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Abdelrahman ElGendy, an Egyptian writer and former political prisoner, is a Dietrich fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s nonfiction writing graduate program.

I thought of <a href="https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-14329_I-HAVE-NO-PROBLEM" target=_blank>this line</a> by poet Mourid Barghouti as the Palestinian flags billowed above my head. This was the first pro-Palestinian rally in Pittsburgh since the massacres in Gaza began this October, and protesters shook their signs in solidarity: End the Occupation! Cease-fire Now!

The day also marked my first rally since <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/16/egypt-prison-friend-memory/" target=_blank>my arrest</a> 10 years ago in Cairo at a protest against Egypt’s 2013 military coup. The organizers of the Pittsburgh event, who were of Arab origin, began their speeches by denouncing the attacks they had not yet faced but anticipated. I clenched my jaw listening to the long preface: We Arabs are decent, civilized, peaceful. We are not the antisemites nor the savages they claim we are.

The harmony of the day’s gathering was suddenly interrupted by a yelp — my wife’s. I turned in time to see that a bulky and bald White American man had knocked her and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/10/13/day-rage-hamas-palestine-protests-america/" target=_blank>several other</a> protesters over. He raised his middle finger as a stream of insults poured out of his mouth. A clutch of protesters eventually surrounded him, pushing him toward the on-site police. More than anything else, it was the look in his eyes that I will never forget. Not the hatred, not the violence — that, I could stomach — but the lack of hesitation, the assuredness that he would never be labeled a “terrorist” or “barbaric.” Only we would ever face those charges.

In the weeks since, my eyes, like so many others around the world, have been glued to the news. The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/09/gaza-strip-israel-hamas-explained/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Gaza Strip</a> has been reeling from vicious bombardment and a complete siege. In the second week of October, the Israelis <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/12/no-power-water-or-fuel-to-gaza-until-hostages-freed-says-israeli-minister" target=_blank>cut Gaza’s access</a> to water, electricity and fuel. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/22/gaza-israel-war-20000-dead/" target=_blank>According to</a> the Gaza Health Ministry, the death count has exceeded 20,000 Palestinians — a number without precedent across about 75 years of occupation.

As I scour the internet, trying and failing to find a trace of good news, I return to Barghouti, who died in 2021:

I look at my life, since the day I was born.

There is life after death; there is life after death

Over the past two months, we’ve witnessed a military campaign that an increasing number of scholars <a href="https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2023/11/Historians%20Declaration_w.pdf" target=_blank>are calling</a> a genocide.

We’ve also seen <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/29/western-coverage-of-israels-war-on-gaza-bias-or-unprofessionalism" target="_blank">biased news coverage</a>, along with <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/i-am-zionist-how-joe-bidens-lifelong-bond-with-israel-shapes-war-policy-2023-10-21/" target="_blank">American complicity</a> in the massacre, as much of the rest of the world <a href="https://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/90891" target="_blank">stands by</a>.

As Arabs, we’re asking fundamental questions about our place in the world. We’re coming to understand that our disposability is not a failure of the world order; it’s one of its integral functions.

In “<a href="https://amzn.to/3GyVSSd" target=_blank>All the Pasha’s Men</a>,” Egyptian-born historian Khaled Fahmy writes about the earliest iteration of what we now know as the Egyptian passport — the tezkere, an Ottoman-era term for identity card. In the early 1800s, under Muhammad Ali Pasha’s Ottoman rule, to deter Egyptian peasants from abandoning their villages and to better regulate their movement, the authorities mandated that each person carry a tezkere: a document that included the bearer’s name, physical description, father’s name and village name. Without it, people would face repatriation to the villages they had come from.

Today, “tezkere” is the name of the identification document that every modern Egyptian prisoner carries behind bars. I know this from experience. For six years and three months, I navigated seven Egyptian detention facilities, clutching the worn yellow card that logged my personal data, cell assignments, sentencing details and records of additional punishments, from solitary confinement to visitation bans. The tezkere, echoing its origins, encapsulated the state’s regulation of my body.

