UNINTENDED IRONIES

A dialogical monologue by Jihan El-Tahri, asking herself: how did we become what we are? Edited, revised, extended, based on the transcript of a recorded conversation with Annett Busch, Lagos, May 27, 2018, informed by many other conversations before and after. 

All these premises that oblige you to follow a certain path—if you stray from that path, it’s only because you made a conscious decision to not go down that line. For me, the question was about these rigid blocs in which we find ourselves without ever choosing them—and then we perpetuate them. How do we perpetuate this? These formulations of identity that you didn't even choose, didn't even know, and then, suddenly, you become. But you find yourself rejecting because that is not you. It continues even with all the films I have done, because every one of my films is about How did you get there? With all these givens, with all these hopes, with all these dreams... how did you get there, to mess it up so badly? That is what all my films are about.

How did you get there in the first place?

The first beginning is about How you start disentangling? How you come to the recognition: that's what I am? That's what my constitution is. And then you get a second phase of How do I face this? What bits of it do I integrate as a given? As there is nothing I can do about this and what bits i'm going to reject. The recognition of having been brainwashed and what to do about it and what to replace it with! And once you start replacing it with something you suddenly realise that's another form of brainwashing. So where is it that we find the elements of real things that actually belong to you? The elements of identity that you can call yours. Of course answering any of these questions you can not but start from a colonial, independence and post colonial perspective because the shifts that happened, although you might not even have been born, become the deal handed down to you.

I’m going to make this personal, because that's what it is really about.

My first confrontation with all of this was during the so called first Gulf War in August 1990. That was a concrete moment that disrupted my floating around the world, being an international citizen, a citizen of the world, speaking multiple languages being very good at integrating into this and that. I never really needed to think about identity and all of this, it seemed like a waste of time, I was like Let me do things. Then comes the Gulf War and I'm literally stuck between the fire and the frying pan. The Gulf War made the question of identity impossible to ignore. Here I was writing for an American paper about ‘the Arabs’, a culture and a people that I know and I understand and actually its part of me! I’m watching it being destroyed, wiped out without me really understanding what this is about.

Is it about this one man, Saddam Hussein? I mean, what is this really about? Yet I had to sit down and write. The structures of how to write and what makes a good story and who gets to be sourced and who isn't was forcing me, despite myself, in a direction that was getting me feeling extremely uncomfortable without me really knowing why am I getting more and more depressed by the day? I was sinking into desperation without knowing who to talk to or what to put my finger on.

Let me give you an example: A few days into the Gulf war, I get a message from the magazine I was contributing to US News & World Report saying go to Tarabil, the border between Jordan and Iraq, and write a story about how Jordan is smuggling Scud missiles to Iraq overland. Of course my mouth drops and I ask “How can that be possible? It’s impossible to transport them on trucks! If they are sent in pieces then by the time the Iraqi’s put them together, the war would be over, so what’s the point?” The response was: “We have credible sources here in Washington that have confirmed this information. We need you to go write the story with the colour in situ.”

I was a bit baffled, do these guys know what as Scud looks like? Do they know the size of this thing? Anyway, I checked with my local sources who would have first hand information, but I knew that my ‘Arab sources’ would be dismissed no matter how high up the hierarchy. The newsroom had ‘confirmation from Washington’ then obviously I had to go see. I talked to a friend and colleague from the BBC called Allan Little into coming with me. He too thought it was a crazy story but there was no harm checking, at least it would get us out of Amman. We went to the border and for a couple of days inspected every truck talked to every driver and the people camping in the area. Everyone laughed at us—"Smuggling Scuds" became almost a joke. While there we did get details, colour, pictures of all sorts of smuggling across the border—from blankets to cement. But no Scud missiles. I write my piece and of course I write about the smuggling and the parallel economy that grew out of the war et cetera, et cetera... . But obviously I did not mention Scud missiles. When the magazine hits the stands the following week, I get a call from the Jordanian authorities accusing me of fabricating stories about smuggling Scuds. I was shocked since I hadn’t written that into my piece. They showed me the magazine and indeed, under the story I had written there was a Bold Bullet Point—which only experts or journalists know that this means it is a separate story—saying exactly what the Washington sources had said. I tried to explain that I had not written this and explaining the significance of the Bold Bullet Point. I will never forget the look on their faces, especially that they knew that they could do nothing to me... . I was writing for a major US publication after all!

