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.