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Listening to Language

Mary Ann Cain

By beinginsulted,bullied,and turnedinto objects, youngpeoplelearn to insult,bully,and turn that thefirst Theseactions containtheseedsof violence. othersinto objects. Itfollows,therefore,

is to examine thewaysin which wearealready conflict. stepin teaching peace teaching -Mary Rose O'Reilley(qtd.in BlitzandHurlbert24)

n National Public Radio's FreshAir, Andrew Kromah, a Sierra Leone journalist, described an unexpected encounter with a rebel leader as he was traveling in the field. The leader's initial response was to order him shot. This was not the first time the journalisthad faced such death threats;SierraLeone, in his opinion, suffered from the world's worst acts of violence. Kromah pulled out his official newspaper identification, showed it to the leader, and proceeded to describe how he was worth more to the rebels alive than dead. At first the leader refused;what use was a journalist to him? Kromah responded that he could make the group's motives known throughout the country. He could explain to people what actions they were undertaking and why. In short, the journalist concluded, the leader could use him to make their group better known to their countrypeople. Finally, the leader agreed to let the journalist live and to give him an interview. Kromah concluded that his identification badge, as well as his connection to a newspaper known for its commitment to the truth, gave him the power to persuade a killer not to kill him. If we consider all language acts as sites of learning and teaching, then the journalist'sencounter may be understood as a pedagogical scene. As David Bleich
MaryAnn Cain is associate professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where she teaches writing, rhetoric, and women's studies. Her articles have appeared in CCC, Dialogue, and several book Studies,WPA:WritingProgram Administration, Composition JAEPL, and FeministTeacher, chapters are forthcoming. She is also the author of RevisioningWriters'Talk:Genderand Culturein Acts of and her fiction, nonfiction, and blurred-genre work has appeared in numerous literary jourComposing, nals and anthologies.

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writes in "The Materiality of Language and the Pedagogy of Exchange," "[T]he teaching and learning of language is mutual, collective, and reciprocal, as well as individual. It is neither just reciprocal nor just individual but both" (117). If we examine this pedagogical scene for its "mutual, collective, and reciprocal"teaching and learning exchange, we may conclude that the journalist was a successful teacher and learner within the situation. He did not try to impose his "ways with words" upon the leader. He did not argue why killing him was wrong, or plead for his life, or tell a parable about another terrorist who had, in a humanitarian gesture, released him to tell his story of the gunman with a heart. He did not model an argumentative, persuasive, or narrative mode. Instead, he offered an exchange-the leader'swords to become part of his own. The journalist got his interview. The leader got his message across. And the people of that violence-wracked country had the beginnings of a dialogue toward peace. What Mary Rose O'Reilley suggests is that few of us would survive such an encounter. We teach conflict, not peace. We resist rather than exchange with our students'language.We "insult,bully,and turn [ourstudents]into objects."If O'Reilley is right, then it makes sense that our students would, like the terrorist leader, scoff at the presumption that words have power. Instead, power is about who has the force to back up their words. Who has, as the Warren Zevon song goes, "lawyers, guns, and money"?As long as their language is resisted by us, they cannot know the power that words have-not simply "their own" or "our"language, but the "mutual, collective, and reciprocal, as well as individual"power that comes in material pedagogical exchanges. As long as our language is resisted by them, we cannot know the violence we reproduce-or how to cultivate more peaceful exchanges. Feminist educator Patti Lather explains ideology as "the stories a culture tells itself about itself [, .. .] something people inhabitin very daily, material ways and which speaks to both progressive and determinant aspects of culture"(2). To understand our ideology regarding violence, we need to examine the "verydaily, material ways" in which violence, as a social construction, is created and perpetuated by our words, actions, and thoughts. Bleich writes, "[S]ocialconstructions are human choices made in order to change specific material existence" (124). We need to know what we are already "choosing" in our own pedagogical scenes and how our choices lead to exchange, negotiation, and movement, or resistance, conflict, and stasis, through the physical, emotional, social, and discursive spaces we occupy, individually and collectively. Within the classroom, our constructions of violence are deeply embedded within the stories we as a culture tell ourselves about violence and thus much more difficult to identify within specific, material practices. In other words, we can't know what we are choosing because we are not making conscious choices. Instead, we are simply acting within the limits of the "real."As O'Reilley writes, "[m]ost academic brutal-

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ization is more subtle than the cases of corporal punishment most of us have come across from time to time" (qtd. in Blitz and Hurlbert 22). Social constructions may be about "choosing,"yet, as O'Reilley implies, they don'tfeel that way. But the constructions we "choose"collectively and individuallynonetheless manifest themselves in specific, material ways. As Michael Blitz and Mark Hurlbert argue, "No one encounters violence or peace in general. The experience of each is always unique" (21). In this regard, the "reality"of violence is not something that can be known or fixed conceptually. We may discuss it as an ideology, but when it comes to our own experience, we cannot know violence outside of the stories that shape our views of its reality. Because our social constructions of violence are enacted in "verydaily,material ways,"we need to foster awareness of our individual and collective practices of discursive exchange. Awarenessasks how itfeels to movethrough these discursive forms and to articulatewhat is happening as we move through and with them. Such awareness requires us to shift our attention away from using language as an end in itself (in other words, making a point) and instead use language to bring attention to our sensory awareness vis-a-vis our bodies. Many feminist writers, including Helene Cixous, Elizabeth Grosz, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, have embraced "writing the body" as a radical discursive practice (based upon awareness of what women already do, discursively and otherwise) designed to disrupt gendered subject-object dualities that are deeply embedded within dominant discursive forms. As feminist geographer Gillian Rose writes, This sense of spaceofferedby these feministsdissolvesthe split betweenthe mind andthe bodyby thinkingthroughthe body,their bodies.This way of thinkingalso seems to disregard and real space;spacesare any distinctionbetweenmetaphorical mademeaningful andinterpretation, whichmakes feminist through experience spaces
resonate with an extraordinaryrichness of emotion and analysis. Spaces are felt as part of patriarchalpower. (Feminism146)

