On the (other) Melissa Hussain Case

This is an excerpt from my dissertation, on the (other) Melissa Hussain case that was recently in the news:

Since taking on my husband’s last name after we were married, I have been all-too aware of how my last name throws people off—it confuses them, or makes them nervous, or both. People are not sure what to think, because I am white but my last name is “Hussain.” Students who step into the classroom on the first day are surprised—they expected a woman of color. And a few years back, when I visited a friend in Texas, she asked me rather apologetically whether she should introduce me to her friends as “Melissa Hussain,” rather than as “Melissa Tennyson” (Tennyson is my maiden name). I looked at her, rather perplexed, and told her that my last name is in fact Hussain, so of course she should introduce me that way. The unstated—and no doubt unconscious—point she was making is that “Tennyson” sounds like one of “us” (as in white people in a small town in Texas). But “Hussain”? Hussain sounds like a foreigner, and a very bad one, at that—in other words, an Islamic foreigner, or a Middle Eastern foreigner, or a terrorist, or possibly all three.

Now, let me share one more story in regards to my last name, a more extreme example of the anti-Islam racism and homogenizing assumptions prevalent in the U.S. While I was in the final stages of writing my dissertation, another woman with the same name as me—in fact, spelled exactly the same—who is also a teacher, was suddenly thrust into the national limelight (February, 2010) when she complained about her students on the online social networking site Facebook, and parents caught wind of this. Given the fact that this woman—an eighth grade science teacher in North Carolina—was not a Christian (and a young woman who had stepped into the class as a mid-term substitute), her students were harassing her, and obviously trying to push her buttons. They gave her a bible and a Christmas card (with Christ underlined), while they also sang “Jesus Loves Me” in class instead of working on their homework. The students had also been insisting that she teach creationism in her science class. She threw the Christmas card away, and insisted that the students not sing the song instead of doing their homework, and that they stick to science instead of religion in the science classroom.

On her Facebook page, the teacher complained about her students (without naming any of them) to her friends, calling the bible gift a “hate crime,” and asserting that she “was able to shame” her students over the incident. Her major error, it seems, is that she had not established high enough security settings for her Facebook account, which meant that parents of her students could read what she was saying to her friends, and they took offense.

Like me, this teacher is a white woman who took on the last name “Hussain” through marriage. Given the current national anti-Islam hysteria, a name like Hussain strikes a chord of hatred in mainstream America, particularly if it is connected to anything that is perceived as an attack on the religious right. Almost instantly after this story broke into local headlines, the religious right began to rally against this woman. Unfortunately for me, when people searched for information about her online, the majority of the links they found were for my own Facebook page, blogs and websites.

People swiftly assumed that she and I were in fact the same person (and for the record, NO, WE ARE NOT), and various members of the religious right proceeded to flood me with hate mail and hate messages on my blogs, and began posting information about me that they could garner from the public view of my Facebook profile and from the poetry and essays that appeared on my blogs and published articles online. (There were also supporters that immediately rushed to my side as well—this was, in fact, how I learned about the news story in the first place, through a friend request on Facebook that left me scratching my head—it was from a woman who said she was “so sorry to hear about what I was going through,” and I had no idea what she meant.)

But the attacks persisted, nonetheless, and they even went to the extent of dragging my family and daughter into it, bringing up the case of my husband’s delayed immigration visa last year, and analyzing photos of my daughter with Santa Clause, contemplating why an apparent heathen such as I would allow my daughter to celebrate Christmas. And even after discovering that I was in fact a different person from the one in the news story, many from the religious right still felt completely justified in attacking me, given the fact that I have been fairly open about my own political views—which are far removed from theirs—in my writing that appears online.

In response to a post I had made on this writing blog, stating that I am not the same Melissa Hussain as the one in the news, one person wrote: “Yeah, but you’re as big of a liberal kook (pardon the redundancy) as she is, so the attention is warranted. The last place any of you ever need to be is in the academic world.” Needless to say, elementary school is not part of the academic world. Furthermore, the academic world is, arguably, the last safe haven for liberals in the U.S. Facebook, however, is not a safe haven. And for the record, what is the crime I have committed? The crime seems to be that my thoughts and ideas do not sit well with those of the religious right—that thus apparently warrant the “liberal kook” label—while the crime is also that I have posted such thoughts and ideas online, and that my name is Melissa Hussain (guilt by association).

