tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52486317389212968172024-02-20T10:35:08.937-08:00Michele's JournalM.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.comBlogger105125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-54063312445961336292010-06-10T18:42:00.000-07:002010-07-15T10:25:14.301-07:00The Book Bridge Project and "The House at Sugar Beach"Two years ago I inherited a project at the college where I teach. The brainchild of my former colleague, Mary Brown, the project is a precursor to many state, county, city, and library programs that attempt to bridge the literacy gap in the community by selecting a book for an entire community to read. The project at my college is "The Book Bridge Project."<br />
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This academic year we will be reading <i>The House at Sugar Beach</i> by Helene Cooper. This is an intriguing story that connects those Africans who left the United States for Liberia with their most recent trials and tribulations during and following the last coup in Liberia. Cooper's memoir is of a girl and woman of the privileged class; however, it will help some U.S. Africans understand the tensions inherent between former enslaved and free U.S. Africans returning to the continent and indigenous Africans. <br />
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Tune in to this blog or go to Book Bridge Book Bridge on Facebook for a list of events this fall.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-38455386070924157202010-06-08T19:49:00.000-07:002010-06-10T18:36:16.540-07:00Laurence Fishburne in "Thurgood" and Late Spring and ReprieveThe taste of late spring on the skin is better than homemade, hand churned ice cream or a cupcake from Buzz Bakery in Alexandria, Virginia. Spring is delicious this year, even when the air becomes heavy with pollution and the weathermen remind us that it is code orange, which is a euphemism for if you are a breathing human, don't go outside without grave consequences to your respiratory system. Although the weathermen only warn the young, elderly, and persons already suffering from respiratory ailments to avoid prolonged exposure to the air outside, code orange days can affect anyone. So tell me why do I see folks jogging on these days in the middle of the afternoon with the heat index at 95 degrees or higher?<br />
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</div><div>Who ever thought that we, supposedly as the most advanced and intelligent species on Earth, would create hazardous conditions where we live. Even primitive woman, I believe, knew better than to defecate near her food source. Yet, we continue to defile the Earth, defecate in our own home, and pray that somehow the Earth will heal itself.</div><div><br />
</div><div>As my poet friend reminds me, this is a nutty place, like "Blade Runner" revisited. It is a nutty place, but I don't recall a time in my life when it wasn't: from the paint factory that blew up near my home when I was four or five sending my baby sister sailing off the dining room table to the floor (I think she was perched on the table because either my father or mother was tying her shoes) to the film of black soot that used to settle on the car whenever I ventured to southwest Detroit, a neighborhood that was a toxic wasteland when I was a child.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Environmental racism, pollution, defilement of the Earth--humans, being all too human. But we defile our bodies too with all kinds of toxic substances, thus can we really expect humans to honor the Earth when we will not honor our bodies? Hum!</div><div><br />
</div><div>Anyway it is a lovely late spring night in metro DC. The air is crisp and cool, the slugs are as thick and long as my middle finger, and the sunflowers on my dining room table are wondering why someone cut them from their stalks to be sold in the local grocery store.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Laurence Fishburne is phenomenal in "Thurgood" at the Kennedy Center. While the script could have been more engaging, Fishburne's ability to stay in character for 90 minutes reminds me why I have always regarded him as an incredible stage actor, remembering the times when I saw him perform in Atlanta when the town sported one or two repertory theaters. Check out Juan Williams book on Marshall.<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=michesjour-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0812932994&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe></div><div><br />
</div><div>Just received my brochure for the 2010-2011 lineup at the Arena Stage in DC. Of interest to me, and perhaps to some of you, are the stagings of "Every Tongue Confess" by Marcus Gardley and directed by Kenny Leon, "Let Me Down Easy" by Anna Deavere Smith, and "Ruined" by Lynn Nottage. Check out the complete season line up at <a href="http://www.arenastage.org/about/news/1011-season.shtml">http://www.arenastage.org/about/news/1011-season.shtml</a></div><div><br />
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</div><div>See you at the theater next season.</div><div><br />
</div>M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-70931281441148304092010-03-31T06:47:00.000-07:002010-03-31T07:28:57.383-07:00Facebook Dissed Me, Censored My SpeechI normally do not engage in political discussions on the Internet, and I often reserve these conversations for having with only close friends and family. <div><br /></div><div>See here is the deal. I was censored at a very young age to keep my thoughts about politics, but not religion, to myself. My mother used to tell me stories about her cousin who was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee when this cousin was a professor at Temple University. While I have not attempted to verify the veracity of my mother's statements (simply because everything that I have verified that she has told me thus far has been true), her cautionary tale kept me in check. </div><div><br /></div><div>When I enrolled in undergrad at Wayne State University and came home with one of the leftist, if not Marxist, publications, my mother again gave me a cautionary tale about how my activity in any leftist ---particularly Marxist, Communist, or Socialist--organization could jeopardize my father's security clearance. </div><div><br /></div><div>When I finally transferred and completed my undergraduate degree at Georgia State University and had to sign an oath as a student that I would not engage in treasons acts against the U.S. government (remember Georgia seceded from the nation), I better understood my mother's concerns. </div><div><br /></div><div>But the benefits of my entrenched habit of keeping a lid on political activity and discourse that revealed my streak of radical thought became crystal clear while on an interview with the U.S. State department when an official asked me, "have you ever published anything that advocated an overthrow of the U.S. government?; have you ever published anything that was critical of the U.S. government?; have you ever participated in any activity that advocated overthrowing the U.S. government?" I proudly answered NO to all inquiries about being critical of the U.S. government in any public forum. <div><br /></div><div>So guess how surprised I was when Facebook warned me that my language in a private chat with a high school buddy could be abusive or harassing to others. What were we talking about? Well, my high school buddy innocently said, "I'm watching Fox News. They are too much." Or something to that effect. In response to his comment, I replied that "whites are going to be a political minority, and the 2010 census will reveal that they are a racial minority too. It will be nice for blacks to be part of a majority culture. Perhaps we can become a political majority too." Or something to this effect. </div><div><br /></div><div>I thought the conversation was pretty benign. This is one of those friends who is like family, so he has sat at my mother's dining room table and engaged in those heated political debates that were part of the discourse in our household, with jazz playing in the background and usually good food on the table. Thus, he knows how intense the conversation can get, which is why an exchange like the one above is extremely benign for us.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hum, Facebook censors speech. Now I am curious about how many right wing, gun toting, militia, anti-govenment groups have Facebook pages and are actively engaged in posting news feeds and other information on Facebook. If you know of any, do send me their names because it is time to compose a letter to Facebook.</div><div><br /></div><div>I hate to shut down my Facebook page because it is my main source of contact with my younger cousins, nieces, and nephews: those generation X, Y, and Z folks (are we at Z yet?). Not engaging in Facebook will cut me off from these relatives. I know you are asking: why don't you just call or write them? Well, they don't call or write, they text and interact on Facebook. Also, my students are more likely to "hit me up" on Facebook to ask a question about a course than they are to come to office hours.</div><div><br /></div><div>Facebook has a right to protect members against harassing and abusive speech. But I also have the right to cease communicating with someone in a private chat who is verbally harassing or abusing me. I wonder if this is a First Amendment issue. I wonder which words are programmed into Facebook's software that spawn that pink warning sign about abusive and harassing language. I wonder if I hurtle anti-black and racial epithets and invectives will Facebook display that pink warning sign. I wonder if Facebook is using the color pink because they think pink is a less offensive color.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, I wonder. But I do know that there is something wrong about the pink warning sign that subsequently warned me that my chat would be shut down for five minutes. It also caused me to wonder where is the line between critical inquiry and abusive speech. Perhaps I will walk to this line again and step over it just to see how quickly my speech is censored. The problem is, I am unsure where the line is drawn.</div><div><br /></div><div>Certainly, I have been quiet long enough and have not had any reason to be sanctioned or censored because of my speech. But perhaps this is the problem. Perhaps it is time for me to speak up. But as I recall, I was always getting in trouble with my English teachers and professors about something I read or said, and I thought that what I was saying or was reading was benign too. I suppose it is all about perspective. If you are reading Franz Fanon in a public school in the 10th grade, this could be a problem to some folks.</div><div><br /></div><div>Okay, if you know of any right wing, militia, racist, anti-government groups on Facebook, please forward their names to me at michelelsimms@yahoo.com. Let the research and protest begin!</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-50016560147117351992010-02-12T11:37:00.000-08:002010-02-12T11:52:03.198-08:00Essay on Book "Deans and Truants" by Gene Andrew JarrettDeans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature by Gene Andrew Jarrett. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. ISBN: 13: 978-0-8122-3973-7; ISBN: 10:0-8122-3973-3<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">It is Not Black Enough: Anomalous Texts and U.S. African Writers</span><br /><br />In an era when some literary critics and scholars are calling for the end of race as we know it, and arguing that the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States signals a post-racial milieu, Jarrett’s book seems not only timely but also in conversation with an ever-increasing perception of a certain kind of black racial hegemony that marginalizes black artists, critics, and intellectuals who espouse centrist politics that ignore or minimize the impact of race on U.S. Africans. In short, Jarrett’s argument in Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (2007) rests upon the sole premise that from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s, certain male writers and critics defined the aesthetic terrain upon which African American writers could create imaginative texts. Jarrett regards these critics as the deans of the African American literary aesthetics, while U.S. African writers who did not toe the aesthetic line are considered truants. Such writers, according to Jarrett, “break the chains of reality by writing anomalous fiction that resisted and sometimes critiqued the conventional restrictions of authentic African American literature to racial realism” [author’s emphasis] (1). Jarrett identifies William Dean Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka as the deans. In contrast, he cites that Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the artist Henry Ossawa Turner, George Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison produce works that classify their texts and themselves as truants. Although Jarrett’s premise appears to be tantalizing, serious fallacies challenge the credulity of his argument that I will examine below.<br /><br />Early in his treatise Jarrett cites Ward Connerly, who contends that black writers are “racially profiled” (2-3) in the publishing industry and bookstores. Likewise, Jarrett also questions the efficacy of having sections of bookstores exclusively devoted to African American literature. Both statements challenge how the publishing and bookselling industries package as well as market and at times exploit U.S. African writers. This is not a new issue and is not adequately dealt with in Jarrett’s examination of the relations between publishers and U.S. African writers. Nonetheless, Jarrett framing his work with a quote from and reference to Ward Connerly lays the foundation for a project that unjustly accuses certain writers as black ideologues and perpetuates whites as being devoid of race, more human than Africans, and universal, thereby ignoring the realities of the market and the lack of power that U.S. Africans have both inside and outside the publishing industry. Marginalization or “racial profiling” of U.S. African writers by the publishing industry has been grappled with by many writers since the beginning of the African American literary canon. One only has to recall the circumstances of production, the degree to which Phillis Wheatley was interrogated by a court of prominent whites, and the themes and imagery of many poems by Wheatley to recall that African writers, since the nascency of producing texts in the colonies to the present day, have neither dealt exclusively with what Jarrett terms “racial realism” nor have they necessarily maintained control over the aesthetic timbre of their works.