I was walking down to Hollywood Video last night. I’d seen the first bit of "National Treasure" on some cable channel and decided to avoid the commercials. On a typical Saturday night, traffic is snarled at the corner 2nd Avenue NE and 45th Street N. The cars leaving the video store lot and trying to get into Dick’s, a local hamburger joint, make getting onto the street where I live a challenge. Even so, I was thinking on that walk about what a great Seattle neighborhood Wallingford is. In the past twenty-four hours, I had walked to get groceries and takeout and a meeting with some friends. I regularly walk to book and computer stores, a major university library, a half-dozen pho shops, and a YMCA. On a clear day, my neighborhood walks and bike rides bring me to views of Mount Rainer, the Olympic Mountains, the Cascades, downtown Seattle and Lake Union; I can pick from three largish parks and a university campus if I am in the mood for green space. All these thoughts ran through my head as I found my DVD (it was free) and headed for the Shell station to pick up some Milk Duds for my wife. As I crossed 2nd, for some reason I thought, “we cannot really afford to live in this delightful place.” A one-bedroom bungalow a half-block away recently sold for above its $415,000 asking price. I love this place but cannot imagine being a homeowner, not sure if we will be able to stay long-term.
Perhaps I think too much. I admit that I worry about just how I inhabit the place I live in. Since 1981, I have changed addresses at least once every three years; I have lived in nine different counties, for as few as three but only as many as five years. I suppose my story is not that different from many of my peers, highly educated professional people who have moved around the country in pursuit of degrees and careers. But my story makes me uncomfortable. My parents have lived in the same house since 1970, and my mother’s parents lived on the same farm in the same house from 1932 until they died (1995 and 1997). My folks know the place where they live, know the streams and springs that feed their well, know when the cowslips will bloom and when the weather will change. My grandparents knew the actual birds that returned to nest in houses or trees each season; that is, they knew specific birds, could actually pick out a finch or red-tail hawk with the binoculars that always hung by the west-facing picture window. My grandfather put in that window the 1970s for the purpose of being able to see more birds. They both died on that 120 acre place in Hollaway township.
Now in Seattle, I am still trying to distinguish Douglas and Silver fir, much less the various maples native to the northwest. I know the streets in my neighborhood and the routes I ride on my bike. I can manage downtown and know enough to avoid the ‘burbs (they make me unsettled, a little queasy). But my sense of place feels anemic compared to the one held by my people. I walk to stores (many of them national chains) but do not have a feel for the soil or the fauna. Indeed, this place is all so built up and (high-end) convenient that knowing soil and fauna feels like criminal trespass. I am acquainted with my neighbors, at least enough to say hello, and my wife and I have had one or two neighbors over for dinner a few times. Our next-door neighbor watches our cats when we fly back to Wisconsin for visits—she’s from Madison; we look after her dog when she is gone (to more exotic locales usually). We have a connection with her, but it is one that really comes from a different place. So I live in a place that I love but know only it the most shallow way. I wonder what the implications are of admitting this. My parents know who they are in part because they know the place where they live. Who am I?
The minute I write that, I wonder if this is all just nostalgia. I have studied ecology and human community, have taught “learning communities.” I may not have a deep sense of belonging connected to some of the places I have lived, but I know what it means to feel “at home.” My feeling of home has to do with people, with conversations that get into meaningful topics, with afternoons on the trails around the glacier at Mt. Rainer or on the roads through Discovery Park or along County C through Ozaukee County as it parallels the Lake Michigan shore. That feeling of home can feel as intense as my childhood connection to the maple forests of Iron County, Wisconsin, but is it? I wonder. Can my transitory, relational sense of place nurture my own growth and carry me into a well-lived life the way that Hollaway Township did my grandparents. Does place do that for anyone in the urban and suburban U.S.? Because my own intuitions about place are skewed by nostalgia and guilt and because my culture is not known these days as one that cares for or about places (we care deeply about “place” when that word aims at status but not, I think, otherwise), my wonder is tinged with concern. I cannot, it seems, make a claim without hedging.
In the coming weeks, I want to explore my place in the world.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Monday, April 02, 2007
Here's to Complexity!
On reading the Greenwood “Literature in Context” monograph on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, I was a little concerned. Kalu Ogbaa is surely right about the novel: Achebe is offering a pre-contact Iboland that is not Edenic. Achebe is pointing out “native” traditions that make a people vulnerable to the debacles of colonization and post-colonial Nigerian experience. But he is also working through a pre-colonial reality that complete on its own terms, complete independent of contact with Europe. Ogbaa seems to emphasize (for a largely high school reader) the way that Achebe implicates Africans in “scotching Africa” (1). I wonder about this emphasis. Seems to me that the novel (and Achebe’s other novels and his essays) are as interested in the everyday experience of real Africans as it is in establishing blame for what happened after the arrival of the British. Indeed, it is the relationship between everyday experience and the experience of colonialism that seems to drive the work.
Ogbaa notes that Achebe documents a set of “ugly” traditional practices (exposing twins, dismissing the contribution of women). What Ogbaa passes over (in this admitted simplified introduction to the novel) is the frequency with which the narrator and even characters in the novel think about those traditions. Rather than reporting on the “mistakes of the ancestors,” the novel puts those traditions into play and reflects on them. What annoys me with this simplification is that it seems to ask young readers to fall into the very binary (Europe scotched Africa vs. Africans scotched Africa) that this novel—as a novel—undoes.
