Ottoman History Podcast - Recovering Migrant Histories

Episode Date: January 21, 2023

with Randa Tawil hosted by Chris Gratien & Brittany White | What are the perils and possibilities of writing the histories of everyday people? In this episode, we return to this question with Randa Tawil, as she reflects on the process of research and writing. Tawil previously joined us on the Ottoman History Podcast to talk about the life of Zeinab Ameen, a woman from late Ottoman Lebanon who set out for the United States with her family, only to become separated from them and endure a difficult, circuitous, and ultimately heartbreaking journey that illuminates what it meant from Arab migrants to navigate the many spaces of the mahjar. In this conversation with University of Virginia students, we go behind the scenes to examine how the category of "migrant" can be both problematic and productive in writing about past people. We explore the importance of speculative analysis, and we discuss how history writing functions as an act of recovery with value for our present. « Click for More »

So something that we have been discussing in class is how focusing on stories of migrantsifts them and empowers them and makes them similar to us in many ways? focusing not on people as migrants, but on people who get categorized as migrants. And the effects of that categorization to me is like the difference. Hi, I'm Chris Grayton. You just heard Professor Renda Tawil responding to one of the many excellent questions posed by students in my class at University of Virginia about migration, displacement, and diaspora in the Middle East. She's been on the Ottoman History Podcast before in an episode called Zeynep's Odyssey, episode 478 to be precise. from late Ottoman Lebanon, who set out for the United States with her family, only to become separated from them and undertake a years-long journey in which she faced numerous challenges, threats, and forms of stigmatization. And despite the fact that her story is truly bizarre, completely heartbreaking, and full

of unhappy twists and turns, I found that conversation with Renda Tawil to be really fun, and over the years, it's been one of the episodes of Ottoman History Podcast that always resonates with students. I do recommend checking it out or reading Renda Tawil's article, which you'll find linked on our website. I thought Renda's talent for storytelling and her attention to how legal regimes and their categories shape people and their movements made her the perfect guest to sit down with me and Brittany White, a University of Virginia graduate student who studies the history of African diaspora in the Middle East, to talk more about how to

approach a recurring theme on our program that is narrating migration. Thank you. And thank you for having me. Yeah, we're really happy to have you in this totally normal situation. Totally not awkward at all. It's not awkward at all. Well, the last time I was at my friend's house on an island outside of Seattle, and we were doing this via Zoom.

So I feel like it's fine. It's really hard to interview people over Zoom. Yeah. You did a good job. A lot of people don't bring the energy over the Zoom. So I'm glad we're doing this in person. And what we want to talk about in this conversation is sort of behind the scenes, how an author who studies migration approaches their craft. What are the perils? What are the possibilities? What are the questions we need

to be asking at every stage of the process? We'll start off with me and Brittany talking, then we're going to open it up to our audience of UVA students who are all super excited to ask you some questions as well. So based on your experience, what are the challenges and possibilities of narrating stories of everyday people from history? Thinking about my own experience with this, this is certainly not like some genius in a room figuring out this story. So many people helped me along the way, writing this, thinking this through. In academia, you see one name on the article or one name on the podcast, but truly it is like a group endeavor. And the more people you involve, the better.

I think for me as a scholar, I'm very much attracted to the work of recovery and thinking about recovery as a really important part of doing history. Recovering these fragments of stories that have often been erased in the archives, that archives aren't built to tell, really. And the limits, of course, really. And the limits, of course, are that you can't truly recover these stories that you'll never know. You know, people like Zainab, at least to my knowledge, has not written her own diary about this. She hasn't written her experience herself. Everything that I encountered that has to do with her and her story are all written from people who were trying to police her, right? Trying to deport her, finding problems with her. So the challenge, of course, is how do you take archives that are basically there? The only reason I found her was because people were

trying to make sure she didn't enter the country. And so the challenge, I think, as a historian is, how do you work with those archives? And how do you work with the very real reality that you're not going to be able to tell a full story about this person, right? But rather, you can try to recover fragments of her life and also think about how power actually worked to create her into this person that is deportable, this person that has been erased in an archive. You know, you'll see it's not really about her inner life. It's not about how she felt about things, but much more about what were these institutions