In other words, writing the body is about creating spaces for true exchange, negotiation, movement, change between readers and writers, students and teachers, selves and others. Unfortunately, much of our current use of language in the pedagogical scenes of our profession turns us away from that awareness and thus deadens our senses to these crucial differences. Instead of paying attention to the materiality of our pedagogy, we focus instead on the abstract point to be made. Classrooms (and other pedagogical settings) often insist upon the subordination of our awareness of the spaces through which we move physically, emotionally, socially, and discursively. Our relationship to these spaces is sacrificed in the name of "higher"causes of learnabstractideas and concepts useful mainly in a distant future (Cain). ing, of "bankable"

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Rose invites us to consider Luce Irigaray'sconcept of the imaginary as an "in-between" space, one different from the "real"ones of the practicalworld and the "imagined" ones of metaphor, a space where the categories by which "real"and "imagined" are called into question, and where "the imaginary relation between self and other is performed" ("AsIf' 62). Using the imaginary as a frameworkfor discursive relations allows us to revisit the distinctions between the "social and the symbolic, [...] or the real and the textual, or between the bodily and the cultural, or between agency and structure" (66). As a result, reciprocal meanings betweenbinary oppositions-between the "real"and "symbolic"as well as between language and violence-are possible. In this essay, I consider how social constructions of violence are reproduced within a particularpedagogical scene in "daily,material ways" through specific discursive practices. These constructions define the limits of the physical, emotional, social, and discursive spaces contained within those scenes. My analysis focuses on how the ideology of violence at work in this scene reflects a failure of language to counteract violence. I also explore how awareness of the spaces that define one's movements through them is inhibited as well as fostered by particularforms of discursive exchange. Finally, I consider what new spaces we might negotiate through an exchange of language and attempt to understand how language can work as a substitute for violence. O'Reilley's question, "Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?" (qtd. in Blitz and Hurlbert 11) offers a compelling rethinking of our pedagogical scenes. When the spaces through which we move restrict the pedagogical exchanges necessary for peace, we cannot know ourselves, either individually or collectively. The challenge, then, is to move through these spaces in ways that encourage our fullest awareness of them, not just those dimensions that the "realities" of such spaces-our social constructions-appear to impose.
THE CAP ON VIOLENCE PROJECT

In December 1998, I received permission to become a participant-observer of a group of local artists who worked with area teens enrolled in a court-ordered program fostering nonviolence. For six months (anuary toJune 1999), I observed movement artistLisa Tsetse and her colleagues in the CAP on Violence Project (an outreach program of the Fort Wayne Dance Collective), theater artistJohn Beams, poet Helen Frost, and percussionist Ketu Oladuwa, as they worked with groups of teen boys and girls. The particularsegment of the CAP program described below was also in cooperation with the local Center for Nonviolence, which coordinates nonviolence curricula for the teens. Sox Sperry and Rodney Bolden were among the staff members present during these sessions. Lisa'sone requirement was that I participatefully

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in all the activities (discussions, movement, writing, percussion) along with the teens and artists.'As I analyzed my notes, I noticed two dominant social constructionsor, as Patti Lather puts it, "the stories a culture tells itself about itself'-of violence. The first story is a heroic view of violence, in which unique individuals are called to rise above the evils of ordinaryviolence through an extraordinarysense of righteous anger, which results in a form of violence that society may more easily justify. For the boys in this project, violence also mediates the passage from childhood to young adulthood, just as it does in many male rite-of-passage stories in the culture around them. The second story is of violence as the antithesis of emotion, located within male bodies that are disconnected from feeling. Unlike the first view, in which powerful emotions such as jealousy, devotion, anger, joy, fear, desire, love, and hate play a significant role, this view portraysviolence as the product of no emotions, a mechanistic detachment from self and other. Violence in this case is primarilyfrom a victim's perspective, one in which the perpetrator of violence is constructed as lessthan human, as otherand thus distanced from the victim's own identity. My goal in this analysis is, first of all, to demonstrate what these stories of violence have to tell us about how certain discursive practices have failed to prevent, and, in some cases, even contributed to the reproduction of violence. These stories typically function as binary oppositions within our culture, separating and placing into a hierarchy of power the roles and identities surrounding violence (victim/perpetrator, male/female, rich/poor, white/black, straight/gay). Yet when we examine these stories in relationship to each other, we can see that it is through violence that such inequities are maintained, and that violence depends upon maintaining a binary opposition between the "social"and the "symbolic." Consequently, the social, "real"world of violence triumphs over the symbolic, "imaginary" world of language, their inherent When is difference. stressing presumed, language separated in this way from material effects or consequences of its use, then language (as well as other symbolic forms of expression) gives way to violence, whether physical, verbal, emotional, psychological, or spiritual. Thus, within both of the social constructions I have noted, it is violence, not language, that ultimately holds power, and is "persuasive" in shaping an individual'sactions, thoughts, and beliefs, as well as sense of self. Language, in contrast, is "merelysymbolic," of little material consequence except to reinforce the view that the ultimate power is outside language, or any symbolic form of expression, in the "real"world. Violence ultimately depends upon this binary distinction between the "merely symbolic" and the "reality"of social and cultural exchange. As long as we choose to construct violence as "reality"and language as "merely symbolic," we fail to "examine the ways in which we are already teaching conflict."

