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Teaching Transnationalism as an Identity: Expressions of Simultaneity in Looking Both Ways: An Egyptian-American Journey by Pauline Kaldas. By Layla Goushey

In her latest book, Looking Both Ways: An Egyptian-American Journey, Pauline Kaldas expresses the synchronous, connected, simultaneous experience of the transnational individual. Where distance once allowed Arab-Americans a certain amount of time to shift from their Western realities to their Eastern roots when communicating by handwritten letters and expensive long-distance phone calls, now with the benefit of communications technology and air travel, they experience a singular situation in multiple ways while contending with their own and others’ multiple perspectives.

Kaldas articulates the subtle concept of simultaneity, of living in a transnational migratory space. She expresses this sense of simultaneity in her description of her experience during the Egyptian protests of the Arab Spring of 2011. She writes “As soon as the protests begin, I call my family in Egypt. All of them are staying at home, hoping that things will calm down soon. The emails and phone calls tumble into my house almost simultaneously with friends and colleagues asking about my family.”

In physics, simultaneity refers to the perceived relation of events to each other. John Walker, founder of Autodesk, Inc. and co-author of AutoCAD offers a definition.

One of the most fundamental deductions Albert Einstein made from the finite speed of light in his theory of special relativity is the relativity of simultaneity—because light takes a finite time to traverse a distance in space, it is not possible to define simultaneity with respect to a universal clock shared by all observers. In fact, purely due to their locations in space, two observers may disagree about the order in which two spatially separated events occurred.

Pauline Kaldas invites readers to understand the impact transnational simultaneity has on everyday lives and perceptions. For Kaldas, this phenomenon starts with a name. Her name. Soon after her birth, there was a hint of what was to later come. Her name, Pauline, was awarded to her after several days of thoughtful consideration by her relatives. Her parents were forward thinkers who were interested in new ideas and in the promises of the West. The name Pauline was suggested by her Aunt Vicky, who had studied French. While the name Pauline was an oddity in Egypt, it is familiar to Europeans and Americans. This name was meant to “satisfy the needs of tradition and modernity,” Kaldas writes, “This name, with its foreign pronunciation, its removal from the Arabic language – still perceived as inferior in this post-colonial society – must have caught my mother’s ear.” She goes on to write “This name marked my place at the periphery of the world I was born into and which became mine.” So, at birth, Pauline Kaldas was situated in a conceptual, simultaneous space at the border of the Western world that she would later enter and make her own, while still being immersed in her Egyptian homeland. From one vantage point, she possessed a unique name that set her apart in her home country; from another perspective, her name foretold her entry into the world her name symbolizes.
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International travel is increasingly accessible to many people, but not everyone. Through literature, such as Kaldas’ book, readers are inspired to consider how instant, global communications are impacting all communities, whether or not the reader is aware of the emergence of individual experiences of transnational simultaneity. These are important concepts for readers to consider if only to decipher how their experiences link with others in the world.

In the chapter “Make it Like the Recipe” Kaldas discusses her inability to follow a precise recipe. She explains, “Perhaps it’s my winding life path that makes it so difficult for me to follow rules – there is always another way to get there even if it involves a lot of stumbling.” She expresses transnational embodiment more fully as she describes a conversation with an Egyptian friend who tells her that her entire body transforms as she switches from English to Arabic. He says, “you become a different person with each language.”

Those who express secure transnational cultural embodiments have spent extensive time in two or more countries as children or adolescents. Multiple language acquisitions contribute to their personal characteristics, and they embody transnational simultaneity by expressing themselves through multiple cultural norms. For multilingual and multicultural individuals, those internalized “different persons” mentioned by Kaldas’ friend will have different views of the same events. They will find alternate paths to the same destination. Differing cultural understandings and interpretations live within transnational individuals and are also external to them, simultaneously.

After teaching teenagers and young adults for over twelve years, I have learned by trial and error that teaching writing and teaching Arab Studies requires a scaffolded approach. There is a well-known teaching axiom that says, “We have to start from where students are.” Kaldas’ work is accessible to readers who are new to topics in Arab studies, and to Migration, Diasporic, and Transnational Studies. She offers numerous well-told vignettes that can be launching points for richer discussions on immigration, on intercultural competencies, on the Arab Spring, and of Egyptian and Pan-Arab history. I will use this book to introduce readers to new ideas in Arab and Transnational studies, and I recommend this book to anyone who seeks a rich and enlightening literary experience.

