War on Terror Reaches the Poet
New America Media, Commentary, Kazim Ali, Posted: Apr 21, 2007
Editor’s Note: A poetry professor in a small college in the Northeast decides to recycle old manuscripts and becomes an object of suspicion.
SHIPPENSBURG, PA -- On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at Shippensburg University, I went out to my car and grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front seat of my little white Beetle, carried it across the street and put it next to the trashcan outside Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously left my recycling boxes there and they were always picked up and taken away by the trash department.
A young man from ROTC was watching me as I got into my car and drove away. I thought he was looking at my car, which has black flower decals and sometimes inspires strange looks. I later discovered that I, in my dark skin, am sometimes not even a person to the people who look at me. Instead, in spite of my peacefulness, my committed opposition to all aggression and war, I am a threat by my very existence, a threat just living in the world as a Muslim body.
Upon my departure, he called the local police department and told them a man of Middle Eastern descent driving a heavily decaled white Beetle with out of state plates and no campus parking sticker had just placed a box next to the trash can. My car has NY plates, but he got the rest of it wrong. I have two stickers on my car. One is my highly visible faculty parking sticker and the other, which I just don’t have the heart to take off these days, says, “Kerry/Edwards: For a Stronger America.”
Because of my recycling, the bomb squad came, then the state police. Because of my recycling, buildings were evacuated, classes were canceled, the campus was closed. No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not even that. Because of his fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the culture of fear, mistrust, hatred and suspicion that is carefully cultivated in the media, by the government, by people who claim to want to keep us “safe.”
These are the days of orange alerts, school lock-downs, and endless war. We are preparing for it, training for it, looking for it, and so, of course, in the most innocuous instances—a professor wanting to hurry home, hefting his box of discarded poetry—we find it.
That man in the parking lot didn’t even see me. He saw my darkness. He saw my Middle Eastern descent. This is ironic because though my grandfathers came from Egypt, I am Indian, a South Asian, and could never be mistaken for a Middle Eastern man by anyone who had ever met one.
One of my colleagues was in the gathering crowd, trying to figure out what had happened. She heard my description—a Middle Eastern man driving a white Beetle with out of state plates—and knew immediately they were talking about me and realized that the box must have been manuscripts I was discarding. She approached them and told them I was a professor on the faculty there. Immediately the campus police officer said, “What country is he from?”
“What country is he from?!” she yelled, indignant.
“Ma’am, you are associated with the suspect. You need to step away and lower your voice,” he told her.
At some length, several of my faculty colleagues were able to get through to the police and get me on a cell phone where I explained to the university president and then to the state police that the box contained old poetry manuscripts that needed to be recycled. The police officer told me that in the current climate I needed to be more careful about how I behaved. “When I recycle?” I asked.
The university president appreciated my distress about the situation but denied that the call had anything to do with my race or ethnic background. The spokesperson of the university called it an “honest mistake,” not referring to the young man from ROTC giving in to his worst instincts and calling the police but referring to me who made the mistake of being dark-skinned and putting my recycling next to the trashcan.
The university’s bizarrely minimal statement lets everyone know that the “suspicious package” beside the trashcan ended up being, indeed, trash. It goes on to say, “We appreciate your cooperation during the incident and remind everyone that safety is a joint effort by all members of the campus community.”
What does that community mean to me, a person who has to walk by the ROTC offices every day on my way to my own office just down the hall—who was watched, noted and reported, all in a day’s work? Today, we gave in willingly and wholeheartedly to a culture of fear and blaming and profiling. It is deemed perfectly appropriate behavior to spy on one another and police one another and report on one another. Such behaviors exist most strongly in closed, undemocratic and fascist societies.
The university report does not mention the root cause of the alarm. That package became “suspicious” because of who was holding it, who put it down, who drove away. Me.
It was poetry, I kept insisting to the state policeman who was questioning me on the phone. It was poetry I was putting out to be recycled.
My body exists politically in a way I cannot prevent. For a moment today, without even knowing it, driving away from campus in my little Beetle, exhausted after a day of teaching, listening to Justin Timberlake on the radio, I ceased to be a person when a man I had never met looked straight through me and saw the violence in his own heart.
Related Stories:
Taxi Terror -- One L.A. Cabbie's Fare From Hell
Blacksburg to Kunduz: Reflection on the Virginia Tech Massacre
Massacre Exposes America’s Dirty Campus Secret
Page
1 of 1
|
User Comments
Truth/Seeker on May 10, 2007 at 20:49:41 said:
Pretty good story, Just a few a questions that come to mind. How did you know it was someone from ROTC when all calls given to police are kept in confidence? Also I found it funny how you explained your bumper sticker that you are a democrat. That seems funny how you talk about ROTC and then say you are for a political party that doesn't favor a free country from terrorism or radical islam and others that hate our way of life although never experiencing it. To the author of this article, place yourself in another country. If this would have happened if you would say something negative about the government or anything else? ROTC provides people who protect your right to say things and probably didn't do anything you said in your article.
