The Question of the Question is the Foreigner: Towards an Economy of Hospitality

Isn’t the question of the foreigner [étranger] a foreigner’s question? Coming the foreigner, from abroad [étranger]?

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality

The Law of World Citizenship Shall be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality
Emmanuel Kant

“If someone else could have written my stories,” Elie Wiesel said: “I would not have written them. I have written them in order to testify.” To testify, Shoshana Felman argues, is “to vow to tell, to promise and produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth.” This is because “no one bears witness for the witness,” and as a witness, this writer is under the ethics and the obligation to testify. Here, personal testimony, personal experience, as bell hooks put it, becomes “such a fertile ground for the production of liberatory [praxis] because it forms the base of our theory making.” It is, or can be, a way to know and can inform how we know what we know. The story I vow to tell in this article is a personal story. It dares to think through the reception of my body, my name, and my accent; that is, how I am gazed at, received, and hence treated. As a “foreigner” who is put in a different line every time I fly or go through the airport, as someone who is searched in person and who missed his flight because “they” had to check whether my name was in the terrorist list, and as someone who is always told “you speak different,” with an accent, the repetition of this story “appoints” me to think through its significance.

This is an immigrant Black body that is assumed to be Muslim in a post-9/11 United States. It was born and grew up in Sudan, studied in France, and holds the Canadian passport. For political reasons, it found itself as a political refugee in Canada, my second home, and for job reasons, it finds itself presently in a small college town in Northwest Ohio. Involuntarily, as we shall see, it finds itself in a “third space,” torn between here-and-now and there-and-memory. Given this bodily experience, the question of the question is not a theoretical one, indeed, it is too personal to be otherwise. It summons and beseeches me as a witness, and raises a number of questions: First, “how can the hosts (hôtes) and guests of cities of refuge be helped to recreate, through work and creative activity, a living and durable network in new places and occasionally in a new language”? Thinking specifically of the hosts, second, what reception do they extend to foreigners, those whose papers are not in order or those simply without papers (CF, 16)? Third, what is the nature of this ethic of reception, this economy of hospitality and how is it cultivated? Finally, do they receive foreigners as parricides, parasites or enemies with no right to asylum and who, in their minds, potentially commit acts of terrorism, or as beings at home with themselves (l’être-soi chez soi)?

Let us not anticipate simple responses to such questions, yet we already know certain things about foreigners. We know that they are coming, that they are already here, that they are staring us in the eye and reminding us that we have proper names and these names refer us somewhere else: to the old country. We walk up and ask them: “what is your name? tell me your name, what should I call you, I who am calling on you, I who want to call you by your name? What am I going to call you?” (OH, 27). Our question was not predicated on duty and obligation but on ethos and desire. We genuinely wanted to know, but the question seemed perturbing and confusing to them, hence they were not able to answer it. They did not understand the question. They did not speak “our” language. Language cheated us hosts and guests. It stood in the middle like a haunting Kafkaesquian figure. We didn’t know in what language they could address us or in what language they could receive ours; we didn’t know how to interrogate them; and above all, we didn’t know their names. Questions such as “who are you? where do you come from? what do you want?” (OH, 131) became unnecessary, if not outright violent. Contrary to their original intentionality which was warm welcoming, these questions moved us from hospitalité to pas d’hospitalité, or from hospitality to hostility.

This is the question of the foreigner. The foreigner is the other, the guest, the immigrant, the exile, the deported, the expelled, the rootless, the stateless, the lawless nomad, the displaced, those who come or go abroad, those who “turn up” at our front doors and “traumatize” (OH, 78). They traumatize, first, because we don’t know what to do with them. Do we give them asylum, “home,” and thus welcome them? If so, how? Or do we expel and return them to the place from which they were expelled? Second, they traumatize us through their stories. These tend to discomfort our comfortable selves and homes. This is well illustrated in the following example. I gave a public lecture on the genocide in DarFur, Sudan, to a group of highly educated senior citizens in Northwest Ohio. One of their central question was why should they care. They worked all their lives, they said, they saved good money and they are living good and comfortable lives. Clearly, whenever the question of the foreigner is posed, it has to be inverted into ethics: How can we go on living after witnessing trauma? Being Sudanese myself and a refugee I wonder how much I traumatize their comfortable homes! I wonder how much empathy they will offer the next refugee who knocks on their door and say, “here I am”! (OH, 56) Despite their absolute best intention, they invited me to talk about DarFur after all, these senior citizens cannot talk about what they do not know. And this is what makes the question of the question so urgent, especially after 9/11.