I went to my hotel room feeling like a traitor, but I did not understand whom exactly I was betraying. Once again my head starts spinning with questions... Who on earth am I? This story happens a few days after the beginning of Desert Storm (The war) but I had started asking myself this question after an incident on the first night of the war. I had gone up to the bar of the Amman Intercontinental where all the International Press corps was staying. Most of the foreign correspondents, mostly Americans and Brits, were my friends with whom I had covered many stories in the Middle East over the past years. I was one of them or so I thought. So, I go for a drink and one of the journalists is sitting at the Piano and all the others are making up words of a song to go along with the music. Obviously I don’t remember all the words, but the Chorus was: “Saddam we are going to kick your ass.” I wanted to join in the “fun” and laughter, but I just couldn’t. I felt personally offended. Why? After all, my country had the second largest army poised to bomb Saddam! Was I pro Saddam? Certainly not. However, there was no doubt in my mind that everything happening around me had nothing to do with who I am. The next question was inevitable: Who am I? I guess that is where my journey of questioning my identity starts.

That's act one.

Act two

I leave journalism, completely. I close the door and say that is not what I wanted to do. I need to do something else. Instead of quickly going to get the story, I want to know where all this came from. So I start doing more in depth research, wanting to write, taking time, and the more I was doing that the more I was coming across notions and questions that people either didn't want to answer or before they accepted to answer you needed to show your colours. I had to take sides. And I was faced with this consistent questions of Are you Arab or are you African? And the second question, Are you Muslim or are you Christian? But no, I'm just asking a question about history here, it's not about... And I kept trying to answer, I guess I'm Arab but I'm not just Arab, I'm etc. But I kept feeling I need to take a side, I have to be this or this. THIS or THIS. It’s always about the “or.” Twenty years of my life I was being everything at the same time, I could fit in any context and this question had never even occurred to me. It was the first time in my life I thought about identity, grappling with identity was imposed on me. My whole education was geared towards becoming a citizen of the world— my father was a diplomat—and we fit in everywhere. Then all of a sudden I was becoming the other. But what is that other that I’m supposed to be? It was very delicate, I was at a crossroad.

We are still at the beginning of the 1990s, 1991, 1992. There is Desert Shield, beginning August 1990, that lasted for eleven months; then there was Desert Storm and there was the whole fallout—I had also been covering the PLO and all of this. I started reading, not trying to look for answers as I couldn’t pinpoint the question. There were certain books that for me were saviours, like reading Cheikh Anta Diop. How I came accross Cheikh Anta Diop? I remember I went and picked up a copy at the library. I didn’t buy it. I lived near Beaubourg and I used to spend a lot of time alone in that library. I can't remember who pointed it out but somebody said something about "Egypt being black", which made me look for that book. It was a person completely unconnected to what I was doing, because at that point I didn't want to see any journalists, I didn't even want to see my friends. I'm not very good at depression, but that was the closest I ever got to real depression... . I hadn't yet met these African filmmakers and I remember reading this book and thinking why has no one told me about this? It was Nations nègres et culture by Cheikh Anta Diop. And I remember not buying it because I wanted a copy in English. My French was not good enough. It was good enough for me to understand what was going on but I knew instinctively that I needed to understand every subtlety. The book was talking to me personally—so I wanted an English copy to buy and that's why I kept going back to the library. Anyway.

That's when I kept saying—How come?—this book is talking about Egypt, about Egyptology, about Africa. Out of my country where I did an important part of my schooling, at the American University where I studied African politics, but I studied mainly South Africa. South Africa was going fighting against Apartheid and Nelson Mandela incarnated the battle for freedom, not just in his country but for all of us. So you suddenly start asking all these questions about your actual schooling. I remember, next time I went to Egypt I looked up my curriculum and tried to find out if there had been courses that were offering this, but that I didn't choose and didn't see because I wasn't in that frame of mind. But no. So here my interest in history starts, I was interested in politics but not really connecting that to an interest in history. At the university I was reading the revolutionary stuff, or issues of the Cold War. My studies never really had much to do with Egypt.

