Thinking “Outside the University”

In a way, the challenge of revealing the relevance of literature that is historically and culturally removed from students is familiar to all instructors. Yet B mentions that some of her “students are from the bloody refugee camp,” and we are reminded of the specificity of her context. It is “insulting” to insist on the value of the literature she is supposed to teach them. What may seem vaguely obvious is brought into sharp focus here – that is, when one is teaching in a colonized land, what is of interest to students takes on a force that must transform the classroom:

I want to know what the students are interested in. So, one of the things that I do at the start of the course is I ask students about all the things that interest them outside of university and also academic disciplines that interest them. So, for example, you know, a lot of students will say things like they are interested in medicine or they're interested in crime and criminology. And so based on what they say I can prioritize certain literary works.

So, for example, I have a disturbing number of students who love watching serial killer movies. They love Element of Crime and also the psychology of crime. And so for that reason, when I started developing courses, I prioritize everything from Shakespeare's Richard the Third to Macbeth to Robert Browning's “Porphyria's Lover” and Poe's “Tell Tale Heart.” (B, Personal conversation)

B's orientation to teaching in this context is strikingly similar to perspectives that fall under the heading of student-centered pedagogy in the United States. Less analogous, however, are the contexts for this approach. One centers student interests in the context of settler colonial occupation, the other as both response to, and the effect of, neoliberalism in the United States.

What, then, can we learn from thinking of interests that come from “outside the university” as a practice undertaken against the everywhere-ness of death? What would it mean to situate interests through the colonial histories of the specific contexts in which we teach rather than through student-centeredness?

B's turn to the popularity of crime genres through texts by William Shakespeare, Robert Browning, and Edgar Allan Poe is reminiscent of Edward Said's argument about the worldliness of texts in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983). Texts are worldly in the sense that they travel across space and time and are accommodated to different contexts; in B's case, it is to the context about which Said wrote so much. Her goal here isn't to teach her students “how great literature is”: rather, in each semester, what her students study is different depending on what it is that directs their interest away from the colonial insistence on death. As A put it to me:

When you live under occupation death is everywhere. And it is every day, we wake up and think about death. So, it's very hard to go and meditate and think about your intuitions and your inner side.

I do not know what it would look like for us to begin moving towards the relation between interests in general that are found outside of the university and anti-colonial pedagogy, but I think that we will only learn what this might look like in conversation with those who, like B, are actively in the midst of constructing that relation out of necessity. That these interests must come from outside of the university and outside of an enclosed canon reveals an important relationship between anticolonial pedagogy and continuous revision: class-by-class experimentation that is required in the interest of an education that does not reproduce a border between the inside and outside of the classroom and the university. This is an education, to borrow from the poet Rafeef Ziadah, in life.

What might our own teaching of the Romantic and Victorian texts that we share with B and her classroom look like if we began each semester similarly with such a discussion –n ot to win students over to literature, but out of an interest in learning something about the relationship between interests generated generally and teaching against colonialism's interest in the indifference of interests abstracted from its context?

C shared a similar perspective on teaching, but turned to the language of communication:

I think over the past few years I've been trying to not be a distant professor but am trying to get close, trying to listen to students and trying to know what's going on and to empathize and to understand and to be able to educate and teach them and guide them about several issues. [. . .] Students are a little bit resistant to communicate, especially in English, because they are not allowed to communicate in Arabic in the classroom. As an English teacher you have to communicate in English, so we have to get out of the box and exert more effort and try to teach students more than expected. (C, Personal conversation)

C emphasized the usefulness of classroom presentations in order for students to engage with what interests them as well as to facilitate their discussion with one another. He teaches survey courses in British Literature and World Literature and told me he enjoys teaching Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in particular. But he likes teaching communication courses with students the most:

Because, you know, in communication courses, students are given the chance and the opportunity in the space to communicate and to speak about issues in general and also to practice talking English in class, to be able to, you know, just like to engage and to participate. And to think aloud and so the communication courses for me were actually more successful than teaching literature students. (C, Personal conversation)

Note here that C also speaks about the relevance of “issues in general,” as did B. He also describes the inseparability of teaching communication and literature through the language of exposure:

Students are non native speakers of English. Some people think we should not teach literature to students. The only work that should be taught is skills and students should only be able to speak and to be able to write some decent writing. But that is not good enough, because they should be exposed literary texts and to be able to understand that and to be able to reflect on, you know, to be able to be critical and evaluative and to try to connect with the text and see if this is this, and the relevance in one way or another between a personal experience a student has had with the texts and songs. (C, Personal conversation)

