Dinner table conversations with my terrorist father; personal essay & reflection

How American imperialism is the bane of my existence, and why my dad refuses to go through smart gates at airports.

“Rohaila saab, Khuda ne Shaytaan nu hee Amrika ditta si, aur qiyamat tak uthe hi ohne apne jinnã de nasl peda ki si, us te baad hi o duniya vich apna fasad phelan vaste nikala si.”

"Rohaila, God granted Lucifer American soil and kingdom come; that is where he birthed the only litter of his own little devils before he went on to wreak havoc in the world with his evil.”

If you ever fell victim to dining with my father back in 2013, you’d likely find out quickly that the American dream was nothing but a nightmare to Baba. I was reminded of the nostalgic hate speech he used to spew alongside my older sister only recently, when he dropped the above banger. He claims his Punjabi roots when he’s at his angriest.

Three days ago, we had dinner with his best friend from medical school. I tagged along because cynicism on a Sunday sounded like a great end to my day. His friend kept convincing him to move to the States, and my dad kept convincing his friend that he would not sell his soul to the devil, that is, the United States, unlike his friend. Is my father incredibly dramatic? Yes, is America the root of most evil? Every year, I inch closer to a ‘without a doubt’.

Pakistan has been the eyes of TJ Eckleburg when America plays Gatsby, carrying out its not-so-little interventions in the name of terrorism during a decent chunk of the 21st century. When it was our turn, Pakistan was the appellant, and America was the judge, executioner, and jury. The trials were closed, the verdict predetermined, and the media was fed the script as if the letters were grass and the anchors were cattle.

Before us, it was Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, it is Iran; nothing else has changed since the last decade.

Whilst Obama dropped bombs and missiles in North Waziristan, while the understandable anger of the villagers there spilled into schools and marketplaces in Karachi, my father spat fire while menacingly tearing naan in half on the dinner table.

Back to the dinner, spite was served with tea, and conspiracy was garnished on top of spiced potatoes decoratively at the table while I thought about the genuine rage behind my father’s eyes. His hands fluttered in the air as the waiter tried to dodge them almost. His friend’s scowl deepened with each sentence uttered. The last time I saw Baba’s eyes simmer like that was during a family trip.

There stood my sceptical father fourteen years ago, insistent that the smart gate the airport had just introduced was going to steal all his information, and when my mother finally coerced him into going through, the alarm started blaring.

A ton of security pat-downs and broken discussions with an irritated Arab administrator who was mad my father did not speak his language later, we found out my dad shared a name with a wanted terrorist. My 60-year-old father, who will not move his car unless everyone’s wearing a seatbelt, got stopped by security in a foreign country for allegedly being a terrorist.

I found it almost poetic that a brown Pakistani man was denying being a terrorist on Arab land. It was only a few years back when the roles were reversed; only the onlookers were not 2 little girls and a fuming mother but American soldiers.

The thing is, it’s a common name. I know four men with the same name as Baba. Nothing lies in a name here. Even in the Arab world, it’s just as common. A white person couldn’t tell an Arab apart from a brown person half the time, and yet America uses a knife so precise to divide us, we forget what unity means.

What truly pointed my father out was
His shade of brown,
The roll of his R’s,
The strange cursive letters on his passport.

It’s the same amount of fear that propaganda feeds off of to frame my people; had my sister not stepped in, I’m not sure what would have happened that day. That is not to say my father was afraid for himself; my dad is one of the most self-assured and do-not-fuck-with-me-or-else people I know. He feared for his family.

I was eight years old, and all I could think about was how my father couldn’t keep a secret for the life of him; there’s no bomb under his hat, officer – let him go! Just a bald spot; his only crime is being follically poor. I did not know colour made a difference; I liked mixing all my Play-Doh and crayons together.

Baba stands at 6’1", tall and upright, with greying hair, fit for a man in his 60s, and clearly South Asian. He’s worn the same two Rolexes as far as I can remember and has never changed his hairstyle. My sister and I used to joke that my dad and mom looked like the Yin and Yang symbol in shades of brown. My mother gets stopped often in Pakistan because of how white she looks, and my father often gets assumed to be her trafficker. If my mom’s mad at him, she goes with it.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. As I thought about the incident more than a decade later, my father simultaneously brought it up. It was the first time he did so; with how silent Baba had been on it, you’d think we almost dreamt it.

