Category Archives: Interview

An interview with a notable person in the field, including an edited transcript and a profile of the interviewee.

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.

Harriet Stone: Not an Advocate for the “Irrelevant”

Interview

 

Harriet Stone, a professor of French and Comparative Literature, comes across as serious and self-assured, qualities necessary for teaching at Washington University in St. Louis.  Her words are direct and unapologetic, not unlike Edna Mode’s in Pixar’s The Incredibles.

Stone began studying French at Wellesley by accident, getting placed into a French survey class for reasons she suspects were due to its under-enrollment instead of recognition of her French skills.  Once there she went on to study French as part of a comparative literature major.  Stone recalls the joy of studying French thinkers during the tumultuous times of the late 60’s and early 70’s.  She was “drawn to the elitism of it,” Stone says, “it was culture with a capital C.”  Thereafter, specializing in 17th century French literature, she wrote a thesis that compared how the English and the French writers ended plays. Although Stone’s specialty may on the surface seem to be “the fine point of nothing whittled down,” a jab offered by a friend’s mother, she sees it as a broad and ever-expanding topic of interest.  Her undergraduate thesis illustrates the big ideas that Stone’s research still examines: “The point of it, of an English class, was to end with some question or some basic unresolved ambiguity, whereas the French always seem to have an answer— the words of wisdom— the point.”  Stone sees these decidedly different approaches as indicative of differing cultural priorities and mindsets.  The French often look to the 17th century, the apogee of French literature, for clarity and wisdom.  Stone feels that this retrospective approach that seeks resolution holds true in modern French politics.  Her research has taught her that studying 17th century French literature does not mean you are stuck in the 1600’s.

Stone defines modern-day America as an “activity culture,” a culture hell-bent on being the first and profiting off the new.  She acknowledges that the idea-driven French culture has taken a backseat to other cultures in the modern world.  Although Europe is currently in the news, Stone recalls the time when France was economically less interesting than China and India.  Spanish has taken over as the language of relevance in the United States but Stone believes Latin American culture, while very rich, falls into the same pattern of being activity-driven, barring it from having the intellectual authority of the French.  As Stone says, for many “it’s Cinco de Mayo but it’s not Cervantes.”  While Stone thinks an activity mindset encourages creativity, the downside she sees is that America fails to understand and learn from the past, as shown by the recent election.

In fact, Stone argues that now, more than ever, educated people, people who will be the decision makers, need to study the past.  She admits that she entered academia during a fortuitous time.  As a professor, she is adamant about exposing the minds of her students to moral questions that can transcend any one historical period. Stone sees that undergraduates in the current generation often wish to study themselves, choosing courses that directly promote aspects of their identity, a preference of which students aren’t necessarily aware.  This trend becomes problematic when academic departments compete amongst themselves for students’ attention, particularly when their subject seems outdated and unappreciated by employers.  Stone worries about public ignorance among the masses generally but particularly among students coming out of top schools.  She says, “this may be the end of schooling for a lot of people and if you don’t raise questions like ‘how do you interpret an advertisement?’ the country believes what it hears and that is not good. How you critically examine a text is a basic skill for life. That’s what you’re doing by looking at these texts. You’re learning how to read and reading for ambiguities–literary language is not scientific language.”

According to Stone, French literature brings to the table the tools to build an “idea bank” that you can draw from in the future.  Even so, she is aware that before any of these long-term benefits can sink in, students need to overcome the hurdle of translating difficult texts.  For those who only want to learn conversational French, her classes can be taxing since the language is antiquated.  Although her specialty is the 17th century, Stone teaches literature from the Middle Ages up to the present, and with each new century there are new challenges with the language.  Stone is concerned with the rhythm of the class and attempts to counteract with various challenges the natural lull that happens during a long lecture, such as briefly switching to English.

