I wasn’t in school on September 11, 2001. I had an eye doctor appointment, so I skipped a day of sixth grade and went to work with my parents at our pizzeria and deli in Fairfield, NJ. The pizzeria was very different than the quiet and orderly classroom: there was the rush of the usual early morning customers, and, as always, both TVs played the news. I was slathering my toasted bagel with butter when the first plane crashed. I watched the adults around me, trying to take cues on how I should comprehend the situation. There was a stir of shock, then a ripple of pause as we all turned to watch, the buzz and murmurs of customers dying down as the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
In that moment, I didn’t know how much the September 11 attack would impact my life. My parents would lose many of their regular customers in the months that followed as the patriotism of unity ran its course and the media marked us as terrorists. Terrorist, a word I did not know, would become synonymous with Muslim.
I soon returned to that sixth-grade classroom where my religion was suddenly under scrutiny. Not many of my teachers tried to counter the narrative that Muslims were terrorists, and their hesitancy meant that I was entirely alone. But now, as a teacher myself, I empathize with them. How can we address the world’s most violent and contentious issues in the classroom? It’s been over a year of Palestinians succumbing to unimaginable suffering, and I find myself asking: How can I be the teacher I needed after September 11?
How can we address the world’s most violent and contentious issues in the classroom?
I spoke with Salar Abdoh to learn more about creating inclusive classrooms that protect both the teacher and the students. We had hoped to meet in person for this conversation, but due to his travel schedule, we felt it would be more efficient to talk over e-mail, phone, and text. Salar Abdoh is an author—his latest novel is A Nearby Country Called Love—a teacher, and a war journalist. Some of his other novels include Out of Mesopotamia, Tehran at Twilight, Opium, and The Poet Game. He divides his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran. Salar regularly publishes personal essays and short stories plus numerous translations of other authors that appear in journals across the world. He is a professor at the City College of New York where he conducts workshops in the MFA in Creative Writing program and also directs undergraduate creative writing.
Aybike Ahmedi (AA): As a first-year teacher, I ask myself how much of my own experiences do I want to share with my students? Is there a fine line between what is appropriate and what is not when we are all impacted in some way by the events of the world? The current grief and misery in Palestine and the war’s escalation in the Middle East weighs heavy on my heart, but I can’t help but worry that by speaking up about these issues in my classroom, I might face repercussions such as losing my job or alienating students. How do you decide how much to share your own experiences with your students?

Salar Abdoh (SA): It depends on who the student is. The only experiences of war, for example, that I will share with a student, if at all, is if they have been there or else truly desire to know more. It also really depends on what the subject is we might be discussing. Just the other day, for example, I told the class (because of the subject matter of the submission from a student that particular week) that you can be a 10-year-old girl growing up in America or a 10-year-old girl growing up in Afghanistan. The two experiences of being 10 years old and female in the two geographies have pretty much nothing to do with each other. And then I told the class about how I happened to be in Afghanistan just two months earlier (after the fall of Kabul and America’s dishonorable exit from there after two decades), and I saw with my own eyes what a fight these young Afghan girls (some as young as six years old) were putting up to get some sort of an education in the face of all the obstacles surrounding them, including a ban for female education past sixth grade. So yes, sometimes I do share my experiences because they help bring a point home.
AA: I think that’s the beauty and significance of impactful writing and literature: they help bring the point home. When we are reading an essay, say, by June Jordan, on the horror of police brutality, although it’s written in the 80s, the students can still connect with the same themes and issues. It then leads me as a teacher to want to introduce Jordan’s poetry on Israel’s war in Lebanon in 1982 because it is once again something that is relevant today. I do ask myself if basing creative writing prompts on these pieces helps students process events or if it forces them to dwell on the suffering in the world.
SA: Often when I speak with a new creative writing instructor at the City College of New York, I will tell them a variation of this: “Don’t forget that you have to be a bit of a therapist in a class like this. They are going to be writing very personal stories sometimes. And because this is CUNY, these young people are usually here in our public university because they come from hardship backgrounds; often they are the first generation of their family going to college, or they are immigrants who have escaped war, revolution, oppression, and/or are refugees from climate and economic disasters in their own countries. They have stories. Hard stories. Stories that will bring tears to your eyes as well. This is a side role that you cannot avoid among all your other roles as an instructor.”
