I can probably explain my enthusiasm for this English
course, or, in this case, rhetoric and cultural studies, but I’ll save that for
some other time. Rhetoric and cultural studies, the inside and outside of
discourse (thanks, Don), and, as it’s turning out, a course in cross-cultural
personalities. I’m speaking of Penelope, who in that beautifully crafted
elegant essay, taught me for the first time in my life, what strife you live
with in bridging two cultures, how difficult it is to have to deal with, among
other things, nasty, unenlightened criticism from both sides. And yet, how beautifully
you represent the-already-here–and-in-your-face future – the truly bi-cultural individual,.
It’s the future, however, as shaped by transnational
corporations, little respectful of borders of any kind, they transgress them as
standard operating procedure; they displaces whole peoples, if need be, it
turns impoverished campesinos, driven off their land by, say, NAFTA, and turns
them into subminimum wage slaves of US capital, or saves them as a reserve army
of the unemployed, to be used as necessary. For this reason, without the
overthrow of the reign of capital, it’s the future of humanity in the matrix,
forced to adjust to what postmodernists call hybridity, nomadism, border
crossings, multi-culturalism, all useful concepts, as I will argue, but then
there exists as well the threat of amalgamation, the loss of all cultural
identity, under the grinding effects of a ruthless economy, the postmodern
self, the schizoid self, the actor self as played by Morgan Freeman, playing
himself, the playful ludic self. This is the subject position which cyber
capitalism wishes you to adopt, but don’t believe it! Still, it will have to be
the subject of another blog, my critique of the ludic, postmodern subject.
As far as the modern or traditional unitary self goes, this
is the way most of us think of ourselves as having a more or less stable
identity, grounded in Cartesian logic and our own “experience” of ourselves in
all our plenitude and presence in the “obviousness” and “common-sense” of it,
as free agents, acting in reality, responsible for ourselves, grounding our
identities in elaborate narratives of where we come from, and its traditions, where
Patriarchy’s wisdom is respected: “My father always told me, when in doubt,
empty the clip!” [sorry, Michelle]. If I heard her right, Michelle called upon
her cultural values to help her come to terms with the possibility of her death
in Afghanistan!
In Vietnam, however, one spoke of going into “Indian Country,”
inhabited by “gooks” and “slopes,” [“Haggis” today] and free-fire zones where
you were ordered to kill everything. The use of napalm, Agent Orange, B52s
dropping 500 lb bombs, endless search and destroy missions, and for what? To stop
communism, I guess. Far from being a noble cause, far from being a tragic
mistake, Vietnam was a war crime against an innocent people. Many soldiers, to
their credit, rebelled, and a major reason for the precipitous withdrawal of
American forces at the end, was just that. They were fast losing control of
their military.
And Maria. Born to Cuban refugees, raised for the first 17
years of her life in Cuban culture and language, from which experience she
still bears the trace of an accent. I thought her first from some eastern
European country like Hungary or Poland, but, I misspoke, and said, “middle
eastern country.” Well, it turns out, she married an Egyptian and moved to
Egypt and had a child, now a full-grown professional of one kind or another.
Sorry, Maria, I forgot what you said she did. So, we’ve got another
border-crosser extraordinaire,
spanning three cultures and just getting started.
The only bordercrossing I’ve done is study foreign
languages, and even there, it’s all academic. I can speak, read, and write in 3
languages, but I can’t understand any of them very well, when it’s spoken and
especially if it’s spoken to me (I get scared and shut down). I did one
involuntary cross-cultural stint in Saudi Arabia, but I made the mistake of
thinking it would be cool, early on, to get some hash to while away the time,
as I used to do back at the University of Arkansas in graduate school (French
and English poetry). So I bought the hash, cost me 250, 1979-dollars, golden
Lebanese brick of harsh the size of a match box. Now it so happened that the
guy in the next room, not really a “roommate” – we never communicated, no mutual
language, aside from assalmualaykem! Wa alaykemassalam! – was hosting a visit
from his father, a Bedouin looking type, from Bahrain, Sunnis, to be sure –
anyway I was in my room, smoking up some hash, and then I left the apartment
and went down to the street. I sort of got swept along by a crowd heading for
the Friday Mosque, so I followed. There, in the parking lot, for no apparent
reason, a throng of Saudi males had formed the perimeter of a large, rough-drawn
circle. In the middle were your typical Saudi military, armed with snub-nosed
machine guns, teenagers really. I joined the circle and all of a sudden the “cops,”
as they were, ordered those in the front to sit down, thus fixing the shape of
the circle. A van drove up, and out came guards with two prisoners, arms bound
behind their backs, their heads bare, and I think there was a red scarf around
their necks or that could be a memory of when the sword blade cut off their heads, which went rolling on the
ground. I held an after image of a splash of red. The prisoners had first been
forced to their knees and forced to incline their heads toward the saber, wielded,
no doubt, by one of the official thugs in the service of the royal family, the
House of Saud.
Bad enough that I chose to see that, while stoned, even
worse was the experience of getting back to my room and not being able to
locate my stash. I searched frantically, and, while fumbling around my
belongings, I began to realize that my neighbor and his father had come into my
room, discovered the hash and for some as yet unknown reason, had removed it. I
was on the verge of preparing myself to go into their room and confront them,
ask them what they wanted … and all the time my fear was a rising tsunami, till
I was riding a veritable flying surfboard of terrorized paranoia… But then I
found it. I sold it the next day for 50 dollars.
I felt so afraid and alone, one night, that I vomited in a
can used for an ashtray at one of those open-air cafes, called Gahewah where
you order Shishaw wa Shahi. After I had been there for a while in the ‘Kingdom,”
as they say, I got more used to it ……. nah, never really … So I admire
successful border crossers, for wont of a better word. They have a lot to teach
us, perhaps the very most to teach
us, about how we teach our students, especially those from different cultures,
because these are going to be the students and teachers of the future of
English, the profession. It ought to be their stories and experiences and
knowledge at the center of the curriculum of how to teach writing.
The following paragraph by Raul E. Ybarra (Learning to Write as a Hostile Act for
Latino Students. Peter Lang, 2004: 17) has caught my attention:
I found that cultural and
communication differences do play a part in how Latino students respond and
react to being taught academic writing. Cultural differences contribute to the
different and/or negative impressions Latino students have about writing and
other English courses. As Farr (1986) states, “Aspects of one’s culture are
part of the tacit knowledge that members of a particular group unconsciously
share simply by virtue of being members” (Farr, Marcia, and Harvey Daniels. Language Diversity and Writing Instruction.
New York. ERIC Clearing House on Urban Education Institute for Urban and
Minority Education, 1986: 200). When the culture or ethnic backgrounds of the
culture differ, “meetings can be plagued by misunderstandings, mutual
misrepresentations of events and misevaluations” (Gumperz, Jenny Cook, and John
Jay Gumperz. “Introduction: Language and the Communication of Social Identity.”
In John Gumperz, Ed. Language and Social
Identity. Cambridge Univ Press, 1982: 1-21).
