Recognizable Cathartic Writers and Mentorship Toward Social Justice

[Kyle Desmond]

Don't take it from me...

Before I bore you with my own story, I thought I'd let some veterans chime in on why disclosive writing should be a part of our the aforementioned education revolution, and why mentorship, compassion, and a sense of social justice is so important in students of all ages 

T. C. Boyle answered the question “Why I write?” (Goldberg et. al., 2006) by describing an adolescence with an uneducated father, little literary support at home, promiscuity, drug use and a love of music. He claims to have been generationally and socially in limbo “caught somewhere between the hoods and the honor students” (p. 1). Despite this environment he found someone who had similarly suffered and who believed in him as a writer.         

• I found my first mentor there [at SUNY], in the history department—Dr. Vincent Knapp, who himself had made his way up, hand over hand, from the depths of the working class.  He saw something in me—in my writing and intelligence—and he tried to promote and encourage it (p. 2).

For Boyle, there were more instructors and mentors, like Kelsey B. Harder, Krishna Vaid, Vance Bourjaily and Frederick P.W. McDowell, who collectively extolled the lessons of hard work, self-disclosure and workshopping which, in turn, had a significant impact on his voice development. His transference from “punk” to author runs parallel to the evolution of his writing competence, and eventually into a greater sense of self-efficacy. During a particularly painful workshop session with his peers, he read an extended segment of one of his early plays.

• When I finished, flushed with the sort of exhilaration that only comes from driving the ball over the net and directly into your opponent’s face, Krishna began to applaud, and so too, though it killed them, did my fellow students. That was it. That was all it took. I was hooked (p. 3).

And later in his development,         

• Something had happened to me, something inexplicable even to this day: I felt a power in me. I don’t mean to get mystical here, because science has killed mysticism for me, to my everlasting regret, but suddenly, though I’d done nothing to earn it, I felt strong, superior, invincible (p. 3).

How writers feel once their voice has developed—especially when it comes to the issue of finding a caretaker—often answers the question, “why I write;” and in Boyle’s case is undeniably linked to the “generation Jones” phenomenon described in the My Cathartic Writer’s Voice section of this chapter.       

• First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can’t see or hear or smell or taste, you have something. Something new. Something of value. Something to hold up and admire. And then? Well, you’ve got a jones, haven’t you? And you start all over again, with nothing (p. 6).     

From Richard Wright to Toni Morrison: Ethics in modern and postmodern American Narrative by Folks (2001), takes a critical look at ethics and self-disclosure in literature. Although ethics is the central thrust of the book, Folks does touch on the issue of environment—especially those of southern and African American writers—and the authenticity necessary to develop these colorful voices.         

• t is only through what we, as particular human beings, have experienced and observed that we can comprehend the joys and hardships of others. Every impression that we gain from reading is understood as if it happened or could happen to us, in the course of our lives, or to particular human beings whom we know or can imagine as actually living in the way that we live (p. 6).    

This puts a great deal of the ownership—ethical ownership, in this case—on the writer. It is recognition, however, that there is something bigger than oneself and that there exists a responsibility bigger than just telling the world the story of one’s story to evoke sympathy or to purge oneself of demons. Regardless of the vehicle with which writers illustrate a social injustice, for example, readers will always be on the lookout for an authentic writer’s voice—a voice that can only be developed though life experiences. 

• In their own ways, the Flannery O’Connor, William Styron, and Kaye Gibbons employed elements of Gothic romance to confront alienation and terror of human disability, racial strife, and class control, yet the “otherness” that these writers summon up and that American society has conventionally striven to repress extends well beyond differences of race, class, and disability. Equally important, these writers involve the reader in encounters with repressed elements in the reader’s own psyche: universal terrors of human isolation, dependence and death that are too easily displaced onto the fantasized landscape of social relationships (p. 15).

Each of these writers took from their personal experience—failures and triumphs—and developed a writer’s voice that can be recognized across genres, characters and plots. The “otherness” suggested by Folks is universally known in literary critique and often linked to feminist theory and the repression of the subaltern or oriental (someone with a different orientation). The essence of developing the cathartic writer’s voice, then, is to determine what makes an individual different, outcast or unique, and to use it as a central touchstone—as it directly pertains to experience and education—and be diligently loyal to that experience and that learning environment.     