Reading through Jacques Derrida’s book, Of Hospitality, my intent in this article is to articulate an “economy of hospitality.” First and primarily, I want to ask: How do we welcome the foreigner; how conditional or unconditional this welcoming, this hospitality? Second, being the foreigner myself, when do I become the host, or will I always be the guest, the perpetual foreigner? Finally, in my classroom, where I am supposed to welcome students, be the host, what does this mean in relation to being a foreigner? The paper is guided by two hypotheses: 1) in North America, I shall always be the “foreigner” thanks to language, race, and my proper name, but 2) this foreignness becomes a resource, source, and capital from which to draw and thanks to which I can be a host in my classroom. I am using the term North America through out the paper to refer to Canada (where I lived) and the U.S. (where I am living). The reader is thus requested kindly to travel with me back and forth, North and South of the 49th Parallel.

UN/CONDITIONAL HOSPITALITY

The law of hospitality is a law of tension. In fact, Derrida argued, the law of hospitality is plural, it contains two laws: conditional and unconditional. Unconditional or absolute hospitality is a law that breaks with the law of hospitality as right or duty. Instead, it “requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner… but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names” (OH, 25). It is an unquestioning welcome, where a double effacement takes place: an effacement of the question and the name. They both take a back seat, become unnecessary. However, Derrida asked, “Is it more just and more loving to question or not to question? to call by the name or without the name?” (OH, 29). His response is emphatic in that within the law of unconditional hospitality, “Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is citizen of another country, a human… or a divine creature… male or female” (OH, 77).

To do so, unconditional hospitality calls for suspending language, holding back of the temptation to ask the other who s/he is, what her/his name is, where s/he comes from, etc. (135). Unconditional hospitality, in sum, is a gracious act, a gift that is not governed by duty (performed out of duty), and certainly not about paying a debt or participating in an economy of exchange: my gift should not make you feel that you owe me your life. It is a law without law (83), where the stranger turns into an awaited guest and someone to whom you say not only “come,” but “enter”: “enter without waiting, make a pause in our home without waiting, hurry up and come in, “come inside,” “come without me,” not only toward me, but within me: occupy me, take place in me” (123).

This gesture of unconditional gift, this act of love is impossible without sovereignty of oneself over one’s home. The law of hospitality therefore, for Derrida, is the law of one’s home. The alien, the stranger other is welcomed as non-enemy. Ironically, if not tragically, one can become xenophobic in order to protect one’s sovereignty, one’s own right to unconditional hospitality, the very home that makes the latter possible. (Think about the Patriotic Act passed by the U.S. Congress after the tragic events of 9/11, where conditional laws are imposed not only on foreigners, but on the very idea of democracy.) Once this is the case, the guest becomes an undesirable foreigner and as host I risk becoming their hostage (55). Retaining the self as self, very significantly, I need to be master at home, affirm my being there, and retain authority over that place. I do so by “saying” (usually by passing laws): this place belongs to me, we are in my home, welcome and feel at home but on the condition that you obey the rules of hospitality. Henceforth, the foreigner is allowed to enter the host’s home under conditions the host has determined.

Derrida refers to this unconditional hospitality as “the law,” a universal, absolute and singular. For Derrida, unconditional hospitality is meaningless without its plural and dialectic other: “the laws.” The laws of hospitality are an expression of earthly laws and duties that are always conditioned and conditional, hence creating conditional hospitality. The law is above the laws, however, as he succinctly put it, “even while keeping itself above the laws of hospitality, the unconditional law of hospitality needs the laws, it requires them” (79). This is because to become effective the law has to be concrete, tangible, determined, and near, otherwise it risks “being abstract, utopian, illusory, and so turning over its opposite.” Conditional laws, Derrida adds, “would cease to be laws of hospitality if they were not guided, given inspiration, given aspiration, required, even, by the law of unconditional hospitality” (79).

