Pigeon English

I've been thinking quite a bit about diversity recently. Our 10th Grade curriculum has a spot reserved (unofficially) for authors of color, and over the years that spot has been filled variously by Nella Larsen's Passing, Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine, and, this year, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. The debate about our texts is not as heated as those I've heard other schools have had to endure on the subject of inclusivity; we all agree how important it is for all our students to see themselves somewhere in the texts they read, and our focus (at least at face value) is on the student population, not politics. But I do wonder about the quality of these "diverse" texts all the time. I wasn't a big fan of Passing, I'll admit, and I wasn't exactly enthused about Jasmine either. Maybe it's something about one-word titles.  Interpreter of Maladies is a decent text, but I've questioned in my own mind exactly how much of it sophomores will be able to engage meaningfully; there are some poignant adult themes which draw their energy from some degree of dysfunctionality, but they may not resonate with the average sophomore. Don't get me wrong, the writing is beautiful, but will it draw in my students?  The sense I have with those selections, including Lahiri, is probably not, and that we are simply ticking a box of some unseen, but decidedly palpable survey without much thought about the student experience beyond the token.  Ironically, those "other" texts are being foist upon us with the same authority that texts from DWEMs have been in the past.  The proverbial sins of the father, I suppose.  Surely there's a better way?

So I've had several chats about this very subject with our Director of Diversity this year.  My arguments go along the lines of what I mentioned above.  I even used the word "tokenism" in those conversations.  My European male whiteness shines as I tell her that I think we're sacrificing quality for simply ticking the box.  Besides, just how many boxes are we able to tick in any given year.  There will always be many students in our diverse population who will not see themeselves in anything they study in English.  I'd love for the opposite to be true, but the reality is we've got a year. What will the engaged reader read this late in history, to borrow from Bloom.

They have been good discussions, and I'm actually quite excited about approaching the situation from the perspective not of which texts we select but, rather, from the perspective of how we educate the faculty to reach students not like ourselves.  Selecting a text simply because it allows us to tick that box is a bit superficial (so is that definition, I suspect).  The more challenging course of action, dare I say policy, is to educate the educators, and I'd love to be involved in that effort.

Anyway, in the course of one of those discussions, I mentioned the idea of authors taking on the persona of someone not like themselves, speaking as an "other".  Would a book like Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman, for example, be considered appropriate for that diversity text?  The protagonist is an 11-year-old Ghanaian immigrant, and his patois is that of ethnic inner city London, but Kelman himself is white.  He looks a bit like a young Phil Collins I think, not that Phil Collins ever looked young mind you.  Our Diversity Director wasn't sure (about the text, not Phil Collins ever looking young), but conceded that it's an interesting question, one that I hope we'll continue to unfold over the remainder of the year.  But this whole preamble is leading towards the fact that I just finished reading Pigeon English this weekend (between FA Cup matches).  I'm still on my Man Booker kick, and he was one of last year's short-listed authors I'd decided to put on my own list (see New Literary Age).  I'm really in two minds about the novel to be honest.  On the positive side, I was left with a numbing sadness after the last page, and my subsequent retrospection on Harri's year shared with us through the novel.  I mean numbing in the context of feeling too much as opposed to not at all: the cause not the effect.  I also enjoyed the authenticity of the inner-city experience.  It went beyond the author simply doing his homework; I sense that he lived those experiences, albeit in the hard streets of . . . Luton.  Londoners might laugh, but Luton can be a dodgy place.  On the less positive side, the novel fairly wore me out.  The pace of the prose, I mean, was like Hemingway on crack.  It may be an authentic representation of the workings of an 11-year-old's mind, but the synaptic machine-gun fire and chaotic juxtapositions literally left me exhausted.  I suppose it's a case of author's "mission accomplished" in the context of verisimilitude though. 

On this side of the novel, I'm pondering how well the text would work with my sophomores.  Based on some of the essays and discussions I've experienced from waves of sophomores over the years, quite well I imagine.

No Exit

Last night, Dana and I went to the Mobtown Theater to see No Exit by Sartre.

It's a text that holds a special place in our hearts since it is a play we read together in college, actually before we started dating (all those decades ago!). Perhaps I'm overstating things a little when I say "our" hearts, since I remember Dana frequently "absenting" herself from lectures to spend time wandering in the halls to escape what were admittedly boring lectures. True story: a friend of ours asked the professor for some make-up work in that class for Dana, and his response was "I thought she had dropped." So when I heard from a student of mine that No Exit was playing locally, I had to check it out, for old time's sake. It would give Dana a chance to see all those things she had missed in the early 80s.