John on Apr 29, 2007 at 10:14:09 said:
LMAO!! Absolutely absurd- A Muslim, lecturing me about the violence in someone's heart. Oh wait...he's a "poet", too...Must be tough to find something that rhymes with "jihad".
concerned student on Apr 24, 2007 at 21:21:10 said:
Wouldn't it be nice if it actually was the ROTC. That would make you feel better wouldn't it. Instead of the professor your fighting with! Yeah I am sure that would look worse than a person from the armed forces doing their job! Besides a few days after VT and you didn't expect SHIP to be concerned! Yeah right! I personally am happy that someone did something about it! This could happen and I don't think it was because of your race, they were just giving a description. Race had nothing to do with this. The person did not see the sticker on your car and did not recognize you. This gives cause for concern. If they had seen that the car belonged to faculty perhaps they wouldn't have called in. Besides who pulls up to a trash can and then drives away? And to the person who made the comment about the trashcan.....if you have every BEEN to this campus the wright hall is not even 20 feet from the road a bomb in a box would have had an effect on the building and yes, the trash can as well.
Dennis on Apr 24, 2007 at 20:16:10 said:
The professor casually overlooks the context of the incident. Virginia Tech had happened two days earlier, and college campuses were swept by bomb threats, gun scares, and other incidents. Students across the country were on edge, and here is a box being placed next to the ROTC building.
Everything was cleared up via a phone call, but nonetheless, we are treated to another episode of an overly sensitive liberal moaning about he has been scarred for life. Perhaps had he bothered to heed Al Gore's call to save the Earth, and actually walk to the recycle bin instead of just placing his box of trash on the sidewalk, he could've avoided the whole mess.
Rosa on Apr 24, 2007 at 06:32:58 said:
1. Grow up
2. Drop the race issue, and accept that yes, it was an honest mistake.
3. Next time, throw the box away at your house
4. Don't ever criticize anybody in any ROTC program or the military, for doing what they think is right.
Ras Siddiqui on Apr 23, 2007 at 08:45:47 said:
It is the unfortunate times that we live in.
Kazim, just be glad that you are not from the
other side of the border.....
Very well written. You are a Poet.
Anonymous on Apr 22, 2007 at 12:48:49 said:
It\'s not the world we live in that is becoming a \"police-militaristic/fascist Empire\" - it\'s just America. No where else does stuff like this happen. Only in America can a little box close a bridge or a school. And who, pray may I ask, would think a terrorist would put a bomb next to a trash can? I can just see the headlines: \"Trash can blown to smithereens - Terrorist act - one person injured from slipping on banana peel\"
Bruce Doxey on Apr 22, 2007 at 11:44:57 said:
Orwell's 1984 was tardy, but it did finally get here with GWB.
emiliano zapata on Apr 22, 2007 at 10:16:34 said:
Terrorism is the magic word for police-militaristic Empire-building. Terrorism is the result of the actions of the Empire, not the other way around. Is there terrorism in any country with true self-determination that is respected and left alone by the world power? And what about all the news (for a really long time now) about the intelligence agencies in the US knowing about the plans for the attacks on the World Trade Center? Just recently, France released information about their intelligence agencies informing the US about those plans. And, what about the US effectively protecting Carriles, the terrorist who sabotaged a Cuban plane? How does THAT terrorism play into all this talk about terrorism? Terrorism is the wonder tool for police/fascist States to subdue its citizens with their own "convinced" cooperation.
A Lawyer on Apr 21, 2007 at 17:04:42 said:
Have you considered making this a legal issue. There ARE laws on the books prohibiting race-based discrimination, and the comment of the campus cop seems to make this an obvious instance. The ROTC fellow would likely have difficulty explaining his suspiscions on other-than-race bases, too. (Pre-9/11, I represented a somewhat similar victim. In her case, it was race-based shoplifting accusations by a big retailer.)
I would suggest that one of the many tools we have to fight this kind of nonsense is the law. Although difficult and time consuming, the law is part of the way forward. Don't forget that Civil Rights were not just a battle by Martin Luther King and people marching in the streets; Thurgood Marshall and Robert Kennedy contributed by using the courts, too.
Sandeep Singh on Apr 21, 2007 at 14:21:47 said:
I have also had those looks and been in those situations and I can tell you that I don't blame them for having suspicions. It really isn't so bad to be overscruitinized, being shot for wearing a turban is. When it turns out that people who like like you have a tendency to plot mass murder, thank your lucky stars all you get are funny looks. Now what about these terrorist plots, Kazim? I think we ought to worry about that more than the Anglos.
emiliano zapata on Apr 21, 2007 at 10:43:02 said:
How awful to live in a country where you are a suspect before being a person. How awful to realize that the World we live in is becoming a huge police-militaristic/fascist Empire.
M Avery on Apr 21, 2007 at 08:29:06 said:
Such a potent and true final line:
-->...when a man I had never met looked straight through me and saw the violence in his own heart.
Thank you, Kazim Ali.