Perhaps, then, such public expression served as a beacon for “others” in similar situations, gave voice to the unspoken or unrequited actions, feelings and inspirations held back among those who read O’Connor regardless of their disability. This illustrates how the act of unpacking one’s voice development helps to demystify and inspire others to develop.

Cultural, Philosophical and Educational Voices

Cultural

In, Hear My Voice: A multicultural anthology of literature from the United States, editor King (1994) anthologizes multicultural stories and then asks students reflective, open-ended questions about literary elements for which they must think critically. King claims that individual voices have been suppressed in the United States for generations. “Movies, mass media, and school texts have omitted or compressed beyond recognition the rich histories and contemporary cultures of Native Americans, African Americans, Asian American, many European Americans and Latinos” (xiv). The author reminds her readers that each individual has a story that may be older than even they themselves know. “Your own story is unique. It includes who you are and how you got to be the person you are. It tells about the people who raised you and influenced you. Your story begins before your birth; your family’s history is also a part of it” (pp. xiii, xiv).     

Hogan (2004) claims that voice development is part of our lives regardless of authorship or culture, and that we make meaning of our experiences through the use of literary schemas.         

• Thus schemas, prototypes, and exempla guide our perception and our thought, bring parts of the world into structure and emphasis, discarding or downplaying others. They also guide our literary construction of sensation and of cognition. Of course, the ordinary structures and instances that gather our daily lives into coherence figures into literature. But perhaps more importantly, literary schemas provide broad principles for new literary compositions, and literary exempla guide the detailed choice of plot, character and diction in new works. Indeed, such literary elements pervade ordinary life as well—for we understand our friends and foes in part through literary characters, our experiences and aspirations in part             through literary plots (32).

And while “There are many canonical works which, though written by members of dominant groups, set out to portray the lives, feelings and society of ‘subalterns,’” it is in what Hogan calls “Writing Back” that the marginalized take back their Voice. He uses Kipling as an example, suggesting that Tagore was “writing back” when he wrote Gora and undermined the racism and contradicted the Indianness of the Irish sahib in Kim (33).  Hogan, like Bakhtin and Lacan, makes the connection between formation of our internal lexicon, meaning making and the development of our writer’s voice. He contends that an “idiolectical” lexicon exists in every human mind, which stores “a mental structure of words, meanings, morphological forms and principles, ‘encyclopedia information,’ personal recollections, and so forth” (p. 35). It is when the marginalized endeavor to “Write Back,” against the established stories, words and principles that have oppressed them that they render the original voice moot. “[W]hat matters for a new author is not the precursor text per se—a notion that almost becomes meaningless in this context—but the new author’s lexical internalization of the new work” (p.35). Such writing back allows the marginalized to create their own voice—a new voice or tradition for themselves. “A literary tradition is what allows a writer to create a new literary utterance, and to do so in such a way that a readership will be able to understand and respond to it” (p. 199). Himes’ (1974) contribution to Kitzhaber and Malarkey is his essay, Dilemma of the Negro (sic) Novelist in the United States. In it, he discusses marginalized writers in relationship to their environment and to their audience.

• We have a greater motive, a nobler aim; we are impelled by a higher cause. We write not only to express our experiences, our intellectual processes, but to interpret the meaning contained in them. We search for the meaning of life in the realities of our experiences, in the realities of our dreams, our hopes, our memories (p. 31).

Himes contends that when a writer’s experiences are so full of brutality, restriction and degradation, his soul is “pulverized.” However, the marginalized writer must find meaning regardless of such experiences. “Then begins his slow, tortured progress toward truth” (p. 32). In his essay, Discourse, Tradition, and Power in a Literary Transition, Asante-Darko (1998) explored the ideology, orality, and language choices responsible for Africa’s catharsis from a predominantly oral (pre-colonial) culture, to that of a written culture (postcolonial), offering possible inroads to the way African writers use their voice development to this day.  

• It must be underlined that the writer's work of correcting and influencing the lives of individuals and the wider community through the use of literary aesthetics, could not be done ex-nihilo. It had to be derived from the interpretation of the collective experience. However, the representation and interpretation of the collective experience are influenced by the personal as well as communal perceptions within one and the same society. These factors were compounded by the different levels of ambition, courage, and capabilities to erode all possibilities of a uniform perception (among different writers) as regards matters of truth and their interpretation even within the hitherto enclosed belief systems of pre-colonial Africa (pp. 2, 3).

