Roqayah Mohammed walked into Evanston Township High School carrying a pot of her mother’s rice, one of her favorite Iraqi dishes. She wanted to bring a taste of her own culture to the first-ever South Asian Middle Eastern Alliance meeting.
Dr. Anita Thawani Bucio, an English teacher at ETHS, remembers the day vividly. Two of Roqayah’s friends, Sehr and Arooshay, had approached Bucio with the idea of creating the club. Bucio didn’t know the students, but she understood why they came to her. It was November 2015 and ISIS had just claimed responsibility for the Paris terror attacks, so she was hearing more incidents of hate in school than usual.
“After Paris, and honestly post-9/11, our lives changed,” Bucio says. “If you were South Asian or Middle Eastern, you were viewed as threatening, dangerous and you were met with hate.”
According to Bucio, South Asian and Middle Eastern students make up about one to five percent of ETHS. She says these students needed a safe space to process the difficulties they faced as underrepresented identities. At that first meeting, the group set out goals. They wanted to practice cultural art and write poetry about their lives. They wanted to perform traditional dances at the pep rally. Most of all, Roqayah says, they wanted to create a sense of community.
“That was our way of embracing our culture and representing it at a school that had few students, kind of making it a community,” Roqayah says.
Roqayah and her friends also created a full-day summit, inviting cultural speakers and hosting educational workshops. The first year proved promising, as 50 students came together to celebrate their identities.
Bucio is now preparing for the fourth inaugural summit, which has expanded to include all Asian, Middle Eastern and African students. She’s expecting over 150 students, including ones from nearby Niles North High School, who want to model their own group off the success of ETHS. The sense of community empowerment continues to benefit the students, Bucio says.
“The feeling of invisibility is super real,” Bucio says. “Just having a space for students to have a voice is so important.”
Today, Roqayah is a sophomore at University of Illinois studying on the pre-medicine track. She goes to Muslim Student Association events and feels comfortable navigating her multifaceted identity – Iraqi, Muslim, Middle Eastern, Arab, American. But it wasn’t always that way.
“I used to feel that gap, like I had to be one or the other at a specific point in time,” Roqayah says. “But now a lot of my friends are either Muslim but South Asian, or they’re Arab or Iraqi like me, and they’ve also grown up in the U.S. so we can relate so much in the sense that we’re both American but Arab at the same time. I have that community where I can relate to people and express myself in both senses.”
Life Turned Upside Down
In October 2008, at 10 years old, Roqayah arrived in Chicago with her 12-year old brother Abdullah and her mother, Ahlam Mahmoud. The past five years had been a whirlwind.
When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Ahlam recalls her children throwing up from the sound of B-52 bombers. Ahlam was an English-Arabic translator and guide for journalists, and after being appointed to the Baghdad City Council in 2004, she took on more humanitarian work. But local Iraqi militias became suspicious of her connection to the American forces and she was kidnapped, beaten, interrogated, released for $50,000 ransom and forced to flee the country.
Ahlam brought her family first to Jordan, then Egypt, and in 2006, to Syria. There, her oldest son Anas complained of shoulder pain. Ahlam couldn’t afford a private clinic, so she took him to a hospital for Iraqi refugees. The doctors gave Anas an injection, but it was an overdose and caused internal bleeding. Emergency surgery could not save Anas. He died at 12 years old.
While the death was devastating, Ahlam processed her grief in the only way she knew how – by helping more people. She began volunteering with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Damascus and partnered with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. She also ran a makeshift school out of her own apartment, teaching 70 students.
This drew the attention of Syrian intelligence, who frequently visited Ahlam’s apartment to observe classes, search books and threaten to shut down the school. Shortly after, she was asked to spy on the American journalists and humanitarian workers she knew and write a weekly intelligence report. When Ahlam refused, she was locked in a cell and transported a few days later to a prison in Damascus.
Ahlam was held underground for five months. It likely would have been longer without her humanitarian connections, who pressed Syria for her release. As a condition, the UNHCR agreed that Ahlam would leave the country within a week. She was brought to the UNHCR office, where Abdullah and Roqayah were waiting, and that night, they were on a plane to Chicago.
Dr. Bucio first heard this story when Roqayah led a workshop on trauma for South Asian Middle Eastern Alliance. She remembers being in awe as Roqayah calmly re-lived the refugee experience of fleeing for safety, unpacking what it was like to see her own country ravaged by war and the upheaval that accompanied the violence.
“When I first came here I was in a bit of a shock coming from a different country,” Roqayah says. “It wasn’t something that we looked forward to, it’s not like we’re going on a trip to a new country – it was sort of like running away, like we have to do this.”
To make matters worse, Roqayah’s father, Shams Ahmed, had gone back to Iraq six months earlier because his father was deathly ill. He wasn’t able to make it to Chicago until 2010, and today he lives in Skokie – separately from Ahlam – who lives in Rogers Park.
Roqayah processed the tumultuous changes by embracing her new life. She and Abdullah started school at George B. Swift Elementary in Edgewater, and they were pleased to find fellow refugee students from all over the world: Mexico, Togo, Liberia, Vietnam, Philippines.