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VIOLENCE

AS HEROISM

The first example illustrates the heroic story of violence. Out of several dozen teens, Daniel was one of the only ones, either male or female, with whom I had individual conversations. As I analyzed my notes about Daniel, I saw how my reflections about him were organizedin large partaroundthe heroic story;I was "reading" him through this story. At the same time, this story was "reading"Daniel and me; its ideology determined the social and cultural constraints that shaped our assumptions about the "reality"of violence. Daniel was one of a few boys (and the only African American one) to volunteer to participate in the CAP on Violence project's annual performance,2 so I got to know him a bit better than most of the teens. I drove him home on a few occasions after rehearsalsand asked him about his plans for summer and beyond, his interests, his attitudes about school, and, on days he brought it up, problems he was having at school. Daniel's mother and stepfather lived on the southeast side of Fort Wayne, in a mostly segregated neighborhood. Daniel expressed the desire to live on a "better" street where houses were not neglected. He also hoped for a better life for himself. Bright, thoughtful, and articulate, Daniel did not expect to go to college. His stepfather considered the armed services a good direction, and for the most part Daniel agreed, although for somewhat different reasons. Daniel saw himself as having a problem with violence; he felt that the army would provide the necessary "discipline" and "structure"he needed to lead a successful life. On the other hand, Daniel expressed a deep appreciation for artistic endeavor,which had led him to participate in the CAP on Violence performance. He was also interested in youth leadership at his church. Tall, lanky, and lithe, Daniel was young enough to move with ease and grace across the studio floor. In later rehearsals, his ability to leap astonished peers and artists alike; despite having had no formal training in dance, Daniel could jump with the best of them. Perhaps more astonishing was Daniel's willingness to perform such movements in front of his peers, since most of his male peers considered modern dance "queer"and even objected to removing their socks the one time they visited the dance studio. On the first day that I joined the group, Daniel told a story that captures the heroic view in which certain forms of violence transcend social restrictions and are subsequently deemed socially acceptable. During the opening discussion, the boys were asked how easy it would be for them to obtain a gun within a few days. Since I was unable to record the discussion or even take notes until afterwards,this version reflects not only what I remember of Daniel's words but my sense of what he meant to convey about his feelings:

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Daniel knewhow toget a gun. Whodidn't?He knewhowto useone,too.He and his brother had triedtoprotecttheirmother; them.Hisfather turnedon whohadspenther lifeprotecting hismotherran outside to her car watched, Daniel, helda knifeto his throat.Whilehisbrother She cracked the stickoverhisfathers head. The for the stickshe carriedtofend off molesters. and his mother, father barelynoticed,sofill of anger was he. BetweenDaniel, his brother, theymanagedto wrestlehim down.Daniel pulled out the gun he carriedin hisfront waistband.Theknifecasehooked on his beltloop it looked like a beeper flappedagainsthisstomach; He pointedthegun at hisfather Hisfather didn'tcareifDaniel was armed.He didn'tcareif thepolicetoldhim to leave thepremises. All he caredaboutwasgetting his way with Daniel's mother Thepolicehad comesoonafter Hisfather ragedevenat them.Finally,theyhauledhim away.Daniel neverhad toshootthegun. But he knows what couldhavehappened if he hadn't had it in thefirst place.

Daniel's story foregrounds a common story of violence in our society: violence as heroism. This view of violence as a necessary evil is so commonplace that it hardly requires elaboration. Every day, we view media images of police storming houses and schools in pursuit of violent criminals, armies attacking other armies, heroic rescues in movies and television that depict high-speed chases, gunfire, and martial arts duels. These images are seldom questioned for the violence they portray;what is more likely to be questioned is when it is justified. For this reason, Daniel can see himself as "justlike everybody else."3 Violence as heroism is evident in Daniel's struggle to protect his mother from his father'suncontrolled rage. Daniel does not condemn his own acts of violence; instead, they are elevated into acts of heroism. He fought to save his mother, and in the process, began his rite of passage into manhood. That he and his brother could not completely control the father without the mother's help speaks to the fact that this transition had not yet been completed. Yet violence clearly played a necessary part. Although his father'sbehavior was violent, Daniel refuses to label himself or his family as "bad"or "violent" but instead as ordinary people trying to work out their problems. Daniel's violence toward his father, as well as his possession of a knife and a gun, is elevated to a righteous cause-namely, defense of his mother. While Daniel did not actually stop his father (it was his mother who used a stick to protect her sons), had the police not arrivedwhen they did the violence most likely would have escalated and Daniel could have been forced into more extreme measures. In some ways, it is difficult to reconcile Daniel's heroic tale with his development in the CAP on Violence program, since in many ways Daniel was an emerging leader and even a potential role model for other boys. He knew he had a "problem" with violence. He admitted that he didn't want to let himself lose control when provoked by others. He even talked about the armed services as a place where he could learn the necessary discipline and self-control that he found elusive. Yet ulti-

