Being a Palestinian-American has involved a lifetime of being identified through my Arab identity, and hearing clichéd jokes about airport security, suicide bombings, and the abundance of pita bread in one of our two freezers at home. Even though being Arab has played a large role in my experiences as an American, the Arab Spring made me realise how little I knew about the politics of my parents' homeland. Most of what I understood about the region was gleaned from headlines or from exhausted conversations with my father and uncles. Despite my lack of knowledge, I found that as regimes fell, many began to give me the authority to speak on the region based on my heritage. While the Arab Spring is important to me, this is not my Arab Spring.
Growing up, I had a tendency to view the culture of my parents as a burden, as my parents routinely justified rules and restrictions as being a part of "our culture." Unable to belong entirely to the Arab or American communities, I immersed myself in the mosque, and believed that the problem of Muslims lied in the cultures of our immigrant parents co-opting the religion, therefore believing that separating culture from religion would solve many of our problems. I was not alone in this.
My fellow first generation Americans and I would routinely mock what we called 'boaters', wrinkling our noses at potential suitors "straight from the motherland." While not ashamed of our heritages, we were merely trying to remedy the feeling of being caught between two worlds. Through eventually learning that culture and religion were not so easily separated, I realised that culture was far more fluid than I had realised. My view of what it meant to be Arab was oversimplified, and based on cultural norms I perceived as unmoving and archaic. I did not realise that the world my parents spoke about, grew and changed after they left. Their view of culture is nostalgic, embalming their history and identity in a foreign world.
When my parents and stateside relatives spoke of politics in the Arab world, they described an unchanging world of corruption and instability, and I suppose I thought that Arabs without hyphens resigned to the same inevitability. As the corrupt leaders cursed throughout my childhood fell, conversations with my relatives took a different turn, and suddenly they were no longer repeating the same tired refrain, but actually making an effort to be informed. In many ways, it was as though they woke up from a nostalgic haze, and realised that perhaps they did not know as much about the politics of their worlds.
Culture is malleable, personal and influenced by a number of factors, and perhaps to the dismay of our immigrant parents, culture is not cyclical, and none of us can truly preserve the vision of culture in their minds; the reaction to fear of the Americanised strangers in their homes. Despite our shared heritage, I have an entirely different lived reality than a cousin in the West Bank, and those same cousins are not reliving the experiences of my parents.
Understanding the difference between being an Arab and an Arab-American is also important because our community needs its own shake-ups and changes, and conflating the two may make it easy to claim those victories as our own. Despite being proud of the Arab Spring and its impact on my own life, I have not lived there, and those victories are not my own. Ignoring the massive cultural differences only serves to gloss over the changes needed in the Arab-American community, and if anything, the Arab Spring shows how much work we have to do.
My childhood was a world of hummus, fried chicken, Um Kalthoum and Southern Baptist churches --- a world away from instability, dictators and corruption. My world is far different than those on the ground, bravely fighting for social change, and despite having shared cultural roots, I have a different lived reality. Being unable to differentiate between Arab-American culture and that of other Arabs across the globe is not only ill-informed, but also detrimental because it encourages a static definition of culture. I cannot speak for the Arab Spring, and solely defining me based on the first half of my hyphenated identity only serves to fuel the right-wing Jihadi fantasies of Newt Gingrich, hastening our own Arab-American Spring.