Month: August 2006

On a warm Friday evening, most of the lights were out at the Coffman Union bookstore on the U of M campus. In the back, though (the place is the size of a department store), a hundred chairs were set up and people milled about, greeting one another and conversing in English, Arabic, and Somali. Some of the women were covered; most, however, weren’t. In typical Arab fashion, the scheduled program started a little bit late.

Kathryn Haddad eventually stepped to the podium. “Welcome, everybody, to the release of the eighteenth edition of Mizna, the United States’ only Arab-American literary journal.”

Mizna began in Minneapolis in 1999 as the brainchild of Haddad, a playwright who is also the journal’s director. These days, it’s in libraries and universities all over the country and the world, and has received honors from the Utne Reader and Pushcart Press.
Between the program’s opening, a moment of silence for the wars in the Middle East, its closing, coffee and sweets, and a peaceful Minnesota evening, there were readings from Mizna’s new issue. The inspiration for the material fell between those disparate worlds, too.

The crowd members’ diversity, shared equally among Arab-Americans, African-Americans, and European-Americans, was rather unique for a literary event in Minnesota. The third of these groups was primarily middle-aged and seemed mostly indifferent to fashion, favoring instead practical clothing, canvas bags, and pins with messages. At least three pre-program discussions were fueled by loathing for the current administration. The Arab-Americans and the African-Americans, who were mostly Somali, appeared, in general, more professional in their style and less overtly liberal.

The first reader, Ahmed Yusuf, was Somali, which seemed slightly incongruous given Mizna’s focus. “We struggled with that for a while,” said Haddad after the event, “but we eventually decided to include anyone who can speak to the Arab-American community.” Yusuf’s sing-song delivery of a story about an underdog soccer team from a blighted Somali town addressed sport, rivalries, and war-induced poverty—subjects that would surely have resonated in most Middle Eastern countries. Yusuf rolled his r’s just like an Arab, so delicately that even if he had spoken about raids, interrogations, and external rendition, the inattentive would easily have been lulled into thinking his words were almost sweet. They’re not, of course, and politics were understandably at the heart of many of the other featured readings.

The subject matter wasn’t all the expected politics, however; the readings didn’t always begin and end with a pro-Palestine stance and anti-Bush rants. Poet and playwright Ismail Khalidi was born in Lebanon but grew up in Chicago. In the two poems he read, he directed the same vitriol toward “Chicago’s finest” as he did toward the occupiers of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. While the first arrested him on the way to sunrise prayers and barked ignorant orders, the second “stripped Gaza of their pride and ego.” Khalidi questioned the motivations of the police with as much heartache as he questioned Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet, about a proper response in the face of Israeli occupation.

Brooke Anthony, a volunteer at KFAI radio, read two poems inspired by news coverage of the war in Iraq. She looked every bit the longtime activist behind the podium, a woman opposed to war on general peace-loving principle. As a native-English speaker, she didn’t quite pronounce the names in her poem correctly—the kh in Khayat sounded like a straight hard k, not a soft, gentle, throat-clearing sort of kh. And the r in Ibrahim didn’t roll as charmingly as Ahmed Yusuf’s r’s. In a way, through her imperfect language, Anthony showed that the American cultural struggle to blend aspects of ourselves isn’t restricted to newcomers.

Amid all the strife and difference, this blending, as individuals and as Americans, is at its sweetest when there is a recognizable common ground. Mazen Halabi, who was born in Syria and now works as a software consultant in Fridley, approached the podium with the humble grin of someone who more often reads to his children than to a crowd. His voice gaining in confidence, he told a story of his childhood in Damascus. With the tale’s adolescent humor and grumpy sandwich vendors, Halabi painted a picture that didn’t sound much different from that of a Minnesotan childhood’s—until a friend was taken away by secret police working for the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad. But then, grieving mothers are common to stories from all over, too.

