All posts by mhoyer

On Advocating for Other Cultures: A Conversation with Somy Kim

Interview

Somy Kim is an associate teaching professor in Northeastern University’s Writing Program; she is also fluent in four languages, with a basic knowledge of two others. Unsurprisingly, her accounts of traveling after college are fascinating; her research, focusing on the essay film as a genre and its significance in the cultural history of the Middle East, especially Iran, is a penetrating exploration of film as a cultural object; and her face, as we try to find a table at Pavement Coffeehouse at 11 on a dreary Wednesday morning, is a little surprised.

“I didn’t expect it to be so crowded.”

Professor Kim is refreshingly honest about naïveté, and the role it has played in her studies and her travel—generally speaking, her encounters with cultural exchange. We manage to snag a table after a few minutes of waiting, and we are already deep into conversation. As a writing professor, she is very interested by the writing course that this interview is for, and we discuss the various ways to approach peer editing and the importance of an open and inviting classroom atmosphere, among other things, for twenty minutes before I start the recorder. All in all, we talk for about two hours and the conversation ranges over a wide spectrum of topics, from the evolution of her studies to the potential of film reviews as an instrument of social justice. I originally found Professor Kim through her work in Middle Eastern studies, but her experience studying and working with foreign cultures and cultural exchange is extensive and multifaceted.

I ask her how she gained this experience, because her academic resume doesn’t explain it all: she earned her BA in Linguistics from UCLA, paused for six years before receiving a Masters degree in English Literature from DePaul University, and then obtained a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. At what point did the shift from linguistics student to expert in Iranian cinema occur?

I learn from Kim that Los Angeles is home to one of the largest Iranian/Persian diasporas in the world. During her time at UCLA, the Near East became a focus of her undergraduate career, but because UCLA had no study abroad program in Iran, she began learning Arabic in order to study abroad in Cairo. From there, she continued traveling, spending time in South Korea, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as returning to Egypt; during that six-month visit, the Iraq War began, illustrating visualization’s role in creating different perceptions of war in the Middle East and the US: “People were in the streets, going crazy on the TV 24/7 where images of bloody bodies… My mother and sister, I would call home and they were like, “We don’t see anything over here!” It’s such a very different experience.” She and her husband returned to the US from Cairo for his new job at DePaul, and after the birth of her first child, she began feeling restless and decided to take one course.

That one course turned into a Masters degree in English literature, but in her last semester, Kim took a course on postcolonial literature. As she says, “It was the first time I knew that we could study things that were not British and American literature. I didn’t know that.” Suddenly, Kim was able to study one of her long-time passions, film, using the critical theories and forms of narrative analysis she found in Comp. Lit.: “I actually did go from novels and poetry to writing about film because I felt more connected to the films. … As a person writing about other cultures, I felt I got an invitation to cinema.” The films were made for her, as a viewer, to watch.

She pauses to take a bite of her sandwich and I check to make sure the recorder is, in fact, still recording.

Now, Kim has a unique perspective to bring to the writing courses she teaches, a perspective informed by her experiences navigating other cultures. We discuss the issues she encounters studying, as she puts it in one of her papers, “a cinema replete with such culture-specific and historically laden allusions.” Clearly, one has to be an expert in the culture to address such a complex subject, but navigating that role when it comes to a foreign culture different from your own is a complicated undertaking. Recently, she has begun to recognize a kind of positivist attitude in her approach to film analysis: avoiding critique, and emphasizing praise and recognition, because of her position as a non-Iranian, as coming from a non-Middle Eastern background.

We also discuss the challenges that she faces in the classroom, especially how to approach and teach problematic, but seminal, subject material, like the film “Lawrence of Arabia.” Ultimately, it’s a question of how to effectively educate students from a wide variety of disciplines on in-depth engagement with culture and cultural products. Kim knows better than most, and tries to communicate to her students, that a film is a story, not a one-to-one relationship, and that by analyzing a film we are unpacking just one narrative about what it is to be.

