The story and rhetoric of Mark O'Brien

In the past week we have watched three documentaries about the disabled community for the Dis Doc class. Here are some thoughts on my response to one of these docs, Breathing Lessons, about the life and work of Mark O'Brien.

My initial thoughts upon encountering the following documentary subjects: 

OK, this boy is disabled but his is a happy story. He has parents who support and film him. He is socialized and knows to look at the camera. He’s part of a community, even if it doesn’t look like him.

This woman looks composed. She’s a talking head. She is saying something about politics, but seems level-headed and not fanatical. Probably won’t tell me anything I don’t already know and agree with. Her hand shows her disability.

This woman is going to be provocative. She is a performer, and wants to change the way we’re thinking about something. She is probably resentful of a world where her beauty is not upheld, since she’s parodying an ideal of beauty that we like to gawk at.

What is the purpose of my initial, split-second sizing up of a documentary subject before they speak? I suspect it serves to arm me emotionally against what they will say. If I can categorize and classify their comments before they even make them, they are less likely to upset me and derail my sense of rightness in my own life. I suspect that another purpose is to insulate me against intimacy and recognition of myself in that subject. I use that split second to quickly tabulate the way those people are different from me. I can imagine myself like a boxer, sizing up a new opponent (an unfamiliar narrative) and spreading my feet wide, readying myself to take on (protect myself from?) this new narrative.

Mark O’Brien’s mode of storytelling didn’t give me the chance to anticipate and prepare for his message, or to establish this combative/protective stance. He spoke in Breathing Lessons from his stretcher, head propped on a pillow, tilted to the side. His voice fluctuated only minimally. Sometimes at the end of a sentence he smiled, which provided relief to me as a viewer because it constituted a clue to how to feel about what he had said. 

For the most part, his language was stripped of what we are taught to appreciate as rhetorical flourishes. His plain speech, adorned only with his own vacuum-assisted breaths, caught me off guard and packed an emotional wallop. When he says “I have fantasies. I get very angry at able-bodied people and I just want to mow them all down with machine guns,” he says it in the same voice he uses to describe the virus that causes Polio. When he says “You have to be lovable. I'm still trying to figure out how to do that,” his words could also be mine. That intimacy with the subject is destabilizing. 

His language disarms me. 

Arthur W. Frank writes in The Wounded Storyteller that “actually hearing traces of the body in the story is not easy. Observing what stories say about the body is a familiar sort of listening; describing stories as told through the body requires another level of attention.: 

Frank paraphrases Martin Buber, saying the body “does not use speech, yet begets it.”

Mark O’Brien as a storyteller seemed to illustrate this phenomenon. O’Brien has polio, and thus cannot move his body from the neck down. Without the traditional vocabulary of body language - gesture, expression, posture - his speech becomes a body language, mediated by the body which is experiencing the illness. His body is his rhetorical device.

The power of his delivery lies in how his words evade all my attempts to pre-judge (and thus somehow blunt the impact of) his comments. I feel incapable of maintaining a distance between his vulnerable body and mine. His words, offered without prelude, force me to see myself in him - fearful of loneliness and boredom, desirous of love and attention, rageful at others who have what I don’t have.

Do I have to prepare myself not to be affected by the stories I encounter? Can I accept that interaction with other humans changes me - that I will always be impacted and altered by my interactions with others? Can I guard less preciously the version of myself that I must protect against uncomfortable narratives? Can I hold loosely in my hand my current sense of “rightness”?

Words he says that resonate with me:

“I feel like nobody really cares what my opinion is.”

“I can feel this illusion of self-sufficiency.”

“You can’t demand love. You have to be lovable. I’m still trying to figure out how to do that.”

“I wonder what meaning life has.”

“I’m very self-conscious about my appearance.” 

What does my ability get me, if I still feel these parallels with Mark O’Brien? I’m not as different from him as my vanity wants to believe I am.

Learning to write in college

 What does a college writing course do for students? 

For many African American students, it marks an early experience of "choose the White way, or fail," a genre of experience that college is full of. 

The chapter on college writing instruction in On African-American Rhetoric emphasizes that often in these classes, writing is seen as a strangely uncontextualized phenomenon. Comp/Rhet classes have, they point out, been "proponents of a prescriptive, analytic paradigm in which the focus is on finished texts and textual features with little regard for the circumstances of their creation."

What will these young people face in college? 

Which is ridiculous. To look at a text without studying the conditions of the writer - in a writing class - is to miss 90% of the piece. Maybe the whole piece. My vehemence on this issue is based in my experience reading Their Eyes Were Watching God in high school, when I didn't understand the circumstances of that text's creation at all, and could not understand the power of Zora Neale Hurston's use of vernacular language. In fact I was snobby about it - thinking that she didn't really know how to write very well. 

