Yonsei Memory Project is proud to present new essays in a series called “Valley Writers Respond.” In early May, 2020, Yonsei Memory Project invited writers based in California’s San Joaquin Valley to reflect on the current moment, utilizing a single word as a prompt for writing. “Valley Writers Respond” was inspired by a strong desire to do something, to help tend to each other, to create understanding even through difficulty as we all find our ways through a pandemic. YMP has never shied away from deep truth-telling, and now, while so many are in duress, we turn to art and artists to hold space for us to process.

In “Valley Writers Respond” three Valley writers share their wisdom in short original essays. The project includes essays by Samina Najmi, Will Freeney, and Steven Church. Samina Najmi, a professor of English at California State University, Fresno, was invited to reflect on the word, “distance.” Here is Samina Najmi’s offering.



Distance Learning

by samina najmi

may 26, 2020

My mother’s email, with the subject heading “Cycle of Life,” sits in my inbox. The first line is visible without my clicking it open; it’s the curvy, right-to-left Urdu script—beautiful to look at in the Rumicode software my brother created, but a little slow-going for my now unaccustomed eyes. She often shares her meditative and eloquent micro-essays with me this way. I make a mental note to come back to the email at the end of my grading day.

Suraiya Jabeen writes every day. She has done so for as long as I can remember. Growing up, I’d see her fill big, lined notebooks that resembled the attendance registers in Meadow Secondary School, which she founded in Karachi in 1975, barely two months after we had moved back from England. Those handwritten records of her “sorting out” her life and loves fell casualty to the moves, fears, and distances of the past half-century. But still she writes.

Ammi has been sheltering with her younger sister, my Khalammi Talat, since mid-March. For the past five years Ammi’s home has been with her youngest child, Sadia, and her family, in San Diego’s University Heights. But immunocompromised as Ammi is, we all thought it safer for her, and less lonely for Khalammi, if the two sisters stayed together in my aunt’s Hillcrest condo, a short drive away. Days later, when I drove the five-plus hours to La Jolla to move my daughter out of UC San Diego housing--her academic term cut short by the pandemic—I did it as a day trip, without seeing Ammi and Khalammi, or any family, in San Diego. Already, love meant staying away.

Grading in May is always frenzied and exhausting, coming as it does not only at the end of the semester but at the end of a long academic year. This year, with teaching as we knew it suspended in mid-March by the threat of COVID-19, the depletion I feel seems self-indulgent. My students have lost jobs and livelihoods. One lost his father. In some cases, these young people have no choice but to brave the coronavirus threat and pick up hours as essential workers. At least one, whose family members have lost their incomes, is supporting his entire family on what he earns as a tutor at the Writing Center. Many find themselves physically displaced, in living situations that inhibit their ability to learn. For all of Fresno State’s offers of devices and hotspots, they have problems with access to online instruction. Some students are also parenting and schooling at home. With these hardships in mind, I opted to teach asynchronous classes, without Zoom meetings, so they could participate in online discussions and submit assignments in their own time. The effort to translate the dialectical mode of learning to the written word resulted in an exponential increase in class time for me. There was no absolute start or end time to classes, seldom a moment when I felt caught up. But two weeks into this online “transition”—a misnomer because there could be no transit time, only an abrupt launch into another dimension—my students responded to the survey I gave them with overwhelming preference for the asynchronous model as the least stressful in their new lives. And so I stayed the course until the end of classes in early May.

In the afternoon I take a break from grading and call Ammi. I ask her to read her emailed essay to me. I’m startled to hear her Urdu title for the piece, which translates to the paradoxical “Welcome, Departing Springs.” In brave and beautiful voice she articulates the reality that, though she’s still only in her seventies, mortality stares her down daily. The chronic pain of the past six months and her gradually diminishing physical abilities sound a friendly warning to savor what’s left of her time in an imperfect but still serviceable body.

The first epidural shot of steroids did nothing to ease the pain. The second became a challenge to schedule during the lockdown. Besides logistical impediments to an in-person appointment at the clinic, Ammi had to choose between the risk of exposure to a potentially lethal virus and the certainty of immobilizing pain. As hope subdued fear, she went for the second epidural, in mask and gloves and wheelchair. Sadia could accompany her only so far; social distancing measures meant she had to wait in the car during the procedure.

Three weeks later, the pain still rages.

As a friend with greater experience of remote instruction puts it, there’s so much wandering and herding in online teaching. The metaphor lingers with me, though it obliterates the individuality and mindfulness of my students. I did indeed expend a lot of energy taking count—who appeared, who disappeared on the Canvas discussion board; how often, and for how long. It wasn’t to be punitive but to know who was still there, still hanging on. If they had wandered, from what? Towards what? Or does the verb by definition imply a lack of purpose in either direction? And what, then, is the role—the point, even—of the shepherd?

Meadow Secondary School flourished in Pakistan’s megacity of Karachi for thirty-three years. It began as a preschool in our two-bedroom home and grew with Sadia, one grade at a time. Ammi tells me I came up with the name as a twelve-year-old. You mean like a pasture? someone asked in disbelief. But Ammi loved its implications. When I enrolled in Karachi University, Meadow gave me my first, part-time position as an English teacher.

In 1975, Suraiya Jabeen had a vision to bring psychologically savvy teaching methods to the austere and outdated classrooms of our struggling-to-be-middle-class neighborhood, and to make that education affordable. Without much capital, success was slow but steady and, eventually, staggering, though Ammi never grew rich. Throughout those years, Madam Suraiya knew the name of every child who walked through Meadow’s gates, a vital bit of every child’s history. For the younger ones, she emphasized learning through play. She reasoned with the older ones, teaching them to question and persuade rather than simply obey. Fathers leaving for employment in Jeddah or Dubai trusted her to watch out for their sons and daughters. Madam Suraiya was known to waive tuition for the needy; to press with promise the hand of a dying mother and make it easier for her to go.

But Meadow Secondary School finally closed its doors in 2008. Ammi’s rheumatoid arthritis had gotten the better of her. The new owners, educators who had promised to continue the legacy, instead shut it down. Devoted alumni have posted Facebook images of the sad, empty building and grounds. It’s one thing to grow up with fond memories of the school you left behind. It’s another to have that physical space erased. But for students, staff, and principal alike, it’s a different kind of loss altogether when the physical site of memory still stands, weathered, worn, and crumbling. Like the aging body of a loved one—still beloved, still greeting each spring as though it might be the last.

I wasn’t able to see all my students through to the end of the semester. There were six I couldn’t get back after we moved online, though I tried and they tried. I had feared the darkness that would swallow them. But the shepherd’s vigilance proved futile, the proddings failed.

The morning I submitted course grades for the semester, my son walked in on my grief for the distances I couldn’t bridge. When I told him, through sobs, that I had lost six students, he thought I had lost them to COVID-19. And, in a way, I had.

Emergency remote instruction, we called it. Distance learning, we say.

It’s a hard thing to recognize, let alone accept, when remoteness becomes a receding—a wandering into meadows that lie beyond the sight and call and reach of love.

SAMINA NAJMI is a professor of English at California State University, Fresno. A scholar of race, gender, and war in American literature, she discovered the rewards of more personal kinds of writing in 2011 when she stumbled into a CSU Summer Arts course that taught her to see. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Warscapes, The Rumpus, Pilgrimage, The Progressive, Gargoyle, Chautauqua, and other publications. Her essay "Abdul" won Map Literary's 2012 nonfiction prize. Having lived in Karachi, London, and Boston, Samina now calls the San Joaquin Valley home. She watches and writes as her children, her students, and her citrus grow around her.