Joining us as the Clancy Taylor Public Humanities Summer Intern, we are glad to have Zainab aboard for the project! She is a second year PhD student at Rice.
No two public humanities ventures are identical, and there is some amount of figuring it out as you go along. Zainab has managed everything thus far from web design, to setting up the tech components so José Aranda and I can be on the road and send materials effectively to her in Houston. She receives and uploads interview videos and transcribes them, as well as fact checks material and researches place histories, writing background mini-reports for me so I am better prepared. Zainab’s interests in women of color feminisms and colonial and settler colonial histories make this project a good match. We’ve had a lot conversations about the research ethics of feminist oral histories. I am also learning from Zainab for she is no stranger to community engaged outreach.
When it comes time for a test interview so we can try out our conversation questions, Zainab gamely volunteers!
She and I sit down in my living room in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston. We are working out the bugs about sequencing questions. She is following my lead, and I forget to begin with Houston. Instead we began with something just as important. We agree we should have a “pact” that however the interview goes, it is perfect, it is just right. We have agreed to a value of relationality.
On the Where of Here (Houston)
Krista. Would you want to talk about how the project is already working on you? As we have prepared to have this conversation and, as our research intern, you have been so in the middle of launching it?
Zainab. I’ve been thinking about, and our conversations are all about place. It has me thinking of my place more, or my places. And also the word “West.” That’s not a word I would have associated with feminists before. That phrase ”feminist West” is really interesting, and it’s making me think about the West. And I know you work on the US West.
Krista. One burden for scholars who work in “place studies” is the need to account for “the world” in “the place,” to account for “global” presences in “local: places. When that cosmopolitan understanding of place is activated, place can’t be made to seem small, or self-enclosed. Homogeneous. Of course, the US West as a regional place comes into being precisely through the global transits and encounters between Indigenous civilizations and settler colonial forces from England, Spain, and France, among others.
You and I have talked about this. The US West as a term or a geographical referent carries, in its meanings, this “other” West, the West of colonial world powers headquartered in Europe and North America. The US West/Western world intermixing all along the way of this work. I’ve shared with you my “West as a Keyword in American Cultural Studies” essay. So the colonial West, the west of Western world powers, mixes with the US West.
Zainab. Yeah. The “feminist West” has been making me think about the feminist communities that I wouldn’t think that I would be a part of, in the West.
Krista. Let’s talk about “the West” as you are invoking it. Or how you came to be there?
Zainab. It’s slightly complicated. I grew up in Islamabad in Pakistan. My parents are from Karachi, Pakistan, and then my grandparents are from India. They were migrants in 1947 when Partition happened. But my “there” really is Islamabad. Because I grew up there. I felt very connected to Islamabad, I was there till I was 17. But I knew that my forefathers weren’t from there. But the “there” they were from, is not really a place I can go to again, or ever. I can’t go and my parents haven’t been either, to India. We can’t really go. So Islamabad really was home to me. I think it was when I left Islamabad, I was 17, and I went to Saudi Arabia for a year. That was an interesting experience. I finished high school there. And then I moved to Syracuse, New York. Which was not some place that I’d expected to move, I moved there for university. Syracuse was my first home in the US, and by the end of my four years, it did feel like home as well.
Krista. You’ve told me that Islamabad is a new city. It was essentially invented in the 60s?
Zainab. Yes. Karachi was the original capital, Karachi is a very old city. I don’t know how old but Karachi and Lahore, these are very old cities. Islamabad was created in 1965. It’s in the foothills of the Himalayas. And it is a very planned city. I find it familiar, but some might find it a little too planned. It’s divided into sectors, and every street is numbered, and every sector is numbered. F-10/1, F-10/2, F-11, that’s how we say streets. It’s very different from Karachi, where my parents are from. We used to go every summer and in Karachi, if you’re saying where I’m from it’s very complicated whereas in Islamabad everything is a simple line, it’s number to number. There’s a lot of complex history, about resources being taken from other parts of the country to create Islamabad into a beautiful, safe, clean city. You won’t find that level of safety and cleanliness in other parts, which… growing up, I didn’t realize, I was like Islamabad is the best, I love living here! There’s a reason all the diplomats live there. It’s also the capital city, but it’s very curated, very planned.
Krista. And then you move to Syracuse, New York.
Zainab. I have very conflicted feelings about Syracuse. They are good at student outreach, incoming student outreach. But Syracuse itself. There were a lot of unwelcoming aspects about Syracuse. There were very few people of color at Syracuse University. The dorm I was in was majority white. There were definitely incidents and things that happened that made me feel unwelcome. But over the years, through the effort of me and other Muslim students, we were able to build a Muslim community. So by the end of my time there, I felt like I belonged. You create a place, you carve a place for yourself.
Krista. So who were the people you built belonging with?
Zainab. Honestly, it was Muslim women, who were older than me, who took me under their wing. And there were very few. There wasn’t much happening at the University, but people took initiative. Graduate students mentored me even though they didn’t need to, I wasn’t in their department or anything. And then, after me, I mentored the younger people. I had very nice kind friends. My roommate and the people on my floor, really did try to help me. I was very new to the US. But I had to take some part in creating community myself.
Image of Mosque Isa Ibn Maryam (The Mosque of Jesus, Son of Mary), formerly the Catholic Trinity Church, in Syracuse, NY. Part of the complex of the North Side Learning Center.
