The Arab Spring: Sout Al Horeya صوت الحرية

[Note: April 11, 2011: This will likely be a work in progress: you might want to bookmark and return.]

At the end of "The Battle of Algiers," the 1966 Italian film -- produced under the auspices of the National Liberation Front (FLN) that had fought against the French in Algeria for years until finally crushed by military occupation and torture -- we see the last four FLN fighters blown up in a building the French special forces have surrounded. Suddenly, it is two years later, and an amazed French correspondent in Algiers calls home to say that demonstrations have unexpectedly broken out all over the country, thousands of homemade flags waving and voices chanting about freedom ("Horeya").

The film had a surge of popularity after the US invasion of Iraq, as it was apparently used in briefings about how to control an urban rebellion in an Arab country. I remember the surprise with which I  exclaimed to friends, "Surely the Americans watched the film to the end. The French won every battle, then lost the war." Suddenly it's 45 years later, and again "those unintelligible and frightening rhythmic cries" are echoing from the Arab quarter, and this time it's the rulers who seized and held power across North Africa and the Middle East for 40 years who stand amazed.

What's going on? where did these people come from? How did they get so well-organized? How do they (mostly) maintain nonviolence in the face of overwhelming police and military presence? I think we have just seen the irruption, from an area known to be among the worst in the world in its provision of education to its young people, most corrupt and inefficient, least open to liberal social and economic policiey, of a generation of self-educated young people, who are completely at ease in the Net and who know how to bring down governments. They've been communicating with each other for years, filling the social media of the Internet with Tweets and Facebook wall entries tapped out in the transliterated characters of instant messages and voiced in thousands of MP3s and YouTube videos by local rappers.

It's the hip-hop aspect of all this to which I hope to return on my own upcoming visit to Morocco – but that will await the next blog entry. For now, and in response to many questions from friends in many walks of life, some tips on how first to see and then to begin to understand what's at issue on the streets of Tunis, and Cairo, and Amman, and Benghazi, and …

We haven't heard such cries of liberation from this neighborhood recently. But then of course we haven't been listening. The stories we hear about Egypt are tourist accounts of its exotic and seductive history and culture, along with a sense that, if somewhat remiss on human rights as governed by Sadat and Mubarek, Egypt is nonetheless an essential part of the "peace process" (cf. "peace") and a bulwark against militant Islam. From the Atlantic to beyond the Gulf, where America's allies have stifled dissent, brutalized regime opponents, diverted hundreds of billions of dollars from the economy, given up on educating the young, and assured the Western world that after them there is only holy terror, new voices are heard.

By not listening I also mean that we haven't looked closely at the faces, we haven't seen the lips move and had a feeling for what's being said. Egypt, like most of the southern and eastern quarter of the planet, is for us at the top of the world food chain merely ambience, and the setting for our own fantasies and fears (cf. Edward Said).

Here's what they said as they marched around Tahrir square. Here's what they said after they had beaten off and "arrested" the goons who attacked them with clubs and knives and whips and guns. Here's what they said, along with "God is great!" and, "Leave! Leave!"

asha' ab youreed esqaat ar ra' is
asha' ab youreed esqaat ar ra' is
asha' ab youreed esqaat ar ra' is
asha' ab youreed esqaat al nezam

"The people want the leader gone
The people want the leader gone
The people want the leader gone
The people want the regime gone." 

and here's how it sounded on the square, in the voice of a young girl with a microphone amidst the masses at Liberation Square. Suddenly, 12 days after the demonstrations began, a new face appears: Wael Ghonim, Marketing Director for Google in the Middle East, who has been active in social media organizing for several years, who returns to Egypt from his home and job in Dubai, who is held by security forces for 12 days, and who pours his heart out about what has just happened on the Square.

