The word “illiteracy” gives me pause.
No, that’s not quite
right.
When I hear or read the word “illiteracy” I stop cold.
Closer.
The word “illiteracy” inflicts in me a sensation of violent nausea
wherein my brow remains furrowed for several minutes and I incur the wrath of the
involuntary teeth-mashing that starts in the face of acts of egregious inhumanity.
It is a wonder that reading words about others’ horrid behaviors can induce
this reaction, even more so, in my experience, than other modes of expression.
See for instance these recent tweets by Teju Cole, author of Open City and a book review recently published in the New York Times about Andre Aciman’s new book, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. [An aside before you
delve into the small fates that Cole composes on Twitter: it is difficult to
accept the recent claims by Noam Chomsky about the “shallow” nature of this medium
after reading tweets written by a writer whose words, about the worlds he sees and
discovers as well as those he brings together to let readers into the worlds of
many others – including that of Aciman’s and the citizens of Lagos – with
respect, irony, and a haunting beauty that moves his readers to write back, to
interact, to engage, and to wonder aloud.]
Nsofor, 57, head of the vigilantes in Nwangele, entered a
girl of four.
In Justice Yahaya's courtroom in Kano, Hamza got 24 months
for child rape, and Sani got 30 for marijuana possession.
Déjà vu. At Mediterranean Park in Abuja, words failed Sunday
Nzeh, so he stuck a pen in Sarah Odere’s eye.
If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother. With petrol and
matches, Akinkuotu, of Ondo, orphaned himself.
In 140 characters or less, Cole’s distillations of news from Lagos newspapers deliver a punch (to the gut, to the psyche, to the soul),
even more potent, perhaps, than the fuller length accounts of the always human
and often inhumane acts he chooses to remix. His are words about actions that may
go unheard or overlooked, in part simply by virtue of their geographical
distance from our daily lives and partially because of the metaphorical and
metaphysical walls we build in our attempts to hyper-focus on our immediate and
proximal realities. In giving those realities of distanced others a wider and
varied audience, Cole brings their happenings, both familiar and strange, through
our phones and laptops into our conscious minds; often these remixes, that
serve as poignant social commentary on that which might otherwise be accepted as “normal”
behaviors and acceptable social practices, demand our attention precisely
because of their abhorrence.
But while such visceral reactions, such as the one described
above, may be understandable in light of the small fates about which Cole
writes, one might wonder why and how the concept of “illiteracy” evokes the
same. For context, I turn to a recently published column in the local news
website, Philly.com, written by Inquirer columnist Karen Heller titled, “Illiteracy,the scourge of Philadelphia.” In it she correlates “illiteracy” with poverty – and
in so doing, borders on accusations of causation – and proceeds to accomplish what
she likely set out to do: disrupt social malaise long enough to evoke discomfiture
in readers who may otherwise place themselves at a far remove from the realities
she asserts. Presumably, the logic might
go, if we taught more kids to decode print in a timely fashion, socioeconomic disparity
would be grossly alleviated, if not eliminated altogether. This is not an
indictment of Heller; she is writing in the socially acceptable language of
literacy that, despite more than ample evidence to the contrary, remains
squarely framed as “reading at an eighth-grade level and possessing basic math
and computer skills, abilities that more than half a million residents are
missing.” We – that is, researchers,
educators, writers in and of multiple media – still have far to go, it seems, before
we are able to effectively disrupt the social imaginary on matters related to literacy
and language practices.
The distaste, the sheer disdain I have for the word “illiteracy” lies in assumptions
that the word carries about all who are unfortunate enough to be viewed through its veil. Although Heller relies on quotes from Judith Rényi and Lisa Schorr,
both of whom have been appointed to educational roles within the administration of
the city of Philadelphia, her column underscores the wide reach of the
topic of literacy as it becomes ensnared with other social ills such as
unemployment and incarceration. Heller writes:
"Uncorrected, a lack of literacy
remains a lifelong disability. "A person walking around illiterate at 35
is going to be illiterate 50 years from now," Rényi says. That 50 years
translates into low-level or no employment, an ongoing dependence on social
services, or worse. Most of Philadelphia's prison population reads below the
fourth-grade level, demonstrating few resources for legal employment."
Her column, like the writing of other columnists and
journalists who will continue to, as they have in the past, inform the collective mind of the
populous, carries weight. Perhaps one column of 500 words may not change
anything, but a few hundred words here, an evening news story there, a blog
post that captures the attention of a political machine eager for an educational
soundbyte – an especially dangerous possibility as we enter the next presidential
election cycle – and suddenly we may find ourselves on the precipice of
another No Child Left Behind. Teachers' hands and tongues become tied when, as a nation, we are prone to follow and vote for a catchy slogan over what may be jarring prose. Words matter.
Children and adults walk into classrooms prepared to learn
and too often they are castigated for what they lack; so all-consuming must be
this practice of judgment and evaluation that it is a wonder any learning
happens at all in schools and other institutions of purported learning. In seeking
to teach, educators are steered away from the education already thriving in the
lives of their students. If we change nothing else – that is, if we continue to
strive for print proficiency in children and all adults, adhere to common content
and communicative standards, while navigating the tricky waters of an
increasingly inexplicable testing culture (clearly hell-bent on ensuring its
own existence above all else) – but remove “illiteracy” from our
vocabularies of categorization, then we will have made a significant change. To
view someone as “illiterate” is not merely a neutral or socio-demographic designation.
It is an act of dehumanization.
Words matter. The word “illiteracy” matters. And insofar as “illiteracy”
will continue to inflict educational and psychic damage – and keep the proverbial
wheels squarely situated in slippery mud – a simple shift toward literacies can provide openings for understanding the literate lives and the meaning-full existences of students, older and newer, toward new starting points that are more likely to yield "outcomes" that the warriors against "illiteracy" claim to desire.
Perhaps this is better expressed as a small fate:
Angel told stories to anyone who
listened. His teachers insisted they couldn’t teach him or hear his words unless
they were written down.
