The passenger profiling programme, initiated by Northwest Airlines in 1994, is designed to allow airport security to focus on the passengers most likely to pose a threat. The automated screening system identifies a normally small percentage of passengers for additional scrutiny…. CAPS uses data from airline reservation systems to select baggage for inspection and nominates some passengers at random for the additional security measures. The profiling factors are classified.
– Flight Global, 8 October 2001
1991 HEATHROW
(10 Years before 9/11)
I am told to stand at the first desk.
The border agent is blond, has a thin line of lips and never looks at me. I imagine him fishing in the lakes with his father whom I do not know. I imagine his town in economic depression, and he decides to get a government job in London.
He does not look at me. He does not imagine me.
He raises his hand in a stop sign and leaves.
I wait. My purse is heavy on my shoulder. My suitcase, which I borrowed from my sister, is a duffel bag and sits on the floor. Other passengers push through the gates, presumably to meet their families. I do not have family in England. I have letters from my publisher indicating my mission in London. A room is reserved at a small hotel.
The officer returns holding a big heavy book, slams it on the desk and rifles through pages. When he puts his hand out, I instinctively hand over my passport. He still does not look at me. He studies my picture, or my name or both. After examining the list in the book, he marks a line with his finger and says. “Sorry Ma’am we have to hold you for questioning.”
I am led into a room with a metal desk, a chair on each side, bare walls, and another door. The guard motions me to sit on the hard folding chair. I try to keep my back lifted, my body alert. The man across from me wears a black sweater with an epaulet on each shoulder. His hair is very dark, his face is olive, and his beard spotty. He does not speak. The guard who brought me in, leans against the wall and crosses his arms. “Why have you come to the UK?”
If I could dive a hand into my suitcase, I could retrieve the letter from W.W. Norton that I had asked my editor to write. “I am here to speak to publishers about my book.” I point to the desk as if it is lying there.
He leaves and returns with my newly published memoir and hands it to the man at the desk. The bearded one glances at the front, the pictures of my mother and grandmother, he reads the back, the blurbs that were so exciting to acquire; he opens the flap, sees my picture with the big smile and then lifts his eyes to me. He asks me to pronounce my name. He has an accent, not a British one.
“Elmaz Abinader.” I say it with a decided American pronunciation.
“Sorry, Mrs. Abinader, we’re going to have to inspect you further.”
“Me?”
“You’re Arab, aren’t you?
OAKLAND 1993
“We can say it doesn’t include factors like race, ethnicity, national origin or any of those things that would be discriminatory,” said Rebecca Trexler, an FAA spokeswoman. “We can’t say what the criteria are in the system. That would be telling the terrorists what we are looking for.”
– Tampa Bay Times
I am on tour. A Pacifica station in Berkeley is featuring my book in their fundraiser, and one of the broadcasters will read the entire book on the air. I will be interviewed.
After I disembark the plane at the Oakland airport where I have never been before, I gather my bag and head toward the driver waiting for me. Two uniformed men approach me. They don’t speak to each other. When one one says to me, “Come with us,” he sounds like my father.
They take me through doors painted the same color as the wall. I’ve been through these invisible doors in other airports—London, New York—so I’m not surprised when the green panels part, and I am ushered into a room with a long table, staffed by two more men, and one women, whose dirty blond hair is tucked under her cap. My hair springs out in big loopy curls, my hair is dark.
Both my bags are placed on the table and thrown open. I see my underwear in a pouch, my jeans in a stack, my tunics rolled and lined next to each other, my sneakers, my toiletry bag; my big Canon camera.
They remove the contents, shaking each piece of clothing, one at a time. I see a concert ticket fall from my jeans pocket, a tear in my flowered bikini underwear. Every bottle of shampoo, conditioner, lotion, is opened and sniffed. My camera is taken apart, exposing the film inside to the light.
I hold perfectly still. I have learned to hold perfectly still.
One man grabs the suitcase, the bag, and my purse and leaves. He will x-ray them somewhere else and when he returns, they will be inverted and the crumbs and gum wrappers that dwelled in the bottom of my purse will be spilling out.
The woman. She steps forward and takes my arm. I am led through a brown door to a room as small as a bathroom stall. The swiping of her hands up and down the front and back of my body sparks little spasms or maybe I imagine them as I hold myself as still as a lamp post.
