HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE A PROBLEM BY MOUSTAFA BAYOUMI Essay

HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE A PROBLEM BY MOUSTAFA BAYOUMI - Essay Example 9/11 is an incident the changed not only the course of history but uncountable lives. It gave the world a reason and a new direction to be vigilant. But most of all, 9/11 also became a crusade, a holy war, a war to purge the world of the evil that changed the way Americans looked at things. Everything has been tinged in the shade of suspicion since them. The world has been torn asunder in two, Us or Them which can be taken as a euphemism for the World or the USA. The US war on terror that started out as the war against those who caused the country the mighty suffering of 9/11 has been spilled from the battlefields and war zones into the houses of ordinary people. It has been seeped into the lives of ordinary people, people who had nothing to do with the atrocities committed on the fateful day of 9/11. aside from taking the war on terror to the arid lands of Tora Bora and or the fertile banks of Tigris and Euphrates, United States have initiated a war on its on ground and in the heart of one of the greatest cities in the world; Brooklyn, New York. Moustafa Bayoumi's How Does It Feel To Be A Problem, is an endeavor to delve deep into a war United State has waged against some of its own citizens and how the mounting paranoia at Pentagon has shattered the lives of some of the innocent bystanders that got caught in the crossfire. Bayoumi has utilized copious amounts of ethnographic data using the lives of some of the collateral damage the war on terror has caused. Using the first hand account of the lives of seven young Arab-Americans, Bayoumi explores the dark crevices of this new war, whose victims are indicted and trialed only because of their ethnicity and religion, hence coining the new term Islamophobia. Using a very simple and heartwarming dialect, Bayoumi tells us of the struggles these seven innocent people whose crime was to be from the same creed and ethnicity that was at war with the United States. Their lives are the testament of this new breed of hate crimes and racial segregation that has swept not only all across America but also has taken the whole world into its ugly clutches. After painstakingly interviewing and observation, Bayoumi draws a very intimate narrative of the lives of seven young Arab-Americans who may have Arab blood in their veins but are American by all aspects and narrates of how their worlds turned upside down after 9/11 when their ethnicity became the reason for them being ostracized and profiled not only by the populace but the state itself. How Does It Feel To Be A Problem, tells of the paranoia that gripped United States after 9/11 and the how it gave birth to a new breed of racial profiling and hate crimes, where everything that has anything to do with the East has been eyed with fear and suspicion. How Does It Feel To Be A Problem, introduce us to Rasha, Sami, Lina, Akram, Yasmin, Omar, and Rami, all young, all American-Arabs who either spent their entire lives in United States or moved here for the prospect of a better future. All of them belongs to Brooklyn, NYC, home to the largest number of Arab Americans in the United States and also termed as "Mecca of Arab America" (Brooklyn