Teaching Oral History in a College-level "New Wave Immigrant Literature" course

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Teaching Oral History in a College-Level “New Wave Immigrant Literature” CourseElizabeth Stone

Abstract: This article documents a pilot project teaching college students enrolled in a literature class on post-1965 (or “new wave”) immigration to do an oral history, a curricular alteration I made because the canonical texts tend to emphasize the experiences of a very small subset of immigrants. While keeping the focus on literature, my goal was to introduce students to the skills and ethical values required of an oral historian and to enrich and nuance students’ sense of the recent American immigration narrative, one that is disproportionately filled with texts written by well-educated immigrants or objectified accounts of poor or undocumented immigrants. Student feedback indicated the experience was gratifying, leaving them with a deepened sense of the friends or classmates from immigrant families whom they had chosen to interview and a more immediate understanding of the range of contemporary immigrant experiences.

Keywords: autobiography, ethnic narratives, immigration, literature, narrative, qualitative research

In “Family Stories as Secret Texts for Immigrants,” which appeared on March 16, 2009, in the New York Times, Kirk Semple reported on a course titled “The Peopling of New York” taught at a college in Manhattan by sociologist Nancy Foner, noting that Foner routinely asked her students to interview a family member about recent family history. Inspired by Foner’s approach, I resolved to introduce an oral history project into a course I teach at my college, also in Manhattan. Titled “New Wave Immigrant Literature,” the course focuses on works (fiction, memoir, non-fiction, feature films, and documentaries) associ-ated with the current wave of immigrants, especially those who have come to the United States since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act reopened

doi:10.1093/ohr/oht094The Oral History Review 2013, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 332–363

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immigration. In New York City alone, in 2010, the foreign-born accounted for 36.8 percent of the population.1

The decision to include an oral history project was not one I made lightly. Not only did I have to master the values and techniques of the discipline of oral history myself, but I also had to allocate course time to instruct my students. In order to do so, I revised my syllabus, substituting a few shorter literary works for longer works, using more films than I am accustomed to, and limiting back-ground reading. The texts I use are, for the most part, either written by well-known, highly educated, and exceptionally talented authors from immigrant families or are edited accounts in documentary films of immigrants from China and Cuba trying to enter the country illegally (see Appendix 1). But there is a huge range of immigrant experiences between those two extremes, experiences that are largely absent from public discourse. By having my students interview either immigrants or the children of immigrants, my first goal was to have them create texts—which I, as the course instructor, would deliberately valorize by including them in the syllabus—to fill in the absent experiences, which would, in turn, enrich their understanding of the American immigrant experience.

My resolve to include oral histories came, first, from my conviction that, however valuable all the canonical works are, my students needed a more varied sample, and I also thought giving them the opportunity to do an oral history with someone whom they chose (but who also met specified criteria) would tear down the wall that most students have between “school” and “real life” and thus deepen their understanding of the ranges of the immigrant experience.

Second, I wanted my students to understand another trend in immigration that is still almost completely absent from public awareness: an emerging group of people who do not identify as citizens of any particular nation. I am thinking not only of people whose families have emigrated multiple times in the course of two generations (for example, eastern European Jews to Cuba and then to the United States in a fifteen-year period), but also of a college student I know who is the German-born child of an American mother and an Italian father who was raised in Belgium and came to college in New York. What is she? Post-national, since there is no nation-state she identifies with.

Third, I wanted to challenge the customary authority of white middle-class and upper-middle-class students whose families have been in this country for three generations or more and who are accustomed to seeing themselves and their perspectives reflected in the culture and legitimated in the classroom. About half of my students are from this cohort, while the other half are commuters from New York City, many of whom are either the children of immigrants or immi-grants themselves. I hoped that requiring students to do an oral history and then

1 “State and county quickfacts: New York (city), New York,” United States Census Bureau, accessed May 27, 2013, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/36/3651000.html.

Teaching Oral History in a “New Wave Immigrant Literature” Course 333

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/36/3651000.html

making at least half a dozen of those oral histories part of the syllabus would challenge the first group’s often-entitled sense of the customary order of things.

Fourth, I knew that my college also had a large group of residential stu-dents who were themselves the children of immigrant professionals and who, in their appearance, presented themselves as completely assimilated Americans. But I also surmised, as the literature indicated, that they were likely to feel transnational: affiliated as Americans and also as members of a second nation-state, therefore having a private identity that was all but invisible in class and on campus. They might well speak another language at home, get their news from a satellite dish, not identify themselves as Roman Catholic, Jewish, or any of the various Protestant denominations, and live by parental rules quite different from the more permissive rules of native-born parents. They might not be free to date or have autonomy in choosing their eventual spouses, for example. I wanted all my students to get a deepened sense of who their classmates might be, not just so assimilated Americans could better understand transnationals, but also so that first-generation immigrants could understand other first-generation immigrants. My hope was that, although doing this oral history would be labor-intensive, it would also add value, driving home an understanding that immigra-tion was more in their midst than many might realize.

What follows, then, is an account of the series of pedagogical steps I took, week by week, to help students do an oral history relating to “new wave” immi-gration in the context of a course that was primarily a literature course. (Only those weeks featuring work on the oral histories are discussed below.)

Week 1: Introduction to Oral History and its Role in the Course

Right at the outset of the course, I drew students’ attention to the section of the syllabus relating to oral history, announcing that the following week we would begin a discussion of the oral history term paper they themselves would produce. I told them it would be worth 25 percent of their grade and that sev-eral of their oral history texts would become part of the course readings, would be discussed in class, and would be included on the final exam. My intention was to convey that what they created would have the same authority as the other texts listed in the syllabus. Students were not particularly surprised at the assignment, perhaps because some literature classes contain non-fictional material in the form of texts or documentary films. But they were immediately interested, especially when I noted that, as interviewers, they would have the opportunity to indulge their curiosity and ask probing questions of people they knew, questions that might otherwise be considered intrusive. By the end of the hour, one student knew she wanted to interview her stepfather’s mother from

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South Africa, another wanted to interview her Nigerian-born roommate, and another wanted to interview her Indian-born boyfriend.

Week 2: Framing Oral History as a Link between the Personal and the Historical

I continued to model the notion that a student-produced oral history could have the same authority as a published text and that what began as a personal account could become part of public discourse. I began class by sharing my own background with them, presenting the kinds of demographic details I wanted them to discover about whomever they interviewed: early in the twentieth cen-tury, my mother’s parents had come from a small island north of Sicily at about the same time my father’s parents came from Eastern Europe. My mother’s first language was Italian and my father’s Yiddish, although with six children in my mother’s family and seven in my father’s, English quickly became each house-hold’s primary language. I added that I had married a man whose ancestry was German, Danish, and Scotch-Irish and that our two children did not think of themselves in ethnic terms at all, only as “American.” I had grown up think-ing of myself as Italian-American, had written extensively about my own ethnic background in a larger examination of oral family narratives, and had produced a few brief oral histories on being Italian-American included in an article for the New York Times. I also told the class that six years earlier, as an outgrowth of the course, three undergraduates who had already completed the course—one for-eign-born and two the children of immigrants—had gone on to coauthor with me a paper on family stories and their relationship to transnationalism, another way of demonstrating that undergraduates could have the authority to contrib-ute knowledge to the scholarly and public conversations on immigration.2

During this discussion, I asked my students to take a couple of minutes to jot down a paragraph or two about their own backgrounds, including the lan-guage they spoke at home. The goal was to give them the opportunity to prac-tice producing the kind of demographic narrative about themselves that I had modeled and that they would eventually be eliciting from their interviewees. I also asked those who were from immigrant families to indicate if they were will-ing to be called on as class resources. Among the twenty-seven students in the class, thirteen were from families in which one or both parents had immigrated to the United States after 1965. Four of the thirteen had been born before their

2 Elizabeth Stone, Erica Gomez, Despina Hotzoglou, and Jane Y. Lipnitsky, “Transnationalism as a Motif in Family Stories,” Family Process 44 (2005), 281–98. See also Elizabeth Stone, Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us, with a new introduction (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004); Elizabeth Stone, “It’s Still Hard to Grow up Italian,” New York Times, December 18, 1978, accessed May 27, 2013, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F00E17F63F5511728DDDAE0994DA415B888BF1D3.


