Wednesday, July 01, 2020

YUSRA LAILA VISSER (1975-2020): An extraordinary life that ended abruptly



Eyragues, May 23, 2020

Many have had the opportunity to know Yusra Laila Visser personally. She served the Learning Development Institute in the double role of Vice-President and Secretary of the Board. As a researcher, she was involved in important ways in research regarding the Meaning of Learning (MOL); the Book of Problems (BOP), or what we don’t know about learning; the Learning Stories Project (LSP); Problem-Oriented Learning (POL; also covered in her Ph.D. thesis); Building the Scientific Mind (BtSM); and more recently Human Learning in the Anthropocene (HLA). She participated in 2005 via teleconferencing in the first BtSM colloquium in The Hague, Netherlands; in 2007 she was present at the colloquium in Vancouver, Canada; and in 2011 at the fourth one in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Moved by challenges she met in her personal life she became increasingly interested in the study of resilience, asking herself questions about what resilience entails, what the factors are that facilitate its development (and other factors that might impede it), and, in general, what it is that can help ordinary humans to respond, in their day-to-day life, in a flexible manner to the challenges they meet. Having spent the first 18 years of her life in Africa and the next 26 in America, she took the courageous decision last year to make the next major move in her life and establish herself in Europe. Her purpose was to once again reinvent her way of being while focusing her research interests on 'quotidian resilienceand the four factors we had then identified as pillars on which to build the facilitating framework for the development of ‘human learning in the Anthropocene,’ namely enjoyment, compassion, respect, and responsibility.

Yusra’s WhatsApp profile includes a quote from MC Solaar’s lyrics: “Soy como el sol. Hijo de África” (I am like the sun. Son of Africa). That’s Yusra, ‘Hija de África,’ the continent where she grew up and from which she derived her inspiration; where we as a family grew up together; and where all of us, humans, have our origin. She didn’t mind that, as a child, attending occasionally a high school in Florida, she was stigmatized, despite her light complexion and blond hair, as a “stupid Mozambican.” Mozambique was her country of permanent residence at the time. But she also saw herself as a world citizen. She had been conceived in an act of love as we, her future parents, traveled through the countries of South Asia, was born in the Netherlands, and named after a Palestinian 10-year old refugee child—featured in my 1975 documentary film ‘The Dream’—who made beautiful drawings that helped her cope with the challenges of life in a refugee camp in Jordan.

Yusra’s Arabic name, ىيسر, denotes a state of ease, of blessedness, the opposite of hardship. It’s a notion that occurs twice in the Qur’an (e.g. 94:6, which reminds us that with every hardship there is ease). Indeed, throughout life Yusra was seen by many as someone who was ready to make things easy for others and provide comfort to many, without expecting anything in return. It made life of those to whom she gave easier, but the ever-increasing demands made on her complicated her own life, particularly as she was afflicted with a rare disease, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), that progressively debilitated her. I spoke with Yusra 12 days ago, on May 11, via Skype. She clearly felt exhausted, looked pale, was in severe pain, and expressed disappointment about her staying in Italy, which was no doubt occasioned by the CoVID-19 related imposed stringent constraints that had put her in almost complete isolation from the many friends she had made since she took up residence in Bassano del Grappa. “I want to go to another country,” she told me in desperation. “Where,” I asked her. “In Africa,” she said. But a week later she was found dead in her apartment, assumed to have died, in solitude, two days earlier, on Saturday, May 16. We are preparing her burial here in France. From where she will be buried, she will then, indeed, be on her way to another country . . the country where memories live. In December 1996 I had Yusra on the phone immediately after the abrupt death of her best friend at American University in Washington, DC. When she later reflected on the tragic event, she realized that, while we are alive, we are but “memories in the making.” She will henceforth be one of those memories already made, and a very precious one at that, one we will want to sustain and build on.

Yusra’s tragic death has led us to the idea of establishing a scholarship fund in her name to promote research on issues that were close to her heart, the ones already mentioned: resilience, enjoyment, compassion, respect, and responsibility. Those are still uncommon issues for educational researchers to concern themselves with. Yet, they are the most crucial ones for our current epoch. We already knew, of course, but it wasn’t yet an agenda. Now it is. We will give top priority to establishing the fund, working hard and counting on your help. Be assured we will be back in touch soon.

Finally, a brief personal reflection.

My personal relationship with Yusra was a special one. We both had an inescapable feeling that our lives were fundamentally entangled and often joked about it. We didn’t have to tell each other. We already knew. After it became clear that, in fact, we shared the same genetic disorder that was involved in her untimely death, the jokes changed in character, helping both of us to cope and accept, and to provide support to each other. There is beauty in sharing abnormality. We were seen by others to be a strange couple, sticking out of the crowd. When Yusra was still very young and went to school in Maputo, Mozambique, we were a recognizable oddity as we rode our bikes along the Avenida Julius Nyerere for her on her way to school and for me on my way to work, rehearsing the tables of multiplication through random mutual questioning of each other. We were possibly the first humans ever to enjoy those boring tables, that no one likes, because we did no longer recognize them as tables. Much later, when, over a period of four years in the late 1980s, I spent short periods of time at the Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, Yusra always accompanied me and attended the research school associated with the university. We lived like a single parent with a single child. In a country where everyone drives a car, we were seen daily, riding our bikes again while having conversations about life’s fundamental questions. In February 2019, while attending, as we always did, the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, this same strange couple was seen walking, hand-in-hand, the streets of Washington, DC, Yusra meanwhile using a walking stick as well. A gentleman commented in passing: “So glad to see you’re still holding hands.” And finally, on February 1 this year, we found ourselves aboard the KL612 from Chicago to Amsterdam, she on her way to Venice, Italy, and I to Marseille, France. We had managed to be offered by KLM to sit together in the first row of the ‘Economy Comfort’ section. In flight, while Yusra was asleep, I spoke with the steward at the back of the plane about my work, which aroused his interest to the extent that we exchanged information about email addresses. I told Yusra when I came back to my seat. She later spoke with the same person, in the company of yet another crew member, and was quizzed about her own work. And then, when we sat together again, we had, during the long remaining part of the flight, literally all members of the cabin crew coming to see us and speak with us. When finally we arrived in the early morning of February 2 at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and had disembarked, the entire crew stood waiting for us to make sure that Yusra would be given assistance for the transit to her next destination. It was our last flight together. But our memories will meet again.

In closing, let Yusra speak. Here is a poem she wrote long ago. It’s about fear, life, love, and death.

fear

fear of
death
because i love life
life
because i don’t want to lose
the feeling of
loving
and being loved

fear of
loving you because
love is life
and life ends
so how can i love life?

fear of love and life because
their presence
creates the possibility of
their absence
and in
their absence
there is fear

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