Teaching Notes

WHITE CHRISTMAS
Delta Records
OTIS!: THE DEFINITIVE OTIS REDDING
Rhino Records

How, then, to be the kind of teacher who uses popular culture as a classroom teaching tool and yet not seem to be exactly that cartoon hippie instructor who tries, lamely, to be hip with his reluctant students, as on “Beavis and Butthead”? I am a UC Lecturer teaching lower-division composition classes to talented, bright, and bored undergraduates there mostly against their will, who locate “composition” and writing somewhere near dental work.

Lucky them (!) when they encounter a middle-aged pony-tailed socialist with a goatee wearing his “No Nukes” t-shirt and exercising a predilection for writing on the board such phrases as “the social construction of reality”—exactly as the Sociology teacher in the famous back-to-school episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." (I am not making either of us up.)

Yes, pop culture pedagogy is, indeed, one way to funnily distract students from the mandatory, often punitive-seeming (to both students and teachers) experience of comp class. But using film, television, and recorded music to get students to see the value of analysis, interpretation, and essay writing as skills which might empower them beyond the classroom is also potentially risky. I failed with the Sex Pistols, for instance, and Loudon Wainwright III, two of my own favorites. Go figure.

Johnny Cash’s “Boy Named Sue” worked well enough. Students “got it”: the rhetorical flourish, the cornball humor, the necessarily instructive bit of redemption at the end. But they really hated the music..

Yet listening to songs and even reading their lyrics at the same time helps students to trust their instincts, to build confidence by thinking things out loud—and, importantly, writing them down. Listening to music also lets them imagine that exercising a cultural critique—even about pop culture—is one way of becoming a literate, active, engaged citizen intellectual..

While instructors at the University of California are given lots of leeway to teach creatively, up against not only a strict and impossibly ambitious syllabus, but a ten-week schedule, they may need—especially new teachers—“tried and true” thirty-minute exercises in, say, models of inter-textual interpretation. With a finite number of shopping days till Christmas, I share this “application analysis” exercise because it consistently works, helping to teach students to go beyond only comparison and contrast and see how understanding one “text” helps us see another. And, yes, it’s fun.

Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” is, you’ll recall, a heartwarming, even cloying nostalgia bouquet, though not without its melodic appeal and, yes, that beautiful voice. Of course, many students do not recognize this 1940s era holiday classic. Otis Redding’s version is even less familiar. Perfect.

I first play the Der Bingle version, using as questions for discussion the four topics in Jack Rawlin’s chapter in The Writer’s Way: “Thesis, purpose, audience and tone.” We go through this short list in reverse order, ending with the thesis—“intellectual or emotional argument” as I call it—of the song. With its opening of Christmassy bells, strings, and background chorus (tone), students of course recognize the nostalgia theme, guessing that the likely audience is their—or somebody’s—grandparents, a student or two further speculating that this might involve World War II and being far away from home. “Purpose” is easy, as is “thesis”: the idealization of a particular kind of snowy old-time Christmas, despite perhaps never having seen it, makes people love family, hearth, and home.

Not surprisingly, nobody mentions race, class, ethnicity, or sex..

Then I play the Otis version, with its obviously joyful, sexual but also slyly ironic response to the old fogey standard in which, as the liner notes indicate, “[Otis] can’t quite bring himself to say 'May all your Christmases be white' the first time through, so he gently stammers and ad-libs his way around it in a clever, horn-spurred turnaround until he can make his hidden agenda perfectly clear.”

And, yes, here some clever student guesses at “audience,” which leads to a short
digression on “genre,” in which their teacher discusses briefly rhythm and blues, soul, and Motown.

And when we try to answer, together, the question of how our “reading” (or “listening”) to Otis says something about how we now hear and understand Bing, things really get rockin’.

What, exactly, is Der Bingle saying? To whom? What is Otis saying, especially when he seems now to be talking to Bing and those folks from twenty-five years earlier? And why does he seem to have turned a benign carol into either a sexy song or a political song or a Black song or...?

And, my favorite question: How might those old 1940s folks respond to the Redding version? And, yes, well, how do you suppose they did, class, when the Otis version appeared at the height of the Civil Rights and rock and roll and anti-war movements?

That’s when I turn down the music and let them write for twenty minutes, responding to the above.

May your teaching be merry and bright. And may all your Christmases be, well, not exactly white.

Andrew Tonkovich
University of California, Irvine

THE SILENT DUCHESS
By Dacia Maraini. Translated by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood. New York: The Feminist Press, $14.95.
.

