Stalking Helen, Pt. One

Request line! Sometimes I feel so overwhelmed by all of this and yet get used to it at the same time so I forget about obvious things that people might be interested in. If you have questions/concerns/querulous criticisms I would love to hear them! I'll start with my schedule, which isn't too exciting, but a request all the same : )

I have class Sunday through Thursday, which is still difficult to remember, and weekends on Friday (Muslim holy day) and Saturday.

SMTW: 8:00 Arabic for two or three hours. My class has 12 people and isn't moving very quickly, but I am already much better at some basic things, like verb conjugation. Arabic has different verbs for two females, two men, a group of females, a group of men, you two females, you two males, and you group of females and you group of men. Add that to your basic list of he/she/I conjugation and it gets complicated. Most of the dialects don't use this many, which is nice, but also makes it harder to learn them all.

STR: 11:00- 11:50 Modern Arabic Literature in Translation. Right now we are studying the historical periods of poetry and literature to prepare ourselves for modernity. My favorite lesson was the one in which I discovered that Arabs invented rap. It's true! (You can skip ahead if Umayyad poetry doesn't sound so exciting : ) )

The crash course:

The Umayyads were members of the Quresh clan (Mohammed was also one of them) and in the years after Mohmamed's death they thought the leader of the Moslems should be one of their clan. As my professor explains, they valued tribal values more than religious values and tried to use the ideas of tribalism to bring other Moslems to their side. The Umayyads had several different kinds of poetry- Political, Love Poetry, and Hija (Satire). They used satire to continue the competition among the tribes, and poets would criticize each other and each others' tribes using the same meter and rhyme in various competitions. Therefore, if you use a little bit of imagination, you can envision the "battles," if you will.


MW: 12:00- 1:20 Comparative Politics in the Middle East. It's ok. I'm so glad I took Middle Eastern History classes or else I wouldn't be able to follow the references to 1967, 1952, 1956, Nasser, etc. etc.

W: 4:30- 7:00 Introduction to Forced Migration ( Refugee stuff) I love this class so much. I'll need a whole entry to talk about it. I'm also trying to get Jayanthi to guest-blog on her time with some Sudanese refugees last night that she will be teaching English. Pretty incredible.


I'll comment on my activities (?) later- these are still developing.