Christmas

by Lucy S.

Christmas night.  Maybe it will be the last time we all celebrate together, or maybe it will be the last time we all celebrate the holiday in this house. Or both.  Or maybe next year we will find ourselves all here again, still celebrating together, wondering again if THAT will be the last year that the celebration will be the same.  One of the psychological agonies of living in the same house with my spouse, permanently separated, has been this sense of not knowing what to hope for.  The holidays exacerbate these feelings.  I resist the sentimentalities pulling at me because I know not to trust them. But I am never immune to them.

Kevin, my one son who doesn't live at home, who lives a half hour away with friends in the city, has been here, but he has to be at work tomorrow at 5 am. His dad offered to drive him by his place first and then to Target, where Kevin currently works stocking in the back. Before going to bed, I wanted to be sure his dad knew the time -- which probably conforms to the stereotype of the mother who worries about everyone, but they don't always communicate well enough with each other about these things. Ryan, my youngest, said his dad was outside, so I opened the door and he called from out there, "Do you need me for something?" I asked if he was out with our dog.

"No," he said, "I'm looking at Jupiter!"  He had the telescope out there that the kids and I got him for Christmas in 2006, the holiday right before the semester at the U when all the awful stuff happened during spring break. (He's always loved astronomy, so this seemed to me to be a perfect gift back then. That's turned out to be true. It was our one "big" gift of the year. We don't spend much on the holidays; our gifts for each other are pretty modest, though well-appreciated, but some years we'll buy one person something bigger. This year it was a tablet for Kevin so he could have some kind of computer access where he lives.) I told  him the time Kevin had to be at work, and he said, "Okay, I'll wake him up about 3:20!"

A simple thing like that kicked off those connections in my head (our earlier gift to him; the following spring). I don't usually focus on them for too long. If I wasn't writing this, I'd have picked up a book to read to purposefully propel my thoughts onward before trying to sleep. But these thoughts pain me because they bring back the ghosts of those feelings I used to have that surely, SURELY, there must be some way to make things better when, after all, we were both pretty good people, right?  There are times when the fuller reality of this other person, this life, distinct from me, worthy it its own right, blows freshly into my consciousness and if I'm honest, I know that this person is far more than whatever reductive role he became in relation to me.  That's a good thing - recognizing that truth - but it invariably carries with it the inescapable sense of something wrong in me.  I know that's wrong - that binary - the idea that one of us must be wrong and bad so that the other can be right and good. But knowing that intellectually sometimes fails to break through those deeply ingrained ideas about how things are supposed to be.

I was talking to my best friend the other day, who is finally going to marry her partner this coming year, maybe in the spring. She left her spouse in 2004. The relationship had been miserable for her in many ways, but again, some kind of truth gets flattened out when hours and days and weeks of year after year get summed up as happy or unhappy.  Still, she left. It was an upheaval of her whole life. She almost didn't make it out, though.  Leaving for the new relationship went against so much that she'd believed for her adult life that she felt wrong at her core - no, not her core - she felt wrong because other people's ideas of right and wrong were working on her. She was afraid that many people she loved would turn against her. She considered suicide. So much so that she put the pills in her mouth and laid there, ready to swallow. Thinking of her loved ones is what made her run to the bathroom to spit them out. She knew she couldn't inflict that kind of pain. So she resolved to live, and to try this new life -- to try to be happy.  And she has been gloriously happy, though not without pain. Her relationship with one of her sisters has never been the same; her sister believes the choice was morally wrong.  Our relationships with other people can hurt us and make us to doubt ourselves, or they can remind us that we need each other, and that we can come through for each other. If we have any "core," maybe it's that love for life in ourselves and each other.

Now, as she gets ready to plan this simple, beautiful wedding, she feels the ghosts of the old beliefs. What if somehow those beliefs were right? She doesn't seriously think that, but when you believe something for so long, it leaves traces in you.

I said, they can't be right.  For one thing, these religions act as if Jesus preached a gospel whose primary message was: don't be anything but straight. I said, the scriptures that even seem to refer to that issue are only minimally in the Bible, and I was at a discussion last year where a theologian explained that the translations are more ambiguous than people realize, and that there is so much historical context that readers now don't know. I said that it doesn't even make sense within its own logic. One of the two most important commandments, according to Jesus in the Bible, is to love your neighbor as yourself, and upon this, all the law and prophets are said to depend - yet the same people ultra-focused on gay relationships - who claim to live by the Bible - don't interrogate themselves about how seriously they try to live by that commandment. They can support the wars, the bombs and drones killing kids, parents, grandparents, all kinds of civilians just trying to live their lives, and they can buy the junk our economy produces without even a twinge of concern about how it's produced on the backs of others living miserably exploited lives -- while this peripheral issue is made into a huge focus. How many people live by the command to give someone not only your outer coat if they ask but your inner coat, too, or to invite the person to your home who can't invite you back, rather than only those who have the means to invite you in return? Or, how many people agonize over the scripture that says "greedy persons" won't "inherit the kingdom"? I said, what do any of these scriptures mean in the lives of people who claim to believe in them?

But there's a problem if this slips into saying that "we're all sinners anyway," because it still then may imply that her relationship is nonethelss "a sin." I said, in that religious tradition, part of the meaning of sin is to cause harm. And what harm is this relationship causing?  In a world where people's bodies are violently attacked by these mass weapons, how is THIS, of all things, what causes harm? The pain it causes is the cracks it opens up in people's belief systems.  When someone they love lives outside of their narrow parameters regarding what is morally right, and they believe God is going to burn that loved one in hell forever because of that, they encounter a tremendous crack in their concepts of justice and love. The same Bible commands them to love even their ENEMIES, and to do good to those persecuting them -- but how are they to go on loving the sister (or brother or son or daughter or other loved one) who their God will burn forever?  The logic of these beliefs begins to break down if you think about them too much.

I said, do you really believe that the man is supposed to be the head of the house? It's not just that some men have used that the "wrong" way. The whole premise is faulty. It infantilizes women to the extent that they live by it. But who really lives by it?  If they claim to but don't, they sometimes end up twisting and turning their communication into passive-aggressive knots in order to "sort of" conform. If they believe it on some level, but don't live by it, how often do they feel bad about themselves, and how often are they perceived as "nags" or "dominating w/bitches " for not being "submissive" enough? And it hurts men who try to live by it, too. Who has ENOUGH wisdom to dominate others? I've said dumb things and had wrong ideas so many times, and the thing that always helped was if someone went back and forth with me in a dialogue. The believers in man as head of house say it's the best way, that decisions can be made, because the final authority ultimately rests in one person. (That patriarchal mentality manifests at many levels.)  I said, is that really true? Don't she and her partner make decisions all the time without either one being the boss? Yeah, she said; they just talk about it, and sometimes they come up with a decision different than either one of them originally thought of, and it comes out of those back and forth discussions.

Rather than causing harm, I believe that her decision to LIVE in a way that embraces love for herself as well as others will help prevent future harm. I read an article the other day that said that 30 percent of gay teens try to commit suicide. A shocking, heartbreaking figure. Maybe her decision will help make a society where people don't try to kill themselves because they don't fit into supposed norms.

That's why some of these ghost feelings can't be trusted. They're remnants of old ideology that hurt us before and keeps hurting too many people.

I try to tell myself that with regard to my own situation. In my case, it's the binaries that haunt me... he is good and right so I must be bad and wrong... Or, people should be able to make their marriages work. Or, sacrifice - don't be selfish. Or, maybe you can't be happy anyway because you're just a miserable person, so if that's true, why mess up other people's lives? Of course, this pretends that I have a choice, when in reality, he wants out of this relationship as much as I do. But that makes me think about how I felt like I tried for so long and soon I start thinking that maybe he is the bad and wrong one, and the truth is that I DO sometimes feel like the victim - the wronged person in all this...  And sometimes I just get so tired of trying to think of it all from this BIG omniscient perspective, and I just want to be grounded in my own. Can't I just advocate for myself sometimes, even within my own mind?  Or is that thought, too, a kind of self-pity?

I told another friend recently that we do have to take care of ourselves, that we can't always push ourselves to "be the better person," because when we go too far with that, we sometimes get a backlash within ourselves. We might get selfish, cynical, angry... So then what is the balance?

I confess that these perfect balances elude me. But I'm glad to be alive, and glad for the holiday we had together today, despite whatever internal and external tensions I felt. I hope next year's Christmas will be happy for us all, however and wherever we each celebrate it.

***

Rereading this the morning after Christmas Day makes me think about how my friend and I have done this for each other for many years. We've talked each other through so many struggles, even when neither of us had any grand solutions. In our friendship, I learned that sustained, honest dialogue with people who care about you makes life worth living. Real friendship can be the foundation for all kinds of healthy relationships. It's what I've tried to create with my kids. It's what I try to build with others, though it's not at all easy to find. And sometimes you just have to accept that some people either can't, or they don't want to talk with you that way. Some people won't or maybe can't be those kind of friends. She finally accepted that reality with her ex-spouse. I finally accepted that, too.

My friends have always kept me alive. Sometimes I remember how my grandfather used to get mad at me and spout that old cliche that too many adults say to kids: "You don't go to school to make friends! You go to school to learn!"  That was supposed to snap me into shape when I hated the new school where I had no friends. And I'd say, "No, Grampa - friends are the main reason I care about school."  I guess that's still true for me in many ways. Friends are how and why I learn and do so many things. Without friends, what do all these endeavors matter anyway? 

So wherever it is that I'm living next year and however I celebrate Christmas, I hope I'll have lived another year talking with good friends (family or otherwise).

A “Nontraditional” Student's Path to Degrees / Dear Teachers

by Lucy S.

I think of this as a transcript-poem hybrid. While politicians and academic administrative bureaucrats debate ways to shorten lengths of paths to degrees for nontraditional students like me, the students continue to live out the twisting, turning realities that these experts ignore in their quests for carrot-and-stick prescriptions.  I hope the form makes visible the long path a nontraditional student’s education can take, and some reasons why.

