Exile and Memory in Contemporary Western Armenian Literature

[Covers of Krikor Beledian`s novel \"Thresholds\" in Western Armenian and in French translation.] [Covers of Krikor Beledian`s novel \"Thresholds\" in Western Armenian and in French translation.]

Exile and Memory in Contemporary Western Armenian Literature

By : Jennifer Manoukian

A thick stack of black and white photographs flutters to the floor. A man stands over the jumbled pile and, looking past bent corners and nibbled edges, sees dozens of faces staring up at him. These faces are vaguely familiar—an old neighbor, a distant cousin, an aunt who used to spend summers with him. Some photos land face down and, from his height, the man can just make out the names and dates scribbled in purple ink across the backs.

He kneels down and, with the tips of his fingers, quickly rakes the photographs into a haphazard mound. He leans over it to inspect the faces more closely and immediately a voice begins whispering in his ear. Memories begin to flood the room. But these memories are not his own; they belong to the men and women in the photos. This voice anchors them to a story, breathes life into their stoic faces and makes their one-dimensional images come alive. But it also transfers the crushing weight of their memories onto this man’s shoulders.  

In these memories lie the aching pain and unrelenting torment of deracination and exile. Although this suffering is not his own, he treats it as if it were an indelible part of his personal experience, silently assuming the burden of memory and selflessly disregarding its psychological toll.

Krikor Beledian: Agent of the Armenian Diaspora

This scene makes up the final pages of Krikor Beledian’s novel Seuils [Thresholds]. Published in Western Armenian in 1997 and translated into French by Sonia Bekmezian in 2011, Seuils is the first in a series of semi-autobiographical narratives exploring facets of the author’s childhood in Beirut and the first of his novels to be translated into any language. Beledian, born in 1945, is one of a handful of writers who currently publishes creative works in Western Armenian—the branch of the language once used by Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and now used, to varying degrees, by their descendants scattered throughout the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas.

In the early years of these diasporan communities, Western Armenian continued to serve as the language of literature and culture, but with each passing generation the number of people with the linguistic dexterity needed to write in the language has been dwindling. In 2010, UNESCO classified Western Armenian as “definitely endangered,” the second of five stages on the language extinction scale. A language reaches this stage when few children learn it as their first language. Beledian, however, writes as if blissfully unaware of this serious situation.

A prolific writer of poetry and prose since the 1970s, Krikor Beledian has become one of the few figures in contemporary Western Armenian literature—a scene that was once brimming with gifted writers who, like Beledian, took risks and experimented with the language, injecting it with new life after its near destruction. An academic as well as a novelist and poet, Beledian makes his home in France and teaches Armenian literature at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco) in Paris. He has published novels, critical essays on Armenian literature, and collections of poetry, as well scholarly volumes on Armenian history and literature.  

Beledian silently proclaims his exceptionality as a writer not only in the choice of Western Armenian as his sole language of artistic expression, but in the way he treats well-worn tropes in what he calls Armenian diaspora literature—writing by diasporan Armenians about diasporan Armenian experiences in languages other than Western Armenian. He squarely contrasts Armenian diaspora literature with Armenian diasporan literature—writing by diasporan Armenians about diasporan Armenian experiences in Western Armenian.

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[Krikor Beledian. Image via the author.]

In Armenian diaspora literature, there is a tendency to dwell on the past and look to the villages and communities in the pre-1915 Ottoman Empire for direction on how present-day Armenian culture should look and feel. There is great concern for preserving this heritage to the detriment of valorizing Armenian experiences in the diaspora as they exist today. Beledian’s novels focus on giving diasporan experiences the consideration they deserve and asserting the vitality of modern diasporan Armenian identities. He does not allow his ancestors in the Ottoman Empire or the fledging Republic of Armenia in the Caucasus to prescribe how identity in the diaspora ought to be constructed. His novels encourage Armenians to see value in their own varied experiences, form their own understanding of Armenian identity, and not to look elsewhere for validation.