... for me that's what university was

So I started questioning my education without knowing that I'm questioning “education” with a capital E. I graduated in 1983, I then wrote my master thesis about the impact of water shortage on the Arab Israeli conflict—at the time no one was talking about it, it was seventeen articles and two books and that was it. Shortly after that I started working at Reuters first as a Photographer then as a journalist. So I was in and out of university from 1980 to 1985. Practically every one of my friends was in a national struggle. Who are my friends? They are either Palestinians, South Africans and Ugandans some of them said they were Ugandans then but later it turned out they're Rwandas—and all this comes to help me later. So I'm sitting among a pool of people who are deep in the heart of liberation struggles. I had one friend who had walked from Ethiopia all the way to Cairo, another friend who then became the editor in chief of a newspaper in Uganda. They were my group, they were all in Cairo. I never sort of questioned it because at the American University in Cairo [AUC] there were a lot of Africans—if you don't go to America or England you go to Cairo. Why? Because 1980 the war in Lebanon had already started so the AUB [American University of Beirut] is already dead, everything happens at AUC. When I am between classes and I am having a coffee I am sitting with a Sudanese person, a Ugandan person, a South African and a Palestinian. What are we talking about? We are revolutionaries, we are leftists I mean all these stupid appellations that you don't quite formulate yet and for me that's what university was.

These were people who were on bursaries—that's how I discover Cairo. I'm the rich kid from Cairo whose Cairo was limited to the island and the beautiful houses and suddenly I meet all these much more interesting people that I've ever met who live in these dingy little flats in downtown. I discover downtown and the history of my downtown through the eyes of these people. I discover buildings, I discover histories of architecture, I discover all this through the eyes of people who see Egypt as a hub of helping them. The offices of the ANC were still open. There were still the offices of the PAC [Pan African Congress]. One of my friends, Samir Dollie, it was funny how this all comes to play much later, his father was at the PAC office. So I knew there was a distinction between the PAC and the ANC just because one guy wouldn't go to that office and the other guy wouldn't go to that office.

Another friend from South Africa who later became South Africa's ambassador to Iran, Ebrahim Saley, the guy who was the intermediator for Pan Am 103, was my school friend. The first minister of information of Rwanda after the genocide was sitting next to me and we were going out for parties—it was a time and it is funny when I say it like this, I feel like I'm a hundred years old. But this is happening in the 1980s, this isn't that long ago. When all this is happening in the 1980s it is a continuum from just a few years ago. 1974 [the independence of Lusophone Africa] was just a few years ago, so we were at the tail end of all these consequences, or the immediate after effect of independence.

We're still receiving it, we're not even questioning it yet, that's where Ayi Kwei Armah's book was really interesting because The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, is that for me: sitting around the table with these guys, the immediate post-independence and you're questioning with them what happened. Why is it not happening? So I'm part of something, but technically I shouldn't be part of it because as an Egyptian we were the first, we were helping everyone else. I should have had a different attitude to all this, but I'm an Egyptian from the diaspora— I grew up abroad, mainly in England—who has never been accepted as a real Egyptian.

I'm part of this outcast group and my questions were actually not very dissimilar. When we take classes, we were the ones looking for the good professors. Everyone else was looking for the good graders. In Gail Gerhart's (1) class we were always three or four maximum because she was a tough grader no one was going to take her class, they'd flunk it. But we wanted to know what this very knowledgable women has to say. No one would dream of judging her, even if , her husband was with the Ford Foundation and at the time, any foreigner was first presumed to be a spy. But with her, it didn’t matter, after all she had just written the book Black Power in South Africa [1979] that was based on all these first hand encounters. Her meetings with Steve Biko, Robert Sobukwe and other outlawed leaders of the Pan African Congress (PAC) and the Black Consiousness Mouvement.

I took three classes with her, and I remember my term paper for the class I took in 1983 was about the introcution of a Tricameral Parliament that would include Coloureds and Indians. That move by the Apartheid government was a last attempt to divide the non-white South Africans in order to obstruct the black population from claiming any rights. All this was happening the same year I was taking that class. The creation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) had just been created bringing together all non-white movements in order to make South Africa ungovernable for the Apartheid regime. Of course we now know that this was the begining of the end of Apartheid and we were studying it as it was happening.

