Through an autoethnographic approach to creative writing and tapestry weaving, I delved into my research inquiry of examining my identity as a Muslim Syrian American. First discussed will be autoethnography as a research method. The significance of this project can be understood through an analysis of Paul Duncum’s “Seven Principles for Visual Culture Education”. The author and writer inspirations for this project, especially Helen Zughaib are then introduced. Lastly, the process of writing the poems, the subject matter, and choosing the tapestries will be explained.
I drew from both author and artist inspirations when conducting my research. I have read writing by the authors Matthew Salesses, Tommy Orange, Linda Hogan, and Sandra Cisneros. They all deal with ideas of identity. From reading these authors, I have found that they approach the broad definition of identity through things like place, and many of them write about their transformations from childhood to now. This inspired me to do so myself in my series of three poems. I looked at art by Shireen Taweel, Beth Lo, and Helen Zughaib. I noticed that they include lots of language, figures, and place (both landscape and architecture) in their artwork about identity. I chose to focus on place as the theme of my identity tapestries. Shireen Taweel uses metals and more natural/monochrome colors, while Lo and Zughaib both use bright colors. Beth lo and Zughaib both use stylistic imagery, while Taweel’s is more about complex geometric and arabesque patterns. All three are explicit in ideas of culture and identity. Helen Zughaib is the artist I most closely modeled in method. She is a painter (who mainly uses gouache). Her work comments on cultural identity, family life, and the plight of refugees and displacement in the Middle East (the Arab Spring), and the Lebanese Civil war. She made a series of paintings titled “Stories My Father Told Me”, which is based on the folk tales and family history her Lebanese father told her, and includes stories of migration and displacement.[1]She talks about both Syria and Lebanon in these stories. I felt very connected to them, especially seeing as I grew up hearing similar things from my parents. I found her combination of art and writing to be appealing to my own process, because I often find that the subject matter I explore in my art often needs more context in order for the viewer to understand the message I am trying to convey. Therefore, poetry writing seemed ideal to complement my tapestries.
I decided to think of my poems in three phases, as I thought of three mindsets I have had in accordance with my identity. Place is the element that connects the triptych. They are presented in sequence, and tell the story of how my views of identity have changed over the years (fig. 1).Phase 1 discusses my childhood, moments where I struggled to fit in and other moments I felt I belonged, using place like the mountain view seen when driving through the street in Fort Collins to get this across. I begin my poem with “The Colorado Foothills frame her childhood”, and then proceed physically frame the text (which consists of some of my school memories) with the image, starting with it and coming back to it at the end of the poem. The tapestry is of the view I saw when driving to the mosque Friday nights with my family during the summer (fig. 2). I loved those sunset views, they were one of the most constant reminders of home and belonging that I encountered throughout my childhood. I chose photographs that were taken either by me or by a family member to use as reference photos for the specific scenes I described, and chose colors that matched the descriptions in my poems. The picture of a Fort Collins street is one I had taken, but I altered it to include a sunset.
Phase 2, “In Syria” covers the discoveries I made and the culture shock I experienced when visiting Syria; feeling different because I did not grow up there, but also feeling like I belonged being surrounded by family. I chose the Citadel from which my last name Kalaaji, comes from, the Citadel of Aleppo which I visited while in Aleppo, Syria (fig. 3). In Syria, my whole view of who I was altered: I had family and deep historical roots, neither of which I had experienced living in America. The picture is one my sister took while we walked up the steps of the Citadel. In my poem I compare walking through the ancient building to crossing realms: a whole different world from the one I knew was presented to me.
Phase 3 is where I wrote about embracing both parts of my identity. It is written based off a recent experience I had while watching the snow fall in the cul-de-sac where my family lives. The house across the street is the view I see every morning, a building very familiar (fig 4). This poem reflects my current mindset on identity: I can be both Syrian and American at the same time, they are not separate because they are both a part of who I am. The neighborhood was covered in snow and the precipitation brought with it a peacefulness that seemed to hush the world. I felt a great sense of belonging in that moment.
