Writing and Fighting -- For What? (Part 1)

by Lucy S.

From the time I started this blog last January, I’ve been trying to understand what I’m doing with it. I wonder if it’s too fragmented and unfocused, even as, for me, all these things connect, often more intuitively than overtly.  But I probably need to work on overtly identifying and explaining the connections better. 

A few posts back, I wrote about huge questions regarding my practices and goals as a new college teacher (What ARE my goals? How do they differ from simply perpetuating an unjust status quo?). Then I wrote a very personal post called “So.” Jiji wrote her excellent piece, “Run, Run, Run, Run,” which I think makes the connection between these education endeavors and the personal pretty clear. Thursday night, I put up a simple post called “Old Photos of Me and Gloria” with a couple old photos and a few thoughts about their significance along with a few memories. What do my more personal posts have to do with my efforts to highlight care-labor – unpaid or often poorly paid – as a parent, family member, friend, childcare provider – and now as a contingent college teacher? And what do they have to do with larger political, social, and economic struggles and endeavors?

This post is one effort to begin to dig into that more fully. To ask what I’m writing for is in some ways to ask what I’m fighting for.

I’ll start with this. I think of many of the people I write about as “my people.” That’s how I feel about them and myself, and the experiences and mutual concerns and affection that connect us in various ways. They constitute my past and present – the more distant past, the past of recent years, and the present. My decision to return to school in 2009 to finish my B.A., my continued efforts in graduate school for a master’s, and my new work teaching literature and composition have all grown out of my love for people – not simply people as an abstract concept, but THESE people. These relationships always help me make the leap to care for others. I think we can learn to love our fellow human beings by loving particular people.

If what I do in these educational endeavors can do nothing for someone like who I was at various points in the past, or who Gloria was or is, or my grandmother, parents, kids, nieces, nephews, other friends and family… I begin to wonder what I’m doing.  Years ago, when I took those photos with Gloria during our high school years (shown in my last post), I knew I loved to read and write, but I couldn’t grasp how to connect this love to meaningful activities within the system or society as I understood it. (I knew I wasn’t on a college track, “knew” I wasn’t ‘college material,’ knew I wanted to be part of some meaningful cause bigger than myself, but couldn’t understand what that meant or how to find it, and “knew” at some deeply embedded level that something was deficient about me – not pretty enough (this mattered so much then, like it or not, as far as I understood in my small circles); not intelligent enough; not quick-witted enough; not confident enough (a vicious cycle, of course….). In Gloria’s case, she’s said many times that when she got C’s, she felt that she WAS a C. At times, we talked about what we “could have” been or “would like” to be in some other reality. An attorney, she sometimes said (and says), and she was logical enough and relentless enough in working toward a truth that I always believed she would have been a great one. Me? I always said a teacher or a writer. But all of that seemed like a pipe dream, about as attainable as becoming famous actors, with no path visible to US for getting from one point to another. School guidance counselors saw us as at best average students, nothing special. And of course, the whole system is set up so that we still often think that more meaningful jobs are for those who are ‘special,’ not ‘average.’

So we would find our meaning somewhere else – not in formal education and not in paid work back then. Well, Gloria did make a point of graduating from high school, and this meant a great deal to her.  I probably would have graduated, but my parents moved halfway through my high school years, so I took the California proficiency exam after tenth grade to get the ‘legal equivalent of a high school diploma’ and started my first job at McDonald’s. I moved out young. We had kids – Gloria first. Married in her teens, she put her all into being a ‘good’ wife and mother. The places they lived were immaculate; she bathed her baby (soon babies) every day; she cooked; she managed what money they had wisely. As for me, I was a single parent with my first child, determined to prove people wrong who thought I had no business having a baby. Having absorbed some negative feelings attached to welfare, I held off on even applying for Medi-Cal till my last trimester. At seven months pregnant, I first saw a doctor. I worked till my due date, went three weeks overdue, and went back to work fulltime when Justin was two weeks old because my “disability” income from the state was ending (and California is one of the better U.S. states in even providing maternity leave pay).  I worked long days, lengthened by the 90 minute commute each way. I woke up at 5 am, left the house by 6 am, and wearily returned to my apartment at about 7 pm after picking up Justin from the family daycare home. Justin was my purpose, but my sense of meaning kept unraveling.  I felt exhausted and guilty no matter what I did within the narrow parameters I recognized as available to me. I cried almost every day during part of the long drive to work or longer drive home through Southern California traffic (and blasted music for part of it, trying to drive out the dreary melancholy or the more acute desperation). My boss lectured me about work ethic, though I was the top telemarketer in that soul-draining job. Gloria, meanwhile, was married with two small kids; her spouse (with his own serious abandonment issues) regularly accused her of wanting to “f-” someone else and demanded she not go anywhere wearing shorts of any kind (among other things). If I wanted to see her, I had to go there, because she couldn’t have taken her kids to come and visit me – not in a million years back then. We were fighters, to be sure – never just passively accepting what happened to come our way – but we didn’t fully understand HOW to fight or WHAT to fight against or for.

