Writing Identity in Three Genres: Teaching Creative Writing at the American University in Dubai By Jillian Schedneck

Writing Identity in Three Genres: Teaching Creative Writing
at the American University in Dubai By Jillian Schedneck

“Miss, I’m Saudi,” Sarah began, leaning forward in her desk as if explaining something essential about her role in this class. “So, you know, there’s a lot to write about.” The class, seated in a circle, erupted in laughter while Sarah, her long, dark curls spilling around her face, chuckled in surprise. I had asked my creative writing students at the American University in Dubai to be prepared to share the topics for their personal essays, focusing on particular stories and scenes, but Sarah assumed the simple fact of her origin would be enough to impress the American teacher. I asked her to be more specific. “Well,” she considered, “I could write about women not being allowed to drive.” Alia and Basil slumped in their seats. We had heard that before. “The assignment is to write about you.” I said. “Your relationship to Riyadh, how it shaped you.” “It’s complicated…but I’ll think of something.” I continued around the circle, hearing from Sabiha, a Tanzanian with Indian ancestry who never felt she truly belonged to North Africa like those who could trace their lineage for generations. Farah told the class that she left Azerbaijan for Dubai at nine and felt at home in neither place. Karla was comfortable anywhere but her native Philippines. Lama, who was Lebanese, grew up in a rural, conservative town in the western region of Abu Dhabi, neighboring emirate of Dubai, and felt completely alienated from her peers and surroundings. Basil, brought up in America, resented his parents and himself for their lack of involvement in the Palestinian cause. With Dubai’s nearly eighty five percent foreign-born population, I shouldn’t have been surprised that almost all of my fifteen creative writing students had complicated relationships with their pasts, native countries and subsequent jumbled identities. While “Who am I?” is a question asked by most college students of any background, Dubai’s unique position helped bring such concerns to the forefront, particularly in a creative writing class where one’s idiosyncratic worldview inevitably rises to the surface. You can feel alienated anywhere, but in Dubai, the land of transient expatriates and guest workers, the odds increase. The small native population was often accused of closing itself off from the international foreign majority. Expatriates often complained that there was no dominant Dubai culture in which to assimilate. The city also lacked recognizable history – there was little besides ultra-modern shopping malls and shimmering towers to allow for any kind of cultural identification. Almost everyone I met outside of university seemed to exist in two places at once: Dubai, the city of money, comfort and superficial concerns, and Cairo, Beirut or Montreal, the cities of their daydreams and idyllic memories. All of this made it difficult for my students to feel rooted anywhere. The rest of the class came from India, Pakistan, Finland and Nigeria; some had been born in Dubai, and others arrived recently to attend university. And while these were the privileged ones (the university parking lot resembled a car show, with Hummers, Range Rovers and Escalades) I had to remember that wealth didn’t always mean finding an easy place in this world. “This is great material,” I told the class. “You’ve also brought up some really big and complicated issues. So the question is: how will you write about it all in just a few weeks?” I teased. The students chuckled but no one ventured an answer. Farah and Marwa stared at me wide-eyed, pens poised, waiting to write down the magic answer. Sabiha folded her hands neatly, ready to hear my sage advice. Far from challenging me, a twenty-eight year old American only a year-and-a-half out of graduate school, they swiftly handed over total control of their essays. “You have to figure out how to write your own stories. But I will give you some advice: write in scenes, zoom in on important details and images and try to show your emotions through actions and setting.” This was not the answer they were hoping for. I watched their frustrated faces brainstorming ideas for scenes that might highlight some of their complicated relationships to the places they called home. In my notebook, I wrote about my own national identity – fourth generation American with Old World roots from the Ukraine, Sweden, Russia and Austria. I had no ties to any of these countries, languages or histories, and I felt unbelievably plain and stable compared to these students. Growing up in New Jersey, I envied my first generation Indian, Korean, Filipino and Spanish girlfriends who easily floated between the vast, white world – the one of their accents and clothes and tastes – and that other