that were policing her, that created her journey, and how did that affect her life? And I think the possibilities are that in these histories of everyday people, because we don't know, right? We don't know how she felt. I don't know who she was as a person, but we can open up a kind of reflection

and actually show that this may have happened. This other thing may have happened. She may have felt badly about this. She may have been scared. And when we start adding that kind of like conditional sense to history, I think that's actually really helpful in the way we think about history because it opens things up. History isn't just right, like what happened and this is exactly what happened. Rather,

it's really about reflecting. It's really about different possibilities. And to me, that's why I do it because when we think about different possibilities in the past I think it helps us imagine new possibilities for the present and the future right that speculative dimension of history is kind of actually inherent to what we do even though some people might say like oh well I'm a I'm a speculative historian I put the may and the might and the could in there that's actually doing that also reveals that history is this production,

this act of imagination in the scholar's mind. I actually really like speculative history because it makes things, it makes it feel more intimate to me. And it kind of takes away that idea of like knowledge as only written word, you know, knowledge as only written word, knowledge as only things that are placed in archives

that are known in that way. Personally, when I write, I always look up what month somebody, for example, landed in Marseille or something. And when you know that they landed there in January and they were stuck there for two months or two weeks or something, that person might have been freezing. They might have not.

It was cold. For sure. It was cold. And I think that it allows you to, I don't know, understand it a little more. Did the person write down, I am cold today? Like, no, but that's still an important piece of knowledge, I think, that's important to understand

experience. You know, my work is on the Ottoman Empire, but I've done some work on deportation from the United States. And in doing that work, I realized that the history we write is not so long ago as we often think. That 100 years ago means that people who knew this person are probably still alive, which is always important to keep in mind. who knew this person are probably still alive, which is always important to keep in mind.

But writing the history of, let's call them everyday people, as we did, is different than when you're writing the history of a historical figure who is already a subject of a lot of discussion. You might be the person who redefines how this person will be remembered. So it's one example of the responsibility of the scholar. But there's a whole bunch of competing responsibilities that you have towards the person, towards the way they're remembered, towards history itself, towards your audience, towards people who live today who may be impacted by it.

So I'd like to hear you talk about how you see that question of responsibility. One of my favorite scholars who i go back to is sadia hartman who's written her most recent book was wayward lives beautiful experiments and she writes a lot about writing about everyday people and sort of mostly african-american women and she actually talks about recovery as some sort of reparations, as like a way of kind of being able to start to move forward from the haunting of enslavement. And that's something she writes a lot about is the hauntings of slavery, that we still live in their hauntings. And what does that mean? It's all around us, right?

We still live in their hauntings. And what does that mean? It's all around us, right? We as a society, emancipation happened, and yet we have yet to move forward. I haven't thought much about like reparations for migrants. I, you know, it's a different thought. But in terms of kind of thinking about hauntings of migration, hauntings of who has been allowed into the country, who hasn't, who do we think of as desirable migrants, and why do we think of them like that, right? What are the sort of social norms, or why do we think certain things are just how they are? To me, that's really important to break as a historian, to make the familiar strange

that how things are has a history. And it actually has a history that has a lot of choices. It has a lot, it is imbued with power relations. And if we can do anything as historians, it can be to kind of punch that idea of like, oh, things are just this way because they are just this way. Or, you know, oh, I haven't thought about that. Isn't that just how it is? Right. So that's, to me, the responsibility, or at least my responsibility as a historian, I think. But I think also, Chris, if I can just like say, like, I don't know exactly why but most of my writing does end up being these kind of like micro histories or I just am attracted to writing about history through the lives of kind of regular people and that's I don't know that's just I find it more interesting like for myself as a writer, I find the idea of how somebody navigated systems to just be like

a very evocative way to tell history. And so I think that's, that's kind of like, just my like, what I like, and I don't know that it's the best way, or it's certainly not the only way, but it's like how I like to tell stories when you were writing the article for Zainab and and when you're when you're writing now are you thinking about your audience and how does how is your prospective audience reflected in the way that you're telling the in the style of your writing I mean if I'm honest I like to think of myself and what I would like to read and what I would have liked to read. You know, like, who says this? I don't remember who says this.

Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison, right? Like, write the book that you wish you had read. And that's kind of how I see it. Well, I think it kind of leads to another question we had, which is about the stakes for today. another question we had was, which is about the stakes for today. So what we write about people in the past may influence how our readers see people who resemble them in the present. Migration has been a political issue for centuries now and continues to be.

And how we write about past migrants certainly is part of a present day conversation in ways that maybe, you know, all history writing is, but maybe it's a little bit more present than other topics. So, yeah, I wanted to hear your thoughts on what work this is doing. I really appreciate in critical refugee studies, there is theory or a way of writing about migration in which migrants aren't a problem to be solved. It's not about a migrant as this category, but rather actually thinking about the discourse behind migrants and thinking about how that even subject is created. Like who is called a migrant? You know, I think the classic example is like you know brown people are called migrants white people are called expats right that's kind of if we can think about it right

these categories are are made they're created constructed for me and my writing what i have tried to expose is not only are these categories constructed discursively as in you know in a narrative form but they are kind of created physically like how people travel what barriers are physically set for them affects how they enter a country and how they're seen in that country whether they can travel on a one-way ticket on a plane verse having to navigate crossing a border without documents or having to navigate a coyote system or having to navigate changing laws in lots of different countries happening kind of at the moment. The infrastructure that is created actually produces a particular type of migrant as desirable or undesirable.

You mentioned a little bit about theory, and I forget whether it was in the previous podcast episode or in the actual article itself, you mentioned that you use Zaynab's life as theory itself. Can you explain what you meant by that? I try to really think about the strategies of the people that I write about, how they have navigated, how they have the choices that they have been forced to make or the choices that are there and try to learn from them. So with Zainab, what I was able to learn from her is the way that migrants are able to navigate borders through connections, but also that for women, I think the thing I learned most from her is how these choices that women are given who travel often by themselves because there is patriarchy entrenched both in border control

as well as their own communities, they have to make these bargains that actually isolate them further and oppress them further, right? So with a story like Zaynab, she was like oppressed or she was kind of pushed back because she was a single woman. And she was treated badly because she was a single woman. And the only thing she could do was sort of rely on her sexuality for this man, Abdullah, her husband's cousin, to come and get her. And that isolated

her further and put her into more danger. And so I think her choices and just simply even her not having choices or choosing from really bad choices. To me, that was a lesson. And I want to respect the intelligence that she clearly shows, because I don't know how anyone can survive the ordeal she had survived. And I think she has a lot to teach us, as opposed to me sort of being like, oh, this is, you know, I have all these theories and I'm planting them on her. Like, no, she was a very smart woman, clearly. And we have a lot to learn from her.

Well, I learned a ton from Zeynep and from you, the way you pieced the story together. And one of the things you kind of pointed out is that if you haven't had to do something like go through a legal process of migration or deportation or any kind of such thing, it's kind of hard to comprehend what a person who seeks to do that faces. Or if you've never had to apply to a visa as someone with a weak passport, as they call them, you don't really understand what people, the lengths people go to, for example, just to visit the United States. And there's a really valuable intervention that historians can make there, because there are a lot of people who have the signs on the yard that say

like, migrants welcome, but they don't actually know what it means to migrate. Some people who may be hostile actually do. The people who are in law enforcement who have maybe a more realistic, but maybe less favorable, they know what the hoops that people jump through. But a lot of people who just say yes to migrants should still know what that actually entails. The actual journey or the actual paperwork becomes kind of mystified and especially the way that we often tell stories. And I think it's changing. But let's say, you know, 20 years ago, often tell stories and I think it's changing but let's say you know 20 years ago whatever like the way that we often tell stories of migration kind of either start after a person arrives in a place and then okay how do they you know acclimate how do they make community or perhaps

why did a person leave their other country and then come to this new country. But actually, the just like infrastructure, the way that people have to move the papers, they need to sign all of this stuff is often sort of just not talked about as much when in fact, those are the things that produce them as migrants. That's what creates a person as a category of a migrant or a refugee or a asylum seeker or an expat. You touched on a little bit with like the discussion of expat versus migrant. And while Zeynep's story is like certainly a gendered one, like it's also a story about race, particularly when you get into the trial, the murder trial. Can you tell us how race played a part in Zeynep's story and how it may have looked in the different places that she went.