Had the teacher in the news story been named something more typically “American,” such as “Sarah Jones” or “Suzy Smith,” I doubt that people would have been so swift to assume any links that appear online for a person with that same name must all be connected to the same person. Granted, the name “Melissa Hussain” is quite uncommon in the U.S., but this does not negate the racist assumptions embedded in the reactions to the news story. For instance, people immediately assumed that she was Muslim, given her last name, although those who knew her at all clarified that she was agnostic, if anything. Consider this comment, for instance, that appeared in the response section to an online news story on the case (I have preserved the original spelling and punctuation):

Please correct me if I am wrong here did I not see somewhere that all Hussains are blood relatives? Muslims Like Sadamm and countless others that are professed enemys of America.I think that she should go with her mate/partner back to his country and see how the right of freedom of speech is handled there,where women must cover their faces and never speak.We dont need these kind of people here, yes Mitch this country was founded on Christian beliefs by western europeans who intended it to stay that way and not become the worlds mother.

To state the obvious, the last names of Saddam and the teacher in question are in fact spelled differently, although this fact seems to be irrelevant to the person who posted this statement. Of course, both versions of the name (Hussain/Hussein) would be written the same in Arabic, and transliteration can go either way, with an “a” or “e” in the anglicized spelling. Nevertheless, the implication that anyone whose last name is closely or even remotely spelled like Saddam Hussein’s—whether or not they are from Iraq or even the Middle East—is likely to be related to him and thus to be an “enemy of America” is, of course, fundamentally racist. Also, white supremacy, Eurocentrism, and xenophobia are evident in this statement. Furthermore, I would argue that such a statement is indicative of the new racism that has emerged in the U.S. since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, one that I would characterize as an Orientalist racism. That is not to say, of course, that Orientalist racism did not exist prior to 9/11—of course it did. But in the U.S. context, the flames have spread into wildfire since then. Or to put it another way, such racism can be characterized as an “anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Middle Eastern, anti-South Asian, anti-turban, anti-Hussein/Hussain/Middle-Eastern-sounding-name” kind of racism.

All such conflations, homogenizations, and erasures of racial, national, and geographical specificities point to a hegemonically constituted historic bloc—to use the Italian Marxist-Leninist theorist and activist Antonio Gramsci’s famous terms—a bloc characterized by racism, that construes all Muslims or Arabs as terrorists within the long-standing tradition of American popular culture. The racist assumptions about the Islamic world and the misconceptions of Islam have indeed escalated since 9/11. In the dominant ideology, Islam equals terrorism, and Muslim-majority countries are terrorist countries and hence any one seemingly associated with them in any way (through last names or otherwise) is considered suspect. These sweeping generalizations of Islam and of the Muslim world—including the Arab world, and by extension, the East—are, of course, what Edward Said theorizes and critiques not only in his major work Orientalism, but also in his documentary and historical work called Covering Islam.

Women, (Under)Development, Empire: The Other(ed) Margins in American Studies

Here is the abstract for my dissertation-in-progress (to be completed in May, 2010):

An endeavor that traverses the interdisciplinary areas of American studies, rhetorical theory, women’s studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and literary studies, this project emerged from two basic questions: 1) What does it mean to do American Studies, if U.S. imperialism is taken into account? 2) In this era of globalization, what does a country like Bangladesh—one of the poorest countries on this planet, which relies heavily on aid from the World Bank, the IMF, and western donors—have to do with U.S. imperialism? The fundamental argument of this study is that if one inserts the tools of feminist political economy and rhetorical critique into certain methodologies of American Studies and also internationalizes American Studies to account for U.S. imperialism, Bangladesh—described as the “periphery of the periphery”—provides an excellent site of both theoretical and political interventions. Taking into account the many possible pitfalls for a project that “internationalizes” American Studies—one that could very well reproduce imperialism—this study asks what links can be found between such macro-structures of power-relations as U.S. imperialism, capitalism, racism, and patriarchy if we examine, for instance, the exploitation of poor women’s labor-power in Bangladesh’s garment factories which produce the majority of WalMart’s bargain clothes or the eugenist-racist “family planning” programs of USAID in Bangladesh or the country reports produced by the World Bank. However, this study does not simply fix and freeze a Third World site such as Bangladesh as an object of oppression and domination, but to highlight active resistances to U.S. imperialism, capitalism, racism, and patriarchy emanating from Bangladesh in various forms, including cultural productions, feminist activist work, and mass movements. Also, a fundamental question of this study is how academic work can be pressed into the service of social change.

