All About Me
A wonderful and somewhat unnerving thing for me about serving my Fulbright award is that it is "all about me." I can never assume to make any kind of contribution to an entire nation's university teaching system nor curriculum. I will teach the way I teach and others may or may not watch, ask questions, evaluate their own teaching. I will take part in conversations about curriculum if they occur, but my ideas and experiences may or may not be tenable here, meet the needs of faculty and students in this system without libraries, reliable internet, or effective international mail; from which only the rich travel; which operates meaningfully and effectively through a world view I can only describe as non-western. Instead, my Fulbright is teaching me about me. I was raised to understand that it is never about me. Don't get me wrong; I was not devalued or ignored. The important lessons for all my siblings, my brother included, were to leave every place better than we found it; to be aware of others; to learn others' ideas; to live a life of service. Because I am female, I also learned from my society that women were to be behind the scenes, facilitating the lives of their partners and children, working jobs - many meaningful, yes - but outside public view. The domestic sphere was mine and I could craft it as I wished. The smarter and more beautiful I was, the better for my family. And I must always have a family. Women for whom it was "all about me" were a little suspect both in my world and in my family. (But to give my family credit, men who were "all about me" were suspect, too.). Now I find myself serving an award meant to foster cultural exchange, personal and institutional diplomacy, and peace to learn that it is, actually, all about me. But, just maybe, that was the lesson all along and I missed it. I strive in my classroom in the States and in CI to make the readings and thinking "relevant." For me, "relevant" really means my students come to understand how words, usually old words and most often American words, matter in their individual and communal lives. What are these words saying to them? What are these words calling them to understand or ask of themselves and the world? Hmmm..."all about me"... It has been my great privilege here to get to know the poet Sarah Vap. Anyone who has ever had one conversation with Sarah will ardently insist that there is nothing, absolutely nothing about Sarah that even whispers "all about me." Sarah is the most genuine, engaged listener I have had the privilege to talk with maybe ever. Yet she told me recently how her current scholarship began ten years ago through a very personal experience - not interaction with any of the many needs of the world, as one might imagine for an intellectually adept, liberal, contemporary poet. Ten years of writing and thinking exploring other cultures' understandings and representations of "spaces of generativity" was fueled by a personal moment. "All about me"? Well, Sarah is a poet and poetry's gift, it seems to me, is making the personal both public and another person's personal, allowing readers to say, "Ah, yes! Me, too. Wait - how did you know that carefully buried secret I hold?" Sarah's poetry and her analytical work and poetics remind me that we must begin with "all about me" to move through and outside ourselves, for that is all we have. If we have only ignored and denied the self, we have no way to recognize or accept the gift of others, to see through the need to hope. Hmmm..."all about me"... At this moment, in the fifth month of my ten-month assignment, I understand the "all about me" to demand I risk using my voice in new ways. I, too, came to my scholarship - my lived and eternal questioning - through the personal, not one decisive personal experience but through the personal daily. To this point in my intellectual work, I have thought about, questioned, and written about race in America always with the introduction - voiced or not - of apology: "I am a white woman and I cannot really know but..." I think it is time for me own my personal; I think my new and growing understanding of owning the personal just might enable the service I have been taught to value. Here goes. I am a white woman who has always been most effected by the writings of black women. Though they write a story I cannot write, they do write my story. I have lived my entire life in the American South, ensconced in the privileges of white skin and middle-class economics. I lived separate from blackness - no black-skinned folk in my church, my neighborhood, or my home. But I was always aware of race, watching and wondering what my role could possibly be, receiving clearly voiced instruction from my family that my role was NOT superiority. Still, no one seemed to know what our role was. I learned in my childhood that the law of the land and the attitudes of its people were unfair, immoral, ignorant, and unkind in regards to race at the same time that I suffered personally none of those indignities. I was emphatically taught to stay silent about race and my world was orchestrated to keep me distanced from it. Both blacks and whites told me it was not my fight. Privileged whites allowed that we should help "those people" all while clinging to a sense of superiority and difference. Maligned blacks told me that I could not possibly, ever understand. Yet what I have always known is that black women are my people. Black men are my people. We are not separated by any real hierarchy. My experiences are most definitely white and in many ways vastly different from experiences unique to blackness. I would never claim otherwise. But my white experiences are intimately linked to the experiences of those living in black skin and there is a very particular kind of knowing that I do have. "Race history" is my history; America has made it so. Every interaction between a white-skinned person and a black-skinned person is my story; it marks and teaches me. I can never tell a black woman's story; but my white woman's story is not devoid of race; it is not "separate but equal" or separate but superior. My white woman's story in America is not separate from black women and men's stories in America. Perhaps my subjugation through gender binds us; perhaps my sense of estrangement from capitalism binds us; perhaps motherhood is what crosses all falsely constructed boundaries. I don't yet know and I might never know the how and the why of it all. What I do know is that my personal, very white woman's story is inextricably bound to race and I now live in West Africa to better understand this binding. Hmmm..."all about me"...There may be service in this story no one really wants to hear. If white-skinned police officers saw black-skinned boys as bound to their own stories, would they shoot them so quickly? If those with the greatest privilege - racial, gendered, economic - saw their stories as intricately bound to those with little or no privilege, would they enact systemic change? The only story any of us have is our own. Mine is racial. "Blanche, Blanche!" These words call me out to be just that: a white woman in a black and brown world where race matters. So be it.
