Image by Fons Heijnsbroek.
I’m planning to put my house on the market, which means I have to empty it out. No big deal, right? Go through the stuff, get rid of most of it. This is necessary, young man, so do it! Instead, here I am, doing the opposite. I’m writing about it, indeed, internally screaming with amazement.
When you’re my age (and no, I’m not actually a young man), cleaning out the house in which I’ve lived for the last forty years means digging through my life, almost all of it, and even more, apparently – e.g., boxes of miscellany rescued from my parents’ house decades ago, then stashed away and forgotten. But now it’s all cascading back to me – recent memories, old memories, and lots and lots of: “Huh? What the hell is this?”
This is an old man’s treasure hunt, which complicates the actual task of emptying the house and getting it ready to be sold. The problem for me is how easily I get lost in the treasure trove of whatever – how easily I lose a sense of the task at hand and simply focus my attention on what I’m finding . . . not only ogling it but analyzing it, absorbing it, getting lost in it. This is not an abstract process – not for me it isn’t, especially considering that, because I’m a lifelong writer, I’m coming upon lots and lots and lots of forgotten work, going back multiple decades: essays, journalism, fiction, poetry, classroom assignments, unfinished novels. The temptation to start reading this or that or that is endless, and as I say, here I am: not just putting stuff in boxes. I’m letting myself get pulled into my words and, in the process, pondering – pursuing – yet again, the meaning of life.
And I invite you to join me.
Here, for instance, is an excerpt from a piece I wrote back in the mid-’90s for a zine that I was involved with called U-direct. I bring it back into public view today simply because the issue still eats at my soul. We all have voices. We all deserve to be heard, not simply categorized (as per our so-called education system) . . . and oh so often, dismissed as unintelligent, a.k.a., stupid.
Over the years, my primary side work has been teaching writing. I taught it to people of all ages, from elementary-school kids to adults. For a while I had a gig with an organization called The Chicago Teachers Center, working at several low-income high schools on the city’s West Side. I worked with the teachers, encouraging them to reach out to their students beyond the rules. Writing starts with telling the truth, not spelling correctly or getting your commas right. That comes later.
“One of my assigned schools,” I wrote:
“was Orr High School. The school resonates with memories for me – of kids with so much to say, so little encouragement to say it. Orr is in the heart of the city’s poverty belt. And the education system, as it reduced the kids to their standardized test results, seemed like part of an army of occupation.
“I spent my time with three classes, pretty much countering everything they’d been taught about how to write. I’d read aloud pieces of writing that I hoped spoke to their lives – often accounts of gang life – get a discussion going, then have them write for about 10 minutes. I called it free writing: ‘Write what you’re thinking right now. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar. Let your voice loose. Surprise yourself!’ Here’s what happened in one of my classes in my second week at Orr.
“When the ten minutes were up, I looked around the room for volunteers to read what they’d written. As usual, there were none. I caught Patrick’s eye and said, ‘How about it?’
“He shrugged and began to read. ‘I don’t know what to write. It’s kind of hard growing up when everyone you know . . .’ And then he stopped, his voice so choked he couldn’t continue. He looked down at his feet, then, in a burst of anger, balled up his paper and threw it into a corner. The bell rang.
“‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘That’s OK. Sometimes writing stirs up your emotions.’”
“He didn’t look at me, just dashed out of the room with the others. I retrieved the balled sheet of paper from the corner and put it into my briefcase with the rest of that day’s writing and didn’t read it until I got home. As I did so, spooning a lonely lunch of Thai food out of its paper carton, all the weariness left my bones, left my heart. Here’s what he wrote, unedited:
“‘I don’t know what to write. It’s kind of hard growing up when everyone you know and grow up with dies or gets killed. You can’t turn to no one even now the Police is putting drugs on you saying that you already had them. so when its my turn to go there won’t be no crying. Because we were all Born dieing.’
“As despairing as the words were, I couldn’t contain my elation. I wanted to cry and shout and dance around the room, thundering ‘Hallelujah!’ I wanted to dance all the way back to the West Side, show off Patrick’s words to whomever would read them. He had broken through.
“Later I would ask Patrick – who, having gotten past his angst, wrote in coming weeks intricate, harrowing and funny stories about growing up – what it felt like writing this piece, and he said, ‘It felt like telling the truth.’
“And that was what it felt like to me when I read it that first afternoon after school; it felt like reading the truth, or a piece of the truth from the West Side of Chicago, a world so different from the one that I knew. But it was now a world I was coming to know. . . .”
And three decades later, as I pack up these words, I’m still coming to know it.
The post ‘It Felt Like Telling the Truth’ appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert Koehler.