‘Why not? You’ve had a whole summer to work on it.’
I was surprised to find I had clicked into the role of the teacher.
‘The novel I chose is really boring. I don’t have anything to say about it.’
The essay was due to be submitted in two weeks, so it was too late for Julie to choose another book. I suggested that we should have a chat about it, while the other students did some work on their project. Julie had chosen Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, which I hadn’t read. I asked her to tell me about one thing she liked in the novel, even if it was only a sentence or a character. Julie talked for about five minutes about Ida and Rose, the two main female characters, explaining their struggles and how they were described. Eventually, I interrupted her: ‘So why aren’t you writing about that?’
‘Because that isn’t what my question’s about.’
‘But this should be about what interests you.’
‘I’m not being funny, but I’ve just spent a year being told not to write “I think”. Now are you telling me this should be personal?’
Julie later told me that she had worked as a dinner lady at one of the private schools in the city, and that she had signed up for the Access course because she got fed up with watching the students go off to university.
A couple of weeks later, Julie came up to me before class and said she’d been trying to read Othello, but that she had a few questions about it. She thought if I could just answer them, she would be able to get to grips with the play. She handed me a small scrap of paper. One of the questions was: ‘I don’t understand why Iago is doing this to Othello. Has Othello done something to him, or has he just got it in for him?’
In another class, in the spring of 2003, I gave the students some extracts from accounts of life in Israel and the occupied territories, including Jeff Halper’s description of attending a protest against the demolition of Palestinian homes:
In the end an army jeep came and I was tossed in the back. We drove up the security road to Pisgat Ze’ev, where I was told to go home. Walking over to a bus stop, dirty, smelly from the sewage, my clothes torn, a woman asks me what happened. Reluctantly I tell her that I was trying to resist the demolition of some of the homes of her neighbours in Shuafat, nodding in the direction of the camp. The reaction was painfully predictable. “Terrorists! They’re trying to move their houses into our neighbourhood! Why don’t they build with permits, like we do? They don’t pay their taxes and expect free houses and services! This is our country. When I came here from Morocco….” The bus pulls up, we get on and she tells the driver: “Leave him off in Shuafat. They’ll kill him there.”
We had a good discussion about the extracts. At the end of the class, I saw that one woman, Tina, was still sitting down, as others packed up their bags and left. As I was collecting my books and handouts, ready to leave, I caught her eye.
‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard about this on the news all the time. But I always thought it was a civil war.’
E.P. Thompson, in a 1968 lecture called ‘Education and Experience’, concluded that:
There is no automatic correlation between ‘real feeling and just sense’ and educational attainments. But the pressures of our time are leading us to confuse the two—and university teachers, who are not always noted for their humility, are often ready to assent to the confusion. To strike the balance between intellectual rigour and respect for experience is always difficult. But the balance today is seriously awry.
Thompson was trying to define (and defend) extra-mural work in UK universities, which since he wrote has been all but extinguished. The old extra-mural departments offered courses outside of normal hours for students who could not otherwise access higher education. I have spent the ten years of my career so far working in the dying embers of this tradition. The phrase ‘real feeling and just sense’ is from The Prelude, where in Book 13, Wordsworth writes of walks he had taken in a rural community:
When I began to inquire,
To watch and question those I met, and held
Familiar talk with them, the lonely roads
Were schools to me in which I daily read
With most delight the passions of mankind,
There saw into the depths of human souls,
Souls that appear to have no depth at all
To vulgar eyes. And now convinced at heart
How little that to which alone we give
The name of education hath to do
With real feeling and just sense…
There are times when education provides a vital structure and enables us to transcend our own perspective, or prejudice; to realise, as Tina so honestly articulated, that we make assumptions all of the time that are false, without even knowing they are assumptions. Or that those assumptions are made for us. Yet, as Thompson saw, educational institutions contrive their own distinctive forms of prejudice too; they have their own blind spots.
I sometimes had doubts about how useful I could be to the students at Al-Quds, and I felt sure that an expert in Palestinian (or postcolonial, or comparative) literature would have more to offer. I doubted my subject too, wishing I had more practical skills to offer. Yet I had also moments of naïve delight. ‘I never knew ancient literature was this cool,’ Qais wrote to me. I knew what he meant: ‘Shakespeare is amazing,’ I found myself thinking. And it was Shakespeare’s plays, above all, that offered my students a space to reflect on their lives, without seeming to do so. It was partly the distance from them, the invisible borders they had to cross out of their own experience, that gave them a space to engage with the plays imaginatively. Shakespeare himself, of course, is giving nothing away. He survived in his own times by rarely revealing his own point of view. Many of his contemporaries were gaoled for the words they had actors speak on stage. When the classes worked, it was because of a sort of alchemy between what we read and the students’ experiences. And, of course, the pleasure split both ways for me, since I got to cross borders both into Shakespeare and into my students’ experiences; each was a ‘school to me.’
