I gave the students a handout, as most of them did not yet have a copy of the play. For each course, students would be required to buy a ‘reader’ from the university bookshop. This was a small centre full of photocopiers, in the basement of one of the main buildings on campus. I had taken my copies of Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar to them alongside a brief course outline, and they had produced a pack out of the material, enlarged so that the footnotes were more readable and with generous margins at the sides so that students could take notes. Students would then buy these bootlegged copies of the plays for their classes.
The first quotation on the handout was by a British critic, Jonathan Bate:
Shakespeare’s birthday is celebrated annually in Germany; there is a Globe Theatre in Tokyo; a library devoted to him stands on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC [in the United States]… Why has a sixteenth-century dramatist of humble origins become the best known and most admired author in the history of the world? And, anyway, what exactly is so special about his works?
I told the students that, although Shakespeare was now read all over the world, they should not take for granted that his works were great or special. Their job, as readers, was to discover whether he seemed like a great writer to them.
Alongside Bate’s introduction, I gave the students an article by Amir Nizar Zuabi, part of a series in which people of different nationalities wrote about Shakespeare in The Guardian. Zuabi is a Palestinian director and actor, who has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He suggests that ‘the rhythms’ of Shakespeare’s writing are familiar to a Palestinian reader: ‘For Arabs, the poetic form of the Qur’an is one of our cultural foundations, and Shakespeare’s blend of verse and prose seems as natural as the way we think; it is the way we breathe.’ But his larger argument is about ‘what Shakespeare writes about’:
There are not a lot of places where the absolute elasticity of mankind is more visible than in the Palestinian territories. In the span of one day, you might find [yourself] reading a book in the morning, then in the afternoon be involved in what feels like a full-scale war; by dinner you and your wife have a lengthy discussion about the quality of that book, and just before you slip into bed there is still time to witness another round of violence before you tuck the children into bed. This mad reality blends everything—injustice with humour, anger with grace, compassion with clairvoyance, comedy with tragedy. For me this is the essence of Shakespeare’s writing; and the essence, too, of being Palestinian. This Shakespeare, I grant, is not an academic chap. He is Shakespeare as I think he should be performed—untamed, not civilised and polite, but alive and kicking. He lived in dangerous times, and made the most of them in his work.
The students said relatively little about the article and I could not judge what they made of it. It was also hard to get all of them to speak. The discussion ended up being dominated by the few men and a couple of the bolder women. The space didn’t help. We were packed into a small room, with the students in rows facing me.
There was one student I noticed in this class, although I couldn’t have said why. He was sitting in the back row and looked a little older than the other men, who seemed more like boys. He had a full beard and thick black hair sculpted in a wave above his head. He was wearing thick-rimmed black glasses. I noticed him in part because I knew he was attending to what I was saying. He sat straight-backed, almost still, but occasionally a smile played around his lips. Later, I found out that his name was Haytham.
As the material we had to work with became thinner, because they had not yet read the play, my improvisations became more desperate. We talked about the kind of actors they would cast for the main parts. I asked them who could play the Prince and, when they were silent, I kneeled down:
‘Could it be a short man?’
‘No!’ they roared.
I put on a reedy high-pitched voice: ‘Could it be me if I spoke like this?’
One woman came up to me after class and asked if we could act the play. ‘There is a theatre at the university,’ she said, ‘but nobody uses it.’
Mundhir, one of the men from the class, walked with me to the Special Topics seminar. He told me I had to understand that the students were shy about speaking English in front of me. I wondered if group work might help, or asking the students to work in pairs. But I also feared this might degenerate into chaos, with so many students in each class. I was also wondering how to learn so many names.
Mundhir went off to his next class and nobody turned up for mine. Before I arrived, I had been told that my second course would be on the nineteenth-century novel, and I had brought with me various texts including Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. But it turned out that I would be teaching Special Topics instead, a course for which I could select any texts. I had a limited selection of books with me. I had brought a couple of anthologies of nineteenth-century short stories, which I had hoped to use to supplement the core texts I had chosen, and I decided to focus on those instead. It was a lucky accident. In retrospect, it is hard for me to imagine how we would have ploughed through those long novels. Focusing on the short stories allowed us to move on quickly if one story didn’t work, and to disappear down side-avenues between the texts.
While I was waiting in the classroom, I stood facing the window. The Shakespeare class was in a room at the very bottom of campus. But the room for this class was in the Faculty of Arts, about halfway up the hill. From the window you could see out and over the next building, beyond campus. The Wall ran horizontally across the horizon. As I was staring out of the window, a couple of students arrived and told me that the English students were all on strike ‘because of the department’s policies.’
As I walked back to the office, I ran into Lynn, an American woman who taught literature, and who I had met on my earlier visit. She was always slightly nervous-looking, with piercing eyes and a mischievous smile.