As we bring our mugs back to the counter and head out the door, I am left with more questions than I arrived with, but also unquestionably more knowledge. Maybe, looking back on our conversation—especially the roles that naïveté and the desire to learn more play in gaining cultural knowledge and expertise—the two go hand-in-hand.

In Response to: “Will London Fall?”

Letter to the editor

To the Editor:

Sarah Lyall paints a mesmerizing portrait of London in her recent article: a vibrant city, filled with people unconstrained by ethnicity or socioeconomic background. While the portrait is beautiful, I take issue with the frame. Lyall refers to London as, “the metropolis that globalization created” in the article’s description, but London has been a multicultural metropolis for much longer than the recent phenomenon we refer to today as globalization. If Lyall is, in fact, referring to processes that were in motion long before the rise of the internet and free trade agreements, then she should call them what they are: colonialism and imperialism. I agree with Lyall’s claim that London may fall as a result of Brexit and the anti-globalization sentiments that motivated it, but she frames London’s fall with watered-down language and simplifies the issues. She writes that Brexit will be harmful to London as the city changes and immigrants who form integral parts of the community leave or are forced to abandon their cultural heritage. The full implication of these changes, which she never addresses, is that London’s history and the composition of its current population are reflective of the UK’s economy: built and dependent on foreign cultures and markets, and vulnerable when faced with isolationist policies. London is a great city, yes. As Lyall says, when you walk through the financial district, you can “listen to the plumbing system of international capitalism.” But that hum of international capitalism comes at a steep cost, and Lyall does herself and her reader a disservice by pretending otherwise.

Sincerely,

Molly Hoyer

Wellesley, MA

April 22, 2017

Worth Every Penny

Op-Ed

In Tessa Spillane’s twelve-year tenure coaching the Wellesley College varsity rowing team, the program has developed from a historic (first women’s collegiate rowing program in the country) but competitively average program, to a national championship-winning team. This shift occurred for several reasons, such as a collective team initiative in 2010 to go to the national championships for the first time, the intensification of the team training plan, and the focus on a healthy team culture. One factor that cannot be dismissed, however, is the amount of additional resources the team has received: a new strength and training coach in the fall of 2013, three new boats donated during the 2014-15 season, and updated equipment like lighter oars and new erg machines. These investments in the program, advocated for by Spillane, have seen significant returns, not just at the national championship, but at regional and conference levels as well. As Wellesley’s team becomes faster, so too do the other Division III teams. The amount of time it takes for a women’s DIII varsity boat to complete a 2,000-meter race, the standard in rowing, is steadily decreasing and approaching times previously thought to be accessible only to Division I or II athletes.

While Wellesley’s rowing team is growing and thriving as a result of these changes, women’s sports, especially team sports, continue to suffer from a lack of investment and support. The US women’s soccer team made headlines in 2016 when their five highest-profile players brought a lawsuit against their governing body for wage discrimination. More recently, the US women’s ice hockey team threatened to boycott the world championships because of inadequate pay and a lack of training and development opportunities. Steph Houghton, the highest-paid female soccer player in the UK, is paid about £65,000 (approx. $80,300) annually, as compared to her male counterpart, Wayne Rooney, who makes £300,000 (approx. $372,500) each year. The tennis star Serena Williams, the highest-ranked player in what is arguably the most equitable sport (tennis, thanks to all four grand-slam events offering the same amount of prize money for both genders), still made less per victory than her male counterpart because of prize money disparities at lower-level competitions.

Many of the arguments in defense of these lopsided numbers are based on the idea that since women’s sports don’t attract the same amount of attention as men’s sports, women don’t deserve to be paid the same. Either the sporting events are not as competitive, which detracts from the entertainment value, or consumers have simply declared their lack of interest.  The proponents of this defense argue for salary based not on the merit of the quality of play, but on the quality of entertainment. Either way, the governing bodies of these sports are requiring the same amount of work from the female players as from the male players when the cameras aren’t rolling. In order to compete at the level required to even contend for a medal at international events such as the Olympics or World Cups, national athletes must train like the athletes they are: professionals. A professional athlete’s schedule and training plan are as time- and energy-intensive as a full-time job, and they should be compensated accordingly, as the men usually are.

