The Transcript

Karthika: Welcome, Dr. Wendy, thank you so much for joining me on CulturallyOurs. I am excited to have you on the podcast and cannot wait to chat with you and get to know you a little better.

Dr. Wendy: Thank you for having me.

Karthika: Absolutely. So, before we begin, could you tell us a little bit about sort of who you are, where you’re from, just to kind of help set the stage for this conversation?

Dr. Wendy: Sure. I’m a professor of political science at Northwestern University and I grew up between the suburbs of Chicago and Lincoln, Nebraska. I left the Midwest for university and then for graduate school. I discovered the Middle East during a college semester abroad in Morocco. I had never been outside the United States at that point. It was my first chance to go overseas and I chose to go to Morocco because I wanted to go to Africa and then discovered when there was a program in North Africa that I could spend a semester in North Africa and also a semester in Spain as I’d studied Spanish through school. And that sort of started my passion for the Middle East and the Arab world. I began studying Arabic there and have been studying the Arab world and the Middle East ever since.

Karthika: I would’ve never guessed Lincoln, Nebraska. We do a lot of driving out west and it’s like, you know, once we get to like Nebraska, it’s like this is going to go on forever. And then we hit the mountains.

Dr. Wendy: Indeed. Most people say, ‘Oh Nebraska, I’ve either driven through it or flown over it.’

Karthika: For sure. Now, as a professor of political science at Northwestern you have written several books on conflict and politics in the Middle East. Why did you choose to sort of focus on this topic and why this part of the world?

Dr. Wendy: As I mentioned, I fell into it. I’d never been outside the United States. So, for me, going to Morocco as a college student was the most interesting place I’d ever been perhaps. Cause it was the furthest away from Nebraska culturally and geographically I’d ever been. So, I got hooked. So, in some ways, it was, quite random that I started to study this part of the world. But many things kept me going back. And as someone interested in politics, I was fascinated really by the politics, of the Arab world. When I went to Morocco, it was in the authoritarian states, in an era, in the mid-1990s that was quite repressive. And I think I was captivated by the experience of ordinary people living under systems that were fundamentally unfree in which government was not accountable in which basic civil liberties were not protected in which there was really endemic corruption, for many people felt like created barriers and ceilings to what they could achieve if you didn’t have connections to important people you might not get very far in life. And that at the time caused huge numbers of Moroccans to try to illegally immigrate to Europe in the hope of just being able to fulfill their basic aspirations. And as I continued studying the Arab world and went from Morocco further east, I ended up going to the Palestinian Territories. And what I found in Palestine was a very different form of oppression being under occupation, but some of the basic human experiences of living in a place in which opportunity and freedoms were limited, in which people felt like they couldn’t rule themselves, and couldn’t really determine their fates because they had these blockages imposed external powers or by political systems. We’re the same. And as I traveled to other parts of the authoritarian Middle East, I encountered the sort of different dimensions of that experience. So that’s what captured me on a human level and also captured me on a political level. And that’s been the guiding, sort of the theme of, my research as a political scientist. So, I’ve written now three books related to the Israeli Palestinian conflict or the Arab Israeli conflict and one book on Syrian conflict, the Syrian uprising, and war.But this theme of how people struggle for freedom and how they cope in the absence of freedom has been what’s tied me to this part of the world and what’s motivated my research.

Karthika: And there is a lot is going on, but I love how you focus on like you said, the human element. And you talked about your books and that’s how I met you and I heard you speak your latest book, ‘We crossed a bridge and it trembled’, is about the Syrian crisis and people there have lived, like you said, very different lives than what you’ve been used to. Right. So, as you kind of wrote and researched this book, can you share some experiences of the people you met or you interviewed that had an impact on you, on your life and more importantly on your sort of mindset?