B's and C's approaches are not a decontextualized teaching, but a radically immanent contextualization of literature inherited from colonialism. This philosophy of teaching was referred back more than once to the Palestinian teacher, scholar, and poet Khalil Sakakhini for whom “all learning occurs in context,” and rather than “giving rules for teaching Arabic grammar, present[ed] examples and ask[ed] the students to extract the methods and principles and apply them to other new problems” (Alshwaikh 67). The contamination of interests to which they speak is an apt place to begin planning for anticolonial collaboration with Palestinian teachers because it challenges us to ask what we have taken as the given distinction between the relevant contexts for teaching British literature. B and C's pedagogy provokes a thinking about the general interest of an anticolonial pedagogy that must get beyond national borders and their reinforcement through strict periodization, both of which militate against the interests that we might share with our Palestinian colleagues who are teaching the same texts as we do.

Beyond the Classroom and the Nation

A question worth continuing to ask is why the refrain of general interests appear in classrooms that themselves cannot be separated from colonial conditions and how the cultivation of such interests through communication is, or is not, bound up with struggles against colonial ways of knowing in our classrooms. Such questions will have to be asked directly in conversation with teachers in Palestine and through conversations cultivated through “the point” of Palestinian liberation from the occupation in all of its forms.

Some of the conversations that I had with instructors pointed in this direction through their own interests in texts from the Romantic and Victorian periods. For A, this makes Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” (1816) into more than an Orientalizing text, because of the centrality of imagination and power to it:

I also tell them that it's not all about colonialism, because there is you know, the other, because there are other things in the poem that are very rich, and that can be emphasized like the power of human imagination that has to do with colonialism in itself, but actually the power of our imagination, and how this power made [Coleridge] capable of building a palace in the in the air as we say. And then it was destroyed in a moment because he lost this connection to imagination and to nature. I connect it to Romantic philosophy because they believed in the power of imagination, and the inspiration of nature. So once you lose this connection to your imagination, then you can't be creative anymore. (A, Personal conversation)

A emphasizes both the power and fragility of the imagination, of its capacity to create “a palace” and the ease with which that power disappears in an instance. It is hard not to be drawn to the looming threat of the loss of creativity in this context, especially considered in relation to the destruction of Palestinian homes, archives, libraries, mosques, and farms that began with what Nur Masalha describes as “the hunt for ancient manuscripts, rare books, and associated artifacts [that] took place in the nineteenth century at the height of . . . European and Russian political and ecclesiastical penetration of the Holy Land” (283).

It would be all too easy to read a longing for national identity as determined by a Romantic ideology of sovereignty, borders, and self-possession into A's interest in the cultural and architectural power of the imagination. Yet everyone whom I had conversed with insisted on the historical importance of co-existence to Palestinian identity and that what is at the center of Palestinian demands for freedom is the end of Israeli sovereign power over their lives – and deaths – as well as the restoration of lands that had been part of Palestinian collective ownership for centuries prior to 1948. As D told me:

We have similar things between us and the Israelis. At the same time we have to be two-sided. Some brave literature, some brave writers say we can live with them. At the same time, we can't say directly that we can really live with them. This is occupation. If I want to go to Nablus I have to go through checkpoints. I cannot live comfortably. Really, we need our own freedom. We need to think like other people. We need at the same time, we need brave writers. (D, Personal conversation)

A described the same need for such writers in the context of combatting the patriarchal nature of Palestinian society under the conditions of, and in reaction to, the present occupation. This is where she described the relevance of Victorian literature to students' lives:

They connect to Victorian literature, particularly when we talk about women and their position. That's interesting. We talked about how the society was patriarchal and there were voices that reject this patriarchy, and they can connect to that. We have this suffering. The voices of women are silenced. So, when we talk about feminism, when we talk about gender issues, they feel that, yeah, they listen. Yeah, it makes sense. Because this is their suffering. And most of my students are female students actually. Like if I have a section of 35 students, 30 are female students and only five, or sometimes less, are male. (A, Personal conversation)

Survival and Knowledge

Whereas A told me that it was far more difficult to get students to connect to Romantic literature (especially poetry, because of its emphasis on nature and solitude), C proposed a direct and significant relationship between Romanticism, of both British and American varieties and Palestinian literature. According to what he called his own “self-analysis” of poetry, Romanticism was a huge movement in Arabic poetry more generally:

