My mom keeps asking me “Why do you want to go to a dangerous Middle Eastern country this summer? It doesn’t sound like a good idea.” For a long time, all I could tell her was that everyone who I knew that had been a part of this program said that it changed their lives to spend a month in Amman, Jordan.
I think for a while, I was caught up in the idea of being able to take pictures covered in mud from the Dead Sea and while riding a camel wearing a scarf and pretending like I was the most interesting person in the world. It seemed like it would just be the next great adventure.
As this trip got closer, though, I started to get nervous. So nervous that I considered trying to drop the program. The negative words from people I knew and the stories of how the U.S recently killed Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad, Iraq (a completely different country than the one I planned to travel to) were all I could think about. The Middle East did not seem like a place that I should be as a very White, American female.
It took me going to the program orientation last weekend to realize that my desire to go to Amman is actually this incredible desire to expand my single story of the Middle East and its people. I don’t want to think of this area as dangerous or that the people are as prejudice against Americans as I have been taught. I want to learn their story. I want to practice their culture. I want to know the Jordanians.
I think this thought process has also been helped by our discussions of identity in class. We unknowingly give others their identities. We push our prejudices on others and expect them to conform.
Pecola from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye never stood a chance to decide who she was going to be. The White dominated society told her what pretty was and she believed it. And so, she instead had to become ugly because she was not societally pretty. She had her identity forced upon her becuase no one took the time to actualy see her.
Gloria Anzaldúa in her book Borderlands La Frontera discusses how Americans told her that because she did not look white that she couldn’t be an American even though her family had been here for generations and she had a mix a blood that included Anglo descent among many other bloodlines. She had a part of her identity ripped from her because someone did not take the time to hear her.
We do this all the time. Both these books were written over 30 years ago, but the issues are still the same and worsening in a lot of ways because we now have the ability to curate the information that we expose ourselves to. We only see the identities of others that match our predisposed thoughts of people. We do not see the good anymore.
A single story shapes the way that people view themselves. We are all culprits of this crime because we believe the rewritten history of our countries. We all have only a single story of what it means to be anyone that is not ourselves. I know I feel the fool.
Attending the Jordan program is the start for me to expand my view of the world’s narrative and for me to stop forcing my violent perspective of the Middle East onto the identity of the Jordan people. Jordan is actually the most peacful country in the Middle East. I have a hope that my single story will soon begin to expand and flourish into a full view of what it means to be human no matter your race, gender, values, or any other dividing idea between people. I just want to love the world no matter what it takes.
My mom is still not going to sleep for the entire time that I am in Amman, but I hope I am still able to help change her single story of the Middle East along with my own.
Comments