APRIL DIGEST: Identity/Spite
This month's digest is on spite's creative and destructive power through travel, politics, film, music, and friendship.
In early April, I spent about two weeks riding the Amtrak from one city to the next on the east coast. The trip combined both of my favorite impulses behind travel: reuniting with the familiar & warm parts of my life that were out of immediate reach on one hand, and accumulating thousands of steps through freewheeling walking and exploration on the other. In New York and DC, I got to reunite with friends I hadn’t seen in over a year, including my old cat Miskeh. In Philly and Boston, cities I had never visited before, I spent a lot of time with the built environment and with my own thoughts, examining both with attempted precision and open-eyed curiosity.
In Philly and Boston, I paid note of all the American self-narrativizing inscribed into preserved historical buildings and monuments. For all of their historical significance, New York City and DC did not seem to so readily call attention to their historical backdrop; it always felt easier to be distracted by their present functions as central hubs of American commerce and politics. Boston and Philly, on the other hand, seem to live a bit more in the shadow of their own historical significance as sites of colonization, rebellion, and everything in between, even as the 21st century continues to stretch on.
As I walked across some of the oldest urban sites in the 13 colonies, the US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon had started to “wind down.” During ceasefire negotiations, the American president casually called for civilizational extermination on his twitter soapbox, accompanied by a sadistic Israeli bombing campaign across Beirut more horrifying than the city had witnessed since 1980. Naturally, the monuments to American settler revolutionary bravado I encountered conversed directly with our genocidal political moment. I once again found myself asking the same questions I have been asking ever since I immigrated to the US, questions about responsibility, survivor’s guilt, identity reckoning—questions that easily recall anxious clichés of righteous posturing or perpetual cycles of despairing self-importance.
I dodge the thoughts and feelings I knew I spent all too much time with over the past decade, and tried to jump instead into somewhat new territory by asking harder questions. What do I make of my status as an American, not strictly in terms of my political and social responsibility, but more broadly in terms of my own self-conception? Have I been perhaps too eager to “escape” my Americanness as an identity, passport and its accompanying bloody privileges notwithstanding? Is having grown up as an American outside of the US too comfortable of a position, since it allows me to enjoy the fruits of my US middle class positionality while dodging any real reckoning with it, displacing any self-interrogation onto “those Americans” who are white, wealthier, or who don’t speak any language besides English? Is it lazy, dishonest, and too self-purifying to disavow America and Americanness as a collection of experiences at the root of many of my sensibilities and unconscious tendencies? Or could rejecting the “American” self-descriptor be an act of political renouncement and anti-imperial ethical self-making, one I may foreclose in the name of brutal honesty? And relatedly of course, given the bloody American history and present I am all too acquainted with, ought I continue to live as an American in America when I have the option of traveling and living elsewhere? If so, why?
I ask these questions as I also confront two clashing emotional reactions to my American colonial surroundings. On the one hand, I feel a sense of awe I am reluctant to confess to here. “Awe” cannot be confused with adoration, admiration, or respect—that would betray the abject disgust I feel when I sit with a built environment forged through American indigenous dispossession, slavery, and imperial expansion. I mean by awe a natural reaction one can feel when faced with something that seems larger than comprehension—like being enveloped in a building whose grandiosity and architectural detail expose and mask sediments of human and non-human experience, foreign and familiar. I feel horribly amazed at the turn of history, in all of its triumphs, brutalities, speech, silence, mundanity, comedy, terror, grace. It all could have turned out a million different ways, yet here I am & here are the people being memorialized and the buildings being preserved.
The other feeling is of course a feeling I have held even before I had any real awareness of being American, one that has accentuated a lot in the past few years: spite.
