Praxis and a Liberal Arts Education
By Lekan Aleshe-Shittu, Staff Writer
Illustration by Emma Shoaf, Production Assistant
When I lived in Cairo, I often found myself in a small, dimly-lit room filled with cigarette smoke. Many people—most of them Sudanese—sat huddled together over cups of tea, listening intently as someone read a poem, sang a song, or told a story. I first stumbled into this room by way of a dear friend’s warm invitation. She organized open mic nights for Sudanese youth in Cairo displaced by the current war. Within this warm environment was an energy that sparked considerate and deliberate conversation. We spoke about Blackness often; about inhabiting an identity deemed inferior by wider Egyptian society. We spoke about poetry, violence, Islam; about our fondness for calls to prayer lolling on air thick with heat. Most importantly, we spoke about community—place-making against the backdrop of the liminal, the unknown, and frequently, the unsafe.
During this time, I was simultaneously enrolled in a graduate seminar housed in the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo. In this small course chock-full of migration specialists, refugee resettlement caseworkers and NGO staff, the complexities of migration and mobility became so much more evident. Despite this, displacement took on a seemingly intangible quality: It was legal definitions, international agreements, administrative procedures. During open-mic nights, it was daily life.
It got me thinking about how, sometimes, my Oberlin education—-the one which I love and cherish wholly, the one which I tie so much of my own self worth to, could be divorced from reality. I’ve sat in many a Politics class (I’m a minor) dissecting the horrors of war, the triggers of violence, the death and destruction wrought upon peoples of the Global South, while scrolling through Twitter. I’ve sat in classes dealing with colonialism, imperialism and genocide, inundated by this weird sense of disconnect hanging over the classroom like a cloud.
It occasionally feels as though what we learn and the identities we learn about are intangible and ephemeral—people who live in a very, very far away land. We speak and write about them, yes, but I wonder if we truly think about them. I’ve spoken about this before (and I will never stop talking about it because it truly was some fuckshit and I’m still pissed off), but I remember my first week of freshman year, when my Politics professor divided our class into colonizers and colonized. He then, with an air of humor and confidence, instructed us to write the pros and cons of each on the blackboard. Even then, I understood that he wasn't being racist. I understood that he was trying to teach the class about abuse, subjugation, the incredibly powerful and destructive ideas of racial supremacy espoused by the imperial core. But the disconnect between real life and our lovely little reality in picturesque Oberlin, Ohio, had never been clearer.
I remember being one of two Black people in the room, and I remember being told, “Don’t be pressed” (by that same professor), when I tried to express my discomfort. I remember crying in frustration and anger. I remember thinking, “This is real life for so many people,” and here are we, in all our privilege, playing pros and cons.
In truth, this is probably one of the reasons why I am an Africana Studies major, and one of the reasons why I do not shut up about Blackness or African identity—it is impossible for these things to be far away, because I understand both myself and the work that I do to belong to a global and interconnected community of Black and marginalized peoples—it is one of the only ways in which I can tie my education to social reality. Even then, the question remains, what does this knowledge look like the moment I step out of here?
I’ve deeply appreciated my Oberlin education (it has changed my fucking life in ways that I cannot even begin to comprehend), but now that it is almost over, I’m rather scared about what I will do with it. I have learned so fucking much about this terrifying world we inhabit. I have written hundreds of pages about it. How then do I transform my education, this one which—in absolute truth—is probably the best thing to ever happen in my life thus far—into a tool that’s actually useful? How does one bridge that disconnect between classroom and reality?
In Cairo, I realized that sitting in my Migration and Refugee Studies class and attending my friend’s open mic nights were two completely different (albeit incredibly important) experiences. I’ve been obsessed with the idea of praxis since then. Of not only merging my Oberlin education with tangible action, but being more present in my classes—especially those that deal with really painful and scary issues. Maybe I don’t text my friends when learning about geopolitics. Maybe I don’t play Wordle against the backdrop of a conversation on global health problems. Fuck, I don’t know.
I’m still figuring out what this praxis could look like at and after Oberlin, and so, I thought I’d open up the conversation to anyone who wanted to maybe speak about it. I don’t exactly know how to reconcile these ideas, but hey, maybe I could learn from you.