She puts her hands between my legs.
TEL AVIV 1996
So why, I asked, are we still allowed to board airplanes at Ben-Gurion International Airport with bottles and tubes of liquid brought from home, while in Heathrow or JFK they confiscate our face cream and toothpaste?
“Oh, that’s simple,” he answered matter of factly. “We use racial profiling. They don’t.”
– Lt. Col. Eran Tuval to journalist Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz
A light rain is falling as the plane lands. Although I just flew the short distance from Cairo to Tel Aviv, I am dead tired from days of performances, classes, and interviews. I am a visiting poet from the U.S. on USIA tour of many countries.
Once I retrieve my bags, I report to the processing room where arriving passengers are vetted upon arrival to Tel Aviv. Long tables, one after another, are staffed by officers, most of them female.
The first group of tables is surrounded by Japanese tourists, a Holy Land group, as I can see their gleaming crosses on their chests and some hold rosaries. They look exhausted. There is nowhere for them to sit. Open suitcases line the tables exposing their blouses, their bloomers, and their sensible shoes.
I am directed to the second station where two soldiers stand. Women. One has her pants slung low, and I can see a belly button piercing above her belt. I automatically place my suitcase in front of her.
This guard looks at me. Straight at me with blue crystal eyes. “What is the purpose of your trip?”
I think of pulling out my official USIA itinerary but don’t. Instead, I say, “I’m here to share my poetry.”
She scans my open case but doesn’t touch anything. “Where is your writing, please?”
I slide my hand into the inside pocket and pull a handbound collection of my work. Some poems tell of my Arab family and our migration; all of it talks about displacement. I glance at “Letter to My Father,” the poem on top.
I hand the manuscript to her.
This soldier passes the bundle to her colleague, and they speak in Hebrew. She turns around holding the manuscript like a tray and walks away.
As I wait, I glance behind me and see one of the Japanese women has begun to cry, braces herself again the table. A friend wraps her arms around her from behind and guides her away from the scowling soldier.
The other guard also leaves my table. I am alone, not knowing if I can touch anything or move or drink my water.
What are they doing with my poetry for nearly thirty minutes I wonder. I shift my hips, bending my knees alternately, wishing I could do a downward facing dog.
Both soldiers return. The one holding my writing has let it fall forward. The poem now on top is “Preparing for Occupation.”
The belly-button soldier pushes the poems back into the pocket and closes the suitcase. “You may go. Have a pleasant time in Israel.”
I pause, briefly, peek at the Japanese tour group, still leaning on one another; the guards still tossing their clothes. I walk out into the rain and feel lucky this time. For days, walking in Jerusalem, I scan the streams of tourists clutching their rosaries, searching for those women.
EAST JERUSALEM 1996
Since the 1990’s, several contemporary Palestinian …artists use the materials of occupied land in order to reclaim agency over it and to resist the settler-colonialist structures which continue to exploit it.
– Had Dahsan, ArtMejo, Earth, Olive, Stone: Materialities of Palestinian Resistance
At the house party, Dinah, the consulate person, introduces me to three or four people, who get into conversation with each other and then she leaves. I stare at the table covered with mezze and find am not hungry. I wander to the bookshelves and see mostly American classics. William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, John Steinbeck. I feel lumpy and obvious.
There is a sunporch through a white door with a screen.
I steal away but instead of being alone, I find three men on the porch smoking cigarettes. They are quiet and faced toward the street.
The road is made of large stone and climbs upward.
The houses around us are beautiful limestone and gold.
At the top of the hill is a child’s playset, swings, a slide, and a bouncy clown.
A bearded man turns to me, the streetlight brightens half his face. “You are the poet?”
I nod. His English is good. The other two men face me too. One says something in Arabic to the other. He answers. “hmmm.”
“What about you? Are you with the consulate?”
He shakes his head, “No. We are artists. The most famous artists in Palestine.”
Are they? I wonder. I say. “It’s such a pleasure to meet you. I feel very lucky.”
The bearded one turns to his friends and translates. He shifts his eyes back to me and speaks quite quickly but softly. “I used to paint with oils and do some sculptures, but the three of us agreed to only use materials that comes from here.” He pokes two fingers toward the ground. “Here from Palestine.”
“Do you mean you make clay from the earth of Palestine?”
