Cherien Dabis On Being Told She Wasn't American

The interview is with filmmaker Cherien Dabis and it comes to us from BOMB Magazine. You can read the extended interview at Bombsite.com. Actress and director June Stein conducted the interview when they sat down at a restaurant in Manhattan. And we jump in with Dabis talking about her family’s arrival in America. She was the first member of her family actually born here. 1976 in Omaha to be exact. Her father is Palestinian, a pediatrician. Her mother is Jordanian. And they moved to the heartland so her dad could do his residency. But the family’s adjustment was hard and a little rough.

June Stein: Did you have brothers and sisters? How many brothers and sisters…

Cherien Dabis: I had one older sister who was so lonely that her best friend was a nail in the wall.

June Stein: Her best friend was what?

Cherien Dabis: She used to speak to a nail in the wall. That’s how lonely she was.

June Stein: She spoke to a nail in the wall?

Cherien Dabis: They eventually actually moved to Ohio where my dad was placed, because there was a small town there that needed someone with his medical specialty. My parents were like: “Oh this little town is cute and it’s quaint. And there’s zero crime rate.”

June Stein: What was the name of the town?

Cherien Dabis: Celina, Ohio. Rural Ohio. In a town of 10,000 people surrounded by cornfields. We were one of only a handful of immigrant families there. My mother was bored to tears. Every year she saved every penny all year long to take us all back to Jordan for the summer. It was an interesting upbringing. I mean Jordan and Ohio are such amazingly different places. In this small town people barely left the state.  There were some people who had never town, never really left the area. It was like… we got all kinds of questions, like, “Are there cars in Jordan? Are there phones? Do you ride camels?” It was really rudimentary.

June Stein: Were you ostracized at all at school?

Cherien Dabis: We weren’t really ostracized until the first Gulf War. There was ignorance and things, but the first Gulf War when that sort of ignorance turned into discrimination. I was 14 and you know prior to that point my dad had been relatively successful. A good business. He had saved kids’ lives, so he was kind of like a town hero in some ways. And then the first Gulf War hit and it was really amazing, because almost overnight he became the enemy. My father’s patients, a lot of them, walked into his office and asked for their medical records and left, because they didn’t want to see an Arab doctor. We got death threats. Anonymous handwritten notes left in our mail box and they said things like, “We’ll get Saddam and we’ll get you too.” Or, “Love it or leave it.” Those kinds of things. My dad actually kept them all. One of the most egregious things that happened, though, was that the secret service came to my high school to investigate a rumor that my 17-year-old sister had threatened to kill the president. That was kind of the breaking point for me where I was like: “Who are these people? Where are they getting this information?” But there was no escaping it.  Prior to that point in my life, I was like, “I’m American. I’m no different than anyone.” I just wanted to fit in. I would go to bed and pray to wake up with blond hair and blue eyes. But it was that point in my life where I was like, “Okay, clearly I’m not just American; clearly there’s this whole other side to me that I need to examine.” And I became really interested in who I was and where my parents came from. It’s interesting that because I grew up traveling so much, I feel like I was given this sort of like the gift of perspective. Whenever I got used to one thing, I was taken out of it. And then I had to get used to another thing and then I was taken out of that. It was always goodbye, goodbye. It was always the Arabs not understanding the Americans. The Americans not understanding the Arabs. And constantly having to defend one side to the other and explain who I was. So what that gave me was a perspective of an outsider. I was really always felt like I was on the outside looking in. And because of that I sort of had this philosophical, observant, “What’s happening here? What can I do to facilitate these two things?” I felt like a bridge.

David Gerlach: That’s Cherien Dabis on being an American until a town says you’re not. And this is Blank on Blank. I do wish to thank BOMB Magazine and its contributors for adding this conversation to the archive. Be sure to also check out Dabis’ first film. It’s all about her experience growing up in the U.S. It’s called “Amreeka.” This interview was produced by me and Shawn Wen. Our sound logo comes to us thanks to Jeffrey Alan Jones. And for more of our interviews, lost interviews that you can’t hear anywhere else, head over to Blank on Blank.org. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.