Learning to Re-member

by Lucy S.

I’ve just come back from a trip home to Southern California, where I spent time with close friends who are family to us and family who are close friends to us, including my cousin Johnny, who got out of prison last February after 17 years, and Gloria, my lifelong friend.  Justin, my oldest son, went with me. This trip taught us so much. 

We learned that my cousin Johnny's first felony, in his early 20s, when he and his wife had a baby under a year old, was a set-up by a friend of my uncle's. That man, friends with so many judges, lawyers, and affluent business people, always on the hunt for new ways to make a lot of money, asked Johnny if he could put a business in his name. It's a little shady, the man said, but perfectly legal. He offered Johnny $200 to do it. Johnny agreed, and it turned out to be a credit scam of some kind, for which Johnny went to prison for five years.  The man urged him not to tell my uncle or anyone else, and promised to take care of his wife and baby. He did nothing for them. When Johnny got out, the man asked my uncle to see if Johnny wanted to make some extra money moving some of his wife's things from one home to another. Johnny agreed, and stole some expensive items. The man complained to my uncle, who asked Johnny, who freely admitted taking the items and said he wouldn't give them back. "I'm not asking you; I'm telling you," my uncle said. "Ask him why I did it," Johnny countered. Then he told my uncle the whole story, and my uncle furiously confronted the friend. That friend answered vaguely that it was "years ago..."  

And I learned that Johnny and I are still close, as we once were.  

We learned that we're still part of our family and friends, and that maybe it's time to go home.  Not because it's objectively 'better' than where we are, but because it is home, and we are members of those people and that place.

Now I'm trying to shift my focus back onto being ready for the class I start teaching on Monday. I feel like school (as a student or now as a new teacher) takes such an intensity of concentration for me that I've become afraid to take time off. Because of that, when I do take time off, I feel sort of swept up and engulfed in the waves of everything else – who I was before, all of my relationships...  And I get burned out at times with how much school takes out of me. In despairing moments, I question whether what I'm doing makes sense.

But in California, I felt good telling people I hadn’t seen in a long time that I finished my master's degree and am now in my first year of teaching college classes.

I feel good telling them this because I say it as one of them. I want to take what I've learned and use it to affirm the people I come from. I want to say that in some ways WE are teaching these literature classes. I try to use what I've learned to say that our perspectives and stories had power and truth all along, and to show that learning can be used to fight back instead of to become part of those who look down on, marginalize, and in various ways help oppress those most colonized, enslaved, exploited, excluded, and imprisoned (and their ancestors): the working classes; the poor; people of color; immigrants; unpaid or poorly paid caregivers; and others the dominant have tried to keep out and keep down. What we learn needs to undo the ways we have learned to be ashamed of who we are or who we come from or who we were as kids.  

Otherwise, education can enslave us and make us further participate in the enslavement of others. In Debt: the First 5000 Years, David Graeber says:

[T]o make a human being an object of exchange, one woman equivalent to another for example, requires first of all ripping her from her context; that is, tearing her away from that web of relations that makes her the unique conflux of relations that she is, and thus, into a means to measure debt (159).

Reading this again, I think of a friend raised in Dallas and punished in school as a little girl whenever she spoke Spanish. By first grade, she refused to speak it at all. Her bilingual parents would speak to her in Spanish and she would answer in English. Even now, as the mother of four grown sons, she will not even pronounce a Spanish word as it would be pronounced in Spanish, let alone speak the language she still understands. School taught her to see her first language and culture as inferior to the dominant one, and as something she must lose or be punished for keeping.

In the case of another friend, when I hear her say various racist comments about African-Americans, I think of how in 8th and 9th grade, a lot of her friends were black. When I hear her say so many negative comments about people on welfare, I remember that she was on welfare when her son was a baby and her first husband went to prison for a year and a half. When she says mean things about the way other women or girls look, I think of her telling me years ago that when she and her sister were little, people would say her sister was so pretty, and would say nothing about her, standing there alongside her sister. She has internalized oppressive ideas and turned them against who she was, the friends she used to have, and so much that she came from.  She has done all she could to become middle-class, which she frames in entirely positive terms. If we just met now, we probably would not become friends. But we've been friends most of our lives. We’ve called each other sisters for most of those years. She helped care for my three oldest kids as babies when I worked and took community college classes. So I am trying to work through my aversion to these things she says in a way that does not in turn throw away our relationship and part of my history.  

At times, I rail against the “American white middle to upper classes” and against all that makes me sick about class-climbing. I may put some of these things in racial / ethnic terms at times, but it's beyond being or not being of European descent. In The Possessive Investment In Whiteness, George Lipsitz describes this 'whiteness' as “the unmarked category against which difference is constructed, … [which] never has to speak its name...” He includes Richard Dyer's identification of a primary source of “white power” and its “dominance”– the way it seems “not to be anything in particular.” (1)  This 'whiteness as a norm' marks the way people become part of the "respectable" group in this country. The Irish were not considered white at one time. Poverty-class whites are also way outside of that "respectable" kind of "whiteness."  And working-class or poverty-class people of many ethnicities too often look down on themselves, or their kids look down on their parents. At the same time, class and race are so entangled in this country. In a society in which the dominant preach equality while perpetuating deep inequality, it is no surprise that many of its members argue for their superiority over this or that other group or person on the basis of how closely they can resemble the constructed identity and lifestyle which "never has to speak its name." 

