What happened on Sunday: Pastoral Care

 Portland Friends organizes faithfulness groups -- clusters of three or four people who get togehter outside of worship to 

- socialize

- build community connection

- be present for and encourage our faithfulness to the guidance of Spirit in our lives

I am new to faithfulness groups. The trio that I'm part of started getting together in May of this year. We try to meet twice a month. I'll use random initials to refer to my faithfulness friends.

Yesterday we met at one of our houses and sat outside. C had made pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and brought out a colander of need-to-be-eaten-grapes. A food element makes a huge difference at a gathering like this.  

We have developed a habit of checking in, on items that are new but also on updates from past conversations. During yesterday's check-in E shared about their cat's recent illness and vet visits. It had been a stressful month for E because of the care the cat needed. 

C said, "I'm on the pastoral care committee. It sounds like you could use some support."

We talked about what pastoral care looks like, and how it can be given, or how to signal that it's needed. 

I find it hard to ask for pastoral care. The best case scenario seems to be what C did for E yesterday: noticed a need, and offered to fill it. 

In this way, faithfulness groups, or a small group of people who know my life better than the rest of the Meeting, seems important if our community is to support its members in a substantial and practical sense.

At our past gathering, C had said it's hard to attend the pastoral care committee meetings on Zoom when her toddler is right there with her. I asked if I could come over and offer a sort of "Mother's helper" child care during those meetings. C said yes, and our first session will be on Thursday. 

I'm struck that my being part time at my capitalist job has enabled several community connections in the past few weeks, including this offer to take care of C's child while she does other important community work for the Meeting. 

Community requires time.

Do we need to reference early Friends?

 Recently a Friend said, "I'm get so annoyed when the first sentence of anything references Early Friends and what they did!" Do we have nothing today we can draw on? Nothing since them? 

Beacon Hill Friends Meeting

This resonated with me though I had never thought about it before.

Reading Faith and Practice has been a reminder that modern Friends have rich experience and wisdom. 

In the section on the inward Christ, this quote from Richenda Scott indicates we can experience God through our friendships: 

"Perhaps for many of us, particularly for those of us who are younger, the way to the knowledge of the meaning of Jesus Christ lies through human friendship and affection and love. Then there may come the moment when we are carried out of ourselves, far beyond what we have hitherto known and clung to." 

                            -"Love and Discernment," The Friend, Dec 5 1975.

I find that affection and love is born of vulnerability. And this I found in Beacon Hill Friends Meeting last Sunday where I worshipped after an airport run to Logan. 

The ministry was varied -- it didn't feel like those who spoke were necessarily "touching the same thing," but there was a feeling of sharing what feels profound among f/Friends. 

One person shared that their housemate had put their pet bird to bed the night before, which involved rolling the birdcage into her bedroom. The large old metal cage had four ball caster wheels "which all have different opinions" she told us.  

Sometimes as you push the cage, it doesn't go straight. 

Sometimes it shakes as it rolls.

Sometimes it crashes into the wall despite careful driving. 

And sometimes, it moves smoothly for a few feet.

This is perhaps my favorite kind of ministry, and it relies not at all on references to Early Friends. 

I love stories of how life teaches us when we pay attention.

This cage -- how different is it from my life projects? 

- Reliant on many things going well, not all of which are in my control. 

- Unpredictable in its movements. 

- Sometimes provides a period of smooth sailing which doesn't last more than a few feet. 

- Requires frequent recalibration. 

This was not the only message that felt like something said between friends that would awaken affection and love. Maybe I can rely on this idea of Meeting as a place where we share the food of human friendship: presence, witness, listening and a willingness to see the divine in (sm)all things. 

Series: What happened on Sunday -- 2. Zoom worship

 I attended Sunday's worship on Zoom. I was sitting in the parking spaces closest to the Brunswick library where I could get on their wifi and I watched many folks walk into the UU church across the street. Why wasn't I joining their worship, I asked myself. Might be interesting, after all. 

But my goal was to know what attending Portland's zoom worship felt like. I am newly on Ministry and Council and wanted to know how Zoom felt from the other side of the screen. 

I was a little embarrassed to be in the car, so I put dewy green grass blades as my background. 