<br /><br />While these insights that initiate Jarrett’s text are controversial and establish the possibilities for an engaged analysis of some of the issues that beset U.S. African writers, he elides these issues by not thoroughly interrogating the power and role of the publishing industry in defining and dictating the production and distribution of texts by U.S. African writers in a capitalist economy. That there has always been a paucity of publishing houses owned and operated by U.S. Africans complicates issues regarding production and distribution, but more importantly this lack also limits the aesthetic possibilities for U.S. African writers also remains undisputed by many U.S. African scholars, critics, book reviewers, and the writers themselves. But this issue is somewhat ignored, or unsatisfactorily dealt with, in Jarrett’s analysis. Further, Jarrett ultimately excludes novels by U.S. African women writers from major concern and examination in his study of racial realism who, I argue, have always constructed subversive and anomalous texts because of their lack of power within the publishing industry and as well as their marginalization within U.S. society. Jarrett dedicates his book to Claudia Tate, a feminist and advocate of recovering and critically assessing the place of black women’s literature within the African American canon, and whose work Jarrett appears to be heavily reliant upon. However, the over-representation of U.S. African male writers in general in Jarrett’s study speaks loudly to the selective nature of his work rather than to the historical accuracy of the literature; or to Jarrett’s desire to trump Tate’s stupendous work.<br /><br />Jarrett begins his study by examining the historical record and evoking Tate’s study <span style="font-style:italic;">Psychoanalysis and Black Novels</span> (1998). He initiates the historical analysis of African American literature by privileging William Dean Howells as the dean of realism and the person who ultimately determined the parameters within which U.S. Africans writers would aesthetically abide, beginning with Paul Laurence Dunbar, so Jarrett asserts. Jarrett contends that because of Howells, characterology and an author’s phenotype have over-determined whether or not the text is considered black or African American. He evokes Tate’s Psychoanalyis and argues that Tate’s theoretical foundation for her interrogation of anomalous texts by African American writers is unstable because it is based on the readers’ “vague feelings of emotional discomfort” (qtd. in Jarrett 13). In addition to these “vague feelings,” Tate further asserts that her project examines those texts that “do not abide by traditional rules of racial representation and therefore do not make racial politics their centermost concern” (7). Jarrett’s choice to reduce Tate’s precise and complex thesis to one statement suggests his duplicitous and selective reading of her work.<br /><br />Nonetheless, Jarrett argues that he hopes to accomplish what he claims that Tate does not do in Psychoanalysis by examining the “protocols of race” (here he appropriates Tate’s language) and how the aforementioned deans of African American literature demanded adherence to such protocols by African American writers, thereby marginalizing those texts that did not adhere to such racial protocols. According to Jarrett: "[b]oth traditional and revisionist anthologies of African American literature, however, have kept in place something that continues to authenticate black-authored literature. By clinging to it, they have ignored the history of many black authors, some indeed canonical, who have tried to transcend or write beyond it. That thing is racial realism" (6- 7). Jarrett’s interrogation of what he terms racial realism and anomalous texts by African American writers initiates with examining how Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s photo on the front of his second collection of published poetry Majors and Minors (1895) helped to characterize Dunbar as a true African, unlike Charles Chesnutt, whose phenotype according to Howells, allowed him to be mistaken as something other than an African. Jarrett argues that the purported dean of realism, William Dean Howell’s, seeing Dunbar’s photograph, grasped hold of Dunbar’s allegedly African legitimacy, and perpetuated making phenotype, signifying Africanness, the requisite for experiencing and writing the authentic U.S. African experience. Hence, Howells becomes the arbiter of black literature and Jarrett fails sufficiently to analyze these power dynamics inherent in a U.S. European establishing who is a true African and what the aesthetics for Africanness will be in the black literary imagination. A U.S. European, rather than a U.S. African, incarcerates the literary imagination of a U.S. African as well as the continuous captivity of his humanity. According to Jarrett, in an effort to escape the strictures of racial realism into which Dunbar perceived himself being pigeon-holed by Howells and ostensibly the U.S. European publishing industry, Dunbar wrote and published his first novel, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Uncalled</span> (1898). Jarrett contends that <span style="font-style:italic;">The Uncalled</span> challenges and escapes racial realism in its portrayal of all white major characters, as well as Dunbar’s concentration on regional, rather than racial, culture for the use of dialect. Jarrett argues that Dunbar’s decision to write outside of racial realism has marginalized this novel and prevented literary critics, unconsciously steeped in the discourse of racial realism, from seriously considering the merit of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Uncalled</span>, thereby leaving Dunbar’s first published novel beyond the pale of canonical African American literature. However, what seriously needs to be addressed is not whether Dunbar’s novel is marginalized by contemporary arbiters of the African American literary canon because it reaches beyond the boundaries of racial realism, but whether the novel is a good piece of literature. While the criteria may be subjective, there are basic elements of good literature that remain undisputed. Of course, some of these elements are: does the writer tell a good story? Are the major characters developed? Is the narrative compelling? And does the novel hold readers’ interest? Jarrett argues that early reviews of The Uncalled were mostly positive; therefore, the ongoing marginalization of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Uncalled</span> must be solely attributable to critics’ and scholars’ inability to read and analyze beyond the strictures of racial realism. But Dunbar’s novel has not withstood the test of time, not because it is an anomalous text as Jarrett argues, but rather because it is not representative of being one of Dunbar’s best novels. In fact, Dunbar does not reach his peak in terms of his ability to write a good novel until <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sport of the Gods</span> (1902). Although this novel will qualify as adhering to Jarrett’s conception of racial realism, it is undisputedly a better novel than <i>The Uncalled</i>. For this reason more so than its adherence to racial realism, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sport of the Gods</span> is canonized.<br /><br />While Dunbar may have written beyond racial realism in <i>The Uncalled</i> and examined dialect as a product of regional culture, Alain Locke, the alleged dean of the New Negro modernism according to Jarrett, in fact embraced dialect as not only authenticating the language of the black folk, but also as a way to imbue modernism with U.S. African realism. Under Locke, the strictures of racial realism begin to narrow, and visual art becomes subjected to its purview. Initially Jarrett’s position about Locke seems quite plausible given Locke’s primacy in allegedly ushering in the New Negro and Harlem Renaissance. However, one wonders how much more influence did Locke have than W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois not only penned “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926), but along with Jessie Fauset he often controlled black writers’ and artists’ access to publication and income as editor of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Crisis</span> magazine. Nonetheless, Jarrett examines Locke’s response to and dismissal of the work of the U.S. African artist Henry Ossawa Tanner because Tanner’s paintings did not support racial realism. Jarrett claims that Locke disregarded U.S. African artists and writers engaging in metropolitanism. Locke classified Tanner as such an artist. Tanner’s images of Europeans and landscape in his paintings as well as his “attraction to American ‘genre’ realism in the early to mid-1890s” in The Bagpipe Lesson (1892-93), The Banjo Lesson (1893), and The Thankful Poor (1894), according to Jarrett, did not merit Locke’s wholesale dismissal of Tanner as a U.S. African painter of merit (Jarrett 83) . Jarrett writes: “Locke’s dismissal of these painting as shallow, if not also stereotypical, neglected their significant racial-political context and themes” (Jarrett 83). Jarrett argues that although Tanner engages in genre painting, he is working against the depiction of the U.S. African as minstrel, therefore adding both dignity and humanity to the image of the African in the late nineteenth century. Yet, an overwhelming majority of the paintings in Tanner’s oeuvre consists of biblical themes portraying Europeans rather than Africans. Jarrett contends that this seems to be one of the major reasons that Locke dismisses Tanner’s contribution to African American art of the period as well as Tanner’s objective to escape ghettoization in order to gain artistic freedom. Jarrett writes: “These paintings ostensibly avoid explicit representations of blacks in order to tell more universal stories of humanity” (86). Here Jarrett posits images of Europeans, rather than of Africans, as “more universal stories of humanity,” thus privileging paradigms that Locke sought to deconstruct and that Jarrett himself seems to be advocating. Or, he is suggesting that it was more politically astute and tactful for U.S. African artists, like Tanner, to cling to a European aesthetic and imagery to garner both critical acclaim and financial reward. Jarrett’s argument regarding Tanner is unconvincing and irrelevant in a critical study about literature. Eventually Jarrett contrasts Locke and Tanner as a way to buttress his argument regarding Locke’s adherence to racial realism despite the fact that it is a matter of historical record that Locke was also charged by Zora Neale Hurston to “knowing nothing about Negroes.”<br /><br />Yet, if there is a writer from this period whom Jarrett argues takes Locke, and others like Charles Johnson and James Weldon Johnson, to task for their demand of and adherence to racial realism, it is the satirist George Schuyler. Jarrett claims that Schuyler “began an iconoclastic campaign” against Locke and his “ambassadorial status” (93). From his dispersion of calling blacks “lamp-black Anglo Saxons” to his promulgation of cultural monism in the United States, Schuyler’s belief that “color is incidental” (Jarrett 104) is underscored in his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926), to which Langston Hughes responds in his essay “Negro Art and the Racial Mountain” (1926). Obviously, Schuyler is one of those canonical writers, like Dunbar, whom Jarrett contends has been marginalized because of his attempts to skate the doctrines of racial realism. While Schuyler’s essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” appears in both the 1st and 2nd editions of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Norton Anthology of African American Literature</span> edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the late Nellie Y. McKay, Jarrett is correct that no excerpt from Schuyler’s novel <span style="font-style:italic;">Black No More; Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free </span>(1931) appears in either edition of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Norton Anthology</span>. Finally, Jarrett contends that for Schuyler only class and regionalism demarcate “Negro” culture or American culture, and not race. But race is inextricably and overwhelmingly linked to both class and culture, at least in the United States; and too many U.S. Africans existed within a caste system well into the late twentieth century. Schuyler’s satire of race in Black No More culminates his position about the transience of race, a transience that he detaches from historical, social, and economic realities and one in which only a person of relative privilege could imagine and write. Schuyler’s marriage to a U.S. European woman suggests the unspoken challenges he had with negotiating both the racial realism of his existence as a U.S. African and in his imaginative texts during the 1920s and 1930s in a social climate that made it difficult for interracial marriages to exist without considerable public disapproval. When the critic Dorothy Van Doren negatively reviews Schuyler’s Black No More because “the novel tries to debunk the values that she and other traditionalists of Negro art held so dear,” it is Josephine Schuyler, the wife of George Schuyler, who responds to such criticism arguing that the novel is “an allegory of how the African American novel could cross the taxonomic color line from ‘racial literature’ to ‘national or sectional literature’” (qtd. in Jarrett 108). Hence, it is Schuyler’s U.S. European wife who ultimately voices the place, role, and possibilities for racial, that is, African American literature.<br /><br />If any of the deans attempts to deconstruct the relations among class, race and culture, no one does this better than Richard Wright, while he simultaneously, according to Jarrett, erects strict boundaries that made it nearly impossible for African American writers who were his contemporaries to breach the tenets of racial realism, although undoubtedly, some did. Jarrett contends that as a result of Wright’s prescriptive in “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937) and the subsequent commercial success of Wright’s novel Native Son (1940), two aesthetic camps evolved. These camps consisted of those writers who considered racial realism a handicap towards Americanizing Afro-American literature and those who promulgated the universal possibilities of Wright’s work, especially through his character, Bigger Thomas, who becomes emblematic of all oppressed people. Jarrett argues that Frank Yerby, whom he considers the truant in Wright’s generation of writers, joins the former group. After unsuccessful attempts to enter into the school as a racial realist and embrace the ideologies ostensibly promulgated by Wright, Yerby insists in a letter written to Michel Fabre regarding Yerby’s relationship with Wright “the race problem was not a theme for me” (qtd. in Jarrett 143). “[Yerby’s] first published novel, The Foxes of Harrow, signifies a philosophical turn toward an anomalous aesthetic and away from the racial realism of the period” [author’s emphasis] (Jarrett 144).