"It's definitely different," said special non-degree graduate student and Arabic teaching assistant Qussay Al-Attabi GS, who arrived in Providence from his native Iraq last summer to take classes and teach at Brown. "It's a new culture, new people, new educational system, but I'm trying to cope with that."
Al-Attabi, who grew up and went to college in Baghdad, served as a part-time interpreter for the U.S. Army in Iraq. His academic experience in the U.S. has been much more demanding than his studies in Iraq, he said, but also much more rewarding.
In addition to taking graduate courses in the Department of English, Al-Attabi instructs students in Arabic. He said he makes an effort in class to talk about his life back home and especially his experience as an interpreter for the military, "time allowing, of course."
"The point of our class is just for us to get experience with conversation," said Kate Ganim '08. "But he definitely has talked about his home ... about the general state of Iraq, though not a lot about his personal experience."
One major difference Al-Attabi sees in his home country is that students do not enjoy the same degree of academic freedom.
Al-Attabi said that all his life, there have been significant restrictions on freedom of speech in Iraq. Academics in particular faced these limits, he added. "It used to be that you could talk about anything except Saddam," he said. "Now with the rise of religious fanaticism in Iraq, you can talk about everything except for certain religions."
"Students in Iraq do not have the same opportunities as in America," he added. "They can only dream of having the same facilities."
Growing up in Iraq during an age of United Nations-enforced sanctions, Al-Attabi remembers when Iraq was prohibited from importing pencils because their graphite was categorized as "dual-use," meaning it could be used for weapons production. "I don't know how many thousands of pencils you would need to make a bomb," he said.
At that time, Iraq was also not permitted to import or copy books, Al-Attabi said. When he studied at the University in Baghdad, the libraries housed only books predating the 1990 sanctions and completely lacked periodicals and journals.
"There was... a cultural cut from the world," Al-Attabi said.
However, Al-Attabi considers himself lucky for the education he received in Iraq, which he said was more available to him because of his father's career as a university professor and his mother's position as a teacher.
When he was translating for the Army, he was "treated really well, with respect," by the Americans he worked with, Al-Attabi said. Traveling with the military helped him see his own culture from a new perspective, he added, and it made the lack of communication between Americans and Iraqis particularly obvious.
"I had to work like a bridge between those two different cultures," he said.
As an interpreter, Al-Attabi said he needed to be sensitive to idiomatic differences and colloquialisms between Arabic and English. Having grown up in Baghdad, Al-Attabi was familiar with the specific Iraqi dialect and the contemporary experience of living in Iraq, which he said was not the case for every interpreter.
In 2003, the U.S. Army had fewer than 30 interpreters for all their forces in Iraq, Al-Attabi said, and most did not speak Iraqi Arabic. Many who were from Iraq had left in the 1960s and 1970s, and were unfamiliar with the experience of living in the country today.
Because of this lack of sufficient quantity and quality of translators, Al-Attabi and many other Iraqis were recruited by the military. Recruitment of Iraqi academics "was fortunate because so many people had the opportunity to work, and... got the chance to cooperate and tell the U.S. about the culture," Al-Attabi said.
Ganim said Al-Attabi's classroom style is "very engaging," and that students are encouraged to participate in conversation in a positive manner.
"He makes it a very comfortable classroom environment, where there's not a ton of pressure," Ganim added. "He does a good job without making it a stressful atmosphere."
Al-Attabi said he feels completely accepted at Brown and has not encountered any discrimination based on his culture or background. Despite the comfortable environment students notice in his classes, Al-Attabi finds his work here at Brown to be extremely demanding, though he said he never stops being grateful for the opportunities here.
Al-Attabi said he is not optimistic that any level of academic freedom will emerge in his homeland. "We might have books in the libraries again, but we will not have people willing and living in the academic environment to read them," he said. "Not within ten years."
