New Major Added

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Scores of Kalamazoo College students do not usually gather outside Mandelle Hall’s Olmsted Room to await word on the fate of a faculty meeting agenda item. But gather they did late last fall, and they greeted one particular vote with applause and celebration.

The matter? At its meeting of November 14, 2014, Kalamazoo College faculty unanimously approved a new major at the school: Critical Ethnic Studies. It is the second major approved in the past two years. In 2013 the faculty voted to create a new major in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Prior to that, the major in Business was approved in 2008.

“[The approval of the major in critical ethnic studies] places K at the forefront of where the discipline is going.”

After the vote for Critical Ethnic Studies, faculty and staff arose in a spontaneous standing ovation, which sparked the applause and cheers of the students quietly waiting in the Olmsted Room’s foyer. When the meeting adjourned high fives were shared among all.

“One reason I came to K was because of its commitment to diversity,” said Assistant Professor of Political Science Justin Berry at the meeting. “I have many students who are looking forward to this opportunity.”

Assistant Professor of Music Beau Bothell added, “I’m very excited to have new critical ethnic studies majors coming into my courses and challenging our assumptions of what and how we will teach.”

“Not only does this help K catch up to where other institutions have been for years,” said Assistant Professor of English Ryan Fong, “it places K at the forefront of where the discipline is going.”

Calls for ethnic studies at K go back more than 40 years, to the late 1960s when the discipline was first born and institutionalized as academic programs at San Francisco State University and the University of California-Berkeley. Periodically, since those early days, the call for ethnic studies at K has been sounded by various faculty, students, and groups, including, among others, the Black Student Organization (1968), the Asian and Pacific Islander Student Association (2007), and the K chapter of the the national Chican@ student organization M.E.Ch.A (2012).

Several Kalamazoo College students, including many taking the winter term class called “Language: The Colonial and Imperial Difference”

Students, including many taking the winter term class called “Language: The Colonial and Imperial Difference” celebrate the fact that the course is now a core requirement of the new major called critical ethnic studies. Reid Goméz, the Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor in Ethnic Studies, is pictured in the second row at right, in the blue shirt and vest.

From the field’s origin its founding principles were (and remain) four: self-determination, solidarity among American racial minorities, educational relevance, and an interdisciplinary approach. The ethnic studies field provided early models to examine relationships between racism, colonialism, immigration, and slavery in a U.S. context. Its rigorously intellectual approach sought to create curriculum that reflected (and exercised) multiple voices and worldviews derived from knowledges and ways of knowing that have been silenced or made invisible.

At K, the culmination of the field’s disciplinary development and the calls for campus movement on the matter began in earnest in late 2013, when K appointed Reid Goméz the College’s first professor in ethnic studies. Her position was financed by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In addition to her teaching duties, Goméz worked as part of a Core Curriculum Working Group to write a “Critical Ethnic Studies Major” proposal for faculty consideration. With the approval of the proposal the group will administer the program and serve as the major’s core faculty. They are Goméz, the Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor in Ethnic Studies; Espelencia Baptiste, Associate Professor of Anthropology; Shreena Gandhi, Assistant Professor of Religion; Amelia Katanski, Associate Professor of English; Shanna Salinas, Assistant Professor of English; and Babli Sinha, Associate Professor of English.

Ethnic studies questions how knowledge is defined and who gets identified as a thinker. It’s less about the study of a specific area, ethnicity, or culture and more about disrupting singular notions of knowledge by ending the suppression and control of multiple knowledges. It’s somewhat akin to the fable of the five “scholars” trying to define an elephant based on their singular limited engagement with one portion of the whole. In this tale about blindness, multiple knowledges are excluded; as a result, the elephant is misperceived as a tree, fan, rope, wall, and hose when each “scholar” insists on the hegemony of his “knowledge” of the leg, ear, tail, body, and trunk, respectively.

“The ethnic studies field has always been counterhegemonic,” said Goméz. During the four decades of the field’s development the intellectual inquiry of one branch (called critical ethnic studies) has focused on “the logics of racism, colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and hetero-patriarchy” and moved away from the notion that people are oppressed because they are not known or understood.

At K, the Working Group wrote, “Critical ethnic studies [will] interrogate the production of knowledge. The primary project is to theorize from multiple, and simultaneous, narratives of silenced peoples and epistemologies.” The major will be an interdisciplinary, intellectual, and collaborative inquiry.

Eight units are required, including three core courses, four electives, and a senior colloquium. The core courses—“Argument With the Given,” “Language: The Colonial and Imperial Difference,” and “Insurgency, Solidarity, and Coloniality of Power”—define the field’s scope and approach to scholarship and provide the necessary practice with key language and theory.

The electives currently number 17 courses in the departments of anthropology and sociology, English, and religion. More courses from other departments will be added to the electives list as professors reshape them to fit the criteria for critical ethnic studies cross-listing, a process that involves the review and assistance of CES core faculty. According to the Working Group, “The core faculty aspires to serve as a campus resource. They intend to engage the campus community in questions of power, epistemology, and discipline, and to participate in a learning community shaped by the intellectual goal of substantive engagement with each other, within and across individual faculty disciplines and areas.”

The senior colloquium involves the entire cohort of each year’s majors. The majors will meet together in the fall term to decide the form and content of that year’s colloquium including assessment guidelines and procedures. “The purpose of the colloquium is to determine an intellectual social-political project that can be carried out over the year and that contributes to the field,” wrote the Working Group.

The new major is lauded not only by faculty and students. “We recently received funding for a campaign gift of an endowed professorship,” said President Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran. “And the donors would be very pleased to have this endowed chair support a professor in critical ethnic studies.”

