Ibrahim Sablaban is an inpatient psychiatrist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, MI. A second generation American and son of Palestinian refugees, he takes a keen interest in minority mental health, culture bound syndromes, and healthcare disparities across American urban centers. He sits on the Michigan Psychiatric Society. His non-fiction essay “When Suicide Speaks Arabic” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.
So, who draws first? Figuratively speaking. In America, someone’s going to draw. Someone’s going to attack and define you by some arbitrary standard. And that someone could be anyone.
In “Untarnished” Fall 2020 Intima) a nephrologist from Pakistan residing in the United States for over 30 years retells a story that’s as uncomfortable as it is familiar. He and his perceived identity are attacked without warning. A mind “besieged,” accused of being a wife-beater and a terrorist sympathizer by a patient he’s provided care for for over a decade. Ali Rizvi walks us through the chaos of being ridiculed in the most fundamental ways.
Attacked for following a religion he doesn’t ascribe to, Ali’s first response is putting some distance between himself and Islam. He tells his patient he’s got nothing to do with the accusations. He tells him his parents were Muslims, not him; a knee jerk, defensive response formulated through shock that leaves him feeling less-than. But how does one benevolently shut down a tirade?
“I could sense my answer deteriorating into a cowering and unintelligible blabber,” he tells us. As his patient continues to critique Islam and Ali by association, we peer into a frantic confusion. “This is what happens when we forget we’re different,” I found myself thinking, an automatism a lifetime in the making. Who “we” exactly is, I’m not sure. I’m not agnostic, Pakistani or an immigrant.
In the span of a few moments at the end of a doctor’s visit, a man is left demeaned. Ali ultimately puts his patient’s needs before his own, and trudges through the pain.
I can’t help but think of young Rafiq’s story in my own narrative piece, “When Suicide Speaks Arabic.” Defining yourself as the ‘other’ is cold and isolating–but at the same time liberating. You become impervious to the perceptions of your identity, and the attacks mounted against you lose their strength. If I call myself an alien, it doesn’t really matter what they say. Of course they’d attack me–it’s the way this works, right? And if a U.S. born psychiatrist feels this way, and an agnostic nephrologist isn’t safe from the abuse, just imagine how a refugee in this country must feel. So when given the chance, I wouldn’t be surprised if they drew first–even on themselves.
Ibrahim Sablaban is an inpatient psychiatrist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, MI. A second generation American and son of Palestinian refugees, he takes a keen interest in minority mental health, culture bound syndromes, and healthcare disparities across American urban centers. He sits on the Michigan Psychiatric Society’s Legislative and Policy Committee and in particular, is a proponent of medication assisted treatment for substance use disorders and the de-stigmatization of buprenorphine and methadone in the Arab and Muslim American communities. A life-long writer, he has a growing fascination with the study and exploration of acculturative stress in both immigrant and refugee populations given the turmoil abroad. His non-fiction essay “When Suicide Speaks Arabic” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.
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