The New York Times put its heavy hitters – Roger Cohen, Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof– into Tahrir square and they did a marvelous job of reporting both awe at what was happening and shock at how wrong US media have been of what was possible in countries like Tunisia and Egypt. The NYT's video archive on the demonstrations still underway is a useful resource. The essential source, though break up – and by far the most popular – was Al Jazeera. "Biased"? Of course (cf. Fox, CNN, New York Times). Al Jazeera liked what was happening in Tunisia and Egypt. But engaging, articulate, well produced – and with a wide range of opinion presented, with a depth of on-street and editorial coverage unmatched by the Western media  It's largely unwatchable on cable in the US, unless you happen to be in Vermont or Ohio, but the streaming English coverage is available to anyone with Web access). Russia Today (speaking of POV) weighed in with commentary from American rapper. M-1. 

For me, Tahrir Square finally came home in the impassioned statements of the young techies who engineered the social media, as seen in Cairo's Facebook Flat and the splendidly-produced compilation of the slogans of liberation lip-synched to the people calling out to the world in the "Voice of Freedom."

Pause, look at the faces, hear the sweetness of the Egyptian dialect …

Our voices reached those who could not hear them
In every street in my country the sound of freedom is calling
Our weapon is our dreams 

Where have we heard these voices before? How will we as 21st century Americans respond to these echoes of our revolution, these voices blowing in the wind?

_______________________________________

Suggested Links

 ______________________________________

On the day of this draft blog entry, I was interviewed again by my friend David Van Nuys for his Shrink Rap Radio podcast site. We discussed political demonstrations across North Africa and the roles youthful political organizing and popular media have played. The interview is linked here.

February 21, 2011 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 03, 2011

Al Jazeera Live blog Feb 11 - Egypt protests: http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2011/02/10/live-blog-feb-11-egypt-protests

March 03, 2011 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 31, 2010

ad-drrj llah y-5lik!

 

درّج الله يخليك

The phrase above translates literally as "Colloquialize, God protect you!" The Moroccan listener understands, "Speak Moroccan (rather than Modern Standard) Arabic, please!" I have used it a few times in responding to questions from the audiences at various talks I have given in Moroccan Arabic over the course of the last 15 years. The context has typically been a session in which I was introduced as an American professor interested in the Internet and/or some aspect of Moroccan culture and society, and in which I then proceeded to explain how I came to Morocco in 1970 without formal training in either French or Modern Standard Arabic (fusha, الفصحى  ) and learned to communicate in darija (الدارجة ) the language spoken with family and friends by a large majority of Moroccans (the exceptions being native speakers of one of the three Moroccan Berber languages, now characterized by the more appropriate term "Amazigh"). This rich and varied offshoot of the Middle Eastern Arabic brought by Muslims who came to Morocco and Spain over the period from 711 to 1492 CE has centuries-old poetry, a rich musical tradition extending from the semi-classical 19th and 20th century malhun to the passionate lyrics of Nass el Ghiwane and Jil Jilala in the 1970s and to the explosion of contemporary Moroccan hip-hop since the mid-1990s. Darija is ubiquitous. One charms and is admonished by one's parents, one reestablishes connection with a long-unseen friend, one jokes about the complexities of modern political life, one recounts one's dreams and hopes in this language. It is almost the only Arabic one hears on a Moroccan street or in schoolroom halls between classes. However, one does not typically speak darija in the classroom, employ it in responding to an interviewer from the national radio-television stations, or risk using it among one's educated peers at a public forum.

Twenty-eight years ago, when we were researching adolescence in Zawiya (Davis and Davis, 1989), the national news was broadcast twice every evening on the one available channel -- once in formal French and once in Modern Standard Arabic, neither of which most of the adults in our neighborhood could understand. As a result, parents would ask their schooled children, "Who's that? What's he doing?" The child would glance at the screen, listen for a few moments, and say, "That's the leader of Syria. He's gone to Jordan to meet with their King." I wondered then, and I wonder now, about the wisdom of a national media broadcast in a language only a few percent of the population really understand.

