05 October 2009
Arab Students Explore Worlds of Imaginative Writing in Iowa City
Washington — When writer and teacher Tarek Eltayeb gave his students an assignment to write from the point of view of anything that wasn’t human, he never expected a wolf. “I happen to love wolves,” Eltayeb said. “And, in fact, I have written a long poem on wolves myself.”
Eltayeb, born in Cairo of Sudanese parents, is a novelist and poet living in Austria, and is one of two instructors who were assigned to 12 Arab students, aged 16 to 19, during two weeks of summer workshops and seminars in Iowa City, Iowa, long regarded as the literary capital of the Midwest region of the United States. The other instructor, Lebanese writer and journalist Iman Humaydan, is the author of three novels.
Writing as a nonhuman object was one of the exercises the students — from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and Israel — experienced as part of the bilingual program “Between the Lines.” The program, administered by the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, brings new and notable international writers to the university each year for seminars and readings.
The visiting students spent their mornings working in English with more than 70 Americans, members of the Iowa Young Writers Studio. In the afternoons, they worked in Arabic with Eltayeb and Humaydan.
WORKSHOP WRITING
The workshop approach of writing and critiquing each other’s work — the heart of the teaching method for virtually all creative writing programs at Iowa — was a new experience for many of the students.
“Being the center of attention at the workshops was hard. Sometimes you get criticized a lot,” said Nael Roby, from Israel. “The beautiful thing about it is that you change your writing for the better, but you get to keep your style.”
Iya Ghassib, from Jordan, agreed. “The workshops taught me how to stand by what I believe and to actually be convinced of what I write — otherwise, no one else will be!”
The object of these exercises, whether English or Arabic, is to break down conventional ways of thinking, to react more with senses and imagination, and to learn how to manipulate language through play and surprise.
The Arab and American students attended regular literature seminars, but two mornings a week they teamed up and went outside on what were termed “Missions Inscribable.”
In one case, students picked out a car on the street. After examining it and peering in the windows, they wrote a page-long character sketch of the person who owned and drove the car, according to Stephen Lovely, director of the Iowa Young Writers Studio.
For some of the students, writing freely in Arabic proved harder than in English. “What surprised me the most during my trip was to figure out my ability to write in Arabic, such as poetry and stories, since as a kid I only used to write English poetry,” said Hussein Ali Youneiss, from Lebanon.
“EXQUISITE CORPSE”
One of the writing exercises that Eltayeb led goes by the strange name “Exquisite Corpse.” The first student writes a line on a piece of paper and passes it to someone for a second line. By folding the paper, each of the next writers sees only the previous line, not the rest of the poem.
The objective? Learn to play with words and see what surprises and insights lurk inside seemingly random words and thoughts. (When first played by French surrealists in the early 20th century, one result was “The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.”)
Another exercise was to pretend to lose your mind and “write like a crazy person” — a favorite of some students, including Youneiss.
“Iman Humaydan taught us to have more than two eyes so we can look at the world from different views — and the results were astonishing,” he said. “We took our feelings and ripped out the logic from them to have short stories that are quite touching.”
Eltayeb also led the students to a painted wall and told them to write about it — but with a catch. They couldn’t describe the images; instead, they had to respond emotionally to them. “It was hard at the beginning, but they wrote several wonderful poems,” he said.
Despite their full schedule, the students had free time for shopping, playing basketball and attending readings at the well-known literary bookstore Prairie Lights.
Along with the International Writing Program, the University of Iowa is home to the famed Iowa Writers Workshop, the oldest graduate creative writing program in the country. A large Summer Writing Festival runs annually from June to August.
As a result, Iowa City probably has more writers per capita than any other community in the country; it was named UNESCO’s most recent City of Literature, after Edinburgh, Scotland, and Melbourne, Australia.
“It’s so important to see other people and how they think and live and write about their experiences,” Yara Abou Fakher of Syria told the local newspaper, the Iowa City Press-Citizen.
“The most memorable thing that is still kept in my heart was finding out how much I loved literature and writing,” said Nael Roby. “And it will always be in my heart until the day I go back to Iowa City and have a reading of my own.”
For more information, see the Between the Lines Web site. You can take a photo tour of Iowa City as a UNESCO City of Literature.
