They Are All Terrorists

By Lori Yeghiayan Friedman

is what my (now long-dead) mother used to say to the TV news reports of the bombings, beheadings, settlements, kidnappings, hijackings, imprisonments, killings―the latest eruptions of violence in a region far away, part of a war my mother fled with her family decades earlier.

She said it while sitting in the Barcalounger, relieved to be off her feet (finally!) after a Sunday dinner at my medzmama’s house in East Hollywood, vaguely gazing at the glowing screen of the massive Magnavox wedged into a corner between the behemoth built-in china cabinet and the sizable stone fireplace—that monstrous TV, an immovable object that had no chance of being carried away if, say, the family had to leave in a hurry. It said: Whatever wars, genocides, upheavals or forced evacuations may come, I’m not going anywhere and neither are you.

On screen, the war raged on like a TV show that could never be canceled.

She said it quietly to herself about the leaders on screen while we waited to pick up our party pack of kebab at a restaurant in my medzmama’s neighborhood, in a sad, L-shaped corner mini-mall on Hollywood Blvd., the small TV hanging in an upper corner like in a hospital room. On screen, the powerful nation’s sweet-faced leader (who was a killer) shook hands with the powerless people’s soft-spoken one (a killer), while the rosy-cheeked American president (killer) looked on.

She said it through clenched teeth, face red with effort in the kitchen of our apartment in West Los Angeles, standing on the scuffed linoleum, scrubbing the pans, sticky with burnt bits of roast beef, while the mushrooms sprouting out of the ratty carpet in the dining room silently grew another quarter millimeter. Oof, she added before it, sounding irritated, They are all terrorists, sounding irritated at the terrorists who were responsible for her refugee status, the moldy carpet, the congealed greasy meat clumps that wouldn’t come off no matter how hard she scrubbed with the Brillo.

Whatever, is what I said. Well, I thought it loudly, placing it like a billboard onto my careless face, while I sat somewhere not paying attention to her or the TV, or while I leaned in the kitchen doorway waiting for her to finish so I could ask her for money or the car keys, because I was a young shithead who understood nothing other than what I wanted, which was to go thrifting with my friends to find the most perfectly-ripped-at-the-knees-jeans, about which my mother would later comment, You look like a homeless person.

She said not a word about how it felt to be without a home, or a country, when they packed up for a two-week trip until things cooled down, only to have their land seized, house and business gone; “home” a place she would never know again. She never talked about her parents’ terror at losing everything, the future they’d worked so hard to build, after the same thing had happened to both of their parents in another land decades earlier. She didn’t say a thing about what it was like to move to another country where they were dependent on relatives, a country she hated, where she became sickly, asthmatic, where everything went wrong. She never talked about what it was like to then leave the continent, a refugee tucked into the hold of ship, a charity case allowed in by another country she never wanted to live in, or what it was like to live in a room above a church when she and her family first arrived in Manhattan just as winter set in, and she went to school in the thick of adolescence, crushed by the need to belong, a damn foreigner, when she did belong somewhere, just not here, because the terrorists stole everything and made her this little girl lost, adrift forever on the other side of what might have been.

Maybe those four words were all she had: They are all terrorists,

is what my mother said, but not to me. To me she said, I want you to grow up in one place, have a home and friends you never have to leave. She said, I want you to get an education, have the chance I never had. She wanted me to write.

The war has not changed much and neither has the news. But, I have. I am still that careless shithead, but I know a few things and watch from the safety of my living room in the country where I was born and where I live, the one where we tell ourselves we are free. On my TV, the grim-faced powerful nation’s leader (a killer) looks dead-eyed at the camera with a message for the powerless people’s leaders who are faceless (killers) and live underground, the war newly erupted, renewed for yet another season.

Terror is a tactic used by every leader, from mayors to kings, to attain and maintain power, but the word “terrorist” is reserved for the powerless, the ones who wage war, maim, bomb, steal, blow up, stab, behead, kidnap and imprison in the name of God, of righteousness, of safety, of fairness, of revenge, of greed, but not the powerful who do the same things for the same reasons.

My wise and traumatized mother never got to see what she did right when she made sure I knew all the words. But I want her to know, I want you to know, that when I watch the news I can only think of four of them, set in a neat little row like a passed-down pair of silver candlesticks or an heirloom string of yellowing pearls: They are all terrorists.

Lori Yeghiayan Friedman’s creative nonfiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her writing has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Mizna, Stanchion Zine, Pithead Chapel, Hippocampus Magazine, Emerge Literary Journal, Bending Genres, Autofocus Lit, Memoir Land and the Los Angeles Times. Her flash piece, “In the wings, no one can hear you scream,” is included in Already Gone, an anthology edited by Hannah Grieco and published by Alan Squire Publishing. She earned an MFA in Theatre from UC San Diego. Follow her on X and Bluesky: @loriyeg

Photo credit: doodle dubz via a Creative Commons license.

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