Iraqi refugee women in the Inland Empire named security as something they valued highly in the United States. Yet for women whose religious dress makes them more visible targets for hate crimes, Muslim women find themselves in the epicenter of the ongoing process by which Arabs and Muslims have been made into racial Others. Chapter 4 situates Iraqi women within the context of the gendered experience of the War on Terror, the atmosphere punctuated by anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from the highest levels of the US polity, such that the act of claiming belonging in public spaces, whether bus stops, graduations, or garage sales, can never be far from the specter of violence. The Iraqi women narrative broaches the question of multiple forms of citizenship, one for them (as Others) and one for “white” Christian America.
Refugees find and create belonging in real, physical places, each shaped by a particular regional history. The process of becoming American for Iraqi refugees was happening within the cultural-political borderland of Latinx California, among people who had also survived a century and a half of their own marginalization. What did “becoming American” mean in this particular cultural geography, with its own layers of racial history? Immigrant strategies to achieve national belonging have historically involved differentiating from subordinate racial groups. Chapter 5 shows how, as Iraqis embarked on the path toward belonging and membership within the majority-Latinx communities of the Inland Empire, they both navigated difference and found a nascent solidarity with Latinx neighbors, despite frustration, confusion, and ambivalence.
As long as the War on Terror continues to fuel fear of Arabs, Arab Americans, and Muslims, the work to prove worthiness to fully belong will never be over.9 Arab Americans know that a terrorist attack that involves a Muslim (or anyone who looks Middle Eastern for that matter) has the potential to set the worthiness scale back to zero, as it did in the fall of 2015. The year 2015 saw historic levels of refugee movements out of Syria, Iraq, and North Africa coinciding with major terrorist attacks in Paris, France, and San Bernardino, California, which is one of the most populous cities in the Inland Empire. While the Republican presidential candidates that year singled out refugees from Syria and Iraq as existential threats, a larger “Islamophobia Industry” foregrounded an anti-Muslim discourse in the presidential primary, naming Arab refugees as a potential fifth column.10 So successful was the political opportunism employed to conflate terrorism and Arab refugees that it led to the passage of the American Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act by the House of Representatives in 2015, profiling Iraqi and Syrian refugees as threats to national security.
So it was that seven years after being deemed worthy of asylum, Iraqis were singled out (alongside Syrians) as undesirable refugees and threats to our way of life.11 While the SAFE Act did not become law, the discussion itself made me wonder how people—many who had put their lives on the line for the US coalition—would feel about the United States’ radically changing stance toward Arab refugees from the Middle East. As refugee policy became driven by the ideological constructs of “stealth jihad” and “sharia creep,” what strategies would they adopt on their path to belonging in the United States?
I was particularly concerned about what these changes meant for Iraqi youths and how they saw their future in the US polity. In my interviews with Iraqi youths up until 2015, they had imagined the United States as a space to express individual and collective identities without fear of judgment, a place to find belonging without having to compromise their cultural and religious values. After the seismic political shifts of 2015, what would belonging in the United States look like to them? Chapter 6 draws on their fears and hopes, captured in a focus group I conducted with them in 2016, just two months after the San Bernardino terrorist shooting on December 2, 2015, which left fourteen dead and twenty-two wounded. I wondered if they would continue to embrace this American identity even as the mosque in Indio was attacked and anti-Arab/Muslim rancor lifted its ugly head in national politics. Chapter 6 explores the experience of belonging among Iraqi refugee youths as they confronted the disturbing ways in which they—Arabs and Muslims—were being so brazenly profiled in the public arena.
This book is more about the reclaiming of belonging than its loss. I have tried to bear witness to how cultural citizenship was worked out in the everyday experience of belonging. João Biehl and Peter Locke have written about what belonging looks like for people who are potentially unwanted, how “powers and potentials of desire” can “break open alternative pathways.”12 In a similar fashion, Iraqi lives in this book bear witness to a people’s ability to claim belonging even in the face of such appalling circumstances as being named the “enemy” and to the way they have made their way in a country as perpetual players within the theater of the War on Terror.
Violence was the essential commonality for the fifty individuals who participated in this study. Whether they were Chaldean, Assyrian, Armenian, Kurd, Arab Sunni, or Arab Shi’a, they were all Iraqi citizens who felt the heat of violence—on their bodies, their friends and families, their faith communities. All of them experienced the removal of belonging even before they crossed the border to Syria, Jordan, or Turkey. This is not to gloss over profound communal and religious differences, group power differentials, and vastly different histories of vulnerability. This is a testament, first and foremost, to the pervasive and widespread nature of the violence inflicted on Iraqi civilians in the postinvasion period. No demographic was shielded from the terror that burned through Iraqi society after 2003. Their story begins, in chapter 1, with the terror that removed the possibility of belonging.
1
Belonging and Displacement
If only memory, or hope, or regret
Could one day block our country from its path.
If only we feared madness.
If only our lives could be disturbed by travel
Or shock,
Or the sadness of an impossible love.
If only we could die like other people.
—Nazik Al-Malaika, “New Year”
The removal of belonging for Iraqis happened suddenly after the US invasion in 2003. This unfolded in different ways. Letters were delivered with religious symbols crossed out, hinting that people of a certain religion would be killed if they stayed in the neighborhood; family members were murdered or kidnapped and held for ransom; armed thugs came to places of work; churches and mosques, sacred symbols of religious communities, were bombed. For some Iraqis, the message was less violent but still effective. Messengers came to tell wives and daughters that they must dress differently; employment was contingent on membership in a certain tribe or political party. Whatever the means used to get the message of nonbelonging across, the chaotic and violent aftermath of the 2003 invasion was a crisis point for a huge swath of the Iraqi population.
In the years following the invasion, violence toward civilians escalated to the point that no group was left untargeted. Millions of Iraqis were faced with decision points—to stay or flee, where to go, how to get there, for how long, how do we survive, and what comes after that? The words “crisis” and “decision” are etymologically connected. “Crisis” originates from the classical Greek verb κuív-ειv—“to decide”—and in English, it has come to mean, among other things, “a turning point.”1 The violent denial of belonging precipitated a crisis—a search for its recovery.
What follows is a series of individual and family migration histories that represent common experiences of the violent removal of belonging, followed by exile and survival in surrounding countries, and