So perhaps, and she was in Veracruz, you talked extensively about what that looked like in the United States, but I wonder also, did it play a part in France and where she came from in the first place? Race plays a big part and particularly I would say like racialization and being racialized

because these ideas are fluid and changing. And as soon as migration becomes a business and as it becomes sort of countries policies, these categories start to be created. Right. These countries need to create categories. Shipping companies need to create categories. So, you know, I said they need to create categories. They don't need to. Let me correct myself. These companies, they are creating categories as well as states. There is an impulse to categorize migrants. And one of those categories is what we think of today as race. And so for someone like Zainab, as I wrote in the article

and maybe a little in the podcast, so much of Syrian movement through Marseille becomes racialized often by how they travel. So they travel because ships go from Syria, from the port of Beirut through the Suez, or touches the Suez Canal for business reasons right Suez Canal Canal is a huge transportation hub and then go to Marseille Syrians are seen as part of a kind of traveling diseases of cholera and are put into a different

health regime so Syrians are made to quarantine in a way that Italians and Greeks aren't because the ships go the north of the Mediterranean. And so in this way, that sanitation regime becomes racializing because being Syrian suddenly takes on all of these different things, right? There's also France's longer history of Orientalism and Oriental tropes.

Something I write about more in my book manuscript is how anybody who wants to profit off the migration system, they want to profit off all of it, right? They want to streamline it. But of course, it takes many, many, many actors to actually get a person to these different places. So there are ticketing agents. There are hoteliers. There are trackers. There are so many different people that work to get somebody from point A to point B.

And the government of Marseille is really annoyed at how much profit Syrian hotel owners are making, right? How much profit the trackers are making, how much profit all of these people are making. So the French government is very resentful of them and just thinks of them as greedy. Syrians are greedy. They're trying to get money. They're messing up with all the migrants. They, you know, they just take money and run. And some of them were corrupt and some of them weren't. Right. And so what you see in this period is the government is really trying to kick out all of the business, all the entrepreneurs, let's say Syrian entrepreneurs. And so it's another kind of layer of racialization that if you're a Syrian who's working in the city, you are corrupt.

You're greedy. You're messing up France for other migrants etc and then france ends up becoming the colonial power in syria less than a decade after yeah about a decade after zaynab's story right absolutely yeah um and so you know and again these these this shipping this migration it's all just part of colonial expansion. Like you can't separate the two. All of these big shipping companies, Messagerie Maritime, that company was created as a postal service. So it was a government funded private company to be the postal service for the empire. And so they're totally created. And then of course, it's like, well, we can transport

people too. That that'll you know give us more money that's great and then you asked about Mexico yeah with Zainab's story I focused more on like the U.S. border and control and how they saw Syrians there and so I think that really comes from early early histories of Spanish control and indigenous people at the border actually are at that area. There being like a long history of conquest and fighting and warfare. This area of what is now the United States and Mexico has a long history of like colonialism and fears of the other coming over the border. And then at the time of the early 20th century, Chinese workers who are using that border and who are creating communities there, as well as Syrian workers and Japanese workers, and that being seen as people trying to come into the U.S. surreptitiously, which is not true, right? It's

a way in which the U.S. imagines that border. And we still see it today, right? That border is still seen as like, it can't be controlled. And there are people who are constantly passing through. And so that racializing regime is something that Zainab passed through. So I just want to wrap things up with one final probably short question for you that builds off of Brittany's questions about race. I often tell people that fundamentally the migration regime we're talking about 100 years ago that was based on race and nationality was discriminatory in all sorts of ways. Passports, visas, all this. It's still the same system that exists today. No matter what changes have been made to it,

we still live in that same system. Do you agree with that? Absolutely, and I think that's part of the haunting. If we don't like how those histories present themselves, then we need to radically rethink and open up our imagination to other ways of being like it doesn't have to be the way it is and it actually takes a lot of work to start thinking differently but it's work worth doing i agree yeah good uh so we britney has a mic with a long cord. I'm going to ask her, because I am hobbled currently,