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family migrated; another nine were born here and had at least one foreign-born parent. Of those thirteen, the countries of origin were in Europe, Asia, Central America, and the Middle East. Nearly all of the thirteen spoke a language other than English at home, including Arabic, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Urdu. All but two were willing to serve as class resources, a designation meant to valorize their knowledge. Of the remaining fourteen, the immigrants had been grandparents or great-grandparents who had arrived from Europe in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.

The rest of class was devoted to discussing the definition and key elements of an oral history. I elaborated on their oral history term paper options: interviewing an immigrant who had arrived as an adult, an immigrant who had arrived as a child 12 or under, or an American-born child of immigrant parents (see Appendix 2). The option of interviewing the child of an immigrant would focus on how the “genera-tion gap” played out (or did not) in immigrant families, a focus I chose because quite a few texts in the syllabus were written by the children of immigrants, and these often concerned the ways the generation gap was complicated by a cultural gap, immigrant parents on one side and their Americanized child on the other.

Week 3: Analyzing an Example of Oral History

In order to help students understand the format, texture, and content they would produce for their final text, I offered as a model an excerpt from Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan’s Crossing the Blvd: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America, which is based on audiotaped interviews with a mother and her adult daughter, both immigrants from Afghanistan, and which had then been edited into a pair of fluid monologues typical of the kind that routinely appear in the work of Studs Terkel in oral histories such as Working.3

Preparation: The Oral History Interview

In discussing the excerpt, I asked the class to speculate on what questions the interviewer might have asked in order to elicit the interviewees’ responses. Since most students had not yet done formal interviews, I reviewed sample questions and gave a brief lecture on interviewing techniques (see Appendix 3).4

Preparation: Learning the Historical Context

I also alerted the class to the fact that some families would have emigrated due to momentous events (such as the Vietnam War, the Cambodian genocide of the

3 Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and About How They Feel About What They Do (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).

4 Donald Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 84–109.

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late 1970s, or the Bosnian genocide of the 1990s) and that they would need to familiarize themselves with contemporary historical events affecting their inter-viewees. As an exercise, I asked them to write a brief report, using Wikipedia and the New York Times archives, on one historical event that we would be encountering in our readings (the extended gathering at the Peruvian Embassy in Havana of those seeking asylum, as depicted in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban, for example, or the civil war in Pakistan in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “When Mr. Prizada came to Dine”).5

Preparation: Ethical Considerations

I also made students aware that there were various ethical components relating to the interviewees’ informed consent, privacy, and safety. As two film docu-mentaries, “Balseros” and “Golden Venture,” showed vividly, the interviewer asking the questions and the film editor deciding what ended up on the cut-ting room floor were the ones controlling how the interviewee was presented. Interviewees themselves were not in charge of their own subjectivity. Each inter-viewer would also be functioning as an editor and, as such, could introduce bias by taking material out of context or by selecting material in a way that was ultimately unrepresentative. Writers, too, I noted were not entirely in control of their representations, because editors also serve as literary “gatekeepers.” But writers’ texts were freely created and not dependent on an interviewer’s ques-tions limiting and shaping their answers. Yet, without the interviewer, the inter-viewee would have no public voice at all. Such observations led to a discussion of whether educated, English-speaking immigrants were more likely to retain their ability to represent themselves and therefore less likely to be objectified and stereotyped than less educated, non–English-speaking immigrants. There was no conclusive answer—how could there be? But I wanted them to be aware that there were ethical dimensions involved in interviewing and editing.

Week 4: Confirming that the Class Was on the Right Track

Doing an oral history is a complex task and understandably daunting for novices. In addition to wanting students to prepare adequately and to understand the genre, I wanted to make the task manageable by dividing it into component assignments with clear due dates. In addition, I thought this would prevent them from leaving everything until the last moment and then turning in a project

5 Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), 236–40; Jhumpa Lahiri, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” in Interpreter of Maladies (New York and Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), 23–42.


that had gone awry very early on. Therefore, during the fourth week, students were required to turn in their questions and present thumbnail sketches of the interview subjects they had chosen—identifying them by name, age and ethnic-ity, and reasons for emigrating. They were also asked to confirm that they had verbally secured the subject’s permission to be identified and to have his or her interview material shared with all class members.6 Everyone had readily found someone to interview, although only one student had chosen to interview a family member. Two students in the class—one whose parents were from China and another from Bangladesh who had previously, for some years, been an “ille-gal”—had agreed to be interviewed by other students. Another student from a New England White Anglo-Saxon Protestant family that had been in the United States for many generations was going to be interviewing her boyfriend whom she had met at the college, the California-born son of Iranian immigrants. As the students shared their interview choices, we were offered glimpse after glimpse of moments of connection and intersection in American life—exactly the diver-sity Walt Whitman celebrated more than a century ago in Leaves of Grass.7

Altogether, the interviewees represented twenty-two different nationali-ties and several patterns of immigration—some families came together, others arrived piecemeal; some individuals came alone, with no plans to return or to bring their families; others had lived in several countries before arriving in the United States.8

Week 8: Reviewing the Transcripts

As a result of reading a model oral history and being exposed to interviewing skills, students had twice had reinforced for them the idea that oral histories are densely filled with solicited details, more so than conventional conversation. The transcripts provided an opportunity for me to see how they were doing and, perhaps more usefully, for them to compare their transcripts with their class-mates. During this class, lasting one hour and fifteen minutes, students worked in groups of four, reading each others’ transcripts in terms of criteria I spelled

6 All interviewees gave permission for their words, photos, and identities to be shared with all members of my class. While drafting this article, which I had not anticipated doing when I had defined the scope of permissions, I contacted student interviewers asking them to request additional permission for use of the material and explaining that I would be submitting it to an oral history journal. Some interviewees gave complete permission while others had conditions regarding use, which I have implemented. In one case, an undocumented alien gave permission for his full name to be used in this article. I have made the decision to give him a pseudonym.

7 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, accessed May 25, 2013, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1322/1322-h/ 1322-h.htm.

8 The twenty-two were Bangladesh, China, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Greece, Haiti, India, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Pakistan, The Philippines, Poland, Sweden, Trinidad, Turkey, Uganda, VietNam, and Yemen. Several interviewees identified with more than one ethnicity.

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out on a handout (see Appendix 4). In particular, I wanted them, as readers, to point out where anecdotal material was strong and where it was weak. In addition to giving feedback and getting feedback, students benefitted from this session personally, because they were better able to see the strengths and weaknesses in their own work, and go back to their interviewee with additional questions. Group work also gave everyone in the class the opportunity to enrich their anecdotal knowledge of immigration.

Week 11: Submission of the Final Project

Students submitted, in hard copy and online, the following items:

1. A complete transcript of the interview.2. A final ten-page manuscript edited into a coherent interviewee monologue

(modeled on Lehrer and Sloan’s Crossing the Blvd, which had been discussed in class during week 3), preceded by a title, photo of the interviewee, brief introductory paragraph presenting the interviewee’s basic biographical information (name, country of birth, age, educational level), and the historical circumstances, if any, prompting the family’s departure from their country of origin.

3. An assessment of what they had learned from the experience.

Over the next week, I read all the manuscripts and assessments, inviting the class to browse through the material online. Ultimately, I chose six oral histo-ries to add to the syllabus, my criteria being that all be thorough and that, as a group, they reflect a range of experiences. All were the oral histories of immi-grants, three who had come as children with their families and three who had come as adults. They were students’ friends (or friends of friends) from outside the university, classmates, roommates, or relatives. The six were:

• Shada L., 22, a student at the college, came to this country from Iraq with her parents in 1991 as an infant and had grown up in Connecticut. She was interviewed by her roommate, Elizabeth Bowen, a White Angle-Saxon Protestant from Maryland. (This was one of the most successful oral histories, and I include Bowen’s interview questions, manuscript, and assessment as Appendices 5, 6, and 7).9

• F. (who asked that she be identified by her first initial), 33, came to this country from Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1994 and had lived in Queens before moving to New Jersey. F. met her husband, a Dominican-American, at college in Manhattan. She was interviewed by her brother-in-law, Abiezer Mendez, who lives in the Bronx.10

• Alonso Perez, 29, a pizza deliveryman from Ecuador, was smuggled into this country at the Mexican border by a coyote in 2006 and remains undocumented (therefore

9 Elizabeth Bowen, “‘I Want to Call Myself an Iraqi:’ The Changing Names, Plans and Secrets of an Iraqi-American Family” (Term Paper for “New Wave Immigrant Literature,” April 2011).