If there are no laws governing items such as visas, border crossing, local, national and international traveling, arm sales, technological communication, or even the right to asylum, to name just a few, unconditional hospitality becomes an impossible possibility. This is due to the fact that, though we as individuals might desire living in the ville refuge (refuge city) or ville franche (open city) where migrants and the expelled may seek unconditional hospitality and sanctuary, these cities can not escape geography (where are they in the globe and how do people get there?), law (are they governed by the Geneva Convention and international laws?), language (what language do/will people speak once they get there?), etc. As a matter of fact, in the case of the State, it is illegal, not to say impossible, to welcome unconditionally, especially after 9/11 and especially in the United States. The “foreigners” in the U.S. with names like mine, Ibrahim, could recite by heart the book of “laws of conditional hospitality.” Top of these laws is: Thou shall not piss the U.S. government, represented in local police, FBI or CIA!

There can only be conditional hospitality there. Will Ibrahim always be a foreigner in North America? I will address this question later. The imaginary invoked by the name Ibrahim, significantly, recovers an assumed relationship between hospitality and the question, in other words of a conditional hospitality that begins with the name. The name invokes a place of birth and language. The foreigner is a foreigner by birth, born in a foreign land where people speak a different language than that of the host country. Inept at speaking the language, the foreigner “always risks being without defense before the law of the country that welcomes … him; the foreigner is first of all foreign to the legal language in which the duty of hospitality is formulated, the right to asylum, its limits, norms, policing, etc. He has to ask for hospitality in a language which by definition is not his own” (15). A central question that Derrida poses in relation to this is: what if he was speaking the language of the host country, with all that that implies, would he still be a foreigner and how do we think about hospitality in regard to him? Thinking through my classroom, again, I will address this paradox later.

The exiles, the deported, the expelled, the rootless, the stateless, absolute foreigners, Derrida observes, share two sources of sighs, two nostalgias: their dead ones and their language. “On the one hand,” he writes, “they would like to return, at least on a pilgrimage, to the place where their buried dead have their last resting place… On the other hand, [they] often continue to recognize the language, what is called the mother tongue, as their ultimate homeland, and even their last resting place” (89). Clearly, we are dealing with a particular conception of language, a new name to an old phenomenon: language as a place, a homeland that never leaves us and we always come back to; a mother tongue that is a “sort of mobile habitat, a garment or a tent… a second skin you wear on yourself” (89). Language as the last condition of belonging, the most mobile of personal bodies, my cellular phone that I carry “on me, with me, in me, as me … a mouth, and ear, which make it possible to hear yourself-speaking” (91).

If language is so central to the experience of the foreigner, there is a second layer of language that concerns not only the foreigner but also the citizens of the host nation in general: the language of the law. In the U.S., the law (or more accurately laws) of conditional hospitality is the Law of the Father. The master of the house, the host, the authorities, the nation, the State, the boss, the spouse, the lord, the king, the president is the one who lays down the laws of hospitality. “He represents them and submits to them to submit the others to them,” that is to say, he speaks with authority and through an authorized language (149). In so doing, he inflicts violence that most likely is recognized and recognizable only to and by those upon whom the laws are applied. Muslims and Middle-Easterns in the U.S. are currently experiencing what is recognized and recognizable to African Americans for a long time: the violence of being the absolute Other. Hospitality can only be conditional and to survive one is almost required to “have the gift of second sight” or, using Nietzschean terms, “the most subtle of ears” (20). That is to say, if we cannot hear the cry of the foreigner, and if we cannot see the foreigner crying – mostly because of lack experience (“For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear,” Nietzsche argued (20)) – that does not mean nothing is there, that the foreigner is not crying.