Dr. Wendy: Every person I interviewed in one way or another affected me. So one is that I came to this project, I began in 2012, the Syrian uprising began in 2011 in the context of what people often call the Arab spring. And I was watching that from afar and that’s what drew me into study Syria as one case of these experiences, of revolutions for freedom and dignity. But at that point, I’d already been studying the Middle East and traveling in the Middle East and studying Arabic abroad and researching for many years. So as I began in the mid 1990s, and, and really from then until the present my experience as a Middle East specialist has meant long times of just kind of hanging out with people in the region and whether it meant I was at a student in Palestine or me worked at an NGO in in Ramallah or in Gaza City or lived with a local family in Morocco or spent a long times summers in Lebanon and so forth. It’s meant a lot of time and context, which as you said, are all culturally very different from the one I grew up in. But it’s become a kind of a second home that’s always different. Always an outsider and never a local and always an outsider looking in but have spent a lot of time in people’s homes and coffee shops talking into the wee hours of the night on shared taxis and on buses and that sort of thing to get to know them. This culture is very different but has become familiar with so many years of traveling within it and so forth. And the people who’ve I’ve met along the way, I mean there, there’s just so many, you don’t even know where to begin. There are there, I’ve met, in the people I’ve interviewed there, some people I interview once and never see again. There are people I’ve met once and then we become friends on Facebook and communicate in that way. And I get to see this kind of voyeuristic through social media, their lives evolve. And then there are people I’ve become very close to and stay in touch and have seen repeatedly over the years. So, there’s one family, for example, that is now in Turkey. I met when they were in Jordan, they’d fled Syria to Jordan. And since then relocated Turkey. I have over the years seen the members of the family be separated and then reunited. I’ve seen the children of the family get married and have a child of her own. Other kids who very little grew up than when I met the family, the mother was pregnant. And since that baby was born and is now a brilliant six-year-old. So, it’s been the most special, although I met them in the context of doing research and gathering interviews about political experiences. I’ve seen the entire evolution of a family and its members and the ups and the downs and the tremendous joys, but also the frustrations and the sadness and the challenges. And it has been such a gift to be a part of their lives and have them become a part of my life the six years since.

Karthika: Right. And that makes perfect sense. I mean, and you talked about this too in your book where it’s about the people at the end of the day. People who’ve experienced it and their stories, how it impacted their lives. Yes, it’s political and all of that stuff, but it’s always about the people. Right? Now, what are the things that may be surprised you as you spoke to people and you kind of wrote your book that maybe you are not expecting you?

Dr. Wendy: So, one thing is, I mean there’s a tremendous amount of writing and documentation about the Syrian conflict. It is a conflict that in the era of social media in the era of citizen journalism, there’s so much ink that’s been spilled on Syria, anything that’s happened in Syria, well not everything but so many things had been captured by cell phone videos and have both Syrians themselves have written about it, whether it’s on social media or in citizen journalism or media activism or personal testimonials as well as outside journalists and so forth. So, there’s a lot that you can follow and know about Syria without ever living, leaving your computer screen wherever you are in the world. So, in that sense, sometimes you feel like what more can surprise me because you can simply read and view and learn so much. But even given that, when you sit down and speak to ordinary Syrians about their experiences, you learn dimensions that as we were saying, just put the human element of all those politics.So it’s one thing to know these basic facts that how Assad seized power in 1970 and created a strong authoritarian regime and the his son took power in the year 2000 and these are the institutional and military and political and economic elements of this particular, system and why Syrians felt oppressed and rose up and how they rose up and how this uprising got off the ground and how it militarized and how it escalated and how it became this multi-dimensional war that is very complicated and is very brutal and has, invited the intervention of all sorts of different state and non-state parties and created this humanitarian catastrophe that we are now following from afar. But as I said, when you speak to ordinary citizens about what it’s been like to live all of these phases of life and live these different contexts and what it felt like to go out and protest for the first time and what it felt like to experience bombing raids and live as a family in your house, hearing bombs drop and not knowing when and where the next bomb would drop and if it would collapse your entire apartment building on top of you and every one and you and your family would die and the people who were arrested and put in prison where they were tortured, where they were starved, where they lived under tremendously cramped conditions with people literally, you know, packed on top of each other like sardines and in cells so crowded that people could not all sleep at the same time. They took shifts. Some people sat and some people lying down. All of this information’s available to read. I mean, it’s well documented by human rights organizations. There was a recent stunning, phenomenal investigative report on the front page of the New York Times earlier this month that documents this type of experience in prisons. But there is nothing like sitting across the table from somebody who has experienced this, himself or herself, describing what it felt like on a personal level, on a psychological level, on an emotional level. Both those who’ve experienced prison and the families of those who’ve been arrested and don’t know whether their loved ones are alive or dead and they just wait and wait and wait for information about the disappeared. I’ve spoken to many mothers who’ve been in that situation or wives whose husbands have been arrested or, or children who, whose parents have disappeared.

