Winter 2027 – Kyra Gent – the ocean would paint me blue

Dear Jihad,

I don’t know how to address The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue without addressing you. You’ve allowed me to wander in your world, run along with your thoughts, and swim into the pool of your feelings. Now let me take you along with my experiences as I was reading yours.

Mine started on the first page, where you’ve written your Mama about your motherland. You’ve painted a beautiful picture about Syria: the “warm,” “blue” ocean, the “voices of [your] ancestors,” and the imagination of a life that was never yours. Despite never having set foot on Syria’s “soft soil,” the country feels more like home than New York City, a place where your presence feels like a “sin,” ever has. The place where your name already triggers your non-Muslim country fellows. Add to that the hijab that you so proudly wear, and you’re a prey for Americans who are eagerly waiting to mark you as a terrorist. A place so far removed that you “feel the thread [to your motherland] breaking.”

In your longing for a country that doesn’t know you, you will find my world, thoughts, and feelings. Only, my version of “soft soil” is pastel-pink cherry petals covering the pavements, and my “warm,” “blue” ocean is a steaming bowl of jjigae made by my grandma, whom I’ll never get to meet. It’s in this longing that I recognise the same blindness that haunted me when I was your age: the glorification of a country as the answer to all the faultlines in your current life. Because surely, Syria’s soil would cure all, perhaps even connect you to your Mama again.

After all, it is that soil that has blessed your grandmother, aunts, mother, and you with different magical gifts; from being able to sense the trees to speaking to the jellyfishes. Yours is to see the vibrant colors that surround everything you encounter. Something you visualise in your beautiful, harmonious paintings about your motherland that miraculously pop up on buildings in New York overnight. A fantastical element, your gift, but also another symbol for how mythologised Syria is for you.

A mythology that becomes unraveled through Salama’s eyes, who contrasts the romanticised version of your motherland in As Long As the Lemon Trees Grow (2023), written by the same author who has penned down your story. For Salama, the “infinite blue ocean” isn’t a fantasy she longs for, but rather the one thing that nearly swallowed her whole while trying to escape Syria during the war from 2011-2014. She was eighteen, then, around the same age you are now. Yet you seem blissfully ignorant toward acknowledging the blood that has trickled into your ancestors’ soil. The very soil you so crave to step on. 

But why should I criticise you for longing for a land that doesn’t know your name? Why shouldn’t you want to escape to a place filled with “coral orange” and “sunflower yellow”? I’d be a hypocrite to do so, because if I peeled the layer of critique away, it would reveal my coveting for the very yearning I criticise you of.

Had it been me in your position, I’d use my brush until the last drop of paint was splayed out across the canvas. I, too, would’ve chosen to escape to a place where I can blend in; where there are no looks, questions, comments, and actions that indicate that you don’t fully belong there … right? But even if we could run away to our motherland, would we then fully belong? Or would we be betrayed by our unawareness of local customs and traditions? Or by locals altogether? Anyway, let’s not crush that perfect illusion entirely. For now, it’s all we have.

However, that harmonious place you know as Syria and your magical gift have been stolen from you in another way: through the grief that has now been your only companion since losing Mama. Relying on either Baba or your sister, the former isn’t an option; Baba lately resembles a ghost of a roommate more than the father you need. Meanwhile your sister tries to continue her life at work and eventually moves to Qatar. So, there you are, alone, stuck in a hostile place while the world has turned “grey” (page 2), “grey” (page 29), “grey” (page 77). 

But life goes on, and you’re now starting your senior year at the private school Braxton Academy; the final stepping stone for getting into the art college Opus in San Francisco, where you’ll be able to take your painting to the next level. But instead of being excited about starting your last year of high school, you’re anxious. Not only because of the ridiculously high tuition, but also because you can’t hide away in the back of the classroom at Braxton anymore.

As the only Muslim between the “different shades of white faces,” you’ll stand out. It doesn’t matter how much you try to assimilate to American customs; your skin color and hijab are reason enough for your new peers to frown upon or comment on. After all, if a stranger on the street hisses “ISIS bitch” to you, why should your new classmates think any differently?

I wish that your suspicions weren’t confirmed, but I think we both know that that fantasy only exists in the paintings you create. It started as ignorance, the time when Alexis told you “You would be so popular without your hijab.” Then your name was offensive, because how dare it call to mind the association with jihadists to one of your classmates whose uncle “died in Afghanistan […] from an IED that jihadists made?” Surely, you should know what connotations the word jihad calls to mind? How insensitive to carry that name; one that stands for bravery instead of armed struggle or terrorism in Arabic.