Stone herself has no problem staying engaged even after 35+ years of teaching, which only confirms her point that the ideas embedded in French literature and the lessons from history are ever-pertinent and worthy of analysis. She advocates for a culture that can seem distant and irrelevant while also teaching an action-oriented generation.  Despite her occasionally apathetic and skeptical audience, Professor Stone insists that 17th century French literature still has a place in modern America.  After talking to her I must say, I am convinced.

Profile: Gretchen Brion-Meisels

Interview

Gretchen Brion-Meisels has known she wanted to be a teacher since she was eight years old. As she sits contentedly in her cozy office wearing a simple t-shirt, jeans and flipflops, she is quite possibly the most comfortable and friendly Harvard university lecturer you can meet. This comes as no surprise given that her work involves helping young people feel at home, safe and openly communicative in their schools and communities.

Brion-Meisels first started teaching through a program called Breakthrough by tutoring fifth graders for summer school. In fact, since a young age she found it more fun to play with younger children than her own classmates, in many ways. To this day, she prefers spending time with younger people, including her students.

After completing her undergraduate studies at Harvard, Brion-Meisels became a middle school teacher. Her first years teaching in Baltimore were challenging. She loved her students, but often found that the school felt oppressive. “The students were basically asked to check their lives at the door and come in for school,” she says. That first year, Brion-Meisels promised herself, “I would not keep teaching past the point at which I felt like I was dehumanizing kids.”

Today, Brion-Meisels teaches courses focused on the prevention of bullying and how to improve school communities for young adolescents. She contends that in order to understand youth and to find the best ways to help them, we must involve young people in finding the solutions to their success at school. That way education research would be different and more progressive for young people. Her research involves asking youth how they “define, choose and use” supports, and examining why students may not be using these support systems. One thing she has found is that adults may not always know what students need from the support systems.

In her teaching experiences, Brion-Meisels noticed how problematic and impractical it was to have a group of adults sit at a table deciding what types of supports students needed. She has a disapproving look on her face as she describes how many school systems are failing students and a deep conviction that adults and the administration need to find better ways to help students. Instead of pointing fingers, the leaders of the school should provide an inclusive and loving environment so that students are unafraid to seek help. Adults should be much more careful to ensure that their implicit bias is not hurting the children that they teach.

Brion-Meisels is an advocate of social emotional learning, a way for students to use the necessary skills and knowledge to identify and manage their emotions. This approach, often spearheaded in schools by counselors, helps students get along with one another, maintain healthy relationships and achieve positive goals. She believes that schools with strong multi-tier anti-bullying and anti-discrimination programs — including clear policies, supportive adults, strong relationships among all stakeholders, and supports for struggling students — are the most successful in providing a safe and inclusive community for students.

“The purpose of education is to give you the tools to improve the world and to improve yourself,” insists Brion-Meisels. For her, this means using her own education to further the education of others.

An American Who Stayed Abroad

Interview

“Sometimes I think I’ve seen it all” says Kathleen De Carbuccia, nee McDonough. “I mean, I am a small-town American turned spy, turned foreign diplomat, turned lawyer in Paris.” She is petite, elegantly dressed and has a bob of silver hair that follows her gestures to a tee. The small town she refers to is Cooperstown, located in upstate New York, where baseball was invented. Her demeanor is kind and inviting, she is warm, easy to talk to. Now retired from diplomatic work and the law, she talks about her experience as an ex-pat in Paris.

As a young adult, De Carbuccia studied at Wellesley College, the all-women’s institution outside of Boston. Here, Kathleen developed an interest in foreign governments. The Vietnam War was in full swing, there was increasing mistrust between the then USSR and the American government. “We all thought a nuclear bomb could drop at any moment.” De Carbuccia’s eyes have a far off look. She is remembering.

