Haley Shepherd

USM senior lecturer, Keltoum Rowland often reflects on how her upbringing in different countries motivated her embrace of different languages.

In the early morning hours in Beirut, Lebanon, seven siblings would flock to a bakery. The bakers would provide the children with flat bread, letting them add their own toppings of sauce, a spice mixture known as za’atar and a range of other ingredients like meat or cheese, before baking it all together for them. This Lebanese dish is known as manaiche. And those peaceful mornings at the bakery with her siblings is one of Keltoum Rowland’s fondest memories from her time in Lebanon.
Rowland, a senior lecturer at Southern Miss specializing in French and study abroad, has traveled to many different countries. But Lebanon was her favorite. She lived there from 1979 to 1981, during a time when the country was filled with civil unrest and violence. She remembers how her home lost a wall overnight to a nearby bomb that went off and how she got separated from her family because she went to someone else’s house and couldn’t leave due to civil unrest. Even though she lived there during a dangerous time, Lebanon is a country she holds dear. She loved it because of the cuisine, friendly people, and diverse cultures and religions.
Rowland was born in Algeria to a mother who was a French housewife and a father who was an Algerian diplomat. Due to her father’s job, her family moved a lot, never staying in one place for too long. Besides Algeria and the United States, she lived in France, Libya, and Lebanon. Her childhood was filled with diverse experiences of food, languages, and cultures. Growing up, she and her siblings were told to never get attached to a place they lived in.
“What was upsetting is that we could not stay long, you know,” she said. “We, always with my father’s position, had to leave after sometimes, one or two years. And I was mad because we would make friends. We would get accustomed to a culture, to the food, and then suddenly, we had to leave.”
While the constant moving around was upsetting, Rowland was still grateful for her father and his job, and it was because of him that she found her passion. When he was stationed in Washington, D.C., she was able to go to the United Nations in New York and sit with the translators. That moment sparked her love of languages, and it became her dream to become a translator for the UN. In an attempt to get the job, she learned multiple languages, including Arabic, French, English, Spanish, and Chinese.
Instead of becoming a translator, Rowland went to a university in Saint-Étienne, France where she studied the teaching of languages. That school required her to study abroad in another country teaching French for a year, which was when Southern Miss contacted her for a teaching assistant.
“USM chose me,” she proudly said.
She has lived in Mississippi ever since. The thirty years she’s been here marks the longest she’s ever resided in any country. But she often reflects on certain moments of her upbringing in other nations.
In the late 1990s, while living in Algeria, she watched her friends being taken out of school and married off due to the standards of the local patriarchal society. She spent her late teens in fear of that being her future as well, even though her parents told her that she would finish school. But she still worried they would change their minds.
“I lived in fear that this was my destiny,” Rowland explained. “That was my future, because I lived in Algeria. And at that time, for a lot of girls, that was the reality. And that was why I was always the first one ready for school. You know, my brothers never had to worry about that.”
Everything that Rowland has been through has made her into the woman she is today. Had she not gone to the UN she might not have found her love of languages and come to USM. Instead, she might have owned a cafe called L’apéro, serving drinks and tapas. Had it not been for her parents, she might not have been able to finish school. And she might have been married off and never achieved her goal of being independent and free. But she lived through the fear she faced.
“I don’t have regrets because of what happened in life,” Rowland said. “And I cannot change anything in my life, because I like what I am today. I am proud of what I am today. It is what we say in Arabic. This is my maktoub; it’s written.”