Here are two of my reflections: 

1. It is a pleasure to see the worshipping body as a fly on the wall. I have never seen the worship room from this vantage point, and the sight of all the Friends gathered and sitting in silence was heart-warming. I believe in the power of visuals and this image of the gathered body emphasized for me the importance of our collective spiritual practice. I didn't feel as though I were a part of that body, but it was affirming to see it anyway. 

The other heart-warming visual was at the rise of meeting when everyone shook hands. Watching folks turn to their neighbors and greet one another after the stillness of worship was beautiful. 

2. I can't imagine that the zoom experience would be very satisfying if I didn't know the people in the room. One reason these visuals and the sounds of Meeting were enjoyable was that I recognized people and anticipated having a good deal of in-person fellowship with them very soon. To have Zoom as an option does feel important but it by no means diminishes the centrality of in-person worship.

Series: What happened on Sunday - 1. Care of Worship

How do we educate ourselves in the Quaker way? It seems that this education must be an ongoing activity if newcomers and long timers are to be reminded what we do in Monthly Meeting and why we do it.

Last weekend at Portland Friends Meeting I saw an example of what I’m calling “ongoing onboarding." 

I carpooled to meeting with Genna who is on Ministry and Counsel, the group that cares for the quality of worship in a Monthly Meeting. Genna had Care of Worship that day, meaning they were designated to ground worship prayerfully and hold the gathered group in prayer during our hour of expectant worship. 

Worship starts at 10 am. We arrived at about 9:15 to open the meetinghouse. By 9:30 Genna was in their seat in the worship room. I joined about 9:40. Gradually more Friends came into the room. It was quieter than usual. It felt like as each person entered they sensed the spiritual work already underway, the work of setting the container for worship. I thought each person seemed jazzed about this, as though they entered the room and realized, “Oh – we’re doing this!” As each person sat down they took on a piece of the responsibility for the quality of worship. 

The worship was deep and alive for me. The spoken messages were short and dwelt on love. One friend encouraged us to acknowledge aloud the love that exists between us, not to wait forty years like he had with a friend. Someone else asked how we make manifest in the world the power of love we experience amongst ourselves. Silence radiated around these messages.

Let me describe how Genna moved our covered group through the stages at the end of worship. 

Transition 1: into joys and concerns

Genna said, in a tone that did not break the feeling of worship, that we would continue by holding up joys and concerns, either inwardly or for the whole group to hear. The joys and concerns which rose were poetic, almost like worship messages in their prayerfulness. Someone expressed gratitude for the Meeting’s ongoing support of her as she provides care, both “instrumental and invisible,” to her sister. Another person raised a concern for an immigrant friend who fears every time his wife or children leave the house that they won’t return. It was as though the love experienced during worship found its first concrete objects in these requests, and we held each with love.

Transitions matter

Transition 2: Genna then stood by the door for maximum visibility and introduced themselves. They explained that they were one of the people holding Care of Worship that day, which meant they were praying for the group’s faithfulness. “You may find that you also do this,” Genna said, acknowledging that many people hold the group in prayer. These people, Genna said, we can call elders, but “Some people use the word midwives,” Genna explained, “because it’s not only old folks.” And, they went on, elders don’t just admonish un-Quakerly behavior. They help in the birthing process, bringing forth whatever God has for us to experience. 

Transition 3: “This is a moment of transition, and we’re going to have announcements and introductions,” Genna said, “But if you’re not ready to  leave the space of worship, there is no obligation to stay.” 

“After announcements we will have snacks. I will be holding Afterthoughts in the back classroom. This is a place to talk about how worship was for you, or ask questions about Quakerism. I have some quinoa salad and spinach to share. That will be in the back classroom after rise of meeting, which is what we call it when we get up.”

I perceived that newcomers to the meeting watched Genna with mild interest. Many long-time members though, were rapt, watching this example of eldering with fascination. When was the last time we had heard someone explain care of worship? Were we aware that many people were holding our Meeting in prayer? Did we know it was an option to forgo announcements and continue in worship? 