Well, we knew we were fighting for our kids. We each tried in our own ways to take good care of them, and help them become ‘good people' who would be 'happy.' That connected in various ways to education. Thus, it was devastating in certain ways when we saw the schools failing them and them struggling in those schools. Gloria fought from within the system. As her kids got older, she worked at a flower shop in town to earn income, have her own job, and have backup when her spouse periodically got laid off. I sometimes fought from within, but increasingly grew into believing that opting out was the only way for my kids. Homeschooling.  Bad experiences piled up rapidly for my older kids. And we moved so much, chasing jobs and dreams of a way out, as if such a thing were possible. My efforts and Gloria’s seemed so different from one another’s, and yet at some core level, we were trying for the same things, both trying the best we knew how to raise our kids well and give them meaningful lives.

So I think all the time now – what am I doing for people like the us of the past or the us of more recent times, or our kids or people like our kids? 

And there are others. I’ve written a number of times about my niece, Rose, in here, who died in 2007. What am I doing for people like her? What am I doing for those who might become the parents and teachers and principals and probation officers in the near future of people like her? I can think of so many steps along the way where she might have been cared for instead of treated harshly. Or there is my nephew, Ricky, her brother, who struggles with depression, deep insecurities about his severe stuttering, loneliness, and a sense of going nowhere in life. He wants to work on important things. He yearns for family relationships, but we’re so far away. How do I work to create a system that doesn’t rip family and friends apart from each other? How do I help create a system that treasures and supports each person’s learning, creating, growing, and participation in society for their whole life?

I’ve written of William, Rose’s partner, who came to the U.S. at age eleven from El Salvador and was deported in his early 20s, knowing no one there anymore, shot in the head, murdered there. How does what I do impact everything connected to that? (The U.S.’s support of dictatorial, vicious regimes when it suits the government’s political interests; the valuing of human life based on categorizations of citizenship or “legal” residency, the inability to even reason with anyone on his or so many other cases…) 

And there is my close friend Jiji who lived with us for a time in the summer of 2012, who I laughed with so many times about a thousand absurdities as we walked around our grad school campus or sat in the nearby coffee shop. We debated, we shared stories, we cried together at times. Because she is from a “third world” country, she is so much more restricted by these “first world” governments in her choices, even as they congratulate themselves about “diversity” and “multiculturalism.” She is so pressured from a multitude of directions, deep anxiety always riding her back. How does what I do help in even the slightest degree to address the disgusting continued legacy of colonialism, racism, imperialism, and the other brutal ‘isms” that she is forced to navigate through?

There is my friend and honors thesis partner, Delaine. We were co-enthusiasts, burning with hope to change the world through education.  Every week in the fall of 2010, we met for lunch, and man, did those conversations sustain me. We daydreamed about creating a special school, maybe for kids and their parents, something democratic…  We shared our readings, our pain, our hope, our personal stories. Now she teaches math at an inner city high school in the South, giving it all she can, growing increasingly upset about the chasm between her ideals and the crushing realities inflicted on the students she tries to help. How do I study, write, and teach in a way that helps create a system worthy of the passion and work of someone like Delaine?

There’s Amir, a good friend who I feel that I’ve known for far longer than almost four years. Monday, he’ll visit my class to read and talk about three stunning poems of his, and to talk about reading and writing poetry. If he’s “lucky,” that won’t be possible next fall. He’s recently finished the expensive process of applying to PhD programs, a process that filters out those without the time or money to apply to several programs (and the $160 for each GRE exam – general and subject). And the ability to pick up and move, more than once. How does what I do challenge this model that excludes people or forces the “lucky” into an individualist existence, broken from their networks of support over and over, all to emerge with a PhD that most likely (statistically speaking) will never get them a tenured job?  

