A Thought Journal

To be Where Not to Be

Over more than a decade ago, my French instructor Monsieur M. told us a joke in class that I still remember about a non-attentive boy in a French lycée:  the teacher was teaching Hamlet to the class and the boy was dreamily looking out of the window. The teacher, noticing this, asked the boy to come up to the chalk-board and write the famous line from Hamlet that the class had been discussing (Être ou ne pas être – c’est le question; To be or not to be – that is the question). The boy nervously walked up to the board, all eyes on him, and picking up a piece of chalk, hesitantly wrote: “Être où ne pas être – c’est le question!” As our beloved Monsieur M. explained to us, trying to illustrate through this example the complexity of the French language and how the slightest inattentiveness, therefore, could result in great errors, the boy had got the line from Hamlet entirely correct, word for word, except he placed an accent mark over the ‘u,’ thereby changing the meaning of the word from ‘or’ (ou) into ‘where’ (où).  The teacher took a moment to review the boy’s sentence (which now read: “To be where not to be – that is the question”), and instead of scolding the boy for not paying attention in class, changed the sentence to read: Être où ne pas être – c’est aussi le question (To be where not to be – that is also the question)!

I can’t say why I remember this anecdote from my French class when I have lost most of my French except ‘bonjour’ and ‘merci,’ but I do realize that “to be where not to be,” or at least wanting to be where one isn’t, can’t be, or shouldn’t be is aussi an important question. In my opinion, it is the crux of all creative endeavors – reading, writing, painting, dramaturgy – everything is driven by our desire to live a different life elsewhere, like the little boy in Phantom Tollbooths who always wanted to be in someplace else, no matter where he was. Or like Matt in The House of the Scorpions, for that matter, who wasn’t allowed outside his ‘little house in the poppy fields.’

Perhaps, no one appreciates the lure of imaginary (not unreal, but imagined) places elsewhere than a young student jailed inside a classroom for eight hours a day like the boy in the lycée. What I (now) read into the joke that Monsieur M. shared with us to keep us from wandering away (in our imagination, at least) from his classroom is the little boy’s desire to be at someplace else -  a place he was not allowed to be at, not even in his mind, during school hours - that was inadvertently reflected in his writing (a Freudian slip?).  To be where not to be! The irony of the situation is that the boy was simultaneously in two places where he shouldn’t have been. Firstly, he was physically in the lycée when his mind was elsewhere, and, secondly, in his imagination he was at someplace else where he wasn’t allowed to be when he was in the lycée. This is the peculiar irony of schooling that Rabindranath talks about: “we rob the child of his earth to teach him geography, of language to teach him grammar” (Rabindranath Tagore, Personality, 1917: 116-17).

Someplace Else: The Lure of Imaginary Places

Growing up in Kolkata, India, in the late 90s and early 2000s, we did not have much night and weekend places to go to; the ‘adult’ places – places where not only adults went to, but being where makes your eighteen-to-twenty-something-year-old self feel quite like the adult that you rightfully have turned into for hanging in there for so long. The only such place that existed back then was a smoky, claustrophobic, little pub at the Park Hotel on Park Street, named ‘Someplace Else.’ For us, young undergrads, it was truly someplace else, for where else could you race your friends through tall boys to live music from uppity rock bands like Hip Pocket in a 20 feet by 20 feet smoke-filled room full of 200 drunk adults? In early 2000s’ Kolkata, Someplace Else was unparalleled in its ‘urban unreality’ in the imaginary landscape of the young.

Whenever I visit Kolkata now, I usually take a tour down memory lane and find myself in Someplace Else with a glass of JD& Coke in hand (usually in the afternoon because I don’t appreciate the crowd much anymore), but back then I would allow myself to go there only as a rare treat. For one, the place was a bit upscale and back then I did not have much money; but more than that I was acutely aware that the culture of my class background did not allow me to frequent a place like that even if, in reality, I could afford it and that added to the thrill when occasionally I would let myself go. The charm of Someplace Else had always been, and would always be, that of a place elsewhere where I could never be and where if I could be I would be(come) someone else! Like Hellen Keller I longed to transcend my reality.

Being (in place) and Becoming

I have always wondered about the lure of places where one has never been or never could be, except in imagination. What is it about these places we do not know that draws us so strongly in – places we read or hear about in stories, places we visit in our (day)dreams, or in postcards or photographs belonging to others, in movies, or in the histories of places of the past that no longer exist? I have come to believe that it is the unknown that so strongly attracts us to such little places.  We do not merely exist (be) in places, but we become in places. And in places we do not know, there’s an endless possibility of who we could become; this is the adventurism behind Romanticism, and Colonialism! And yet, who we could become in an unknown place is very much contingent upon the places we know well, the places we come from; places make us perhaps more than we realize! For one, more often than not, the lure of the distant, or the unknown, is bred of the ennui of the local, or the all-too-well-known, like most school-going kid will tell us.  And yet, alternative pedagogies tell us that this does not have to be the way it is; that, depending on our vantage point, the allure of the local could be inexhaustible.

Do Not Enter! Gated communities and control of places

In reality, however, despite our imagination and our memories, we all have to negotiate several gated communities in our lifetime – places we are not allowed to be at even when there’s no one stopping us from entering (like Someplace Else during my early adulthood or the someplace else that the little boy in the French lycée rather wanted to be at in his imagination). In many ways it is like Foucault’s ‘panopticon’ that shadows us like the Ghost in Hamlet, even when we are fully aware that ghosts do not exist; and it is this awareness (of non-existence of ghosts), heightened by our own defiance that makes gate-crashing so much fun , when we dare. It is on such occasions that one wonders if the addition of the accent-mark by the little boy in the French lycée was really a deliberate act of subversion.

