Tyrone Williams, “Mea Culpa: Pan-Africanism…” continued

So it appeared to me that this course was going along rather well until we got to the Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde, well known for her feminist activism in New York City starting in the 1960s until her untimely death in 1992. As I read several of Lorde’s poems, I noticed that the women in my classroom were silent, unusual for a group that had previously been very talkative and seemingly engaged, willing to discuss not only the meaning of poems by Brooks, Walker, Clifton and others, but also willing to discuss the social contexts and cultural norms informing their works. I asked them what was wrong. Reluctantly, they began to speak up about their discomfort with Lorde’s poems: is she really talking about making love with another woman, they asked. Yes, I responded, but what I really wanted to talk about was Lorde’s use of phrasing and metaphor, about the conflict embedded in the title phrase of her book Sister Outsider, and so on. These women students weren’t having any of it. Several expressed that they thought Lorde was “disgusting” and “immoral” as a person. The importance of the writing itself was eclipsed by Lorde’s sexuality and lesbian identity. 

I didn’t mind the students’ moral judgments. I simply wanted to place other considerations—aesthetic, social and political—alongside, not in front of, their moral imperatives. For example, in our discussion of Lorde’s poem “Woman,” I tried to emphasize the importance of Lorde’s agricultural images (e.g., “where I plant crops/in your body”) in relationship to her desire for sanctuary (“to build my house like a haven”). Lorde’s desire for an elsewhere, I suggested, could be a response to both racism and homophobia. At the same time, I emphasized Lorde’s commitment not only to racial solidarity as seen in a poem like “Harriet” but also her commitment to political radicalism as evident in a poem like “For Assata [Shakur].” 

Mea culpa: I’d forgotten. When I moved to Cincinnati in the early 1980s, I had been surprised by the conservatism of most Black Cincinnati residents. Though only 250 miles from my hometown of Detroit, I felt then, and still feel almost forty years later, that Cincinnati was far more culturally “distant” from my hometown than, say, Chicago or Cleveland, each only five hours away by car. The demographic behavior seems to be really that of a typical Southern US town. Culturally, I found it was not the sophisticated, cosmopolitan city that its commercial developers and corporations like Proctor & Gamble, or General Electric, or Kroger have portrayed it to be—the Queen City of the Midwest. Provincial beliefs about, for example, gender and sexuality, seem to reign among many different classes of people, including the Black community. I have been perceived—with my more open social and political views—as a cultural snob. For a long time, I have been surprised that my social, cultural and political views generally are not mirrored in the Black people I meet. Of course, it only took a little reflection to realize that my Detroit was not the actual city of Detroit. It was but a small neighborhood north of the Detroit downtown business district, the Cass Corridor—site of Wayne State University as well as prostitution, drugs, and radical politics in the 1960s and 1970s. In short, the Cass Corridor I grew up in was to the city of Detroit what southeastern Michigan has been to the rest of the state, a sliver of liberal, and sometimes radical, cultural and political agitation in an otherwise deeply conservative upper-Midwest American region. 

This is all to say that it would be difficult to dispute black conservative thinkers like William Wilson and Stanley Crouch, who have argued that while Black people in general are social liberals they have been, in all other aspects, fundamentally conservative. No one has captured this apparent divide in the “souls” of Black folk better than W.E.B. DuBois and Toni Morrison. It was DuBois who observed that the newly emancipated Africans, no longer African but also not yet American, are haunted by “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring souls in dark body…” Morrison has observed this split in the leading progenitors and defenders of that secular religion, Black Cultural Nationalism, to say nothing of the cult of personality that tainted, as examples, the Civil Rights Movement, the Nation of Islam, and the Oakland branch of the Black Panthers. The reduction of these movements to, respectively, Martin Luther King, Jr., Elijah Mohammed, Malcolm X, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton tended to obscure the work of ordinary citizens on the ground and reinforce the “Great Man” concept of history. As subsequent biographies about, and autobiographies from, Coretta Scott, Betty Shabazz and Elaine Brown have demonstrated, history is also driven by women, children and “ordinary” men.

