STILL MOMENTS:
A Story of Faded Dreams and Forbidden Pictures
Chapter 1: The Call
Each one of us is guilty for the sole reason that we belong to a category, a race, a people. You fear that someone will attack you only because nobody has done it yet.
Mouloud Feraoun, Journal 1954-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War
Mouloud Feraoun, Journal 1954-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War
January 22, 2003 would have been uneventful enough to be forgotten if it were not for the phone that rang at about 5:30 p.m. I had just gotten home from work. My two children, sitting in the dining room, were completing their homework, and my wife was still at work. I was explaining an eighth grade algebra problem to my oldest child when that call came. I went to the kitchen, picked up the cordless handset, and heard a stranger say, “This is Agent Robert H. from the FBI office in Normal. We got a report from the state police that you were taking pictures of trains, and I would like to talk to you. I called you last week and left a message…”
The FBI? I vaguely remembered an unclear phone message on our old answering machine a few days earlier. However, I usually do not pay attention to messages unless I recognize the voice. I had thought that the message was from a telemarketer or service provider looking for prospective clients, so I had erased it.
After I confirmed that yes, an Illinois State trooper had stopped me almost three months earlier, Agent Robert continued:
“In these times of terrorism, I would like to follow up on the report and talk to you. Could I meet you at your house to ask you a few questions about your love of trains?”
His words jolted me. The FBI’s interest in me was disturbing. In a state of denial, refusing to have my life connected to a federal police agency, I hoped to hear a friend's voice burst into laughter, indicating it was a prank call. But there would be no friend’s voice because the one friend I had told about my encounter with the state trooper was a woman.
My mind scrambled for words. To refuse his request for questioning and any connection with him, I managed to say:
“I don’t love trains.”
When it dawned on me that this call really was from the FBI, I chose to continue the conversation in our basement. I did not want my children to overhear anything that might upset them. They usually ask “Who was it?” and “What did he or she want?” after a phone call. I did not want to have to lie, nor did I want them to know that it was the FBI because they would worry about it.
“I prefer not in my house, but maybe in your office?” I suggested as I attempted to remember what my rights, if any, were. I was not sure if I could refuse to meet with him, but I knew with some certainty that I could refuse to meet him at our home.
The agent turned down my offer and reiterated his preference to meet at our home, which, in turn, I refused. The last thing I wanted was a couple of well-dressed FBI agents knocking at our door. Their visit would probably reinforce any suspicion my neighbors might already have about my family and me. Except for the mess of books, articles and pictures in my office, I had nothing to hide. The intrusion into my private life would be a humiliating experience.
To cut short our disagreement on the venue for our meeting, I decided to stall and asked:
“May I have your name and phone number and let you know after I talk to my lawyer?”
After I got his contact information and quietly but quickly hung up the phone, I felt as if time had stopped, and I experienced my second still moment right there. Then a rush of thoughts stormed my mind, yet none justified the FBI phone call. Bizarre as it seemed then, I was torn between worry and laughter. I was confused and, for the first time, unable to think clearly. It was as if I had come to a crossroads without any road signs. On the one hand, I worried about being arrested and unjustly detained. On the other, I felt like bursting into laughter, as the FBI’s suspicion of me seemed very ludicrous. It was very hard to accept the change from my role as a silent spectator to the events that followed the 9/11 attacks to the role of a suspected terrorist. I remained in the basement as I struggled to find a logical explanation for this suspicion.
The FBI’s interest in me was a mix of irony and surprise. The first was that I was suspected of being a terrorist here in America after I fled Algeria twelve years earlier to escape its repressive regime and its terrorism. The second was that I thought the FBI went after criminals instead of people photographing old barns, spiders, and railroad tracks.
But history was only repeating itself; for this was not the first time I had attracted the attention of law enforcement authorities for taking pictures, except that the three previous times had occurred in Algeria. Whether I took a picture of ships in a harbor, graffiti on a wall near a police station, or a sand dune near an oil-pumping station in the desert, I found myself having to prove that photography was a hobby and that I was not spying for a foreign agency or government. However, this time, something was definitely different. As I was to find out later, my skin color made my taking pictures appear suspicious.
Confused and tired, I sat on a chair. I wanted to focus more intently on what had just happened. Yet, I found myself standing up a second later as if my body was telling me to do something. I did not know what I could do: I had no reason to run away, because I had neither done anything wrong nor broken any law.
I sat down again and closed my eyes. Then for the first time, I heard a strange voice:
“Have you been asleep? I’ve been trying to talk to you.”
