Bill Ayers

1. What words of advice would you give a teacher who is struggling to incorporate reflective writing practices into his or her pedagogy?

Recognize that aesthetics is at the heart of teaching—strive for beauty and something pleasing and lovely in your work—and remember that the opposite of aesthetic is anesthetic. Anesthetics put us to sleep, but an educated person is always striving to open her eyes, to pay attention, to see more clearly from wider and different angles of regard. Wake up! Get moving! Nourish the imaginative and the weird and the queer! This is a call to ourselves no less than to our students. Art often hurts, is unruly and refuses to be domesticated, but art also urges voyages.

2.  How would you direct your class to learn the fundamentals of writing while helping them better connect to the culture they live in?

Everyone has to “learn the fundamentals” in light of something, or while engaged in something, so why not in larger concentric circles of culture, society, experience, personal observation, politics? Classrooms should always ask in one way or another: What’s your story? How is it like or unlike the stories of other people here and elsewhere? How did you get here? Where are you headed? What are your choices?

Here are a couple I use a lot to get the juices flowing: What’s the story of your birth? How do you know? How’d you get your first name? What are three nicknames you might consider for yourself? Have you ever been wrongly accused? What are three things you MUST do before you die?

So begin class: Write for 10 minutes and finish this thought: “People always ask me…” After 10 minutes, ask them to read aloud. Your mind will be blown. Then collect the papers and give a second prompt: I can’t believe I did it, but I guess I did…While they work on the second, go from person to person, teaching the fundamentals: spelling, grammar, usage. I also like homework assignments that are simple lists: everything you saw in the last 24 hours that was red; a collection of things observed on the sidewalk outside school; all the ingredients in dinner last night.

3.  What are good writing challenges/assignments that will help the student enjoy Discovery and Surprise?

Discovering things is inherently enjoyable—watch a baby or a toddler, anyone under six who has not yet been schooled, and witness both their internal desire to discover, to explore, to ask queer questions of the cosmos, and the deep satisfaction that accompanies making connections, proving hypotheses, reaching contingent conclusions. So you don’t have to labor hard; simply create a classroom environment and challenges/assignments that reflect what was learned by watching babies and toddlers.

We want our students to be able to think for themselves, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own. We want them to ask fundamental questions—Who in the world am I?  How did I get here and where am I going?  What in the world are my choices?  How in the world shall I proceed?—and to pursue answers wherever they might take them.

Good classrooms are rich with materials to explore, opportunities to leap into learning, and provocations to think more deeply. Because I’m a freak for comics (and just wrote my first graphic novel), I want you to embrace graphics in writing, and across the curriculum. (By the way, looking at the finished product, a comic book about teaching seems somehow just right to me now—the intimacy of classrooms, the aesthetic and the feel of being an educator, the challenge and the joy, the pain and the promise—all of it tough to describe, and represented here with a distinct immediacy. It’s a pathway into the ineffable, relying neither on words nor images, and not mashing pictures onto words, but a third thing altogether with its own opportunities and demands—words and images working together in a dance of representation and meaning).

Graphic novels are now a normal part of the wildly diverse, wacky, and rich gumbo of our culture. If you were teaching a history class today on the Holocaust in Europe, you would mobilize memoir (Ann Frank, Elie Weisel) essay (Hannah Arendt, Thodore Adorno), and film (Shoah, The Sorrow and the Pity) to help students get a deep and meaningful, nuanced and complex picture of the entire sweep of the times and events. To leave out Maus would be to banish a fresh and intimate work that adds immeasurably to our overall understanding of the Holocaust.

Dykes to Watch out For is an essential text if you hope to understand the Clinton/Bush years. On and on and on: teachers integrate poetry and literature, art and science, film and painting into everything they teach, as they should. So why not comics?

I teach a writing class on memoir, and I use the graphics Maus, Persepolis, Fun Home, and Epileptic along with more traditional offerings like Homage to Catalonia and Black Boy. Students respond variously, but I would be irresponsibly narrowing their horizons if I left out the comic books.

Plus, the comics world might give teaching a new breath of life—wouldn’t it be cool if a zillion artists and marginalized bodies flocked to our classrooms to lend a hand?

4.  Do you think a teacher’s reflections, or, perhaps, his or her ability to successfully teach all students, is enhanced and strengthened when students are invited to participate in the process? If so, have you tried to incorporate this sort of collaboration in your classrooms?