The question then is, do you really tell someone not to write about something because it is too painful? I don’t think so. Writing, among other things, is a path through which we make sense of our deepest aches. We can stand there, afraid to walk through the thicket to the other side, or we can have the courage to brave it. One of the best things about long experience in life and in teaching is that I have a vast storehouse of personal knowledge and involvement to draw from when speaking to a student about a particular hardship or trauma. Also, and this is important, in a creative writing class so much is shared. In this sharing, a student sees––usually as early as the second week––that they are not alone, that there are others who know their pain, others who have been, or are, where they have been. This creates a natural dialogue (as opposed to a workshop dialogue) among the students, and there is nothing both more therapeutic and more conducive to writing better and writing more completely than this give-and-take among students. When such convergences occur, then I can sit back and direct the traffic, so to speak, making sure everybody gets through that thicket in the jungle in one piece and turns out so much the better off for it, both as a writer and––more importantly––as a human being filled with empathy towards others.
Writing, among other things, is a path through which we make sense of our deepest aches. We can stand there, afraid to walk through the thicket to the other side, or we can have the courage to brave it.
AA: Writing has always been an outlet for me, but I didn’t easily find my way to the pen. I always wished I had an earlier introduction to creative writing as a child/adolescent, especially in the aftermath of September 11. I feel the value of it isn’t taught enough early on in school, and so, for me, it didn’t resonate that it could be something to help me understand myself and the world. We are currently witnessing relentless wars in real time; how do you speak about what is happening in your creative writing classes with your students? How do you stay unbiased towards your students who might hold different views or values?

Photo by Aybike Ahmedi.
SA: Living in America where there are people from virtually every corner of the earth, you are bound to have relationships with people who stand at the opposites of just about any divide––whether on issues that are international in scope or those that are domestic. In the past year, people have reached out to me time and again about this very issue of how to handle a classroom where emotions run high. I don’t think avoidance of a subject is the answer. And I don’t think giving into the myth that there are always two sides to any story is also the answer. How you handle a class in such situations sometimes needs footwork that may not come easily to you. In my own life, I always subscribe to a saying of one of the great classical Persian poets, Saadi of Shiraz: “From whom did you learn etiquette? From those who do not have it.” It is enough to witness just a fraction of a fraction of the drivel and meanness that exists out there in social media, on television, pretty much everywhere, to know that that is not what you want in your class. When you know what you don’t want, it is an easy step to handle what you want, which in this case is keeping an unbiased attitude, especially in the classroom.
I have always said in my interviews that my best, closest, deepest readers for a war novel like Out of Mesopotamia have been American war veterans who experienced the same places that I experienced but from the other end of the scope, so to speak. Why are these readers so ideal? Because their experiences have taught them to look at the world beyond today’s illusory ticker tape. As for the classroom, it is in some ways not unlike an arena you enter to engage in any kind of sport. There are rules you must follow. If you don’t, then you are doing the greatest disservice to your students; you are teaching them essentially that it is OK to cheat––cheat in class, cheat with each other, and cheat in life. Having said that, you will inevitably at some point in your teaching career come to a moment that is untenable. If something like that happens, it’s best to reach out to a superior and ask their advice sooner than later, because sometimes these untenable situations can really rile a class to a point that you don’t want to get to.
AA: I’ve had many conversations over the past year about the war in Palestine, and there have been many who have told me, “Of course you care more being Muslim.” I find this to be a callous response—I care because humans are dying—but I know people talk to me about it more because I am Muslim. And now that I have this additional role as a teacher, I also understand that some of my students approach me on these topics because I am Muslim. Does your experience as a war journalist shape your approach to teaching creative writing?
SA: My immediate answer would be no. But then I have to backtrack a bit and consider things. In my 2014 novel, Tehran at Twilight, for instance, a professor, who could very much be me, is confronted by an American veteran of the Iraq war who is also his undergrad student. Over the years I’ve had a few students who were veterans of America’s wars in the Middle East. And it never failed that there was a special bond between us. In the case of Tehran at Twilight, however, the student angrily calls out the professor for not saying it like it is to the rest of the class––and by that I mean not taking the time to talk about the incredibly cruel and unjust world we live in. Now then, often I’ve wondered how my experiences shape me in teaching, and I think the one thing they do is to be infinitely patient and strive to have inexhaustible empathy because, yes, we do live in a cruel world, but there is no reason to throw that in the face of a 20-year-old who is living their own hardships in a country that sponsors steroid capitalism and essentially has little to no social safety net or social welfare.