”Saanu puri zindagi keha gaya si ke ai American Dream pao, chahe Amreeka vich hou ya na hove, zindagi twadi set hojave gi. Parho, likho, maa baap diyaan gaal’aan suno, apne urdu te punjabi zubaan nu bhar che phenko, Angraizi apnao, bachiyan nu vi sikhao, paisa banao, fir puri dunya twadi.”

”Our entire lives, they told us to chase the ‘American dream'; whether you’re in America or not, it’s the road to success. Study, listen to your parents, forget your mother tongue, pick up English, teach your children too, make money, and before you know it, the world’s your oyster.”

A deep sigh fell over before Baba continued

Bhai jaan, jitna bhee pesa hasil karlo, jitna bhee ghareeboon mai banto, jitna bhee ilm aur taleem hasil karo, apka rang ye loug dekhtai daag ke tarhaan hee hain. Sab kuch de dein ge, magar izzat nahi.” Urdu comes when my father feels calmer.

"Brother, no matter how much money you earn, no matter how much you give to the needy, or how much wisdom or education you gain, these people will look at the colour of your skin as if it were a stain. They’ll give us everything but respect.”

The dinner ended, and Rohaila uncle left the table with a lot less enthusiasm than when he entered. He works a respectable job in Dallas, managing a bank, though in all fairness, how much respect really lies in banking in the devil’s land? Yet even he knew what my father said was true.

Get your suburban picket-fence nuclear family, your white-collar job, a great deal on your car, and still, do anticipate stares from the neighbour next door who made sure you saw his “Make America great again” banner on your way to work.

Pay all your taxes and bills on time, all your debts, and work double the amount of an average Caucasian American, but don’t forget – you’re stealing their jobs as an immigrant.

Sit peacefully in your garden until you get shot down by a white supremacist because all brown people are terrorists, and it’s his right to bear arms.

Come! Celebrate American democracy and all the good it’s done for the world! A modern version of British colonialist greed? No! Not at all!

You can be denied refuge from the country bombing the shit out of yours.
You can be irrationally detained and deported by the democratic utopia
You can be starved by the most civilised people on Earth on your own land.

That’s all fine, though; it’s because they need to intervene. Wait, what’s that? Deal with the consequences of intervention? How dare you suggest that?

According to anBrown University study, post 9/11, American-led ‘intervention’ has resulted in 4.5-4.7 million civilian deaths. It includes Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Pakistan. The war on terror during Obama’s bloodthirsty reign resulted in over 80,000 civilian deaths in Pakistan. Does America claim those? Nope.

I know what I am about to say will spark a lot of ‘Don’t compare tragedies’, but rationality exists even in times of war.

9/11 resulted in 2977 civilian deaths. The U.S. decided to change the concept of a proportional response into its own axis grid and equation for an adequate assessment. What a phenomenal insight into American innovation! Pioneering at its best.

The thing is, I could sit here and go on and on about how my father believes America backs the Taliban – and how he’s right – or how the survival of the United States relies on warmongering and that it’s a child of greed and will only give birth to greedier little shits like it.

I could give you a history lesson on why Pakistan is strategically painted as a terrorist state to support American imperialism.

How the state of ‘third world’ countries today is because your governments will use your own tax dollars to plummet our economies and democracies instead of addressing your healthcare and housing crises.

What about how the West has entrenched itself so deeply into the world that it is impossible to escape it, and the only way out is through it?

My grandmother thinks our people shouldn’t have greeted yours all those centuries ago so warmly; we should’ve met them with the same cruelty you now do us.

My uncle believes we shouldn’t have let American bases on our soil and that we should have never let the British leave until they drew our borders correctly. Maybe tolerance would still exist within our neighbourhood had we been harsher with the only unwanted entity.