I dismissed the voice and said to myself:
“Calm down and think logically now.”
“You thought you were safe here in America,” the voice continued.
Until then, my conscience had consisted of only one voice – the true voice of my thoughts and mind, a familiar one that I had grown up with, the one that has been guiding my life for as long as I could remember. Although the new voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else, it, too, was in my head. It said, “What if you get arrested and detained without access to a lawyer, your family, and the outside world? What if your detention turns into a physical disappearance?” The FBI was a powerful organization, and such things have happened to others. In this new and post 9/11 world, the FBI had the power to arrest me while it sought potential evidence of terrorist activities. These were the fears, scary but realistic, that the voice kept feeding me.
Until that time, I did not remember ever having heard the voice speak to me. Besides, if I had heard it, I had not paid attention to it because I had refused to think of myself as a potential victim in America. I had not become a disillusioned new immigrant. After all, I had played by the rules of society. Therefore I found it more pleasing to focus on positive aspects of life in my adopted country. Nevertheless, it now seemed as if I had only sidestepped the issue of racial and ethnic discrimination, one of the ugly and unpleasant facts of life. The post 9/11 events, my American friends’ concerns about our safety, my encounter with the state trooper, and now the call from the FBI, formed a pattern that I needed to heed and to take into account.
The new voice communicated thoughts that I could not easily dismiss, because ignoring them could be detrimental. Yet, I was reluctant to let fear and bitterness into my mind.
The FBI’s suspicion seemed crazy and surreal. Yet, it was real and scary indeed, and I needed to consider its consequences fully. Of course, I wanted to shut out the new voice and to forget the call. I needed a temporary relief and a warmer refuge for my confused mind. My thoughts left our basement in Central Illinois and sought moments of hope in my past. Needing emotional balance and strength, I searched my memories and stumbled upon one that was almost a quarter of a century old.
At that time, I was a twenty-three-year-old undergraduate student at Tulane University in New Orleans. Early one morning, I arrived at the help desk of the Computing Services when my supervisor walked towards me, his right hand extended for a handshake:
“Good job,” Irving said, smiling and firmly shaking my hand.
Surprised, I said, “Thank you. But for what?”
“For helping us release the hostages,” he said. It was January 26, 1981, one day after Algeria had helped negotiate the release of the American hostages from Iran.
“But I did not do anything to release them,” I said with a measure of modesty.
“Well, Zighen, I'd like to thank Algeria for helping us free our people, but since you are the only Algerian I know, I have no one else to thank but you,” he said.
The “times of terrorism,” the FBI agent mentioned during the phone call, referred, of course, to the times after the tragic events of 9/11. The scenes of the airplanes ripping through the towers and the ensuing destruction had stunned me. The TV images were unbelievable, beyond comprehension. When I first saw them in the workplace cafeteria, tears had filled my eyes. Just like in Algeria, civilians in America had fallen victim to indiscriminate violence.
Unfortunately, in the aftermath of 9/11, several acts of violence were committed in America against innocent people with Middle Eastern, North African, and East Asian appearances. Yet many Americans showed their solidarity with innocent people from these regions and stood up to protect them. In Central Illinois, members of Normal's New Covenant Community Church kept watch in the lobby of the Bloomington-Normal Islamic Center during a prayer service. American friends, Annette and Maurer in Louisiana, Mary Ann in North Carolina, and Katherine in Virginia contacted us, inquired about our safety, and advised us to be careful. Their hospitality, continued friendship, and concerns brought a ray of hope to our lives after 9/11. With some apprehension, my family and I attempted to carry on with our lives.
The first Friday after the 9/11 attacks, as an American colleague and I left a local restaurant, he offered to walk me to my car. His offer surprised me when I realized that he was concerned for my safety and not merely being gallant. When I indicated that I felt safe because I had done nothing wrong, he said, “Zighen, there are people out there, right now, who do not care a bit about your innocence.”
“How could America allow this?” I inquired for I considered my new home as the land of justice for all and where one is innocent until proven guilty.
After a pause, Eric said, “All I can say is do not go to unfamiliar places where people don’t know you.”
The idea that I might become a target had never crossed my mind. It was an unpleasant matter that lacked justification and was unacceptable; nothing in my life had prepared me for it. I grew up in North Africa, a region successively invaded by the Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, Spaniards, and the French, where people’s skin, hair, and eye colors are very diverse but hardly a racial and political issue.
