For kids growing up in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, Christmas was a time when the usual monotony of Catholic school was replaced by indescribable magic. It wasn’t so much a gift as a feeling of reality being temporarily suspended and replaced with something more exhilarating. I think that was part of the reason I continued to believe in Santa Claus until I was 10 years old.
Of course, I had a relatively privileged childhood in the nation’s capital. This imperial headquarters continues to this day to embody the racism and socio-economic inequality that governs life in the so-called “Land of the Free.” I knew vaguely about such domestic issues since childhood, but I knew even less about my country’s contribution to global suffering. For example, in 1982, the year I was born, Washington had given the green light to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, which killed tens of thousands of people.
Closer to home, the decade of the 1980s was marked by the United States’ support for right-wing genocide in Central America in the noble pursuit of making the world safe for capitalism. The fact that the boredom of Catholic school was my biggest complaint on earth meant that I was doing much better than many others – in 2003, at the age of 21, in the United States. This became even clearer when I left my childhood behind in favor of a traveling lifestyle, which exposed me to the aftermath of America’s misdeeds from Colombia to Vietnam.
I’m 42 years old now, and I didn’t have high expectations for Christmas when I flew from Mexico to Washington, D.C., in mid-December. My parents had returned there after a long period of living abroad just before my father passed away last year. It wasn’t just my father’s absence that seemed to pre-emptively put a damper on the festivities this year. The potential for indescribable magic appears to have been pretty much annihilated by the dire situation on the ground and the continuing US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, where nearly the entire population has been forcibly displaced. Dew.
Meanwhile, America’s turning Christmas into a huge traffic jam of Amazon delivery trucks only serves as a stark reminder of the all-consuming presence of apocalyptic capitalism and its reduction of humanity to an endless, soul-sucking economic transaction. is.
But ironically, it was precisely those trade-based interactions that first hinted at the holiday spirit here in Washington, DC. A Sudanese driver who works for my mother’s ride-sharing company gave me a hug.
When this man from Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, I’ll call him Al-Safi, came to pick me up, he was enthusiastic about my “Free Palestine” sweatshirt. Also 42, he worked as a human rights lawyer in Sudan before fleeing the country in 2013 after being arrested and tortured too often.
However, upon arriving in the United States, Alsafi decided that the American Dream was not at all what he expected. Not only is he regularly subjected to overtly racist attitudes, he quickly becomes fed up with the oppressive consumerism that has become a substitute for life itself. He was also currently planning to flee the country. Needless to say, we had a lot to talk about.
A few days before Christmas, Alsafi invited me to dinner at a cozy Ethiopian restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, just across the bridge from Washington, D.C. I spent a month in Ethiopia in 2016. Al-Safi spent several months there in 2013 before fleeing Sudan and immigrating to the United States. Over drinks of Ethiopian Habesha beer and injera with lentils and mounds of collard greens, I asked Alsafi about some of the details of his Sudanese khasari experience.
During one detention, he was blindfolded and beaten, while his torture officer kept ordering him to move to a corner of the room. He staggered around, looking for a turn, but to no avail. “It was funny,” he told me with a hearty laugh. “When they took off the blindfold, they found out that there were no corners in the room. It was round.”
Alsafi didn’t like driving, but he had to drive long distances to support his family in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, where he had fled ongoing violence in Sudan. On the drive back to my mother’s house in Washington, D.C., he pointed out important geographic landmarks that he now knew far better than I did. Things like the Pentagon building, the Watergate Hotel, and a patch of tents housing homeless people that Al-Safi told me about. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the US capital in July to speak out against genocide, he was forcibly removed for “security” reasons.
There was something paradoxically uplifting about our shared pessimism, and the night ended with one more hug in front of my mother’s apartment. In the lobby of the apartment was a giant Christmas tree and a growing pile of Amazon delivery boxes. As Al-Safi continued his journey, I was reminded that even in societies conquered by capitalism, there are still humans. It just might be like magic.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