<br /><br />Yerby’s insistence on writing anomalous novels that do not examine Africans or persons of African descent as central characters substantiates, argues Jarrett, not only Yerby being excised from the African American literary canon, but also the inattention that critics have paid to his oeuvre. While Jarrett’s claims might have merit, one only has to consider that rarely does popular literature, particularly “costume novels of historical romance” (Jarrett 145), become the fodder of academic canons contemporaneously. Perhaps the jury is still out on Yerby’s oeuvre since Jarrett does not consider broader cultural or political conventions that also transcend race; for instance, a writer’s desire to be economically self sufficient and writing to the market that has historically been perceived as white and middle class. For example, Jarrett fails to consider how Wright’s own aesthetics about racial realism were radically altered throughout his career and is evidenced in his novel Savage Holiday (1954). Not only does Jarrett not address this novel at all, but he ignores the work that Tate does in Psychoanalysis in her analysis of Wright’s anomalous novel and how the novel like Wright’s The Long Dream (1958) “accentuates [Wright’s] personal and unsocialized desire” (Tate 9) . Thus Jarrett’s positioning of Wright as a dean, yet ignoring Wright’s own desire to break out of the tenets of racial realism, makes Jarrett’s argument about Yerby tenuous at best.<br /><br />Moving from Wright and Yerby’s relationship, the last dean and truant relationship that Jarrett examines is the one purportedly to be between Amiri Baraka and Toni Morrison during the 1980s. Jarrett casts Baraka as the omnipotent voice of the Black Arts Movement: an editor, critic, poet, dramatist, and essayist who—along with Addison Gayle, Larry Neal, and Hoyt Fuller— levied a prescriptive for U.S. African art and a Black Aesthetic that not only re-inscribed racial realism, he argues, but also ups the ante. Much ink has been spilled by critics regarding the limitations of the black aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement, as well as the<br />movement’s and Baraka’s discourses of misogyny, bigotry, and homophobia. That Jarrett would continue to argue the impact of these aesthetics of the late 1960s and 1970s on Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif,” published in 1983 in <span style="font-style:italic;">Confirmation: An Anthology of AfricanAmerican</span>, co- edited by Baraka and his wife, Amina Baraka, either pronounces Jarrett’s misperception of Baraka’s sphere of influence or Jarrett’s inability to examine, or his ability to ignore, how Baraka himself, by 1983, had begun to repudiate his earlier discourse of racial realism and anti-feminism. In “Recitatif,” Morrison successfully problematizes the use of language that enables readers easily to identify which race the characters are. However, “Recitatif” is neither Morrison’s first nor last engagement with expanding language and images beyond their racial strictures. She also attempts to do this in one of her least critically successful novels, Tar Baby (1981), as Morrison examines class hierarchy within U.S. and Caribbean African communities. Far too many critics ignore the intraracial class antagonisms that exist between the protagonist Jadine and Son, the anti-hero, as if class is not an inherent element in U.S. African literature. That Morrison would expand the Jadine characterology one step further by writing “Recitatif,” which is devoid of language and images that will ensure the main characters’ racial origins for the reader, speaks more to Morrison’s own quest to deconstruct language than it does to her conscious desire to write outside of racial realism, as Jarrett suggests. For by 1983, is it not appropriate to at least entertain the idea that non-Africans are raced, too? Thus to write beyond racial realism in 1983 is to deconstruct race completely and acknowledge the way that race, itself, is not just non-Europeans, but is also a social construct. This seems to be the main impetus of Morrison’s short story rather than her writing beyond racial realism, which only seems to apply to U.S. African writers, black racial characterology, and protocols widely accepted by readers as signifiers of black reality. Although Jarrett employs a very canonical approach in examining the aesthetic power that Baraka wielded during the 1960s and 1970s, to establish Baraka as a dean is also to ignore Baraka’s own delving into writing beyond racial realism during his beat period when he was” heavily influenced by the white avant-garde” (xviii) poets, according to William J. Harris, editor of <span style="font-style:italic;">The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader</span> (1991).<br /><br />Ultimately, Jarrett’s study is about culture. It is also about who exercised influence over, and representation and dissemination of, U.S. African visual art and literature from the late-nineteenth century to the 1980s. Jarrett’s disingenuousness study begins with the emblazoning of the frontispiece of his book with Claudia Tate’s name, to the errors in the endnotes of chapter as well as the incorrect date for Wright’s expatriation from the United States to Paris.1 Jarrett capitalizes on Tate’s premise about the protocols of race, that he dubs “racial realism,” which is so well constructed by Tate, but without the tenacity and perseverance, fine acuity for detail, and superb research that Tate was known for throughout her career. As Tate argues so pointedly:<br />that the broadly held critical consensus about Negro literature during Wright’s lifetime [are]: race and Negro are mutually signifying; race is the central preoccupation of the black imagination; a nonracial novel is one with white characters; and presumably, only nonracial novels address so-called universal themes” (87) suggests the challenge that U.S. African writers had with negotiating both the breadth of their imaginations and garnering financial recompense, since all of the male writers that Jarrett studies sought to support themselves solely by their pens. What continues to be problematic is the inability to interrogate the impact of economics on the aesthetic choices that Dunbar, Tanner, Schuyler, and Yerby made. I exclude Morrison because she worked full time as an editor for Random House in 1983. And even after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 hercareer as a professor suggests that financial security had not compelled her to remove herself from the everyday world of work in the same way that the aforementioned male writers and artist desired to do. While it is unnecessarily within the purview of scholarship to honor one’s elders, particularly one whom Jarrett purports to have compelled his awareness into how to approach the “anomalous” works of fiction that his study addresses, Jarrett dismisses Tate’s insightful analysis as easily as he ignores the works of Chester Himes (Yerby’s and Wright’s contemporary), as well as women writers like Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston, Andrea Lee, and Ntozake Shange who have published anomalous texts, or have iconoclastic approaches to their writings, that continue to beg critical attention. After all, as Houston Baker so succinctly stated nearly three decades ago in <i>The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature</i> (1980) in his analysis of not only black literature but what he terms the “anthropology of art,” that, “[…] art must be studied with an attention to the methods and findings of discipline which enable one to address such concerns as the status of the artistic object, the relationship of art to other cultural systems, and the nature and function of artistic creation and perception in a given society” (xvi). Jarrett’s project fails to satisfy these minimalist criteria. Finally, it is unfortunate that Tate’s death prevents her from responding to Jarrett’s work; however, I am certain that her response would not have been a positive one.<br /><br />Footnote<br />1. Jarrett contends that Wright permanently leaves New York City for Paris in 1946. But according to Wright’s biographer, Michel Fabre, Wright only visits Paris in 1946, and it is in 1947 when he permanently expatriates to Paris with his wife, Ellen and daughter, Julia. See Fabre 313-24.<br /><br />Works Cited<br /><br />Baker, Jr. Houston A. <span style="font-style:italic;">The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.<br /><br />Fabre, Michel.<span style="font-style:italic;"> The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright</span>. Translated from the French by Isabel Barzum. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1973.<br /><br />Harris, William J., ed. <span style="font-style:italic;">The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader</span>. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991.<br /><br />Jarrett, Gene Andrew. <span style="font-style:italic;">Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature</span>. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.<br /><br />Tate, Claudia. <span style="font-style:italic;">Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race</span>. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-62126537191420435872010-01-07T11:51:00.000-08:002010-01-07T12:17:37.848-08:00Hopes for a Better Year in 2010For some of us, 2009 was a horrendous year. Most of my friends are making it, but a few have lost their jobs and their sources of income. We help each other out with coffee cards, meals, and get togethers. This sort of help, while not major, lends in maintaining some degree of continuity and hope, I suppose. I recall that in 2004 when I was laid off from the University of Michigan, my greatest pleasure was my morning coffee at the Starbucks on Washtenaw. While this pleasure might have seemed like an indulgence I could ill afford, it did provide me with the reserve needed to continue seeking employment, rearing my child, and remaining hopeful. More important, though, maintaining my routine of my morning coffee helped me to remain in touch with friends and acquaintances who were always willing to help me out. Steve Carpman helped me move my 2,000 or so books out my office and stored them in his barn (heated, cooled, and ventilated--what a barn); Ramsey Jiddou provided me with an opportunity to learn mortgage brokering and with someplace to go in the mornings after I drank my coffee; and Nicole and her four kids gave me all the laughter I needed to mitigate what seemed to be an overwhelming experience. I had been unemployed before, but never with a child to support. Needless to say, I was scared shitless, and I was doubly afraid that my unemployment would prompt my son's father to seek custody. So no matter what, I had to appear to be stable even if I had only child support and unemployment to carry me until I found a job.<br /><br />I weathered that storm as I see my friends weathering their storms. The most positive aspect of being in metro DC is that work is always available. Unlike in Michigan, you do not have to be chronically unemployed in metro DC, although you can find yourself underemployed and working two or three jobs to meet your living expenses. This is what I have taken to doing to meet the cost of living and pay my child's tuition. I feel that I am lucky though because I could still be in Michigan and the situation could be a lot graver. My goal is that my attitude towards work and my situation will shift. While I cannot control the economy, I can control how I respond to life's challenges. I tell my son this all the time, as my parents told me; so now I have to embrace what I already know. But sometimes it is very hard.<br /><br />My son and I talked about how the older generation views his generation. He mentioned that far too many of the elders always remind his generation how they are not amounting to anything, yet these same elders do not offer any support or help to the people in his generation. He says that he and his friends discuss this all the time. I must mention that he and his cadre of African American male friends are either at the university or working full time. None of them are slackers, and I marvel at their commitment to their education and work, a level of commitment that I know I did not possess at their age. My son and I discussed possible remedies. He stated that he would like to see more of the elders mentoring young men in his generation and overall lending a helping hand. We also discussed the lack of presence of Howard alumni in the lives of students as a perfect example of the failure to give back to the community. We know that some alumni do give back, but my son concluded that far too many Howard students are left on their own to fend for themselves. That given the historical relevancy of Howard University and the success of so many Howard alumni, he concluded that alumni need to be more assertive in their assistance to and mentoring of Howard students. I suggested that he draft a letter to the board of trustees and alumni association expressing his concerns.<br /><br />The semester begins on Monday for my son and I: he as a student, me as a professor. For some reason this year, we are both dreading returning to the university. Perhaps it was the snow storm. Perhaps the break was too short. Either way, I am feeling worn out and so is my son. We both want 2010 to be a better year, not because we are wedded to the idea of progress, but we both had our own challenges in 2009 and do not want a repeat performance. Only time will tell as we focus and make our way through another year.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-8096161602062006792009-08-30T11:29:00.000-07:002009-08-30T12:20:33.759-07:00Back from Summer Break and GhanaI have been quiet all summer, not because I have not been writing, but because I have been teaching so much that my writing has become particularly cryptic, and comprehensible only to me. Now that fall has come, the teaching is still with me, but there is something oppressive, for me, about teaching a full course load in the summer. I will never, ever again teach more than one course in the summer; I do not care who asks me to do it.<br /><br />Ghana. I chaired a session at the 5th Biennial Conference for the Association of the Study of the Worldwide Diaspora (ASWAD) in Accra, Ghana, this summer. Twelve days before I departed, I herniated two discs in my cervical spine and was highly recommended to have "spinal surgery" immediately. My philosophy about surgery is that if there is minimal function in the injured body part, I will avoid any invasive procedures. Thus far, this philosophy has kept me relatively healthy, alive, mobile, and free of pain. But the pain from having two herniated cervical discs was nearly unbearable. Yet I went to Ghana anyway with topical lotions from my massage therapists, heat pads from the drugstore, and lots of prayers from friends, family, and neighbors.<br /><br />The roads in Ghana, chock full of potholes, did not help my spine at all; however, I distracted myself with examining the hawkers: some old; but, most were young, school aged children. Making eye contact with a hawker guaranteed your obligation to buy, well at least for a Westerner like me who had not developed the thick skin and quick tongue that was needed to "shoo" away the hawkers. "Roll up the window," the van driver warned me as we stopped at a red light near Nkrumah Circle and the hawkers immediately descend on us, pressing their hands through the windows with plastic sacks of "purified water," certified by the government of Ghana, fried plantain chips, and other delicacies that I could not properly investigate with my eyes because this signaled my tacit agreement to purchase the goods. Changing U.S. dollars on the black market, courtesy of the conference van driver who guaranteed that finding an exchange bureau would be impossible, seemed to be the best way to get Ghanaian cedis; further, the banks would not change my money unless I had an account. Needless to say, my experience was that the van driver was correct because I could never find an exchange bureau despite being directed to one in the Osu district and the prospect of giving my money to the hotel front desk clerk so that she could bring me cedis the next morning went against my U.S. cultural mode of money exchange and capitalism. Besides, the hotel clerk, too, would go to the black market to exchange my money, but quoted me an exchange rate that was insulting, to say the least.