A Song of Love, A Song of War

This poem was published in the journal In Our Own Words (2010), produced by Grand Valley State University’s Women’s Center.

A Song of Love, A Song of War

I was telling you a story about love
how even in war it goes on speaking its own language
—Adrienne Rich

Most days, I cannot bear to turn on the news
the stories of violence, of destruction
are different now, after her birth—
sending shock waves through my womb.
So instead I hold my baby in my arms,
sleeping now against my breast,
content, full with milk,
her fingers curled around mine.
There is no communication more perfect than this.

Our breath rises and falls together in the twilight,
the silence only broken by a lone blue jay who sings
outside the window, his own song of love or of regret.

I hum a song, touch the fuzz of her hair,
and wonder: how we will speak out of the
silences that clutch us—
how to begin
in the frightful day
with words that can be tangible
and nourishing as
bread and soup, the common cup?
“How to do what we need for our living,”1 everyday?

How to name the fear that
tightens its long tail around the torso
of ignorance, indifference, indolence
in this country?
If we do not name it, it will crush us.

How to make paths that do not destroy us,
to believe in the simple miracles of humanity, of peace,
to press our hands firmly against the earth
to believe that answers move there,
waiting to be reborn?

How to explain that they will not come through the ways we have known,
treacherous paths taken by the men who say they lead us
through wars on terror, Wall Street bailouts, homeland security,
while most of us are left spinning in our own fear and isolation?
Will shopping really save us?

How to find ways to be alive in the twenty-first century
when we know there are reasons for the fears
but not the ones they tell us?
Not the Iraqis, the Afghanis, the Palestinians,
not the immigrants, the blacks, the gays, the poor.

And there are answers
that we won’t hear from the news anchors.
Swirling in the womb of the earth below us,
they have nothing to do with fear,
and nothing to do with war.

1. From Audre Lorde’s speech given when she was named State Poet of New York.

“Hers the worst tortures that our souls can know”: Towards a Third Space Black Feminism in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley

Abstract: This essay revisits and rereads the work of the relatively ignored eighteenth-century African American poet Phillis Wheatley who is characterized here as a third-space black feminist. The essay is divided into three sections. The first section critically examines the multiple levels of colonization and silencing that Wheatley was subject to, both in her life and in the reception of her work. Against the grain of conventional understandings of Wheatley’s world and work, the second section advances a close reading of Wheatley’s poetry, pointing to the ways in which she subtly signifies—while also undermining and resisting—the material, discursive, and institutional practices of slavery and patriarchy. The final section argues that Wheatley rightfully belongs to—or even pioneers—the tradition of early black feminism and that her work deserves increased critical attention, not just tokenized acknowledgement, in the service of ongoing feminist and antiracist movements across the world.

Excerpt:

Ain’t I a woman?
—Sojourner Truth

Woman power / is / Black power / is / Human power.
—Audre Lorde

I. Revisiting Phillis Wheatley

The eighteenth-century African-American poet Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753-1784) remains virtually ignored not only in the humanities in general, but even in contemporary literary studies as well. It is true that some literary critics from time to time have paid only lip service to her work which has received very little or no attention from politically and historically engaged black-feminist critical perspectives. My essay, therefore, attempts to address this particular gap—admittedly on a modest scale. I intend to revisit Phillis Wheatley as a black feminist poet in ways in which I do not merely underline her historical significance as such, but also reread her work politically and symptomatically. And my rereading attempts to accentuate certain—if not all—crucial coordinates of her poetry, poetics, politics, and praxis from the perspective of black feminism. I even argue that Phillis Wheatley herself in her own work anticipates such a perspective.