‘I’ve been making lists for you,’ she said, ‘Need-to-know lists: how to ask for groceries in Arabic and that sort of thing. How’s it going?’
‘Everything’s been going really well so far.’
She laughed. ‘That won’t last.’
We walked up a steep set of steps, back to the English Department offices, which were at the top of campus. We had to stop a couple of times, as Lynn caught her breath: ‘I’m a smoker,’ she apologised.
‘Why are you here?’ she asked me, as we stopped about halfway up. She smiled: ‘I’ve given up being polite.’
Lynn complained that teaching at Al-Quds had become like a game of ‘monkey in the middle’, that the students were not interested in learning but only wanted to pass and get their grades. She said that plagiarism was rife and that students were constantly bartering for better grades. ‘About 10% of the students are really good,’ she said. ‘The others are only here because….’ She shrugged.
When we got back to the department, there was a throng of students in the hallway. A woman called Salwa came to apologise because she had been absent from my Shakespeare class. She mumbled nervously at first, but I understood gradually what she was saying. The servees she was in had been stopped at a check-point on the way in, and all of the students had been searched, so she had arrived too late for class. Two other women spoke to Lynn. As we turned to walk into the department, Lynn said that on her way in she had seen five Israeli armoured jeeps down the road. The students had told her that tear gas had now been set off in the town.
‘Stay inside, girls,’ Lynn called out over her shoulder.
4
I was part of the story
Khalid and I greeted one another like old friends. He had returned home after studying in England for a year. One of the challenges, he said, was learning not to queue again. He described waiting politely in line at the Allenby Crossing from Jordan into the West Bank, only to find that everyone else surged forward. Khalid had started a Masters in Leeds shortly after we had met on the servees in 2011, during my first visit to the campus at Al-Quds. We had
stayed in touch and he had been to visit me in Bristol. As he told me about Allenby, we were standing in a small crush of students outside one of the huts on campus where you could buy lunch. Khalid raised his hand above the heads in front of us and fixed his eyes on one of the men behind the counter. When he got the man’s attention, he ordered two falafel sandwiches.
I asked Khalid to tell me more about what the degree had been like when he was a student. Murshid was not the only one with doubts about whether we should be teaching English literature. I was aware of uneasy parallels between what I was doing and the subject’s history as part of the curriculum in colonial settings. Kamau Brathwaite, a poet and critic from Barbados, has written about the legacies of an English education system in the Caribbean:
People were forced to learn things which had no relevance to themselves. Paradoxically, in the Caribbean (as in many other ‘cultural disaster’ areas) […] we are more excited by [English] literary models, by the concept of, say, Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood than we are by Nanny of the Maroons, a name some of us didn’t even know until a few years ago. And in terms of what we write […] we haven’t got the syllables, the syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane, which is our own experience, whereas we can describe the imported alien experience of the snowfall.
I was unsure of the relevance of much of what we were going to read to my students, and I feared that they were partly resistant because learning English gave them few opportunities to articulate their own experiences.
In the Shakespeare class, we had just read the party scene at the Capulet house, at the end of Act I, in which Romeo and Juliet first catch sight of one another. The lovers speak a sonnet between them, at the end of which they kiss, not yet knowing one another’s name. Only the audience knows the danger they are in. There was a subtle tension in the classroom, with some of the students shifting uncomfortably in their seats. I did not know whether I was challenging local etiquette, to suggest that two unmarried teenagers might kiss, or drawing attention to behaviour they were familiar with but embarrassed to talk about. The students had disappeared around a corner in their experience.
We skipped ahead to look at the scene in which the Nurse returns from speaking with Romeo, to establish his intentions:
Nurse: Your love says, like an honest gentleman, and a courteous and a kind, and handsome, and I warrant, a virtuous—Where is your mother?
Juliet: Where is my mother? Why, she is within.
Where should she be? How oddly thou repliest!
“Your love says, like an honest gentleman,
‘Where is your mother?’”
There were ripples of laughter. It felt like a small breakthrough, although I did not know how much the silent majority among the students was taking in.
As we ate lunch in the sunshine, I told Khalid about the scene with the Nurse. ‘That sounds like my grandma,’ he said. ‘When I go to see her in Nablus, she will tell three or four stories very quickly. You know, it took me a while to adjust to the English way of writing, that you make a point, back it up, give some evidence and so on, because in Arabic culture you go a long way round to the point. It’s a completely different style.’
