OPINION
The Value of Literature and the Arts is in the Interpretation For parents and educators today, supporting humanities-trained Muslims would be the best way to breathe new life into social justice in the classroom BY REEM ELGHONIMI
W
.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of a “double consciousness” both does and does not capture my experience. As a female child immigrant to the U.S. from Egypt in 1979, I became entangled in a history of race and gender. Mainstreamed into a Texas elementary school, I was called “sand n*****” during my second-grade year for the first — but not last – time, by a blond boy who glared at me as I sat down next to him. Taught by my parents to be polite, I smiled and nodded, churning inside. Although I didn’t understand the word, his look and the slur’s ferocity emblazoned them in my memory. Nor was it one with which my parents, as immigrants, were familiar. Nor one my first-grade teacher, Ms. Kerr, patiently recorded for me on a hand-held tape player to learn along with my mother’s list of Arabic phrases. For me, education in race consciousness was never punctual. Like my past, it could not prepare or buffer me from the onslaught of bullies and bigots. My parents and I stood outside of history when we entered the U.S. and then, in one moment, we stepped within it.
MUSLIM AMERICANS’ PRESENT MOMENT
In November 2021, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) stated that she assumed her colleagues, elected lawmakers who were Muslimas of color, were terrorists and suicide bombers. As of early 2022, tens of thousands of Muslim families continue to be separated despite the lifting of the Muslim/ African travel bans. Inevitably, vulnerable populations within out-groups, such as children, face the severest consequences of such politicization. 58
Karl Shapiro
Currently, 51% of school-age Muslim American children report religious bullying and harassment, almost double the percentage of children in the general public (Natasha Tariq, Jan. 25, 2022, https://www. ispu.org/10-needs/). Even more alarming is the fact that school administrators and teachers are responsible for 30% of these incidents. Four decades after my childhood experiences, American public sentiment toward Muslim and African immigrants has deteriorated.
SHARED PASTS ARE VITAL EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
As a child who navigated only one line of latitude, from the African East to the American West, no footpath guided my steps. No route had been prepared and marked out for the journey my schoolfellows and I had to take together. That didn’t have to be the case. Such
ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2022
rapprochements have been a vibrant though little-known part of this country’s literary past. Today, as parents and educators, we can bring these resources to the front of the class, provided we listen to those who can best interpret our story and relate our history. To wit, when Poet Laureate Karl Shapiro (1913-2000) used his “California Winter” to judge the state’s unique topography and climate among other geographies and eras, he didn’t invoke European lands to mediate his cultural past. If the walls were older one would think of Rome: If the land were stonier one would think of Spain. Vividly, he chose Egypt’s river culture: It is raining in California, a straight rain Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough, Filling the gardens till the gardens flow, Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile, Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green, Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile. “California Winter” was meant to surprise. Shapiro had a reputation for iconoclasm, but he was also a staunch and consistent defender of Jewish and African American rights. Synchronizing the beginning of his career in the arts almost precisely with the escalating reach of World War II, he publicly identified as a Jew. Given this background, such literary-historical interludes are untapped reservoirs for addressing xenophobia in our educational curricula. As the statement that American writers drew on Egypt as a trope, ancient mythology, or a form of romanticism — a kind of “Egyptomania” — doesn’t apply to Shapiro, his cultural turn toward it should be taken seriously as a model for relating to Muslim populations in the West.
READING “CALIFORNIA WINTER”
The poem’s imagery locates Egypt in the American West, which produces Mediterranean crops and foliage: heavy oranges, shiny olives and dark camellia. By invoking the land of the Nile instead of the European Mediterranean, Egypt replaces Rome, considered the origin of republicanism, and Spain, one of the origins of agrarian culture.
