Daniel, Cornel West, and small movements for justice

Gloria Steinem's memoir is instructive in its structure. She zooms in on several of the populations she has worked with to fight for justice, or the communities that she has entered for long enough to get a sense of their own desire for justice. Two of these are

- Women flight attendants demanding fair treatment and reduction of status as sexual symbols
- Conservative women who picket against Planned Parenthood because 1% of its services are related to safe abortions, who then come in for abortions themselves before returning with renewed vitriol (fuelled by guilt?) to the picket line.

She tells her own story and the story of the women's movement in this country around and through these stories of isolated, small-ish scale movements for justice. In these communities people who what they want, and are able to band together at least a little bit to demand it. And it works. And they are inspired by things they read or hear about similar stirrings in other places.

We are indeed so inspired by words we hear from one another. I have been inspired this week by the prophetic and insightful words of my students in role play and discussion. I have been inspired by their poetry. I have been inspired by Steinem's example of living a life not rooted to one place or idea or possession (or possessions in general) but "on the road" in spirit if not in physical reality.

I have been inspired by the combined glory given to both arts and political activism in some things I'm reading recently.

1. Warmth of Other Suns, which has loads of epigraphs citing songs and novels by black and non-black writers and artists about the struggle for freedom and what living as a black American has meant to them. Here are two from the beginning of the book.

I was leaving the South 
To fling myself into the unknown....
I was taking a part of the South
To transplant in alien soil,
To see if it could grow differently,
If it could drink of new and cool rains,
Bend in strange winds, 
Respond to the warmth of other suns
And, perhaps to bloom.

        - Richard Wright


Our mattresses were made 
of corn shucks
and soft gray Spanish moss
that hung from the trees....
From the swamps 
we got soup turtles
and baby alligators
and from the woods
we got raccoon,
rabbit and possum.

        -Mahalia Jackson, Movin' On Up

I appreciate how Wilkerson pays credence to the power of the arts, especially music, in encapsulating and expressing struggles and triumphs - I should just say the human condition.

2. Cornel West's speech at U of Washington in 2014, which I watched on youtube. I have never seen him speak before and my goodness what power. A theme throughout was the important of taking inspiration from musicians and the musical world both in our ability to harmonize, improvise, experiment, and sing the truth of the situation, in order to constantly raise the level of the collective art we are engaged in making.

3. If Beale Street Could Talk, which has allusions to music throughout. The most moving recently was a reference to Daniel, a character who is incarcerated for two years and thoroughly traumatized by his experiences inside. The narrator of the book asks '"Didn't my lord deliver Daniel? Then why not every man?" It's an old question, and still unanswered.'

This prompted me to stop my audiobook and begin singing that amazing spiritual "Didn't my lord deliver Daniel?" I found this beautifully directed and performed version which I share with you now.

___

On a separate note, I have heard the name of Quakerism, the legacy of Quakerism, invoked by a solid handful of high profile folks in the past few weeks in ways that have made me uncomfortable. People speak of write about the valiance of Quakers fighting against slavery. Do we live up to this legacy today? I have to remember that John Woolman was not just searching and courageous in his journal - he was in his public life too. I cannot read about injustice and then continue with life as normal. I must organize. As Cornel West says - he answered the ubiquitous audience question of "how can I as a normal working person help?" by saying "You've got to take out time to organize, through whatever organization you have available to you." Indeed we must.

Cosy Sheridan, Gloria Steinem and the wisdom of women

Snowday

The director of my choir is a force to be reckoned with. A talented leader, he is also harsh, fairly aloof to most of us, and sometimes domineering. I don't think I would ever choose to be in the same room with him were it not for a choir rehearsal. But for rehearsals, he is unbeatable. We, a ragtag community choir, rise to great heights under his hand keeping the beat, and his voice, alternately counting and critiquing. 

On the weeks when he is not there, the assistant director, Kerrin, leads rehearsal. I know I am not alone in my disappointment when I walk in and Kerrin is on the stage. (They never tell us when Brady will be out of town, because they probably know we wouldn't come to rehearsal.) 

