Fiction for the Fourth

This weekend my roommate went back to Ohio to spend time with her family, and I had our 1840 house to myself. The rainy weather and the dark, log cabin interior to our house made reading the activity of choice.

For school, I'm reading Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence (reviewed along with other adolescent books here). It has raised a million questions about what it was like for my mother to raise three of us; by this book's calculation, adolescence begins at 10 and ends around 25, so she was dealing with three adolescents for a while, and is still dealing with one!




The book argues compellingly that the best thing we can do for teens is help them develop their impulse control. Self-regulation is key to success (not to mention safety) during adolescence and later in life. What's more, self-regulation can be taught, while intelligence cannot, really.


 

He also argues that the phenomenon which everyone will recognise of adolescence lasting longer, with twenty-somethings living at home and people delaying marriage and parenthood, can be a boon to society if managed well. He says that adolescence is a period of brain plasticity, during which we remain hyper impressionable. This can be good - the more different and challenging things we are exposed to as adolescents, the more open-minded we will be. Better to test and stretch the brain as much in its plasticity than to let it settle into an unchanging mass as early as twenty.




This made me feel like I want to keep traveling and teaching, two things which support brain plasticity in my experience. Challenge, surprise, dynamism, and constantly a flow of new people.




In school reading related to my other school, Richmond High School, I was enthralled by one title in particular that Meg, my mentor teacher, recommended I read from the tenth grade reading list. The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls is a memoir from a girl who grew up in a family that was constantly on the move in the western US. It is a recounting that emphasises, above all, that children can get used to anything, and will consider whatever they have as normal if their parents do (granted that they don't have easy access to peers to compare themselves to). It is a marvellous story which also brings home the importance of loving parents, when all kinds of other resources - money, jobs, extended family, schools - are not present.


In short fiction this weekend, I read "The Fugitive" by T. Coraghessan Boyle, a story of a young Mexican man in California, dealing with illness, and listened to this wonderful short story twice (when I listen to things, I really need to listen to them twice): Ben Lerner reading John Berger's "Woven, Sir." The discussions which follow, which always irk Monica for their high brow nature, are to me like mini lessons in contemporary literature, so I like them, even if they are stuffy. 

I also enjoyed sitting by the rainy window and having coffee in a new (well, old), and finally properly sized coffee cup which I found at a thrift store last week. 

Juneteenth in Richmond

Today is Juneteenth, and has involved a confluence of appropriately themed events.

This morning I read the first chapter in Beverly Tatum's Can We Talk About Race, one of the texts assigned for the MAT program at Earlham. She discusses the desegregation of schools after the Brown v. Board of Education supreme court case, then follows with an explanation of the re-segregation of schools in the 80s and 90s after subsequent cases allowed schools to evade the integration measures.

Tatum talks not only about the disparity in performance brought about my segregation in schools, but also the challenge of successfully integrating without bulldozing black identity out of the students. After all, of the 3 million teachers in the US, only 7.5% are African American. Hence, most black students are taught by white, female teachers, a curriculum that has little to do with their identity and heritage. She pointed out that in their majority black schools, black students had texts drawn from black artists and black history, (poems from Langston Hughes, words from spirituals, biographies of black leaders...) which, particularly in early days of integration, though today as well, traces of black identity are hard to find.

One of the moving parts of Tatum's essay was her retelling of a teacher's experience in a class that was examining a text that identified the British pioneers as the earliest settlers in Texas. "Knowing full well that Mexicans (his ancestors) lived in what is now known as Texas long before any New Englanders arrived, the student blurted, "What are we, animals or something?"

The class had a discussion of how racism manifests in the school system they are part of. "And they described the stance they took in order to resist that racism and yet not be thrown out of school. It amounted to nothing less than full-blown and cooperate not-learning." (Tatum)

This, of course, makes a teacher's heart sink.  Tatum says the answer is a) making sure the environment reflects minority identity as well as majority (have black teachers, administrators, art, texts) and b) affirm students' identities by asking them "Who are you? What do you want to do?" and affirming, "You can do it!"

I might well have black students in my student teaching classroom this year, and will likely have Hispanic students, and I'm looking forward to seeing how my mentor teacher engages their individual histories.