Karthika: There’s just nothing like the emotional dimension and intensity of having a real person tell you what it’s been like to live. All these things that we know exist as facts and as numbers. It just puts it into a whole different perspective. You feel like you’re experiencing everything that they’ve experienced. Just by that conversation, right, it’s like you go back with them to feel all of that. Now you’ve studied conflict, you’ve studied conflict almost every day. What are some maybe common misconceptions that people like us who are maybe not so day to day have about Syria or maybe even in the broader context of conflict all over the world?

Dr. Wendy: Well, once I would say about Syria and in the Middle East, one of the biggest misconceptions that I discover when I speak to people, especially people in the United States, is to see most conflicts in the Middle East through the lens of religion or of sacked of these sort of social categories that people, I think in the United States at least, I often see the Middle East or the majority Muslim world and say, oh, it’s all about religion and Islam, that there’s something radical about Islam that makes people fanatical. Or people in the Middle East have been fighting each other for, for millennium over whose God is right or what’s the best way to pray or their tribal and family-oriented. And Society’s divided that there’s something primordial or, unmodern and, that drives people to kill each other and not be able to get along. And, you know, I think that’s a kind of a typical orientalist view of the Middle East that sees somehow that the west is civilized and modern and superior and these people are backward and driven by religion too, to radicalism and revenge and bloodthirstiness. And when say the conflicts that I’ve studied these uprisings against authoritarianism, the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, the Syrian struggle against the dictatorship are our struggles on the most basic human level of people wanting to be free to have a world in which they take pride, to feel solidarity, with their fellow citizens as opposed to distrust, um, and struggles for dignity, for the basic conditions that allow people to feel pride and dignity and fulfillment and opportunity and, and live as full human beings who aren’t degraded or, or put down. So far from religion and culture and even far from politics in any complicated way. These are conflicts that are struggling for the most basic human desire to be a human being, a full human being and be treated and respected and have space where you can have self-respect as well. So I think if we since see past some of these things that make us different, religion, culture, sect, language, geography and connect on this human level, we’ll see that so many of the conflicts in far off places of the world are driven by those basic human values and aspirations as well.

Karthika: Oh, Absolutely. Now, maybe I know the answer to this, but, did the book sort of change you or you know, not just this book but all the other books, have they changed you in any way? It is very emotional reading these stories.

Dr. Wendy: It’s very emotional. Some stories, you know, stand out more because maybe, as I was reading it, some things I could relate to, you know, feelings of why am I here? Why is my family safe or you know, how come I’m having a good life? For the people who’ve kind of moved away from it. Or just, you know, experiencing, like you said, not knowing where people are, people’s family are. How would I handle all those emotions, I mean without really kind of almost going into some sort of depression? I mean it’s pretty hard. And I think this is not only for me but for any non-Syrian who works on Syria or works on conflicts of this type all over the world, struggle with this at the same time knowing it’s not an iota of what the people we study are actually experiencing, you know, as much as it is difficult for me it’s second-hand difficultness and there’s actually this expression sort of second-hand posttraumatic stress or compassion fatigue. So my emotional burdens are always that of a witness and an outsider and a documenter, which is far from actually experiencing these things. I mean as much as I have stories about being tortured, I can never, ever begin to imagine what it’s like to physically and emotionally experience that. But still, it takes its toll, on me too. So, what I’ve felt along the way is something that I first heard from a friend and a colleague, who I met in Germany and during the course when doing interviews in Germany who translates books about the Holocaust. And she said, you know, in doing work of this sort and which daily work for her as a translator or me as a writer or interviewer deals with these horrific topics, that the key is to find almost the sort of middle sweet spot compromise zone in which if you’re too emotionally connected, you’re simply overwhelmed by the pain and then you’re not able to work and you’re not able to be of service to yourself or to the people you’re studying or to history or anything. If you allow yourself to feel too much of the pain and the trauma, then you’re immobilized. But if you go too far from the pain and the trauma, then you become too calloused and cold and this becomes material, or it becomes data and you lose sight of the fact that these are real human beings. You’re talking about, not just words on the page. So, the trick is to find something in the middle where you are distance enough to be able to work and be effective and be functional and produce something but be emotionally connected enough that you never lose sight. That these are real people and real lives and often lives that have been destroyed or had been uprooted or be shattered. And over the years I, unfortunately, haven’t found a single trick or single strategy to find that middle zone, but it’s the principle I always keep in mind. Over the years, sometimes I go too far in one in one direction or the other. Sometimes I’m emotionally overwhelmed and I need to make a stop and break because I am not able to work. And sometimes I became too callous that I feel like I’m losing touch with the reality that these aren’t just, you know, words to make an effective piece of writing a forsake. So I just tried to keep that in mind. And if I go too far in one direction or the other to come back to that middle, which I think is has been the most effective space for me as someone working on these topics.