10 Abiezer Mendez, “Oral History: F.” (Term Paper for “New Wave Immigrant Literature,” April 2011). F. did not want to be named in this account.


I have not used his real name). It was his eighth attempt. He was interviewed by Sadia Noor, a friend of Alonso’s girlfriend. Sadia came from Bangladesh in 1999, lives in Brooklyn, and was for some years herself undocumented.11

• Tuncay Kola, 30, emigrated from Turkey to California in 2006. He was interviewed by Meredith Clavin, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant from California.12

• Amna Malik, 47, emigrated from Pakistan to Virginia in 1987, as a young wife accompanying her physician husband. She was interviewed by Sami Jameel, the American-born son of Pakistani immigrants. Amna is a friend of Sami’s parents.13

• Carlisdania (Carli) Mendoza, 20, was born in the Dominican Republic in 1990. Soon after, her parents left for New York, leaving Carli with her aunt until they sent for her in 2000. Carli, an excellent student who will be attending medical school, was inter-viewed by Sharai Rivera, a second-generation Puerto Rican who met Carli through a campus club.14

Week 12: Class Discussion of the Six Selected Oral Histories

The class discussion was animated, with students contributing what they had learned about immigration and about themselves. Many also were able to link what they learned from the oral histories with the texts in the course. Below are excerpts from the assessments of five of the six whose interviews became texts for the course. The sixth student asked that hers not be used.

Elizabeth Bowen felt the process of interviewing compromised the inter-viewee’s subjectivity: “I think that this project was a really important exercise in acknowledging the extent to which an interviewer controls the subject’s narra-tive. Although I wanted Shada to be able to tell her own story . . . the fact is that I directed the flow of conversation and in the end, I decided which parts of her story were worth including and which weren’t [a point which had been discussed in two documentary films the class watched, “Balseros” and “Golden Venture,” about undocumented immigrants]. Perhaps she would have chosen differently. I had some concept beforehand of the fact that an edited interview does not allow the interviewee full subjectivity, but I had never been forced to think about it in such direct terms” (see Appendix 7 for Elizabeth Bowen’s full assessment).15

11 Sadia Noor, “Alonso Perez” (Term Paper for “New Wave Immigrant Literature,” April 2011). Alonso Perez is a pseudonym.

12 Meredith Clavin, “Oral History: Tuncay Kola” (Term Paper for “New Wave Immigrant Literature,” April 2011).

13 Sami Jameel, “An Oral History of a Pakistani Immigrant: The Personal Story of Amna Malik” (Term Paper for “New Wave Immigrant Literature,” April 2011).

14 Sharai Rivera, “Carlisdania ‘Carli’ Mendoza’s Oral History” (Term Paper for “New Wave Immigrant Literature,” April 2011).

15 Elizabeth Bowen, 8–9.

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Abiezer Mendez found similarities between cultural norms embraced by his Bangladeshi-born sister-in-law, F., and the Indian-born parents in the film, “The Namesake,” based on a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri: “What I found to be most interesting about F’s story was [her reaction] when she first witnessed a couple kissing in High School. Kissing is an image that is constantly reproduced in America, and it is surprising to find this to be something shocking to people of other cultures. In placing this in context with The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, I found the situation to be similar, when Gogol asked his girlfriend not to make physical contact with him at his parents’ house. This was an aspect of Muslim and Bengali culture that I did not know about. I initially expected her to tell me a lot about the Bangladesh Liberation War but she almost seemed like she didn’t want to discuss it. What I did find interesting was the hatred that is still alive [in her] with regards to Pakistan. I also found it interesting that the war was primar-ily one of language according to F.”16

Sadia Noor, who herself was once an undocumented immigrant and who, as a Muslim, has faced prejudice, was shocked to find the degree to which she herself harbored prejudice: “Alonso’s story reminded me of the stories of every other South American immigrant I had ever heard of, and I was hoping to find someone more ‘interesting’ so I could have a better project. However, two days before the preliminary proposal was due, I had no other takers. And then, I had a brilliant idea. Why not take the most clichéd example of an immigrant ever—a former gang member, drug addict, and all-around delinquent—and find that something ‘special’ in him? [But] it did not work that way. Alonso went from his delinquent past to a man with a menial job at a pizza parlor. He did not sud-denly go from rags to riches here, carried no real amazement at what New York had to offer, and was not planning on bringing his family here so they could drink from the ‘sweet nectar’ of opportunity in America. There was nothing truly unique in his story. . . . But then again, there was. Almost every topic we covered, there was something we could commiserate or celebrate together. By the end of the night, I parted from Alonso with a hug and a kiss, a far cry from the stiff handshake with which we had greeted each other. As I took the train home that night, I realized something that made me feel worse than any of the other things I have ever experienced—that before I met Alonso that night, if he had even so much as smiled at me in passing . . . I probably would have subcon-sciously pegged him in my mind as one of ‘those Mexicans’, who leer at every woman on the street and drink beer on the corner while waiting for jobs to come to them. But Alonso is neither Mexican nor a lay about, and it had taken me far too long to recognize that. For someone who regarded herself as open-minded, I was pretty damn judgmental. If I am even slightly less close-minded because of that three-hour interview with Alonso, then I am better for it. The next time

16 Mendez, 10–11.


I see someone who reminds me of Alonso . . . I will not crack that joke about the Mexican and the lawnmower. I will instead . . . wonder what his story is, and whether he has yet found the courage and honesty to tell it to someone in need of an open mind like me.”17

Meredith Clavin felt she learned about her friend, her own biases, and also about interviewing: “I went into the assignment thinking, ‘I already know him. What more is there to learn?’. . . . [But] I found it amazing how little I knew about his life in Turkey. . . . When I first went to visit [my friend] Lauren in C.A., I was surprised to hear that she had a Turkish boyfriend. I remember having all these preconceived notions about Tuncay. When I met him, my prejudices van-ished. He did not push his religion down my throat, like I expected him to. In fact, religion was never really mentioned in our conversations.” Meredith con-cluded, “The only negative aspect to this interview was its formality; I had never conducted one before and was nervous. I think Tuncay sensed my trepidation, because he did not speak as much as he usually does when I ask him questions. As the interview went on, I became more relaxed, and the questions started flowing. When I looked over the transcripts, I [saw] that I did not have enough detail, so I formulated a list of questions, and casually asked Tuncay them over the course of a few days. The second time around, I found Tuncay to be much more candid. If I were doing another oral history, I would plan further ahead by asking my interviewee practice questions before I pressed the ‘record’ button on the tape recorder.”18

Sami Jameel, the son of Pakistani immigrants, interviewed a Pakistani-born family friend as a way of contextualizing his knowledge of his own parents. “I was very excited to interview Mrs. Malik for my oral history project. [Since she] is a close friend of my mother’s, I felt like interviewing her would provide more me insight into my mother’s own immigrant experience. Growing up, my parents used to tell me what I thought was a lot of what it was like to be Pakistani immi-grants in America. After interviewing Mrs. Malik, I quickly realized that what my parents did was contextualize their experiences to get me to behave and appreciate what I had. (It was quintessential Asian guilt-trip parenting). Mrs. Malik, on the other hand, was very anecdotal in the way she presented her immigrant experience. What I learned is that even though I thought I knew a lot about the immigrant experience, as a son of immigrants, I still had much to learn even about people from my own heritage who came here. . . . One of the things I found interesting while interviewing her is her view on Pakistan. Most Pakistani immigrants I know, including my parents, miss almost everything about Pakistan. No matter how cynical they might be while they’re over there, when they’re here in the Pardes they tend to rant about how much they miss it. Mrs. Malik was

17 Noor, 12.18 Clavin, 12.

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much more objective in her feelings toward her homeland, acknowledging that she would not want to live there again. She makes the distinction between the culture and the people she loves, and the systematic problems that plague the country and consequently make America look that much greater.”19