If only they had the courage to ask for the definition behind your name rather than assume their pejorative one. But doing so would mean they’d have to admit their misconception about you and your community: that not all Muslims are terrorists.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the term “white superiority.” It kept coming back to me when I was reading about the confrontations you had throughout the novel. The belief seems deeply rooted into the minds of your peers, considering how they treat you. You, existing there in that predominantly white space, exposing the safe bubble that is created for them; one that allows for unjustifiable behaviour towards marginalised groups to be swept under the rug by those in power.

It’s within that bubble that aggression against Arabs in the United States echoes without any correction. Because it doesn’t just stop at bullying, does it? They go as far as murdering a random Muslim woman in the street — though to you she wasn’t random at all; she was the light of your little family. The death of your mother makes no difference to the orders that are meant to protect civilians. And so, the four shots into her body are ignored by everyone but you, Baba and Amal: no legal action, no mourning…

… nothing. 

 

If the murder of a Muslim woman can go unnoticed by the system, what has to happen for her to earn acknowledgement? What makes a life grievable? Your story raises awareness on how American power structures maintain this image of a “White Christian civilized nation.” Only those who fit into this ideal are seen as worthy lives. Worthy of grief, success, and humanity. Something that becomes clear when I look at western media: while tragedies of non-western countries are mentioned, they’re rarely tied to the roots of those disasters.

How can a country that’s been exploited by western nations rebuild itself when they’ve been stripped of all their glory? But it doesn’t matter. After all, wealth — including the comfort of ignorance — is permitted solely to “superior” white society.

It’s in this message of your book that I return to your paintings that appear everywhere in New York. Murals all over the city portrayed a Syrian Muslim girl in a beautiful, joyful world. With your murals depicting happy hijabis, you gracefully counter whose lives are worthy to be recognised by those in power. And it seemed to work; people loved your art, stopping to admire it and posting it online for others to see.

The paintings show the humanity of Muslims deserving recognition far beyond the Arab community. It tells Americans that other rich and beautiful cultures exist, which aren’t meant to be offensive to others. The murals have given you pride, because your name “no longer [needed to be a] whisper but [could be] a roar.” 

But your story travels farther than the United States; it crosses the Atlantic Ocean, where it reaches the Netherlands. Because I know your story would’ve had an impact on my childhood best friend, who struggled with Islamophobia growing up in our primarily white neighborhood, too. From comments about how she would’ve lost her beauty if she’d worn a hijab, to inappropriate questions insinuating how Islam oppressed her. Reading about your experience would’ve healed something in her that I couldn’t. I only wish your story could’ve had a chance to give her hope, too. For a better world; one where she can belong even without being the norm.

The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue was so close to doing so. If only my friend would’ve had the magic ability, too, to raise awareness for her rightful place in our world.  Because while your paintings are made by your own hands, you don’t have a crew painting them overnight. Their appearances in the city are miracles that just emerge. Without the magic, your murals would’ve stayed in your sketchbook — still an ode to your culture, but not a counter voice against the white, western canon. 

I wish we would’ve seen that the actions you took were ones we can take as well. That toleration and respect towards Arabs is caused by magic takes away from the equality you advocate for. As if without the magic, the message would’ve been impossible to spread. But I don’t think that’s the case.

Take Angie Thomas’ 2017 The Hate U Give, for example. Protagonist Starr is just like you, a high school student who’s hypervisible in a predominantly white school (only she’s Black instead of Muslim). She, too, gets confronted with racist insults, prejudices, and aggression. She, too, grieves the death of a loved one due to a shooting. She, too, loses people because they are unwilling to change their ignorant attitudes that are caging her. And she, too, speaks out against the discrimination that can turn deadly for her community.

Yet there’s no magic coming to her aid to spread her message. Instead, she is supported by friends and family; an entire community that stands beside her. Your story could’ve been even more powerful if you had that element, too. That you didn’t have to rely on magic for your voice to be heard in your world.

Though, even without the magic, your voice has reached me: your reader. Through your eyes I’ve gotten to know a story behind the statistics and claims that I had already seen. A story filled with grief and struggles that society doesn’t allow you to have, because they’re only reserved for the lives they deem worthy of recognition. Unfortunately, your story is just one of many, but know this, Jihad: However magical your murals may have been, they have paved a path for both of our worlds to hold the systems in power accountable for their inferior treatment of Arab Americans. So, thank you for sharing your story.

Wishing you the best,

Kyra

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