At West Richmond Friends a special service had been organised for Juneteenth, featuring music (Deep River, among other evocative pieces) a children's story about the new $20 bill with Harriet Tubman on it, and a message about Frederick Douglass's speech about the meaning of the fourth of July for the Negro in which he provides a stirring example of using an opportunity to speak out to present an uncomfortable truth.

Bob, who brought the message, emphasised that it is worth celebrating the journey of a nation, much more than its beginning.

The closing query, before silent worship, was "What has this journey of progress meant for me, both personally and as part of the groups I'm part of?"

In considering progress made for women since the original July 4th, I can vote, can go to school, can marry a woman if I want to, can run for public office, can contemplate a life without children, can start my own business, can teach economics, can fight in combat ... and I can wear a skirt and apron, have children, and bake bread all day if I want to! Of course, my privilege makes much of this possible, but I'm conscious of the magnitude of the progress anyway.

Fiction for children

In the annual start of summer fiction issue of the New Yorker several writers contribute essays under the common banner "childhood reading". An intriguing theme for net between a handful of the essays is that "children's literature" is really whatever children read. Some of these writers grew up with what would be considered mature stories like Moby Dick and Robinson Crusoe. Others, like the reader of The Secret Garden, remarks that its themes of abandonment, cholera, and regret make it heavy handed compared to most modern young adult lit. 

Other contributors experienced lit through everything but reading. Listening to tapes, listening to people, looking up words in the dictionary, (these are the reflections of someone who immigrated at two and didn't write strongly as a child). 

What Rivka Galchen notes is that her memories of what she read are not from books, but from 

"The mysterious “Banacol” stickers on the apples [my mother] peeled for me, the Royal Dansk Danish Butter Cookies tin, mailings from Ed McMahon, deputized to me, which might make us millions, my parents’ odd names on checks that had pale mountain ranges in the background, mountain ranges that I had been invited to select myself, from the sheet of so many options."

What do you remember reading when you were young? 

I remember reading the cereal box, even more than the activities the nutrition facts, whose scientific words and units of measure (g) meant nothing to me, except how they compared to the corresponding values on Tess's box. 

I remember learning (it was certainly a long and subconscious process) that names were misleading sometimes, like at The Topsham Fair Mall, which was not a mall and was not fair. Part of its uninspired sprawl was the Fairground Cafe, which also inspired confidence and also was a disappointment with its un embellished tune salad on cold white bread. 

 Bananas that were as green as my favorite camp tee shirt were labeled "ripe" in the supermarket. I gradually learned, as everyone does, how dishonesty is woven into the way we use language. 

 More egregiously dishonest use of language for political purposes takes place in the first scene of act three of Julius Caesar which I'm reading now. Cassius says that by cutting life short we actually save ourselves years that we would have spent merely fearing death anyway. This is right after Caesar has been stabbed in public, and Brutus says 

Brutus Grant that, and then is death a benefit.
So are we Caesar’s friends, that have abridged
His time of fearing death. Stoop, Romans, stoop, 105 And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood
Up to the elbows and besmear our swords.
Then walk we forth, even to the market place,
And waving our red weapons o’er our heads,
Let’s all cry ‘Peace, freedom and liberty 

I remember reading my mothers signature and noting the difference between the letters in her name and the letters distinguishable on my permission slip. 

I remember the neon sign at my family's business with the word Office spelled in one coil of green. In places the black paint had flaked off and office looked more like offuce. And I couldn't understand why milk wasn't just called milk, but 2%. I learned to despise the words with pulp stamped across the top of the orange juice carton, not because I disliked pulp, which I didn't, but because it was only cool to like pulp free orange juice among the girls at school. 

And the cars. Some of the first words I could recognize were the names of the cars we referred to by their make. Mom's sable, the family Taurus, Wesley's Mazda. Granny's grand marquis was an enigma with that final s. 

A huge part of learning language is the acceptance of truths we don't understand, or maybe the initial inculcation into the social conceit that we are honest and that things make sense.  

Julius Caesar

This morning I was sitting at the table and suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to watch some ballet. I looked on the websites of the New York Times and the Guardian for clips of contemporary ballets or productions of old ones. Here is a piece from the New York City Ballet with Balanchine choreography, but the dancer seems not nearly enraptured enough for my taste, so I abandoned it.

On the Guardian's website my search led me to a series of videos of theatre monologues. I enjoyed this one from King Lear. 

