When was the last time you talked to a student at NYU Abu Dhabi? Chances are, you never have. Our university, an institution that doesn't have the best reputation for building community, has built one from scratch on the other side of the world. Yet it remains, to us, a mystery — a giant question mark written in the distant sand. Its students, all the more so.
Enter Rachel Broderick: CAS alumna, NYUAD Academic Coach and the indefatigable impresario of Headless Society, a creative writing club that now enjoys the distinction of being the only student activity with branches, like Louis Vuitton, in both New York and Abu Dhabi. Two weeks ago, the members of the original Headless — a club that Broderick established in her freshman year and persists, in her absence, under collective leadership — got a chance to meet the members of a brand new chapter at NYU's satellite campus.
"I spend so much time talking to Headless in New York and so much time talking to Headless in Abu Dhabi, but they never talk to each other. I saw myself as less of a mediator and more of a mail service — a voicemail service," Broderick told me.
As the first attempt at meaningful correspondence between the two sides of our newly globalized student body, Broderick's experiment is significant in and of itself. But it's more significant, I think, because it was much more than a meet-and-greet over Skype. It was a cross-pollination of creative expression, an exchange predicated on imagination and ignorance. In microcosm, it suggested the kind of communication that will need to be established between our far-flung campuses if we're going to be a 'global network university' in any real sense of the term. In microcosm, it suggested the obstacles we may face and the ones we have yet to cross.
Thought Experiment
On the seventh floor of the Kimmel Center, against the glittering backdrop of a city she still calls home, Broderick, still jet lagged, asked the members of Headless New York what they imagined when they thought of Abu Dhabi — that far-off place "where Garfield sends Nermal in a box." The conceptions, most of them misconceptions, began to trickle out.
Aladdin. Bombed-out hotels. Desert riches. Skyscrapers sprouting next to wooden shacks. Jawas on Tatooine.
"A big camel park where the camels are secretly making all the rules," GSAS student Janet Glazier, one of the longtime members who now leads Headless New York, piped in.
"I want to talk about it, but I don't want to feel like an idiot," another member added.
The conversation went on for some time. Arabian Nights idealizations were batted around with "Modern Warfare" nightmares; ignorance was professed by pretty much everyone. Finally, it was time to write. Like any other Headless prompt, Broderick gave everybody in the group 15 minutes to compose whatever they wanted — a poem, a short story, an ode in iambic pentameter, a block of babble. The only stipulation: This time, Abu Dhabi — the imaginary Abu Dhabi — had to be in it.
People wrote. Afterward, they shared. After that, Broderick pulled out some papers she'd brought with her on the 20-hour flight. Direct from the minds of NYU Abu Dhabi's students: the imaginary New York.
Headless Transplant
"The biggest surprise with Headless Abu Dhabi is that it happened so quickly, so easily, and that it's retained essentially the same form as it has in New York," Broderick told me. And it is surprising.
NYUAD has its share of student activities — among them, dragon-boating and an acappella group called Abu Dhabeats — but it's safe to say that Headless is making a uniquely large splash. Nearly one-third of NYU Abu Dhabi's 150-student freshman class attended the first meeting. 25 to 30 have shown up consistently ever since.
For many of them, English is a second or third language, a fact that has prompted Broderick to include exercises each week that invite expression in one's native tongue. In the first meeting, she wrote the Emily Dickinson quote from which the Headless name derives — "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry" — on a big piece of highlighter-yellow butcher paper and asked everyone in the room to translate it. She ended up getting over 20 different versions.
"We have a Hungarian speaker, a girl from Lagos, Nigeria, someone who speaks Hindi — people from all over the place," she said.
Still, she emphasizes that despite their diversity, NYUAD students aren't all that different from each other, or from us. They write in English, and they seem to write for the same reasons.
"I think they have a lot in common with NYU in New York students. You can say, in general, that NYU in New York students have a very enterprising spirit, and these kids, in leaving their home countries and stuff to come to Abu Dhabi — to this strange, new idea for a school — in a sense have that same willingness. They want to be involved in something different and new," she said.
Like the original version, Headless Abu Dhabi is, above all, an escape.
"It's a place with humour and with ideas, but also a place to let that small, critical voice in your head melt away for a while," NYUAD freshman Alistair Blacklock said in an e-mail.
"I like the respect. People respect one another's rights to deliver their piece and are very encouraging when someone does share, which takes a fair bit of courage," freshman Tom Taylor added.