So, Derrida concludes, in the eyes of the law, the exiles, the deported, the expelled, the rootless, the stateless above all are foreigners. They should be warmly welcomed, given asylum, and have the right to hospitality, but they should fall under the law of the land, they have a reciprocal obligation. Hospitality must be extended to them, Derrida emphasized, “certainly, but remains, like the law, conditional, and thus conditioned in its dependence on the unconditionality that is the basis of the law” (73). In other words, a tension, a dialecticism must remain between the law and the laws of hospitality. The former is hyperbolic and unconditional and the latter is conditional and juridico-political. “We will,” Derrida contends, “ always be threatened by this dilemma between, on the one hand, unconditional hospitality that dispenses with law, duty, or even politics, and, on the other, hospitality circumscribed by law and duty” (135). The economy and the ethics of hospitality must straddle the two. The two are and should be inseparable. Ideally, they should meet in, at, and during that moment that Derrida calls “moment without moment,” where they both imply and exclude each other, simultaneously, where they “incorporate one another at the moment of excluding one another,” where they exhibit “themselves to each other, one to the others, the others to the other” (81).

PAS D’HOSPITALITÉ: BEING THE GHOST

To define who is the xenos, the foreigner, in a land of foreigners is virtually impossible. The very question, a critic might wonder, is unnecessary, feeds into xenophobia, and authorizes those who “speak an odd sort of language” (5) or with an “accent” be called “foreigners.” My simple response is: not to speak about foreignness does not do away with the existential phenomenon of the “event” nor the violence incurred as a result of its presence. Not to talk about it is a luxury afforded to few, an ethical position that I as a displaced subject cannot afford to take. Quoting Eli Wiesel again: “If someone else could have written my stories, I would not have written them. I have written them in order to testify.” And since testimony cannot be simply relayed, repeated or reported by another without thereby losing its function as a testimony, there is a need for personal testimonies, as I already indicated. This debate is too significant to be put aside, but we must. We are confronted with questions of “being,” not simply definitions, with the impossibility of this writer’s being in North America. The questions were first raised in Canada and are continuing now in the United States. As I have shown elsewhere, most displaced subjects find themselves straddling between here and now and there and memory, between the “old” and the “new home.” Marked mostly by language, the question of hospitality poses itself in the everyday. It is not one that displaced subjects choose to answer but are required to answer. With regards to my “case,” the question of the question is complicated by three factors: language, race, and my name. These have given me the “second sight,” “the most subtle of ears” that Nietzsche talked about above, and I have every intention to use them.

Following a Hegelian philosophy, the foreigner is defined on the basis of the law which is laid down and determined by: the family, civil society, and the State (or the nation-state) (45). Within this law, the foreigner is the one who comes from abroad to a land or a country that is not his or her own by birth. They either seek permanent residency in their new “home” through immigration or for economic and/or political reasons, they seek asylum and political refugee status once in the host country. Increasingly, they could also come as students and then decide to stay. By and large, they tend to speak a different language (or languages) than the host country, but because of globalization, especially with the spread of the English language, more and more they speak the host country’s language fluently but with an accent. They could even be native speakers of English, yet their “accent” will haunt and mark them forever as “foreigners.” The work by Alistair Pennycook and Bonnie Norton is particularly informative in addressing this contention.

In an interesting article, Sura P. Rath, an “American” of Indian descent, is asking us to “call him American.” Living in the U.S. since August 31, 1975 first as a “non-resident alien” student and then as a trainee, as a permanent resident (“resident alien” or holder of the coveted “Green Card”), and finally as a “naturalized citizen”; and, on the other hand, armed with a passport that bears his name, a social security card that identifies him as a wage earner, a driver’s license, a voter ID that recognizes him as a mentally sound person eligible to vote, etc. aren’t these enough to “make” him “American”? His answer is:

My self-description as an American is a spatial identity; constructed from the external territory, it has nothing to do with my whatness, my essence or being as a person, until the larger culture readjusts itself to accommodate my presence. For the time, it is a contractual arrangement: in exchange for my willingness to accept the subject-hood of the sovereign nation called the United States of America, I am ‘subjectified,’ branded with a territorial marker of citizenship… Yet the territorial persona, as a mask of my identity, cannot fully represent the subject/object of my person, the material body and the psychic being.