The College will extend Goméz’s appointment through the 2015-16 academic year and also will conduct a tenure track search that year. In academic year 2016-17 the funding for the position will transition from the Mellon Foundation grant to the endowed chair support.

“Critical ethnic studies is a process of engagement and shapes the ability to engage content in a variety of fields of study,” concluded the Working Group in its report. “The field requires the logic governing the academy to change [and] this change is realized through the relentless pursuit of other ways to engage and through ongoing discussions of additional means of engagement. These processes invert, rethink, and displace universalities. Central to the field is a refusal to consume the other. Critical ethnic studies scholars must go beyond themselves and devise conversations that move past voyeurism and consumption.”

Word of the decision spread quickly and far. One academic advisor heard within a day from an advisee on study abroad in Tokyo who expressed his delight and wondered if he’d have time to change his major.

K Journey; Space Journey

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It is a very long trip from Yazd, Iran, to Kalamazoo. But in 2010 Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti ’15 was able to negotiate its many twists and turns, as well as making the cultural adjustments associated with the journey. Now, five years later, he’s graduated from Kalamazoo College with majors in physics and chemistry.

Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti next to Olds Upton sign

Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti ’15 in front of the building where he spent a great deal of time during his undergraduate studies.

Next he will turn his full-time attention to an even longer odyssey—the 93 million miles traveled by the sun’s solar winds. When those winds arrive at Earth, our atmosphere and magnetic field usually deflect them. They re-converge, however, on the night side of our planet, where some interesting things take place, including the creation of what are called flux ropes.

Those are the phenomena and that is the field (magnetospheric physics, to be exact) that Mojtaba is studying at the University of Michigan this fall as he starts work on his Ph.D.

According to him, such a rarified area of inquiry would never have been possible had he not come halfway around the world to Kalamazoo College.

Yazd, a city of more than a million people, is situated in central Iran, about 300 miles south of Tehran. Mojtaba graduated from high school there, and even started college. But then he had conversations with his uncle, Hashem Akhavan-Tafti, who had come to the states after the fall of the Shah, then graduated from K in 1982 (and is now a member of College’s board of trustees).

His uncle encouraged Mojtaba to make the same migration, even though both men knew the journey involved a great many steps. The first was to obtain a visa to enter the United States. Because the U.S. doesn’t have an embassy in Iran, Mojtaba had to travel to Turkey to file his application. He couldn’t leave Iran, however, until its government permitted him to do so.

Once he obtained his visa Mojtaba relocated to Howell, Michigan. There he spent three months on a farm with his uncle and Aunt SuzAnne. She is the person he most credits for helping with his acclimation to the West. “She is my best friend and the best mentor I could have asked for.”

A precondition for Mojtaba enrolling at K was improving his ability to speak and write English. To do so, he took an English class at Western Michigan University, then took what is called the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), a standardized proficiency test for non-native speakers wishing to enroll in an American university or college.

Once he received word that he’d passed, he was set to begin his studies at K in the fall of 2011. By that time he’d been in America for more a year and was, well, more than ready.

Before classes started, however, he embarked upon his LandSea adventure. “That was a big learning experience for me,” he recalls. “I made some of my best friends during that time.”

Although naturally outgoing, Mojtaba says that his biggest challenge has been to become more social. “Just to become comfortable and act normal, to be likeable. I’ve learned the value of a smile.”

When told that his smile and the twinkle of his eye bear a resemblance to those of tennis great Roger Federer, Mojtaba nods and says, “Yeah, I’m told that from time to time, especially by the guys on the tennis team.”

From the beginning, his studies at K have focused on the sciences. He spent the summer after his first year at Wayne State University working in a neuroscience lab. His foreign study—in Lancaster, England—involved particle physics.

“The sky is no longer a limit!”

Jan Tobochnik, the Dow Distinguished Professor in the Natural Sciences, has been impressed with Mojtaba. “He is a very outgoing young man, very personable. He loves to organize things. For example, he was part of an effort to get the College to put solar panels on the golf carts we use on campus.”

Mojtaba also helped organize K’s first Complex Science Society. “It’s to help bridge the gap between social sciences and empirical sciences,” he explains. “During our first year we focused on renewable energy. During the second we dealt with vaccination practices in the U.S.”

He also was involved in establishing a local chapter of the National Society of Physics Students. That work led to him and others into local elementary schools to encourage young children to pursue science.

For his Senior Individualized Project (SIP) Mojtaba studied the atmospheres of Earth and Mercury, two of the planets in our solar system with magnetic poles. His SIP received departmental honors.

He spent his SIP summer of 2014 at the University of Michigan with his advisor, Professor J.A. Slavin, and studied physical phenomena such as ‘magnetic reconnection’ and ‘coronal mass ejections.’

Because of his SIP work, NASA invited Mojtaba to attend the launch of its Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) mission.

As a result of that experience he was invited to attend the March, 2015, launch of a NASA mission at Cape Canaveral. The Magnetospheric MultiScale mission carried four identical satellites that, once deployed, gather information about the Earth’s magnetosphere. Mojtaba had worked with data from a similar spacecraft for his SIP.

The original plan was to view the launch, with others, from a favored site on NASA grounds. That hope was scuttled, however, when officials realized that Mojtaba was an Iranian national.

“They told me I’d have to watch from across the harbor instead. But at least Professor Slavin went with me. Even from there, it was still stunning to watch.”

When he’s needed a break from school work, Mojtaba has sometimes retreated to nature. “I really enjoy going to the Lillian Anderson Arboretum. It is a good place to heal.”

