By joining our Readers' community, you can access this feature. By joining our Readers, you join a community of like-minded people, thirsty to discuss shared or not! The corridors are crowded with underpaid, disgruntled employees and the stench of body odor from the anxious people being carted from one room to the next. In Lebanon, women cannot pass on their citizenship to their children; nationality can only be passed through the father. Every three years, I have to renew my legal status in my country because my mother had married an Ethiopian man.
An officer approached us, wary of how lost we seemed, and offered to help us with directions. She then looked at my ID, smirked at my mother, and asked: Min wen jibtiya?
I cannot tell you how many times somebody in Beirut, whether it be a hairdresser or my neighbor, has denied me my Lebanese heritage. My skin is too dark, my Arabic accent too choppy, my hair too unruly and big. A surname can even identify the rural village your grandparents were born in. Intrinsic to our family names is also our value to society, our positioning in the socioeconomic hierarchy. In a hurried attempt to compartmentalize me, Lebanese people ask me perplexedly if I meant Tadros, which is a common Lebanese surname.
Their intuition was right: I am not one of them. I was coming from Somerville, Massachusetts, where my classmates were primarily first-generation children of immigrant families. Meanwhile, my classmates in Beirut spent the bus ride back home making fun of me. I was teased for my thick, textured African hair.
They told me that I looked like their Ethiopian maids at home. I spent my mornings getting ready for school staring at my face in the mirror, wishing I could rip the starkly Ethiopian features off my face. My lips - too full. My skin - a melanated caramel with tan undertones. With every demeaning comment about Ethiopians I heard, or every instance in which I heard others disparaging Black people, I sunk deeper into my shame. It felt like my blood was tainted—unacceptable.
