here & now
5 Books That Saved My Life: 1.
The Wretched of the Earth, news of her miraculous recovery, MalaFrantz Fanon la’s story was hardly unique to any of the 2. Orientalism, brown children who watched foreign Edward Said news channels over dinner, who regular3. Women, Race and Class, ly heard stories of children being killed, Angela Y. Davis abused, stolen, or physically disabled for 4. The Doctor and The Saint, anything from trying to pray to writing Arundhati Roy an exam. 5. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and Alex Haley I can tell you the first time I heard the name of my home country in class. I was eleven, it was sixth grade and we were “I was thirteen years old when Malala talking about al-Qaeda in social studies. was shot in the head. I remember sitting My teacher pointed to all the countries in my eighth grade homeroom class, lis- where the terrorist organization opertening to my teacher read out the BBC ated. It was the first time most of my news report of Malala’s standoff with non-Pakistani classmates had ever seen the Taliban militants who wanted to Pakistan on a map—the first time some stop her, and other girls, from going of them had heard of the country. I can to school. As my teacher read on, the also tell you the first time I ever heard the school bell rang and my class of Black, name of my country mentioned in class brown and Asian kids unanimously got not in relation to 'terrorism' or 'Islamic up and left, cutting my teacher off with extremism', I was twenty, it was my their unabashed apathy. Not one (of second year of university. I couldn’t help close to 50 kids) cared to stay and hear but wonder, was that everybody sitting in what happened to the girl who got shot the class’ first time too? This disparity in in the head for going to school. It left our our education is the reason so many of teacher furiously speechless. This act us grew up being called 'terrorist' by our of unspoken, unconscious, unanimous peers. More importantly, it’s the reason apathy, highlighted for me the duality of why so many of us accepted being called education and the role of the classroom 'terrorist'. While the example is specific, to an immigrant, a person of colour, or the experience is one that is universally more correctly, a colonized individual. felt. At home, my Pakistani family, continuously watched news reports of Malala’s standoff in Northern-Pakistan and eagerly tracked her recovery. At home, Malala was a hero, a symbol of an unrelenting thirst for knowledge that every colonized person carries. At school, Malala was a victim. A reminder to all the Pakistani/Muslim/immigrant children, that our presence in the classroom was owed to the fact that our own people were too savage to teach us. Before the
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Let’s ask ourselves: how do colonized children sitting in a classroom see themselves in relation to a colonized child fighting for the right to sit in a classroom? If they react with apathy in the classroom and compassion out of it, what does this imply about the classroom? Our state sponsored education would like to maintain the illusion of neutral objectivity, but the truth is, the classroom is where colonization is taught as a process of nature, as fact,
