Polyphony: A Meditation

What follows as an introduction to Polyphony: Reader and Explorations for First-Year Writing is a series of snapshots or collages by each contributor. We elaborate on our academic convictions, personal backgrounds, teaching experiences, pedagogical approaches, and motivations for participating in this project through the ROTEL initiative in Massachusetts. We each come from very different backgrounds, shaped by different experiences that brought us to think and teach and write and inhabit the world as we do.

Our own crossings to write the book together were occasionally harmonious, sometimes cacophonous, but always polyphonous. We wanted to honor that multivocality here where we each intercut one another to coexist in our individual way.

Elise Takehana: In the Fall of 2021 I taught a section of Writing I that focused on the politics of language. We read about language reclamation, the social role of satire, using metaphor to explain scientific concepts, prescriptive grammar in schools, and the power of naming. In the end, I felt like I failed those students and botched the harder conversations on the stakes of their writing and the meaning and value of intentionality in their language choices because they were largely willing and even motivated to continue venerating standard English and even global English. Writing this book with my colleagues was a way to improve my practice by learning from their expertise and experiences. Maybe they knew better ways to reframe the standardization of language and its discriminatory effects, reframe the tragedy of language death?

Diego Ubiera: I recently taught The Farming of Bones (1999), a historical novel about the “Parsley Massacre” of 1937 enacted by the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. In an attempt to deliver Edwige Danticat’s work, I shared a personal history with my students. My grandfather lived in the borderlands of Haiti/DR during the massacre and had many stories to tell. I discovered this only recently. There’s a tremendous collective amnesia and silence around this massacre both on the island and elsewhere.

I have to admit to myself that my own silence on writing about this is influenced by a typical academic conceit around identity politics. I am often encouraged to focus more on universal topics, that focusing on the Dominican Republic is too specific – implying that I should avoid “navel-gazing” and performativity. I feel this tension in the first-year writing classroom. In my view, students are sometimes incentivized to go universal, assimilate and avoid the specificity of their lived experiences as a legitimate realm of academic reflection.

My grandfather was a schoolteacher for many years in the border village of Dajabon/Ounaminthe. When asked about 1937 – in his 90s and suffering from dementia – he would rise out of his muted, depressive silences, and repeat obsessively, “the kids, the kids, only because of their skin color, color, color. The kids were good students, even though they talked with the ‘i’. They would say, ‘comei, andai, jugai’ and I would correct them.”[1] In some regions of DR/Haiti, all verbs ending in an “r” are replaced with an “i.” In his testimony he mentions that he would shield his students in his house from the soldiers.

Much of Danticat’s work is about voicing/silencing and communicating lòt bò dlo, a complex Haitian Kreyol saying that means life “across the waters” or “beyond death.” I was stunned to read that he, perhaps already far gone, or lòt bò dlo, would obsessively repeat images and memories of language. Linguistic violence was a key element of the massacre. Between October 2nd and October 8th of 1937, Trujillo armed soldiers with machetes to “secure the border.” He ordered the army to ask people to pronounce “parsley” correctly in Spanish to test people’s supposed dominicanness (“perejil”). If the word was pronounced with a francophone inflection, the soldiers would kill them. Between 17,000 and 35,000 died.

When I was asked to contribute ideas for this reader, my mind always went to these sorts of stories about language, memory, the body and linguistic violence – the relationship between language and power is one of my main concerns, especially in the first-year writing context. Ideally, students feel a sense of openness in my writing courses so that they feel free to experiment and develop their voices. I avoid dictatorial command in order for students to have a sense of agency over the registers and sounds they carry in their lives.

Jennie Snow: While working on this project, I was struck to hear some of my students in an upper level seminar ask if it would be okay to use “I” in their papers. We paused and discussed this notion—my response to them being “of course I want to hear your I…in our discussions every day you speak freely and self-reflexively and that kind of analysis is exactly what I am interested in ‘on the page.’” They expressed their reservations since they “were always taught not to.” I was used to having this conversation in my first-year writing courses as students transition from high school and standardized testing and are eager to relinquish the handcuffs of arbitrary rules that are passed down as “proper usage” or “standard English.” But I wasn’t expecting to have this conversation with students close to graduation, no doubt my own hopeful shortsightedness (or idealism) about what happens in college: that the emphasis on critical thinking means confronting your “I” and observing the changes over time, that a first-year writing course is an exploratory space for developing a writing voice, that other teachers and mentors encourage experimentation, and that experimental failures aren’t punished but understood as process.

