You Gotta Be Ready for Some Serious Truth to Be Spoken
2002; Volume: 29; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-641X
Autores Tópico(s)Art Education and Development
ResumoWHEN YOU ASK STUDENTS TO BREAK SILENCE, TO BEAR WITNESS, TO CONNECT the meaning of their own personal lives within the larger societal frame, you gotta be ready for the truths that fly out, crawl out, peep out, and scream out from underneath the thick walls of practiced silence. You gotta be ready for stories of border crossings, coyotes and cops, night beatings, wife beatings, baby beatings, date rapes, gang rapes, daddy rapes, gunshots and chemo, pesticides, HIV, AZT, protease inhibitors, and the pink-cheeked 19-year-old who says, Hey, next Tuesday I'll have five years clean and sober; can we have a cake in class? You gotta be ready for stories that start out, Ese pinche Columbus didn't have no stinkin' green card. You gotta be ready for the straight A student who has to leave school because her INS paperwork hasn't come through yet, the social security number she gave at registration was the first nine numbers that came to her mind, and she cannot get financial aid because she is illegal. To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means you gotta be ready for all the stories, whether you want to hear them or not. When you ask students to speak the truths of their lives, you gotta be ready for the Stanford-bound future teacher of America who writes about being kicked out of the Navy for being too racist. You gotta be ready for the sweet-faced, curly-haired lover of Jesus who writes stories of his days as a violent skinhead, beating up Blacks, Jews, and queers. You gotta be ready for the stories the young man cannot yet share in class, scribbles slid under your office door, 4:30 A.M. e-mails, telling of his father's rage, the belt, the whiskey, the steel pipe slammed down hard on the body of the thin nine-year-old boy. father's last words, before he left the child cowering in the corner, his back broken in two places: Be a man, you pussy. I better not see you cry. To teach Creative Writing and Social Action, you gotta be ready for these stories to share classroom space with the one by the retired prison guard, now a minister and college student, who writes of his experience as a young African American police officer on the scene with five white sheriffs in 1960's rural Mississippi when a 17-year-old gas station robbery suspect, a young Black man whose family he knew, was thrown into the back of a squad car, handcuffed, and locked inside with a 120-pound German shepherd police dog that was ordered to attack. Then, when the writer describes the ensuing screams, the beer bellies, spit, and cigars, the white laughter, the blood, the horrific carnage told 40 years later with such immediacy and precision, you can only hold your heart and say, Oh, good lord, why did I ever stress the importance of using sensory details, concrete language, and vivid imagery? To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means you gotta be ready to hear the stories held in private silence the past four years by a young woman working with the local Rape Crisis Center, stories about rape, domestic violence, and child sexual abuse--things she says she didn't think you were supposed to talk about in college, at least not until she took a women's studies class and Intro to Creative Writing. It means you gotta be ready for the young Japanese-American student who kind of drifts through class, quiet and respectful, suddenly shocked into consciousness by the poetry of Janice Mirikitani, suddenly alive and angry and writing poem after poem after poem about Executive Order 9066, model minorities, identity, resistance and rice, practically busting down your office door one day in his excitement to tell you he finally realized what he would write his senior capstone paper on. The camps, he says. going to write about the camps. Both my grandmothers were sent to the internment camps. I'm going to interview them over break, get their stories, get the truth of my history. …
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