So the power relationships began to be determined by those who—through self-appointed positions of expertise—interpreted art and current events, expressing their views as societal representatives on issues of theme, language, audience, ideology and style. These writers then began to own the discourse in African Theory and aesthetics. Asante-Darko exposes this as a direct link between power and literary discourse employing the work and words of Dathorne.

• …[T]ension between an ancient aristocracy and a new technocracy, between traditionalism and westernization, between the dignity of the old and the sprawling vulgarity of the new.’ The new writer was thus considered the opponent or usurper, rather than the complement of a traditional oral artist. In this context the prominence of the former was strengthened by the avowed and conspicuous adoption of decolonization as a metaphor for progress and evolution, both in literary terms and more generally at the level of societal models. This ability to juxtapose decolonization (here clearly linked to written literature) to an oral tradition which, in turn, could be seen only as a backward literary manifestation, raised the image of the new group of African writers/artists. It even elevated them to the status of combatants (p.3).  

For example, Aimé Césaire appointed himself both the voice, and the literary representative of the oppressed by claiming to be the “mouth” of those suffering through hardships and the “voice” of freedom “of those that collapse with the ups and downs of despair” (p. 3).  Césaire saw colonialism as “racialised,” something in which millions of [black] men were skillfully taught things like fear, inferiority, trembling, kneeling, and how to act as servants [to white men] (p. 3). African literary theory as a critical theory was considered a tool in the anti-colonial struggle and writers participated in the “writing back” process, adapting the oral message to the written word in an effort to get it out to a bigger audience, regardless of low literacy rates. It is little wonder, then, that the African literary discourses differed between native writers “who presented pre-colonial Africa in idyllic terms of beauty, peace and progress… and their …Anglophone counter parts who seek to expose the full image of pre-colonial Africa with all its virtues and vices” (p. 5).

Ironically, in the revival of African values and pride even the Negritude writers eventually had to appeal to, and target the colonialist audience, and therefore the language of the colonizer, rather than the colonized had to be used. In Asante-Darko’s conclusion, the author accepts the different interpretations as expressions, voices, of Africans, and believes that the audience or reader will identify with whatever they consider most relevant to their own reality.

Philosophical     

In The Literary Voice of Pain and Suffering, Yi (2005) contends that literature, as a discipline, can help alleviate pain and suffering—especially in cases of depression—due to its connection and allegiance to both the written and spoken word. “The immediate ‘painkilling placebo effect’ of words and their healing powers… …forms a link to literature whereby the isolated nature of the pain and suffering… …is given voice and expression” (p.1) Yi goes on to say that the importance of this voice cannot be understated. It a source of empowerment, and provides a link to a wider community. It could be said that the powerless are also voiceless and that “Many who suffer silently and in confusion might be helped if we learned how to tap the resources of literature in restoring significance to an individual human voice” (p. 1). Power, in essence, then, is an arbitrary morality, created as a tool of control, whereas literature possesses the power to “reinvent suffering by extending and contracting” its borders, “orchestrating the language that validates and invalidates pain recognition of the individual voice and its agency is paramount to any reformulation of morality” (p. 2). Yi also likens Nietzsche’s paradigm of transfiguration “through sickness and creativity to literature’s role in the creation of a moral community of suffering,” in that, if “we are to be liberated,”…  …“from the harmful and unjust effects of an arbitrary morality, literature’s construction of a discourse based on a ‘moral community’ of suffering takes on a profound aspect” (p. 10).     

By orchestrating language, especially language ripe with emotionally-charged words and experientially authentic imagery, the ingrained, traditional power structures that lead to exclusion and marginalization can be successfully challenged. The causal connections harbored in such traditions and memories lead to errors that culminate in this arbitrary morality, and literature—specifically personal and disclosive biographies—can systematically diffuse some of those assumptions.

• If literature’s task is to create a discourse capable of encompassing the many perspectives and expressions of pain as well as the varying discourses that engage in its definition and treatment, it may be contained in the form of pathography. A pathography is an intensely personal account of pain and suffering, serving as a testament to the overcoming of (the) silence … and …taking its cue from Nietzsche’s maxim of the eternal recurrence, strive to nullify the oppressiveness of ‘duration in vain,’ without end or aim, [which] is the most paralyzing idea (p. 3).

