Day 20: Arab American Heritage Month: How Do We Celebrate When We’re Grieving? by Jehan Hakim

April is Arab American Heritage Month — a time that’s supposed to honor the culture, contributions, and stories of Arab Americans. A time to be proud, to reflect, and to teach others about who we are.

Last year, I wrote about how this month makes space for identities like mine — a Yemeni American woman raised in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, where I rarely saw anyone who looked like me in my textbooks, classrooms, or local government. I shared how Arab Americans have always been here — building businesses, raising families, contributing to every sector — while constantly being misunderstood or erased.

But this year feels different. This April feels heavier. How do we celebrate when we’re grieving?

Since October of 2023, the message has been loud and clear: Arab lives are disposable. From Gaza to Yemen, Arab bodies have been brutalized, violated, and forgotten — with the full support and funding of the U.S. government. We’ve watched in horror as thousands of Palestinians — children, journalists, entire families — are massacred. We’ve heard the silence from those who once said “never again.” And we’ve been told that our grief is dangerous, that our mourning makes us suspect, that our pain is political.

Meanwhile, in Yemen, the U.S & Israel continues to strike under the guise of “retaliation,” further destabilizing a country already pushed to the brink by years of war, famine, and foreign interference. My people — already bearing the weight of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis — are now being punished for showing solidarity with Palestine.

As a Yemeni American, I carry all of this. I carry the rage, the sadness, the numbness. And I know I’m not alone. Arab Americans across the country feel unseen, silenced, and targeted. We’re tired. We’re grieving. And we’re angry.

Arab American Heritage Month can’t just be about dabke performances, calligraphy nights, and food festivals. It can’t be limited to facts about ancient civilizations or surface-level celebrations that make people feel comfortable. Not when we’re watching our people die with no end in sight.

This month has to mean more. It has to hold all of us — our culture, our beauty, our joy, and also our sorrow, our rage, our resistance.

We show up anyway. We show up for our students with “hard to pronounce” names and keffiyehs tucked nervously into backpacks. We show up in classrooms, on social media, in the streets — organizing, educating, mourning together. We carry our ancestors’ resilience even when this country tells us to forget them.

We are not only survivors — we are teachers, artists, caregivers, leaders, mothers, daughters. We are sacred. We are whole.

To every Arab woman holding it together for her family, to every student scared to speak up, to every Arab who’s felt disposable: I see you. Your life matters. Your voice matters. Your story matters.

We are not just here in April. We are here every day — grieving, resisting, loving, surviving.

And we’re not going anywhere.