Read on Twitter
On 9/11 the Hudson River was strewn with office paperwork. I didn't see the bodies falling from buildings. I had walked from midtown to Chinatown and walked over manhattan bridge. It was fashion week and some photographer stopped me to tell me that it was the Palestinians. (1)
I walked home to Brooklyn. My dad had been giving out masks and water. He worked in downtown where they were getting the ash and smoke. The next day we started getting threatening calls. Our door was vandalized with slurs by the end of the week. (2)
My brother was harassed at his college to the point where he dropped out of his engineering program. I mean not by students -- I mean by faculty. He never told us. I found rap lyrics that expressed this -- something he had written in his notebook. (3)
My white-passing mother wore the American flag and refused to speak Farsi or Uzbek. She didn't speak English well. I haven't spoken to either of them since 2002. (4)
The next week, the search was on to make Afghan Americans into stars or into "bridges". Townhalls were set up. Young Afghan Americans came out of the woodwork. They went in droves to serve as translators. The pay was 100k-200k. They spoke "kitchen" Farsi/Pashtu. (5)
A lot of script writers wanted to write films about rescuing Afghan women. Did they show the Afghan woman in the right way? How did men torture women there? Was this violent scene authentic? etc. (6)
A lot of kind things were going -- interfaith sessions. Oral history projects. Programs to help landmine victims. There was one project that very wealthy women put together with a handsome Afghan American man from DC as their lead. They raised tons of money. He disappeared. (7)
I remember an Afghan American wall street type. She said "Going to Afghanistan now is like winning the Pulitzer!" Her brother went from a struggling filmmaker to a war profiteer. People were getting rich at selling the parts of war, the little things that made war work. (8)
Afghan Americans joined the military. They tortured elders. They mistranslated bc they misrepresented themselves to make some money. "Finally, people are paying attention to us," they said and haphazardly destroyed villages bc they didn't know the right words. (9)
There were ones who came back driven mad by war. Drawing Afghanistan as a bleeding womb and harming themselves for what they did, what they say. Mutilated animals posted them on FB. Snapped photos of suicide bomber parts. "Strong" men who went mad. (10)
Then there were the untouched. A glam girl trans in her kitchen Pashtu & masjid Arabic torture sessions in Kandahar and in Guantanimo. She said, "All I have to do sometimes is be in the room in short sleeves & have a cute soldier put his hand on my shoulder." (11)
She bought her mother a house. She bought herself an apartment. She bribed her way into an ivy league school. She was completely untouched by anything she did and she told us at afternoon tea in the breeziest of voices. I think she was telling us to be independent like her. (12)
An Afghan American woman filmmaker showed me the note she wanted to slip Spielberg at a film premiere. She had written, "Help me. I am an Afghan woman who wants to make films" her number & yahoo account was on it as well. She cried all day bc she couldn't reach him. (13)
Then there were the hate crimes. The beheading of the Afghan American filmmaker. The missing children. The open bullying at schools and colleges. There were the food vendors lost during 9/11 whose names no one placed on plaques but who were victims. (14)
There is always more to say and to write. I am sure I will delete these tweets by the end of the day. I just needed to purge. What made me a New Yorker was 9/11 and the pandemic. (15)