<br /><br />A herd of cattle in the middle of the city, chickens pecking underfoot and in the rain gutters, and goats bleating challenged my perception of what is proper in a city landscape. The acrid, choking smell of burning rubbish each night filled the nostrils until, after the second night in Accra, I looked forward to stepping outside the hotel and sucking in the night air for the smell reminded me of fall in the midwest when we would burn the leaves at the curb after having raked the lawns.<br /><br />I heard the Moslem "Call to Prayer" at 4:30 a.m. Not cow or bull horns being blown, just a chant rising like the incoming tide and the blossoming morning sky. At first, I mistakenly thought the sonorous singing came from the women, men, and children setting up their makeshift markets along the roads (all of Accra seems to be one endless market), but a British couple standing outside the hotel waiting for a taxi informed me that a mosque was a few blocks away, and I was hearing the call to prayer.<br /><br />My visit was punctuated not by the presentations at the conference, but by two day trips I took with other participants at the conference: one to the slave dungeons at Elmina and Cape Coast and the other to the Village of Aburi. The commercialization of these two dungeons, which are Unesco sites; my own connection to the transatlantic slave trade as one whose family survived this inhumane trafficking in humans; and the dire poverty around both sites all coalesced not only to leave me in a state of pain and confusion but also cognizant enough to thank my ancestors for having the tenacity to survive, for without their survival there would have been no ME. <br /><br />The conference participants were warmly received by the chief and his court in the Village of Aburi. We were properly entertained and fed, and I was very appreciative of the hospitality the chief and his court extended to us. But my eyes and heart kept looking at the villagers, the commoners, who surrounded us and were disallowed from participating in any of the events. Yet, as soon as the events ended, the villagers descended on us, and I found myself attempting to negotiate the various requests for U.S. dollars, to purchase goods, or for my e-mail address or telephone number because the person really wanted to come to the States. How to discern who is genuine when so many appear to be in need?<br /><br />I received five marriage proposals and one indecent proposal from a man from Burkina Faso. One 22 year old Ghanaian, in particular, confessed to me that it was "love at first sight." I was not flattered, and mildly suggested that he would be better off asking me for sponsorship for his education particularly since I had a 19 year old son in the States. Imagine this 22 year old attempting to be a stepfather to my 19 year old son. What a hoot! This young Ghanaian did not know the kind of trouble he was asking for :)<br /><br />Home. I hailed a taxi at Reagan National Airport with the help of a Ghanaian. "I just returned from your country, Ghana," I told the porter. He laughed and asked, "How do you know I am from Ghana?" "Your tribal mark," I responded. We talked about my experience as I waited for the taxi. My taxi driver was a middle-aged gentleman from Pakistan. I told him about my experience of hearing the morning call for prayer for the first time. He agreed that it is a pleasant sound to hear at dawn break. Then I said to him, "this is a very rich country, isn't it?" "Yes, it is," he said, as he expertly guided the four door, Ford sedan south on I-395 on smooth asphalt that made me feel luxurious for one of the few times in my life.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-71891107157359448182009-06-02T12:04:00.000-07:002009-06-02T12:30:55.094-07:00Sunmer and FunI've been quiet for awhile. The end of the semester has its own set of challenges: fielding student e-mail messages and convincing them that yes, the grade that they received is the grade that they earned and the one I calculated; there is no gray area. I do not subjectively grade. I have grading rubrics for every assignment (something that none of my professors used when I was in undergrad); use a formula to calculate their final grades; and only round up grades according to how my many math teachers taught me. This way, I can eliminate as much bias as possible when I am assigning student's grades. Three weeks after the semester has ended, I think that I can stop checking my e-mail for student messages about grades for the summer. <br /><br />My son is HOME!!!!!!! Yes, I am screaming. He's such a delightful young man, and he has had a very successful freshman year. He is far more disciplined than I was at his age, so I am very, very proud of him. He still hasn't found a summer job; so if any of you out there know of any summer positions any place in the U.S. please let me know. I've had to drag my son out of the house for fear that he wasn't getting enough vitamin D. He admitted to me that he was a bit depressed about not finding summer employment. I've given him a few strategies: like going door-to-door and inquiring about employment at all of the businesses in the neighborhood. We live between a strip mall and a town center. There must be no less than 50 businesses between the two venues; he should be able to secure some type of employment.<br /><br />Yoga and hiking are going well. A good friend gave me a retro bicycle recently. So I'll be adding cycling to my exercise program as soon as a buy a helmet so that the Fairfax County police won't ticket me. Will start kayaking soon. The Sierra Club offers free kayaking and canoeing lessons every Thursday evening at 6:30 p.m. I'm trying to make myself drive into the District soon because tonight is the first night for free canoeing and kayaking this season. I'm just waiting another hour or so to see what the weather holds for us. Thunderstorms are being forecasted, and we won't be in the water if a storm arises. <br /><br />Went to my nephew's high school graduation; he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and did not even say anything; and did not stand up when the "Beta" club members were called. This sort of keen ability not to honor one's accomplishments runs in the family. I'm trying to get the younger generation not to be this way. For example, when my father retired, there was an acknowledgment/retirement luncheon that I did not know about. Perhaps this event still would not be part of my knowledge if I had not spied a U.S. flag some weeks later in my father's study. When I inquired about it, he told me with a great degree of reservation that it was the flag flown over the U.S. Capitol on the day he retired, and was given to him to honor his many years of service to the U.S. government. Okay, I felt really humble. I also wished that on some level he would have shared his accomplishments with his children (I don't doubt that he discussed them with my mom). But my dad raised us to understand that you always give your best effort, for doing so is about your integrity and has nothing to do with being acknowledged or receiving awards. So I suppose that my siblings, nieces and nephews, and I are the same as my dad. Therefore, I should not be surprised when my nephew does not stand to acknowledge that he is Phi Beta Kappa, or when a local fraternity acknowledges my son's high academic achievement and he refuses to attend the award ceremony, or when I have to be convinced to attend my own hooding ceremony. It is in our blood. Ultimately, the only one to judge my accomplishments is me, and I am, as my friend told me yesterday, hard on myself. <br /><br />My nephew wants to be a stockbroker. My son just wants to finish undergrad; although he recently asked me questions about graduate school. I'm going back to U Mass-Boston to train as an instructional designer. I'm tired of online courses being 90% text based; there is too much technology available for these universities and colleges to upload only text and call it an "online course." It's a travesty and only addresses the needs of the most astute visual learners. If you are an aural learner, please avoid online classes. My goal is to mitigate this by learning not only to design but the psychology behind learning. Wish me luck. Wish my nephew and son success. They have so much energy and enthusiasm. And they are two very focused individuals!M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-43268781547853595292009-04-18T17:06:00.000-07:002009-04-18T17:21:14.779-07:00Sun, Domesticity, and LoveWell the sun brings out the best in some folks, and I'm one of those folks. No matter what is happening, somehow my mood and outlook remain positive and optimistic when my face is kissed by the sun. Left the Fairfax County Courthouse on Friday in good spirits despite losing my hearing (yes, I'm was in contempt of court for not ponying up the equivalent of one-half the cost of tuition, room and board at University of Virginia for my lovely son attending Howard University, but that's another story that I probably shouldn't blog about less I get sued by my former husband, oh well).<br /><br />I once read by some famous writer that if you write long enough, you are bound to anger some folks. I have had my share of angering folks: from my 5th grade student teacher in history who accused me of plagiarism to lawyers who think that if they send me a demand letter, I'm going to crawl in a corner and let them do with me as I please. Oh, well, having worked 10 years of my life for a circuit court judge, large defense firm, and bond attorneys, I'm not easily scared when lawyers send letters to me; which is why when I go in court I often win, but I often piss folks off. But it's all in the writing, which is why I tell my students, if you have good writing skills, they will take you far beyond the classroom. In fact, good writing skills are essential to surviving in this complex U.S. culture. But as for the outdoors and my life beyond legalities: hiking is my anecdote to boredom.<br /><br />Still hiking. I've slowed down a bit this week. I need to let two blisters heal. So I'll meet my hiking club on the Mall in DC and look at the monuments. This is not really a hike, but a way to meet, look at the monuments, and stop for coffee. Walking the Mall will give my feet a break, but next weekend these old dogs are going to get a workout in the Shenandoah National Park. I can't wait to try out my new trekking poles in the mountains.<br /><br />Loving domesticity! Anticipating my son's arrival home for the summer, I've opened up the kitchen again. My good friend Ricci has been allowing me to experiment on him with some new dishes. Since Ricci is a "food machine," he rarely turns down my dishes. I have found that since my son departed for the university, I am rusty in the kitchen. I rarely prepare a meal unless someone else is around to eat. So Ricci's presence helps me get back into the swing of things.<br /><br />Glad the sun is back. Happy to be enjoying my living space. Hum, and Ghana is calling me for a summer excursion and conference!M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-90064698248955682712009-04-06T09:36:00.001-07:002009-04-08T11:15:32.032-07:00Furloughs, Hiking, and Rainy Weather<span xmlns=""><p><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;" >What a wonderful weekend. It was nearly 70 degrees all weekend in metro DC, so I had an opportunity to hike through parts of Bethesda, Maryland and look at the Cherry Blossoms in the Kenwood neighborhood. Sunday I spent the day in Annapolis just soaking in the bay air coming off the water and remembering how much I love being near the water. Having grown up in Michigan, a peninsula (I have to often remind my friends of this), I grew accustomed to seeing water, lots of water since my parents were good about making sure that we spent a lot of time on the Great Lakes as children. When I go to Annapolis and stare out at the Chesapeake Bay, I feel as calm and confident as I do when I am on the ocean. Annapolis is by far my favorite city in metro DC: its sailboats (it is sailing capital of the U.S.), the 17<sup>th</sup> century architecture, and the cobblestone streets truly engage my senses. Yes, slavery existed in this town, but there is something about those native Black folks from Annapolis (the ones who know that they are direct descendants of African slaves and trace their original landing in the New World to Annapolis, MD) that despite all of the discrimination and the ever-pervasive color line, that continues to define their lives in the most insidious ways, that gives me some degree of solace, for they are so defiant, so sure of who they are and where they are from. I tease my friends from there, and tell them that they must have descended from the Fulani group because they will not bend, they do not yield. Recently, the city officials erected a sign designating the corner of West and Calvert streets as the Harlem of Annapolis. While this is a tribute to the artistic and intellectual endeavors and accomplishments emerging from this neighborhood, had anyone consult me, I would have reminded them that the U.S. African population in this area predates the movement of U.S. Africans into Harlem. But, hey, no one asked me. If you are ever in Annapolis, on the wall of the Stanton Center is a mural depicting some of the notable U.S. African residents of the Clay street community. Check it out for it is slowly being gentrified as a generation of elders born in the first decades of the twentieth century are passing and leaving their homes to their grown children who often see no value in keeping the property or returning to the neighborhood.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;" >Hiking is going well. I am looking forward to my next strenuous hikes. I have my warm weather gear that friends recommended I buy. Everyone is swearing by Under Armour, so I purchased my first three pieces this past weekend. I still need to get some lightweight rain gear and trekking poles. In this past Sunday's Washington Post, there was an article about hiking the Appalachian Trail. I will be hiking a portion of the trail in a few weeks. The writer of the Post article suggested that you have trekking poles. So it is confirmed, I will shell out the bucks for trekking poles; besides, I must protect these knees on the descents. And thus far, I have been lucky: I still have good balance so I haven't fallen into any streams. But it is only a matter of time before I lose traction on a wet rock and crash into a stream. I have waterproof boots, but if the water is deep enough, my feet will be waterlogged, and since I almost always forget to carry an extra pair of socks, the rest of my trek will be very uncomfortable. Trekking poles will help me to maintain stability and balance!