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mately violence was essential to his survival.If one was disciplined, intelligent, and well trained (for example, as a soldier), then one could employ violence with social approval. Thus, language could not replace violence as part of human interaction. Michael Blitz, in his e-mail exchange with coauthor Mark Hurlbert, summarizes why language has failed for his students: "[T]hey are probably figuring that the world all but ignores them most of the time, and that the surest way to be noticed and listenedto is to tell the world something shocking, something dark, or awful, something unexpectedly desperate" (60). In short, language fails because no one is paying attention. What the hero story teaches instead is that people pay attention to violence, and that language, as "merely symbolic," holds no power. Since violence depends upon oppositions between the social and the symbolic, certain aspects of the social, physical, emotional, and discursive spaces of the pedagogical scenes I'd observed maintained these oppositions as the "reality"that constrained the teens' lives. For instance, the physical space of the church basement where I first joined the CAP on Violence project was, at first, "dead"to the boys, whose bodies were contained within its "unreality."As Rose comments, "[T]hat (space) which is non-real is condemned by geographers as dead, deathly, frozen, icy, calcified, as feminine; and it is condemned, expelled into the realm of the non-real" (69). Such a space reinforces the idea that no one is "paying attention" because no one-including the boys-pays attention to what is not "real." Because this space was "unreal,"the boys initially acted in ways to shut out, rather than explore, its physical dimensions. Each week Daniel and sometimes a dozen or more other teenaged boys would come to the basement of Simpson United Methodist Church and sprawl out into something like a circle on the floor. The basement was very large, and the white cinderblock walls, the white floor, and the bluish-white glare of the lights overhead at first swallowed up their small circle. A yellowing portrait of a CaucasianJesus stared from the outer wall. They cushioned themselves against the cold white tile with coats, athletic shoes, and boots, and used their arms as pillows. They leaned their stomachs againstthe hard floor. Even though the basement was relatively warm on a February night, many of them were unwilling to part with their outerwear, as if needing it to protect themselves. Clearly, this was not a space open to their inquiry.Instead of scraping their wet sneakers across the floor to see what sounds might be produced, or jumping up on the stage behind the potted plants, or using the wide open floor to roll around, jump, or wrestle, the boys instead moved in very restricted ways upon entering. Furthermore, while they were allowed into the basement, the boys were not invited into the upstairs portion of the church. Nor were they given chairs to sit on or anything else to cushion themselves against the hard floor. Thus, they were not interested in the space itself. The space was, in this sense, "dead."It gave them no important feedback. Its whiteness represented the "dead, deathly, frozen, icy, calci-

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fled, feminine" qualities to which they were being subjected. To explore such a space required some identification with it, but because of its "unreality,"identification posed a threat. Furthermore, with at least 50 percent of the boys in this project AfricanAmerican or biracial,white space also reinforced racial inequality. For black boys like Daniel, white space is a way of controlling black male bodies by placing them in a space where their words have no meaning, their body language is invisible, and the rhythms of their lives is nullified. As a social space, the church basement was also dead, separate from and thus of no consequence to the boys' own social spaces. Separate and unequal spaces were nothing new to the boys; they were often taken outside their "real"lives and placed into "unreal"spaces by authority figures. They could not control their social interactions-whom they chose to speak to, how, where, and when. They were repeatedly asked by the adults to respond to verbal, physical, and musical prompts while few of them initiated such responses from others. During the opening discussion, one of the boys commented on how glad he was that the adults were doing all the talking. Thus, for the social space to be "alive,"their interactions would have to be felt to be within the boys' control, including the authority to initiate responses in others. The emotional space was equally "dead"for these boys. Just as the physical and social spaces turned their attention away from their bodies and their relationships to others, the emotional space turned their attention away from the powerful feelings that had brought them to the courts and this program. As Daniel's story shows, selfpreservation, as well as preservation of those who help them survive, is a powerful motivation to these boys. But in a "dead"space, little, if anything, provides useful feedback on how to stay alive. Several of the boys spoke about dangers they had faced and feelings they had had. Nonetheless, they maintained a reserve that Ketu, the percussion artist, later referred to as a "veneer."Their emotional expressions were furtive, subtle, hidden, especially for a newcomer such as I. They had been placed in this program for having been "out of control" of their emotions, which led to violence (and/or led to someone's inflicting violence upon them). Consequently, the boys adopted dispassionate tones of voice when describing acts of violence they had witnessed or participated in, were awkward in making physical contact with others, and generally held their bodies stiffly. Again, inquiry into their own and others' emotional states was not engaged, since in this unreal space, nothing could help them deal with the struggle to survive that they faced when they returned home. Because the heroic story reinforces binary oppositions between "real"and "unreal" spaces, between being "in control" of a space versus "out of control," it does nothing to challenge the assumptions that structure these contradictions. Instead, these contradictions are the boys' "reality"-a fixed limit that constrains their lives. They are either "out of control" and within someone else's control or "in control"

