In my mind, I am on a plane, descending through the clouds of Fez, Morocco. A flight attendant’s voice recites a line from Cervantes’ Don Quixote through the speakers: “I do not insist that this is a full adventure, but it is the beginning of one, for this is the way adventures begin.” I look to the right and find my younger self seated next to me: a sixteen-year-old American-tongued Kuwaiti girl whose mind, steadily shaped by Kuwait’s Western curriculums, opposes visits to the neighboring skies of the Arab world. To her, this trip is insubstantial, unsophisticated, and the epitome of intellectual regression. I give her a warm, hesitant smile as she dog-ears The Great Gatsby and hums to T.I.’s “Live Your Life” while ensuring that her iPod’s volume is at its maximum level. I tap on her shoulder and she pulls out her headphones, her eyes urging me to explain that audacious interruption. In one breath, I ask, “Aren’t you the least bit curious about Fatima al-Fihriya? You wax lyrical about the pursuit of knowledge, yet you don’t seem interested in the fact that this remarkable 9th-century woman opened Al-Qarawiyyin, the world’s first university, right in this very city!” She merely shrugs as Phantom Planet’s chorus “California, here we come” soundtracks her quixotic mental escape to surf-town. With a frustrated sigh, I recognize this unrelenting inner schism that both my present and sixteen-year-old selves inhabit.
Upon our arrival in Fez, I recall American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). His concept of double consciousness, described as the experience of being a Black body that houses “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals” in a white-dominated world, inspires me to turn to figures who extend this notion of twoness into postcolonial contexts. I draw on literary critic Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (1999), which explores cultural ambivalence through his Palestinian-American background. I also look to cultural theorist Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Maghreb pluriel (Plural Maghreb, 1983), whose vision of identity beyond boundaries is shaped by his Moroccan-French bilingualism. In his memoir, Said recounts his unresolved experiences at British schools in Egypt: a place where his Arabness was lost amid elitist, imperial narratives and curricula. Meanwhile, Khatibi develops the concepts of pensée-autre (“other thought”) and double critique: a decolonial process, or a mental reversal of colonial influence, in which individuals assess both Western frameworks and their own traditional beliefs, ultimately creating a plural identity that refuses to be confined to a fixed category. The result is a shared space of twoness: a cultural and dialectical dyad where one lingers in intangible liminality. One is neither here nor there, neither Arab nor Anglo, but quietly hovers in the indeterminacy of two contrasting worlds. This, I reflect, parallels Kuwaiti writer Nada Faris’s idea of the “Anglowaiti” – a term combining “Anglo” and “Kuwaiti” to describe the conflicted, double identities of Kuwaiti individuals who deliberately adopt English as both a lingua franca and a “language of self-expression.” Rather than merely tilting at Cervantine windmills, I find that pensée-autre and double critique allow the Anglowaiti’s ‘either-or’ tension to remain open and plural—neither fully reconciled nor forever divided. Who would have thought that an exceptional American IB school in Kuwait would find me dissecting this state of irreducible in-betweenness through the scholastic experiences of a prominent postcolonial critic?
In Said’s memoir, the out-of-place student’s bivocality reverberates through the hallways and classrooms of Egypt’s Gezira Preparatory School (GPS) and Victoria College during the 1940s and 1950s, causing his disorientation to follow him into adulthood. In his earlier years at GPS, which he describes as a “constructed colonial suburb,” he notes how he was taught by rigid British educators, with very few Arab children and no Egyptian faculty surrounding him. The student body consisted mainly of English students, a group to whom Said attributed a marked “hauteur.” Their names embodied a pure Englishness, in contrast to his own hybrid name which bore the weight of two opposing realms: “Edward,” named after the Prince of Wales, and the Arabic surname “Said.” He was a Palestinian Christian boy in a Muslim-majority country not truly his own, speaking the language of the colonial oppressor. The scholastic atmosphere scaffolded a Eurocentric narrative of a sophisticated “us” versus a subservient “them,” reinforced by the literary backdrop of “meadows, castles, and Kings John, Alfred, and Canute.” This curriculum enforced an imperialistic pedagogy that eliminated Arab presence, knowledge, and language. Said’s secondary education saw no change, as he poignantly writes, “There was a great distortion underlying the Victoria College life, which I was unaware of at the time. The students were seen as paying members of some putative colonial elite that was being schooled in the ways of a British imperialism that had already expired, though we did not fully know it.” It is in this obfuscated realm that the student mind is dually torn. Said’s experience, described as an “unsettled sense of many identities—mostly in conflict with each other,” is one that the Anglowaiti shares to a degree, and is therefore in need of a Khatibian pensée-autre and double critique to refocus what this ambivalent double identity could actually mean.
