February 25, 1998

Book reports, a research paper for Mr. Blight’s American history class, five paragraph essays for Mrs. Manley’s English…the writing I did in high school I remember as drab, uninspiring. In one paper, when I wrote something like "I think what the writer means is…," the paper came back from the thin, bird-like teacher with the blood-red marginal comment, "I don’t care what you think; what does the author think?" Being a half-way decent student, I learned this lesson: keep your mouth shut. Don’t get involved. Keep your distance because your ideas don’t matter.

The reading I did, on the other hand, stands out as vibrant and alive. I read for me. I read because people respected a kid’s space when he or she held a book or a magazine. Sons and Lovers, Tropic of Capricorn, Oyez, Oyez, Oyez, a book about the history of the Supreme Court I bought when someone said I’d make a good lawyer. I read motorcycle magazines, Mad and Rolling Stone, and all the reading that I did—trashy or sublime, informative or just entertaining—had something that my school writing did not. It was somehow more real, more alive and full of purpose. The writing, on the other hand, was really restrained and bleak. The boxes that school and teacher built were strong and tight, with no windows or doors, leaving little room for experimenting, expressing my own feelings or concerns, for using writing as a way of thinking or really communicating.

I think that this retarded whatever progress I could have made as a writer then, held me back. I always liked writing, though. I kept a journal, wrote letters and poetry, and harbored unspoken ambition to become a writer some day, but school writing was a different thing altogether: Dry, lifeless, without purpose, it seemed punishing, mean, deliberately separate from what most people would call self-expression. Later in her essay, Atwood says, "I’ve implied that the writer functions in his or her society as a kind of soothsayer, a truth teller; that writing is not mere self-expression but a view of society and the world at large…." (24) But in eliminating the role of self-expression in school writing, I think my teachers effectively eliminated any possibility of truth for me. Who ever saw truth worth much of anything in a five paragraph essay?

Barbara Christian’s "Black Feminist Process: In the Midst of…," might illustrate the way that expressive, personal writing and more formal goals like enlightening or convincing come together. She writes about the concerns and contexts that a professional critic like herself works with, a formal and philosophic topic, but the essay opens with a description of the author at work, reading. Her daughter, ten years old, comes in asks her to play. "You’re not teaching…you’re just reading a story," she says. (143) Christian writes her life onto the page in order to tell the story of literary criticism, or herself as a critic. She reconnects later to this earlier scene when she says to her daughter, "Reading is itself an involved activity. It’s a response to some person’s thoughts, and language, even possibly to their heart." (145) Notice how the formal grows out of the personal? Even her comment, a response to a writer’s heart, implies the personal, I think.

Writing is the same: the personal engagement, writing the self, is what drives it and gives it purpose for the writer. I said in one class yesterday that even writing a stock analysis can involve this personal engagement, but then thought (but didn’t say) that that’s probably not true. But this morning I realized that how analysts frame reports, the stocks they select, and what they choose to consider (from just profit and loss to ecological impact) can involve personal, subjective concerns. Even a grocery list can be political, I think, and creative.

Maybe the best example of the essays we have read is Renato Rosaldo’s "Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage." Rosaldo, an anthropologist who writes about issues of cultural interpretation, writes about the Ilongot of the Philippines, who work out their grief by cutting off peoples’ heads: "The act of severing and tossing away the victim’s head enables him, he says, to vent and, he hopes, throw away the anger of bereavement." (439) In the longish essay, he examines the culture the headhunters live in quite formal tones, as we see here: "Rather than speaking of death in general, one must consider the subject’s position within a field of social relations in order to grasp one’s emotional experience." (441) And,

So the personal is what touches, even in very formal writing. The personal is what gives us reason to write, and even in the most formal writing it can play a role—behind the words is a writer who lives as we live, who thinks, but also feels, who loves and hates, who is fair and who tells lies. In my high school classes, they were really teaching me to not be a writer, but something else, something more mechanical and unalive. No wonder students learn to hate writing! We can only hope that some day the boxes they build around us in schools will more doors and windows, eventually disappearing altogether.

Sources

Atwood, Margaret. "A End to Audience?" In Brunk, et al., 25-37.

Rosaldo, Renato. "Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage." In Brunk, et al., 439-457.