world their faces called up. I wrote about dancing at my friend Sonya’s sister’s wedding, listening to Teresa’s father tell the story of meeting her mother during the Korean War, eating tapas and learning Spanish words with Melissa and her mother. I saw it was a lovely thing to possess layers of belonging and identity, to hold two worlds at once. Yet America, with its welcoming dominant culture and strong ethnic communities, seemed to allow for a much easier blending of identities. With each genre we encountered, it was clear that, far from feeling at ease in two places and cultures, my students worried about belonging nowhere. They constantly reminded me that their identities were terribly in flux and that their own places in this world, any sense of rootedness, teetered on the precarious. Creative Nonfiction During the first week of class, I handed out the introduction to Amin Maalouf’s In The Name of Identity. An award winning novelist who lived half his life in Lebanon and half in France, Maalouf responded to the question of which identity he considered most authentic by writing: “What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself?” He worried over humanity’s default need to locate a fundamental truth or essential identity, a hardened core of allegiance presented at birth that cannot be altered by later experience. Yet only when we are welcomed to claim all pieces of our identity – national, regional, religious – can we begin to act as bridges between cultures rather than instigators of prejudice and exclusion. When we discussed the short essay in relation to their own experiences, my students also expressed dissatisfaction as they recalled the many times they had been asked where their true allegiances lie. They too had trouble figuring out if they felt more affinity for Pakistan or Dubai, Gulf Arabs or Levantine Arabs, English or Hindi or Arabic. Lama raised her hand and said, “Honestly, when I’m asked if I feel more Lebanese or Jordanian or UAE, I want to say, ‘I’m from Mars!’” Alia said, “I want to tell people that I feel a part of the multicultural community of Dubai, but I think people will look at me funny. How is that any kind of real belonging?” “Can it be?” I asked. They looked at me skeptically. For Alia and other expatriates who’ve grown up in Dubai, it isn’t possible to become a UAE citizen; only those of native local origin hold Emirati passports. Surprisingly, Sharina – the only Emirati in the class – shared her classmate’s confusion over who she was and how to answer the question of her primary allegiance: “There are two kinds of Emiratis, Miss, Arab Emiratis and Ajami Emiratis, who have Persian roots because their great grandfathers settled here from Iran hundreds of years ago. So there is a split there – are you more Persian or more Arab? The Persian Emiratis try to hide their Iranian roots because now it is seen as better, more authentic, to be Arab. I am Arab and people sometimes ask me if I feel more Bedouin or “modern,” because I go to school here and speak English more easily than Arabic. You can never be both.” I asked the class if they thought creative writing could help people understand these issues, and see that no one should have to choose a single identity, but can claim every influence. Some nodded weakly, others more vigorously. I made my final plea. “I think it’s an important step. Readers need your essays, stories and poems. They need to see the world from your points of view.” Our time was up; I handed back their weekly assignments about an important friendship and asked to speak to Sharina after class. In her essay, she had written: “In an Emirati girl’s life her priorities are already set for her: reputation, religion and family. And as it turned out, it is bad for my reputation to be seen with a guy, let alone be his friend.” Her essay tells the story of her relationship with Yusuf, another Emirati student. Their mutual friends wouldn’t believe they weren’t romantically involved. Her mother had even told Sharina that friendship between opposite sexes wasn’t possible. In order to preserve her reputation, she had to stop meeting with him outside of class. I had often spotted Sharina and Yusuf in the Starbucks next to my office. He had been in my composition course the previous semester and I knew him to be earnest and quite sweet. Slight with shaggy hair, he made you think of the word boy rather than man. Sharina, on the other hand, was forthright and spirited, unlike many local women I had taught. While a small distinction between her and many of the other local girls in Dubai, the way Sharina wore her sheyla, or headscarf, spoke volumes about her personality and influences. She covered her whole head and forehead so not a peek of hair was exposed. Almost all the other local girls on campus wore drastic side parts so that a black sweep of bangs crossed their exposed foreheads with their sheylas tipped back