Lourdes Maria Alvarez: Cultural Explorer

By Anne Cassidy

The music spilling from Lourdes Maria Alvarez’s computer speakers has a brisk beat and wailing vocals. The accompanying video on her computer screen features a man named Hakim and a woman named Olga Tañon, both with sultry good looks, singing and dancing together. The music and video seem out of place in Alvarez’s book-lined McMahon Hall office. But Alvarez, an assistant professor of modern languages at CUA, checks her favorite Arabic-language Web sites frequently to keep abreast of popular Middle Eastern culture.

The vocalists  “are singing about an impossible love,” Alvarez explains. “Olga sings in Spanish and Hakim [who’s known, Madonna-style, by one name only] sings in Arabic. This song is a huge hit in the Arab world and in Latin America.”  

Like the song, Alvarez is a crossover hit. While she’s taught Spanish language and literature at CUA for four years, her fluency in Arabic and her interest in the Middle East have made her a sought-after lecturer both on and off campus.

From Baghdad to Burbank

The 1924 film "The Thief of Baghdad," starring Douglas Fairbanks, shows the romantic, stylized view of the Middle East held at that time.

“In the earlier, 1924 version of this film there’s no anxiety about Arab power or Islam,” Alvarez says. “Islam is presented as a benevolent force that helps a ruffian understand he has to live up to his greatest potential to win the heart of the princess he loves. But when you get to the 1940 version you have these petty despots whose claim to power is questioned.” While Alvarez has not analyzed films made after 1950 in any systematic way, Hollywood portrayals of Islam have become increasingly negative, she says.

The reason for this change, Alvarez speculates, “is that we didn’t have an economic and political interest in the Middle East until after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. We weren’t dependent on foreign oil. We didn’t have a stake in whether those Middle East governments were legitimate or not.” But as time passed, we did develop a stake in these issues, she says. And that change is reflected in American cinema.

“Like Throwing Myself into an Ocean”
Looking at the connections between East and West is something Alvarez loves to do. Her parents were born in Cuba and she grew up speaking both Spanish and English. Languages came easily to her and she studied French and Italian in high school and college. Before attending graduate school at Yale, she began studying Arabic.

“That was the hardest thing I ever did,” says Alvarez. “It was like throwing myself into an ocean.” But the language captured her heart. She wrote her dissertation on popular medieval, bilingual (Spanish-Arabic) Andalusian poems called muwashshahat, then became interested in the 13th-century Sufi poet Abu al-Hasan al-Shushtari, who adapted the secular song verse style to describe divine love and whose songs are still sung in Morocco. “His work is a living link between the present and the medieval past,” she says.

“I’m ultimately interested in this idea of cultural contact,” Alvarez says. So she studies historical eras when one worldview bumped against another. What she’s learned is somewhat encouraging, especially in these war-torn times.

“If you want to find historical examples of religious intolerance, massacres, wars, you’ll find them. If you want to find examples of cultural collaboration, cooperation, cross-fertilization, you’ll find those, too."

Lessons from the Past

One region rich in cultural cross-fertilization was al Andalus, the part of Spain controlled by Muslims for almost 800 years, from 711 to 1492. This territory ranged from almost all of the Iberian Peninsula in the beginning of this era to only a small southern sliver at the end. During the 10th to 12th centuries, Muslims, Jews and Christians all lived together in harmony. Then the harmony ended.

“The tolerance fell apart partially because of political expediency and a certain misreading of fundamentalism,” Alvarez posits.

“There were some who thought that the ‘fundamentals’ of fundamentalism were, ‘We don’t get along with those types of people.’” It’s a complicated story, Alvarez says, and at various points Christians and Muslims were at fault. But the end result was war, expulsion and intolerance.

“The parallels to our 20th and 21st centuries are uncanny, and I think it would behoove all of us to know more about the history of al Andalus,” Alvarez says.

At CUA Alvarez teaches Spanish language, medieval Iberian lyrics (which include works in Arabic, Hebrew and Spanish), a course on translation and a course called “Shahrazad's Legacy: Medieval Storytelling Traditions from Damascus to Toledo.” She’s also the Spanish study-abroad coordinator.

We Are All Connected
Alvarez believes in the power of stories. One of her published articles analyzes a 10th-century Arabic fable that describes a conversation between humans and animals.

Assistant Professor Lourdes Maria Alvarez

And connectedness is what she analyzes in her lectures. In March she gave a talk on “Don Quixote and Other Tales from the Orient” for the Maine Humanities Council, and last December she gave a presentation entitled “The Gullible Thief and the Sea of Stories: Arabic Storytelling Traditions and the West” for the Mosaic Foundation, an organization that raises funds for education and children in the Arab world.

“Dr. Alvarez is one of the most charismatic members of our department,” says Joan Grimbert, professor of French and chair of the Department of Modern Languages. “Her lively interest in popular Arabic music and Arabic's contribution to medieval storytelling traditions has resulted in an astonishing array of invited lectures, amply illustrated with music and film excerpts.”

Speaking of film and music excerpts, the singing duo of Olga and Hakim is largely unknown in the United States. “There’s all this stuff going on over there [in the Arab world] but it’s under the radar here,” she says.

Alvarez likes to search under the radar and find the ancient and modern places where cultures overlap. Then she likes to share them. “I’m buoyed by the fact that I feel my research is important,” she says. “And I’m having a lot of fun.”

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