Multi What?

I want to introduce you to my other blog:

Multi What? A blog about mixed identity.

Multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multi-multi...

Multi who, multi what? A blog about mixed identity, by one of the world's few (?) Somali-Armenian Americans.

...Tiger Woods is Cablinasian, this lady's Armali.

I've done some renovation, and now I'll be approaching it from a different (more personal) angle. I'm reposting this most recent entry here, because this is an important part of who I am, and because I thought this would be a good way to announce the rebirth of Multi What?

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Hello, World!

What's an Armali?

To start with, I'm half Somali and half Armenian. I could go with Somenian, but I think Armali sounds nicer, right?

That means I'm half black and half white---like a certain president we know, I have a black African father and a white (ish?) American mother.

oh THAT's healthy!

My mother is a second generation Armenian American (or third generation, depending on how you count it---her grandparents all came to the US from Armenian villages in Turkey around 1915-1920s.) My father is Somali. He was born and raised in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, and first immigrated to the US as a young man. My parents met in Boston, Massachusetts. I have a younger sister and brother by the same parents.


But that's not all! (Ha, I feel like a game show.)

My mother's first husband was Ghanaian, and I have two sisters by that marriage. So they're half Ghanaian and half Armenian. Their father's second wife is Tanzanian, and my sisters have a brother (my step-half brother?) by that marriage, who's half Tanzanian and half Ghanaian.

My father's second wife was European American, and I have one sister by that marriage. So she's half European American and half Somali.

My stepdad, my mom's husband now, is African American, and I have two stepbrothers (by his first marriage) who are African American on both sides.

My stepmom, my father's wife now, is Somali, and I have a whole lotta siblings who are Somali on both sides.

My mother has only one sibling, my uncle. My aunt-by-marriage is Jewish American, and my only maternal first cousin (he's like my brother) is half Jewish and half Armenian.

My name is Arabic, and I minored in Arabic in college, but English is my only native language. My parents never taught us Somali or Armenian---I really, really want to learn, someday.

I was raised Muslim---I think of myself as agnostic now, just FYI. My mother's family are
(at least nominally) Armenian Orthodox Christian, and since my aunt is Jewish, we kids got to know all kinds of holidays, when we were growing up : )

I have family in Boston, New York, Arizona, Virginia, London, Kenya and who knows where else!

Okay, I know I'm forgetting something...

Like Me?

This photo made little cartoon hearts swirl around my head.



From the Official White House Photostream:

President Barack Obama bends over so the son of a White House staff member can pat his head during a family visit to the Oval Office May 8, 2009. The youngster wanted to see if the President's haircut felt like his own.

(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

PS---Love, love.

PS

PS, an update.

I asked around. Apparently I'm the last 25-year-old on earth to start graying. Who knew? It must be my strong Armali (Armenian-Somali) blood.

My grandmother wrote me a letter, I got it yesterday. She's always so sweet and supportive, in a strange and wonderful way:

We will be okay and pray that all of our loved ones will also be okay.
(I'm sure we all will as we have strong Armenian constitutions.) xxxoooo

I love you too, Gramma.

Happy Mother's Day, Mamas.

Look

I found a white hair today. I'm 25. At first it freaked me out, but then I thought of my mom's awesome white streak. I kinda want one.

Something Beautiful (Happy Birthday, Happy Graduation Sisters)

Our Mama.

"You Are Being Lied to About Pirates," by Johann Hari

WTF---NUCLEAR WASTE?!

How did I not know about this? Why aren't more people talking about this?

I'm really glad to see there are people out there taking a multi-angled view of this pirate mess. There's so much human suffering involved, and there's more than one place to lay the blame.

(I know, I know---this place is completely scattered. But please just go read this article over at the Huffington Post.)

"You Are Being Lied to About Pirates," by Johann Hari

You Are Being Lied to About Pirates

Johann Hari, Columnist, London Independent

Posted April 13, 2009 | 10:05 AM (EST)

[...] The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?

It's just so shocking (and depressing) that an issue of this magnitude could fly under the radar for so long. I can't believe I'm just hearing about this now, especially since I'm subscribed to an email news search on keyword "Somalia."

Did I mention I'm half Somali? My father is Somali, (born and raised in Mogadishu), and my mother is Armenian American.

I mean, it's pretty devastating. I know that the mainstream US media is significantly less than dependable, especially regarding world and minority issues, but wow...

Apparently they're planning to try the surviving pirate as an adult, even though he may be as young as fifteen? See blog post by Kalash at kabobfest.com.

Sigh.

At least South Park is paying attention, see the episode "Fatbeard":

When You Put It That Way

I'm talking to my sister on the phone---"You must be so lonely," she says.

SHE'S GOTTA HAVE IT, written and directed by Spike Lee

So, She's Gotta Have It just came on as the local Saturday night movie. Usually it's weird horror films from the 50s/60s/70s, so this is a surprise.

Apparently this was Lee's first feature-length film, and he plays a part in it (Mars Blackmon.) It came out in 1986. I've never seen it before, and actually I haven't seen most of Lee's films. As it happens, Clockers and Do the Right Thing are on my DVD mail-rental queue right now.

