Thoughts About Teaching

As I mentioned in the last post, I won't be teaching the next academic year. I have a fellowship, which means I have the luxury to sit on my ass for an entire academic year, read, write, improve my French etc. I am thankful,not because I don't like to teach, but because I am not very good in juggling the pressures of teaching along with the pressures of writing. But in the last one year, I had been thinking a lot about teaching and the issues that I had been facing as a teacher. And since they are too many in number, I will try to refrain from making any blanket statements here.

Lately I have been wondering, if I love my students.Yes, I sure have spotted possibilities in many of them, have felt occasional affection for them, felt that they are very nice, cute and sweet. But do I love them in the way I have been loved (and continue to be) by many of my own teachers? I will have to be honest here. The answer is NO.While it might just be my own personal deficiency to be lovey-dovey, I think, the issue at hand is a little bit more complicated. Ordinarily, within the semester system, we teachers get to teach our students for 16 weeks.Out of these 16 weeks, the first two are usually consumed by introductions, handing out and explaining the syllabus, setting down the ground-rules etc. Within the next fourteen weeks, we try to cover at least three large assignments, three smaller ones, numerous housekeeping issues and last but not the least, the academic materials. So, not a whole lot of time is left to get to know each other in a way that will open up spaces for intimate important conversations. I try to have at least three individual conference meetings with my students during any single semester, but they are still circumscribed by the demands of the curricula. The bottom-line is, unless a student decides to write a thesis with a particular teacher, contacts between the teacher and the taught are going to be fairly minimal and formal.Not only that, just when we begin to feel after the fourteenth week or so, that the class is going somewhere, the students are getting comfortable with each other, with me, the semester ends.

So, I am thinking, maybe this is one of the ways in which the corporate university model polices the teacher-student relationship? By keeping it minimal, extremely formal and thus preventing the formation of any long-standing bonds between the teachers and the students?

First Day of Summer 2010

Grading done.
French exam done.

I won't be teaching for another year. But that doesn't mean much. Too many things to take care of. Too many writing projects to be finished. To many books to be read. And most of all,the dissertation needs to be finished.

I cooked something experimental after a long time today.A close friend of mine is staying with me for the month. It's always interesting to see how my desire to try out new recipes always escalates when I have people over. I tried a new dish. Found it in this website. I am cutting and pasting the recipe below just so that I succeed to keep a record of the things I am cooking these days:

AYAM MASAK MERAH
RED CHILLI CHICKEN
Prep time: 25 min | Cooking time: 20 min | Serves: 2 as a main, 4 as a side

2 large chicken breasts, diced into 1-inch cubes
1 small onion
1 medium-sized tomato
2 lemon grass stalks, discarding the rough green tops
1 tsp ginger-garlic paste
2 tbsp sambal olek / chili paste
1/2 tsp turmeric powder
2 tbsp light cooking oil
salt, to taste
water, as needed

MARINATE chicken in salt and turmeric, and set aside for 20-25 minutes.

BLEND onion, tomato and lemon grass to a smooth fine paste, adding a little water if necessary.

SAUTE the marinated chicken in hot oil till lightly browned, and set aside. In the same pan, fry ginger-garlic paste, Sambal Olek and onion-tomato-lemon grass paste, stirring continuously till sit tarts to give out oil from the sides.

ADD in chicken, salt and water if necessary, and stir fry till chicken in cooked through and the flavours absorbed.


I added some coriander powder while marinating the chicken. And added a quarter cup of raisins while blending the tomato, onion and the lemongrass.Partly because I am not the biggest consumer of that heat we call jhal in Bengali. Oddly enough, spicy is the word we use to refer to jhal here in this country. But my understanding of spicy is very different. Things can be extremely spicy without necessarily being hot at all.

Hoping that this desire to experiment will soon influence other areas of life. Aka writing. Haven't done any original writing so far today, but gearing up towards that. I have promised to myself that I will submit the first three of my bildungsroman series of poems to five journals by this week. To that end, I am making a list of journals now.

My Writing Sucks!

