Spring 2009, students listen to Cihan Kaan read his story "Crimean Saladin" from upcoming collection of short stories Halal Pork and Other Stories (Spring 2010). Kaan is the first Tatar American novelist. Many students heard about the Tatar genocide for the first time.
Hunter College Fall 2001 – Spring 2009
I started teaching college at the age of 23. Needless to say, teaching itself has been one of the best learning experiences of my life. I started Hunter College when I was just a year or two older than my students. Hunter allowed me to experiment with classes that were close to my academic field of research. Robert Ku, the (former) Acting Director of the Asian American Studies Program and Cristine Alfar, Chair of the English Department, were generous and made room for West Asian and Central Asian within their English Department and Asian American Studies Program. Here I was given the space to design and initiate courses in West Asian American Film and Literature & Central Asian Film and Literature.
In Fall 2001, I taught the very first Arab American Literature course offered in NYC. This group of students were perhaps the most important to me. At a time when racism against Arab Americans had intensified, the class became a safe haven to share our lives with each other and create a compassionate and educational space. It was also the class that was the most publicized. Two documentaries were filmed here. WNYC/NPR visited and the students’ voices were heard beyond the classroom. Because of this semester, my teaching style changed from a traditional highly-disciplined structure to one that was more relaxed and playful, while maintaining its educational rigor.
(L-R) Nora, Omar, Rasha, Yasmin, and Moustafa Bayoumi author of How Does it Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America. Former students: Omar, Rasha and Yasmin shared their life stories and contributed to one of the best books on Arab American youths. It won the American Book Award 2009
One particular incident that stood out for me was when a student told me that he imagined Baba from Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner to look like Saddam Hussein. This was in the years of 2002/2003. Because of all the media craze over Saddam Hussein, my student said that he saw Baba when in Afghanistan as a young Saddam. When he was sick, he visualized Baba as the Saddam caught by the Bush administration.
This is when I realized the importance of including visual material that allowed my students to see Middle Eastern/West Asian faces and develop different relationships with these faces. Regardless of how sympathetic they felt towards the characters, if the only face they could conjure up to fit Afghan/Iranian/Arab was Saddam Hussein, then I didn’t feel like I was running a proper class.
Summer 2008, Vaimoana Numietolou (Tongan American Artist/Poet/Performer) speaks to Postcolonial Literature class about her artistic response to Gaugain and other colonial artists.
It was after this semester that I incorporated film, video art and photography into literature courses. It was very important for me to introduce visual as well as textual relationships with West Asian Americans (Arab/Afghan/Iranian) faces. The theorists who became the skeletal foundations of these classrooms were Edward Said and Ella Shohat.
Here are some highlights from my years teaching at Hunter College. The courses I taught were: West Asian American Film; Arab American Literature; Asian American Literature; Asian Pacific American Media; Asian American Gender and Genre; and Central Asian American Film and Literature. This portfolio is a highlight of some of the trips we took and guest speakers I invited to my classroom over the years. I took advantage of the luxury of teaching in midtown Manhattan and its proximity to local cultural events.
After receiving a generous grant, I resigned in May 2009 to focus on my dissertation and creative writing.
March 2006, Class trip to MoMA Exhibit "Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking" featuring Emily Jacir, Ghada Amer, Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat and others.
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