Although I did not include it on the list of oral histories students were required to read (because the interviewee in question was a diplomat’s daughter and her experiences were at once too rarified and too singular), I briefly discussed in class one interview touching on post-nationalism: Moire Kiyingi, a college classmate of Bianca Leggio, was born into what Bianca called “a life of roaming” before college, living in four different countries with extensive visits to a fifth. 20 The daughter of professionals, Moire was born in Vienna to Ugandan parents who then moved to Calgary, Canada. From there, amidst visits to Uganda to see extended family, Moire was sent to boarding school in England and then returned to Toronto, Canada, before moving to New Rochelle, New York, where she attended high school. Moire said, “They always, even now, look at the Uganda newspapers online. . . . They’re very much connected. I envy their strong identity. I find it annoying that I can’t identify definitively as any one culture. . . . Maybe my passports are Ugandan and Canadian, but it’s just difficult, inside me, to associate with anywhere, not just where I come from, but wherever I’ve lived, ’cause I just don’t stay in one place for very long.”21 Not that she is without connection. Wrote Bianca: “[In] Moire’s story, the one word she can take for granted, her leavening concept, her word . . . is] ‘family.’ The truest homeland she’s known.”22

Since this was the final week of class, I also distributed a final exam study sheet defining the scope of preparation necessary for the final exam. Below is the section relating to the oral histories:

You will be responsible for the following oral histories (all on Blackboard).Emigrated without their nuclear families, as adults:

Alonso Perez, EcuadorTuncay Kola, TurkeyAmna Malik, Pakistan

Emigrated with their families as children, or joined them here later:

F., BangladeshShada L., IraqCarli Mendoza, Dominican Republic

19 Jameel, 9.20 Bianca Leggio, “The Oral History of Moire Kiyingi” (Term Paper for “New Wave Immigrant Literature,”

April 2011), 1.21 Leggio, 5.22 Leggio, 8.


Write an essay of 3–5 pages at home in relation to one of the following prompts. For this essay, you may use three oral histories, or two oral histo-ries and any one of the other texts for this course. (30 points)

I. In a mass media society, a country, city or region is often conveyed or constructed as an “idea,” or “imagined community.” In “Avalon,” for Sam, Baltimore is an idea, so is the Baltimore of “The Wire” though these are two vastly different Baltimores. In the oral histories, many of the speakers construct and express their ideas of “America” including their ideas of “Americans.” Discuss the “Americas” and/or the “Americans” that emerge.

II. In a society that is in flux rather than static, there is always a generation gap. How it’s negotiated between the generations and what the nature of the differences/conflicts are depends on the individuals of course (as we’ve surely noticed in the works of Lan Samantha Chang and Jhumpa Lahiri). How does the fact of immigration inform this gap and/or the ways the individuals involved reckon with it?

As it turned out, half chose question I and the other half chose question II. My goal with this essay question was to encourage students to study the oral histories critically, comparing them to one another and to the literary texts we read. Students quoted immigrant interviewees who were surprised at the degree to which Americans valued personal freedom over family, disappointed that Americans did not seem hospitable to newcomers, and felt “the American Dream” was alive but tarnished.

When it came to discussing the ways in which the generation gap might play out in immigrant families, students noted how the children of immigrants often struggled to maintain loyalty both to their families and to their own identities as Americans, a culture where personal autonomy is assumed. Such assumptions exacerbated intergenerational tensions particularly in the realms of whom (or even if) their children could date, what subjects they should study, what reli-gious observances were considered mandatory, and when might be a reasonable curfew for a college student. For several local students from well-to-do immi-grant families, the biggest struggles with their parents were over whether they could live on campus or not and whether, upon graduating and securing a job, they would be permitted to live separately from their families.

Conclusion

At the outset, I had four goals in adding oral history to the curriculum of “New Wave Immigrant Literature”: I wanted to address lacunae in the available published texts, so as to include the experiences of those who were neither the exceptionally talented and educated children of immigrants nor from families of impoverished “illegals”; I wanted to challenge white upper-middle-class students who were

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accustomed to seeing their own experiences and values duly noted on the cultural map; I wanted to bring the experiences of “post-nationals” into the curriculum; and I wanted all my students to recognize that the emerging group of “transna-tionals” who identified with two cultures looked, to all intents and purposes, like assimilated Americans. To a significant degree, these goals were realized.

My students were all fully engaged with their projects because they were interviewing people they had selected. While this may be unusual in regard to oral histories, the benefit was that part of the interviewers’ background research was already done. While many said that interviewing felt initially awkward, most said that knowing their interviewee enabled them (and their interviewee) to relax more readily. Many students, most of whom were English majors whose customary perspective was literary rather than sociological, also commented on the challenge of taking a question-and-answer transcript and editing it into a smooth and coherent monologue.

I do believe the venture was successful as an intellectual venture, because my college is located in a city with a large number of immigrants. Also, because I had checked on students’ progress during week 4, when thumbnail sketches were due, I knew that diversity in the final yield of oral histories was likely. Ultimately, twenty-two different countries were represented in the oral histories, and many of my students did get an opportunity to see that friends and class-mates who seemed to be completely Americanized were in fact “transnationals.” And, one interviewee was “post-national.”

I was less successful in using oral histories to reach immigrants who cov-ered a full range of socio-economic and educational possibilities, however. Put simply, all my students are obviously in the throes of becoming educated, and the people they tend to know are like them. So there were a disproportionate number interviewed who were from families that not only valued education but were able to take on at least some of the costs associated with a private college with selective admissions.

I cannot say anything conclusive about whether my white upper-middle-class students realized that their customary position was one of seeing their own experiences and perspectives reflected in the curriculum, or that this class challenged that position. Certainly, “My Big Fat Greek Weddings,” a cin-ematic text for the course, satirizes White Angle-Saxon Protestants, and we did consider the possibility that satirizing an ethnic stereotype (or any stereotype) tended to be more permissible if the group was socially empowered. Beyond that, I can only offer that one student, a White Angle-Saxon Protestant from New England whose boyfriend (and interviewee) was the son of Iranian immi-grants, said that the text that stood out most for her was “The Namesake,” because she identified with the story line of the protagonist, the son of Indian immigrants, and his blonde American girlfriend (who made quite a few cultural gaffes in the film).


As to the broader use of oral histories in the humanities, sciences or social sciences, obviously contemporary oral histories have no role in, say, courses about Shakespeare or Introduction to Biology. But many contemporary liter-ature courses have themes—courses on immigration, or war, or disability, or gay literature, or women’s studies—and with adequate preparation, many fac-ulty members might develop a unit on oral histories as part of their curriculum. Indeed, even a brief Google survey confirms that all these groups (and their subgroups) now have online oral history archives supported by the government or one university or another. Further, many of these resources offer instruction in doing oral histories. Beyond the humanities, oral histories have an obvious place in courses of study, undergraduate or graduate, which embrace qualita-tive research, including education, environmental studies, ethnic studies, his-tory, narrative medicine, psychology, social work, social justice, sociology, urban studies, women’s studies, and so on.

I have now taught the course for a second time including oral histories, this time developing a permission form governing use for interviewees to sign.23 There are about fifty contact hours during the semester, at least seven of which were allocated to an aspect of doing oral histories. And this time did come at the expense of the rest of the literature. Nonetheless, in what I now think of as an interdisciplinary course, more was gained than lost: first, the students’ own experience of actively pursuing knowledge about the immigrant experi-ence made them more engaged readers of immigrant literature; second, they learned much that was new (and pertinent to the course) about people they thought they already knew; third, they came across immigrants whose experi-ences put a human face on controversial issues such as the use of the term “illegal” immigrants, a characterization now rejected by the Associated Press in the 2013 edition of its Stylebook.24 And fourth, uncommon as it might be to conduct an oral history in a literature class, students learned about aspects of the immigrant experience they could not have found in the available com-mercial literature. So the gain was considerable, the loss, minimal. In closing, I add only that the most onerous component of this venture was having to read as many as thirty-five ten-page oral histories over a single weekend in order to allow time for me to select and assign the selected oral histories as last-minute required texts. Happily, the oral histories themselves were rich, rewarding, and compelling.

23 “I, ____________, give you permission to interview me for your class oral history project and to share the project with members of the class. In the event that this is to be more widely circulated or used, I do/do not give permission for my name to be used and I do/do not give permission for my photograph to be used.”

