Good Morning Family, Friends, and Colleagues,
As I wrote the column below I thought about an exchange I had during the previous Trump administration.
In response to an opinion I had publicly voiced a ‘respected’ businessman along NH’s seacoast - whose business I had patronized for over 20 years - suggested to me that I should leave America and “go back” to where I came from and even said he would pay for my ticket if I accepted his offer.
I replied that there were no scheduled flights between Exeter NH and my homeland - Manchester NH.
I’m still here.
Today, I find myself occasionally hesitant to name friends and colleagues, details of places I visit, patronize, in order to not call too much attention to activities unrelated to my opinions and interests.
All I write, what I see, what I believe, what I think you should know, is before you now.
Stay safe, loved ones, and stay warm.
Salamaat,
Robert
Photograph © Johara, 2025. All Rights Reserved.
Embrace the Sojourner:
One Tyrant’s ‘Garbage’ Is Another Person’s Freedom Seeker
“A person can only be born in one place,” Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote. “However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare.”
Her name is Iman:* she was born in Somalia.
I was born in Somalia, which is in East Africa. My parents started with nothing: poor, poor, poor. They eloped, which was unheard of in my country, when my father was 17 and my mother was 14…
Growing up in eastern Africa in the 1960s and ’70s, I could not have aspired to become a fashion model even if I’d wanted to: If they existed, news of their habits never reached me at boarding school. My own idols came from the Arab world’s then-splendid music and movie stars, such as Umm Kulthum, Faten Hamama, and Mariam Fakhr Eddine. When the day of [Peter Beards’ photo shoot] arrived, though I brought along my own face and body, these were the women whose images I summoned to bring me to life in front of the camera. I pretended I was all of them. More prosaically, for protection, I also brought my five girlfriends, who stood sentinel just outside the camera’s frame. While I was hardly confident, I was not scared. I felt I had nothing to lose, only to gain. In Arabic my name, Iman, means ‘faith.’ I had faith…
Then, in the 1990s, following the end of the brutal regime of President Siad Barre there was civil war in Somalia. That changed everything: there were massacres and crimes against humanity. There was Black Hawk Down.
Most Somalis arrived in America as refugees from the civil war that racked a land riven by tribal conflict after generations of colonialist exploitation. Today there are over 260,000 people of Somali descent sharing these lands with us, of which about 73% are naturalized citizens - and that pleases me.
Her name is Ilhan Omar.** She was born in Somalia.
Life in Somalia before the civil war was beautiful. When the war happened, I was 8 years old and at that stage of understanding the world in a different way…
Many Somalis are among the constituents of Representative Omar, a Minnesota Democrat whose family fled the civil war and spent several years in a refugee camp in Kenya before coming to America.
We say [America] is a land of immigrants, and we forget that this was a land that belonged to people. And those of us who are new immigrants and those of us who come from generations of immigrants have to realize we are not that much different from one another…
The reasons for weaponizing division are not mysterious. Racial fear prevents Americans from building community with one another and community is the lifeblood of a functioning democratic society. Throughout our history, racist language has been used to turn American against American in order to benefit the wealthy elite...
Her name is Warsan Shire.*** She was born in Kenya to Somali parents.
She lives in Los Angeles and I first learned of her when her poetry was adapted for Beyoncé’s album, Lemonade.
In a poem entitled Home, she tells us:
you have to understand, / that no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than the land...
i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark / home is the barrel of the gun / and no one would leave home / unless home chased you to the shore / unless home tells you to / leave what you could not behind / even if it was human…
Even if it is human.
Even if it is human.
He calls himself commander-in-chief: “We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way, if we keep taking in garbage into our country, Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage…
“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” he adds, saying “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”
I want them. America wants them, needs them!
I remember a moment, 10 years ago, when I learned about a three-year-old Kurdish Syrian boy, Alan Shenu, who had drowned, along with his mother and five-year-old brother, on an Aegean beach while attempting to escape civil war in Syria.
Sometimes I just feel my breath being sucked out of my body.
I remember thinking, as I looked at photos of Alan’s lifeless body face down at water’s edge, of a moment in my daughter’s life, perhaps also age three, when she was fast asleep on a blanket on a beach along Hampton NH’s Plaice Cove, trusting in her family, in the world, to embrace and shelter her.
I think today of grandchildren, carefree, perhaps in the Mediterranean or Atlantic, knowing intuitively that loved ones, ready to protect and shelter them, are just steps away.
I think of an academic gathering in Boston last week where I was amidst Americans of Indian, Albanian, Lebanese, Iranian, Chinese, and Kenyan ethnicities.
Where we all had so much to share.
Go and do likewise.
I think of a dinner I shared in the Seacoast this week that included Palestinians, Syrians, Irish, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Turks, and some assorted unknowns.
This is who we are, where we are meant to be.
Go and do likewise.
Sojourners are not garbage - they are our brothers and sisters - sojourners grown so frightened and desperate at home - oppressed, exploited, unemployed, hungry - that they will do anything to try and liberate themselves and their families.
Most leave home because they believe there is no future for themselves and their families in dysfunctional states: often states where the overweening arrogance of American and Western imperialists and colonialist powers - complicit with corrupt local authoritarian and dictatorial regimes - helped to create unlivable oppressive and inhumane conditions which persist to this day.
I know those strangers.
I am descended from them.
“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares,” Hebrews 13:2. NRSV
I share their blood. I believe that most knew they had little opportunity or security in their native lands and risked and sacrificed nearly everything - including leaving some loved ones behind - to travel to this land of promise hoping to be included within Emma Lazarus’ invitation to tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Welcome and embrace them.
... no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than the land ...
No One.
Poet Donald Hall: Photograph © Robert Azzi, 2025. All Rights Reserved
After making reference to meeting Donald Hall in my last Mezze, a couple readers asked me if I could share any of the pictures I took of him. This is one.
Storms are sweeping across our nation from many directions.
Draw your keffiyeh close.
Stay strong.
Resist.
Salamaat,
Robert
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