I didn't actually recognise the importance of university until three, four years ago when I turned fifty—which is a bit ironic. I started university really early, I had just turned seventeen. Seventeen is young, so these are my formative years. I was trying to choose stuff that I found fascinating, so I studied things like Russian history, we were only a handful taking that class. I went on a trip to Russia which was like a three month trip. Now that I'm thinking back —and I never thought of this—but I really was one of the outcasts, although nothing in my profile should make me one of the outcasts. There was for example Paul, he was American, gay and with a ponytail down to here, in Cairo of the early 1980s, with flip-flops, and who was a Russia buff slam bang in the middle of the Cold War. An American obsessed with Russia and his main thing was about the love affairs of the Russian aristocracy and how they reflected into politics within czarist Russia and how despite communism it filtered through. I remember the first time that we went with him to Russia he took us down these little streets and said Baroness God-Knows-Who was living here and she was going out with the husband of et cetera. It was fascinating! It was all these things from other worlds that gave layering to history and meaning to things I knew were relevant to what was happening in our part of the world. I was questioning but I wasn't head on.

So, after the Gulf War the question of Who am I? Am I Arab or am I African? Am I supposed to think this or am I supposed to think that? And I felt that everything was going towards one direction, but my heart and my space and what I felt was right was going in the other direction. Suddenly America was the only Super Power and it was “saving the world”. So, 1990, get rid of Saddam Hussein, impose democracy, we're fighting for the good of men, things like that. But inherently for me this Pax Americana that was taking shape where Peace would be imposed under the hegemony of the US and with US conditions and by force if they deemed it necessary, was not where I wanted to be. So I was fleeing from that but going towards what?

All this is happening. All these accumulations and next thing I know I'm in Paris because I've been kicked out of Tunisia. I’ll never really know for sure why I was expelled, but Operation Desert Storm had started and the tension was very high. I initially thought because I was so versed in what was happening within the PLO and they were starting to clearly side with Saddam Hussein. However, years later I was told that my explusion had to do with my contacts and documents I had managed to obtain from the Islamic movement Ennahda. You see, I was the North Africa correspondent for Washington Post and US News & World Report, so yes, 85% of what I was covering was the Palestinians—as the PLO headquarter was in Tunis—but I was also doing Algeria. I covered the riots in 1988, which then led to the municipal elections that the FIS [Islamic Salvation Front] won, followed by the general elections of 1992 which were interrupted thus sparking off a civil war, now called “The dark decade”. The Islamic movement is now the big thing. I had to leave Tunis within a few hours and the first flight leaving was to Paris. So, I ended up in the last place I'd ever thought of living!

Every carpet has been pulled from under my feet and the only thing left for me is to go back to daddy. Which was the one thing I was not going to do. I've just spent an entire lifetime battling for the space, for the freedom, for I don't want your name, I don't want your money etc etc. I'm not now going to leave this aside and go say daddy, I’ve failed. It would have been the end of me. I lived in an eleven square meter room, luckily I'm not too tall, but like I'm fat so you could barely fit into that room. I didn't have money, I didn't have friends, I was smoking heavily, but I didn't have the money to buy the cigarettes. I'd collect all the yellow pieces and go and ask What is the cheapest thing you have? and of course Gauloises was the cheapest thing. So I lived on Gauloises for a long time. I'd broken all relations with all the different—the press—I didn't care who it was, I'm not writing for anyone, I'm not doing anything, because I don't know what that deal is... . All I know is I don't want to be part of this. And I remember the covers—when you're walking on the streets in Paris, you have these poles that have the covers of the magazines and sentences like, Islam is the menace. Suddenly this Islam thing was a big deal and of course I knew about the growing Islamism because I had covered all of this in Egypt—the Musilm Brotherhood— and Algeria, so all this was part of my world, but seeing it encroach onto my new space as the menace... . For the western world made you feel that being Arab was problematic, now being Moslem had also become problematic. All this combines to put me in a space of okay, you gotta sit down and define what you want to be and how you're going to do this. Because none of these lineages, these blood things, all these criteria that everybody is using is not working for me because I've not lived in any country long enough. My parents are the typical kind of secular elite that has blood from everywhere. So none of this was going to work for me and that's where I decided, I decided, that my identity is primarily as an Egyptian, my context is that of Africa. So I'm primarily an African, then an Egyptian and then you can call me Arab and then you can call me Muslim and then all the tributaries of all of that.

