by Jie Wu
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| "Boatman Crossing the River" by Jie Wu |
1.
It’s almost Eid, I thought to myself: I need to go across the river and visit the teachers and students at Talimi Haq School. The school is a non-formal educational center run by Howrah Pilot Project in an industrial workers’ settlement, populated mostly by Muslim households, in the city of Howrah, India. Here, students and volunteer teachers address each other as sister and brother, using the Urdu terms “baji”(sister) and “bhai”(brother).
A few days ago, Amina baji had invited me to school for the upcoming Eid-al Fitr festival. Eid, also known as the "Feast of Breaking the Fast,” celebrates the completion of – the twenty-nine or thirty-day period of fasting from dawn to sunset undertaken by many Muslim residents in Priya Manna Basti, where Talimi Haq School is located. During Eid celebrations, people eat special foods, wear new clothes, offer prayers, share gifts between friends and family and go to attend Eid fairs.
In 2014, I had the chance to celebrate Eid with the students and teachers at Talimi Haq School. For more than six months, I had been working as a volunteer English teacher and researcher there. As a researcher, I looked into how residents from Howrah and Kolkata (cities on opposite sides of a river) related to the river Hooghly (also known as the Ganga, or Ganges) that flows in between. I had hoped to be able to grasp the complex relationships between people and the Hooghly river in the contemporary context of globalization. I alternated my time between the roles of researcher and English teacher in the school.
After three months of difficult research work, I had hit a major wall. I started questioning myself and the motivations behind my research. Would my work at all benefit the students and teachers of Talimi Haq School? Sometimes the answer seemed to be no, and so I dedicated more time and effort towards my other role as an English teacher in the school. I thought that perhaps I could contribute more to the students by teaching them English rather than selfishly collecting data for my personal study and possible publication.
It was during my short stint as an English teacher in Talimi Haq School that I came to realize that I was infected with a dangerous syndrome – the White Man’s burden. This syndrome can be described as a seemingly selfless desire (in reality being selfish because it is a personal desire) to "civilize" and save the non-white peoples from their perceived savagery and ignorance.
The British novelist and poet, Rudyard Kipling, popularized this term after writing the poem "White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands”. In this poem, Kipling called upon the U.S. to take on the burden of empire, similar to what Britain and other European nations had done, in order to civilize and save the non-white peoples, whom he referred as "your new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child.” Although I am not "white", I could see that my privileges as a Chinese American, brought up and educated in Portugal and later in the U.S., led me to becoming infected with the White Man’s burden syndrome.
I arrived in India proudly armed with a Cambridge TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate. I thought that this English teaching certificate and my previous experience as an English tutor for a literacy NGO made me more than qualified for the new teaching assignment at Talimi Haq School. I saw myself as the foreign teacher who would "save" the students from their chronic English learning problems. Direct in-field experience quickly proved to me how unqualified and untrained I was to teach the students at the school. For instance, my inability to speak Hindi or Urdu, communication failures and cultural differences made it very difficult for me to teach the students at this center. I also saw how local teachers could teach the students in a much more efficient, sustainable and culturally specific way than I could. I was humbled and thus began my ongoing effort to cleanse myself of the disease of the White Man’s burden.
My teaching experience at Talimi Haq School taught me about how there was nobody and nothing at all within my sense of ‘I’ – the egotistical teacher, to "save."
It was only my mind that urgently needed to be saved from its teacher-and-savior complex, something ingrained in the global system of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism. English teaching, if not carefully and consciously undertaken, is a powerful tool of submission, domination and colonization of non-English speaking peoples, which in most cases also means non-White people. After slowly discerning the imperialism of English teaching, I took up the role of an assistant to the local teachers and helped them in whichever ways I could. I observed that the change in my attitude made it easier for me to get along with the other teachers, but I could still sense there was some kind of gap or invisible barrier that prevented me from fully understanding and connecting with the teachers and students of the school. I thought about this often. I would ask myself: What it is that separates me from the students and teachers at Talimi Haq School? Is it language, culture, class, caste, gender, privilege or religion that pushes us away from each other?
As time flowed by like the river Hooghly these existential questions lay unanswered in my consciousness. After a nine-month stay in India, doing research and English teaching, I returned in December 2014 to visit my family in Lisbon, Portugal. Back in Lisbon, the memories of India being with the teachers and students of Talimi Haq School kept returning to me. I tried suppressing them but all my efforts were in vain. What it is that separates me from the students and teachers at Talimi Haq School? Is it language, culture, class, caste, gender, privilege or religion that pushes us away from each other?
Continue to Part 2 here.
To support the project that Talimi Haq School is currently undertaking led by the local teachers, please visit their Indiegogo page here.
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