What I Cannot Teach

Carla Harryman

Why I Can No Longer Teach Kathy Acker: A Preface

1. School

So here we are in the present and we’re reading Blood and Guts in High School—an appealing title to some who may be almost anyone even today so many years later who has experienced high school—the first Grove Press Evergreen edition is 1984—now there is a new edition—which means an early visit as a guest author  in a classroom of Kathy Acker’s at the San Francisco Art Institute would have been in the academic year 1982-‘83—so I knew her since before then, probably 1976, though the first time I saw her at the Blue Room in San Francisco  performing on a kind of disco-platform stage infused with blue light, I hadn’t yet met her. I thought her performance was gutsy and absurdly dramatic. But that sense of “too much” was not a dismissive judgement just a register of impact and lack thereof. This high impact and its deflection is something that has interested me about Acker’s work, then and now. Caught between signs, the reader finds the possibility of reading beyond programmed expectations of narrative. This experience of encounter with one’s programming of narrative is in my opinion a critical—urgent and necessary—encounter, if one takes the education of the writer seriously.  

Tyrone Williams

Mea Culpa: Pan-Africanism and Sisterhood Die Again

Mea culpa: I should have known better. Many years ago, after several years of teaching eighteen- to twenty-two year olds at a small religious-affiliated university in Cincinnati, Ohio, Xavier University, I was offered the chance to teach a lower-level English course in our Weekend College Program whose target audience was, according to the marketing brochures, “older adults” who worked fulltime. It took me a while to realize that this was a euphemism for single, primarily Black, mothers. I decided to play to my audience and teach something I never was able to teach during the weekdays—Black women poets. We were reading poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker and Lucille Clifton, and the students responded well to them, discussing their own experiences as daughters and mothers, and the multiple challenges they faced raising their children.

Laura Hinton 

On Being Title IX-ed For Reading that Passage from Claudia Rankine; or, I Was a White Woman on the Zoom Screen

I am a survivor of a Title IX inquest at my university for reading aloud from a work of Black American literature that contains the “N-word.” 

I read aloud from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which uses the “N-word” to challenge racist language and beliefs as part of its anti-racist poetic text. 

This important and brilliantly ironic work of poet’s prose had been assigned my English students near semester’s end. 

Self-identified mostly as BIPOC, several students in a Fall 2020 Zoom classroom stopped me from reading from Citizen. I was told that I was a “white woman,” that I was not allowed “to say that word.”