Mojtaba’s post-graduate studies will focus on the data coming from those four spacecraft. “Solar winds have the potential to overwhelm our technological civilization. If we could predict when that was going to happen we could take preventive measures to reduce the likelihood of a problem. I also hope to get involved in designing instruments for future missions.”

On a different note, pun intended, he has begun taking violin lessons.

Mojtaba soon hopes to achieve another goal—becoming an American citizen. He intends to make America his permanent home.

“While two decades of living in and facing the challenges of growing up in a developing country prepared me for working hard,” he says, “coming to the U.S. and obtaining a liberal arts education enabled me to broaden the scope of my understanding as well as the impact I can have as an individual and as a citizen. Today, more than five years after my first time entering the U.S., I have come to believe that even the sky is no longer a limit!”

Mojtaba also hopes to help other students the way he was helped. “My aunt and uncle have established a scholarship institute called ‘The 1for2 Education Foundation.’ It means that a recipient of the scholarship commits to pay for the education of two others. My aunt and uncle helped me, so I want to help others someday.”

AAEB Member Considers Externships a Vital Part of the K-Plan

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Vital, perhaps a tad overlooked, and with a “porch time” aspect unique to K, Kalamazoo College’s Discovery Externship Program has connected students and alums since 2002. The externship provides students with valuable observation and participation in a field of their choosing, and, unlike a traditional internship (or any undergraduate program in the country) it also provides students homestays with K alumni. Opportunities range in character and geography, from helping at a community kitchen and farmer’s market in Chelsea, Mich., to working with children on the autism spectrum at Daily Behavioral Health in Cleveland, Ohio, to getting up close and personal with octopi in the crystal waters of the Caribbean for the Northeastern University Marine Science Center.

Andrew Terranella ’99, M.D.

One of the program’s early alumni adopters, Andrew Terranella ’99, M.D., saw immediately how K students might benefit from time spent at his work. A physician with the Public Health Service, Terranella works with Indian Health Services to provide care to reservations in the southwest United States. In 2008, when he arrived at his first post-residency job as a pediatrician on the Navajo Reservation in Kayenta, Arizona, he called his alma mater.

“We often had medical students come to the reservation,” said Terranella, who serves on the College’s Alumni Association Executive Board, “and I thought it would be fun to have a K student come out, so I called Pam Sotherland [program and data manager at the Center for Career and Professional Development]. She said, ‘Well, we have a new thing called an externship.’”

Terranella and Sotherland composed a description of his medical, rural externship, and soon after two young women, Anna Hassan ’10 and Lauren Torres ’10, signed up and made their way from a verdant Michigan summer to the red dirt and open skies of the Southwest.

Terranella wanted to maximize the benefit of externship for the students by providing some hands-on, brains-on work in addition to job shadowing. “We were launching a program in the clinic called, ‘Adventures in Medicine,’ which was a summer science project for local children and teens,” Andrew explains. “I had a general idea for the program, but I wanted the K externs, along with two medical students, to design the curriculum and administer it.” First things first, though. “We wanted to have one week of orienting to the place and to get to really know each other, so we went on a river trip on the Green River in Utah, which was a blast.” After that, the externs had time to plan and then implement the three-week science program. It is the time students spend with alumni during homestays that differentiates the discovery externship program from any other.

In addition to having the chance to see what a physician does, Anna and Lauren worked with students from area schools, in the process learning how to run a biomedical summer class and how the tribal community functioned. That interaction is important to Terranella. “I think it’s important for people to see that reservations exist,” he explained, “because there is an entire group of Americans that people don’t pay a whole lot of attention to. And yet the reservation is beautiful country, the people are fantastic, and the medicine is really interesting, a type that you won’t see in an academic setting.”

Through hosting externs, Terranella also hopes to inform others of the importance of public health and Indian Health Services, specifically. “Having students come here is a great way to share the cultural experience of working with IHS. Cultural competence is not something you may always learn about in medical school or as an undergrad,” he explains. In fact, in part because of that arid and exhilarating summer at Kayenta, Hassan went on to get her Master of Public Health degree and now works with underserved communities in New Orleans.

Terranella keeps in touch with many of his externs, and credits the homestay aspect of the program for fostering a close-knit bond. “Undoubtedly an important part of the experience is just having one-on-one time—what we call ‘porch time’, which is sitting together after a work day and chatting about anything. Porch time makes externships something more valuable than just getting to see my work. It’s about experiencing a life, as well. What is work-life balance like? What is like to be an IHS doctor living in Tucson? And I get to ask questions of the students and find out about their passions.”

Because of the rewards of hosting, Terranella has offered an externship to K students every year that he can. In addition to those of Hassan and Torres, he has provided externships for the following K students: Emily Parsons ’11, Jenny Kwon ’16, Elizabeth Lenning ’16, Miranda Doepker ’16, and Karina Duarte ’18. And he intends to create an externship at his new job—deputy director of a tribal hospital on the Tohono O’odham reservation in southern Arizona—as soon as he’s settled.

“It’s a really great experience. I’ve loved having the students.”

To get involved in the externship experience, visit the Host an Extern page at Kalamazoo College’s website. Here, you can see past externships, find tips on creating a successful externship and see what past hosts say about their experience.

Korean Soundscapes

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If you’re walking on a fall afternoon across any college campus in Korea, you’ll probably hear the sound of Korean farmer’s music. More accurately, the sound will enter your body. It will synchronize your heartbeat with its own. The large drum, called the changgu, provides the pulse. The beat grounds you, connects you to the campus, to the landscape, to Korea.

