Space Exploration Continues Apace

Went to a ginormous Montessori conference today. First off—thousands of attendees (yeah, I was surprised too) and I swear...95% women. No wonder I've already twice been told men are head-hunted for this gig. Just sayin'.

The keynote was Dr. Brené Brown. Here is a TED talk of hers which recently, and quite unbeknownst to my cave-dwelling ass, "went viral" apparently:

Of her address, let me say this: She took an hour and change to say what she said above in twenty minutes, and I prefer the twenty-minute version. Having said that—she's also a charismatic, engaging, and genuine person to listen to, which was fun and refreshing. The fire alarm, which had been acting up earlier as well, went off a couple of times during her talk and the house audio went down as a result. She was game enough to try to find a way to talk to the whole room (did you see the size of that crowd?) off mic, which clearly wasn't going to work. I felt a rush from my short-lived #OccupyOakland days and almost went, "MIC CHECK!" but refrained.

Still, when I got home later and thought back on it, I was left without a clear sense of the point. As I read her: Vulnerability is a necessary condition for a fully-lived life, and by avoiding it we deny ourselves full lives. It's a good message I can definitely get down with, and well-delivered. But...So what? How are we to overcome this? To be fair, she got started talking practically about how this was to be accomplished (establishing explicit practices of gratitude is the drift), but I suppose I'll have to buy her books to find out more detail about all that.

The other talks I went to were frankly...meh. One was about mindfulness in the classroom, a topic I'm quite curious about, but the talk boiled down to Here is what mindfulness is and why it's good, which I didn't need to hear. The next one was about the cognitive benefits of kids being in wild natural spaces, which boiled down to It beats the pants out of any playground you can build. I confess that I left early because I wanted to beat rush-hour BART.

Brought home a souvenir, speaking of buying books—the title presumably gives it all away:

We shall see.

More Montessori Notes: Math Meditations

Another brief thought from my observation yesterday. The same kid who showed me the buckle thingy had earlier been working on the binomial and trinomial cube works. Talk about concentration. She took apart and reassembled this thing (which would have taken me how long to figure out myself?) twice in a row, methodically, smack dab in the center of a room abuzz with movement and voices. She looked up periodically to beam at her teacher, who in turn pointed out that she'd been working on it repeatedly in recent days. Just another day in the education of a five year old.

Now getting back to this business of teaching in silence. Here is a demonstration of how you teach someone to work this thing:

Two points here. One: This teaching method reminds me of nothing so much as a Japanese tea ceremony. And two: Under the surface there is some serious math going on.

As I said, the girl was clearly getting something out of working with these things. I'm so used to thinking of algebra as something that's performed on paper that it's difficult for me to get outside that box. But come to think of it, about the best math education I ever got was from the habit I picked up in middle school of doing tons of modular origami. Hell, for a few years running our family Christmas tree was decked out entirely in that stuff. And sure enough, origami made the numbers-on-paper aspect of tenth grade geometry easier for me when the time came...But over years, what sticks with me is not the notation of geometry textbooks but geometry as a permanent feature of my visual sense. Point is, I might not know what that kid is learning from them blocks, but she certainly does.

Another Space Walk: Further Observations of the Montessori Method

It was a miserably rainy (and hilly) bike ride to get there, but worth the visit...Yesterday I had my second Montessori observation. Stayed a bit longer this time and therefore got to see a wider variety of activities and not just the students independently choosing and doing "works," as the learning tools in Montessori's system are known. However the first hour or so was indeed heavy on the "works" stuff, with the same basic selection and layout as I saw at the first school I visited. People consistently say that each Montessori school is very different and so one should go see several—I showed up with my eyes peeled for such differences but the first and foremost impression I got was of similarity.

Then again, the teacher whose class I was camping out in had a somewhat different style than the "approach silence" deal I saw before. I thought I noticed a bit more direction from her, as she steered the children towards certain types of works. You've been drawing pictures for a long time now, she might say. Why don't you go choose a language or math work? You're five years old, so you need to do some math or language practice today too, love. You can draw more pictures in a little while. Another thing: this appeared to be a much more affectionate classroom than the earlier one I saw. Hugs, kisses, and nicknames like "love" and "babe" all around. Another detail I found interesting: One of this teacher's most effective tricks for defusing four- and five-year-olds' meltdowns was simply to take the kid by the hand and have them accompany her around the classroom as she continued to observe others' work.

This time around I also noticed much more the amount of attention one needs to pay to little kids' motor skills, in all parts of their bodies. How to sit with feet planted, how to stand in a line, how to relax and get some self-control over one's wiggles...All these things played a part in addition to the fine motor skills of writing. (Speaking of which...This time around I got to talk to more kids and participate a bit more in the class; one fond moment I had was to help a kid improve on his method for writing the numeral 4.) The last thing I observed was a trip to the gymnasium—which would have been a trip outdoors but for the pouring rain—when the kids were let loose to run wild. Which they did.