Had been reading one of older stories. I am embarrassed. The writing reads like shit. No plot. Characters weak. Total disaster. But I still think there is an underlying interesting theme somewhere. I will try not to pay much attention to all the negative feelings, and just concentrate on the revision. Maybe (maybe) after the 20th revision, it will look like okay. Choleable, as they say in K-town.

It Hurts Me More Than It Hurts Them

Yesterday I posted my work for the UCLA Extension's Advanced Short Story Workshop.I didn't produce anything new, but did some major revisions of a story I had written exactly a year before. I did get some feedback on it then, but did not know how to process the feedback. Now, going back to it after almost a year, I felt that some parts just needed to be hacked out, some essential parts added, and I also played with the POV. One of the most important things one of my reviewers then told me was that, the teacher-figure in the story looks a stereotypically bad-guy, with almost no subtleties. I felt that a limited third-person POV can't achieve the kind of empathy and subtlety that she was suggesting, so I made some changes. I made the teacher's grand-daughter narrate the tale, a grand-daughter who also happens to be her student. DRR read it last night, and while he liked some parts of it, his major criticism was, it's not very clear why is the narrator feeling compelled to tell the story?

I have to agree. As of now, that's the weakest aspect of the story.

So, here are some of the things I have been thinking today:

1. Make the narrator hate the protagonist. Make the protagonist hate the narrator and make cryptic comments about her grandmother. Rather than making the anger dissolve through the pages, make the protagonist dwell on her anger.And not just anger in the general sense, but anger directed specifically towards her old teacher. That is, make the antagonisms more pronounced, and see what happens. That way, make the people in the story brush up against each others' nasty sides, but it will also probably make the narrative revealing their more humane and contradictory sides. Make the grandma die, make her death the occasion for the story to be told, the narrator feeling compelled to tell the story.

2. Write the story from an omniscient perspective. Make Jhinuk witness Shilpi in the truck carrying her grandma's dead-body, and let her react. That way the narrative can delve into both inside Jhinuk's head, as well as inside Shilpi's head, and if the need be, can also observe Shilpi telling Jhinuk certain things about her grandma, trying to redeem her. So it can also go inside the school-teacher's head too. But here too, the sense of crisis and antagonism and the lingering anger should be retained, just so the story moves forward much more easily and the characters have enough reasons to act the way they do.

Now, the thing is, to try out both of these, and see where they lead me. But it will have to wait for some time, I guess. I am too swamped right now, and I don't think I will be able to get to these changes until the summer holidays are here. On the other hand, it will be nice to get some feedback from the workshop too. See what they have to say!

From Poetry Daily

To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage

for John Olivares Espinoza

You are nothing like my father.
And like my father
you are nothing.
Zambo. Castizo.
Without draft animals
the Mexica used the wheel
only as a toy.
Please keep off the lawn.
Green mirrors are asleep
beneath the grass.
In graduate school a landlord asked,
Here to pick strawberries?
“Y me vine de Hermosillo/
en busca de oro y riqueza.”
Are your hands
always so dirty?
Slip a finger in my mouth.
I’ll devour the grime
under the nail.
Pomegranate, grenade.
Sometimes in order to say a word
it’s necessary
to spit it out. A spic sells seashells
on the seashore. Assonance
is often considered a blemish
by corrido singers.
You walk out with a French horn in your arms
and you’re a butcher
in El Dorado holding
the golden entrails of cattle.

(Note)

Eduardo C. Corral

Witness
Volume XXIII / 2010

Chapbook

Spring Break! Last week, I had finished the second draft of my first chapter, had turned it in to my dissertation group for discussion and feedback. One of my co-advisors liked it, the group liked the arguments overall. Although, the general feedback is, I will have to do a lot more with the editing and language and footnoting. So, basically, I still need to go back and do a lot of the finalizing stuff. But at least, the argument worked, and I think, I do have a better sense of the direction of my project.