Kerrin is a talented and knowledgeable musician, and a capable director. The only person who seems to doubt this is Kerrin herself. Therefore her leadership is somewhat painful to undergo, because she is constantly apologizing and undercutting her own ability. 
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry for not being clear." 
"Did you get lost there? Maybe it's just me that gets lost." (She doesn't get lost.) 
"Good! Goodgoodgoodgoodgood." (When we haven't done well at all, but she seems afraid to be anything but positive.) 

The sopranos talk constantly through her rehearsals, something they never do with Brady. We go much, much more slowly through the music, and she asks "Did anything stick out in there? Should we go over it again?" When all we want is someone to tell us where to start and what to work on. It can be disheartening when the leader doesn't assume the role of leader thoroughly enough. 

I think about this in relation to the classroom. I do ask for student input and reflection often. Sometimes I'll ask for their help on small things like how we should rearrange into a circle. Should we go around these two tables? Should we move the tables to the corners? This seems minor, and maybe it is. But I want them to know I value their ability to problem solve in a context when their contribution is relevant. If I'm deciding how to lead a part of my English lesson, I'm less likely to ask their opinion, since it's my job, and ostensibly my area of expertise, to know how to lead the lesson, and I don't think they would have a better idea than I would, about whether to share in groups of 2 or 3, or whether to write for five minutes before talking through their ideas. Maybe they would. 

But I wish Kerrin would be more confident in her role as director when she is up there. Last night, she said we needed to cut off on time at a certain place, because she wasn't going to be able to cue everyone at that moment. "I'm only human, unfortunately," she said. This made me want to cry. Everything about how she presents reveals that she truly, truly believes, as many women do, that it is unfortunate that they are only human. When society tells them to be so much more, they are disappointed and ashamed to find they have (in the words of Othello's Emilia:) "Affections, desires for sport, and frailties, as men have". I want to call out to Kerrin - it's OK to have frailties! We all have frailties! And that is what makes life interesting! And (in the words of Hugh Grant's character in Two Weeks Notice:) "Saints are boring!"

On Friday Mum and I went to February's IAMA concert, featuring Mountain Country, and Cosy Sheridan. Mountain Country is a five piece country band, four men and a woman on standing bass, that played all original music. It was typically sexist in its messages: a woman is "a good thing" something "nice to come home to" that "smells good". The male speaker in the songs is "hard to hold onto" and a "rambler." 

I would have been more willing to forgive these as the conventions of the genre were it not for the fact that at the end of the set the lead singer and guitar player introduced each musician by name - except the woman playing bass. You could feel the cocked heads and raised eye brows in the UU audience until another band member acknowledged her, and an overwhelming whoop and applause went up from all corners of the room. "She always gets the loudest applause." the leader griped into the microphone. "It's because she's the cutest," quipped the banjo player. 

No, my dears. It is not because she's the cutest. It's because of what we can tell she has to put up with. 



The "rambling" song especially made me think of the memoir by Gloria Steinem that I'm listening to on audio right now, subtitled My Life on the Road. Steinem describes how when she was young, all images of women were associated with home and hearth, and the men were the ones to go gallivanting off. She has bucked that trend by spending more than half of the past 40 years on the road, organizing, mobilizing, speaking, being a feminist activist. 

I am greatly inspired by her commitment to listening, and being part of consensus circles that meet with "all five senses". Think about what that means. 
- Sight - we can all see each other
- Smell - we are close enough to smell each other and the aroma of the ...
- Taste - ...food we are eating together.
- Hear - we are close enough that we can hear without microphones or phones.
- Touch - our chairs are close enough that we had to jostle each other to get into the circle, and we are not afraid to touch each others legs or hands as we pass the talking piece around. 

This reminds me of circle time in advisory, when two student leaders come up with two questions to ask each other, and we discuss them in pairs then come into a circle to talk about them. 

Being part of an audience has always seemed sadly distant from the idea Gloria Steinem describes. I wish that at a concert or a talk there was more sense of being part of a listening circle among audience members. 