Everything is better/fuller/deeper/more authentic if students are in it from the start. The work of teaching—planning, organizing, setting up, cleaning up—should not be invisible to the kids. Quick example: A teacher sees the possibility of getting $500 from a local foundation if she submits a two-page proposal for a curricular project; she proposes to paint a huge map of the county on the playground blacktop, gets the grant, and one weekend she and her partner and friends get the supplies, paint the map, and dazzle the students until the novelty wears off. Another teacher starts from a different place: she says to the kids one Monday, “I saw this announcement in a teacher paper for a $500 grant…” The kids spend days brain-storming, calculating, writing a proposal, and executing the work. They are active, not passive, co-creators and colleagues not quiet recipients. Whenever my teaching feels to me like it’s not what it should be, or the class is heading south, I pause and say, “Something isn’t working for me here…Let’s spend some time talking about where the class is headed and where you want it to go…” Or I have an evaluation form that flips the script: What have I (student) done to make this class work well? What is one thing I’ve learned that I will carry with me, and what have I taught others? What do I want Bill to do next to contribute to our learning? It sounds scary, but it is essential.

5.  Do students do enough creative writing exercises in school from your point of view, or are their assignment formulated, dull, boring, and geared towards standardized tests?

Not enough, not nearly enough; and, yes, boring, dull, clichéd, etcetera…

6.  Could you elaborate more on how teachers can teach in an alternative way as an ‘Act of Resistance?’

I’d never really considered teaching until it snuck up on me, and captured me when I wasn’t paying attention. I was 20 years old in 1965, living in Ann Arbor, and returning to the University of Michigan from a stint in the Merchant Marines. The US invasion of Viet Nam was escalating, and in October, in the midst of growing conflict and protest, I was one of 39 students who sat-in and disrupted the local Selective Service office. I was jailed for 10 days, and there I met a fellow anti-war activist who was involved in a small freedom school affiliated with the Civil Rights Movement. I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position and everything—the kids, the sounds and smells, the energy and the rhythm—felt somehow just right to me. From that day until this I’ve been a teacher, a peace activist, a trouble-maker, an artist-in-residence, and a work-in-progress, and teaching has been linked in my mind to the long and never-ending struggle to create a more peaceful, just, and balanced world.

There is no recipe for resistance, but there are some simple (simple to say if not to do) steps one can take to stay alive: 1) Make a list of your commitments to your students today (I will never treat them like objects; I will never undermine their integrity), and put it on your mirror and try to live up to it every day, especially after failing to fully live up to it yesterday; 2) Creative insubordination (cut the wires to the PA); 3) Ask forgiveness not permission (Oh, I didn’t realize I needed that form); 4) Befriend the custodian; 5) Take the side of the child; 6) Get to know the parents outside of school (bar-b-q, book club); 7)Make friends in the community; 8) Find allies among the teachers, and create a teacher-talk group; 9) Tell the truth as you see it, but always with the goal of communicating and convincing (as opposed to having a goal of feeling self-righteously superior); 10) Have a sense of humor, doubt, skepticism, and agnosticism, especially about yourself.

I try to resist bureaucracy and mindlessness, powerlessness and despair, and sometimes I am slapped down and sometimes praised. I’m never sure in advance which will come or when or why. I was on the organizing committee for a faculty union recently, and took a lot of abuse from the administration; I was advised against being involved in school reform in the early 90’s and then got praise and promotion because of my involvement. Since I can’t predict with certainty what will happen, I think the best course of action is to do the very best job you can of being fully you, doing what you do.

7.  In ‘Seeing the Student’ you mentioned that ‘developmental theory’ was used to speed kids up through the stages of development. What happens to kids when the institution tries to speed them up? How does this affect their morale or performance?

I think I said that it could be employed as speed-up, just as high-stakes testing spawns test-prep tutors. But the important point is that human beings take time to grow, time to reflect, wonder, imagine, pretend, rest, be bored, and a lot else. In our fast-moving, OCD, ADHD world, too many adults and institutions consider childhood a messy and unfortunate problem to be overcome. Out come the drugs and more.

8. You wrote in the Introduction of ‘To Teach’ that teachers should not be mechanical cogs in an impersonal system but ethical actors with a large degree of flexibility in order to support the growth of the children. Since you first started teaching until now, have teachers become more like cogs in a machine or ethical actors there to support the development of children?