24 Rachel Weiner, “AP drops ‘illegal immigrant’ from Stylebook,” in “Post Politics” (blog) in the Washington Post, April 2, 2013, accessed June 5, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/04/02/ap-drops-illegal-immigrant-from-stylebook/.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/04/02/ap-drops-illegal-immigrant-from-stylebook/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/04/02/ap-drops-illegal-immigrant-from-stylebook/

Appendix 1: Syllabus—Course Texts

New Wave Immigrant LiteratureENLP 3652Prof. Elizabeth Stone

In the canon of twentieth-century American literature, works by or about immigrants rarely qualified for inclusion. However, in 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act was passed, expanding immigration and doing away with quotas, which had favored western Europeans. Up until recently, with intense policy debates about immigration (we will speak more on this), immigrants were welcomed unambivalently. During the previous wave of immigration, dur-ing the late nineteenth-century and the first quarter of the twentieth century, assimilation was both assumed and prescribed. Immigration and assimilation are still the subject of significant public conversations, but in the wake of the civil rights movement, the women’s movement of the 1960’s, and the gay rights movement, acceptance of pluralism as a fundamental American value has, to some degree, replaced insistence on assimilation. The texts for this course are either written post-1965 or, if written earlier, nevertheless embody the values that subsequently became dominant. Among the texts only “Avalon” primarily depicts a period of time prior to 1965.

Texts

Films

“Avalon” (1990) feature film“Balseros” (aka “Cuban Rafters”) (2002) documentary“Golden Venture” (2006) documentary“My Big Fat Greek Wedding” (2002) feature film“The Namesake” (based on the novel by the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri) (2006)

feature film

Books

Lan Samantha Chang (1998), Hunger, a Novella and Other StoriesEdwidge Danticat (1994), Breath, Eyes, MemoryJunot Diaz (1996), DrownCristina Garcia (1992), Dreaming in CubanJhumpa Lahiri (1999), Interpreter of MaladiesBharati Mukherjee (1989), JasmineRichard Rodriguez (1982), Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez:

An AutobiographyAmy Tan, “Mother Tongue”


Interactive media

Sarah Kavanagh and Katherine Schulten. Learning about U.S. Immigration with The New York Times. http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/learning-about-u-s-immigration-with-the-new-york-times/

Appendix 2: The Oral History Project

The paper for this class will be an oral history. You have two choices: You may choose someone who emigrated here—the counterpart to the adults (gener-ally parents) in the works of Chang, Diaz, or Lahiri. The person you choose may be a family member, a work colleague, a faculty member at Fordham—anyone you feel you can have a frank and candid and in-depth interview with. Here your focus will be on your subject’s experience of making the move from the country of origin to the United States. A sampling of questions is below [see Appendix 3]. Most questions will need follow-ups. You are looking for specific details and anecdotes to flesh out the person’s experience and make it colorful and interesting to a reader.

Alternately, you may pick someone from the first generation—the daugh-ters in “Hunger,” or the narrators in “Edison, NJ” or “How to Date,” or Lahiri’s Twinkle—someone who was born here, or who arrived as an infant and may feel himself or herself to be a member of two countries, one of which is the United States. Here you may be exploring what it feels like to be “transnational,” or you might want to see how relationships between the generations are colored by the immigrant experience that your subject’s parents may have had. Here you might want to pick a friend or classmate—someone of whom you can ask direct questions. Again, in every single case you want to have specific examples to give human interest to your oral histories.

On February 23, submit your preliminary proposal. This will include the specific person you will be interviewing. By this date that person should have given his/her permission for the interview material to be shared among class members. You will know the country of origin of this person or his/her parents. And you will turn in a one-page, single-spaced report indicating what you know of this immigrant group and the history of their country of origin, including the reasons, including specific historic events that prompted the departure. Impoverished country? No jobs? War? Famine? Large-scale disaster? Flight from oppression or persecution? You will also turn in a list of twenty-five questions, which you can draw from some of the resources offered below [see Appendix 3]. When you do the interview, you will use a tape recorder, and you will be transcribing the entire interview.

Your final paper will be 10–12 pages and will have a summary introduction of your subject, giving his or her name, age, background, place of residence, occupation. The format of the rest of your paper will be modeled on the excerpt

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http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/learning-about-u-s-immigration-with-the-new-york-times/

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/learning-about-u-s-immigration-with-the-new-york-times/

from Crossing the Blvd. Include a photograph of your interviewee. At the end, write a one-page, single-spaced account of your reaction, what you learned and what you might do differently if you were to do another oral history.

Appendix 3: Sample Questions and Other Materials for Conducting an Oral History

Steps to completing the oral history

• Select a person you wish to interview. • Obtain his/her permission to do the interview and to share the material among

class members. • Set up an interview time and location; set aside an hour or so. • Do some research on the country of origin. • Create questions to guide your interview. • Record the interview; take notes on interviewee’s mannerisms, etc. • Transcribe the interview into Q/A format, word for word. • Edit the Q/A into a focused monologue in a manner consistent with the models

provided.

Some guiding questions for immigrant oral history interview

• What country are you originally from? • Why did you leave this country? • When did you leave? How old were you at that time? • What were the conditions in the country when you left? • How did you prepare for your trip here? • Who came with you when you emigrated? Who did you leave behind? What did you

leave behind? • How did you get here? Did you stay somewhere else before arriving here? • Why did you choose the United States? Why not some other country? • Who decided you would come here? Did you want to leave? • How did others in your home country treat you when they knew you were leaving? • What changes in lifestyle did you make when you came here? • What was your first impression of the United States? Has this initial impression

changed over time? • What are some of the differences/similarities you have noticed in the cultures here

and in your home country? • What were your hopes for yourself (and/or your family) when you came here? Have

you realized these hopes? • How were you treated when you first arrived in the United States? How are you

treated now? • Were your expectations of America met? Was your idea of America the same as

the reality?


Guiding questions for first-generation oral history interview

• Name? • Date of birth? Place of birth? Place of residence? • How much do you know of your parents’ experience in their country of origin? • Do you know why they came? • What language do you speak at home? • Have you visited you family’s country of origin? How often? Do you have relatives

there? How else do you communicate with them? Who are they? Did they come to the United States as well?

• What is the ethnicity of your neighborhood? • Are your friendships multi-ethnic? Or are most of your friends from your ethnic group? • Do you commute or live away from home? Was this an easy decision for your family? • Does your family have expectations about the ethnicity of friends or who your boy-

friend or girlfriend should be?

Read the material on the websites below:

http://www.oralhistory.org/do-oral-history/principles-and-practices/#best http://blogs.dalton.org/edinger/2010/09/22/oral-history-interview-questions-2009/

This website has some oral history questions, pertaining to immigration:

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/newamericans/foreducators_lesson_plan_09.html

Appendix 4: Class Handout—Editing the Transcript

Editing the transcript

Everyone should exchange transcripts with a classmate and read it with the fol-lowing tasks in mind.

1. Make sure the introductory heading is there, with name, age, country of origin, year of arrival (or of parents’ arrival), job, and any other details that are pertinent.

2. Read the transcript for typos or spelling errors.3. Underline words from another language, which the interviewer should then italicize.4. If you think something needs more explanation or is unclear, ask the interviewer

to insert explanatory material [within brackets]. If the interviewee says something parenthetically, those comments should be in (parentheses).

5. Underline all anecdotal material in your classmate’s transcript: this is material which tells a story. Usually this will be something other than just a series of events in a timeline. TIMELINE: “I first came in 1988, and I lived with my sister in Queens and from there I moved to my own apartment around the corner.” ANECDOTE: “I remember the time my new wife met Mrs. Croft, my former landlady. . . .” The rest of what happens in that retelling is an anecdote. You as interviewers will want to emphasize your anecdotal material.

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http://www.oralhistory.org/do-oral-history/principles-and-practices/#best

http://blogs.dalton.org/edinger/2010/09/22/oral-history-interview-questions-2009/

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/newamericans/foreducators_lesson_plan_09.html

6. Suggest any material you think is boring or irrelevant or repetitious by putting an X near that paragraph.

7. Suggest ways to make segues, either through suggesting the interviewer insert a question, or by introducing a summary line or two, which connects the two parts. Say there is a long anecdote about the trip to this country, and another long passage about a first day on a new job here. You might suggest separating them with a line: “Soon after arriving here, Mr. Sen got his first job.”

Appendix 5: Elizabeth Bowen’s Interview Questions

1. Did any family members outside your immediate family move to the U.S. or to other countries? If so, where? Do family members remain in Iraq?

2. How did your family get to the U.S.? Did they come directly here?3. I know you were too young to remember the move, but what have you

heard about it from your sister and parents?4. Your family came to the U.S. thinking they’d be returning to Iraq

eventually—why the U.S. as a temporary location? Why not somewhere closer?

5. What were the conditions that made your parents decide to leave Iraq? How did the post-Gulf War economic downturn personally affect your family?