The video that overtook my Saturday, however, is this one featuring Damian Lewis as Antony in Julius Caesar. I have now watched it probably 8 times, and each time my eyes are streaming by the end. I find him absolutely enthralling.

This video sent me into the school library to find a copy of Julius Caesar today. We don't have one, but luckily there are loads of scripts available pdf form online. What we did have is a CliffNotes guide whose introduction talks about persuasion as an important theme in the play, particularly political persuasion.

The play was performed in 1599 when Elizabeth the first was ageing, and had no clear successor, a fact which made the populous nervous. Shakespeare mirrored some of their discontent and some of the scenarios in their minds by evoking 44BC in Rome, when Caesar comes back to Rome after defeating Pompey in Spain, one of Rome's adversaries, and tries to persuade the population to crown him king. He is highly ambitious and sees himself as superior to all other contenders for power. I've only read to scene two, but it seems already as though there could be a timely re-staging of this play around Donald Trump's candidacy.

I want to teach this play! I'm reading the study guide and wanting to have a class to go into tomorrow, to open the scene and talk to the students about the nature of democracy, and how easily a crowd can be swayed. After all, in the scene that Lewis's speech comes from, he speaks to a crowd which has just been hardened against Caesar by Brutus's comments, but by the end of Antony's speech, the crowd is howling for the blood of Caesar's murderers. If public opinion can be so quickly swayed at the hands of a powerful rhetorician, how stable is the democracy really? 

Introduce myself to my cohort (Homework assignment)

(This post is the first homework assignment, which I have to share via a link. The suggested newsletter editor, smore.com, is not functional on Palestinian internet, apparently!)

Very excited

…to teach English Literature to high school students

This is at Maktesh Ramon, a crater a few hours south of Jerusalem.

It is very warm here in Ramallah as I write this. I have all the shades drawn and the fan on, though the air is stubbornly sluggish. I can hardly imagine how this city’s (and many others') residents will withstand the physical stress of 30 such days, without food or, astoundingly, water, starting Tuesday, for Ramadan. 

Last year during Ramadan I was amazed to see how life as usual continued in the city streets. People continued to walk around, taxis peeled around as usual, windows down in the dust, people calling to one another as they bought colourful pickles from street side bins; everything carried on with what seemed to me the same fervor as ever, all without a drop of water to cool the jets between 3:50 am and 7:49 pm. 

My primary source of fascination and education since I’ve been here, however, has not been the city, or Arab or Muslim culture, or even Arabic language (at which I'm still hopeless). I’ve been fascinated by the high school students that I’ve had in class, and the literature we have studied together. Truly, studied together, because I didn’t choose the syllabus, so part of the challenge has been staying ahead of them and figuring out how I want to engage us in the text. 

I’m quite excited about what happens in a classroom when the students create their own meaning around a text. That is not to say that they ignore the story that’s there, but they allow their experience and their context to influence how they understand the text. 

I’ve enjoyed asking students what they think about a text before telling what’s impressive about it; having them create role plays about the themes of the text before reading the story; asking students, when reading drama, what they think will happen next.

On another hike, this one near Ramallah, with Monica, a
very significant teaching mentor for me.

I am drawn to the literature classroom because of its dynamism. I taught two sections of two different courses, and got to see how the composition of the class, as much if not more than the culture of the students, influences a class’s reading of a text. 

Some classes develop affection for certain characters, or follow certain motifs more closely. One class took it in stride when Lady Macbeth is pronounced dead - they seemed to have been expecting it. The other class was completely up in arms and carried on for minutes: “Miss! What? She died? When? How did that happen? She died? MISS!” 

My undergraduate degree is in economics, so literature was a new direction for me (since high school at least), but it’s grabbed me by the back of the neck, and I feel quite infatuated. 

I am curious to see how working with American students is different from working with students for whom English is a second language. I look forward to meeting you all!

The Palestine Literature Festival, part II

Tonight I experienced a few firsts at the Palestine Literature Festival's closing night.

- I heard a Nobel laureate read his own writing, part of a short story about threshing floors in South Africa. The writer was JM Coetzee and the venue was the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center Garden, which was so full people were sitting on banisters, stone walls, and (like me) the ground under the green lighted fig tree. I found the story fascinating for the way it revealed the mystery of language for a young person trying to make sense of the world. I'll write about that separately.

- I heard a first-hand account of what it was like for one black American woman to travel the route of the slave trade through Ghana. The poet was Saidiya Hartman, and I never wanted her to stop speaking, even though her message was thoroughly discomforting. 

