[lit-ideas] Commencement

  • From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 00:41:38 -0700

Living 'the story of your life'

A 1970 Reed graduate tells the class of 2006 their lives are already in motion

Tuesday, May 16, 2006
SHELBY OPPEL WOOD
The Oregonian

Tamim Ansary, a writer who emerged on the nation's radar via an e-mail he wrote to friends after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, didn't attend his own Reed College graduation. Such a public ritual didn't seem right for capturing the meaning of a moment that, to him, seemed entirely personal.

But 36 years can change a man's mind. At the invitation of Reed seniors, Ansary returned Monday to the Southeast Portland campus to address the 287 members of the class of 2006, as a warm breeze ruffled the sides of a white tent erected for the ceremony.

The son of an Afghan father and American mother, Ansary, 57, was raised in Afghanistan among a large, tightknit clan descended from a seventh-century family in Arabia who helped the Prophet Muhammad escape from Mecca to Medina. Ansary's uncles include a general and a government minister; his Western-educated father taught science and literature at Kabul University.

He left Afghanistan at age 16, in 1964, before the country was overrun by the Soviets, then warring ethnic factions, then the Taliban. He went to high school in Colorado, then to Reed.

After graduation in 1970, "I spent another six tumultuous years in Portland as part of a counterculture . . . we were ardently immersed in building the pure new civilization," one with community gardens and food co-ops and a collectively owned newspaper, the Scribe, for which he wrote, Ansary told the Reedies…

"We really thought we were going to build a world of peace and love and justice and harmony . . . and our days were filled with meaning," he said.

That period, Ansary said, seemed to have the potential to define not only his life but also the direction of modern society.

"But the years passed and the juggernaut of industrial modernity hurtled on," he said, and it was the counterculture that crumbled and "we who scattered to the many winds, to become sales executives and lawyers and math professors and carpenters' wives."

Soon after, in his early 30s, Ansary set out for North Africa and Turkey, with hopes of entering Pakistan and returning to Afghanistan. In his 2002 memoir, "West of Kabul, East of New York," he wrote that he hoped for a better understanding of Islam, the religion he had grown up in but ultimately abandoned.

He never made it to Afghanistan and came away traumatized by the rigid version of Islam he encountered in his travels, a "darkening world" that was not his, he wrote in his memoir. Back in the United States, "(I) took up my life as one unconflicted soul: Tamim Ansary, American guy."

He thought the Afghan chapter of his life was in the past. He married an American, settled in San Francisco, had two daughters. He worked as a textbook editor and wrote children's books and educational software. He is now a columnist for Encarta.com.

Then came the 2001 terrorist attacks.

After hearing angry, scared Americans on talk radio demanding that the United States wage war on Afghanistan and "bomb them back to the Stone Age," he typed an e-mail to a small circle of friends.

"I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden," he wrote. But it's the people of Afghanistan who were "the first victims of the perpetrators."

"Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. . . . Flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually, it would only be making common cause with the Taliban -- by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time," he wrote.

Before the week's end, "World News Tonight" and the "The Oprah Winfrey Show" were calling. Ansary suddenly found himself an unlikely spokesman for Afghans and for Islam. But he hadn't seen Afghanistan in 36 years and had become, as he has written, "the most secular of men."

Still, the e-mail had taken flight. The memoir followed. A New York Times reviewer called it "a book that steadies our skittering compass . . . (that) sees things we cannot make out, and need to."

Ansary's Afghan chapter, as it turned out, wasn't over.

On Monday, he didn't tell Reedies to aim high or go for the gold or dream big. Graduates -- whether at Reed or any college -- are often told that their lives are about to begin. Ansary seemed to argue against that notion:

Life is already in motion. Every moment, including this one, he said, is part of the arc.

"I'm saying, you live the story of your life. . . . Every moment contains where you're coming from and where you're going to," he said.

Chapter 25 of a novel may be beautiful, he said, but you can't appreciate it without Chapters 1 to 24.

"What lifts any story to greatness is not the particular events of the plot, but how the plot unfolds toward meaning," he said. ". . . Only death releases us from the present moment to become our whole lives. At every other moment, we're contributing to what that whole life will have been."

For information about Ansary, see www.mirtamimansary.com

Shelby Oppel Wood: 503-221-5368; shelbyoppel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

©2006 The Oregonian
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Forwarded by Robert Paul
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