I learned not to presume that the dream of ‘60s and ‘70s Pan-Africanism, its ashes still smothering in sectors of the Cass Corridor, could be found on a university campus. For that reason, I continued to emphasize in my literature courses what I thought of as the potential collectivity of racial and gender differences, introducing my students to the multiple poetics in the works of writers like Bukowski, Dumas, Acker, Coover, Barthelme, Phillips, Abe, Borges, and Oyeyemi. When a parent called my chair to complain because she’d seen a copy of Pussy and the Pirates in her daughter’s bookbag, my chair simply notified me of the complaint—and that was that. Significantly, the student—who I didn’t know since names were not divulged in student complaint procedures—came up to me after class one day, embarrassed that her mother had complained about the book I had assigned her class. As the student readily admitted, she herself did not quite understand Acker. But she sensed that she was in territories—linguistic, cultural, social—that she had never before been. This experience was, as she put it to me, “interesting.” 

But that event occurred in the mid-1990s.

In February 2021, Xavier University’s “Ethics, Religion & Society” lecture series featured a former academic speaking about how to have “difficult conversations” in the classroom. The executive director of the conservative Heterodox Academy, she spoke to a smattering of students and faculty about the importance of supporting different viewpoints on college campuses and the history of freedom of speech in US history. One of the faculty members in the audience noted that while the organization’s promotion of “viewpoint diversity” was commendable, not a single person of color was among the Xavier panelists responding to the talk—and that this fact was indicative of larger problems around “viewpoint diversity” in the way it tends to neutralize other signposts of diversity. Here then was the reverse of my experience in the Weekend College classroom, in which racial diversity actually had arrested viewpoint diversity. That the lack of racial and ethnic diversity on the Xavier panel went largely unremarked by the Heterodox Academy speaker was hardly surprising, since many members of the Xavier “family” share similar values to that conservative institution. Both institutions orient themselves around diverse approaches to “truth-seeking,” which supervenes each organization’s commitment to their mutual second-tier concerns: racial diversity, empathy, respect, and so forth. Of course, as one of the Heterodox Academy’s board members points out on the organization’s website, it came into existence in order to respond to what has become, in academia, “the accepted narrative.” I assume this phrase refers to a belief often expressed in major US newspapers, that American universities are dominated by “liberal” thought and values. Anecdotal stories like that of the conservative professor hounded out of the classroom for offering his or her unorthodox takes on evolution, poverty, or black cultural values, along with so-called statistical evidence that purports to show preferences for racial and ethnic minorities in admission processes, are the twin towers of our reputedly mishappened higher-education systems. 

Complaints like these are nothing new. Any decent history of US higher education will remind us that colleges and universities arose amid social antagonisms and are themselves the sites where many of these hostilities—class, racial, ethnic, and gender conflicts being only the most obvious modes of antagonisms—play out. Thus, the various crises that roil higher education are inextricable from those erupting throughout the wider society. In this context, it can be tempting to treat the university as a haven, an ivory tower. This cliché accounts for why the concept of “poetics,” however understood, can never free itself from a humanism that relegates practicality to matters outside the university (e.g., labor) while preserving for itself an interiority understood as prior to, and thus the ground for, moral and ethical “development.” Within the structures of higher education and, more narrowly, within the arts, the aesthetic serves to engender “appreciation” that, per Emerson and Arnold, sanitizes the pursuit of what we call “making a living.” As I have noted elsewhere, the Language Writers were only one of several movements in the twentieth century attempting to sever poetics from its humanist origins. For the Language Writers, poetics had become calcified, routinized, within the confines of the creative-writing workshop. Although the New Critics were responsible for institutionalizing creative writing within academia, they never assumed the university was the only site for writing poetry and fiction. They imagined creative-writing programs would be both parallel to and imbricated with the college and university. However, having ousted their Marxist, feminist and other “social-science” rivals from creative-writing programs, they did not anticipate the development of “theory” as a response to their valorization of the aesthetic. In the context of creative writing, theory is a synonym for poetics. Thus, poetry as part of a humanist mission of appreciation within the university is in conflict with poetics as a critical theory and praxis outside the university. Under the sign of financial austerity, the monetary cuts being instituted at American colleges and universities over the last twelve-plus years are meant to jettison the most general sense of poetics—critical thinking—in order to streamline higher education into school-to-labor pipelines.