My sister insists we should’ve given Obama the finger when he asked for our help with Afghanistan – the point is, history cannot be altered.

There’s this folktale in Punjab that my mom used to tell me all the time.

Two villages have a trivial disagreement over a wall. The argument lasts for years, with money lost, bridges burnt, people killed, and chaos spreading everywhere. They’re stuck playing the blame game. Meanwhile, a tyrant king who oversaw them both kept stealing from the villages to build a fortress; no one could come in, and no one could take anything out. By the time the villagers came to him, he gave them false reassurance of ‘intervening’ and ‘stopping it’ when they returned for the verdict. He closed the gates, leaving them with nothing.

Circles are nature’s symbolism for cycles in human history. It leaves traces in our stories. The repetition is naturally occurring. The relevance is too. One of them is that false paternalism lies in the heart of the tyrant.

It’s the same textbook of global predation (my dad insisted I use a very aggressive term here) this time around, too. Iraq was a failed and terrorist state that needed intervention, so was Afghanistan, so was Pakistan, and so is Iran.

Each cycle, your president of choice will trot up to his little stage and preach to the desperate choir, and your media will feed off it like bees to nectar. Each cycle, your weapon manufacturing companies count their pennies in anticipation; you’ll believe it’s for your safety and give them more.

When they’re done intervening, they take back all our resources and money, and then when we try to follow suit, they raise the gates.

That’s not to say they’ll share with you; they never have, and they barely ever will. The reaper will put pennies on your eyes and call it a day. An American will likely learn more about their own history from a cab driver with skin like mine than from their high school teachers.

My father hails from a small city in the Punjab province known as Sheikhupura. At the bright age of fifteen, his parents had both passed away, and as the eldest son of a sort of lower middle-class family, my dad threw away his hopes and dreams and began working three jobs. The wages he worked for were, in fact, not legal, nor were the hours for a minor. It would send your average activist in New York into orbit to know how much he endured trying to decide between dignity and survival.

The right to an adequate standard of living, the right to housing and shelter, education, fair pay and leisure is a privilege for many, a right to only a select few.

However, when it comes to food on the table, a roof over your head and your four baby sisters, you’ll come to realise the third world cares little for principles of humanitarianism – why would it? It’s never reached them. We’re not tan enough for the UN and not whitewashed enough for the WHO.

Years later, he saved up enough to go to one of the best medical schools in the country back then. In the 80s, King Edward Medical College stood at number one or two in Pakistan. His money ran short despite his mind being brilliant, so he had to settle for being a psychiatrist. My father gave back by creating one of our city’s first major rehabilitation centres for drug addicts. It had its doors open for twenty-something years.

In my pre-teen years, due to the constant indoctrination from the education system (you can take the British out of South Asia, but the colonial hangover remains ever steady), I’d often side with the Western concepts of how we were tyrannical Pakis and muzlamist curry munchers, proud suicide bombers and whatnot.

“Zoha, there’s no such thing as a perfect victim.” This statement from my father is what rerouted my thinking eventually. Today, I understand it much better.

If you pillage and burn down our cities, kill our young men, and rape our women, you should expect retaliation. Pride is everlasting in the third world. We have a history and ancestry to honour, as well as values and beliefs.

Parhe likhai jahil is a term often used to describe Western politicians in South Asia. Educated and literate idiots. Extremism is often a reaction towards a domino effect that is the tidal wave of colonialist hunger. Is it moral? No, is it understandable? Yes. The difference exists for those who wish to understand it.

As Alan Cumming stated in Cabaret, money makes the world go round.

When you destabilise an economy, you set up a nation for profound failure. Without money, you cannot educate; without education, you cannot liberate; without liberation, humanism becomes a myth. The poor will blindly follow whatever false messiah preaches to them first, the rich will clean their teeth with the bones of their people, and the puppeteers will host the banquet each time. They’ll feed our nation’s elite enough to keep them fat and happy so they don’t move, and they’ll terrorise our poor or revolutionaries enough to keep them at bay.

Neocolonialism is colonialism nonetheless.