My language is plain and prose-like -- maybe too much so.

My continual second person voice addressed to my teachers is an attempt to say how deeply teachers can affect students as students learn in some ways 'toward' the best teachers. I hope it shows the gratitude and devotion we feel for those special ones who teach us so much while we plod onward.




There are zero of you.
You’re a hazy phrase to me. "A college teacher." 
When do I ever even have a reason to string these words together?
I work in fast food, drive through photo booths, "babysitting," telemarketing…

First semester. There are four of you.
My son is two.
I am our sole support. 
U.S. HISTORY 2 - Dr. Brax. You wear a formal jacket and tie, though you were once at People's Park in Berkeley. You're distant, even awkward, but not unkind. And I'm here to learn what you're here to teach. Your 8 am class wakes me up to my country's history. I tell anybody who will listen what I learn from you. 
ENGLISH COMPOSITION - Professor Vaughn, our young adjunct professor with a janitorial business on the side. We give you (and your wife in absentia) a baby shower in class one day – Surprise!
INTRO TO SPEECH - Dr. [what was your name??] You tally our “ums," without counting them against us. I give a speech on the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and a Vietnam vet in his late 30s politely excuses himself, and tells me afterward it'd hurt too much to hear it. Teresa, a 37-year-old student, and hippie back in the day, raising three kids alone after her husband died of cancer, tells me they used to travel the country selling their paintings – and she’s the first one to teach me about Nicaragua in her seven minute speech, delivered campfire style, with a lamp she puts in the center of a circle she invites us to form, sitting on the floor.
INTRO TO SOCIOLOGY - Dr. Wengart. Another transplanted Texan to our Mojave Desert town. You formally introduce me to feminism.
I’m working on a B.A. in Journalism!
No.   English.
I want to be like you, my Comp teacher. 
I want to be like all of you, teaching hungry, grateful people like me.
I love you all!!!! 

Second semester. Six of you.
I’m an English major, Journalism minor.
I write for our college newspaper. (I interview professors who went to Vietnam and Nicaragua during semester breaks, and a woman who runs a domestic violence shelter. I slam our administration for not setting a more progressive example by recycling. I interview and photograph students for our campus questions.) 
One textbook I read in the library because I can’t afford to buy it. 
Sometimes I plan out a week or ten days of meals on the remaining $14 I have for food – two fish sticks for Justin, two for me, and baked potatoes, or cans of soup, or eggs and toast. 
I have two paying jobs – one in the college writing center.
Essays I write by pen, or type on my friend’s borrowed typewriter.
You all accept my essays in whatever forms they come in.   

Pregnancy – faintings – withdrawal.
A year off. I'm married now. Proposed to at the Grand Canyon, even.

First semester back. There are three of you.
My son is four. My babies are three months old.
My two closest friends or my gramma take care of my kids when I’m in classes. 
Three’s the best I can do right now.
When my kids sleep, I read and write, early in the morning, late at night, or during afternoon naps.
All is well.

Second semester back. There are three of you again.
I’m still an English major and a Journalism minor, for one last semester,
A writer and copy editor one more time for the paper.
I learn that later this year I have to move and leave school.
My grandmother takes her first and last college class with me – 
History of Music in America.

Mom and Dad's California family room for 2 months
Germany for 30 months
Mom and Dad's California family room for 5 months 
Sacramento for 16 months 
Anoka Minnesota for 6 months
Knoxville Tennessee for 28 months
Chaska Minnesota for 16 months 
Mom and Dad's family room for 5 months
Aguanga California for 51 months (a lifetime record in one place)
My sister and brother-in-law's Midwest place for 2 months
Big City, Midwest for ??? (a new lifetime record)

Wait – when I lived in Aguanga there was one of you.
Class was a 90 minute drive from home.
My oldest, 15, took the geology and matching lab course with me.
Dr. Spear, you wrote the answers for lab on the chalkboard late in each class
To copy.
I asked could I instead keep the worksheet to hand in hours later at your evening lecture class
To work out the answers myself.
"No," you said. "You'll turn it in now or you'll take an F."
I asked, "Why?"
"Because this is an assignment for a college class," you replied.
"And that's the way things WORK. In the REAL world." 
So I handed you the paper, and walked out with my son.

24 months later, there were three of you.
Classes were that same 90 minute drive from home.
U.S. History, the first half - a part-time professor who worked full-time during the day and taught at night. My 13 year old unofficially joined me and my 17 year old for that class, and got an unofficial A. From outside after an exam, I saw you through the windows, leaning over to comfort a sobbing young woman who’d failed the test.
Another music class – for my son. Billy Hawkins, you told us to call you. A longtime jazz musician. You handed out cash to students who correctly answered questions you called out! Sometimes you’d even beckon confused passersby in to offer them the same chance…
Psychology of Personal and Social Adjustment - I needed a lifetime in that topic.
Shortly into the semester, 9/11.


Our Big Midwest City. There are four of you.
33 months after moving into the house,
At a huge university, I take:
ENGLISH - Textual Analysis - Dr... You tell us what the study of literature is not, and it is NOT so many of the things that made me love it.
ENGLISH - American Literature 1 - Professor... almost done with your dissertation, finishing a PhD, no time to teach this class.
POLITICAL SCIENCE - a minor? - Dr... You’re the only professor I feel a connection to here. We study the Cuban Revolution.
TEACHING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE – another minor? – Dr... You teach like a businessman. "Pragmatic," you say you are.
I feel completely out of place. I had no idea it would be so different.
My kids are 8 to 21.

Another second semester. There are four of you.
Political Science - Dr... 
Political Science - Dr...
Political Science - Dr...
Linguistics at the graduate level for a Teaching ESL minor – Dr…
I've given up on the English major – it’s not what I thought it was.
One of my 17 year olds goes to Political Science classes with me sometimes.
---------- Our T.A. dies near the end of the semester. 
We your students find out he is your son,
A Teaching Assistant in his mother’s political science class on Democracy.

Summer, then Fall without classes.
Maybe I won't go back.
It hurts less to not go back.
I think I’m a better mother when I’m not in school,
My spouse seems to like me a little better when I’m not in school,
I don’t have to face those classrooms where there's no one like me when I’m not in school. 


A third semester starting in January. There are four of you.
ENGLISH - Literacy and Diversity - you're one of my favorites - Dr...
TEACHING ESL - language acquisition and study abroad - for the minor - Dr... You know eleven languages and are always learning one. You've taught for four decades. You often talk with me after class about language acquisition as we walk out, down the steps, and across the street.
BRITISH LITERATURE, 1800s to sort of now - almost a Dr.... I nominate you for a department award because you teach us so well. And you’re a mom, like me! You have a 6 year old daughter. You get the award. And you finish your PhD this semester!
ENGLISH - History as Memoir - almost a Dr... (For once, there are students like me in there. I don’t stand out. I can relax.) I like that you debate with us.
Spring Break ------
On the first day, an anonymous email directs me to a link.
I’m confused. I don’t have My Space. 
Back and forth posts – Oh – 
My spouse... is involved with someone else.
Why am I shocked; why am I shaking?
I call one of my oldest friends, crying.
My friend says, "Well, at least it's not like you guys were so in love anyway. If it was me, I’d be devastated, but you didn’t have a good marriage anyway.”
I thought I did feel devastated. Is this some lesser emotion? 
She doesn’t understand. I don’t understand, either. 
I want out of this melodramatic cliché – I’m not a victim - if I would just stop crying – but what was the use of trying all those years – but what choice was there anyway – but “I feel like such a loser,” I tell my friend – “You’re not a loser; he’s the loser,” she says – and I hate something false in every part of this – I just want to not be in this set of events, and what difference does any of it make, anyway – and then I keep crying for some reason.
I tell my oldest son when he gets home, who tells me his brother (one of the twins) sent the email.
He'd seen the page, and kept the information to himself
Dysfunctional in his community college writing center job that week, breaking down. 
"You can't tell her till spring break," said the oldest, "or she'll lose the semester. She has midterm exams and papers. You have to wait." 
I want to say I’m sorry to them then, sorry everything isn’t different, but that too sounds like melodrama.
By the end of the week, there’s a sort of reconciliation.
And I go back to school,
But the reconciliation keeps crumbling,
As others have before.
------------------------------
You, from the previous spring, who lost her son, ask me to write a piece for a book to remember him, a book for a scholarship in his name.
I agree, of course. I’m so scared
That I won’t write what I want to for you and him.
Still I write it. You so graciously say it was just what you'd hoped for.
I go to an event to launch the scholarship and book
At the end of my semester.

Summer, fall, spring.
Summer, fall, spring.
Why go back?  What difference does it make anyway? 
24 months after the event to remember and honor your son's life,
You invite me to join you and others for one last gathering
Before newly graduated PhDs go off to start jobs.
One of them asks me about my education.
I stopped going, I say. I didn't know where it was even going anymore.
She says, sometimes you just have to do something as well as you possibly can and see who you'll become by living through that.
Maybe I will return.
Summer.

Another first semester. There are five of you.
SPANISH - Professor ... You’re overwhelmed, but nice.
ENGLISH - Shakespeare - Dr… You’ve taught for decades here. (My oldest son takes the class with me. We read the plays out loud together and laugh.)
ENGLISH – Postcolonial. You become a friend. I love your class. 
ENGLISH - a Directed Study. You’re my connection to the first time at this university – my old Literacy and Diversity professor – still a favorite.
ENGLISH - another Directed Study – Dr… Within a month, you make me regain all the old faith I had in education and then some. You’re one of those special teachers who change people’s whole lives. 

