Favorite compliment
"You're never here, never present."
Most common critique
After years exiled in suburbia, I went to college to leave - to play the system and consequently gain exposure to all that I could absorb. Eight countries and three years of an undergraduate degree later, here I am, writing from Southern Africa, compliments of Furman University. Why would I stay in Greenville, South Carolina when I could take the same class in Southern Africa?
I surrender to a state of carpe annum because it is the only way I can justify my education. It is how I convince myself not to leave it all behind and just start doing some form of tangible work - building a school, monitoring elections, coordinating logistics for a safe house. When my American passport can stop bullets and bombs I need an impressive reason to play with ideas.
I consciously choose to fight back by paying tuition to learn about poverty. Each year, class, and country makes me more dangerous, more informed. Surely it is a crime to consume knowledge and not take a side! We should all be branded radicals after exposure to an education from the margins. After learning from the oppressed, neutrality should no longer be a viable option; there should be a burden to provoke the status quo. Systemic oppression can only be maintained through ignorance, dependent on apathetic consumption. So, why not ask who is making our clothes or preparing our food?
Each textbook is a weapon. I feel more powerful with each new idea and speaker. I can feel the momentum building as we imagine a different, just world. I use my privilege to "arm my voice" with words, not weapons. I continue to stay in the tower of academia in honor my brothers and sisters disappeared from their classrooms for wanting a liberating pedagogy. In honor of them, I refuse to play ideological dress up. I will not put on and take off ideas as they become fashionable. If students living under repressive governments are dying for what they believe in, I will justify every opinion I proscribe.
_________
Textbooks used in-country are the following:
The Invisible Cure
Sickness and Wealth
Mandela's Children
In addition, we have a course reader with excerpts from books such as:
White Man's Burden
The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients
4 comments:
inspiring post ali! i wonder about this constantly - what the hell am I doing reading all these books and writing an article about NGOs that no one is going to read? but maybe if we can somehow use this knowledge to slowly change the way people think outside academia...
and i totally agree - I simply don't understand someone (including many of my friends and SO many grizzled old NGO vets I meet) can remain so neutral or indifferent to the global system after seeing it at the edge of the empire in a developing country.
ali - you continue to inspire me with your words. can't wait to read more.
Sometimes, I forget that I know the writer of these words. There is such force in the way you write, Ali. I'm excited to see the path you follow through your time in southern Africa and how you look at the end of it all.
oh and ps, i just read sickness and wealth for a global health class - it's fantastic! (and edited by some global health professors here at the UW)
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