“You have to stir it.”

Growing up with an Arab, but also Mediterranean mom was in some ways lost on me. I love being Arab and Mediterranean, but as far as being one of the women in our family who competed for the title of “good cook,” I wasn’t in the running. I wasn’t even trying to be in the running. No one thought I was.

But I was around the kitchen growing up with my mom making us Americanized versions of Egyptian dishes. I presumed this was due to ease for my mom (tortillas for Egyptian goluash was easier than phyllo dough), but I also wonder if it was to tailor Egyptian dishes to American ingredients and American kids. 

So when my mom told me the tahini jar had to be stirred a certain way, I paid her little mind. Stirring the tahini jar when it’s brand new or if it has settled is a mandatory part of using tahini that I’d like to think only Mediterranean or maybe Arabs know. But it involves a bit of labor and since Europeans don’t understand tahini there’s no invention to do it for you. 

All you can do is take a big wooden spoon—the wooden spoon all Arab women own—and stir it until the consistency is perfect. Tahini naturally has an oily consistency at the top and a thick, sticky consistency at the bottom. The perfect consistency comes from tirelessly stirring it until it is largely the same texture. Not doing this stirring process essentially means that you are using the incorrect ingredient. That’s one of the many reasons I never eat hummus made by anyone who’s not Arab. It’s just not worth the calories.

On that note, my mom’s hummus is otherworldly. As an Egyptian, she’s not supposed to know how to make hummus but I’m willing to bet if there was a hummus making contest she’d win. She learned it from a Palestinian friend and has perfected every small nuance to the recipe with a precision that no cultural appropriator could ever do—with the precision of someone who was shown how to make it in the kitchen. Even my Palestinian friends marvel at her hummus.

This is our tradition as indigenous people. That’s to say, it’s oral, and shared. There are little things to us as indigenous people that people who are not indigenous will never understand about our culture fully. This is true of indigenous people around the world, I believe. But we can appreciate and respect each other for these differences. My mom learning and making the best hummus in the world after being taught by a friend is a symbol both of what’s possible when we share with those we are different from and perhaps also that faintly drawn European borders aren’t supposed to be hard and fast separators. 

I never wanted to stir the tahini. If I needed the tahini and it was unstirred, I asked my mom to stir it. 

I even arrived at CDMX, where I now live with my husband, and bought a small jar of overpriced tahini from a non-Arab store (a sacrilege!) and kept it in case something got stuck in my throat. Did you know we use tahini to get things unstuck from inside your throat, like a piece of carrot? Just take a tablespoon. It seemingly magically will move whatever is stuck with its perfect, somewhat sticky consistency. I may not be the perfect Arab woman, but this much about tahini I did know.

But I did not stir the tahini jar so it did not work or taste as it should. So the next time my parents sent me an enormous jar of tahini from their local Middle Eastern store, I spent about 15 minutes stirring it to the perfect consistency while my husband complained and tried to get me to sit down and hang out with him.

And I wondered how much of my family and ancestors I’ve lost as the result of my parents immigration, and how much more my kids would lose as I immigrated to Mexico and married a Venezuelan-Italian who has grown up in Mexico. When I meet people who think they are boring for being both born and raised in the same place as their ancestors, I am amazed. “What’s that like?” I think aloud. They never know how to answer.

My husband tousled me around the bed while I mulled over the very serious future of my kids and their abilities to grasp the chain of people who had to come together in Egypt, Venezuela, and Italy for them to exist. I wondered how connected they’d feel to any of these.

For myself, it’s hard to tell where my identities begin and end. Sometimes, one part feels more prominent than another, and later, it just switches on me, maybe even in the same day! Arab, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, African, Muslim, autistic, woman, American—I am a lot of things!

I’d like to see myself as a twisty fruit snack of all of my identities—separate but intertwined. Separate but connected.

You can’t un-intertwine “American” from that fruit snack. There’s a lite version to all my identities due to the fact that I am born and raised in America. I will gladly tell you I pick and choose the best parts of my identities and I am a mishmash of them all in a way that is very much just me. Not everyone of my exact family background would say the same. Maybe this is the American in me.