The literary influences on Beledian’s writing are emblematic of the melding of cultures inherent in the diasporan Armenian experiences whose authenticity he unwaveringly defends. In the words of literature scholar Talar Chahinian:

[Beledian’s] fiction demonstrates a style that is somewhere between the nouveau roman and the post-modern novel. His novels often shun punctuation rules, sequential plot lines, and reliable narrators. But though his novels’ forms are overwhelmingly inspired by French post-structuralist thought, their linguistic acrobatics and content are strikingly representative of the post-1915 Armenian diaspora, marked by a sense of chronological interruption and geographic dispersion.

Incorporating French influences into the core of his work is not an attempt to proclaim the superiority of European literature or to disparage the Armenian literary tradition; it is used to give a voice to diasporan experiences and allow them to speak through the structure of the novels.

Catastrophe in Translation

The structural skeletons of Beledian’s novels are filled out with inventive language that seek to revitalize Western Armenian as a literary language. When we read his work in translation—even in Bekmezian’s sublimely evocative translation—this attempt naturally goes unnoticed. Needless to say, a significant dimension is lost in translation when the original language is essentially its own character in the book.

The intrinsic challenges of translating Beledian’s work notwithstanding, Bekmezian’s French translation of Seuils does achieve one particularly critical goal: it acquaints a wider public with a literature intended to be read only by the Armenian community. Since Armenian is unique in that few beyond the community learn the language or achieve sufficient proficiency to penetrate its literature, reading Western Armenian literature in translation is like listening in on someone else’s therapy sessions. It reveals the collective joys, fears, preoccupations, and obsessions of an exiled people and delves deep into their psyches.

Nothing weighs more heavily on the Western Armenian psyche than what Beledian and a small group of other Western Armenian intellectuals call the Catastrophe of 1915—more commonly referred to as the Armenian genocide. Bekmezian’s translation shows us how such a shattering event is remembered and discussed within the community. Treated with subtlety and woven into the narrative like it is woven into the fabric of Armenian family histories, the Catastrophe in Seuils is not fleshed out in all of its grisly details as it would be if the book had been intended for an audience unfamiliar with the Armenian plight. It does not belabor the misery and adversity of the Armenians and has no designs on shocking readers into recognizing that it took place.

Beledian’s treatment of the Catastrophe is devoid of the sorts of underlying political motivations often seen in Armenian diaspora literature and in the public debate on Armenian genocide recognition. It looms, but it is never explained and does not need to be. For Armenians, it is shared history, common knowledge, a vivid part of their historical memory. Instead, Beledian considers the effect of the Catastrophe on the men and women who experienced it firsthand and on their children and grandchildren who have taken on that suffering as their own. How is this burden—disguised as family memories—passed along? Why do second and third generation diasporan Armenians still feel such an attachment to their pasts? Why do they still feel like an exiled people almost one hundred years and four generations after the Catastrophe?  

Vicarious Suffering

In Seuils, Beledian probes these questions by exploring the stories and pictures of three women—his aunt Elmone, his grandmother Vergine, and his neighbor Antika—who were all driven out of their villages in southern and eastern Anatolia in 1915 and later settled in Lebanon. Their stories of pain and exile are told to an unnamed narrator by an omniscient voice that charges him with the responsibility of collecting, recording, and transmitting them.

The fragility of family history is a recurring theme in the novel. The narrator is empowered by the idea that, in an instant, he could burn the photographs and rip up the stories and nothing would remain of his family’s past. He is seduced by the power inherent in this role. The voice, however, implores him to keep the pictures and write down everything it tells him in order to keep the traces of the community alive. And he dutifully agrees.

But the narrator struggles with the fact that he has inherited this suffering. He rebels against what he perceives as a hindered sense of agency by filling in the gaps in his history with his own elaborate stories. In allowing the narrator to write original scenes in his family‘s past, Beledian comments on the malleability of history. He asks readers to question what they really know about their history and how they know it. History, he argues, is a constructed reality shaped by the people through whom it has been transmitted—people who pick and chose what should be remembered, what should be forgotten, and what should be embellished. Once a story reaches the present, its adulterated form may bear little resemblance to the lived experience.

This understanding of history feeds the narrator’s constructed relationships with the three women whose stories he has inherited. Not knowing any of them well, yet still feeling an obligation to record their experiences, the narrator invents a personal connection based on the pictures he holds in his hands and the painful stories whispered in his ear. Beledian uses the narrator to illustrate the illogicality of his bond: why does the narrator and, by extension, second and third generation diasporan Armenians with no direct connection to the Catastrophe, appropriate the suffering of their ancestors?

