Istanbul
Last night, a group of very kind Bahraini women I met at a café here invited me to live in their wealthy little country in the Persian Gulf. My qualifications? I looked Arab. From which country? I asked. Kuwait, they all agreed.
When I first traveled to Europe as a 14-year-old kid, more than a few Spaniards I met insisted I was Chinese, which roughly translated to “really foreign” or “completely unlike us.” But more recently, my physiognomy has just as often given others reasons to include–rather than exclude–me.
Whether I’m in South Africa or Hawaii, locals are always projecting one or another ethnicity or racial category on me. In Johannesburg I’m “Coloured,” and in Honolulu I’ve often been mistaken for being a mix of Portuguese and Samoan. (Yes, that specific.)
But I shouldn’t say “mistaken,” because I don’t waste time correcting folks who are trying to welcome me into their group. You know what I mean, braddah? If people find common cause with me for my looks, it certainly beats the times those same looks aroused suspicion or plain old prejudice back in the continental US of A.
When the Bahrainis first asked me where I was from, I told them I was born in California. But my Americanness mattered little to them. They had already determined that I was one of them. The way I figured, they were vacationing in a non-Arab country, and they found an excuse to create connection with a chatty stranger.
By the end of our conversation, the youngest member of their group, a medical doctor, walked around the table to show me photos of Bahrain’s capital on her iPhone. Mostly they were nondescript images of marinas, restaurants, and walkways by the Gulf.
“We are an island country surrounded by water,” the doctor told me. And after a brutally hot summer in Madrid, the idea of island life genuinely appealed to me. And suddenly, so did the idea of leaning into my newly anointed Arab identity. I then turned to my new best friends and said, “As-salaam alaikum.”
