The Culture and Politics of Contemporary Street Gang Memoirs

Chapter Four: Brothers Who Could Kill with Words: Language, Literacy, and the Quest for Education in Gang Memoirs

97 BROTHERS WHO COULD KILL WITH WORDS Language, Literacy, and the Quest for Education in Gang Memoirs Gangsta rap and ghetto films both savor graphic and aggressive imagery. Film scholar Jonathan Munby describes the ghetto action movie cycle as “uncompromisingly violent,” contending that these films “struggled to provide a positive message about the fate of America’s black urban communities .”1 Violence is certainly an integral and typical characteristic of gangsta popular culture, and one aim of this book is to consider whether contemporary street gang memoirs fit readily into that gangsta ethos. But in contrast with the gangsta penchant for contentious subjects such as extreme violence, the memoirs diverge from their musical and filmic counterparts by engaging with more positive themes, including self-help (learning to read and write by oneself) and conversion through education. The memoirists deploy narrative tactics and approaches to make moves toward becoming pedagogical rather than violent narrators. Formal education is the traditional portal for acquiring language and literacy skills; the narrators of Blue Rage and Always Running discuss their childhood schools at length. Educational institutions are depicted in all three narratives as sites of conflict, whereby the right to language and literacy must be forcibly negotiated, suggesting these marginalized young men fought an uphill battle to acquire the skills to narrativize their experiences. Language and literacy skills undertake a symbolic role, serving as a figurative alternative to guns. They are also deemed structurally prerequisite for survival and success in mainstream American society. They can fuel playful identities, hold historical significance, even save lives. This chapter will explore how themes of pedagogy are developed in the memoirs. The lack of conventional education acts as a narrative Chapter Four Language, Literacy, and the Quest for Education in Gang Memoirs 98 springboard working to expose and critique unequal social relations in the United States. Working-class non-white youths are frequently sidelined, often receiving a substandard education. For example, in 1988 the high school dropout rate for the entire LA Unified School District (LAUSD) was 39.2 percent, but for schools in South Central the dropout rate was significantly higher, estimated at between 63 percent and 79 percent.2 This launches a potent social critique of the failings of educational institutions. The chapter will consider whether these authors were actually failed by school, how they construct these disappointments in their memoirs, and what insights such experiences may reveal. At the same time, the rejection of conventional education opens up space for personal trajectories. The failure of state structures leads to dramatic stories of informal education and advancement on the street and especially in prison, where conversion usually takes place. The narrators demonstrate personal strength and the ability, against the odds, to overcome this adversity. Through using unconventional and improvised resources (the gang, the street, and the prison, among other means), the narrators can gain status and ultimately write their own life stories. While these accounts of overcoming difficult odds offer certain traditional American narrative pleasures of self-reliance and rugged individualism, the difficult and unpredictable journeys told in these memoirs also expose the faultlines and inequalities of living in the contemporary United States. The generic expectations in American culture—and in memoirs themselves —of mobility and uplift are followed by true-life or actual dimensions that are far less teleological, creating tensions that will be addressed in this chapter. Like the previous chapter, this one is driven by textual evidence. It will commence with an exploration of the representations of formal education in the memoirs, followed logically by the depictions of informal education on the street and in prison. Though the chapter is primarily concerned with how the memoirists narrativize their identities and lived experiences using language, literacy, and education as frames for discussion, it will close with a consideration of how the narrators construct themselves as authorial educators. The textual focus is the three memoirs; however, when discussing the possibilities surrounding the narrator as teacher, the final section of this chapter will make brief reference to the children’s series of books that Williams released to help elementary children learn to read. In all three memoirs schools are presented as a site of crisis in which schooling is portrayed as unconstructive and unsupportive. In Always Language, Literacy, and the Quest for Education in Gang Memoirs 99 Running the narrator describes high school in East LA in the...