National Healing: Race, State, and the Teaching of Composition

Voices from the Dark; Voices from the Light

Voices from the Da rk; Voices f r om the Light The Russian psychologist, Fyodor Vasilyuk, explains how the conflicts that each of us faces in our lives can counteract the creative nature of our experience. We can lose, the “psychological possibility” (1988, 195) to act in a world that overwhelms us with either difficulty or ease (95–172). In either case, we may fail to face that which makes a situation “critical,” that is, the factors that require our creative efforts toward a solution. When that happens, Vasilyuk argues, we fail, as peculiar as it sounds, to experience life fully. We fail to work for solutions to mundane and world problems, and we fail to construct the “new selves” necessary for life in the new circumstances or worlds we imagine and for which we work (164). Conversely, when the psychological possibility for action is restored, experience leads us to produce futures rather than to repeat the past or endure the present. We can write for health, when we realize the possibility for bringing health to thinking and living that is confused, contradictory, or disconnected (Hurlbert 1991, 146). To experience fully and creatively takes all the resources at our command . The process is so critical, so essential, and so necessarily creative that it requires our openness to nothing less than change. I, a Western writer, search for these resources in the East as well as the West, North and South, as I attempt to deepen the possibilities for composing and teaching writing, and to enrich the experience of the processes of both. I cannot tell you how many times during the writing of this book I have had to sit back, here, in the moment of composing, before putting fingers to keys, to reach a place of “not trying deeply” (Sikong 1996, 26), not trying deeply because it is the only way I know to open myself to the words to say and the way to say them. It is the only way I know, today, to get them right. Reading Sikong, I find the reminder I need to remain open to the words, open so that the words will come, that state of mind where I can entertain the critical in creative ways. Poet Pierre Joris has formulated what he calls a “nomad poetics.” A nomad poetics is a dynamic theory for unfixing, in distinctly international terms, our conceptions of what a poem can look like, how it can 102   national healing sound, and what it can contain and mean. It is a poetics of movement; it is a declaration of intent against static formalisms. It is a theory that is “always on the move, always changing, morphing, moving through languages, cultures, terrains, time without stopping” (2003, 26). It is a poetics designed to make inroads against the entrenched universe of discourse, not to mention the entrenched economic order that supports it. As the epigram that begins the essay, “The Millenium Will Be Nomadic or It Will Not: Notes Toward a Nomad Poetics (1996–2002),” says, in part: “The days of anything static, form, content, state are over” (25). A nomad poetics resists provincial and exclusionary thinking about first and second languages, and it provides a rationale for why we should resist discursive residence in our native rhetorics. Why? Because, again, according to Joris’s epigram, “The past century has shown that anything not involved in continuous transformation hardens and dies” (25). Transformation is life itself. And life requires us to draw upon all the options for meaning making that we can discover even as various nationalisms would consolidate power for use at home and against other states. In “The Millenium Will Be Nomadic or It Will Not,” Joris gathers ideas and insights, some written and published by critic Brian Massumi in another text and inserted, with permission, by Joris into his own. Some of these insertions are crucial for understanding the relation of nationalism to composition. For instance, “The State-form is not a form. It is an abstract process: a drive to ‘unity’” and “[a]ny drive to unity is necessarily a drive to dominion, and necessarily fails” (27). The unity is the unity of the nation, of course, the consolidation of state power, certainly , but also the unity of the people into one discourse (despite the accommodation of difference in the form of acceptable experiments of state-sponsored discourse). The value? According to Massumi, “Unless the people are made one, there is no way to make...