In Her Dream I Spoke Arabic: In a college composition class a few years ago, many worlds came together.

By Jesse Millner

A student from Palestine writes “theological” instead of “theoretical.” I help her understand the difference. She has no thesis. She arrived in America three years ago having learned to write essays that reference poems and the Koran. She loves her family, misses raising tomatoes outside of the village she grew up in. Her main point is the compassion with which she writes about the world, how the very first creature she wrote about was a rabbit, which she drew a picture of in the top right corner of the page in her notebook. Rabbit, she says, in Arabic, contains the first letter of that alphabet. So it’s logical to associate learning alphabets with drawing rabbits. She comes to see me in my office with her work and I tell her how good it is, how her voice is strong and beautiful, how she paints the world with strokes of kindness, how she’s almost making me believe in God again.

Is that the main point of teaching, of writing? To learn about others, to hear their voices, to see the wonder with which they still view our world? A student from Lebanon writes about living in an apartment building where, after the 1988 civil war, they had to use black garbage bags to replace whole sections of the outer walls of the building. During one attack after air raid sirens went off, her grandmother had to be left under a table in their apartment because she couldn’t walk and she was too heavy to carry to the shelter.

Sitting next to the woman from Lebanon is a former American soldier who had served in Iraq. His first essay is about beauty, and he says beauty for him is being allowed to leave his running shoes on the floor in the middle of his apartment, and to throw his clothes on his bed when he gets home. He writes, “For me, chaos is beauty.”

For me, my students are beauty. My writing classes are filled with a chorus of young voices straining against the walls of the five-paragraph essay. They are amazed that they are allowed to write in first person. They are astounded that they can write about issues that are important to them: My Palestinian student’s fifteen-year-old cousin was beaten by Israeli soldiers because he ran from them. His leg was broken. One soldier picked a fresh lemon from her grandfather’s orchard, cut it in half, and then rubbed the bitter fruit into her cousin’s eyes.

On her way to school each day, she had to pass three IDF checkpoints. She writes that the soldiers were young and afraid, that they asked her about her major in college, what she liked to do in her free time. She feels sorry for them. She wishes, as the young men do themselves, that they could go home.

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Her name is Enas. My spellchecker underlines her name in bold red, and I think of the blood spilled in Palestine. Enas writes about the smell of her grandmother’s bread. Enas writes about the beautiful red cheeks of her ripe tomatoes. Enas writes about teaching second grade when she was in college because an Israeli curfew prevented the regular teachers from traveling.

Yesterday after class Enas showed me pictures of her friends and family in Palestine. They lived on a mountain covered with olive trees. Some of the photographs show children playing in snow. Enas tells me she has forty-five cousins. I’m drawn to a particular photograph that shows Enas with her family just before she moved to America. Enas, her aunt, and her mom are all wearing white hijabs. She flips the album and on the next page Enas is wearing a sombrero in Disneyland. I tell her I’m delighted by the juxtaposition. She types “juxtaposition” into her hand-held translating device and I watch the word I know flow into Arabic.

I ask my class to write down their dreams. I tell them not to have coffee or tea when they woke up. I said it was ok to go to the bathroom. Enas writes about a dream where I came to class drinking a beer. Since I’m a recovering alcoholic and haven’t had a drink in twenty-eight years, I was a little bit taken aback. Then she talks about how, in her dream, outside the classroom door she could see images of Palestine: a rope swing that her grandfather had hung from an olive tree branch for her when she was little, a car carrying a bride to her new husband’s home. She could also smell burning wood from an oven where her grandmother baked fresh bread. At the end of the piece she listened to me speaking Arabic. And when she read aloud my words in that other tongue, when I listened to myself speak through her, I heard myself in a different way.

It didn’t matter that I only said, “Enas, pay attention instead of looking out that door.” The words were magic and they still linger like foreign ghosts on my tongue.