blacksnextdoor

In Najla’s kitchen the other day, Najla, while preparing dinner for me and a couple of friends who hadn’t arrived yet, reminded me that it’s foolish for me to not consider marrying Wael, a journalist friend of hers from back home who wants U.S. citizenship so bad he’ll pay me enough to make the whole venture worth my time.

I don’t believe that marriage should be a business – least of all an illegal one.  It’s something very serious, very emotional and I’ve told her this every time she’s brought it up. She always gets quiet immediately afterwards as if I’m being holier than thou and need to get real – but the other day, she said something that offended me:

“You’re lucky. You were born here.”

I know that Najla is very proud of her cultural and national origins. In a few minutes, her apartment would flood with friends of hers from her country and their kids who will use the language of their homeland with each other, who even having lived in the US after a number of years, mostly socially interact with each other, their notion of being an American based on it seems having access to jobs and services that don’t exist back home.

So I know that Najla wasn’t undermining her origins when she referred to me as the lucky one.

But she was undermining mine. Because she was saying that being an American is just a matter of paperwork that I could sign off on to share the wealth or not.

I’ve never felt so arbitrary.

But it’s not just Najla, it’s so many of my friends, Hicham, a cool Moroccan contractor I know who ‘just wants to make enough money so he can get the hell out of here’ or my French friend Fatima who hasn’t been around for more than a year but who likes to take both fists and gesture as if she’s squeezing water from a sponge to portray the US quality of life.

OK, in an economic crisis like the sort we’re in, the numbers are very important. But just focusing on numbers alone does not address the dilemma of being an American today.

In fact, it’s this notion of America being a mega grab bag that all we have to do is refill to restore, that causes this cynicism.

Increasingly, whole communities full of memories are being erased.

The southernmost area of Harlem becomes ‘Soha.’ Instant neighborhoods like this are invented in every major city eliminating real neighborhoods rich with urban history.   

Surging numbers of people enter the U.S. every day with the popular conclusion being that if this constant social churning feeds the economy, it’s healthy.  I’m not convinced of that. I’ve seen blocks transition from one ethnic group to another.  It’s seldom this natural wave that pundits who live in static, affluent communities, say it is.  Afterwards, you wonder where people and stores are that are gone, filled with nostalgia and loss.

There are those who say Obama bent over too far during the G20 – see that obsequious bow to King Abdullah for an embarrassing example – but I feel like he’s trying, really trying to get the point across that America’s not just an economic and military empire, not just a dropper of bombs or a revolving door for the world’s work force, but a country with a heart and soul.

Everyone agrees his eight day tour of the world was a success in this regard, but now let’s see if this case can be made right here, at home — or have I become too much of an irrelevant spectator to refer to this country with such familiarity?

I was over the sink, washing dishes the other day when of all things, I wondered how Mariem was doing.

Mariem was a fiery Latina Republican who I worked alongside for TWO, I repeat TWO years which included the last very fierce campaign for President in which her ugly world view was this inescapable background noise in the office I tried in vain to block out day to day.

She’d quote Karl Rove and Sean Hannity after reading the latest headlines on her computer screen, turning a professional space into her own personal right wing podium, in these sudden hostile outbursts, egging on the politically like minded around her to join in the most miserly, bigoted, cynical little tete a tetes that would make smoke fume from my ears.

When I couldn’t take it anymore, I complained about her during a meeting with a couple of higher ups. Instead of them showing the slightest bit of interest, they recited clichés about team spirit that left me wondering  (like I always do before I quit a job), if my financial stability was as important as my mental health.  

One night, upon leaving the office, Mariem appeared in front of me on the street and began to rant and rave about how much she distrusted upper management, hated our company. When she was done venting, she offered me her hand and clasped mine as if we were comrades in some worker’s revolution.

From that moment on, every day at noon, she’d ask me if I felt like having lunch together. She’d ask with a grimace as if she expected me to ignore her or say ‘no,’ which for a while I did. One day, I decided to join her and the next thing I knew, it became a regular routine.

Was it a cheap thrill? Were we re-inventing or betraying ourselves? How was it possible that I was able to sit with such an evil witch at small tables for two every day and enjoy my salad?

One answer may be that Mariem’s cell phone chats with her sister had the same intensity and tone as those with mine. Sometimes, in fact, when she’d end a super hyper sisterly chat with Lorena, it would seem as if the same breathless confidence would continue between us and vice versa.

We were both inspired and moved by this similarity without ever really acknowledging it, our lunches often becoming this super personal time in the course of the very impersonal business day where I could expect Mariem to insist that ‘I eat some steak or a burger for my anemia’ or coerce me into sharing a red velvet cupcake with her lest she eat a whole one by herself and risk getting fat.

How the hell in my journey into myself, did I find this…this…reactionary McCain Palin supporter? Was there any benefit in this strange exercise?

During this time, I remember an African American friend of mine in marketing at one of the famously liberal New York publishing companies, telling me that she had white co-workers who wore Obama buttons on the lapels of their jackets but never uttered so much as a ‘hello’ or ‘good-bye’ on any given day at the office.

Anyway, I no longer work in the same office as Mariem.  My last days, I was unable to take a minute more of the morbid, venomous, racist critiques of the Obama administration that would sporadically rise up from her desk and spread throughout the room like some toxin poisoning everyone within reach and I recall not so much as uttering a word to her in parting.

Were the contradictions of our friendship error messages we ignored or was there something natural at the core of it  that our clashing political interests obscured?

Still, as much as I fondly recall dashing through the streets of Manhattan shoulder to shoulder with Mariem, laughing, if I ever see that witch again, I’ll keep things simple and exclude her from my view.