The Silent Duchess by Dacia Maraini is an excellent novel for an exploration of patriarchy and the female voice. It can be read in Women's Studies and literature courses. Students in my Women's Studies Capstone course at the William Paterson University of New Jersey read this 1990 Italian novel in translation. Since the focus of the Women's Studies Department is diversity, this international selection about a woman with disabilities was ideal.

When the novel opens, Marianna Ucria, the main character, is a seven-year-old deaf and mute aristocratic child living in Palermo in Sicily in the 1700s. As a child with disabilities, Marianna lives her life in the margins in her family and in society.

Her father, Duke Signoretto Ucria, takes her to the public hanging of a twelve-year-old boy, thinking that the trauma might shock her into speech and hearing. His plan doesn't work, and at the age of thirteen she is married off to her mother's brother, Duke Pietro Ucria, whom she refers to as "uncle husband." When she returns to her family after being raped by Pietro, her mother and the church remind her that it is her duty to stay with her husband. Her family is ashamed of her "undignified behavior." Her father returns her to Pietro, only asking that he not be too severe with her because of her age and disability. In other words, some abuse is expected! Marianna's father represents patriarchy. He is unemotional, authoritarian, and cruel.

Marianna uses a writing pad affixed to her waist to communicate. Ironically, Marianna's handicap frees her from the stifling everyday life of noble women. Each of her sexual encounters with uncle husband is a rape. Marianna gives birth to five children. Sadly, she replicates her own fate when she doesn't fight hard enough to put off the arranged marriage of her oldest daughter at age twelve. After Pietro's death, Marianna learns the secret behind her deaf and mute condition when she questions her brother Carlo, a monk. He doesn't answer her questions, but Marianna has the ability to read people's minds, and while in her brother's presence she becomes knowledgeable about the horrendous truth about her rape. Carlo thinks about the rape and its cover-up as an "affair between men." Marianna violates the social order when she refuses to mourn her husband and decides to do as she pleases. Freed by the death of her husband and her knowledge, she chooses to travel with her servant Fila, who had been given to her as a gift from her father. Marianna, who questions the right of anyone to gift another with a human being, supports Fila's desire to leave her and marry.

Students write journals while reading The Silent Duchess. The novel is rich in issues pertinent to Women's Studies courses. Some of these issues include infanticide, child abuse, incest, forced marriage, marital rape, classism, ableism, and sexism. In a journal, one student pondered, "How could her parents love Marianna and be so willing to marry her off at the age of 13 to a man three times her age. Her parents really married her off to her uncle because it was economically beneficial for them to do so."

I also assign a student the task of facilitating the class discussion about the novel. Students are angered by the blatant preference for male children in The Silent Duchess. Marianna gives birth to three girls before birthing a boy. When her son Mariano is born, family members pass the newborn from hand to hand "as if he were the Infant Jesus." Students are impressed by Marianna when she starts to assert herself. Following the death of her fifth child, her much beloved Signoretto, Marianna rebuffs her husband's sexual advances. One student remarked, "I feel that this occurrence was actually a turning point in Marianna's life, and actually came to empower her."

Ironically, as a "Silent Duchess," Marianna learns much. As a woman with a disability, she is viewed as inferior by others in her social class. Her disability has given her insights that others do not seem to have. She is aware of the foibles of the aristocracy and how sons are initiated into sex by using servant girls. She is marginalized, and she cultivates a rich interior life, a life nourished by her avid reading and her observing eyes.

In conjunction with reading this novel and exploring the issue of a woman's voice, I show The Piano, a film about a nineteenth-century English woman, living in Australia, who is mute. Students compare Marianna with this mute woman. We also read "The Laugh of the Medusa" by the French feminist Hélène Cixous, an essay that discusses the importance of the female "voice." Cixous says that women need to write themselves into existence. I also show the film A Room of One's Own, a dramatic monologue based on Virginia Woolf's essay by the same name. Responding to the film, one student wrote, "It inspired me the same way that Cixous' work and The Silent Duchess did, encouraging me to write for me, for myself." Another student connected a line from the film about not being able to lock up one's mind with The Silent Duchess: "It reminded me about how Marianna's mind refused to be locked up."

In the Afterword to The Silent Duchess, Anna Camaiti Hostert writes that Marianna's dumbness represents women's insurmountable difficulties trying to express themselves. Marianna's journey becomes a metaphor for the act of writing for women—a coming to voice. The novel "describes a transition from a patriarchal world where women are silenced and silent to a female symbolic order in which women are finally able to speak with their own language."

Arlene Holpp Scala
William Paterson University

ON THE REZ
By Ian Frazier
New York: Picador, $14.