In order to account for the relevance of such a perspective, it is important to go back to her only published full-length collection of poems called Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. When this collection came out in Boston in 1773, she became the first black slave known to have published a book in Britain’s North American colonies. What often gets overlooked, however, is that she was also the first black woman to publish a book. Further, while some critics call attention to and even advocate Wheatley’s particular struggle as a black woman poet, their scholarship seems to leave a sizeable blank vis-à-vis her place in the early tradition of black feminists. In this essay, then, I argue for a re-visioning of the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, whose feminism can be seen across what the contemporary Vietnamese feminist theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha calls the “infinite layers” of the colonized self of the “woman, native, other” (94). Indeed, as a black-slave-woman-poet and thus inhabiting a multi-layered—if not just a multi-hyphenated—location, Wheatley simultaneously advances a feminist, antiracist, and antislavery agenda on different tracks. While Wheatley’s approach seems indirect in most instances, on a careful rereading, however, one can argue that she fashions a poetics of resistance to the dominant power-relations and production-relations of racism, imperialism, patriotism, and patriarchy characterizing the specific historic bloc in eighteenth-century America.

Wheatley’s own immediate historical-material circumstances and her living conditions together prompted and significantly shaped her indirect approach. She heavily depended on her slavemasters, the Wheatley family, for publishing her work. Socioeconomic forces—accompanied as they were by her specific relations to them—of course rendered her situation extremely precarious and vulnerable. This means, for instance, that she could speak out directly in a certain limited sense, yet—in many cases—she was simply unable to voice out a direct critique of the very institution of slavery. Also, Wheatley’s upbringing—by no means a free or a fortunate one—was responsible for isolating her from a community of slaves with whom she could otherwise share her experiences and her frustrations so as to enable her, from the vantage point of that community, to speak directly against the brutality and atrocity of slavery, racism, and sexism all at once. It is true that she enjoyed certain privileges in the Wheatley household. For example, she was allowed to pursue her own education otherwise inaccessible to slaves. However, such “privileges” forced her to inhabit only a confined (and confining) space, ruthlessly alienated as it was from any connections to her past and from others who had a similar past. It is no wonder that Wheatley was unable to remember much—if anything—of her African homeland where she had lived until age seven or eight. Such alienation and forced amnesia are a function of both colonialism and slavery, as they both perpetrate—hand in hand—physical and epistemic violences on the colonized subject.

Of course Wheatley’s experiences of such violences are radically different from those of many other slaves made to live in the most brutal conditions. She cannot be thus neatly aligned with other female slaves in the south who were subject to brutal physical and mental violence by their masters. Nor did Wheatley simply assimilate into white culture. As Gary Nash points out in his seminal work Red, White, and Black, there was an “assimilationist tendency” (180) among slaves in the North. While this is true to some extent, full assimilation for black slaves was impossible in that overtly racist society, whether in the New England area or in the South. Wheatley was also not able to assimilate fully into white family and enjoy the same privileges as her master and mistress. Once she was manumitted, she lost her relative privilege of working as a writer and publishing her own work. Thus, that she could publish only one book—her tremendous promises and potentials notwithstanding—is understandable. And, more significantly, her book of poems itself bears stark testimony to her lack of power as a “free” black woman in a racist-patriarchal society that produces, generates, sanctions, and even legitimizes silences of the colonized, black, and female Other.
Wheatley has been ignored, excluded, and othered—also in the twentieth century—by a whole host of critics on the basis of her lack of apparent authenticity as a slave writer. For example, in 1939, J. Saunders Redding argues: “certainly she [Wheatley] was not a slave poet in any sense in which the term can be applied to many who followed her” (3). Similarly, in 1975, Terrence Collins writes: “Wheatley introduces the slavery question [. . .] as a means of justifying her presuming to speak on the topic of freedom and tyranny” (153). Collins concludes by determining that “Wheatley’s true legacy is the testimony her poetry gives to the insidious, self-destroying nature of even the most subtle, most gentle of racially oppressive conditions” (157). In 1974, Angelene Jamison writes, “after reading various poems of Phillis Wheatley, the first comment of most students is that she was not Black enough and of course they are correct” (130). All such critics tend to dismiss Wheatley for not being an “authentic” slave. Their dismissals of Wheatley on the ground of her “inauthenticity” have been contested by some recent scholars, particularly in the way that those dismissals amount to exclusion of black women from the discourse of the humanities.