As I thought about it more, I recalled how I hid from my I for a long time—and still do. I’ve never known what my writing voice should be, and wasn’t sure I wanted one. I do remember in college trying all kinds of passive constructions and neutral structures to sound like I was speaking from an objective position—this was after all how many of my teachers themselves spoke and modeled interpretation. At the same time I was learning that this objective perspective is exactly what I was expected to inhabit as an educated white person, and this training was something I wanted to un-learn. (The high school lesson on Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” took on added layers.) Key mentors along the way encouraged me, coaxed me, not to bury my argument, or concede too much space in my analysis—go ahead, try an “I argue” statement. It’s only been recently, on the other side of a dissertation, that I am somewhat comfortable reaching for this sentence. I know it takes time, necessarily. But I also think that one of the functions of first-year writing is to create an environment for students to experiment with how they show up in writing and find expression in language (something I think this book encourages). This is more than just the prerogative to “break the rules” once you know them, it’s about getting to know, again and again, the I.

ET: The last film I made included found footage my mother sent me. One clip included an impromptu interview between my aunt and me when I was six years old in my grandmother’s backyard in Kópavogur, Iceland. At one point, I said “Heyrðu, á ég að fara í kastalann minn?” but I didn’t understand myself. I needed my mother to translate so I could understand something that once flew out of my mouth without thought or pause.

Jhonni Carr and Román Luján in “Language Solidarity: How to Create a Force Field with Words”: “We propose to use Spanish as a force field of words. Whenever we speak a minority language in public to defend others from language discrimination, we engage in linguistic solidarity, or the practice of protecting others by speaking in a given language. We are currently in a moment when English is a hegemonic power attempting to suppress linguistic and cultural diversity under a fictitious guise of assimilation—that in order to become part of a new culture, it is not enough to gain a new language and customs; you must also sever your cultural and linguistic backgrounds…We conceive of language solidarity as a grassroots endeavor that works toward achieving social justice and, in particular, language justice…” (53-54).

ET: I’m starting to learn Spanish because I’ll be moving to El Paso shortly. I cannot imagine not learning Spanish when so much of the community around me is Spanish-speaking and so many of my students will be too. But I’m daunted by the thought. I remember naively starting to learn French, of dedicating an hour or two a day to it, thinking in six months or so, I’ll speak fairly well and be able to read at a decent level. But a language is so much more than translating one word for another. Language carries so many cultural references and understandings, so many allusions to history and literature and politics, so many idioms that only work in a certain context. In practice, my French is pretty good now, but it took me a couple of years of speaking the language regularly to dream in French and my internal monologue has still always been in English. Then I thought, perhaps if I lived in a French-speaking country I would have taken to thinking in French, but after nearly 50 years in the US, my mother still tells me she thinks mostly in Icelandic and that it was maybe a decade after moving here that she started thinking in English. It feels daunting now to learn Spanish because I know it will be a long time until I feel like I live in that language and words flow like water downstream.

DU: Tradition feels forceful to me in New England academic circles as well as in my perception of the field of Composition Studies. I was tempted to follow this academic culture by centering testing, disciplinary propriety, merit, rigor, and my authority as an expert. Indeed, negotiating my authority and belonging in this space brought about challenges when I transitioned early in my career from a Modern Languages department to an English department. Questions of language and power again resurfaced. I was granted easy authority from both students and faculty as “The Spanish Professor” but as the face of “English,” challenges emerged.

The OED says polyphony means (among other things):

Music. Harmony; esp. the simultaneous and harmonious combination of a number of individual melodic lines; the style of composition in which melodic lines are combined in this way; polyphonic composition, counterpoint.

Literary Criticism. A multiplicity of independent and often antithetic narrative voices, none of which is given predominance; the use of this narrative technique.

Phonetics. The symbolization of different vocal sounds by the same letter or character; the quality or condition of being polyphonic.

ET: Audre Lorde writes: “we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition.” Taking fear out of the classroom feels like the bigger part of the work in building writing agency. It breaks my heart when students ask me “Is this what you want?” or “Do you have a model of a good one?” That is not the kind of impression I want to leave on others. Being a teacher requires one to contend with the shadow of authority that lingers in that role. It’s something you have to untangle if you want students to see you as a collaborator, as someone who is open to their thinking. If form follows function, students have to know what they want to say before they can know what shape that thinking should take. If I give them a model of a shape, their first thought should be to interrogate the impact of that form: Why? When no one asks why, I know I still haven’t assuaged the fear schooling instills.

A meeting with the professor of my first doctoral seminar course to discuss the B+ on my first paper: “It is just evident in how you write that you went to a state university.” While that was certainly true, I didn’t know at the time that the way I wrote already marked a deficiency. He had no comments on the substance of my paper, only that it didn’t read like an A paper.

