Teaching Peace by Questioning Borders: Donne, Frost, Kingsolver

In the summer of 2009, I was privileged to be included in a Fulbright-Hayes Summer Workshop. We spent a solid month traveling in Western Turkey, led by University of Michigan professor Gottfried Hagan. Dr. Hagan, the coordinator for the university's Middle East and Africa Cultural Studies Program, was born in Istanbul to a German family and lived there until the age of eight. He himself was a good example of the question the Fulbright Workshop was studying—the question of Turkish identity and the problems that develop from the confusions that exist there in Turkey and that have troubled Turkish people for centuries. Our first meeting was with the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople in Istanbul, who spoke of the Armenian Genocide circa 1917 and the related subsequent transfer or mutual expulsion or execution of roughly 1.5 million people, most of whom were Greek expatriates. For the next four weeks, our cohort of sixteen Fulbrighters ranged over the countryside in a variety of activities: examining ancient ruins of Hittites and Trojans (the ghosts of war); speaking with Istanbul city traffic planners about urban conflict; hearing lectures on Turkish culture at Sabanci University; studying the charismatic biography of Mustafa Kimmel (later honorifically renamed as Atatürk—Father of the Turks) and the monuments, shrines, and frequent adoration in his memory; visiting the tomb of Rumi, the Sufi poet, in the ardently Muslim city of Konya; observing the divergent practices of covering among Turkish women; and discussing Turkey's interest in joining the European Union with governmental officials in the emphatically secular capital city of Ankara. It was an exhausting and exhilarating month of activity, often involving more than three excursions or visits in a single day. At the end of our tour, I cornered Dr. Hagan and said, with mild exasperation, "Look, Gottfried, we have been seeing an amazing variety of cultural truths here, and are very grateful, but at the end of our trip, can you tell us what you wanted us to come to understand about Turkish identity? We've seen so much, and it seems so chaotic and conflicted. What is the point you are so eager for us to figure out?" He paused, as if a coach speaking to the team in the huddle, and said, "I would have you understand that national identity is a curse . . . that the things that separate people and create borders or identity differences between them are essentially evil." This then is the baseline perception that confirmed for me what was true for Turkey as well as for us in the United States. Turkey is a country that is 98% Muslim but maintains a strongly secular government and public sphere of discourse. The call to prayer echoes through the streets five times a day. The people are not, to contradict former GOP candidate Rick Perry, terrorists. They are one of the few forces of stability in the Middle East (witness recent struggles with Syria). Moreover, their internal conflicts are not far from ours in that the separation of church and state is a matter of daily debate.

The Fulbright goal is to familiarize teachers with cultural difference and for us to then bring back to our students a greater awareness of the greater world. I had already become sensitive to such dynamics. In December of 2003, I recorded an essay for broadcast on my local PBS affiliate, WKMS, in Murray, Kentucky: "The Immensity of Small Wonder," a meditation concerned with Barbara Kingsolver's 2002 collection of essays, Small Wonder. I promised myself I would write about it because it causes me to remember the duties we owe each other, as well as ourselves. Kingsolver is no stranger to the essay as a literary form, having published an earlier collection, High Tide in Tuscon: Essays from Now or Never, shortly after her initial success as a novelist in the late 1980s. In that set of essays, she wrote about leaving her Kentucky home and moving out west in a rather intrepid bid for independence and a new life. Kingsolver is unlike many Kentucky writers who leave...