My brother Rick with whom I wrote Teaching the Taboo describes coming to terms with a fact of life: I’m an agent of the state, he says, and an agitator and inciter—both. I have to live within, not run away from, that contradiction.

And it’s always been so. I have no nostalgia for a golden age when teachers were moral actors, or the path to excellent and engaged teaching was paved with rose petals. When I say we should not be mechanical cogs, I’m urging us to recognize and embrace that contradiction, live within it, and find ways to organize, link up with our natural allies (parents and students and colleagues and community folks) and fight back! This involves in the first place changing the frame of the discussion. I hope that people might see that teaching at its best is profoundly intellectual and ethical work, filled with joy and challenge, agony punctuated with moments of ecstasy, and certainly that all the ideas of teaching as clerking are not only reductive and morally repulsive, but they are also aesthetically unappealing and unlovely, entirely unworthy of our deepest humanistic dreams.

Education in a democracy must be distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy, but how?  Surely school leaders in fascist Germany or communist Albania or medieval Saudi Arabia all agreed, for example, that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matters, so those things don’t differentiate a democratic education from any other.  What makes education in a democracy distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal, the belief that the fullest development of all is the necessary condition for the full development of each; conversely, the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all. Education is where we decide whether we love the world enough to invite young people in as full participants and constructors and creators; and whether we love our children enough to give them the tools not only to participate but to change all that they find before them. Democracy, after all, is geared toward participation and engagement, and it’s based on a common faith: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force.  Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights, each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. We focus our efforts, not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in public life.  Democratic teaching encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands.  Education in a democracy is characteristically eye-popping and mind-blowing—always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider, shared world. How do our schools here and now measure up to the democratic ideal? Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making.  Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime throughout history.  Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant.  There’s no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt.  While many of us long for teaching as something transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce teaching to a kind of glorified clerking, passing along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information.  This is a recipe for disaster in the long run. Educators, students, and citizens might press now for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving schools of needed resources and then blaming teachers for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating “educational debt,” the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served.  All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified and generously compensated teachers.

The noisy proponents of market competition in public education have managed to push their ideas onto the agenda by the force of their wealth, certainly not because of any moral persuasion, or even the results that their schemes have produced. But the project continues, because it is faith-based and fact-free. We need to challenge the freight train with evidence and argument and a vision consistent with our deepest democratic dreams.

In a school focused on the needs and dreams of the broad community, we would be inspired by fundamental principles of democracy, including a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being. We would rally around the idea that the full development of each is the condition for the fullest development of all, and conversely that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each. One implication of this principle is that in a truly democratic spirit, whatever the wisest and most privileged parents want for their kids—that is exactly what we as a community want for all of our children.

Imagine a school or a classroom where asking, framing, and pursuing their own questions becomes the central work of both teachers and students; where the question of what is worthwhile to know and experience is taken up as a living challenge to focus all student activity; where we would practice participatory democracy; where all the themes, implicit and explicit, are built on a foundational idea that we are swirling through a living history, that nothing is guaranteed or foreordained, that we are, each and all of us, works-in-progress swimming shakily toward an uncertain and distant shore; and where every day we act out the belief that the classroom, far from being a preparation for life, is indeed life itself. Building community and trust and traditions and engagement would then become central lessons of a successful school.

Hal was concerned about the transformation of that signature phrase from a revolutionary challenge to a marketing tool announcing that everybody has the capacity to become more worthy. It worried him that Gramsci was being made to sound like the irritating “mission statement” of the Gates Foundation, read every morning on NPR, announcing their belief that every person should have a chance to lead a full and productive life—not the right to actually lead that life, but merely a chance at it, and a diminishing one at that. There’s a big difference between those who envision a philanthropic society where the people of property and privilege share some of their largess with the less fortunate through a small group that rules as a kind of Lady Bountiful with beneficent kindness and fairness, and those, like Hal Adams who worked toward the creation of a robust public square, a commons characterized by shared ownership of community property, as well as a society built on an the unshakable faith in a quite radical proposition: every human being is of incalculable value, each endowed with artistic and intellectual capacity. We envision, then, a society that is actually self-governing, with a revolving leadership of organic philosophers: a fair society and a beloved community.

