“We don’t read literature to find the truth,” I tell my Composition and Rhetoric students. “We read literature because it reveals new ways of thinking, seeing, and allows us to investigate our world from a distance.” My students, who often speak on top of each other, are silent. The noise from downtown Chittagong enters our classroom—the persistent beeping of car horns, the dinging of bells from the rickshaw drivers, and the yelling of strolling vendors announcing their wares. The quiet is also uncomfortable for me, but I bite my lower lip to keep my words from spilling out, and I wait for one of my students to lead the conversation.
“But why do we need to learn about racism?” Karima, a student from Pakistan, asks.
We are reading “Fifth Avenue, Uptown” by James Baldwin, initially published in Esquire magazine in 1960, and they are struggling with the material. Harlem is on the other side of the world and their imagination. I teach at the Asian University for Women, the first liberal arts women’s college in Bangladesh, where, for most of our students, their university education is fully funded by European and American corporate donors. Many of my students are the first in their families to receive a college education, and as a result, they are the first to operate outside of the constrictive caste system. Despite leaving their respective home countries and their families for months and sometimes years for their schooling, they consider themselves lucky. Their education removes them from their assigned class and caste destinies, unlike the rickshaw or street vendors outside our window.
The students are diving into my favorite part of writing and thinking: when literature becomes mirrors and windows, allowing them to see the intersectionalities inside and outside of their world.
The students agree with Karima, and the classroom splinters into different conversations about the existence of racism in Bangladesh and their home countries. I need to pull them back into the text, so I lift the decrepit blinds, revealing a city choked in dust and decay. Like the residents in Harlem, this city and its residents are left to fend for themselves. The students become silent again. “Let’s look at the waste pickers,” I say. “Look at the boy selling bananas, look at that young man selling tea, do you think any one of them can get a better job?”
“No,” the students resolutely shout. “Not at all.”
“What’s stopping them?” I ask. I know this question is going to collapse the world of Harlem and Bangladesh into one. The students are diving into my favorite part of writing and thinking: when literature becomes mirrors and windows, allowing them to see the intersectionalities inside and outside of their world.
My department is called “Access Academy,” and it’s a remedial bridging program for incoming students. Students spend one year developing their writing, and at the end of the year, they have to produce two major papers: a rhetorical analysis and a comparative essay. However, these types of essays often intellectually marginalize the students—English is their third or fourth language, and before starting university, they used English selectively, only in their English classes and to communicate with their English teachers at their charity-funded high schools in their home countries.
The first two months of the semester, I followed the assigned curriculum, where the students read and wrote about white Western writers, and I’d edit their writing and provide feedback. But my students struggled to write these analytical essays even though our classroom discussions revealed that they knew how to examine ideas, critically evaluate points of view, and build connections within the text. So, in the middle of the semester, I pushed the canonical writers off the cliff and changed my curriculum to infuse diversity. Instead of looking through windows into Gatsby’s summer parties, I wanted them to see Harlem—its stoop parties, kids drinking up the sunshine as they waded in the fire hydrant’s spewing water, and the small mom and pop shops dotting every corner and sidewalk. I wanted them to see the creative and intelligent ways of Black urban survival.
Baldwin’s writing is jugular, unflinching, and negates the art of subtlety that is often prized in creative writing. But I’d worked my way up to Baldwin, starting with Arundhati Roy and other canonical postcolonial writers who provided them with historical context and the language to draw parallels between Harlem and their worlds. I hoped that these tools would empower them to investigate the social constructions of their interior lives and further.
James Baldwin once said, “Every bombed village is my hometown.” . . . He’s teaching us to see outside of our world, without leaving it, and at the same time, his statement illuminates our own global connections.
James Baldwin once said, “Every bombed village is my hometown.” In literature, we would call this Baldwin’s window. He’s teaching us to see outside of our world, without leaving it, and at the same time, his statement illuminates our own global connections. By placing his “home” at the center of the occupation, he places himself, his culture, and his identity into the fray and enables us to see the systematic planning and design of political, economic, racial, and ethnic atrocities committed by our government or the dominant social group.
My students are running from home and, at the same time, searching for home. Outside of the classroom, they have their shared harrowing stories of escaping the Taliban, fleeing from forced marriages, and hiding from their fathers, who believe that girls should not be educated and have attempted to trap them at home. A free college education is the knife that allows them to carve their own lives, cutting them free from the social hierarchy that constricted their family.
I ask the question again, “What’s stopping a rickshaw driver from becoming a teacher or a lawyer?”
They sit in silence awaiting my response, but instead, I read an excerpt from Baldwin’s essay. “It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself. Walk through the streets of Harlem and see what we, this nation, have become.”
