Contact Zone

Anwr Adam

Rhetoric of Contact Zone

Dr. Barbara Manroe

01/18/2010

Rhetoric of Contact Zone

I am sure that no one in our cohort has been affected by Kaplan’s Contrastive Rhetoric more than I have; I am sure that no one will live the events of Contact Zone more than I will. It is my life. It has stirred my emotions and probed my short memories in the USA. I feel a strong kinship to this topic. As a foreign language learner, I know how shocking and frustrating it is when I speak and write crossculturally; how dangerous it is when I address and converse with people who they know nothing about me, about my people, about my life, about the chisel that curved my identity, about the vessel that nurtured my thought, about my culture; the culture that shaped a cosmic being called Anwar. I know how it is when an eastern graduate student studying in different schools of thought and burdened with others’ mistakes bursts into a western culture. I can guess the problem that he will face; I can see the frustration that he will live; I can feel the discrimination and degradation that he will gulp. This is his problem and the problem of a whole generation of Muslim expatriates in the US. And it is the problem that Rhetoric of Contact Zone tries to solve.

What I want to write about here is not those occasional events that we face in streets or stores, but those systematic scenes that occur in the American educational institutions. What I want to say identifies itself with Kaplan’s question “what may be discussed?”. The incident I want to tell shows how the tension between the American teacher and a foreign language learner occurs; how difficult choosing a topic it is. How appropriate or inappropriate a topic might be for two cultures. How the class might be a point of cultural clash. This incident happened to me in one of the American institutions in Pullman. And for academic honesty, I have narrated it in one paper presented to fulfill the requirements of 501 class. The story is as follows:

The other bitter scene was when she asked us to choose a topic for our research paper. She told us that the topic should be related to our field of study and that it should address a current issue; Like other students I chose mine; I told her that I would write about the racial discrimination and its effect on students; she frowned on me; then she said “racism does not exist any more”. I told her that it did exist and that hundreds of articles were being published on this topic; but she insisted that I change the topic. And because of this insistence, I had to go to the director who was a nice woman. I told her what happened. She talked to her and convinced her to accept the topic; finally she did. This was not a happy ending. When we started writing our papers, she ordered us to submit a section every week. The first section I submitted was marked “rewrite it”. The comments she made were silly; one of them was “you have never talked about Black Americans’ racism”. The second section was unsatisfactory, too; the third, the fourth. I went to the director again; I complained, but in vein. She told me that the teacher was the authority in my case. I decided to quit. I told the teacher that. She said “you are free”. I failed the course.

It goes without saying that the teacher in this scene- although I accused her of being a racist in 501 paper- lives the feeling of the “imagined community”. She thinks that the American society is homogenous. She is hoaxed by such banners as nationalism, Americanism, one anthem, one flag, which, in my point of view, are false ideologies which hide a set of relations that negate them. They hide the fact that America consists of different races, different religions, and different subcultures. And this is what the power point pictures that we studied in class hinted at. The first picture shows how families in different countries view the world cup, which, I think, represents a visual metaphor showing how families from different races lead their lives differently in the US. The second picture reinforces the idea of false ideology. It shows how intimacy hides racism; how hugging and hilarity hide racial differences; how they do not eliminate them; White is White; Black is Black; and Asian is Asian; The third picture displays how cards made of plastic differ in numbers. For me this means how the people who are American differ in character, identity and culture. The fourth picture articulates this clearly. It explains how dogs from different kinds sitting around a table (America) and holding different play cards (identities and cultures) represents a state of being in the USA.