Dearborn Exhibit is Snap-shot of America
Freeze the frame. There were 29 kids involved through most of a school year, doing interviews and shooting videos and telling the stories of their lives, but freeze that one frame and you’ll capture the spirit of the whole project.
The kids were from April Kincaid’s journalism class at McCollough-Unis School in Dearborn. Ninety percent of the student body there, and all but one of the kids in the class, are of Arab descent.
These are seventh-graders, part of the first group of Americans with no memories that predate 9/11. They live in a city that national commentators sneeringly call Dearbornistan, where a crackpot preacher from Florida with a congregation the size of their class and an ego the size of their building comes to protest things that don’t exist.
Freeze the frame. The kids’ words and pictures are on display at the Arab American National Museum, in an exhibit called “In the Heart of Arab America: A Middle School Perspective.” There’s a website, too, www.livingtextbook.aaja.org.
Go to one or the other and find the slideshow by Mirmat Chammout, who was born at Oakwood Hospital. She was named for a famous Lebanese singer, she loves lamb chops and sushi, and she cries when she watches “Titanic.” She snapped pictures on St. Patrick’s Day and set a slide show to music, and freeze the frame:
There’s a girl in the back row. She’s Muslim, like most everyone else. She’s wearing a headscarf — and atop it, green and goofy, is a set of shamrock deely boppers.
These are 12- and 13-year-olds. They wear shirts from Hollister and American Eagle. In a few years, they will have driver’s licenses, and they will beg for reasons to zip to the store. Some will go on to college and some will go to work and some will join the Army.
For now, they wear headscarves and deely boppers. They are Arab American kids, and you can sort those three words any way you like. Arab, American, kids.
Journalistic help
The project was called the Living Textbook. It was sponsored by the Asian American Journalists Association. Much of the Middle East is in Asia, including Iran, the birthplace of Emilia Askari’s dad.
She’s a former newspaper reporter who lives in Franklin, where she has two kids and a husband who’s a GM engineer. Askari co-directed the project while she finished a master’s degree at the University of Michigan. She says it was not random chance that led her to McCollough-Unis School.
With the 10th anniversary of 9/11 looming, we can expect a torrent of words about the attacks and the impact and the aftermath. It’s an almost surprising milestone — 10 years already? — of a seminal moment, and Askari’s group wanted to give some young voices a chance to be heard.
“We tried to give them some storytelling skills,” she says, “and then we turned them loose.”
Diverse ideas
Joe Grimm of Bloomfield Township, the other director, talks in one of the videos about an assignment. He was going to tell the class to write about the upheaval in Egypt, but Kincaid, the teacher, had a better idea.
Let them pick their own subjects, she said, and Egypt turned up in reports anyway. But so did the Super Bowl, texting, and the time one of the boys caught a big fish.
The kids reported on the Arab Spring, and a mom who stays up late gathering scraps of information on the telephone.
But they also wrote about the Tigers and wore Pistons gear on jersey day.
Mohamad Zahra, who wants to play football at U-M, took pictures at Thanksgiving dinner. So did Jamila Nasser, who wants to be a principal. There was turkey and rice in both houses, and also hummus and tabouleh.
It was delicious, they said, and it was as all-American as a St. Patrick’s deely bopper.
Neal Rubin
The Detroit News