“Teaching The
Conflicts and Learning To Curse”—
Notes Toward A
Pedagogy For An Intro. To Lit. Course
1. “Teaching The
Conflicts”
Have you ever wondered why we live in America, still the
most militarily powerful imperialist
nation in the world, yet still we call our language, and department, English?
After all, American English is different from British English, and even more
different from Shakespearean English. This is partly due to our colonial
history, but also to white people’s fear of the influence of Black English
& Spanglish on the language (even as many whites still use words that
originated in African-American or Latino communities).
As English Departments notoriously lag behind the perpetual
flux of an American language in transition, this dated designation may take
some time to change on an official level. In the meantime, we will be a country
divided, between so-called “high” English and low English. To be successful in
this backdrop, we must become culturally amphibious, ambidextrous; we must know
how to code-switch, to translate between specialized vocabularies and the
audiences they imply. Double-consciousness can be made a positive if seen as a
form of cultural bilinguality that allows you to pass without losing the right
to your own identity in the process.
Such thoughts have lead me to teach William Shakespeare
alongside of Amiri Baraka in courses that introduce students to the study of
literature. It’s a way to “teach the conflict” inherent in our language and
culture. Let’s start with Shakespeare for his work remains the best example of
the standards of white European-centric literary excellence, and his works have
profoundly influenced—for better or worse—contemporary drama, novels, poetry
and essays, as well as the more popular—if not necessarily more populist—arts
of Hollywood films and pop songs. Even today, Shakespeare is most invoked as
common ground among those who can’t agree on much else about a shared canon
that doesn’t reduce itself to the tepid “moderation” of the lowest common
denominator. That doesn’t mean Shakespeare has to be a sacred cow, especially
if you can learn more about your self from watching and reading him than you
can from any self-help app. Unfortunately, many teach it as a sacred cow, with
little knowledge that by doing that, they lose their effectiveness as teachers.
Like many others, I had “stuffy” teachers in college who
turned me off to Shakespeare, as to Beowulf,
Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pope and Pound among other writers I was supposed to
read. In the meantime, I found other work, like Amiri Baraka’s, that spoke more
to me, but these were rarely taught on the fringes of proper academia. I knew
this wasn’t because of the literary merits of the work, the lack of
intelligence, passion, relevance and the virtues of complexity and difficulty,
but rather because of politics, habit, or “the tradition” (if anything they
might have been excluded precisely because
of their acute contemporary relevance).
As a result of this, I resisted Shakespeare initially, yet
after receiving my M.A. (which I had managed to do without knowing Shakespeare,
to the chagrin of some traditionalists), I had become comfortable enough with
an alternative tradition that I was able to read and watch Shakespeare in a
different light, not as the “stuffy” guy my teachers presented his works as.
I’d read it on my own and enjoyed the weird poetry which, to its credit, could
seem like a freestylin’ Coltrane solo not necessarily tied down to the burden
of making sense (meaning). Sure, I didn’t know what exactly was being said, and
how it contributed to the story I was supposed to care about, but that didn’t
matter the first time I read these plays.
Then, I took another Shakespeare class, and learned what I
call the “soap opera side” of Shakespeare, the more popular story side, and I
realized how part of the fun, and even the political importance and moral
imperative, of reading Shakespeare was getting to engage in the debates over how to read, interpret and act him (or
it). There were so many interpretations, so many different ways of being acted,
so many different critical approaches that I found many wrote entire 300 page
books on just one play. In reading Shakespeare, I found I could bring the
burning ethical, moral, and socio-political issues of our time with me in a way
a lot of 20th century canonical writing didn’t make room for. I
could put my self, and put the soul, into Shakespeare as I could non-verbally
do with punk/funk dance music. Not only that, I could be legitimized for it.
I couldn’t find a way to make an honest buck as a dancer,
but I could get gigs teaching Shakespeare and, through that, other literature.