Another second semester. There are three of you.
Or sort of four, or even six.
SPANISH. You and I often talk after class about the anarchists.
ENGLISH - Honor's Thesis (with a number of you involved)
ENGLISH - Environmental Literature. I feel intimidated by you. But I meet one of my dear friends, thanks to you. You make us writing partners. 
ENGLISH - American Literature 2. You, the special teacher, who taught one of my directed studies and teach my American Lit class now, and will work with me on my honor's thesis - you tell me I could go to graduate school, and you meet with me regularly to talk about literature and listen to my personal stories, and you treat me as a friend.
But near the end of the semester, you have news. 
You're moving to take a job 1000 miles away.
Because you have no job security here. (Contingent faculty… and not to get too legalistic here, but our legislature tried to make the U give one year notices for not rehiring, so the U got around that by “firing” them every time they hired them for one more year – and these institutional details sure do play out in real people’s lives.)
And you're only my teacher - well, kind of my friend – 
And I guess a kind of mentor and hero in my mind.
Reasonably or not, I feel heartbroken.

Summer. Writing. California. 
My uncle has Parkinson’s (no - later they change it to ALS), his muscles collapsing so soon after diagnosis. 

A third semester. There are three of you.
Or six or seven.
SPANISH. You’re a grad student with another year to go to PhD. And you do a good job with us.
ENGLISH - Creative Writing Nonfiction Graduate Level. I think you think I'm stupid and dislike me, but I would not have missed this class. I write some of my stories.
HORTICULTURE with a Lab - another science requirement after all. You, the class teacher, and you the lab teacher – you’re both nice men with lots of enthusiasm for your topic, but this has no applicability in my life after all – no organic gardening methods here, and I gave up my minor in Teaching ESL to get this requirement meant – but sometimes we have fun in the lab.
ENGLISH - Honor's Thesis (three of you - one from 1000 miles away). I write over 70 pages for you all – well, more for you, my political science professor whose son was our T.A., and most of all for you, my Directed Study, American Lit professor who takes my efforts so seriously, and who makes me feel that we’re part of something heroic.
I graduate – 
B.A. in English, minor in Political Science, summa cum laude.


Spring semester. I'm not in school. But there is one of you.
I keep asking for your feedback on my 70 plus page honors thesis.
You send me a 9 page response from 1000 miles away
And I keep reading it.
I apply to a master's program knowing I can't go without a fellowship.
So I try to plan what I will really do.
Three of you write recommendation letters for my application.
I get the fellowship. I get the fellowship.
I will go to graduate school.
I take my two younger kids to stay with my uncle and aunt in California for two weeks because my uncle is dying – my great friend, my sort of other dad.
I email you from there, trying to not succumb to despair 
Seeing my uncle being killed by ALS.
You send me an email of understanding and hope.
My sons graduate with B.A.s at the end of the semester.

Summer.
I don’t know how to be at home.
My spouse and I have lived separated in the same house for years now.
But he waits and waits for me to finish my education. He wants me to have my chance.
I take cross-country driving trips with my kids.
I don’t know where I belong anymore.


A first semester at a new university. There are three of you.
And there is always one of you, also - my friend.
I drown you in email, as I've done for so long, because you’re so far away.
I’m trying to understand who I am now.
My uncle is dying. I call him on drives home at night.
I tell you I can't keep up with the work of graduate school.
I say something good is going away and it's never coming back.
Everything is bleak.
I hate reading so much theory, 
Reading all these efforts people made to make sense of human life,
Crammed into my mind like that, seeming so futile.
My uncle dies the day after Thanksgiving.
I fly to California and stay for over a week, waiting for the funeral.
I come back to winter and three long papers to write.
I don’t know how I can do it. 
I cry through so many days, trying to write from morning till night.
You're drowning in work,
But you take my emails and respond when you can.
When I fall into despair again and again,
You say you thought I was doing so well. What happened?
Others of you give me extensions –  
You all tell me to keep writing
And I make it.
You send me an email telling me how proud you are of me.
And you tell me what you said in your recommendation letter.
And I cry and laugh and smile.

Another second semester, and there are three of you.
And always one more from afar.
I grow brighter as the semester moves us toward spring.
One of you saves my grad student life with your lighter work load – 
From you, I learn so many lessons about creating a restorative class.
One of you reminds me of a gentleman scholar, emphasis on the gentle, gathering us together for studies in the English Renaissance.
And one of you teaches transnational literature and theory. Like all great teachers, you make me feel that our work together is a cause. 
I am one of you, this semester - just a little. Not really.
I’m an upaid community ed. English as a Second Language teacher.

Summer. I go to California 
And Idaho to see my parents who have retired there.

Another third semester; three of you again.
You who taught my brittle shaky self Native American Literature my first semester – you teach 19th Century American Women’s Rhetoric. I tell you, “I think I need this class!” I’m stronger this time around. And I realize how strong and open and caring you are.
You – a new you – have agreed to an independent study of working-class literature with me – and we meet almost every week for a good two hours -- how generous you are.
And you who taught transnational texts – I take your class on Occupy and writing resistance, and again – our work is a cause. I ask you to advise my final project next semester.
And one from afar. Well, you’re my friend; but these verbal distinctions sometimes fall short of the realities they must stretch themselves around. Teacher... friend... where does one leave off and the other begin?

Last semester. There are three of you for my committee.
One, my advisor, also teaches a class you allow me to be part of as a guest.
And one far away.
I write my master's project
On ascending through education,
And all the complicated threads running through these ‘upward’ stories – the inequalities they reveal as they supposedly testify to access and mobility – and I don’t want to do this cynically, because I know how much it still means.
I graduate with an M.A. in English.

Summer. I apply for a job to teach a class in the fall at the university I’ve graduated from. My working-class literature independent study professor who was on my committee who I consider my friend – he hires me. He gives me a chance to teach. It is a gift I’ll never forget.

First semester, there is one of me.
And one of you far away,
And others of you nearby and not so near.
I love you all.
Maybe I am one of you now.

***

Postscript: 

During the first semester of my master's program, I wanted so badly to write about my experience as a nontraditional student while the last round as an undergrad was still fresh in my mind and while I was living the graduate part of the experience. What I imagined, at least, was a book -- a personal narrative with some theory woven into it in an accessible way. My imagined audience would be first and foremost other nontraditional students (or those considering that path), and then those who teach and learn with them as well as those who try to set policies affecting them. I found a multitude of books about educating students like us (some excellent), but what I needed so badly during those years was to read other accounts of those who'd gone through similar experiences. I wanted to not feel so alone in that journey. And I imagined, at least, that I had it in me then to write it. But that first semester soon overwhelmed me in its workload, and I gave up the idea. By the second semester, I'd lost the urgency and couldn't remember what it was I ever had to say about it all anyway. 

And now -- well, now I feel at least some space opening up in my head again.  I have more time, especially during some weeks, so that I could devote my mornings to it.  Maybe I have something to say again. I'm not sure. It's one thing to write for this blog without my full name, and it's another to write something that I even try to send out into the world with my name. I didn't have my experiences alone. As I told a friend recently, I'm not Thoreau writing primarily about my experience in the woods (although he did slam his local society and nation pretty hard).  My life is so bound up with the lives of others,  Telling my story means telling some of other people's, too. And I struggle with the question of how to do that ethically, even when what I say is overwhelmingly positive.

Meanwhile, the transcript-poem-plain prose-hybrid I just wrote was an attempt to at least get SOMETHING down on the page -- some way to see the sweep of it as it spanned those years. I'm not sure if that will be the beginning and end of the 'whole' account of my nontraditional student experience, or if I will finally be able to write a lot more about it as a personal narrative. 

Even in this post with a limited audience, I struggled with telling about what happened during my spring break of 2007. And I've struggled with leaving it in.  It feels too personal to me to include. But most of the women I know (including myself of course) who have held off on our education (some forever) or interrupted it (some repeatedly) have done so in part because we decided to put our personal relationships first.  Or sometimes we were too wounded in those relationships to find the strength to venture into what can be rather cold institutional classes. In those times, we yearn for friendship, not alienation. 

I'm not at all arguing for some simplistic inversion of this -- putting one's formal education and the work connected to that before all personal relationships. Rather, we have to shatter that binary; we have to break through the either/or of personal relationships versus continued commitment to learning and teaching in these institutions. That's why I chose to also call the post "Dear Teachers."  A small number of teachers did break through that boundary into forging friendships with me.  Without friendship, I don't think I could have continued. I don't mean that the friendships were a means to some bigger end -- the bigger end being "getting my education." Rather, friendship became so intertwined with my education that they both became, not end-goals, but life itself. But this postscript is getting too long for me to say more about that right now.  Maybe I am ready to write that narrative. 

Night Before Last Class - First Semester

by Lucy S.

10:30 pm. I've been reading, thinking about, and writing feedback for student essays all day. Mostly, I love this last batch of essays.  Reading about their lost loves ones, frightening health struggles, cherished experiences, bewilderment, anxiety - I can't help but feel closer to them.

From what I've come to know of them, I think they're all upper-middle-class. Some of their families might even be wealthy. (I don't know where the line is supposed to be now; when do people cross over into the 'wealthy' category?) What I know is that their lives seemed so different from mine or my kids' lives or the lives of the people I've been close to my whole life in their opening letters at the start of the semester. I heard from homecoming kings and queens; football quarterbacks for their high school teams; junior hockey devotees; graduates of private K-12 schools; people who went to summer camp every year (my kids have never been to summer camp in their lives!); people with family summer lake homes... But I heard also from a kid who said he almost lost his "best friend" -- his dad had a heart attack (the homecoming king). Later the 18-year-old whose family owns the lovely lake home wrote of coming home from summer camp and being told the news (in the lake home, while her grandparents put away the raspberry jam they'd made) that her mother had discovered she had breast cancer and needed a double mastectomy. I read an essay by a quiet student (who told me he loved poetry) that began: "I was born with a hole in my heart."  In this latest batch of essays, one student wrote about one of his closest friends taking his own life on the same day that this student started college for the first time. Another wrote about being in a car with his grandpa driving (his Poppa) when the grandpa suddenly passed out with his foot on the gas pedal. This student had to quickly turn the wheel to keep them from crashing into people at 60 mph. His Poppa had had a heart attack. He wrote of his grandfather's consistent respect for people, his resiliency, and his eventual recovery, against the odds. Beautiful, poignant essays - all of these, and others.