There are, in fact, athletes who have been able to successfully balance a non-athletic profession with high-level athletic performance. They are typically individual athletes, however, like the rower Gevvie Stone or the triathlon competitor Gwen Jorgensen; these athletes have total control over their schedules, their choice of coach, and their training plan. Team sport athletes, on the other hand, have much less flexibility. They are held to a strict practice schedule and, in the case of US women’s soccer, are required to compete in at least twenty games during the season, each of which they have to win in order to earn the same amount that the men would earn even if they lost each game. Their governing bodies, such as the US Soccer Federation, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), and the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL), require a level of commitment from their athletes comparable to that of many full-time occupations, and rightly so, but without providing the appropriate compensation to support their employees. These unsustainable standards are particularly problematic for Olympic-level athletes; while individual athletes are selected several months before the Games, team athletes are selected and commit to mandatory training schedules several years ahead of time.

How then do we ensure investment in and support of female athletes in these sports? Notable examples abound, especially outside of the United States. In the United Kingdom, for example, the English women’s cricket team won their first victory in the Ashes competition after a succession of losses, and the England and Wales Cricket Board increased their pay significantly. This investment on the part of the sport’s national governing body enabled the players to be professional cricketers, a change that brought them a larger following. Within the rowing world, one corporate executive, Helen Morrissey of Newton Investment Management, completely shifted the dialogue when she decided to sponsor the Women’s Boat Race, ensuring that it happened on the same day and with the same media coverage as the men’s. A Russian professional basketball team, owned by a billionaire industrialist, paid one of their players, Diana Taurasi, to rest her body and not play for her American team in the WNBA – the difference between what she is paid by the Russian team for a season and what she would have been paid by the WNBA was over a million dollars. In each of these cases, a different investor made the choice to support female athletes by providing capital and resources: a governing body, an external business professional, and a team owner.

Women’s sports are worth the investment, both as jobs for women who deserve to earn a living wage for the remarkable work they do, and as a product that generates consistent returns. Governing bodies and the organizers of competitions hide behind the excuses that female athletes “aren’t as competitive” or that women’s sports are a “vicious cycle” in which there is no interest from the public to drive investment, but interest from the public can only be generated through investment. Demonstrated in sports varying from cricket to basketball to rowing, there are plenty of ways outside of traditional entertainment practices to invest in and support women’s sports, which will generate the consistent, positive return that both athletes and their fans deserve.

Magic in the Orchard

Film Review: "Women without Men" (2009)

Adapted from the Iranian magical realist novel of the same name, Women without Men is a beautiful piece of cinematography and storytelling. The film is visually stunning, and director Shirin Neshat elegantly weaves together the personal stories of four women surrounded by wider political and cultural conflict.

The film begins on a rooftop. The house below is white, contrasted sharply against the blue sky and the black of the chador and hair of the woman standing there. She wanders around the rooftop, occasionally peering over the side while the call to prayer echoes around her. Each time, we see her face and then a shot of the sidewalk below. Finally, the woman leans forward, and her hair floats back towards the camera. Her chador hits the ground, and she soars through the sky as we hear her voice say, “Now I’ll have silence… silence… and nothing.” The sound of running water breaks the silence of several shots of clouds; a small stream appears. The camera pans along the stream while the woman’s voiceover resumes, saying, “And I thought, the only freedom from pain is to be free from the world.” Once she finishes speaking, the camera centers around a small opening in a wall through which the stream continues. The camera advances along the stream and through the opening into a mystical orchard during a two-minute continuous shot, until the title of the movie appears on the screen.

The detail of this opening scene is important because the sequence introduces several key aspects of the film: the cultural context of the story, indicated by the call to prayer and the chador; the centrality of women; the magical realism of certain sequences; and the context of the orchard as an escape from the world and its pain. Neshat successfully introduces and expands upon these themes throughout the film in a concise but artistic way that puts Women without Men in a class of its own within the first ten minutes.

