I love learning you see, I always did.. in fact it is one of my most consistent sources of motivation.. even more than love, ambition, and definitely more than any earthly desire. So why then am I resisting it? Why is it that instead of reading about corruption and the state (which I really do want to learn about) am I looking up the words fro Sheikh Imam's song "dour ya kalam"? If my desire was "to know", why would I, a couple of decades after reading Freire for the first time and preaching about participatory education and the centrality of the lived experience in a person's learning choose to fly for 5 hours and isolate myself in a foreign country to "learn"? A country that forces me to write in a language which, 5 years on, I still do not own. Knowledge packaged from an external perspective which places me as I read it outside of my own communities and outside of my natural gaze. A space that finds my engagement in the most vibrant time in my part of the world a "distraction". I am required to leave the place I call home for that learning, not to learn about other places and worlds as traveling allows, but to isolate myself from that same place I want to study and produce what academia approves of about it.
But damn are my mind and spirit defiant. They keep on taking me back to my language, building walls between myself and the institution by which I aim to be endorsed.. and make finishing this PhD way too difficult.
3 comments:
i love this. out of curiosity tho, why did you write it in english (tho i am pleased you did, cos it means i can read it!)
hey Naira, was wondering how come nobody asked about this earlier (and glad you read and like this post)
I wrote it from college to let out the frustration of an especially difficult day - no possibility of writing in Arabic on the departments computers (unless I use Yamli!).. But the question is worth asking, seeing that half of the stuff on my blog are in English.
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