Cosy Sheridan

The second set on Friday night was by Cosy Sheridan, and I felt us approach the ideal of audience unity under her influence. The first sign was that, after the song "The Pomegranate Seed" a woman two rows ahead of me waited until the applause died and exclaimed "That was beautiful!" She spoke the "sense of the room" as Quakers would put it. The next sign that we as an audience had been transformed by her performance was when she said "We'll play one more for you," and a man on the other side of the sanctuary asked with unguarded sincerity, completely devoid of jest or self-deprecation, "Can you just play for another hour?" He too spoke to desire on all of our hearts. I can't remember the last time I was at a concert where I wished the performance would go on for another hour. 


What made Cosy so compelling? Mom said it - "She's a real folk artist." I believe we were drawn to the universal images of humanness that we, like Kerrin, are taught to despise in ourselves and hide from the world. She spoke of her desire to build a fence between herself and her neighbors, feelings of shame before a mother, the desire to be healthy combined with distaste for healthy things, the difficulty of finding fulfilling work and liking the life we've made, and the challenge of feeling OK about having less money than we associate with mainstream "success". She conveyed these ideas with warmth and humor and harmony, a sure-fire way to get them to sink home immediately. 

The last time I was in an audience that seemed linked to the same degree was listening to Colson Whitehead speak at the SLC Public Library, where he lifted his iPad to the microphone in order to convey the crackly sound of a 1960's song, which he mouthed the words to until we were all singing along (well, all the people who had been conscious for the original broadcasting of the song - I had never heard it before). We were united in song, something I'm sure none of us expected when we arrived at the auditorium and promptly ignored everyone around us, even in the very next seat. There were spontaneous spurts of laughter during this song, which I think revealed the degree to which people were taken out of themselves by this turn of events. 

Today is a snow day, my first since high school, I think. The phenomenon has lost none of its magic!

"So many stories"

Yesterday after school, a newly arrived student, B, met with me to read together his homework. He writes in his home language, Thai, and then uses google translate to change it to English. Each time we meet, I am amazed at the capabilities of Google Translate at this point. This week, he gave his ideas on Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "I, Too". 

Then, I asked him to show me on the map where he is from. Thus ensued a half-hour continuation of our conversation in which B taught me more about Thailand than I ever have known. For example, that its tenth king died two years ago. He was the longest serving king in the world, and the oldest, at 89. The country mourned for one year. B spoke these things into his phone in Thai, then showed me the translation on the screen. He also showed me the folk tales of his native land, in images, and I found this one in an English retelling on the blog of a Thai-German young woman. 
I am reminded by these kinds of conversations of the vastness of my students' lives. B said "I know so much in Thai", and "In Thai, I learn so fast." He is learning very quickly here too, and I can only imagine how much more quickly he would progress in his own language, on topics of his choice. 

bell hooks says that student stories are essential to bring into the classroom. It is essential to acknowledge the parts of them that are not directly related to school. I wish that school could leave the boundaries of the classroom more often. I would like to experience the world with my students more - the other week students in my advisory asked what class we would like to add to the classes offered at school. I said, one where we explore the city together, and see what we find. It's true. 

bell hooks, ways of knowing, and being a white teacher

bell hooks reflects, in one of her essays in Teaching to Transgress, that if she had been able to take classes on critical race theory from progressive black professors rather than her progressive white professors, she would have, because those teachers, by dint of being black, would deliver the information differently because of the "spirit that orders the words" when they speak. There is a legitimacy, of course, that comes from being a minority, which changes the way students perceive content that is delivered to them. 

I feel my own lack of legitimacy in this area as a white teacher when we consider thoughtful texts by black authors in my class. Yesterday we discussed Audre Lorde's "Poetry is Not a Luxury" and even though she speaks of women, not of black women or white women, I felt a certain gulf between myself and my students as I spoke with them about how Lorde exhorts us: 

"We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions our dreams imply and some of our old ideas disparage." 


A white teacher telling the students that we need to encourage each other feels a bit empty, frankly. I just imagine what these black students would feel if it were a black woman, or a black man, or a fellow refugee, speaking to them about the need to encourage each other. Of course I encourage them daily, but it's within a fairly proscribed academic context. I encourage them about their jobs and their sports pursuits, but I cannot pretend that we are really part of the same community, and they know it. 