The adolescents of 1982 are now adults, and most of them have enough schooling so that they can follow the news headlines on the hundreds of channels available through satellite broadcast. It is still the case, however, that most residents of the countryside and the poorer neighborhoods of Morocco's cities are not understanding the details of complex news stories or the pronouncements of their government officials. One hears an announcement of a new policy or a reporter's summary of an international meeting in fusha, and then the broadcast breaks for an advertisement for soap powder or yogurt -- in darija. This contrast between formal and informal language, between complex and simple grammar, between prose that stretches understanding and slang that hovers at the edge of crudeness, is of course part of US and other media. By early adolescence US teenagers learn -- even if they choose not to employ -- semantic and syntactic rules to distinguish between the street and the classroom. Pronounce all syllables, finish sentences, use "like" sparingly, think in paragraphs. What seems different, and crucial, to me is that the 12 years of public school and the four of college/university offer a graded series of examples of spoken and written thought that move the student from an alphabet-illustrating poem to a Shakespeare sonnet, from Hemingway to Faulkner, from arithmetic to calculus, from social studies to real history. It took several generations for American prose to earn the grudging respect of scholars in England, but Mark Twain and Walt Whitman found their place in the canon. The argument I wish to make here, the dialogue into which I hope to enter with my Moroccan colleagues, concerns my conviction that darija offers many and convincing examples of speech that should be recorded, written, and shared with pride; and that a curriculum moving by graded steps from the epigrams of Sidi Abderrahman el Majdoub (17th century CE Moroccan oral poet) to the qasidas of malhun would prepare young Moroccans for the complexities of fusha and the subtleties of the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish or the prose of Naguib Mahfouz better than the current front-loading in elementary school of modern standard Arabic's complex grammar and daunting vocabulary.

The most striking change in this question of colloquial versus classical Arabic has been with the emergence of a robust Moroccan film industry and an Internet-accessible popular music. Most Moroccan  films are now made in darija, and they are viewed with delight and comprehension by most Moroccans. The Ministry of Education has begun a program of teaching elementary classes partly in Amazigh, and this has presumably been a boon to the children targeted. It raises in some minds the question of why it is not prudent to use colloquial Arabic in the lower grades and to move gradually into Modern Standard Arabic.

It is not for a foreign researcher to presume to resolve this problem, touching as it does an attachment to classical Arabic rooted in the great power and beauty of the Qur'an and the longing for solidarity among Arab peoples; but I have been increasingly outspoken about my own delight in Moroccan oral colloquial culture and in numerous recent experiments in the use of colloqual language for literacy and the introduction of literary works composed in darija and written in Arabic script. These include:

  • Alef, Tanmia, Tarbiya, and Moustaqbali, all projects developed by US and Moroccan sponsors to promote literacy and enhanced school success in school by means of colloquial materials.
  • Khbar Bledna, a Tangier-based publishing enterprise that for a number of years offered a free weekly magazine with articles about literature, sports, cooking, and other materials likely to be of interest to the population at large. Khbar Bledna also publishes books of basic literacy instruction in darija and the three Amazigh languages, as well as pamphlets on Moroccan family law, a collection of stories from the oral tradition, poetry, and "Tqarqib Nnab."
  • A fine translation into darija of the French classic, "Le Petit Prince," by a Moroccan professor of linguistics and English literature (Youssi, 2009).
  • "Tqarqib Nnab" (Elalamy, 2006), a marvelous set of vignettes of Moroccan life by a professor of Francophone literature who is the author of several novels in French.

All of this work has been met with surprise and appreciation by some and vehement condemnation by others. it seems to be the writing of such materials in Arabic script as much as the privileging of darija in an educational or literary setting the troubles the authorities. These enterprises have been met with accusations (a) that one cannot in principle write Moroccan Arabic because it is not a language, merely an "argot," and (b) that any attempt to do so is an attempt to undercut the success of Moroccan national education in Modern Standard Arabic -- if not a plot by foreign agents. I would welcome civil discussion of these questions in comments to this blog.