AA: When I think back to my schooling, I wish my teachers had included the work of Muslim writers, and I believe it would have inspired me earlier on to use outlets such as creative writing to articulate my Muslim American identity. I believe there is a lot of value in introducing your students to creative works from authors around the world, especially those that are so far from Western expectations. I know that I would have benefited from seeing works by other diverse writers much sooner in my education. And even when students don’t relate to the material, it can be thrilling to discover more about the world. How diverse are our reading lists? How much work are we, teachers, doing to discover different kinds of work to include on the syllabus? We can use this diversity to build new kinds of writing prompts that invite individual exploration. This is the education creative writing can offer. Are there ways you use creative writing to connect your students, outside of them sharing their work with one another?
Even when students don’t relate to the material, it can be thrilling to discover more about the world.
SA: I believe the workshop method is overused in America, and students don’t get a whole lot out of sitting in a circle laboring to be critics of each other’s works. Therefore, I give a lot of exercises. And I let those exercises take the students where they will. And the other thing I do is use material that usually no one uses when I want to share texts from various literatures. Quite soon in my teaching career, I realized something: in the past people were prisoners of the so-called cannon of English literature. Now they are prisoners of what is hip in literature that is written in English. Often I go through instructors’ syllabi and notice the same authors are used over and over again, even the same works by the same authors. There is a whole world out there––a whole world beyond, say, New York City and, in general, the North American/Western experience. My long-time connections with various journals like Words Without Borders, The Markaz Review, Guernica Magazine, and Stranger’s Guide allow me to take my students on rides to places they would almost never go in their other classes. These journals, and others like them, are venues that promote and highlight writing from elsewhere, and they manage to open up worlds to students that are beyond what I call the “usual suspects” parade of today’s authors that are used in creative writing and literature courses. Often I will use works by writers from worlds faraway and by those who are formidable but unheard of. The world is a big, amazing place, and I try to open my students’ minds by taking them on far, far journeys instead of sinking them even more into the dreary, tiresome, and frankly boring identity and race politics of the United States. I’ve found that this always pays off, and my students are grateful for getting something other than the usual repetitious discourse they receive in their other classes.
Finally there is this, too––and we’ve already touched on it a bit: as a teacher you have to, at some point, understand your own rhythm and hone it; if you don’t, you will not be as effective. Nor can you tell yourself, “Well, I guess I just don’t have rhythm.” Rhythm means knowing when to say what, when to put the breaks on, and when to push the envelope a little bit. I will give you an example that happened just this past week. I was on assignment in Ukraine where obviously another brutal war of the 21st century is happening with no apparent end in sight. I was in the town of Izum, or Izyum, which is still not very far from the Russian lines and is the site, among other things, of a terrible massacre of civilians. My son, who is a college student of 21 at this very university where I teach, sent me a message to see how I was doing. How I was doing was that I was not doing very well, to be honest. At the time I happened to be at the very place where the bodies of the several hundred murdered townsfolk had been thrown into quickly-dug graves and then, when the town was retaken, dug out again. The photographs I took of the place are something right out of a horror film. Now then, perhaps even until six months ago, I might not have told my son where I was and what I was seeing. Why, after all, put that kind of a load on a young man? But then I thought to myself: my son is already a junior in college and an International Studies student, plus he is inclining toward going into humanitarian work after graduation. If there was ever a right time to show him something about the world, something ugly but also unfortunately not uncommon, that time is now. So I sent him a few pictures. Not because I wanted to share “war porn” with him, but because I wanted him to understand what he will be facing now and then when he does actually work in the field he intends to go into. The time to share this information with him was right and ripe. We had a long chat, back and forth, right there with me in the Ukraine and my son in New York City. We had never been closer as father and son and never more sober about what kind of a world we are living in. I created that moment, even curated it. I did so because I thought it was time. This, ultimately, is what a teacher must cultivate in themselves, a sense of timing. And we can call that rhythm.
Featured photo by cottonbro studio.

Aybike Ahmedi
Aybike Ahmedi is an Uzbek, Turkish, Muslim American writer from New Jersey. She explores her Central Asian heritage through her oral history projects and is currently writing and filming an oral history documentary on the Central Asian diaspora. She teaches English Composition at the City College of New York where she received her MFA in Creative Writing. She also works as an archival assistant to Professor William Gibbons in the CCNY Library, processing the materials of John Henrik Clarke and Herb Boyd. Her writing has appeared in the Cephalopress anthology,Borders and Belonging.