Gary Rector studies in his K dorm room in 1961

Linguist in the making: Gary studies in his K dorm room in 1961.

On countless fall days, I’ve heard the changgu resonate from unadorned citizen centers and sandy schoolyards. Elderly housewives gather with shop owners and learn the changgu. Awkward teens gather with other awkward teens to play the changgu. Led by teachers of lithe grace and resounding voice, their bodies learn new rhythms.

Kalamazoo College alumnus Gary Rector ’65 found a home in Korea. He also found a home in the changgu.

In 1994, after 27 years in Korea, Gary Rector took the famously difficult Korean citizenship exam. He was the only one to get 100 percent. He became a Korean national, fluent in both Korean language and the changgu.

As a fellow K alum who has lived several years in Korea, I wanted to learn more about Gary’s story, so I went to visit with him in his book-lined office near his home. He has lived in the same northern Seoul neighborhood for 40 years. When he first moved there, it was all traditional-style Korean houses, and many of his neighbors were fortunetellers and shamans. Now, the neighborhood is a jumble of crumbling traditional homes, 1980s villas and shops, and soaring new apartment complexes, intersected by highway overpasses and steep hills. I asked Gary what brought him to that neighborhood. It turns out that it’s the place where he learned to play the changgu.

Childhood

Gary’s interest in his surrounding soundscapes started at a young age. He grew up in a musical family in Kentucky and still treasures early memories of his family playing bluegrass and spirituals. When he was an elementary school aged boy he moved with his father to Toledo, Ohio, and there he gained an awareness of how the sounds of language can differ, one place to another.

The Kentucky family members of Gary Rector holding instruments

Musical roots: The Kentucky family members of Gary Rector ’65 loved to play music together.

He spent childhood summers in Kentucky, and the school year in Ohio. As he traveled between these regions of two distinct dialects, he learned to speak both, alternating the Southern dialect of Kentucky with the Midwestern pronunciation of Ohio. Also, for a time, he and his father shared a house with Polish immigrants, and young Gary realized that he could understand their Polish. His interest in language burgeoned in high school; he studied French at his home high school, and travelled to another high school in order to study Russian.

Kalamazoo College

In 1961 Gary started school at K. He continued to study French, as well as other languages, and became particularly interested in linguistics. After his junior year in Caen, France, he was hired for a work-study job in the language lab helping other students with French pronunciation.

Gary also got involved in theatre and music at the College. When he first arrived at K, his roommate (and to this day lifelong friend) John Bolin, convinced him to come along to theatre auditions. They both performed in many plays, and John later went on to become a longtime theatre professor at Berea College.

Another K friend was learning to do flat picking on the guitar, and Gary realized that his mom and dad had done that as well. Suddenly inspired, Gary began to play. He joined a jug band with friends, and continued to play with the band after graduation.

Jug band? “Wait,” I interrupted. “Did the jug band have a name?”

“Yeah, it did have a name,” he responded vaguely, with a mischievous smile. For a moment, I felt like I was talking to the college-aged Gary.

“What was it?” I didn’t let him off the hook.

“New Pandora Mountain Backstairs Walkup Letters to Mother Coloring Book and Jug Band. The girl who played the washboard named it.” His eyes twinkled.

I laughed. Classic K kid, I thought.

A significant mentor for Gary at Kalamazoo College was linguistics professor Peter Boyd-Bowman. He fueled Gary’s interest in linguistics. He also operated an innovative program for learning neglected languages. From 1963 to 1965, students in Boyd-Bowman’s program used a combination of audiotapes and pronunciation coaching from exchange students to learn Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Swahili, and Brazilian Portuguese. Many of the students who participated continued studying their language of choice more intensively through a summer program. Gary wanted to learn Hindi, but the program was limited to first- and second-year students, so he wasn’t able to participate. Ironically, Gary became probably the most successful student of neglected languages that Boyd-Bowman mentored. Gary’s later experience learning Korean reflects the personal motivation and attention to pronunciation that formed the basis for K’s neglected languages program.

“The New Pandora Mountain Backstairs Walkup Letters to Mother Coloring Book and Jug Band”

After he graduated, Gary took a job at the Gibson guitar factory in Kalamazoo. Then, he decided to join the Peace Corps, requesting a non-European language speaking country. And so began his Korean experience.

Korea

Gary was part of the fourth class of Peace Corp volunteers sent to Korea, and arrived there at the end of 1967. Before starting their service, the volunteers received language training, and Gary stood out as a particularly skilled linguist from the beginning. His group of volunteers focused on public health, and after training he was posted in a small village called Cheongdo, outside of Daegu.

To learn Korean he spent as much time with local people as possible, speaking only their language. He also regularly bought a monthly volume of cartoons, and read them with a little boy he knew. Gary would ask the boy to explain any words he didn’t know, and, in exchange, would give the boy the volume when he finished reading it. After nine months in Korea, he also began to study the Chinese character writing system, and eventually became a fluent reader as well.

Gary brought his guitar and autoharp to Korea, and continued to play music. In 1969 he even composed and recorded a pop song in Korean titled “A Tomorrow Without Tuberculosis,” for a Peace Corps volunteer record aimed at earning money for the Korea Tuberculosis Association. The album sold more than 20,000 copies! Gary knew he wanted to learn Korean music, and tried more classical court-style instruments, but they did not particularly suit him. When he went to listen to Korean farmer’s music, he fell in love.