What I felt very passionately, though I did not make this distinction in more than one class, is that as students they need to encourage each other. As friends, they need to encourage each other to look within, to face their fears, to "bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within in," so we can "learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living," which causes "those fears which rule our lives and form our silences [to] begin to lose their meaning."

hooks talks about the importance of individual experience in the classroom as a legitimate way of knowing, especially the experience of oppressed groups, like women and minorities. I feel much better about my ability to create a space in the classroom for the sharing of this kind of experience, as a white female teacher. Still, listening to her makes me want to be a principal just so I can search out and hire teachers of color, which our system so desperately needs. 

Yesterday many of the young women in my class (and many men as well, in fact) knocked my socks off with their comments about the essay. Only maybe 30-40% of the students in each class spoke during our 15-20 minute circle discussion, but the things that were shared were thoughtful and, I trust, impacted the thinking of everyone in the room. 

In perhaps my favorite moment all day, MN asked, "Miss, what does she mean by 'poetry is the skeleton architecture of our lives'?" I was unsure what to say, because indeed that phrase flummoxed me each of the half dozen times I read and annotated this essay in preparation for class. Luckily, MA jumped in with a response before I even could pose the question to the class - and she very rarely does that! She said "It means it's the most important thing. It's the thing that all our other action depends on." I was astounded by the ease and clarity of her interpretation. Of course, that makes perfect sense and is a powerful vision of poetry, and totally in line with Lorde's thrust in this essay, that poetry is not a luxury. Neither, I said to the class, is our literal skeleton a luxury - "We would fall down without it" mused SH. MN jumped onto MA's comment - "Ah, so she's saying we need to look inside ourselves to find it!" Again, this deepened my own understanding of Lorde's concept of poetry as skeleton.


In the first period, the conversation focused on fear and the ways it keeps us silent. Lorde's comment about how fears keep us silent and that, by putting them under "scrutiny" we can begin to be free of them, spurred a conversation of what kinds of fears make us silent. 
Fear of actually facing violence, said ZE.
Fear of facing incarceration if we are guilty, said DI.
Fear of people's reactions if we tell them we are sick, like if we have HIV, said AM.
Fear of being abused, or of telling someone that we've been abused, said MY.
Fear of angry parents if we tell them that we are in a relationship, said AA.  

Before we read Lorde's words about encouraging each other, I asked students how we overcome these fears. They said "raise your voice; be confident" and I said that those things are hard. How do we gain the confidence to raise our voice? Practice, they said, and encourage each other. This is exactly what Lorde tells us, I said. We looked at the section where Lorde says that "We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where the language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it." 

We had just written poetry at the beginning of class, a stanza of lines all of which began with "I". When we reached this point in the discussion, we could say "That was training. Lorde would congratulate us here on doing the hard work of looking within and asking 'What and who am I?'" We then talked, in both first and second periods, about what that takes courage. Why is it hard to turn the spotlight towards ourselves? 
Because sometimes we've made mistakes and done things we don't want to look at, said MN.
Because we like to put the past in the past, and pretend it has no power, said ZA.

_________

At the beginning of the period, as I told the classes that their homework was to read two poems by Langston Hughes, I said that it was his poetry was caused me to like poetry. "I didn't like any of the poetry we read in high school," I told them, to which RA said "Me neither!" I thought this was great, I always love the candor of what RA says. So I said "I'm so glad you said that, because it reminds me to say to you, even if you don't like any of the poetry we are reading now, don't give up on poetry, because there are a million kinds, and you might connect really well to some other kind of poetry. Don't do what I did, which is graduate thinking 'aw, poetry is just not for me.'"

I was going to make a comparison to what people have told me about beer - "you just haven't found the right one yet!" But I didn't. 

I've been thinking what kind of academic writing I could do about what goes on in my classroom, and I feel like reflecting on being a white teacher in a classroom of African and Asian and South American students might be fruitful line of inquiry to pursue.

