Back of the Throat

Abstract

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION Back of The Throat began as a paranoid thought game. In those first few months after 9/11 as an Arab/MuslimAmerican one wasn't quite sure where one stood. What laws were still in place to protect one from government inquisitiveness or from a government, rightly or wrongly, deciding to throw aside civil liberty concerns in the need to protect the country from an amorphous enemy whose potential for another strike was very real. In this climate, where one feared officials needing to look and act tough and avoid allowing more terrorists through the net, I personally, on a visceral level, found myself fearing a knock on the door. For no logical reason, I should add. Names were being called in. I remember one person advising a girlfriend of hers to call the F.B.I, because her Iranian boyfriend had been acting quite suspicious. ("He's so secretive. Never let's on what he's up to.") One news report I read talked of a man who called the paramedics because his wife was having a heart attack. When the paramedics arrived and saw the material he had in his house-book titles that alarmed them and other apparently subversive material (I forget the specifics of the article read on a website over four years ago) they called the police and the man was arrested. Then there were the news reports of people being pulled aside at airport screenings because of the reading material they'd brought with them. Men were being kicked off airplanes because the pilot read the manifest and didn't feel safe flying with a Muslim on board. Generally speaking, Arab/Muslim men flying together on an airplane was a bad idea. Non-Arab passengers were nervous seeing us seated together. In those first few weeks after 9/11, I even found myself reluctant to go to an airplane restroom for fear I would alarm someone. I would sit there, full bladder getting fuller, thinking, this is insane. Everyone has gone insane. Justifiably so, of course. The attacks were unprecedented. Hideous and mind-blowing. Few of us had been quite this dumbstruck by an event. And God knows, there are a lot of hideous events going on around the world to choose from. So the public and official response...! well understand why they might have erred on the side of "presume guilt until proven otherwise." Which led me to wonder what in my house, among my possessions, might alarm government officials were they to come for a casual visit, to make casual inquiries, as they were doing at that time. Knocking on doors, after being given those "tips." The rumors of this happening, true or not, were rampant during those first few months. And so the paranoid thought game began, and turned into a play. A few things that made the writing of this play difficult: Getting enough distance from my own fears, from the heartbreaking news going on around me, to find the humor 1 knew mis play had to have were I to avoid making it unrelentingly harsh. I kept putting it aside whenever I felt the play drifting into areas where characters were coming across as too dehumanized. Reading the first draft was like listening to a tin can rattling with loose change-only the loose change here was language divorced from characters who had yet to come into their own. True, the situation I was setting up for them was by its nature dehumanizing. All the more reason then that I felt the need to have my ear firmly pressed against the hearts of these characters. Particularly the agents. Which was another stumbling block. I particularly set the play aside whenever I felt the agents were coming across as too unlikable; whenever their back and forths between each other, and with Khaled, made them seem too buffoonish, or casually cruel. Innumerable lines and exchanges were cut whenever I felt them scoring at the expense of this likeability I was trying to establish. At the very least, I wanted their actions to be understandable and appreciated, so that an audience might feel, (at least privately) that yes, I too would have to endorse their actions, given what we face. …