<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;" >Received notice a few weeks ago that I will be furloughed from Howard for two days; and, at the top of the agenda for the Budget Committee at the community college where I teach is furlough. I have to tighten the belt, bite the bullet, and continue preparing myself for this worsening economy. The recession is finally hitting metro DC. I am teaching far too many classes for any one person, which is why I have been so quiet on this blog. But I must do what I have to do in order to insulate myself from an economy that our president predicts will worsen before it improves. I believe him.<br /></span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;" >Read Paule Marshall's latest publication, <em>Triangular Road: A Memoir </em> (2009). It is a thin book that opens with a tribute to Langston Hughes for the support that he gave Marshall in the early part of her career. While the book allows a glimpse into Marshall's life, it is still too scant on the details and how she accomplished writing and rearing her son as a single parent. Perhaps this is one memoir in a sequel, and there is more to come from Marshall. Hopefully so, for I believe that Marshall is one of our under-celebrated U.S. African women writers.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;" >I'm signing off: I have to teach this afternoon, and I have spent the last three hours in Starbucks grading essays and conferences. Spring will come and stay soon. I'm tired of the rain outside!<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p><p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:12;" ><br /> </span> </p></span>M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-13238024397551356942009-03-09T18:32:00.000-07:002009-03-09T19:04:24.096-07:00Arabesque at the Kennedy CenterWow, I hope your weather was as warm, inviting, and calming as ours was in metro DC. It was a weekend for being out and about. Although I had planned to spend the entire weekend held up inside the Kennedy Center at Arabesque, a festival of Arab culture, I hit the Capital Crescent trail on Saturday afternoon, hiking from Bethesda to Rosslyn, before heading over to the Kennedy Center to hear Suheir Hammad on Saturday night.<br /><br />I took the time to tidy up a bit before heading to the Millennium Stage to hear Suheir Hammad read and perform poems, including some from <span style="font-style: italic;">Breaking Poems</span>. Her performance was wonderful: a mixture of spoken word and "traditional" poetry; some performances from memorization and other poems read. Her father introduced her, and he was so fatherly: enthusiastic, louder than he probably knew he was, and proud of his daughter. Hammad read a poem in tribute to her father, and it brought tears to my eyes so touching were the images, so sonorous the rhythm, and so emotional her delivery.<br /><br />Hammad blew me away when she opened <span style="font-style: italic;">Breaking Poems</span> to a page bearing lines about Detroit, and looked up at me and said, "you're from Detroit." Serendipity? I don't think so. This caused me to reflect on my own upbringing and my relations with Arab Americans in Detroit during the 1970s and 1980s. While I knew only a handful of Arab American kids growing up, most of them were immigrants and had been segregated into Black communities, my relations with the Arab American community became more engaging when I returned to metro Detroit from 2001 to 2005. As an adult actively communicating with adult Arab Americans, my maturity enabled me to pose questions and receive responses for which I had always wanted an explanation. But the hysteria of post 9/11 tempered and informed a lot of our conversations. I was still an outsider. And there was reason for my Arab American friends to be suspicious of everyone, including me.<br /><br />The special police and K-9 dogs were out in full force from Thursday to Sunday, respectively. Security was obviously beefed up. And I was concerned that attending Arabesque was perhaps an endangerment to my safety. I do not need to see a lot of special police to make me feel secure. In fact, I feel less secure when they are around. After seeing far too many K-9 dogs on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, and unmarked Fords all day Sunday around the Kennedy Center, I became very uncomfortable and suspicious. When a crowd of pretentiously heeled, mostly non-colored people, began to flood the Hall of Nations and Hall of States, it was apparent that something important was occurring. Perhaps not as important as Arabesque was to me, but something important enough to call out the "militia" in full force. One of the guards told me, "It's a celebration for Senator Kennedy's birthday, and the president is attending." Well, this made me feel a bit better, for I was contemplating what threat could a hall full of Arabs present in a cultural space like the Kennedy Center. But even the poet Suheir Hammad joked on Saturday night, "have you ever seen this many Arabs in one place besides a jail?" With K-9s roaming the premises, who of Arab descent was going to laugh at that question?<br /><br />It was tempting to sit around and get a glimpse of the president, but I stopped being a cheerleader in the 12th grade; and I no longer crash parties. I left just when the president entered. The SUVs were nine deep in front of the Kennedy Center, and the police and secret service presence was so concentrated that it placed a damper on the atmosphere. It was time to go home. I boarded the shuttle to the metro station and made my way to northern Virginia.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-60161313017642458342009-03-02T17:32:00.000-08:002009-03-02T18:00:32.075-08:00It's Been a Long TimeOh, I've been hiding out on Facebook, reading, going to pilates allegro classes, and hiking. I've also been writing: a book review, a critical essay, and an abstract for another critical essay. We are snowed in in metro DC. Although our president was right about what whimps we are to shut everything down when it snows, I was happy to have a day off without guilt. I finished reading Zadie Smith's novel, <span style="font-style: italic;">On Beauty, </span>today. It is quite good. I haven't digested it yet because I turned the last page less than an hour ago, and I am committed not to write another critical essay until I write some fiction or creative nonfiction.<br /><br />Hiking is going well. I finished my first strenuous hike this past weekend. It was eight miles in the Shenandoah National Park. Now, eight miles is not far at all for me to hike. But eight miles up to a 2,500 foot elevation was a bit much. See here it is. It's not my age that challenged my physical ability; but my greatest fear: heights. Coupled with my ongoing fight with anemia, I was winded and had to focus on not looking down to the precipice below in order to complete the hike. I know that if I was with a familiar friend, a lover, or family member, I probably would have stopped hiking and someone would have had to rescue me. But because I was raised not to be a burden to strangers, I kept trekking along even though I could hear my heart beating loudly in my ears, and I had to periodically stop and bend over to catch my breath. All I can say is that I made it, and I'm making an appointment with my physician to have my red blood count checked. When you are anemic, you don't have enough red blood cells carrying much needed oxygen to your organs. The gentleman hiking in front of me told me that I was panting like a smoker. So I know it's time to go to the doctor. As for the heights, I can't do anything about this. I have tried for years to overcome this fear, even going parasailing over the Atlantic Ocean. It is what it is, and nothing is going to change this. I just have to grin and bear it.<br /><br />My legs still ache from the hike on Saturday. Nonetheless, I pushed myself out the bed and walked in the snow around the perimeter of the shopping center (the long way) to the Starbucks this morning. I needed another good cardio workout. Trying to get this heart in shape despite the anemia.<br /><br />All is quiet on the eastern front. The market is continuing to crash. The moneyed folks really don't like our president's plan for a "redistribution of the wealth." But none of them commented on the upward distribution of wealth that has occurred for the past eight years. Oh, well, it's business as usual in the good U.S. of A.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-85679590810304536202009-02-12T10:02:00.001-08:002009-02-12T10:41:37.013-08:00Class and Black Women’s Literature<span xmlns=""><p><br /> </p><p style="text-align: center;">Performing Class: U.S. Africans Strutting Their Stuff<br /></p><p>I think that it is apropo that I am sharing the panel with scholars whose papers examine the links amongst race, class and gender, and film and representation. For while my primary interests are in literary studies, my examination of how class is manifested in narratives by twentieth-century Black women writers inevitably leads me to turn my eye both to the text and to the extra-textual world that highly informs the printed text. Of course, in the extra-textual world, a text in and of itself, is performance. And the links between performance on the world stage and how that performance gets replicated (no matter how imaginatively) in printed texts by U.S. Black women writers concern me. I view creative writers as artists whose works often give voice to changing trends, social ills, and human desire before the masses, and even sometimes before the scholars, find the language to articulate eruptions in the culture. For, after all, creative writers only have the tool of language to convey their narratives. And is it not language that ultimately constructs our personhood, with or without agency? In my examination of twentieth- century fiction by U.S. Black women writers, I am struck by the preoccupation, if you will, of the complex negotiations that their black heroines undergo in attaining, maintaining, and oftentimes, negating class status. My work is concerned mostly with Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Ntozake Shange, Andrea Lee, and Toni Morrison. In each of these twentieth century Black women's fiction, the heroines struggle to come to terms with dual allegiances to race and class. Their concerns with gender are critical to their allegiances with race and class. However, it is the race/class dance, the performance anxieties of both, that take prominence in these heroines' lives. Hopkins, Hurston, Shange, Lee and Morrison create these tensions to interrogate how one performs blackness and femaleness, blackness and class, and blackness and upward mobility.<br /></p><p>Although these fiction writers have invested their novels with tensions around the anxieties of class and race, the same degree of attention by scholars of literary studies has been lacking. It seems that scholars of literary studies have left the interrogation of class and race to the sociologists. However, while scholars of literary studies have aptly examined the way that identities are constructed, particularly in regards to race, gender, and sexuality, less attention has been given to the way that Africans in the diaspora construct class. My project is two fold: one, I examine the history of differentiated class status amongst Africans of the disapora in the United States, and two, I am especially interested in the ways that twentieth-century U.S. Black women writers construct, portray, and give voice to black class status in their heroines in fiction. I believe that like other components of people's identities—for example race, gender, and sexuality—people learn to perform class. Often such performances are tangentially related to economics, yet they are not wholly determined by economics either. Class is a performative act that embodies complicated intersections of race, gender and identity, and is equally determined by historicity. Class for the African of the disapora in the U.S. must be interrogated not only in consideration of the history of slavery but also with an acknowledgement of the insidious and perpetual dis-integration of these Africans due to racism. Both the history of slavery and the culturally embedded practice of U.S. racism so over-determine the economic and social statuses of Africans of the disapora in the U.S. that these elements cohere to create at times an impermeable caste system wherein the fiction of race often eclipses other signifiers, and operates as the primary signifier in which both the dominant culture and other Africans read the place of Africans of the disapora in the United States. <br /></p><p>Yet my attempts at examining, interrogating, and drawing conclusions about black class as performance are grounded in the history of black racial slavery in the colonies of the New World, and what later became the United States, in particular. Despite this history of black racial slavery that subsumed black lives within a pervasive caste system, those persons of African ancestry who managed to break free of the constraints imposed by slavery, nonetheless found themselves still hemmed in by the restrictions that caste imposed on them. Yet this engendered its own sort of duplicity, for it stratified persons of African ancestry into an intraracial hierarchical society that included bondsperson and free person, non-propertied and propertied, unlettered and lettered, and immobile and mobile—thus intraracial difference evolved among the population of persons of African ancestry in the New World colonies of North America, and I believe therein lies the birth of the performance of class.<br /></p><p>Untying the creation and history of a black caste system is as complicated as black racial slavery itself, since both are predicated on visually identifying a population of people whose skin color, hair texture, and physiognomy differed from the dominant population. Historian David Brion Davis argues in <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World</span> (2006):<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;">In the Chesapeake (a region that includes Maryland and Virginia), <em>all</em> people of African ancestry were increasingly seen and defined as 'Negro.' This arbitrary racial classification gradually became the norm for most of the United States. And this basic dualism or division between whites and Negroes, between the free and the slave, leads to the argument of the historian Edmund S. Morgan that Virginia's slavery and racism became, paradoxically, the social and ideological basis for America's dedication to freedom and equality" (135).<br /></p><p>So while some persons of African ancestry were able to attain social and economic statuses that elevated them above the lowest rung of the black caste system, their African ancestry—which later became a racial identity perpetuated by colonial legislatures to ensure white domination and control— made it impossible for them to escape the black caste system regardless, of class status. But as Morgan points out, the very nature of slavery and racism becomes not only the basis for the freedom and equality sought by non-propertied white males, but most importantly for those persons of African ancestry denied access into and a voice within the body politic.