Reclaiming Texts: Maysoon Zayid, "Little American Whore"

Dear Maysoon Zayid,

Thank you for performing your comedy show, “Little American Whore,” along with some extra standup, at the Scripps College Humanities Institute on March 5. I attended your performance and I had a wonderful time! Your material is hilarious and your delivery is assertive and spunky. Your stories about marriage, relationships, and the accompanying anxieties and disasters were very personal, and I admired your candor. I find your work very inspirational, and I feel that you are participating a necessary and often overlooked dialogue about Palestine by using your comedy as a medium for advocacy and social change. I wanted to talk to you about your show as a contribution to the dialogue between cultural texts in our society.

I enjoyed the ways in which your show emphasized the lack of perspective that you have encountered in various settings throughout your career. Your anecdotes about the women at your shows who were worried about what would happen “if your family found out” and the A-list actress who told you, in tears, that your show was “so much better than ‘Life is Beautiful’” showed how people extrapolate media stereotypes and superimpose them onto new situations and people they encounter. The ostensibly “objective” gaze of the news media often blinds us to the highly subjective cultural texts with which we are presented. When the basic visual codes of these texts don’t “match up,” we often react by assuming that they still do and falling back on the assumptions of the texts. Hence, as you portrayed in your act, the “Muslim woman” becomes the “headscarf-wearing woman” or the “woman in danger of being honor-killed”; the Palestinian American becomes the “terrorist” or simply “foreign”; the woman with cerebral palsy is visually identified as “drunk”; the person with a disability is assumed “not to be able to walk” and so on. I feel that your work is combating and indeed reclaiming power over cultural texts that purport to be able to define the identities of entire populations rather than respecting individual agency.

American culture, especially in recent years, seems to have created a thick cloud of misinformation, violence, and, most importantly, fear around all things Middle Eastern. This cloud is made up of extrapolations of the most disturbing kinds, and somehow, they rapidly become the primary modes we use to relate to everything that falls under the cloud. We carry the texts of newspaper headlines, cable news stories, daytime specials, and New York Times bestsellers with us when we go to work, go to the grocery store, or get on an airplane. Your show is a new text that can remind us to question where our texts are coming from, what values they are rooted in; it reminds us that it is unacceptable to equate a child in a refugee camp with a terrorist on the basis of religion or nationality. It reminds us of the danger the world faces as extrapolations like these find their way into government and military policy.

I wanted to thank you for your work; even your website uses humor to make people more conscious of the effects societal texts have on our daily lives! Good luck in all of your upcoming shows, your film work, and with Maysoon’s Kids. I wholly admire your ability to reach people through comedy and your commitment to use that talent to make a difference in the world.

Sincerely,

Jessica Burrus