When I came to America in 1977, I found out just how much skin color separated people. As a newcomer, I did not know to which group I belonged. Because my tan color appeared to be a middle ground between black and white, I thought I was shielded from this issue. However, deep in me, I knew that associating a skin color with actions was preposterous. Both brain and skin, two distinct organs, could not share the same function in a human body. And I continued to believe that most people did not judge others by their skin color and that the official claims of justice, equality and opportunity for everyone were genuine.
Lingering in my mind, my friends’ concerns started to weigh in, and I could no longer censor the thought of becoming a target.
“What happened to the feeling of security you have been accustomed to since your arrival in the US?” the voice asked, as if in a challenge.
“The question is whether that feeling might have simply been a fruit of my imagination,” I thought.
Thereafter, while shopping in stores or walking in streets or parks, I found myself scrutinizing and analyzing the way people looked at me, wondering if their greetings were sincere and whether they noticed my complexion. I once went as far as imagining them attacking me as I walked by them. Another time, I even refrained from greeting people because I was afraid to attract the attention of a vengeful person.
The new circumstances required a new interpretation of things. Did I misread the thoughts of the beautiful and elegant women surreptitiously staring at me in stores before 9/11? My innocent yet probably naïve guess had been that they were fantasizing about the tall, tanned man that I was. Some would lower their eyes as if they had been caught doing something they should not have been doing. Others would attempt to get hold of themselves and arrange a smile with their red-painted lips. Could I have been that wrong? Could their eyes have instead seen a terrorist in me? What a change of perspective!
Across the nation, the FBI began to arrest hundreds of people, and indiscriminate and violent attacks on people from North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Asia continued to be reported. Because my troubles could come either from people bent on revenge or from those who are supposed to protect me, I felt doubly targeted. As I continued to worry, my belief in America as a safe heaven started to fade, my optimistic outlook on life began to blur, and my dream of a glowing future in my new country dimmed. My journey from North Africa to North America seemed somehow less exciting, and a strange feeling of fear, an inch below panic, started to creep into my mind.
The FBI’s suspicion of me—as was later confirmed—lay not in anything I had done but in the color of my skin. When I came back to America in 1990, I never thought that one day I would become a target of racism. That was why I could not think of myself as one. Instead, the FBI’s interest in me stimulated my curiosity in the matter. In addition, I found in the interest an opportunity to resist according to my principles: to act and to attempt to change things. By refusing the FBI agent’s terms—to meet him at our home—I thought I was already making myself accountable to these principles. The FBI might have the power and the upper hand, but I was not going to let myself become a victim of their authority.
That is when another interpretation of their interest in me suddenly crossed my mind. Their need to meet me amounted to a definite weakness on their side. They wanted something they thought I had. Somehow, I had power too.
Order the book and read the rest of the story
The FBI? I vaguely remembered an unclear phone message on our old answering machine a few days earlier. However, I usually do not pay attention to messages unless I recognize the voice. I had thought that the message was from a telemarketer or service provider looking for prospective clients, so I had erased it.
After I confirmed that yes, an Illinois State trooper had stopped me almost three months earlier, Agent Robert continued:
“In these times of terrorism, I would like to follow up on the report and talk to you. Could I meet you at your house to ask you a few questions about your love of trains?”
His words jolted me. The FBI’s interest in me was disturbing. In a state of denial, refusing to have my life connected to a federal police agency, I hoped to hear a friend's voice burst into laughter, indicating it was a prank call. But there would be no friend’s voice because the one friend I had told about my encounter with the state trooper was a woman.
My mind scrambled for words. To refuse his request for questioning and any connection with him, I managed to say:
“I don’t love trains.”
When it dawned on me that this call really was from the FBI, I chose to continue the conversation in our basement. I did not want my children to overhear anything that might upset them. They usually ask “Who was it?” and “What did he or she want?” after a phone call. I did not want to have to lie, nor did I want them to know that it was the FBI because they would worry about it.
“I prefer not in my house, but maybe in your office?” I suggested as I attempted to remember what my rights, if any, were. I was not sure if I could refuse to meet with him, but I knew with some certainty that I could refuse to meet him at our home.
The agent turned down my offer and reiterated his preference to meet at our home, which, in turn, I refused. The last thing I wanted was a couple of well-dressed FBI agents knocking at our door. Their visit would probably reinforce any suspicion my neighbors might already have about my family and me. Except for the mess of books, articles and pictures in my office, I had nothing to hide. The intrusion into my private life would be a humiliating experience.
To cut short our disagreement on the venue for our meeting, I decided to stall and asked:
“May I have your name and phone number and let you know after I talk to my lawyer?”