U-Turn towards Africa

So that decision to shift my space, in many ways, was primarily Cheikh Anta Diop's book because it allowed me to combine the two. I found an articulation of how to reintegrate myself into that broken narrative. Because there was an intention to take me out of this narrative, out of the space called Africa, by taking Egypt out from Africa, intellectually and politically—Diop’s argument that the colonial powers intentionally detached Egypt from the Continent in order to have the argument of civilising the barbarian. The argument made sense to me and once I understood its implications I was not gonna let that happen. Besides, destiny kept pushing me down that road. In January 1994 a friend invited me to go to the Louvre for the openning of an exhibition titled Egyptomania, every painting, every piece of furniture and every statue seemed to be screaming out to me you see Cheikh Anta Diop is right! The paintings from the Empire period inserted French Kings into Pharaonic settings, the Pharaonic statues had European features and even the arm chairs had the Sphinx as hand rests. It felt soo weird and I was angry at first but then I started laughing...something in that exhibition combined with what I had been reading suddenly gave me a kind of difinitive clariy.

I was not gonna be the tool of that colonial desire to divide and rule, to accept that Egypt be severed from its natural context in order to serve the colonial design. So, I did a determined U-turn and moved all my attention towards discovering ‘Africa’.

Until you come now—fast-forward—I don't even know how to call it, a recognised film-maker —it's not even the right word. An acclaimed film-maker—all these words are stupid because they don't mean anything. Because it didn't give me more space, it didn't give me more anything. Every time I start a new project I start from zero. Every time it was about a different African country, I'd have to justify why I, now I’m seen as the “white girl”, can legitimately question “our” issues and then I'll pull out my Cheikh Anta Diop, and I pull out this and that to claim that space. It was an eternal struggle. I didn't have a place at the table, but they didn't mind me sitting in the back row, where I could whisper something into someone's ear something that they could say. That was allowed. 

And for a while I was happy with that because I was still not understanding the lay of the land. And then you get to the stage where I make a film that like everyone can't sort of, but she's that girl we all know—why did we not pay attention, why did we not see that? Just like, oh that little thing knows how to do something and suddenly the space on the table was opened up but when it came to serving food you weren't served at the same time. I'm just giving an illustration. Let us eat first then you will eat. Alongside us, but not with us.

So all this, I guess I'm just easing into this making of space. And as a female, and I think that's important, my years as a photojournalist when I was very young and completely unseen, I mean I would be standing there, I've always been round and fat so I take space. But why is it that people don't see me and can just talk over my head? Of course it's a boys club and of course some would say it's more pronounced in the African context, but that's bullshit. All these male foreign correspondents and photographers, 99.9% white WASPS, were doing the exact same thing, I'd be sitting at the table and they'd come take over that table I'm sitting at, not even see my existence and start talking about the most intimate private details as if I had no ears or eyes. The biggest lesson I learned from being the fly on the wall in the early years is that men in professional situations can pretend that the females that are doing the same job are “equal colleagues” but they don’t truely believe that. They consistently use their ultimate weapon—which is sleeping with them—to justify dismissing their professionalism and claim that they only got to where they are at in their career by sleeping around with influential men. I was horrified by the way these foreign correspondants openly spoke about their female colleagues as though they are objects and I vowed to my self there and then that I would never ever put myself in that situation.

Fast forward again to the African context, here I was now going to every FESPACO. Now I'm going to the guild meetings in Paris, now I'm actually being seen, now I actually have an office that is big enough in Ménilmontant where people are starting to look for offices. I end up sharing an office with Abderrahmane Sissako who is producing Mahamat Saleh Haroun [Abouna, 2002] and so the office I'm sitting in, that I am actually paying part of the rent for, becomes the hub. I shared the office with Abderrahmane, Haroun, Idrissou Mora-Kpai, it is the hub for African filmmakers where everybody comes. So I was at the centre, included but at the same time dismissed, I end up going to dinner every night with the boys. [...]

So I was at the centre and getting clear insight of the configurations and of alliances and things I wasn't even aware were happening. But I was still the only clear skinned face who little by little was acquiring more knowledge than they had about the continent, so when somebody wanted to do something about the Congo—Zeka Laplaine included, Zeka who is half Angolan and half Congolese, but he hadn't lived in the Congo, he'd say Have you got a fixer in the Congo? Do you know someone in Rwanda? So I became part of the African configuration but still not accepted as...a full ‘African’—I don't think I ever will be accepted. But to come back to the word sub-Saharan.

Just as we're doing collective talks and now I'm thinking I'm part of the guild, because you always hope to be part of something and you stand up and call for this and call for that and then it comes to financing, Oh no but you can't apply. Why can't I apply? Because you're not sub-Saharan. And suddenly the funding lines, the invitations, everybody, absolutely everybody will get invited to Cannes for the “Cinema of the South” pavilion, but I wouldn't. Why am I not invited? By this time I've probably done more films than them, all about the continent, I’m from the continent, so Why? Because you're not sub-Saharan.

