“Why would you want to write about that?”
“Why would you want to write about that?”
The question she asked seemed perfectly logical in her mind. In mine, it illustrated to me how perfectly oblivious she was.
I was a senior in college at Northwestern University. Entering college, I assumed I would be pre-med, like every other first-generation-to-attend-college, hyphenated identity, perfectionist eldest child with an immigrant parent.
My route shifted as I was exposed to the world of the liberal arts–literature, philosophy, political science. My mind began to spin, absorbing and analyzing ideas I had never confronted before. I became enamored with words, with depth of thought, with nuanced expression. Science offered one type of exploration, a fascinating mystery uncovering the logical, the mechanical, and yet enigmatic, patterns of the natural world, while the liberal arts offered an unencumbered opportunity for the limitless exploration of the capacity of human thought. Encouraged by my mother to choose the second path, I decided to pursue a degree in English and International Studies.
“Why would you want to write about that?”
I was brainstorming topics to research for my senior independent research thesis in the English department. I had come across the work of Nabil Mattar, namely his text titled: “‘Turning Turk’: Conversion to Islam in Renaissance Thought.” It was a few months after the September 11th attacks. Luckily, I did not encounter overt hostility as a visibly Muslim, Palestinian American woman. However, I had begun to reassess my relationship to the texts and authors I had esteemed so dearly. Yes, my identity was under scrutiny, and to an extent, under attack, not just locally and nationally, but globally, as the world was forced to come to grips with the alleged “clash of civilizations” the September 11th attacks represented for some pundits.
Coming across this work, my mind flooded with the parallels I began to noticed between the sometimes subtle, other times not-so-subtle, undertones of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim bigotry present in Renaissance texts, and the bigotry present in the then early 2000s stereotypical representations of Arabs and Muslims in American media–the films, the television shows, the musical lyrics–this bias was everywhere.
The Turk and the renegade, meaning the Christian convert to Islam, played a momentous role on the 17th century English stage. The sheer number of times the renegade was mentioned in 17th century English literature attests to the public’s familiarity with the renegade as a figure. One way to make sense of these stage representations is to look at the context of the religio-cultural climate of that era. While the 17th century proved to be a period of internal tumult and turmoil for England, the fears of the day were exacerbated by the ubiquitous paranoia against the Ottoman “menace.” The English conception of the Turks, their Empire, and Islam influenced the manner in which they viewed themselves as players in the international arena. While Ottoman military, maritime, economic and religious power seemed to intensify and expand, England faced its own internal divisions; warring factions struggled in favor of various political and religious sects. England was fraught with sectarian strife between Anglicans and Presbyterians; even within these two major groups, many internal divisions developed. As a fear of popish plots escalated among the Presbyterians and a paranoia and lack of tolerance toward all non-Anglicans fomented among the Anglicans, the Ottoman Muslims were cast as an additional threat — a religious ‘Other’ that all Christian sects should, and must unite against.
Thus, with religious schisms already present, a combination of these deep rifts within English society and the impending hazard the Ottomans presented, caused the English to project the image of the evil ‘Other’ onto the Ottomans. While England became a breeding ground for social and religious strife, the Ottomans seemed to flourish; thus, the viability of the English identity in the international realm was endangered. The complexity and instability of both the Ottoman and English identities were displayed in the drama of this period, as the English struggled to reclaim the strength of their identity at home, while also remaining conscious of the superiority of the Ottoman imperial identity.
As I read academic research on these representations, I began to see evidence of the same phenomenon in modern media. Just as the “Turk,” “Arab,” “Mohammedan,” and “Saracen” were often used as interchangeable pejoratives to denote the presence of a threat to white, Christian power, modern media conflated the brown Other in the same manner–Arab, Palestinian, Indian, Irani, Afghani, Iraqi, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Eastern Orthodox–all possible terrorists, extremists, militants–all potential threats to Western cultural and political hegemony.