several inches. This small difference implied that Sharina was more conservative than the other girls, and it also suggested that she wasn’t interested in following any trends. I could see why Yusuf was drawn to her. As a former resident of the more conservative emirate of Abu Dhabi, where separate seating sections for women and families in restaurants was the norm, I was delighted to see Emirati men and women sitting together on the comfy couches in the university Starbucks, watching Arabic music videos and sipping lattes. Because I had known young women in Abu Dhabi who suffered because of this strict separation of the sexes, I was always glad to see Sharina and Yusuf together. A week before, I had spotted them sitting on a bench outside the Art Building, their heads bent in intimacy – I smiled once again at the pair they made. Yet in Sharina’s essay I learned this had been the moment when she told Yusuf they could no longer be friends. She wrote: “I was angry at our society. But I have accepted and embraced who I am and where I come from, along with the baggage and issues that come with my identity.” Somehow, I didn’t quite believe it. Sharina’s conservative culture was at odds her modern identity, shaped by the western attitudes of Dubai and this American university. I handed Sharina her essay and told her that I knew Yusuf, and had often seen them together. I wanted her to know I was on her side, for whatever it was worth, and that she could explore this story further in her longer essay, highlighting the pull and push between the traditional and more liberal cultures that Dubai was asking its youth to navigate. But she just shrugged, resigned to their failed friendship. Then she turned to me, smiling at the thought of Yusuf, and said, “Yusuf’s Ajami. You can tell by his nose.” The class wrote several drafts of their essays, but as always in an introductory course, there wasn’t enough time to truly bring them through to a more satisfying completion of their stories, to tease out those themes in a more nuanced narrative. They had taken a huge step, though, in determining their particular split between cultures, landscapes, histories and languages, and how all of this had shaped them. Their essays were filled with the strangeness of returning to the lands of their national origins for funerals or annual summer visits. They wrote of pungent spices and bright colors, of parents who asked them to understand their roots in a matter of weeks and cousins who felt at ease in the chaotic streets of Karachi or Beirut. Sarah wrote of being reprimanded by the mutaween religious police for laughing too loudly in a Riyadh Starbucks. She recalled her grade school friend who suddenly ended their friendship because they weren’t from the same tribe. These were the things that kept Sarah at a distance from Riyadh, yet the resounding call to prayer, and the desert, wilder and vaster than in Dubai, pulled her back. Sabiha wrote of visiting India and feeling completely overwhelmed by the land of her ancestors. Many wrote of their relief upon returning to familiar Dubai, but it wasn’t quite home either. Even Sharina wrote about feeling like a stranger in her own house. Pale and skinny as a child, her sisters thought she appeared translucent, a ghost, and her solitary behavior didn’t help. My students’ essays were so full of this alienation that I started to worry their only impetus for picking up a pen was to describe their state of isolation. Then I read Karla’s essay on her latest visit to the Philippines. She concluded with: “And now there’s a new side to me that’s in Dubai. Since everyone is from different cultures here, there’s more freedom to just be a mix of everything you’ve come across.” Poetry One of the first poems I gave my Dubai students was called “A Place With Promise.” Through vivid images, poet Maggie Anderson describes her conflicted relationship to her home state, West Virginia. Anderson wished the landscape could start over, that she could “wash the slag dust from the leaves / of sycamore and make them green.” To ask this place, “shaped by hills / and rivers, by poverty and coal,” to begin again and become a place with promise once more. I asked my students to write about their place with promise. Which landscape or memory would they hold in their arms if they could? I wanted their writing to move beyond national boundaries and more deeply reflect a sense of place, evoking wind-swept dunes and brick houses, dim hallways and moonlight, shadows on coral stone houses. Farah wrote about Dubai, and I immediately understood how the city could fit under the title “A Place With Promise.” While we all felt the drag of it sometimes – the traffic, lack of cultural outlets, the people we had come to love always arriving and then leaving – we needed to be reminded of its promise, the good intentions of meritocracy and safety, a haven for the bruised Middle East. I