![]() ![]() ![]() Department of State and a college-educated American from upstate New York, Zughaib had always lived with one foot in the West, one in the Middle East. “All of a sudden people are looking at me and saying, ‘Where are you really from?’ What they’re really trying to get at is: Are you from the Middle East?”Īs the daughter of a Syrian immigrant who went on to work for the U.S. “Living in this town, here in Washington after 9/11, was such an eye-opening experience for me,” Zughaib says over the phone from the same apartment across the river. It was then she began to understand the complexity of the trauma: To be of Middle Eastern descent in America was now to be an object of fear - and hatred. The next day, Zughaib says a stranger spit in her face. They called to offer their support in the wake of a grisly national trauma, but neither Zughaib nor her loved ones could fully understand at that moment just how that trauma would manifest. They called from Lebanon where she was born as well as from Jordan and Syria. Soon enough, phone calls poured in from the painter’s family and friends in the Middle East. Across the Potomac, Helen Zughaib could see the Pentagon burning from her home in Washington, D.C. ![]()
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