Roi and I were talking in my car on our way to the Autoport on South Atherton last Friday. We had been to watch Penn State Men’s Ice Hockey team play Alabama Huntsville at home in the Philadelphia College Hockey Faceoff at the ice-skating rink, but the game sold out before all of us could get there. Naturally, we were a little dejected and decided to go straight to Autoport for a few drinks to cheer us up. In the car, I expressed surprise at how quickly the place (meaning, the stands) filled up and Roi said something like he never knew that this place (meaning, state college or Penn State) had so many hockey enthusiasts. And finally I asked Roi if he knew where was this place (Autoport) that we were going to.

I couldn’t help notice the different ways we used the word ‘place’ to mean and knowing that Roi has academic interests in places/spaces, I brought it up. Soon we were arguing (I think the polite word is ‘debating’) about the distinction(s) between a place and a space. I said space is abstract while a place is specific and meaningful (notice how space can sit without an article in this sentence, but place can never!). Roi said a place was geographically defined, while space was socio-culturally defined. Space is also a construct, he added. But so is a place, I argued back. “What makes a place A PLACE are the social, cultural, political, and personal investments of people inhabiting (or passing through) the place.” I said, after a minute’s thought, although, in all honesty, I have not the faintest idea what the heck’s that supposed to mean. We reached our destination before we could finish our conversation, but Roi left me with a question to which I could not think of a suitable reply at the moment. He reasoned that my car, in which we both were then seated, could reasonably be called a place even though at least Roi didn’t have much of an investment in it.

Creswell’s book, Place: An Introduction, supplied me with some answers to Roi’s last puzzling question, even as it raised for me some questions of it’s own. I’ll come to these questions in a minute, but first let me phrase how I think Creswell would have answered Roi’s last question. I think that Creswell would have argued that Roi and I had different ideas of place in mind in relation to my car; and that for me at least both ideas were somewhat ‘superimposed’ (for want of a better word). In the introductory chapter of his book, Cresswell provides several definitions of ‘place,’ one of which, the most straightforward and common of all definitions according to him, is that a place is a ‘meaningful location;’ and by corollary, Creswell defines space as “a realm without meaning” (p.10). By meaningful, Creswell means that which has been invested with some sort of meaning, and the easiest way of investing meaning to a place, according to Creswell, is through naming it like my friend Michelle has named her red Subaru Outback, Ruby. But there are other ways of investing a place with meaning, besides naming it and Creswell gives us some examples. One way of investing a place with meaning that Creswell also alludes to is by decorating or marking a place in some way such that it becomes a ‘personal space.’ I did not name my car (although at one point, inspired by Michelle, I did give it a thought), but I am, in other ways, invested in it – both financially and emotionally. My financial investment in the car is obvious: I bought it with cash money – money that I painstakingly saved for months out of my paltry graduate student salary, I invested more money in repairs and maintenance to keep it running; recently I winterized the car, I put some chemicals that I buy from Walmart for $3.56 a bottle in the gas tank every time I fill the tank to prevent the gas lines from freezing; one night I bought a little stuffed bear for $5.25 from Sheetz and put it on my dash, I got a pair of cheap plastic shades that I put on the little stuffed bear; I buy those little tree-shaped car-fresheners in bright colors and hang them from my rear-view mirror. But beside financial investment, I have also much emotional investments in the car and much of it is inseparable from the financial investments in the car. The fact that I saved money for the car from my salary of a little over $1000 a month, instead of leasing it or buying it on loan is perhaps my biggest emotional investment in the car; that I take good care of it is another. Even the fact that my car has a manual transmission, which reminds me of driving in India or that once I slept the night out in my car with heat on in the parking lot when I locked myself out of my apartment during winter causes me to feel an attachment to my car. It is in this sense – in the sense of being a meaningful location to me – that my car has become a ‘place’ for me. Roi, of course, didn’t have any such association with my car, and therefore, my car wasn’t a place for him in quite the same sense as it is for me.

In the introductory chapter of his book, Creswell provides us with two other “fundamental aspects of place,” besides location, that was first outlined by political geographer John Agnew – ‘locale’ and ‘sense of place.’ Creswell explains that ‘locale,’ according to Agnew, is “the material setting for social relations – the actual shape of place within which people conduct their lives as individual” (p.7). Although the ride to the Autoport was brief, lasting under ten minutes door to door, I believe that it was in this sense of a being ‘locale,’ though not located, that my car briefly became a place for my friend, Roi, as also for me.

Although Creswell’s book explained some of the questions that arose during my brief conversation with Roi, it certainly did not answer all my questions. For instance, if place = ‘meaningful location,’ how would we designate locations that do not have much meaning for us? For there certainly are places that don’t mean much to us – my car didn’t mean much to Roi, and although the company at the Autoport was wonderful I doubt the place itself meant much to any of us who were there that night. Yet, Autoport is definitely a place. Is it because it has a name (although we didn’t name it), and a particular shape and a geographic location? What is the relation between a place and a space, besides that of an antithetical corollary? What does it mean when we call a place ‘our space’ as in my personal space in the corner of the living room by the French window or my bedroom?

