Bayan Haddad The Electronic
Intifada 12 August 2016
Romeo and Juliet in Palestine
recounts the five months that Bristol University lecturer Tom Sperlinger
spent teaching English literature at a Palestinian university in the occupied
West Bank.
The memoir, the author’s debut
book, is made up of 13 episodic chapters narrating his encounters with students
and faculty at Al-Quds University and his grappling with its political and
social environment.
Sperlinger is mainly concerned
with pedagogical strategies to effectively teach Palestinian students living
under Israeli occupation. He finds that his experience with the British
education system does not necessarily lend itself to its Palestinian
counterpart, so he embarks on a journey to expand his outlook to accommodate
the needs of his students in Abu Dis.
The challenges Sperlinger
faces are those that many local lecturers can relate to: small rooms with a
large number of students and pupils’ dependence on rote memorization as opposed
to critical thinking.
Sperlinger also encounters
skepticism about the importance of literature and its relevance to learning the
English language. He attempts to cut through this by asking his students to
reflect upon their experiences in relation to works by authors ranging from
Kafka to Malcolm X.
Sperlinger has his students
produce their own versions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. One pupil imagines
the Montagues to be a Palestinian family and the Capulets as Israeli, and
wonders if they would ever join hands. Another sets the love story between a
Palestinian holder of a West Bank ID card and another with a Jerusalem ID — an
inextricable situation lived by many under Israel’s regime of movement
restrictions.
The result is that not only
are the students more engaged with the literature, but Sperlinger also has a
better understanding of how political and cultural realities shape his
students’ lives.
Sperlinger finds that it is
impossible to avoid the reality of the Israeli occupation, which impacts his
students in complex and profound ways. Indeed, the first thing one sees from
the main gate at Al-Quds University is Israel’s massive concrete wall severing
the town from Jerusalem.
“If you stand on the road,
Jerusalem appears as a thin line, with the dome of the al-Aqsa mosque at its
center, caught between the horizon above and the wall below,” the author
writes.
“The city should be a
20-minute drive away, but it takes students who live there up to an hour and a
half to get to class,” he adds.
Sperlinger — with a certain
level of discomfort, given that his grandparents on his father’s side were
committed Zionists — listens to his students describe their experiences with
the occupation that is “playing havoc with their lives, one way or another.”
He does not divulge his own
family background to his students, finding that he “could not connect Israel’s
behavior with the Jewish traditions” of social justice and alleviating the
suffering of others. He also fears that doing so would change his relationship
with his students: “It would mean making a claim on them — asking them to
acknowledge my family’s history, for example — before I had understood or
acknowledged their situation, before I knew them.”
This journey to understand is
the ultimate purpose of the book. Early on, Sperlinger states that his
narrative is about “the particular students and colleagues I encountered and is
not intended as a general account of life in Palestine or at the university.”
He provides his readers with enough historical context while allowing them to
come to an understanding of the situation in Palestine through his own struggle
to do so.
Sperlinger is constantly
rereading the situation, feeling unsure about his own view of it, and he admits
that he “lack[s] local insights.”
When Sperlinger first visited
Al-Quds University, for example, he couldn’t find it on a map. “I established
that I would be visiting the campus in the West Bank but my guidebook made only
passing mention of Abu Dis,” he recounts.
And, at the end of his trip,
when he accepted an invitation for dinner with his relatives, “Only when I
looked up the address they had given me did I realize that Givat Ze’ev was a
settlement.”
The author’s self-doubts
extend to whether he has been useful to his students and how he wishes he had
“more practical skills to offer.” But he finds moments of “naive delight”
during his teaching in Abu Dis and is grateful that Shakespeare’s plays offer
students a space to reflect on their lives. He describes this as “the alchemy
between what we read and the students’ experiences.”
Sperlinger writes that it
would be “easy to patronize the students of Al-Quds … [and] to mistake
inarticulacy for lack of feeling.” But he rejects this and instead appreciates
the “extraordinary creativity, courage and humor” his students have shown in
their daily lives.
Sperlinger also thinks that
these students have “practical knowledge of ideas that we too often study as
abstract concepts in the humanities.” Here Sperlinger is critical of the
British higher education system that “ignore[s] or exclude[s] certain kinds of
experience routinely and structurally” and has reinforced the belief that
“educational attainment is the only measure of intelligence.”
Sperlinger believes that his
Palestinian students have much to teach their counterparts in the UK — as well
as those who read this short but informative memoir.
Bayan Haddad studied
comparative literature at the University of Edinburgh and currently teaches
introductory courses to literature at Hebron University. Twitter: @BayanHaddad
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