Suzie Afridi - Olive Oil Eyes

 

So, I was raised Greek Orthodox Christian in the small town of Jericho, the youngest of six kids. Dad was a welder. Mom was a farmer. While growing up in the West Bank, we were constantly fed Islamophobic horror stories. Remember how in the 1980s you were told this is your brain on drugs with the egg cracking commercial? We were told this is your life on Islam. And that's why they give us white names. I mean, people often ask me if my real name is Fatima or Khadijah, but it's actually Suzie. [audience laughter] 

 

My sister, who looks way more Arab than me. Her name is Jane, but her eyebrows alone speak Arabic. [audience laughter] So, they give us these white or Christian names as a message for the Muslim boys to stay away. It's like name hijab. [audience laughter] That along with a giant five-pound gold cross usually does the job. [audience laughter] 

 

And so, eventually, we immigrated to America. And by the time I was 26, after my father passed away, I was constantly told by my aunties that I had missed the marriage boat. My sisters were long married by now, one at 16 and one a little later at 19. And so, I was on a mission. I had to find a nice Christian Palestinian boy. Now, where do you find those? At Greek Orthodox church festivals, of course. [audience laughter] 

 

So, every Sunday, I would hit the festival circuit hard. [audience laughter] And then, one Sunday, after eating one too many baklavas, I went to a picnic organized by Arab and South Asian students. And as soon as I arrive, I meet the cutest guy. This guy, his eyes were like this beautiful green color. They were like the color of expensive olive oil. [audience laughter] Now, this guy is talking to me. Words are coming out of his mouth, but all I'm thinking is, please be Christian, please be Christian, please be Christian. [audience laughter] 

 

Somewhere in the words were Pashtun and Pakistan. My heart sank. Olive oil is Muslim. You have to understand, we were absolutely forbidden from falling in love with Muslims. I mean, by the time I was 10, I knew that when a Christian Arab girl falls in love with a Muslim, one or all of the following would happen. She is disowned, her mother gets a heart attack, or she dies in an honor killing. [audience laughter] 

 

I had always obeyed my parents, never considered dating a Muslim. But when Saks, that's his name, asked me to dinner, everything went out the window. And I said yes. I mean, I thought to myself, this guy is smart, handsome, funny, charming, speaks four languages, has lived all over the world. It was just love at first sight. 

 

So, we started seeing each other a lot, almost every day. And within a couple of months of dating in secretly, we exchanged I love yous. And at this point, I felt I had to tell my family. But I was really scared, because I knew there would be backlash. I remembered from the stories that I'd heard as a little girl, there was this woman in our neighborhood who just suddenly went missing, and later we found out that she was murdered for falling in love with a Muslim. 

 

And so, I started weighing my options and I thought, okay, best case scenario, a girl would run away with a guy, but she would never see her family again. This was unthinkable for me because my family were not people that I saw once a year on Thanksgiving. I saw them almost every day. They were like the magical people in my life. In fact, I lived at home with my mom and my brother. 

 

So, I decided that I would start by telling my mom. But she's a heart patient, [audience laughter] so I had to break it to her gently. So, I chose the right time. I made her a nice cup of Turkish coffee. I chose the afternoon time right after Oprah. [audience laughter] Do you remember when Oprah used to give things away and we were all happy? [audience laughter] I told her all about Saks and how happy he makes me and then she said, “No, no and no.” But then, she felt sorry for me a couple of days later and she said, “Okay, I will meet him as a friend. Only as a friend.” I'm actually imitating her accent right now, but you guys can't tell, because [audience laughter] it sounds exactly like mine. 

 

So, within a couple of hours of my mom meeting Saks, all of my siblings and their spouses found out about my new friend, and I was suddenly the family scandal. I was hit with an avalanche of phone calls and emails. They made me feel so bad. They said that I had brought shame to the family. My happiness was nowhere on their radar. All they cared about was how people will react. There's this phrase in Arabic, “kallimnī an-nās,” literally means, what will people say? And it's the dictator that's in our head just stops us from doing anything. 

 

My brother at the time was appalled at the position that I had put him in, because his father-in-law is a priest. Now, for Saks, there was no problem because in Islam, a man can marry any woman from the Abrahamic faith. In fact, at the time, his cousin was marrying a Jewish girl from New Jersey. No one really cared that she was Jewish, but I think they did care that she was from New Jersey. [audience laughter] 

 

And by this time, Saks had already proposed to me on the beach in Half Moon Bay and I had said yes. But the whole going down one knee thing doesn't really mean anything with Arabs and Muslims, because if your parents weren't there, it didn't happen. And so, his parents wasted no time. They flew in from Pakistan for the tulba, which is like an official ceremony where the elders from the boy side ask for the girl's hand in marriage. 

