I’ve been into slam poetry for more than two years now and Button Poetry is one of my favorite YouTube channels. I love it so much that it’s the only YouTube channel for which I’ve enabled notifications.

Late last night, Lebanon-time, I get a notification that a new poem by Jess Rizkallah has been uploaded. Intrigued by the name, I open the YouTube video to find one of the most enriching, gut-wrenching poems I’ve listened to on that website in months.

In three short minutes, Jess Rizkallah was able to convey the struggles that she, a Lebanese-Arab-American woman in the United States goes through trying to juggle her Arab side with her American side, in a culture that is increasingly putting both of her components at odds. I mean just look at a creature like Donald Trump existing and at people, many of whom are Lebanese unfortunately, applauding him.

Jess Rizkallah is a Lebanese-American woman who’s trying to find herself in the dichotomy of cultures in which she is stuck. She is light-skinned enough to pass as white, but brown-souled enough for white people to call her on it and make her question who/what she is, and question she does: From the injustice her family went through, to the change of beauty paradigms in the United States that now include her and her sister (thanks Kim Kardashian?), to the politics in general that make her people feel like lessers.

The poem may be Jess Rizkallah’s personal experience, but I find it’s something most of us as Lebanese, who have been outside the country at certain points, who are immigrants, who might immigrate soon, have to deal with or have dealt with at a certain point: this need to assimilate while also wanting to maintain the semblance of who you are.

Find the transcript below:

i am but i’m not white man says to my brown father go blow up your own country i’m not buying a car from you fires my father replaces him

with another white man.

the first time i hear my father cry,

my grandmother says a hail mary.

& he smashes the statuette of white jesus we still brought it with us when we moved

to the white neighborhood where the children

broke eggs into our living room named us loud & dirty and the white father smiled at us

the next morning

as he mowed

his lawn. & now white man leers at my brown sister

who no one believes is my sister he likes how exotic & kardashian she is all bellydancer hatching

from double apple smoke something entrancing

in the way she talks / way she walks

white man better keep walking say the Lebanese men who say they will protect my sister

they say they are her Big Brothers

i say No, actually I am her big brother.

I am all of her big brothers & I am her big Sister so they tell me my problem: i’m too White

for them too loud & dirty won’t shut up, but they like the way i wear my shorts

& my arabic is too dull of the knife

my tongue could open them with so i let them

drive me home then white man asks to use my phone

tells me i look like a Nice White Girl

not like those Not White girls winks. do i know what he means and suddenly

i hate him it is so easy to hate them but it’s midnight by an alley on boylston & a strange man has

my phone so I just tell him No, I don’t know what you mean and suddenly I feel very much like a white girl because I am.