Middle East Q&A

Q & A with Nesreen Khashan and Jim Bowman for Encounters with the Middle East

How did we find the stories?

We used direct connections with many people—friends, colleagues, heritage travelers, creative writers, scholars, and others, a wide network of people connected in different ways to travel and the Middle East— and appealed to their interest in telling their stories. We also sent out a call for submissions through our contacts in Middle Eastern studies at the University of Arizona and other universities. Travelers’ Tales put out a call for stories on its website, which generated dozens of manuscripts. They provided other support as well, such as sharing from their files of previously submitted and published stories that were related to the Middle East.

How did we select the stories? Why did we select the ones we did?

Let’s start with some context: our experience and study of the region doesn’t match what we see represented in the media about the Middle East. We were looking for stories that showed people’s humanity, the joy and beauty of the region, as well as its struggles. For us, this was a sort of diversity. We were particularly impressed by stories that demonstrated a sense of exploration and wonder on the part of the narrator/traveler. Because we have traveled to many of these places ourselves, we were attracted to stories that gave a sense of these places as we remember them—urban jungles and rural landscapes no less culturally complex than those in the West, where visitors can be treated like royalty, the food is often fantastic, and there’s never enough time to see all the sights.

We were looking for stories where the narrators weren’t afraid to become personally invested in the place, such as one can within the context of travel. When Erika Trafton breaks down at the end of her Jerusalem narrative, Rolf Potts ruminates on the chaotic scene of Cairo during the Eid, or Pat Walker leaves Bethlehem saddened by its violence…these stories resonated with us emotionally and we believed these would reach people’s imaginations, inspiring if not travel then a possibility to transform people’s relationships to a place.

Stories that complicate or contest high profile Middle Eastern myths in the Western press were also a welcome change. Quite a few submissions addressed the fear and anxiety experienced by many Western travelers to the region, and “Kidnapped by Syrian Hospitality” probably plays that angle up more than any. Two stories in particular departed from the maddening conviction in the West that “Middle Eastern woman” equates to “oppression”: “Promise Coffee,” a story about arranged marriages in Turkey by Mike McGee, and “Clothes, Camaraderie, and Qat” a behind-the-scenes look at how women in Yemen assert their identities and empower themselves within their own cultural constructs, written by Betsy Hiel. Murad Kalam’s “If It Doesn’t Kill You First” provides an American Muslim’s perspective on not just the hajj, but also the heterogeneity within Islamic religious practices and ideologies. Such stories create a more accurate, complex picture of cultural life in the region.

What we were looking to avoid? We very much did not want the type of travel writing that assumes a distant, objective, disengaged, and overly judgmental position. When a writer arrives, surveys the landscape, pronounces its comparative deficiencies, and makes no effort to meet and get to know the people, their everyday lives, their passions, their anxieties—we think that’s a recipe for travel writing of the worst sort. We really wanted narrators to engage the differences in people’s lives and in the lands they encountered, and wonder about how these differences affect their own way of looking at the world. In several stories, the narrators demonstrate a humility and openness to learn and be challenged by what they absorb through cross-cultural interactions. Amanda Coffin’s brave, critical comparative writing about a Palestinian stuck in Jordan in “Repatriation and Regret” is an excellent example of what we mean here. With personal writing should come personal responsibility, even better reciprocity in that writer’s relations to the place. We tended to pass over writing that failed to demonstrate how travel can be a process of discovery about self and others.

A drive for geographic diversity also played its part in the process. We wanted a cross-section of the region as we have defined it for this collection. We had an unusually high number of submissions from destinations popular with travelers and writers: Jerusalem, Egypt and Turkey, for example, were places that we had many submissions from, but in the end we turned away many very strong stories just because of stiff competition in these places.

Who are the writers?