There is so much to know about Meeting. Continually orienting us to the spiritual purpose of our shared activities is an important task for Monthly Meetings. This Sunday I saw how that important task may be spread across our corporate activities in a way that explains our particular language and rituals: an intro for newcomers and a reminder for members. 

Cyclones and Wet Nurses

 Last night cyclone Sitrang rang through the gaps in my windows. I wondered if I would be able to sleep. The weather was not too violent in Dhaka, though I was able to spend the evening and night inside. I'm sure for many it was a rough night. 

A flooded road in Dhaka on 10/24/2022.
My neighborhood does not look like this. 

The hardest hit part of the country, along the southeastern coast on the Bay of Bengal, is where almost a million Rohingya refugees are resettled in camps, having fled Myanmar's repressive regime. They have been moved to islands and coastal areas, and are not free to leave these areas. These areas were hit hardest by the cyclone, and some areas received 12 inches of rain yesterday. Here is where I read about it.

This morning in the breakfast room the students were happy. No school! I think the city must be too wet, and transportation must be too tricky, for most to get to school with reasonable effort. The architecture students were happy that their quiz was cancelled. 

I brought the short story "The Wet Nurse" to the breakfast table, hoping to finish it. It's a story that was offered in a workshop on South Asian women's literature at Bread Loaf this summer, with Dr. Marjorie Sabin and her husband. Each week Dr. Sabin would discuss a short story. Given the quantities of writing otherwise assigned for credit-bearing classes, I didn't read any of the stories in their entirety. I brought my print-out of this story with me here because it's an Indian author, Mahasveta Devi, and was originally written in Bangla. 

The story is about Jashoda, a woman whose breasts produce copious amounts of milk. She becomes employed by a richer family as a wet nurse for all the wives' children, which helps the women bear lots of children but not lose their physical beauty, which is important to their husbands. 

This is how we are introduced to Jashoda: 

"Jashoda never had the time to decide whether she could or couldn't tolerate motherhood. Interminable motherhood was the only way she could keep her large family alive. She was a professional mother; it was her career. She was not an amateur in the game like the women in the bhadralog, babu households. After all this world is the monopoly of professionals. The city has no time for amateur beggars, pickpockets, or whores; even the street dogs and crows hanging around trash cans, tempted by the garbage, will not yield an inch of their territory to an amateur newcomer. And so, perforce, Jashoda took up motherhood as a profession."

Mahasveta Devi

I am reminded how lucky and privileged I am as a woman to be able to choose not to be a mother, and to have sources of motivation in my life that do not involve the safety and feeding of my family. The story was written in 1977, so Jashoda's experience is not very remote. Even now motherhood is compulsory for so many women. I wonder how many of my female students can conceive of a future without motherhood, and how many of them would want such a future. 

Well, Jashoda dies, used up, disregarded and alone, of breast cancer. She suckled so many of those around her, and in the end no one wants to take responsibility for her welfare. She is mother to all, but no one fills the role of caretaking child. And it is her sickly breasts that finally end her life. Well, if that isn't a metaphor for how deadly the compulsory role of motherhood is, I don't know what is. 

It makes me think of the first episode of The State of the Union, where the wife asks her husband if he'd rather not go into marriage counseling, and be like a cancer patient who doesn't want someone to poke around inside their body. He says he absolutely wants to avoid the poking. She says that's how cancer kills. You have to go in there and have "a bit of a poke". 

Marriages don't die all at once, she says. They've been sick for a while before they go. Women must be the same way, according to Jashoda's experience. We can live under ill conditions for a long time before the sickness takes over all function. 

It's really too bad the rest of this mini mini series is not available in my current location. 

First two days in Dhaka

View from my balcony on the first morning

 There is a twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness which I have been inhabiting for the past six hours or so, since I woke up at 12:17 am Dhaka time. This zone will be where I hang out until I assume a normal sleep schedule here, ten hours ahead of where I left the US, in Maine. 

There is another twilight zone I'm inhabiting, that between physically arriving in a place, and having any sense of awareness of that place- any bearings, any real acquaintances, any landmarks. 