Writing this, I’m sitting opposite my father. A man who’s proud of his heritage, critical of his nation and resilient by all means. Someone who’s fought tooth and nail to become an incredibly accomplished man. A man who’s been an active philanthropist since before I was born, and yet when we go abroad, I know people do not see beyond his thickly coated brown flesh.

His furrowed eyebrows are too hairy,
His accent is too distinct,
And despite everything he has given to society, his name is too ethnic.

I see a man who’s survived wars, been in military training, and still resisted against the brutality of our army decades later—a man who retaught himself whenever he felt the need to correct his ideologies. A man who’s beyond accepting.

Someone who will not let the plumber leave without food, water and a tip.

Someone who will run late to his flight because an elderly man needs help translating the English signs on foreign land.

A man who has supported every dream, passion and project I’ve ever picked up.

So when I see the resistance burning within his irises, it is reeling to go online and watch Americans jump on the bandwagon of victim mentalities. It is harsh to say, maybe even unfair, but it is reasonable.

The United States has had a foot on the neck of my people for decades.

They can be the only country to use a nuclear bomb, but if we develop one for our own safety, we’re considered jihadists. They can be one of the only two countries to vote against making food a human right, and we’re the ones plummeting people into doom. They can nestle their way into our economies, yet we’re the ones who are corrupt.

Then you go on social media, where war is nothing but a TikTok for a few likes. My family built a bomb shelter when my mother was six months pregnant with me. He has achieved the American dream from outside American land, but the land of the free will not liberate its own resources. Many people like baba sit on that land, having achieved the same dream, yet are unable to wake up in order to make it a reality.

“Please, someone, tell Iran not to bomb us!”
"Omg, we’re going through another 9/11.”

You are not special to the point that you get granted the level of unfathomable security and privilege your imperialistic state gives you; the fact that you act as if it doesn’t exist is not only incredibly stupid but also egregiously tone-deaf towards those at whose expense you are given such liberties. I use the term ‘liberties’ here because the decorative little document called the Declaration of Human Rights only extends to those in the West.

Your land is not yours, yet you fight to keep those you terrorise out of it, going back on your false promises of refuge, and your buildings are built by immigrants, where your politicians take shelter from their sins.

America has never felt the consequences of its actions; the only reparation we’ve ever gotten from it is when they lay flowers and poetry on the mass graves they dig for us.

So the third world stands – waiting. Passing around the UN’s condemnations and letters of disapproval from country to country, as if they will bring back our dead.

Somewhere down the line, we do hope your politicians learn from history.

A circle, being naturally occurring, reminds me of a Frisbee; however, I am not a ravenous politician. I still hope to see the day your government retracts its steps before they make their way back at you.

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Note from the author:
This essay was difficult to write. I genuinely loathe America, and I loathe how dependent we as a world are on it, too. With the current situation in Iran going on, while its satanic offspring Israel slaughters innocent civilians like it’s a daddy-daughter date for two sick sociopaths, I thought it was about time I put out a more brutal piece.

As a Pakistani, American interventionism is a hot topic for debate. This essay does not negate that the third world does have corruption but rather contextualises the root cause of it and highlights the hypocrisy. Do not sit in the safest country on earth, where you enjoy liberties and freedoms at another person’s expense, and police us about our sentiments.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen stated in Development as Freedom (1999), “Poverty is not just the lack of money; it is the lack of opportunity to participate in economic life on equal footing.”

That stands true even today. It always will. Until the West, especially America, realises equality for all human beings means brown, Black, and beige ones, we will always have bigoted men and women running the show. It is unfortunate yet a fact; money makes the world go round. My world cannot spin if I run out of cash to get people to push it around.

As always, thank you for reading. War is never won, and may sanity prevail. I hope every person reading from GCC countries, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, the Arab world and wherever else is safe.

-Zoha

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References:

• Brown University study: https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/teaching

• UN vote against making food a human right: https://www.trtworld.com/article/5c127f78e6f6

• 9/11 death toll (I excluded hijackers): https://www.britannica.com/topic/How-many-people-were-killed-in-the-September-11-attacks

• Cabaret reference: https://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/cabaret/moneysong.htm