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and free to choose where and how to spend their time, whom to socialize with, and how to express themselves. There is no "in-between space" to negotiate (that is, exchange) one story with another, one view of violence with another, one person's language, gestures, movements, expressions with another's.The only thing that can put them back in control, give them power, is violence. Thus, the spaces they inhabited in the CAP on Violence program were, in this sense, dead to them.
VIOLENCE AS EMOTIONAL DEATH

The hero story has what literary theorist Gary Saul Morson calls "sideshadowing," which, as he explains, contrasts with the narrative convention of foreshadowing. Foreshadowing structures narrative events (as well as one's reading of those events) around a predetermined temporal sequence based on an inevitable future outcome. In contrast, sideshadowing, as Nancy Welch explains in her own use of the term, "is a discursive practice designed to open up seemingly closed temporalities, to offer a glimpse of that range of possibilities, the consequences entailed in each. Instead of writing and reading as if the future is already set, we can consider, 'But what if it is not?"' (121). The sideshadowto the hero story is violence as emotional death.This sideshadow is apparent when we consider what lacks power or otherwise appears dead in the hero story. In Daniel's story, he lacks power because he cannot control his father's violent behavior. In contrast to his father, whose emotions are quite powerfully expressed, Daniel must control his own. The heroic self-control that Daniel champions, both in this story and elsewhere in his discourse, actually disempowers him within this story because he acts without the emotional charge (such as righteous anger) that heroes depend upon for making "good" choices. While his father rages and struggles over his family'sfailed attempts to control him, Daniel's lack of emotion makes even his drawn gun powerless in the face of his father's fury. When we analyze the hero story through its sideshadow, then, with the hero acting in an almost mechanistic control, its seemingly inevitable outcome-that without weapons or physical violence Daniel could not have saved his family from harm-is no longer the only possible conclusion. This sideshadow helps highlight the contradiction between heroic self-control (including an emotional void or "death")and its lack of power in the face of violence. Instead of considering how he stood to be further victimized by his father's, and his own, violence, Daniel's story attributes his "power"to his self-controlled use of weapons that ultimately had no effect over his father's behavior. However, the police officer's arrivalreinforces Daniel's assumption that heroic self-control saves the day because they are finally able to subdue his father. What Daniel fails to consider is the power of language (and other symbols) that the police carry,specifically

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their title, uniforms, badges, and training. Nor does he consider the limits of that power due to social and economic inequities. This sideshadow, as it appeared in my discourse, emphasized the boys' presumed lack of emotion or, in other words, emotional "death."Unlike many other meetings to come, the boys' discussion that first night focused on their personal experienceswith violence, in particularshootings, including one discussed by Daniel. In my notes, I commented frequently on the boys' lack of affect as they discussed of affect, far these experiences. Furthermore, I also commented upon my own excess exceeding that of the artists and counselors (who, I should add, were appropriately concerned and attentive). Specifically, I came down with a violent case of the stomach flu. I interpreted my physical ailment as a bodily metaphor for my emotional experience: I could not "stomach"the violence I'd heard. The following week during check-in, I even said as much to the group. I doubted my ability to "takein" the reality of these boys' lives. Like Daniel's hero, I saw myself as somehow lacking the necessary self-control to hear beyond the "veneer"of their words. Several moments from my first night with this group demonstrate how the story of emotional death limited my ability to negotiate the spaces I shared with the boys and thus limited the possibilities for pedagogical exchange, including peaceful uses of language. For instance, my written observations included a comment about Daniel's reaction to the neighborhood shooting: "Daniel sounds like he's just chalking it up to just a 'bad day' or a 'bad break' that this (otherwise 'good guy') is getting." I thought Daniel was rationalizing something I found horrifying: Sure, he killedsomeone but hes still a goodperson. I couldn't see anything but the monstrosity of the murder. Daniel's apparent lack of emotion concerning the consequences of this murder was an emotional "death."I compared his reaction to that murder to how he told the story about his parents, noting that aside from a "drylaugh" as he recounted how his mother had hit his father over the head with her stick, he was calm and matter-of-fact.4I wondered how the boys could listen to all these stories and not feel the exhaustion I did. I also wondered how the artists could listen, week after week, and not be similarly exhausted. Robert had followed Daniel's story with one of his own. He was visiting relatives in Alabamawhen he witnessed a shooting. (The story was too complicated for me to remember all the details for my notes.) The boys were hanging around together, and at some point a shooting occurred. A young man had died, but, as Robert observed, the police didn't take any suspects, even though Robert and his group were witnesses to the crime. According to Robert, the police said they had no "credible witnesses." One of the artists asked him if he thought it was because he was black. Robert said he didn't know. My notes describe how Robert shrugged indifferently to the artist'squestion. I recalled, too, the lack of expression on his face, and the heaviness of his shoulders as

