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 resilience' and 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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