There are parts of the map
I will not show.
There are places I will
always keep secret.
I will eat the tips of my fingers
to keep them unknown and
unvisited
. . .
"Are you a priest or a soldier?" I ask,
"I am neither a priest nor a soldier,"
you say.
"I'm a mapmaker. A cosmographer."
I ask if you can travel
in all directions
at one time.
You say that is an impossibility.
from "Wild Figs and Secret Places," by Gayl Jones
Gayl Jones' long poem "Wild Figs and Secret Places" in her collection entitled The Hermit-Woman details the first meeting in Brazil of an indigenous shaman with a conquistador. The shaman is a woman cast out from her own community, while the conquistador is a mapmaker, survivor of a destroyed ship. The two communicate in the mapmaker's language, a possibility only because the shaman has learned the mapmaker's language from the Jesuits.
The unknown and unvisited places the shaman keeps secret constitute the contested ground of both the poem and the colonial enterprise. The cartographer's mandate to make all places known battles the shaman's urgency to prevent the mapmaker from naming, knowing, mapping, and thus possessing the land. The epistemological differences between the two voices (the shaman assumes a type of movement or being the cartographer claims is impossible) indicate that the two know and experience the world in radically different ways. Their maps, or differing projections of the world, can never resemble each other, just as their names for these places reflect the shaman's and conquistador's opposing positions. The conquistador names his claim the "New World," a phrase the shaman ridicules in the following lines: "This is a New World to you / but to me? / Hah! / There aren't any secret places any more."
I begin with this poem about known and unknown places as a way to start addressing the following question: How do we teach texts from cultures about which we know little or nothing? Most of us who currently teach multicultural texts face this question each time we construct a course. This question also constitutes perhaps the single greatest deterrent to incorporating multicultural texts in the classroom, because in answering the question, the instructor must confront his or her boundaries of both expertise and ignorance.
This problem is not a new one. The difficulties of teaching texts from national literatures and cultures outside of our expertise have been with us for a while in the world literature classroom. Instructors with degrees in English are expected to teach texts ranging from ancient Greece to twentieth-century Russia. Most instructors don't admit to or discuss the pitfalls and occasional blessings of teaching such an eclectic mix. I suspect this lack of discussion has something to do with the nature of the world literature classroom, whose tradition is firmly grounded in the euroamerican literary canon.
Over the last decade the selection of world literature textbooks which counteract the traditional eurocentric bias has increased. However, for those of us who truly wish to teach a multicultural or cross-cultural syllabus, the question remains: How do we negotiate those literatures about which we know little or nothing? One guideline I've discovered over the last decade of teaching can be distilled into one phrase: "Respect ignorance." Both my own and that of the students. Respecting and articulating our ignorance of other cultures requires a certain humility, which is critical if we are to remain teachable.
Please don't misunderstand me. When I say, "Respect ignorance," I am not advocating pedagogic or scholastic irresponsibility. On the contrary, I am advocating an approach to the study and teaching of multicultural and world literatures that allows all members of the learning experience, both instructors and students, to not only map out the boundaries of our knowledge and ignorance of other cultures, but to also locate the strategic plots of cultural misinformation which delineate and sustain processes of racism and ethnocentrism.
One thing we can do for our students is to expose the limits of our own knowledge and experience -- in other words, to model ignorance for them. I'll give two examples from my own teaching experience.
When I teach Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in world literature, I emphasize the need to work at remembering and attempting to pronounce the names of the characters. We have a pronounciation session which is informed by my articulated ignorance. I tell the students that the pronounciations I offer them are approximations -- I do not know the Igbo language and therefore can only guess at how the names are pronounced; moverover, because Igbo is a tonal language, I also do not know where the accents fall. What do the students learn from my public discussion of the parameters of my ignorance? That there is such a thing as the Igbo language, that there are more than 700 languages in Africa, that the Berlin Conference of 1885 divided up Africa so that peoples such as the Igbo and Hausa and Yoruba were geographically dislocated, and that finding out how to pronounce Igbo names is a much more difficult process than finding out how to pronounce names in French or any other colonial language.
The second example concerns Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony, a text I have taught often in various types of contemporary multicultural literature courses. Like the deity Thought-Woman or Spider Woman, who names the world into being and begins the story of the novel, Silko weaves the orature and mythology of the Laguna Pueblo in a narrative of prose, poetry, and storytelling. The focal character is a World War II veteran named Tayo, who returns home believing that his prayer for a cessation of rain during the war in Japan has caused a seven-year drought in his homeland. Tayo's process of healing involves various rituals, which are all part of the overall intricate ceremony of the novel.
