The cedar has finally caught up with me. In central Texas, January is peak allergy season, as the cold air makes the cedar trees in the Hill Country release their pollen and sends allergy sufferers like me running for decongestants and nasal sprays. Today, I’m afraid, I’ve lost the battle and the cedar fever has claimed another victim. I can barely muster the energy to sit upright on the sofa and am currently perceiving the world through layers of congestion and nausea.
This has given me a chance to sit down and write about a gathering I went to on Friday night to bid farewell to Robert and Elizabeth Fernea, two of our oldest and most legendary faculty, who are leaving Austin after forty years to move closer to their two daughters in Los Angeles.
The Ferneas – Bob and BJ to their friends – were among the first wave of American scholars to work in the Arab world after the second world war. Bob has written a series of scholarly works, but I risk his wrath by suggesting that it was BJ who has actually had the biggest impact.
The young couple spent the first two years of their married life in a small village in southern Iraq in the mid-1950s while Bob did field work to complete his dissertation in anthropology at the University of Chicago. BJ, who spoke no Arabic and had no formal training in social sciences, became his accomplice, as she was able to interact with the half of the population that he couldn’t access in the deeply gender divided village. Her account of those years–Guests of the Sheik: an ethnography of an Iraqi village was the first of many bestselling books that she would write aimed at a popular audience. Others would follow, along with a number of documentary films.
Their co-authored book The Arab World was one of the first books that I read on the Middle East. I found it in a small bookshop in Columbus, Ohio, that specialized in remnants, overstocks, and secondhand books when I was in high school, and I still have it on my shelf, somewhere. BJ’s writings about her experiences in the Arab World inspired me to keep track of my own thoughts while traveling abroad and, indirectly, are quite possibly responsible for this blogs, since it began life as a travel log.
The Ferneas settled in Austin in the mid-1960s, and they’ve been involved with the University of Texas in some way ever since. Their activities put UT’s Middle Eastern Studies program on the map, placing it on par with the much better known programs at the ivy league schools.
The last few years have been rough on the couple. BJ has had brain surgery–the only thing that could possibly slow her down. It’s been a shock to see the little woman who’s always darting here and there faster than people a third of her age needing assistance to walk. Bob, too, had a car accident that had him hospitalized for a few weeks although (typical Bob) it still didn’t keep him from telling the nurses how to do their jobs.
I was a student in one of the last courses that Bob taught at UT. At the time, he was in his late 60s, and would show up for class — Thursdays from 7-10 pm — in flip flops, a loud Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to his naval, and short, short, oh-my-god short shorts that left nothing to the imagination. He would sit at the head of the seminar table with his gallon mug of coffee and wrap-around sunglasses perched on top of his bald head and hold court. He was the loudest person in the room — something that he still manages to do.
On Friday night, Bob–who is one of those people who never causes you to wonder what he’s thinking–was wearing a leather blazer and a t-shirt with a screened portrait of Che Guevara in a rainbow gradient. And he managed to correct every single story being told about himself by the dozens of former students and colleagues who came to pay their respects at what I am told is the third such farewell gathering.
They’re an interesting pair. Bob wears controversy like a cologne–if you’re not shocked by what he has to say, he feels like he’s not trying hard enough. And God knows I’ve dodged my share of BJ’s phone calls – the woman is impossible to say no to. And they’ve attracted more than their fair share of controversies for their visibility at anti-war rallies (pick a war) over the years.
But the debt we owe them is profound. We can react to their work, we can accept it, reject it, whatever–but in doing so, we have to take what they had to say under consideration. We can fool ourselves into thinking we’re being more balanced, more fair, that we’re doing it better, but they were there first and they did it first, and we will always be following in their footsteps.
So, farewell to the sheikh’s honored guests as you set off for the next phase of your lives together. You leave big shoes to fill for those of us in the next generation. And we’ll miss you.
I’m kind of surprised to find myself glowingly recommending a book like 