Therein lies my interest: “psychic being.” The latter is not a question of law, as Hegel suggested, in fact we know the language of psychic and desire is beyond the law; lawless and can never be fully captured; something about it is always in the excess. For me, foreignness is a psychic event which is not defined solely by the foreigner but, and more importantly, by those who possess the authorized language to define, the sovereign subjects who lay out or lay down the laws of hospitality. Rath wants to “be American,” but his language, culture and psychic cheat him. He will always be asked: “where are you from?” (not “who or what are you?”) which is usually followed by: “no, I mean where are you really from?” These questions, my own experience tells me, sometimes signify a naïve curiosity but oftentimes a resigned resentment or ressentiment, using a Nietzschean term.

To repeat: I was born in Sudan, where I grew up and finished an undergraduate degree, the paper says, in Études françaises – French Studies – and Psychology. I also studied in France and spoke both French and English. Then as a political refugee, I found myself in Canada, my “home” away from “home,” where I finished my graduate school in applied linguistics, curriculum and cultural studies. Given my background in linguistics, especially phonetics, I am what you might consider if not a native speaker at least a native-like speaker of English. Some words and expressions pronounce me a “foreigner” to North American English speakers, who have as many accents as there are regions. Ironically, and I have been accused of being too apt and gifted with languages, this is less so in French and the other languages I speak. More ironic is that, three years to date, I reside in Northwest Ohio as a Canadian teaching, among others, a graduate course titled, “Teaching Canada.” I also teach an undergraduate course in social foundations (history, sociology and philosophy of education) to preservice students and two graduate courses in cultural studies and philosophy of education.

Clearly, there are two sides and sites to the identity formation processes: the self and the other. My argument is that, in the larger Euro-American and Canadian societies, I shall always be asked where I come from, will I ever go back (I don’t know where!), and do I like it “here.” Contrary to the common saying, curiosity never kills the cat. What kills the cat is fact that it is never given a choice. Yes, I was born in a foreign land and yes, I am fully aware of the implications of this statement. By putting myself in a foreign land, one might ask, am I not feeding into, and giving ammunition to those who want to call me “foreigner”? As stated previously, I have no control over this. What I have control over is my desire, at some point, to claim – yes to tell myself that I “am” and should be treated as Canadian (and in Rath’s case American).

Americanness and Canadianness are primarily narratives, stories we tell ourselves and others, a collective of ideas. The question we need to ask is whether this narrative is open to all to claim or whether it is exclusive. My contention is this, in the imaginary and the eyes of “native speakers,” if you have or speak with an accent, however slight or unpronounced it may be, and your name is Ibrahim, you will always be a foreigner. In Canada, furthermore, if you are not White, even if you are born in Canada, foreignness will most likely be assumed. Adrienne Shadd brilliantly speaks to how psychologically taxing it can be to be “Black” and “Canadian”:

In my case, I am a fifth-generation Canadian whose ancestors came here [Canada] from the United States during the fugitive slave era… Yet, routinely, I am asked, “Where are you from?”… The scenario usually unfolds as follows:
“But where are you originally from?”
“Canada.”
“Oh, you were born here. But where are your parents from?”
“Canada.”
“But what about your grandparents?”
“They’re Canadian.”
As individuals delve further into my genealogy to find out where I’m “really” from, their frustration levels rise.
“No, uh (confused, bewildered) I mean … your people. Where do your people come from?”
“The United States.”
At this point, questioners are totally annoyed and/or frustrated. After all, Black people in Canada are supposed to come “the [Caribbean] islands,” aren’t they?

As I already cited, my hospitality is conditioned by 1) language (having an accent), 2) my name (assumed to be Muslim and from the Middle East) and 3) race. Since I already addressed the language question, let me speak about the politics of race first and then my name. Before coming to North America, I argued elsewhere, I was not considered Black, as the term is defined in North America. Other terms served to patch together my identity, such as tall, Sudanese, and basketball player. In other words, my Blackness was not marked, it was outside the shadow of the other North American Whiteness. However, as a refugee in North America, my perception of self was altered in direct response to the social processes of racism and the historical representation of Blackness whereby the antecedent signifiers became secondary to my Blackness, and I retranslated my being: I became Black.

