On the plane between Paris and Beirut.

Accad, Evelyne

I find it hard to write about how I feel as an Arab American, a Lebanese American, after the events of September 11.

I am sitting next to a man who works for United Airlines in Virginia and is coming to visit some relatives in Beirut. We talk about "the events"; he thinks people "love to fly" and will continue doing so no matter what. I tell him my American Airlines flight between Chicago and Paris a few days ago was two-thirds empty. He tells me he could not find a seat on United and had to fly Air France, which was also completely booked. He says, "Things will get back to normal after we get rid of the wrongdoers." "But we are not going to the roots of the problems," I tell him, "so how can we really have long-lasting solutions?" He nods, but I wonder if the sign is in agreement or because he is tired. I also wonder what nationality he is ... probably half-Arab, half-American like me, but identifying more with his American side, unlike me.

This little exchange is indicative of how I feel about "the events," what I have been attempting to express, but which so few people are willing to listen to. Stated simply, there are huge problems in the world, especially in this part of the world, and they are not going to get solved by dropping bombs.

 Violence begets violence
 Vengeance repeats itself in blood
 Procession of all the innocents
 dying, dying, dying ...
 War conceives only war
 Hatred breeds only fear
 Anger of all the innocents
 Caught up in this chain of death.

These lines from one of my songs resurface and soothe the irritation I feel at my not being heard by this man, already asleep.

Last night I could not sleep. I was "afraid of flying." There had always been a little bit of that fear before, but now it has become a fear that grips me deeply and will not let me rest.

 Images of airhostesses' slit throats
 Arab men gone mad
 manifesting their disgust and fear of women
 through unspeakable sexual violence
 Can I call them brothers, these men?
 Images of young Arab men turned insane
 Through which mechanisms I ask?
 By what, by what?
 I keep turning this question upside down
 over and over again
 The promise of a paradise with virgins
 Remaining ever virgin, reflowering after deflowering?
 What could be so appealing in such penetration?
 A desire for unending purity?
 A need for ultimate possession
 unrelinquished property and propriety?
 repeated sadistic thrive
 with a call for spilled blood every time
 slaughtered lamb,
 innocence butchered at the altar
 Or a mysticism giving much greater sensual pleasure than all the
 real orgasms with real women in real equal tender sharing?
 What could have gone wrong in the formative years
 of their childhood, their adolescence,
 to produce such monsters?

 Palestine torched with napalm
 Palestine's slit throat
 spilled blood all over again
 Palestine made silent at nightfall
 Palestine which haunts me more than words can express
 Palestine crushed, starved, humiliated, abandoned
 before the indifference of the West.

 Were they thinking of Palestine, these men?
 They did not express it
 They left no trace saying it was their cause
 No mention of vengeance for more noble causes
 The Gulf? Baghdad? Palestine?

 No, the mere pleasure of entering a tower
 a body through sick penetration
 anger and oblivion
 Bring down the rest of the world
 Into nothingness

 Their chiefs used Palestine only later
 To try and calm things down
 But nobody believed them
 In these acts of ejaculation.

Evelyne Accad

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign