the inquiry blog: an obituary

IB, the constant companion, relentless taskmaster, and on-call therapist of ENGL7395, passed away today due to internal complications stemming from starvation for intellectual material, severely depleted in these difficult times of Final Paper drought. IB was approximately 13 weeks old.

He wasn't always easy to live with; his refusal to define his own genre and his inability to commit to convention earned him the reputation of “sneaky bastard” (Daly 1). An unreliable confidant, he had an obnoxious way of sharing your secrets with everyone and anyone who so much as asked to see them. But in his defense, he did so out of the best of intentions. His ability to instigate stimulating conversation was legendary, and he was the very best of all listeners, a patient sounding board through thick and thin. Those who may have grumbled about him in life most certainly miss him in death; may the spirit of inquiry live on in his absence. It is a remarkable legacy indeed.

tonight on the t

"Excuse me, can I trouble you for a pen?"

He had long hair and glasses, and a copy of _Fight Club_ (the book) on his lap.

"Of course," I replied, and reached into my bag.

He reached across the aisle for the pen and turned to the man in the stocking cap next to him.

"What's your number, man?" Long Hair asked. I tried to tune out as Stocking Cap answered--eavesdropping is a habit I'm looking to break. I spent the next few stops focusing instead on the ring of black dirt around each one of Long Hair's fingernails, the cover of the book, and the geometric shapes on each man's parka. The pen was returned to me with a smile and I watched Long Hair hand _Fight Club_ to Stocking Cap, who was getting up to exit the train at Tufts. They shook hands and the train stopped. As the doors opened, Stocking Cap turned back around, looked at me, and said, very softly,

"Excuse me, but you're beautiful."

Astonished, I smiled, and remembered to say Thank You right right as the doors were closing.

A few more stops ticked by in silence as I toyed with my phone. Long Hair had produced another book from one of his many plastic bags.

Then, out of the blue, I heard, "I wanna thank you."

I stared at Long Hair.

"For the use of your pen, you know. I wanna thank you. I just met that guy [stocking cap] tonight, just now, and he's just getting out of a psych ward, you know. I think he needs to read books. No one fuckin reads anymore, you know? That really frustrates me. I wish I had something better than Palahniuk to give 'im. At least Palahniuk beats Grisham, you know? But still. I wish I had something better. But I'll call him in three days. It takes people on average nine hours to read _Fight Club_. So I'll call him in three days."

Not really knowing what to say, I asked, "Will he be ok?"

"Him? Oh yeah, I think so. He seems to be in good spirits."

Silence.

"Do you read?" Long Hair wanted to know.

"...A little?" I ventured, a lame substitute for the yeah-tons-but-not-cool-stuff answer that immediately sprang to mind.

I don't really remember the next few minutes in any reproducible detail, honestly--he told me about his mom, an Orthodox Jewish theologian who introduced him to Sartre and Camus when he was younger, and monologued for a bit on his interest in French existentialism and the Western Occult tradition.

Then, out of nowhere: "I've been thinking a lot about miscommunication across dialects, you know?"

I couldn't believe my ears.

"I'm talking about accurate communication, you know? That doesn't happen very often."

Well aware that my time with him was limited, I mentally raced through the million questions I wanted to ask him about this. I settled on: "Do you think accurate communication is possible?"

He rubbed his forehead. "Mmm...Yeah. I mean, only through the use of different modes, you know? Like music. Or painting. I paint. Mostly I paint portraits. Especially of jazz artists. I feel like I communicate best through painting, you know? Most accurately."

His stop was nearing and he was gathering the plastic bags. I bit my tongue--I wanted him to keep talking. Instead: "Are you on Facebook?"

"No."

Silence.

"Well, do you communicate electronically? I could send you some images. You could see what I mean."

He wasn't asking for a phone number, so what the hell? I jotted down my email quickly and handed it to him.

"Thanks. I'm Soren. It was nice to meet you."

And with an awkward sidelong handshake, he was gone, and I was left thinking about "accurate communication", painting, multimodal expressions of self, Maria, "the artist who doesn't speak English is no artist", Soren's implicit belief in the merits of post-psych-ward exercises in literacy, his valuing of Palahniuk over Grisham, the bequeathing of _Fight Club_, miscommunication across dialects, and, by extension, translingualism. What, according to Soren, does painting do that language can't? In what ways might multi-modalism be useful to translingualism? Is translingualism even about accuracy, though? Or is accuracy one of those words (like authenticity...ha, ha...) that just drive everyone crazy?

Anyways.

Nothing groundbreaking, obviously--just one of those strange T interactions (made all the more weighty by the fact that I was on my way home from our class) that I don't want to forget, so I am logging it here.

is it too late for me?

It occurred to me as I was reading Kells that, yes, we should encourage “Students [to] bring not only their language(s) and discourses but the cultural ecologies of their own experience to their writing” (207)...but have I ever done this myself? When I read these articles, I think about them from the point of view of the teacher wanting to know what to do in her classroom. But I don't know why it's taken me this long to realize that I am the student, right now: in all of the writing that I do for all of the classes that I take, do I ever make a conscious effort to employ MY language, or does everything I write come out sounding like washed-out pseudo- (or, more graciously, apprentice-) academese that fits like ugly old shirts I've kept since high school (cuz they're stretched out in all the right places) and wear with a resigned shrug whenever I don't know what else is appropriate? Would I ever stick my neck out on a final paper, for instance, and write something that sounds like Chloe, rather than something that sounds like Chloe-sounding-as-much-like-everyone-else-as-she-can-get? The obnoxious truth is, probably not. Not even on a paper about linguistic diversity, which is the cruelest of ironies...I would probably write that linguistic diversity paper in the exact same linguistically un-diverse voice I've used for every other paper I've ever written, just like I've spent all semester blogging about trans/multi[lingualism/culturalism] in the same damn clinical mono-everything voice that has come to feel safe and legitimating, somehow.

The even-more-obnoxious truth is, I don't actually know what Chloe (minus academese) sounds like on paper. Kells asks, “Where and how do our students claim citizenship? How do they enact what they know and who they are?” (207), and I'm haunted by that because * I am the student! * and I'm afraid that the way that I enact who I am on paper is a very constructed, inauthentic (that just sent shivers down everyone’s spine, including mine—sorry—) process that is the result of years and years in The Academy.

(Note: I'm not interested in playing the blame game. I'm not making claims that I've been brainwashed by anyone or anything. I take full responsibility for the performative attitude I adopt whenever I try to write like a background-less perfect-English machine. And I'll also note that standardization of academic language is certainly not only the US's problem. I have vivid memories of my third grade teacher in France holding up my notebook in front of the whole class and condescendingly asking everyone, “Qui peut montrer a Chloe comment ecrire un sept?” (Who can show Chloe how we write our sevens?) because I hadn't put the little strike-through bar on the diagonal part. A standardized seven! In third grade! I'd gotten the math answer right, I just hadn't written the number the way everyone else did, and I got called out publicly for it. It was a traumatizing experience for a shy little bookworm whose American education had entirely failed her on the European way of writing numbers (now I'm blaming a little). Obviously, that experience was the tip of the Chloe-meets-standardized-French iceberg...)

Point is: can a girl who, right now, as a student, can't really remember her “own” language ever really help her future students write in theirs? How do I encourage a practice that I myself don't practice?

guanxi

I’m struck by the similarities between the linguistic dynamics of the internet-based guanxi described by Hawisher and Selfe in “Globalization, Guanxi, and Agency” (in which “cross-cultural guanxi represent, we believe, a potent form of accumulating and deploying social capital in an increasingly globalized world” (63) and about which “it is a mistake to think that the global landscape of the Internet necessarily leads to a monologic global culture or language like English” (71)), and Trimbur’s discussion in “Linguistic Memory and the Uneasy Settlement of U.S. English” of the transatlantic networks created by the slave trade (an early – if inherently reprehensible – type of globalization?) in which cross-cultural relationships were also matter of capital (albeit bodily and economic), and “Languages other than English were recognized as important for commerce, diplomacy, and knowledge” (24).

A less convoluted way of verbalizing that might be simply to say that (surprise, surprise) here I am, thinking about linking again. Guanxi is a concept to add to my limited vocabulary of linking. It is a term that, I think, is more focused on the person-to-person aspect of linking than the term “link” itself (to my mind a rather sterile, impersonal signifier – albeit with personal implications – of textual motion through cyberspace) tends to evoke for me. Similarly, the slave ship is a surprising context in which to think about the physical linking of people and places in a linguistically productive way.

So not only does linking affect the written text itself and its processes of meaning-making (a la Queen), it also affects the linguistic contexts in which texts are written and produced and thought about in the first place (a la Hawisher and Selfe); and not only does linking affect the ways that meaning is derived from what we read and where we read it (again, Queen), but it also can impact (always in an act of subversion, I wonder? Not sure…) the power dynamics inherent in language—that is, linking people together results in the re-negotiation of the ways in which language can be used to “justify”, reinforce, and exert one person’s dominance over another.

That is what Trimbur is saying happened, right, when he asserts that
“although English was the lexifier or language of power, the linguistic motive, nonetheless, was not so much to acquire English wholesale as to pidginize it by eliminating features of English that were unusual or difficult for relevant language groups to learn and by interjecting into English ways of forming words and sentences that came from African languages.” (29)

…?

Mostly, this is all background rumination for what *really* interests me: the evolution of pidgin and creole languages, the role of the guanxi in the creation of them, and, broadly, the weird things that happen, power-wise, when the “standard” is messed with on such a broad scale. Like Lu, “I am particularly interested in scholarship that approaches the transrelations of nations, cultures, peoples, and language(s) in terms of transactions that transform, transfuse, translate, transport, transverse, transubstantiate, transvalue, transpose, and transplant established ways of doing things and in terms of multidirectional transactions—not merely top-down but also bottom-up and sideways” (49).

standardization

And I thought that the topic of standardization of English within the US was a loaded rhetorical nightmare: “The team wanted an exam that would be recognized by the international community, but not at the expense of losing the sense of what English would mean to Slovaks entering the global economy” (Prendergast 113). If I understand this correctly, the objective is to create an exam that tests fluency in a respectable (for lack of a better word), internationally-understood, yet culturally situated English tailored to fit Slovakian needs. Standardized-but-customizable. International-but-Slovakian. No matter how I try to rephrase or simplify the tall order laid out here, I can’t seem to bring blurry concepts like “international community” and “what English would mean to Slovaks entering the global economy” into focus—where is this international community, exactly, and is it really speaking a coherent lingua franca with enough consistency to establish itself as a unified authority on the standardization of anything?

As we brought up in class last week, it’s hard to get a sense of what “Slovakian” means from this book (not a critique—just a function of Prendergast’s approach to ethnography); therefore, it’s difficult for me to get a cohesive picture not only of what “Slovaks entering the global community” look like, but also what they need English to do for them. I suspect that I would have these same questions even if Prendergast had undertaken a more holistic, deep-anthropological type of ethnography: at the risk of sounding obnoxiously grad-school-y (forgive me!), is “Slovakian” a viable essentialization? Is there such thing as the quintessence of Slovakianism, and what are the dangers of conceiving of a group of individuals in such a broad way?

Nor is the concept of “English” quite clear. For starters, Prendergast has clearly mapped the bifurcation of American English vs. British English in Slovakian consciousness, showing how each is (de)valued altogether differently depending on the historical moment and individuals’ purposes in learning English in the first place. The team itself is bipartisan on this issue: “When a task created by half the reform team for the purpose of modeling the speaking exam was handed out for everyone’s perusal, it was edited to comply specifically with British English… ‘On the weekend,’ for example, was corrected to ‘at the weekend’” (Prendergast 115). Consensus has not quite been reached on what kind of English is being tested here.

Further, I’m a little bit amazed that “The team did not, for example, consider it critical to assess pronunciation” (114). What?! Is this not a conversation-based language exam? A student spoke too quietly, and all hell broke loose. How is pronunciation not important? Isn’t comprehensibility a goal? I don’t understand this at all.

To recap so far: there is a team of scholars seeking to create a standard for English (which may be American English, or might be British, but either way, pronunciation won’t matter…even though the idea is to garner international respect and facilitate communication…hmm…) so that Slovaks (who are they?) can have their linguistic needs (what are they?) met as they go forth into the international community (which, I suspect, does not exist).

I suppose standardization of anything relies on the kind of blurry language that is large and vague enough to encompass what- and whom-ever needs to be encompassed, regardless of where reform is happening.

PS: Oh yeah, and um…standardization of course makes me think of Professor Gallagher’s Radical Departures. I wonder whether he ever radically departs from (standardized?) class norm to allow students to go to his house on presentation week?

the artist who doesn’t speak english is no artist

I have no idea where this is going to wind up, but here goes.

I found Maria’s starving-artist narrative particularly poignant, for a lot of reasons. The most inane one first: I was struck by Prendergast’s attentive rendering of her, which, it seems to me, rather lovingly seeks to capture as much of Maria’s complexity as possible. For example: “Another evocative phrase…was ‘because I love America’; [Maria] used it several times: to explain, for example, why she had chosen to study English in high school…Each time, however, she signaled sarcasm, by either a forced smile followed by a cascading laugh or mock fervor in her voice and eyes” (Prendergast 63). Maria comes across as an expressive, intuitive, idealistic-if-increasingly-disillusioned cultural commentator.

Secondly, it’s curious to think about English as the lingua franca of art, which is something entirely other than finance or composition or research articles. My first thought when reading Maria’s assertion that “The artist who doesn’t speak English is no artist” was, “Really? DaVinci? Rubens? Cezanne? There are entire generations of artists whose work participates in American cultural consciousness who not only did not speak English, but are also all dead—they aren’t speaking anything at all. And their work still matters.” Isn’t that art’s “thing”? Isn’t art supposed to transcend all this petty business of talking and writing in favor of a more visceral (purer?) mode of communication? But that’s a naïve reaction—art, like music, was embroiled in linguistic politics long before English ever mattered (the vestiges of which are visible in the fact that art majors are tested on their knowledge of Italian terminology to this day). So the question isn’t my initial “does art really have a lingua franca too?”, but rather, “when, how, and why did English usurp (that’s a judgmental word) the Romance languages’ rotating roles as ‘the language to know’ for artists in this day and age?” …and, perhaps, “Has the periphery changed?” (Maria locates the divide between the center and periphery of the art world along linguistic lines—has this always been the case?)

Thirdly, and least-well-thought-out, there’s a whole part about translation on pp. 60-61: “…the act of translation between language and experience…[and] one final act of translation—that between viewer and work” (Prendergast). Postmodernity has made the notion of image-as-text a rather common one. It’s not new to think of “reading” an image in terms of its compositional elements, recognizing it as created, situated, etc., which I think is one kind of translation. But video is even more complex: “Maria translated the audio of the video into English subtitles so the work would be legible to the largest portion of the international audience they aspired to attract…The introduction of English, an idiom with which she was not completely comfortable, created exactly the kind of distance it was the point of her art to collapse” (Prendergast 61). Hmm…

point of curiosity: is this the right maria?

I realize that there are doubtless many Slovakian artists named Maria who spent time in the US (Boston, specifically, wasn't it?) on a grant (Prendergast never mentions whether it was the Fulbright...) in the early 2000s. But maybe this is the right one?

[UPDATE: it is the right one! I have gotten in touch with her. Hooray!]

links

I’m thinking a lot about the inherent meaningfulness of links. Dingo’s theorization of the network model (which draws “linkages between national and international texts and policies” (502)) and Queen’s assertion that “The link acts as the mode of circulation by which…already mediated texts are further transformed as they enter different rhetorical fields” (484), while they are dealing with different kinds of links (Dingo’s comparative/theoretical and Queen’s digital), nevertheless seem to be very much to one another’s point: the very placement of texts in various forms of connection with one another – the creation of links – and their movement through time and digital, literary, or political space is a [transformative/productive/meaningful] activity. It’s like stepping away from the actual stuff of meaning (its content, I guess, if that can be imagined for a second,) and looking instead at its structure or context (“…cultural climate, witnessing, and location, for example” (Dingo 502),) in order to…what? Better understand the content?

That’s not really it. My premise is flawed, because the point is that content and context can’t be separated, and should, in fact, be interrogated simultaneously. Is this true? Where a text comes from, where it goes, what it looks like, and what’s next to it matters just as much (100% as much? 82% as much? 51% as much?) as what it’s saying. But again, it’s not a question of determining how much that surrounding stuff matters so much as it is about recognizing that what a text is saying is always inevitably mediated by where, how, and to whom it is saying it. I think.

Queen shows how the literal “movement” of a text in cyberspace can result in misunderstanding and misappropriation (which, I suppose, is one kind of meaning-making). The internet itself – as a mode that deals in links – bears investigation: “How does Internet technology not simply reflect, but also create representations that a/effect particular relations of power among feminist activists across borders?” (Queen 485). The internet is active: the ways in which texts circulate and overlap and link is itself a creative process.

For Dingo, it’s all somehow bound up in the notion of the transnational: “understanding the interarticulations between U.S. welfare and World Bank gender-mainstreaming policies requires studying transnational rhetorics as a multitude of dynamics” (502). This may be too simplistic an essentialization, but it seems that if Queen is telling us to pay attention to (and beware of) the ways in which the texts we find online have already been and continue to be mediated by the internet, then maybe Dingo is advocating that rhetorically active citizens be conscientious linkers, intentionally looking for interarticulations even between seemingly disparate texts: “As my interrogation of World Bank and U.S. welfare policy shows, transnational situations that may seem radically different and disconnected are actually bound by transnational networks of power, neoliberal logics, and similar rhetorical practices that function to define and contain women’s agency in the global market place” (Dingo 502). These interarticulations will presumably be endless in an age of globalization.

It’s not like English majors aren’t used to putting texts in conversation with one another (which is a kind of linking, I think). But Queen and Dingo seem to be using a much bigger scale, at minimum, and perhaps a different paradigm altogether. How does network theory and linking complicate our pre-existing inclination to put texts in conversation with one another?

Parenthetically, the temptation for me is to think of internet links as kind of organic—disembodied, certainly, and somehow “naturally” (do I mean accidentally?) occurring in this odd, vast, impersonal digital space…  

lovelife billboard campaign (in case other readers of royster were curious)

“kaRRaTu kaimaNNaLavu kallaaTaTu ulakaLavu”

I love the notion of a humility ethos:

“In most local RAs, the writers confess the additional work that has to be done for a fuller treatment of the subject or to understand the implications deriving from this particular paper. This humility in local publications derives from Hindu religious thinking, which cultivates one’s insignificance in relation to the vastness of knowledge. The oft-repeated proverb in local scholarly circles…(What we know is a fistful, what we don’t know is a world full), summarizes the attitude behind this conclusion.” (Canagarajah 139)

It stands in such stark opposition to the grad school imperative of “fake it til you make it,” this awkward period in the intellectual growth of center scholars in which they (we) are required to adopt expert ethoi on topics still very much beyond our grasps. Professor Leslie called it “sprezzatura” when she talked to my incoming class at orientation—it means the art of hiding art, or basically playing it cool so that only you know how little you know. (Ha! Confusing turn of phrase. Sorry.) Most days, I still feel like I’m six years old and wearing mommy’s high heels. But that’s the whole point: I am presumably training for a life in academia, and that entails learning to write with all of the assertive confidence of a center academic, whose thesis is not only defensible, but also significant and worth your while, dammit. The best way to get comfortable in those pretty, big-girl shoes is to put them on and walk until I’m not clumsy anymore.

While I understand the logic of sprezzatura and the role it plays in preparing me for a career in center academic (and publication) systems, I appreciate Canagarajah’s invitation to imagine a different paradigm, one in which even the established scholars in a given field recognize – and own up to – how little they really know, in the grand scheme of things (and I would imagine that along with that comes a certain perspective on the “place” of one’s field in the context of broader human knowledge…maybe?). Humility in any aspect of life strikes me as a discipline that requires more practice than arrogance does; and yet, when reading a research article, I’m certainly the first to look for (and value) a “clear” argument, assertive demonstrations of the author’s grasp of the subject matter, etc.

Canagarajah does point out how the humility ethos can cause problems, particularly in the center’s reception of periphery RAs: “In many papers this can give the impression of diffidence in making claims or of a lack of originality…” (139). As a tutor, I have probably counseled students whose papers exemplified an ethos of humility to be more aggressive, more assertive, more “the expert.” Why do I like reading assertive papers when I dislike (or am uncomfortable) writing them in that voice? Has my ear been trained to value something that another part of me (my sensibility? I don’t even know what that is. It sounds too Austenian…) finds disagreeable? To follow a separate-but-related line of questioning, Hinduism obviously plays a rather indispensable role in Canagarajah’s description of the humility ethos—humility is a spiritually-loaded term in many ways. But does it have to be exclusively that? Could the center find a space for an academic ethos of humility?

this was forwarded to me this week. i was struck by the emphasis on language:

I bought a bird feeder. I hung it on my back porch & lovingly filled it with delicious seeds.

What a beauty of a bird feeder it was.

Within a week we had hundreds of birds
taking advantage of the continuous flow of free and easily accessible food.

But………. then the birds started
building nests in the boards
of the patio above the table
and next to the barbecue. 

Then came the poop. It was
everywhere: on the patio tile,
the chairs, the table ..
Everywhere!

Then some of the birds
turned mean. They would
dive bomb me and try to
peck me even though I had
fed them out of my own good
intentions and limited budget.

Other birds became unruly,
boisterous and loud. They
sat on the feeder and
squawked and screamed at
all hours of the day and night
and demanded that I fill it
when it got low on food.

After a while, I couldn't even
sit on my own back porch
anymore.

So I took down the bird feeder
and in three days the birds were
gone. I cleaned up their mess
and took down the many nests they
had built all over the patio.

Soon, the back yard was like
it used to be ..... Quiet, serene....
and no one demanding their
rights to a free meal.

Now let's see. . . . . . .
Our government gives out
free food, subsidized housing,
free medical care, free education
and allows anyone born here to
to be an automatic citizen.

Then the illegals came by the
millions.  Suddenly our taxes
went up to pay for all those
FREE services. Now we have to
wait 6 hours to be seen by an
Emergency Room doctor.
Our child's second grade class has
fallen behind other schools because
over half the class doesn't speak
English.

Corn Flakes now come in a
bilingual box. I have to press
‘one’ to hear my bank talk to me
in English, and people waving flags
other than 'Old Glory' are
squawking and screaming
in the streets, demanding more
rights and more freebies.

Just my opinion, but maybe
it's time for the government
to take down the bird feeder. 

If you agree, pass it on; if not,
Just continue cleaning up the poop. 

canagarajah on publication and the third world

Canagarajah’s initial case was straightforward, if large: “though many in composition research had given voice to the discursive differences in the writing of periphery/bilingual scholars, few had considered the nondiscursive constraints” (21). Put simply, language is only one of many (dare I say one of the lesser?) obstacles facing scholars on the periphery. (I say lesser because, in Canagarajah’s case for instance, it certainly wasn’t his fluent grasp of academic English that interfered with his ability to physically get to the conference he wanted to attend. All the languages in the world will get a scholar nowhere if the government says “no;” all the great ideas in the world will get a scholar nowhere if there is technology with which to record them.) Sri Lankan scholars lack the physical materials necessary to stay current with the field—there is little to no access to scholarly journals in most places; traveling to conferences is complicated by the interference of governmental bureaucracy; the available technology associated with writing and the production of texts is outdated; and, finally, access to publication is limited, if not entirely nonexistent.

This issue of publication appears to have grown in importance to Canagarajah since his initial, broad argument about nondiscursive constraints. He specifically states that “Third World scholars experience exclusion from academic publishing and communication; therefore the knowledge of Third World communities is marginalized or appropriated by the West…” (6). He seems to have narrowed in on publication specifically, perhaps because it is the most complex of the issues on the list of nondiscursive barriers to Third World scholarship: not only is publication impaired by the lack of physical materials available to Third World scholars, but publishing conventions also seem (are?) specifically designed to keep Third World voices out. “Galtung insightfully mentions that whereas the colonialism of the seventeenth century was effected through military means, in later periods imperialist domination has been achieved through the more subtle imposition of values and ideologies” (39)—publication is implicated in this. Further, not only is publication difficult for Third World scholars, but once a periphery scholar’s voice appears in a center publication, the authenticity of his peripheral voice (please take that as it’s intended) becomes questionable: “It is because I moved to the center that I am able to publish about the scholarly deprivation and exclusion I suffered while teaching at UJ, but in the process of moving my status has changed, calling into question my ability to represent my periphery colleagues” (11).

So….yeah. Publication. Center/periphery. Power and disempowerment. These are some big thought bubbles in my head that have yet to intersect. In what ways would periphery voices be threatening to center publications' interests? What is the center's role in enabling periphery publication? We make a big deal about language barriers, but why isn't more attention paid to the material needs of disadvantaged scholars? Does it make us uncomfortable to think about this? Why?

Canagarajah, A. Suresh. A Geopolitics of Academic Writing. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, PA, 2002. 

Reflections on Paul Kei Matsuda’s lecture: Tutoring Multilingual Writers

I was 20 years old and a senior undergraduate English major when I started tutoring at Southeast Community College’s writing center. To say that I was wet behind the ears is an understatement: I was not even remotely prepared for what turned out to be a very steady flow of ESL students, many of them refugees, coming to this small writing center in Lincoln, NE with papers full of war, persecution, poverty, discrimination, and grammatical errors. The most urgent (and embarrassingly basic) question I found myself having to confront was, “What matters, here?” The communication of certain truths about the world, the working-through of personal histories, and the recording of memory obviously trumped proper form and usage on my tutoring agenda, but I wasn’t quite sure how to enact this philosophy. I fumbled through that first year as a tutor, doing my best to negotiate the fine line between encouraging students to uninhibitedly develop content while simultaneously trying to explain linguistic anomalies and demystify the academic parameters in which they were working.

I was often discouraged by how exhausted I found myself after four- or five-hour shifts, disheartened by the confusion I would see on students’ faces, and disgusted by whatever failures in either myself or the academic system allowed students to stay confused. It seemed odd to have to spend twenty minutes explaining how (and why!) to cite sources in MLA style, for instance – knowing that that particular requirement was worth a ridiculous percentage of the overall grade, and was therefore critical to the student’s success in the class – while an essay about death sat unattended. What was my function, really? Was I hired to help students get A’s in their classes (meaning, in practical terms, that I would spend my days explaining MLA and APA formats, pointing out verb tense errors, and making sure that students were writing the kind of essay the teacher wanted)? Was I supposed to teach them how to write (and if so, what purpose did the class serve)? Was I an essay mechanic, coldly diagnosing and fixing the problems that interfered with comprehension in order of grievousness? Or was I allowed to build relationships with the “regulars,” and was tutoring as much about building trust as it was about writing? I didn’t know. “Peer tutor” was a rather undefined relational role, its complexity probably compounded by the fact that I was white, female, and half the age of most of these students.

That’s a lot of rambling, but the point is that Dr. Matsuda’s presentation on Thursday night was therapeutic. Brief rundown of memorable points: he reinforced my vague notion of a hierarchy of importance, specifying that communication is the key, a sentiment echoed by last week’s readings—language is about saying something, and tutors are there to help students do just that. Grammatical mistakes do require attention, but a tutor should feel free to give students space to self-correct because odds are good that students only need prompting to know when and where to revise. Some of the most linguistically perplexing aspects of any writer’s second language (i.e., idioms, prepositions,) require repetition; in fact, everything about learning to write in another language takes time (simple, yes, but comforting).  Finally, the claim that I found to be most intriguing went something like this: “Being a member of a community is a goal and being a student if about socialization as well” (paraphrase.) Tutors should therefore help with socialization.

What do we make of this? What do we do with it?

(trans + multi) lingualism

It turns out that multilingualism has implications for readers too. Bruce Horner calls it translingualism: beyond simply describing a writer or speaker’s state of affairs (i.e., multilingualism means that Chloe speaks more than one language and therefore writes like someone who speaks more than one language, as evidenced by certain specific patterns, errors, etc. in the form and content of her work,) translingualism is an “approach [that] sees difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening” (Horner 303). Translingualism is about Chloe reading her student's work with an eye to difference as a productive meaning maker. It is the opposite of our hemisphere’s heritage of linguistic violence, described by Baca: “When European combatants invaded they were equipped with an enduring Aristotelian syndrome, the rhetorical art of reinventing the cultural Other as a periphery that is declared as such from the colonizing center” (230).

I suppose it is essentially what the minds behind the CCCC’s Students’ Rights to Their Own Language policy had envisioned when they “affirm[ed] strongly that teachers must have the experience and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language” (Explanation of Adoption) in 1974. There’s a certain ethically-driven burden of responsibility bound up in all of this, a sense that fluent readers and writers of Standard Written English, Edited American English, educated English, and all manner of Academese are not off the hook. They (we!) are, in fact, very much on the hook: while my level of comfort with SWE (and my naïve enjoyment of all of its attendant social privileges – subtle or blatant –) automatically places me in a position of relative rhetorical power, my linguistic education, if I am to be truly translingual and respectful of my future students’ right to their own languages, is far from complete. The SRTOL statement above specifies the need for training and experience. Clearly, the protection and nurturing of students’ rights to their own language requires work on the teacher’s end.

I’m curious about this word “experience.” I can’t imagine that this article is claiming that new or inexperienced (in the just-graduated sense, perhaps) teachers cannot encourage students in the right to their language. Is this talking about experience in the worldly sense? I am wary of prescribing “street cred” here, though—I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with the claim that only native (or very comfortable) speakers of a certain dialect are qualified to teach students with backgrounds in the same dialect. SRTOL certainly does not make that claim; quite the contrary, in fact. Powell makes clear the extent to which translingualism is an against-the-grain endeavor: “It is [the] sublimation of ethnicity [on which the US’s scholarly legitimation of narrative is predicated] that leads to a kind of ‘we’re all the same inside’ mentality that ultimately shuts down and erases difference” (5). Given that the sublimation of ethnicity and the erasure of difference is the systemic state of things, translingualism requires effort. And bravery, perhaps? Or at least innovation. Experience lies therein, I think. Experience is a question of doing.

One slightly off-topic question that haunted me while reading: all of this talk of negotiating borders between dialects and learning other dialects for the sake of transligualism made me wonder, Ok, but aren’t there certain dialects that white, Midwestern girls will never be allowed to speak? How do I know what they are? Who decides that? Inherent in the phrase “a student’s right to her own language” is a fine line between wanting all people to be comfortable with all dialects for the purpose of enabling communication and comprehension without the imposition of an unfair, arbitrary standard, while simultaneously respecting the right of certain people/groups to claim absolute agency over a dialect (and, most often, its lexicon). What do we make of this?

Baca, Damian. “Rethinking Composition, Five Hundred Years Later.” JAC 29.1-2 (2009): 229-242. Print.

Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, & John Trimbur. “Language Difference in  Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach.” College English 73.3 (2011): 303-320. Print.

Powell, Malea. “Blood and Scholarship: One Mixed-Blood’s Story.” Race, Rhetoric, & Composition.  Ed. Keith Gilyard. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999.