To understand the Anglowaiti identity, we have to embrace a new mode of thinking that is conscious of both our heritage and external influences, without becoming trapped by them. This is what Khatibi describes as the “duty of an other-thought,” stating that “what is necessary… is to broaden our freedom to think, to introduce in all dialogue several strategic levers,” and that one should “listen to the Maghreb resonate in its (linguistic, cultural, political) plurality, and on the other, only the outside rethought, decentered, subverted, diverted from its dominant determinations, can allow us to go beyond unformulated identities and differences.” Put simply, he calls for acknowledging the pluralities inherent in our cultural formations, such as Said’s Palestinian background and imperial education or the Anglowaiti’s English language and Kuwaiti culture, while also challenging external dominant narratives that seek to define or limit such identities. Total elimination of European influence (or the complete process of “decolonizing the mind”) is not possible, nor is complete adherence to tradition alone practical for the Anglowaiti. Khatibi inspires the bifurcated mind to engage with this distinct space—it mustn’t be anchored by one or the other, by the internal or the external. The Anglowaiti must recenter their thoughts—an “other thought” in practice—so as to embrace a multiplicity in which different cultures, languages, and practices overlap without being categorized, defined, or demarcated by a world that has a psychological tendency to classify or enforce limited interpretations of human identity. In her May 2013 speech, “On Anglowaiti Literature,” Faris asks why there is a need “to lump a group of people — comprised of various individuals, each with different backgrounds and social upbringings [under] the umbrella of ‘identity.’” While she offers this unique term to define the twoness of the Anglophone Kuwaiti, Khatibi’s “other thought” offers an alternative equilibrium: this duality has the potential to become a source of strength rather than an exasperating uncertainty or a newly-formulated identity, especially as one notices pedagogical practices in which ideological modes of thinking overpower the “inferior culture.”
My younger self saunters through the school hallways, singing American and British alternative rock songs in a purely monolingual voice; her P.E. teacher yells “Hey, jukebox!” every time they cross paths. She switches to 2000s R&B as she dances her way to economics class to learn about Thorstein Veblen, then history class to discuss the nuanced stances of European powers during World War I. She sits at the very back of the only two Arabic classes that the school has to offer—diffidently tight-lipped as she struggles to make sense of the language’s complexities. She yields to being subsumed, blissfully so, in an imagined Western world, though she carries the name and genetic makeup of an Arab. She rarely speaks her mother tongue (if it is, in fact, her mother tongue) and fails to connect with those who do not recognize the “sophisticated” and carefully constructed Americanness she projects. The outcome of her experience is effectively expressed in Said’s words: “We learned about English life and letters… habits and idioms that we could never use… being and speaking Arabic were delinquent activities [and accordingly] we were never given proper instruction in our own language, history, culture, and geography.” While his education stemmed from imperial anachronisms, her school reflects the globalization and cultural dominance of Western-influenced education in the Middle East today. She privileges her Westernized mind, leaving her Arabness to lie in perpetual silence. And so, to disrupt this fixated delusion, I forcefully grab her hand as we walk through the Islamic arches of Fez’s Al-Qarawiyyin University.
We enter the Andalusian-inspired classrooms and examine the manuscripts of the 12th-century philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), also known as medieval Spain’s “Arab Aristotle.” I explain to her how his translations, adaptations, and preservations of Aristotle’s works—such as Rhetoric, Poetics, and Metaphysics—were pivotal in transmitting and reintroducing the ancient classical texts to the Latin West. “Most Western scholars completely disregard Ibn Rushd’s contributions. A rhetoric scholar named James J. Murphy criticizes his concepts as ‘plagued by problems of poor texts and even worse translations,’” I elaborate. “Meanwhile, the Arab Aristotle, as well as other Arab intellectuals of his time, adapted and expanded Greek ideas, applying them to their own religious and cultural contexts. This established a critical foundation for European theologians. But only a few recognize this fact.” Wide-eyed and somehow altered, she carefully scans the rare folios, acknowledging the historical weight the papers carry. She asks, “So Ibn Rushd is one of the reasons Aristotle’s ideas were kept alive?” I nod with a smile as she picks up her phone to Google Ibn Rushd as well as the history of the long-standing school. Fascinated, she reads aloud Tao Tao Holmes’s line that “the school’s student body shrank dramatically in the early 1900s when elites began sending their children to the new Western-style institutes in Morocco.” She puts her phone down and absorbs her medieval surroundings: Islamic art and calligraphy carved into majestic walls, elegantly-patterned tiles, intricately carved wood, and a marble fountain resting in the middle of an intellectually hospitable courtyard. We smile at each other, recognizing the Western and Middle Eastern plurality that this historic place houses. The Du Boisian twoness that had long divided us suddenly shifts; it transforms from a space of separation into a space of possibility, where I am no longer forced to choose between worlds, but finally free to inhabit both.