Then there is mass culture to complicate it all and in various ways, to estrange one generation from another, or make people feel ashamed of themselves.  I think of how the woman who calls me her ‘fifth daughter” – who I call my “other mother," who immigrated as a young mother from Colombia, has never been to college, and worked in sewing factories for years (and sews so splendidly) – how she loves to read, and has read the classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by the great Colombian writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Her kids don't read Latin American authors in Spanish or English. They often think of so much from Latin America as ignorant, out of it, old, superstitious. They in turn might love a movie like "Crash," which their mom might not like so much.  In turn, my master’s adviser once mentioned in class how awful he thought that movie was. He'd consider Marquez's work far better than "Crash” or most other mass-culture movies. And then the people with a lot more money than (even tenured) college professors might value mass culture movies far more than Marquez – and the ultra-rich may make or direct the manufacture of the most popular items and works of mass culture. Academics have cultural capital; those with lots of money have economic capital; and the majority of people in our society have neither. 

As someone who also has loved movies like "Crash," and Marquez's great novel, I struggle to understand how to make my education not make me ashamed of part of who I've been for much of my life. When I gradually began to figure out which pieces of culture were 'good' and which were 'bad' in academia, I'd feel so embarrassed about telling a teacher I'd liked one of the 'bad' ones. I'm still trying to figure out an answer to this. My dad gave me a book one time about a Civil Rights activist, and then said it might not be that good compared to the things I was reading in college. He too had picked up on the academic version of 'cool' and 'uncool,' not enough to sort out the differences, but enough to worry about his possible taste for the 'inferior.' Not everything is equally well-done... and yet this can't be right. 

Maybe these paradoxes are themselves part of a big story that we have to keep telling and analyzing. Maybe education to re-member can teach us to value stories whose sometimes painful truths aren’t easily digested, complex stories that we have to chew on a long time, stories to connect us to our earlier selves and each other in all our messiness.

It seems that so many efforts to 'move up' in this society decimate people's relationships with their family and friends, who and where they came from, and the knowledge gained through lived experience and passed down histories – their own or that of their parents and others they used to respect or might have respected. Too often. this all gets devalued, disdained, and discarded. I have felt this and warred with it in myself, too, at various times.  On “Columbus Day” 2011, after an Ojibwe dance and presentation outside at Government Plaza in Minneapolis (with Occupy going on there), a young Ojibwe man said: “We’ve all been colonized.” I think this is part of what he meant.

All of these contradictions sometimes feel like too much to handle – these things that pull me in so many different ways, and the massive amount of time academia takes, so that I get more disconnected from the people I come from and even my own kids.

Add in the massive attention I give my students, because that is inside a form that constitutes a real "college class" that pays me and gives me a title – and add in that those students are in an expensive private college that my kids, family, and lifelong friends could not attend – and add in my guilt for not giving more attention to my loved ones – and it all can make me feel more despair. Conversely, I can get too used to all this, so it feels 'nice and normal.' I deeply appreciate the faculty I know in my English department. I like and care about my students. But I must use my education to re-member myself and help others do the same – to remain a member of all the people I come from.

I teach literature and writing. I’m trying to know how to teach it to empower. And our truest stories do have power. The English writer, painter, and poet, John Berger says:

The secret of storytelling amongst the poor is the conviction that stories are told so that they may be listened to elsewhere, where somebody, or perhaps a legion of people, knows better than the storyteller or the story’s protagonists what life means. The powerful can’t tell stories: boasts are the opposite of stories, and any story, however mild, has to be fearless; the powerful today live nervously.

A story refers life to an alternative and more final judge who is far away. Maybe the judge is located in the future, or in the past that is still attentive, or maybe somewhere over the hill, where the day’s luck has changed (the poor have to refer often to good or bad luck) so that the last have become first (101-102).

Maybe Berger overstates this; there have been affluent, powerful people who told good stories. But I believe what he says is true in the most important ways.  I know that the man who set up my cousin and let him spend five years in prison cannot tell real stories. He can boast about how many people he deceived in his determination to make as much money as he could.. But Johnny can tell stories that matter.  

About Palestinians who stay bound to one another (and surely this applies to others who do so as well), Berger writes:

When somebody has the opportunity to leave a camp and cross the rubble to slightly better accommodation, it can happen that they turn it down and choose to stay. In the camp, they are a member, like a finger, of an endless body. Moving out would be amputation.  The stance of undefeated despair works like this (18)

Am I already too amputated?  How can I be part of the body of those I come from and be also part of the body of those I've learned from and those I teach?  Can we be an even bigger "endless body"?  How do I teach and learn in ways that, instead of amputating, work to re-member?

Works Cited:

Berger, John. Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. New York: Vintage, 2007. 

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2011.

 Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment In Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.