Let us start with your experience as an Iraqi immigrant to the United States. What did you mean when you wrote: "I have found assimilation to be more of a revolution than an adaptation”? What has the process been like in defining your identity?
There is evolution and revolution. Every transplant to new soil undergoes one of the two. Evolution is adapting to a new environment to survive and possibly flourish. Revolution is rejecting the old for the sake of the new; destroying the old to create the new.
For some immigrants it is only a matter of evolution. For me — for many — I had to revolt against myself, I had to reject myself in order to create a new self that is able to function within this new habitat — America. Every immigrant evolves or revolts to one degree or another — consciously or unconsciously. Those that can do neither stay rootless.
I had a double experience of alienation: from Iraq to Greece, where we lived as refugees, and from Greece to America. The principal difficulty for me was not just that I had to learn English or that there were some different rules within this culture. The principal difference was that as an immigrant you are uprooted, cut off from everything that makes you who you are — from your family, culture, traditions, communal spheres; your entire view of the world is riven. And then you are transplanted into a culture that has a different understanding of life, of the human person, of home and family.
This revolutionary shift of worldview was very difficult.
Read the rest of the interview at The George W. Bush Presidential Center.