Yesterday I twilighted through various experiences - working with Lota to get my computer connected to wifi. Meeting Shaon from the embassy and walking around the marketplace as all the shopkeepers set up mats and cardboard boxes to kneel on for the Friday noon prayer. "We've come at an awkward time," he admitted. "We'll just have to wait." We then went to a western coffee shop called North End where he explained to me aspects of India and Pakistan and Bangladesh's past. 

On the walk to Brac University

There is an absolute thrill, even when twilighting, to learning about a new part of the world. And there is a way in which fiction prepares me for the real thing - I read A Golden Age by Tahmimi Anam this summer, and its portrayal of the 1971 war with Pakistan helped frame Shaon's comments very helpfully. 

I floated through UniMart, the large grocery packed with western comforts, edible and decorative, with Bridget, a Ugandan woman studying at Brac whom I met in the dining room at breakfast yesterday. 

I like meeting the women who are living here. I like knowing that I have a dining room where I see other women and chat with them three times a day. That knowledge prevents this twilight zone from being at all lonesome. 

Cars and drivers on the left.

It's funny how quickly a cultural experience which seemed forever so remote can quickly become something one has done, and does. Taking a rickshaw, for example. The storied transport of South Asia, depicted in photos, films, fiction, was summoned without fanfare by first Shaon, then Bridget, for our travel needs. Like the bota-botas in Kenya, you see it and it seems so foreign, then you get on one and you think, ah, here we are. 

Rickshaws

Toward the end of my ride with Bridget, I got a bloody nose (second of the day - I think 20 hours of dry plane air was the culprit) and luckily  - so luckily! - she had a paper towel in her hand and I snatched it to stem the flow. She pointed out a hotel across the way where four very obliging workers thanked us for coming, bloody, into the lobby and using the washroom. 

This neighborhood, Gulshan, is where diplomats and what Shaon referred to as the "international middle class" reside, so most of the locals are service people of one kind or another. That said I can see a slum across the little river from my balcony. Today I'm looking forward to venturing outside of Gulshan. One of my decisions over the next few weeks will be whether to continue living here or find somewhere else. 

This was down one of the sidestreets in Gulshan, the posh neighborhood.

I twilighted through to dinner at 8:00 by watching the 1995 Pride and Prejudice (the proposal/argument episode) then sat with four women who are studying at Brac, two Bangladeshi, two Afghan, and heard about their weekend day and their activities at Brac. 

I wanted to get a picture of this woman
in the pink sari without being obvious.

The antidotes to both twilight zones - the sleeplessness and the placelessness - are oddly the same (and I mean the antidotes beyond actual daily floaty living): tea, and fiction. I started listening around 2 a.m. a stupendous audio performance of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Something that Shaon said stuck with me. He said he is loyal to his hometown, but beyond that sees himself as a citizen of the broader subcontinent of India, not to individual nations. That struck me as quite a beautiful thought, and made me more willing to see Indian and other South Asian lit as indicative of a broader experience and culture beyond its borders. 

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. 

What does Mainstream mean?

 Oh jesus. There is enough to say every day to populate ten blog posts. 

In the afternoon we had our first class of Dis Doc, the shorthand that Dr. Breuggemann coined for her class "Narrative and Documentary in Disease, Disability and Illness." We watched the documentary "Vital Signs" in which people with disabilities respond to, among other questions, "what does mainsteamed mean?" 

One respondant says, "It's where all the abnormal people get together with the abnormal people. It's happened with race too - so who is normal? Who are the already mainstreamed people?"

This point came up again in the On African American Rhetoric book today. The authors point out that in African American rhetoric, there exist always the two strains, one advocating integration, the other advocating separatism. Which is not to say that they don't exist in the same people. The authors refer specifically to WEB Dubois, who seemed to oscillate between these standpoints, as implied in this paragraph from "Conservation of the Races," an 1897 essay:

WEB Du Bois

Here, then, is the dilemma, and it is a puzzling one, I admit. No Negro who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these cross-roads; has failed to ask himself at some time: What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would?

That last question especially seems key to me. Do Germans (or those with German heritage, like me) have a responsibility to wear their German identity visibly and proudly? Certainly not in practice. Do African Americans then? Well, yes, but who puts that expectation on them? 

The authors say, "Du Bois' fluctuations or multiple outlooks suggest, along with genuine existential grappling, varying degrees of optimism/pessimism regarding the prospect of social justice for Blacks within mainstream American society." 