Amid Somali soccer matches, the Chicago police, the anti-war movement, and the secret police, the topic of a poem by P.A. Pashubin, a Polish-American, stood out. She compared the plant purslane to Republicans. While it’s considered a garden weed in this country, several pairs of Arab eyes lit up as she passed around samples of the leafy culprit. “I know this,” one man said. “This is baqli, we use it in fatoush.” The traditional salad of Lebanon, fatoush is served at every important meal. What is viewed as pernicious here is regarded as delicious in a country somewhere else in the world, and as the purslane made the rounds, that typically contradictory notion was not so much reconciled as recognized.

The call came on a cloudless weekday afternoon. “Hey, it’s Luther, I’m going to take off early and fire up the parabolic.” Needless to say, I rushed right over.

“Fire” is not exactly the right word in this instance, as the only flame involved in the parabolic’s operation is more than ninety-one million miles from Earth.

“Luther” is Luther Krueger, a crime prevention specialist with the Minneapolis Police Department, and “the parabolic” is the German SK14, which looks like a satellite dish four feet in diameter, a shining concavity of aluminum that reflects the sky above Luther’s South Minneapolis backyard.

Krueger collects and builds solar cookers. When I arrived, he was dropping potatoes into a pot held fast above the parabolic’s focal point, which can reach a thousand degrees.

The SK14 is the glittering gem of Krueger’s collection, but, an hour later, the yard was cluttered with other models. There’s the twenty-dollar Sunspot, made of cardboard and plastic that folds into a Trivial-Pursuit-sized box. The HotPot is basically a casserole-within-a-casserole surrounded by reflective panels. The Tulsi–Hybrid has a heating element for cloudy days and packs up like a red suitcase. One model, by the Sunstove Organization, is made out of salvaged aluminum lithograph plates from old printing presses.

In the two years since he caught the solar bug, Krueger has amassed about ten different models and given away a half dozen homemade ovens—the Hallacy model—built out of plywood, glass, and insulation. Most heat to between 250 and 350 degrees, and, with a little patience and sunny skies, can cook breads, beans, stews, casseroles, meat and fish, cakes, cookies and pies—anything you don’t need to sauté or fry. “Last summer, I put on twenty pounds,” Krueger said.

Krueger’s wife arrived home just in time for dinner—moist, delicious salmon, soft potatoes, and near-caramelized garlic in bubbling-hot olive oil. She’s all right with her husband’s hobby. “He could be rebuilding motorcycles,” she said.

For Mike and Martha Port, solar cooking is more than a novel way to bake their daily bread. The couple cooked their first solar meal—beef roast with potatoes and carrots—in 1988. Almost twenty years later, their locally based Solar Oven Society, a project of the non-profit Persons Helping People, has produced and sold nearly five thousand ovens in more than forty countries. The goal is to provide people in developing countries with a safe way to cook and pasteurize water without the laborious collection of fuel, related deforestation, and harmful fumes produced by open fires in poorly ventilated kitchens.

Martha Port told of women in Kenya who walk seven hours a day, six or seven days a week, to collect firewood.

To fulfill their mission, volunteer sponsors transport the recycled plastic Sport Solar oven to developing countries, sometimes one or two ovens at a time. The society has conducted four larger pilot projects that sent Sport Solars by the hundreds to the United Arab Emirates, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Afghanistan.

Currently, the society is working on a major contract that will deliver thousands of ovens, Port said, but full details have not been announced.

Port related her story of bringing the first prototypes of the current Sport Solar to Haitians on the island of La Gonave. Nine people were trained to teach others how to cook with the sun.

After the weeklong course, Port sailed to another village on the island to find that one woman from the training had walked home with the Sport and “was already telling a crowd of fifty to sixty people about it,” Port said.

“The environment, nutrition, health, economics—it’s win, win, win,” Port said.

Most of the solar society’s ovens must be purchased either with money or “sweat equity,” Port said. “Things that are free aren’t valued as much,” she said.

The Solar Oven Society is just one of the organizations worldwide preaching the gospel of solar cooking. While Krueger supports the cause, he is not sure he’s seen the perfect philosophy yet. He’d like to see a self-sustaining system, in which local people not only use but manufacture and profit from the ovens.