<br /></p><p>The body politic—which denied, subjugated, and ignored the teeming population of persons of African ancestry—formed its identity vís a vìs this encroaching African presence while it simultaneously pretended that the presence of the African was inconsequential to the ideological foundation of a new nation. The manner in which the African's presence was trapped within the interstices of the fabric of the new nation and likewise ripped from its moorings perhaps unveils how it was possible for communities of Africans to live both within the caste of blackness and outside of it as well. For I am not denying the reality of the black caste system and slavery, however, what I am suggesting is as Africans sold into the Atlantic slave trade learned to "perform" slavery, they likewise learned how to "perform" both caste and class. Gates, Foucault, Althusser, Tate, Foster, and a host of other scholars' work in challenging the idea of master narratives, particularly for subalterns, reminds us that for every African who yielded to slavery, there was (an)other who did not bear her back to the whip. For every African who felt subsumed and broken by black caste, there was (an)other who, despite caste, struggled to obtain land, maintain freedom, and retain some modicum of dignity. For every African who deemed herself outside of the dominant society, there was (an)other who regarded herself as integral to building of the nation. And feeling that one was integral to the building of a nation was as much about performance, even if the performance meant mocking, aping, or emulating the mores of the dominant culture. But may I also suggest that black class performance is not wholly determined by the dominant culture, that in fact, alienated from the dominant culture, standing "outside" of culture, and living in the margins allowed for a performative space that redefined black class. These performative spaces for Black women, in particular, and as manifested in Black women's fiction are domestic spaces, as Claudia Tate so aptly reminds us. Tate argues: "Black women's post-Reconstruction domestic novels used bourgeois gender conventions as an emancipatory text. The novels mediated the changing constructions of femininity at the turn of the century to define woman as exemplary citizen" (97). And these novels almost always used the domestic space as the primary locale for acting out bourgeois desire, exemplary citizenship, and redefining black women's femininity. The impact of the heroines in nineteenth century Black women's fiction as well as nineteenth century Black women themselves who pushed back against racialized and sexualized discourses that sought to subjugate them is attested to in the past and present not only by their accomplishments but also by the number of successful Black men who pay tribute to their mothers who were instrumental in their success.<br /></p><p>But I have gone off on a tangent, and let me try to get back to historicizing this issue of performing class. Just when democracy in the U.S. was purported to level the playing field for white males in particular and gave way to the promise that with hard work, regardless of previous class status, any white male could rise to the level of prosperity, both Black men and Black women capitalized on opportunities that were not constructed for them to take advantage of, despite the divisions of the color line. They crossed the color line, picketed at the color line, and erased the color line. They sought inclusion based on meritocracy and hard work, which lay at the very ideological foundation of the nation. Striving for upward mobility is as much a part of the Africans' presence in the United States as is slavery. Yet, Euroamericans worked overtime to erect and maintain barriers to separate whites from blacks. W. E. B. Du Bois points out in his essay "The Evolution of the Race Problem" (1909) that while European nations were eliminating barriers that maintained rigid class status, the U.S., in fact was engaging in the precarious erecting of racial barriers that would ultimately make permanent a racialized caste system. Du Bois writes:<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;">We are in fact to-day repeating in our intercourse between races all the former evils of class injustice, unequal taxation and rigid caste. Individual nations outgrew these fatal things by breaking down the horizontal barriers between classes. We are bringing them back by seeking to erect vertical barriers between races. Men were told that abolition of compulsory class distinction meant leveling down, degradation, disappearance of culture and genius, and the triumph of the mob. As a matter of fact, it has been the salvation of European civilization. Some deterioration and leveling there was, but it was more balanced by the discovery of new reservoirs of ability and strength. (qtd. in Brotz 546-47)<br /></p><p>While Du Bois is referring to the "discovery of new reservoirs of ability and strength" in European civilization, the very erection of racialized barriers in the U.S. also gave way to new reservoirs of ability and strength within communities of Africans in the U.S. This ability and strength manifested itself in performance. This performance was, and continues to be about redefining the terrain, rewriting the script, and accomplishing the impossible.<br /></p><p>As you can gather, my project is not about re-inscribing the history of the African in the U.S. as a history wrought with condemnation, unrealized struggles, and losses. These elements are part and parcel of any group's history, particularly groups that have been subjugated by a dominant group. Rather my project is aimed at unveiling, revealing and giving voice to the way that the African of the Diaspora in the U.S., despite its history, performed class as a means of survival. Whether that class performance was one of the bondsman, the black caste man or woman, the eighteenth century free black man who owned black slaves, or the twentieth century hip hop artist from a middle-class family who is pretending to be down with the folk and then realizes that she really is down with the folks, class performance, I argue, is imperative to survival. In the five texts that I look at in my forthcoming book, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Narratives of Black Bourgeois Desire: Examining the Class Line in Twentieth Century U.S. Black Women's Fiction</span>, I am concerned with what Foucault refers to as "subjugated knowledges." Foucault writes, "Subjugated knowledges are . . . blocks of historical knowledges that were present in the functional and systematic ensembles, but which were masked, and the critique was able to reveal their existence by using, obviously enough, the tools of scholarship" (7). When you read nonfiction and fiction by Black writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, their literature not only examines Black slavery, but the texts also give voice to the desire for change: the physical, economic, and social emancipation that remain the primary impetus for the creation of these works. These precursor texts provide the foundation for the twentieth century texts that turn an open eye to the overt performances of freedom, and inextricably linked to these performances of freedom are also the performances of class. How to negotiate the complex American terrain that attempts to control the steps, attempts to rewrite the script, and attempts to direct the performance? These women's novels provide insight into how their heroines overcome insurmountable odds to give stellar performances. Whether it is in fiction or reality, life is about performance, race is about performance, gender is about performance, and class is equally about performance. All these elements cohere to create identity, which is, after all, about performance. </p><p><br /></p></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span xmlns=""><p style="text-align: center;">Works Cited<br /></p></span></div><span xmlns=""><p style="margin-left: 36pt;">Brotz, Howard, ed. <span style="text-decoration: underline;">African-American Social and Political Thought 1850-1920</span>. 1966. Intro. Howard Brotz and Foreword B. William Austin. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1992.<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;">Davis, David Brion. <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World</span>. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;">Du Bois, W. E. B. "The Evolution of the Race Problem." Ed. Brotz 539-49.<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;">Foucault, Michel. <span style="text-decoration: underline;">"Society Must Be Defended," Lectures at the Collège De France 1975-1976</span>. 1997. Ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;">Tate, Claudia. <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century</span>. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;"><br /> </p><p><br /> </p><p><br /> </p></span>M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-79261668349369291922009-02-06T03:14:00.000-08:002009-02-06T03:31:05.426-08:00Cold, Change, When Will Spring ArriveI have been really busy. Zipping from one campus to the other, up and down I-95 and MD-50 and finally saddled with the flu, a cold, I don't know. But the symptoms were intense enough to make me sit down and climb into the bed for one week. Luckily I was saved by two snow days, so I didn't miss too much class time.<br /><br />My son's birthday was at the end of the month, but I was too sick to see him. When I finally got well, I met him on campus. He has a new saunter: it's self assured, a bit cocky, and playful. It's all good, as my students tell me. But as I checked out how long his legs have gotten, my gaze traveled up to his face, and beaming from his two earlobes were two cubic zirconias. I got out the car, doubled over in laughter, and chanted: "No you didn't. No you didn't." He grabbed me up in a bear hug and laughed with me.<br /><br />I couldn't be mad at the boy. I just told him that our bodies react to silver, so if that was silver in his ears, as soon as the holes healed he needed to purchase some gold earrings and put them in his lobes. He immediately told me how he has been cleaning his earlobes carefully and he's taking care of them. Then he told me that my dear father was the one who gave him the idea to pierce his ears. Yeah, blame it on his grandfather. <br /><br />I'm still smiling as I write this. I don't think he should have pierced his ears. He's in the doggone business school. But, hey, he reminded me that he had a 3.0 g.p.a his first semester, freshman year, and he's certain that he will pull a 4.0 g.p.a. this semester, now that he has adjusted to being in the university. This will put him in the running for a scholarship, he assured me. Yeah, the boy is already a business person, letting me know how much money I can save as a lure for accepting his pierced earlobes. Hey, what can I say? The boy has never given me any problems, so if he pierces his ears, I can live with it. Besides, this act of self definition reminded me so much of the time when I put a second hole in my right earlobe the summer when I was 18 years old while visiting my cousin, Robin, upstate New York. I recall my father admonishing me. He had reason to be concerned, I was not as focused and on track as my son currently is.<br /><br />It has been too cold, even too cold to go hiking. But we are going to have Spring-like weather this weekend, I'll be out on the trails on Saturday. Jabari Asim's book party is on Sunday; hope that those of you in metro DC can join us. Go to his Facebook page for the location and time. Make sure you rsvp.<br /><br />For my family and friends in Michigan, hang in there. It's cold. The recession has been very real in Michigan since 2001. The country is always slow to respond to the economic downturn in Michigan even though it is the barometer for what is going to happen to the rest of the country economically. Our dear president sounded frustrated on the Air Force One and at the event in Williamsburg admonishing Congress for messing around and not immediately passing the Stimulus Bill. Oh, well... things are getting interesting.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-76223751081506036582009-01-14T18:52:00.000-08:002009-01-14T19:09:14.669-08:0020 Things My Parents Taught MeEverything that I needed to learn to survive, I did not learn in an educational institution. In fact, if my education had been left up to the teachers, professors and schools I attended, I'd be woefully dumb. While I may have had a few bright teachers and professors, I must admit that my parents were the major influences on my intellectual development. But they also taught me a few other things. I will list them below.<br /><br />From my father I learned:<br /><br />1. The difference between a debit and a credit<br />2. How to file articles of incorporation (this was a family project when I was in high school)<br />3. How to check my oil, check the tire pressure, listen to the engine for problems, diagnose the problem, and how not to allow the service person or mechanic to treat me like I'm a dumb chick when I take my car in.<br />4. How to negotiate terrains of power<br />5. Never to tell a guy what will happen if he's late for a date<br />6. How to post accounts (he had me doing this for small businesses before I was in high school)<br />7. How to do problems in trigonometry, pre-calculus, and calculus (my father was a great mathematician when I was a kid)<br />8. How to write a coherent essay on the first draft (in elementary school my siblings and I were not allowed to erase our mistakes, my father made us rewrite the entire essay no matter how long it took us)<br />9. How to be a caring and loving daughter (I'm still learning this)<br />10. How to be daughter #1.<br /><br />From my mom, I learned:<br /><br />1. Never to act dumb no matter how much pressure was placed on me to pretend like I didn't know something<br />2. To read like my very life depended on it<br />3. To stir spaghetti sauce while simultaneously reading a book<br />4. To pay my overdue fines at the library (often my mother would load up the trunk of the car to return mine and my siblings overdue books with her check book in hand; I think my mom was solely responsible for Detroit Public library placing a cap on overdue fees on children's books)<br />5. How to enjoy poetry<br />6. How to play the piano<br />7. How to write fiction, poetry, and plays<br />8. To read literature within a particular context and to deconstruct it<br />9. To enjoy all types of literature<br />10. To develop my mind, develop my mind, develop my mind.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-11946762610224537172009-01-13T19:00:00.001-08:002009-01-14T18:51:03.110-08:00Hiking and ReadingI had an intense week teaching a one-week, all day seminar in African American literature. Pedagogically, this doesn't work because the students don't have enough time to retain any information. If this were a graduate-level seminar it would work because graduate students bring so much knowledge to the classroom, but for an undergraduate class where this might be a student's first introduction to African American literature, the course is very challenging even for the best students. But the students and I made it through, I posted grades tonight, and I get a slight break before the Spring semester begins at the college.