In this sense, Shakespeare is like the New York of the song: “If I can make it
there, I’ll make it anywhere.” It may demand more attention (more like “livin’
for the city” than “workin’ for the weekend”), but it offers a pedigree and
skills you can take with you to the provinces of your daily struggles. So, I
found myself having both intrinsic and extrinsic, both personal and
professional, incentives to pursue immersion in Shakespeare while there were no
professional incentives to pursue, say, Amiri Baraka. While in the short term,
this may be a kind of ‘moral sell-out,’ in the long term it may be the same
kind of compromise that learning how to communicate verbally in English
involved as a toddler.
Coming through the back door, as it were, to study
Shakespeare this way proved in the long term more efficient, a way to artfully dodge much of the dross that too often
comes with the study of literature. The labor-saving device it provided is
something I wish to pass on to my students. In some ways, learning to “master”
Shakespeare enough to publish a book about him was analogous to the art of
“passing.”
2. “Learning To Curse”
(with apologies to Stephen Greenblatt)
It is for these reasons that some of the Shakespearean lines
I find myself most quoting are from a late play, The Tempest. This play (not one of my favorite Shakespeare plays,
for reasons I won’t get into here) can be read as a colonialist fantasy,
especially if understood historically as written concurrently with King James
I’s policy to step up the transatlantic slave trade (which Spain and Portugal
were further along with) and become a colonial empire.
The Tempest’s most
memorable character, Caliban, is a native of this colonized island. From the
colonizer’s point of view, he is a hostile presence, a threat, a savage---at
best a necessary evil whose labor must be “tamed” or harnessed to the rich
exiled Duke (Prospero)’s will. Shakespearean traditionalists will tell you that
the emotional structure of the play is designed to make both viewer and reader
sympathize with the colonizer, and against the colonized. But a play, lacking a
reliable, omniscient narrator to tell us what to think, almost demands to be
read in more than one way. And many have also interpreted Caliban as the more
sympathetic character (ignoring Miranda and the so-called ‘love plot’ for the
time being).
Some critics of the play have even gone so far as to rewrite the play—in order to make their
argument clearer. For instance, Negritude poet Aime Cesaire’s play A Tempest, written during the height of
the mid-20th century internationalist Black liberation movement,
should always be taught next to Shakespeare’s play if you ever find yourself
forced to teach or read The Tempest.
One of Caliban’s (and I’d add Shakespeare’s) most memorable
lines occurs when he’s responding to the colonizer who (in the form of the
“good cop” sheep’s clothes of his beautiful daughter) brags about his
‘kindness’ and ‘mercy’ in ‘civilizing’ him by teaching him proper English.
Caliban replies that the best thing
this “education” (or indoctrination) has afforded him is the ability to curse in the language, to speak the
language of the oppressor, to use the master’s tools to help destroy the
master’s house, as Audre Lorde would put it: “You taught me language, and my
profit on’t/ Is I know how to curse (Tempest:
Act I, Scene ii, 368-69).
Caliban, in this play, is not successful in doing destroying
the master’s house, and, for centuries, enough people in high places have read
his attempt to do so as unjustified, as proof of his savagery, as “Caliban” has
become a highly racialized cuss-word lodged deeply—even if unspoken and
unacknowledged—in the white supremacist psyche of our culture. Today, it’s easy
to see how corporate media outlets like MSNBC and CNN are pushing an updated
version of the Caliban myth in the stereotype of the too loud, black beast. Yet
Caliban’s voice speaks, and bleeds, beyond the confines of the play’s “dramatic
closure” and can be heard, among many other places, in J.Cole’s 2014 song, “Be
Free” or in recent books by Danez Smith or Ta-Nehisi Coates.
I also hear this voice in the young bright students who
would only consider being an English major if there’s a chance they might be
able to succeed in changing it from within. As a teacher, I simply can not sit
idly by and enforce these academic standards without considering that they are
in need of reform at the very least. So I welcome, and even demand, your
skepticism. The master’s tools may not be able to destroy the master’s house,
but at least you can use these tools to help reform it, and reform efforts can be the incubator for
revolutionary consciousness and action. Shakespeare reveals some of the tools
the master uses, and knowing them may help you understand better exactly what
you’re up against as a writer, and as a person.