Back in the United States, Krueger lent me his Sport Solar, which I “fired up” in the backyard before hosting friends for the final match of the World Cup in July. The sun-cooked veggie quiche was a clear favorite over the pesto pizza prepared in a conventional oven. So far, though, my solar-cooking career has ended there; the tree cover in our yard limits me to mid-morning brunch. Ironically, it will take a little deforestation for me to truly join the ranks of the solar-cooking fanatics.

On a Minneapolis fall morning, arriving buses plant casual-Friday-dressed workers along Hennepin Avenue. At most stops, jean-jacketed and khakied women and polo-shirted men stream out, but the passengers who disembark at 730 Hennepin are a different variety. They run the gamut of fashion, from dress shirts and polished shoes to hijabs to basketball jerseys to “Mean People Suck” T-shirts. As they drift into their building just a spitball’s distance from First Avenue, they attract the attention of the Hennepin Avenue crowd, which is exactly what Joel Gibson wants.

Gibson is executive director of Lincoln International High School, an alternative school whose student body is made up exclusively of immigrants and refugees. Established in 1997, Lincoln receives funding from the district; students find out about the school through social service referrals and word of mouth. Numbering nearly three hundred, the students hail from a dozen countries, though most are from Ecuador, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Alternative schools like Lincoln are run by organizations that use district money and their own methods to educate at-risk populations. “Once they get the tools they need to fit into society, they will enrich it,” says Gibson. The school raises three hundred thousand dollars beyond the money from the district to have the small class sizes and individual attention that will allow students to learn English, get job skills, and become collaborative members of society.

On the wall of the five-story school, “My Life” posters plot the paths of individual students from the countries where they were born to their arrivals in Minnesota. One story begins on a farm in Mexico and ends at an after-school job loading trucks at a fruit distributor. Another student tells of being born in Mogadishu to a businessman father, then fleeing to live among his grandmother’s camels in northern Kenya before finally coming to Minneapolis.

The past year was one of adjustment to the new location: new buses to take and more stairs to climb. During passing time, the school explodes with the sounds of slamming lockers—a novelty at the new site, as is hot lunch. The school newspaper brags about the new basketball team and, though many of the students’ cultures disapprove of dating, the school has organized a prom.

Many of Lincoln’s students have lived through war, terror, and other intense traumas. Some have arrived without parents and other family members, and about a third have never before attended school. They are older students, most between eighteen and twenty-two years old, with mustaches, marriages, and children. For some, the main objective can simply be learning to sit through classes for an entire day, along with learning English; for others, it involves navigating more complex social norms.

Suad Mahammud, a Somalian seventeen-year-old clad in a stylish turquoise skirt and hijab, is happy to rave about the school. Because she had attended school and learned English in Uganda, after her family had left Somalia, some friends and family were puzzled by her decision to attend the “immigrant school.” However, for Mahammud the decision was part of exercising her right, in America, to make choices. She wanted to attend a school where there is no violence, where students listen to and respect teachers. “We are all here for one goal,” she says.

There is an overwhelming sense among the students that despite their efforts, they and their school are going unnoticed. While the students who are in the country as refugees feel more secure than their immigrant classmates, there is still a permeating sense of otherness. The school’s downtown location is a step toward a solution to that segregation, as are planned internships and other interactions with the downtown business community. One of the reasons the school moved downtown from South Minneapolis last fall was to bring visibility to this hidden population. Even the orange and blue awnings that flutter outside the building were chosen not to show the school’s colors, but for their eye-catching combination. “If people would come in and check it out, they would see that we are trying to be the best people we can be,” says Mahammud.

Mahammud’s history teacher is screening All Quiet on the Western Front. Mr. Pilgram is the classic high school history teacher, dressed in a blue cardigan and a tie printed with a world map. An American flag-print Puffs box sits on his desk. “They’re burning books here,” he says, pointing to the movie screen. “Book?” one girl puzzles. Her classmate turns to her, whispers “B-o-o-k,” and opens and closes her hands in the international symbol for book.