My cousin Abena was a real mystery. From the gallery of characters of my childhood in Fanta Citron, the ghetto of Mvog-Ada where I grew up in Yaoundé, Cameroon, she was the one most misunderstood.
She was the eldest daughter of my maternal uncle Etoundi, the same uncle who saw himself as the de facto head of the family, despite being the second child. Uncle Bisseau was the oldest of the eleven kids of my grandparents.
All eyes were on Abena after the engagement of Medounga, my other cousin. Abena was an introvert, the opposite of most of my other cousins who were always leaving their mark. Sometimes she seemed to walk on tiptoe. Abena wanted to be invisible. She was always the last to give her opinion and first to throw herself headlong into the chores. She was always the object of mockery.
Uncle Etoundi often gave her one of those looks that said ‘what have I done to deserve this?’ In songo’o, the traditional game that the men of the neighborhood often played, he almost never mentioned her when he talked about his children. It was as if she didn’t exist. He wished he had an older alpha daughter with a bulldozer personality like himself.
Since our walls had ears, as they used to say back then, it was hard to imagine that cousin Abena was unaware of what was being said about her. After months of trying to find her a husband, my aunts and uncles gave up. They were already turning towards her younger sister Mballa, considered more promising.
One day, when I had just returned from school and was preparing my tray of cassava sticks which I was going to sell in the evening, I heard auntie Nfegue, Abena’s mother, cry out.
“Are you sure you’re really my daughter? It can’t be true. No, you’re not my daughter. No, you’re not my daughter. We don’t have the same blood. God sent you to punish me for something. What have I done to the good Lord to deserve this?”
Auntie Nfegue would repeat these words over and over, oscillating between tears, screams and prayers, while cousin Abena sat in silence. It was a very bad sign.
We learned later that cousin Abena was 5 months pregnant. It was a shock. No one knew of any lovers she had. The news had cast a chill through the house. My mother and my aunts embarked on a soul searching mission. How had they not noticed that Abena was pregnant? What signs did they miss? Were they real women, they, who believed that they were able to detect the slightest unusual sign in one of us? They all felt they had failed.
But soon, the focus turned to the father. Who was he? In the days that followed, the adults were whispering. But we children eventually learned that the father was one of the young men who worked at the bar that was next to the house. It was a new shock. No one had ever seen them together. We learned later that they were not a couple. Cousin Abena had approached him (his name was Étienne) when she had seen her family turn away from her. She had explained to him that the only way to regain the trust of her family was to have a baby. She was looking for someone she could trust as a father. Étienne was right there. It was an act of desperation to win the family over. Abena had plunged the family into the darkest waters. She had torn down all order with her act. She had become the agent of chaos.
“I don’t understand anything anymore. I don’t even know what to do,” uncle Etoundi had confided to his playmates at songo’o. “She is crazy. God is punishing me for something. I don’t deserve this.”
Abena’s desperate act had caused something unthinkable, the consequences of which for the family were still not evident. For her, it was clear that she had just become an adult with major responsibilities.
It was cousin Abena I was thinking of in this final stretch of the 2024 presidential campaign between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump when I spoke to Dr. Hassan Abdel Salam, a Muslim American of Egyptian origin. I met him in Livonia, Michigan, a 30-minute drive northwest of Detroit. It was an unusually sunny and warm day, less than a week before Election Day, in the offices of Abandon Harris. Abandon Harris is a movement he cofounded, following the Israeli-Hamas war that has been going on for over a year, and has now been extended to Lebanon.
Dr. Hassan Abdel Salam is a man in high demand, as the polls show a very tight race between Harris and Trump nationally and here in Michigan, a crucial swing state. He was meeting with a group of people who appeared to be journalists when I arrived. In the large hall where he was giving interviews, posters of Abandon Harris were placed almost everywhere. The premises were organized like those of a union: the cause is first; the rest is secondary. On the chairs and the table which separated me from him, it was difficult to miss the posters. Every time your gaze wandered, it fell on another one. You couldn’t miss the message. It surrounded you.
Salam, a lifelong Democrat who said he cried when Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, reminded me of cousin Abena, but the consequences of his desperate act may be much more dire.
This 49-year-old Muslim American is flying under the radar nationally, but he might just be the person who could make Kamala Harris lose the White House, or to put it another way, he might be the unexpected person to help Trump win a second term. He might just be the Eleventh-Hour Surprise in this election.
Some may find this to be an exaggeration, but here is the situation. Dr. Hassan Abdel Salam relaunched Abandon Harris in September, a movement that was called Abandon Biden when the current president was still a candidate. The goal was to punish Biden, and now Harris, by asking Muslim Americans not to vote for them, to make sure that they lost on November 5, because of the support of the Biden administration for Israel in the war against Hamas, following the terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023, in Israel. The attacks left about 1,200 Israelis dead and more than 200 taken hostages. On the Palestinian side, the Israeli military operation has caused the deaths of more than 40,000 people, the majority of them civilians, including children and women, according to official figures.
The war has spilled over into neighboring Lebanon and continues, despite Israel managing to decapitate the leadership of Hamas. Abandon Harris has called unsuccessfully for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and a full arms embargo against Israel.
“The goal is in one sentence, to defeat the Vice President because of her genocide, and then get the blame for it,” Dr. Hassan Abdel Salam said, using the certainty and verbal stance of an activist.