Women without Men follows the story of four women: Munis, the woman from the opening sequence; her naive and conservative friend Faezeh; a young prostitute named Zarin; and a worldly woman of the Iranian bourgeoisie, Fakhri. After the opening sequence, the movie flashes back to an afternoon when Munis is trying to listen to the radio in order to participate in the life and conflicts taking place just outside her door, and her brother, Amir Khan, rips the cord from the radio to force her to make dinner and prepare for a suitor’s visit; Faezeh seeks to marry him and share his conservative lifestyle. Her purity makes no difference, however, as he is set to marry a woman who is rumored to not be a virgin. Zarin’s storyline, in contrast to Faezeh and Munis’s lives of domesticity, begins in a brothel where she lives a monotonous, yet draining, life that is interrupted one day by the traumatic hallucination of faceless men. Each man that she sees, starting with one of her own clients, has no face. She runs to the baths and scrubs herself till she bleeds, trying to cleanse herself of the impurity that is causing the hallucination. When neither bathing nor prayer works, she leaves the city and the pain of the world, and begins walking down a long road under a blue sky.

Meanwhile, Fakhri faces demons of her own within the elite and privileged circles from which the other three women are excluded. A former lover returns from America, and her disillusionment and disappointment with her husband, an army general, reaches such an intensity that she decides to leave. She retreats from the pain to a secluded orchard managed by a quiet, unobtrusive male gardener, down the long road under a blue sky, and begins an independent life there.

The story finally returns to the opening sequence when Faezeh and Amir Khan find Munis dead on the sidewalk. To save his and his family’s reputation, Amir Khan buries her in the garden while Faezeh looks on. She is traumatized, but life goes on for Faezeh until the day of Amir Khan’s wedding; in the midst of a celebration of his success and happiness, Munis comes back to life and leaves his house for good to pursue her own interests and goals. But when the shame that she feels becomes too much for Faezeh after she is raped, Munis is able to guide her down the long road under the blue sky because Munis has already been to the orchard. Munis reenters life after a retreat from the world, a future that we are then able to envision for Faezeh and Fakhri. Zarin, however, is not strong enough for the world outside the orchard and eventually dies from exposure to it. The film ends with Munis’s reflection on why all four women wanted to escape: they wanted to find “a new form, a new way. Release.”

From an aesthetic perspective, I noticed that Neshat and the film’s director of cinematography, Martin Gschlacht, manipulate light and color (especially blue and white) to create an ethereal effect. The characters of Zarin and Munis are the two centers of magical realism in the story, with extraordinarily surreal experiences like hallucinating men without faces and coming back to life, and they are also the centers of Gschlacht’s manipulation of blue and white. Each camera shot is so precise and a piece of art in its own right that while watching the film, I felt I was seeing the world in an entirely new way.

The film makes certain changes to the original story written by Shahrnush Parsipur on which the film is based that are worth highlighting. For example, the role of the gardener is never explained and minimally explored in the film, despite the fact that he plays a central role in the book. The environmental symbolism of the novel, culminating in plot points such as one character’s eventual transformation into a tree, is barely touched upon in the film. The film only lightly alludes to this storyline when Fakhri finds Zarin partially submerged in a pool in the orchard, almost as though she and the orchard were one. Most notably, the film spends a significant amount of time depicting the Iranian Revolution, which is much less of a focal point in the novel. Neshat is an expatriate of Iran, and uses the film as an opportunity to add a political dimension to the story that the author never makes explicit in the book. Although some may see these changes as a loss to the story, I believe that they simplify and streamline the plot, which allows the film to more effectively communicate the parallel between the women’s search for a new way and a new form of being, and Iran’s struggle for independence and autonomy. Fakhri is disappointed by both her proud Iranian husband and her Westernized lover, while Iran is left broken by competing ideologies and world powers. Faezeh is learning how to reconcile her conservative past and beliefs with respect for herself and faith in her own strength, just as Iran is trying to balance elements of conservatism and modernism in its society. Above all, Zarin reminds us that unless women are prioritized and nurtured, unless they are given the space to be women without men, Iran’s progress is unsustainable.

