Dan's blog

     First, I’d like to comment that A Pedagogy for Liberation is a fantastic title. This was the most striking quote in the piece for me: “liberatory learning involves desocialization.”

     As we enter these institutional spaces of learning, even as we acquire language, we start to realize all of the restrictive social and communicative rules we must learn to navigate in order to survive and “move through the system.” This socialization can completely disempower us – turn us into helpless cogs in a machine who do not think critically because we are seeing the world through the structure of how we’ve been socialized. Our roles, as friends, partners, students, workers, are flat and formed.

      Transcending that socialization is the challenge. How do you impart that crucial questioning in someone that can allow them to reject the restrictions and think more freely?

Having just finished Michelle Cliff's "A Journey Into Speech", my mind is running through associations. Images were conjured of Bertha, the voiceless character in Jane Eyre whom Mr. Rochester locks in the attack until she eventually burns the house down.  Bertha's story is later written by a Caribean woman in Wide Sargasso Sea, because this caged woman is not only denied a voice in Jane Eyre, but she also has no history of her own, until Jean Rhys creates it.  

I also thought of Audrey Lorde's quote about refusing the use the masters tools to dismantle the master's house. Cliff talks about her apprehension to using the essay form to write about Speechlessness, which makes sense. Instead, she advocates "mixing in the forms taught us by the oppressor, undermining his language, and co-opting his style, and turning it to our purpose" (33). Language is a space of intense, often unseen oppression, and I think that the decision to reject and then re-establish certain elements of language is an incredibly empowering one. Why must we use these words which exist, this grammatical structure, if it's inherently oppressive? We can navigate it, once we recognize it. 

This is a illustration I came across while traveling last semester, by two artists named Anders Meisner and Mical Noelson. It's a sort plump, child-like body with straw hands and a straw head. It has neither a mouth nor ears, and therefore has no voice -- a type of artistic scare-crow. Having grown up on a farm in WV, I feel very comfortable and familiar with not speaking or being spoken to for long periods of time, as my experience in such a rural place involved less people and and those people spoke much less often than many of the people I've met at Bryn Mawr and in Philadelphia. I can relate to the straw-headed figure, non-verbal. However, not using verbal communication isn't necessarily silence, although we sometimes consider the pauses in between bits of dialogue to be "awkward silences." Ignoring the myriad of other sounds, the "background noise,"  only acknowledges human voices as noise and denies all other sounds. Similarly, we are much more inclined to consider the absence of man-made or industrial sounds to be silence, when nature is full of sounds and life. Is this a human-centric, speech-centric view of the audible world? Is it us defining silence only in human terms?

The imagine represents a human quietness which I can relate to and enjoy, but not a silence -- a natural soundscape.