How can I talk about someone who I have not seen a single time? How can I penetrate her life and understand—beyond the legend, beyond the gossip—the thick, heavy existence of a human being whose scent I have not sniffed, whose hand has never brushed up against mine, who never pulled me into her lap, whose voice I have never heard and for whom I have absolutely no image in my mind.

These questions characterize the relationship between many diasporan Armenians today—living in places as diverse as New York, Paris, Beirut, Aleppo, Buenos Aires, London, Los Angeles—and their grandparents and great-grandparents. They are far removed from the trauma of the past, yet similar feelings of exile and alienation still persist.

Memory has taken hold of Armenians in the diaspora and affected how many understand themselves. Their past is a major source of strength and tends to solidify pride in their Armenian identities. But, as Beledian shows us, rooting identities in the past rather than in the present is problematic because there is only so much we can really know about our history. He illustrates this idea by emphasizing the narrator’s disorientation in the three women’s lives. The basic elements of their lives—composed of village songs he has never heard, dialects he has never spoken, places he has never seen, and a kind of pain he has never experienced—are foreign to him. Yet there is still a connection, still a bond that allows him to transcend all of these differences, however illogical it seems.

Breaking with the Past

Contrary to diasporan Armenians today who choose to remember their family’s past and make it a part of personal identities, those who survived the Catastrophe had no choice but to remember. They bore their pain not only psychologically, but physically. As much as diasporan Armenians feel the need to take on this suffering as their own, Beledian shows that there will always be limits to their understanding. Diasporan Armenians will never carry the traces of torment on their bodies and thus never truly understanding the extent of their pain:

How can you expect [the women] to return wearing shoes with their deformed toenails, their cracked heels, their wild feet that passed through and were burned by the sand, by the hills. You walk and walk, and it’s always the same sand, always the same caravan. There are no camels or bells, only and always this heat that burns your feet.

What diasporan Armenians feel is the suffering that took its first breath once those caravans reached their destination. It is not an inferior form; it is merely the second stage. Armenians born and raised in the diaspora will never truly be able to understand the first stage because the scope of the despair is too large to grasp. They will never know how it feels to be torn from the only life you have known and to be forced to rebuild it from nothing. They will never know the ache of hearing your children utter their first words in a language foreign to you or the unbearable longing for a place that no longer exists as you knew it.

The daily struggle to carry on faced by the first generation in exile was replaced by the second and third generations’ emotional, abstract struggle over identity and belonging. This is the second stage of suffering that diasporan Armenians experience. It is how they feel about what they have absorbed and imagined from the stories about the first stage. This second stage is merely a continuation, since it could not have come into being without the first. In other words, most diasporan Armenians would not be living in the diaspora if their ancestors had not survived the Catastrophe and endured the pain of exile. The suffering among diasporan Armenians is not simply composed of the assumed pain in the first stage. It is also composed of a lament for a life that could have been theirs.

Because of the Catastrophe, diasporan Armenians are permanently estranged from the linear history that their families had enjoyed in their ancestral villages for centuries. They will never know what their lives would have been like had that lineage continued uninterrupted. Unlike other children and grandchildren of immigrants, they cannot travel to see what life could have been like for them in their ancestral villages, because almost all traces of their ancestors have been erased in these places.

This abrupt change in direction and the shock of exile brought unexpected challenges within families: as Beledian illustrates, it led to an intensification of the divisions between Armenians who fled the Catastrophe and their children and grandchildren born in the diaspora. In Seuils, Beledian shows us how the new breed of Armenians born in exile were not necessarily valorized by the generation that fled. In the words of the narrator’s neighbor Antika:

Despite all of your efforts to convince these boys, they do not know the taste or the smell of Erzurum. It is not their air; it is not their water. Their flesh and bones are different.

It is true. Diasporan Armenians will never truly be part of that pre-1915 society that they exalt. It is not their experience, but by clinging to it and treating it as if it is, diasporan Armenians are attempting to take control over their past and create a history different from the one imposed on them. They are rejecting the idea of exile and attempting to blur differences between them and their ancestors. But, as Beledian clearly illustrates, the cultures of the diasporan Armenians and their ancestors are distinct.