Karthika: Let’s maybe switch gears a little bit and get to know Dr. Wendy more. What are some of your sort of mottos or mantras in life, and maybe another way to put this is what motivates you? What drives you from a life and lifestyle perspective?

Dr. Wendy: I haven’t thought about a motto or mantra, but I can say what motivates me and drives me is that at the end of the day I’m an academic, so I’m totally driven by intellectual curiosity. There are puzzles or things about the world that I don’t understand, and I want to understand. So, there’s a quest for learning and understanding. In some ways for its own sake, the intellectual satisfaction of learning something new. So that’s a real motivation for me. But at the same time, I also am a political person who is, driven by seeing political problems and especially problems of political oppression and feeling compelled to in some way make whatever contribution I can. For causes of liberation where I see people who are denied freedom and liberty and opportunity and feel a sense of duty as someone who in some ways has not really felt politically oppressed or denied basic freedoms of speech, of assembly, of an ability to devote to choose one’s leaders and so forth. So I’m quite affected by those who are denied these most basic rights and choose my work and my topics, and what I do and where I do it so that it has a political contribution, a political meaning as well. So those both the intellectual and, and the political are probably the largest drivers and in determining what I do.

Karthika: How do you balance all these things? You talked about the curiosity aspect of it, the academic aspect, but you know, how do you balance that with like your family, your career, your sort of goals, you know, outside of academia?

Dr. Wendy: I feel like I’m very lucky in that as an academic and as a professor, I’ve been able to have a career that allows me to follow those two goals in which my job is to learn. And my job is to teach about what I learned and the teachings also, you know, a tremendously meaningful part of both testing if you know what you know and communicating on that knowledge. So, I feel very lucky that my career allows me that there’s not any sort of a separation or a conflict between the intellectual and the political for me. As far as personal and family and so forth, another sort of benefit of the academic lifestyle is, you’re the boss of your own time. A long winter vacation along with summer vacation, of course, there’s never vacation cause you’re working the whole time, but it allows you to travel and allows you to not have to be at the office nine to five wearing a suit and those types of things. So that leaves plenty of time for me, my personal life and my partner is also an academic and that’s great because that means the two of us to have similar lifestyle calendar, calendar, things so we can travel together. So he’s joined me on many of these trips when I have gone to the Middle East and he’s brought his laptop and worked on his book and own projects. But I’ve been lucky in that sense that, because I do a lot of traveling, a lot of time overseas. And I feel very lucky that he’s been able to come with me. And as well, I’ve been able to go with him for his research trips such that, in other circumstances that might lead to a lot of trouble and complications. But for us it’s been able to work. Everything is not always perfect but I feel very lucky and very privileged.

Karthika: Now if you’re open to sharing with us because I sometimes feel like when you hear these personal stories, you can connect with them better. So what have been some of your life’s most beautiful seasons or experiences? And on the flip side, what have been some of the difficult seasons and what have they taught you?

