“Diaries of an Academic of Color” is an illustrated series that portrays the daily lives of Global South academics in the Global North, living and working through the annihilation of Palestinians and the aggressions against Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere.
Through free-form writing and illustration, the contributors reflect on what divestment can mean for academics of color within knowledge-producing institutions across the Global North. Grounded in the urgency of documenting the present moment and its reverberations in academia, the series reveals how the dehumanization of the “other” has always been structural and systemic.
This story is by Myriam Dalal, with illustrations by Pascale Ghazaly.
Having a conscience is making everything much harder.
As if we needed one more layer of complication to add to our “survival of the fittest” battle as Arab academics in the west.
Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, and the war on Palestine, Lebanon, bits of Syria and bits of Yemen in October of 2023-which coincided with my appointment as a research associate at a university in Europe- my work plan started incorporating multi-level scrutiny measures:
For the places I’m invited to speak at, the funding that I seek for my activities and projects, the people I collaborate with, the researchers I interact with, the university where I work, and our center’s preexisting/ongoing/future collaborations, as well as the research projects conducted here, the way the university communicates about its international collaborations, etc.
And when you’re already in a space where your very being is attacked every single day, from the moment you open your door in the morning till the moment you go back to bed at night, this means you’re adding to your already achy shoulders a new reason to shrug.
You say it’s the mattress that got you this back and shoulder pain, but you know deep inside that it’s Orientalism, you just don’t know how to explain it to the white physician.
Being an Arab woman of color comes with all its “shades of anger” as the amazing Rafeef Ziadeh would say. The orientalist machine starts from the very state administration to the individual level that seeks to discredit you, belittle you, and fetishize you or in its most positive manifestation, save you…