The confused and powerless, who certainly experience the paralysis of “duration in vain without end or aim,” often suffer in a silent, wordless world without resources. Yi argues that by introducing personal accounts and literature into the lives of the oppressed, a transformation takes place in the regaining of their own voice. “Many who today suffer silently and in confusion might be helped if we learned to tap the resources of literature in restoring significance to an individual human voice” (p. 1). With significance there is power, where there are resources there is power, and where there is individual or community voice, there is power.

Educational     

In Politics, Power and Personal Biography, Torres (1998) collected the voices of educational leaders like Gintis, Bowles, Apple, and Giroux, to explore the dynamics of voice, power and education. To conceptualize these relationships, Torres expands on Wartenberg’s argument.         

• ‘Power manifests itself as a complex social presence that exists in an intricate network of overlapping and contradictory relations.’ To consider power relationally helps to identify different power resources, and likewise to identify the relationship between power and education. Education as an institution, and as a dimension of material and symbolic life, can also be seen relationally (7).

If these relations are wrought with what Apple (1998) calls “selective traditions,” then they exist as a dangerous and dividing influence on equity, especially in education. Apple suggests that these inequities will never be addressed as long as our society—as a transformed democracy which lends priorities to systems that excel in consumptive practices rather than those that excel in inclusive, pluralistic practices—does not “take seriously the collective struggles of for transforming material conditions that create ways in which we are in identifiable groups: African Americans, poor people, Latinos and Latinas, etc.” Without transforming the material conditions of our marginalized groups, education will continue to be affected, because consumers will always have an opportunity try the new and improved school and can make mechanical judgments about what constitutes a “good” school and what constitutes a “bad” school. Apple contends that this will lead to a loose educational market and a greater number of apartheid schools, especially under a national curriculum and especially when it comes to testing. “Kids with the gift of cultural capital from their parents, from elite and middle-class groups will do well on it, as usual; but this will be covered by the rhetoric of choice, standards, and accountability” (p. 44). Reducing or eliminating the selective traditions, the contradictory relations, mechanical judgments, dividing influences, and the “educational market” will be the tool used to transform the material conditions of the marginalized.     

Bowles (1998) agrees that any educational reform is pointless without properly responding to the needs of our kids. f it does not address this problem of structurally-determined power and inequities of wealth in the economy” then such a reform will be limited in its impact. Carnoy (1998) takes the issue back to its roots. “[C]olonial schooling was organized to bring native peoples into a subordinate position” and was perpetuated in the United States to keep ‘“people in their place’ while legitimizing the notion of social mobility and [thereby] making it into a powerful mythology” (pp. 81, 82). Carnoy’s own frustration in getting educational assistance to the poorest countries like Mexico, Kenya, and Latin America are reflected in his cathartic dedication to the continued documentation of these struggles. “I am constantly made aware that I have a responsibility to the future, and what happens in education will have a major impact on that future. Can’t stop now” (p. 87).       

Freire’s catharsis and his sentiments echo that of Torres, Apple, Bowles and Carnoy, especially as it relates to how oppression and marginalization directly impact our learning environments.         

• n teaching the necessary content of the field of biology, or history, or language, I debate, clarify and illuminate the class struggle in society. It is included in all the content, because I accept the school as part of that struggle. The school cannot be absent from the struggle (p. 99).  

For cathartic writing such as this to take place among educators and students alike, the hierarchy, and the arbitrary morality of power must give way to a more liberating education.

Conclusion     

The relationships found in the traditions of cathartic writing, my Cathartic Writer’s Voice Development (CWVD), the cathartic voices of published authors, and other cultural, philosophical and educational voices, suggest not only that disclosing defining life experiences and writing for publication acts as a catharsis for writers who choose this developmental strategy, but that this strategy can have liberating, empowering implications for other voiceless, powerless people of difference. Additional literature suggests that this transformation can be expedited by an expectation of competency by, or in harmony with, the reoccurrences of stable, supportive caretakers. Writing strategists, teachers, education experts, and experienced fiction writers share a common view that the direction of their lives, the direction of their writing, and the accompanying sustainability, have unmistakable ties to transformational experiences both on the page and off.