“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.