Two poems from Layli Long Soldier’s book especially touched me, one about her daughter and the other her father. I remember feeling ashamed that it was the two most personal, and perhaps least narratively innovative ones, as if that indicated I didn’t care for either “writing” or “social change”. It was not until reading Boyer’s Undying that I was reminded that we ultimately care about things because we care. Ultimately political action and writing are done because someone wants to, not for compelled by some operating logic of disinterested justice or beauty. I was reminded of James Baldwin’s often quoted line: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer”. For a long time I’ve been thinking about what it means to be honest. Layli Long Soldier’s poems felt honest in their narration. I wonder if it has something to do with Long Soldier writing about the experiences a while after they took place, so the time makes honesty easier. In any case, I felt the honesty of intention is crucial for both effectuating social change and producing impactful writing.

My question is how to write with an audience? How does writing and calls for change reach beyond people already paying attention?

I suppose that my main takeaway from the course would be what I learned from reading the James Baldwin lecture and letter: the importance of writing with specific audiences in mind, and how to choose which audience to address with purpose. In the letter, the intimacy and familiarity with which he writes allows him to examine the more personal nature of racism. Meanwhile, the lecture, which he begins by appealing to authority, and then expanding more broadly on the systemic issues of racism. The attention paid to the audience is a crucial part of writing with the desire to create social change. 

My question would be, related to the Layli Long Soldier reading, would be how to translate the takeaways of this class into official writing. While there could never have been an apology on behalf of the federal government that would have fully healed the wounds of history, how could documents like it, moving forward, make strides towards better and more effective writing?

-Write 1 paragraph on something you learned about writing’s relationship to social change—perhaps using a favorite text as a guide, with the wisdom of hindsight.

The texts that shaped my ideas about writing and social change were Italo Calvino’s “Exactitude”, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, and Anne Boyer’s The Undying. Italo Calvino’s “Exactitude” helped me face some of the difficulties in discussing social problems. With the advent of social media, many people, including myself, have only fragmented ideas of what they are talking about, and often argue about different matter believing that they are discussing the same subject. “Exactitude” made me realize the importance of using the exact expressions to precisely describe the matter at hand. Reading “Exactitude” made me believe that it is essential to use language with precision when writing for social change, as using language in a vague manner could result in presenting the problem vaguely and incoherently.

If “Exactitude” taught me about using language precisely, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas taught me about grasping the confinements of language itself—her poems made me aware of the “manacles of English” and how a poet could try to shatter them. Dissecting the formal language allows her to venture out of the linguistic structure and expose the violence behind the formal apology. Long Soldier’s work taught me that the structure and the language of written material is as important as its content, and that utilizing structure is a conscious choice for writers writing about social change.

The Undying by Anne Boyer taught me the importance of viewing a social problem in a larger scale, taking into consideration the social structures that cause the problem. Her refutation of the pink ribbon campaign and the consumption of breast cancer patients in popular culture made me realize that writing should not stop at raising awareness. Instead of isolating a specific problem and turning it into an object for sympathy, writing should unearth the causes that people fail to see and make the readers face them.

-Write 1 question you have about writing and social change that emerges from your work in the course.

Throughout the course, I have always wondered the effectiveness of writing in facilitating social change. Writing is affective in raising awareness about a given social problem, and making a reader feel compassionate about it. However, as Anne Boyer pointed out, raising awareness and making the problem visible is not enough if it fails to visualize the structural aspects that cause the problem. How can writing facilitate structural change, if it leaves the readers, the individuals, to act upon what they felt through the writing?

-Write 1 paragraph on something you learned about writing’s relationship to social change—perhaps using a favorite text as a guide, with the wisdom of hindsight.