By the time I was promoted to 8th grade, I knew what I was going to do after I graduated high school – I was going to study in Jadavpur University, popularly known as JU (nowadays, current students pronounce it ‘joo’), where my mom was a professor, although at that time I was less than certain about my future field of study. At a time when all my buddies at school talked animatedly during recess about ‘what’ they wanted to become, I, as a high school science student somewhat inclined towards humanities, preferably English, for my future course of study, knew only ‘where’ I wanted to become whatever that was I was to become. My future course of study was limited only by the specializations offered by Jadavpur University. Imagine my disappointment, when my school leaving examination turned out to be nothing short of a disaster and I realized, to my horror, that I had too low a score to get into JU – my dream institution. I finally ended up studying Comparative Literature at JU because that was the only department back then that admitted students based on an entrance examination and not on their score in the school leaving examination, and because to a large extent I lucked out in the entrance examination for Comp. Lit.

Students often say that the university sort of gets ahold of you. So much so that if you have ‘properly’ experienced the place, it stays with you forever; and yet, it is not so much the ‘school spirit’ that entrapped you, but just the charm of the place and it’s host of unique, often bordering on insane (which, by the way, is a good thing in JU), people like the guy who I have heard so much about for having brought his pet snake to class, but never had the good fortune to meet; or the guy I knew who casually (and in a complete sober state) jumped off of a 3rd floor balcony, and broke a leg, just to win a race downstairs against a friend. I don’t know the origin of this belief, but there’s a story that goes around: long before my time as a student there, a visitor to the university asked of a Ph.D student the way out of the university. The student, nicknamed ‘kaka’ (uncle) by his peers and juniors, possibly because he, having already done his undergraduate and masters from the same university, was around for too long, jokingly replied that he came more than a decade ago and still hasn’t found the way out of this “damn place.” Today, as I plan to go back there to collect data for my own dissertation, I think I know exactly what he meant. Although I don’t know how exactly he meant it, whether sarcastically or romantically, yet I know that sentiment all too well and even a few years ago I held a very JU-centric view of college life. Back then, it seemed to me that JU was the absolute best place to be as a college-aged student anywhere in the world, but now I am not so sure. Over the years, the meaning of the place has changed for me and my attachment to and nostalgia for it has somewhat weakened, but, nevertheless, JU holds an important ‘place’ in my life history that I can’t ignore (the fact that I chose JU as my research site testifies to it) and this is a story of how that came to be what it is for me today, despite the weakening nostalgia and the advantage of hindsight. Career-wise, JU, being a premier elite institution that it is, opened quite a few doors for me, but in this narrative I choose to ignore that for the moment and focus, instead, on what the place meant to me as a young student growing up in Kolkata.

 For many of us former and present students of the university, JU Arts symbolized a world of possibilities – not as much in terms of career potentials as, I suspect, for exploring the meaning of youth. At least, that was how it was for me. I had entered this world some years before I was to become a citizen of this world. The concept of ‘bring-your-kid-to-work-day’ doesn’t quite exist in India, but as a gawky 7th grader I would often visit ‘my mom’s university’ that was soon to become ‘my university;’ and I would gawk away at the ‘cool’ university kids there on every visit.

If ‘the bridge,’ the canteens, and the ‘lobby’ were for socializing, the university also provided many places for enjoying a private moment after sun down; places like the unlit football ground; the jheel-paar, which was a lake on the far eastern fringe of the campus; a perch, known as the ‘mancha,’ halfway up a short wind-mill like structure used for God-knows-what next to the jheel (this was also torn down later); a ledge-like structure overlooking a small ditch behind the Philosophy building; behind the inner side of the walls around the Open Air Theatre that the students somehow snuck into past the locked gates; the back-stairway in the Arts building, and, for the less bashful, behind the bushes by the pond and along the side of the main road that ran through the university. 

Of these, the back-stairway in the Arts Building was particularly infamous. People say that many a new life was nearly conceived on the steps of that ‘stairway to heaven’ that it was to us, at least back then. To have had the experience of ‘sitting’ on the back-stairway was a rite of passage for most of us; to be a regular ‘sitter’ there was nothing short of being a S.T.U.D! Once you become a regular there, you entered a community of other regulars you would share the stairway with from the 2nd floor to the 4th floor; and although normally you would never talk to them or try to figure out who they were in the darkness on your way up or down the flights in trying to find a spot for yourself, the knowledge of their presence created a sense of a community similar to a secret society and people regularly got each other’s back whenever there was any danger of an approaching security personnel.

My story of JU would be incomplete without an account of student politics there and how it affected all students’ lives, whether they any of it or not. Of all things related to JU, good and bad, politics was probably the single issue that would have generated the most difference of opinion during my time as a student there, except that hardly anyone was ever willing to debate it rationally. Those of us who were into it back then couldn’t have cared any less about how our activities affected the general students, except when election time approached; and those others who would have nothing to do with campus politics steered clear of voicing their opinions. For every student invested in campus politics, there were three who couldn’t care any less for politics and the student unions, especially in the Arts Faculty.

              This situation somewhat changed, in my reckoning, shortly after I graduated with an M.A in the year 2005, when Forum for Arts Students (FAS), an independent, non-affiliated student organization, was formed in the Arts Faculty, and replaced SFI, the State Government backed student-wing of the Communist Party, at the union two years later.

JU has a long history of student activism and radicalism. It is a well-known fact that JU was a major hub of Naxalite activities during the Naxal uprising of the 1970s, but what most people don’t know (and I didn’t either, until I researched the history of the university for an unfinished project couple of years after my graduation) is that JU was born out of a political struggle against colonialism.

   In the year 1906, a year after Bengal was partitioned, as the Swadeshi movement intensified all over India, a few visionary students and teachers of the Calcutta University, which was established by the British in 1857, decided that in order to win complete Swaraj (self-rule) from the British, Indians needed to establish an indigenous higher education system. Towards that goal, those teachers and students, along with a fair number of peers and colleagues, deflected from the Calcutta University to form the Bengal Technical Institute at Jadavpur, then on the fringe of the city. It was this BTI, then a non-degree awarding institution, that was to later become the College of Engineering and Technology (CET), and finally Jadavpur University in 1956.

I think it is rather unfortunate that most students, even those that are politically active, don’t know of this history of their alma mater, and that the university’s students, teachers, and administration have lost sight of much of the educational ideals and aspirations that accompanied its inception. Nevertheless, JU remains one of the more politically charged institutions of higher education in the nation, and despite many criticisms of unionizing of students, I see potential in it. Although, I must say that with the advantage of hindsight, I now feel that much of the movements we participated in as students were at worst an extravagant and needless display of power, and at best, an annual activity of sorts to close the year with after the exams, fests, and elections were done. And yet, looking back on how invested in it we were back then and just how much campus politics meant to all of us; how much it brought us all closer to each other; how much it was, and still is, a part of the campus culture and who we were then, and who we are now, I cannot bring myself to forget it as many have, after graduating.

In the book, Poetic Possibilities: Using Poetry to Enhsnce Literacy Learning, editors Susan E. Israel and Michelle M. Israel have collected several poems published over the last thirty years in the International Reading Association journal, The Reading Teacher. The poems, written by reading specialists, teachers, researchers, administrators and graduate students, "all involve literacy concepts and are intended for teachers or others who want to use poetry to encourage, motivate, and inspire elementary, middle school, and high school students to read and write." (Preface, p. ix)

The book is organized in five sections titled, 'Discovering the value of reading,' 'Making connections to support developing readers,' 'Motivating future authors,' 'Honoring the special voices within,' and 'Inspiring exemplary reading teachers.' the poems included in the volume tell us about why reading is important, how it feels to be able to read and write, the challenges in the path of becoming literate and ways to overcome them, and the importance of creativity. The last section of the book, 'Inspiring exemplary reading teachers,' contains poems specifically meant to aid teachers to reflect on their teaching practice. In the words of the editors, the poems in this section "can help teachers reflect on reading, the practice of teaching reading, and how children go about the learning process. Many of the poems provide the reader with a message about what is the best way to help children learn and be successful at reading." (p. xi) Each section begins with a vignette and a quote about personal reading experiences or thoughts on the importance of reading, and also contains suggested reading lists and a special section called 'poetry reflections' that contains several questions or "thinking prompts" (p.xii). Each poem in each section is also followed by a set of 'poetry prompts to ponder' and a section on the 'literacy application' for the poem that attempts to fulfill the primary goal of the book - to "help the reader gain a deeper appreciation for how poetry can be integrated in the classroom...to help enhance the value of reading and writing..." (pp.xii - xiii).

The poems collected in the volume are as varied (in their views, structures, styles, length etc) as their authors are (grade school students, graduate students, grade school teachers, university professors, teacher educators, literacy researchers, reading experts, psychologists, etc), but a general perception of literacy that seems to weave the poems together in the volume and across sections, and indirectly points at the authors' ideological position (as also those of the editors of the volume), is what New Literacy Studies scholar Brian Street has termed the 'autonomous model' of literacy (Street, 1993; 1995). That is, literacy is perceived to be a technical skill with intrinsic values and it is believed that people can vastly improve their social and economic situation simply by becoming literate. For example, a poem by Ellen Barrett, titled 'The Gift,' in the fifth and final section of the book, 'Inspiring exemplary reading teacher,' reads as follows:

What a precious gift

So many of us have

To pick up the paper

To know, to understand

What is happening in the world,

What the weather will be.

Can you imagine

If we couldn't read?

We take for granted

The skill we have learned

And don't stop to think about

Our lives without words.

Others struggle daily

To try and comprehend

The little message on the store window:

Sorry, we're closed. Please come again. (p. 116)

While the newspaper is a popular source of worldly information, it is by no means the only source. Even within a highly literate culture like that of the United States of America, the television provides a popular, and maybe even a more convenient, alternative. It is indeed condescending to imagine that a person without the knowledge of literacy is ignorant of the larger world or cannot figure out when a shop is closed. Several studies have shown that for all general purposes, a person without the knowledge of reading and writing wouldn't have any more problems going about his/her daily existence than those of us with this knowledge (c.f. Street, 1995). Nor does literacy automatically translate into success, but this is exactly the kind of idea that the poem seems to be suggesting. The poem concludes with the following words:

So, what can we do

To help them read?

Give them the skills

So they will succeed. (p.116)

Another poem ('Learning to Read' by Molly Drew), which although arguably could be metaphorically interpreted differently, tells us about how a contemporary little child learns to read in school, comparing it to the arduous process by which his/her mother became literate, and ends on a note that how much the child would have missed in life had s/he not become literate. It is also interesting to note that the author feels that communication through "printed word" is a basic human need:

My future success, I do not know; but I can tell you this:

Without the ability to read, so much of life I'd miss

Communicating through the printed word fulfills a basic need.

And unlike mother, I can say, I really love to read! (p. 47)

Yet another poem in the section titled 'Discovering the value of reading' tells us about the things we could achieve in life by learning to read. This poem by Karen Finfrock, titled 'Reading Rap,' is written in the form of a Rap, with the refrain - "R-E-A-D-I-N-G tell you what it means to me (2)" inserted between verses. The first two verses of the poem is quoted below:

Verse 1— When you read a book it'll help you learn.

And when you grow up it'll help you earn.

You could learn so many things as you grow

And the more you read the more you know

Refrain

Verse 2— Reading can open up doors for you.

There are so many things that you can do.

Be a doctor be a teacher be a rapstar too.

Keep on reading and your dreams can come true. (p. 21)

This poem directly equates literacy proficiency with economic success ("And when you grow up it'll help you earn," "Reading can open up door for you," "Keep on reading and your dreams can come true"), as if only learning to read will do all that for one and nothing else like availability of jobs, a stable economy, etc are required. In the 'poetry prompts to ponder' immediately following the poem, the authors suggest that the teacher, having read the poem, reflects on "how reading can help you be successful in life" and shares her thoughts with the students (p. 22).

Proponents of the 'autonomous model' of literacy like Jack Goody and Ian Watt also espouse the idea that historicity is fundamentally related to literacy. Comparing preliterate societies with literate societies, Goody & Watt (1963) argue that one of the fundamental differences in the worldview brought about by literacy is a heightened sense of 'history,' as we know it today. With the advent of literacy, and later the invention of the printing press, as written words were increasingly employed not only to communicate, but to keep a record of human thought, action, speech and transaction, a sense of 'history' developed that is elementarily different from the vague historicity of the myths and legends of the preliterate societies. On the other hand, Brian Street (1993; 1995) challenged this view as only being integral to a particular view of history bounded by units of time — that of the western, literate world. In his view, there is nothing inherently historical about writing and that people labelled as 'preliterate' by some scholars of literacy have their own ways of recording and making sense of history. The poem, 'Oral Tradition Bound in Books' by Marta Frias Morales, included in the fourth section of the book — 'Honoring the special voices within', reflects this view of writing as a tool for recording and preservation of history. It also reflects this idea of contemporary documented (written) history being different from the mythical/mythological history of our (presumably) illiterate ancestors.

Our parents and grandparents have

transmitted unto us the gift of

oral tradition and narrative history.

We cherish and value their

collective memory. Their story

is linked to our development.

Let us pay authentic tribute to our

abuelitos and abuelitas our

bisabuelos and bisabuelas.

Take time to preserve their oral

histories.

Take time to preserve "La Llorona"

stories.

Take time to preserve their wisdom.

Let us record their thoughts,

their dreams, and aspirations

with a stroke of a brush on a

canvas

or the flow of a pen on paper.

Write their words before

the winds drift them away.

Write their words before

the rains wash them into the earth.

If we transcribe their oral histories

into books,

our children and grandchildren will

have

the collective memory of their

ancestors

If we preserve the history of our

ancianos ... (p. 92; original emphasis)

It is interesting to note that the poet feels the only way to preserve and pass on the ancient wisdom of our ancestors today is by transcribing them into books ("If we transcribe their oral histories into books, our children and grandchildren will have the collective memory of their ancestors"). It is probably worth noting that even today in largely literate societies like India and some other parts of the world, traditional wisdom is primarily transmitted orally. It is also worth noting that the poet seems to make some sort of a distinction between 'history' and 'narrative/oral history' in the poem. In the last stanza of the poem, the poet writes:

After we have carefully recorded

our history [emphasis mine] and bound our books

let us shelve them in the house of

books.

Hence, there the collective memory

of our

heritage will be preserved, and we

will truly

cherish and forever honor our

grandparents and great grandparents. (p. 92)

Another important point noted by some New Literacy Studies scholars, including Brian Street (1995), is that 'reading' in the western sense of the word usually implies the practice of silent, independentl reading; but reading does not have to be (and indeed in many parts of the world is not considered to be) either silent or independent. A poem in the last section of the volume, cleverly titled 'To USSR (Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading)' by Mike Angelotti, likens silent independent reading to "sacred trust" between comrades:

Violating the sacred trust

A student made a noise—

Messing up the brains

Of his comrades (p. 121)

The authors of the volume, however, pointed out in the 'Literacy Application' section following the poem that since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, silent, independent reading in schools is discouraged in favor of more collaborative and discussion centered readings by the students.

Finally, one poem in the volume — 'Soliloquies' by Miriam J. Dale-Kallas — deserve particular attention. This poem, divided in three section (each section representing the voice of a different child who is learning to read), narrates the tales of three first graders who are learning to read. The tales capture the children's success, their frustrations and provide a bit of their background stories that is assumed to affect their literacy learning outcomes:

I

I'm a first grader

I'm learning to read

I ain't hardly seen no books before

My home ain't a happy one

My Mom drinks sometimes

My Dad come

Once in awhile

I have an older brother, who is

spastic

I get enough food

Usually

With a free lunch at school

Welfare at home

I was in Head-Start once

That's where I seen some books

After school

Me and my brother

Watch TV

SEASAME STREET

ELECTRIC COMPANY

I can't remember words in a book

I try hard

But I can't

My teacher tries to help me

She uses a machine

To put pictures…words on a screen

She put ear-phones on my head

So I can hear stories 'read'

Once my teacher read a story

About a boy

Who rode a pony

In green fields

I ain't seen a real pony

I ain't seen green fields

I live in a city

In a big building

With lots of apartments

Where rats bite sometimes

I'm absent a lot from school

I have colds

Our apartment ain't too warm

My shirt's dirty most of the time

My pants too

My Mom washes

When she feels like it

Which ain't too often

Learning to read

It's hard for me

But I'll try good!