In Seoul, Gary heard the Korea-America Farmer’s Music Group, led by the man who would eventually become Gary’s long-term mentor, Kim Byeong-seop. Kim had had a bad crop year, so the group hired him to play and teach the changgu. At that point, Gary was in his late 20s, and Kim told Gary he was too old to start learning. But Gary persisted and eventually played the second changgu side-by-side with his teacher. Student and teacher playing together made a symmetrical picture—Gary right-handed, his teacher left-handed. Korean audiences loved that symmetry. In many ways, the music became Gary’s home. For several years Gary slept on the floor in the practice hall and helped newcomers to rehearse.

He would work part-time to earn enough to support himself while he played. After his volunteer service, Gary continued with Peace Corps. He trained Korean locals to use audio-visual materials for public health education. He also created language-learning materials and tested the language ability of new volunteers. Gary then worked for the Language Teaching Research Center, helping to create materials for Korean language textbooks.

Gary and his teacher Kim perform farmer’s music with the latter’s band

In the 1980s Gary (second from left) and his teacher Kim (left) perform farmer’s music with the latter’s band.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, he worked professionally on many creative projects, and his career development followed the rapid trajectory of the Korean economy. He worked as a copywriter, editor, and translator for LG Ad (formerly Heesung Advertising). Then, he worked for the public relations committee for the Seoul 1988 Olympics Organizing Committee.

Gary’s decision to become a citizen began with loss. In 1987, he had a dream that he got a call informing him that his father had died. The next day, he did receive a call, and he learned that his changgu teacher had died. His father died exactly one month later. It was then when he started to think about becoming a Korean citizen because he had more significant personal ties in Korea than in the U.S. at that point, and citizenship would give him the flexibility to do freelance work. Gary continued to write widely on topics related to Korean language, culture, and society. He also took on translation and editing projects. He became a citizen in 1994 and continued to write, edit, and translate for many government and corporate clients. He even wrote a weekly newspaper column on Korean society that ran for 10 years.

Current Project

One of Gary’s current interests is in cued speech, used mostly for deaf students to aid in lip reading and accurate detection of exact phonemes. He worked with Professor Seo Chang-won, a professor of special education at Far Eastern University, to develop a version of cued speech for Korean. Learning cued speech can significantly increase the reading aptitude of deaf students. Gary is interested in applying cued speech to teaching foreign languages. By signaling the exact phonemes, cued speech can help learners increase their listening comprehension, writing ability, and pronunciation.

Gary Rector’s life continues its immersion in the sounds and rhythms of language. For me, his life story is a reminder of the ways we all are shaped by sounds and rhythms, if we only take notice.

The author: Nora Hauk ’04 majored in theatre arts at K, and studied abroad in Chiang Mai, Thailand. She spent two years after graduation on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in South Korea. She is currently a doctoral candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan. She received the Blakemore Fellowship for Advanced Asian Language study, and graduated from Yonsei University’s Korean Language Institute. She is now in Seoul working on research for her dissertation.

The Light and the Dark

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Most so-called “overnight successes” are a matter of years or longer, such as the writing career of Morowa Yejidé ’92 (Moe-roe-wah Yay-gee-day). After a decade of short story publications, her novel Time of the Locust (Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, 2014) quickly gained critical and popular acclaim. The novel was a 2012 finalist for the national PEN/Bellwether Prize In 2015 it was long listed for the PEN/Bingham award for debut fiction and was a 2015 NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literary Work. She is currently a PEN/Faulkner Writers in Schools author, visiting with classes who have been assigned Time of the Locust.

Yejidé, who is married and raising three sons, wrote the book in the spare time she didn’t have, taking advantage of occasional bouts of insomnia, hours between work in academia, and even time in the bathtub when the door was locked to all distraction for three-hour baths of plotting storyline time. Submitting the manuscript to agents and publishers more than one hundred times, she filed away the rejections and kept sending it off, undaunted.

That kind of persistence, that kind of devotion to her art, that kind of determination is part of the hard lessons learned during Yejidé’s years at Kalamazoo College, although not necessarily in the classroom.

“I’ll be honest,” Yejidé says. “My Kalamazoo College experience was of very high highs and low lows. My first two years were about figuring out who I was and how I fit in. Then I went on study abroad to Japan, and my mom died a month after I returned. My last years at K passed in a haze.”

Morowa Yejidé (left) with classmates during her K days.

Yejidé was an international area studies major with a minor in Asian affairs. It was the study abroad experience, she says, that attracted the Washington D.C.-native to K. She spent her junior year in Tokyo, living with a host family, not knowing that in her absence her mother had been diagnosed with stage four breast cancer.

“She made everyone promise not to tell me,” Yejidé says. “She didn’t want me to rush back or have a cloud over me. I found out when I got home—and a month later she was gone. That really went into my writing, how people can say things without saying things. It was a part of the Japanese culture, too. I’ve been fascinated with how people communicate ever since.”

While Yejidé struggled through her final years at K, missing her mother, she found an understanding friend in her college roommate. Around the same time Yejidé lost her mother, her roommate lost hers as well, even more abruptly.

“Her mom was killed coming out of a pharmacy one day, struck during a police car chase,” she says. “We had these long existential discussions—is it better to know ahead or not?—and decided both scenarios were equally terrible. But it brought comfort to have someone there who understood. It all became a part of the light and the dark that K was for me. We keep in touch to this day.”

Another lesson Yejidé took to heart was her mother’s frequent advice to live her life without regrets. So Yejidé pursued her dreams, no matter how fantastic, and they carried her through those one hundred rejections as she sent out short story submissions and the manuscript of her novel.