The authors in this chapter advocate for writing pedagogy that is intersectional - inviting students to use what they have, all the tools of expression they possess, to respond to a moment or task. 

The debate about whether a black student needs to master "Standardized" (White, elite) English strikes me as a variation or a subcategory of the integration debate. "Can we do this 'language' and 'expression' thing (rhetoric) on our own, or is there much to be gained by dropping it and adopting the colonizer's language? 

This is a debate relevant to my students in Utah, who were language learners, and had to face daily the fact that as they acquired more English, their mastery of home languages, and the viability of those languages, diminished. What is lost there? What is gained when they are able to fill out a job application or submit a resume that is comprehensible and sufficiently "educated" sounding to get a job? Well, quite a bit is gained - the ability to earn an income and be seen as a functioning member of our capitalist society. 

In November 1971 the CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication) issued a statement that supported students' use of their own language in schools: 

We affirm the students' right to their own language - the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the  right of students to their own language. 

The point about teacher training is key. It's as central as any other kind of anti-racist training. Teacher training programs throughout the country need to tell white pre-service teachers that their students do not need to speak in a White way to pass the class, and certainly not to write well. 

Speaking of teacher training, I remember reading something when I was in grad school about how the value and legitimacy of language lay in how well it conveyed an idea. That makes me think of how in college, my economics professor would sometimes assign us long readings, then when we came into class, say "Well, they make it very long and complicated in the article, but what he's saying is simple if you think of it in intuitive terms" and proceed to explain the salient points of the article. 

This always annoyed me because I had spent ages reading what was actually poor writing because it did so little to address its audience, and to consider the explanations that might help us grasp their points (the intuitive terms my professor used)

So, yes, the authors of OAAR quote Geneva Smitherman (whom I immediately am inspired by) saying: 

Geneva Smitherman

Communicative competence, quite simply, refers to the ability to communicate effectively. At this point, however, all simplicity ends. For to be able to speak or write with power is a very complex business, involving a universe of linguistic choices and alternatives. Such a speaker or writer must use language that is appropriate to the situation and the audience. He or she must be able to answer such questions as : who can say what to wom, under what conditions? who is my audience? what assumptions can I make about that audience? What are its interests, concerns, range of knowledge? in a given act of speaking or writing, what examples or details will fit best and where?... I am here talking about the aspects of communication such as content and message, style, choice of words, logical development, analysis and arrangement, originality of thought and expression, and so forth. Such are the real components of language power, and they cannot be measured or mastered by narrow conceptions of "correct grammar."

I especially like the question, 'What are its interests, concerns, range of knowledge?' This is a question that every teacher should ask about her students too, before developing curricula. 

Smitherman's student and protege Elaine Richardson refers to today's literacy models as "White supremacist and capitalist based literacy instruction made plain - its emphasis on detachment, objectivity, positivism, conformity, and a mythic meritocracy. 

She uses the term "field dependency" to describe the character of African American literacy. Field dependency is "involvement with and immersion in events and situations; personalizing phenomenon; lack of distance from topics and subjects." 

This is so fascinatingly different from the typical western anthropologists "objective" gaze on an object of study. 

Richardson's data show that when students don't have to worry about matching the dominant language standard, they write more, flow better, make fewer errors, and have better arguments. I have found the same thing with students, and thus do not believe in sentence starters so favored at my school. 

I want to mention that they quote Curtis Campell, saying "our personal lives are in fact arguments, are embedded in argument." This is true, I think for everyone, but we call this "incorrect" when it comes from non-white students. 

My favorite quote in the chapter is, "We should prepare students for societal change, not merely to fit in." I like this because people often counter my ideas about writing instruction by saying "They will need to know this to get a job." Which is true, and of course students need to know how to communicate with potential and current bosses. 

Students need to be prepared for changing media forms and requirements. They need to know how to use the tools they have to do all those things that Smitherman notes: namely, respond to an audience. 

Carmen Kynard points out that getting curricula to reflect the identities of the students has never been sufficiently done by well meaning White teachers. She reminds us that "well-meaning activist students of color were the most important factor in the development of writing pedagogy responsive to their needs.

There is a section about the need for writing instruction to become intersectional too, to include and honor Queer expression. If we don't teach an awareness of intersectionality in writing classes, students won't be able to write about it in their other classes.

Signifyin' and Black feminist rhetoric

 There was a part of this book that said that African Americans believe in the power of words. That's why most things are accompanied by words: music, dance, spells, rituals. The magic is contained in the words. 

