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.