<br /><br />I've been hiking and reading, if you are interested! I'm reading "White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America" wherein the authors, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, argue that although the word "slave" was rarely used to define the legal and social status of the European indentured servants who were forced into or volunteered their labor in the Americas, they were, nonetheless, slaves. The authors hope to add to the vision and history of slavery in British America the image of poor English children who were mostly kidnapped, English female prostitutes who were sold out of the country as brides to English settlers as a way to populate the colonies, English men who either volunteered their labor or were convicts given emigration to British America as an alternative to death, and the Irish who were in constant battle with the English for their sovereignty and humanity and of whom England wanted to exterminate.<br /><br />I am wrestling with not the concept of Britain's white slaves, but the implication of this sort of discourse on U.S. Africans seeking reparations for being enslaved. I know how discourse can be twisted to accomplish political agendas; therefore, deracializing, or de-Africanizing slavery in British America as a social and economic phenomena that was not overwhelmingly African and based on racism will be very difficult for me to wrap my mind around. Thus far, Jordan and Walsh argue that few white indentured servants survived indentured servitude, acquired land, or gained a social status above that of a slave, if they fulfilled their contract of indenture servitude. I haven't finished the book, and I'm curious how the authors will handle the shift in status of Europeans in the 18th century as they were increasingly defined as whites rather than by their national origins as a way to establish a racial hierarchy and race-based caste system in the United States that even free Africans in this country could not escape.<br /><br />If you are curious, Toni Morrison states that reading "White Cargo..." was the basis for her novel "A Mercy."<br /><br />Okay, so it's hiking this weekend, an 11-mile trek, regardless of the weather. Then I will relax on Sunday and break bread with a friend before going off to tap dancing class. My friend teases me about how I prepare for my hiking treks: eating my protein in the morning, not drinking my mochas (ugh, that hurts), hydrating with water, dressing in layers of silk and synthetics, donning my boots and wool socks, and pushing my locs under my wool cap with ear flaps. He told me that I look like I am about to hike the Himalayas. I had to respond, "no, I'd have a GPS tracking system if I was about to hike the Himalayas." We are best friends! Yet despite our 30 year friendship, he still does not see me as a physical person, which I find very ironic since we have hiked, played basketball, swam, scuba dived, and gone bicycle riding together. Hey, he was the person who taught me how to scuba dive. I suppose being middle aged, I think that he presumes that I will stop being physical and sit down. Wrong! I'm going to keep moving until my legs become like concrete. Besides I keep telling him that women in my family have congenital heart defects; yes every last one of us for three generations! Therefore, I can't ever afford to be sedentary.<br /><br />Hope that all are having a prosperous year. We in metro DC are preparing for the president's inauguration; it's going to be pandemonium in DC and very difficult to get around the metro area next week.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-26769508666578494112009-01-07T19:21:00.000-08:002009-01-07T19:31:42.617-08:00"Detroit, July 1967"Below is a poem that I wrote back in October. I've been wrestling with a novel about the 1967 riots in Detroit for nearly four years. The novel is in various stages. Some chapters are complete. Others need more work. Nonetheless, the poem below emerges from my musings about the novel, where it is going, and what needs to be done next. The tentative title of the novel-in-progress is "At Home in the Night." One of my goals this year is to complete a good draft of this novel.<br /><br />"Detroit, July 1967"<br /><br />They swirled like a barrage of gnats<br />Spot lights unveiling <br />Hot summer night torn sideways<br />Babies screamed, slaughters gutted streets<br />Filled up with swollen anger and<br />Hungry mischief. That July 1967<br />When hope snapped necks and dreams<br />Broke backs and no more stilted speech<br />Like shattered glass on 12th street<br />Ringing as loud as the pain, and<br />Confusion, and silent slow silk<br />On his arms, strolling home beneath<br />Whorling wind and heat and loss.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-40156885527633829152009-01-03T16:12:00.000-08:002009-01-03T19:26:36.268-08:00Friendship and New Year's ResolutionsFirst, thank you Johnny for the wonderful get together at your home on New Year's Day. As always, you open your home with grace and abundance, and we always have a good time. I am thankful for your friendship. And I will not rag you about cooking anymore. I realized that we all have our abilities; you provide the space, and me, Lynda, and Kerin will bring the food. It's not about gender, it's about what we do best.<br /><br />Secondly, I never make New Year's resolutions, per say. However, since the birth of my child, I have diligently set ten goals for the year. Most years I can cross off at least five of the goals from my list, this year I managed to accomplish eight of the ten goals. Two goals seemed improbable in light of this financial market and my status in it. So perhaps next year will be the year to make some changes financially. Whichever goals I do not accomplish one year, I carry them over into the next year; that is, provided the goals are still in line with my overall goal that I have set for my life.<br /><br />The goals are nothing ostentatious. For instance, hiking was one of my goals. That was the first one that was easily accomplished. It was just a matter of doing an internet search, looking at the weekend section of the Washington Post, making a phone call or two, purchasing my hiking boots, and meeting the group for a hike. Already, I have formed relations with two other women from my first hike and we are going on a hike on the National Zoo grounds tomorrow after touring the Mary Cassett exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.<br /><br />I don't believe in setting goals that are wholly unattainable in one year. Rather, I break that long-term goal down into its parts and focus on that part of the long-term goal that I can accomplish in one year. This way, I don't set myself up for failure or disappointment. <br /><br />I record the goals on the last page of my bound journal. This way I can always reinforce my goals by reviewing them continuously and I can also periodically realign my focus when I find myself going astray. When I record my list of goals, they seem more tangible and attainable. It's easy for me to forget my focus if I do not write down my goals.<br /><br />What are you goals for the year? How do you maintain your focus? Do you share your goals with family, friends, or colleagues? Or do you keep your goals to yourself? I'd be interested in how you go about attaining your goals. Please post comments.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-23491617866002103682008-12-31T15:23:00.000-08:002008-12-31T15:55:48.130-08:00Happy New Year and HikingAs I predicted, I'm at home on New Year's Eve in front of this laptop after having hiked five miles around Burke Lake this afternoon. One of my neighbors was cajoled into having a New Year's Eve celebration, but having only sent out invitations last night, many of the folks who were invited had already made plans. So instead of celebrating New Year's Eve, we will gather at my neighbor's house tomorrow to celebrate the New Year. I am accustomed to being alone on New Year's Eve. I was never one for going out. I don't like driving home in the cold in evening clothes. I don't like negotiating the beltway after midnight. It's much easier for me to stay home and read a book.<br /><br />But I did begin the day with a hike around Burke Lake. As a group of about 20 hikers braved the high winds (up to 50 m.p.h. gusts) and intermittent cold, I thought about how we redefine actions as we age and our bodies change. Now, my son and I used to skip, walk, saunter, hop, run, and jog around this lake when he was three years old. I never realized it was five miles around the lake, otherwise I probably would not have insisted that my three year old son join me in circumambulating the lake. I just recall that whenever we went on our excursion to Burke Lake, afterward he would promptly fall asleep in his car seat en route home. Now I know why. So, just imagine how confident I was when I realized that five miles around the lake is a piece of cake because I had done this before with my three year old. This is not a hike, I told myself! But, since I tend not to engage in moderate exercise, it's either all or nothing, I decided that I need not push myself; that five miles is plenty distance for a windy, winter afternoon.<br /><br />A tree limb fell twenty feet or less in front of us as soon as we began the hike. The clouds gathered ominously, and I turned to the woman walking beside me and said, "if we were in Michigan, these would be snow clouds." She responded, "we are not in Michigan." But as soon as we turned the bend, the snow began pirouetting from the sky to confirm my lifetime practice of reading the clouds, much to everyone's surprise.<br /><br />The hike was moderately paced. At one point we had to slow down because a tree fell across the trail, and it would have been too difficult for some of the hikers to walk off the trail and around the fallen tree. We opted to stoop under the felled tree. As I stooped, I was reminded of my physical therapist's warning to retain my mobility, flexibility, and balance as I age. For this reason, I am back in the yoga studio. As everyone stooped to get under the limb, me and another hiker assisted people, and I noted how difficult it was for some to stoop close to the ground and get beneath the fallen tree. In fact, three people opted to crawl on their knees. Some hikers needed assistance rising after they cleared the limb. So for some, I suppose, the hike proved to be a bit more rigorous than anticipated. But we all made it to the end of the five mile hike in tact. No injuries. No one winded. No complaints.<br /><br />I am grateful to have had a prosperous and rewarding year. I've made some new friends, reconciled relations with two lifelong friends, and fine tuned my life's work. My son ended the semester on a high note! He's happy and grounded. And this makes me happy. As the year closes, I always list my ten top priorities. This past year, I crossed out eight of the ten top priorities. Two of the priorities were impractical given our financial markets this year, but the eight other priorities were quite attainable. <br /><br />Have a good New Year's Eve.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-442787171258193672008-12-24T12:25:00.000-08:002008-12-24T12:33:02.501-08:00Merry ChristmasWell, the shopping mall across the street from where I live is packed. People are running helter skelter trying to get those last minute gifts for family, friends, and spouses. I feel good only having to bake bran muffins for brunch tomorrow, picking up four bottles of sparkling cider for dinner, and relaxing this afternoon while watching the sky get grayer and grayer. I wanted to skate tonight, but I couldn't convince anyone to join me. I still might get up and make it to the rink before it closes this evening. If not tonight, there are plenty of winter days to skate and be in the cold.<br /><br />I decided to start off the New Year right by signing up for a yoga class on New Year's day. This means that I will not be out late on New Year's eve gallivanting around and trying to sip champagne. Rather, I'll be in early, probably reading a book, and sipping sparkling cider to bring in the New Year.<br /><br />Have a Merry Christmas tomorrow. Hold your loved ones tight, look them in the eyes, and remember to tell them how much you love them as everyone tears off the wrapping paper and stuff their bellies.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-75340170448806649922008-12-19T07:36:00.001-08:002008-12-19T07:40:39.578-08:00White Vigilante Shootings after Hurricane KatrinaWhen I was at the Richard Wright conference this past summer, Julia Wright showed a clip from a documentary capturing white vigilantes shooting and killing U.S. Africans in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. An article in the "Nation" captures in words some of the images that I viewed in Paris. Check out the article at <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090105/thompson">http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090105/thompson</a>M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-6837717215154905942008-12-18T18:16:00.000-08:002008-12-18T18:54:19.782-08:00Cold and Quiet in Metro DCSo recently I lost my favorite academic and intellectual buddy to a difference in perspective about a situation. Oh, well. But my Machiavellian buddy, who is intellectual in a purely non-academic way, re-emerged to engage me in continuous lessons about survival that I often forget while getting caught in the romanticism of literature and fiction. This buddy was an English major, which is why we probably got along when we met 30 years ago. But unlike me, he turned his English degree into a gold mine, and he is always reminding me to stop letting the job work me that I need to learn how to work the job. Yeah, don't you hear the corporate, Machiavellian tone to his advice? But in the past two weeks, I decided that he was right. So, when I posted grades I gave all students better grades than what they earned from my purely crunching the numbers. Hey, and two students have already complained about their grades; even one student who plagiarized an essay. He neglected to remind me about his plagiarized essay in his efforts to negotiate a higher grade. But since I maintain electronic copies of problematic essays (I have told the students this, so I don't know why they are always testing me), I was able to ascertain immediately that this student was being very arrogant or ignorant in attempting to negotiate a higher grade after being warned about plagiarism. However, after sending the student an e-mail message reminding him about the plagiarized essay and also sending him a reassessment of his final essay (which he also plagiarized, but since I was grading so quickly, I ignored language and concepts that appeared suspicious and this essay slipped through the cracks), the student has conceded and thanked me for giving him a second (and third) opportunity to pass the class. Oh well, I am so worn out.<br /><br />But back to my discussion about friendships at the beginning of this post. Anyway, there's always a yin and yang to relationships, and while I cherish all friendships very deeply and will work at maintaining them, sometimes it is best for people to part ways even when I regret the parting, even when the parting is painful. My mother used to tell me that it takes only 60 days to get over a casual relationship. So I operate on the 60 day rule. If I miss a person's friendship after 60 days, I will make one last concerted effort to mend the fence. However, if after 60 days I have made an adjustment, then I move on. If fate should cause our paths to cross again and we decide to mend the fence, then I will be amendable. But if fate does not intervene, c'est la vie.