After I got his contact information and quietly but quickly hung up the phone, I felt as if time had stopped, and I experienced my second still moment right there. Then a rush of thoughts stormed my mind, yet none justified the FBI phone call. Bizarre as it seemed then, I was torn between worry and laughter. I was confused and, for the first time, unable to think clearly. It was as if I had come to a crossroads without any road signs. On the one hand, I worried about being arrested and unjustly detained. On the other, I felt like bursting into laughter, as the FBI’s suspicion of me seemed very ludicrous. It was very hard to accept the change from my role as a silent spectator to the events that followed the 9/11 attacks to the role of a suspected terrorist. I remained in the basement as I struggled to find a logical explanation for this suspicion.
The FBI’s interest in me was a mix of irony and surprise. The first was that I was suspected of being a terrorist here in America after I fled Algeria twelve years earlier to escape its repressive regime and its terrorism. The second was that I thought the FBI went after criminals instead of people photographing old barns, spiders, and railroad tracks.
But history was only repeating itself; for this was not the first time I had attracted the attention of law enforcement authorities for taking pictures, except that the three previous times had occurred in Algeria. Whether I took a picture of ships in a harbor, graffiti on a wall near a police station, or a sand dune near an oil-pumping station in the desert, I found myself having to prove that photography was a hobby and that I was not spying for a foreign agency or government. However, this time, something was definitely different. As I was to find out later, my skin color made my taking pictures appear suspicious.
Confused and tired, I sat on a chair. I wanted to focus more intently on what had just happened. Yet, I found myself standing up a second later as if my body was telling me to do something. I did not know what I could do: I had no reason to run away, because I had neither done anything wrong nor broken any law.
I sat down again and closed my eyes. Then for the first time, I heard a strange voice:
“Have you been asleep? I’ve been trying to talk to you.”
I dismissed the voice and said to myself:
“Calm down and think logically now.”
“You thought you were safe here in America,” the voice continued.
Until then, my conscience had consisted of only one voice – the true voice of my thoughts and mind, a familiar one that I had grown up with, the one that has been guiding my life for as long as I could remember. Although the new voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else, it, too, was in my head. It said, “What if you get arrested and detained without access to a lawyer, your family, and the outside world? What if your detention turns into a physical disappearance?” The FBI was a powerful organization, and such things have happened to others. In this new and post 9/11 world, the FBI had the power to arrest me while it sought potential evidence of terrorist activities. These were the fears, scary but realistic, that the voice kept feeding me.
Until that time, I did not remember ever having heard the voice speak to me. Besides, if I had heard it, I had not paid attention to it because I had refused to think of myself as a potential victim in America. I had not become a disillusioned new immigrant. After all, I had played by the rules of society. Therefore I found it more pleasing to focus on positive aspects of life in my adopted country. Nevertheless, it now seemed as if I had only sidestepped the issue of racial and ethnic discrimination, one of the ugly and unpleasant facts of life. The post 9/11 events, my American friends’ concerns about our safety, my encounter with the state trooper, and now the call from the FBI, formed a pattern that I needed to heed and to take into account.
The new voice communicated thoughts that I could not easily dismiss, because ignoring them could be detrimental. Yet, I was reluctant to let fear and bitterness into my mind.
The FBI’s suspicion seemed crazy and surreal. Yet, it was real and scary indeed, and I needed to consider its consequences fully. Of course, I wanted to shut out the new voice and to forget the call. I needed a temporary relief and a warmer refuge for my confused mind. My thoughts left our basement in Central Illinois and sought moments of hope in my past. Needing emotional balance and strength, I searched my memories and stumbled upon one that was almost a quarter of a century old.
At that time, I was a twenty-three-year-old undergraduate student at Tulane University in New Orleans. Early one morning, I arrived at the help desk of the Computing Services when my supervisor walked towards me, his right hand extended for a handshake:
“Good job,” Irving said, smiling and firmly shaking my hand.
Surprised, I said, “Thank you. But for what?”
“For helping us release the hostages,” he said. It was January 26, 1981, one day after Algeria had helped negotiate the release of the American hostages from Iran.
“But I did not do anything to release them,” I said with a measure of modesty.
“Well, Zighen, I'd like to thank Algeria for helping us free our people, but since you are the only Algerian I know, I have no one else to thank but you,” he said.
