It is officially mid-summer, and hopefully your TBR stacks are getting some attention! In this weekend's post, professor Audra Slocum of Oakland University reflects on an important story from her own teacher preparation program. Thank you, Dr. Slocum, for this Weekend Pick!
 Audra Slocum | Dr. Audra Slocum is an Associate Professor of Secondary English Education and the Director of Teacher Education at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Prior to joining OU, she was an associate professor at West Virginia University and co-director of the National Writing Project at WVU for 10 years. She has presented at NCTE, AERA, and WVCTE and published in English Education, Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, and English Teaching: Practice and Critique. Her scholarship primarily focuses on how teenagers from linguistically marginalized communities navigate oppressive norms in secondary English classrooms. As a teacher educator, she prepares secondary English students to be actively anti-oppressive as they employ core teaching practices. |
Habibi by Naomi Sahib Nye
Habibi by Naomi Sahib Nye is an older novel published in 1997. I returned to this book because I’ve been seeking out more Palestinian authors to deepen my understanding of Palestinian perspectives and experiences.
 | Habibi was a book I read in my own teacher preparation program 30 years ago, and it has stayed with me for all of these years, with small scenes wandering through my mind. This book introduced me to Nye’s poetry, which I have loved and used in my classroom many times over the years. Habibi is a Palestinian word for “dear one” or “loved one” and love is woven throughout the story. It is the story of a Palestinian-American girl, Liyana Abboud, who has a Palestinian father and white American mother. Her parents decide to move their family from St. Louis, Missouri to Palestine in the mid 1990s, just as Liyana is entering high school and her brother is entering middle school, so that they could build relationships with her father’s family. They sell all their belongings and move to Jerusalem, immersing themselves into Palestinian life and their Arab family. |
Liyana and her brother don’t know Arabic, so they first face the challenges of communicating with their grandmother and cousins and aunts and uncles. Liyana sees her grandmother as superstitious and fascinating, with a love of old ways for healing and using signs from the natural world to help make decisions. Liyana’s understanding of her grandmother deepens as she interviews her about her life for a school assignment. When Israeli soldiers invade her grandmother’s home, destroying parts of it, Liyana also first feels more directly the role of randomized terrorization as a tool for oppression.
| Liyana is 14, and a pretty typical teenager, with strong streaks of curiosity, independence, and rebellion. She attends an Armenian school in the Armenian sector of Jerusalem, and on her lunch breaks, she wanders Jerusalem, making observations about cultural similarities and differences from her life in the U.S. In her wanderings, she meets a teenage boy, Omer, who captures her interest. They start with several small conversations, building curiosity about each other, leading to the discovery that he is Jewish. Through this relationship, we experience their connections, worries, and hopes about violence, peace, and justice. The book is saturated with gems of phrases and images that remain lodged in your imagination. |  |
Nye has gifted her readers a protagonist who is also a writer: Liyana records her thoughts, her love of rhyming words, her detailed observations in a journal, allowing us to linger in appreciation for quiet scenes and poignant reflections on religion, human connection, and cultural identity. Although thirty years old, this book still offers a point of view much needed at this moment.
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