To some degree I am ashamed of being American—namely due to the hell unleashed on earth in the name of myself and millions of other well intentioned Americans. But on the other hand I didn’t ask to be American, it just happened, and to reject it is to reject myself as well as my beautiful family and friends. To me, they are literally the best people who walk the planet.

And this is why I am not entirely ashamed of having not stirred the first tahini jar. I am what I am. No more. No less. 

My husband is a Venezuelan who loves yerba mate. He affectionately calls it “mate” for short. Venezuelans don’t typically drink mate but he met an Uruguayan who was drinking mate while riding a bike and that man taught him to make it. It has been a part of the fabric of who he is ever since. He travels with mate. He walks with his mate cup to the gym. Mate is a big part of the culture of many South Americans. Children and presidents alike drink mate, and now, my husband does too.

So how exactly can you drink mate too? Well, like the tahini jar, there is a specific way to treat and drink mate that only the indigenous could know. There’s a specific shaking and blowing of the herbs in the cup when you are getting ready to add water. You tilt the cup to the side, then pour the first water on the side of the herbs, then stand it back up and put the straw/strainer/spoon in a specific way. Just today, my husband said he messed that part up. Sometimes, the first couple sips are spit out for being bitter. Now it’s ready. If you were sipping with a friend, this water after the bitter part would be theirs. That’s to say, you add some water in a specific way after the first few sips. And the entire amount of this water is your friend’s, and after that it’s your turn, and so on.

As you can see, this is hard to explain. I’m not entirely sure I got it right or given each step its due with my writing. As I’ve written it, I know you would not be able to make mate like an Uruguayan man sipping mate on a bike, or even like my husband. 

Some parts of our cultures are beyond mere words. Perhaps that’s what Americans specifically don’t understand about culture. That it can’t be boiled down to the sum of its parts, many of these parts steeped in buying habits. What is an identity that’s indigenous to the US that has any real culture besides that of Native Americans? When I was young it was hipster or gothic. Now it’s starboy aesthetic or wellness girl or mob wife aesthetic. Either way, you can probably get any part of American culture by it adding to your cart. 

I think about my kids. Egyptian-Venezuelan-Italians likely born and raised in Mexico. Will they know to stir the tahini jar? Will they make mate and remember the Uruguayan on the bike? Will they make pasta as well as their dad, or even grandpa? Or will they do the Mexican equivalent of that (and how if their mom is not Mexican)? Or a mix of all?

Living here I can just assume their identity will not be something they can add to cart.

I sometimes feel a great deal of sadness to meet my grandma in a hypothetical imaginary scenario and her be like, “really Sarah? You didn’t stir the tahini jar?” As if I’ve stiffed the of Egyptians who came together to create me. 

I wonder not only if my kids will stir the tahini jar but if they’ll ever go to Egypt, period. If they will ever know it’s nights in which the streets never sleep, the termis (lupin bean) we eat while walking with friends flavored with lemon, the Coke in front of the corner store with your cousins on a hot summer day. 

But I know that they won’t ever know those things. Largely, I am certain because those things don’t even really exist anymore. The beaches of Alexandria are gone. Don’t eat the termis, it’s not safe. The boycott is on Coke, rightfully so, but also, the country is in such a difficult state, does it even make sense for me to keep going?

My husband’s dad came from Italy with his family on a boat to Venezuela, seeking out better opportunities. My husband may strike you as Venezuelan through and through, but some light mannerisms and his ability to whip up the perfect pasta with limited ingredients will tell you otherwise. There was a Mediterranean man in the picture, this is evident. And when Venezuela went the way Egypt seems to be going, my husband brought his fruit snack intertwining identities to Mexico—which has become another identity for him. 

It’s hard to separate my husband from Mexico. He’s lived here since he was 13, more or less. But it’s the way he can instantly switch to a Venezuelan dialect that’ll remind you he’s also a Venezuelan man and immigrant. 

We are both children of immigrants who are also immigrants. We are a smorgasbord of beautiful and unique and even ugly things from the places of our ancestors. It is beautiful. It is also difficult.

My best friend is an Indian child of immigrants from Hyderabad. Unusually light for being Indian, the story goes that her father, a light Indian with some ancestry in regions of Russia or Mongolia, told his mom he would only marry if she found an equally light woman, of class and proper education. The joke is he hoped his mom would find no one. But my best friend is their first born.

