On April 14, Arabic Club hosted Choate’s annual Middle Eastern dinner in the Andrew Mellon Library reading room. Students, families, and faculty members enjoyed traditional Middle Eastern family-style delicacies in the candlelit gallery while authentic Middle Eastern music played in the background. Cabinet members of Arabic Club Meghan Musto ’19, Charlie Schlager ’19, Faris Alharthy ’20, and Will Robertson ’20 worked with Mr. Georges Chahwan, Choate’s Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) teacher, and the rest of the club to organize the event.
The tradition was started in 2012, a year into the Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies program, by the first leaders of the Arabic club: Alex Sassoon ’12 and Gabriella Flax ’13. Mr. Chahwan, the club’s faculty adviser, said that “the club felt the need for an event that would bring the community together around the Arabic culture — to celebrate the culture, to raise awareness around [the] Arabic language, and to use it as a venue to bring everyone together.” Mr. Chahwan added that he wanted a dinner to be created and planned by the students for the students and the community. Mr Chahwan hopes that the annual event will allow students to extend what they learn in the classroom to the community.
Every year, the dinner includes poetry recitations from every level of the Arabic program, which is an important and celebrated aspect of Middle Eastern culture. “Poetry is very important in Arabic because it is the baseline of every piece of Middle Eastern literature, and it has evolved from the form of poetry,” said Mr. Chahwan. This year, the dinner also happened after the Connecticut Council of Language Teachers Poetry Recitation Contest. Charlie Schlager ’19 and John Rhodes ’21 received first place awards for their poetry recitations for third and first year Arabic in high school, respectively. At the dinner, Mr. Chahwan officially presented the awards to the students, whose parents were in attendance.
The Middle Eastern food that was served included hummus, baba ganoush, grape leaves, and chicken and lamb kabobs followed by dessert mezze of dates and other Middle Eastern treats. Robertson said, “When people think of take-out food they think of Chinese, Thai, Indian and Mexican food. They don’t really think about Arabic food [although] there is a lot of great Arabic food.”
Regarding the changing nature of the dinner from year to year, Robertson added, “We try to change our activities every year [so that] different classes will get to present different things they learned in class. This year, we were trying to have green screens and photo booths around the room so people [could] take pictures.”
Christopher Gore-Grimes ’20 added, “The Middle Eastern Dinner has certainly been a memorable Choate tradition that not only Arabic students love to attend…Although we are the ones performing, students that are in other languages programs or have different interests also come to learn about the Arab culture.”
In past years, student and faculty members from Deerfield, Greenwich Academy, and the Brunswick School have attended the dinner as invited guests, helping to spread Arabic music, food, and culture to a broader community beyond Choate.
Mr. Chahwan hopes that the dinner and club activities can help clarify and correct some of the shallow and false narratives about Arabic culture in the media. “A lot of times, the information is incorrect. There are a lot of misrepresentations happening on the Internet and the media,” he said. He thinks it is very important that Choate, an institution with a strong focus on education, teaches people about different cultures, “For some people, the only image they have about the Middle East is the image of wars in the media.”
The students and faculty members in the Arabic program hope that this dinner helped and will continue to help students appreciate cultural differences. Mr. Chahwan said, “We are in a time right now where our nation is especially divisive and xenophobic [in a way] that we haven’t seen in recent years. So in a time like this, when there is a lot of xenophobia and anti-Middle Eastern sentiment, I think it is really important to connect people and to demystify all the cultures at Choate for a stronger community here at Choate.”