JS: In many ways, “polyphony” is another iteration of a pedagogical practice that is inclusive, collaborative, equitable, and open, all approaches that I have layered in my practice over the years. But it’s also more than that, invoking both a jazz orientation that resists standardization and a commitment to multilingualism that remains marginalized in first-year writing and composition studies (and U.S. higher education more broadly). I come to this as an over-educated, monolingual, white woman who is keenly aware of how my own presence is over-represented in these classrooms, which often over-determines the dynamics between me and students and between students. I walk into the role of “teacher” remembering that I am embodying a discipline and an institution, and my students are likely seeing echoes of other teachers, other classrooms, other rules and judgments. (As Elise says, there is a “shadow of authority.”) In this sense, polyphony, for me, has also meant an active commitment to creating a different kind of space that critically engages with the norms and expectations (from all sides) of what happens with English, writing instruction, and “school” in general. Whether or not they’ve been asked before, first-year students are shrewd observers of their learning and the ways that “school” facilitates or disappoints; bringing these insights into the classroom is a tremendous foundation for critical thinking. This means inviting students’ prior experiences, valuing their linguistic resources as strengths beyond my own, and actively communicating a different model of learning that is invested, first and foremost, in the student, their goals, creativity, and agency. It is an ongoing experiment, with a lot of improvisation, to gradually transform these spaces by inhabiting them differently together. It doesn’t always work, and with the habitus of our schools so deeply ingrained, I certainly don’t always have the trust of my students—but this dissonance within multiplicity is also part of the polyphony, inviting a deeper curiosity, patience, and humility. As a teacher, as a person, it’s powerful to experience polyphony not as the realization of harmony across differences (something like multicultural unity), but as the meeting of multiple voices that can create discord and syncopation.

ET: Glenn Gould – So You Want to Write a Fugue but also why not The Fugue

Asao Inoue in “How Do We Language to Stop Killing Each Other, or What Do We Do About White Language Supremacy?”: “I’m trying to set up the problem of the conditions of White language supremacy, not just in our society and schools, but in our own minds, in our habits of mind, in our dispositions, our bodies, our habitus, in the discursive, bodily, and performative ways we use and judge language. This means, many of us can acknowledge White language supremacy as the status quo in our classrooms and society, but not see all of it, and so perpetuate it. I’m trying to explain the conditions in our classrooms that cause your judgements to be weaponized as a White teacher, or even a teacher of color who must take on a White racial habitus to have the job you have. It takes conditions of White language supremacy to make our judgements about logic, clarity, organization, and conventions a hand grenade, with the pin pulled. All we have to do is give them to another and let go of the hammer” (357-8).

DU: I was repeatedly asked to define what I meant by being “concrete” in our discussions for this project. I think this means to approach assignments or keep the classroom in general feeling as organic as possible to allow students to explore from within their own material and discursive realities. The most successful semesters I have had have relied on a grounded approach to the local circumstances of any institution or any one class. This means having the ability to intuitively read the affective, intellectual and material dimensions of a classroom and then design lessons from there. Having taught at a large, research institution in Southern California, then at a small liberal arts college in rural Colorado and then finally at a public liberal arts college in New England showed me the importance of always attending to context and place. Each of these spaces carries different ideas around academic legitimacy and value. As an example, teaching in the borderlands of Southern California required much less of the performative/rhetorical move of teacher-as-authority figure compared to a college in north-central Massachusetts. I bring in texts that allow students to think about these kinds of questions to reconsider the complexities of subject and space and how these dynamics might inform their writing.

We underestimate the question of fear in first-year writing. This project was a reminder that I still carry those concerns over fear in learning, voicing and sharing that perhaps was cemented during my formative years of rigid, discipline-focused education in the Dominican Republic as well as those years in the public education system in North Carolina as a new immigrant. Emphasis was placed on the right look, the right sounds, the right calligraphy and flourish and the right mannerisms to properly assimilate. These kinds of questions around language, power, fear, and authenticity came up for me time and again when proposing ideas for this project.^[1]

ET: Why this book? Because I needed a community of educators after those dark COVID days. I needed to make something with others that meant something – to make first year writing feel like an experience with real stakes after a year of little initials on screens. I needed an educational space to honor human experience and expression again. My new normal had to be generative, affirming, polyvocal, unresolved, but most definitely present with the thinking of others.