I did not grow up a spiteful kid in the traditional sense of the word. But as far back as I can remember, I always actively wanted to “spite” something, maybe a social expectation, or imposed frames for my sense of identity. As a kid I always drifted towards roads untraveled and never found it easy to settle for easy answers about life’s difficult questions; I wasn’t always brave and open to others about my exploration, but I quietly challenged myself and the narratives I inherited about the world nonetheless. Part of it was a sense of genuine curiosity about the world, part of it was my inability to suspend disbelief in response to the more simplistic stories I was demanded to believe, and part of it was just a personal tendency to recoil at the thought of fitting neatly into any readily available descriptor others had for me. I was resolved (or maybe predisposed?) pretty early on in life to spite the so-called “path of least resistance,” whatever it may be. I can name some choices I made to go against the grain of things during my teenage years, including: choosing to try to learn philosophy while living in a Salafist environment that highly discouraged it, discovering alternative rock music while living in Jeddah by spending too much time on the internet, choosing to study history in college despite my weak social studies education and much stronger STEM credentials… and everything in between. These earlier examples precipitated much more dramatic choices that underpinned my early 20s, but getting into those would be another article entirely.
This more conscious inflection of “spite,” to move against the grain of something, is related to yet distinct from spite as a visceral emotional reaction. To spite a framework of knowledge, for example, is a personal choice one can take, though one could be predisposed towards taking that choice for various reasons. But the intense anger one might feel when confronting people’s violent tendencies is seldom a conscious choice. It pulses through the veins and spits itself out through charged actions and vengeful words. It could be the rebellious impetus behind spite as a conscious choice, but the emotion cannot be reducible to the choice. Spite, the emotion, overwhelms the body.
I felt inklings of that spite as I walked through the old parts of Boston and Philly, recalling a feeling that grew in me after arriving to the US in 2015 on the precipice of the first Trump administration and in the midst of the Syrian refugee crisis. It was a spite that grew out of my disaffection with a political system that creates, justifies, and perpetuates immense crises of human suffering in order to maintain the well-being of the few, a spite that envelops my heart when I scroll between images of human devastation in Gaza while American politicians and journalists actively manufacture political and economic cover for their crimes. At times, that spite threatened to take me to some of the darkest and most destructive mental head spaces I could possibly go into, displacing my anger onto people deserving and undeserving that range from: random Americans I would see in the subway, other organizers I disagreed with politically, my employer, my family, myself… That sort of anger can have little patience for a filtering system, it can be indiscriminate and it can be cruel, often harsher on the self than any worthy target of it.
But is it so bad to be a little bit spiteful? Can it not also be a sign that my heart is working? To be nonchalant in the face of this horrific world is to be perpetually numb and morally suspect to say the least. That much is easy for me to observe. The real question is: what is to be done with spite when it threatens to become a bottomless void?
It’s easier for me to identify what ought not be done with spite: overcorrecting in its name, even if restraint is not necessarily easy in practice. In retrospect, I can identify very easily where I had overcorrected over the course of my 20s, all in the name of spite, both as an emotion and as an ethos. (Sometimes, at a grander scale, I wonder if everything that has ever happened in the history of the world has been an abusive overcorrection to abuse. In a lot of ways the 18th-21st centuries, the “Age of Extremes,” per Eric Hobsbawm, seem like they contain the largest concentrations of mass-scale spiteful overcorrections, to put it crudely.)
Setting aside the political dimensions for a moment, bracketing spite can be immensely difficult at the interpersonal level. 2026 has so far brought multiple situations where people I have trusted dealt me completely shocking levels of harm while seeming entirely unconcerned with their behavior. What’s worse is that they can go on with their lives while I have to do the emotional heavy-lifting by grieving people who shocked me suddenly with their lack of care, who either never respected me, or never respected themselves enough to try to be better. It soothes me a little to think that maybe I am not alone in my anger, that everybody who reads this piece has gone through some variation of that feeling. Surely it would leave you all spiteful too.
When I dwell in it, I ask myself, am I able to spite “spite,” to move against its grain, to forgive and overcome? Am I too human to do that, or not human enough? Can forgiveness be an honest and productive undertaking, or is it too painfully naïve to be justified?