Based on biographical information provided by the 30 contributors, it appears that diversity in terms of vocation, region, gender, race, religion, and national identity emerged rather organically through the selection process. A third of the stories come from women who have traveled to or live in the Middle East. People of different religious faiths and perspectives—Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others—tell their stories in this book. The writers currently reside pretty much everywhere on the globe, including several who make their homes outside their countries of origin. Others live month-to-month abroad, plying their trade at Wireless Internet cafes and hotels across the Middle East and elsewhere. While the majority of the writers are U.S. nationals, a half dozen come from the U.K., Canada, and Turkey. As for careers or personal profiles, the range is dizzying. Some write novels, plays, memoirs, and poetry. Several work as professional editors. While all could be considered travel writers, many moonlight as teachers, scholars, graphic artists, foreign correspondents, entrepreneurs, activists, and erstwhile language learners. That’s probably just scratching the surface.

What was the purpose of creating this book?

We wanted to create a book that would represent the lands and peoples of the Middle East in ways that would remind Western readers of a humanity—and world—shared by all. Our determination to see this project through was fueled by frustration with the way most people in the U.S. and in other Western societies understand the region. The Middle East is so often front-page news of gloom and doom, a debilitating cultural script that does an injustice to the diversity and humanity of the region. When you go to a bookstore, despite a proliferation of texts about the region, there still seems to be a paucity of resources that display something other than the latest theory on jihad. Refreshing and accessible travel stories, we hope, can make some headway into countering or qualifying the extremity in iconic images sold to Western audiences as “the Middle East.”

Who are we? Why are we interested in the region?

Nesreen Khashan is a freelance writer who lives in Washington DC. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Nesreen flies back frequently to teach in the Global Studies Program at Mission College near San Jose. Her interest in the Middle East is inexorably linked to her identity as a Palestinian-American who was raised by immigrant parents. Her parents came to the United States from Kuwait, her birthplace, when she was a one-year-old.

It wasn’t until Nesreen was 26 that she returned to the Arab world. Her trip was memorable for all the right reasons. She went on the trip with her father and an Anglo-American college friend of hers. Her college friend and her father never got along. Her college friend thought her father too stubborn and inflexible, her father thought her American friend too high-maintenance and intrusive. It got to be that Nesreen would wake up every morning during that six-week trip recalling who it was she was supposed to please—her American friend or her father. It was impossible to please the two of them at the same time because they came from such two different spaces generationally and culturally. Nesreen felt as if she was something in between—young and American but somewhat accommodating and eager to respect to some extent the patriarchal authority she had been born into.

So each day she would change off—one day for her father, the other day for her friend, and so on. On days with her father, they would walk through the steep streets of Ramallah eating pistachio ice cream on a cone. Her father might remark how nice it was that they were together, implying that the American friend was not present. On days it was the American friends turn, they would go to Jerusalem, over to the west side, where there were sushi restaurants, pizza joints and nightclubs. As two young women are inclined to do, they spent much of their time talking to the local boys. Overall, the trip was joyful if a bit strained.

It was then that Nesreen recognized her own ability to bridge cultures in ways that maybe some others couldn’t really grasp. She knew that there were people who weren’t talking to each other and after that trip she also knew that she would figure out a way to get them to explore that difference rather than shutter away from it. But not that trip. For that trip, her father and her young American friend remained at odds.

Jim Bowman landed in Turkey in the Fall of 1992, just having turned 22, freshly minted passport in one hand, second-hand, out-of-date Lonely Planet Turkey guidebook in the other. After two years of living in Istanbul, a glorious, cesspool-jewel of a city, and traveling within Turkey and getting a chance to meet its neighbors to the south, he got hooked on travel. Visits to Ephesus and Cappadocia,as well an unforgettable 32-hour bus trip from Istanbul to Damascus and a two-week sojourn to Egypt and its sights in Cairo, Luxor, and Aswan had him dizzy with the beauty and diversity of the region.