Katy Siegel, in “A Space for Reassessing the Present” from the Institute of Contemporary Art’s exhibition catalog of Firelei Báez’s work writes: “Man Without a Country includes torn pages from Statesmen (1893), and the faces of some of these ‘great men of achievement’ – presidents, captains of industry – are obliterated with circles in a range of colors and sizes. These dots refer to the Ishihara test, which assesses the ability to perceive color by hiding a figure in one color amid a field of dots in a contrasting color. Here Báez turns her scrutiny away from the colonized object to the colonizer as subject, testing the perception of the men who were, she says, ‘actively filtering what’s being seen, what’s being mined both materially and ethically within a society.” (19)

ET: How do you see X? What do you notice about X? Sharing your perception of a person, a poem, an event, anything… is an intimate moment. If someone shares with you what they perceive, they are also revealing something of themselves. Shinobu Ishihara developed his plates of red and green dots in 1917 to discern if a soldier could perceive those colors as different. What I see confirms that I am not colorblind. I can see the 16 in the red dots surrounded by a background of green dots. When I read Yiyun Li’s “To Speak Is to Blunder” and what I notice first is the nonchalance around suicide, it is colored by how I have been and seen the world. And if I share with you that this is my strongest first impression of this essay, it says something about what I noticed, provokes further questions of why that’s what I noticed, and if I were comfortable with you, I just might tell you why.

JS: Coming in as a new colleague on this project, I was particularly aware of how these discussions were also about getting to know one another: how we think, create, and teach, what we believe, how we persist in the institution. Often enough, I felt what Yiyun Li captures in the line “to speak is to blunder”—any extension of myself in communication is not quite what I mean, always a compromise, but one that is valuable all the same. We gathered together for a project we were all invested in, but from different places, different experiences, styles, and approaches. Discussion necessarily risked vulnerability as I tried to make my thinking, and my commitments, a bit clearer to others. As I wanted to participate in creating material that is rich, complex, and perhaps even unconventional, I had to extend myself in creativity—offer routes that would propel our discussion and remain open to rerouting, doubling back, and starting somewhere else. I realized that as much as I had believed I had honed my teaching over the years to be student-centered, responsive, and adaptable, this experience of discussion and co-creating actually put me in the position of doing what I ask my students to do in almost every class meeting. It’s a humbling reminder to recall, acutely, what it means to be in a position of learning with strangers, and to take the risk of being understood among friends.

Toni Morrison in her 1993 Nobel Prize Speech: ”The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; it does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed…”

DU: As we conclude this project, my approach has been to assemble the ways in which I’ve thought about pedagogy since I began teaching in 2006. For the first six years of my PhD program at the University of California, San Diego my funding package granted me with at least six Intermediate Spanish Language & Literature courses per year. Some of these were more technical intermediate grammar courses and others were focused on Latin American & Spanish literature or film, the detective genre in Latin America, or special topics such as the question of memory/history/forgetting during the various “guerras sucias” of the Cold War in the 20th-century hemispheric Americas.

Trained in a department that is neither a traditional English department nor a department of Comparative Literature, my mentors organized the program as a polyvocal, decentered department of world literatures and cultures within a single unit committed “to the multilingual historical study of the connections and conflicts between cultures and societies.” It was never surprising or an event to find a literature or first-year writing course that in traditional academic circles would be seen as “minor” or too specific. Allowing for courses like these without making it an overly visible, performative event seemed like an attempt to decenter tradition and normalize more voices in the curriculum.

My training encouraged me to question which traditions and subjects are prioritized or centered in academic spaces. I think readers will get a sense of this when they see some of the texts I recommended for this project – particularly Kei Miller, Michel DeGraff, Audre Lorde, and Pedro Pietri. For me, considering power and place is relevant in first-year writing – it is just as important to share with students the historical context in which texts are produced as literary/rhetorical form. In my previous role teaching in a Spanish department, I learned that highlighting questions in the classroom that some might see as “charged” – focusing on fascist repression alongside the proper construction of the subjunctive – required a space that centered nonhierarchical structures of feeling, the student’s own perspectives and voices, and the elimination of fear.

ET: When I was seven years old, sitting at my kitchen table, I watched my father come home from the store and correct my mother’s spelling of broccoli on her grocery list. She moved to this country at 16 and went to community college the year after and failed anatomy and physiology because spelling counted on the tests. She didn’t go back to school until she was in her forties. She ensured I practiced my spelling every day in first and second grade. She bought me a Speak and Spell toy, and I even pestered her for help spelling “computer” while she was in labor. I got 99th percentile on my state standardized test on spelling. Now I teach writing and never correct my students’ spelling. Instead, I remind them that standard spelling came along with the spread of the printing press: an “improved efficiency” for laying out print at a time of great variety in pronunciation.