I had never been to the Mobtown Theater, and it was a bit of an adventure getting there. Armed with my Honda's GPS and Dana's iPhone, you would think it a lock, but not so. The GPS got us to the general area, the iPhone concurred, albeit with the usual delay, but the actual building was nowhere to be seen (no entrance, ironically). We were up and down the road several times before deciding that the theater had to be behind one of the warehouses that lined the street, and risked a right turn up an icy one-laner towards what appeared to be a series of loading docks. But it was the right place. About 15 other existentialists also found the theater, and we were treated to an OK performance. I loved Inez and Estelle, although the latter clearly wasn't paying attention to Garcin who told us that tears can't be shed in hell; she squeezed out several during one of her flashes to earth when she saw the uncovering of her baby-killing legacy. We were so close to the stage that I saw the tears splash at her feet. Quite impressive. Inez, although not wholly malevolent, did come close to the original. But poor Garcin kept flubbing his lines, and the illusion of the play was shattered twice when he had to restart lengthy speeches in order to avoid saying the opposite of what he was supposed to be saying.

There was a 10-minute intermission during which the three actors remained on stage in their respective seats, just sitting. The play bill indicated as much, and I wondered if they might break the fourth wall and field questions from the 15 of us (hell for actors is not, after all, other people), but they just sat contemplating their predicament. Cynic that she is, Dana whispered that perhaps she could hint to them about the unfortunately placed large green neon "Exit" sign to the lobby right by the stage -- if Garcin would just turn his head and lean a little to his left, maybe, just maybe . . . -- but she decided against it. No wonder she left those lectures so frequently back in the day.

But I did enjoy the play, and I think I'll keep an eye open for coming events from the Mobtown Players, now that I know how to get there.

Musee Des Beaux Arts

When I was young, I stumbled across a copy of an obscure print by Bruegel called "The Artist and the Connoisseur."  I can't remember now the context of the discovery, which class I was in or what it was that would have brought me to Bruegel, but I remember vividly how captivated I was by the moment of the transaction between artist and audience captured by him.  I had to be about 13 or 14 (I was at St. Joe's at the time), and it was probably a random musing as I dug around in a book unrelated to what it was I was supposed to be studying; yes, pre-Internet, but still distracted.  Anyway, I re-stumbled into the print when I was teaching at Garrison almost a decade ago as I was preparing for a discussion on W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" and the connection between poetry and painting.  It was like bumping into an old friend.  I printed off a copy and laminated it (SOPA? PIPA?).  That same laminated copy is on my bulletin board behind me as I type here at Friends.

It's one of those go-to sources that I've used on multiple occasions, and I get tremendous mileage out of the print's connection to questions like how do we engage art, how do we see more than what is sitting on the surface, what is the relationship between the artist, art object, and the audience (my 3 As)?  Most recently, I unpinned the print and introduced it to my Philosophy and Literature students; we're closing the semester with a unit on aesthetics, and I thought it would be nice to end with a little fun.  Students had read Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination" and Kant's "The Critique of Judgement," so it gave us the opportunity to talk about an artistic representation of Addison's Chinese and English gardens (the artist's untamed hair and the connoisseur's carefully controlled coif) and Kant's need for "disinterested" aesthetic judgements (the connoisseur looks a little too eager as he reaches in to his purse), amongst other things.  Needless to say, I've looked at this print many times over the years; I know it pretty well, I'd even say intimately.  So it was nice yesterday to have a student (EM) draw out something I'd never contemplated before.  As he talked about the composition of the piece and how Bruegel draws us in to the figures' eyes then out to the unseen painting being crafted by the artist, he mentioned how the heads of the two figures could quite easily be swapped.  Although the artist's face is more in portrait and the connoisseur's in profile, the corresponding body positions are reversed.  "It shows the interchangeability of critic and artist, how their relationship is closer than we might think, maybe intimates a dependency."  After the class I took a pair of scissors to a copy of the print, and he was right on the mark; the swapped heads match perfectly.  It's nice to have the familiar refreshed, even if it did require major surgery.  A head transplant is hardly outpatient stuff.

But talking of Auden, I was driving in to school today, mulling over plans for the morning sitting at the light at the top of Forest Park (the dodgy end) when I was reminded about suffering and the Old Masters.  A woman in a minivan had entered the gas station at the light, advanced her vehicle to the far pump before backing up to the near pump.  It was a busy morning and the gas station was quite full, so there was no way for anyone to get around her minivan.  Two other vehicles had entered the gas station behind minivan woman and those drivers seemed to assume, naturally enough, that she would advance to the far pump, especially after her initial maneuver.  Of course, the resulting bemusement evolved to frustration when she ignored requests to move forward, and that in turn evolved into anger and blaring horns as she calmly got out of her car and pumped her gas.  The second of the two vehicles was not quite "in" the gas station, so when the lights changed, frustration and anger spread to adjoining streets from drivers who could get nowhere until minivan woman finished pumping her gas.  There was quite a disturbance.  Not quite the fall of Icarus, I know, and all this played out in the few bored seconds I spent waiting for the light to change, observing with casual indifference on the unblocked side of the street.  But my light had changed, I had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.