 

Considering how serious this was, my siblings boycotted, and that really hurts. But this was only the beginning. But I noticed my mom soften as soon as Saks's father walked into the door. Imagine this tall, kind, elegant, very soft spoken, very well-mannered man. As soon as she saw him, she took me aside and she said, “If he turns into his father, you'll be fine.” [audience laughter] 

 

Yet, they left that evening without a definite answer in hand, just a promise that she would get my brothers on board. The next morning, my mom gets on the phone and starts lobbying for me like a congresswoman asking for votes. But instead, they launched a campaign against me. I would come home from work, and find hotter stories cut and pasted from the newspaper and left for me to consider on the kitchen counter as if they were recipes of lives gone wrong. And to make matters worse, I was facing this campaign to dump Saks at home. And at the same time on the media, there was a full campaign against Islam with Bush's impending war on Iraq. 

 

I remember my sister called me one day and she said, “I just heard that the Afridi tribe, that's his family name, are a bunch of drug smugglers.” I thought that's so absurd, because he comes from a family of diplomats. I mean, some people in his family have literally entertained the Queen of England and some people in my family entertain in the garage. [audience laughter] 

 

So, one day in the spring of 2002, I come home from work and I find all of my siblings and their spouses sitting in our living room on our hideous sofa set in silence, looking as if somebody had died. My sister stands up and she looks at me and she says, “Suzie, we are disowning you.” I felt like I was handed a verdict. I felt an intense pain, as if somebody had just stabbed me. 

 

So, I tried to reason with them. I said, “Please, just meet him. Judge him for his character instead of just judging him for being Muslim. This is the definition of racism.” I had no luck. My mom tried to reason with them, but she was old and defeated and no one was really listening to her. My brother-in-law, who had given himself the title of family patriarch after my father passed away, spoke for everyone. He said, “I don't care if he is Benazir Bhutto's son. I still would not approve.” And then, right before storming out, he looks at my mom dead in the eye and he says, “You don't know how to raise girls.”

 

In that moment, I just hated being Arab. I hated the fact that this close-minded man could have any say in my destiny, could have any authority over me. It made me so sick. I was devastated and numb. I spent the entire night on the phone with Saks. He tried to comfort me. He said, “Don't worry, I'll win them over.” And I said, “How? They're not even willing to meet you.” 

 

The next morning, I made a decision. I told my mom that if they want to disown me, they can go right ahead. I'm a grown woman. I was educated. I had a job. If things don't work out, I won't come back to them. They won't have to take care of me. Yes, I love them, but my future belonged with Saks. 

 

And so, after the intervention, there was a clear divide. I had my mom, my sister Jane and one of my brothers on my side. And the rest were dead set against me. But I wasn't backing down. I started taking Saks to family gatherings, birthday parties, barbecues, any chance I could get even first communions. [audience laughter] We were determined to win hearts and minds. But his diplomatic charm and moderate views made it very difficult for them to find anything on him. The only thing that they had was his religion. 

 

And so, some of them never actually referred to him by his name. They just simply called him the Muslim. Their comments and jabs were endless and so hurtful. I remember during one family dinner, my little two-year-old niece Janelle jumped onto his lap, because she adored him. And my sister-in-law sees this, and she looks at my mom and she whispers in Arabic. She says, “There you go. He just found his second wife.” 

 

I ate that comment along with many others. We lost a lot of battles, but we won the war. Ultimately, we got married and I realized that I would not have been able to make that choice if we were still living in the West Bank, I would have probably caved in. Instead, I think I made my first feminist stance by standing up to the Arab patriarchy. So, eventually, we had two weddings. One in California. The one in California was like the everything goes wrong version of that movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding. [audience laughter] And the one in Pakistan was a fabulous five-day affair. My in-laws pulled all the stops. My family did not attend that and that was really their loss. 

 

And after that, we grew apart. I didn't talk to my older sister for a number of years, and then my oldest brother moved to Canada and I didn't see or talk to him till 14 years later at our mother's funeral. I was very nervous about seeing him. I wasn't sure what was going to happen. But as soon as he sees me, he hugs me and he has these giant arms and he says the most remarkable thing to me. He says, “Suzie, you did the right thing by standing up to us. You married into a beautiful family. I'm sorry, and I was wrong.” I was stunned, because Arab men never say they were sorry or wrong. 

 

And all these years, I had felt like a pariah. I had felt like my marriage was not ideal. And to hear these words from him, it just meant the world to me. So, in the end, I didn't get disowned and no one had a heart attack. We're still happily married. We have a beautiful son. And now, I jokingly say that I married a Muslim and no one died. [audience laughter] Thank you so much.