A Grand Celebration of the Cultural Week [Archives:2004/742/Education]

During the last few years the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Sana'a, has been organizing an inter-university contest in eloquence and this contest has been in the form of an inter-university debate and an inter-university competition in reciting rhetorically powerful passages from Shakespeare's plays. But this year, the Department did something much broader: it organized a cultural week. Sana'a, as we know, has been declared to be the cultural capital of the Arab world this year. This declaration created a great deal of enthusiasm, a great deal of excitement and a great deal of joy all over, particularly in academic circles in the country. The Department of English responded appropriately to this enthusiasm and excitement, and decided to organize an inter-faculty speech competition on Sana'a's distinctive qualities. The actual topic of the speech competition was “Sana'a is not just a part of the Arab world; it is a part of the Arab world with a difference, a city with its own distinguished personality.” The topic evoked a lot of appreciation all around and students from Sada, Hajjah, Amran, Mahweet and the Faculty of Languages and the Faculty of Education in Sana'a competed with students from the Department of English in the Faculty of Arts. People were not all that curious to know who would come first, or who would come second in the competition. Most people could guess that in view of the standard of excellence exhibited in the past, a student from the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, would, in all probability, be the winner. But they were all curious to know what the standard of the speech competition would be on the whole. Such an event had never been organized earlier, neither by this university, nor by any other university in the country. People thought that students from Faculties in far away places like Sada'a and Mahweet would be cold, shy and indifferent. They thought that students from such Faculties in the remote parts of the country will, because of their faulty accent, their rural background and their lack of exposure to such events in the past, find themselves victims of an inferiority complex, but the most exciting feature of this speech competition was the enthusiasm, the confidence and the level of preparedness with which all the participants, whether from a rural or an urban area, participated in this competition. The real purpose, as the Chairman of the Department conceptualized it, was not to find out who was better or who was worse from the point of view of his/her speaking ability, but to create and develop in the students in all Faculties a love for the gift of speaking, a desire to influence hundreds of people in the audience with the qualities of one's speech. In his welcome speech, Dr Thakur, the Chairman of the Department, said, “I have a dream. I have had this dream for all the twenty-three years I've been in Yemen as a Professor of English. This dream has become stronger, richer and more intense with the passage of time. My dream is that one day a student taught by me and my Department, or by any other Department of English in Yemen, would speak so well in the United Nations and in other celebrated international forums that the whole world watching this speaker on the TV, or listening to him on the radio would clap excitedly and say, 'Here is a wonderful speaker.'” In his welcome speech, he said that however humble, small and insignificant in itself, the beginning for that training, for that awakening, for the fulfillment of that dream had already been made in the form of the inter-university debate and recitation that he has been organizing every year, and the speech competition that he has started this year.
One of the activities included in this cultural week celebration by the Department was a competition in writing poems. Thirty-five poems were selected and published with minor editing in the form of a mini-book. The Department has had the distinction of being the first in starting so many new academic activities in the past. It was perhaps for the first time, that a University Department of English in Yemen could find as many as thirty-five worthwhile poems by undergraduate students good enough to be anthologized and published in he form of a book. These poems were selected not by people in the Department, but by people of proven ability outside the Department, and these referees were heard saying that each of these thirty-five poems had enough of poetic merit to justify their inclusion in a book. Next year, the Department is planning to have this competition on a national scale.
Another ingenious type of competition, a competition certainly worthwhile but perhaps never organized so far by a Department of language and literature in Yemen, or perhaps anywhere else outside Yemen, was a competition in a perceptive selection of quotable quotes. Students were advised and encouraged to consult all possible dictionaries of quotations, to recollect in tranquility all that they had studied in prose or in verse and to explore extensively all that was available on the Internet, and ultimately to select the quotations that they considered to be the best of all that they had come across. The strategy of the Department was that the student should, during this selection, be exposed to and be enriched by the ideational wealth and variety and also the vigor and elegance of expression in powerful statements made by great geniuses all over the world. The idea of this competition created a great deal of enthusiasm and excitement among students and about one hundred and fifty students took part in the competition. The student who got the first prize in this competition was, interestingly enough, a newly admitted student of level one. The quotable quotes selected by the students were so many and so good that the Department decided to compile and edit them and bring them out in the form of a book. By doing this, the Department added a new feather to its cap. Once again it made itself the first Department of English in Yemen to have started this academic activity. Next year, the Department is planning to organize on a nation-wide scale a competition in selecting worthwhile anecdotes.
The last day of the three-day celebration was the day earmarked for the inter-university debate and recitation. The topic of the debate was “What the world needs today is not nationalism but internationalism.” The audience was amazed, in fact astounded, by the overall standard of performance of the participants, the facts that they had gathered, the cohesive framework in which they presented those facts, the rhetorical flourishes that they used in order to beautify their debate and the vigor with which they presented themselves.
When welcoming the guests and introducing the topic of the debate, the Chairman of the Department, traced the history of debates to the city states in Greece during the pre-Christian era while citizens had to defend themselves and their relatives before a jury consisting sometimes of as many as five hundred members. The modern institution of lawyers, he said, and the modern phenomenon of one-sided debates have their origins in the defense and accusations argued out in those city-states more than two thousand years ago. The West has given us the phenomenon of debates and the institution of lawyers as they have learnt from the ancient philosophers, mystics and visionaries from the East. The East with its philosophical preoccupations was less interested in arguing against others and more interested in the debates and arguments that take palace in the psyche of an individual, particularly against negative and destructive emotions. Kahlil Gibran when echoing this debate in the inner psyche once said, “Oh God, let me have no enemy, but if I have to have an enemy, let his strength be equal to mine so that truth alone is the victor.” The Chairman said that although debates in the East these days are no less interesting than those in the West and particularly in Greece, we must not forget the ancient origin of debate in the world. He expressed the wish that the bright young boys and girls in the East, in Yemen in particular, will give to that ancient tradition a new life, a new vigor and a new healthy personality of its own.
The distinguished personalities who were present on the occasion as guests were Dr Mohammed Muttahar, the Vice-Minister for Higher Education, Dr Saleh Ali Bassura, the President of Sana'a University, Dr Ahmed al-Kipsy, the Vice-president for Academic Affairs, Dr Khalid Tamim, the Vice-president for Student Affairs, Dr Tawfiq Sufiyan, the Vice-president for Postgraduate Studies and Research, Dr Hussein al-Bakry, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and Mr. Karuppaiyah, the Indian Ambassador to Yemen. Dr Saleh Ali Bassura, the President of Sana'a University, in his speech praised the efforts of the Department of English in organizing the cultural week and said that the activities included in the cultural week were a welcome addition to the routine teaching in the university.
——
[archive-e:742-v:13-y:2004-d:2004-05-31-p:education]