[1]Helen Zughaib, “Stories My Father Told Me by Helen Zughaib,” DG Web Design, 2015, (accessed December 11, 2019). http://hzughaib.com/blindcharity.html
Phase 1: A Sort-of American Child
Tapestry: Horsetooth Sunset
The Colorado foothills frame her childhood
They always lingered like a painting in the distance,
A compass anchoring west, pulling her to them,
Horsetooth pointing at the sky,
A rock that seems too square and bare within the rolling peaks
She was born here- in Fort Collins
A little girl with a foreign name that appeared
As the publisher on encyclopedias
The kids in her class,
The Sams, Taylors, Annas
Didn’t quite know what to make of the
Name that was not spelled as it was pronounced
By their English tongues
The teacher that had to be corrected every week in second grade
Led the girl to eventually answer to this name that was not hers,
As she told herself it was not so bad
She was goofy and gullible and perhaps
Not as “American”
As the classmates who celebrated the holidays
They did crafts for in class,
The green layers of her paper Christmas tree and
Carol singing so familiar for something she
Was not taught to believe in
Her father baked baklava that she brought to school,
And it was often that people would ask her for them
They were like magic- all of a sudden they noticed her
Sitting in the corner
As they held those pastry swirls,
Green pistachios in filo shells
Sticky in their hands from the carameled-sugar coating
A delicacy of her people
Back in Syria
She liked showing off
When classmates were impressed
With her knowledge of Arabic
She’d say tree and book and water
And they’d say it back
Struggling over throaty consonants
Most of the time though,
She just did her best to fit in
She sang those carols and corrected her name and went to their parties
And she hoped that perhaps, just perhaps, they would not notice-
She was different
The oranges and pinks that dipped down to those peaks
During summer sunsets-
She saw them on the way to the Friday night prayers
And she said look to her family and pointed
As they drove through familiar neighborhood streets lined in pointed wood houses
And she watched, engrossed as the colors deepened, changed, darkened
Into the lid of night
Phase 2: In Syria
Tapestry: Entrance to Citadel
Aleppo walls rich in sandy browns speckle the rooftop view from the Citadel
Until they blur and fade into the foggy heat in the distance
The mosque’s spires reach over the rest
The green domes harmonizing with the treetops intermittent in the
Sharp angles of boxy buildings
She loved this view-
This new place that glimmered bronze in her mind
Today’s heat was not so intense and the bustling city
Was no longer harsh on her small-town ears
This old building was part of her history, her last name,
The people she had just come to know
And as Arabic rolled off the tongues
Of the cousins who stood behind her
She wondered at who it was
That brought her to be in this place
Perhaps her family line had worked here
Some long time ago when the arrow slits were used
To fend off enemy armies approaching the fortress
She ran her hands over the ancient stone
It would tell her what she had never known:
There was so much more,
She had a history she belonged to
Not one where she floated alone in a deep sea
The way it had felt back in America
as the child of immigrants
She had a people she was not severed from
Together they pressed date cookies into molds,
And wrapped grape leaves into rolls stuffed with rice
Entering the gaping arch of this fortress
Had felt like crossing realms
Where time and space blurred with the past
And she was but a dust fleck in the span of history
This new home, this place enveloped her
in the possibilities of who she could be
A return to a place she hadn’t known she needed to see
A new belonging that welcomed her like an old friend
She didn’t stand out so much anymore
The people here knew how to say her name and
They warmly hugged her like they had known her her whole life
And her world expanded to include these new hundreds of relatives
And she instantly loved them as one only does with those who share your blood
Her Arabic was not quite fluent enough,
To express all she had to say to these people, the city,
These floors that carried the weight of her history
Up here the air was clear of the stench of cigarettes-
But even that had garnered her fondness
The Athan rings from five mosques at once,
The call to prayer’s echoes reach even this rooftop
Sound waves weaving together and repeating each other
There was no sound so engulfing, so mesmerizing as this
And it felt as familiar as running her fingers over fraying prayer beads
When it suddenly stopped she instantly missed the embrace of those voices
This city held stories she had yet to discover
And memories like myths to her American self-
And she did not know how she could possibly leave it all behind
Phase 3: The Embracing of Both
Tapestry: Snow Covered Cul-de-sac
Who knew that Aleppo blood would be walking through an old Colorado town
Wrapped in black gloves and grey jacket,
Feet encased in fur lined boots-
It might be snowing, or just the wind
blowing snow off crabapple trees
A chill lurks over undisturbed white
brushing against her fabric shell
night clouds glowing orange, snow blurring the mountain frame
Arms like a gradient of warmth from fingertips to shoulder blades
The roofs and trees trimmed in bulbs of the other houses of
that cul-de-sac where she rode her scooter round and round
sit patiently beneath that blanket,
her own home bare of Christmas cheer
At odd with house that is the view she sees from her window every morning
With orange paint and maroon window panes
Back in Syria, white has only covered the streets once
maybe twice in their memory
and though they are no strangers to the cold
Aleppo tans become dulled in the frigid winter air
Here, she feels like a translator bridging worlds
The point in an angle where two lines meet
Standing in the snow with a headscarf
Challenging them to ask,
To understand her Syria
That it can fit into this western world
Like the slices of a mosaic box
She wants to share it,
Wants them to know about the tragedies
Of her people
And the richness of her history
They can learn if they will only look
In that coated silence,
Thick like a heaping mound of white rice
Aleppo blood relished that moment of stillness
Where the world stopped and nature didn’t mind
Who she was or where she came from
Works Cited
Butz, David, and Kathryn Besio. “Autoethnography.” Geography Compass 3, no. 5 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., September 2009: 1660–1674.