It's, actually, it's, an amazing influence, because it was not only social, but it was rather political because, you know, like Lebanese writers and Syrian writers and Palestinian writers were forced to leave Palestine at some stage in their lives, and then settled in the United States. Like, you know, like first generation immigrants, they had to write about nostalgia and love, politics and exile, and all these experiences, they had in the Middle East and they did that in poetry and tried to see the, you know, the, I would say the thread that ties politics together when it comes to, like, politics. And English romanticism, British romanticism in American romanticism, we have some similarities, definitely some influence going back. And the social economic context, actually, that writers have tried to reflect and the practice of dispossession and exile. (C, Personal conversation)

E also described the connection that she feels to a particular strain of Romanticism. She began with a citation from Lord Byron's poem, “Darkness” (1816):

“I had a dream, which was not all a dream / The bright sun was extinguish'd.” This line sets an unsure tone of darkness, of romantic darkness. Byron talked about the end of the world to the reader, the fallout that comes from that, and the cold and gloomy world which is full of fog. He gives people a sense of despair.

Dark romanticism is immensely about guilt, about sin, about suffering, so it does, or it touches our feelings and has this aspect of suffering, the deep side or the dark side of our life. Which I think not all works of literature do. And when talking about dark romanticism, it talks about something you have felt but that will not be noticed according to reason, that we don't have the language to talk about. So, dark romanticism may represent this feeling without words and this is the way we are maybe dealing with our situation here in Palestine. It deals with this suffering, this dark world which is Palestine, which is gloomy, which we cannot know when we will end this catastrophe. So there is no answer in the future, everything is dark, we don't have a happy, lovely, happy life. As we said, we don't have this glowing future, this glowing present.

So we have to look at the dark side, like other people look at the end. When [dark romanticism] deals with these aspects, when it deals with suffering, with sin, that the occupation does to us . . . it also deals with solitude. All of the writers here need to live in isolation so they can write about this situation, to collect or gather ideas in order to show people the immense pain, the immense suffering that Palestinian's have.

It talks about the importance of imagination, when referring to nature and human nature and the dark nature. Also in talking about this is to be alone, this is solitude to be alone, yes, because we are alone, as Palestinians we don't have someone to look to, to look at our issues and say we are with you, we are supporting you, we are siding with you. So it is to be alone, it is solitude. So, we don't have this bright side of life. And this is why I am very concerned with the dark and gloomy. (E, Personal conversation)

E introduced me to her extended family with immense generosity, sharing food, coffee, and her home whenever she could, and even arranged for her brother to drive me over three hours to where she was. She arrangedfor conversations with other teachers and for a visit to a school for students with learning disabilities. Her overwhelming generosity was paired at each point with a reminder of where we were, from the bullets still lodged in her brother's body to her mother-in-law's statement that she does not know a time when she was hopeful for Palestinians.

I was always reminded of the immanence of colonialism in every conversation that I had. This ongoingness begins in the periods we study, of which Ra'ad says “it is possible to view the 'rediscovery' of Palestine in the nineteenth century as 'Israeli prehistory'” (79). What might our relation to the pasts that we study look like when considered from A's perspective, in which colonialism is the traumatic present?

And when we talk about colonialism and postcolonialism, it's a very wide thing. We're not only thinking about one case of postcolonialism, because here in Palestine, it's very different. And it's not even “post” because the occupation is still here. So we have to think about it in a different way.

I write about trauma. And when I was reading about trauma it's all about the idea that it's a psychological injury, a shock that happens in the past. When I talk about Palestinian trauma, I thought that maybe it's different in this case, because the traumatic moment is repeated, like every day, we have like, traumas every day.It's not only about the Nakba, the one collective event, but it's also the trauma that happens every day because of occupation. It is ongoing and to think about post colonialism, it's the same because we're still colonized. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe, maybe, maybe everything can be seen differently.

We think we are civilized and we live in a civilized world that actually apologizes for colonialism. So now it's like a new page. But, actually, it's not because we still have these ideas of superiority. Yes. Because we still have wars and occupation.(A, Personal conversation)

At the time of editing these conversations and writing this essay, one of the universities that I visited has been closed at least twice due to invasions by the Israeli Defense Forces, and at least one professor I spoke with was facing immediate physical danger from Zionist settler attacks when she was able to travel to campus and teach. In this context of constant invasion, the opening out to what sustains interest for students outside of the university works as a way to refuse the reproduction of the colonial separation between aesthetics and material life. Moreover, it opens up the question for us about the relationship between survival and knowledge as an everyday one, and how that question gets lost when we are too committed to teaching context in such a way that it remains locked in the past.