Teaching As La-Ing: Thinking About the English Lit and Creative Writing Classroom on Turtle Island

Teaching As La-Ing: Thinking About the English Lit and Creative Writing Classroom on Turtle Island Sonnet L’Abbé (bio) Huy ch q’a siem hwulmuxw mustimuxw. Noor hindi opens her poem, “Fuck Your Lecture On Craft, My People Are Dying,” with a confrontation: “Colonizers write about flowers. / I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks seconds before becoming daisies.” In three swift moves—title, image, image—Hindi sets the scene: a young Palestinian writer in a creative writing workshop, likely a poetry workshop, who has urgent things to say and wants the tools to say them effectively, but who is jarred by the values and priorities of a professor invested in the American academy’s Anglocentric tradition of reading and writing. In Hindi’s poem, this professor will teach her how to use metaphor to praise the beauty of the moon and flowers and how to use metaphor to speak of death. Hindi suggests that what is offered, pedagogically, by someone trained to train others’ gaze in a lyrically cadenced appreciation as a convention of genre and who applies that aestheticizing (and perhaps anesthetizing) gaze to flowers and death as though both are wonders of nature, is screamingly inadequate for a student who comes to language to process existence as/under a constant death threat, and whose very ability to gaze or think or write experiences similar threat. [End Page 27] I’m reminded of a snark I read more than fifteen years ago, whose author I don’t remember, about how the then-mainstream award-winning poets, who tended to be white academics, loved to write about being at their cottage and noticing the quality of the light falling on the(ir) lake. It stayed with me because I recognized the aesthetic of a propertied class and felt no confidence in my ability to do authentic trade in it. Literary journals were full of poems that either bemoaned the bored tensions of middle-class married life or read like humblebrags on the quietude of spending one’s leisure becoming an amateur botanist/entomologist/zoologist. My voice wanted to yell, beatbox, groan, chant, and sing spaces into existence, spaces that welcomed me and the threat I posed to my professors’ sensibilities. My very impulse to write emerged threaded with desire to challenge to the cultural and racial dominance, and the privilege-inflected gazes, of those who spent time at lake cottages and in muse-worthy gardens. The writing of Noor’s student speaker, simply by coming into existence, contests the gazes of those who see her people as, at best, “foreign” and less suitable as an object of poetic attention than wildflowers and, at worst, as a cultural threat to be systematically eradicated. When she says, “They’re so beautiful, the flowers,” we hear layers of longing and anger around the privilege of being able to use one’s precious writing energy to stop and smell roses rather than to advocate for one’s life. “One day, I’ll write about flowers like we own them,” is Hindi’s final declaration, after she writes about her dead father, about “Jessica” texting her “Happy Ramadan,” and about Palestinians not being able to see the moon from jail cells. Hindi identifies the dominant, approved gaze of the workshop with a gaze of ownership. Does she end on this note because the sense of urgency and love that compels her work also includes a wish for her own people to be the ones doing the owning? Or does this concluding image forebode that once Hindi has been put through the paces of a creative writing poetry workshop, she will now write as the colonizer does? Is this a fear, or a wish, this anticipation of her voice having been effectively disciplined? My own pedagogy, as teacher of both English Literature and Creative Writing, has always been informed by my own experiences of feeling Eurocentric, colonial values toward “resources,” property, bodies, and power passed onto and directed at me as I was being taught canon, craft, and argument. The question of how English departments see themselves in relation to the justice work of decolonizing, starts, I think, with feeling the...

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