Translating Self and Difference Through Literacy Narratives Author(S): Mary Soliday Source: College English, Vol

Translating Self and Difference through Literacy Narratives Author(s): Mary Soliday Source: College English, Vol. 56, No. 5 (Sep., 1994), pp. 511-526 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/378604 Accessed: 03/02/2010 20:19 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ncte. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to College English. http://www.jstor.org 511 TRANSLATING SELF AND DIFFERENCE THROUGH LITERACY NARRATIVES Mary Soliday he best-knownliteracy narratives are either autobiographies,like Frederick Douglass's Narrative and Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary,or novels, plays, and films "that foreground issues of language acquisition and literacy" (Eldred and Mortensen 513) and that are as diverse as a Hawthorne short story, The ColorPurple, and EducatingRita. But literacy narratives are also told in ordinary people's conversations about their daily lives, as recorded, for instance, in Lorri Neilsen's ethnographic study Literacyand Living, and in the classroom talk and writing of students. I want to focus upon how various literacy narratives portray passages between language worlds in order to consider the relevance of such passages to a writing pedagogy, particularly to a pedagogy for basic writing classes. At the most basic level, the plot of a literacy story tells what happens when we acquire language, either spoken or written. But literacy stories are also places where writers explore what Victor Turner calls "liminal" crossings between worlds. In focusing upon those moments when the self is on the threshold of possible intellectual, social, and emotional development, literacy narratives be- come sites of self-translation where writers can articulate the meanings and the consequences of their passages between language worlds. As I will suggest through a reading of two essays written by one of my students, literacy stories can give writers from diverse cultures a way to view their experience with language as unusual or strange. By foregrounding their acquisition and use of language as a strange and not a natural process, authors of literacy narratives have the opportunity to explore the profound cultural force language exerts in their everyday lives. When they are able to evaluate their experiences from an interpretive perspective, authors achieve narrative agency by discovering Mary Soliday is an assistant professor of English at the City College of New York. She is Director of the CCNY Writing Center and Co-Director, with Barbara Gleason, of a FIPSE-funded pilot project, The City College Writing Program: An Enrichment Approach to Language and Literacy. COLLEGE ENGLISH, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 5, SEPTEMBER 1994 512 COLLEGE ENGLISH that their experience is, in fact, interpretable. In my basic writing classes at an urban college, I have found that literacy narratives can expand students' sense of personal agency when they discover not only that their own stories are narratable, but also that through their stories they can engage in a broader critical dialogue with each other and with well-known texts such as Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory. A considerable literature in composition studies addresses the relationship between cultural identity and writing and calls particular attention to the conflicts which writers experience in crossing between language worlds (Bartholomae; Bizzell; Coles and Wall; Dean; Fox; Kutz, Groden, and Zamel; Lu; Moss and Walters). Discussions of the role that tensions between discourse worlds might play in the texts of basic writers-who are also usually minority, immigrant, and working-class students-raise important political concerns that by teaching students to manipulate the conventions and forms of academic language, writing teachers are unthinkingly acculturating students into the academy and glossing over issues of difference in the classroom. Considerable debate, then, turns on whether writing teachers and their students should assimilate, critique, or reject dominant discourses (for vivid recent examples, see the "Symposium on Basic Writing"; the Symposium on "Writing Within and Against the Academy"; and "Counterstatements" in response to Maxine Hairston's "Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing"). Because these (often heated) discussions involve students' life choices and sense of personal identity, I want to focus upon the issues within the framework of the literacy narrative, with an emphasis upon literacy autobiographies. Reading and writing literacy stories can enable students to ponder the conflicts attendant upon crossing language worlds and to reflect upon the choices that speakers of minority dialects and languages must make. Stories of self-translation involve representing difference, and the representation of difference is at the core of today's struggles in the humanities over competing versions of multiculturalism. Efforts to build a more culturally inclu- sive curriculum have, however, focused heavily on diversifying ways of reading and on critiquing traditional representations of difference in canonical texts rather than on diversifying ways of writing and imagining the self through writing. Of course the issues surrounding the canon are quite vital to continuing the debate about difference in the academy, but multiculturalism should also involve building classrooms where actual translation can occur-where writing can be used as a means of self-definition and self-representation. As significant sites of translation, literacy stories exemplify the "arts of the contact zone," in Mary Louise Pratt's terms, and indeed may themselves resemble Pratt's definition of contact zones as "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power" (34). Because literacy narratives so often focus on the meeting and clashing of identi- LITERACYNARRATIVES 51 3 ties, languages, and cultures, writing literacy stories allows our basic writing or nontraditional students-those "others" of the academic landscape hitherto largely represented by teachers speaking on their behalf-themselves to enter into and influence the contemporary debates surrounding multicultural educa- tion. Ethnographic research shows that telling stories at home is a rich and complex social practice through which family members establish their identities as language users in culturally specific ways (Heath; Labov; Scollon and Scollon). More particularly, telling oral literacy narratives provides an imaginative, al- though not fully understood, avenue through which children and adults develop a cultural sense of the literate self (Goodman; Harste, Woodward, and Burke; Neilsen; Taylor). Within our families we routinely practice representing, even fictionalizing, the nature of literacy to ourselves in ways that are probably culturally specific: parents tell stories of their children's achievements with literacy at school or of their own successes and failures in learning to read and write, and pre-school children tell literacy stories, for example by embedding literacy events within the plots of other stories they tell. Commonplace stories of our encounters with literacy are, to use William Labov's phrasing, "tellable" or narratable because they can foreground the unusu- alness, and thus call attention to the sociocultural aspects, of learning to read and write. Here is a sample from Hope Jensen Leichter's research, an interview with a father who told of his memory of learning to read as a child in Ireland: The teacherswere rough.I meanthe disciplineback then, they'dsock it to you.... We had a fear of the teacher,and when you have a fear of the teacher,you don't like going to school.... In fact, I rememberjumping in the river to avoid going to school.... I pretendedto be sick and I was forced to go so I accidentallyfell into the river.I was broughtback and I got a spankingand I was sent to school anyway. I remembertrying to read . .. with the scene . .. the familyon the beach . the beach balls, buildingthe castlesand all that sort of stuff. I guess I was 7 or 8. [If you didn't read well] you got whipped.... Basically,it was the punishment idea.... You used to have to hold your hand and you would get it, maybe six wallops across the hand with a stick... and your hand would start bleeding.... Yourears would be beatenwith a bamboocane, andyou couldn'tdo anythingwith your hands.... Some

Load more