This idea was brought into sharper focus in chapter 4 of On African American Rhetoric which discusses new words being used by Black feminists. For example, misogynoir is a word referring to racist and sexist actions and abuses against women of color. 

As soon as you hear that word, you realize that we need a word for that. It can't just be sexism, because it is experienced so differently and at different rates by women of color. 

Another one I found fascinating is "wreck", which Gwendolyn Pough discusses as the

"ways the rhetorical practices of Black women participants in hope hop culture bring wreck -- that is, moments when Black women's discourses disrupt dominant masculine discourses, break into the public sphere, and in some way impact or influence the U.S. imaginary, even if that influence is fleeting."

I like the resonance between "wreck" and "rhetoric". We must realize that the voices of Black women in hiphop do often create massive epistemic breaks. This is true for me. Even last summer I thought most black women should just be sexualized as objects in hip hop, then Doja Cat sang, a hundred times in the kitchen where I worked, "Can you kiss me more?" 

What? Women can ask to be kissed more? Epistemic break. 

This chapter talks more broadly about the idea of "signifyin(g)", a rhetorical action whose traits I want to write down: 

1. indirect, circumlocution

2. metaphorical-imagistic (but images rooted in the everyday, real world)

3. Humorous, ironic

4. rhythmi fluency and sound

5. teachy but not prachy

6. direct at person or persons usually present in the situational context

7. punning, play on words

8. introduction of the semantically or logically unexpected

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The example story (from a book by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) is
of two black men who are talking circles around a white authority figure who is asking them who started a riot. Bucking the stereotype that these common laborers wouldn't know much, they spin a web of sociological and historical truth around him to provide an appropriately complex answer to his question (the answer to who started the riot has to do with Lincoln, who freed the slaves without providing any political power for them, and white America generally, which, in the words of Isabel Wilkerson, acts as an insecure alpha.)

The ability to talk circles around someone -- that is one form of freedom that black people have, although they have often had to pay for using it, when White people have perceived that they are being bamboozled. 

Did you know that Sojourner Truth may very well have never said the phrase "Ain't I a woman?" That phrase was added to a transcript of what she said years later by a scribe. But it has become a cornerstone phrase of Black feminist rhetoric. I liked reading that Alice Walker sees her name as related to Sojourner Truth's, since Sojourner = Walker, and Alice comes from a Greek term for "truth". 

Rhetoric: Toward continuous reconciliation

Mind blowing moments abound. 

Last night at the first meeting about the plays Jane Eyre and Johnny Eyre (in which I have two minor roles) the director, Brian, talked about the pressure actors sometimes feel to become their character. 

"Don't worry about that!" he said. "You are fully you, and you are your character. Art is about asking the audience to see two things at once, asking them to hold that you are you AND you are your character."

This was mind blowing. Art is about asking the audience to see two things at once. A novel, asks us to see the real world, and the novel, at the same time. A character, at the same that that I see myself, or my mother, or my country. A painting asks me to see its image and also see reflections of my world, or my past. A song asks me to hear this story or emotion, and overlay my own story or emotion or idea or fantasy. 

Another mind blowing moment: 

Molefi Kete Asante

In On African American Rhetoric today, chapter 4 "Rhetorical Theory" the authors refer to Molefi Kete Asante, who they say offers the most comprehensive discussion of African rhetoric. Asante says "rhetoric must transcend ideologies, whether political or racial, in order to perform the task of continuous reconciliation."

Oh my gosh. Rhetoric in the pursuit of continuous reconciliation. Who has ever heard of such a thing? That is so different from the Aristotelian understanding of rhetoric, "an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion." ...and then to exploit them for my purposes. I feel like rhetoric has always been described in my education experience as something that helps me WIN. Defeat someone else's arguments, and I'm an accomplished rhetor. 

But what is the point of winning the argument, if they don't acknowledge the legitimacy of my claims? If we are not any closer to reconciliation? 

The chapter also discusses call-and-response tactics again, and how prevalent they are in African-American church services and other gatherings. Even on rap albums, where rappers include the voices of people in conversation with them, because the response is integral. 

This quote made me think of the classroom: 

"In Afrocentric rhetoric, the speaker consciously operates under guidance from the audience, and effective performance cannot be ascertained apart from audience participation or, more precisely, audience demands relative to expressions, gestures and tone."

This is true of the classroom! I believe the class can only progress as it is condoned and visibly and audibly approved of by the students. I cannot progress with a lesson unless I have a clear sense that students are behind the direction of this work. And if they are not responding, it is a reflection of the rhetor (me) because the hearership is not interested.