My Great Palestinian Eclipse

The year was 1999 and I was 12 years old. It had been announced that a solar eclipse was in the works and that Palestine, where I was living at the time, would experience a partial eclipse (maybe like 40%). In the days leading up to it, much chatter could be heard about the eclipse and how it would emit "special and mysterious" harmful rays that would immediately blind you if you happen to be outside. How curious, I thought, this couldn't be true. Sure enough, many people seemed absolutely convinced that if you were caught outside during an eclipse, your sight would be immediately taken away.

I decided to do my own research. I asked one of the smartest people I knew, my dad, and he explained that if anybody, on any day, at any time decided to stare at the sun for prolonged periods of time, they would damage their eyesight and that the moon being in the way doesn't add any special rays to the process. The moon just isn't enough to block out all the everyday harmful solar rays. That made perfect sense to me. If only I could find a safe way to look at the sun. I saw on TV that there were people out there with special solar eclipse glasses, but alas, I had no access to such advanced technology. But there was an easy alternative I had seen in one of my books. A solar eclipse viewer that I could make out of cardboard and my binoculars. My preteen nerdy senses were tingling.

On the actual day, a few hours before the eclipse, I decided to go down to the mini mart to get some ice cream. The city seemed...deserted. Little to no cars. Nobody on the streets. The stores were in the process of closing. But it was smack in the middle of a weekend day, I thought, were people really that afraid of this very normal global phenomenon? I got my ice cream and started heading back. On the way home, a man yelled at me to go home immediately. I asked him why. He said, "the kusoof (eclipse) is coming and you're going to go blind!" I casually responded, "I'll be okay. I won't go blind." "Okay, then, but don't come blaming me when you go blind," he challenged me again. "Don't worry, I'll be okay." I responded and smiled as I walked away towards my house.

The hour came when I got to try out my amazing newly designed eclipse viewer. My whole family walked outside. We noticed that all the surrounding houses had their heavy blinds down. In fact, the normally very noisy vibrant city had turned into a ghost town and we couldn't hear any of the normal hustle and bustle. I think there may have been one other family outside but that was it. Silly people, I thought, all you have to do is not look at the sun directly, which one would avoid anyway. But no time for that, I thought, time for SCIENCE! I grabbed my viewer and started focusing away and surely enough there it was. A sun that looked like a moon and it felt so cool to be there. A sight that was exclusive for those who were willing to see it. We took a few photos with the floppy disk digital camera that my dad had recently acquired. I remember seeing a slight haze in the daylight at the maximum making the whole thing very eerie but so amazingly cool at the same time.

That night, we went over my grandfather's house and showed everybody the photos that we took. "You went outside?!" they asked. "Yes, of course, we did, and we are fine." At that moment, I thought of the man who had yelled at me on the street and how much I was thankful that I didn't have to blame him for going blind that day. 

I remembered this story today, the day of the American Solar Eclipse of 2017, as I walked over the 10th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh towards my laboratory. I thought about the power of anecdotes and rumors. How we are so willing to accept inflammatory hyperbolic information so easily. Over the years, I've thought many times about the man who yelled at me and his very real and concerned conviction in what he was saying. I started thinking about how my own passionate outburst have many times been based off hollow assumptions not grounded in reality and I sighed. I can only hope that I continue to learn how to communicate with people who may not be well-informed, and how to recognize that I too could always be more informed.

I couldn't get solar glasses in time for the eclipse this year, but I did try to make an eclipse viewer again, but I didn't have a pair of binoculars and the projection just wasn't the same. Disappointed, I walked on. Luckily there was a couple on the other side of the bridge looking at the eclipse through solar glasses. "Excuse me, friends, do you mind if I look through your glasses?" I asked. "Of course!" they playfully responded. I put on the glasses and looked with a smile at a familiar sight I had seen projected on the floor in Palestine many moons ago. A sun that looked like a moon, and I again felt so cool to be there.

The Token Arab is a personal blog run by a Palestinian American het cis man in Arizona. 

Photo shown is of me at 12 with my eclipse viewer taken by my dad.