Iñaki Estívaliz
I have a friend who is so afraid that, to protect him, I can’t say whether he’s my neighbor or my colleague in Cambridge or Boston, or whether he attends Harvard or MIT. I’m not going to give him a pseudonym. He didn’t want to give me one either. So I’ll just call him my friend.
My Arab friend is so afraid that I can’t specify which European countries he studied in, or whether the brilliant PhD he’s about to complete in the U.S. is in the sciences or the humanities. I’m not making up my friend. This is not a literary exercise, and I don’t have imaginary friends.
My friend looks both ways before stepping out of his house. He spends the day deleting himself from the internet. He only goes out when absolutely necessary. And he never goes out alone. A network of fellow frightened friends makes sure that whenever one of them has to go somewhere, someone else with a car picks them up and goes with them.
He is terrified, especially after seeing footage of the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, just minutes from where he lives in the Boston metropolitan area. Unidentified masked men abducted her as she left her home to meet some friends and break the daily Ramadan fast.
ICE agents took her away when she hadn’t eaten all day. Bypassing state and federal laws and court rulings, they moved her through New Hampshire, Vermont, and Louisiana. She was held incommunicado for 24 hours.
In Somerville, Cambridge, and Boston, protests have taken place demanding the release of Rumeysa, a Turkish doctoral student in psychology specializing in childhood trauma, and a supporter of the Palestinian cause.
My friend’s eyes widen and his hands tremble as he tells me: “Did you see? Did you see? Just like the Gestapo. Did you see how they immediately grabbed her wrists so she couldn’t reach her phone?”
I can’t say which country my friend is from, because my friend is very afraid. But since there are ten Arab countries that produce olive oil, I’ll tell you something about my friend.
When he learned I was Andalusian, the topic of olive trees came up in conversation. The second time we met, he had just returned from visiting his parents in his homeland, and he gave me a homemade, unlabeled bottle of a deep, flavorful extra virgin olive oil from his family’s harvest.
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