“Time of the Locust is a magical realism, literary fiction type of novel,” Yejidé says. “It tells the story of a seven-year-old autistic boy named Sephiri and a supernatural relationship he has with his father.”

Autism is one of several important topics Yejidé explores in the novel. The boy’s mother Brenda copes with single parenthood while her son’s father Horus serves time in a maximum security prison for killing a racist police officer who shot had shot him but went unpunished. Horus is in solitary confinement , increasingly fleeing his isolation and despair by escaping in his mind. Brenda buries her stress in food, leading to obesity and diabetes.

“I love image-driven types of literature,” Yejidé says. “I’m always reading, and I’m a very curious person by nature. I was reading a photo-journalism piece with a single photo of an autistic boy looking out his window at a tree. He had this whimsical look on his face. I found myself wondering—what does his world look like?”

With that, a creative seed was planted. Yejidé unleashed her fascination with the interior world and she explored the different types of communication people with autism use.

“There’s a confinement theme,” she says. “And I played with that same idea with the boy’s mom. She, too, is grappling in the dark. She has a self-imposed prison of her obesity, weight that cuts her off from the world. The boy’s father meanwhile is in a physical prison, another hidden world, and dealing with what happens to him in solitary confinement.”

Yejidé researched her main themes by reading letters from prisoners, watching hours of video diaries, studying autistic behavior and talking with people involved in those hidden worlds.

“Our penal system is the equivalent of a small nation in population,” she says. “I wanted to know what other countries have to say about our penal system, too. When I read the prisoners’ letters, I had to read for what wasn’t there, because they get censored. And autistic kids—they can’t tell us about their world and in that way are like prisoners. Mothers? Always dead last on their own to-do lists. Brenda in the novel is an amalgamation of women who feel that if they stop all that they are doing, their entire world will fall apart.”

Yejidé’s encounter with the Japanese language served as a source for her writing on the difficulty of communication. Her first such experience came in high school, when she went to a friend’s home to do homework. Her friend’s mother was Japanese and spoke no English.

“I learned basic, rudimentary words in Japanese,” she recalls. “It became like a game to us. I ended up looking into learning Japanese, and then when it was time to go to college, I saw Kalamazoo College had this awesome Japanese program. So I applied.”

It wasn’t enough to just apply to Kalamazoo College. Yejidé had to convince her father. At that time, she says, the family lived in Okemos, Michigan, and her father taught at Michigan State University. MSU, for him, seemed the obvious choice.

“But MSU didn’t have that kind of program in Japan,” Yejidé says. “I had to give a dining room presentation to convince Dad. It worked.”

Yejidé immediately felt drawn to the quiet of the Quad, to the smaller campus and more individualized attention at K.

“As an only child, I looked for that solitude,” she says. “I loved the calm tranquility of the Quad. I wanted the in-depth experience of K, and I got it.”

Yejidé says she loved her study abroad experience, despite its dark ending with the loss of her mother. It was the first time her host family near Tokyo had ever hosted an exchange student, and their English language skills were almost non-existent.

Morowa with her Japanese host parents, Mr. and Mrs. Imamura) on the day of seijin no hi (Coming of Age Day), a Japanese national holiday that celebrates all young people who turn 20 that year.

“That’s what I wanted, that immersion experience,” Yejidé says. “We operated on the premise of ‘if you don’t talk, you don’t eat.’ I learned so much from my Papa San and Mama San. We changed each other; they are my second set of parents. They would tell me that I was special, that I would do something great someday. It was awesome to mail my book to them, even if it was in English and they couldn’t read it. I’ve gone back a few times to visit them.”

Yejidé has also returned to her K family from time to time. It was at a K “mixer” for alumni in Washington, D.C., that she learned about current classes at Kalamazoo College about autism from a current student.

“The subject came up about Bruce Mills, an English professor at K who was teaching about communication and autism, and that we should meet,” she says.

Good things come from mixers. Bruce Mills responds: “I have since taught Time of the Locust in two classes already, my spring 2015 African-American literature class and my fall 2016 first-year seminar. Morowa and I connected online and became friends on Facebook. Given my memoir dealing with autism, we had a kind of natural connection.”

Mills’ memoir, An Archaeology of Yearning, explores his relationship with his autistic son. His first-year seminar is called “Crossing Borders: Autism and Other Ways of Knowing.”

“In relation to my African-American literature course, I have been trying to connect the class to folks in the community through our ‘Engaging the Wisdom’ oral history project. It felt like an extension of such connections to have a conversation with an alumna, especially given that Morowa’s book includes characters whose lives speak to civil rights history, the criminal justice system and larger themes of disconnection, imprisonment (physical, psychological, and spiritual) and hope and healing.”

This renewed connection between Kalamazoo College and Morowa Yejidé has led to a homecoming. Yejidé will be doing a reading from her novel followed by discussion and book signing on Tuesday, February 16, at 7 p.m., at the Arcus Center. She will also meet with students in the classroom at a fiction workshop.

Moving from light to dark and back into the light again, Yejidé has no regrets about her sometimes difficult years at K. Her mother would be proud.

“K gives you a unique opportunity to find out what you’re about and what you can become, and it did that for me,” she says. “You just have to commit to that discovery, wherever it takes you.”

Eating Dearborn

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Flatbreads seasoned with zaatar

Kalamazoo College opened me up to the inestimable value of visiting other parts of the world, yet I rarely spent much time visiting parts of Michigan beyond Kalamazoo. Even though my dad grew up in Hamtramck, a suburb of Detroit, I hadn’t visited the Motor City since the early 60s.