Seven Dresses

Feature article

Moroccan weddings are a big deal. While spending a semester abroad in Morocco this past fall, I often wondered whether I would get the chance to partake in the traditional celebration so unique and significant to the country. A lesson in our Arabic textbook centered around weddings in the Arabic-speaking world, and while we learned about certain traditions in countries like Somalia and Egypt, our professor focused for an entire week on the details of Moroccan weddings. My chance to attend a Moroccan wedding appeared at the very end of the semester: three days before finals started, my host dad told me that we would be going to Marrakech that weekend for the wedding of two of my host mom’s cousins, Ihssane and Amine. I had met both of these cousins earlier in the semester during Eid al-Adha, a religious holiday that we spent in Marrakech with the extended family. I was excited not only to return to Marrakech and show off my much-improved language skills, but also to attend such an unfamiliar tradition surrounded by familiar people.

Multiple events lead up to the actual wedding day, starting with the khatuba, or the engagement ceremony. The two families come together about a year before the wedding to agree on the marriage and for the groom’s presentation of gifts to the bride and her family. The other two ceremonies take place during the week of the wedding: the bride first goes to the hamam, the Moroccan baths, with her close female friends and relatives. The next day, the bride receives elaborate henna designs on her hands and feet. Some grooms receive henna as well: a small, circular design will sometimes be drawn in the center of their palms. Once all of these ceremonies are complete, the bride and groom are ready for the wedding.

The zifaf is a long and elaborate process. Details of the ceremony vary depending on region and social class, but there are a few major tenets of a zifaf, primarily having to do with the bride. After certain Koranic verses are read, religious songs sung, and the guests gathered together, the bride enters. At many weddings, she enters on an amariya, an ornate litter, and is carried around the room multiple times while thelitter carriers perform certain dances. She is then brought to a platform where she sits next to the groom for pictures. Over the course of the night, the bride will change dresses up to seven times. Depending on when the ceremony starts, the stamina of the guests, and how quickly the bride can change, a zifaf could end anytime between 4:00 and 7:00 am.

We arrived at the wedding venue, and I realized that the wedding was actually being held in the house of the bride’s parents. This was remarkable, in that the house was actually large enough to host everyone and beautiful enough for the high standards of Moroccan weddings.

All of the guests found seats around the edge of the crowded room, and once everything had settled down, the couple walked in. While Amine wore a rather ill-fitting polyester suit with a skinny tie, Ihssane was radiant in an emerald green caftan covered in gold embroidery, topped off with a golden tiara. The two sat on a couch placed on top of a platform. After Ihssane’s dress had been arranged by her two assistants, a photo session lasted for what felt like an hour. Folders containing the legal marriage documents were then brought in, and the couple proceeded to sign them to the accompaniment of camera flashes. At the end of the legal ceremony, both exited, signaling a new phase of the wedding.

At this point, all of the men went upstairs to a different living room, and for the rest of the evening, Amine came in and out of the room, occasionally sitting next to his bride in her various dresses and participating in a few ceremonies. Ihssane, on the other hand, was either on the platform having her dress arranged and posing for pictures with friends and relatives, or upstairs getting changed in a process that usually took around half an hour. In total, she wore seven sumptuous, as well as symbolic, dresses: green, blue, yellow, pink, the amariya dress, a Western-style white wedding dress, and finally a simple white djellaba, which symbolized leaving her parents’ house and travelling to her new husband’s home. By the time she appeared in the djellaba, we could all see how exhausted she was, despite her joy at the success of her wedding. In the days that followed, I couldn’t help but contemplate the different roles expected of Amine and Ihssane during their wedding.

At first glance, Amine’s license to wander throughout the ceremony—from the main floor with his bride and all of the women to the upper floors where the men were seated—represented the total freedom and agency of men in Moroccan society to do as they like. After all, there are customs and traditions for Moroccan men during the zifaf, in which Amine was able to choose not to partake. Ihssane, however, was both literally and figuratively placed on a pedestal, the object of the guests’ and the camera’s gazes. After further reflection though, I came to view their roles in a different light; it seemed to me that Amine’s occasional presence and participation provides an example of only partially engaging with culture and tradition, while Ihssane carried the burden of fully interacting with and upholding the customs of her heritage. The experience affirmed for me that weddings in Morocco are indeed a big deal: not only are they a celebration of joy and family that reflects the family’s culture and traditions, but they also make clear who is actually responsible for upholding those traditions.