“We do. We takes plants and makes colors.” His arms opens, “And, and…” His gaze fogs a little. “Garbage?”
I think he means Selvage.
“Yes, we use nothing artificial at all. Not for color, not for frame, not for statue.”
I picture his hands plucking leaves from bushes growing from the gravelly earth, smelling them; putting them in a pot. The reds are siphoned from flowers and extracted from seeds; the greens from grasses and stems; the yellows swiped from bushes and weeds.
“May I see your work?”
“It is very close by,” he throws his hand toward the window. “At a very good gallery. Dinah will show you.”
“Are you ever there? I’d love to hear you talk about it.”
“No, I cannot be there.”
“But I thought you said it was nearby.”
“Yes,” he nods and points up the street. I follow his fingers to the top of the hill. “The border is there.”
Near the playground sits a small guard house. In the entrance a sentry is smoking and blowing long streams floating in the beam of the streetlight. His M16 is on his lap angled toward the sky.
SAN FRANCISCO 2001-20NOW
What is Racial Profiling?
Racial profiling concerns the invidious use of race or ethnicity as a criterion in conducting stops, searches and other law enforcement investigative procedures.
– Department of Homeland Security
According to TSA spokesman Michael McCarthy, SSSS appears on a passenger’s boarding pass when they have been selected by the agency’s Secure Flight system for enhanced security screening.
This time I’m ready. My shoes have no buckles, no inserts and they slip off and on. I wear my sports bra because it is wireless. Yoga pants pull on without zippers or buttons and don’t require a belt. My shirt is not woven with metallic threads.
I pull my hair as straight as possible; I don’t wear earrings, but I do use make-up, a deep red lipstick, so I appear to be a professional businesswoman or a college professor, which, incidentally, I am.
Since 9/11, and the establishment of the Homeland Security Department, anyone traveling through an airport, may be stopped for inspection.
Signs punctuate the path from the ticket counter to security:
Take off your shoes. No liquids or gels over three ounces.
Remove your computer from its case.
Empty your pockets. Take off your watch.
My friends at work talk about it all the time. How inconvenient it has become to travel; how much preparation it takes. Everyone is upset and friends tell me what they consider “horror stories” of being selected by the TSA for a pat down. Sometimes the officers throw out their toiletries and trail mix.
I nod in agreement. Don’t add that “I’ve been going through this for years.” Don’t offer what I have learned in eleven years of being the only one.
- Check almost everything so you have very little on you when you go through screening.
- Clean your computer of Arab poetry, prose, names, affiliations, pictures of the crescent moon.
- When they question you, stare at a spot behind their head so you aren’t distracted, or you accidentally make a face in response to questions like, “what mosque do you pray in?”
- No jokes.
At the ticket counter in San Francisco, I use my driver’s license as identification because my passport has visas from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Yemen.
And just like almost every trip I’ve taken since 9/11, the agent has scrawled my ticket with an SSSS indication—Secondary Security Screening Selection.
The lines at TSA resemble sorting pens, cordoned off and patrolled. As I stand behind a burly businessman and in front of my traveling companion, an African American man, the guards choose some passengers to proceed to their gate. Others are directed to another line and their baggage is lifted and placed on a second table.
The group delayed include olive skin men, bearded men, curly hair women, a surfer boy with red hair, a blond Rastafarian style man, a brunette white woman biting her lip, a veiled woman with two children… and me.
My partner is ushered through to the other side. He waits for me, his neatly closed bag beside him. I glance over, shake my head, so he doesn’t say anything.
Officers assemble around the examination tables, opening the suitcases, purses, and bags of one passenger at a time. They swipe instruments covered with a special paper across the frames of the suitcases, the fabric, the inside pockets; they dig, dig, dig, and remove some the items, shoes, soap, purse. Electronics are put into x-ray again.
When they are finished, the suitcases are returned in disarray and the passenger must gather it all, with their shoes in their hand, go over to a table to repack. Time is passing; their gate may be closing.
I know better, always coming three hours before my flight.
My partner stands hands on his hip, watching intensely.
When my turn comes, the ritual is the same. Opening my computer, they turn it on. They spray my inhaler into the air and smell the vapor; they hold my three-ounce shampoo bottle up to the light.
When they are finished with my belongings, the suitcase is passed on to another guard.
I am sent to another line. SSSS.