I want to build an educated city, a school without walls where we can live in search of, rather than in accommodation to. I want us to accept ourselves as works-in-progress, searching and unfinished, on the move in a dynamic, going world, with Chicago as our commons, our performance space, and our workshop.
I want to de-couple education from schooling: all human beings are learning from birth until death—learning, like eating and breathing, is entirely natural. It’s wasteful to think of education as a K-12 affair, or to think of education as preparation for life rather than life itself.
I want a city poised to learn more in order to achieve more in terms of human enlightenment and freedom.
An educated city would take seriously the notion that residents are the sovereign, neither objects to manipulate nor subjects to be ruled. Education, formal and informal, would become focused on the creation of engaged citizens capable of developing the public square and the common space.
Schools would become, then, places where the dreams, aspirations, knowledge, and skills of youth are sensible starting points for learning, where democracy is practiced rather than ritualized.
I want to imagine with my friend and mentor Grace Lee Boggs how much safer, livelier, and more peaceful our communities would become if we reorganized education in this fundamental way—instead of keeping children isolated in classrooms, engage them in community- building activities with audacity and vision: planting community gardens, recycling waste, creating alternative transportation and work sites, naming and protesting injustices around them, organizing neighborhood arts and health festivals, broadcasting a radio show, rehabbing houses, painting public murals. By giving children and young people a reason to learn beyond the individualistic goal of getting a job and making more money, by encouraging them to exercise their minds and their hearts and their soul power, we would tap into the deep well of human values that gives life shape and meaning.

I want to build an educated city, a school without walls where we can live in search of, rather than in accommodation to. I want us to accept ourselves as works-in-progress, searching and unfinished, on the move in a dynamic, going world, with Chicago as our commons, our performance space, and our workshop.
I want to de-couple education from schooling: all human beings are learning from birth until death—learning, like eating and breathing, is entirely natural. It’s wasteful to think of education as a K-12 affair, or to think of education as preparation for life rather than life itself.
I want a city poised to learn more in order to achieve more in terms of human enlightenment and freedom.
An educated city would take seriously the notion that residents are the sovereign, neither objects to manipulate nor subjects to be ruled. Education, formal and informal, would become focused on the creation of engaged citizens capable of developing the public square and the common space.
Schools would become, then, places where the dreams, aspirations, knowledge, and skills of youth are sensible starting points for learning, where democracy is practiced rather than ritualized.
I want to imagine with my friend and mentor Grace Lee Boggs how much safer, livelier, and more peaceful our communities would become if we reorganized education in this fundamental way—instead of keeping children isolated in classrooms, engage them in community- building activities with audacity and vision: planting community gardens, recycling waste, creating alternative transportation and work sites, naming and protesting injustices around them, organizing neighborhood arts and health festivals, broadcasting a radio show, rehabbing houses, painting public murals. By giving children and young people a reason to learn beyond the individualistic goal of getting a job and making more money, by encouraging them to exercise their minds and their hearts and their soul power, we would tap into the deep well of human values that gives life shape and meaning.

Bill Ayers live illustrated by Ryan Alexander-Tanner, the video is now online at the NYCoRE website: http://www.nycore.org/2011/04/conference-report-back/. Please share widely.

The challenging work of teaching pivots on our ability to see the world as it is, without blinders or limits, and simultaneously to see our students as three-dimensional creatures—each a work-in-progress making his or her twisty way through a propulsive, uncertain history-in-the-making. As they enter our classrooms we must reach out and recognize our students as full human beings with hopes and dreams, aspirations, skills, and capacities; with minds and hearts and spirits; with embodied experiences, histories, and stories to tell of a past and a possible future; with families, neighborhoods, cultural surrounds, and language communities all interacting, dynamic, and entangled. And with a couple of basic questions: who am I in the world (or who in the world am I)? What are my choices and what are my chances?

This is the knotty, complicated challenge of teaching, and it’s the intellectual and ethical heart of teaching the taboo: it demands sustained focus, intelligent judgment, fearless inquiry and investigation. It calls forth within us an open heart and an inquiring mind, and it reminds us that every one of our judgments is necessarily contingent, every view partial, and each conclusion tentative. It requires that we refuse to simply pass on the received wisdom and dogma of the day, but rather that we develop along with our students dispositions of patience, curiosity, imagination, respect, wonder, awe, and more than a small dose of humility.