I admire my best friend’s desire to keep and participate in her culture. She cherishes her Indian foods and speaks Urdu and Hindi. She loves desi clothes, food, and tradition, even without her parents’ presence. On Eid, our Muslim holiday, I went to her house where she had made biryani and her entire extended family was present. I said hi to aunt Becky, told her cousin Aaliyah how much I missed her, hugged Zareen-chachi, and got an update on cousin Erum’s life. I am not Desi but let me tell you, being a bystander to your Desi best friend’s culture is like a front row ticket to a colorful world and people. This friendship has added so much value to my life in a variety of ways that I may never fully be able to verbalize.

And yet she was also the child of immigrants who both had immigrant origins to India. What she knows is still a mishmash of cultures. She lived in India and Pakistan briefly but her longest time abroad was in China, where she met her Pakistani-Pashtun husband while doing medical school. I recall the photos of her and him on a motorcycle in China. She was holding both her first two babies. She was a world away from the US and India. 

It was during that time she really started to travel. Not physically but by meeting people. While doing medical school in China, she befriended other people who came from all around the world. She learned to make Chinese dishes but also African and Arab ones from her new African and Arab friends. She learned so much about their cultures just by being around them. And I too am struck by how fortunate I am to be immersed in Mexican culture while also meeting people who hail from all around the world who are either living or traveling here.

Some years ago, I was working in marketing. We were working on hiring a new PR agency, and my manager was enamored with a particular, new agency that claimed to be more modern than the other PR agencies. We met with them, several white women, each of them with fresh blowouts for their blonde hair that were characteristic of women who worked in PR for that industry. 

After the all day meeting, my team went out for drinks. After getting a little tipsy, a member of the team, an Indian man, questioned, “why is it that the US is the only country in which a cop will just pull a gun on someone?” The question was meant to be rhetorical.

My semi-drunk manager, a white woman who dyed her hair black, answered in all seriousness, roughly saying “because we have so many races and religions and ethnicities here! We’re all so different,” as if that wasn’t the point he was making, but with a lot more acceptance of the gravity of the explanation. She seemed to feel like this answer was a reasonable given, even with a few people of color at the table, at least while she was drunk. 

The more I grow, the more I see how viewing our differences as liabilities is truly a fallacy of the human mind. The more people I meet from different cultures or places or races, the more I feel rich. I have been all over the world through the people I’ve met. I have grown so much as a person, through the different cultures I’ve had the opportunity to rub shoulders with over the years. Our cultures, but also each of us as individuals with our fruit snack candy twisties of cultures, are all unique and have so much to give and to learn. It’s beautiful. 

Culture isn’t a thing you can buy or put on. It’s the way people greet each other or innately know when the pasta is done boiling. It’s the way the intonation of a particular language goes up and down, with words that run into each other like a song, like Venezuelan Spanish. It’s my best friend’s grandma not eating if her Indian food wasn’t up to her standard, quietly not asking for seconds so as to not offend. It’s my other best friend’s son knowing where Palestine is on the map at age 3. It’s also my mom using tortillas to make the goulash.

It’s the way we know to stir the tahini jar.

We’re at a crossroads now. I think increasingly, we know too much about the truth of each other to go on hating each other, taking advantage of one another, or assuming anyone is less. To continue to see others as less is definitely a choice. 

At the end of the day, we all say “ow” when we bump into something and play peekaboo with our babies. To continue to choose to see our differences as a negative at this point means to be willfully hateful—and yes, that is a choice some people may be willing to make. This choice will likely become increasingly difficult to make as we all become twisty fruit snacks of cultures, but I am sure, if people want to continue to hate, they will find a way to do so.

On the other hand, we could also all take this time to appreciate and seek to understand each other’s cultures—the various ones that make each of us as individuals unique and beautiful. Not to patronize them. Not to pay to put them on for a moment. But to really, truly take a human interest in one another and our beautiful cultures that were formed through millennia of people making either mate or hummus—or for my future kids, both.

When we make this choice, we win. We choose to enrich ourselves as human beings in a global community on this planet for the short time we are here. And if that isn’t one of the points of our existence, I don’t know what is.