Shems magazine recently caught up with Barbara Nimri Aziz, founding director of the Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc. (RAWI). Dr. Aziz is an anthropologist and journalist as well as the host of Radio Tahrir, a weekly radio program on WBAI, Pacifica Radio in New York.

Shems: What have you been up to lately?

Right now I am so absorbed preparing for the first RAWI conference. It’s going to happen in NYC from June 3-5th. Our membership is from New York, Vancouver, Montreal, Connecticut, Seattle, and Florida. We have members from all over the country and we want to come together. We want to meet each other. Arab American writers are publishing in significant numbers and they are recognized as a community of writers like Italian American writers, Irish American writers, Asian American writers, and African American writers, who, of course are so established now that we can hardly compare, but there is a community writing about being Arab and bringing out new stuff on being an immigrant, going on the Hajj, having a love affair in Palestine, etc.

Shems: When did this wave of writing come about?

Only in the last 15 years, since 1990, I would say. I think it came out of the Women’s Movement; because the people who are writing the most or publishing the most are the women’s community. Maybe they can handle some of the touchy issues or maybe it’s part of the whole Western fascination with Muslim or Arab women.

Shems: Tell us about RAWI.

I founded the organization in 1992, so it is 13 years old. We are basically a community organization. We didn’t have some famous name or some international person who called us together. We just posted an invitation and started with 3 people and now we’re 130 people who are paying members.

Shems: What was the driving force behind creating RAWI?

Well, actually, I belonged to an African American writer’s workshop for a while because the leader knew I was Arab, and you know Arabs and African Americans have many things in common. The head of the workshop was warm to the Arab people in general, so he invited me in but he died two years later. I saw how important it was for African Americans who are writing to be together, to lay certain things out on the table. There’s a lot of private stuff that’s difficult to come to terms with. So, it was a wonderful time.

I was over 45 years old and I had been a scholar in universities and I had never been to such a beautiful workshop where there was a lot of respect for people writing from their hearts and trying to get emotion into their writing. Nobody asked me what my status was or where I worked. We were writers. We talked about the craft of writing. It was a beautiful atmosphere set up by a man named John O. Killens. He had been a leader of the Harlem Writer’s Workshop in the 60’s and 70’s and a lot of very important black writers came through his workshops.

After he passed away the workshop collapsed and I thought, well, if African Americans are doing this for each other, I think we might benefit from an organization for Arab writers because there are enough of us. I thought of it at first as just a local NY group but it just didn’t materialize, so I decided to post it at a national Arab meeting and then people started to come together. So now, after 13 years, we have been endorsed by some very famous writers including Ahdaf Soueif in England, Nawal Sadawi and Marcel Khalifa. This has helped but basically it is still a member’s organization with people slogging along, writing in local literary journals or newspapers and dreaming of a novel that’s in their drawer or reading their poetry to their family.

Shems: Is this a good time to be an Arab writer?

Well, now it has become almost sexy to be an Arab or a Muslim. Everyone wants a Muslim to come to their church or speak at their school and it’s kind of sickening in a way because it’s a little too American. Some artists just won’t deal with these groups but a lot of our people will come because, in general, they want to be liked, they want to prove, they want to educate, and they’ve been silent for so long. When you’re in this kind of defensive stance you have to be very careful because then the agenda is set for you and you are always answering them. It is a dilemma. So, I think writers are welcoming any chance and I think we have to be careful because it’s a sort of flirtation and in some cases it’s not very deep. I always say that the subtle kinds of discrimination, of the variety of not being advanced in your job or getting questions about being Christian or Muslim, Sunni or Shi-ite can be just as devastating as the more brutal acts of racism.

Shems: What writers influenced you most?

I didn’t read much in my formative years. I was sort of a dawara<\m>someone who goes around. I was a little dawara who was here and there and everywhere. Interestingly, boys are not called dawara. So someone might say to my mother, “Where’s Barbara?” and she would say, “Dawara,” wandering. I once wrote an essay about this idea of Dawara and about my wanderings in India.

Shems: When were you in India?

For the first time in 1963, and this is where I really learned to love being Arab. I was just out of college and here I was in India, which we usually think of as not being Arab, but I was very much loved. I became proud because people saw me as an Arab and a Muslim and embraced me in a way I had not felt in America.

