First Day of Our Long Awaited Seminar

Today the junior fellows met in the library rotunda for our first class of our "Seminar on Jordan and the Middle East". I say long awaited because most of the junior fellows, if not all, accepted their job with the understanding that the school would create this seminar for them. Personally, I took this job because I wanted to learn more about Islam and the history of the Middle East. Since we the junior fellows had discussed at our weekly meetings that we were mostly all interested in learning about these two topics and that we would be able to design the seminar according to our own interests, I decided to wait patiently for this seminar to begin. Now we have our course syllabus and have met for the first time. Today we discussed a short story that we had read the night before and a poem by a well known Palestinian poet who recently passed away. The short story was called "Tigers on the Tenth Day" and was written by Zakira Tamir. We discussed how the Arabic speaking world hadn't been actively producing works during the Ottoman Empire and that Zakira Tamir helped revive modern Arabic literature during the 20th century. The story we read was about a caged tiger who slowly comes to submit to his tamer and to forget his own identity. We discussed that Zakira Tamir used his writing to protest the oppressive regimes underwhich he lived. The next reading that we discussed was a poem called "My Mother", by Mahmoud Darwish. Mahmoud Darwish was a Palastinian who fled his home in the 1948 war. His death last August has saddened many of his admirers, including our head librarian who reportedly needed a moment to collect herself when talking about it to a school tour group. The school is even planning to honor his life at an upcoming school meeting. I think the school plans to bring a musician to read Darwish's poetry and accompany it with his own music. Anyway, "My Mother" is about Darwish's regrert at living in exile (Israel) and not being able to be by his mother's side when she passed away (At least, I think that's what I remember hearing today). In this poem Darwish writes about his longing to be with his mother again. However, I believe that Darwish also used the word, mother as a symbol for a Palestian homeland. I'm not sure yet what I think about this seminar. I feel so busy right now because I feel as if I have been and still am gradually committing myself to more and more small responsibilites here and there. I feel really stressed when I start thinking about the prospect of writing 10 papers in addition to all my other responsibilities. I am also not sure what this seminar will teach me about Islam and the Middle East. But I mean that literally: I simply do not know how much I will learn because we only meet once a week and because our seminar is set to cover multiple topics in addition to Islam and history. However, the seminar nevertheless looks interesting as well as promising. Our coordinator tells us that we will here lectures from various esteemed teachers and professors, both from and not from our school, who will discuss various topics with us such as Islamic art, women's studies, and the issue of Palestine and Israel. So, time will tell.