to help bring mics to those who want to talk so we can try to get a good recording on this. I kind of wanted to ask, because I know we talked about last week about how some refugees had tattoos on their faces. So do you know anything about Zainab's physical appearance or anything other than like her language barrier or her gender that motivated any of her story? So we know that she was tattooed, that she had tattoos on her hands. And those were actually written as her differentiating marks. So when you would

be deported, you have like a little card and it would say does this person have differentiating marks one thing that's quite interesting to me and i think you know i went i went into it in the podcast um with that uh translator george horry is actually about kind of differences within the syrian community and policing within that community. From his last name, we can know he's Christian and she's Muslim. And we certainly know there are other stories from inspectors who are Syrian or whatever you want to call them, greater Syrian, but Christian, who are actually policing some Muslims who are trying to enter the country. So accusing them of polygamy, that was a big sort of way in which Muslims were policed from entering.

There's someone at the border who, there's an inspector who was interviewed for this, for a newspaper. He was an inspector at the port in Louisiana. And he says something like, you know, those Syrians who are Shia, they like pray by the light of the moon and they worship their women and, you know, really painting them as like far more exotic. And at that time period, it would be interpreted right as like less civilized. And so there is some of that happening as well. In the article that I wrote, I do have a photo of her at the end. So you can check out her photo. And that was like a really big deal, I do have a photo of her at the end. So you can check out her photo. And that was like a really big deal that I finally got a photo.

It was really exciting. So this class is obviously part content of movement in the Middle East, but it's also about historiography and learning the work of being a historian. And this question might be a little self-interested because we have to write a paper and dive into sources ourselves. We were already talking at the beginning about kind of speculating what somebody could mean when they're writing a source, such as an immigration officer.

And we're wondering through any of your experiences as scholars, kind of questions that you've learned to first ask yourself when you're really trying to dig into a source, especially when the person of interest is not the person writing the source, such as you're interested in Zainab and what does the immigration officer have to say about her? If we could just get a little more out of that when you're looking at somebody's record the person who wrote it like they are a person that's like really important to remember right like this is a person and just because his stuff is housed in like a super fancy building in dc that you need a badge for doesn't mean he's anybody other than a guy who works as a border inspector and trying to maybe suck up to his like you know his supervisor by writing this like really you know long-winded report so one thing I love to do when I'm doing any kind of research is like I find a person's name and I put it into ancestry.com and I put it

into LexisNexis so that I can find if there are any court like any cases that they're in or or any documents on and oh and uh WorldCat which is like the live like the source of books so then you can find like has this person so let's say like an inspector right have they written anything else do I know anything about their own history all of that kind of stuff right and that to me actually like positions them so that you can understand them not as some authority, but as some other person who is like in their own context, in their own world.

Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. But a lot of people like wrote books that you don't think would have written a book. So, for example, one person who this this immigration inspector, Marcus Brown, who a lot of people have written about. And he's he's like in like his inspections have been really helpful for for immigration history. But it's really fascinating to read like his own story, like his he's written books he's written newspaper articles he's you know you can actually get a feel for who he is and then in understanding his own positionality look at how he's discussing someone like Zainab for example um I really enjoyed uh listening to

the podcast and I've been telling like Zainab's story to everybody I've talked to recently but I was really intrigued by your discussion of speculative and conditional history and I was wondering how you approach your research when you are thinking about speculating and describing these conditions that you imagine as you were talking about. I'm writing another article and it's on something totally different. Not really. It is on migrants. But it's pregnant women who were deported when they went to state hospitals in the US to give birth. And, you know, I was trying to describe it. And it's this woman who is from Poland, and she came to the US and it is very, very highly likely she's the first woman in her family to go to a hospital to give birth.