It is precisely because these experiences are so different that the generation that was forced to flee wants to ensure that their stories are not forgotten, no matter the toll it may take on future generations:

She fixes her eyes on mine and waits silently for a moment. She then tries to find the lost thread, the word that has been lost since the old country. Did she reserve this role of custodian for me—the role of learning the legend by heart, of someone to pass on the same story and bring it to a close? Maybe she was convinced to pass on her memories because telling them allows her to survive? Otherwise, how can I grasp why she describes the most painful moments…without backing down and without any attempt to protect me from the violence of her life?

The feelings of estrangement and exile still alive in many second and third generation diasporan Armenian communities are linked directly to this idea because each generation is expected to bear the burden of the past. The baton cannot be dropped until it is passed onto the next generation, with all the painful memories and unbearable sorrow securely intact. This idea has been so ingrained and the responsibility has been couched in such grave terms that to drop the baton means breaking the chain that stretches all the way back to 1915.

Beyond Logic and Reason

In Seuils, Beledian asks Armenians—and now, thanks to the French translation, other readers who carry the pain of deracination—to consider the burden of the transmission of family history and the effects it can have on the extension of suffering.

He is not trying to convince readers to liberate themselves from their pasts or to abandon their family memories, but simply to be conscious of how memories have the power both to shape and paralyze.  

***

Sorting through the pile of photographs, the narrator sees one of his Aunt Elmone and her granddaughter, Dzaghganoush. He is puzzled. He was sure that Dzaghganoush had been born in France and had never met her grandmother. He picks the photograph out of the pile and takes a closer look. A faint line shows that two photographs from two different decades have been superimposed. Grandmother and granddaughter had never been on the same continent, let alone in the same room, but here they stand side by side, spurning any sense of chronology or logic, to spend eternity together. By bearing the suffering of their grandparents and great-grandparents, diasporan Armenians are looking for this kind of closeness—a connection to their past to convey their respect for those who sacrificed so much for them.

New Texts Out Now: Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education

Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Betty S. Anderson (BSA): I always joke that I conceived the project in the pool of the Carlton Hotel in Beirut. In June 2000, I visited Beirut for the first time so I could attend an Arab American University Graduate (AAUG) conference. One day, I walked with some friends all along the Corniche and up through the American University of Beirut (AUB) campus and then back to the hotel. Since it was late June and ridiculously hot, the only option at that point was to jump in the pool as quickly as possible. Two minutes in the pool and the thought occurred to me that my next research project was going to have to be about Beirut in some way. I had fallen in love with the city in just that one day. A half second later, I thought, I should write a history of AUB.

Besides the fact that I wanted to get back to Beirut as soon as possible, I wanted to know why AUB had been so influential in politicizing its students. At the time, I was doing additional research for my book on Jordan (Nationalist Voices in Jordan: The Street and the State) and a number of the political activists I studied had attended AUB. Their memoirs were filled with explanations and stories about how important those four years were for the development of their political identities. However, I had no idea as I floated in the pool that day that I’d have to do extensive research on Protestant missionaries and education long before I could even get to those Arab nationalists. At the time, I really knew relatively little about the school’s history.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address?

BSA: When I finally got back to Beirut in 2004, it was research on the educational systems offered at the Syrian Protestant College and AUB that eventually ended up directing my thesis. I was struck initially by the goals the American founders and their successors set for the school. They talked more about the transformative process they wanted the students to undertake than the course options they were offering. For example, Daniel Bliss (1866-1902) preached about producing Protestants who understood not only the liturgy but the lifestyle required of one converting to this faith; Bayard Dodge (1923-1948) exhorted students to follow the model of the modern American man as they sought to develop new characters for themselves. The former presided over a missionary educational system, the latter the new liberal education system then being formulated back in America. The first half of the book discusses this shift as the American University of Beirut was renamed in 1920.

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[Main gate of AUB campus. Photo by Betty S. Anderson.]

Liberal education, as American educators developed it in the second half of the nineteenth century, asks its students to be active participants in their educational experience. Before this point, professors taught their students a fixed body of knowledge; students were required to memorize and recite the data to prove that they had learned it. In liberal education, the system asks that professors teach students how to think and analyze so they can produce data on their own.