Maybe I'll learn a word or two

PLEASE HELP ME!

II

I'm a first grader

I'm learning to read

Well, I don't know about that

My Mom says

I started to read

A long time ago

When I was one, two, three, four

I played with books

Along with puzzles, blocks

Crayons, tops

I played with books

Along with squashing clay

Picking dandelions,

Tasting birthday cake,

Buying milk, bread, at the

super-market

Touching a red—

red fire-engine

at a red fire-station

I smelled books

Tasted books

Piled books high

'Read'…'Sang' from books

In my 'own' way

Skinny…fat…books

Big…little…books

I sat on Mom and Dad's laps

As they read stories…poems to me

I learned 'look,' 'come,' 'go,' 'baby,'

'see'

Easily

Sometimes

Mom, Dad, and I

Sang

"Hickory, Dickory, Dock"

"Old King Cole"

While my Dad played the guitar.

I don't understand

Why some of my friends at school

Don't like books

Don't like to read

I DO!

III

I'm a first grader

I'm learning to read

I ain't hardly got no

Books at home

I watch TV

I live in the country

But not on a farm

My home is a shack

We have a pump outside

Where the water is at

I don't hardly go no-where

We have an old car

Mostly don't run

I ride the bus to school

Mostly…the bus goes

Without me

I have to get up by myself

And get ready

My Mom sleeps

And don't care

If I get there

I have six brothers

One sister

I've had a series of 'Dads'

We get welfare

Free lunches at school

Hand-me-down pants

When it comes to reading

I ain't much good

No one cares

If I learn or not

Sometimes

I think my teacher cares

My Mom is always scolding me

For not remembering things

She says I'm stupid

Some of my older brothers

Are drop-outs

Probably I'll be a drop-out too

I get to think though

Maybe I'm not so stupid

Maybe I can remember words

Someone—

PLEASE HELP ME! (pp. 94-95)

The poem uses three different voices to represent three first graders learning to read —two of the soliloquies use AAVE (African American Vernacular English), while the third voice is in Standard American English. While some of the characteristics of AAVE like double negatives and the use of 'ain't as a negative indicator (those that are used in the poem) are sometimes used in colloquial American English too, yet the presence of the third voice that employs a Standard American English dialect leads one to believe that the voices using AAVE dialect here are representative of African-American kids. If we agree on the point that the voices in AAVE dialect are deliberately chosen to represent black kids, then one can't help but find a host of issues with the poem and the way it represents African American kids, their families and their literacy learning processes in school and out of school.

For instance, it won't be missed that both African American kids, in contrast to the (presumably white) kid who is represented as speaking in SAE, are struggling literacy learners, are poor, are from disfunctional families, are on welfare, and are in need of help. In contrast, the third kid is shown to come from a happy family with parents who are both caring, literate and reasonably well to do financially (at least they don't live in a "shack" or in apartment buildings where "rats bite sometimes" and the heat doesn't work), and the kid, being surrounded by books at all times and participating in a host of literate activities at home, has no problem reading or writing. While scholars like Perry Nodelman & Mavis Reimar (2002) and Donna Norton & Sandra Norton (2011), along with a host of other scholars (Glazer, 1997; Temple et al, 2011a; Temple et al, 2011b), have shown that having unrestricted access to books from an young age, or being read to, has positive influences on children's literacy learning, there is no correlation between ethnicity and literate activities, just as there is no correlation between ethnicity and social delinquency or financial standing. There are probably just as many white kids who come from broken families, whose parents drink, remarry, are poor, doesn't sing or read to their children or are, otherwise, negligent towards their children's growth and development. There may also be just as many white kids who are rich, ride to school in Mercs or BMWs, might have a library at home, but still prefer watching TV all day to reading. On the other hand, there are plenty African American parents who are happily married, have one or two kids, are literate and financially stable, who care for their children, read to them or take them for picnics. Again the poorest of parents of any ethnicity, at least in the United States, shop for milk and bread, and might take their children along sometimes. Literacy development is dependent on a host of socio-economic factors (Brandt, 2001), including, but not limited to, family environment and acess to books. The school environment also plays an extremely important role in children's literacy development, and it is interesting to note in this light that the little literacy support that the African American kids are shown to be receiving in this poem is at school and from the caring and kindly teachers, whereas the white kid's literacy development is shown to take place entirely at home with parental support. It is also important to note that both African American kids' accounts end with a plea for help ("PLEASE HELP ME!"), while the other kid's account ends in a confident "I DO". All kids need help and support with literacy learning, and black kids need no more help than white kids do. The image of African American kids, and their families, portrayed in this poem is, therefore, extremely skewed and stereotypical; and they don't have any real basis. What is perhaps more disturbing is that the African American kids are portrayed as saying all these things themselves about them and their families. The poet's biases are disguised as the kids' own voice.

The biases of the poem is not limited to race, but extends to gender as well. In both accounts of the two black kids in the poem, responsibility for the children's neglect is implicitly placed on their mothers ("My Mom drinks sometimes," "My Mom washes/When she feels like it/Which ain't often," "I have to get up by myself/And get ready/My Mom sleeps/and don't care/If I get there," "My Mom is always scolding me"), thereby conversely implying that child rearing is primarily a woman's responsibility.