Arguably the most pervasive and persuasive evidence that there is a large and talented population producing a body of memorable work in darija is the Moroccan music scene. Get yourself to YouTube and enter search terms like "Moroccan hip-hop," "Nass el Ghiwane" and you will find yourself in a world of popular expression accessible to 30 million Moroccans and to millions of young people of Moroccan descent in Europe and North America. This work to provokes lively and disparate reactions, most of them by young Moroccans themselves, whether in a cyber café in Sidi Kacem or coffee shop in Utrecht. These discussions occur mostly in "aransiya," a mixture of French letters and numbers used to translate the sounds of Arabic and carried over from the widespread SMS culture developed for cell phone use. Only a few of these lyrics have been translated into other languages, and there are almost no good renderings into English. In previous entries to this blog I have reported on my enthusiasm for this material and presented several initial attempts at translation, and I hope to do more over the next few weeks of my residence in Morocco. This would be a fine collaborative project for Moroccan students and their foreign fans. Merhababikum (welcome)!

I do not want to trivialize the concerns of educated Moroccans about interference with the complex interplay of multiple colloquial and literary languages in the Moroccan educational system. I do, however, want to open a dialogue through this blog and my own speaking about these matters, in the hope that all those who love Moroccan culture at home in the Maghrib and in the Moroccan diaspora may participate. I shall do so in the two languages I actually speak, English (colloquial and literary) and darija.

__________________________________________________________________

Note: Morocco Board requested permission to re-publish this blog entry, and it appeared there as Arabic: Communicating in a Language not Everyone Understands. Morocco Board News Service. Thursday, July 01 2010. Comments are open.

Works Cited

Davis, S.S., & Davis, D.A. (1989). Adolescence in a Moroccan town: Making social sense. Rutgers University Press.

Elalamy, Youssouf Amine. (2006). Tqarqib Nnab (قارقيب  ناب). Tangier: Khbar Bledna. (podcast interview with the author in English and darija)

Youssi, Abderrahim. (2009). الأمير الصغير (Al-âmîr As-saghîr). Rabat: Editions Aïni Bennaï

Links

  • Stetsonville.com podcast site: interview with Elena Prentice, creator of "Khbar Bledna"

March 31, 2010 | | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

March 23, 2009

How do you say "jihad" in Hebrew?

Over the course of the last month, since attending a teach-in about the war on Gaza at the University of Pennsylvania, I have followed with growing horror news accounts of the circumstances under which some members of the Israeli military killed Palestinian civilians. The question that has haunted me is this: How do you raise children in an ethical and moral tradition inspired by belief in a compassionate God, and then send them out at the age of 18 to kill their neighbors on God's behalf? We know that the Christian Crusaders in the Middle Ages, like young Americans North and South during our own Civil War, marched into battle convinced that God was on their side and that religion compelled them to act as they did. We have also heard a great deal in the last decade about the ways the term "jihad," based on the Islamic concept of a spiritual struggle to be close to God and a physical struggle to defend one's religious community from attack, has been turned by radical Muslim preachers into an admonition to kill noncombatants. We now learn that the chief Rabbi of the IDF -- as well as the religious leaders of a number of theological schools supplying soldiers to the Israeli forces -- admonished the troops in Gaza to think of the Palestinians residing there as deserving the same treatment accorded the biblical inhabitants of the lands promised by God to the children of Moses: the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Amalekites. In the latter case, we learn from numerous references in the Old Testament, King David's forces were told not merely to defeat Amalek but to exterminate his people. According to recent news reports in The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, and The New York Times, some Israeli forces were not only admonished to consider the example of the fate of Amalek as they dealt with the citizens of Gaza, but also to bear specifically in mind their duty not to show mercy:

Those who oppose the religious right have been especially concerned about the influence of the military’s chief rabbi, Brig. Gen. Avichai Rontzki, who is himself a West Bank settler and who was very active during the war, spending most of it in the company of the troops in the field.