There’s Dan. I wrote about him in one of my honors thesis essays, “Defining Morality.”  http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/02/defining-morality.html He was my professor; he became my friend. That first semester I went back to finish my B.A., he did a directed study with me that changed my life. He told me many times that I could go to graduate school when I’d thought I couldn’t.  I’ve told him before that he makes people realize things are possible that they did not know were possible. More than what he did for me specifically, even, his whole example restored my faith in what education could be.  When it turned out he was leaving after my second semester back, because he was full-time but contingent faculty – kept anxiously awaiting a contract for as long as possible by our big public university, worried about having a job the next school year – paid too little for the massive amount of responsibility he carried, and the time all the work took – when it turned out he’d taken a job 1000 miles away that would treat him better and pay him better, I was so angry at our university for what we as students were losing and the toll their inhumane policies and exploitation took on his life. That, too, became part of my reason to go on with my education. I wanted to be in it for the FIGHT. I wanted to fight for and alongside a person like Dan.

That brings me to the question of the state – are we fighting for education as a public good?  And if so, what kind of public good?  Are we fighting for an education-centered society, in which people learn, create, and grow over the course of their lives, all participating in continually creating the communities and various spaces they inhabit? 

I will add one more person for now: my cousin, Johnny.  His experience with the state is complicated. After 17 years, the state of California finally let him out of prison. He’d been incarcerated on a 27-years-to-life sentence at age 32 for nonviolent felonies related to his heroin addiction. In November 2012, California voters overwhelmingly voted to change the law so that the third strike had to be for more ‘serious’ felonies. (I have to wonder why anything that isn’t ‘serious’ is even considered a felony…)  The prisons began to release people. He walked out of there in February of this year. We rejoiced – but he came home with Valley Fever, a chronic disease that for some reason is more rampant in some California state prisons, including one that held him for a long time. It’s a fungal disease that can destroy a person’s bodily organs. Its spores reside in some dirt, and people breathe it in. Sometimes when I talk with him on the phone, he struggles to breathe and has to lie down for a while. He can’t work. He’s applied for disability income through Social Security and they’ve turned him down. (They turn most people down the first time, knowing that some will go away rather than reapplying – a strange practice from a government organization that’s supposed to serve the public.)  He’s reapplying. I often wonder how what I do can help Johnny or people in similar positions now, or the Johnny who didn’t learn to read until he went to prison, or the Johnny who struggled with heroin addiction before he went to prison for so long, or the Johnny who had so much of his life stolen by the prison system. Which facets of the state do I want to engage with and change, if any?

This is what I’m grappling with now. Do we change the system or abandon it? And CAN the system be abandoned, or is that just a fantasy of those who think they can ‘opt out’ even as they always remain inside the system?  What do we even mean by the system? The capitalist system? The state? All nation-state forms or just some?

How do I teach and write and live in ways that make a difference for “my people” or so many people likewise harmed in so many ways by things as they are?

I haven’t even written more extensively about my kids as “my people" now.  I’ll do that in the next part of this. 

***

Postscript:

The point in talking about my and Gloria's stories and past experiences is for more than to explain us or talk about what inherently has meaning for us because, after all, these are our lives. The point is that I see these things continuing to play out in so many ways with others of many ages.  The idea that these issues are over is a fantasy that runs in certain circles, even as those who make that claim often replicate patriarchy, sexism, racism, classism, nationalism, imperialism, and other deeply entrenched inequalities and forms of violence in their own ways. 

The way I've told these stories may seem to conform to standard narratives about people missing their individual chance to "rise" and finding this tragic because they, not surprisingly, care especially for how their individual life gets lived. But I mean these things to highlight, in fact, that those standard stories don't serve any of us well. The tragedy is that so many of our lives can't be lived in deeply fulfilling ways that simultaneously make the world better.

I should also say that I don't mean to villainize Gloria's ex. It's hard figuring out how to tell stories truthfully, explaining which experiences affected us in certain ways, without including other people in these accounts.  But I believe that focusing most of the blame on these individual people with their own past traumas and confusion about their own motivations and situations can make us misrecognize the real sources of our oppression. Yes, we have to protect ourselves. We have to call out these ideas and behaviors that can hurt us so badly. We have to sometimes distance ourselves from some people. But we can also try to understand where these ideas and behaviors come from, and ultimately, when possible, transform our relationships with people. In doing so, we help change them and ourselves without succumbing to self-destructive 'pity' for them that keeps us stuck.  Lastly, I want to say, I'm so glad that Gloria has a healthier partner relationship now with a great person.