Today’s Arab passports and the identities they confer continue to play a similar role both within Arab countries and around the world. In my homeland, I’m acutely aware that my body is expendable. A Western body there, however, will always have more currency. Each time Egyptian authorities have harmed a Westerner, they have faced international opprobrium. The brutal killing of Italian researcher <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/magazine/giulio-regeni-italian-graduate-student-tortured-murdered-egypt.html" target=_blank>Giulio Regeni</a> in 2016, for example, haunts them to this day. Overwhelming evidence points to his killers being members of the Egyptian security forces. Tellingly, <a href="https://www.alquds.co.uk/%D9%82%D8%AA%D9%84%D9%88%D9%87-%D9%83%D9%85%D8%A7-%D9%84%D9%88-%D9%83%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%85%D8%B5%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A7%D9%8B-%D9%85%D8%B5%D8%B1-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%B9%D9%87%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%84/" target=_blank>Regeni’s mother commented</a>, “They tortured and killed him as if he were Egyptian.”

Our bodies, broken at no price, are thus broken often.

When I fled Egypt in 2020 after my release from prison, I sought a rebirth: to be recognized as a body whose suffering is consequential. I had no romantic ideas about the American Dream; I’ve too often encountered the condescending notion that our migration is in pursuit of superior values, rather than a flight from the chaos wrought by <a href="https://www.cfr.org/timeline/iraq-war" target=_blank>U.S.-imposed</a> wars, the monarchs and military dictatorships that Washington has installed and <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/01/israel-hamas-war-egypt-sisi-united-states-human-rights-aid/" target=_blank>continues to prop up</a>, or the environmental havoc the United States <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-military-bigger-polluter-most-middle-east" target=_blank>has caused</a>.

But these two months have exceeded my darkest nightmares. An Arab name affords me a new series of monikers, a lineage that begins at “Other” and ends at “<a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/10/9/israeli-defence-minister-orders-complete-siege-on-gaza" target=_blank>human animal</a>.”

As I grapple with my position in the world, my American friends diagnose my distress as post-traumatic stress disorder, triggered by the traumas of incarceration. I never grasped why the term “PTSD” irritated me so much until I read the words of Samah Jabr, the head of mental health services at the Palestinian Ministry of Health. In a 2019 interview, <a href="https://qz.com/1521806/palestines-head-of-mental-health-services-says-ptsd-is-a-western-concept" target=_blank>she argued</a> that the concept of PTSD, with its roots in Western thought, demands a before and after — a time before the trauma starts and a time after it ends. Yet for so many Arabs, trauma is a continuous, intergenerational reality.

There is no pre- or post- for us. Traumatic stress is life. When the eyes of two Arabs in exile meet, there’s a silent acknowledgment. Our tezkere transcends time, prison bars and national borders. We carry a built-in estrangement not only in our pockets but also in the lines on our faces and in our bone marrow.

Today, I move with a profound hollowness, the result of a string of tragic events: the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2023/10/19/israel-hamas-wadea-al-fayoume-us-palestinians/" target=_blank>horrific fatal stabbing</a> of 6-year-old Palestinian American Wadea al-Fayoume in Illinois; <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/11/26/palestinian-students-vermont-shooting/" target=_blank>the shooting</a> of Palestinian college students Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad in Vermont; the reportedly targeted <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/11/06/muslim-stanford-student-hit-run-hate-crime/" target=_blank>hit-and-run</a> of a Stanford University student of Syrian origin named Abdulwahab Omira. The list goes on.

The idea of dying, I can take. We Arabs know death. We’ve grown up with it, made its acquaintance and learned that it has a taste for our bodies.

This world was never built to accommodate us. Even in the most progressive circles, we are a disruption to be tolerated only if we remain model, tokenized Arabs: palatable and coy, offering the prerequisite condemnations before demanding our humanity. Our allies are few, and our confidants are fewer. We understand now.

Between homelands that have crushed us and countries of exile that thirst to do so, it sometimes seems as if there will never be life before death. If this is how I feel, I try to imagine the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. One second, there’s a breathing body, a roof. The next second: mangled limbs, rubble.

In fear of this imminent death, I dwell in death. I wonder, like Barghouti: Will I ever know life before it?

I don’t have the answer. But I know that the facade of Western moral superiority has crumbled. Today, we Arabs shed our internalized inferiority and attempt to carve our way back into language and history: our language, our history. We gather around our collective sorrow and moans as guttural and textured as our alphabet’s A’ins and Kha’as.

In this life that is not a life, we no longer appeal to the world to see us as human. We are learning to see one another instead — and to let that be enough.

Abdelrahman ElGendy

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Arabs are being forced to question their place in the world

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