- I heard spoken word Palestinina Poetry live for the first time! I've only ever seen videos like this one of this locally revered form of non-violent resistance, and tonight a Palestinian American poet from Brooklyn, Ali Abuajamieh, delivered three of his poems on the stage. 

- I felt the tiny hands of a Palestinian baby pressed onto my leg. What looked to me like a 10 or 11 month old, with a choo-choo- in his mouth, was on his mother's in the parched grass next to me. Occasionally he would fall onto me, pushing his tiny might onto my thigh or grasping my sweater sleeve in an attempt to steady himself, or to get my attention, I don't know. 

Some of the crowd at the KSCC tonight, under the green lighted fig tree.

You can tell from the bullet points above that this lit fest was truly international in nature. Coetzee grew up in South Africa during Apartheid, and Hartman has Ghanaian roots but lives in New York now. Abuajamieh's parents are from Jaffa and Haifa (towns now inside the state of Israel, to which Palestinians without specific i.d. can't go). 

Last week on their final, the 11th graders were asked what makes interpreting a play different from interpreting a poem. Many of them asked for clarification during the exam, and I had several mini conversations with students asking where they encounter plays, and what is involved in their experience of a play. The performance aspect, the fast pace, not controlled by the reader, the expressions and intonations of the actor, the choices of the director. All these elements came up in these brief exchanges. 

Tonight the readings combined these two genres, poetry and theatre, as the tone and expression of the reader, and his or her pace, influenced my understanding. There is something special about hearing literature read, since it is so ephemeral. A beautiful sentence, once heard, hangs in my mind like smoke after a flame is blown out - it bespeaks the beauty of what was there just a second ago, and this remnant will inevitably dissipate within the next few seconds; I probably wouldn't be able to repeat the beautiful sentence if I wanted to. I can't go back to it, I can only smile in the warm ambient glow it's left in my mind.

A crummy photo of Abuajamieh, a spoken word poet

This happened several times with Hartman's readings, which come from her book Lose Your Mother, A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. She described going to Ghana and feeling so thoroughly a foreigner. Her accounts of being identified and referred to as "outsider" (I forget the Ghanaian word) made me think of what it feels like to stick out so markedly on the street here, and how much my sister Tess stuck out when serving in Peace Corps Cameroon. 

What made Hartman's message poignant though, was that she had left the US looking for her true "home", and arrived in Ghana only to be made to feel thoroughly foreign, though in a different way than she is in the US. 

She described the horrific experience of walking through the "dungeons", the holding cells for slaves, where the ground is literally composed of the compacted remains of humans. She spoke of the euphemism of the phrase slave trade, which implies mutual benefit, and mutual consent. I had never thought about that specific word and how positive its connotation is in our pro-market society, and how inappropriate it is to describe the coercion of slavery. 

She also talked about litter in a fascinating way. She said, garbage is the point of conjunction between the living and the dead. It is the remnant of what has been life, and what is now dead. It struck me as an astute observation; "trash" epitomises both the presence of life and the triumph of death. 

There are certain images she saw during her pilgrimage that she "rejected". She rejected the reality of walking on the remains of those who had suffered generations before. I wonder if we can actually reject a reality with which we are faced. I'm not talking about a question of self-delusion, which can be the result of cultural narrative ingrained in us since a young age. I mean, when we encounter a situation that disturbs us, can we block it out? 

It surely depends on the person, just as whether we are affected by a horror movie depends on our constitution. Have I ever decided to reject something? I'll have to think about that. Have you?

The Palestine Literature Festival

Last night was the opening event of the Palestine Literature Festival at the Ottoman Court. The amphitheater was full, and the crowd was beautiful. The young, hip, partially-westernized but proudly Palestinian crowd was out in force, plus a slew of Western transplants, and us short-termers. Here is the bio of the first woman who spoke. I'm trying to figure out how to put in an audio file of her voice, which was incredible. If you have never been exposed to formal Arabic, her poem would have been a good place to start! 

Asmaa Azaizeh was born in the village of Duburiya in Palestine’s Southern Galilee region, in 1985. She is a TV correspondent and presenter for the London-based channel al Ghad al Araby. She has written for various Palestinian and Arab publications alongside working with various cultural initiatives. Her first collection of poetry, Liwa, was published in 2011 and won the AM Qattan prize. Her second collection As the Woman From Lydd Gave Birth To Me is forthcoming. She has contributed to anthologies, magazines, and festivals around the world. Her poems have been translated into English, German, Swedish, French, Dutch, Italian, and Persian. 