There, I narrated a significant incident in my understanding of hospitality when one’s skin color determines who/what one “is.” It happened in May 16, 1999, the day I was officially declared “Black,” with a White policeman who stopped me in Toronto, Canada, for no reason other than “We are looking for a dark man with a dark bag,” as he uttered it. After questioning him about my “darkness,” he said, “We are looking for a Black man with a dark bag.” There is no need to mention that my bag is actually light-blue and now, however, I am metamorphosed from “dark” into “Black.” Before asking for my ID, he asked me to lay down my (dark?) bag, which I did. With his order, I widely opened my bag for anyone in the street to see. Since it was a tourist area, everyone was looking into my bag. Some, I observed, were pitying my plight and one White woman was smiling. I first gave him my citizenship card and after 10 minutes, I decided to use my professor identification. After writing down my name and date of birth, he then announced to the dispatcher telling her “All is OK now.” With no apologies, I was ordered to collect my affairs and my bag and, as he uttered it, “You are free to go now.” For me, this was his way of saying: Welcome to your new “home”!

As for my name, in North America, it seems to invoke terrorism and Osama bin Laden, especially in the U.S. after 9/11, more than someone who is secular, not to say atheist. The idea that an Ibrahim can be atheist seems to surprise and trouble the imaginary of a number of people in North America. Three incidents will highlight my point. The first is a letter I received recently in February 2005 from an Islamic center in Greenville, South Carolina, to receive free copies of the Qur’an in different languages. The second is in Canada and also a letter from the Islamic Council of University Professors (ICUP) inviting me to attend a dinner hosted by the ICUP in October 2001 in Ottawa, Ontario. I did not know where my address and phone number were found, since the ICUP letter was followed by three phone calls. I wondered, subsequently, why I was invited to the ICUP dinner in the first place. I knew no one in the Council nor did I hear of it hitherto. My surprise came as no surprise, and it simply had to do with my name.

The third incident happened in Canada three days after the horror of September 11. While at home, a Pastor –who I worked with in a refugee organization – called. She explained that she was organizing a university-wide religious panel to offer condolences to and show solidarity with the victims of 9/11. Each, she added, would recite from his/her respective scripture. She would represent Christians, there was a “Jewish professor” and I would “represent Muslims,” she explained. At this point, I did not know how or what “Muslims” would think of me representing them since to represent, for me, was to speak in their name and place. So I declined the invitation for I could not bear the responsibility of speaking in the name of “Muslims” while my very Islamic faith is doubtful.

These incidents, including the one with the police, invoke something larger than trivial letters, simple phone calls, and routine police search. Powerfully, they are telling me how my body and name are already “read”, “marked”, “positioned” and “imagined.” They are imagined and read in ways that are beyond my control. Here, Ibrahim is, and is is already known. That is, given my name and my socially positioned “black” body, the Pastor, the police and the ICUP assumed their knowledge of me (almost with certainty). Thus, I become a tableau that people draw and read through however they want to. I become a ghost, a glassy figure to see through. These factors, henceforth, determine the nature of the laws (of hospitality) extended not to “me,” if I can be seen and heard, but to what my accent, race, and name represent and invoke in the imaginary of the host, the “lawmaker.”

IN CONCLUSION: BEING THE HOST

In my classroom, the situation is not as dramatic. In fact, not at all! It is, in two words, total opposite. I have one of the highest student evaluations at my school and university and have received a teaching award in 2001. The question I want to ask then is: what is happening to my foreignness in my classroom, and what am I doing in the classroom that students are able to see and hear me? I teach at a college of education and my undergraduate course, upon whom all my subsequent remarks are based, is a mandatory course. On average, I teach between 65-95 students each term; I have students lining up to take my course; and without any narcissism, I do receive some of the most heartwarming comments about my personality and teaching. The former would have to be put aside. It is worth noting that my students are primarily White, middle-class, females, from Northwest Ohio.