The first time I read Ceremony, I knew it was a powerful and wonderful book. And because I am a careful and trained reader, I was able to teach the novel by talking about concerns such as memory, time, war, the intersections of orature and literature, the place of the white man in the cosmogony of the Laguna Pueblo. I also provided some critical context through an article by the critic and author Paula Gunn Allen. At that time, I taught the novel to the best of my ability. But as I began to research Silko's other works and Pueblo mythology and religion, I found a story about someone named Tiyo, known as the snake-youth, who loses faith in the gods and goes into the underworld to bring back rain for a land that had suffered drought; his journey restores belief in the efficacy of ritual and traditional ways. A reading of the myth of Tiyo, the snake-youth, when placed along side an investigation into Silko's Tayo, the veteran, clearly yields a more informed and enriched interpretation.
In subsequent teachings of the novel, I have chronicled my research into Silko's Ceremony and delineated my changing relationship to the work. I ask the students to imagine an instructor teaching Joyce's Ulysses without once mentioning Homer's Odysseus. I tell the students that is precisely the type of blunder I made while teaching Ceremony without mentioning Tiyo, the snake-youth. I ask students to think about what constitutes valuable literary knowledge, where the first omission would be scandalous, if not downright impossible, and the latter omission would most likely go unnoticed. I don't mean to suggest that I gleefully engage in a public flagellation of my scholarly shortcomings. On the contrary, I hope that this story shows how I respect my ignorance in order to argue for and motivate the hard work of careful scholarship.
For students, the process of reading literature by multicultural writers in the U.S. or engaging with texts by writers from areas such as Africa and the Caribbean inevitably effects a confrontation with their previous education. Students begin to understand that there are huge gaps in their knowledge, that they have been lied to and told partial truths. When I read literature by Native American authors, I talk about genocide and history. I usually say something like this: "When we open our history textbooks, we do not read, 'The founding of our country was based on the genocide of the indigenous peoples.'" When I finish such a statement, students do not stand up and applaud my clarity. They react in many different ways, ranging from denial and a resistance to any new knowledge, to outrage and sometimes a willingness to know more. Many students get angry, frustrated and occasionally overwhelmed when they confront the ethnocentric biases of their own educations. I have learned to attend to these different reactions, to recognize and respect them.
These reactions indicate that students are thinking deeply and grappling with difficult issues. Students who begin to question get uncomfortable, and uncomfortable students tend to focus on the process of learning and how to better discover and articulate their own informed opinions.
In teaching Beloved during one summer course at a university in Mississippi, I had the opportunity to observe yet again the profound effect of Morrison's work on students' perceptions of history. One student began class by complaining about the novel, saying that Morrison's language was pretentious, that it slapped the reader in the face. Upon further discussion, the student revealed that she simply could not accept the unspeakable conditions of slavery that Morrison presents as historically accurate. A good deal of this student's discomfort stemmed from her own questions about whether or not her ancestors were slaveowners. When she finally did accept Morrison's descriptions, this student became increasingly more agitated and agitating -- she had long talks with family, confronted her friends, and even spoke up when acquaintances used racist language. This student's process was not without pain; she talked of being emotionally overwhelmed. But the courageous process of confronting the boundaries of her familiar scheme of history allowed her to enter new territory and the possibility of activism.
I have only begun to sketch out this idea of "respecting ignorance." But I suspect that in order to take this process seriously, we must all investigate our pedagogy. Traditional academia expects us, as scholars and teachers, to market ourselves based on the depth and extent to which we can each say, "I know." Therefore, I believe that any pedagogical approach that insists on acknowledging the boundaries of ignorance, must necessarily ground itself in the practices of non-traditional education. Such practices are already familiar to us as collaborative learning, critical, and feminist pedagogies, methodologies which work to expose the hierarchical nature of the classroom and attempt to transform the learning/teaching experience.
In lacing this paper with language evocative of cartography, I knew the word "boundary" would figure prominently. And as I flipped through the thesaurus, I was reminded of the double meaning of "bound." As a verb, the word means to demarcate, circumscribe, restrict and define. But as an adjective, "bound" means to be obligated, committed, engaged, responsible, accountable. This meaning resonates for me when I am given the gift of my students' courage and anger as they grapple with old maps and with the bewildering spaces of the unexplored. Together we are committed and accountable to the journey.
first published: 19 may 2002
last revised: 19 may 2002
webspinner: s.d.shattuck