Right. And I think that's important to think about, like to understand going to a hospital was new and that she might be this, you know, 22 year old who is new in a country and there she can't find a midwife. is new in a country and there she can't find a midwife and she goes to a hospital because that's the modern thing to do and then of course the the doctor reports her to the like immigration and she's up for deportation so anyway and the question is like okay can i write that she's the you know i don't know she's the first in her family to go to a hospital i could be totally wrong but to me that's a really important like layer of texture this is a new thing to do that the world is is changing for this pregnant woman and she does something that she thinks is perhaps right perhaps she does something that she thinks is modern or somebody thinks this is modern and it ends up causing her to be deported you know I think about that a lot and

I don't know the right answer I think that I've been trying to go more into literature and and use literature actually as a way to add texture so that like a novel you know a song from the time period can actually give you some historical understanding that the documents won't be able to? So I'm actually an international student. And one thing that I thought was interesting is that when I filled out my social security papers, I'm technically classified as a legal alien. And I just thought that like the terminology of that was like very interesting and also like alienating, interesting and also like alienating, pun intended, I guess. And I was just wondering, I also lived in the UAE when I was younger and most of the community

was like called expat community because they were mostly all foreigners, but the workers who worked in like high labor intensive camps were called migrant workers. So it was like what you were saying, like the distinction between like who is like probably like brown and white and stereotypes of people who are expats are usually more like affluent

from white communities, travel for like work, business, that sort of stuff. And I was just wondering like when you were looking through like Zainab's like paperwork and like deportation, like what sort of language was used specifically to kind of like alienate her from what was like mostly like her white uh companions who were allowed access into america and stuff like that the way that i saw in her paperwork her being sort of seen as as deviant um was really

relied upon her sexuality as we see in her story right like her mobility absolutely relied upon her sexuality. As we see in her story, right, like her mobility absolutely relied on her sexuality, right? In that sense, like her sexuality became the way in which she was talked about. Her Syrian-ness was not as like present in her discussion. It wasn't in other people's records. But that also like this idea of her being deviant is, you know, race and sex are so intertwined, right? So for her, what I saw was border inspectors really believing that she has a past of being deviant, right, in quotation marks, and it would only lead to that in the future. And the thing that's interesting about, I think, all of these inspectors' proclamations and deportations, et cetera, having to do with this idea of who

would they be in the United States? A lot of it is about projecting into someone's future, right? So would Zaina be a good citizen? Would she be self-reliant? It's just projection, right? And it's funny because we're talking about like speculative history. That's just what they're doing, right? Like speculating, right? And so that is so entrenched in race and gender, right? Is this person gonna be good? Like, I don't know. How do you know, right? But the way that you decide that is through these categories that a person has been placed in. I was wondering if you could touch a bit more on the idea of moral turpitude. So Zinab was denied entry in the U.S. from Mexico due to this.

So I was wondering what other moral reasons might migrants be barred from entering to the U.S.? Also, to what extent these allegations could be dramatized or exaggerated or even falsified. Such an important thing to realize about the kinds of categories that are being put forth, especially in that period, is that they're all very intentionally vague. I've never really said her name out loud, so I hope I'm not pronouncing it incorrectly. But Etni Lupide is a scholar who writes a lot about sexuality and the border. And, you know, one thing she says, because she talks about in 1875 in the U.S. is the Page Act, which prohibited prostitutes from entering the country. And the fact like how the law was implemented was that mostly just excluded all asian women and so when she talks about it she says you know a lot of scholars talk about how

oh but it's impossible to differentiate prostitutes from non-prostitutes or people didn't know who was a prostitute or wasn't and she says prostitute isn't a isn't a category like it's not a thing just because you did sex work like once in your life, does that mean that you are a category of a prostitute and that's a thing, right? She says, no, like prostitute is a title. It is a category that police have put on poor women to punish them, basically. So I love how you said earlier about how history is incredibly intimate. so I love how you said earlier about how history is incredibly intimate and I feel that sometimes when we are reading history and in a book and it's just words on a page and it's a lot of numbers and dates and you can feel very removed from it and I was wondering since you work with history that

since it's people's lives it's inherently very intimate and personal how do you handle the emotional side of kind of digesting stories of such hardship and difficulty? I mean, like, how do I handle it as in like, I watch a lot of comedy, like if that's sort of what you mean in terms of like, how do you handle the emotions that you read about? I think it also drives me to want to like write about it. And I think actually, as we're talking, like I have a background in theater I was a theater major um and then switched to American Studies and in undergrad but I do think like sometimes I read archives like scripts or or like sort of the big like the beginnings of