I remember going to see He Got Game in the theater, with my sister. It came out in 1998, so I must have been 15, my sister 13 1/2. We were visiting our grandparents in Florida for the summer. They dropped us off at the theater, and came to pick us up when the movie was over. I remember it clearly, because this couple in the row across the aisle from us actually had sex during the movie. Nothing like that had ever happened to me (well, near me) before. My grandparents never would have dropped us off if they'd known it was the kind of theater where that could go on without anyone complaining about it---I mean, it's not like the couple was even trying to be discreet---and of course we didn't tell them. I remember feeling kind of scandalized and kind of scared and kind of exhilarated.

Wow, She's Gotta Have It just went into color and then back to black and white.


Update 11 pm: Awwww. Wow again. I loved it.
(The TV dubbing-over of the profanity was hilarious, though.)

Here's a little article about Lee and his work.

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I'm so glad I went to the Tucson Festival of Books today. I'll write about it soon here. I'm planning to go again tomorrow, if I can follow through on waking up early again.

Freedom from Information

The forums/blogs/post-subscriptions are driving me into the ground. My obsession with wringing every drop of information from the internet every day is truly starting to affect my quality of life.

I was finished with work today by noon. I ate lunch, walked to the library to return a book, talked to my sister on the phone, and was home by 2 pm. A nice way to start the free portion of my Wednesday.

When I got home, as usual, I went straight to the computer (after saying hi to my furry roommates, Treble the dog and Boots the cat.) I checked the blogs, checked the forums, read through all the posts that I missed while I was at work.

I talked to S. on the phone, I made a call to the Dept. of Education (stupid financial aid/student loan mix-up I'm trying to get fixed.)

Talking to S. was good---and she sent me the most wonderful postcard, a 1953 portrait of Jack Kerouac taken by Allen Ginsberg. She wanted to make sure my mailbox didn't stay empty! I got it today. If it wasn't for her, there would have been nothing in there but my next Six Feet Under DVD.

Then I checked the blogs, checked the forums, read through all the new posts coming in. Checked the blogs, checked the forums, read through...

Suddenly it was 7 pm.

I meant to take a long bath and read, I meant to work on the story I'm writing for workshop, I meant to finally do some Arabic, I meant to get through some administrative-type chores I have to do, I meant to call my grandparents. Instead, I sacrificed my brain and my time to the false idol of internet chatter, again. I mean, I hardly ever get around to reading the news, since all of this started.

This is no way to live. This little addiction of mine is out of control, and it's become progressively worse lately.

So, I'm totally grounded. I hereby solemnly swear that as of now I will NOT look at P & W, I will NOT open the email account where I have all my post-subscriptions delivered, I will NOT visit the MFA Blog or TSE or the GradCafe. If I can get through this and be good, maybe I'll allow myself to check back (during a limited window of time) a week from now. Or, maybe I'll be past the sweats and shakes by then, and won't want to go back.

Either way, I'm reclaiming my life outside of the computer. First, right now, I'm closing all the bad tabs open in my browser, signing out of gmail, and I'm eating a popsicle. Tomorrow I'm going to come home from work, eat lunch and write.

And not in this blog. Really write.

The Tucson Festival of Books is this weekend, 3/14-3/15, and I'm going. I'm really excited. The UA Poetry Center has a list of their events. I want to go to Alison Hawthorne Deming's reading for sure, and I'm also really interested in a talk called "Fiction out of Friction: Evolution, Arabs and Other Controversial Topics," with Robin Brande and Laila Halaby. And a lot more, too much to go into now. I'm falling asleep at the keyboard.


It's almost my bedtime. Goodnight, world.

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PS--On a related note, Denis Johnson is reading at the Poetry Center on April 9th.

PPS---Why was there no new Lost tonight?

PPPS--Someone recalled the library copy of Burning Down the House I was reading. That's the book I had to return. I've been wanting to buy it, so now I will. It'll be better to be able to mark it all up, anyway.

Rejected 2: The Really Crappy Sequel

I just got my UMass Amherst rejection in the mail, finally. I knew it was coming, but some crazy part of me was hoping I might be on a secret waitlist.

I have to admit that this one hurts a little, maybe a lot---even though I know I'm really lucky to have an acceptance to an incredible program at this point. I've been preparing myself for this (see below), but I'm still kind of on the verge of tears.

Part of me SO wants to be back east, and my uncle went to college in Amherst and has been talking it up ever since I told him I wanted to go to grad school. He thinks I'm going to get in everywhere, as do most of the rest of my family---funny how people just can't seem to understand the way that MFA programs make their decisions.

I keep trying to explain to them that it's not about my grades or GREs or even my SOP. Sample, sample, sample. I'm grateful that my family understands why I want to go to grad school, and that most are even supportive of me pursuing an MFA. (Crazy art school degree...I do get the "What are you going to do with that?" spiel from the extended family I'm not so close with.)

But they think that because I was successful in undergrad, I'm automatically going to get into all these programs and have my pick, with multiple funding offers served to me on a platter. When I told my mom about my first assumed rejection (now a reality), she was way more upset than I was. "I just don't understand why they don't want you!"

Oh, Mama. You don't get it.

Anyway, please forgive me for whining when I don't really have the right. Feel free to mentally slap me. Now I'm waiting for my Michigan rejection---that one won't feel nearly as bad.

I need to get over myself. Down, ego, down!

Good luck to everyone, as always, and continuing congratulations and condolences as this maddening process goes on.

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PS---I was a little bit miffed to see that the letter came from the graduate admissions office, not the department itself. Feels like they didn't even want to waste their letterhead on me. Sigh.