These apart, the volume would be extremely helpful to teachers, particularly beginning teachers, who are looking to integrate literature, specifically poetry, with literacy instruction in the classroom. The book contains a variety of poems of different shapes (literally), sizes and forms from acrostics ABC poems to circular poems, from RAP to poems that make use of visuals and illustrations, and the poems cover a variety of topics from the joys of reading, importance of literacy, challenges to writing and how to overcome them to poems on how to teach reading and writing in the classroom through storytelling, read alouds, and poetry. The poems in the volume also represent a variety of literacy learners from African American children to ESL learners, from learners who have dyslexia to those who are blind, from timid first time readers to proficient child writers. Some of the poems provide practical tips like how to tackle writer's block, while some warn against common mistakes like not writing down an idea the moment it strikes. And almost all the poems encourage readers and writers to keep trying, and not be discouraged by failures. The 'Poetry Prompts to Ponder' and the 'Literacy Application' sections after each poem provide valuable and practical suggestions to teachers on using the poems for literacy instruction in the classroom; the 'Poetry Prompts' especially make for great group discussion starters, and the vignettes in the beginning of each section reminisce the many joys, challenges and frustrations of successful literacy learners, including the editors of the volume.

Reference

Brandt, D. (2001). Literacy in American lives. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Glazer, J. I. (1997). Introduction to children's literature. New Jersy: Merrill.

Goody, J and Watt, I. (1963). The consequences of literacy. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5(3), 304-345.

Nodelman, P., and Reimer, M. (2002). Pleasures of children's literature. Allyn & Bacon.

Norton, D.E., & Norton, S.E. (2011). Through the eyes of a child: An introduction to children's literature. Boston, MA: Pearson.

Scrubber, S., & Cole, M. (1981). The psychology of literacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Street, B. (Ed.) (1993). Cross-cultural approaches to literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Street, B. (1995). Social literacies: Critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography and education. London and New York: Longman.

Temple, C., Martinez, M., & Yokota, J. (2011). Children's books children's hands: Anintroduction to their literature. Boston, MA: Pearson.

As I sat this evening updating the Maps app on Facebook with all the different places I have lived in and travelled to – in India, US and Mexico, I realized that while some of these places have remained vivid in my memory over the years, others (some of them as recent as within the last two years) have faded away to being just a name on the map in my mind. Why does this happen? Why do some places stay longer with us than others? Why do some places pull you so strongly, making you want to go back again and again, while others – perhaps, those you actually visit frequently whether for work or pleasure – never quite resonate with you as strongly? Is it distance (in a temporal sense, not geographical) that makes the heart grow fonder? I pondered these questions as I read excerpts from Willson & Harris’ book, Why We Are Here?

One possible argument could be that places that are memorable stay longer with us. While this is largely true, it also raises some further questions. What makes a place memorable to us? Why are some places memorable, while others are not? And just how memorable a place needs to be to make one want to go back, to instill a sense of belonging? In my limited travels, one of the most memorable places that I have ever been to was Oaxaca, Mexico in the winter of 2011-12. Oaxaca, like Willson’s Mobile is a place with a soul, and like Mobile it was “small enough to be encompassed intellectually and old enough to have experienced a full epic cycle of tragedy and rebirth” (Pp. ix-x). I want to go back to Oaxaca to explore the place and its culture further, and for the sake of the truly wonderful people I had the extreme good fortune of making acquaintance of in my little over a month there, yet Oaxaca does not pull me towards her with as much compulsion as, say, a much less memorable place like Berhampore (Baharampur) or Durgapur in suburban West Bengal. Admittedly, I have lived in each of these two last mentioned places considerably longer (around a year in each) than I have lived in Oaxaca, and therefore it is justifiable that I would have stronger ties to places I have lived longer in. And even if that is true, I don’t think it is all that is to it. For instance, I have lived three consecutive years in State College now and even though I love living in central Pennsylvania, mostly for its natural beauty and the quiet way of life her, I doubt I would miss living here much once I am gone. On the other hand, I have been to Princeton, NJ only once to meet a friend who goes there (not counting this one time I had to go up to Princeton Junction to avail my ride back to State College), and ever since I wanted to go back and have even dreamed (several times) in my waking-dreams of obtaining a Post Doc position at Princeton University – not for the sake of being part of an Ivy League school, but for the sake of living there. The pull of Princeton for me is much stronger than Oaxaca, even though in terms of culture, life-style or scenic beauty, Oaxaca is way more spectacular than quaint Princeton. Even more surprising is the pull of places one has never been to. One such place for me is Edison, NJ. I have never had any reason to set foot in Edison, and perhaps I never will. The extent of Edison that I have ‘seen’ has been through a train window aboard the NJ Transit on my way to New Brunswick, where a friend lived until recently and whom I used to visit frequently. And yet, the strangely familiar (almost like a déjà vu) sight of cramped tenements with walls marked (some would say, ‘defaced’) with colorful graffiti and dilapidated garage-cum-dump-yards along the rail tracks and the dust-covered broken cars sitting in there, shrouded in desolation strongly pulled at my heart each time I made that passage, so much so that I always made it a point to sit next to a window on the side of the train that had the view coming and going.