“If you succeed, are you not afraid it might hurt your cause even more, since Trump is not planning on changing the U.S. foreign policy?” I asked.
“We’re punishing the Vice President to take the blame for it,” Dr. Hassan Abdel Salam calmly responded. “We’re going to be fully accountable in that regard, in order to gain power, not to appeal to the people. Our audience is not the public, but it is the officials, the elites in the Democratic Party, in the Republican Party, who have ignored us, who see us as irrelevant in their calculations when it comes to whom they try to woo, whom they lobby during a campaign.”
Harris has called for a cease-fire linked to the release of the hostages.
About 48% of American adults disapprove of the Israeli military action in Gaza, according to a Gallup poll conducted between June 3 and 23 and released in July. That is down 7 percentage points from March, however.
Abandon Harris is very active in these last days of the presidential campaign in Michigan, but also in other swing states like Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The movement is running digital ads telling Muslim Americans not to listen to those who say Harris is the lesser of two evils. It is urging them to vote for the third-party candidate, Jill Stein, whom it endorsed in early October.
Its members are talking to people in mosques. They are canvassing. They are making phone calls, texting, knocking on doors and driving Muslim American voters to the poll stations, Dr. Hassan Abdel Salam told me.
“Many of our people could vote, but they don’t, so we’re carpooling, bussing, convoying people from the mosques to the polls, because we’re in an early voting session,” explained Salam, who has taken a break from teaching to focus on his activism. (He has a PhD in Sociology and used to teach at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.)
He has been travelling to swing states to deliver sermons every Friday. In three days, on the last Friday before Election Day, he will be delivering the sermon at the American Moslem Society, also known as Masjid Dearborn, the oldest mosque in Michigan.
“What we expect will happen, based on past precedent, is that when we show we defeated the Vice President, the millions of people who didn’t want to defeat [Harris] will go around, asking how this happened," Salam said. "When they realize that she won the popular vote, but she lost the electoral college, they will begin a vast introspection of the party, which also happened in 2016.”
It seemed like he was imagining himself in that moment. Then he continued:
“What will happen is the leadership will peel away, and what we expect is millions of people will put pressure on the party. They might not like us. They will put pressure on the party, looking at the map in anticipation of 2026 and 2028, and they will need to have an anti-genocide policy in Occupied Palestine.”
Salam seems to be describing a plan he must have presented many times to those around him. As we were talking, he seemed to have convinced himself that he has not missed anything, and that everything will happen as planned and promised.
Listening to him, some would find him arrogant, overconfident and cocky. He believes he and his followers are walking on the footsteps of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and other civil rights icons.
Harris, the Democratic candidate, needs the famous “blue wall” comprised of the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — to get to the 270 electoral votes needed to win. Together, the three states account for 44 electoral votes.
Michigan has more than 200,000 Muslim American voters, according to Emgage, enough to make a difference on November 5. Biden won Michigan by 154,188 votes in 2020, whereas Trump won it by only 10,704 votes in 2016.
During the Democratic primary in February, more than 100,000 people cast “uncommitted” ballots to protest against the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, though some of the Arab and Muslim American leaders of the “Uncommitted” movement have endorsed Harris.
It is tough to predict how the Muslim American votes will go here. Besides the Abandon Harris movement, the Democratic Muslim mayor of Hamtramck (pronounced ham-tra-mik), Amer Ghalib, endorsed Trump, despite his 2017 Muslim ban and the anti-Palestinian statements of some of his lieutenants.
Citing internal polling in the Muslim community, Abandon Harris is optimistic that they will win, meaning that Harris will lose Michigan, thus the presidency.
“70% were willing to vote for Jill Stein in our Muslim community here in Michigan, and about 8% for Kamala Harris, 8% for Trump, and then 14% are undecided voters,” Dr. Hassan Abdel Salam said.
In numbers, 140,000 of American Muslims are going to vote for Jill Stein in Michigan, 16,000 for Harris and 16,000 for Trump, with 28,000 still undecided. If this internal poll materializes on Election Day, Harris would see a significant erosion of the votes Biden got four years ago. A large part of the Arab-Muslim community in Michigan voted Democrat in the past.
Salam, who will be voting during this last weekend of the presidential campaign with other members of the movement, has prepared himself for the backlash that would befall him if Harris were defeated.
“The expectation is that me and many leaders are going to be personae non gratae,” he said calmly. “But they will reach out to those who are more sympathetic. They will be in a new environment that we brought up.”
“So, you are sacrificing yourself?” I asked.
“Absolutely, and the sacrifice is completely worth it. It is what I call a bargain,” he responded. “Maybe my academic career will never be the same, you know. I might be, you know, in a low-level Community College in the future. But the idea that you can transform this country in its foreign policy is worth every single sacrifice.”
The Trump campaign has reached out many times in the past few days to ask for their endorsement but they turned them down, he told me.
He believes November 6 would be a new day for Muslims in America. A day politicians will see them in another light. A day that they will be relevant at last. Even if that means doom for all those who fear a new Trump presidency.
“We’re going to try to work with fellow Democrats to change the party towards a pro-Palestinian platform,” he dreamed aloud.
Wishful thinking, I thought.
As I was about to end our conversation, he said it was important to know that Abandon Harris is asking for Muslim American voters to vote for other Democrats on the ballot, because the movement wants a “gridlocked congress.”
Chaos, I’m telling you. Chaos, as a way to redistribute the cards in the Democratic party.