The challenge involves, then, an ethical stance and an implied moral contract: we offer unblinking recognition, and we work to communicate a deep regard for students’ lives, a respect for both their integrity and their vulnerability. We begin with a belief that each student is unique, each the one and only who will ever trod the earth, each worthy of a certain reverence. Regard extends, importantly, to the larger community—the wide, wide world that animates each individual life—since reverence for a specific person cannot be authentically expressed or realized while disparaging or despising the everything that brought forth that individual. Esteem includes insistence that students have access to the tools with which to negotiate and then to transform all that lies before them. We must try to do no harm, and then to convince students to reach out, to reinvent, and to seize an education fit for the fullest lives they might hope for. Another part of the work of teachers, then, is to see ourselves as in-transition, in-motion, works-in-progress.

Teaching the taboo is characterized by a spirit of cooperation, inclusion, social engagement, and full participation—classrooms become places that honor diversity while building unity. Democracy is based, after all, on the sense—at first intuited, and later more deliberate—that every human being is of incalculable value, that each is unique and distinct and still part of a wildly diverse whole, and that altogether we are, each and every one, somehow essential. We recognize, then, that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each, and conversely, that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all. This core value has huge implications for educational politics and policy, and big implications for curriculum and teaching as well, for what is taught and how.

Teaching the taboo is sustained through a culture of respect and mutual recognition that encourages students to develop the capacity to name the world for themselves, to identify the obstacles to their (and other people’s) full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands. This kind of education is necessarily eye-popping and mind-blowing—always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider, shared world.

I want to build an educated city, a school without walls where we can live in search of, rather than in accommodation to. I want us to accept ourselves as works-in-progress, searching and unfinished, on the move in a dynamic, going world, with Chicago our commons, our performance space, and our workshop.

De-couple education from schooling: all human beings are learning from birth until death—learning, like eating and breathing, is entirely natural. It’s wasteful to think of education as a K-12 affair, or to think of education as preparation for life rather than life itself.

I want a city poised to learn more in order to achieve more in terms of human enlightenment and freedom.

An educated city would take seriously the notion that residents are the sovereign, neither objects to manipulate nor subjects to be ruled. Education, formal and informal, would become focused on the creation of public citizens.

Schools would be places where the dreams, aspirations, knowledge, and skills of youth are sensible starting points for learning, where democracy is practiced rather than ritualized.
Imagine how much safer, livelier, and more peaceful our communities would become if we reorganized education in this fundamental way—instead of keeping children isolated in classrooms, engage them in community-building activities with audacity and vision: planting community gardens, recycling waste, creating alternative transportation and work sites, naming and protesting injustices around them, organizing neighborhood arts and health festivals, broadcasting a radio show, rehabbing houses, painting public murals. By giving children and young people a reason to learn beyond the individualistic goal of getting a job and making more money, by encouraging them to exercise their minds and their hearts and their soul power, we would tap into the deep well of human values that gives life shape and meaning.

Below is an exchange between Sharon Kass, the homophobic hate monger from Washington D.C., and moi.

Dear Prof. Ayers:
I understand that Barack Obama has a “secret” gay life. Any information you could give me on that would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Sharon Kass

Dear Sharon,
You’re up awfully early, but then as advocate and activist, the day is never long enough, right? How is the campaign going?
You must know deep inside that the world would be a healthier and happier place on every level if we would all (even you!!) get in touch with our essentially queer selves.
Instead of letting GLBTIQ folks openly into the military (the position of some silly liberals) you should support my idea that ONLY gay people can join the military (kind of like the ancient Greek armies); rather than support the simple demand of GLBTIQ folks to marry and enjoy full civil rights, you should support my proposal that ONLY queer people will be allowed to marry from now on. Make love, not war, and no more yucky man on woman/woman on man freak shows.
My two proposals taken together are sure to solve a zillion current social problems starting with defusing the militaristic and violent culture that permeates our society today.
Are you persuaded? Why so resistant? Do you have a little secret? I have an idea: let’s play truth or dare (you bring the Santorum, and I’ll bring the previously undiscovered tapes of…). Let the party begin!
xxx Bill

March 8, 2011

A wide-ranging group gathered in Nicosia for the first seminar in a series on doing oral history in Cyprus: a musicologist doing a study on folk-lore and songs, an environmentalist, an ethnographer who had just finished nine-months of field work in a mountain village, an historian who wanted to better understand the value of oral sources, an American teaching on a Fulbright, a computer teacher, teacher educator, graphic designer, and students from gender studies, sociology, education, and history. The mix was rich and hopeful.

