paired with “The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual”

Connecting with the broader concepts of the social contract and racial contract, this extended discussion deepens engagement with close reading a poem.

Introduction

JS: Admittedly, when we considered this poem for our project, I hadn’t read any of Ada Limón’s work, though I was aware of her position as the U.S. Poet Laureate and was hearing more and more chatter about her writing. At first glance, this poem may seem simple enough with direct questions and imperatives, and indeed it seemed great to teach because it could introduce students to form and a number of poetic devices. Yet, the longer our group was discussing the poem and wondering where to emphasize the meaning—the part about not wanting to be complicit? the part about stereotypes about the father? what about the way beer and baseball cut through?—the more complex this poem became. In fact, I’d go so far as to say this is an example of what poetry is meant to do: by interacting with the poem through recursive readings, the meaning continues to evolve, even beyond what we can trace to the speaker or poet.

This discussion activity deepens a discussion of the poem by exploring the concept of the “contract” in the title. Designed to follow an initial close-reading of the poem, this discussion moves beyond the literal sense of a contract for a speaking engagement to confront implied meaning around deeper social and racial contracts in U.S. society. I think of this as reading the “fine print” of our social, political, and cultural relationships, which implicate us as readers and writers.

After an introduction to the meaning of the “social contract,” there is a short podcast episode from May 2020 featuring Adam Serwer discussing how the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted social contracts as the killing of Ahmaud Arbery and developing movement for racial justice illustrated the concept of a racial contract underpinning U.S. society. Insofar as the U.S. racial contract is typically understood along a black/white axis, it is particularly generative to return to Limón’s poem and discuss what kinds of contracts are animated in this scene around a bilingual, implied Mexican speaker. In this sense, the poem is a reminder of how literary and cultural texts are often bound by explicit and implicit contracts, but may also experiment past them. At the very least, the poem may generate a critical consciousness of the social, racial, cultural, and linguistic contracts we participate in.

Guide

Concept Analysis: Social Contract(s)

Watch the following video and take notes on how “social contract” is broadly defined. What is a “social contract”? How do we have them and why?

Watch: Social Contract Theory | Ethics Defined

Building on the examples in the video, brainstorm examples of how you know you participate in social contract(s). What explicit and implicit agreements are you aware of?

Now listen to this podcast from May 2020 which takes us back to the early days of the covid-19 pandemic and how this brought new pressures on the social contract. The guest speaker, Adam Serwer, also centers how racial violence during this time reveals a “racial contract” that has long structured U.S. society (which we know prompted the racial justice movement that same year).

Listen: The Racial Contract

The Racial Contract (The Atlantic Link)

The Racial Contract (Podcast Spotify Link)

How do you see the racial contracts play out? Think about historical and current examples, in your own experiences or in society more broadly. How does Serwer’s analogy of the train change your understanding of how social contracts work? How does the racial contract complicate the previous definition of the social contract?

Close Read: Noticing the “Fine Print” in “The Contract Says…”

Working from your understanding of social and racial contracts, return to Limón’s poem, which leads with the title “The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual.” For this discussion, the task is to re-read the poem to figure out the explicit and implicit rules of the contract, or the “fine print,” and to see how the contract is upheld or broken.

• Working with the title alone: What contract(s) seem relevant to this poem? What is the scene of the poem suggesting? What other layers can you add based on the previous discussion of social and racial contracts?
• Working in chunks (lines 1-6, lines 7-10, lines 7-27), what is the explicit or implicit stipulation or request being made? Do you see any “fine print” between the lines?
• Now, evaluating these lines as reflecting some of the contracts you brainstormed, is the contract being upheld or being broken? Who is breaking the contract?
• Focusing on the final section (lines 7-27), how do stereotypes reflect social and racial contracts? How do you interpret the burden of needing to prove or disprove the stereotype?
• Putting this all together, go back to the title that claims “we’d like the conversation to be bilingual” and lines 6-7 that ask for bilingual poems to reach “troubled teens.” Why isn’t the poem bilingual? What contract(s) are being upheld, and which are broken? By whom and why?