He took a quotation from a classical Hebrew text and turned it into a slogan during the war: “He who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful.” A controversy then arose when a booklet handed out to soldiers was found to contain a rabbinical edict against showing the enemy mercy. The Defense Ministry reprimanded the rabbi. At the time, in January, Avshalom Vilan, then a leftist member of Parliament, accused the rabbi of having “turned the Israeli military’s activity from fighting out of necessity into a holy war.” (Retrieved from The New York Times, March 22, 2009)

This Quaker's plea to the "people of the book," Jews, Christians, and Muslims is that we rise up as one in our churches and mosques and synagogues and say to these false preachers "Not in the name of the God we worship. Not in the name of the Merciful One extolled for all these centuries in our sacred books. Not in the name of our ancestors who have died in wars of religious oppression. Not by our faith that our children can live in a world free of pious murder."

March 23, 2009 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 14, 2008

Voices of Youth ... Classrooms in Cyberspace (asswat shabab ... al-9ism ad-dirasiya fi-wa9t al-internet)

From May 5 to May 8 I traveled to northeastern Morocco under the sponsorship of the Public Affairs section of the U.S. Embassy in Rabat.  I spoke to young Moroccans at the “American Corner” in Oujda, at the “Dar Shabab” (Youth Center) in Chefchaouen, and at the Teacher Training College in Tetouan.  My announced title for the first two talks was “Blogging and Podcasting,” and in the third I spoke more explicitly about the role of teachers, building on my 1990s remarks concerning “Classrooms in Cyberspace.” I recorded large portions of each of these talks and have uploaded them to the podcast site www.stetsonville.com. In these talks I followed the same routine as during my Fulbright year in the mid 90s: I introduced myself in colloquial Moroccan (darija), explaining how I studied this distinctive dialect of Arabic at the University of Michigan in the 1960s and became fluent in it during doctoral thesis research in Sidi Kacem Zawiya. Since there is considerable overlap among these three talks, I have added links to each below, in the order in which they were delivered. I realize that my intended audience includes mostly people will find this English introduction daunting, so I intend to add a brief description of what is here in transliterated Moroccan Arabic, as well as a link to Google Français.

The links below illustrate the topics of which I spoke and the resources to which I referred my young listeners. I invite comments on these remarks both from those who heard them and from those who have thoughts about the topics covered: the politics of language and code-switching, the disaffection of youth both in Morocco and in the U.S. from traditional over-30 politics, and the uncertain progress in classrooms around the world in using new information technologies effectively.

darija audio: Oujda, Chefchaouen, Tetouan Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 RSS Podcast Feed

May 14, 2008 in المشاركة | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 29, 2008

Finding, blogging, and podcasting your voice

I spoke this afternoon at the National Institute for Youth and Democracy (INJD) in Rabat on "the role of blogs in marketing elections." I used this draft set of notes as an example of my own blogging, and I promised to append a link to my recorded remarks later. Here it is:
Excerpted audio in Moroccan darija.

Talking points:

  • Youthful disaffection with conventional parties and candidates in the U.S. and in Morocco; examples from polls, from conventional media, and from popular culture
  • Youthful articulation of political views by means of new information technologies in the U.S. and in Morocco; examples from blogs, from conventional media broadcasts, and from Youtube
  • Reaching the powers that be and affecting the outcome of elections, laws, and policy implementation in the U.S. and in Morocco

Links mentioned:

April 29, 2008 in المشاركة | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

October 05, 2007

Bladi Blad

My young friend  Yassine and I have been discussing Moroccan hip-hop music for the last couple of years. This summer he and I have exchanged e-mail, mostly written in "3aransiya" (transliterated Moroccan colloquial Arabic, darija) and have sent each other several audio messages. I hope we can edit these conversations and link them from my podcast site, so others may hear how we have been trying to work across boundaries of language and geography with some of the best of recent Moroccan hip-hop. At my suggestion, Yassine and I  have been focusing in particular on "Bladi Blad," one of the cuts from Moroccan rapper Bigg's latest album, Mgharba Tal Moute ("Moroccans Until Death"). I hope to provide a readable text in 3aransiya with clarifying links to people and issues mentioned in the lyrics, and then to work with Yassine and other Moroccan friends on an English translation. If others are interested in this topic (I noticed that one of the YouTube links to a performance of the song has had a quarter of a million viewings), we can discuss favorite lyrics and how they affect us as we listen to the song. Then perhaps we can move on to other Moroccan examples.