suggested they use one of Anderson’s lines as a starting point: “I keep trying to say what I notice here / that’s beautiful.” Farah wrote about the dhow boats along the old Creek downtown, the now iconic buildings she had seen rising from the sand, the concrete stumps of the new subway systems, of oil and sheikhs, long flowing robes of authority and majesty. I encouraged her to write more on this theme for her poetry portfolio. When Farah told me on the first day of class that she was from Azerbaijan, I mentally thanked my friend and colleague who had recently handed me the novel “Ali and Nino.” This novel’s setting is in Azerbaijan, a country at the crossroads of the East and West. I had never heard of the former Soviet Union country before the book entered my hands. If I had not serendipitously been given that novel, I might have asked Farah where she was really from, told her to stop imagining a country that didn’t exist because we weren’t writing fiction yet – that’s how strange the name Azerbaijan sounded to me. Fortuitously prepared for our introduction, I mentioned “Ali and Nino,” the national book of her homeland, and became Farah’s instant hero, someone sympathetic to her country and identity plight. Whenever I saw Farah I entered the world of Ali and Nino, glimpsed the old walls of capital Baku. I pictured her as Nino, even though that character came from the neighboring country of Georgia. Farah’s delicate face, big eyes and lithe body created the perfect female protagonist in my imagination. But Farah’s life had not been filled with the trials of loving the mischievous, noble, warrior Ali. Farah’s mother had a severe nervous breakdown when her daughter was five, and they were estranged for three years. No one had told Farah where her mother had gone; she simply appeared again when Farah was nine, right after they moved to Dubai. Azerbaijan became the place of her mother’s mysterious illness, and Dubai her cure. Farah had written her essay about visits to Baku, where she didn’t speak the language or share the same values as the girls her age. Like Dubai, Baku had become an oil-rich city, but something was different between the two: in Baku she was expected to fit in, and in Dubai no one quite did. After class, Farah asked, “Miss, where are you from?” I must have blushed. Six weeks into the semester and I hadn’t even told them I was American? Did I think it was written on my forehead? When I said I had grown up near New York, she nodded in approval. “We thought you might be Canadian.” She collected her Mark Jacobs purse and turned back to face me. “It’s still exotic to us, you know, to be American.” This surprised me. I had assumed that our collective cache was long over since 9/11. To me, exotic meant attraction to the unknown, yet my culture was all around them, especially in this American university. “That is good to know,” I said. Perhaps Farah thought it exotic that I had specifically chosen Dubai because of its great mix of cultures. Unlike so many of my students, who seemed adrift here, my residence was a matter of intention rather than circumstance. Before they handed in their final drafts, I asked my students to bring in poems from their country’s authors. I encouraged them to read aloud in their native languages, which received unanimously averse reactions. But once they got their tongues around speaking in a language not everyone understood, once they realized that the subjects their ancestors cared about were the same for all of us today – love, acceptance, mortality – their voices opened up and rang with syllables that were undecipherable to me. Somehow I understood. Marwa read Khalil Gibran’s “You Have Your Lebanon and I Have My Lebanon.” As an American exile, Gibran had a distanced and sympathetic perspective on his homeland. This sentiment resonated with many students as Marwa read, “You have your Lebanon and its dilemma. I have my Lebanon and its beauty.” In Gibran’s Lebanon, exiles “migrate with nothing but courage in their hearts and strength in their arms but who return with wealth in their hands and a wreath of glory upon their heads. / They are the victorious wherever they go and loved and respected wherever they settle.” The children of his Lebanon are “the lamps that cannot be snuffed by the wind and the salt which remains unspoiled through the ages.” Since my students were reading from their country’s literature, I read to them from mine. My choice? “Two Countries” by Naomi Shihab Nye: “Skin remembers how long the years grow / …it remembers being alone and thanks something larger / that there are travelers, that people go places / larger than themselves.” After reading works from their home countries, Sabiha and Rhonda read poems from the cultures they felt the most affinity for, places that had nothing to do with their native origins: Portugal and Italy.   “I don’t know why, Miss, but I felt so good in Lisbon,” Sabiha said.