It would be easy to patronise the students at Al-Quds, and I heard colleagues (both Palestinian and American) do this, for their lack of sophistication or for their reluctance to read. It would be easy too to mistake inarticulacy for lack of feeling. But my students at Al-Quds showed extraordinary creativity, courage and humour in their daily lives, and in navigating the obstacles they faced, even in getting to class. Formal educational environments are sometimes very bad at allowing students to utilise the ‘real feeling and just sense’ they have brought with them to the classroom. They can also reward particular kinds of obedience. When I have taught groups of clever and privileged undergraduates in the UK, I have sometimes found a peculiar pattern emerges. The students may be sophisticated, well-read, and articulate; they can be a joy to teach. But they are not always thinking, in part because they may not have had to (although this is a generalisation in its own way).
In the UK, universities ignore or exclude certain kinds of experience routinely and structurally, now even more than when E.P. Thompson spoke in 1968. We collude in a belief that educational attainment is the only measure of intelligence. We thus deprive ourselves of access to large swathes of experience, by denying entry to those whose lives have been the most demanding or by demanding conformity from them. In the years to come, this will be a challenge in international recruitment as well as domestically. Universities in the UK are under immense pressure to take increasing numbers of international students, because they pay higher fees. Inevitably, this means recruiting from elites of various kinds. We make only limited adjustments for the vast numbers of those who cannot afford to pay, including the perpetually or temporarily dispossessed. There is much that we miss out on, as a consequence. For example, these students have practical knowledge of ideas that we too often study as abstract concepts in the humanities, such as injustice and how it feels to be denied one’s humanity. There is much that the students at
Al-Quds, for example, could teach their counterparts in the UK.
As Thompson articulated it:
Democracy will realize itself—if it does—in our whole society and our whole culture: and, for this to happen, the universities need the abrasion of different worlds of experience, in which ideas are brought to the test of life.
The Palestinian poet, Rafeef Ziadah, makes another version of Thompson’s argument in ‘We teach life, sir!’:
And I perfected my English and I learned my UN resolutions. But still, he asked me, Ms. Ziadah, don’t you think that everything would be resolved if you would just stop teaching so much hatred to your children?
Pause.
[…]
Rafeef, remember to smile.
Pause.
We teach life, sir!
A number of my students quoted this poem to me and I quickly fell in love with it. It underlines the futility of some of what Palestinians are ‘taught’: to speak English or to ‘learn’ about international law. The retort ‘We teach life, sir!’, which is repeated throughout the poem, is not only defiant, it is also celebratory. The poem speaks to a polite audience who may be unused to such horrors (‘remember to smile. / Pause.’). Yet it transforms all that is happening to the speaker into a resolute claim for the power of what she has: ‘We teach life, sir!’
The students organised an end-of-term party, which happened to coincide with my last day on campus. It was in a large, light hall in a building I had not been in before. They had prepared sweets, chocolates and cakes and decorated the room with balloons. There was a disconcerting lull, at the start of the party, as if after all of this preparation nobody was sure what to do. Eventually, some formalities broke out. The students presented several of the staff with certificates and I managed to say my thank-yous and goodbyes in Arabic, with a couple of corrections from the audience.
In our last class, I had asked the students to write a story about the semester. Tariq had written one in which it turned out I was James Bond. There was a series of improbable events, and then he quoted himself saying: ‘But, dude, this is madness! This is Al-Quds University!’ Tariq told me he was relieved he would not have to travel from Hebron to Abu Dis any more. I asked if he remembered our encounter on my first visit to campus in 2011, when he had said it was all a waste of time. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t remember that.’ He smiled. ‘But it sounds like something I would say.’
Haytham had come to see me in the office before the party and we had sat smoking in the hallway. He had failed one of his other courses and would have to repeat it the following year. It was a language module, which many students found challenging and which he had nicknamed ‘rocket science.’ He was worried that the lecturer whose class he had failed would be at the party. ‘I’ll tell him it’s not you,’ I said. ‘We’ll say you are Haytham’s twin brother.’ But Haytham sat in the corridor outside the hall, perched on a windowsill. When I looked out just after the speeches, a small crowd of students was standing in a circle around him.
After the party, I walked up the hill to get the servees with a few students, who were chatting to me in Arabic, testing out which phrases I knew. Lynn walked ahead of us with Haytham and when we got to the top of the hill they both stopped, ready to walk home. Haytham stood slightly apart, his bag slung across his shoulders, and lit another cigarette. ‘Well, goodbye doctor,’ he said. Lynn and I said an affectionate farewell.