6. How did the Americans in your town treat your family when you moved to Connecticut?a. What were the prevailing perceptions of Iraqis/Arabs/Muslims in

your area at that time?7. Were there any other Iraqis living in your town when you arrived?

a. Was your family able to make connections with people of their own ethnicity/religion in the U.S.?

8. What lifestyle changes did your family have to make when they moved to Connecticut?a. What were the resources available to your family so that they could

uphold traditions from home?9. How many times have you been to Iraq?

a. Do your Iraqi relatives ever visit you in the U.S.?b. How difficult is it to see the members of your family who live abroad?

10. Have you found it easier to form relationships with people in your own ethnic group, or are your friendships more multi-ethnic?a. Why do you think this is the case?

11. Do you feel that your non-Arab friends are understanding of your background, or do you often have to do a lot of explaining?

12. How much of a religious education did you get growing up?a. Was there a mosque in your neighborhood?


13. I know it was a difficult decision for your family to allow you to live in the dorms rather than at home, since you’d be living with people who weren’t devout Muslims—what exactly were their concerns?a. How did you convince them to change their minds?

14. We’ve talked a lot about the “double life” you lead as a non-practicing Muslim whose parents are very traditional. How did your parents’ strict rules affect the way you grew up while attending multicultural American schools?

15. How do their rules affect you now that you live away from home?a. What parts of your life do you have to hide from your parents?b. Do you think they are completely unaware of the things you hide

from them?16. Now that you’re an adult, have you had any conversations with your

family about the possibility of marriage in your future?a. What are their expectations for you in that regard?

17. Your parents don’t make you wear a headscarf. Why did they decide to give you that freedom?a. At what age did you decide you didn’t want to wear it?b. Was your choice not to wear it ever a source of tension within your

family?18. Until you went to college, you chose to be called “Sharry” rather than

Shada. How old were you when you made that decision?a. Why did you change it, and why did you decide to change it back to

your Arabic name in recent years?19. When it’s just your family in the house, do you usually speak Arabic or

English? Or a mixture of both?20. We were in middle school on 9/11. What was that day like for you?

a. Did you anticipate that people would treat you differently because the attackers were Muslim?

b. How did your parents react to the event?21. You’ve mentioned before that your classmates changed the way they

saw you after 9/11.a. Can you give some specific examples of how people changed their

behavior toward you?22. Despite the fact that the 9/11 hijackers were not Iraqi, soon

enough Iraq became a center of American attention, fear and misunderstanding. How did it feel to see the country you grew up in waging war in/against the country where you were born?

23. How did your parents react to the War in Iraq? Your sister?24. How did your family react when Saddam Hussein was caught?

a. What have your parents/other family members told you about his rule?

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25. What did you hear from family in Iraq during the war, particularly at the beginning?a. How did you communicate with them?b. How often?

26. How did your ethnic background influence your decision to major in Middle East studies?a. Was that discipline something you’d always been interested, or have

you only taken an interest in it in recent years?27. You’ve done work in Syria with Iraqi refugees and you now mentor an

Iraqi student who has been given a scholarship to attend college in New York. Can you tell me about those experiences—what made you decide to get involved with these organizations, and what have you learned through your work with them?

Appendix 6: Elizabeth Bowen’s Oral History

“I Want to Call Myself an Iraqi:” The Changing Names, Plans and Secrets of an Iraqi-American Family

Shada L. does not remember moving to the U.S. Her family left Iraq in 1991, when she was only two years old. At the time, her home country was war-ravaged and in a recession because of international sanctions follow-ing Saddam Hussein’s refusal to cooperate with U.N. disarmament terms. Once the Gulf War had ended, the Iraqi people were left with a devastated economy, damaged oil refineries, political insurrections, and a food short-age that led to government rationing as well as, according to UNICEF, the deaths of approximately 500,000 children. Although Shada’s family is Sunni, which allowed them to avoid Hussein’s repressive actions against Shias and Kurds, they were still confronted with the country’s damaged infrastructure, transportation and educational systems. Shada’s family was a part of a migration wave that occurred in the early 1990s, when Iraqi families who were wealthy enough to leave the country did so, many with the intent of returning to Iraq once the situation there had improved. According to the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, 49,006 Iraqis immigrated to the U.S. between 1989 and 2001. Of these immi-grants, 25,710 (over half) were naturalized between 1991 and 2001.

Shada grew up in [hometown deleted for privacy purposes], Connecticut where her parents run an architecture firm. She is 21 years old and will be graduating from Fordham University this semester as a philosophy and Middle East studies double major. She has one older sister, Sara, who is also an architect. Unlike her parents, Shada is not a practicing Muslim.


I. THE WAR BETWEEN HOMES

It’s actually a funny story about how I started going by Sharry. It started when I was in kindergarten, and my sister and I went to an after-school program. This woman was coming around the first day, asking us all our names and I was really shy about my name at the time. Whenever some-one asked my name, I’d be really nervous because people would always butcher it or make fun of it. I was really shy, too, so [when she asked my name,] I said it in a really quiet voice and the woman was like, “What?” I repeated it and she said, “What?” So my sister jumped in and said, “You can call her Sharry!” I was like, “Uh . . . okay! I have an American name! I’m so cool, my name’s Sharry!” And then it stuck, for years.

When I was coming to college I started thinking about switching [my name] back because I thought, “I’m meeting new people. This is a good time to do it.” And then I just chickened out. But my sophomore year, my friend Ali sat in on my Arabic class sometimes. When we first met, [he asked my] name and I said Shada. I started meeting people through him and introducing myself as Shada. And then I thought, “I really like this; I should have done this a long time ago.” So whenever I met anyone else I would introduce myself that way. I tell people who’ve been calling me Sharry to switch, but it’s really hard because they say, “No, I’ve been calling you Sharry forever; it would be weird. You have a new name in a different language all of a sudden.”

[At home, we speak] a mix of both [English and Arabic]. I think in English, so I automatically respond in English. My mom usually speaks English with us, but my dad always speaks in Arabic and I’ll respond in English unless I’m consciously thinking about how I want to enhance my Arabic. My dad is always trying to push it, too, so if I say something in English, he’ll make me repeat it in Arabic. Which is good—it’s important, especially because I am trying to get better at Arabic. Also because I want to go back; I want to make that a bigger part of my life. Sometimes I’ll wish we had never left or I’ll wish that my Arabic was better. When I went to Iraq, jokes would go around that I wouldn’t understand, and there were references I didn’t get. It’s really painful for me to feel like I want to belong there, I want to call myself an Iraqi, but I really, and I grew up here. I’m an American. So I’m just constantly trying to become more in touch with that side of myself.

[The first time I went to Iraq,] it was in 2004. We flew to Jordan and then drove from Jordan to Iraq. We were driving to my dad’s house—his family’s house. I remember him saying, “We’re almost there,” and I started shaking. When we got there, Dad just got out of the car and walked up to the gate, opened the door and walked in. Like normal. He just went to the

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side door, opened it and walked into his house. He called out, “Hello?” And then I heard all these people screaming and running to the door, like “Ahhhhh!” I was showered with kisses from people I didn’t know. It was my first time meeting all of them. Everyone was crying.

We slept immediately because it had been a 24-hour trip. Some of my family wasn’t home at the time because we got there during the day and they were at school or work. So my sister and I were sleeping in this room, and we woke up to all these people sitting there staring at us! It was so funny! But it was also really nice that they were that excited and watched over us in our sleep.

[We’d gone back because], after the war broke out, it was just this shock of, “Oh my god, we haven’t been home in so long and our family’s going through a war; what are we doing here?” So we went back to see family. [At home in America,] there was just this fear for my family and [my parents were] calling them as much as possible in this constant state of worry. Things were really shaky at that time. I remember my parents being really upset; the war was on their minds all the time and I could sense that.

In terms of why the war was happening, of course they knew from the start that it was all just bullshit. We went out to rallies all the time; we’d been going to rallies since I was even younger because of the sanctions. But my parents were very active about informing people, especially my dad. He was always speaking at churches or anywhere, just letting people know what was really going on. And he was always in touch with my fam-ily, making sure that they were okay. It became, for my dad, at least, an obsession. Even now, he’s still constantly in touch with that. Whenever he has any down time, he’s online, speaking to my family or watching clips or reading articles. He’s just always completely immersed in what’s going on over there. Part of it is wishing he could be with his family.