a script and so being able to kind of think in that way has been helpful for me. But to go back to the emotional aspect of it, I think there are times where it's really hard. That is something that researchers have to deal with if they want to kind of uncover and bring out these things. But it certainly can take a toll and you wanna take a break and and yeah watch them watch some good comedy colleague of mine was researching the famine during the first world

war in lebanon yeah for years reading that stuff and he's pivoted to food studies yeah a hundred percent cuisine a hundred percent and i think that's also important is to like remind yourself of beauty remind yourself of like fun and joy and that that's also really important to write about and to remember and and again I think there is like a motivation that telling these stories can be cathartic because at least for me like Zainab's story and I'll just speak for myself as somebody who studied from undergrad like critical ethnic studies and studied race and was really interested in it in the United States but never really saw stories historically of Arab women and that's changed since I went to undergrad but

to be able to put that out there for me was like a cathartic experience. So when writing Zainab's story how did you imagine it being used in the future? And in the broader scope, how do you think stories similar can be used to change the view of migrants and sort of like break down political barriers that the migrants face? I don't know in terms of like how I was visualizing it. I just wanted her story to get out there for reasons of challenging our notions of migration, challenging our notions of who, you know, use the U.S.-Mexico border and kind of adding more, I think, more Arab women into U.S. history is like is always a good thing. and so I think for me it was really about like oh wow I've I've I'm kind of finding something I find super interesting and I think I want other people to find it and know that it's super interesting and I can't my friends are bored of me just telling them about my about my archival findings and I don't know how if it will change anyone's like view of migration I don't know I

wish I wish I felt more confident in that. I think that once you put something out there, it has a life of its own. The way that I see it is like this meant a lot to me. Here you go. I hope this means a lot to somebody else. And you can just kind of hope that that that that happens. This point about enthusiasm is very key. You want to reach the people who are enthusiastic so then you can just tell your story and they'll listen without getting impatient. Colleagues can be very impatient when they read writing.

And what was really refreshing for me in doing podcasts and stuff like that is finding the people who generally have interest. And that's your audience. So you create it, but then the audience is always gonna end up being different than what you imagined. So I'm curious to know how you would distinguish your work,

the work of a historian from investigative journalism. The questions that I'm asking are I think more social, perhaps they're more historical and perhaps more theoretical. There are different like ethics that go into journal. You know, journalism has its own set of ethics. Historians have their own set of ethics. I don't know.

I guess that's kind of the difference, but I don't know. What do you think, Chris? I haven't thought about it that much. Well, I've learned that there's a lot to learn from investigative journalists that I kind of, you know, when I finally did learn, it was very helpful. But at the same time, like, don't you think it comes back to the speculative um analysis question like investigative journalists are invested in facts right and our whole point is like look what you think is a fact is a is a constructed thing that that the facts themselves are also fictions at the same time and i don't think that holding that ambiguity

is possible in investigative journalism interesting Interesting. Yeah. Honestly, I think it's important to write all sorts of things and like try your hat on all sorts of writing because I think being too siloed in one thing, like just like you said, like it kind of shuts you off from different questions or different ways of thinking. You are an investigative journalist, but you're also a novelist. You're also a political scientist. You're doing investigative journalist, but you're also a novelist. You're also a political scientist. You're doing all those things at once. Well, I tell my students, like, I consider myself like a detective,

but the stakes are very low because everybody's dead. So I don't have to like find the perpetrator or victim. A lot of cold cases in history. Everyone's dead. Lots of cold cases, but yeah. These were such wonderful questions and you guys are so like i'm just blown away at how just like how wonderful you all are thank you as well it was great uh to get all these uh amazing questions and also the engagement in CoLab and everything. I really appreciate you all really welcoming our guest, Dr. Venda Tawil, to class.

It was obviously a pleasure to have you here. And yeah, this was just another chapter in our ongoing conversations, both in class, but also on the podcast about the how-to of migration. And it continues to be a source of really stimulating questions that I think strike at the heart of our modern societies. There's a reason why people are writing about migration as the quintessential political question, let's say,

because through how people talk about quote-unquote migrants, we actually learn about what they're saying about themselves, about citizenship itself. And so it's very important work, a contribution to our civil society as well. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed this.

And please feel free to email me. Thank you all.