What De Carbuccia felt, along with many of her peers, was frustration in the face of the drastic changes happening across the world. They all wanted to be involved, one way or another, in the shaping of the world. Some opted for the artistic route, others became involved in the anti-war movement, still others got involved in local government. At 21, Kathleen chose to join the foreign service. She took exams for the CIA and the State Department, both of which offered her positions. Though she began CIA training to become a foreign spy, her most probable posting being Eastern Europe, De Carbuccia ended up on the diplomatic route, but she kept in touch and often dealt with covert agents in her future work as a diplomat. Kathleen is a little reticent when it comes to her own covert work; however she has no trouble recalling the irony of her working alongside her CIA counterparts: “spies needed covers. Some were placed at the State Department, so anytime I would mention I was a diplomat, everyone simply assumed I was a spy. It was like a badly kept secret that is never confirmed. Sometimes I would receive sensitive information from undercover operatives who mistook me for one of their covert colleagues!” She smiles, but it is evident the times were far from amusing, and relating any sort of information was dangerous even for the lowliest of diplomats.

During her years as a diplomat, she served as an interpreter for the American Embassy in Paris and helped with the relations between representatives from across the globe. “Cultural exchange was done through the State Department and we were trained specifically to handle different situations,” she says. “The most complicated portion of our jobs was to interpret other cultures, to know how to act in front of different representatives and to advise our higher-ups on the better ways to handle certain events, talks, deals, etcetera.” De Carbuccia’s work, however, also focused on the promotion of her own culture abroad: “Until the 1990’s the US government had an agency (US Information Service) which promoted US culture (art exhibits, speakers, concerts) abroad; they had an active center in the Latin Quarter that put on lectures and had movie screenings on a daily basis.”

Once married, De Carbuccia became a licensed lawyer after studying at the University of Paris and becoming a member of the New York State Bar Association in 1987. She worked at the Paris branch of an American corporate law firm. Though out of the State Department, De Carbuccia still acted as a go-between different cultures, except this time her work had less to do with the understanding and promoting of cultural heritage, and more to do with the intricacies of perspective each culture perpetuates. As she says herself, “there are two attitudes toward culture: that of art and that of business.” De Carbuccia says her work as a lawyer fell under the second category. She would arrive at meetings with her own culture, her colleagues arrived with theirs, and collectively they’d try to find a balance.   

She continues, “I had just spent so much time understanding the small workings of politics and culture, this time I was thrown into conference rooms and dealings. I wouldn’t worry that the way a single prime minister holding his spoon could offend a foreign visitor, instead I worried that the conditions of a contract would be acceptable to an American and not to a Frenchman.”

A 30-year veteran diplomat of Paris, De Carbuccia found roots in her posting , like many other foreign workers before and after her. She remains on the board of various American citizens’ abroad organizations, and sometimes still acts as go-between, an interpreter for her grandchildren, her husband and her fellow ex-pats.

Mediating Narratives in the Somali Diaspora

Interview

On a busy Wednesday morning, I found myself in an unoccupied office in the Wellesley College History department.  While the room was somewhat bare of furniture, it was filled with the energy of the woman sitting across from me. Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a Somali-Italian writer whose work explores the experiences of Somalis living in the diaspora.  She was born in Italy and grew up in the Somali capital Moghadishu before returning to Italy after the outbreak of civil war in Somalia.  Since her return to Europe, Ali Farah has published two novels and a number of short stories and poems.  I talked to her about her work, why she writes the stories she does and some of the challenges she encountered.

Dual identity is at the center of Ali Farah’s work.  Her Italian mother and Somali father met while he was studying in Italy.  Ali Farah grew up in Somalia but was educated in Italian and later moved back to Italy.  Somalia essentially functioned as an Italian colony from the end of the nineteenth century up until the early sixties.  Every facet of her books, written primarily in Italian, emphasizes the complex relationship between colonizer and colonized. She explains that while she learned about the history and literature of Italy while in school in Moghadishu, she learned little about Somalia.  Somalia was also absent from the Italian history books.  She tells me that “Italy has a big problem with the colonial memory, people don’t usually know what happened in Somalia, that Somalia is connected with Italy.”  As a result, she hopes that her work will help pioneer an expansion of post-colonial literature in Italy. She tells me that because she does not have an accent when speaking Italian, people often forget that she is Somali, that she “has another story.”   By writing in Italian, she is able to integrate the stories of Somalis living in the diaspora and of Somali-Italians like herself into Italian post-colonial discourse.

