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).