Khalid had a meeting in the American Studies department about a possible job as a teaching assistant. I waited outside while he was talking to one of the academics. In the hallway, there was a simple wooden frame, with eight photographs in it. They showed Barack Obama, then a senator, visiting the university in 2006. When Khalid emerged from the meeting, he told me he was uncertain whether to take the job. He was in two minds about trying to go abroad again, which was the only option if he wanted to do a PhD. He said that of his close friends from university, one had gone abroad to study dentistry, one had become a hairdresser, and one had studied business and was now working in a sweet shop. Khalid had been fired up by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and he thought it was important to develop ideas that were uniquely Palestinian. ‘I felt like a capitalist writing my thesis,’ he said. ‘Why do we always say the private sector might be a good thing?’ Khalid said that students in Palestine were not used to being asked ‘What do you think?’ or ‘Do you like it or not?’
Sooner or later, when I was with Khalid, the talk would turn to a girl he had met. ‘There’s this girl,’ he would say, before describing how he had met her or why she was just out of reach. Each time we met, there would be someone new. He was thinking aloud, and told me that he thought this new girl might be the one for him. ‘You know, I can imagine it. Except that monogamy seems like a…a….’
‘A nightmare?’ I offered.
‘One thing in England, Tom. In my circle of friends, all they wanted to do was go drinking and dancing. There isn’t the same culture of talking in England. Nobody there wants to talk about politics—I mean, nobody wanted to talk about British politics, let alone Palestine.’ He asked me whether I was travelling around much while I was in the West Bank. ‘Have you been to Tel Aviv?’ I said that I might go another time. ‘I envy you so much. You can just go.’
One of the peculiarities of my early days on campus was how familiar some of the university routines felt, even when I found myself straining at the limits of what else I could understand. My first glimpse of Al-Quds Bard felt especially familiar. Although it is on the same campus as the main university, its buildings are newer and seem consciously modelled on an American college, with glass-fronted offices and teaching rooms. Even the students hanging around outside the building were more Western in dress. When I went to meet the Dean of the college, to discuss teaching I might do there, he told me about a letter he was opening, which confirmed that he would be given back power to approve students transferring between courses; such decisions had been briefly transferred to a more senior academic. The little tensions of academic politics were familiar from home.
I ran into Lynn during the lunch break. She asked me what students were like in Bristol, and whether we had the same problems with discipline at English universities. I said that there were problems with plagiarism and that in lectures I’d had to tell students off for talking or texting. About an hour later, I was still in the office and she came in and asked if she could wait for Ahmed. I slowly twigged that something was wrong. It was 2.30pm, and her class was due to run for another hour. She told me she had walked out because the students wouldn’t listen and had refused to take a quiz she was giving them, which was a punishment for not having had the texts with them in the previous class. We talked a little, and Ahmed arrived with the president of the students’ English Club and Haytham, the student I had spotted in my Shakespeare class. I had discovered that the English Club existed mainly to negotiate with staff. The students Lynn was teaching were second years, and they did not always understand English. Haytham turned to me and explained that in the first year, the students took general courses and intensive language lessons only began in the second year. Most of the students I was teaching were in the fourth year. Lynn asked if the students found her difficult to understand because of her accent and Haytham said that wasn’t a problem.
‘The thing is,’ Lynn said, after they left. ‘I have no children and I never taught high school. I have no experience of disciplining kids.’
We did not have the first Special Topics class until about two weeks into term. Lynn and I were scheduled in the same room, with many of the same students, so we all met at the department to resolve it. Lynn agreed to come in early to teach her course, because she lived closer to campus. I still had an hour with the class afterwards and we read the first of the short stories, ‘An Arrest’ by Ambrose Bierce, which is about a fugitive called Orrin Brower. It is only two pages long. I asked the students to point out any words they did not know. There were about twenty of them, including buckshot, fugitive, aching, and captor. Shortly after escaping, Brower gets lost, but he is determined to keep walking for as long as he can: ‘Even an added hour of freedom was worth having.’ He is apprehended and led back to prison by a gaoler:
The students debated whether Brower was courageous or not, since he had committed a crime. Someone said that Brower had killed his brother-in-law, which made him a bad person, whereas others emphasised the mysterious ‘conditions of awful personal peril’ in which he had done it. I texted Lynn later to thank her. She replied: ‘Happy to help. By the way, this was once a very different place. So sorry you could not have come when we still had a chance of making this a first-rate school.’
Early on, we also read ‘A Toy Princess’ by Mary De Morgan, a children’s tale, in which there is a land where the people are without emotions. The king marries a foreign woman, who dies shortly after the birth of their daughter. The baby princess infuriates everyone by crying and is rescued by a fairy godmother. She is replaced with a ‘toy princess’, who can only say a series of polite phrases: ‘just so’, ‘yes indeed’, ‘thank you’ and ‘if you please’. I asked if the story would be different if it was called ‘A Toy Prince’ and one woman said emphatically that this was a description of how girls were expected to behave in Palestine, to be good and polite, whereas boys could be noisy and misbehave. Wafa said that the story was disappointing because society did not want to change. When the secret is revealed, the king and his followers choose to keep the toy princess instead of the real one.
Romeo and Juliet in Palestine Page 4