Dr. Wendy: What have been the most beautiful seasons? I guess sort of continuing with the themes we were just talking about. I feel very lucky to be able to travel and as I said, when I went outside the United States for the first time as a college student I discovered that being abroad is as well as it can be exhausting and tiring. You stick out in these places where you will, you basically stick out. And there are all sorts of different social cues and expectations. Every moment is filled with meaning and discovery in a way that when you’re in your normal life, in your normal place just isn’t. Every trip to the grocery store is a cultural encounter. And every bus ride is an exciting linguistic and social and cultural challenge in a way that in my normal life in Chicago, those things are just normal. I don’t even think about them. So, there’s a way in which I always think of every moment being sort of pregnant with meaning and fulfillment and challenge and vibrancy. So tremendously enriching. So some of those moments have been difficult but also just so enriching in the end of the day. Sometimes when I’m abroad and I just get sick of the fact that, you know, I walked down the street and people say, Oh, you are foreigner and you’re like, I just want to walk down the street, leave me alone. That’s the advantages in terms of what you get out of it as a person, so outweigh any types of, of costs thats just been really the most enriching moments of my life. I would say on the flip side that the hardest seasons. So, I’ve lost both of my parents. My mother passed away when I had just finished college. And my father passed away two years ago. When you lose your parents which is a part of growing older, have been probably the most difficult things that I’ve coped with and my siblings have as well.

Karthika: I understand. It is hard for sure. What you had kind of talked about earlier from your perspective, you have that curiosity, you’ve always been political from the point of view of learning. What advice would you give to somebody who is not like that but still sort of wants to make a difference? How can we kind of do something which is done for the right reasons? I mean, what are some things that we can do as everyday people who maybe don’t have that academic mindset.

Dr. Wendy: Well for me, the most important thing would be to learn and again, we’re in an era in which information is so readily accessible. I can speak from my perspective studying the Syrian uprising and war or in many ways these uprisings across the Arab world, that they were not only struggling for political change, but to change the narrative of, and I think many Syrians feel like they are involved in that struggle now. That they are offering suffering horrific things and people around the world don’t know or they don’t care, or they don’t pay attention, or they don’t understand and have an inverse view of reality. And think that these ordinary citizens who are being killed are terrorists and they deserve to be oppressed or whatever. So just try to learn the truth.And we can do that simply by reading the newspaper, by reading different news sources, by reading as much as possible writings and documentations and interviews and pieces of creative and cultural expression by people from these areas themselves expressing for themselves their point of view in their experiences. So it doesn’t have to be anything complicated in academics. It can be the huge outpouring of sources that are simply available on the Internet if you search for it. And to just learn as much as possible and read and watch and listen with an open mind and with an open heart.And to try to ask yourself, what would I do if I were in this person’s shoes?That’s for me what the most important way to try to experience politics in another part of the world is with the kind of human empathy and challenge yourself to not see them as distant others in a very exotic and distant place, but as other human beings. And ask yourself if it were me, but what I do if I lived under this political system, would I protest? Would I flee as a refugee? Would I take up arms? Would I become a fighter? Would I want revenge? Would I ask for forgiveness? And that’s a way of connecting on a human level and beginning to care.Otherwise I think while these are ultimately political conflicts that can’t be resolved monetarily, some people are suffering tremendously and are just in need of tremendous material needs. So, there are lots of places to donate funds if you’re able to help those who have much less, and they have much less because maybe they’ve lost everything. They’ve lost everything in the course of having to flee. They lost their home, they lost their business, they lost their employment in livelihood. So, in the Syrian situation, for example, there something like 6.6 million Syrians who are internally displaced. They’re still in the borders of Syria, but they’ve been forced to flee their homes. Something like 5.6 million are refugees mostly in the countries on Syria’s borders. Many there do not have any legal status? They are often working in the informal economy and exploitative conditions for very low wages if they’re working at all, sometimes are living in most undignified situations. There’s extreme weather, they’re flooded or they’re snowed in or in deserts where there’s no proper access to clean water and, and food and so forth, where there are hundreds of thousands of children who are not in school, often are working to support their families and families are dependent on the wages of 11 and 12 year olds who are working 12 hour shifts in factories or fields.  I mean, the situation is dire and, and people are simply in need of material help. So there are many places to which one can make contributions from a charitable perspective. And here I would strongly urge to make those contributions to smaller organizations that are run by people from the community themselves. So, in this area in case there are dozens of Syria, non-governmental organizations and civic activities which are created by Syrians for Syrians serving other Syrians. And while the United Nations and other of these really large international organizations do tremendous work, they’re often really large and bureaucratized with a lot. A lot of overhead. And when you invest, and again, in this case, in the Syrian situation, just as an example, when you’re investing in Syrian organizations, it’s not only more likely that that aid will get directly to Syrians because Syrians know each other’s needs and have their networks and so forth. But investing in those who are donating to that Syrian organization. You’re also investing in Syrian civil society and the growth of these groups that are the future of Syria, of people coming together, forming institutional capacity, organizations that are effectively giving employment to people who need employment as well as employment to do good work in the world. And then of course there are refugees and people in need much closer to home and great organizations locally, you know, whether its refugees you could use help learning English or getting tutored in school or just having local friends because the experience of being a displaced and resettled person can be so isolating. And you know as people in this country who are voters to also vote responsibly. Not to take that privilege for granted and remember that people around the world, and across history have died for the right to vote. So those of us to have it and not use it is not just a negligence of a civic duty and the opportunity to shape our worlds, but is, in many ways, just an insult to those who died for such a privilege. So, one is to vote and then to vote responsibly for politicians who we feel embody our values and will create policies that create the kind of world that we want to live in.