I'm noticing one of the things that I guess I hope graduate school will provide: a larger framework for understanding the things I read and see today. Of course I'm aware that Black people in America today don't agree on the degree or type of integration that would be best for the Black community (and as Eddie Glaude points out, the idea of a monolithic "Black community" is misleading and flawed.) But reading about this history, and tracing the strains of opinion from Sutton Griggs' Imperio and Imperium published in 1899, to Douglass, to Du Bois, to Garvey, to King, to Malcolm X, to Michelle Alexander... is helpful for me to understand the persistence of this grappling. And it is so much more nuanced than just "join 'em" or "ditch 'em". 

Sutton Griggs

The authors are using the jeremiad term to follow the arguments of African American rhetors. 

The term jeremiad comes from the book of Jeremiah in the old testament, in which the prophet refers to the promise the people have made with God, then describes the nature of their declension on this promise, then prophesies the doom that will result from continued failure to fulfill the promise. Black writers and orators have relied on this structure to warn America of the stakes of their failure to live up to their moral ideals as stated in their founding documents. 

Interestingly, Malcolm X departs from the typical jeremiad form of his forebears David Walker and Frederick Douglass when he discounts any supposed morality among White Americans. In 1965, he wrote in "The Bullet or the Ballot": 

So I say, in spreading a gospel such as black nationalism, it is not designed to make the black man re-evaluate the white man–you know him already–but to make the black man re-evaluate himself. Don’t change the white man’s mind — you can’t change his mind, and that whole thing about appealing to the moral conscience of America–America’s conscience is bankrupt. She lost all conscience a long time ago. Uncle Sam has no conscience.

So what can the Jeremiad do if it doesn't rely on our sense of morality? Well, maybe the same thing the old testament did - rely on our fear of annihilation. Indeed, in the same text, Malcolm X points out that "They don't try to eliminate an evil because it's evil, or because it's immoral; they eliminate it only when it threatens their existence." 

This reminds me of a concept developed in critical race theory - the idea that White people will only adopt anti-racist measures when they directly benefit White people. 

Black Power

The last part of this chapter talks about the debate on the use of the term Black Power in the 60's. It was used first at SNCC speeches. It quickly gained currency and stirred controversy. Leaders like Malcolm X and King had to publicly denounce or embrace the slogan. 

Stokely Carmichael

 The book says that just two days after Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks used it at a SNCC event, King was "forced to discuss" the slogan with Carmichael as they walked "through the Mississippi Delta." 

Part of rhetorical power, then, seems to lie in what we are forced to discuss. The Occupy Wall Street movement forced us to discuss the 99%: who it was, why it was, and who was the 1%. 

In class Dr. Robinson said we should think of analyzing rhetorical power as going beyond literary analysis. Literary analysis is looking at the parts of a text and making meaning of them. Rhetorical analysis is adding a step to this: considering the work that a text does on the audience. How is the audience changed by the text? How do they walk away differently? 

Initially, I think the "work" or "effect" could be very hard to define, but very worth discussing in a class. We watched a video this morning in class and considered the "effect" it had on us. I could tell even from our preliminary comments (before class ended) that the woman of color in the class had been affected differently than I had (not surprising). Talking about the difference in the effect of rhetoric is the power of classroom space, and it's the space I want to open up with both White students and students of culture. 

This phrase White students and students of culture. It sounds harsh. But I think it gets at the ways that the idea of "Whiteness" harms White people. What is my culture if I am White? I don't know. I don't know. I have had to subsume my cultural identity (as German, British, and what else??) for the privilege of being "White". I sacrifice my individual identity, it's the price I pay for the White label. 

If I maintained my cultural identity, I'd have to reckon with the harm done to my people by White people. The idea that I belong to Whiteness in the same way that Eastern Europeans, Russians, British people, and others do, would be untenable. There would have to be a reckoning, a reconciliation, with the fact of class division within White communities. 

Whooeee, and as Resmaa Menakem pointed out, we do not want to do that!

A four-member class

 I am very excited to be taking Michelle Robinson's class Teaching African American Rhetorics at Bread Loaf this summer in Ripton, Vermont. 