I'm 64, Yassine is 15. For us older folks, one of the pleasures of Moroccan hip-hop is its appreciative references to the best of 1980s Mproccan rock and popular music, and in particular to Nass El Ghiwane. Let's compare the Ghiwane and the Bigg, the 1980s and the post-9/11 scenes. What do, for example, the widely varied comments on YouTube and in blogs tell us about the ways darija-speakers understand Moroccan rap culture?

Here are some useful links:

Bladi Blad YouTube music videos with

and

October 05, 2007 in المشاركة | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

May 03, 2007

Jeunes Marocains et Nouveaux Médias

Cac0705_ext This afternoon at 4:30 GMT is the roundtable introduction of "Voices of Youth,"  a podcasting project for young Moroccan sponsored by Tanmia, described (Google translation from the French) as "a  Moroccan Internet portal intended to reinforce the capacity of Moroccan associations thanks to the use of communication and information technologies" (Arabic, Google English). I will join the discussion and plan to speak briefly (in colloquial Arabic) about my own interest as a cultural psychologist in Moroccan youth, popular media, and the Internet. It will be useful to me -- and may be to others -- to have at hand the resources I plan to mention:

May 03, 2007 in المشاركة | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

March 19, 2007

What I didn't hear from the candidates

Aljazeera2 Haverford's picked a new president, and I think we got a fine one. I attended the sessions with faculty and with an advisory committee. Even as I admired the search committee's choice of all three finalists, each an exemplar of things Haverford wants and needs to be, I realized I had other concerns for the next iteration of Haverford College.
What I didn’t hear, from the presidential candidates, is why it matters so much right now, how Haverford College does its job. Why should we worry? We’ve never been richer, never been better in ranking and recognizability. Why shouldn’t we continue to get better in ranking and recognizability, building our faculty and honing our classes in what will long remain the best way to educate the young – a traditional highly selective liberal arts college. That’s how things can look from inside the bubble, the Haverbubble that’s been bruited on campus for years. But friends, we’re getting long-distance calls from our Peace and Global Citizenship interns, and there are lasers in the jungle …
We’re in some trouble, folks -- culturally/politically/spiritually. I mean us good guys: the educated sane people who are watching all we value put at risk, so that we fear for the earth and for those we love. If we believed what we’ve been saying about our educational mission we’d be more deeply reflective concerning our “research” and our “teaching,” and we’d be talking about how that leading and serving was changing the world. How badly does the world need sane, smart, humane citizens and leaders? How can we not be in constant dialogue about how to do faculty-student collaboration better, about how to truly imbue with better teaching for life in 21st century? And is talking enough? Do we matter, in a world falling apart?
We have an Internet extending to the most surprising places. We have search engines, email, highly immersive role-playing on Warcraft and SecondLife. Our students can listen to any music in the world, and talk with the creators and fans, if they have the curiosity, the language tools, the travel opportunities. Where’s this Facebook/MySpace mashup youth culture headed? How much longer will they choose to communicate with us, if we don’t get our act together?

March 19, 2007 in Current Affairs | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 12, 2006

9/11, Gaza, Beirut, Fallujah

At the end of August, I emailed to an American friend Israeli writer Amira Haas's Haaretz piece "Can you really not see?" I also forwarded an ironic email from a Belgian/Moroccan friend pointing to an apparently serious proposal on the Jerusalem Summit wesite for a "humanitarian solution" to the Palestinian problem by disbanding UNWRA and causing all Palestinians to emigrate. This is a delayed attempt to reply to both friends, -- amidst the emotions of the summer's violence in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq -- with a plea from both mind and heart.