The second half of the book examines how the students reacted to this shifting pedagogical focus. The American leaders of the school repeatedly stated their goals for the students, and most books and articles on AUB focus on only those voices. However, that stance leaves out an important element of the AUB story, because only the students can truly determine whether the programs are effective. AUB is famous for the many student protests that have taken place on campus, starting with the Darwin Affair of 1882, leading to the Muslim Controversy of 1909, and then on to the large protests of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. As I discovered when I delved into the archives, students used dozens of newspapers to explain why they were protesting. The catalyst was always a particular event, on campus or off, but the students always framed their arguments around the freedom they felt the liberal education system promised. They fought against any administrative attempts to curtail their actions and frequently accused the administration of not following the guidelines set by American liberal education. This issue became increasingly contentious as students worked to define an Arab nationalism that called on them to be politically active while on campus. The administration continually opposed this position, and many of the student-administrative conflicts centered on the differing definitions of freedom put forward on campus. I put “Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education” in the subtitle of the book because by the twentieth century, these were the two dominant elements defining the relationship between the students and the administration.

J: How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous research and writing?

BSA: Most of my work has centered on education in one form or another. In my book on Jordan, I wrote of the politicizing role high schools in Jordan and Palestine, as well as schools like AUB, played in mobilizing a national opposition movement in the 1950s. I have published a number of articles analyzing the narratives the Jordanian and Lebanese states present to their students in history and Islamic textbooks. Moving on to a comprehensive study of one particularly influential school was a natural progression. The difference was that I now had to study American education in the same way I had previously examined the influence of education in the Middle East.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

BSA: I hope AUB alumni want to read the book and, equally, that they find something of their story in it. I did not want to cite just the Americans who founded and ran the school; I purposely wanted to write about the students themselves. Typical university histories leave out the words and actions of the students in favor of hagiographies about the founders and their famous successors. I also hope that scholars and students interested in studies of education and nationalism will be interested. This is a book that addresses both Middle Eastern and American studies.

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[Assembly Hall and College Hall, AUB Campus. Photos by Betty S. Anderson.]

J: What other projects are you working on now?

BSA:
I have a contract with Stanford University Press to publish a book called State and Society in the Modern Middle East. Like with anyone who undertakes to write a textbook, I am frustrated with those that are currently available. Textbooks of the modern Middle East typically focus just on state formation, the actions of the chief politicians, and the political interplay between states. My text focuses instead on the relationship between state and society as it developed over the last two hundred years. The states in the region centralized in the nineteenth century, faced colonialism in the early twentieth century, and then independence after World War II; these stages created new roles for state leaders. Civil society, in the broadest definition of the term, emerged from the eighteenth century forward as people sought new ways to organize within and against the states now intruding on their lives. They took advantage of the new institutions the states built to establish for themselves new class, national, and gender definitions, while frequently opposing the states that had introduced these very institutions. My text examines how schools, government offices, newspapers, political parties, and women’s groups constantly negotiated new relationships with their respective states.

Excerpt from The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education

From Chapter One:

"The great value of education does not consist in the accepting this and that to be true but it consists in proving this and that to be true," declared Daniel Bliss, founder of Syrian Protestant College (SPC; 1866–1920) and its president from 1866 to 1902, in his farewell address. President Howard Bliss (president, 1902–1920) said in his baccalaureate sermon in 1911, "In a word, the purpose of the College is not to produce singly or chiefly men who are doctors, men who are pharmacists, men who are merchants, men who are preachers, teachers, lawyers, editors, statesmen; but it is the purpose of the College to produce doctors who are men, pharmacists who are men, merchants who are men, preachers, teachers, lawyers, editors, statesmen who are men." Bayard Dodge (1923–1948) stated at his inauguration as president of the newly renamed American University of Beirut (AUB; 1920– ), "We do not attempt to force a student to absorb a definite quantity of knowledge, but we strive to teach him how to study. We do not pretend to give a complete course of instruction in four or five years, but rather to encourage the habit of study, as a foundation for an education as long as life itself." The successors to these men picked up the same themes when they elaborated on the school`s goals over the years; most recently, in May 2009, President Peter Dorman discussed his vision of AUB’s role. "AUB thrives today in much different form than our missionary founders would have envisioned, but nonetheless—after all this time—it remains dedicated to the same ideal of producing enlightened and visionary leaders."