Besides the glimpses of it I felt while walking around Philly and Boston, spite awoke within me to destabilizing extents twice during the past month. The first time was when I found out the Syrian mass murderer Amjad Yousef was apprehended by the Syrian authorities. The man perpetrated some of the most horrific crimes I have ever seen recorded on video, blindfolding tens of innocent people and forcing them to run into their own graves before gunning them down and burning their corpses. His capture brought back all kinds of difficult emotions: anger towards Yousef and the system that armed and emboldened him, grief for the parents who lost their children and the children who lost their parents, indignation at all the idiots who still find it in their hearts to deny that grief by whitewashing, denying, or ignoring Assadist crimes, bafflement at the banality of the violence, frustration with myself for being too young and too far from Syria in 2013, for not doing enough, for being alive and healthy while kids my age died senselessly. My whole day disappeared into a spiral of intensity.
The other time spite similarly destabilized me was after watching the beautiful new Palestinian film All That’s Left of You, which follows inherited pain across three separate generations of a family displaced from Jaffa in 1948. Without spoiling the film, the events themselves as well as the framing device through which they are told shook me to heights of anger and grief I hardly ever feel after watching a film. I felt many of the similar emotions as the ones accompanying Amjad Yousef’s capture, except this time they instead centered on proximity. I viscerally remembered the fact that I live among the perpetrators of senseless violence that continues to unfold in Palestine, that my own tax dollars still directly contribute to the bloodshed and starvation endured in Gaza, to occupation and misery across Palestine, and now to death and destruction in Iran and Lebanon as well.
To “spite spite” and forgive Assadist, Israeli, and American perpetrators of horrific violence must surely be an exercise in untold stupidity, if not altogether unthinkable for anyone who still directly endures the violence. Transitional and restorative justice conversations go beyond the scale of the crude terms I’ve put this Substack article in, but I know for a fact that neither can be sustainably reducible to all-out forgiveness or all-out revenge. That vast gray area between the poles is where I struggle, and where perhaps we all ought to struggle, so as not to lose ourselves entirely to our losses.
So what then of being American, and living in America?
I am convinced that to live here as ethically as one can as an Arab and Muslim person is to continuously ask questions about what it means to live here and why. For me, the answer currently lies in my proximity to my family whom I hope to care for as they age, my ability to grow in my set of skills through the resources available here to possibly be able to give something to my people back home, and to find my own local battleground wherever I am living in order to be most effective at fighting for a more dignified future for all of us, deserving and undeserving. It takes an unbelievable amount of patience and discipline to stay loving and sane while living here. It also takes friends, family, community, spaces to share in worship, culture, food, film, music, politics, and lighthearted banter over a game of cards. Without these affordances, I could never dream of staying here. And after 11 years of doing it, there is no doubt that living here has become a part of me, that I am affected by being an American in ways I love and resent, that denouncing all of that is dishonest and maybe even irresponsible, that running away from the power to live and fight here, however contradictory, could reflect a lack of gratitude for the blessings of friends, family, and resources that I have been granted, and that leaving is not in itself an ethically purifying activity. If I have the ability to spite injustice even in a modest fashion, I’ll take it.
None of this means that I shouldn’t one day decide to leave America. It remains true that living here is a fundamentally bloody contradiction that cannot be resolved without massive political, social, and economic transformation at national and international levels. At the rate things are going, one day, there may be no battlegrounds to begin with, no affordances that aid with retaining sanity, no space left to raise children to become decent people. At that point, I would have no qualms spiting the script of migrating from the global south to the north and moving back to Syria.
For now, as I gear up to go to law school and spend the next three years of my life in the city of St. Louis, I have to believe that spite can be loving, that love can be spiteful, but that I also need to take care not to lose my heart to spite. Next month I travel to Jeddah, Damascus, Aleppo, and Beirut, cities with growing significance in my life. I am sure the trip will put this reflection back into further perspective.