Reason and sympathy. The crux of the argument that I wanted to make to my first friend's email is that understanding the violence we read about from day to day requires both reason and empathy. He and I look similar on a little political orientation measure because we both value reason. We understand that the current political system offers poor candidates, deceptively described, who are elected into jobs where they serve not the general good but various special interests. We would both like a more open system in which the best of available information is brought to bear on each important decision, and policies are honestly assessed with respect to their consequences. There's something else at issue, though, when we try to understand the difference between, say, Americans' reactions to a picture or news story of a suicide bomb attack in which Israeli children have been killed, and a story about Palestinian or Lebenese children's deaths as a result of Israeli bombing – or Iraqi deaths as a result of an American attack. I don't want to oversimplify an important matter, and I suspect there are multiple reasons for responding differently to these two images – (and of course there are many people who find both images bring sadness, anger, and a resolve to try to work for peace.

Generally, though, for Americans there is an "empathy gap" in the typical ways we respond to Israeli/Jewish and to Arab/Muslim suffering, and it is related to the much greater likelihood that we in America will know people who are like the people victimized in terrorist assaults on Israelis than we will people who are like the people victimized in terrorist assaults on Arabs – and, as you know, I use the word “terrorist” to describe attacks on civilians designed or certain to cause terror, whether the destruction is brought by someone boarding a bus with a basket bomb or piloting an aircraft loaded with cluster bombs.

I’ve been brooding about the way personal experience shapes, and sometimes derails, the discussions we’ve been having with American friends. Susan and I know a good deal about Morocco, the Arab world, and Islam at a factual level, but when you push us we always seem to revert to telling stories about people we know, friends from Sidi Kacem or Rabat or Taroudant. Our readiness to do that is a natural result of the fact that we have known our close Moroccan friends for as long as most of our close American ones. It means, however, that we often seem to forget the larger point being discussed and to try to make folks with no first hand experience of that part of the world and with very little empathy-producing exposure to fiction and film about it understand 40 years' worth of such personal moments – moments in which we knew that our Moroccan friend was as smart, as sane, as humane as anyone we talk to at home. So obvious, but painfully hard to get across in the face of the spin our media and leaders put on Middle East events.

The URL that my Moroccan-Belgian friend had pointed me to was, of course, sent ironically by him. The "solution" proposed by the Zionist think tank is structured like a plausible argument, and seems to advance by reasonable claims based on its own statements of fact (e.g., that the Palestinians reject every opportunity for peace and fail repeatedly to establish democratic self-government). At the level of human culture, however, it is implicit that while Jews as a unique cultural/religious/ethnic group need/deserve a homeland in which they are the near-exclusive occupants, Palestinians need not be distinguished from any of the other Arabs amongst whom they might be sent to live when Israel is a fully Jewish state.

Emotion and empathy. Here's an exercise I recommend, to observe your own empathy regarding a stranger's tragic death. Think for a moment about the fact that the anecdote to which I'm about to direct you is part of an archive of over 1200 accounts of victims of the 9/11 World Trade Tower attacks and their families, and notice that this is a man mourning a woman he never married, but with whom he planned to spend the rest of his life. As you open the account and read the short description of Richard A. Pecorella's feelings about Karen Hawley Juday, read of his determination to find pictures of her at work, and notice your own emotions as you get to his description of the two pictures he has found of her at the Towers:

He has long quested for images of Karen on the 101st floor of the north tower, where she worked, “and there’s one picture of her at the window in her navy blue sweater top and cream-colored pants,” he said. “And there’s one of her falling. Same clothing. She’s covering her face.”