One thing that particularly stands out to me from the many things I’ve taken away from this course is the power that exists in showing rather than telling. I hesitated to select this aspect to discuss because it now seems to be a critical, obviously necessary thing to keep in mind when writing about social change, but that’s hindsight bias for you, and I truly did not have this in mind when I first entered the course. In thinking back to our first assignment on exactitude, I can now see that in the past I used to approach describing the need for social change “exactly” by providing as much detail into outlining the connections between what I was writing about and the overarching theoretical points I was trying to express as I could. During that assignment, I considered the fact that every individual’s perspective on reality is entirely different even when viewing the same situation and, because of this, I worried that my point would not come across clearly to readers if I did not provide a direct guide to understanding a situation I was writing about from my perspective. However, after engaging with Etel Adnan’s To Be in a Time of War and John Ruskin’s letters from Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, I reconsidered my prior writing style in discussing the need for social change. I realized that frequently referencing commonplace occurrences such as with the train whistling in Ruskin’s work and writing in Adnan’s style of repeated sentence structure and listing of step-by-step daily behaviors did not read as thoughtless or meaningless, but, in fact, inspired me to produce what I found to be the piece this quarter that best expressed my message. Just by listing daily interactions and showing how an issue at-hand influences one’s everyday experiences it is possible to identify to a reader just how pressing, ever-present, and impactful a certain societal problem is without having to tell the reader directly. Further, I now believe that there is great power in making sure to leave room for the reader to come to their own conclusions when presented with the evidence of daily impact, such as James Agee seemed to partly be addressing when discussing the desire to present his subject matter in the form of a museum exhibit in Now Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I understand this power to firstly come from the concept that a person will perhaps personally understand and better remember a conclusion they reached on their own rather than another individual’s that they merely read. Following that, in thinking about our final class discussion on the power of defamiliarization in theater, I now feel that I better understand part of what Berthold Brecht meant when he wrote that an audience member who does not become enveloped into a character on stage’s mindset is allowed an important space to “protest” in On Chinese Acting. In allowing a reader to review presented evidence, even though the selected display is still partly influenced by the author’s value system, rather than be told what to think of it through the mind of another, they can contribute their own realizations, questions, agreements, and disagreements. I believe this importantly starts an conversation between the author and readers in the writing of social change, a place where more added perspectives can allow necessary growth to occur, rather than a one-sided lecture.

-Write 1 question you have about writing and social change that emerges from your work in the course.

One question that I still have comes from our unit on letter writing versus lecture giving, specifically concerning the idea of determining a target audience. I still am questioning when and why one decides it is best to structure their writing on social change to be specifically accessible to those they believe to be similarly impacted by an issue at-hand or more so to as wide of an audience as one can reach? Does aiming to reach a wider audience mean that one should have to write in simpler terms, explain from the basics, write in a more universally acceptable language than their native tongue, or even leave out more complex or potentially controversial points so that the general argument is able to be understood and heard by more individuals or does it strip the author or some of their legitimacy and voice to feel obligated to do so?

Write 1 paragraph on something you learned about writing’s relationship to social change—perhaps using a favorite text as a guide, with the wisdom of hindsight.

The theme I’ve definitely been following throughout the course of the quarter – as I’m sure I’ve probably talked about once or twice in class – is the use of abstraction, or alienation, by a narrator in a story. This, in relation to what kind of empathy and closure the writer wants the reader to feel, becomes a technique to agitate readers. In not allowing for full closure, or perhaps leaving something missing for the readers, the writer allows for the reader to fill in the gap. Thus, the reader becomes active in the writer’s movement for social change. And yet, this relationship is certainly complicated by who the writer is, who the narrator is, who the subject/s is/are, and who the readers are. How does the writer consolidate their own social positioning with their narration of a story that may or may not be theirs in a way that acknowledges the social positioning of the story’s readership? There are a lot of moving parts, and it’s a tricky line to navigate. If the writer is to employ the tactic of alienation, what parts of the story does the writer make abstract, foreign, or difficult to relate to, so their audience cannot fully empathize, but isn’t just left confused? I’m certainly thinking of Keene’s piece in Counternarratives, where the narration of Carmel’s story feels ever so slightly cold and distant, and yet readers who certainly cannot completely understand her story are able to fill in those gaps to think critically yet sentimentally about Carmel’s story. I’m also thinking of Agee and the dilemma he actively struggled with in being a privileged, liberal white man trying to accurately yet powerfully portray the struggle of the tenant farmers. Perhaps his own self-conscious narration and thus self-alienation is supposed to have readers also feel self-conscious and alienated. And I’m thinking of Layli Long Soldier’s creative use of form. Her poems are alienating in two critical ways: their structures defy common poetic forms, and they tear up a government document, while maintaining familiar political/legislative language. “Whereas” comes to mean something different for us, because she takes what is such a formal word in government documents and forces us to think critically about what it is used for through alienation.

Write 1 question you have about writing and social change that emerges from your work in the course.

How do we, as writers, juggle the weight of implications in the story we are telling, while staying true to our personal stakes in the narration as well as closely monitoring what stakes our readers get to have in our work?

One thing I have learned about social change writing is that it can manifest in a variety of different ways. It is written in many genres, targets disparate groups of people, and works towards enacting different levels of social change. I previously had a more narrow conception about what social change writing meant, which was more strictly tied really to protest movements and motivational pieces.

I am wondering how authors of social change texts like to measure their success. One obvious way would be by measuring literary awards/accolades, but I am wondering if there are are other metrics specific to pieces with implications for social change and what those metrics may look like.

