By Dr. Mansour Al-Maswari
A Columbia Global Emerging Scholar on how displacement uprooted his life, and what it meant to share his story and culture at Columbia Global Center Amman.
Some nights, I still wake to the sound of shells that aren’t falling. Exile plays these tricks on you—phantom pains from a homeland that exists now mainly in memory. The war that drove me from Yemen wasn’t mine to choose, yet here I am, carrying its weight across continents, through lecture halls where I speak of things most would rather not hear.
My students in Yemen once asked why I taught literature in a country coming apart. What use were books when buildings were falling? I told them stories survive when cities don’t. I didn’t know then how soon I would become living proof of my own lesson.
Before displacement rewrote my story, I had certainties: a PhD in Comparative Literature, an MA in Political Science, a permanent teaching position at Amran University. The future had shape and substance. Now, as a non-resident postdoctoral fellow with Georgetown’s MESA Global Academy and remote editor for an Amman news outlet, I’ve learned that academic life can continue even when everything else stops. Knowledge travels light. It crosses borders without papers.
A Room of One’s Own, Finally
The Columbia Global Center in Amman welcomed me in 2023 as a Columbia Global Emerging Scholar when welcome was a scarce commodity for Yemenis. Under the mentorship of Muhsin Al-Musawi, a Columbia University professor of classical and modern literature, I found not just funding but something rarer—intellectual shelter. My research on Gulf culture and identity formation wasn’t just academic anymore; it became my way back to myself…