by Jad Abumrad
It's hard to say what was going through my mind at the beginning of this project, or what's going through my mind now that it's done. First, a combination interest, excitement, maybe a little bit of apprehension (I AM Lebanese after all and the questions I wanted to ask others could easily be tuned on me... and ARE at one point in the doc). Now, relief.
But have I learned anything?
I suppose when you're posing questions like "What does it mean to be an Arab in America NOW?" you tell yourself not to expect answers with a capital A. But then again, deep down, as a journalist, you always hope that someone can provide that nice neat little soundbite to sum it all up (or at least to perfectly capture the ambiguity.) and that never came. Maybe what I learned is just how complex the questions are - particularly questions of identity. That in fact any group of people as diverse as the collection of individuals who fall under the umbrella term "Arab" - any group spoken of from the outside as "a community" - turns out to be, when you look from the inside, MANY communities. Light skinned Arabs are a world away in how they are experiencing "the backlash" than dark skinned Arabs. That's something I already knew before these interviews, but now afterwards it's something I REALLY KNOW, know what I mean? Nonetheless, I wanted to find the commonalties among Arabs. I could find only two: a common language and a shared feeling that a terrible event has been stuck to them like glue.