In Detroit, Arab and Muslim Communities Grapple to Heal from Collective Trauma

In Detroit, Arab and Muslim Communities Grapple to Heal from Collective Trauma

by Nargis Hakim Rahman

Sumayya Cherri can’t get the image of dead children out of her head. Since the bloody war between Israel and Hamas began on October 7, she has been watching news on TV or the internet and scrolling social media almost constantly – and it has taken a toll.

Born in the Detroit area two decades after her grandparents migrated from war-torn Lebanon, Cherri, 31, has found herself grappling with anxiety, grief and depression over the past three months as she has watched the Israel-Hamas conflict unfold.

“I don’t know how to deal with my mental illness right now,” Cherri said. Seeing the number of Palestinians killed by Israel reach 20,000 – most of them women and children – while international calls for a ceasefire have been ignored has left her feeling helpless and hopeless.

“We’ve watched babies given death certificates before their birth certificates and fathers dig with their bare hands under rubble, calling out one by one the names of their children, hoping to hear a response,” Cherri said. “We’ve heard the echoes of women and children screaming after being carpet-bombed during their sleep. Yet we are here, safe, going about our lives normally and knowing the tax dollars we work so very hard to pay are paying for the death and suffering of other human beings.”

“Survival guilt,” she added, “is real.”

As a daughter of parents who grew up as Lebanese war survivors and émigrés, she knows what it’s like to grapple with the feeling of not belonging while navigating between two identities – Muslim and American.

She is not alone. Greater Detroit is home to the largest concentration of Arabic-speaking and Muslim people in the country. At least 205,000 Arabic speakers live in the three core Detroit area counties, according to census data compiled by the Arab American Institute. More than 240,000 Muslims are estimated to live in the state.

For many of them, this is a time of unspeakable anguish. Watching and following the displacement and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza is magnifying the pain and distress they already feel – and have felt since the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim backlash that followed the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

For people like Cherri who grew up in the aftermath of 9/11, the present moment feels all too familiar. “Watching the younger kids get doxed, bullied, intimidated by their peers and city councils triggers PTSD from past experiences. How many more generations have to grow up in this environment?” she asks.

For Muslims, the fear and sense of being targeted that festered after 9-11 intensified in 2017 when then-President Donald Trump announced his so-called Muslim ban, said Michigan-based psychiatrist Asra Hamzavi.

Read the full story at https://mindsitenews.org/2023/12/29/in-detroit-arab-and-muslim-communities-grapple-to-heal-from-collective-trauma/. Originally posted on MindSite News on December 29, 2023.