Getting off campus I felt more at home. I started volunteering at the Northside Learning Centre. It’s a refugee Education Centre. I fell in love with that place the first day I walked in there. They provide English language learning for adults and children. It was initially supposed to be an adult learning center, but the founder told me that if you want to do an adult English Learning Centre, the women won’t come because they have children. So they opened it to everyone. The founder said we’re open for ages 4 to 74! For the children it was more tutoring than learning because a lot of them had been in the US for a while. When I started working there, I found a sense of community. And it was my first year and I was like, wow, okay, I can feel like I’m at home, even though there weren’t any Pakistanis. My students were all Somali and other East African students, a few Ethiopians, a few Burmese students. By the end, it was a lot of Syrian students. I mean, I can talk about Northside forever, because I loved that place. You’re surrounded by these young Muslim girls, and the whole center was a lot of different languages and different people. A really happy place. Which is interesting, because they wanted adults to come after work. It was 5:00pm to 8:30pm, 3 days a week. I remember when I would go home, at 8:30, there was a Syracuse University bus that would pick up the volunteers or the workers. I would always think, 8:30 I should be exhausted. I’ve been in class the whole day. And then I’m doing this, but I was never tired when I was going home. That was the kind of place it was.
I never thought that that’s the community I needed. When I came to Syracuse even in the beginning, I was like, I’m fine. It’s okay. I have very nice friends. And it’s all good. But when something happens to you… if somebody says something that’s racist, who do you turn to who will understand and who will support you? In my experience that is Muslim women… they’re the ones that I rant to.
Now I’m looking for that kind of community in Houston. And I haven’t quite found it yet. But it’s something that I know matters to me.
Krista. Are you comfortable talking about one of these racist events?
Zainab. Two weeks into my freshman year, a student who lived in my dorm sent around a Snapchat photo of me to other folks who lived on the floor captioned “bomb threat.” I remember that really shook me when I found out, I didn’t really know how to respond to it. I didn’t have a community to turn to, I was so new to the university and to the country itself. There wasn’t really anybody, any figure of authority or university resource that I felt like would have supported me. But honestly all those years in Syracuse, it was the classroom environment that felt most hostile. I sat in so many classes where the instructor would have us debate the pros and cons of drone strikes in North West Pakistan, or whether Muslim immigrants should be allowed to enter the United States, or whether “some countries” have cultural differences like honor killings that make it impossible for migrants to assimilate to American culture. Stuff like that. And students would say this while I’m sitting right in front of them, in my hijab, visibly Muslim, and the professors would not intervene, they encouraged these debates. These classes felt like a battle everyday, especially because there would be only one or two people of color in the room, it felt like I had to always be arguing for my community. I remember one sociology class where there was a literal debate at the end of the semester, “Is multiculturalism bad for women?” (based off of the Susan Moller Okin article) and I remember half of the class coming up with carefully prepared points for why Muslims can’t assimilate, and how Muslims are uniquely oppressive toward women, and then I had to rebut their points. In those moments I was so so angry at the students who said this stuff, but now in hindsight I can’t believe how irresponsible the instructors were.
Krista. Wow. And in classrooms too. That’s awful. Islamophobic . . .
Zainab. Yeah. That’s what it usually is, anti-Muslim racism.
Krista. We began by talking about “unexpected feminisms.” I’m wondering if you’d like to talk more about that phrase, or the term “feminism.”
Zainab Abdali with sisters (Fatma, Maryam, (Zainab), Kulsum, from left to right) in Islamabad, 2004.
Zainab. I did not identify with feminism at all until I got to college. In high school, in Pakistan, I really did think of feminism as something not for me, but something for, like white Western women. I associated feminism with a white savior idea, about “saving Muslim women.” But my parents are very open minded, considering how religious they are. My dad raised me very strongly to believe in economic independence for women. We are four sisters and my parents gave us freedoms that I didn’t see other girls of my age getting. But I didn’t associate that with the word feminism, maybe women’s rights or women’s equality, but not feminism.
When I came to college, I took a class in Native American women and feminists. Dr. Sally Wagner was teaching us about how Indigenous women influenced the activisms of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She made us think about feminism for each of us individually. At the end of that semester, I did a project on a tribe in northern Pakistan, an indigenous tribe of that area, the Kalash, on Kalash women. That class made me think about being Native in non-American contexts. At the end of the class I shared that I felt comfortable calling myself a feminist because I had been exposed to women of color feminisms which allowed me to look beyond the prior associations I had had about feminism. I found my way to feminism, to a Pakistani Muslim feminism, through Indigenous women’s feminisms.
Krista. Would you like to say more about what your reading or thinking is right now?
Zainab. My feminism is abolitionist and anti-carceral. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about abolition as a great framework for the way I approach feminism. It is connected to prison and police abolition, and then also to ending the War on Terror. There is a Muslim advocacy group that put out a call recently, maybe last year, to “Abolish the War on Terror.” That’s a really broad vision and so ambitious. They frame anti-War on Terror organizing along the lines of prison abolition. Their materials quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore. I find that to be a really promising and clarifying way to go about it. Angela Davis’s Freedom is a Constant Struggle and Abolition Democracy both are works that place the War on Terror and the torture in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo along the same continuum of domestic prisons and policing in the US. Connecting the figure of the criminal and the figure of the terrorist, connecting policing and warmongering – this work speaks to the absolute necessity of abolitionist feminism.