Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay

FOREWORD

I’ve told this story before. It was a profound moment in an already long teaching career. I had heard Paulo Freire’s name for the first time at a CCCC convention in the mid-eighties, and was tantalized by the discussion of his ideas. That summer I was fortunate enough to participate in a week-long workshop with him and scholars like Henry Giroux and Michael Apple, thinkers who restored my faith in education. Drawing participants from the west to east coasts, the workshop was wellattended and provocative, but some of us—educators of color—began to feel a familiar discomfort in relation to the dominant group. We formed a pan-ethnic People of Color Caucus and met with Freire, sitting together on the floor, in overstuffed chairs, speaking of our concerns and experiences with racial and class inequities. Inevitably the question arose: “What can we do?” His advice was for me unexpected but unforgettable : “Find the spaces,” he said, “invade the spaces.” This book from the heart and mind of Professor Cristina Kirklighter does just this. Not only does it provide a helpful overview of the work and trends in our field, an impressive and meticulous synthesis of scholarship on the essay, but it brings together a seemingly strange and eclectic lot— from Montaigne and Bacon to Emerson and Thoreau to Freire himself, Villanueva, and Behar—in a way that makes sense. In her quest to establish the personal essay as an invaluable means of individual expression and social study, the author offers a humanized view into European and North American essayists, long ago studied and perhaps forgotten by some of us: Montaigne through a contemporary lens and perspective; Emerson and Thoreau as nation-builders. Even the Latin American Freire is drawn as a vii F O R E W O R D Gail Y. Okawa man in the process of discovery and change, alive, dynamic, and in flux. This portrayal made me recall Freire’s ironic reference that summer 14 years ago to himself as an “efficient dish washing machine” (or something to that effect), a man revising his role in his own family. Sometimes making gods into men is an invasion. Cristina’s work in this volume affirms my work during much of my career, especially the last 15 years or so, and reveals some chance—and some deliberate—crossed paths. In forming a multicultural cohort of writing center tutors at the University of Washington in the 1980’s, many of them undergraduate or graduate students of Alaska Native, American Indian, Asian American, African American, and Latino/a backgrounds, I began to see how personal life experience and critical reflection merged in the tutors’ developing sense of themselves as thoughtful professionals. I was hooked by the connection. In designing my dissertation study years later, I asked my participants—all teachers of color—to trace their experiences with literacy from their earliest recollections to their careers as teachers of writing at the time, a choice based on my experience with the UW tutors, an abiding interest in the persons behind the roles, my research on autobiographical narrative, and what was, by then, an internalized belief in the power of personal and critical reflection. At one point, I had the bright idea to ask Victor Villanueva if he would participate in my study and write an autobiographical narrative for it, to which he replied, “I’ve just written one; do you want to see it?,” and sent me a draft of Bootstraps. In effect, we have been doing this work “so as not to lose [ourselves] in the enormous distance between what [we] do and say,” as Freire wrote later (Letters to Cristina 3), and Professor Kirklighter points out in this volume. Like Cristina, in the early 1990’s, I combed through CCCC program books and attended the sparse offering of papers on the personal essay, the autobiographical, the narrative before they came in vogue, when Anne DiPardo and others were admonishing compositionists to see the value of students’ personal narratives in light of the politics of literacy. On one of those occasions in 1994, I happened to hear Cristina deliver her first paper “Redefining the Autobiographical Essay Through Multiculturism ,” was inspired to speak to her after the panel, and invited her to join the Latino Caucus (of which I have been an honorary member since 1987). Inclusion works against the isolation; another invasion of another space. Even those of us who do this work need to be...