Michelle Robinson

We just had the first class and I have reflections on our class size and on the first reading, which I have just begun and will use this blog to process. 

Why are there only four students in the class? We are three White women and one Black woman, and Professor Robinson is Black. (She teaches English and has various other projects/duties at Spelman college, the HBCU). 

I walked past other classrooms in the Barn, where many academic classes are held here on the Ripton campus. They were full. Like, 10-15 students in each. What were these classes on? I don't know - Chaucer, British literature of Revolution, the Odyssey. I was initially encouraged to see that there was demand at Bread Loaf for courses with such a clearly anti-racist teaching intent as TAAR. But apparently there actually isn't much. 

I'm grateful they didn't close the course because of low enrollment. The other anti-colonial class I wanted to take this summer, especially after my appointment to a position at Brac University in Dhaka, Bangladesh, was "Fiction of Empire and its Aftermath in South Asia." 

When I emailed about joining this class, the response was that the professor withdrew from teaching it, but I wonder if there just weren't enough interested students. 

Prof. Robinson said today that rhetorical texts are texts that do work. That attempt to make a change in the audience's mentality. This, to me, is basically any text ever, except all my notebooks full of stream of consciousness writing. Although, the attempted change there might be in my own mentality - does that count? Surely. 

In the introduction to On African American Rhetoric, the authors Keith Gilyard and Adam J. Banks say that WEB Dubois believed all art to be rhetorical. He wrote in "Criteria of Negro Art" that "despite the wailing of purists," he rejected the notion of art-for-art's sake and considered all art to be politically instrumental (p. 296). 

He added, "I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda" (296). 

So, this seems to constitute all art, all writing, from an advertisement to a poem to a book jacket blurb. Maybe not the shopping list. Though I suppose if someone else were to see my shopping list I would make sure it represented the version of me I wanted to project (propaganda) to them. Broccoli, eggs, sweet potatoes, you know, not chips, muffins and frozen dinners ("I COOK.")

Toni Cade Bambara

The introduction dwells on the experience of Sylvia, the protagonist in Toni Cade Bambara's short story, "The Lesson." Sylvia goes to FAO Schwartz under the supervision of a teacher, Mrs. Moore, who is keen to demonstrate to her young charges the economic landscape of New York. They live in Harlem, and Sylvia is disgusted and angered by the price of the toy sailboat in the window. She angrily asks the teacher why they have come. 

Miss Moore, who is Black, seems aware that her job as educator of these young African American students is to facilitate and epistemic break. 

OK, epistemic break. The text talks about how for Michel Foucault (who was a 20th century French philosopher, though I would have guessed he was way older than that) epistemes are "concepts that counted as legitimate knowledge, and they were circulated and reproduced by means of related and regulated discursive practices." 

So, racism is made up of many epistemes that are reproduced and passed down -- until parents and teachers and friends and Black women help us break them! 

Anyway, growing up Black in America, Sylvia's self-understanding is dominated by the narrative that she "spurs and justifies" her ignorance. Think about what that means. She is growing up in a world that spurs - ie encourages, her to be ignorant of the disparities around her, of the machines and structures that ensure that she will likely (without the intervention of Miss Moore) ever see that sailboat downtown, let alone be able to purchase it. 

Her world also justifies her ignorance. What could this mean? That she understands that her ignorance is explained by the poverty of her neighborhood. She has no real expectations, no need for knowledge for she has no ambitions. This she sees when she looks around her neighborhood, which of course is not culturally bereft, but financially poor. 

So, Miss Moore's job is to take her and her classmates downtown to see how the other half lives, to start to be able to perceive at least the fruits of this racial capitalist machine, even if they don't understand how that machine works. 

The initial impact is to make Sylvia angry. And the outlet for that anger is Miss Moore. Sylvia says, "So we headed down the street and she's boring us silly about what things cost and what our parents make and how much goes for rent and how money ain't divided up right in this country."

Here's the key: But Miss Moore, in the manner of great educator Paulo Freire (1970), comprehends that the teacher-dominant, overly narrative approach is inefficient and relatively ineffective. The children need not another sermon from an adult. They need field experience. Sylvia, for example, whose name literally means "lost in the woods," her forest being not so much Harlem but her state of mind, has to be led physically to greater awareness."

