when i became a professional actress and realize what the name najka said regardless who my father was, it meant i would be received and expected of me. and when i was a little girl i went to school, i was then episcopalian and relatively white and was trying to fit in but kept hearing i was arab and i would look at tv and see what was presented which was muslim. and a certain type of all the things my father wrote about, terrorists or fanatic muslim or belly dancers and so i didn't fit into any of these categories. i was trying very hard to fit in to america but it wasn't working. when i was in high school i switch to another school where students were mostly jewish and all of a sudden i fit in. and wyatt looked and the way i asked, to the upper west side of manhattan was the connotation, and in a certain type of neurosis, jewish people. and had a lot of confusion about my identity and as i got older, the time in which i was born, 1974, we would go to lebanon but the war started when i was a year old so there was a war in lebanon and my dad was palestinian and i didn't understand how