While she feels that she has a responsibility to tell these stories, Ali Farah explains that it is not always easy, both because of the personal nature of the narratives and difficulty of their content. I asked her why she chooses to write fiction rather than memoir because her stories, especially her first novel Madre Piccola (Little Mother), are so close to her own experience.  She explains that “fiction is a better mediation of the violence because you can distance yourself” and that “if you write a memoir, I think that people can feel that is just something that has to do with you, you represent yourself more as a victim or as a testimony.” Because she writes fiction, Ali Farah is able to incorporate experiences other than her own.    When writing both of her novels, she did many interviews with Somalis and, in the case of her second novel, Africans of the diaspora living in Italy.  She tells me that some people thought she had collected too many stories to really incorporate into a novel.  She tells me that the purpose these interviews was not just to help her write her book, that it was a way of creating space for people to tell their stories.  In fact, “it was a way of healing themselves and also to try to reconnect themselves, to make a sense of what had happened before, of our collective stories.”  In this way her writing both amplifies the experiences of others and helps them to move through those experiences.

Ali Farah’s first novel, Madre Piccola follows the stories of three Somalis who escape to Rome after the outbreak of the civil war.  The ongoing Somali civil war began in 1991 when armed rebel groups toppled the existing government.  The violence that ensued resulted in the displacement of over one million people within Somalia and caused almost as many to flee the country.  In Madre Piccola, Ali Farah explores the experience of those who chose to leave Somalia.  She tries to answer the question of “how you can redefine yourself, how you can feel out your identity, how can you feel comfortable in a new place when you have lost all your points of reference, your family, your friends, and so on.  And for me the answer was through relationships.  And so you try to root down yourself in a new country in a new place, telling your story to others, trying to make other people understand what is your point of view what is your story.”  However, as she found in her own experience, getting others to understand your experience is not always straight forward.  She tells me that when talking to others who are not Somali (including myself), “I need to mediate my story, to make a compromise to make it understandable to you.” To achieve this, Ali Farah uses not only content, but also structure.  According to her, Madre Piccola uses “interlocking voices” to show “how the diaspora works, how memory works, and how it’s not always in a chronological order, in a coherent way.”   In her second novel, Il comandante del fiume (Commander of the River), she explores how the diaspora is experienced by second generation Somali-Italians. She says that with this book “the question I was asking myself was about what we translate to the second generation about the trauma we lived.”  With this latest story, she is thinking about the experience that her children are living, growing up in the diaspora.  This book is another example of how Ali Farah is able to mediate both her own experience and the experiences of others so that they can be understood by a wider audience.

It is clear to me after our conversation that Ali Farah’s work serves a dual purpose. It both helps those with a shared experience to process their trauma and helps others to better understand these experiences.  After thanking her and parting ways, I reflected on our discussion.  Having outlined the challenges of telling one’s story to people of different backgrounds, it was clear to me from our conversation that Ali Farah was a master at exactly this.

Adoptive Black Mom

Interview

A cursory Google search reveals dozens (if not hundreds) of blogs and books about adoption written by white adoptive parents, yet there are relatively few by people of color. Adoptive Black Mom is one of a handful of bloggers writing about her experience adopting her daughter, a black teenager named Hope, from foster care when she was a preteen. She began blogging about her experience in the fall of 2013, writing under a pseudonym to protect her (and now her daughter’s) identity. In the beginning, her blog mainly discussed her experience going through the adoption process; now, it details her day-to-day life with her daughter. A couple of weeks ago, she was kind enough to sit with me and talk about her thoughts on race and adoption from foster care. She has a warm personality and an infectious laugh.