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they rose and fell. Similarly, another boy whose name I could not remember discussed his brother's killing in Indianapolis. One of the artists asked him how long ago it had been. He replied that it had been two months. Again, what I remembered were his motionless face and flat voice, so much like those of the other boys with horrific stories to tell. While the hero story constructs violence and its remedy as the product of extraordinary emotion, the emotional death story claims violence and its remedy as the product of an extraordinarylack of emotion. Within this perspective, violence robs everyone-victims, perpetrators, and witnesses-of feeling. So powerfully did this story shape my experience that I felt exhausted just from listening. The death story also affected my experience of physical space. In my notes, I compared the boys' bodies to wooden puppets sprawled across the floor, with pupin some ways pet-like affect. Ketu's question, "How can we get beyond the veneer?" affirmed this view. However, unlike Ketu, I did not see this "wooden" physicality as a veneer; nothing was "alive"behind the veneer. In contrast, my body was aliveand vulnerable. I had no protection or "veneer."My body (and the physical space I those of the boys were dead. My physical "aliveness" occupied) was alive because their "death" as puppets, subject to social control and manipulation depended upon a dominant culture. Thus the death story put my existence into an adversarial by opposition with the boys'. For me to move "freely" within that space, the boys' bodies had to be confined or controlled. An improvisational exercise that night further illustrates the oppositions upon which the death story depends. After the opening discussion, John invited the boys to say how much they weighed, individually,and then as a group. When they called out their weights-175, 200, with the "runt"of the group a mere 115-I was amazed and rather intimidated by their size. In my reflections, I wrote, "Never would have guessed they are so big. Baggy clothes hide their size. It's scary."Here is how the death story distorts differences between self and other, exaggerating as well the differences between social groups to maintain subordination of one over the other. Physically, I am as tall as, if not taller than, many of the boys. While I do not weigh as much as the largest boys, I was certainly no "runt"among them. Furthermore, on that particular night there were seven adults to seventeen or so boys, so I was not isolated physically or socially. Yet as I analyzed my notes, I saw repeated references to a scarcely recognized fear and intimidation on my part: What was to stop those boys from turning on me? In contrast, Helen wrote in the margins of my notes, "Oddly, perhaps, I never do feel at all threatened by any of the kids." Clearly, the story that shaped the spaces I occupied maintained rather than challenged the inequities between us. As the improvisational exercise continued, the artists asked everyone to turn to someone and tell that person, "Youcan trust me, I won't hurt you." One of the boys

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turned to me. My notes reflect the uncertainty I felt as he smiled and spoke the requisite words: "He and I turn to each other at the same time. His eyes are soft and he smiles a bit. It almost seems like a put-on. Not that I think he'll hurt me, but something rehearsed. Not entirely sincere." This was the first time since I joined the project that I had to address any of the boys directly, in close proximity. My uncertainty indicates the contradictions upon which my sense of self and security depended. I "see" the veneer, and perhaps something "soft" behind it. He may be "sincere,"but not "entirely."I also remember how easy and "natural"it was for me It did to smile and speak those words to him. I am used to being heardand believed. not occur to me until later, as I wrote my reflections, that this boy's trust was something I would have to earn. Similarly,if this boy was "not entirely sincere," it was, at least in part, because he was not used to being heard and believed-at least not by white women authority figures. If we reread the death story through its sideshadow, then we begin to see more than the predetermined future forecast by its ending and instead focus on a range of possible consequences-in short, the materiality of the story's language. In my interactions with the boys, I am ultimately the one who is "dead"or lacking power because I construct myself as defenseless, vulnerable, and emotional in the extreme. Yet I also construct myself as moving freely between the spaces I occupy-I smile "easily"and expect to be heard and believed. In contrast to the hero story, in which heroes are motivated by powerful feelings of self-righteous anger, self-preservation, and the protection of others, in the death story, emotions weaken one's power, make one vulnerable to the mechanistic control of violence. Emotions take away one's protection-in other words, one's self-control. And yet emotions offer a certain freedom and control over others. Ironically, our stories portray the experience of our emotions to the contraryDaniel believed that his self-controlled use of weapons gave him power; I believed that in lack of emotional self-control left me the violence inscribed the vulnerable to my and lack of us affect. Yet the allows to sideshadow boys' physicality "glimpse [.. .] that range of possibilities, [and]the consequences entailed in each."In Daniel's story, the foregone conclusion of the necessity of weapons opens into the possibility of other consequences. One consequence that actually emerged in the discussion was the effect of violence on the community. In response to Daniel's comment about the neighborhood shooting, John agreed that the neighbors might, indeed, be good people, yet the father's "bad choice" was nonetheless "devastating."The effects of violence, even in a "good cause," are potentially (levastating not only for the hero but for those he or she seeks to protect. John's comment made the effects of that murder on the boys themselves, as well as on those they wish to protect, material. Similarly,the sideshadow to my story recasts the assumption that emotions have no "real"power over violence, which results from emotional "death."Emotions trans-

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form the "unreal"into the "real,"and vice versa. They shape our experience of the materiality of the stories by which our lives are constructed. We cannot know our reality (including who we are in relation to others) without them.
THE BODY OF A POEM