I imagine all writing dealing with social change are personal (manifestos have to have a reason for being written, for example) but the usage of the word “I” adds a sense of urgency to the piece in recognizing how your own experience is a critical piece of a larger problem, and forcing others to see individual experiences versus an abstract movement might make calling for social change more effective. Something that I’ve noticed from my own project is how personal my pieces had become; the reason that I feel so strongly about what I am writing about is because I have a stake in it. Reading Boyer’s The Undying and Baldwin’s letter to his nephew really resonated with me, because both of these authors were writing about something that their own experiences had validated. There were also poems in Long Soldier’s Whereas (such as the poem regarding her father apologizing) where that usage also popped up. I think something apparent in all the pieces we read in class, not just those above, was the need to give a voice to someone who didn’t have that before, and to make sure you aren’t taking away their agency when doing so. When that voice is your own, that becomes much easier than when you undertake the same job for someone else.   

Question: Where do you draw the line between saying something you think is honest but might come out as overstating to someone else? There were quite a few times where I found myself asking if invoking a concept/person was too much and if I had a right to do so, but my decision came down to validating my own experiences, and I was wondering if toning down language for people to stop and listen to you makes it less impactful. 

Something I now think more about it is the importance of incorporating the voices of the people whose stories you aim to tell in a respectful way. It is hard to do. We talked about this with our discussions on Keene and Hartman. Although we didn’t agree on an exact way or guideline to do this, (because I don’t think there is a straightforward answer), it definitely is something to constantly think about. Specifically, I’d always thought about stories surrounding slavery and how they have become basically “trauma porn.” So when trying to tell stories of slaves or other people that haven’t been told before, it is important to consider voice. However, there are limited sources so it’s hard to fill in the gaps in history. I think this is an important conversation to keep having in regards to historical fiction.

The discussion around the James Baldwin assigned readings made me think more about audience. Specifically if something is written to be private or public. Or what it means if something is written to be private or intimate, but made public. This has made me think more about the audience for my project and how formatting (letters) changes the interpretation of the pieces. Also, this made me think about novels that are told entirely through letters because there’s a sense of intimacy and privacy because of the format, but it’s being read by a large audience. I would be interested in exploring writing through letters more in the future.

Question: In terms of writing, I wonder what types, genres, or formats are most effective in inspiring change amongst the everyday person? I honestly would be interested in seeing this as a psychology study.

My favorite text that we read this quarter was Keene’s Counternarratives. Carmel’s story, which is presented as merely a footnote in a text about an abstracted, male-dominated history about Catholics in early America, taught me to look for silences in the text. It demonstrated that I need to pay attention to who is not speaking when reading about history, especially as it relates to women, people of color or other groups that face oppression. I thought the duality in the text between Eugenie and Carmel was also fascinating, as it showed that sometimes, people who face some sort of repression or oppression, like Eugenie, can turn around and also be oppressive and silencing to others. I think this text also taught me that binaries that we can construct – like those who silence and those are silenced – are far more nuanced. Above all, Keene’s work taught me that social change can be created when you write to fill in the gaps in history and give a voice or even simply pay attention to those who were silenced. It’s too easy to assume that if there is no extant writing or documents about someone, then it’s like he or she never existed and that he or she has no impact on our lives today. Keene shows us that that is wrong. Even though he gives a fictitious account of a woman named Carmel, he is reminding us that there are thousands of people who are not in the history books but who lived and breathed and mattered, and they too deserve to have their stories told.

Question: Is it ethical to write from a perspective other than your own when writing for social change? An example would be a man writing from a woman’s perspective or vice versa – with the exception of satire, should one only write one’s own perspective, as doing otherwise would be making assumptions/writing without the lived experience?

Throughout the quarter, I’ve found myself grappling with all of the different techniques we’ve explored about writing effectively and responsibly for the purposes of social change. It seems clear to me that the work we’ve read has the ability to make a political statement and inspire thought with regards to social change, but there wasn’t a single, identifiable approach as to how this can be done correctly. Anne Boyer’s The Undying seemed to be at odds with the philosophies of Hartman and Keene, who advocated for leaving gaps in narration when retelling the stories of those who have been historically silenced and are no longer with us. Boyer, on the other hand, believes that it is her responsibility to “tell” rather than to leave intentional gaps, because to put the responsibility of filling them onto the reader would not do justice to her narrative. I suppose the takeaway from this is that when writing for the purposes of social change, careful attention should be paid to the medium and goals of the writing. There doesn’t seem to be one effective approach, but rather, the writing this quarter has made me aware of many of the challenges of this type of writing. The method of tackling those challenges depends on the specifics of the work, which will perhaps inherently be likely to cause controversy or disagreement.

My question is: What is the difference between writing for the purposes of social commentary versus social change? How should/do writing methods differ when the goal is to inspire thought in readers versus when the goal is to create actual change through the writing itself? Are these both possible (especially the latter)?