I've been turning all of this around in my head all semester. It's a strange thing for a working-class person like me to teach these new adults. I start to think the old liberal cliche that contains some truth, but also deceives in its easy feel-good conclusion: We're just people. They suffer. Their loved ones suffer and die. They worry about their individual futures. They struggle with their awakening realizations about injustice. They struggle with guilt, outrage, confronting their own too convenient judgmentalism. As I do.  And I think: haven't their parents given them the childhoods many of us WISH we could have given our kids?  Is it wrong to spend summers at a lake? I get confused.  It's not wrong, I think -- what's wrong is the horrific scarcities forced on so many others. What's wrong is that some people -- the majority -- live with the pains of the upper classes, but at the same time, live with deprivations that exacerbate the losses and illnesses.

This is true at my level, too, though. Most people in this world live so much more destitute than I do. The radical Left often refers to this disdainfully as White Guilt. (Some of the Right does as well.) It's not always White, however.  It might more broadly be termed the guilt of the materially comfortable in a world where most people are not comfortable.

My own relative comfort at this point in life comes after years of moves, a bankruptcy, months here and there staying with my parents. When Ryan was born, we lived in a three bedroom basement duplex. And still, that comfort is precarious. It requires that so much holds together.  Yet none of that compares to the most desperate levels of poverty. The desperate levels scare me.

My Aunt Dolores called me tonight. She told me that her brother Jerry's wife Bertha needs dental surgery. Bertha's in her mid-50s, but she looks older. Her diabetes is severe. She has heart disease now. Two of her teeth are dangerously infected.  Our teeth impact our hearts, we now know. Bertha has no dental insurance. The doctors say she needs this surgery right away because of the danger to her heart. It will cost $8,000. Jerry's trying to come up with the money. For years, he had a good union job, but those jobs ended. Now he works for UPS handling packages. I don't know what UPS pays him in California, but i know what it pays here. $8,50 per hour to the package handlers. Jerrry's in his late 50s. My son in his 20s worked there for a while; he said it was grueling work. Jerry's back is getting worse.  I think of how Jerry and Bertha seemed to be doing pretty well when they were younger. I used to go over their house when their five kids were little. Those kids were so close in age. Jerry and Bertha always seemed like such easy-going, affectionate parents who took good care of their kids. They laughed with them, played with them, disciplined them, but kindly. But forces so much bigger than them took over their kids' lives as those kids grew up. April, the oldest, has always been thought of by the family as the "good girl." Now in her 30s, she lives with her parents, worked until recently being laid off, and helps pay the bills. Jerry Jr has been in prison for some years now ("drugs" is the only reason I hear). Iliana won't speak to her parents. She has mental problems and blames them. Manuel lived there until recently. He struggles financially. Boy, their "baby," killed himself in  the spring of 2011 in front of his father. Jerry, one of the hardest working, nicest guys I know, can't understand how to fend off his crushing depression or these external forces that attack him and his family. Bertha still jokes; she's strong. But she's falling apart.  How did this happen to them?

Dolores tells me that a dental surgeon says he'll do it if Jerry can come up with $1700 and make payments on the $8,000. I tell her that I think the Affordable Care Act is supposed to make it so Bertha can get this insurance. Their income is low. But we're not sure about the details. And she needs the surgery soon. I say, why can't a bunch of us pitch in $100 each? She says most of them don't have it. But come on, I think. There are so many of us. Surely we can come up with $1700. I keep thinking about this and it eats at my conscience. I call her back and say, what if I call Jerry and just loan him the $1700? No, she says. Wait to see if he can get it. I say, but what if something happens to Bertha? No, she says. Just wait. I say, let me know what's going on with her. What are our moral responsibilities when we can come up with the money if we have to, and someone else may die if they can't get hold of a certain sum?

It's late now. Almost midnight. Tomorrow I go to teach the last class of the first college class I've ever taught. I told the students I'd bring the Nerf football. (It's been a running joke with us -- all those avid sports players telling me to find a way to use sports in our class and me saying I have the ball but they have to think of what to do with it. I have said, don't you think it would be weird to be talking about a powerful, serious passage in a text as we throw the ball around? They laughed.)  I am trying to understand how to weave all these realities together. So are many of my students.

Last week - First Semester

by Lucy S.

I'm going to try to make this more even more of an account of my experience. Some days, I may be too tired to say anything of much substance, but maybe there's value in just getting it down in print.

I'm exhausted. I was up till about 1:30 am and woke up at 6:30 - which isn't all that bad compared to what some people do - especially considering I don't do this everyday. But I don't deal with sleep deprivation as well as I used to. It's almost 9 now and I need to sleep.

Today we returned to three poems the class voted to return to. All semester, on Wednesdays and Fridays, students have read a poem at the start of class and we've spent about 5 or 10 minutes talking about it. I kept telling them that at the end of the semester, we'd return to some of the poems. Fourteen of twenty voted. The top choice was "Child of the Americas" by Aurora Levins Morales. Second most popular was "I Too" (or "I Too Sing America") by Langston Hughes. There were several tied for third place, so I went with "Digging" by Seamus Heaney, because I found connections in all these poems. I also printed up "I Hear America Singing" by Walt Whitman, so that they'd understand that this was what Hughes was linking to. I prepared well, I think.  I brought in some background information about the authors and about the Harlem Renaissance movement for Hughes. I shared a little from Terry Eagleton's book How to Read a Poem. We talked a little about the idea of a poem being moral, as Eagleton says. I think they enjoyed it. I hope so. I don't think I was GREAT. But I think I did a decent job.

But it went by so quickly. We had 65 minutes total. So it felt a bit anti-climatic.

Ryan, my youngest, got burned on his foot with boiling water. He was making tea at his friend's house. While pouring the pot of water, he accidentally tipped the cup, so the water poured over the edge of the counter onto his foot. I've been trying to help him. I had him put some gel from freshly cut aloe vera onto the burned part. And manuka honey, which is supposed to heal burns like that, but the honey feels awful to him.

Our heater is also going out. So I'm looking at $3000 to $3500 for a new one, maybe more. They're coming tomorrow to give me estimates.  Meanwhile, it's cold in here, especially in my room.

That's all for now. Workaday writing without eloquence, and some common struggles.

December 2013 With My Learning Comrades~Kids: Sean and Ryan

by Lucy S.

We're moving into winter now.  This morning it was below zero.  Next week's the last week of classes for my first semester teaching a college class. I'm glad I didn't have to go into it cold. I've taught and tutored ESL, but I think the teaching experience that has helped me the most has been all the years teaching and learning with my kids. Thanks, Sean and Ryan (and Justin, Jonathan, and Kevin).


Books

Adams, Richard Watership Down (me and Ryan)
Blanding, Michael The Coke Machine
Bradbury, Ray Farenheit 451
Card, Orson Scott Ender's Game (one only in the series)
Carson, Rachel Silent Spring
Cather, Willa. My Antonia.
Davis, Rebecca Harding Life in the Iron-Mills
Dawson, George Life Is So Good
Dickens, Charles Hard Times
DiCamillo, Kate The Tale of Despereaux
Dodson, Lisa The Moral Underground
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Chapter One.
Fleischman, Paul Seedfolks
Funke, Cornelia Inkheart books (three)
Habila, Helon Oil on Water
Hochschild, Adam Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
Jimenez, Francisco: (trilogy) The Circuit; Breaking Through; Reaching Out
Jacques. Brian Redwall (books)
Jaffee, Daniel Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival
Kingsolver, Barbara The Poisonwood Bible
Klein, Naomi The Shock Doctrine
Lapierre, Dominique and Javier Moro Five Past Midnight in Bhopal
L’Engle, Madeleine Wrinkle in Time series
Lewis, C.S. Chronicles of Narnia series (all, me and Ryan; Sean up to book 2)
Lowry, Lois The Giver
Lowry, Lois Gathering Blue
Lowry, Lois Messenger
Lowry, Lois Number the Stars
More, Thomas. Utopia
Nix, Garth. Keys to the Kingdom (me and Ryan)
Peck, Dale Dritfhouse books (two)
Peck, Robert Newton A Day No Pigs Would Die (me and Ryan)
Philbrick, Rodman Freak the Mighty and Max the Mighty
Roy, Aruhndhati. Walking with the Comrades
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter series
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle
Sinha, Indra. Animal's People
Skye, Obert. Levin Thumps (five)
Stowe, Harriet. Uncle Tom's Cabin
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn


Short Stories and Essays

Bulosan, Carlos. "Be American"
Chesnutt, Charles “Po’ Sandy”
Chopin, Kate “The Story of an Hour”
Cleary, Kate M. "Feet of Clay."
Edmundson, Mark. "The Ideal English Major."
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Birth-Mark”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The May Pole of Merry Mount”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Minister’s Black Veil”
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."
Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"
Irving, Washington “The Adventure of the German Student”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Irving, Washington “Rip Van Winkle”
Kafka, Franz. "A Hunger Artist."
Poe, Edgar Allen “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Travens, B. "Assembly Line."
Wright, Richard. "The Library Card."
Zitkala-Sa "Impressions of an Indian Childhood"
Zitkala-Sa "School Days of an Indian Girl"
Zitkala-Sa "An Indian Teacher Among Indians"