[Being Arab after 9/11] was really, really hard. My mom’s scarf became an issue again, which was weird because I’d become so used to it. Whenever we left the house, I felt it again like I did when I was young and other kids would stare at her. We did get shit from people. I remember once my mom was standing on a grocery line, paying for food, and there was this woman behind her speaking really loudly about Muslims being terrorists. My mom just looked at her and moved to another line.

Another time we got into a really bad car accident and we were sitting on the side of the road. My mom was there and she had her headscarf on, of course, and this guy just drove by in a car and yelled out the window, “God bless America!” because we had just been in a car accident. There were other stories I heard from friends . . . someone shot an arrow into my friend’s window. Who shoots an arrow? It was in Paterson, New Jersey,


where lots of Arabs live, so they were an easy target. And there were peo-ple who would just spit at Arabs. It was a lot of really gross shit that made me go, “Oh wow, I thought I was unconscious of being different, but now it’s an issue all of a sudden.”

But then there was the other end of it where people just became more interested and wanted to know about Islam. There was a Muslim community in the town that I lived in and they hosted all these interfaith dialogues. Even just regular people would say, “Oh, hey, I want to know about Islam”—that was nice. And I think people are a lot more aware now, just because of that. Just because 9/11 happened.

II. UNTIL THINGS GET BETTER

[My parents decided to leave Iraq] because of the sanctions. People were really poor at the time; even basic food was hard to get sometimes, as well as medicine and health care. My family was upper middle class so they were doing fine, but compared to the pre-sanction era, it was starting to become more difficult. Originally, [moving to the U.S.] was just sup-posed to be a temporary thing. They just wanted to leave for a while until, hopefully, things got better. But then the first Gulf War happened and of course, things just went downwards and we never went back.

In 1990, my dad left and went to London; then he came to the U.S. We were supposed to follow him soon after, but the war broke out so we were stuck in Iraq until after the war ended. Then the three of us followed him to the U.S. I have other family who left as well but didn’t come to the U.S., so they’re scattered all over the world—Denmark, Sweden, Australia, Canada, England. We chose the U.S. because my mom was born in Chicago. She grew up in Iraq but she was born here because her dad, my grand-father, was studying at the University of Chicago while my grandma was pregnant with my mom. So she was born and then really soon after, they went back. She already had citizenship so it was easy for us to move here.

When we first got here, we were living in a two-family house in a really poor area. We didn’t have much money and my parents both had architecture degrees from Iraq, but because they’d just gotten here, it was really hard for them to find work. My dad ended up doing deliveries for some company and my mom was sewing clothes. So it took them a while to just find work in their field. Eventually they did each find jobs at firms and I’m amazed at how far they’ve gone. Finally they have their own firm now, which you don’t even see sometimes with people who have lived in the U.S. forever. I really admire them for that.

My parents were really isolated. To this day, we still don’t know very many Iraqis in the area where we live. There were other Middle Easterners

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in Patterson, so there were a lot of Arab stores and that’s where our mosque is. So we’d go there a lot and my parents shop there all the time. We got to know other Arabs but they’re mostly Egyptian or Palestinian.

[My parents were] unable to connect with the people here because the social dynamic is totally different. Back home, people are really, really social and your door is always open for your neighbors to just pop in and out. And you have a ton of family living in the same house. Sometimes if you get married and you have kids, you stay in the same house and take a certain part of the house, and your sister takes another part of the house with her family—that sort of thing. So it was just really difficult for my parents, being just the two of them with two young kids and not knowing anybody. Their English was pretty good so that helped them, but even to this day there’s still a certain amount of distance that they feel with Americans just because of the cultural differences. There’s always this feeling of not having the same connection to people here as they did back home.

[I don’t think they’ll move back to Iraq.] Maybe another Arab coun-try. But for the longest time my parents were kind of split on the issue. My dad has always wanted to go back. My mom originally wanted to, but decided that it was a really bad idea and she dealt with the problem by pushing it away and saying, “I don’t want to go back.” Even when I see her interacting with her family back home, there’s this weird distance that I think she uses as a coping mechanism. She just says, “I have a new life here and that’s that.” But I spoke to her recently and I asked her the same question—would you go back to Iraq—and I noticed a switch. I think it had something to do with us being in Syria last summer and her remem-bering the kind of connection that you can have with people over there.

Dealing with having kids grow up in another culture was always really difficult for my parents, and it still is. They were trying to keep what they grew up with at home as much as possible, but they were also trying to make sure that we were able to be comfortable here, to get along with the kids at school. I think the biggest regret that they’ve had is that we weren’t able to grow up in the same situation that they grew up in. [For example,] in the Arab world, it just doesn’t happen where kids move out of the house if they’re not married—especially not a woman. For a woman to be living alone over there, it just doesn’t happen, even today. My dad will say a woman doesn’t leave the house on her own. Even when I want to travel, my parents have to be with me. So I could only apply to colleges that were in the area because my parents wouldn’t have me go anywhere else. It’s expected that once I graduate I’m going to live at home until I get married, which is not the course that I’m planning on taking. But now it’s just a matter of once I’m financially able to support myself, that’s when I can move out.


III. KEEPING SECRETS

He has to be Muslim; you can’t compromise that. Preferably Arab, particu-larly Iraqi. I used to think that it was only Islam that mattered, but then I asked my parents, “Do you want me to marry an Arab?” and they said yes. That really shocked me, actually, because I didn’t think my parents thought in those terms. I asked why, and they said, “That way we can meet his family, know if he comes from a respectable family.” In Iraq, people still ask you what tribe you’re from. I don’t want to say tribe, exactly, but it means your super, super extended family. Marriages happen between families over there, not between individuals. So if two men know each other and they both have kids, they’ll say, “Your daughter is good for my son, because we’re really good friends and our families know each other.”

My sister has been proposed to twice. Not directly, but they’ve pro-posed to my dad. One of them was actually a cousin. That’s not so com-mon, but it happens. My parents understood that Sara was freaked out because it’s her cousin and we’re just not used to that here, so my dad was open to her saying no. If she had said yes, he would have said, “Okay, you can get married.” But my mom was more like, “What the fuck?” She told Dad, A) they’re cousins; B) they don’t have the same experience because he’s lived in Iraq all his life; C) Sara’s smarter than him. She pointed out A-B-C and my dad was like, “Oh.” But my grandma, my dad’s mom, had said something before she died about my sister and our cousin being a good couple. I think that really killed my dad.

It was the same thing with the other guy who proposed. He was just a family friend who my sister has never spoken to; he’d seen her at family gatherings. So she said no, she wasn’t interested, and my dad said all right. My dad wants us both to get married so he’s going to be excited about anyone he thinks is a respectable person and who’s Arab and Muslim and all the requirements. If we meet someone like that on our own, that’s fine, but my parents are fine with arranged marriage, too. My dad just thinks that’s the right way to get married. He says those kind of marriages always work out better than the way it happens here, where people date and guys mistreat women—sleep with one woman one night and then peace out. That’s legitimate, but it doesn’t justify arranged marriage.

My parents don’t expect a completely arranged marriage. They met in college; it’s not like they didn’t know each other before they were married. They were friends throughout college. It was interesting because their friends knew that they were going to get married even before they had gotten engaged. It was just this unspoken “oh, those two.” Of course, they weren’t technically dating.

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I have to hide my dating from my parents. I’m not allowed to date at all, but especially not if it’s not the desired kind of guy. My mom’s sister was married to an Iraqi, and they moved to Sweden and he cheated on her so they got a divorce. A few years went by, and my aunt met someone else who was Swedish and not Muslim—not religious at all—and they got married. I didn’t find out about this until years after they got married because my mom stopped speaking to her. My sister told me this, only because [she asked my mom], “What happened to our aunt? You haven’t spoken about her in a while,” and that was when my mom chose to tell her. I don’t know how long she would have gone without telling us. I was just disgusted by my mom not speaking to her, and then not telling us. I was also really surprised because I think of my mom as the more liberal one and the one not forcing Islam down our throats all the time, so to see her react that way was really unsettling. Now they’ve reconciled and our aunt came to Syria with us, but they still don’t really talk about her husband. So I don’t know how my parents would react [if I didn’t marry a Muslim,] but I know it wouldn’t be good. I don’t know how I would deal with it, but it’s something I’m going to have to worry about if I do choose to get married.

