Our Hyphenated Identities: Kiki's Story

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Meet Kiki Karam. Kiki is a sophomore in the Commonwealth Honors College majoring in journalism with a public relations concentration and minoring in Arabic. Kiki’s parents are from Chekka, a small beach village in northern Lebanon, but immigrated to America during the Lebanese Civil War between 1975 and 1990. Kiki’s hyphenated identities are Arab-American and Lebanese-American. This is her story:

For most of her life, Kiki has been battling assumptions. Because she’s Arab, it’s automatically assumed that she’s Muslim. Because she has fair skin and light eyes, it’s assumed she’s from European descent. But she’s none of those things. Kiki is a Maronite Catholic, a sect of Catholicism found predominantly in Lebanon. Kiki is Arab, she speaks Arabic at home, eats Arab food, and identifies with Arab culture.

These assumptions have led Kiki to live what she calls “a double life.” At home, she can be fully Arab, but outside of her little Arab enclave, she can’t be. Outside of her home, people don’t know her, and when she lets them in, she says she feels “ostracized because my parents speak to me in a different language, and I have smelly food and big hair.”

This “double life” took full effect when Kiki was just 14 years old. As an adolescent, Kiki began to beg her hairdresser mother to apply straightening treatments to her big curly hair, arguing that curly hair was “wild” and “different”—she was embarrassed by it. Her mother eventually agreed. Since then, she’s had six of these treatments done to her hair. The process greatly damages natural curls, and even though Kiki stopped the treatments the summer before college, her hair has yet to fully recover. While her straightened hair allowed her to live her “double life,” looking back, she regrets replacing her beautiful curly hair for straight. But she doesn’t blame herself, noting that “growing up, there was no representation of girls with curly hair, no way to style it, and no YouTube tutorials.”

It wasn’t until coming to UMass that Kiki began to feel comfortable with shedding her “double life.” Kiki admits that UMass (and Massachusetts in general) is not exactly the most diverse place, but it’s the most diverse place she’s been a part of. And that has made all the difference. Being among other curly-haired girls with similar backgrounds has allowed Kiki to embrace her features. And while she does straighten her hair from time to time, she’s come to love and accept her curls and her Arab identity.

Kiki hopes to use the skills and experiences as a journalism student, and as an intern in D.C. this summer, to tackle American misperceptions of the Middle East and better educate the public on happenings in the region. As a contributor to the Daily Collegian, Kiki has written about the lack of representation of the Middle East in Western media. In her article, “Tragedies in developing nations deserve more attention,” Kiki writes:

“Tragedies in the Western world take up weeks, even months, of news coverage either on television, through news outlets, or on social media. However, when a bombing, explosion, or war breaks out in a developing nation, the media does initial coverage and states the facts, but that’s it. Through Western media, we are trained to normalize tragedy in less-developed parts of the world. The Middle East, especially, is widely considered a never-ending war zone, so people lose interest. Where is the empathy for developing nations?”

At the beginning of college, Kiki says she didn’t know where her space was, but she’s come to learn that “it’s about making your own space.” Her space is through informative and provocative writing that allows her readers to realize and combat their own misconceptions. Her space is through bringing her friends to her family home in Lebanon to share her culture with them. Her space is through wearing her natural curls. Her space is through being unapologetically and undeniably herself.