Poetry

Ashbery, John. "The Painter."
Auden, W.H. "Musee des Beaux Arts."
Barghouti, Mourid. "Even Gods."
Barghouti, Mourid. “The three cypress trees.”
Berry, Wendell, "The Peace of Wild Things"
Cullen, Countee. "Incident"
Dickinson, Emily."Because I could not stop for Death" (479)
Dickinson, Emily. "Hope is the thing with feather" (314)
Dickinson, Emily. "I felt a funeral in my Brain" (340)
Dickinson, Emily. "I like a look of Agony" (339)
Dickinson, Emily. "I'm nobody! Who are you?" (260)
Dickinson, Emily. "Much Madness is divinest Sense" (620)
Dickinson, Emily. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (1263)
Dickinson, Emily. "The bustle in a House" (1108)
Dickinson, Emily. "There's a Certain Slant of Light" (320)
Frost, Robert: “Home Burial”
Frost, Robert: “Mending Wall”
Frost, Robert: “The Road Not Taken”
Frost, Robert “The Wood Pile”
H. D. excerpt from “The Walls Do Not Fall”
Hayden, Robert. "Those Winter Sundays"
Heaney, Seamus. “Digging”
Hughes, Langston. “I, Too”
Hughes, Langston. "Mother to Son."
Hughes, Langston "Theme for English B"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Banking Potatoes"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Facing It"
Komunyakaa, Yusef: “Sunday Afternoons”
Lorde, Audre. "Coal"
Lorde, Audre. "From the House of Yemanjá"
Merwin, W.S. "Losing a Language"
Morales, Aurora Levins. "Child of the America."
Neruda, Pablo. "It Rains."
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. "Are All the Break-ups in Your Poems Real?"
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee."Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia."
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. "Kottayam Morning."
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "England in 1819"
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Ozymandias"
Thomas, Dylan “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”
Whitman, Walt. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."
Whitman, Walt. "I Hear America Singing"
Williams, William Carlos “This Is Just to Say That”
Williams, William Carlos “The Red Wheelbarrow”


Movies

"A Better Life"
"Children of Heaven"
"The Cove"
"Darwin's Nightmare"
"Flow"
"The Garden"
"The Grapes of Wrath"
"In a Better World"
"Joyeux Noel"
"La Cosecha" (The Harvest)
"Life in Debt"
"Man of La Mancha"
"Planet Earth" series
"Under the Same Moon"
"Winter's Bone"

Week 14 - First Semester

by Lucy S.

Next week is the last week of classes. I can hardly believe it. I'm different than I was at the beginning. I'm a teacher, or I'm becoming one. Teaching this class, reading their papers, working so hard on writing feedback - these have taught me more than I ever realized they would.

I tell my students to start with a passage from the text, type it out, then let their writing grow from that passage. Summarize at first. Define words. Seek connotations. Connect. Analyze. Read the passage and what you've written now. Think. Write some more. Talk about it with someone else. Write. Avoid abstractions and stock phrases and descriptions. Use concrete detail. Let your thesis emerge from this work, rather than trying to shove the text and your essay into a thesis-corset.

Teaching demands similar processes from me.  No pre-planned formula could teach me what I can only learn by actually teaching.

Four years ago at this time, I was finishing up my first semester back at my undergraduate university. I remember talking to my directed studies professor (who is now my friend) about graduate school. I said I'd go if I were younger, but it didn't seem possible at this point. He began explaining more about it.  I started to wonder if maybe it was possible after all.

People need ways to imagine themselves moving from one position to another. They need bridges. My friend built those bridges for me every time he explained something more about what had previously been a mystery to me. He helped (and helps) me travel on those bridges.  I want to do that for my students.


I've woven writings of people I know into this class where I think they fit. I used an excerpt from a 1994 article by the chair of our department (who has also become my friend) about one of the novels we read. Understanding it was a challenge for the students, but they grappled with it and got to read some literary theory. It expanded their understanding of the novel. I told them who the author was - his position at our own university. I smiled as I told them about him, told them how much the article had deepened that novel for me, later told them I'd just talked with him and shared his insight about what it is to have a moral response to literary art (the topic of his article).

This connects to one of our themes - the ways in which the authors we've read use their written word in the world. I want the students to see the realness of the authors doing this - to feel that they too could do this. I want them to see bridges from who they are now to a possible future 'them' as people whose writing moves out into the world.

I took them to the auditorium to see our visiting writer - a poet and professor from another university. We read some of her poems in class the Friday before that Monday. Some of the students went to other events where she spoke. One, an 18 year old accounting major, told me how thrilled he was to get to hear her speak and how much he loves poetry. I told him about Wallace Stevens, the great modernist poet who sold insurance to make a living.

I read them an excerpt from a book by a professor in our College of  Education. The author argues for the importance of democratic engagement in the class.  This may be one of the few public spaces in which students experience that kind of substantive democracy and begin to realize that they can actively participate and shape something they are a part of (beyond the more private realm).I told them this.

I referred a few times to a dissertation by my friend (the "bridge-builder") who wrote about representations of the corporation in American literature. This was when we read Animal's People, a novel set in a fictionalized Bhopal - a city in India where the worst industrial disaster EVER took place. I shared with them my friend's point about how you can't shoot a corporation (and the summarized scene from the novel from which he developed this point). I did this because the point was vital to our discussion of the "Kampani" in Sinha's novel, who left the city full of poison (Union Carbide, in real life). But I did it also because I wanted the students to FEEL over and over these connections between them, me, and others who write in the world.

A couple weeks ago, I had them read an essay published in Counter Punch that compared someone widely considered a hero for her fight for education for girls to a group of desperate immigrants trying to get into Italy by boat (without permission by that government to migrate there).  The first is celebrated - rightly so, the author pointed out. The latter - well, many died when their boat sank - and there was talk of fining the others for illegal immigration. We don't know the names of the others; they are simply represented to western readers as part of a mass. Why was their struggle for a better life not valorized? That was the author's question. He wrote of how the dominant western capitalist narrative would unravel if we called the would-be immigrants heroes. That author is another professor at our university - another friend of mine, and a former professor and advisor. He, too, came to our class one morning.  The students got to question him and dig deeper into his point as he expanded on it and conversed with us.  He shared some of his writing process, too. Thus, they encountered another person sharing his word in the world. (My use of that phrase itself is rooted in my experience in his class last fall, where he used it.)

Monday my dear friend Amir came to our class to read three of his poems with us. I made copies for everyone. He taught them some specific terminology - just enough to deepen their experience with poetry without overwhelming them. He got to analyze his own poems with them - such stunning poems - and they got to ask him questions about HOW he wrote them.  He talked to them about this process as well.  They realized again, at perhaps a deeper level, the value of imagery, of specific details. They realized that they too could try to write poetry. He told them that being a poet has changed the way he experiences life, the way he sees, the way he thinks. I think he made some of them fall in love with poetry. I know I was ready to write after that. I could feel how special that class meeting was even as we were living it.

Next we discuss a book about fast food union organizing called Wages So Low You'll Freak. Then the author will come to our class to talk about his experience and his writing process.

I am realizing that what I and those students and those texts and all the people who have contributed to that in so many ways - the people whose work I told them about or had them read - the people who taught me so much, including my kids, who gave me my first and longest lasting teaching experience and who continue to teach me - and so many good friends and family members who all have taught me and inspired me - I'm starting to realize that what WE have created in that class has transformed us. As the last classes unfold, I realize that we've somehow done something humane and moral and beautiful.  We've all done it.

Doing this didn't require that I feel confident going in or that I have no doubts or even anguish about it at times. It just required that we all persevere and try hard to bring one another along across these bridges.

I want to tell them on the last day what my friend told me in the fall of 2010. "Our efforts, if we allow ourselves to be true and if we acknowledge that our work is important, must be a constant struggle to stave off the disaster that is a democracy without art, without true literacy, without a full education. Lucy, keep writing, keep writing, keep writing. We – the collective we, the democratic we – need artists and thinkers like you. We need your Excellence."  I will print that up for them as the last handout, minus my name. I'll let them know that a teacher once wrote that to me.

I want every one of them to believe that about themselves. We need us all.

Real and Fictional Bodies In and Around Animal’s People, or: What Difference Will a Story Make?

by Lucy S.


My story you wanted, said you’d put it in a book. I did not want to talk about it. I said is it a big deal, to have my story in a book? I said, I am a small person not even human, what difference will my story make? You told me that sometimes the stories of small people in this world can achieve big things, this is the way you buggers always talk.

I said, many books have been written about this place, not one has changed anything for the better, how will yours be different? You will bleat like all the rest. You’ll talk of rights, laws, justice. Those words sound the same in my mouth as in yours but they don’t mean the same…

Animal’s People (3)


This is an attempt to respond to the questions Animal raises here near the beginning of Indra Sinha’s novel. Not to answer them easily and directly, for it could only be a false ease and superficial quick, straightforward answer that could reply to these questions that way. These questions which can make us doubt and despair before we even begin say in one way or another: what is the point? And they are fundamental questions which face writers who write as and with “small people in this world” against giant, hierarchical organizations and systems which others form and maintain to accumulate ever more staggering amounts of money and power. The writer is in the same position as Animal, asking: “what difference will my story make?” The writer surely faces the questions and skeptical challenges Animal directs at the “Jarnalis,” questions which come from within, without, or both, at many points in the writing process, but especially at the beginning. “[H]ow will yours be different?” Animal must have interrogated Sinha this way as he came to life as a part of the novelist’s consciousness and Sinha wrote him into the world. Perhaps Animal begins as “a small person not even human,” not because he walks on both hands and feet, his back twisted and bent from exposure as a newborn to the poison gas released one night from the Kampani’s factory, but in part because he is a character in a story. And characters in stories tend to enter the world as small people, “not even human”; they are words on a page which the author hopes to transform for readers into real humans and real concerns.

“Many books have been written about this place,” says Animal, “how will yours be different?” It is true – many newspaper stories, many articles, and various books. Before and beyond the characters in Sinha’s story, there is a real counterpart to this novel, a backdrop against which Sinha writes – but no, not a backdrop – rather, a world. It is not in back of the story; it is the story which is utterly immersed in that world. And it is this world, the same one in which we, whoever and wherever we are, will read the story.


