Interview: Dr. Maytha Alhassen, Writer, Professor & Journalist

By Angela Tai

You’re a Syrian-American Historian, Journalist, and Writer. What brought you to this line of work (because they all seem relevant and random at the same time). One could argue that you blazed your own trail? 

 My work is very much tied to my dissertation topic and the invisible subtitle is ‘engaged witness.’ It draws from spiritual philosophy and engaged practices. It’s used in terms of speaking to your witness and testifying against this justice of oppression. I wanted to be a war reporter as a child and I got to see the damage and trauma but I didn’t emerge unscathed either. The social justice work led me to working for refugees in Greece and Lebanon. I also worked with incarcerated folks in Rikers Island. That’s where the poetry comes in, the last part of that category is the healing that I need to do and offer. Being able to tell your own story is a form of healing. The work that I do arises from having a multitude of acts of witnessing. 

You appear regularly as a Guest Co-Host and Digital Producer on the English-language television current-events program The Stream on Al Jazeera. What have you learned from working on this television program and in turn how have you transformed both personally and professionally?

Al-Jazeera has been a remarkable network for marginalized voices in the world of media. I can’t think of any other channel that does this. They pulled from people within communities that weren’t typically a part of the journalism industry. For me, it was powerful; I was working for Al-Jazeera when they were viewed in three hundred million households globally. It was great to be a part of a show that would take you to different parts of the world everyday as well. Again, they’re looking at the marginalized stories that might not make it to mainstream media. This led me to where I’m currently doing a lot of my work - The Young Turks. TYT is one of the largest online media platforms. As a co-host/digital producer for the Al-Jazeera English show “The Stream” it was powerful to jump from the Philippines to Romania and Saudi artists; I really loved having that global perspective. Young Turks is more American focused which is also interesting.

You co-edited Demanding Dignity: Young Voices from the Front Lines of the Arab Revolutions. This book brings together stories written by today’s generation of Arab youth who have directly inspired and sparked a revolutionary spirit in the Middle East and North Africa. You also talked about how, in a way, the Western media failed to portray the revolutions. What do you hope to convey through this book?

Thank you for that and thank you for not calling it the Arab Spring. The project wasn’t necessarily my brain child, the project emerged from the “I Speak for Myself” book series, the initial book being one which I contributed to and was composed of 40 muslim women speaking to their experiences living in the U.S. When the uprisings started, in my middle of my doctoral program,  it was painful to be in the US and watch all of this happening on live TV. Those revolutions cascaded across the region and I knew I had to do something. I started traveling all over from Tunisia to Egypt to Lebanon and posting stories. I was writing for a blog and an individual from that independent publisher asked me to produce a version discussing the arab uprisings after reading my posts. What I didn’t factor in was that people were actively engaged in the uprisings in their own countries. I was soliciting stories from a certain group of people in each country I visited. My co-editor and I approached potential contributors with a loose understanding of the book, as an “untitled book about the Arab Spring.” They’re responses were illuminating. They were interested in writing their stories but almost uniformly responded to our email with the question, “Great I would love to write something, but what is this ‘Arab spiring’ thing?”  I wrote an article for The Huffington Post and learned that ‘Arab Spring’ was a term foisted onto the MENA region, which was a part of the Bush administration and neoconservatives as “proof” that the invasion of Iraq yielded “democratic successes,” which we knew then and very much know now destabilized Iraq and the whole region.. It was an example of how it was used to excuse and justify an invasion that has left Iraq in shambles, not using that term was a very intentional refutation of that framing. 

Living in America, you talked about the fact that there’s a general fear of Arab men, especially after 9/11. Living in NYC, I definitely have seen first hand how my friends have been discriminated against just because they’re Muslim. What are some of the things people can do that could help change some of the negative perceptions people might have about the Arab culture and people? 

In my 101’s on Arabs at colleges and at high schools across the nation, I’ve realized that a lot of people don’t personally know Arabs or Muslims. Even before  9/11, it was difficult to be associated with Arab culture or have an arabic name. All of my Arab classmates made up a completely different identity because they didn’t want to deal with what it would mean to be a Palestinian or an Egyptian in the U.S. In high school, one of my Arab classmates (who pretended that she was Turkish to avoid reprobation) brought hummus to school and when people asked her what it was, she responded “a dip.” Years later, of course, “hummus” became a grocery store and restaurant staple. But back then, it felt dangerous to be anything but not white.

Now that we’re telling our own story, it’s providing a different outlet for folks to connect with us. When things were happening in Syria, it was like this familiar dance over and over again. People come with a plethora of questions that they don’t know or haven’t been educated about. For my TED talk, I wrote a poem about Syria which was cathartic for me, this has also been the best way for me to approach the negative perceptions. 

You mentioned that the protest movements in Arab countries have galvanized and challenged corruptions domestically in the U.S. What parallels do you draw between Black Lives Matter and some of the uprisings in Middle Eastern countries?

It’s remarkable that something that was so worldwide was so quickly quashed, tiny requests and moving onto those demands with violence have got to go. I’m going to fast forward to the shooting of Michael Brown in the city of Ferguson. Another parallel in Ferguson was the brutal response to the murder of Michael Brown whose lifeless body laid in a pool of his own blood for four and a half hours in the middle of the street — a public execution. The police instead responded with tear gas and rubber bullets; people started to discover that that tear gas was made by a company that sold the same tear gas used in Egypt and Palestine. People in Palestine were responding to people on the ground in Ferguson with strategies to manage the tear gas and other assaults. There were international solidarities that were being made in response to those techniques. 