Let us then look quickly at several layers at which Wheatley was—and is—silenced or subjugated. First, Wheatley was silenced and colonized by her own racist society. Second, she was further silenced and subjugated by the white Wheatley family. Third, she was even increasingly subject to such a predicament because she was a woman in an overtly patriarchal society. Fourth, this predicament continued to remain a sanctioned one for her because she was not only a woman, but also a black woman. Fifth, even today her voice continues to remain unheard and even dismissed and thus silenced in the discourse of the humanities that otherwise postures or parades as critical and even progressive.

This multi-colonization and silencing of Wheatley suggests her position as what I would like to call a third-space black feminist writer. Contemporary feminist theorists and activists theorize the third space —a space outside of traditionally constructed binaries such as master/slave, oppressor/oppressed or colonizer/colonized. The third space is a space of both oppression and opposition that cannot be fully explained or represented by those binaries. The third space, then, is a space differentially inhabited by multiple layers of identity, consciousness, and oppression, and for that matter, multiple levels of possible opposition. Chela Sandoval, for example, in her magisterial work The Methodology of the Oppressed speaks of the third space in terms of a “differential oppositional consciousness” (63). She writes: “The differential (or ‘womanist,’ ‘mestiza,’ ‘Sister Outsider,’ ‘third force,’ U.S. third world feminist . . . it has generated many names) mode of oppositional consciousness [. . .] recognizes and identifies oppositional expressions of power as consensual illusions” (62-3). Wheatley occupies, I would argue, such a third space or “differential oppositional consciousness.”

So where does Wheatley stand, then, vis-à-vis other slave writers? Although some scholars have attempted to re-establish Wheatley’s place in the “canon” of authentic African-American slave-writers, their revisionary scholarship has often failed to recognize her specifically complex position as a woman slave-writer. For instance, such scholarship does not attempt to move past the fact that she is a woman, and actually engage the ways in which she operates and writes from what might be called with today’s hindsight a third-space black feminist position.

These Hills

These Hills

“For God’s sake / they are connected / underneath.”
—Muriel Rukeyser, “Islands”

The earth took thousands of years
to make these hills, after all.

Pause. (A century of sunsets over the Palouse.)

If you press your palms into the earth—frosted now by October’s breath—expect the memory of glaciers. And other memories. For instance, Jesus drew on the ground with a stick. The only time he ever wrote.

He could just as well have been standing on the bluff outside town where you can see miles of rolling hills and when you yell the distant mountains return your voice as a gift.

And since he was a pretty smart guy maybe he would have known then, pulling his stick through the red clay, that all of this would happen. Maybe that’s what he was writing down.

Like Lewis and Clark standing by the Snake River. Like the blood of natives soaking the soil. Like ploughs crawling over the earth like bloated beetles. Like wheat growing tall over decaying bones. Like blinding sand etching the roads to reservations. Like concrete casinos sinking into wet ground where natives serve beer to Europeans.

And of course he could have seen farther than that, like if it was July and there were no clouds. Like across the country. Like to the White House and the Oval Office. Like to the Pentagon and the War Room. And probably he would have shuddered.

And I would have written it in the dirt too if I were him.
At least as a warning. For the hills.
For the earth. So it could endure.
But not for us.
We’re not very good at listening.

Revolutionary Bookstore: Of Dialectics and Contradictions

Revolutionary Bookstore: Of Dialectics and Contradictions

for Carol

I must include
myself in this.
It could’ve been me
standing at the cash register
with starched shirt
eyeing warily the woman
in the oversized coat
who looks and smells of
hunger, poverty
touching new copies
of Marx, Lenin, Mao
with calloused fingers.
I could have been the
one to wince at
smudges made on the
linoleum by her worn shoes
or the one to have
shifted from foot
to foot unable to cross class-
lines even discursively
when she asks for books
on revolution.
We live with our contradictions,
first-world “revolutionaries”
middle-class activists
who plan rallies, recycle,
speak of world hunger in coffee shops,
and cannot talk
to a woman
who is poor.