“Sometimes places find you,” I said. In her final poems, Farah included a meditation on life in Dubai. When I read, “I remember when all you could see for miles were the rolling desert dunes,” I recognized her place with promise. She would scrub the city clean with piles of sand until it shimmered with new hope like the sparkle in her mother’s eyes when she finally woke from her delirium and reunited with her daughter. Fiction All the local newspapers were following the case of Qasm and his onyx stone. An old man from Yemen, Qasm had come to Dubai to sell his precious stones at a booth in Global Village, a two month long fair showcasing elaborate pavilions with jewelry, textiles and sweets from twenty-two different countries. The centerpiece of Qasm’s collection was his onyx, which he claimed made its wearer impervious to bullets. Back in Yemen, he claimed he had tied the onyx around his sheep and shot a bullet at her four times; she survived without a trace of injury. Potential buyers were treated to this story and shown the primitive shape of a gun etched into the stone as further proof of its reliability. The advertised price was over four hundred million dollars. The police soon arrested Qasm for attempted swindling. At his trial, Qasm announced that he wanted the chance to prove his stone’s magical powers, and asked to wear the onyx while standing before a firing squad. Qasm’s lawyer argued that if his client wasn’t able to prove his stone’s power, then the case must be declared a mistrial. Qasm pleaded, “I am willing to prove to the world that it's a bulletproof onyx stone. I am ready to face a death sentence if that’s what it will take me to prove that the stone is doubtlessly bulletproof. I didn’t con anybody’s money, but the police tricked me and filed a malicious case against me.” The court, of course, did not allow Qasm to test his stone. He was sentenced to six months in jail followed by deportation. I handed my students copies of one of the several newspaper articles on Qasm’s case and gave them their assignment: write a short story from Qasm’s perspective. Did he really believe in his magical stone? They grumbled. I agreed the assignment would be challenging. But I wanted them to write from a totally different perspective, and Qasm was about as far from their identities as they could get. The article and assignment would also allow them to see Dubai through a different lens, one where people believed in charms and amulets, spells and incantations – things my cosmopolitan students espoused as old world. I wanted to learn how they would grapple with this modern/pre-modern split within Dubai. Forced to see Dubai with fresh eyes, as a place of scams and rubes rather than emptiness and longing, they wrote about sleepy villages and big city lights, cops and swindlers and shady lawyers, all within the carnival atmosphere of Global Village. Some gave Qasm sharp manipulation techniques and armed him with deliberate intent to scam gullible tourists. Others rendered him desperately in need of money, his ruse his only hope for survival. Only Lama wrote from the perspective of a Qasm who truly believed in his stone’s power and was willing to risk his life to prove it. In Lama’s version, Qasm did stand before the firing range. When shot, his onyx slipped off his neck. Qasm floated high above the city, watching the people below, bound by gravity and circumstance and denied the pleasure of being uplifted by stones and magic. For the final short story assignments, I asked my Dubai students to write from the perspective of a different gender, nationality or age group. Karla chose to write about Donald, a schizophrenic. By the end of the piece, her protagonist pities the nurse who berates him for living in two worlds at once. She wrote: “My dear Ms. Greta doesn’t understand. That room where I live is not empty. It is filled with many things, things that only I can touch with my head. Poor, poor Ms. Greta. So unsatisfied, so lonely, so… normal.” Besides being incredibly funny, her story revealed something important to her classmates: it would be a shame to be “normal” and to claim only one identity. Her story showed the great advantage of bouncing between two or three identities, welcomed in all rooms, countries and worlds. On the last day of classes, Sharina brought the final draft of her story to my office with Yusuf in tow. I had sensed that their separation wouldn’t last. Yusuf waved from the doorway as Sharina approached my desk, handed me her story, and whispered, “Does my sheyla look ok?” She wore a white headscarf instead of the standard black. Her skin looked softer, her brown eyes shone brighter. I told her she looked beautiful. She smiled and joined Yusuf in the hallway – they were probably on their way to Starbucks. Sharina’s story was about a young Emirati man named Zayed, who is on vacation with his mother and sister in the east coast of the country. At night, he ventures from their rustic resort complex and enters Chalet 19, a den of impropriety. Women, naked except for veils, dance luridly while men throw money at their feet. The next day, Zayed tries to rationalize his behavior by telling himself that he didn’t really lose control or truly enjoy that scene. As he starts a fire to cook for his mother and sister, his white headdress, called a ghetra, falls into the flames. Sharine wrote: “I sat slightly panicked and realized that I had no other choice but to watch helplessly as my ghetra became fuel for this growing flame, soon to be nothing more than just ashes by daytime, dragged away by that salty sea breeze my mother had so longed for.” Like the burning ghetra and her black sheyla, I saw that Sharina and all of my creative writing students that semester had lifted off the old and, however painfully or unwittingly, opened up to something new.
Jillian Schedneck taught Literature and Creative Writing at the American University in Dubai for the 2007-2008 academic year. In 2006 she was a professor at Abu Dhabi University. Jillian holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from West Virginia University. She is currently working on a travel memoir about her experiences in the United Arab Emirates titled Abu Dhabi Days, Dubai Nights. Her creative work has been published in literary journals such as The Common Review, Brevity, and Fourth River.
“Writing Identity in Three Genres” was previously published in Milspeak: Warriors, Veterans, Family and Friends Writing the Military Experience
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