Yet the persistence of this general poetics, critical thinking, in higher education in part also accounts for the hyper-medicalization and commodification of students attending American colleges and universities. For example, whether diagnostic improvements have uncovered the same percentage of psychological problems among students, or whether there are simply more psychologically damaged students entering colleges and universities, remains an open question. Certainly, catastrophic climate changes, the rise of digital media (which is far more environmentally and physiologically damaging than analog media), and increasing violence across the country has emboldened the arguments of those who insist that there are numerically more students entering the educational system—starting at kindergarten and beyond—with psychological traumas, affecting students’ abilities to acquire knowledge however it is, as we say today, “delivered.” That last word—delivered—points to the other side of the relationship between higher education and its “customers.” If US universities are increasingly driven by product-oriented metrics, students and parents can hardly be criticized for treating education exactly as prescribed by outcome-oriented values. Such values emanate from middle- and high-school counselors, as well as marketing and public-relations university administrative staffs. In this environment, private universities, at least, act as if they cannot afford to lose students for any reason. The desire to retain students at all costs—adding later drop dates for classes by registrars, more grants and scholarships by financial aid, and greater emphasis on eye-candy appeal in marketing brochures—means that students who enter higher-learning institutions with psychological traumas must not be subject to what are now called “triggering content.” Such “triggers” might result in higher attrition rates. Since the faculty member generally has no idea what kind of trauma any specific student may be burdened with (not all students are willing to divulge their psychological ailments to their teachers), it is up to the professor to tread gingerly, especially if he or she has placed on a syllabus materials that may be considered “challenging.” In addition to its traditional, positive, academic sense of learning what one has not known before, challenging has acquired a new negative denotation, referring to sexual, racial or political content that makes a student uncomfortable or, worse, “triggers” a trauma event. Now it goes without saying that the literary material any faculty member may be including in a list of readings need not correspond to a specific trauma in a simple one-to-one relationship. Inasmuch as a text, say, in a literature course, may be culturally, socially and/or politically challenging, the “trigger effect” would seem a function of textuality in general. In other words, the catalyst for a student’s re-experiencing of a traumatic event may be less an effect of a specific work of art than an effect of the textuality, the semiotics, of a class among classes, overseen by an authority figure among authority figures. Since challenging texts may also “trigger” what we might regard as “good” traumas—the shock of having to revise one’s world view, one’s political beliefs, one’s cultural values—it would appear that the authority of any author or teacher can never be questioned in advance of the moment of encounter between a text and a student. Even those so-called “trigger warnings” now required on many US university syllabi may inadvertently trigger (in the “bad” sense) the very trauma it was meant to arrest.

If learning only begins at the intersection of epistemological ruptures, there is no learning, understood as anti-humanism, without risk, without, perhaps, trauma. Of course, this is not to claim that all forms of trauma are the same. What is at stake here is how to value, how to assess, the trauma. There is no question that sexual and gender trauma are “bad” insofar as they involve violations of what we regard as one’s private possession, the body and its organs. But since all traumas occur in the body, is it possible that change in a belief system (political, religious, for example), a violation of the brain, can be as traumatic as a violation of the sexual organs? If we say no, that nothing is more personal than one’s sexual integrity, are we then re-inscribing the old body/mind dualism?  

Perhaps the ruminations above are moot since learning, in the sense of acquiring new knowledges about, for example, the literary and literature, is hardly the point today. However, the decline of interest in the literary and literature as objects of knowledge may not necessarily be a negative phenomenon, except, perhaps, for those who have dedicated decades to teaching and writing the literary and literature.

*

In the Fall 2018 semester, I taught a course entitled “Major Black Writers,” one of two global literature courses in our department’s catalog. Like many English departments facing declining enrollments in the major, mine had opened our upper-level courses several years prior to all interested students, not just those majoring in English. Among the thirteen students initially enrolled in this course—eleven females and two males—only two were English majors. Perhaps because the class focused on all Black women novelists, both men dropped out before midterms, leaving an all-women class. 