Life as a lesson block

I have taken to thinking of my days as lessons. In the classroom, each lesson begins with reading. When I have the lesson properly planned out, it ends with writing of some kind. Reading and writing bookend the more active and interactive work that goes on.

Part of me thinks, if this is a beneficial structure for class, why not adopt it in life? And indeed I do write in the mornings, and read at night. On weekends, I am lucky enough to be able to read and write in the mornings, and read and write at nights. It's the life.

The other aspect of lessons is that, after something large or substantive, like a hands-on activity, video making, discussion, or video viewing, I think it's important to allow students to write down their thoughts, as a way of processing what they've just experienced.

I want to practice that practice right now, after having finished The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. I liked the ending. An academic conference in the future, at which two professors discuss their research into the authenticity of the document known to the audience as The Handmaid's Tale. How easily all our troubles and dramas will be glossed by a future academic conference. The intensity of my emotion, the realness of my experience, cannot hope to be re-felt, re-captured, by future generations, caught up as they will be in their own time and narratives.

The most horrifying part of the book seemed to be that old women are sent to the "colonies" to clean up toxic waste, offered no protection, and so die after a short time on the job. This injustice against older women revealed to me how strongly I respect and admire women of that age. I am much angrier at the injustices against them than against the Wives and Handmaids and Marthas.

Margaret Atwood

The book also says interesting things about covert activity, and how human nature will not be contained. Everyone in the story has something that he or she is hiding, and even though the consequences are dire, they do the hidden activity anyway. Life along the oh-so straight and narrow just isn't really an option, it seems. And some of us will die for the risks we take to experience just a little bit of life.

Atwood says in an essay in the New York Times that she leaves the narrator unnamed because so many people have passed through history, storytellers who have left us their tales, unnamed and unacknowledged. They have been heroes, and we will never know who they are. Most of them, in fact, their stories will never be told. Offred was one of them. We are the lucky audience of readers, one day to become writers, who benefit from the fact that they, who like Offred maybe didn't want to tell their stories, did.

Women

Women's voices have dominated my brain waves this week
1. bell hooks
2. Audre Lorde
3. Students in discussion 

bell hooks

1. When I was in graduate school at Earlham, my two program coordinators, Becky and Randy, told us one winter afternoon, that we should all ask our mentor teachers to be excused from teaching class on a certain Wednesday in the near future, because bell hooks was speaking on Earlham's campus and this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I had never heard of bell hooks, but I took their word for it and skidaddled after third period tenth grade to Earlham's auditorium. 
Tangent to say that being a sola audience member has enormous benefits, including a) getting unbelievably good seats at the last minute, because there are always awkward seats between parties left in the good seating sections; b) getting to read unapologetically during intermission because no one expects you to be social; c) never worrying whether your companion is enjoying the show, and d) if you are not enjoying the show, leaving at the interval with no explanations to make or embarrassed negotiations to endure. 

I enjoyed benefit a) on the day of bell hooks' speech, because when I arrived they said there was no room left in the auditorium. However, from the doorway I could see that there was a seat in the very first row that someone had heaved a backpack into. I strode quickly down the aisle and asked the person to move it (hooks was already speaking) and I sat in the best seat in the house, looking straight up into her face, for the rest of the talk. 

What struck me most about her was that she did not apologize or try to conform at all. She said unpopular things (as well as popular ones) she was openly critical of some people, even people close to her (why is it that women can never do this?) and she was funny, in ways that strained decorum. 

2. An apparent indifference to the pressure of social norms is also a trademark of Audre Lorde's work and words. When I was in graduate school at Bread Loaf (graduate school really did its job, in the off hours!) a fellow student mentioned a memorably-named essay, "Poetry is not a luxury" by a memorably named poet, Audre Lorde. This week I read it and assigned it to my students for weekend homework. Lorde says that poetry is the language we use to imagine realities different from our current reality, and it is through uttering these words that we begin to bring the next, improved reality into existence. 