Thirty Dollars a Month

Blog Post

As a varsity rower at Wellesley College, my daily schedule is structured around practices and workouts. I didn’t have many expectations prior to leaving for my semester abroad in Rabat, but I figured I could easily find a gym or establish a running routine. Within two weeks of my arrival, however, I learned that not only was my school schedule not conducive to working out, but that gym memberships in Morocco cost just as much as gym memberships in the US: around $30 to $40 a month. When I did finally get the time to go and look at a gym in my area, I was surprised by what I would get for $30 a month.

There were two separate rooms, both dimly lit and very narrow: one had a large open space for dance and aerobic classes, along with treadmills, ellipticals, and spin bikes, and the other was packed to the brim with strength equipment. My friend Emily and I found a changing room downstairs, but there was no guaranteed security in keeping our bags there, so we were advised to leave them with the attendant. Unfortunately, she was gone from her desk just as often as she was at it, so we came with as few valuables as possible and hoped for the best.

Then, to our chagrin, we discovered that the majority of the five spin bikes had no way for us to adjust the seat or handle height. Only two of the three treadmills worked, and one of the two ellipticals: cardio options were clearly very limited.

Why not go for a run? Rabat is not particularly hilly, and we were two blocks away from the ocean, where there is a wide sidewalk that extends the length of the city. Well, first because of personal preference: I like variety in my workouts, and I infinitely prefer spinning to running. The second reason was that within a month, I had already developed a hearty dislike of being out on the street for an extended period of time in Rabat.

As a white woman I clearly stood out anywhere I went in Rabat, a city not particularly appealing to tourists. As a tall woman, I stood out even more: I was regularly taller than most women by at least half a foot, most men by a few inches. All women are subject to street harassment in Morocco, the only difference being what your harassers say. By October, when Emily and I had decided that we had adjusted enough to our routine to add on going to the gym, I was sick of hearing “Ma reine” and “Beautiful, beautiful” whispered and crooned to me as I walked past cafes. I was even more tired of hearing hisses and words that I did not yet understand.

Exercise is a safe place for me, where my endorphins go up and I feel connected to a community. The street was the opposite, so I retreated to the gym.

While the cardio room was typically empty except for Emily and me trying to figure out which machine was working that day, the strength training room was always packed and hopping.

On any given day, at any given time, we would walk in to find six to ten men making the rounds on the equipment. This group included one tall, bald man instructing people on how to best use the machines and the proper technique for certain exercises. He was remarkable for several reasons: he reminded me of my own strength training coach back at Wellesley, an intimidating woman with a no-nonsense attitude; he was taller than me; and he treated everyone in the room with the same level of respect and patience, including the young Moroccan women we saw there.

There were two women who we noticed consistently during that month. These women were tough, motivated, and powerful. They moved from exercise to exercise methodically and with purpose, seemingly at home in an environment that often overwhelmed me. When Emily and I wanted to work on our bench press, but the piece of equipment we needed was occupied by a young man who showed no signs of leaving anytime soon, we asked one of these women for advice. She quickly reassured us that we had just as much right to use the equipment as the young man, and helped us find the vocabulary to address him.

Exercising in Morocco is a question of dedication and resources. The process of finding a gym or another place to exercise where we were comfortable was difficult, and once we found it, we had neither the time nor the money to exercise at a gym for more than a month. But during that month, I saw a phenomenon of Moroccan culture that I had noticed from time to time in separate parts of my daily life but hadn’t seen displayed so clearly and plainly: strong, modestly-dressed women approaching male-dominated spaces with poise, purpose, and confidence in their ability to command the respect they deserved. While I didn’t possess the skills and cultural knowledge of these women, I could admire their strength and learn from their example.