I drove across the Middle East from England to India with a group of people and arrived in India to work with Tibetans. For whatever reason, I was looking for adventure but I wanted to work. I wanted to work with refugees and I was attracted to the Tibetans because I was kind of directed that way by the people in college. I lived there for three years and I went back constantly.

I loved living in something close to an Arab culture. We were eating with our hands and having a lot of family around. The food is close enough and I loved Indian music, which is not at all like Arabic music. I was surrounded by good people, partly because they loved my being Arab; it made them feel good. It wasn’t the language because they didn’t speak Arabic. We spoke mostly in English. There were certain Asian qualities I suppose I had, even though I was Western and they could feel it. There was a certain shared respect and certain ways of interacting. They made me feel for the first time, proud, whereas in America I was always hiding it. I was not born in America but when I came here I was very young. My parents were originally from Syria.

Shems: What happened next?

My first degree was in marine biology, but after India, I took up anthropology. I was always more comfortable in Eastern cultures and was never afraid of people. I trusted the people. It could be my Asian background and of course it’s partly curiosity. It could also be because I’m talking now and I talk a lot now, even on the radio, but when I was younger I didn’t talk. I was always listening, I was always asking people about things and that made me a good anthropologist and a good journalist.

When I started to read seriously, it wasn’t until I left academia and the university. Ultimately, I left the academia because of Orientalism. I continued to work in Nepal and India and Tibet but I began to realize that it was Orientalism because whereas in the Arab and the Muslim you have the very negative portrayal, in the Tibetan you have just the opposite and no one will look at the negative. No one will look at the inequality or the patriarchal nature of Buddhism. There are a lot of very unpleasant things that are presented through Buddhism or Hinduism or Judaism or Islam. Religions somehow tend to be a very male thing and I saw it clearly in Buddhism. There were other things about the culture that no one would look at. The perception is that it’s all yogis and Shangri-la and beauty and tranquility and non- violence and so forth. I saw that even though I was an anthropologist, I wasn’t working in that realm. I was trying to expose Tibetan culture and show that it has many of the same elements as other cultures and it’s not a perfect culture by any means. People’s actions are based on economic issues and some geographical issues rather than on pure Buddhist ideals. On the one hand I was saying, look at how beautiful the image of the Tibetan people is and look at how ugly the image of my people is. So in many ways, anthropologists and novelists created the beauty of

Tibet, which is a myth. Every culture is beautiful. Every culture also has ugly parts to it or parts that are unpleasant or restraining. I didn’t like anthropology because I thought it was biased. After realizing this I wasn’t happy in the university. I also wanted to know my own Muslim people and culture.

I had done my PhD in England and I saw the British bias. When I came here I saw the American bias, so I always doubted my training in the field. I am a field worker; I never became an academic. I needed to be out in the field because I am an ethnographer and ethnography is essentially journalism. I also realized that anthropology tends to focus on the poor and doesn’t look at the rich. It doesn’t look at the people in power. I did work in Nepal, which is a dictatorship but no anthropologist will dare to mention the word. So, while I liked many of the things I learned, especially to do field work and collect data and double check and triple check, and be comfortable with strangers, I decided to switch to journalism because I thought it had more passion and, of course, the writing was better.

I started working in Iraq in 1989. I went to do an article because it was after the Iraq-Iran war but before the invasion of Kuwait. I stayed the first time for 2 or 3 months. The last time I was there was just up to the invasion, which was two years ago. I’ve written two books about Iraq. The first one was a story about an Arab American working in the Middle East and now I have a book of essays. They are full of admiration for the Iraqi people and anger about the sanctions. I have had an easier time of getting my writing out in other people’s books. In one of the essays being published now I was sitting in Mosul on Women’s Day and we knew we were going to be bombed within ten days, and there it was, Women’s Day!

Shems: Do you have any advice for our community?

Well, in the RAWI newsletter on the back page, I often put the three principles of the Italian American Writer’s Workshop: Read our books. Buy our books. Write or be written. The publishers understand that the writer’s core community is still the writer’s market. Remember, who starts out big? No one.

For more information about the RAWI conference please visit shems.info/rawi