On the night of December 2-3, 1984, some of us in this world experienced a catastrophe. It was one of the worst industrial disasters that had ever happened – perhaps the worst, if devastation and suffering should compete for levels of horror. Hundreds of thousands of real, already human people along with many animals and everything else were exposed to poison gas in what Sinha has fictionalized as Khaufpur, and what is Bhopal. The Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) had constructed a pesticide plant there in the 1970s, in a part of the city not zoned for hazardous industry, where hundreds of thousands of poor people lived. It was maintained with far lower safety standards than those at the corporation’s “sister” West Virginia, U.S. plant. That night, because of the failure of various points in the system, the facility let loose into the air over forty tons of deadly methyl isocyanate (MIC) (Broughton). The gas killed 4,000-10,000 people within hours to days, an estimated 15,000- 20,000 in the years since, and injured over 550,000 people, according to the Indian government’s figures (Broughton; Sharma “Bhopal: 20 Years On”; “Union Carbide not liable…”).[1] UCC insists that the total number killed by the gas is 3000, with another 102,000 permanently disabled, and used these figures as part of their justification for a 1989 $470 million settlement, mediated by the Indian Supreme Court and meted out by the Indian government to claimants. This has been estimated to be an average of $2,200 for families of the dead, or, as Sinha points out in his interview at the end of the novel (quoting Outlook India) an average of $500 for “a lifetime of misery” to the surviving victims. This misery includes “charred lungs, poisoned kidneys and deformed foetuses” (Broughton; Sinha “A Conversation…”). The water and land at and around the site remain heavily polluted. A survey approximately two decades after the disaster reported that 91% of residents were drinking water contaminated by the abandoned factory’s toxins leaking into the aquifer (Sharma “Bhopal’s Contamination…”). That is one obviously and necessarily incomplete piece of the larger story in which Sinha’s novel exists.


Other pieces of this story extend out into a multitude of directions and interconnected issues. When I noted in the previous paragraph that the poison gas poured into Bhopal’s air that night “because of the failure of various points in the system,” I meant primarily that the mechanical devices and safety procedures had failed because of a chain of decisions and events, many of which were driven by the company’s efforts to cut down on plant costs. Two petrochemical engineers, utilizing UCC’s own March 1985 investigative report, have retraced in meticulous but generally graspable detail what happened that night and before that night, mechanically speaking, to allow the gas to escape. (Bloch & Jung). But “the system” might equally refer to not only the Indian or U.S. but global legal and economic system in which UCC and other corporations operate, a system which failed so many people in Bhopal that night and has failed them to such a massive extent since then. Moreover, it is a system which fails the vast majority of us all. Some examples of systemic failure connected to this disaster include the more specific series of steps linked to but beyond the purely mechanical which led to the release of the murderous gas that night; the choice to manufacture products containing MIC in any place; the construction of the pesticide plant in that Bhopal location without any reliable knowledge or democratic decision-making about its presence or operations by the people living around the site; and what it is about the corporate form that places it inherently at odds with living bodies.


What went wrong at Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal was set in motion long before that December night in 1984 by the market forces and logic of capitalism as they played out in that particular situation. As noted before, the facility was built in a highly populated neighborhood not zoned for hazardous manufacturing. This is in part because the plan was to import smaller amounts of MIC from the U.S. to then mix with other chemicals to manufacture the insecticide Sevin. But “pressure from competition in the chemical industry led UCIL [UCC’s subsidiary, Union Carbide India Limited] to implement … the manufacture of raw materials and intermediate products [including the highly toxic MIC] for formulation of the final product within one facility. This was inherently a more sophisticated and hazardous process” (Broughton). By July 1984, the company was losing money manufacturing Sevin at one-fourth production capacity because “[w]idespread crop failures and famine on the subcontinent in the 1980s led to increased indebtedness and decreased capital for farmers to invest in pesticides.” UC put the plant up for sale, but when it did not sell quickly, they began to scale way back on operations, including safety measures, in order to cut down on the costs of maintaining the plant. This in turn created the mechanical conditions which led to the poisonous gas leak (Broughton).


MIC, a key ingredient in Sevin, is highly toxic, dangerous at levels over 0.02 parts per million (Fortun 121). It is produced in just one place in the U.S. – the community of Institute, West Virginia in the Kanawha Valley, a place with far higher than average cancer rates [2] (Fortun 85-86). In May 2009, a West Virginia newspaper carried this commentary by former teacher Nancy Swan: “MIC Storage at Institute, WV: A Ticking Bomb.” Swan parallels the situation to Bhopal prior to the leak, noting that journalist Rajkumar Keswan repeatedly published warnings starting two years before Bhopal’s disaster. Swan herself, along with other teachers and students, suffered permanent damage from MIC poisoning in 1985 at a Mississippi school when the board let roofers spray MIC (with other chemicals) on foam roofing during the school day. A 2008 explosion at the Bayer plant in Kanawha Valley (with MIC onsite) led her to submit her piece. Perhaps the report released in April 2009 by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the explosion further impelled her. The report “found that the August 2008 explosion at Bayer’s plant in Institute, West Virginia, ‘came dangerously close’ to igniting several tons of methyl isocyanate, or MIC…” (Woellert). The news article provides a summation of the accident:

On Aug. 28, a pressurized waste tank containing Methomyl exploded, sending a fireball hundreds of feet into the air. One Bayer employee was killed instantly and another suffered third- degree burns and died more than a month later. Eight other people, including six emergency responders and two contract employees, reported symptoms of chemical exposure.

Communication repeatedly broke down during and after the explosion. Safety equipment and cameras had been removed or dismantled, and company officials falsely told emergency personnel that day that “no dangerous chemicals had been released.” Most alarmingly: “The explosion ruptured and threw a 2.5-ton steel tank through the plant. Had it struck the MIC container, ‘the subcommittee today might be examining a catastrophe rivaling the Bhopal disaster’” (Woellert). Producing, storing, and applying MIC and other lethal chemicals imperils workers and nearby community residents as well as the people, other living beings, and whole environments anywhere these products are made or used. When did we democratically choose this?


At the same time, the poor bear far more than their ‘share’ of the toxic burden. This is the case within the U.S., and is even worse – much worse – for the most destitute people around the world. Corporations and their powerful political allies undeniably use poor people’s lack of economic and political power along with the economic desperation created by capitalism (and the legacy or current manifestations of colonialism) to force dangerous facilities and toxic materials into places where they would never be freely chosen by a majority. Lawrence Summers’ infamous 1991 memo (while Chief Economist of the World Bank) arguing that the World Bank should be “encouraging MORE migration of dirty industries to the LDCs” (less developed countries) is a particularly glaring example. His argument is that they are “vastly UNDER-polluted” (euphoric caps in these excerpts all his) since statistically many of the people in the poorest countries are likely to die for other reasons before they would get the cancers which the added toxins would increase among them (Summers). Apparently, addressing the causes of these premature deaths is out of the equation for Summers and his colleagues. After the leaked memo caused an uproar in some circles, Summers then claimed that it was only meant sarcastically (“Furor on Memo at World Bank”), but the memo’s argument harmonizes with the neoliberal privatization and profit-above-all positions pushed by Summers and entities like the World Bank and IMF then and now. Furthermore, it squares with the continued enactment of just what he advises: dumping “dirty industries” disproportionately onto the poorest people. If only his memo’s expressed premises and practices were really all just a big joke that no one would ever really consider.


Focusing on the particularly horrific values or actions of one individual or one corporation matters, but it is important to also realize that these people and companies behave according to the standard logic and legal structures of capitalism and the corporation. Law professor and author Joel Bakan recounts some of his interview with iconic economist and champion of business and privatization Milton Friedman in which Friedman explains what a corporation is, in his view:


“A corporation is the property of its stockholders,” he told me. “Its interests are the interests of its stockholders. Now, beyond that, should it spend the stockholders’ money for purposes which it regards as socially responsible but which it cannot connect to its bottom line? The answer I would say is no.” There is but one “social responsibility” for corporate executives, Friedman believes: they must make as much money as possible for their shareholders. This is a moral imperative. Executives who choose social and environmental goals over profits – who try to act morally – are, in fact, immoral (34).

Bakan further explains the situation for corporations, as legal creations:

Law dictates what their directors and managers can do, what they cannot do, and what they must do. And, at least in the United States and other industrialized countries, the corporation, as created by law, most closely resembles Milton Friedman’s ideal model of the institution: it compels executives to prioritize the interests of their companies and shareholders above all others and forbids them from being socially responsible – at least genuinely so (35).

Cultural anthropology professor Kim Fortun describes them this way:

By law, corporations are persons enjoying the rights promised by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. constitution. Corporate identity, legally defined, has many of the attributes of the Enlightenment subject: while constituted through multiple bilateral contracts with employees, vendors, customers, and others, the overarching responsibility of a corporation is singular – maximization of shareholder wealth. In other words, the multiplicity of social relations constitutive of the corporation is reduced to a single objective – profit maximization” (104).

This objective explains why those at Union Carbide chose to negotiate a crassly inadequate $470 million settlement when, as Edward Broughton notes: “Had compensation in Bhopal been paid at the same rate that asbestosis victims were being awarded in US courts by defendants including UCC … the liability would have been greater than the $10 billion the company was worth and insured for in 1984.” Paying as little as could be gotten away with was corporate ‘morality’ for its executives and shareholders. The system’s logic made UCC stock immediately rise $2 per share, or 7%, when the settlement was reached (Broughton; Fortun 34). The mentality wrought in this system speaks via a New York Times financial analyst who interpreted the settlement and its accompanying stock gains this way: “[P]sychologically, it’s terrific. Financially, it’s reasonable. This relieves the pressure on Union Carbide and the stigma” (qtd in Fortun 118). Psychologically terrific for whom? Financially reasonable for whom? Whose pressure is relieved? This normalized corporate profit obeisance explains why the UCC corporate website still lists the gas leak this way: “caused by an act of sabotage, results in tragic loss of life” (Union Carbide Corporation) when Bloch, Jung, and others have utilized UCC’s own reports to retrace what went wrong. Admitting blame interferes in the largest sense with corporate public relations tied to profit and may put companies at risk for further claims. This in turn explains the otherwise insane reasoning expressed by UCC’s CEO Warren Anderson in a 1990 company statement. Anderson asserts that from the beginning “we were willing to take moral responsibility for the tragedy and that we would do everything in our power to help,” including an offer of a “prompt and fair” $20 million settlement (Fortun 98-99). What can moral responsibility possibly mean here for CEOs who must define morality in Friedman’s terms? In what ways could this moral responsibility possibly manifest? Individuals within the company may privately ‘feel sorry’ about “the tragedy.” But despite the legal assertion that corporations are ‘persons,’ corporations are unable to respond ‘morally’ or feel anything.