All of this is to say that the debate that occurs in The Tempest is still relevant to the
most pressing contemporary issue of our day, even if the apologists for
Prospero (who they see as a stand-in for Shakespeare himself) are clearly on
the wrong side of history. Yet as long as Shakespearean studies stands as a
shared point of agreement among the vast majority of Literary-Academic
gatekeepers, you will be afforded a greater respect for knowing how to speak
this language, even if you’re trying to curse ‘mo better in it. If you’re not
free to curse in literature, it is hard to be free to transcend cursing by
grounding it more proudly and clearly in a greater love (as Baraka’s oeuvre
shows). If you’re not free to talk back to the voices of officialdom that run
this society (Google, Geico, Bank Of America, for instance), and be heard and
taken seriously, your right to free speech means nothing. This is part of how
many learn to censor themselves.
Instead, I strongly encourage you to curse in this course,
and I will do my best to provide you some of the master’s tools to do it with
(some new toys, like perfectly legal deflated footballs, corked bats, or
performance enhancing substances).
At the same time, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also show you an
increasingly legitimate alternative
to the master’s tools, an opposing candidate, a movement or at least the
writing of a man who devoted his entire life to learning how to dig himself—and
others—out of the trap made by the master’s tools that had banned many people’s
“oom boom ba boom.” Amiri Baraka accomplished much in this regard, even if his
task inevitably remained unfinished at his death. And, we may learn from his
failures and successes without sacrificing any of the literary pleasures that
draw folks to Shakespeare. A lengthy
essay could be written on the many points of similarity between these two
writers.
Yet, if one were to say, “Baraka is our Shakespeare,” he’d
likely be criticized from at least two different fronts (or angles): 1) those
who consider that statement a preposterous elevation of Baraka to the level of
Shakespeare who is clearly superior: no contest. And 2): Champions of Baraka who
feel the comparison reduces his
achievement by (merely) aestheticizing it; why do we even need to legitimize
Amiri Baraka by roping him into the confining standards of an imperialist
retro-canon? That, in itself, is what Baraka and The Black Arts movement was
fighting against. Yet, even if Baraka hated the uses to which Shakespeare has
been put by today’s culture industry, he clearly admired and defended this
writing, if understood historically. So, if the snobby Shakespeareans press me,
I could back up the “Baraka is our Shakespeare” claim. In the meantime, I will
teach the two of them side-by-side, to further your culture bilinguality, as
some teach classes that compare the Biblical accounts of creation with the
Darwinian more scientific view.
I am not arguing that all legitimate literature can be
contained by, or falls between, these two polar opposites. After all, they’re
both male and we need to hear women’s voices and writing just as loudly
(including feminist critiques of Shakespeare alongside of Audre Lorde). But
devoting more time to these two approaches in an “Introduction to College
Writing on Literature” course can help prepare you for the more advanced
requirements of a 4 year college’s English requirement. It certainly can
provide you a much broader perspective than other implied literary dualisms:
for instance, the history of English Literature has often been taught by
starting with the difference between the lyric poem/song “Caedmon’s Hymn,” on
the one hand, and the narrative epic perspective of Beowulf (which can be seen as the precursor to both contemporary
screenplays and novels), on the other. We find a analogous split in the broader
European literary history starting with the Ancient Greeks in the much-hyped
distinction between Sappho and Homer. We also find it in the history of
American poetry, often seen as truly beginning with Dickinson and Whitman.
These various binaries are not nearly as capacious a form
for understanding and mapping the breadth of contemporary literature, art and
entertainment, as the difference between Shakespeare and Baraka.
As far as I know, few—if any—other College English teachers
consider such a paradigm when introducing the study of English Lit. to
students. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must let you know that this
approach may seem off the beaten track if you’re intending to pursue English as
a possible major. But I stand by my claim that thinking about literature this
way—focusing more deeply on less texts and writers—is ultimately more efficient
because it emphazises your confrontation with what kind of work writing about
reading can do. It can provide you with an edge in this highly competitive
field over those who have a more superficial knowledge of a greater quantity of
texts. We shall test—and probably refine-- this hypothesis this semester.
Chris Stroffolino
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