Editor’s Note: This story contains details of violence and sexual harassment.

Attending Syracuse University has been the main reason I’ve failed at my mission to not be “that writer.”

The “that writer” syndrome is known in the writing community — which I’ve become immersed in as a poet and multidisciplinary writer — as a boxing effect that limits a writer to one topic or one type of writing to the point where that’s the only thing they’re known for. Solely by living on campus, I’ve had to fit that premade mold because campus culture is often up in flames to the point that taking a break from introspective, analytical and serious writing isn’t a choice for people like me — the ones you can point out of a crowd and read their identities like a script. More often than not, people with intersectionalities and positionalities similar to mine or even more visibly so than myself, are conditioned to utilize every skill we have to survive. 

For this column, I had planned to write something on the lighter side. I wanted to step away from theory about institutional apathy or how I experienced a hate crime at Juice Jam because I am multifaceted and a lot more than what happens to me. 

I started writing not because of my marginalized identities, but because I loved taking a captured scene and turning it into a melodic, detailed and lively experience through my words and poetry. I started writing because I simply wanted to write and because I recognized the talent and poetry within me to garnish and host multidimensional universes that the average human’s imagination cannot even fathom yet alone tap into or create.

Nonetheless, another day at SU means another topic to urgently address. In today’s column on “What Happened Now SU,” we’re tackling the pro-military rhetoric.

The rhetoric is so evident that an SU student felt comfortable and protected enough to tell me on a social media app that he liked me because “It reminds (him) of shooting kids in Afghanistan. (He) was thinking (he) could shoot some kids in (me), so wassup?” There are uncountable things that are disturbing and necessary to unpack just within that statement and the mountains and rivers of pro-military agenda behind it. 

Number one: I am not from Afghanistan.

The sardonic part of it all is that I’m not even from Afghanistan; I’m from Iraq. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Reduction of human life to nothing but merely collateral damage to achieve power expansion through the military industrial complex is exactly what America is built of. Especially after 9/11, America has actively and attentively conceptualized and structured lifelong wars and violence against Iraqis and Afghans globally. 

After all, to Americans, I am Iraqi  in the nationality sense of the word, but I am a product of 9/11 before anything else. It doesn’t matter, not even as much as an extra pen at a final exam, that I’ve lived in Maine for five years. It doesn’t matter, not even as much as the second zip code when entering an address, that I’ve contributed to the 2020 election two months of volunteering, national speeches, articles and, above all, putting my life on pause to execute the above, which is generations more than what the most politically involved Americans are willing to sacrifice. 

It doesn’t matter whether I speak a different language than Afghans, have an ocean of difference in culture or that even our music sounds vastly heterogeneous. At the end of the day, we are nothing but the very thing that’s wrong with America. Not America’s colonial roots, not America’s constant celebration of murdering and erasing Indigenous lives, not America’s hunger for brutalizing Black lives, not America’s need for power by any means necessary. It’s none of the above. I, a college student listening to J. Cole and 21 Savage every morning, am the very thing wrong with America. At the end of the day, nothing matters but the 9 of their 11 as I live everyday in defense of my humanity.

Number two: How is that remotely romantic?

I read a post recently on America’s romanticization of violence. That perpetuating and engaging in violence is one of the very things that keeps America alive. It is embedded in every part of the American lifestyle, even romance.

Romanticized violence is everywhere. It’s on dating apps. In social settings. In the bedroom. It’s just as systemic as Greek life’s perpetuation of rape culture. The aforementioned text itself is an example of what romanticized violence entails. It is appalling, and very much so encouraged by American rhetoric. 

It is more than easily notable in how American media has perpetuated the Civil War and how the U.S. education system teaches us about America’s “adventures” abroad. It’s not foreign that the white, settler colonial state education system exhibits the war as a source of unity and yielding an opposing result to America’s racial dissonance. America’s prolonged engagement of the Appomattox myth deeply furthers the culture of romanticized violence.

Flowery support of military bootlickers and not only “thanking them for their service,” but moralizing the work they do to “defend” America is present in American culture, especially since the 1990s. Posturing the military’s employment of soldiers’ bodies as nothing but killing machines under the wholesomeness of American patriotism in itself is humorous to anyone with critical thinking skills and even more so for someone like me, as I spent 13 years of my life amidst American-made and eternized violence. 

Americans keep violence alive in everything they do because it’s globally known that without violence America wouldn’t stand a chance at pretending to be a “world power.” 

Number three: This text isn’t even the worst thing I’ve heard since being at SU.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been signed up for wars as a participant without my consent, giving me post-traumatic stress disorder. It is far from a wonderful sight having to walk amongst swarms of ROTC students as I’m trying to peacefully get food from the Schine Student Center. Living in constant emotional turmoil and a visible sense of unsafety should be an eloquent reason as to how PTSD has gormandized my peace. Nonetheless, even within that, my PTSD feels unequal to that of American soldiers’, especially on this campus. 

During a meeting with one of the psychologists at Barnes Center at The Arch, the psychologist unhesitantly compared the intensity of my life with PTSD as someone with American war and military infiltrated childhood, shrapnels flying more often than birds, to that of ROTC students. Referring to her experience with soldiers as I am garnishing every sense of support I could utilize to better my life didn’t only channel every ounce of anger within me, but also was traumatic in itself. 

The comparison is also systemic. We see it in any conversation regarding war and PTSD from the American perspective. Troops, who have actively chosen to participate in the military industrial complex, are limned not only as the focal point of the conversation but also the ones deserving of empathy, even mine. If I set a cent aside for every time someone tried to play the two sides argument with me, telling me to consider that some of these soldiers are BIPOC or poor and by logical extension I should be more empathetic, then I’d have a million dollars saved up. 

When I am in a conversation with a mental health professional, I shouldn’t have to defend my trauma. I also shouldn’t have to explain why mentioning the very reason I live with lifelong agitation is unethical, inhumane and simply put, cruel. Mental health professionals, specifically those at SU, should know better.

Number four: No one should have to read that message.

I’ve been dispositioned to intellectualize my struggles in order for the world to categorize them as merely significant. Saying “That made me so angry” or “What the actual f***” in response to anything I experience isn’t enough for others. I don’t get to process it or simply live it and mourn another part of me and move on — I have to take it in as yet another thing to discuss and address. I have to dissect what’s wrong with it. I have to point out the parallels between it and systems of oppression. I have to place it in accordance with different positionalities, then create a call to action around it in order for that experience to trigger or mobilize any sort of empathy. And the best part of it all is that once you share that experience, then you’re viewed as nothing besides it.

No one deserves to receive or read that text. That’s it. That should be enough. That should be the end. But here I am, writing another article “4 Your Eyez Only”so maybe this time you won’t be desensitized to my struggle.

Zainab Altuma (Almatwari) is a sophomore in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Their column appears biweekly. They can be reached at zhalmatw@syr.edu.

Published on November 1, 2021 at 12:20 am