<br /><br />The semester has finally ended. I have posted the vacation notice on my university e-mail and voice mail accounts. I've spent the past two days reading Marge Piercy's "Woman on the Edge of Time" as a way to decompress from the semester. Tomorrow morning, I will return to my own writing, which has been woefully neglected these past 15 weeks.<br /><br />It's cold in metro DC as it is everywhere else in the nation, it seems. I dread the cold, but I'm planning to ice skate on Christmas eve in memory of the way that my eldest niece, Brandi, and eldest nephew, Deondre, used to beg my mom and me to take them ice skating on Christmas eve, downtown Detroit. We would skate at Hart plaza with the Detroit river in the backdrop and the lights from Windsor, Ontario beckoning. Hopefully, I will get some of my neighbors to join me. However, if my neighbors decide not to join me, it will be me and the other lonely hearts on Christmas eve ice skating with the U.S. Capitol building and the Smithsonian museums in the backdrop. But I don't doubt that in addition to lonely hearts, there will be families, lovers, and people who just like to ice skate on Christmas eve.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-46753702046293803672008-12-14T12:48:00.000-08:002008-12-14T14:37:06.873-08:00Yoga Practice and the Books are ShelvedFinally, I made it to the yoga studio. One of my former yoga instructors opened her own studio this past spring. Since early June, I've been promising that I would go by Radiance Yoga and take a class. But each time, I'd talk myself out of going. However, with all things quiet on the eastern front, I finally got to the yoga studio.<br /><br />I purposely took a slow moving, beginners class, even though my practice level is far pass the beginner's stage. As I became reacquainted with muscles that I have long ago stopped recognizing, I realized that I was exactly in the class that I needed to be in yesterday morning.<br /><br />My muscles hummed, talked, and even yelled at me. At one point, in a simple warrior pose, my left arm started shaking uncontrollably. That was when I acknowledged that I was woefully out of shape. Having succumbed to working two jobs last year, I realized that I have sacrificed my health trying to survive economically while living in metro DC. So, I have to set my priorities right. It's back to yoga practice at least once per week, back to the pilates studio for my allegro reformer class (I prefer doing this than lifting weights); and I've enrolled in a tap dance class. Hey, don't laugh. I tapped as a child and teenager. When I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan from 2001 to 2005, I tapped at the community center with a bunch of other middle-aged, college professors. Besides, once you become proficient in tap dancing, it can provide a really good cardio workout, and it is much gentler on the body than running. <br /><br />In addition to re-committing myself to getting in shape again, I finally shelved the books. Along one entire wall, from the floor to the vaulted ceiling, are my books. A wonderful friend, hearing the "chick cry" in my voice, offered to come over and anchor the book shelves. I owe the brother a crab cake dinner. It took him ten minutes to anchor the shelves. He turned to me and said, "this was easy," and chuckled. He used my drill, but his bits. I noticed that his bits were of a better quality than mine. So no matter how much I drilled, I did not have good bits to get the job done. I own wimp bits! Now I wonder why the guy in Home Depot didn't steer me toward a better drill and bit set.<br /><br />Shelving the books was like taking a stroll through my past. My life is marked by the books that I read. Also, having to shelf the books again, reacquainted me with books that I have long forgotten I owned. This also allowed me to take inventory of the books that are missing. For instance, I don't know what has happened to my editions of the Marquis de Sade. Don't be too judgmental, my mother gave them to me to read while in undergraduate school, and I don't recall why she gave the books to me, but I am certain it was in response to something that I asked. Oh, yes, there was a play on campus about the Marquis de Sade, and I was surprised that she had copies of "Justine" and Juliette" in her collection. <br /><br />Nonetheless, I am most intrigued by what I was reading during my adolescent years. So I paid special attention to those books: John Henrick Clarke's "Harlem" that I purchased and read before I entered high school; my high school editions of Salinger's "Franny and Zoey," "Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters," and of course, the infamous "Catcher and the Rye," which I read every year from the time I was 14 years old until I was 29 years old; and Kurt Vonnegut's many novels that my physiology and anatomy teacher tolerated my reading and chuckling over during his lectures. I really don't know why this teacher accepted my rudeness, except that he would tell me that I was bright, shake his head, and place my A examination down before me. Ironically, I was the only girl who sat at our lab station of four. And perhaps there was only one other girl in the class besides me. In my curriculum, by the 12th grade (which is when we took physiology and anatomy after two years of intensive courses in chemistry and biology) most of the girls had been weeded out and had transferred to another curriculum (usually health and welfare). The three boys who sat at my lab table all went on to be medical doctors (one is a pretty successful orthopedic surgeon who admitted to me about seven years ago at a class reunion to having copied off my examinations; I asked him for a chunk of his salary in return). Perhaps my physiology and anatomy instructor knew the odds were against me if I decided to pursue the hard sciences at the university, particularly if I did not attend an all-woman's college. I never thought about sexism in the hard sciences while matriculating in high school. I just knew that for the most part, the teachers (mostly males, I recall one female biology instructor) simply ignored the girls, or seemed to tolerate us. We were the best and the brightest of the students in Detroit, so they seemed to be a little hesitant to reject our presence overtly. <br /><br />But, back to the books. I opened a biography of Vita Sackville-West and from the yellowing pages dropped out a letter from a friend whom I haven't seen in 21 years. I sat on the floor reading the letter and recalling our friendship, and how and why we lost contact with each other. Multiple editions of Morrison's books, falling-apart-editions of Tolkien (another author that I read during science classes), and various books in Spanish that were assigned to me in high school that must have suggested that I had a high degree of fluency that I have subsequently lost. Shelving the books and paying particular attention to my books from adolescence reminded me that I have always been doing what I now earn a living doing, that is reading and sharing my love of the book with others. While in an orthodox manner, I am a classroom teacher (even when my job title says, "professor". In a less orthodox manner, I am doing no more than what I have always done my entire life since I learned to read: consume a book, find a group of people who will listen to me, and share my enthusiasm of the book with them. As I anticipate the new semester, I'll have to remember this when the lifting gets too heavy and I just want to quit mid-term.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-67440463285898771002008-12-08T13:19:00.000-08:002008-12-08T14:05:17.738-08:00Our Children and My Self-Induced AnxietyI have figured out the true source of my anxiety. While there are some challenges in my personal life that warrant attention, they should not be causing me anxiety and vertigo. But I realized today as I got on campus, that the true source of my anxiety is acknowledging the degree to which so many of my students at the community college and university where I teach are ill prepared to be in classes at either the college or the university. At the college my students' lack of preparedness boils down to a deficiency in basic reading and writing skills. At the university, it is a lack of study skills and seriousness. <br /><br />I've always advocated that not every high school graduate is ready or willing to attend college or university. Some high school graduates need a dose of reality and should go immediately into the work force. Thus, when they realize that their promotion opportunities are limited because they lack a bachelor's degree, then perhaps they will buckle down, get focused, and apply themselves.<br /><br />My anxiety intensifies at the end of each semester when I watch the attrition rate in my classes rise, the failure of students to submit their final essays, and the increase in my students' lackadaisical attitudes. Then it is the deluge of e-mail messages and phone calls with the explanations for why they haven't been to class in two months, but really need a grade in my class. They always forget to say "passing grade." Yes, a failing grade is a grade, but my students lack the savvy to be specific.<br /><br />I probably have more anxiety than usual because the majority of my students are U.S. Africans, and native Africans recently immigrated to the United States. Many have graduated from the public school system in this country. While I cannot fully blame my students' lack of preparedness on the public schools, I am seeing an increasing number of students who seem to have been simply passed through the system. Any student at the college level who cannot craft a coherent sentence has not only been passed through K-12, but also has been passed through freshman-level English courses: a prerequisite for every class that I teach.<br /><br />So while I want to get to content, I spend too much of my time teaching basic research and writing skills. Yet, my students are not astute enough or lack the courage to hang in there with me and acquire the skills that they need in order to be successful. Either it is apathy or they disbelieve me when I tell them at the beginning of the semester, "if you hang in here with me and take this course seriously, you will not only learn the course content, but you will also have better writing skills."<br /><br />Ultimately, my anxiety also hinges on my annual review. Last year, my colleague and I (the only two U.S. African in the department at the college at the time) were verbally reprimanded for having the highest failure rate in our courses. I succinctly explained to my chair and dean, that far too many of the students had been passed through lower-level English courses, and when I got them, they were woefully deficient in their writing skills. This year, I have put in place all types of mechanisms to make it virtually impossible to fail my class unless you produce and submit nothing. And some of my students are producing and submitting nothing.<br /><br />How to solve this age old problem? Do I accept the fact that an entire segment of our population (mostly African and Hispanic students) are purposely under-educated? Do I continue to emphasize to my students the need to have excellent writing and critical thinking skills when they cannot see how these skills are relevant to their economic survival, no matter how many examples I give them? And how can a sorely underpaid college or university professor tell students anything about having marketable skills when they perceive my sole skill as teaching, a skill with limited economic returns from their points of view? <br /><br />It is a complex issue. But it is an issue that I am not willing to abandon until I figure it out. I know that this country educates at least two kinds of students: the elite and everyone else. If you fall into the category of everyone else, but have the economic resources to attend school in an excellent school district, you just might survive. However, if you do not have these options, chances are you will neither be prepared nor survive college or university without a lot of commitment, sacrifice, and tenacity: qualities which far too many of my students lack.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-77498445891647411322008-12-07T12:52:00.000-08:002008-12-14T18:56:37.692-08:00The Habit of Reading and the "Dancing Mind Challenge"As I have posted earlier, I am indebted to my parents, and my mother in particular, for habituating me toward sitting quietly with my own mind either reading or writing, or simply thinking. As a child, I was known for sitting on the sidewalk and watching the ants for long stretches at a time. My mother never disturbed me; or, perhaps she did to call me in for a meal. Nonetheless, she honored my need for solitariness, and often I could finagle my way out of doing housework simply by picking up a book.<br /><br />Many years ago, Toni Morrison bemoaned the fact that students at some of this country's best universities and colleges unabashedly confessed that they had gotten through high school and their undergraduate studies without as much as reading an entire book. Morrison brought attention to the deficit in reading in our culture, and encouraged all of us to learn to sit alone with our own minds.<br /><br />This February, in conjunction with Bucknell University, Morrison is inviting college and university students to spend eight hours alone reading or writing during the week of February 18th. Morrison's birthday is February 18th. This is her "Dancing Mind Challenge." Morrison addresses the inability for people to engage in solitary endeavors in her "Dancing Mind" speech that she gave upon accepting the National Book Award in 1996. You can read her speech at http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspeech_tmorrison.html.<br /><br />So all us, regardless if we are college and universities students or not, please don't forget to mark your calendar and set aside eight hours beginning February 18, 2009, to sit alone with your own mind and dance with another's.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5248631738921296817.post-16764525687136112452008-12-05T15:58:00.000-08:002008-12-07T12:52:43.943-08:00End of the Semester and ColdIt is the end of the semester. Students are jockeying for grades. The pleas are coming in: even telephone calls from parents. And my resolve is crumbling. Like them, I just want it all to be over. Unlike some of my students, I am obligated to do the work to get to the finish line. <br /><br />It is colder than usual in northern Virginia. I picked up my son from the metro so that we could retrieve his tuxedo. He looks so good in it. Hopefully, he will also remember to wear his topcoat, which he tried to convince me not to buy. He swears that he will never put on a tuxedo again. Oh, yes he will even if he has to escort me to a formal affair. Anyway, I have asked him to take pictures. Hopefully he will. <br /><br />There is a lot of anti-Africomm buzz in and around metro DC. As soon as I get a handle on it, I will blog about it.M.L. Simmshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10850324550510860024noreply@blogger.com3