Judith Butler asks, ““What is real? Whose lives are real?” She says that “[t]hose who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization.” And she asks, “Does violence take place on condition of that unreality?” (33 Precarious Life) With these questions, Butler taps into old, deep, common recognitions which have prompted many of us, even as children, to say things such as, “They act like those other people [or we ourselves] aren’t even real,” about groups of people who in some way harm other groups of people, by discrimination, imprisonment, bombings, forcibly taking and then withholding too much of the means of life or joy, and any of the situations which those with highly unequal levels of power would not impose on those who feel most “real” to them. We know, then – we know deeply – that safety and quality of life are somehow bound up with being seen as “real.”


This corporate- and capitalist-inverted system in which the unreal abstractions and placeholders of profit, money, and corporate interest are treated as real while actual people’s lives as well as whole ecosystems can be derealized into acronyms like LDCs (lesser-developed-countries) by corporate-occupied brains like Summers – this is the failure that allows a catastrophe like Bhopal to happen and then be responded to so poorly initially and in the long run. It is in this reality that Sinha writes his novel and faces Animal’s questions. “[M]any books have been written about this place, not one has changed anything for the better, how will yours be different?”


Other questions emerge from this one. What would this novel be different than? Even if it fails to be “different,” there is at least an ideal (almost Platonic) “different” which this points toward. But is difference itself what is needed? If so, what kind? There are presumed binaries built into Animal’s question. They are some of the myriad binaries which the novel interrogates. One may be the implied contrast between all that has been written about “this place” which has not “changed anything for the better” and the opposite: the book which would perhaps change everything (which Animal knows his story is unlikely to do). Yet this novel certainly does not leave readers concluding that nothing really makes a difference. Two binaries embedded in his questions in the opening passage, then, are: failure/success and same/different. The presence of Elli, the American doctor, in Khaufpur provides one example of the unusable nature of these binaries. If nothing ever written before has made any difference at all, what is Elli doing there? Hasn’t her decision to go set up a clinic there been motivated in at least some way by stories of some kind about what happened and the continued inability of so many to get adequate medical treatment? And it cannot be denied that Elli makes a difference in this story of Animal’s. Yet this story does not center on Elli; she is one character among many who matter. What is difficult to express about Sinha’s novel is the ways in which many common, sometimes cherished tropes are present – the ‘saving’ idealistic, naïve American helper in a poorer country; the charismatic, idealistic leader (Zafar); some rough, cynical characters with good hearts (Animal, Farouq); a sort of courtly, and not so courtly, love (Animal to Nisha); and more – yet Sinha does not invert our expectations. Or rather, he subverts them by not inverting what we expect to be inverted. The question becomes not whether the novel is predictable or unpredictable ; the question is whether that binary or any of them even work or matter. In what ways have these binaries themselves participated in propping up injustices as distractive false areas of focus? We might say that this is art interrogating the aesthetic rather than the ethical response – except that aesthetics are utterly bound up in this experience. Thus, all of these dichotomous ideas and categories become (as they should be) thoroughly entangled, unable to be artificially segregated.


Animal says to the Jarnalis – and Sinha may have said to himself: “You will bleat like all the others” (3). Like so many of Animal’s statements, it is a blunt, cynical assertion, a challenge to make it not true, and a carefully guarded hope for an outcome well beyond the limits of only bleating. But from this early moment, though Animal repeatedly insists elsewhere upon a distinction between humans and animals – and that he is an animal, not a human – we find the boundary already blurred. The journalist, Sinha, and all the rest who have written or will write or purport to make a difference will bleat like sheep, goats, calves, or children crying piteously or in fear of wolves – or will whine, or babble, or prate (“bleat” OED). Already, then, we speak and write as both animals and weak humans when we take on the predatory entities which continually gorge on lives, labor, and ecosystems to enlarge their profits and power, yet this acceptance of weakness and inadequacy is what paradoxically makes Animal and the others (as well as the rest of us) strong enough. This is part of what Zafar means later when, as the organized resistance leader who has just achieved a small but new and amazing victory against the Kampani in court, he says, “Having nothing we can never be defeated” (54).


To continue along this line, if we think about the strategy of ‘taking it back’ – that is, taking a derogatory term meant to disempower and degrade, and utilizing it to instead empower ourselves while draining the ability of others to use it against us – this is what Animal has done by insisting on his identity as an animal rather than a human being. And it is on a larger scale what Sinha is doing here. It has become a commonality to describe the dehumanization of groups of people by saying that they are considered and treated as animals. But the ability to play these categories against each other participates in these atrocities. (And who among us finds Descartes’ nailing of animal paws to walls and cutting them open in various ways while alive ‘not so bad’ because the victims were ‘only’ animals?) What Sinha has done by putting this protagonist Animal front and center in his novel – this person who blurs the boundaries between human and animal and who elicits from us our own realization of our own blurred boundaries (‘bleaters’ that we are) – is work to remove that categorization of animal as a means to disregard and destroy some groups of lives. Thus, when Nisha voices her anguish at trying to appeal to an inadequate and too often corrupt justice system by saying that “our government’s of no use, courts are of no use, appeals to humanity are no use, because these people are not human, they’re animals,” the inversion does not work. As readers will, especially under the desperate circumstances, Animal lets it go (having his own vital agenda at that moment – his marriage proposal), but nonetheless he (like readers) consciously realizes that he is “ignoring her insult to animals” (332).


At the same time, Animal’s character demonstrates that animal does not mean passive recipient of persecution; animal does not inherently mean victim. Animal’s name was bestowed upon him by the other orphanage kids when he fought back. A boy kneed him in the face; Animal was so angry at the pain that he bit the boy’s leg until he tasted blood and bit harder. The kids then yelled “Jaanvar, jungli jaanvar,” or “animal, wild animal” (16). What does it mean when we realize that this animal fights back and he speaks – that he is able to tell his story, which is another way of fighting back – while the human Jarnalis, like all the rest, bleats? Who is the animal; who is the human; and in what ways do these categories matter as we repeatedly encounter these mergings and blurrings over the course of Sinha’s novel?

What Animal resists from the beginning is being reduced to precisely what he, in one sense, is: just a story or a story character – whether for the Jarnalis or for the readers of Sinha’s novel. His questions work to shame those making him a means to their ends, when those ends do nothing for him and his people in his part of Khaufpur. He records himself, not in any divorced- from-real-life notion of ‘art for art’s sake,’ but rather, art for his sake, and gradually, art for all of their sakes, but for our sake as well if we have blurred and merged with Animal and his people somewhere along the way. This blurring and merging – this reading with – is more than just, in a general sense, ‘being on the same side’ of large, interconnected issues. An unfortunate example of the latter is Rob Nixon’s extended focus on Animal’s People in the first chapter of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon does not ‘read with’ the characters – a position which I believe is crucial to making Sinha’s novel poignant and powerful for readers. An example is Nixon’s own ‘gaze’ on Animal and his use of him as a literary trope. This is, of course, part of what literary scholars do, but at times, rather than deepening readers’ experience with and understanding of the novel, his interpretation feels like a performance for its own sake that sits apart from the novel’s emotional life, flexing its literary analysis muscles. Nixon writes that Animal’s “picaro is literally outlandish, his twisted body the physical manifestation of extraterritorial, offshore capitalist practices” (57). With his body read this way, Animal is stripped of his ‘realness’ and reduced to a symbolic object to embody a point, the very exploitation Animal interrogates and resists from the beginning.


In this assertion, I am certainly not arguing that Animal is in some sense sacred in an un-discussable victimhood which can only be pitied or spoken of in saintly terms. Clearly, that would be far from the novel’s presentation of his character. But let us contrast Nixon’s reading of Animal’s body with Animal’s song about himself and Elli’s response to it. Her response suggests the kind of attachment to Animal’s character which makes this novel capable of moving readers toward resistance. Animal sings:

I am an animal fierce and free
in all the world is none like me
crooked I’m, a nightmare child
fed on hunger, running wild,
no love and cuddles for this boy
live without hope, laugh without joy
but if you dare to pity me
I’ll shit in your shoe and piss in your tea

Elli laughs, “That is so sad.” Animal responds, “If it is so sad, why are you laughing?” “‘I don’t know,’ she says, wiping at her eyes. ‘Maybe because otherwise I would cry. The idea of living without hope, it’s terrifying’” (172). Elli here models a way for readers to engage with Animal – to laugh and cry with him, to enter into a relationship with him, to feel for him. Relationship is key in this novel, enacted in a multitude of ways among Animal and ‘his’ people. What Animal himself says in his song speaks to multiple layers of consciousness as well as multiple truths and fictions he tells himself and others, layers not easy to sort out. Almost every claim in this verse might be read as its opposite and be equally true and false. He must maneuver among these tensions, contradictions, and dualities – human and animal; particular and universal; ‘civilized’ and ‘free’; fear and bravery; hope and realism. These are some of the same constructed binaries and multiplicities with which any literature of protest must engage because they are vital issues we all must interrogate. New sorting into the binaries is not what is needed, however. Rather, the kinds of relationships we see in Animal’s People demonstrate that these binaries themselves are dangerous. Relationships with these characters blur the borders between the false binaries, including those of “us” and “them.”


Admittedly, this kind of reading will strike some as not what a critical, scholarly reading should be. Faye Halpern, for example, says that all readings ‘with the grain’ mean “being a ‘good’ reader,” which she finds problematic, arguing against scholarly readers becoming “over-involved” in texts (51, 52). For Halpern, critical readers should be unmaskers. Her article focuses on sentimental literature but does not limit these precepts to that genre. Halpern states that “how critics read” – period – is by remaining distant from texts (56). Her habits of reading, as a literary scholar, can, she says “block [her] access” to the emotions in a passage and thus to becoming a part of the narrative audience (59). Near the end of the article, she admits that something is given up in this kind of reading, and ends saying that perhaps there should be a “discussion” of the “benefits and costs” of this kind of reading practice. But these notions assume that readers cannot read immersively and critically at the same time and afterward as they continue to ponder a text. Halpern thus perpetuates at least two sets of false binaries here: reading immersively versus reading critically, and the literary scholar as reader versus the ‘regular person’ as reader. Although the practice of literary study enhances our abilities to read critically, this ability is certainly not unknown to the rest of humanity. The truth is that we all read, not only our books, but the totality of our world, including those close to us, both immersively and critically.

