My students and I have not seen one another in quite some time now: all classes were canceled for a while in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy; I was in Oakland for a few days presenting at a conference; in between that, we had something of a blizzard (Snow Storm, Athena); students on the Manhattan campus had to pack up all their belongings in 2 hours, in the dark, to be squirreled and packed off to dorms across Queens; some of my students are undoubtedly still cleaning homes and Sandy debris. In the midst of all of that, school goes on: topics for final project topics have been set; we have mandates to make up missed time that will cut into the Winter break; we have been trying to still do our research all along. Some are also teaching so this means they are attending departmental meetings or even doing the assessment/research projects that I have facilitated in my own program. We have a few more weeks left in the semester to grind out like this. It seems safe to say, if my levels of energy are any indication, that we are ALL drained and depleted. But we are here. Same place, same time. And we WILL focus back in on what we really came here to do, despite all that other institutional stuff that gets in the way.
I take full responsibility for not designing a better sequence of discussions and events that could have linked us better in the time that we were away from one another. How do we crank the energy all the way back up? How do we capture what we already did, looked at, wrote, and discussed? How do we step boldly into the rest of the semester and the work we still need to do?
I have hit a pedagogical challenge beyond the limits of my own imagination because I don’t have any clear, quick answers to these questions other than to apologize for the time away …and then catapult us right back into the semester. I’ll say/do that apology like this though:
It’s been a long time, I shouldn’t have left you
Without a strong rhyme to step to
Think of how many weak shows you slept through…
and then, brought to you live (forward to 2 minutes and 30 seconds) …
In short, let’s get back to the work at hand and get it poppin!
This week we are explicitly reading about black masculinities and literacies and/or black girlhood, womanism, and literate lives. As a way to represent all of that, I want to look closely at Nikkey Finny’s “Foreword” for Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy by Ruth Nicole Brown. Here are the (some) of the lines that moved me:
I have been asked at least one hundred times to travel and talk to young girls about the path of my own life. I have been honored to do so. But I have never been asked to travel and listen to any young girls talk about how they see the world or how they think the world sees them. Always while there, in the middle of whatever I have come to say, even if I look up and reach out in the hopes of lifting up a two-way conversation into the air, most of the girls still look lost. What could I possibly want to hear from them? Everything!
All understanding is not always available to the tongue. I am a woman deeply connected to my body… This understanding of the body came to me through my poetic sensibilities. I have and keep a fierce responsibility to my body as well as to my mind. I hold on to this responsibility by way of words, language, and silence…
Black girls know the answers to a wide universe of things but nobody is asking them any questions…
What does it mean to have a sun-drenched intimate cathedral of space created for the questions Black girls want to ask?… This is the Black girl praise house… [This is] the tradition of the old Camp Meeting revival, where the longed for spirit makes the journey to be fed and IS fed… [This is] the voice of Ida B. Wells saying, ‘I wish I could put my arms around my people and fly away,’ but instead firing up her anti-lyncing campaign…
Nikky Finney offers us these lenses here into black women’s literate lives as a way to see and hear the weight of what we are dealing with this week. I’ll close here with her 2011 Acceptance Speech of the National Book Award in poetry where she gives us a bridge all the way back to how we started the class: in the slave quarter culture.
