girl and a Jamaican girl of mixed African heritage have between them so many of the gulfs that society has created. The best of friendships have trouble in these waters.

Dear Nadine, I wish I had known more of you.
Dear Nadine, I wish I had risked letting you see me.
Dear Nadine, I still dream about you.

Dear Nadine.


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