For me, the biggest theme or idea in the readings we’ve done has been how to write about the intimate sufferings of other people while combating the drive of readers to consume the work for a sort of pleasure that leaves them complacent and plays into already existing power dynamics between those suffering and those reading about suffering. There are many ways in which consuming work about injustices and suffering can provide perversely pleasurable feelings for writers. Boyer discusses the pleasure of voyeurism and of accessing the intimate sufferings of another person. Drnaso’s work also presents people’s feeling of entitlement to see gruesome acts or intense pain felt by others. Boyer also talks about our desire to read a coherent narrative, treating a human being’s suffering as a sort of story that ought to contain the traditional, emotionally satisfying aspects of a narrative. Agee brings these types of voyeuristic pleasures to light and also mentions how reading about the suffering of others often gives us the satisfaction of feeling like informed, sympathetic, thoughtful citizens. But it does this without driving us to necessarily “do” anything about the power structures making it so that we read about the intense suffering of others in the comfort of our own homes or on our commute to work. 

The pieces we read all seemed to deal with this truth (and attempting to push back against it) in some artful way. Boyer refused to provide a traditional narrative structure for her personal account of her “cancer journey.” Drnaso refused to show us the most intensely gruesome part of his story, despite the story revolving around images (and despite the fact that the characters in the story saw and reacted to the video of Sabrina’s murder). Agee made his own biases as a conscious writer presenting the life of others apparent through inserting his own self into the narration to remind us that he was not presenting some “ground truth,” and to force us to think about why we, as readers, consume this type of material. Keenes opened up room for readers to see the interiority of a historically unrepresented character, Carmel, but refused to present us with her complete thoughts because it would be false to suggest another person from a different historical time could access them completely. 

Question:
My question is sort of related to the things I discussed above. In Boyer’s The Undying, she claims that “visibility doesn’t reliably change the relations of power to who or what is visible except insofar as the prey are easier to hunt” (159). How can we make injustice visible (through writing) in a way that incites action, or at least fails to submit to the traditional power structures implicit between those who suffer and those who read about it?

Like Ketaki, Brecht really upended my ideas of quality theater and challenged my notion that acting had to feel “real” to be good. The alienated form of Chinese acting seems to understand acting/performing as presenting rather than embodying. Brecht says this alienation “makes protest possible” for audience members. I found this really interesting—I’m not sure I’m totally convinced we can’t protest something we experience emotionally or empathize with, but empathy does certainly seem to muddy an effort to historicize and criticize society. I was really struck by Schumann saying that acting through mimicry (or an attempt to present something as “real”) is a dangerous “overly generous serving of intimacies.” He describes sincere intimacy as an “addictive spice” in the entertainment industry. This made me think about our discussion of the type of intimacy we are party to when we read a memoire. I’ve always found this intimacy and sincerity really powerful and moving, so it was strange to hear it described as something dangerous in its appeal to consumers (of which I am one). I personally thought Boyer did a good job of queering the expected narrative structure in The Undying, but it’s interesting to see how puppetry does this in a very different way. Schumann talks about how a puppet’s face “should not be degraded to serve the purposes of character and story.” This lack of character and story in the narrative gives the puppet the ability to “interfere as an agent in its own right” in stories that “don’t know anything about it.” I thought that was a really cool way to subvert narrative structure. It was really fun to see this happening in the video of the Grasshopper Rebellion Circus performance. The alienation and ridiculousness of the puppet performance definitely felt super unique, and the type of tone it created felt effective in subverting capitalism norms of art consumption, which allowed it to more effectively comment on these constructs. 

Process Notes:

I choose to make a banner as my assignment this week. I wanted to do this because it seemed the most out-of-the-ordinary, and because I’ve always been super bad at doing crafty things, so I thought it might be fun to try to force myself to. I also wanted to think about what type of succinct message someone from my extended family—or just someone more representative of “Trump’s America,” who feels very removed from the intellectual elite environment we have here—might want to say to people at a place like UChicago. I’ve also struggled to describe or “sum up” my social issue / topic, and I figured the word constraint in a banner would be a useful challenge. I wanted to highlight the sort of irony of intellectualizing the struggle of the proletariat as members of a type of elite (by the fact that we have access to the resources of an institution like UChicago). So I cut out the letters for the words from  a copy I have of Weber’s The Protestant Work Ethic. I also thought this added another layer because it’s a book that most of us have to read for the UChicago core classes. I made the background by cutting out covers of various New Yorker magazines because, again, this magazine symbolizes a community and dialogue of the intellectual elite. Generally, the process of making the banner was super new and different for me. It took a lot of time and patience to cut everything out, but it was really fun and satisfying to make something tactile, which made me think of the desire to craft something that Layli Long Soldier talked about with her quilting project. I will bring the banner to class, but I was super worried that the New Yorker cover pages might rip before or on the way given that they are very thin, so I figured I’d include a picture now. Hopefully my toes and the background of my carpet are not too distracting.