My second-semester honors Freshman English class was multiethnic, multireligious, multicultural—about half of them American-born. Several of them were proud of their historical knowledge, but only Wanda, whose Native American grandmother regularly took her to pow-wows on Long Island, knew anything beyond stereotypes about our native peoples.

Angelo, a student my age (in his early forties), and a disabled veteran, was the most vocal. “To tell you how ignorant I was: I served in this country’s armed forces for most of my adult life, and I didn’t know there was any Indians in there with me. Reading this book, reading that book of Native American speeches, reading Last of the Mohicans, it makes me think it was wrong not to know! My own father, I was telling him about this book, and he told me, ‘Hey, you’re Indian too. You didn’t know that?’ ‘Pops,’ I said, ‘how could I know if you didn’t tell me?’ ‘You’re Puerto Rican!’ he says. ‘Where’d you get that color in your skin? You never heard of the Taino?’ And so, when I’m not reading for this class or my other classes or working, I’m reading about my people, Professor. I was ignorant, and now I’m not, and it just makes me wonder at how we can be so ignorant of things so close to us.”

I swear, at least once a week, Angelo would address us at this length, and I always enjoyed it and felt grateful. His classmates, most of them teenagers, sometimes rolled their eyes. Good students though they were, they weren’t interested in revelations from an older classmate. Even so, I think his candid remarks helped them strive to be candid as well.

On the Rez focuses on the history and present-day life of the Oglala Sioux of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, but what became for us the center of the book and our discussions is Frazier’s friendship with Le War Lance, who figured so memorably in Frazier’s Great Plains.
He calls me every few weeks, it seems, to ask for money. It’s good that he does, I suppose, to keep me from getting sentimental when I think of him. Even now I can feel my words want to pull him in a wrong direction, toward a portrait that is rose-tinted and larger than life, while he is pulling the other way, toward reality. . . . Once when I said I had no money to send, Le became angry and told me he would not be seeing me again, that he expected soon to die. Then he told me to “suck on a banana and make it real,” and hung up. I didn’t hear from him for a year or more after that, and I began to worry that maybe he actually had died. . . .

“Are they really friends?” asks earnest Joseph.

“Why not?”

“Because Frazier’s always buying. They go get beer, and Frazier doesn’t even want Le to have beer, and he buys it.

“I don’t got a problem with that, Professor,” says Angelo, “because I know friendships are just like any other relationship. They’re unequal. I don’t have equal relationships with my children. I learned you got to take each relationship on an individual basis.”

Joseph protests, “Shouldn’t friends be friends on an equal basis? Isn’t that what friendship is?”

“Should be or is?”

“But if friends aren’t equal, there’s always a struggle!”

“That’s what he’s saying,” says Angelo. “The writer, Frazier, he’s showing it like it is, not like you want it.”

This unequal friendship troubled us because we didn’t see our ideals of friendship illustrated, but how all of our relationships strain with imbalance. For the first time in a writing class, I found essays on friendship interesting.

Frazier’s sense of humor leavens his troubling reflections on the roles evil and envy play in the terribly sad history of the Sioux, in particular, and Native Americans in general. The evil is the political and social history, the poverty, the drug abuse, and the envy is just envy.

The other important relationship for Frazier in the book is with someone he never met, but only discovered through his research on the reservation: SuAnne Big Crow. She was a wonderful high school basketball star who brought Pine Ridge a glorious state championship. She died in 1992 in a car crash at the age of seventeen.

When SuAnne talked about the reservation, people recall, she sometimes used the metaphor of the basket of crabs. It’s a common metaphor on Pine Ridge. She said that the reservation is like a bunch of crabs reaching and struggling to get out of the bottom of a basket, and whenever one of them manages to get a hold and pull himself up the side, the other crabs in their reaching and struggling grab him and pull him back down. The metaphor could apply, no doubt, to many places nearly as poor and lacking in opportunity as Pine Ridge.

Some of my students attested to the truth of this metaphor back where they came from, but what makes this image resonate so powerfully in On the Rez is that Le is one of those who tries to pull SuAnne back down. “My interest in SuAnne, when I mentioned it to him,” writes Frazier, “seemed to make him morose and sour.” And then, one day, Le badmouths her, scrawling across the portrait Frazier had mentally painted of her, leaving Frazier “depressed.” Frazier soon runs into Le’s “source” for the slander and discovers that Le, apparently out of jealousy and envy, made it up.

And there we had another big pothole on the road of friendship to discuss.

Bob Blaisdell
Kingsborough Community College
City University of New York

to issue #65 table of contents