See Something, Say Something

By Briana Naseer

“I hope you never grow up

to do something like that.”

 

The first thing

my second grade teacher says

when someone asks what happened

on 9/11.

 

Is she speaking to the whole class,

0r just me?

 

At seven years old, I don’t know

that this day launches me

into a dystopian reality—

 

that it means a TSA flyer

in every one of my bags

every time I travel, letting me know

that someone took it

 

upon themselves to search through

my birth control, my underwear,

my deodorant,

however they please.

 

I don’t know that it means

people I call my friends will yell,

“Don’t blow me up!”

casually at me, as if it means nothing,

as if I am in on the joke,

and I don’t know to be hurt

because it has always been this way.

 

At one of my high school Christmas concerts,

I cringe when the band director plays

a tape of soldiers reuniting with their children

and passes around a hat for donations

 

because now I am beginning to understand

my dad is being asked to give money to

people who kill

people who look like him.

 

In grad school, I delete

all anti-military sentiment

from my various profiles

because my mother convinces me

it will keep me from getting a job.

 

I tell her adamantly,

even though it’s gone,

it’s still true.

 

When the US attacks Iran,

I don’t think of white Americans.

I don’t think of this country’s soldiers.

 

I think about the Iranian community

in Los Angeles who are immediately

warned by the police to not retaliate,

who assure everyone else

that they are on high alert.

 

I think of the children in Iraq and Iran

who have grown up thinking drones

over their heads at all times

are typical, expected.

 

I think about how 2,996 people died on one day,

and how more than 244,000 civilians

have died in the nineteen years since,

most of them brown and Muslim

like me.

 

I think about how hate crimes

against Muslims in the U.S.

have risen by more

than five hundred percent

since the towers fell.

 

I think of my children,

unborn but undoubtedly

brown like me.

 

I wonder how anyone can want

all of this to repeat itself,

as if we have learned nothing.

 

I wonder how I am expected

to see all of this

and say nothing.

 

Briana Naseer is a Pakistani-American school psychologist and poet from Chicago, Illinois.  Her debut poetry collection is entitled Rind.