So little by little you get out of the way, the gender thing. Then you get out of the way, the colour thing and the Francophone / Anglophone thing. Then you sort of, by elimination you get all of these things out of the way and then you realise that the problem of divisions is so deep... . At some point I was left with this sub-Saharan thing. So I decided let me look at what this sub-Saharan thing is. And of course, we always take for granted that these divisive demarcations are part of the colonial residue. But from all the reading that I've always been doing I didn't seem to recall the word sub-Saharan sticking to my brain as a concept as such. So I started going back. In French we would say j'ai essayé de dérouler la pelote, so it is like this thread... And then I came again, but this isn't a word that comes from colonial terminology. So now why are all these Africans around me claiming themselves as sub- Saharan. When did these divisions happen? How did these divisions happen? And how did my buddies now, because some of them are my buddies, how did they claim this new identity to become their main identity? And how did that main identity become this collective thing?

So the more I looked into that the more I got into area studies. So I start looking at areas and then names kept popping up. Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami—I studied their books as part of my curriculum, they came to our university and were treated as semi gods. These were the most celebrated scholars in the world after all. Huntington had already started talking about his concept regarding the clash of civilizations and how the new confrontation will no longer be between Captialism and Communism but rather between Islam and the West. Now we know he was right or did he already know something about what was to come? His book Clash of Civilizations was published shortly after the Gulf War if I remember correctly. Fouad Ajami was Lebanese and his book The Arab Predicament reframes the intellectual, political and social crisis in the Arab World seen through the prism of the 1967 defeat. That would obviously strike a chord with anyone living in Cairo. 

So all these stars that were the stars of that world of politics that taught me politics, that made me know all these things. I read these book avidly and they all made sense to me. I guess they played on the right chords since all of us as young rebels were questioning What Went Wrong and Why? But at that age I was not really able to read between the lines. I did not see until much later that I had adopted their analysis without questioning its vantage point nor its vested interests.

These names keep popping up in connection to Area Studies. And then I start thinking, why are they investing $350,000,000 annually to create this discipline throughout American universities. What is the aim? What is the ultimate goal of this? It is a lot of money at the time and this having been retained as the best methodology to think up a new world order which then includes reacting to African independences—I could not see the connection.

[...]

How do we address it ?

I guess I have to accept that in my head I am both the West and the South, just like I am both Arab and African and I claim these spaces because I can't be anything else. Where I'm at now is the combining. It is not the either or, it is the and. I want the and, because you have to trust that my brain is as good as yours and I am capable of being both and being really both. I'm not anyone's tool but I cannot unlearn English to be something else. But I can use that English to go in the direction that will add on to my Arabic. So it's this combining. And when we were talking about linear narratives and restricting linear narrative to if you do that then you are from this side. I am saying fuck you. I'll do a linear narrative if I want to. And if with your blinkers, blinders, want to put me into that narrative based simply on that linearity, that is your problem. If you look at the form that I'm using alongside content, alongside the tools, alongside where it's going you're gonna know that's not where I'm going. So your frameworks of references don't have to apply to me. I'm going to pick and choose what I want to pick and choose because actually, unfortunately for you, not you, what you guys don't understand, you guys being the undermining other, is along these years most Africans have acquired skills much much higher and bigger than yours.

Each one of us Africans speaks multiple languages, can actually do a whole thing outside of your parameters as well as inside of your parameters. Each one of us Africans—be it from Togo to Bahir Dar—has at his disposal our own indigenous knowledge as well as—because of the internet—all the western knowledge too. We have access to your knowledge but you don't have access to ours. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that my belief in the next generation is—we're talking about a level playing field because what we are addressing is still the world order that exists today, that's not what's going to be existing in the future. It is crumbling in front of our eyes. So I believe that area studies, and what I'm trying to figure out with area studies for me, is just how do we address it. It's not, how do I break it down, because I can't. Replace it with what? I can't un-be who I am. But how do I expose that trajectory, so others go into it with their eyes wide open... . I wish I had read Ayi Kwei Armah’s Eloquence of the Scribe earlier. You know that Ayi Kwei Armah was hand picked out of his school as part of the early scolarships for Area Studies but he was bright enough to understand how he was being manipulated. He left his last semester as Harvard and went to Cuba and Algiers to join the struggle. Another unintended irony!!

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