The crux of this misreading involves the analysis of point of view. Ogbaa declares that the narrator is “an omniscient reporter” who understands the Igbo and reflects their “feelings” (7). I can hear the novel this way. The narrator to my ear is at once an insider and outsider. Like Achebe, the narrator ahs heard and taken at face value the traditions and belief structures of the tribe; the narrator even knows (in an empathetic way) the intentions of these tribe members. But like Achebe, the narrator (and many characters in the novel, even Okonkwo) is aware of alternative traditions and beliefs and of the provisional and contradictory way that individuals hold intentions. Surely Achebe offers a view into what caused the scotching of Africa, but that view is contained within a narrative that makes impossible the determination of a simple causal chain (X caused Y caused Z).
Indeed, such a view is what, in 1958, this novel seeks to undo. The narrative continually questions causal links (tossing in the discontinuous nature of experience—indivdiuals choose to kill others, captives are assigned to new homes, guns “accidentally” explode). Rather than helping readers establish a history of the scotching of Africa, the narrator (and narrative) moves readers (at least readers like me who come from outside of Africa) to wonder about how we see history unfolding and whether our presumptions are not inherited from the ancestors and are, in some instances, a waste.
This I would argue is a more compelling purpose in this novel. Achebe chose not to write history and to write narrative instead. This last claim might lead us to wonder about whether history is not always already a sort of novel (it surely is always narrative). That’s another thread.
Can’t resist encouraging readers of TFA to go and see Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond. I happened to watch it last night and can hear “the great African novel” rattling around like a ghost in the lines and scenes.
Ogbaa notes that Achebe documents a set of “ugly” traditional practices (exposing twins, dismissing the contribution of women). What Ogbaa passes over (in this admitted simplified introduction to the novel) is the frequency with which the narrator and even characters in the novel think about those traditions. Rather than reporting on the “mistakes of the ancestors,” the novel puts those traditions into play and reflects on them. What annoys me with this simplification is that it seems to ask young readers to fall into the very binary (Europe scotched Africa vs. Africans scotched Africa) that this novel—as a novel—undoes.
The crux of this misreading involves the analysis of point of view. Ogbaa declares that the narrator is “an omniscient reporter” who understands the Igbo and reflects their “feelings” (7). I can hear the novel this way. The narrator to my ear is at once an insider and outsider. Like Achebe, the narrator ahs heard and taken at face value the traditions and belief structures of the tribe; the narrator even knows (in an empathetic way) the intentions of these tribe members. But like Achebe, the narrator (and many characters in the novel, even Okonkwo) is aware of alternative traditions and beliefs and of the provisional and contradictory way that individuals hold intentions. Surely Achebe offers a view into what caused the scotching of Africa, but that view is contained within a narrative that makes impossible the determination of a simple causal chain (X caused Y caused Z).
Indeed, such a view is what, in 1958, this novel seeks to undo. The narrative continually questions causal links (tossing in the discontinuous nature of experience—indivdiuals choose to kill others, captives are assigned to new homes, guns “accidentally” explode). Rather than helping readers establish a history of the scotching of Africa, the narrator (and narrative) moves readers (at least readers like me who come from outside of Africa) to wonder about how we see history unfolding and whether our presumptions are not inherited from the ancestors and are, in some instances, a waste.
This I would argue is a more compelling purpose in this novel. Achebe chose not to write history and to write narrative instead. This last claim might lead us to wonder about whether history is not always already a sort of novel (it surely is always narrative). That’s another thread.
Can’t resist encouraging readers of TFA to go and see Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond. I happened to watch it last night and can hear “the great African novel” rattling around like a ghost in the lines and scenes.
What's a Student Got to Do?
So I recently made a posting at Inside Higer Ed. This happened a few days after I wrote the post below titled “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” I seem to be back to this topic. We (my students and I) have just finished our first week of spring-quarter classes. That first week always (re)introduces me to eager learners and to students who hope to be able to sit quietly in classrooms and get through. It is that latter bunch that I am thinking about here.
The question I have is about access to education. I value access; anyone who can read and also put together a few sentences in English is welcome in my classes. That said, I am worried about making access meaningful. It’s not clearly to me that coming to one of my classes and sitting there silently grants access to much of anything. I suppose that I could do stand-up comedy or show lots of films to draw folks in (I am experimenting with podcasting and blogging), but I wonder what those sort of entertainment-based media give access to.
I guess that I am writing here with a sort of question in mind. What is the purpose of coming into a college class and just sitting? What do I need to do to make that more rare? Clearly, I need to move away from large-group discussion (there are lots of reasons why that format limits involvement). I need to design small group interactions so that no one is able to hide but that all feel safe in contributing. I can get better at these things.
But, should I cut out the folk who resist participation even when (or maybe especially when) participation called for? How do I hear from those who resist so that their concerns can be considered and so that I can adapt the classroom?
And here’s the question that bothers me most: should my students have to participate? It’s a required class, after all. How am I to respond to a student who says, “Thanks, but no thanks; I prefer to sit and write down what you say?”
The question I have is about access to education. I value access; anyone who can read and also put together a few sentences in English is welcome in my classes. That said, I am worried about making access meaningful. It’s not clearly to me that coming to one of my classes and sitting there silently grants access to much of anything. I suppose that I could do stand-up comedy or show lots of films to draw folks in (I am experimenting with podcasting and blogging), but I wonder what those sort of entertainment-based media give access to.
I guess that I am writing here with a sort of question in mind. What is the purpose of coming into a college class and just sitting? What do I need to do to make that more rare? Clearly, I need to move away from large-group discussion (there are lots of reasons why that format limits involvement). I need to design small group interactions so that no one is able to hide but that all feel safe in contributing. I can get better at these things.
But, should I cut out the folk who resist participation even when (or maybe especially when) participation called for? How do I hear from those who resist so that their concerns can be considered and so that I can adapt the classroom?
And here’s the question that bothers me most: should my students have to participate? It’s a required class, after all. How am I to respond to a student who says, “Thanks, but no thanks; I prefer to sit and write down what you say?”
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