Within the pedagogical scene that I have described, we see how these two social constructions of violence shape our experience of the language we use for learning and teaching by focusing our attention away from its materiality.The language exchanges that are already occurring are "sideshadowed"in favor of a cultural mythos of absolute control and power over self and others. In this mythos, language is an emptyspacedevoid of any presence or meaning. It is simply a container for "real" power. Thus, these stories ensure that language will be objectified as "merely symbolic" within the pedagogical scene and that violence will remain the subject of "reality." Yet when we inquire into the "dead"spaces of these stories through sideshadowing, Irigaray'simaginary space becomes available. Instead of an object of control (a "merely symbolic" container of meaning) or the subject of domination (we are the puppets through which language "speaksus"), language moves us between categories of subject and object in an exchange of self and other. Language is both/neither subject n/or object. It is something other;it resists the limits we place upon it, even as it listens to and is shaped by the meanings we inscribe upon/within it. Unfortunately, the ideology of violence focuses our attention away from these double moves that language makes and instead insists that we can move/think/feel eitherthis way or that way, but not both at the same time. Yet the materialityof how we actuallyuse language shows us over and over again that we learn and teach throughsuch contradictions. The movements we make-the "exchanges"-within the pedagogical scene depend upon holding such spaces open through our listening, which depends upon our awareness of the materiality of the language we use. These contradictions insist that we focus on the "pointlessness"of our language use (in other words, what the ideology of violence claims as "dead"). They instruct us as to how language limits and shapes our sense of self, actions, thoughts, and feelings within a particularpedagogical scene and how that affects us, as well as how we can exchange language in ways that move us beyond the limits of our experience. Ultimately, new knowledge depends upon not simply new information but also new spaces in which that knowledge can be meaningfully exchanged. The CAP project was successful not only because it fostered the kind of "pointlessness" that created spaces for listening to language, but also because language was part of a continuum of other symbolic forms, including movement, percussion, and theatrical improvisation. These other forms helped make me more aware of the

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contradictory aspects of how we shape and are shaped by language because it put language into the context of how it is actually lived. The following story illustrates how listening to language changes one's sense of self in relation to others and ultimately makes peaceful exchanges of language a more conscious and powerful alternative to violence. In the ideology of violence, one cannot "exchange" language without losing control of oneself. That was my reading of the boys' discursive (and other symbolic) moves. What language they gave was guarded, fragmented, in muted tones. They had to preserve the selves they knew and protect those who protected them; otherwise, when they returned to their lives, they would be lost. "Our"language had no power for them; using it threatened their very survival. Yet when they reached for books of poetry near the end of my second night with them, they encountered a discourse that was neither "theirs"nor "ours" but something "in between." They could "exchange"with this language, even lose themselves in it and yet, at the same time, "find"themselves more deeply because they recognized aspects of their own language in a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar discourses. They also understood what this language was doing in terms of telling something true to the writers' as well as their own experience. Rodney, one of the Center counselors, read a prose piece out loud from a local anthology of Fort Wayne teens' writing about violence, Why DarknessSeems So Light. In "The Murder of Angela," Edna Ruth Hepworth describes how, after her mother died and her alcoholic father abandoned her, she lived with an aunt who was stabbed to death before her eyes by the aunt'sboyfriend. Rodney commented on how impressed he was that someone could get through such an experience. Then Taylor raised his hand (usually the boys didn't raise hands before speaking) to tell the group why he liked that piece; his own losses of both mother and father in a short period of time were similar. The author's sentence, "I lost my family again" (20), had formed a hinge between their losses. I don't necessarily think Taylor lost his parents in the same way as Edna Ruth did, but for him, the double trauma of losing one caregiver, then another, spoke his truth as well as hers. The boys' apparent lack of skepticism about the author's story signals, in one sense, a naive reading, in which the story'struth claims are taken at face value. None of them stopped to consider that the story's gothic horror, mixed with journalistic factuality ("He grabbed a knife out of the drawer and stabbed her 38 times in the back" [20]), suggested any reason for doubt. As Michael Blitz points out, "[T]he surest way [for young people] to be noticed and listenedto is to tell the world something shocking, something dark, or awful, or unexpectedly desperate"(60). No one questioned this writer's motives. Yet whether her aunt was stabbed thirty-eight or three times, or not stabbed at all, Taylor heard a sentence that told his truth and

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hers. They were different truths and yet they were the same. They both grieved the loss of parents and protectors, and for that, their lives would never be the same. Reading and discussing this story and other literary works that night opened that imaginary space where the boys could be believed and heard. The truths they had to tell were not "merely"imaginative nor were they factual. They were confessions, declarations,reflections, apologies, regrets. They livedas language in the boys' experience. They understood what such language did without explanation. Yet, as Helen pointed out, they were also poems. To make this turn toward the literary material, she asked them to write statements on index cards, beginning with the ." When she read their cards out loud, prompt, "I want to tell the truth about did have tell them that their collective work formed a litany. she not to anonymously, It simply functioned that way; through repetition and variation of a series of similarly structured sentences, they heard and felt the accumulation, heard and felt the weight of their words in the voice of the "other." They literally heard their own voices in hers, and the voices of those whom they had read in theirs. Reading aloud helped facilitate this exchange of voices, making the language come alive not simply as written work but as part of their dialogue and discussion. They could hear how they all had their own truths and yet together they spoke a collective truth. They could also hear how they had overtaken "someone else's"form and made it speak for themselves. Their "everydaygenres" of confessions, declarations, apologies, and so forth merged with those of the poem. Their individual selves merged to make a collective statement of truth. In the listening spaces of the imaginary, emotion, like language, makes these double moves. Carl, a thin white boy wearing a Cubs shirt, stood up in the middle of the group. He looked like he'd grown up in the suburbs. He just stood there, unmoving. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ketu approachhim. He wrapped his arms around Carl, and they both began to sob. Later I learned that Carl, like Taylor, had lost both parentsin a short period of time. The loss and grief of Edna Ruth Hepworth and Taylor had overtaken him. The boys watched quietly; even Cam, in his Hornets cap and gold stud earring, restless and complaining under his breath all night, did not stir, even though it was time to leave and two males were hugging each other and crying. Together they formed a poem; their bodies, younger and older, lightand dark-skinned, wiry and muscular, cropped blonde hair and shoulder length dreadlocks, merged in that moment. After an evening of moving through the contradictions of their bodies, rhythms, and words, of hearing and seeing and feeling themselves through the voices, eyes, and bodies of others, they could finally hold this imaginary space for each other. For at least this one moment, their articulated truths had more power than the violence that had spoken through them all their lives.