This is not fun for the teacher - doesn't mean the teacher is the best friend of the students. This is the position that Ms. F, at my last school, took on. She was not the students' best friend, but served and escorted them to truths about their existence in America which would constitute epistemic breaks with the narratives they had been raised with in refugee camps. Or among families in this country of White bodies, or bodies of culture (terms borrowed from Resmaa Menakem). 

Today Dr. Robinson said that teaching should be uncomfortable. That as soon as teaching is not uncomfortable, you're probably not doing much for that community of learners. 

Two other ideas that struck me from the introduction: 

1. Bambara's revisions of dominant narratives. In one example, she retells the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears as "The Golden Bandit" "to remind people to scrutinize official versions and authorized tales". She reveals Goldilocks as a "burglar-chile-vandal-thief" who will not confess to her exploits or take responsibility for them, choosing instead to frame the bears.

Critically, the way Bambara engages an audience about this retelling is entirely through questions about it. Both about the story, and about the story's implications for navigating "official versions" and authorized texts in today's world of media and fake news.

Amiri Baraka

2. Amiri Baraka's idea of "changing same," which he uses to describe how rhetorical responses among the African American community change to match the changing forms of oppression -- what stays the same is the presence and reality of oppression. Blues music, he says, developed and adapts in response to the nature of oppression. Black Twitter, the editors of this book suggest, is a recent example of changing rhetorical responses to a changing landscape of oppression. 

I'm eager to learn from these and more titans (this is the first time I've heard of Bambara) with my classmates and Dr. Robinson. 

White people talking to white people (WPTTWP)

Last night I was on Mount Olympus's Western face watching the sun gild the clouds above the Oquirrh Mountains in the most glorious pink. This morning I watched that same sun touch the highest peak of those same mountains. I saw it from the Park and Ride at 6570 South Wasatch boulevard, where a hiking meetup was taking off. 

I do not love these group hikes. But each time I am glad, after the fact, for the opportunity to talk with people who I would not otherwise have rubbed elbows with. Especially when we get to talk about White privilege and structural racism.

 In his book Democracy in Black Eddie Glaude Jr says if we are going to change the way we see Black people, "White people -- and only White people can do this -- will have to kill the idea of White people." 

It is never hard to connect a substantive conversation topic with race and power structures, since race pervades so much of our societal psyche. 

I have been encouraged by our anti-racism meetings at school to engage the topic of race when it comes up. Today the woman I was hiking near, a professor at Westminster College, said she didn't like working at her last college, Williams, because "I didn't get it about having wine and cheese parties, for students." The atmosphere of elitism was so intense that even she as an educated white person didn't feel comfortable. 

We then had a conversation about how institutions of higher ed make/fail to make attempts to create space for students of color and marginalized students who might easily feel that this school (and its bougie cocktail parties) is not for them. We mentioned some of the things Westminster does, and also how the curriculum and theoretical framework that is taught in classes makes a big difference. 

I told her what Ivy said about TikTok being a great place to find educators talking about how to be culturally responsive and anti-racist in the classroom. I also recommended and texted her the link to Zaretta Hammond's Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, which she seemed very keen on. 

Of course, this was a fairly easy conversation to have because she, like me, is a White educator who wants to do more for equity in her classroom. But any conversation we can have with those around us that normalizes talking about racism and how to be less racist, seems worth while. 

Isabel Wilkerson has a fascinating chapter of Caste: The Origins of our Discontents which illuminates how flimsy a term "white" is, and how recently its meaning has been debated. Just 120 years ago, in this country, when Italians immigrated they were not considered White. 

A Black man initially accused of miscegenation was released when the court found out the woman was Sicilian - it was no longer a marriage between White and Black. 

In 1894, 11 Italians were lynched in the South for Jim Crow-type offenses, facing the same punishment Black people would have faced. Different states at the time determined "Whiteness" by vastly different formulas.

Maybe "killing the idea of White people" is not as far off as I thought when I initially read Glaude's directive. He advocated, and I advocate, WPTTWP.