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kalamu at Clemson
On New Orleans Schools & Writers As Activists
3 November 2005, Clemson, irony of ironies.
we’re at the Strom Thurmond Institute at Clemson University in
Clemson, South Kak-ka-lack-key. We are Students at the Center,
our New Orleans, high-school-based writing program now in exile,
post-kartina. Three or four weeks back we met here for a SAC
retreat, bringing together high school students, SAC graduates,
staff and supporters for a meeting to kick-off our post Katrina
program. We are no longer simply struggling to survive, we are
re-grouping and deploying to carry on and fight back.
How do you fight back against a hurricane? You don’t. You
can’t. Decades of dealing with hurricanes in New Orleans has
taught us there ain’t but two ways to deal with a hurricane:
either hunker down until it blows over or run and get out the
way. Some SAC folk decided to hunker down. Some decided to run.
Jim and Greta hunkered down—they had good reasons (it’s a
long story for another time). Kalamu ran (I’ve learned to pick
my fights and from what I saw coming, I wasn’t up for tangling
with Katrina). When the levees broke, Jim and Greta had to flee.
We’re in the aftermath now that Katrina has left town. What we
are fighting is what George Bush would/should call an axis of
evil, i.e. 1. lying-every-time-their-lips-move
politicians (from the local up to the national level), 2.
vulture corporations circling to profit off misery, and 3.
an old-line New Orleans establishment who are glad that poor
black folks are gone. It’s a formidable opposition.
Our focal point is public education. Today there are no public
schools in New Orleans. New Orleans is the urban future. Which
was the point of the symposium moderated by Staffas Broussard, a
civil rights veteran and mathematics professor at the University
of New Orleans who also is a key member of the New Orleans
Algebra Project, a national educational effort founded by Bob
Moses.
The program opened with a wonderful alto sax solo by
13-year-old, New Orleans public school student Stephen Gladney.
On the panel were:
Greta Gladney, founder and director of the Renaissance
Project, a community development non-profit based in the Lower
Ninth Ward;
Charmaine Marchand, Louisiana State Legislator, District
99 (New Orleans, lower 9th ward and Bywater neighborhoods);
Brenda Mitchell, President of United Teachers of New
Orleans
(American Federation of Teachers Local 527);
Jim Randels, founder and co-director of Students at
the Center;
Kalamu ya Salaam, co-director of Students at the
Center.
Present in the audience were:
Reggie Lawson, head of Crescent City Peace Alliance
(non-profit that works with schools, anti-violence, and housing
in the schools and neighborhoods surrounding Douglass High
School;
Steve Bradberry, lead organizer for ACORN in New Orleans;
Roger Dixon, teacher Charleston Public Schools;
Debbie Barron, director for secondary school language
arts in
Greenville County Schools (also developed program modeled after
Students at the Center at Mauldin High School in Greenville
County);
Romona Davis, director of Center for Professional Growth
and
Development (teacher center for New Orleans Public Schools
funded by Health and Welfare Fund);
Malcolm Suber, director of UrbanHeart, collective of 21st
Century
Community Learning Center sites in New Orleans;
Betsy Uhrman, Open Society Institute (based in New York).
* Plus, Dixie Gaswami, lead teacher with the Breadloaf
School of English and with The Strom Thurmond Institute.
The approximately 100+ audience members included Clemson
students and staff as well as friends and supporters.
The panel predictably spoke out forcefully in support of public
education and expressed solidarity in terms of confronting the
absence of public schools in post-Katrina New Orleans. What
remains to be seen is whether this coalition will be strong
enough to challenge the school board and the state. A suit is
not enough of a challenge, I believe we need to construct real
alternatives that force folk to take sides.
SAC announced that one way or another, we were going to open a
school that accepted all students. Again, it remains to be seen.
Running a school is no joke.
Many writers don’t understand the importance of being an
activist, not just an intellectual supporter, but someone who
actually works day to day on issues important to the communities
we write about and often claim to speak for. Our commitment
ought to be more than words we write. Our commitment ought to
also be work we do. In doing actual work we learn who we are,
who our people are, who our friends and allies are, and who our
enemies are. We learn by experience.
We emotionally feel as well as intellectually
understand, and in this process we gain insights, we observe
human interactions and reactions, we are emotionally touched and
thereby gain a wealth of material that will strengthen and
enliven our creative work. This translation of reality into
creative work is not a simple one to one correspondence.
What is said in a meeting might end up as
part of a conversation in a love story. The way someone walks
down the hall, might become an image in a poem. The point is
that the fodder for our creative fires, is the actual stuff of
our communal life and is thereby not only more real, but also
more heartfelt than if we sat around imagining settings,
conversations, images, etc.
Moreover, the creative me is part of the community. My body has
many of the same needs for food, clothing, shelter, health care,
loving relationships that other members of our community have.
How each of us actualizes our existence as a human being, how we
seek and find our human needs on both a material and social
level, all of this is not just an individual concern—this
seeking is indeed also representative of our community, even
though many of us act as though being an artist is an individual
and lonely pursuit.
Contrary to popular wisdom, writing is not a solitary pursuit,
for the inspiration for writing, the fuel for our imagination is
outside of each writer, is in fact the world, is specifically
the community within which the writer/fish swims. No matter how
unique our individual experiences, for those of us who are
writers, our work is strongest and most broadly accepted when we
express ourselves in such a way that our audience immediately
and deeply feels themselves as our subject matter.
To ignite passion in our audience we must
strike them individually, they must feel and respond to our
words—and thus learning to write is not merely a technical
question, it is also a social question. No matter how unique the
individual expression, every individual has a essence that is
shared by others. The writer’s task is to identify essences
and not simply to elevate uniqueness.
Writers, you will write better if you rub shoulders with your
community (who may or may not be your primary audience, but are
certainly the base of your source material), if you get your
hands dirty by participating in community struggles
(understanding is not just intellectual, truly deep
understanding is also experiential), for writing after all is
simply a conceptualization, a description and identification of
the world within which the writer lives or imagines, either way
the major influences come not from inside the writer but rather
from outside to the writer.
The genius of writing is, of course, what one
does with those influences, but nevertheless the influences are
external. This is why I encourage writers to be active in the(ir)
world(s). * * * * *
update 20 April 2010 |
