As a Muslim child immigrant in American public school, I found no route, prepared and marked out for me and my schoolfellows, for the journey we had to take together
On my first day in an American classroom, I heard the words “sand n*****” uttered by a blond boy in second grade who glared at me as I slid into the empty seat beside him. As a female child immigrant arriving from a Muslim-majority African nation (Egypt) in 1979, I was inextricably entangled in a history of race and gender. Mainstreamed into a Texas elementary school before I had learned English, I did the only thing I knew. I smiled and I nodded, manifesting the politeness my parents taught me. But I was churning inside.
Together, the ferocity of the look and the slur, passed down from one generation to another innocent one, emblazoned them in my memory although the word was not one I knew. Not one with which my immigrant parents 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. It is why W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of a “double consciousness” cannot capture Muslims’ experiences of racialization. When we entered the U.S., my parents and I stood outside of history, and, then, in one moment, we stepped within it.
American Muslims’ Present Moment
In November 2021, House of Representatives member Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) stated that she assumed her colleagues, elected lawmakers who were also Muslim women of color, were terrorists and suicide bombers. As of early 2022, although the Muslim/African Bans on travel to the US have been terminated, tens of thousands of Muslim families continue to be separated. These situations highlight the danger of relating only political narratives of groups other than one’s own.
Inevitably, it is vulnerable populations within out-groups, such as children, who face the most severe consequences of such politicization. Currently, 51% of school-age Muslim children in the US report religious bullying and harassment, almost double the percentage of children in the general public (Natasha Tariq, January 25, 2022, https://www.ispu.org/10-needs/). More disturbing, school administrators or teachers are responsible for 30% of these incidents. Four decades after my experiences as a child immigrant, American public sentiment towards Muslim and African immigrants has deteriorated.
Shared Pasts — 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 for the way forward. I found no route, prepared and marked out for me and my schoolfellows, for the journey we had to take together. That didn’t have to be the case. Such rapprochements have been a vibrant though little-known part of America’s literary past. We lack only resolve and collaboration to bring these resources to the front of the class.
To wit, when the Poet Laureate Karl Shapiro judged California’s unique topography and climate among other geographies and eras, it was not European lands he invoked 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, it was 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.
The answer as to why he emphasized Egypt lies in the shift of focus to race and the working class. After tracing a link with African civilization, the verses span the gulf of social class, centering the field of vision on cultivation:
Fig tree and palm tree — everything that warms
The imagination of the wintertime.
Transplanted Mediterranean saplings bring warmth to offset the barrenness of winter. Like the Nile’s annual flooding, California’s rainfall is an ample yet ephemeral provision of nature. That abundance cannot always offset the harshness of the climate, but it can fortify even non-native crops. Thus, it is not natural resources that Shapiro salutes. Through the hands and will of the planter, it is cultivation (of what is appropriate for a particular climate) that is valuable. Rather than elite governance or rule by a landed class, symbolized by ancient Rome or medieval Spain, the stanza pays tribute to those who tend the fig and the palm, whether in Egypt or California, modeling consciousness on ordinary people’s reciprocal commerce with their habitat.
Published in 1957 in The New Yorker, “California Winter” debuted after the 1956 Suez Canal crisis, during which Israel, Britain and France invaded Egypt, bombing civilians and the magnificent historic landscape alike. This fact argues against a folkloric or romantic vision of ancient civilization, making it more likely that the poet attempted to forge bonds between his context and contemporary Egypt based on ordinary citizens and their intricate relationship to their environment.
Such a position subverts the conventional political narrative of this crisis: the planned invasion was justified by President Nasser’s perceived threat to free maritime trade. However, the event’s official history, reported by the U.S. Office of Defense, stated, “Nasser’s action could be defended as legal, and there was no reason to believe that there would be any interference with canal traffic” (https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/secretaryofdefense/OSDSeries_Vol4.pdf, p.52). Eisenhower’s demand that the three aggressors withdraw ended the crisis.
During this tense period, the poetic reference to Egypt counters the Egyptians’ post-1956 politicization and agrees with another interpretation: One action that precipitated the Suez nationalization crisis was Washington’s withdrawal of its promised funding for the Aswan High Dam.
Environmentalists often cite the ecological and social harms of building dams, such as displacing rural populations. While the political elites and corporations usually reap the benefits, typically income generated from new hydroelectricity and agricultural infrastructures, Nasser’s project channeled Suez revenues toward training and leveraging Egypt’s skilled and semi-professional workforce. Over a decade, the endeavor employed and paid nearly 35,000 indigenous technicians and engineers.
Despite the environmental cost, this monumental engineering feat, commemorated (and was paid for by) nationalizing the Suez Canal. This stunning achievement symbolized Egypt’s cultural self-determination, on the heels of its political independence, in the face of foreign military invasion and Washington’s withdrawal of aid.
Since Shapiro highlighted the ordinary working person’s relation to land and water as a cultural affinity with Egypt, “California Winter” appeals to global consciousness, namely, that different material realities in each environment call for empathy, rather than political demonization, toward other cultural groups and nations. As one of the world’s poorest countries, Egypt’s circumstances presented difficult choices.
The Suez crisis and the damming of the Nile evoked in the American West poet a camaraderie borne of understanding that all people face limits to their agency in the natural environment. On that account, it is dismissive to characterize his work as an “imaginary war” against “Europe and the Past” (David Orr, “Review of Karl Shapiro,” Poetry 187, no.3, 2005, p.244–5). Such opinions have misconstrued Shapiro’s intent to reach beyond the common stock of cultural ties.
As climate change exacts an ever-greater toll on topographies already susceptible to scarcity, we should heed Fred Pearce’s words: “When the rivers run dry, we mine our children’s water” (Fred Pearce, “When the Rivers Run Dry” [Boston: Beacon Press books, 2006], p.33). If the current tendency of relating to other cultural groups, especially non-dominant ones, along combative political lines continues, future generations of children will equally bear the human and ecological cost of a polarization that obstructs cooperation.
Since the value of literature and the arts is in the interpretation, for Muslim parents and educators today, supporting Humanities-trained Muslims might be the best way to breathe new life into social justice in the classroom.
An apt metaphor that renders the politicization of Muslim immigrants’ cultural identity is an observer on the shore witnessing a large swell capsize a ship and knowing that they can do nothing but watch and wait. I say this not in passive resignation, but only because while trying to marshal the agency to move toward a better condition, the immigrant — like the observer who doesn’t apathetically turn away but keeps watching — is nonetheless rendered incapable by the disparity in his/her resources to aid. Not from a lack of will to do something but because of the extenuating, restrictive material circumstances.
In some ways, American Muslims still stand outside of history, facing real barriers that prevent fellow citizens from learning about them as individuals. Today, the most obvious barrier is the dominant political narrative that demonizes them and excludes their voices and stories from social studies education. Until we take the consequences of those obstacles seriously, then, like the fictional observer on the shore, I can only watch and wait for this country to right itself.