· Abstract:
Identity involves presenting to others as well as oneself, and autoethography is doing so in order to place the self in social contexts (p. 1660). These trans-cultural communications allow authors to scrutinize, publicize, and reflexively rework their understanding (p. 1660). The “crisis of representation” stems from the ethnographic constraints of power and subjectivity of colonial perspectives and asymmetries of power speaking for the “other” (p/ 1661-1662). Autoethnogarphy seeks to destabilize this ethnographic authority through critical reflexivity (p. 1662). The ethnographic “I” is the primary research subject (p. 1663). Autoethnography “groups together a variety of existing self-representation practices” (p. 1664). The five categories of autoethnography include autoethnography as personal narrative, autoethography as reflexive or narrative ethnography, autoethnography from below, indigenous ethnography, and insider research. These categories all collapse the conventional distance between researchers and research subjects (p. 1671).
· Notations:
One of the authors is David Butz, a professor and the director of the graduate program in the department of geography at Brock University. Since 1985, he has been conducting community-level research in northern Pakistan. The other author is Kathryn Besio who is an associate professor at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo. She is a social cultural geographer interested in the violent legacies of colonialism in inequalities of class, gender, and ethnic privilege. Both authors deal with identity in places that seek to shift away from “objective” separations between the research and researcher. The audience of this source gain a more in-depth understanding of why autoethnography emerged as a method, as well as five categories that can be used to understand different types of autoethnographic research. Autoethnography as personal narrative, my research method, utilizes first-person forms of writing (short stories, poetry, fiction, etc.) to blur the distinctions in emotion, representation, and performance (p. 166).
Czako, Zslot. “IDENTITY.” Visual Communication 10, no. 3 (August 2011): 419–432.
Duncum, Paul. “Seven Principles for Visual Culture Education.” Art Education 63, no. 1 (January 2010): 6-10.
Flum, Hanoch, and Avi Kaplan. “Identity Formation in Educational Settings: A Contextualized View of Theory and Research in Practice.” Contemporary Educational Psychology 37, no. 3 (July 2012): 240–245.
Marechal, Garance. “Autoethnography.” InEncyclopedia of Case Study Research,edited by Albert J. Mills, Gabrielle Durepos and Elden Wiebe, 44-46. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc., 2010.
· Abstract:
Autoethnography is defined as a form of research in which the researcher focuses on self observation and reflexive investigation. This is done in the context of ethnographic work, in which the researcher considers a group which he/she belongs to as a native, member, or participant (p. 2). As anthropology has a renewed interest in personal narrative, life history, and autobiography, new conceptions of self-identity have been found (p. 2). Three conditions of self include “self as representative subject”, “self as autonomous subject”, and “other as autonomous self” (p. 2). Systematic, self-conscious introspection where the researcher plays a dual role, both in and out of the community, the “ultimate” participant (p. 3). The researchers subjective experience can be the central focus (p. 3). Autoethography is not committed to generalization, however, it reveals cultural influences and broader social relevance, possibly connecting to local action or a larger global context (p. 3).
· Notations:
This encyclopedia entry gives a general understanding of autoethography to the reader in the context of case study research. Autoethnography is a method that can be undertaken to give insight into the perspective of an individual, which can then be understood in larger social implications as an identity relating to a specific group, whether it be Muslim, Asian, Native, or Black, etc. American. It may not be generalizable, but the perspective can be utilized to draw cultural implications in experience, which others may feel they can relate to, or at least understand. Personal experiences are presented as an expression of human life, which the reader takes to understand that autoethnography is about more than the researcher; it also delves into the human experience as a site for cultural and political dialogue.
Sullivan, G. “Art Practice as Research” in Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts pp. 95-120. New York: SAGE 2010.
Zughaib, Helen. “Stories My Father Told Me by Helen Zughaib.” DG Web Design, 2015. http://hzughaib.com/blindcharity.html(accessed December 11, 2019).