What was it that places as far apart as Edison, Berhampore, and Durgapur had that Oaxaca, New York, and even State College, where I currently reside lack? I don’t know for sure, but I have a strong sense that it is memories, stories – memorable memories, not memorable places makes one feel like one belongs. I have some pretty wonderful memories of Berhampore and Durgapur – memories that I cherish and forever will, and Edison, although I have never been there, brings back treasurable memories of places, of many adventures and misadventures, no less memorable for it, and of my living and growing in those places that looked similar. Wilson is right when he says, “a place exists in the mind and heart as much as in its physical location. Its written history, if it is to be completely true, must be part recorded fact, part memory, and part metaphor” (p.93). It seems to me that we don’t miss a place per se, as much as we miss being who we used to be in that place – we miss, what Wilson calls, “was my territory” (p.97). That is my theory, and it is true for me at least.

As I read Keizer’s book, No Place But Here, I saw me and my students (both Americans and Indians) in it; I was touched, inspired, brought to tears but at the same time I also wondered in what ways is this a book about a place other than the occasional place related references Keizer provides? Keizer is a powerful writer and the place he teaches in comes alive in his writing. As we read on, we come to appreciate the challenges faced by Keizer’s students and those by Keizer’s as their English teacher, moreover as a teacher who cares teaching within a system that largely doesn’t care a hoot, and we come to appreciate what it means to teach and to teach in a rural place like the Northeast Kingdom in particular. 

The closest I have ever been to Vermont was when I drove through New Hampshire on our way to Maine last December; I have no idea the kind of place Northeast Kingdom is but I can make a somewhat informed guess after reading this book. Similarly, I have a slightly better idea now of what it means to teach in a place like this; I have a slightly better idea of where the students mentioned in this book come from now that I have a slightly better idea of the place they call home – the understanding of the people come from an understanding of the place; the place is in the people just as the people make the place. 

But people, or maybe I should say too many people – mostly strangers – could also take much away from a place; too many unknown people (of which there’s got to be many when there are too many people) make place too big, and abstract, for the mind to grasp – the place loses its place-ness. 

Few months ago, I had an argument with my new roommate who had just returned from his first trip to the Big Apple full of the place about how I find New York too impersonal and devoid of any character for my taste. He seemed surprised which is not surprising given that he is well aware of my penchant for people watching and New York seemed to him the heaven for someone who likes nothing better than to sit by a window with a coffee or beer in hand and watch people on the street; and it is. There have been times when I made a day trip to the Big Apple just so that I can lose myself in its crowded streets. But New York had never been a place for me; just a name. Call it Chicago, and I wouldn’t probably even notice the difference.

I come from a big city too – almost as big as New York City, only bigger and more crowded. I loved watching people hurry by me on the streets of Kolkata too. There are places within Kolkata, my stamping ground – neighborhoods I grew up in, streets I got into fights in, alleys I took on my way to school and different alleys I took on my way back, dead-end roads where I had given away my heart and seen it crushed numerous times, tea-shops where I have spent hours and years with my friends talking about girls and debating about Marx while sipping hot tea, the place where as a teenager I used to crouch behind a garage huddled together with my mates smoking cigarettes and an occasional joint out of eyesight of any passer by. All these places in the city I grew up in have stayed with me but Kolkata as a whole, just like New York, was never quite a place for me; it was too big and abstract and too full of strange faces. A place doesn’t quite become a place for you, no matter how long you live there, until you have walked its length and breadth and have something to share – a story or an anecdote, if you will – for it’s every nook and corner; a place isn’t a place for you until, as Wallace Stegner reminds us, “a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it – have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation… No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments” (From The Sense of Place by Wallace Stegner. Copyright 1992 by Wallace Stegner).

Personally speaking, it is just hard to have that sense of a place in a gigantic metropolis with thousands of strange faces swarming around you every moment of the day, and night. That is why the Big Apple had never been a place for me although I have been there more number of times than I could remember, by the day and by the night, sometimes just to watch people walk down the Broadway and lounge at the Times Square, the ‘Crossroad of the World.’ But I have never belonged there – you don’t watch people, unless you are watching them for some particular reason or they are strangers who’ve just strolled into your area, in a place where you belong together. On the opposite end of the spectrum, it could be said that you don’t belong where there is a crowd of strange faces all around you all the time, that is, we don’t belong in ‘crowds.’ That is the reason why, when a long day draws to a close, you ache to retreat to some familiar place – a hangout pub or café, or just a couch by the TV in your living room – with some familiar faces in order to try and create a sense of place, and a sense of belongingness to that place, in an attempt to become a ‘placed person,’ to quote Wendell Berry, as opposed to a ‘displaced person’ that most of us, big-city dwellers are for the most part of our days for the most part of our lives.  This is the reason, or, at least, one of the reasons why, I feel, people flock to their addas in the street-corners of Kolkata and in the Coffee Houses and pubs – to find themselves in relation to the place(s) they inhabit, while another large number go to discotheques to lose themselves, also in relation to place, in a crowd of anonymity, gyrating to thumping music.

But could one ever belong to a big city like New York or Kolkata? Perhaps. Perhaps if one has lived there long enough, has watched the city grow spatially as s/he grew old; perhaps if one has “been born in it … [has] grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it,” but no sooner than that. My mother who was born and grew up in the same city as I have and who lived there twice longer than I have been alive and still lives there feels the city like a place she had known, although lately she has been complaining that she can’t keep up with the growth of the city any longer – her once familiar place has started to out-grow her and is gradually becoming less and less familiar. And as for me, I bailed out long before I even started to discover our City of Joy. Till the time I decide to go back and pick up the threads of an old, but incomplete acquaintance with the place, Kolkata will remain in my memory as an unfinished collage of places and people I have once known and places and possibilities I am yet to discover. Who knows if that will ever happen?