“I liked that I was surrounded by people who were different, but we had one thing that we could all relate with,” Roqayah says. “I didn’t feel judged or like an outsider for not being able to speak English.”
The refugee students took English as a Second Language (ESL) classes together, and in the supportive environment, Roqayah quickly learned the language, placing out of ESL classes in less than two years. With no Arab classmates, Roqayah says she forced herself to pick up on the language and culture, trying hard to make friends and fit in.
Abdullah was having a tougher time acclimating to his new life. He befriended two classmates who spoke Arabic and often relied on them to translate. Because of this, Abdullah struggled, and it took him three years to become comfortable speaking English. The cultural transition added further difficulties.
“I was scared to go to school because in my country if you don’t do your homework or if you do a bad thing, they will beat you with a stick,” Abdullah says.
But it wasn’t the teachers that gave Abdullah trouble in Chicago – it was the students. His classmates picked on his poor English, and Abdullah got beaten up twice in his first year at Swift. The second time was so rough, Ahlam describes, that he stayed home for several days. Ahlam was concerned and wanted to find a safer environment for Abdullah, so for high school, she decided to send him to ETHS.
Evanston was not much better. One day in art class, Abdullah reached into his bag to take out a notebook. He remembers the student next to him yelling, “He’s got a bomb, he’s got a bomb!” Abdullah was shocked and confused as the student continued spouting hateful rhetoric, exclaiming, “You come into our country, you’re coming to bomb us!”
Abdullah became angry and started yelling back, telling him to shut up and leave him alone. Before it escalated physically, the teacher broke them up, and the student was suspended for two weeks. But these types of incidents shook Abdullah’s confidence, affecting his ability to make friends and build a new life.
“I used to be very scared, I would stay home all the time and I was very lonely,” Abdullah says. “I was shy and not good at making friends, I just wouldn’t talk to anybody.”
Fading Memories, Future Dreams
In 2016, Abdullah and Roqayah went back to Iraq for the first time in 10 years. For Abdullah, the visit brought back fond memories of life before strife and displacement. He was able to see his family, his home and his former life – and he missed it.
“I was having fun and when I came back [to Chicago] I was so mad,” Abdullah says. “I was like, take me back there, I don’t want to stay here.”
The trip also brought back memories of Anas, and the trauma that Abdullah still carries with him. Roqayah says that he often tells her about Anas appearing in dreams, and every year on the anniversary of his death, Abdullah pushes the family to donate food or money in his honor.
The death of Anas weighed especially heavy on Abdullah. In losing an older brother, he had lost both a role model and best friend, and the grief built as he struggled to make friends, learn English and fit into American culture. Today, Abdullah is still processing his trauma.
“I deal with it,” Abdullah says. “I say it’s all God, God takes what he wants, you know? We say ‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un’ – to him, we belong. To God, we belong. We belong back to him.”
When Abdullah came to Chicago, he leaned on his religion to work through the stress. He prayed five times a day, fasted and read the Quran avidly, even memorizing specific verses.
But now, Abdullah says he’s gotten lazy. Sometimes he prays, sometimes he doesn’t. He blames it on poor influences, especially the friends he made at Oakton Community College. He recalls a Romanian friend who would mock his religious practices, saying, “Oh man, why do you have to pray five times a day, just pray like one time!”
Abdullah’s performance in school also suffered after the loss of Anas. Without his older brother’s support, Abdullah filled the void by following his friend’s ignorance.
“He was like fuck school man, just work a job, don’t worry about school,” Abdullah says. “I took his advice and look what happened to me now, I should’ve been done with school already. I was taking classes but I failed like seven of them because I was listening to my friend’s advice. I have to deal with it, it’s my fault.”
Abdullah is still taking classes at Oakton. He’s enrolled in Chem 101 and Math, and he studies a lot, he says, because he’s trying to get all A’s – well, maybe a few B’s, he adds; Chem 101 is pretty tough. He has two more semesters, and after that he might go to University of Illinois Chicago, where he’ll study to be a pharmacist. His parents think it’s a good career for him, and he seems to agree.
He no longer hangs out with that Romanian friend, and he’s trying to get back into reading the Quran. It’s a Friday, which means he doesn’t have class, but he still went to the library to study with new friends – finals are coming up in two weeks, he says.
Right now, Abdullah says he needs to get his degree, but his dream is to get married and have kids in the future. He still misses Anas. Every now and then something will trigger a memory, and he’ll cry. Just two days ago, he got into a fight with his father and cried himself to sleep.
He wants to stay focused in school, it’s just hard sometimes, he says. Especially without Anas. He recalls his first writing in English, a poem he wrote about his brother and presented to his ESL class at ETHS.
He begins reciting it to me. “Brother, I wish you were here. I wish you were here so we can play together. I wish you were here so we can have a lot of fun. I wish you were here so we can study together.” Suddenly, Abdullah stops. He can’t remember the rest of the poem.