In other news, just finished revising a poem for which I had received some good feedback. My own sense is that, it's almost there. Maybe I will need another edit after a while. A tweaking here, and a tweaking there. But mostly it is done.I also have developed in the course of the last week or so, a better sense of my first collection of poems. Initially, I was more interested in coming up with a full-length book. Undoubtedly, the full-length book would have allowed me with more of a space to deal with both thematic and formal complexities. But, the way a lot of my poems are evolving, I don't think a full-length book will have much space for a lot of the shorter poems I have written in the last three years.So, a chapbook project, I think, will be much more suitable for bringing together the kind of work I have been doing for the last three years. If I have to look into this project with an impartial eye, I will have to say, these poems are not that impressive by themselves.It's not that I think they are totally bad or unreadable, but I wouldn't say, they are earth-shattering or anything. But they have played a very important role in my life, and my growth as a poet/writer, because they have pointed out the areas to me--the areas where I need to work, the kinds of research I need to do in order to keep on writing more meaningful and relevant poems, the formal areas where I need to develop my linguistic skills. In that sense, this chapbook project will play an important role in bringing to fruition a specific phase in my life.

So, for now, I need to write the concluding poem of the collection, bring them all together in a single file, and begin to revise. I am giving myself a year to do all that work. So, hopefully, by the summer of 2011, I will have the manuscript of a chapbook ready. Ready enough to be sent out to publishers! Wish me luck!

Proma Tagore's Poems

Had been reading Proma Tagore's work from Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets. I wanted to read her work primarily because she is another South Asian academic-poet figure, and on top of that, writes about Bengali-ness in interesting ways. For example, one of her poems is called khichuri after noon. Now how can I just bypass a title like that? Similarly, she has a bi-lingual poem called "between tongues" which is literally a list of phrases in Bengali and their translations in English. It is an interesting idea, but there were a couple of places where I stumbled hard. For example, kalpanar daka, she has translated as through a calling of dreams. Now, kalpana is so not dream, it's imagination. So, I keep wondering is it a bengali-american's lack of enough knowledge of the language, or is it more like a stretching of the meaning of the word kalpana. Similarly, chotobelar gantha has been translated as "childhood weaves". I find that too literal, for "gantha" is indeed weaving, but it's also a word which connotes stories or narratives. And here, I would have liked a little bit of more exploration to play with that double-meaning in the English translation. But maybe then, she leaves them in the way they are for only the Bengali readers to get certain things? In any case, I don't think I will venture out to write a bi-lingual poem in that way anytime soon. I will stick to English and Bangla. Separately.

But overall, I do think, her poems do have some strong lines. For example,
"in remembering,
our rage will hold,
our words will refuse to be kept,
and i will not be consoled
tonight."

Or,
"resilience singing out
in all textures of brown:
earth, mud, clay, bark."

I like these lines because there is an effort to engage with colonial/imperial/neo-colonial state of being in here, it moves beyond the de-politicized way of dealing with gender in both American and Bengali mainstream women's poetry. I like the little reference to color, the different shades of brown all explored through concrete objects. It irrevocably brings up race, without being very explicit about it. That is, it does not pronounce the word "race" anywhere. I love the title of her poem "when places leave." There's a sense of mystery in there. And again, a sense of an awareness of the colonial/neo-colonial state. I mean,places vanish. Literally. In so many ways. And then, obviously in the minds of the people. And my home-state is, right now, in the middle of all that. Places are vanishing fast. So are people along with them.

But where I am also thinking a little bit, and feeling somewhat skeptic, is the way I am seeing post-colonial academic jargon very squarely placed in her poems. I want some of that there, though not in the form of those jargons themselves, but rather in forms of ideas, concrete stories, images, and words. In short, I want that theoretical knowledge from post-colonialism and gender studies to be translated into poetic forms and formal techniques of writing. The other thing is, these poems are little too "diasporic" for me. I am not "hybrid" in that sense. I speak and read and write in my native-tongue quite quite fluently. Thank you.

So, there is that obvious problem of not being able to relate to that immigrant anxiety in here.Instead, I would have liked a little bit more delving into concrete history through the images and the stories. Like, the little note she has about the use of the word "khichuri" in her family, especially in women's lingo, could well have been a poem in itself, and in my opinion, a much more interesting one than the one she has now.That footnote has a sense of history, social space, language in the way the poem does not have. Especially, I could have done without a coinage like "hybridized tongue."

My own writing has taken a back-seat now. I mean, I am writing. The second draft of the first chapter of my dissertation. So, I am not seeing much chance of spending much time with my poems and stories until Spring Break.