I spent most of my last few days in Ramallah marking exams. In the midst of this, I got a text from Lynn: ‘Protesters made a hole in Wall behind my house and there were clashes all night. House is still filled with tear gas. Lots of shooting, door to door.’ The students were full of surprises again. The final question in the Shakespeare exam had asked them to choose one of Octavius, Portia or Calpurnia from Julius Caesar and explain how the story of the play would be different if it was told from his or her point of view. This was an extract from Noor’s rewriting:
If the story was told from Calpurnia’s point of view, the play would start with Caesar, describing him as a noble, humble man, who freed Rome from Pompey’s tyranny, and became a good king. Then she would move to her dream, and how scared she is for her husband, and she would describe how she tried to convince him not to go to see the public. After the death of Caesar she would go through deep sorrow, and she would decide to seek revenge. She would call Antony before the conspirators do, and tell him to go and see the conspirators when they call him, and she would tell him how to manipulate them and the commoners. She also would give him the letter and tell him to pretend that this letter was Caesar’s will. She wouldn’t tell the audience about Brutus’ and Cassius’ conversations, and she would add to the play a description (a full description) of the corruption that happened in Rome after Caesar’s death, and I think that the play would end with her and Mark Antony getting married.
In the Special Topics exam, some of the students had debated the topic ‘We should study Palestinian literature instead of English literature at university’. One student wrote:
Yes, we should study Palestinian literature instead of English literature in the university. Because we are Plastinian [sic] not English people, so we have to know more about our literature. For example, I’m third year student in the university, and I don’t know anything about Palestinian literature, I just know Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot, and that thing not god [sic] for a Palestinian person.
Lika’ wrote:
As we are Palestinians, we should study our literature. Every nation must know everything about it, history, art, culture, and tradition. There must be people within a country [that] don’t know anything or don’t know many things about their country’s literature. That’s why a country must teach its literature. For me, for example, I don’t know all things about Palestine literature. I once heard information about our literature, I become like, REALLY!
When I had nearly finished marking the Shakespeare exams, I checked my e-mail and found that I had a message from a student called Shadia. She’d taken the Shakespeare exam the day before. Shadia wrote: ‘On 12 May, the Israeli army imprisoned my brother, at 3am they came to our house, they broke the doors window and took him, they also took my soul with him.’ He was younger than her, in his late teens. The family had been allowed no contact with him after his arrest, and no reason had been given for it. She was worried that she might have failed the final exam, but she realised there was nothing I could do. This was not the first time I had received this sort of message from a student, but I feared she was right. I was not going back to campus—I had agreed to leave the exam scripts with Ahmed. I paced around my apartment, not wanting to check her grade. When I finally looked at her paper, Shadia had got 38 out of 40.
I no longer think that Romeo and Juliet is a love story. When I’ve read it in the past, the lovers have predominated. But it’s a fleeting affair, and they may be mismatched as a couple; many readers have noted that Juliet outgrows Romeo. While we were reading the play in Abu Dis, the danger that the lovers are in, which had once been the background to the story, suddenly became the foreground. One line, which I had never noticed before, kept coming back to me. Juliet has just asked Romeo how he made it to her balcony. He replies:
Romeo:
With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls,
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do, that dares love attempt;
Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me.
Juliet:
If they do see thee, they will murder thee.
(II, ii, 66-70)
You could read Juliet’s words, like Romeo’s, as teenage hyperbole. But I now think she is in earnest.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared on Mondoweiss. I would like to thank the editors for permission to reprint it here. Patricia Ferguson and Jeremy Harding made many helpful suggestions about a draft of that article. I am grateful to the United Nations for permission to reproduce
a map of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
Some of those whose influence is felt most in this book are not thanked here because they appear in the story, usually under a new name. I am especially grateful to my colleagues in the English Department at Al-Quds, for their kindness and for the trust they placed in me, and to all those who befriended me in both Abu Dis and Ramallah. I am grateful to those students who gave permission for me to include extracts from their work.
The semester I spent in the West Bank was made possible by two supportive heads of department, Mohammed Thawabteh at Al-Quds and Roger Middleton in Bristol. My original connection to the university was Sari Nusseibeh, who I introduced at the Bath Festival in 2008. I am grateful to him and to Sarah LeFanu, who asked me to chair that event. I would like to thank the curry night regulars: Marijke Peters, Merit Hietanen, Zara Mesbah, Marie-Pierre Py, Matthew Richard, Amber Savage and Joe Slowey. Mohammad Abu Hilwa taught me much about the Arabic language and about Palestine. Casey Asprooth-Jackson and Stephanie Saldana were generous colleagues at Al-Quds Bard.
My stint at Al-Quds was inspired by the examples set for me by Neil Hertz and my father, David Sperlinger, and I would not have started this book without their encouragement. Vivienne Jackson, Josie McLellan and Theo Savvas each read a draft with sensitivity and improved it beyond measure. Jess Farr-Cox saved me from a variety of errors. The students who I have re-named Haytham, Sami and Qais also read an earlier version and made many helpful suggestions. I hope that I have learned something from Haytham’s honesty.
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