Eve L. Ewing: Original Sins

 Fate is kind.  Until she's not.  Not sure why this book caught my eye in the "free books" rack at the bookstore, but it did, and the back cover was enough to make me take it home.  It turns out to be on exactly the same educational thread that has been consuming my professional thoughts lately: what does culturally responsive education really look like?  How can we learn from the sins of the Carlisle School, and empower BIPOC to create equity and justice?

Ewing's analysis of the issues surrounding the American education system is insightful, and laid out in a clear, engaging way that illustrates how American education was designed to do different things for different people.  For white people, it was designed to create deep thinking and prosperous leaders.  For Black students, the goal was explicitly from the very foundation to inculcate submission and control.  The schools created for Native populations were even more insidious: their stated goal was utter erasure of Native identity and culture.  In short, the American education system is not broken; it is functioning exactly as intended.  

Her solution is unique among the many similar books I've read recently.  She does not propose lessons, activities, etc. to increase equity.  Her solution is not pedagogical at all.  "I humbly offer that braiding allows us a metaphor to think about a different mode of teaching and learning" (265).  This is not only a reference to the importance of hair in BIPOC culture.  It is a deeper symbol of the epistemologies of those cultures.  Knowledge is communal and inextricable from care, and not only in BIPOC cultures is this true.  It was true for all people before the original sins of hierarchy, oppression, and privilege upon which this country and many others were built.  Getting back to that center is a step on the road to healing for all students, regardless of background.

Huang Xiang: A Lifetime is a Promise to Keep

 In 1997, inspired by an initiative of Salman Rushdie's,  the city of Pittsburgh became designated a City of Asylum for oppressed writers and artists from all over the world.  These writers, fleeing persecution in their home country, were given a place to live and resources to pursue their craft.  I recently visited Pittsburgh with some good friends, and we explored the row of whimsically decorated houses, decked out in murals and writing in myriad languages.  Unsurprisingly, there was a book store nearby that featured works by poets who have lived in these spaces over the past decades, and my eye was drawn to the volume in question.  Huang was evidently the first poet in residence at the City of Asylum nearly 30 years ago, moving there after facing censorship and imprisonment by the mainland Chinese government for his sentiments, and especially his commitment to individuality and self-determination. When I saw that the book was a side-by-side edition with the original Chinese text, I snapped it right up, along with a signed copy of the poem "Listening to Mountains from Behind Iron Bars" in the author's own calligraphy.  

The editor of this volume, Michelle Yeh, is decidedly more insightful than I am used to seeing in introductions to such editions--and by insightful I mean that I agree with her.  As she observes, Huang is primarily a poet of the self, and specifically of creating and exploring that self, the magical "I". It is no wonder that this message failed to resonate with the communist government.  He expresses this search beautifully, without ever fully resolving it, in such works as "I Believe"

    I

    Shine in my nakedness

    Right here

    Golden

    Melancholy

    Beautiful

It is the process, not the product, that is of special interest to Huang, and he captures it vividly in "Living Simply":

    Man is an earthen mold

    The heart a cooking tripod

    His naked soul and flesh

    Burn 

    In a cup of clear water

    Bathe

    In a mountainful of luminous snow.

The self is not simply discovered.  It is forged, created, molded, and tempered.  We decide who we are, and in a society that wants to mold us, though not in the same ways that mainland China might, we all need our own City of Asylum.