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CONCLUSION:

LISTENING

TO

LANGUAGE

IN

THE

CLASSROOM

Our cultural ideology insists that violence exists outsidemeaningful experience. Yet at the same time, we live as if our lives depend upon it; thus, violence clearly has great meaning for us. The dilemma that we face is that there is no directmeans by which we can grasp that larger meaning; instead, we must rely upon symbolic forms such as language to perceive it. Thus, paying attention to how violence works requires that we listen to the materiality of our language, movement, rhythms, and bodies to understand how it is of consequence to us in the pedagogical scenes we enact within and outside the classroom. Instead of just listening for the "problems" to fix or corrections to be made to the language of our students, our listening can involve paying attention to what is already happening in terms of how language engages those who are using it. The discourses of survival that Daniel, Edna Ruth, Taylor, and Carl all engaged mixed with discourses of violence, yet when the survival discourse was engaged by the group, everyone could appreciatehow amazing it was that we had survivedour own horrors and, as Rodney commented, "got through" them. Daniel's story also shows how survivalmeant not only protecting himself, but also protecting his mother and brother from harm. Especially for teens, for whom the suicide rate continues to rise alarmingly, survival is something to not only celebrate but also understand more deeply. The truisms of teaching instruct us to listen to our students, just as the truisms of critical theory instruct us to listen to the "other"(or inform us of the impossibility of doing do). Yet what this material view of language can show us is that it is language itself (and other symbolic forms) that we must "listen"to. There is no "direct" way to listen to self and other. By listening to those double moves, it is possible to construct usable truths that can mediate the binary oppositions we face each time we encounter what is unknown or unfamiliar in our experience. As long as we are listening to language, there is hope that we can "teach [and learn] English so that people stop killing each other."
NOTES
1. Because it was not possible to take notes on site, I wrote notes the following day and later offered these notes to the artists for their voluntary input. Also, after consulting with staff members at the Center for Nonviolence, I chose not to audio- or videotape these meetings, to protect the identity of the teens and preserve the sense of "safespace" that the adults sought to foster. I received written permission from some of the teens to use them in this research, but have not used any of their actual names. 2. Each June, teens associated with the CAP on Violence project, as well as other teens in the community, perform as part of the Fort Wayne Dance Collective's annual concert. The artists help the teens generate a theme, write a script, create stage props, choreograph movement, and play instruments. 3. During the performance, Daniel recited the following lines. Although the teens wrote their own script, I cannot say whether or not Daniel actually wrote these words. However, he did perform them

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with great feeling and conviction: "I am a harmless person. But because of getting into trouble once, I am branded a troublemaker for life. The way people gossip or spread rumors, it seemed like I should be locked away forever. People shouldn't criticize me, because I am who I am for a reason, and if they took the time to come into my world, they'd see I'm just like everybody else." 4. In her written response to my field notes, Helen noted next to my comment about Daniel's laugh, "I don't recall this. I remember it as a serious contribution." It is interesting to note how differently we interpreted what counted as "emotion" and what it meant to us. WORKS CITED

1 (2001): 117-42. Bleich, David. "The Materiality of Language and the Pedagogy of Exchange."Pedagogy Blitz, Michael, and Mark Hurlbert. Lettersfor the Living: TeachingWriting in a Violent Age. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1998. Cain, Mary Ann. "Active Minds, Invisible Bodies: Classroom Space as Constructions of Experience." Classroom and WritingInstruction. Ed. Carol Rutz and Ed Nagelhout. Hampton, 2003. Space(s) Hepworth, Edna Ruth. "The Murder of Angela." Why DarknessSeemsSo Light: Young PeopleSpeakOut about Violence. Ed. Helen Frost. San Antonio: Pecan Grove, 1998. 20. Kromah, Andrew. Interview with Terry Gross. FreshAir. Natl. Public Radio. WBNI, Fort Wayne. 9July 2001. and Pedagogy With/InthePostmodern. New York:Routledge, Lather, Patti. GettingSmart:FeministResearch 1991. Morson, Gary Saul. Narrative and Freedom:The Shadowsof Time. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. Rose, Gillian. "AsIf the Mirrors Had Bled: Masculine Dwelling, Masculinist Theory, and Feminist Masquerade." BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Genderand Sexuality. Ed. Nancy Duncan. New York:Routledge, 1996. 56-74. Feminismand Geography: The Limits of Geographical Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, Knowledge. 1993. Welch, Nancy. "No Apology: Challenging the 'Uselessness' of Creative Writing."JAC 19 (1999): 117-34.