There was a lot to wrapped up in Anne Boyer’s Undying: a critique of capitalism, a feminist inraveling of illness, and a profound reflection on being a human being experiencing pain and death and fear in a body. Wren and Allison have both noted how Boyer critiques the way cancer has been represented as a source of epiphany or, more generally, an instrument for reflection in both media and literature as well as by the loved ones of cancer patients. I was struck by Boyer’s reflections on what it means to represent sickness even as the sufferer. As Nayun noted, Boyer said she would “rather write nothing at all than propagandize for the world as is” (116). Her “fear of turning the pain into a product” reminded me a lot of Agee’s wariness surrounding his own representation of poverty and suffering for an audience who would largely see the piece as entertainment, or as an opportunity to feel informed (134).  I keep coming back to this question or observation because it feels like the central worry in a class on writing for social change. Even Boyer, someone who does not need to worry about telling another’s story from the outside — given that she’s telling her own, that is — tells her story in a language and culture that consumes these stories in perverse and unproductive ways. I think both Boyer and Long Soldier use poetic language as a means of expanding and complicating our notions of narrative. This allows them to break outside of the cultural constraints imposed on writing and storytelling for social change. On 113, Boyer discusses how “what being a writer does to a person is make her a servant of those sensory details” which can be dangerous as “the senses are prone to showing’s lies.” By declaring that “showing is a betrayal of the real, which you can never quite know with your eyes in the first place,” Boyer throws a wrench in our traditional understanding of “good writing” and also of “truth.” To be honest, I’m not completely sure what exactly she means when she discusses the deceptiveness of showing as opposed to telling, but I found this complication to be a good example of the ways in which she expands and complicates the conversation not only about sickness, but about writing and more generally being a person with a body, through the type of language and musing a poet produces best. 

To preserve formatting, I’ve attached my writing assignment and process notes below.

Content Warning: eating disorder

week 8

I found Baldwin’s letter to his nephew to be the most powerful of the pieces we read. I got pretty emotional reading it. It seemed, to me, to express most of the same things his letter to teachers did, but they felt more poignant in the context of writing to his nephew, a young black man. I do think he spells out certain points, like how white people can be “innocent” and “ignorant,” more explicitly and thoroughly in the letter to educators. It definitely helped my reading of the letter to his nephew to read the letter to teachers before. In both letters, he describes the way white people easily forget that black people exist as equally complex human beings. The letter to his nephew exemplified the existence (which feels like a terrible word to use here) of black people. Baldwin talked about the universally human experience of loving someone, and raising them, and seeing their relatives  in them and watching them grow. And throughout the letter, we could feel the love he has for his nephew. This felt like an important emotional reminder that the lives of those written out of history are equally as emotionally deep. Baldwin, unlike past writers who have attempted to open up the stories of those silenced by history, was able to explicitly discuss his experience because it was his own — he did not need to fear misrepresenting himself. Given this, in the letter to his nephew, he did not have to waste time or emotional effort making accomodations for white readers. I, as a white reader, found this really powerful. He noted how “innocents” would think he was exaggerating, but continued knowing that his nephew, having actually experienced the life of a black man, would not need convincing of its conditions. This being said, I found Baldwin’s tone throughout both letters more poignant. At times, it felt like Ruskin’s tone was too formal, making it feel less sincere than Baldwin’s more conversational tone was. I think this conversational sincerity permeated both of Baldwin’s letters, which made them feel more emotionally gripping and powerful to me. 

To my future child, before she learns to drive, 

One of the first things my mom taught me was never to drive behind — or even next to — a truck. Our lessons began after the peak in my teenage resentment and sass; I hadn’t needed to drive until graduating high school, as I’d been in boarding school before. Yet, they didn’t lack the shouting or frustration you’d imagine there to be, when a mother tells her teenager how to drive. With the trucks though, I never questioned my mother or attempted to push the boundaries of the instruction. Even now, when driving, I feel a sense of danger when I spend too long close to a truck. They obstruct my view when in front of me. They could vere sideways into me if I cruise next to them. They could even fall over into me, crushing my hybrid easily. In fact, when I first learned to drive, my parents made me drive our pickup truck. It was much harder to maneuver, much bulkier. But that way, if I collided with a truck, it wouldn’t crush me so easily. 