It seems that this foreigner is most at “home” in his classroom. I am able to occupy the position of the host, not in the larger North American society, but in my classroom. Once I close that door, it seems, my students and I are able to sail away in/to a “foreign” land, where true intellectual dialogue and human connection are possible. By virtue of culture, my students recognize – most likely, only – conditional hospitality, whereas I, as we shall see, recognize only unconditional hospitality in my cultural life. Tentatively, one might conclude, those who grow up in a culture where individuality and “my” room, “my” car, “my” house, “my” book, etc. are emphasized tend to have the cultural language of conditional hospitality. On the other hand, those who either grow up in a culture or have little material possessions tend to recognize and practice mostly unconditional hospitality.

There is a need in the following concluding paragraphs to name, sketch out my classroom philosophy, especially when it comes to the idea of teaching. Conscious of its significance in the learning process, the economy of hospitality in my classroom is best described as a Freireian praxis. It does not side step the position of the foreigner, it works through it; it becomes a capital of exchange. Foreignness is not a deficit but a position to be occupied both by me and my students. It is seductive, incredibly stimulating, and a necessary imaginative space in imagining the Other. The Other is no longer outside, but inside; the Other is myself, within myself; and she is there not to be consumed but critically dialogued and engaged with.

I dare to teach – unconditionally – and “it” is not about making statements. Teaching, in my class, is an invitation, a form of seduction, a space of deskining ourselves from ourselves and our comfortable subject positions and hence be able to meet at the rendezvous of true and absolute generosity. It is a space of open, inverted and unconditional hospitality; where unity does not mean sameness and working across difference is possible regardless of race, gender, class, ability and sexuality; where difference concerns the labor of love, freedom and democracy as it does fear, poverty and nihilism. It is where pedagogy of freedom becomes a second nature; the word and the world are connected; students and myself are not reduced to clients; and critical, transformative and liberatory consciousness is our ultimate goal.

As a sovereign space, occupied by sovereign subjects, I tell my students to “enter,” to “come.” Once there, I am in no fear of using the power and the authority bestowed on me by credentials and institutional structures. Using does not mean abusing power, hence I lay down the classroom rules and hand to hand give the course outline as a contractual arrangement: we are hereby ready to begin a “true dialogue.” It structures my power, on the one hand, and gives students responsibilities and obligations, on the other. Our rendezvous is usually in that “moment without moment,” a moment of suspense, of working with and through even what we do not agree with.

This takes time and I am in no hurry. I take my time, I show my passion, I humanize and love the very act of teaching (without the grading!). I grew up within an economy of unconditional hospitality. In the African side of me, our home had little by way of material possessions, so we had to share. On the other hand, there was an unconditional gift of love, humor, security, patience, humility, and humanity. Coming to North America where individuality is the absolute signifier, my foreign consciousness manifests itself, wittingly or unwittingly, in my classroom and in my interaction with my students. I usually take my students to my “place,” not the physical but the mental and the intellectual one. I invite them there, I ask them to come in, to enter that safe space. Apparently, they see that safety and most of the time they voluntarily come with me, within me, and I in turn within them. Once there, we laugh, we humanize and question each other. It is very beautiful there. Contrary to Anne Dufourmantelle who argued that, “Perhaps only the one who endures the experience of being deprived of a home can offer hospitality” (OH, 56), one doesn’t have to endure the experience of being deprived of a home to be able to offer hospitality. At least, this is my hope with my students with their students. I hope, through empathy, being in my class and, like the senior citizens above, experiencing the foreigner, that the foreigner becomes them and they the foreigner. I want us to meet at the rendezvous of humanity. I want them to see and hear me, the foreigner, unconditionally. But above all, I want them to set me free, to be myself. I want to be and live in that city of refuge, where …

Love’s procession is moving;
Beauty is waving her banner;
Youth is sounding the trumpet of joy;
Disturb not my contrition, my blamer.
Let me walk, for the path is rich
With roses and mint, and the air
Is scented with cleanliness.
Kahlil Gibran