Before introductions we began with a quick-write: five minutes on oral history, and reasons for taking this class. When we went around the circle and introduced ourselves, reading excerpts from the writing, it was immediately clear that there was a lot of wisdom in the room. People used words like “grass-roots history,” “history from below,” “the power of stories,” “different narratives,” “beyond the dominant story,” “voices from the margins,” “history of the everyday,” “personal meaning,” and “memory as history.” We were on our way.

Discussion was wide and smart, and contradictions were the focus of energy and debate: language/translation, subjective/objective, technique/stance or approach, total relativity/truth. Nothing was resolved, but simply naming the complex and contested territory felt illuminating.

There was as well a persistent question of representation—how do oral historians make and frame an archive (web, interactive, film, installation)? What are some of the creative ways people have communicated their work to and for a public?

March 9, 2011

Everything was reviewed and revisited, revised and re-opened—conflict and debate, contest and contradiction driving deeper. Other issues were added to the list: How open and how pre-planned should we be? Is the interview a Q and A event or an interpretive/relational event? How do we begin to find and select participants? How random, and how deliberate? How broad or how narrow do we reach for participants? How aware are we of our preconceptions and frames? Do we need a specific research question to organize the interviews, or is a phenomenon of interest adequate? Is an interview protocol advisable or should we ask an open-ended question and then follow along? How skeptical or credulous should we be? How aware should we be of the historical record and past events that are likely to surface? When does analysis begin, and how; when does it end? How stable/unstable is the record we make? In some ways, while irresolvable, these questions point, not only to rational research approaches, but, as well, to differing dispositions of mind and feeling.

In the course of the seminar we drew on slave narratives, 9/11, Tiananmen Square, events unfolding in Egypt and North Africa, events in front of our eyes like illegal migration, prostitution, and taxi drivers, demonstrations in the North against Turkish troops on the island. Again and again we saw the ability of this work to confound rather than confirm, to surprise and disrupt rather than to settle things. It’s a wildly weird, diverse, and queer world out there, and while illumination, enlightenment, and liberation are always possible, getting to the bottom of things, once and for all, becomes more elusive as each page is turned. Oral sources are the first draft of history, the interview the first draft of biography.

Participants spent the remainder of class interviewing one another, and then reporting to the group about the process. This exercise was in turn raucous, sober, thoughtful, emotional, revealing and concealing. It was also critical as we considered why the interviews went as they did, what questions were initiated and which pursued, how narratives were shaped and why. This could easily lead to a follow-up with a set of questions to drill still deeper.

March 10, 2011

We reviewed short excerpts from interviews done recently for the Cyprus Oral History Project. While short, each provided us many entry points to explore problems and possibilities with this work. Here are some of the questions that fueled our conversation:

Is it advisable to have two interviewers with one interviewee?

How do you become aware of and negotiate issues of power in the relationship?

What are the approaches, from formal to casual, available to interviewers, and how do you make your own style work for you?

How autobiographical can one be?

How important is it to come well-prepared, both technically and in terms of content?

How does one interrupt, or press beyond the surface of a well rehearsed or oft-repeated story, and should one? Is authenticity the point, or is the reason the story is told over and over what’s really interesting?

The most complicated and revelatory discussion was about the complex nature of language: When the interviewer says, “I want to talk about the events around 1974,” that carries enormous significance here. It points to a particular year as pivotal, as having elevated significance, and it locates the interviewer as part of a particular narrative, and distant from other possible narratives. One participant responded, “I’d rather start with 1958 and 1959…” which is quite a different signifier.

So the power of words to frame responses: Turkish coffee/Greek coffee—it’s the same coffee, or is it? Is there not a Cyprus coffee? No! What are we drinking with the coffee, and with our mother’s milk?

What is a refugee, and what an exile? Who are the missing, and who the dead? What is a war of liberation, and what is a catastrophe? What is fighting for freedom, and what is terrorism? Who is an illegal immigrant, who an undocumented worker? Is it Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City?  It depends, and it contains a narrative.

And so we reflected together on “I want to talk about the events around 1974,” and posited alternatives: “I’d like to talk about the modern history of Cyprus, and how we came to where we are now;” “I want to talk with you about the Cyprus issue as you have experienced it;” “I’m interested in your perspective on the Cyprus conflict, the things you or your family has experienced in your lives.”