I don’t think any of us can really be blamed for the anger trucks might conjure up upon encountering them in your morning commute. They’re terrible for the environment — much worse than our fuel-efficient hybrids. They’re a symbol of pernicious capitalism: inconveniencing drivers, hurting the environment, all to ensure our amazon prime packages are delivered in one business day. 

It seems universally accepted — by drivers and local police alike — that when one drives too close to a truck, it’s fine to speed in order to get away from them. No one would blame you for tailgating a car if it was forcing you to drive next to a truck. The car would realize, and it would speed up so you could escape the truck. 

I never find myself looking at the people who drive trucks. Their heads are not on the same plane as those of the other drivers on the roads. More than that, I don’t like imagining what it must be like, to drive a truck for work.

I rarely see my uncle Greg. I once was in his trailer when he came back from a long stint driving truck. Since then, my mom’s insisted we don’t go back there. They can come to us — family, that is — if they want to celebrate holidays. When I saw Greg, I thought he’d died. I screamed. All 300 lbs of him laid collapsed under the trailer’s dining room table, where we’d each entered with our own box of pizza for dinner. Donna, the mother of my cousins, assured me he was fine. He almost always collapsed on the floor of exhaustion before he could reach his bed upon arriving home. She woke him up and he let out a warm, santa-clause esque laugh, grabbed a pizza, and went to his room. 

I tell you this, about my uncle Greg and trucks on the road, because I think the road, in a way, reflects something larger that happens between the rest of us commuters and those who drive trucks for a living. It’s easy, almost innate, to feel anger towards them, to do everything in our power to avoid close contact. We’re taught to from a young age. It’s easy, almost innate, to feel better than them, to resent how they hurt our beautiful, dying world, and to forget how we hurt it, too. It’s easy not to look at their faces as we speed by.

Lawrenceville Teachers: 

I imagine you very rarely think about trucks. Teaching at a boarding school, why would you? But I wonder if you can conjure up memories of your experience driving our there in the world beyond our little home. Maybe you can even remember learning to drive. Maybe you’ve even taught your kids how to drive. For one reason or another, being who you are, I’m sure you know to avoid trucks. It’s unsafe to drive behind them or next to them for too long. They obstruct your view; they spew grey gas clouds in your direction. It is universally accepted that, when we are confronted with a truck on the road, we can speed to get away from them. A certain level of anger and frustration upon experiencing too many gas-guzzling trucks on our morning commute is also universal. It’s natural to wish the trucks weren’t there. What I’m interested in, is how we think of — or rather, don’t think of — the people driving these vehicles. 

Lawrenceville is not somewhere people who have much experience being around truck drivers come to study. This is mostly due to money. But even with a large proportion of our students on full financial aid, those students who identify with the truck drivers of America would not, well, fit in here. We wouldn’t want them, with their loud laughs and limited vocabulary and disinterest in the pros and cons of the socratic seminar versus the harkness discussion. 

As Baldwin says, “it is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person.” Here we embrace this sentiment. I guess I wonder, then, where do the truck drivers and their kin fit into the equation? Is it also their responsibility to change society? Can they, in a different way, see themselves as educated people? Educated in different things, perhaps, but harboring knowledge we don’t have, surely. Is progress a matter of welcoming them into a community like ours, or is it something different? That is, could it be an expansion of the concept of education, a disentanglement of what our responsibility and merit is as the elite. A valuing of acts beyond the mind, and a rethinking — ironic, I know — of how these different educations set one up to contribute to the changing of our society. 

But what if we know they’re wrong. “They,” here, refers to the truck drivers and their kin. They, it seems blatantly obvious, are the people responsible for Trump, right? But Trump is not of the truck-driver and kin. In fact, he went to a co-ed boarding school focussed on intellectual and character development, before heading to Wharton, a place we send at least two handfuls of students each year. I guess I just wonder how this information all fits together, how we, as thinkers, can make sense of it. Beyond this, I wonder what we can and should do? Is it a matter of simply inviting more truck drivers and their kin to participate in the intellectual inquiry that occurs here? I tend to think they wouldn’t leave still being truck drivers and their kin. Something about them would be fundamentally changed. They would be educated. But what does that mean, exactly? If we were to educate everyone in this way, would that be the solution? The thing is — at least for now — the functioning of our society still relies on truck drivers and their kin. 