And then, more than a half-century later, my wife, Carolyn Berg ’72, and I visited Detroit and suburban Dearborn, each a feast in its own way.

It was fascinating to see the people of Detroit, a city on the remake, leveraging the aesthetic and financial advantages of properties abandoned when the city’s auto and other industries downsized or closed shop. Young artists, restaurateurs and entrepreneurs are revitalizing places outside the city’s center, and we were knocked out by Detroit’s old-neighborhoods-made-new, especially Corktown, bursting with renewed energy at restaurants, breweries and bars that seemingly overnight mushroomed out in old warehouses and manufacturing facilities.

We were even more eager to visit the Dearborn neighborhood.

About three years ago, the National Report mentioned that Dearborn had been placed under Sharia law. The article said the Dearborn city council “voted 4-3 to become the first US city to officially implement all aspects of Sharia Law. The tough new law, slated to go into effect January 1st, addresses secular law… as well as personal matters …[and] could see citizens stoned for adultery or having a limb amputated for theft.”

The story was, of course, baloney – and intentionally so. National Report is a satire site. One problem with satire is the propensity of some to regard satiric fiction as fact. Sure enough, the Dearborn-under-Sharia-law story was soon repeated as fact in the Conservative Tribune, Human Events and several other publications that perhaps could use better fact-checkers.

The story may have seemed credible to some because Dearborn contains the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States. Many people from Lebanon, Kuwait and other Arabic countries came for good paying jobs. More recently, many Arabic people have immigrated in order to escape conflict zones in the Arab world. The Arab Americans we met seemed very glad to be in the U.S., and we were very glad to visit their community, which offers some of the most wonderful Middle Eastern food we’ve had, in great abundance and variety.

The Arab American National Museum is a good place to orient yourself to the local community and its history. The Museum offers food tours that include visits to local shops and restaurants, a wonderful way to learn about the culinary options available in Dearborn. What follow are a few places we visited—several as part of that tour—along with some suggestions about the wonderful foods you might try.

Baking fresh bread on site, and serving up steaming platters of grilled meat and vegetables, Al-Ameer is a neighborhood mainstay. It is, in fact, a recipient of a 2016 James Beard “American Classic” award, though that honor clearly hasn’t gone to their head. The night we visited, the servers were friendly and efficient. The pricing was downright budget-friendly. We liked the koosa (zucchini squash stuffed with meat), shawarma and ghallaba (a Lebanese stew of meat in lightly spicy sauce).

Croissant Zaatar

Shatila is a huge Arab-American pastry palace on a street lined with Middle Eastern restaurants and bakeries. There’s a relatively small section serving their renowned ice creams, including pistachio and rose water (our favorite), and a vast display of delicate French pastry side-by-side with sweets showing more Arabic character. The French occupied Lebanon for some years, and their influence was noticed at a number of Dearborn pastry shops. For example, we enjoyed a croissant, the traditional French breakfast pastry, filled with zaatar, a traditionally Middle Eastern spice blend.

The grocery store Dearborn Fresh Supermarket is a wonderful place to buy Middle Eastern basics at reasonable prices. We selected some sour plums, traditionally eaten with salt to bring out the sourness, as well as several Middle Eastern breads and pickled cheeses. We also took home some dates from Saudi Arabia that were fantastic. Unlike many varieties available in the U.S., these Saudi dates were not soaked in sugar water; they had a naturally caramel-like, deliciously chewy texture. We bought a 4.4 pound case!

Mocha Café owner, Fawzy Alghazali

Mocha Café is owned by Fawzy Alghazali, who came to the United States from Yemen in 2002. Alghazali specializes in Yemeni sweets, some found nowhere else in the area, including harisah, a savory block of chopped nuts and spices, and araysi, a mango smoothie with chopped strawberry, banana and other fruit, very popular in Yemen’s port of Mocha. Alghazali told us he came to the U.S. with his father, though much of his family remained in the Middle East. “I worked at a gas station,” he said, “and on an ice cream truck, then at Macy’s. I got in partnership with friends and bought a donut shop in Hamtramck.” Today his café operates in two locations, and Alghazali considers himself living confirmation of the American dream.

The Arab-Americans of Dearborn are trying—as did my grandparents and other immigrants who arrived in this country decades or even centuries before—to make a safe home for themselves and for their families in the U.S. For those, like me, who live to eat, the restaurants and sweet shops in Dearborn offer what may well be the broadest, deepest and most concentrated selection of Arabic cuisine in the country. You don’t always have to travel to another country to explore other cultures and enjoy their cuisines.

Matriarchy, Mezcal, and Mole

Grace Work

Peripatetic First-Year

Frontier Brothers

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Perhaps it was something about Stetson Chapel.

When Robert Sewell, Sr. and Rowene Pionke were married there (October 30, 1948) they hoped the children they planned to have would fulfill their own dreams of graduating from Kalamazoo College.

Dreams come true. Robert Jr. and his younger brother Richard graduated from K. They also discovered careers in Alaska, where their parents eventually moved—a second dream-come-true for their fisherman father.

Robert Sr. retired in the 1980s, left Kalamazoo to visit Rich in Anchorage (and fish for anything with fins) and never looked back. The boys’ mother also embraced the northern lifestyle and found work there. The two now are buried at Ft. Richardson, after a number of happy years in Alaska near their sons.

Richard Sewell ’78

Rich Sewell in 1982, with Anchorage in the background.

“I had wanted a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, without a lot of religious affiliation, in a small urban area,” Rich says. “I’d taken tennis lessons and played on the Stowe Stadium courts from the time I was six years old, and Robert, who is two years older than I, was enrolled at K.”