This time, only two other people are with me. Both men. One bearded. We are waiting to enter the puffer—the TSA calls it an “explosive trace portal,” a device capable of detecting traces of explosive residue on a person’s body or clothing. But I don’t know this while I wait. I worry.
I am finally directed into the booth. The guard instructs me to cross my arms across my body to hold my clothes down. Air shoots powerfully toward me and a vacuum sucks it away. I hold my breath, although I don’t know why. When I exit, I stand outside the booth as an officer stares at a screen. Finally I am dismissed. My belongings lie in a pile at the end of the table.
My partner joins me and helps fold and store my things. He starts a casual conversation with a different agent who is sitting back, having coffee. He asks what that machine does.
“The puffer?” the guy points.
“Yes, I’ve never seen one before.”
“It tests for explosives.” The guard says.
“How?” my partner watches another passenger come through.
“It collects dead skin cells.”
NICE, FRANCE 2022
(21 years since 9/11)
You may be subject to an additional security check:
These checks may follow alarm triggers or be carried out randomly in accordance with regulations.
They may carried out in the form of a physical pat-down (by an officer of the same sex), a complete search of your belongings, etc.
– Nice airport website
I am older and seem much less suspicious, I think. But that doesn’t stop me from being obsessive in my preparations, following my due diligence.
I have the fast pass, CLEAR. I registered for a Known Traveler Number, Global Entry, and the automated passport global control app.
I always buy a round trip ticket, use the same travel sites, print my boarding pass, as well as have it on my phone.
I still give myself three hours before every trip.
But not always.
I am in France with my writing partner, Faith. We were staying in a writing residency near Fontainebleau, south of Paris, when we decide to fly to Nice to attend the James Baldwin Conference. After days of research, we find our best option is to grab an Easyjet from Paris to Nice.
At Orly, the gates are crowded. Families are also headed to the Cote d’Azur. Travel this year is a return to our normal way of being. The pandemic locked us out of our annual pilgrimages to residences and conferences and visits to friends in Egypt or Nigeria or France. We are in our happy place. I enjoy an ease of familiarity that comes with traveling. My passport in my hand, I am wearing a mask and I am with my friend.
We march forward in line at security, ready to head to our gate, just ahead. Faith and I place our bags, onto the table. The guard pushes hers forward. Faith passes through.
With a blink, looking at me or my credentials, the security officer asks me to step aside for further inspection. My bag is sent to the next table.
Faith waits.
The next inspection includes rifling through my gauzy tops, flips flops and scarves, and then patting me down. As they swipe the carefully selected tunic I am wearing, front and back, I stare above their heads.
The two years I hadn’t traveled didn’t make my body forget how to freeze in place, hold my breath, stay silent.
The following morning, Faith and I attend a panel on writers-of-color and travel. I notice immediately the panelists were not born when the profiling initiative was introduced and they were children when Homeland Security became the law of the land.
One describes how their bodies feel when they are isolated as travelers of color, pointed at by people in stores and on train platforms. Some audience members nod. Tell their stories of being invisible, not being served, sneers.
I sit back, wish I had coffee.
I listen distractedly. I feel for the young brother in dreadlocks who was treated like a thug, the sister who had to remove her headwrap. Discrimination against Muslims is legislated in France, one reminds us. The French Supreme upheld the ban of burkinis at public pools.
Their voices fade into the background. I hear my own from several years ago wailing that I was always seen as other, whether I was in an Arab country or the U.S., in Europe or in the Caribbean. Stories are looping from me to them, from Faith to them.
We know it. It is like breathing.
At the end, the audience falls into animated conversation with one another on the way out to the village. I see them together, wild in their youth and energy, their anger met with affirmation; their voices met with chorus. They are not alone.
As a way of bidding goodbye, I say, but not aloud:
There are years ahead like this. Just keep traveling.
Elmaz Abinader’s recent work has appeared in Michigan Quartely Review, Prism International, and Mizna, and the anthologies Essential Truths, Minding Nature, and Beyond Memory. Her poetry collection, This House, My Bones, was the Editor’s Selection 2014 from Willow Books. She has a memoir, Children of the Roojme: A Family’s Journey from Lebanon, and a second book of poetry, In the Country of My Dreams, which was winner of the Josephine Miles Award from PEN Oakland. Elmaz is a co-founder of The Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices).