Karima looks outside once more and flips through Baldwin’s essay. Then she gasps. “Oh, this essay is about power, the class system, and how we are obedient to it.” Her peers stop skirmishing in their seats and listen. She continues, “It’s like life in Harlem is the same as life here.”
“Wow, look at you,” I say to Karima. I open my palms to give her a high-five, but she balls up her fist to give me a bump instead. The world has seen Barack and Michelle Obama’s fist bump, and she wants to recreate this intimacy and culture with me. The rest of the students marvel at our interaction, and I know I will have to recreate this fist bump again and again until the semester draws to a close. Even on this side of the world, Blackness, but more specifically Black Americanness, is given the single story of inventors of the cool. Partly true, but more importantly, this iconography is conjured up by Hollywood, and though I’ve never been cool or trendy, I know my sheer Blackness projects this mystique.
I turn to face the entire class to deliver my closing argument, but their eyes are focused on their text, attempting to find their own “ah-ha” moment. So, I, too, turn to the text. “A few have always risen—in every country, every era, and in the teeth of regimes which can by no stretch of the imagination be thought of as free. Not all these people, it is worth remembering, left the world better than they found it. The determined will is rare, but it is not invariably benevolent.”
In the next class session, I transform the room into an interactive art gallery with three stations that bring Harlem and urban Black-American life into focus: images of Harlem, a short documentary featuring interviews with Harlemites, and music from contemporary rappers Julez Santana, Kurtis Blow, and Immortal Technique. I want to create more windows into Harlem’s past, its present, and into America’s caste system.
Before our inclusive curriculum, the students struggled to arrive at this level of sophisticated analysis, and now they are seamlessly interweaving it into their writing.
After devoting half the class to staring through windows, the students sit down to write. Nusrat, a student from Bangladesh, makes a political reference to the Rohingya refugee crisis when she writes. “The Rohingyas in Bangladesh face the same fate as the dwellers of Harlem. [This] area is congested, and it’s surrounded by dirt and pollution. There are no love, respect, or leadership opportunities for the people in Harlem. The same goes for the Rohingya situation in Bangladesh. They are not treated as human beings.” Before our inclusive curriculum, the students struggled to arrive at this level of sophisticated analysis, and now they are seamlessly interweaving it into their writing.
“Reading James Baldwin’s stories makes me aware of the unfair and unusual things in my society,” Thao, a student from Vietnam, writes. “When I live in a society full of injustice, I get used to it, and my instinct to fight for justice diminishes. Sometimes this is so depressing, but it makes me more mature and stronger to face the evils in life.”
The students at the Asian University of Women are some of the most ambitious women I’ve met. Receiving their bachelor’s degree is just the first step in their education journey, and many of them will move abroad for advanced degrees, or they will return to their home countries to create businesses, work in the ministry of education, or run nonprofit organizations. They will become the creative, academic, and intellectual guard in their countries and create space for others to advance. With the empathy and connection that they’ve practiced in my class, they literally can change the world.
But this fate is not reserved for these students alone. All our students, wherever we teach, will carry the things they’ve learned with them to all their fields.
Chittagong is my bombed village and my hometown. The city is war-torn, but the last war fought in this country was over 30 years ago and miles away from Chittagong. The country is in and out of political crisis, the recent one being the ousting of the country’s Prime Minister, Shikh Hasina. As she fled to India, looters flooded her mansion and took everything that was not nailed down. Despite a change in the government, Chittagong remains stagnant with piles of trash strewn on the sidewalks, rainwater bubbling up from the clogged drains and flooding the streets. Outside fancy restaurants, gangs of kids are ready to pick-pocket unsuspecting passersby. They once chased my friends and me until we relented and tossed a few bills into the air. When they rushed for our money, we sprinted to the main road. Besides my coworkers and the group of French engineers living next door, I have never seen a tourist in this city.
Before Harlem was gentrified, tourists never visited the neighborhood. It was too dirty, too deadly, too much of everything. These days, Harlem is fit for consumption, and buses armed with tourists and their cameras weave in and out of the avenues. Chittagong is Harlem. Harlem is the Soweto township in South Africa. Soweto is Laventille, an informal settlement in Trinidad. Laventille is Rochinha, a favela in Rio de Janeiro’s South Zone. In James Baldwin’s “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” he shows us how these fragmented cities and neighborhoods highlight the rabid architecture of economic, political, and cultural inequalities and reveal how these frameworks ultimately shape, control, and dictate our daily lives. He advises us that these systems can change, but we must see others’ humanity to create this change. “It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.”
Featured photo courtesy of UCLA Library Digital Collections.