Rich credits K for preparing him to explore options, seize opportunities, and adapt to circumstances that might otherwise have defeated him.

He appreciated the variety of opportunities at K. “I took hockey ice skating at WMU through a contract they had with K,” he says.

“I worked with hand ringing and we got involved in fund raising to buy the tower bells for Stetson Chapel,” he adds, recalling his parents’ ties to the place they were married.

And Rich found the professors and classes special.

“Professor [Lawrence] Barrett taught freshman English and helped me learn to write, and he encouraged me to say what I was thinking,” Rich says. “It was near the end of Dr. Barrett’s career but he was still enthused about helping freshmen.”

During summers Rich worked at the Eckrich meat packing company.

“I was paid well,” he recalls. “With that and my scholarships and grants, I was able to pay my own way. I realize students today can hardly do that.”

After graduation Rich was hired at the South Central Michigan Regional Planning Commission in Kalamazoo. In July 1981, when his job was eliminated because of funding cuts, Rich left for Alaska. He figured he’d stay a few years and then return to Michigan or explore elsewhere. Instead, the economics major sunk his roots in Alaska.

He was hired as regional economist for the department of planning in Anchorage, where in late 1984 he predicted an economic crash.

“I’d been a foreign exchange student from Plainwell High School to Santiago, Chile, in 1973, and I’d seen things go bad there,” Rich says.

“City officials wanted me to revise my forecast. When I refused, I was out of a job.

“In 1987 there was a major economic downturn, forerunner of the national housing crash when 50 percent of Alaskan housing value was lost,” Rich recalls. His predictions had come true, though they cost him his job, but his K experiences had prepared him for change.

After losing the Anchorage position Rich reoriented himself by driving back roads through Germany, Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, France, and other European countries.

“His K experiences had prepared him for change.”

“At K I had learned to be adaptable to trying different things and figuring things out,” he said. “Travel gave me time to think and reminded me I was supposed to be always learning new things,” he said. “I visited museums, reread Homer’s Odyssey and followed the route the hero took. And I learned there was an opportunity for seafood exports in Europe.”

Rich returned to Alaska, took a French course at the University of Alaska, and started a seafood company that processed and exported salmon to Europe, Asia, and Hawaii.

When the Valdez oil spill occurred, salmon took a hit. So Rich, who had done research about blue crabs during one of his off-campus experiences at K, reviewed what he had learned and obtained a grant through the Alaska Technology System to learn about the live king crab market. He switched to shipping king crab and returned to school for marketing and management classes. That led to the offer of a fellowship in the business school, and he enrolled in a master’s program.

“That proved to be a creative way to move forward with my business and do something productive,” Rich said.

When Alaska law declared that only six companies could buy crab in the Bering Sea, Rich found himself again out of business. He went to work for the Alaska Department of Transportation (2004) where he continues to be employed.

His first assignment was a posting at the isolated borough of Bethel.

“I was a foreigner there,” Rich said. “Some people still speak only Yupik. I needed a translator, so I took a class at the University and learned the Eskimo language.”

Rich has worked for government agencies, owned and operated his own seafood companies, and ridden the ups-and-downs of a volatile economy, oil spills, and unpredictable government regulations. The survival skills he needed, he says, he learned at K.

About 10 years ago Rich met Ellen Provost, a physician who is now director of epidemiology for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. The couple recently celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary.

“Now I have a stepdaughter, Rachel, and a baby granddaughter, Addison,” Rich says.

“Many people come and go to and from Alaska. To avoid that phenomenon, my solution was to encourage my family to move here.”

Robert Sewell ’75

K student Robert Sewell hitchhiking in 1972 near Empire, Michigan. The photo was taken by friend and fellow K student Shana (Goldiamond) Aucsmith ’74.

Rich’s older brother Robert was a student at K when Rich enrolled.

After his first year at K he volunteered at the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, Maryland) as a volunteer for phase I safety studies of new medicines.

When he returned to the College, he did an independent study internship at the Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital, working as a research technician in a study of aggressive behavior. As a result of that experience he became increasingly intrigued by behavior analysis.

Robert eventually transferred to Western Michigan University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree (major in psychology and a minor in chemistry). He continued his education at WMU with a master’s degree (1982) and doctorate (1985), each with an emphasis on behavior analysis.

He visited Rich in Alaska in 1983; and two years later accepted a position as a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. Like his brother he planned to stay only a few years, but also like his brother he has remained in the “last frontier” for more than 30 years.

Today Robert manages Alaska’s SHARP program, an effort he conceived and initiated in 2007. The State agency, a division of Alaska’s Health and Social Services, provides direct financial incentives for health professionals.

“We need to encourage people to come to Alaska and stay,” Robert said.

Robert has stayed. “Michigan was my home,” he said, “but I love the magnificent scenery, the people, and the native culture here.” He and his wife Olga and his 17-year old son, Luke, live on Douglas Island near Juneau. His stepdaughter, Lauren, is a registered nurse who works in oncology in Portland, Oregon.

The brothers remember the occasion when they were lab partners during a biology class at K. In a sense, says Rich, he and Robert continue to collaborate. Both now are on the Board of Directors for the Alaska State Employees Association. And their adopted home is now, simply, home. Their forbears are buried here.

BeLight

The eZine of Kalamazoo College

Archives

K Journey; Space Journey

AAEB Member Considers Externships a Vital Part of the K-Plan

Korean Soundscapes

The Light and the Dark

Eating Dearborn

Matriarchy, Mezcal, and Mole

Peripatetic First-Year