I met Alessandro Portelli late in the afternoon in his small office at the University of Rome, up a winding stone staircase from the courtyard and down the narrow hallways through knots of students awaiting classes, lounging on wooden benches and sharing hugs, notes, news of the day. He was finishing an interview with a reporter, and I sat nearby. Sandro Portelli has a round, animated face, twinkling dark eyes and bushy eye-brows, half-glasses perched on his nose. He laughs easily, with a quick boyish smile that makes him look suddenly half his age.

Portelli is professor of American Literature in the Department of Language and Literature in the School of the Humanities, a center of important innovative scholarship and intellectual courage for many years, but clearly occupying no exalted space—if real estate is any indicator— in the larger scheme of things here. He’s best known in the states for The Death of Luigi Trastulli which marked a critical turn in oral history, a turn toward memory, not as an inferior and broken lens on reality, but as significant in its own right.

His shared office is crowded with four desks and eight chairs, and it wants a good cleaning and a fresh coat of paint. But the walls and bulletin boards are bright and busy, bustling with life—political fliers, posters and cartoons, book and album covers, iconic photos of Elvis and Malcolm X. He and his colleagues appear to share a political perspective and a distracted professorial aesthetic. And in the short time we were all together, they expressed a shared belief that the Italian university is quickly becoming a parody of the American: less and less commitment to any serious intellectual project in favor of performing rituals of accreditation and certification, with the bean-counters increasingly in control.

Class was a few steps down the hall, but we managed to be late. Portelli had joked earlier that a professor is someone who thinks a year is nine months and an hour 50 minutes. When we arrived a dozen students—all undergraduates attending an open-admission, tuition-free program—were scattered about the small lecture room, and Portelli took to the lectern.

The class was “Cultural Translation” and the focus this evening was misconceptions in translation, and reading for meaning. He began by reciting the opening line of Huckleberry Finn: “You don’t know about me.” Translate that into Italian. What seemed straight and simple at the start became within five minutes layered with paradoxes, bristling with problems of rhythm and perspective, the meter of common speech, and the contested matters of meaning. The conversation turned to the theme of indefinite or indistinct boundaries, a theme that dominates the whole book, and is introduced right here: there is no thick bright line between knowing and not knowing; you don’t know me, but here goes.

Professor Portelli handed everyone the opening paragraph of Rebecca Harding’s Life in the Iron Mills, originally published in 1861 in the Atlantic Monthly: “A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer’s shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul smells ranging loose in the air.” Translate that into Italian!

And we did. For more than an hour we unpacked those sentences, wrestled with sound and significance, marveled at the choices Harding made as she artfully rendered a scene of ordinary life and then planted it in our imaginations. Portelli illustrated again and again how inadequate the dictionary is in the complex art and work of translation: scent and smells, clammy, immovable, and muddy—without context and culture the choices, word by word, are baffling. Every word is a signifier that evokes a signified; these are inseparable but distinct qualities, like a sheet of paper with a front and a back. But signifiers are based on convention alone; the signified, on the contrary, is an open space of imagination and meaning-making, huge and varied, filled with possibilities for new creations. To move from signifier (English, say) to signifier (Italian) without entering the critical space of the mind is to distort and mangle, and possibly murder the entire affair.

“When you read, don’t translate,” Professor Portelli told his students. “Just drift along, try to understand, pick up perspectives as you go, but always use your own experiences and your own life to imagine what the author means.” He noted that formal schooling had told these young working-class kids that they don’t know much, and that they should curb their experience and learn the important things here. “This is wrong,” he said. “Your experience and your knowledge are critical starting points for this work.”

“We spent an hour on translation of a single paragraph,” he declared as class ended. “And that seems to you painfully slow and perhaps a bit tedious.” But, he continued, this is an exercise in reading, an approach that is applicable to watching TV or looking at the newspaper or having a conversation with friends. Unleash your imaginations; explore the mental images evoked by words; rely on meaning-making before technique.

Later we were joined by Mariella, an economics professor and his partner of close to 40 years, and they took me for a late dinner at a new restaurant in central Roma recommended by her niece, “an excellent cook.” The food was light and wonderful, the conversation a rushing river tumbling from politics to work to family, spilling its banks and hurrying on.