Djelloul Marbrook

America is haunted by The Other, by otherness. The fastest approach to an understanding of this is to consider the photographs of the people we send to Washington. They don’t look like our demographics. They look northern European.

We look for The Other to determine who we don’t want in our churches, our neighborhoods, our schools. Worse yet, we look for The Other to determine who should not be helped by our hard-earned tax money. Much of our historic resentment of taxes is actually an unwillingness to provide public help to people unlike us.

In our quest for The Other we have at times considered Asians as well as Italians, Jews, Greeks and other Mediterranean people as non-whites, and today we are inclined to consider Arabs and Hispanics in the same light, whereas at least 47 percent of our Hispanic population identifies itself as white.

Of the thirty most advanced nations in the world our taxes are one of the three three lowest, and yet year after year we elect politicians who pander to our resentment towards taxes for the entire population’s quality of life.

Part of this is understandable in non-racial terms. Our independence began as a tax rebellion. The American revolution glorifies individualism, self-reliance and the inviolability of property rights (although lately we seem to have sold the idea of eminent domain to monied interests).

Taxes and otherness are inextricable, and the impact of The Other, most often the dark or darker other, on our consciousness defines the kind of culture we are.

We celebrate our melting pot, but we prefer it boil in other neighborhoods. We tend to withhold taxes from people who don’t look like “us,” or attend our church—people we wouldn’t want marrying our children. They’re either slackers and cheats or they’re on their own, or both.

At the same time that otherness preoccupies us we don’t have a clear idea of who “we” are. Anglo-Saxon, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, White Christians, Nordics, Germans, Scots, Irish, Poles? Who are we? Certainly the men and women we send to Washington look, by and large, like some kind of amalgam of the above.

But we are also Native Americans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Jews, Arabs, many varities of Hispanic, and almost any other ethnicity you can name. All Americans. All buying into the American Dream. But are we all willing to help each other, to accept each other?

This question of the Dark Other has fascinated me all my life, and so it’s no accident that my first book of poems, Far From Algiers, speaks to it.

Sen. Barack Obama tried bravely last month to discuss this issue openly. I think he understands, as I try to understand in many of my poems, that the problem festers when it is not discussed.

But it isn’t just our problem alone. Both France and England, among others, are tormented by their own perceptions of the Dark Other. In some sense it’s a legacy of the way Christendom has historically seen the Saracens, the People of the Dawn, the Arabs. They are the Dark Other, as were the Turks. Indeed the Saracens were sometimes so amused by their own demonization in Christian eyes that their soldiers wore horns and tails to mock the Christian knights.

This is the legacy of the Dark Other, those whom we demonize rather than understand. This is the reason African-Americans in prison are drawn to Islam. They underastand that Muslims, like themselves, have been painted as the Dark Other. The degree to which Jews and Italians and others have forgotten that they were once the Dark Other is the degree to which they subscribe to an American tragedy.

It is about color, because color is the easiest difference to identify. That is why the Irish are not the Dark Other, as much as they were discriminated against when they began to arrive in great numbers on these shores. It is why Swedes and Norwegians and Germans and Poles are not forced to wear the Dark Other star.

Hollywood has done its share both to exacerbate the stereotypes and then to erase them. In my lifetime I have felt fabulously enriched by the slow ascendancy of African-Americans and Italian-Americans, for example, to stardom. But it has been slow and painful. I can hardly imagine watching films today if I were deprived of actors who in my childhood and youth would not have been allowed to become stars.

But this sea change in “liberal” Hollywood is not reflected in our willingness to pay taxes to support unfortunates who do not share our racial and cultural histories. And I am as reluctant to call Hollywood liberal as I am to call the press free. Hollywood has its enlightened selfishness as surely as the press has its corporate censorship. And these too are issues that ought to be discussed, because only a fearful society shies away from discussing the tough issues.

This anxiety about The Other short-circuits culture. It disconnects us from our dearly held national ideals, theatening to turn them into delusions. We say we want equal opportunity for everyone, but the Dark Other is the unspoken exception in our collective mind.

The issue rises painfully to the surface when we discuss profiling, whether on the highways or at customs stations or in airports. We are in the ironic and chagrined position of witnessing transportation safety officers of color profiling the Dark Other from among passengers.

Two incidents in my own life come to mind as I struggle to make sense of this conundrum. Once at an Episcopal church where I was chairman of the building and grounds committee we were discussing whether to shelter homeless people in extreme weather. And if we did, we asked ourselves, what would be the rules? One warden was dead set against it on all the usual grounds—insurance, staffing, stewardship of the property. I became so frustrated with him that I asked if any of us had any doubt what Jesus would say if he were sitting among us. Because he is, sitting among us, I added. The reaction was similar to what it would have been if I had wiped my mouth with my necktie over soup or farted at the communion rail. The homeless in this instance were the Dark Other, and by pointing out the disconnect between the values we espoused and our actions I had been exiled to the Dark Other. Not only did insurance trump Christianity, fear did.

I remember a not dissimilar instance shortly after 9/11. My wife and I were on the Lewes, Delaware, car ferry. I was looking out on the water when I noticed a middle-aged man studying me. You may remember we were all studying each other closely in those days, looking for the Dark Other, the
terrorist. He approached me. Are you a Christian? he asked. I didn’t feel particularly threatened by his demeanor, but I knew he had been emboldened to do this asocial thing by our national tragedy. I am baptized and I do try to be, I said, trying not to be rude. That’s a start, he said, and then he regaled me with his Christian (family) values. The man reeked of his own short-circuit. He was importuning a stranger who had done him no wrong and telling himself it was for the stranger’s own good and that he was doing it in the name of his lord. There was no way for me to feel comfortable with my responses. I didn’t wish to hurt him, I didn’t wish to be importuned, I knew we were all deeply shaken by events, and I knew we were all on the lookout for anybody who didn’t resemble our third cousin.

Somehow we have to find our way past this obsession about The Other. When I walk around Manhattan I am reassured. When I walk about upstate, as I often do, I am less than reassured, because the homogeneity of the population is more pronounced. At the end of the day, I rejoice because I live in a country where I have the right, the privilege really, of being able to write this without fear of consequence. And yet I know there are those among us who are cooking up consequences for free expressions. It’s a perilous and yet hopeful time, and those of us who have been watching HBO’s John Adams know that that is the American condition, perilous and hopeful.—DM