I listened to a talk she gave in 1990 at UCLA. She said that when she acknowledged her position in the communities of a) black Women, and b) lesbian women, she was placing herself so far out of the mainstream that she noticed a new disregard for how others perceived her. If she was so clearly not part of the "normal" crowd, then she didn't have to work so hard to appear to be "normal". 

Audre Lorde

This self-produced sense of freedom really struck me. I wonder if I, too, could decide "Well, I'm not like most of those folks, so let me lean into that and stop trying to seem like most of those folks, or trying to be good at what they want me to be good at, or look the way they want me to look." It seems so tantalizing. 
Today I watched Litany to Survival, a documentary about Lorde's life and work. She so boldly embodies the challenges that she put to the establishment, but she is also so warm and human that it is impossible to be offended. One can only look inward and consider how I might better myself along the lines she has identified as unjust. 

3. Friday's class involved a circle discussion of the poem "Ways of Talking" by Ha Jin. Here it is. 

Students said things which had me beaming, nodding, nearly falling out of my chair at the insight and thoughtfulness of their comments. I think they said some of the most profound things they've said all year, including their knock-your-socks-off comments about key parts of Othello. I will not try to recreate their ideas here, but take your own stab at thinking about what is going on for the "we" speaking in this poem.

Ways of Talking

BY HA JIN

We used to like talking about grief

Our journals and letters were packed

with losses, complaints, and sorrows.

Even if there was no grief

we wouldn’t stop lamenting

as though longing for the charm

of a distressed face.

Then we couldn’t help expressing grief

So many things descended without warning:

labor wasted, loves lost, houses gone,

marriages broken, friends estranged,

ambitions worn away by immediate needs.

Words lined up in our throats

for a good whining.

Grief seemed like an endless river—

the only immortal flow of life.

After losing a land and then giving up a tongue,

we stopped talking of grief

Smiles began to brighten our faces.

We laugh a lot, at our own mess.

Things become beautiful,

even hailstones in the strawberry fields.

Meeting Friends Late In Life

A rooster on Ramona St.
in Portland, OR

Despite the appearance of the words Meeting and Friends in the title, this post is not about Quakerism.  

Yesterday in the book Stoner, by John Williams, the main character, who is a university professor of English, meets a new colleague and hopes to become friends with him.

"It was some time before Stoner recognized the source of his attraction to Lomax. In Lomax's arrogance, his fluency, and his cheerful bitterness, Stoner saw, distorted but recognizable, an image of his friend David Masters. He wished to talk to him as he had talked to Dave; but he could not, even after he admitted his wish to himself. The awkwardness of his youth had not left him, but the eagerness and straightforwardness that might have made the friendship possible had. He knew what he wished was impossible, and the knowledge saddened him."

Why should it have to be impossible? I too am saddened by the idea that friendships which start later in life are doomed to remain shallow. I marked this passage in the book before I read the following passage this morning in an essay, published originally in 1975, about a friendship with WH Auden:

I met Auden late in his life and mine—at an age when the easy, knowledgeable intimacy of friendships formed in one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be left, to share with another. Thus, we were very good friends but not intimate friends. 

I think both Hannah Arendt (the author of the essay on Auden) and Stoner present outdated and unnecessarily limiting points of view on friendship. 
What if the friends are not the same age? If one is older, are they limited by the perceived length of that person's time on earth?
Why not go into friendship assuming that this connection will be deep and fulfilling, and see what happens? 

When I was in college I read this quote: 

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

read This "parallelism of life" seems to be the key to friendship to me, not any requirement of age or length of time being friends. If I share current pursuits with another, regardless of the difference in our ages or the different paths we have trod until this moment, there is rich potential for friendship. 

The "community of thought" seems to say that we need to be thinking about some of the same things, so we have things to talk about and reflect on. Again, this does not require similar age or deep history. I don't know what he means by "a rivalry of aim". That we are seeking ends that are in competition with one another? I confess I do not see how that contributes to friendship. 

Except that with teacher friends, there is always a healthy nugget of comparison and competition when we talk about what's going on in our conversations, which I think productively goads each of us toward better expression of our ideas and better practice in the classroom. That rivalry adds a forward motion to the friendship which I feel is worth quite a lot.