You talked about being bullied and put in ESL classes just because you’re multilingual and Jasmine (Disney cartoon character) being the only figure on TV that looked like you growing up. How do you think the hardship you faced as a young person helped shape who you are today? 

Let me explain that story for a second because I think it’s illustrative of what the fight was like growing up for us. Growing up in the U.S., I was raised in Southern California. I was raised in a suburb just outside of Los Angeles. I went to public school my whole life. Now, at a public school ( I don’t know what they do at a private one), they ask you what languages are spoken in the household. If you put a language in addition to English, they automatically put you in ESL (English as a Second Language) classes. I had already taken Montessori preschool classes and was fluent in English. When I went to class, they showed me a picture of an apple and asked me, “what is this?” I went back to my parents and said I wasn’t learning anything, my parents went to the administration and their response was “okay let’s test her and see if she could potentially qualify to get out of those classes.” Then, I passed the test and transitioned into the mainstream course load. Actually, I ended up doing so well on the test that I skipped a grade and was put into classes for gifted students. I couldn’t help but think about the other people in that class who weren’t “remedial” learners but were being treated like they were because they had magical linguistic superpowers and what their trajectory would be. If I hadn’t gone to my parents, I would have a completely different set of circumstances now.

You teach some pretty challenging material in your courses. What are some of the common misconceptions your students have about Arab countries?

I did teach at Chapman University for a year but now I teach grad students in a Social Justice and Community Organizing M.A. program at Prescott College. I taught Intro to Human Rights, Mediation and Conflict Studies, Refugees and Migration studies at Chapman. For example, when we hear the phrase human rights, I show them the very western dominant framework flowing from  human rights discourse and practice. We reproduced power relations that produced an American empire and Western colonial domination. This was a part of the logic that was continuing to bolster the empire. But, as part of countering those dominant narratives, I pointed students to the work of local grassroots communities around the world and exposed them to various iterations of the abolitionist movement throughout history. We looked at the varying ways communities sought out justice, freedom, and equality for everyone. 

You recently moved from creative consulting on Hulu’s “Ramy” to becoming a staff writer. How much of the show reminds of your own journey of being a Syrian woman in the United States? 

I do want to say that I’ve done a report documenting and analyzing 100 years of representing Muslims in Hollywood (Haqq and Hollywood: Illuminating 100 Years of Muslim Tropes and Traps and How to Transform Them)  that was a part of the fellowship I did with the Pop Culture Collaborative. On TV, what’s remarkable is the character Dena Hassan, who was someone in her 20’s and was probably one of the first Arab Muslim woman main characters to be U.S. TV. But also important, we have writers in the room who come from that same or similar background to the character, which translates into more nuance and resonance. Our main character was losing her hair in real life, so we spoke to that specific story in an episode for season 2. The evil eye is undeniably something a part of our culture (and many others). It is believed to have a deleterious effect on your own life. Therefore, publically broadcasting successes and achievements can be frowned upon, stemming from the idea that such declarations invite jealousy, which is embodied as “the evil eye.”  

You have decades of experience in healing practices, including yoga, reiki, doula, and meditation. What do you do for your own health during quarantine? Do you have a routine?

I’ve been destabilized because of changes around work and real physical changes that have taken place around the household from June until now. I’ve basically been moving from place to place and I’m trying to find a commitment to a routine, either in the morning or at night. In regards to the murder of George Floyd in late May - it’s an issue for all Americans, black lives matter for everybody. The person who owned that cornerstore was a Palestinian Muslim man, which compounded the urgency the Arab community needed to respond to this tragedy. The fact that there is this practice of calling the police for a $20 bill believed to be counterfeit is something we need to shift our understanding and attitudes about. We need to create cultural community contracts. If you saw a child crossing the border, would you call border patrol, knowing what we know about border patrol practices? So some organizer friends and I, in response, formed a collective called Arabs for Black Lives to educate our community about systemic racism and anti-Blackness  and express our support for the Movement for Black Lives. 

There is a difference between activists and organizers - organizers are working nonstop around the clock behind-the-scenes but we do need activists out on the streets and online advocating and championing campaigns and demands. I was spending several hours doing this work, then I started to do yoga again and parts of my body were tight again. They needed to be tended to and just moving the body was highly important for me. The big issue is how being inactive or sitting has affected the body that I inhabit so I’ve been focusing a little more on taking walks. Early on, I was quarantining with my parents and trying to help them with their co-morbidities and tend to my autistic brother’s emotional struggles navigating the quarantine. I really wanted to help my family and it turned into this re-commitment to my yoga practices and my family. I’m definitely not someone who needs to see or be around people constantly; the one thing in this world that is killing me is my love for infants. I don’t like not being able to hold them. I don’t care about not going to the club, I love going to the beach but not holding a baby?! 

What is your definition of happiness? 

I prefer to talk about joy. I know there’s a vague meaning for the term happiness and how it was applied. I actually started looking at different religious and/or political texts and learned more about how this nation talks about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Happiness is framed as something that you need to work towards, happiness is construed as a future goal to be obtained. You have to build up the capital to be able to afford happiness. What I have found with joy is that it is more about being radically present. To me, feeling joyful is more embodying a mindful presence, feeling the frequency of ecstatic gratitude. Happiness almost feels contingent on “needs.” For example,, “I’d be happy with this much money or with this soulmate or if my kids do well in school.” When I think about moments of joy, I think about feelings and not possessions or future goals, like “I feel the joy of being able to eat this ripe peach.”