Karthika: Very true. Well, lets start to wrap this up, just in the interest of time with a few more questions, if you could give, any advice or even talk about a life lesson to the younger Wendy, what would it be?

Dr. Wendy: Oh I would say don’t stress so much. Thankfully things will be okay. They have a way of working out even in ways you can’t understand that the time.

Karthika: So true. Now what do you do for fun? How do you unwind after a long day, either teaching, or researching?

Dr. Wendy: Well, I’m a gym rat, so I love to exercise and I love to go to the gym and go to exercise classes. I’m also a pretty, active bicyclist because I don’t have a car. So biking is my main way of transportation. But I also just love a gym environment.

Karthika: Nothing like a good exercise and workout. I prefer classes to personally. My theory is if I walk in, I am forced to stay there for the hour cause walking out midclass is very embarrassing.

Dr. Wendy: Absolutely. And it encourages you as you feel to go both longer and more intensely than I than ever would exercise on my own. There’s nothing like an instructor and blasting music and the class of other people looking at you to make you do your aerobic best.

Karthika: Yes, that is true. Okay. Quick rapid-fire round. So, don’t overthink it. Just whatever comes to mind

• Coffee, tea or something stronger – Oh, coffee.
• Favorite flavor of ice cream – Okay so here the caveat is that I am vegan so I don’t have dairy ice cream, but there are now magnificent kinds of coconut milk-based ice cream and cashew ice cream. Not that I am endorsing a corporate brand but anything by the brand Coconut Bliss if you have ever tried it is fantastic. So Coconut Bliss ice cream.
•  Drama or action-adventure Drama
• Favorite Season – Spring, Summer, Winter or Fall – Fall for sure
• Childhood dream job – I dedicated my childhood basically to childhood gymnastics. So, I think I want it to be a gymnast. Not really understanding that that wasn’t quite a job. Not a job you can do over the age of 17.
• Beach or mountains – Mountains
• Favoite Food – Lentil soup.
• Three must haves you’d take with you on every trip? Well, unfortunately, my laptop, gym and book.
• Favorite country in the world – Oh for the good memories I have there more than for its current political direction, I would say Turkey.

Karthika: So, what lies ahead for you, Dr. Wendy? I mean, are you fully living your dream or what comes next?

Dr. Wendy: I plan on writing more about Syria. I’ve collected all of these interviews and I continue to collect more interviews and there’s still so much more to say about Syria and it’s still a story that is so evolving that I will continue writing about that for the foreseeable future. Otherwise continue all the other elements. We talked about of my trips to the gym and my splurging with coconut bliss ice cream and, and otherwise trying to keep, keep two feet on the ground and be grateful for what I have.

Karthika: That’s amazing. And I have to try this coconut ice cream. Thank you so much, Dr. Wendy. This was amazing. I’m so glad I got to hear you speak, read the book and now chat with you. So, I appreciate your time.

Dr. Wendy: Oh, it was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on.