Free Indirect Discourse
Of the five pieces about Abu Dhabi that were shared by members of Headless New York last Thursday, only one — an indulgent fantasy in which Nermal was reimagined as a sultry woman-about-town — didn't self-consciously invoke the issue of stereotyping. Each speculation was imbued with a distinctly Western hesitancy about seeming ignorant, misinformed, insensitive, misrepresentative. One writer called Abu Dhabi "a city of white in the middle of nothing." You could tell, just by listening, that to New Yorkers it's a place of unstable and nigh-unspeakable oxymorons.
The Abu Dhabi students' writing was tempered in a different way. They weren't afraid of political correctness; indeed, they go to school in a place where political correctness is so ingrained it's almost irrelevant. Instead, the concern was personal.
"Their concern was, 'They hate us!' because of all the media, all the bad press, all the misinformation and miscommunication between the two," Broderick said.
Each piece was a love affair with New York's energy, heterogeneity, idiosyncrasy — not a canned version of the city, but an image that had obviously been fermenting in the students' minds.
For one writer, the image was kinky:
"Ladies and gentlemen,/I present to you the detestable New York/Will you not cry for her?/She stands before you in nothing but/a threadbare rope, exposing her left teat,/cigarette already lit in between/her fingered galleries."
Another writer asked a question that lingered in the air: "Does New York feel real to you? Because Abu Dhabi doesn't always, but maybe it really is just a desert mirage. New York feels more real, and I've never been."
Hello, My Name is NYU Abu Dhabi
How best to bridge the gulf that separates us from the Gulf? It's a question that the university will have to answer at some point. To me, the current bifurcation is reminiscent of a Catholic school dance: boys on one wall, girls on the other, leaving plenty of room for Jesus and speculation.
"Connectivity to NYU in New York is an integral component for us at NYU Abu Dhabi, and more broadly, we believe that the chance for students to engage each other across borders clearly enhances the experience for students at both campuses," Megan Fallon, associate director for student life at NYUAD, told me. "I expect that the Headless Society is the first of many cross-campus opportunities that we will see as NYUAD continues to evolve, and as our students establish more and more clubs and associations."
Nevertheless, the question still remains.
The results of Broderick's transcontinental hustle felt neither groundbreaking nor transcendent. It wasn't like "Hello, World" appearing on a computer monitor for the first time. But it was a great idea. It was the first attempt at cosmopolitan dialogue I've seen that started with ignorance, emotion and true uncertainty rather than posturing, rhetoric or didacticism. At a university that's quickly adopting cosmopolitan dialogue as a philosophical and pedagogical foundation (Broderick herself helps out with a class called "Cosmopolitanism and Popular Culture"), whatever she did — however she did it — seems important.
"Creativity is what gives you a space to be hybrid, inexact, clumsy, whimsical. It would've been logical to have the NYU Abu Dhabi students write a piece about Abu Dhabi so I could bring it here and inform people, who could then inform back. But art is a lot more than information. I wanted them to work with expectations instead, because I think that breaks open the boundaries of the conversation. It's more interesting to be challenged," she said.
If anything, the experiment suggested that lasting, meaningful interconnectivity is not something the university will be able to conjure through formulated policy or Sextonian incantation. It's going to take work from the bottom up. It's going to take a willingness to engage with the unexpected on our own. It's going to take patience. It's going to take time. Given that NYU in New York is so deeply fragmented, there's certainly the possibility that it may only happen through clubs like Headless.
"Up to this point, the connections between the two schools are so institutional. I don't know how we're going to tackle this, but I'm putting in my mouthguard," Blacklock wrote.
At the end of the meeting, Broderick showed a video of Headless Abu Dhabi made by NYUAD film students Adam Pivirotto, Mate Bede-Fazekas and Jordan Schulze. After all the writing, it was a slightly more concrete introduction to the other side of Headless on the other side of the world.
"She's taken a group of 'elite mystery kids' and made us realize that they're actually pretty normal — or at least normal in the sense that they're pretty similar to NYU kids. And, dare I say, a little cool?" Glazier said.
Aside from the dude with the Australian accent, the main highlight of the video was an awkwardly bumpin' dance party in front of a very different night skyline — a skyline that looked tall, quiet, in some sense yet to be written. The dance party wasn't the easiest thing to get started, Broderick told me with a laugh. But she did it, somehow, and we can learn from that.
