Viewpoints

“I’m Just a (Muslim) American Girl”

By Siddrah Alhindi

Spectrum staff

My little sister and I listened to the sounds of protesters and police clashing back home in Syria. “Don’t look,” our father commanded, while his eyes were glued to his laptop computer and Facebook.

It was 2011. We were at home in Staten Island, where my sister and I, native New Yorkers, live with our Syrian-born dad during the school year. In Syria, a singer whose lyrics were a protest anthem got his throat carved out and his body dumped in a river. My sister and I have not been back to Syria since 2011, when the war began. My father has been away from Syria for even longer than that—because his Facebook page says Syria’s president is a very bad man.

I am a child of the West and of the East. I was born in a Brooklyn, New York hospital. I go to a private Muslim school in Staten Island where the hijab is a part of every girl’s uniform and all the boys and girls pray together at the end of every school day. I spend summers in the Middle East with my mother who’s been divorced from my dad since I was four.

For four years straight, we didn’t see her at all. When that separation ended, in the summer of 2016, Mama looked at my breasts and hips and the hijab that girls like me begin wearing once they hit puberty. She seemed kind of shell-shocked. “Are those really my daughters?” She kept asking that question.

This summer, my annoying little sister, who dares to think that we are equals, will again squabble with me over who gets to sleep in the same bed with Mama and sit in the front passenger’s seat of her car. My little sister—and, yes, I do love her very much—will type on her phone whose turn it is to be closest to Mama.

When we leave my mother at the end of this summer, all three of us will cry. I have a video of us crying and hugging at the airport—that was when we’d not seen each other for those four years—and I set that video to Coldplay’s “The Scientist.” Nobody said it was easy, it’s such a shame for us to part … That’s how the chorus goes.

I do not know the details of my parents’ divorce. I do know that our parents love us fiercely, and that my dad hustles to make a way for us in this country. He’s had a lot of jobs in this country. He mainly is a carpenter, a job he loves—when he can get it. He drove a car for Uber briefly, but quit. I respect his hustle. I wrote a poem about it. When my father spends a couple of days at a time at a construction job in New Jersey, my sister and I look after each other and answer our father’s calls to ask if we are ok and if the door is locked and that kind of stuff.

“You guys barely spend time around me … Come sit in the living room.”

That’s some of the stuff Baba says when he is not out of town working and comes into our rooms to find my sister and me with our faces are glued to cellphones or laptops. Sometimes, we choose the Internet over Baba. We would rather not be with him in the living room where the TV news—noisy and obnoxious—seems always to be on.

So, what’s my point? I’m just another teenager trying to make her way in her family and a complicated world. I’m a daughter of divorcees. I love them both. I blame neither of them for anything.

And I’m am an American Muslim teen who has worn my hijab long enough that I almost forget its on my head. I am troubled by what some people assume about me when they look at my covered head. I know that many outsiders stare at me but don’t imagine me in my bedroom, behind a closed door and dancing to 90s throwbacks like the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe.”

Or binge-watching Netflix and crying when a sick character dies.

Or ringing our nice white neighbors’ doorbell to hand them a dish of the good food my father cooks or a Christmas gift for their two little boys. If our door is open, their mom just walks through to say to me, “Hi, how’s your dad and your sister?” I love that she is a good neighbor. Neighborliness is basic teaching of Islam.

I am a child of the East and the West, and very much an American girl.