The “times of terrorism,” the FBI agent mentioned during the phone call, referred, of course, to the times after the tragic events of 9/11. The scenes of the airplanes ripping through the towers and the ensuing destruction had stunned me. The TV images were unbelievable, beyond comprehension. When I first saw them in the workplace cafeteria, tears had filled my eyes. Just like in Algeria, civilians in America had fallen victim to indiscriminate violence.
Unfortunately, in the aftermath of 9/11, several acts of violence were committed in America against innocent people with Middle Eastern, North African, and East Asian appearances. Yet many Americans showed their solidarity with innocent people from these regions and stood up to protect them. In Central Illinois, members of Normal's New Covenant Community Church kept watch in the lobby of the Bloomington-Normal Islamic Center during a prayer service. American friends, Annette and Maurer in Louisiana, Mary Ann in North Carolina, and Katherine in Virginia contacted us, inquired about our safety, and advised us to be careful. Their hospitality, continued friendship, and concerns brought a ray of hope to our lives after 9/11. With some apprehension, my family and I attempted to carry on with our lives.
The first Friday after the 9/11 attacks, as an American colleague and I left a local restaurant, he offered to walk me to my car. His offer surprised me when I realized that he was concerned for my safety and not merely being gallant. When I indicated that I felt safe because I had done nothing wrong, he said, “Zighen, there are people out there, right now, who do not care a bit about your innocence.”
“How could America allow this?” I inquired for I considered my new home as the land of justice for all and where one is innocent until proven guilty.
After a pause, Eric said, “All I can say is do not go to unfamiliar places where people don’t know you.”
The idea that I might become a target had never crossed my mind. It was an unpleasant matter that lacked justification and was unacceptable; nothing in my life had prepared me for it. I grew up in North Africa, a region successively invaded by the Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, Spaniards, and the French, where people’s skin, hair, and eye colors are very diverse but hardly a racial and political issue.
When I came to America in 1977, I found out just how much skin color separated people. As a newcomer, I did not know to which group I belonged. Because my tan color appeared to be a middle ground between black and white, I thought I was shielded from this issue. However, deep in me, I knew that associating a skin color with actions was preposterous. Both brain and skin, two distinct organs, could not share the same function in a human body. And I continued to believe that most people did not judge others by their skin color and that the official claims of justice, equality and opportunity for everyone were genuine.
Lingering in my mind, my friends’ concerns started to weigh in, and I could no longer censor the thought of becoming a target.
“What happened to the feeling of security you have been accustomed to since your arrival in the US?” the voice asked, as if in a challenge.
“The question is whether that feeling might have simply been a fruit of my imagination,” I thought.
Thereafter, while shopping in stores or walking in streets or parks, I found myself scrutinizing and analyzing the way people looked at me, wondering if their greetings were sincere and whether they noticed my complexion. I once went as far as imagining them attacking me as I walked by them. Another time, I even refrained from greeting people because I was afraid to attract the attention of a vengeful person.
The new circumstances required a new interpretation of things. Did I misread the thoughts of the beautiful and elegant women surreptitiously staring at me in stores before 9/11? My innocent yet probably naïve guess had been that they were fantasizing about the tall, tanned man that I was. Some would lower their eyes as if they had been caught doing something they should not have been doing. Others would attempt to get hold of themselves and arrange a smile with their red-painted lips. Could I have been that wrong? Could their eyes have instead seen a terrorist in me? What a change of perspective!
Across the nation, the FBI began to arrest hundreds of people, and indiscriminate and violent attacks on people from North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Asia continued to be reported. Because my troubles could come either from people bent on revenge or from those who are supposed to protect me, I felt doubly targeted. As I continued to worry, my belief in America as a safe heaven started to fade, my optimistic outlook on life began to blur, and my dream of a glowing future in my new country dimmed. My journey from North Africa to North America seemed somehow less exciting, and a strange feeling of fear, an inch below panic, started to creep into my mind.
The FBI’s suspicion of me—as was later confirmed—lay not in anything I had done but in the color of my skin. When I came back to America in 1990, I never thought that one day I would become a target of racism. That was why I could not think of myself as one. Instead, the FBI’s interest in me stimulated my curiosity in the matter. In addition, I found in the interest an opportunity to resist according to my principles: to act and to attempt to change things. By refusing the FBI agent’s terms—to meet him at our home—I thought I was already making myself accountable to these principles. The FBI might have the power and the upper hand, but I was not going to let myself become a victim of their authority.
That is when another interpretation of their interest in me suddenly crossed my mind. Their need to meet me amounted to a definite weakness on their side. They wanted something they thought I had. Somehow, I had power too.
Order the book and read the rest of the story
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