It’s not only dating [that I have to hide]—even just hanging out with males. It’s interesting because even if a guy were gay, my parents don’t think being gay is right, either. They can’t know I drink, or even academic stuff sometimes. I won’t show them certain books I’m reading, like The Second Sex or even my thesis that I wrote last semester. I didn’t really talk to my parents about it, because it was about Arab women and… me, basi-cally. The shit that we have to go through.

I think that’s a lot more painful than [having to hide] the drinking and the dating because I want to have meaningful conversations with my parents about things that I’m genuinely interested in and that take up a big part of my life. This is what I’m doing in school. I want to be able to share it with them and I can’t. Or even stupid things, like, “Oh mom, I met this guy.” I can’t tell her that. I’ve found that sometimes I’m just sitting down with my mom and we’ll be completely silent. I know that would have been different either if I were more religious or if my parents were more liberal. I just really think of it as if I live two lives—there’s my New York life and my home life. A lot of what I would care to talk about is what’s going on here [in New York].

When you pray, you have to wash yourself beforehand, and if you have nail polish on, the washing doesn’t count because you have a layer over your body. I went home the other day with nail polish on, and when I got there, my family was happy to see me. I sat down to dinner with my dad, and after half an hour, I saw him looking at my nails. He didn’t say anything about the


nail polish, but he asked, “Have you been praying?” I said no, and he asked why. He was like, “Do you not think about it? Do you not care?” I’m always so tempted to just say, “No, Dad, I don’t care; I don’t pray; I don’t ever want to pray; stop asking me.” But of course, I can’t do that.

I’ve found that I’ve been pushing more and more. I used to say, “Oh no, I’m sorry, I’ll go pray right now.” But now I’ll say, “No, I didn’t pray; I’m not going to pray.” I’ll say, “I don’t think about that. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that I don’t think about that.” But who knows, maybe in a few years I’ll straight up say I don’t care. [This most recent time,] he said, “You can study for your tests in school, but you should prepare for the big test, the real test.” I just looked at him and walked away. He was just disgusted with me. That’s always really painful—it’s like, “Oh, nice to see you, too, dad; haven’t seen you in three weeks and you think I’m a failure at life. That’s awesome.”

[My resistance to Islam] had a lot to do with being among non-Mus-lims. When I was young, I didn’t understand why I couldn’t do all these things that the other kids were doing, or why my mom wore a scarf. I remember I was five years old, and this girl came up to me after school when my mom picked me up. She said, “Is that your grandma?” because my mom had the scarf on her head. Little things like that, that as a little kid made me embarrassed when my mom picked me up from school. Or she’d pack me something, some Arabic food for lunch, and I would eat it privately. I was just so afraid of standing out.

My parents tried to take us to the mosque on Saturdays when they had school where they taught Arabic and the Qur’an. But my sister and I were always really reluctant to go and it just wasn’t very well organized, so that didn’t really go anywhere. We would just learn a sura (chapter of the Qur’an) here, and then in another year we would learn two more. I know other families whose kids went to private Muslim school and they’re all a lot more religious. They know about the religion a lot more than I do and I think my parents kind of wish we’d gone through that schooling, although it wasn’t as good of a school system as what we went through.

I never came to understand the religion enough to want to [wear a headscarf]. But now that I do know more about it, it’s a conscious deci-sion not to wear it because I don’t believe in it. My dad brings it up a lot, just in passing. Little comments like, “Don’t leave the house; you’re sinning because you don’t have a scarf on your head.” He’s not really aggressive about it but every once in a while it’ll just pop up somehow. He’ll try to sneak it in. But my mom, who wears it, has never said anything to me about it. It’s just a matter of they can’t force us to wear it. What are they gonna do?

I’ve kind of built up this reaction where, when I hear my parents say, “Let’s open up the Qur’an,” I resist it. Whereas if I’m [reading the Qur’an]

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on my own just to educate myself, that’s something I want to do because it doesn’t make sense to resist something you don’t know about. But [Islam] has always been the one part of my culture that I don’t really want to keep with me.

I try to keep all these things to myself until it’s time to confront my parents. If I were to tell them right now, “By the way, I don’t want to get married and I’m going to move out of the house when I’m making money,” they would freak out. I don’t want to jump to confront them. After all, I don’t know what’s in my future either. I keep a lot of secrets from my par-ents, but that’s just because—it sounds funny, but it’s out of respect for them. They would feel like they failed as parents if they knew the things that I did. So it’s definitely difficult not to be able to connect with them. They’re the people who are the closest to me, but they’re the farthest at the same time.

[photo deleted for privacy purposes]Shada L. in the summer of 2010, when she traveled to Syria to take

Arabic classes and do service work with Iraqi refugees.

Appendix 7: Elizabeth Bowen’s Assessment

For me, the hardest part of this interview was that I have a close personal relationship with the interviewee. I knew going into it that some of the questions would be hard ones to ask—topics that aren’t always pleas-ant for her to talk about and that I’ve seen can make her emotional. I’ve seen her cry over things her parents have said to her, so I was nervous to ask her about conflicts with her parents. Although she did get teary a couple of times during the interview, I was lucky in that she was still will-ing to talk about those issues. As a result, I got a chance to really learn about that relationship for the first time. I knew that she kept secrets from her parents, but she’d never told me explicitly about the kind of constant emotional toll that it takes on her to live these two separate lives. I was surprised, for example, to learn that her system of deceiving her parents is so intricate that it reaches even to her choice of whether or not to paint her nails, and that the system can and does break apart with a mistake so seemingly trivial as going home with red nails.

I think that my prior knowledge of the interviewee’s life was both a blessing and a curse. In some ways it was helpful, because it allowed me to construct questions based on aspects of her life I already knew were interesting; I didn’t have to search for the interesting parts quite as much during the interview. It was also helpful that she knows and trusts me, so she was willing to talk about very personal struggles. However, I think that my preconceived notions of what I wanted her to address could have


been a detriment in some ways, since perhaps there were other aspects of her life that we didn’t discuss just because my initial questions were less general than they might have been if I were interviewing a stranger. Maybe there’s some great story she’s never told me, so I wasn’t trying to get her to talk about it.

If I were to do another oral history, I would try harder to come up with themes for my questions before I conduct the interview. In this case, I basically structured the order of my questions in terms of the chronology of Shada’s life, so they started with the move from Iraq and ended with her life in college. However, I didn’t end up structuring the edited version chronologically at all, so I had to do a lot of shifting quotes around. I struc-tured this oral history around the different versions of her family that she presented over the course of the interview—first the family stretched across two conflicting homes; then the isolated family in a new country; then the family divided by generational differences. However, if I’d known in advance that I wanted to focus the oral history on aspects of Shada’s family rather than simply on her as an individual, I could have created a different flow of questions that might have been less work to organize and also might have prompted different responses.

I think that this project was a really important exercise in acknowl-edging the extent to which an interviewer controls the subject’s narrative. Although I wanted Shada to be able to tell her own story and I asked her if there was anything she wanted to talk about outside of the questions I asked her, the fact is that I directed the flow of conversation and in the end, I decided which parts of her story were worth including and which weren’t. Perhaps she would have chosen differently. I had some concept beforehand of the fact that an edited interview does not allow the inter-viewee full subjectivity, but I had never been forced to think about it in such direct terms. In this case, I actually had to question my own role in shaping someone else’s narrative, which meant wrestling with the fact that my narrative of Shada’s life could not possibly be her own, no matter how much I wanted it to be. If I were to do another oral history, I think one thing I might change about my approach would be to ask the interviewee what he/she’d like to talk about first. I asked Shada if she had anything else to say at the end of the interview, but at that point the conversa-tion had already been limited to the focuses I gave it. Perhaps if she were able to direct the conversation at the beginning, it wouldn’t be so much of my own construction. Of course, it is an interview, so no matter what, I would be controlling the narrative in some way, whether by structuring the conversation topics or by asking follow-up questions to statements the interviewee makes on his/her own. No matter what, the interviewer is

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a problematic figure in producing an oral history, and I didn’t realize quite how questionable a position it is until I had to do it myself.

Elizabeth Stone is a Professor of English and Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of four books, including Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us and The Hunter College Campus Schools for the Gifted: The Challenge of Equity and Excellence. She has written for the New York Times and elsewhere on the subject of immigration. E-mail: [email protected].


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Teaching Oral History in a College-level "New Wave Immigrant Literature" course

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