MARCH 2017

lifelong degree
A Ph.D. in Arab Studies and Doctorate in Life Experiences
BY WEAM NAMOU
Born in Basra, Professor Yasmeen
Hanoosh left Iraq in
1995, at the age of 17 to come
to the United States. Despite knowing
very little English, she was able
to attain, within 13 years, a Ph.D. in
Arab Studies from the University of
Michigan and she is currently an associate
professor of Arabic language
and literature at Portland State University.
When she first moved to America,
Hanoosh lived in the City of Southfield
and went to Southfield Lathrup
High School where she set herself up
for her first great challenge.
“I went to the library and looked
at the books and I just wanted to read
all of them,” she said. “But they were
in English, and I could barely read
English.”
She picked up one book and said
to herself that if she could read it
from cover to cover, then she has
accomplished a great thing in life. It
took her an hour to read each page
because she had to look up so many
unfamiliar words in the dictionary.
“It was a gradual and painful process
that took months to get through,
but I went through it, and I basically
taught myself English,” she said.
Aside from having to learn English,
Hanoosh encountered other difficulties
in her new home.
“Those were very interesting
times,” she said. “One usually expects
the culture shock to be with
the American culture. My bigger
shock was the Chaldean community
in America. It was neither the
Hollywood community that I saw on
television, nor the Chaldeans I knew
in Iraq.”
Hanoosh had come from a war
zone. At the end of the Iraq-Iran war,
her family’s home was bombed. They
later endured the Gulf War and the
sanctions.
“There, people were concerned
with life or death,” she said. “Here,
they were more concerned with the
symbolic meaning of Chaldeans.”
For her, these issues, although
valid, seemed irrelevant. It took her
Yasmeen takes a break.
decades to understand their relevancy
in the West.
“There was a lot of indirect pressure
to identify as non-Arab and that
became the focus, using big crosses to
indicate we’re not Arab, we’re Chaldeans,
and this became the discourse
of victimology. It’s a defensive kind
of identity. The Christians in Iraq
didn’t have the luxury to think about
these things because they had to figure
out how to survive while bombs
were going overhead. ”
At Southfield Lathrup, Hanoosh
had to cope with issues she didn’t
have to deal with in Iraq, such as selfesteem
and a sense of belonging. She
was literally a world away from Basra,
where she was confident with herself.
“Chaldeans felt they were not
white, or black, or any other group,
so they had all sorts of concerns
about their conduct,” she said. “In
Iraq, what women and men had to
do or not do was a given.”
She feels incredibly lucky to have
stumbled upon people who supported
her in her pursuits and fostered
it by sending her in the right directions.
Meanwhile, she also had to
contend with her family who didn’t
understand why she had chosen the
path she chose and were suspicious
whether it had any rewards.
“In our community, the pressure
to conform is very strong and there’s
little appreciation or understanding
of other pursuits of the mind,” she
said. “The easier solution would have
been to give up.”
But that was not in Hanoosh’s
nature. Her ambitiousness led her
to set incredibly difficult tasks for
herself. She accomplished them by
working hard and not socializing.
She achieved great status with her
degrees, several publications and a
number of honors, grants and fellowships,
including the International
Studies and Foreign Language grant
from the U.S. Department of Education,
Florence-Gould Foundation
Award, and the National Endowment
for the Arts Translation Award.
With all this success, she finally became
“legitimate.”
“My family didn’t support me to
pursue that path until they saw the
results,” she said. “Then they appreciated
the hard work.”
Today, Professor Hanoosh directs
the Arab program at Portland State
University (PSU), which teaches the
Arabic language and Middle Eastern
culture.
“In my own research, I work on
the more marginal themes within
these subjects and I pursue projects
to help the refugees,” she said.
One of her efforts is the Arab refugee
assistance program, an exchange
program that helps Iraqi refugees acclimate
to Oregon with help from
PSU students. It also helps expose
students of Arabic at PSU to the real
culture that they’re trying to study.
“There isn’t an established Chaldean
and Arabic community to help
them here,” she said. “I look at Michigan
as an example of how we can
help them integrate. There’s nothing
like that here.”
This year, Hanoosh is also leading
a community conversation throughout
Oregon through the Institute for
the Humanities’ Conversation Project.
The topic is “Arab Refugees in
our Midst: Terrorism, Bigotry and
Freedom.”
Given the adversity she went
through, Professor Hanoosh advices
the young women in the community
not to get discouraged from following
their path.
“Don’t let the larger mainstream
expectations direct your life,” she
said. “There’s a lot of diversity within
our community. There are Chaldeans
all over this country, all over this
world, pursuing their heart’s desire
and that’s oaky. When we don’t pursue
knowledge, we don’t find about
this diversity. When you pursue your
own desires, you will stumble upon
these people.”
26 CHALDEAN NEWS MARCH 2017