I decided to focus my research on the Renaissance representations of the Other–the Othellos of English Literature–and I soon found evidence of many more depictions of “Othellos” than I had ever imagined.
My advisor was so blind to the challenges I faced, to the complexity of my relationship with a literary canon I so admired, yet felt so slighted by, that she could not fathom why I would want to focus my research on a topic that so clearly related not only to my interests, but to who I am as a human being.
I had never been taught to see through a literary lens other than the one constructed by whiteness. Slowly, I began to understand that whiteness was constructed due to its proximity to brownness–a reactionary contrast asserting its dominance in the looming presence of all that was brown–Turk, Arab, Ottoman, whatever. These identities were all blurred and amalgamated into one massive menace by the white lens. For Black Americans, Ta-Nehisi Coates refers to the construction of those who believe themselves to be white; James Baldwin states that this lens is created because people “think they are white.”
As a child growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I remember a time when no one really knew what an Arab or a Muslim was. During my brief stint in the public school system, a boy asked me if I didn’t celebrate Christmas because I was Indian. I don’t remember how second-grade-me answered that question, but I remember how it made me feel–invisible.
When I came across the Othellos of English literature, I had an epiphany; suddenly, I was no longer invisible. Shakespeare would have known who I was. Mary Shelley would have as well. The excitement that resulted from that epiphany quickly dissipated. Yes, they would have known who I am, but they certainly would not like me.
As a high school English teacher, I demonstrate this feeling by showing my students a Key and Peele skit about two Black Englishmen watching a performance of Othello. Prior to the intermission, the two men are so pleased to see a Black Shakespearean general, as one of them states, “Methinks things are looking up for people of the darker hue.” Sadly, they are both disheartened after exiting the play and witnessing Othello’s downfall. “A black man got it going on, and you shuffle off his mortal coil? I say unto thee that’s a tragedy.”
The skit perfectly articulates the experience of reading as the Other. Othello can not overcome his past because of his race, his previous faith (Islam). Safie, a marginal character in Frankenstein, must escape her Muslim Turk father, and “aspire to higher powers of intellect and an independence of spirit forbidden to the female followers of Muhammad.” It is difficult to prepare oneself for the existential crisis that comes with the realization that you have more in common with the villains, not the heroes, created by the authors you revered so dearly.
I learned to separate the art from the artist. To read and to teach not for admiration, but for critique. I can read these authors, but I must disengage admiration from analysis. I internalized the words of Toni Morrison, that “definitions belong to the definers, not the defined;” I would not allow myself to pay heed to the definitions imposed upon me as a Palestinian, Muslim American. Yes, these definitions exist and they are prominent because of power dynamics, but I, and my students, have the potential to contextualize and deconstruct them; to excise the rotten core, and replace it with a refashioned, rejuvenated understanding of who were are, unclouded by the debris of what others believe us to be.
In his work, “A Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin discusses the paradox of education, namely that:
“…as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it — at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.”
In a way, that professor taught me quite a bit by asking that question. I became more aware of my identity and how it functioned in relation to others, to the texts I read, and the media I consumed. As a teacher and a writer, I aspire to guide students and readers to examine the world around them–the images, the words, the sounds–critically and in the context of their own identities, not in spite of them. It is impossible to objectively analyze; rather, we must be conscious of who we are and who others believe us to be, when assessing our relationship to written and visual media. The key lies in not teaching others what to think, but how.
Deanna Othman is a Palestinian Muslim American writer and educator from Oak Lawn, IL. She writes on Muslim and Palestinian identity, media, and other relevant topics. You can follow her on Twitter at @deannaothman and read some of her work at https://www.huffpost.com/author/deanna-othman.
This blog post is part of the #30DaysArabVoices Blog Series, a month-long movement to feature the voices of Arabs as writers and scholars. Please CLICK HERE to read yesterday’s blog post by Tarek Khalil.