In dozens of publications, SPC and AUB students have also asserted a vision of the transformative role the school should have on their lives. The longest surviving Arab society on campus, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa, published a magazine of the same name during most academic years between 1923 and 1954 and as of 1936 stated as its editorial policy the belief that "the magazine`s writing is synonymous with the Arab student struggle in the university." From that point forward, the editors frequently listed the society`s Arab nationalist goals. In the fall 1950 edition, for example, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa`s Committee on Broadcasting and Publications issued a statement identifying the achievement of Arab unity as the most important goal because "it is impossible to separate the history, literature and scientific inheritance of the Arabs" since "the Arab essence is unity." Toward this end, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa pledged to accelerate the "growth of the true nationalist spirit" among the students affiliated with the organization. In describing education as an activist pursuit, the statement declares, "To achieve political ideas which are aimed at our nationalism it is necessary for we as students to seek information by many different means." In this call, the AUB Arab students must take on the task of studying the Arab heritage as thoroughly and frankly as possible so that when they graduate they can move into society with solutions to the many problems plaguing the Arab world.

Since the school`s founding in 1866, its campus has stood at a vital intersection between a rapidly changing American missionary and educational project to the Middle East and a dynamic quest for Arab national identity and empowerment. As the presidential quotes indicate, the Syrian Protestant College and the American University of Beirut imported American educational systems championing character building as their foremost goal. Proponents of these programs hewed to the belief that American educational systems were the perfect tools for encouraging students to reform themselves and improve their societies; the programs do not merely supply professional skills but educate the whole person. As the quotes from al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa attest, Arab society pressured the students to change as well. The Arab nahda, or awakening, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called on students to take pride in their Arab past and to work to recreate themselves as modern leaders of their society; the Arab nationalist movement of the twentieth century asked that students take a lead in fighting for Arab independence from foreign control. The students streaming through the Main Gate year after year used both of these American and Arab elements to help make the school not only an American institution but also one of the Arab world and of Beirut, as the very name, the American University of Beirut, indicates. This process saw long periods of accommodation between the American-led administration and the Arab students, but just as many eras when conflict raged over the nature of authority each should wield on campus; the changing relationship between the administration and the students serves as the cornerstone of this book, for it is here where much of the educational history of SPC and AUB has been written.

From Chapter Five:

The 1952 April Fool’s Day issue of Outlook (called Lookout on that day) satirized the proliferation of student protests that had dominated campus life for the previous few years. In the paper’s lead article, the author declared, “A School of Revolutionary Government, designed to equip AUB students with a wide knowledge of modern techniques of conspiracy and revolution, is to be opened during the fall semester, a communique from the President’s Office announced late Friday.” Continuing the same theme, the article reports, “All courses will include a minimum of three lab hours to be spent in street battles with gendarmes and similar applications of theories learned in classrooms.” President Stephen Penrose (1948-1954), the article stated, gave a Friday morning chapel talk on the new school motto: “That they may have strife and have it more abundantly.” In a further announcement, the paper described the day’s protest.

There will be a demonstration this afternoon at three in front of the Medical Gate to object against everything[.] All those interested please report there promptly five [minutes] before time. The demonstration promises to be very exciting—tear gas will be used, and the slogans are simply delightful. If all goes well, police interference is expected. If not to join, come and watch.

This, of course, had not been the first era of student protest; the difference by the 1950s was the widespread and sustained nature of the conflict between the administration and the students. When Lookout published its satirical articles in 1952, students had been organizing demonstrations in support of Palestinians and Moroccans, and against any and all things imperialist, since 1947; these events only petered out in 1955 as the administration banned the two main groups organizing them, the Student Council and the Arab society, al-cUrwa al-Wuthqa. Students engaged in these exercises explicitly as Arabs, proud of their past, and striving toward cultural, political and economic unity in the future. In their actions, students sought to integrate their educational experiences at AUB with the real-life events taking place outside the Main Gate, for only then did they feel they could be trained to function as the vanguard initiating the necessary changes in their society.

[Excerpted from Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. © 2011 by The University of Texas Press. Excerpted by permission of the author. For more information, or to order the book, click here.]