The program of the festival had this introduction to the nature of the festival: 

"Staging a travelling literary festival in Palestine is certainly a challenge, but we can't imagine PaleFest working any other way. As our international guests move from the weaponised economics of Ramallah through the siege of Jerusalem to the evisceration of Al Khalil and the ruins of Ein Hod they understand the different aspects of the occupation. In each city we work with our partner organisations and some of the finest voices in Palestin'e irrepressible literary scene to produce a series of unique events. In besieged Gaza, artists based there will also deliver events under the PaleFest banner." 

While I waited for the event to begin, between sessions of staring at the people around me, I read about another poet whom I'd never read or even heard of: Wallace Stevens. 

The idea of a two-faced person has come up often in the literature classroom this year, from Dr. Ridgeon in Doctor's Dilemma, and Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi (not the mention the Duchess herself, in a softer sense, when she lies to her brothers, and to herself in telling Antonio that everything will be OK after their marriage), to Lady Macbeth and Macbeth, who show remarkable bravado but also have lines that reveal intense fear and uncertainty. Wallace Stevens brings another meaning to the idea of "two faced," a less pejorative meaning. He was an insurance trader during the day, and, according to Schjeldahl, (I just had to write that name) "the quintessential American poet of the twentieth century".

It makes me sad to think of men with literary passion and genius being contained in suburban lives and day jobs, roles foisted upon them by social expectation. Stevens apparently struggled with depression his whole life. What if such men were encouraged by society to pursue their literary passion with abandon? What if they were allowed to live the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez did in his early years as a writer, as described by him, in Bogota, Colombia, surrounded by the literary heavy weights of his day? Perhaps then, Wallace might have had as significant a role in the American public life as Marquez did toward the end of his life (as described here by my favourite profile writer.) If we allowed more people to gain legitimacy as a non-politicised "voice of the nation," the political discussion might take on broader scope. 

One of Stevens's poems is "Sunday Morning", whose first stanza is below: 

I. 

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late 

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, 

And the green freedom of a cockatoo 

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate 

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. 

She dreams a little, and she feels the dark 

Encroachment of that old catastrophe, 

As a calm darkens among water-lights. 

The pungent oranges and bright, green wings 

Seem things in some procession of the dead, 

Winding across wide water, without sound. 

The day is like wide water, without sound, 

Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet 

Over the seas, to silent Palestine, 

Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

Hm. For me this stanza evokes the contradiction between the magnificent luxury and beauty of our (my) lives, and past suffering of which we should be recognisant of on a Sunday morning, whether in a service full of pomp and circumstance or in Quaker silence. We ought to dwell on those who have less, who are suffering, who are in need of prayers, even as we enjoy "late coffee" (like I'm having at La Vie cafe right now) and "oranges in a sunny chair." The elements of our heavenly morning "mingle to dissipate the holy hush of ancient sacrifice." Indeed, Christ's suffering is a silent mist that wafts through my Sunday morning mind while I "dream a little" of my wonderful future life (at Earlham, teaching literature, visiting new places, meeting new people). The "encroachment of that old catastrophe" threatens our easiness, and is actually not so old, since injustice is really only ever down the road.

The "wide water", "without sound", at first may seem a buffer zone, separating me from the procession of the dead. Indeed my very luxurious day is like "wide water". But I (like Christ!) am able to walk across it, "to silent Palestine". The proximity of my dreams to the "dominion of the blood and sepulchre" is emphasised again. Those two realities are too close for comfort on a Sunday morning, I think.

On another note, and with a half smile, I take issue with the description of Palestine as silent. It is many things, but not silent. 

- children shouting at a table on the other side of the garden, 

- the chickens in the back garden crowing, 

- cars honking while they watch someone try to drive over a sidewalk, 

- some sort of amplified auction going on (has been for over an hour) in the next building, with one of those mikes that reverberates the voice of the speaker

- the Palestinian folk music on the sound system at this cafe, 

- and the call to prayer. 

- This morning the construction site next to my house started up at 6:30 with someone sanding the side of the building, or that's what it looked like from my vantage point