That’s the rub. That’s what gets me, because we’ve lived here in Detroit all this time and we know how to get along here. But if I were to pack up and move to Montana tomorrow, of course I would be forced to grow up and mature a little and be prepared for the unknown, because I don’t know where I am. I’m out of my comfort zone. And, just like the rest of you twenty- and thirtysomethings, I’m at an age where I really haven’t figured things out yet, either. But that’s the sort of thing that happens to all of us at that age, living in Detroit or not. Talking about Detroit in these wildlife terms is just as offensive as those of you on the opposite side doing all you can to erase the history—remember our “blank canvas” phase, everyone?—of the people that have been here. And, yeah, there’s also that subtle undercurrent of racism when you talk about “adventure” in a city that’s mostly black.
Why don’t we just make a deal that when you move to Detroit, you just move here and shut up about it? Buy your abandoned building, build your lovely studio space and make art to your heart’s content, but at the same time, keep that maudlin BS to a minimum. Get off this endless spiel of trying to “save yourself” and just pay some property taxes. Welcome to Detroit.
HUDA AL-MARASHI
Cleveland’s Little Iraq
MY HUSBAND AND I MOVED to Cleveland from a high-rise in Queens with bewildered giddiness. In the mornings, we woke to the sounds of birds chirping. No sirens, no honks. Although the downtown was eerily quiet, traffic moved. Parking was ample, and the grocery stores’ aisles were wide enough to accommodate carts with play cars attached—a dream come true for a mother of young children.
Still, I had my reservations about our new home in the Midwest. My husband and I were both the children of Iraqi immigrants. We’d moved to Cleveland for his work, and I didn’t know how we’d fit in, in a region known for whiteness and farms. I doubted we’d find a Muslim community, let alone a Middle Eastern supermarket.
It only took me one trip along Lorain Road and West 117th to realize how wrongly I’d assumed. Those two streets boasted more Middle Eastern supermarkets than I’d ever had access to my entire life. During my childhood in a California tourist town, we made monthly hour-long drives to the closest Middle Eastern grocery. We came home with pounds of halal meat dumped into plastic bags that we then had to package and stack in the freezer. In New York, the scenario was the same, except I was the one with children underfoot as I portioned meat into freezer bags.
Now, only miles from my home, butchers prepared their halal meats in trays just like butchers prepared meats in mainstream grocery stores. They had a halal deli and frozen foods, fresh pita bread, and an assortment of cheeses, lebne, jams, and olives. I found the convenience of it all dizzying.
As I stocked my refrigerator at home, I told my husband we could live here forever. We mused as to where all these Arabs had come from and why we hadn’t known there was a community here before. Maybe it was a spillover from Detroit? Maybe there were other Iraqis?
I discovered there were, in fact, many Arabs in Cleveland. At the Islamic Center of Cleveland—my first local mosque that actually looked like a mosque, complete with a gilded dome and minarets—I found Jordanians, Palestinians, and Syrians, but no Iraqis.
I didn’t understand why I sought out this community. I hadn’t been to Iraq since 1979, when I was two years old. During that trip, my parents were interrogated so intensely at the airport, they decided Iraq was changing for the worse and that it wasn’t safe to return. There had been only a handful of other Iraqi families in my childhood seaside town, and in New York, the only foreign language I needed was the fragmented Spanish I used to communicate with my Colombian neighbors. I wished I could say that I missed speaking Arabic, but I didn’t have that kind of relationship with my mother tongue. I had always been far more comfortable with English.
Still, I continued to search. At a Shia mosque in a converted church in Brecksville, we met Iranians, Pakistanis, and Afghanis. They were warm and welcoming, but I wished I’d met some Iraqis, just a few families whose dialect reminded me of home.
On our way out, an Iranian woman told me her neighbor was Iraqi and that she planned on attending the Eid al-Fitr party to celebrate the end of Ramadan. “Come,” she said, “I will introduce you.” Without my having to tell her, she understood what my young family needed: people who looked and sounded like our relatives, people who’d stand in as aunts and uncles, cousins, and grandparents.
At a west side recreation center, I met Lenna, the wife of a neurologist and the mother of three children. From her first lilting “Hellow,” I knew Lenna was a real Iraqi, born and raised. Rather than introduce myself as an American who could barely speak Arabic, as was my habit, I had a radical thought: Try.
I surprised myself. By the end of our conversation, Lenna could tell Arabic was my second language, but still she complimented me, told me how well I spoke for someone born in the U.S. We exchanged numbers,