This lecture is a brain-dump of sorts, the type we’ve been taught to do before organizing ideas into an outline for an essay. I imagine that more minds, thoughtful and nuanced minds like your own, coming together to think on this, could lead to more substantive, well, thoughts. Part of the problem, I think, is that we so rarely bring our minds to truck drivers and their kin. They are, at least to me, depressing. I wonder, though, if you could think to ask your students some of the questions I’ve posed above. 

Process Notes

I’m realizing, upon reading others’ work, that I misunderstood the assignment. I wrote the second letter as, well, a letter rather than a microlecture. But I imagine it could still be given as a sort of speech or talk, as I based it on the type of transition Baldwin made between writing to his nephew and to teachers more generally. The two letters definitely came out quite differently. I realized, after writing the first one, that I hadn’t really explicitly spoken about the actual issue I was tackling. But given that I saw the audience as my —very hypothetical — future child, I wanted mostly to just open up room for her to think about these things, and to learn more about her extended family. I’m not sure whether the “not seeing” truck drivers in any way linked explicitly to systems of education in the first letter, though, although I did purposefully mention my experience in boarding school. Additionally, the first letter was, like one of my other pieces, mostly me just recounting true facts/stories about my family. I didn’t mention my uncle in the second letter. It could be interesting to bring him in if I made the piece longer. I’d say I’m least happy with the tone of my second letter/talk. It feels almost ironic or exaggerated, which I didn’t really intend. I wanted to make a clear tone shift, but the thing is, I was so close with my teachers at Lawrenceville that I don’t think a letter/lecture to them would really require a shift in tone that strayed too much from the tone of the first letter. That being said, I wanted to craft a tone that was more reminiscent of the way a graduated student might, more generally, speak to an educator. 

I was particularly moved by Long Soldier’s “Whereas” poem on page 75. To me, the poem brought up questions about cultural continuation and motherhood. In the first stanza she holds “the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota,” At first, I read “as a mother” instead of “as mother” in the prose; the lack of an “a” suggests stepping into a larger, universally understood role of “mother,” and implies that motherhood might be viewed differently for Lakota people. She asks herself questions: “What did I know about being Lakota…What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces.” The period at the end of her second question stopped me in my tracks, despite there being no line break. After two questions — ones ending in question marks — in a row, phrasing the last question as a statement made it feel more weighty, more permanent. Her daughter would be pieces — it was not a question to Long Soldier. She ends the poem, after mentioning the national apology, which concerns “us, my family,” saying “my hope: my daughter understands wholeness for what it is, not for what it’s not, all of it            the pieces.” The spacing between pieces and the rest of the sentences makes it feel, to me, like a weightier statement, something that holds more space (literally) in the poem. I’m left thinking about pieces and wholeness, unsure exactly how to feel or what to think about what “wholeness” means for native people whose culture has been degraded and dismissed.

Welcome Letter to the UChicago Class of 2020:

https://news.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/Dear_Class_of_2020_Students.pdf

*I utilized different fonts and font sizes in the poem that were lost when I pasted the poem into the text bar, so I’ve attached a PDF with the original letter, my poem, and my process notes below.

writing assignment 6

One of my lingering questions after last week’s reading was how we can go about expressing stories of silenced people who are not dead. What right do we have, as outsiders benefitting from the privilege to travel and learn and write, to represent the experiences of people who don’t get to represent their own experiences? This is one reason I chose to write about the divides between the intellectual cosmopolitan elite and blue-collar/rural americans, rather than about mass incarceration. That is, I have personal experience with the former. To me, it seems problematic to represent experiences of marginalized communities rather than seeking to support those communities in speaking for themselves. Agee expressed many of the problems I see with this type of representation as an outsider. He describes the act of 

      “prying intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, to parade the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism’ (whatever that paradox may mean), of humanity” (7)

In a — presumably purposeful — patronizing tone, Agee delineates two separate groups of people. There is this “appallingly damaged group of human beings” being paraded to “another” separate group of people, one that Agee, and we as scholars are part of. He suggests that this display or documenting or storytelling is always in the name of something — “humanity” or “science” or “journalism” — but insinuates that these things are a guise for a more perverse desire of one group to see another’s difference and suffering. I think Agee thus complicates what “truth” means in these images when they come from his own representation as an outsider meant for the gaze of other outsiders.