Poem II

Poem II

for Muriel Rukeyser

I, too, lived in the first century of world wars.
They thought they had seen it all when they said
“the war to end all wars”
but we have become numb to death
that arrives each morning
with the thud of the newspaper
at the doorstep.

We cling to each other,
those of us still left
who have not succumbed
to the blind fears of the homeland
code red code yellow code green
and the incessant drone of advertisers:
“buy this and you will like yourself more” or
purchase this cream and you will forget there
is a war going on and the
images of Iraqis
being tortured by American soldiers
who are bringing them “democracy”
and the women and children dead in the streets of
Baghdad and Fallujah for the sake of freedom
will all fade away in your consciousness
because this cream will make your
thighs look smaller.

And we cling to memories of peace
imagine a world without war
where human labor is not bought and
sold as a commodity
where people matter more
than profit
and the most important
news is the laughter of the
old ones and the young ones
as they listen to each other.

The Silences

The Silences

Among those who had hidden themselves
were four women and a little girl of about seven
hiding in a pit-a dugout covered with leaves;
and two S.S. men went up to the pit and ordered them to
blank come out.
“Why did you hide?” they asked
and began to beat the women with whips.
The women begged for their lives:
they were young, they were ready to work.
They were ordered to rise and run
and the S.S. men drew their revolvers and shot all five;
and then kept pushing the bodies with their feet
to see if they were still alive
and to make sure they were dead
shot them again.
–Charles Reznikoff, “Holocaust”

Silence
Speaking in the pauses,
not of
(“splendor of the hills” or
“realms of gold”)
themes from poets
anthologized, memorialized
in bourgeois homes
with high-backed chairs
deep pillows
clean sheets
food—
no simile for death
synonym for dirt.

Only the silence of a Jewish woman, kneeling at the edge of a mass grave
before a German soldier
her image frozen in the ink of the poem:

in the moment before the bullet, her eyes speak
no words.

No words.

Twenty-three—
My age.

At the pace of maggots among the dead
her silence consuming my words,
eating them

speaking
where I cannot.

No Weapons Found

No Weapons Found

By now news reports
fade—hard to know
what damages today
wrought on Iraq
camera’s eye
dark
as ashes on streets in Baghdad
swirled by hot winds.

“No War” posters piled in the corner of this small apartment,
gathering dust from
wheatfields billowing now over the Palouse.

The town naps in summer sun
birds and crickets sing the lullaby
tweet-tweet, forget the war
tweet-tweet, it’s over now.

But listen to what they tell us now.

No weapons of mass destruction found.

No
Weapons
Found.

Children wander homeless in Baghdad,
bellies extended from hunger.
Bush in the Oval Office.
The warm sun.
Tweet-tweet.

I (Don’t) Pledge Allegiance

I (Don’t) Pledge Allegiance

I pledge allegiance

to humanity, to the people of all nations, but not, no definitely not

to the flag

of this country that Chinese children were forced to make overtime in sweatshops after 9/11 because of our blind patriotism and when I think

of the United States of America

I think of the Native and African slaves, I think of the massacres, the land soaked with indigenous blood, the death and destruction in the name of progress

and to the Republic

which belongs to rich white men I have one thing to say: “fuck you” because I know that

for which it stands

is capitalism, imperialism, racism, patriarchy. And the beast can’t contain itself in just

one nation

it needs to gobble up the whole Goddamn world

under God,

who apparently approves of all this death and destruction because this fuckin’ country is

indivisible,

or, like Rome, at least we think we are—good thing we don’t read history—and if you ain’t noticed yet the rest of the world doesn’t like this country very much and
neither do most of the people who live here

with liberty

out the window, the Patriot Act and Homeland Security keeping all our mouths shut

and justice

well—like Langston Hughes said—she’s just a “blind goddess,” and

for all

we know she went blind a long, long time ago.