Again, the novel itself shatters these constructed divisions. Animal himself is an apt example of this, both as one reading his own ‘world’ and as a character whom we read. He continually, and rightfully, mingles skepticism with trust. For some time, that trust is primarily directed toward his dog Jara; his surrogate mother, Ma Franci; his best friend and (in his mind) love interest, Nisha; and the little girl, Aliya (with varying degrees exercised toward others). Discarding all critical skepticism would be stupid, and in any case, impossible, but Animal’s own well-being and growth depend on realizing, as Zafar tells him early on, when he stuns Animal by trusting him to deliver a large sum of money, that it is Animal who needs to learn to trust. Animal proves trustworthy with the money, yet says he “despised Zafar for trusting [him].” (39), because Animal cannot disentangle his complex feelings about this. Animal does not know if he can trust himself and does not want to feel whatever Zafar’s trust may elicit from him. At this point and at many points along the way, I believe readers find themselves simultaneously trusting Animal, and yet not always trusting his ‘reading’ or reactions to various people and events; and on his side without agreeing with everything he does (to put it mildly). And is this not what it means to live bound to others in this world? There is no formula for this, no safe separation which keeps us ‘critically distant’ unless we choose not to trust and love. Yet that would leave us in the least safe position of all – one of isolation – making our readings of our world , not ‘neutral’ (as if such a state might be reached), but grounded in whatever ideologies we have internalized minus a feeling for and merging with those we are ‘reading.’ Thus, like Zafar, we must trust, not because those we trust have definitively proven they can be trusted, but because no real growth is possible without this trust. We trust and keep trusting, even with or especially because of the flaws of those we trust. As Animal says, “If you want my story, you’ll have to put up with how I tell it” (2). And as Judith Butler puts it, “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something” (20 Precarious Life).

This is the utter vulnerability of relationship. Yet it is not romanticized sentimentality. To be sure, it is thoroughly steeped in feeling, but this entangled mass of emotion, intelligence, critical ‘reading,’ and that ungraspable force we call ‘will’(those moments when we are moved from our previous ways, and we act) – all of this is inherently necessary to making common cause with each other. And making common cause is crucial to resisting the corporatized, violent status quo. We cannot wait for the perfect, fully trustworthy people to show up. With no guarantees, knowing that we may trust the wrong people and that the results may be painful or even dire if we do, we nonetheless decide to trust anyway. We must make do with each other, or at least enough of each other – the ones we decide to trust. From Zafar, among others in this story, we discover that far more people than we might realize can be trusted because being trusted so profoundly affects people.

Yet not everyone should be trusted. Trust moves people, but it does not move lifeless forms or their massive material manifestations, constructed with monetary profit as their aim. The corporate form shapes the behavior of the people serving them and served by them. As Zafar says, the people who do the bidding of the Kampani “look ordinary … [b]ecause they are ordinary. They are not especially evil or cruel, most of them, this is what makes them so terrifying. They don’t even realise the harm they are doing” (195). Frank is an exemplification of this. His way of seeing and understanding the world, even Elli, has been shaped by the work he does for the Kampani. He hovers between claiming that he cannot affect what they do, that he is only doing his job, and saying that he can “knock on some doors” back home or that he can delay the agreement about to be made between the courts and the Kampani lawyers – all of the time, looking for vulnerability in Elli as a way to personally ‘profit’ (322-324). Thus, just when we may be ready to shatter every binary in this reading of Animal’s People, we find that not even that simple binary works (binaries/no binaries). This is not a novel in which there are no ‘bad guys.’ The ‘bad guys’ are those who internalize the logic of corporate and capitalist ideology and deal with other people accordingly. Outside of their jobs, these people will not all be as crassly selfish as Frank; they may not be ‘bad’ or untrustworthy in their personal lives detached from their corporate roles. But it is this detachment itself – this normalized compartmentalization – that allows the derealized violence about which Butler writes. People acting as corporate agents cannot be trusted because the very nature of their role requires that they put company profit ahead of relationship with one person or even a multitude of people.

What is true for people is false for a corporation. Those maintaining the economic and legal corporate form and pushing the agendas of the specific companies for which they work believe or at least try to make others believe the very opposite. The chairman of one of the oldest corporate branding companies contends that “corporations, as brands … have … souls” which help them forge “intellectual and emotional bond[s]” with people. Another public relations firm CEO says, “It’s absolutely fundamental that a corporation today has as much of a human and personal characteristic as anything else” (Bakan 26). Judith Butler has written extensively about the inherently precarious condition of living bodies and the question of what it means to be responsive, as well as responsible, to one another as bodies. “[T]he body is a social phenomenon;” she writes, “it is exposed to others, vulnerable by definition … It is not, however, a mere surface upon which social meanings are inscribed, but that which suffers, enjoys, and responds to the exteriority of the world” (33 Frames of War). This, of course, is not the condition of the corporation. It cloaks itself in the very name ‘body,’ but as with slavery, it is a practice, allowed by economic rules and laws manifesting in devastating practices over actual lives. It does not suffer or enjoy as a living being and has only one kind of vulnerability – profit and loss.

In March 2012, MSN Money ran an article entitled, “Bhopal Tragedy Still Haunts Dow Chemical.” Dow had been “facing immense pressure from the Indian Olympic Association regarding its sponsorship of the London 2012 Olympics.” The article explains:

[Union Carbide’s] plant also dumped toxic waste, which contaminated the ground water in surrounding areas. Over 40,000 people depend on this ground water for drinking. The contamination continues today, endangering the health of the surrounding population. Countless children in the region are born with deformities and mental disabilities due to the effects of these poisons […]

Union Carbide was bought by Dow Chemicals in 2000. Dow has refused to assume any liability for the tragedy, citing that it did not have any ownership stake in the company involved until 16 years after the incident.

What, however, is the primary concern in this article? Writing for those who place market profit at the center of their lives, the primary question for the writer and target audience of this article is: “How might this backlash impact the company's business and its stock price?” The answer?

While we don't expect anything to come of this issue, the market is still aware of Dow's possible vulnerability. In 2004, a prankster claiming to be a Dow representative told World News that Dow had agreed to clean up the site and compensate those harmed by liquidating Union Carbide for $12 billion. Immediately afterward, Dow's share price fell 4.2% in 23 minutes -- a loss of $2 billion in market value. (Trefis)

I want to emphasize two basic points from this article, which most of us know but perhaps do not often think about. Corporate well-being and the well-being of living beings are inversely proportional; what helps one harms the other. Secondly, the corporation which is defined by law as a person can, unlike a person, be bought and sold. Did Dow buy the “moral responsibility” which UCC’s CEO Warren Anderson claimed Union Carbide had for the catastrophe? Who is able and willing to respond? Did responsibility dissipate in the transaction? But there is no eerie mystery here. Clearly, the people involved in making this deal do everything in their power to help maintain the legal structure that makes such abdication of responsibility possible because it makes them massive amounts of money.

The distinction that actually matters, then, is not between what is human and what is animal; it is between what is real and what is false, and whether we are going to harm and kill real bodies, and make and inject real poisons into bodies or ecosystems on behalf of abstractions such as corporate forms and the placeholders we call money and profit. Whether Sinha’s novel or any other novel makes the difference that it should depends upon whether it brings its readers along to discover and keep discovering what is real and what is fiction; what is true and what is false. If it makes us only believe or wish something were true that is not, and if that believing or wishing becomes a substitute for acting in solidarity and in truth with those who are ‘true,’ then it fails. But each person determines this, each set of “eyes” to which Animal speaks over the course of the novel. At first, he hates the idea of “[t]housands staring at [him]” through the eyes of the Jarnalis. “Their curiosity feels like acid on my skin” (7). Too often, groups of destitute or persecuted people whose lives are highlighted for a short time are gazed upon this way, and this, too, is a kind of derealization. If we read Animal as a specimen in a story or a merely interesting protagonist who we think has little or nothing to do with us, we participate in the compartmentalizations that allow violence of so many kinds. We mistake what is real and unreal.

Animal’s People is, among other things, about trust and discernment, and believing that what we do can make a difference even when we do not think that we believe it. All along the way, Animal gradually enlarges his ability to trust, not only the other characters in the novel, but those to whom he is speaking. It is about the paradoxical step we take to trust even when we do not quite trust and do not quite have a reason to trust, as in early on, when he says:

I’m remembering the eyes that hide inside your eyes, you said I should ignore you and talk straight to those who’ll read these words, if I speak from my heart they’ll listen. So from this moment I am no longer speaking to my friend the Kakadu Jarnalis, name’s Phuoc, I am talking to the eyes that are reading these words. Now I am talking to you (12).

All of us who read this story are “Eyes.” At some point, we can become eyes which see from within Animal, rather than only from without, but this requires our own trust. As Animal learns, not simplistically, but carefully to trust the right people and remain cynical about those he should be cynical toward (the Kampani and its government cohorts), likewise we as readers of this world must try our very hardest to trust the right people. If Sinha wins us over and proves to us that Animal and his people are the right ones to trust, we become Animal’s people as well. What difference will Animal’s story make? Perhaps at the end, we, like Animal, will conclude: “Everything the same, yet everything changed” (364).

“Eyes, I’m done. Khuda hafez. Go well. Remember me. All things pass, but the poor remain. We are the people of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will be more of us.” Animal

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[1] The higher numbers of estimated deaths come from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), based upon nine years of close follow-up with over 80,000 survivors (Sharma “Bhopal: 20 Years On”).


[2] Fortun points out that a number of other chemicals are produced there as well, so it is difficult to definitively determine which exposures might contribute to these higher rates.