In one of her first blog posts, Adoptive Black Mom explained that she always felt as though she would eventually adopt. Being a black woman didn’t have a large impact on her experience adopting, as she made sure to work with a diverse agency and even had other people of color in her parenting classes. However, on her blog, she discussed realizing that strangers would view her as a single black mother and begin to associate her with negative tropes about black motherhood once she was a parent. About nine months after applying to her local agency’s older child adoption program, the decision to adopt her daughter was finalized.

Adoptive Black Mom has blogged about her experience every step of the way, and I wondered how she confronts a problem that often crops up in the adoption community: adoptive parents overshadowing the voices of adoptees. Because her blog focuses on her experience as an adoptive parent, I asked her how she avoids speaking over adoptees. “I defer,” she responded immediately. “I speak only to my experience. I always defer to adoptees; I have my voice, and they have theirs. Even in my writing, I really try not to speak for Hope.” In fact, she regularly invites adoptees to correct her through social media. Once, she also invited Hope to join her podcast, Add Water and Stir, co-hosted with black adoptive mother and blogger Mimi Robinson. ABM pointed out that it is her daughter’s right to speak for herself, and the podcast was Hope’s opportunity to tell her story from her own perspective. “That was her script. My blog is really about me and how I’m approaching my life as an adoptive parent with this amazing, yet challenging kid, and what this experience looks like, and I respect that….Our role [as non-adoptees] is to be a good ally, and good allies fall back.”

Black and Hispanic children are heavily overrepresented in the foster care system. According to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, 24 percent of the children in foster care are African-American, while 21 percent are Hispanic. Only 43 percent of children in foster care are white. Adoptive Black Mom acknowledged the role that negative ideas about black parenting play in increasing these numbers, saying, “There are also some built-in assumptions that in communities of color, we don’t know how to parent appropriately. [The parenting of people of color] is more confrontational; there’s a history of corporal punishment.” She argued that this racial bias leads to more children of color being removed from their families and not returned (though she did point out that not all parents of any race whose children are removed should have said children returned). ABM noted that a possible solution is to have more training for social workers on unconscious bias and systemic issues related to poverty and class. In terms of adoptive parents, she stressed the importance of certain attitudes toward first parents.  “I think it’s very easy for us to demonize – all of us – first families. And that’s not always accurate. People make mistakes and sometimes those mistakes result in tragedy, but that doesn’t mean that they should never have their family back.”

Knowing that some people of color are reluctant to adopt, I asked ABM why she believes that it’s important for more people of color to adopt. “Even for domestic infant adoption, there are lots of women of color who want to place their children with people of color, and the numbers are just not there to meet that need.” She also pointed out that many children of color would like to be parented by families of color, too. However, she added that “for some kids, at the end, they just want a parent. They don’t really care who it is. That said, I also recognize that what kids want as they get older in foster care seems to become increasingly less restrictive. Why? Because they just want a home. That doesn’t necessarily mean that their ideal scenario isn’t with a person of color. And those kids 1) they deserve a home and 2) they deserve to be parented by their dream parents, too.”

To young prospective adoptive parents of color, she had this to say, “It can be done. Have a good sense of humor. If you’re interested in older child adoption, do your homework, find a good agency. Really understand trauma and non-neurotypical brain development.” She discussed the need to surround yourself with a supportive community or village. “Think about how you’re going to build your village. My village doesn’t look like what I thought it was going to look like, and I don’t know anybody whose village looks like what they thought it was going to look like… Everybody’s village looks different.” Adoptive Black Mom also emphasized the importance of listening to adoptee voices when doing research about adoption. “There are not that many [adoptive parents] of color who are blogging about our life experiences, but there are quite a few adoptees of color who blog or tweet or they’re on podcast. Listen to them. I would…say listen to them more than listening to us.”