There were difficulties from the start. We began with Morrison’s Song of Solomon, a novel so imbricated with the cleavage between Northern and Southern Black history in the early twentieth century that it should, by all rights, be taught in history departments. The white students in the course knew Black history better than the Black students; but the Black students knew Black colloquial expressions and cultural mores better than the white students. Nonetheless, we made it through most of the semester fairly well until we arrived at our next-to-last novel, The Stone Virgins. Written by the late Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, The Stone Virgins is a terse portrait and analysis of the civil wars that roiled Zimbabwe from the late 1950s to the mid-‘80s. Its focus is on two sisters, both of whom are raped by a young fighter. One sister is decapitated in front of the other. The latter survives only because other people in her village arrive at her house in the nick of time to save her life.

As any American-literature academic knows, many syllabi today are required to have those statements warning students of any potential “triggering” content in the listed books. My syllabus did not contain this “trigger warning.”  However, I did provide students with an informal verbal warning orally regarding the rape scene in Vera’s novel. Three students—two white women and one Black woman—informed me that they would not read this graphic rape-murder scene or join in any discussions. I was happy to summarize that scene for the class, but the discussion of that scene (which four of the women in this small class had not read) led to more general comments about the Black novelists we had read thus far. The Black women in the class were critical of the aura of “hopelessness,” as they put it, in the novels covered so far; they wondered why these women novelists could not write more “positive” material. They did not deny the historical realities underpinning the fiction; they believed that it was appropriate to have the material available, and that the issues raised by these texts was important to discuss. Yet what they wanted, they said, was a “resolution.” They wanted problems and dilemmas portrayed in these novels by writers like Vera and Morrison “solved.” Or, failing that, they wanted the direction toward resolution paved out. The students, in other words, were willing to accept the diagnosis, so long as there was a clear remedy spelled out within these works of fiction.

This is not the first time I’d heard such complaints from students. When I pointed out to my women students that these Black women writers were trying to underline the depths and complexities facing Black people in the last century, to say nothing of the challenges Black women faced around the world, the students were largely unsympathetic. Only after the semester was over did it occur to me that what was missing in that class was a sense of, well, sisterhood. I don’t mean a sense of racial connection among the students. I mean a sense of common interests in relation to the travails of women across the globe. With the exception of one Black woman, an Africana Studies minor, none of the other students expressed a sense of comradeship, never mind sympathy, for the various women characters we encountered throughout the course. When we concluded the semester with Helen Oyeyemi’s admittedly difficult magical realism tale, Icarus Girl, the explicit cultural conflicts—the protagonist is a troubled, racially mixed nine-year-old girl who is fraught with conflict—between her mother’s Nigerian and her father’s English homelands, between her English classmates and the Nigerian “spirit” who becomes her best-then-worst friend, and between the world of children and the world of adults. Such a conflicted fictional life seemed to make little impression on the students. Instead, they sympathized with the psychiatrist hired by the girl’s parents. The Oyeyemi protagonist just needed therapy, they suggested.

Mea culpa: I’d forgotten that American individualism and common sense are currently so pervasive that they now override aesthetic, cultural, and social markers, or gender and racial traumas. Unlike many of my students from the 1990s, or even the early post-millennium, these students displayed little interest or curiosity not only about history but also about people who “resembled” them—according to racial, ethnic or gender identities—even as several shied away from some of the most graphic scenes in the texts we read because of some of those very markers of their differences. 

One student had missed classes in this course due to her involvement in a disciplinary trial, I later discovered, having been the victim of sexual assault. The student volunteered this general information of her own accord as we discussed the make-up work she had to complete for a course grade. She went on to establish a Xavier branch of restorative justice, an alternative model of punishment sweeping college campuses. Instead of students found guilty of sexual assault being expelled from campuses, they are offered an opportunity to make reparative gestures toward their victims: admitting guilt, making restitution (symbolic or not), and generally talking through the events that led to the complaint.

While I felt that my own personal hopes that some semblance of the old ideals of comradeship might still be flickering in the sociocultural zeitgeist, that the old, admittedly flawed, dream of Pan Africanism, or Lorde’s multiple senses of sisterhood, however marginal, might be still be relevant, it may be that these new models of conflict-resolution offer a new vision. Inasmuch as restorative-justice models are now being used in some criminal law proceedings, these new ways of restoring individuals to communities they have wronged might offer new strategies for conflict resolution within societies roiled by ethnic and racial conflict, as well as between countries struggling over territorial resources (like water), belief systems (religious and political), and age-old ethnocentric antagonisms.