After two very good years in Istanbul, subsidized by long hours of mercenary duty teaching English to wonderfully spoiled and entertaining private school students, Jim headed home for more professional training, which eventually brought him back to Turkey, this time to a private university in Ankara. Over the next four years, his Turkish improved leaps and bounds, as did his connections with and understanding of the people and cultures of Turkey and the Middle East (which matters deeply to him). Yet some of the shine wore off the romance of travel.

In July of 2001, with a heavy heart, he packed up his carpets and kilims, Turkish comic books and coffee mugs, and returned to the U.S. with plans to immerse himself in the study of rhetoric and writing. Then a few months later, the region he had lived happily and traveled widely in for large swathes of his adult life became “news” in the worst sort of way. As a Ph.D. student taking courses at the University of Arizona, curiosities from his life experiences in Turkey found their way into seminar papers, and a desire to hold onto his Turkish led to a minor in Near Eastern Studies, a language study scholarship, and summer work, over a period of several years, that introduced the Middle East to teachers in the U.S. through one-month trips to the region. His continuing fascination with the region focuses on how travel writers imagine the Middle East.

The book Encounters with the Middle East serves in many ways as a window into what he thinks would be beneficial to know about a region that so often ends up misunderstood, reductively rendered, and disparaged in the discourse of these times. In addition to continued duties teaching in the Writing Program, Jim is completing a doctoral dissertation concerning the rhetoric and representation of Turks in the travel literature of Cyprus, 1955-2005. He studies in the Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English Program and the Near Eastern Studies Department at the University of Arizona, where he teaches courses in rhetoric, writing, and research.

What kind of impact do we believe a book like this can have on Western audiences?

If people can identify with those who come from outside their dominant cultural worlds—and don’t we all have that capacity?—then this book can reach them and affect their views of this region and its people. When you meet someone like Nabil in Amanda Coffin’s story, or the curious boy of Michel Moushabeck’s memoir, or many of these characters, then the story might be doing some of the seeding needed to eventually help Western audiences break through the fear-based messaging typically associated with the Middle East. The stories allows readers to recognize the complexity of a region that leaves travelers spellbound with its legendary hospitality, colorful landscapes, cultural treasures, and inescapable contradictions.

How would this book be helpful in U.S. classrooms?

This collection of 30 different narratives is easier for instructors to distill and students to process. In terms of activities, instructors can be precise about what issue they would like to focus on in the stories. These stories capture different issues and themes from diverse lands, so pragmatically there’s a lot of choice. Many of the stories approach themes that are commonly represented dichotomously in US media, thus giving instructors the opportunity to challenge assumptions and promote dialogue about what these stories reveal about or own culture.

Why would someone never planning to visit the Middle East want to read this book?

This book gives people who are turned off by the din of news from the region a reason to take another look at by approaching the Middle East from the more accessible lens of the travel writer. While some stories tackle tough issues, none of them have the exhausting qualities that news reports tend to have, with their declarations of violence, doom, and setbacks.

We imagine that the appeal of Jerusalem and the Holy Lands of the bible continue to be important to many people everywhere in the world.

Intercultural dialogue within our own communities represents another key motive for readers. These stories tell us about the cultural and religious practices of people in the region who have immigrated to or are visiting our own countries: people from Turkey, Iran, Israel, Egypt and so forth. A number of the stories touch on Muslim traditions in particular, and although these stories don’t represent the entire Muslim world, their treatment of certain religious traditions resonates with people who live in other parts of the Muslim world, and other Muslims in the United States who are not from the Middle East.

How is travel writing able to effectively convey valuable cultural information about the Middle East?

The narrators in a way can really function as a positive mediating force because they don’t have that purported objectivity of the reporter, they’re on the inside and they’re writing on the inside. They haven’t been culturally scripted in the way that the news report in Iraq to get “the story.” For these narrators, going to the barber or going to the carpet shop or having dinner out is the story. We believe that people in the US, like anywhere, have the capacity to recognize shared qualities with others, both narrator and narrated.