If your breath catches, your pulse quickens, and as you feel the sting of tears at your eyes you hear the beginning of a gasp from your mouth you are, I will contend, having an empathic reaction to the imagined pain of two strangers: Ms. Juday, who died jumping from the flaming World Trade Center on 9/11/01 and Mr. Pecorella, who mourns her. I suspect that most of us do have such feelings in relationship to this story and others that came out of 9/11, and millions around the world reacted to the images of 9/11 victims with empathic feelings of grief and sorrow.

By way of comparison, see Baghdad blogger "Riverbend" on the 3rd anniversary of 9/11.

September 11… he sat there, reading the paper. As he reached out for the cup in front of him for a sip of tea, he could vaguely hear the sound of an airplane overhead. It was a bright, fresh day and there was much he had to do… but the world suddenly went black- a colossal explosion and then crushed bones under the weight of concrete and iron… screams rose up around him… men, women and children… shards of glass sought out tender, unprotected skin … he thought of his family and tried to rise, but something inside of him was broken… there was a rising heat and the pungent smell of burning flesh mingled sickeningly with the smoke and the dust… and suddenly it was blackness.
9/11/01? New York? World Trade Center?
No.
9/11/04. Falloojeh. An Iraqi home.

In relation to what examples do we understand the victims of the Palestinian-Israeli or the Iraqi-American crises? Beyond our reasoned sense of the historical claims and statistical characteristics of these two peoples, what examples come to mind as we think about the individuals who have suffered as a result of the constant violence there? If it is relatively easy for you to come up with an Israeli example that lets you know as you think about it that you are engaging these poor victims of murder as fellow human beings, I think you have passed an essential test for empathic engagement with the welfare of others in a world we must share. We react to these murder victims as fellow human beings – parents, children, colleagues – with whom we feel some of the sorrow and pity appropriate to their tragedy.

But what about the Palestinians? Does an example come to mind of any particularly characteristic Palestinian participant or victim? If so, what was it? If you have two vivid examples, one from each side, do they feel similar to you? If not, how do they differ? I suspect most of us will have more trouble coming up with poignant examples of Palestinian than of Israeli suffering at this personal and empathy-inducing level. If my example is a good one, it will make people wonder about this "empathy gap" and it might partially prepare them for an empathy-inducing experience from the other side. And, if my example is useful, it should do as much good for folks who have a problem coming up with an empathy-inducing example of Israeli suffering. God knows, there are enough of them.

Of course, to really close the empathy gap we have to build bridges between the kind of sympathetic experience most people I know have had, if not with Israelis, then with their many American Jewish friends who are deeply sympathetic to Israel. But what really interests me is the wealth of resources available to any literate person in our society by which they might come to sympathize deeply with the Jewish people and with at least some Zionist aspirations. Don't we assume that the Jews of Israel are in important ways like our own Jewish friends? And do we not know these people to be warm, intelligent, loyal, liberal (usually) –  indeed, model friends and neighbors? I'm trying to imagine a century of American experience that increasingly has included Jews as neighbors, and friends, and teachers, and favorite authors, and entertainers, and artists. Surely their history among us has been one of the proudest legacies America can celebrate. Can we not imagine reaching a similar level of both sympathy and empathy for the millions Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims living among us in Europe and America, and for their relatives in the Middle East? Can we, literally, not imagine it? If so, I suggest we get to work on finding some examples that open our fellow citizens to the shared humanity of these others.

I think that's enough for now.

November 12, 2006 in memex | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

July 13, 2006

Teaching With Technology: Identity Trajectories

I spoke twice to colleagues assembled at Macalester College for the fifth annual Al-Musharaka seminar, "Identity Trajectories: Teaching the Culture and Society of North Africa and the Middle East at Home and Abroad." I plan to quickly review the years since the introduction of NITLE's Arab World Project at Middlebury College in July, 2002, using my own experience in teaching with technology this past decade, and then to discuss my current interest in Moroccan youth blogging, podcasting, and hip-hop culture. I'll record these presentation.

Herewith, some links to talking points and resources mentioned in our discussions:

July 13, 2006 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

»