Here's another way the Montessori method zooms in on motor skills...A little girl proudly demonstrated this work for me (along with the button and zipper dressing frames):

This motor skill business is part of a huge range of stuff I've never thought about "teaching" (or perhaps more accurately, "helping somebody learn") before. Certainly as a high school teacher I've encountered plenty of students with fine motor skill difficulties, as manifested in their handwriting. But by the time a kid is in adolescence, we're usually more worried about getting them through, say, To Kill a Mockingbird than taking the time out to help them write "4" better.

Another example from my vast ignorance of early childhood education: A five-year-old named Millie came up to me as soon as I got seated in a corner of the class, and started talking to me. "Whose daddy are you?" "I saw a tarantula at my birthday party." "What's your favorite color?" "This is a red dolphin with a gray tail." "Here's how you say hello to a frog: 'RIBBIT!'" Etcetera. She was also all over me physically, practically climbing into my lap to talk to me. The teacher quickly kaiboshed this. "Remember what we talking about Millie, about touching people and talking to them?" Turns out Millie is one hell of a trusting and sociable little girl—her parents and teachers are working on breaking her of the habit of wandering up to strangers and initiating conversations...A somewhat adorable but obviously dangerous habit. Later in the gym, she came up to me again and grabbed me by the leg to take me on a walk around the basketball court with her, which once again the teacher had to stop because I was too stupid and too stunned by all the cuteness to remember. I have much to learn about this age group, for sure.

New Blog for Occupy Oakland Education Committee

Please take a look at the new blog, Education for the 99%. Folks from the education committee of Occupy Oakland are still stirring it up, I'm glad to report. The front page currently features this cartoon, which I like a lot:

Teaching Tip: Approach Silence

So my visit turned out to be a good idea. Spent about an hour on Monday watching 3-6 year olds at work in their Montessori classroom. First and foremost: They are cute, these ones. If cute were a verb, that's about all they'd be doing. Mind you, I was not present for tantrums, pants-soilings, snot-volcanoes, or any other hazards associated with this age group; all 18 (or so) of the little ones were at the top of their game as far as I could see.

Of course, being cute while conveniently not crapping themselves was far from all that they were up to. Here is a clip closely approximating what I saw—there's more like it on YouTube, but I chose this one because it highlights the uniformity of the Montessori system globally. Here are kids in Estonia working with lots of the same materials and in the same basic set-up:

I was also well-prepped for my visit by the many conversations I've had with my sister about her children's school, recognizing much of what I observed from her previous descriptions and explanations. At the same time, I keep hearing the advice that I should continue to observe at different Montessori schools because "they're all so different." My next appointment is in a couple of weeks, so I look forward to seeing what a different iteration might look like.

Dr. Montessori is on the left, I believe.
Also: the materials the kids are using haven't changed.

My strongest impression, and biggest surprise, came from watching the teachers at work. There were three adults in the classroom, one of whom was the head teacher of the school and had worked there for 21 years. She graciously sat with me to answer questions during part of my visit, and I learned a lot of background and technical stuff. But what really impressed me was simply how quiet all three were. They deliberately kept their voices at a constant minimum volume—and may in fact have spent most of their time in silence. You rarely heard them much at all.

The purpose (as it was explained to me) was to disappear as much as possible—to let the space be for, by, and about the children. This is not to say they were inactive. Sometimes they intervened in or initiated situations. Sometimes a student might approach one of them, quietly tap them on the arm, and ask for a lesson (delivered in near or total silence). You can read some theory about the Montessori teacher's role here, but let me say that in practice the adults' work looks like a combination of...how can I put this? Meditation and dance.

"Meditation," partly because of the whole silence thing, but also because of the intense focus clearly required to make the system work. All three looked concentrated as hell on observing the kids and the space itself to make sure they knew what was going on and where they might or might not be needed. As in any kind of teaching, there's a long-term kind of attention you have to pay to each student (or as many as you can, if you have 160) to see what's changing. But here there was an immediacy, a presence, required of the teachers which looked delicious to me. In my experience, as noted, what happens is that everyone's attention is sliced, diced, skewed, and screwed in the service of top-down curriculum. Not here.

And "dance" because these teachers acted like a collective Ginger Rogers to the kids' collective Fred Astaire...Which is an awkward metaphor meant to convey the way they skillfully follow their students' lead. There's activity swirling throughout the room—not chaotically, mind you, but it's complex and hard to see all at once because it's not standardized. No rows, no desks, and no expectation that we're all going to do the same thing at once and produce the same product at the end of the line. Somehow all three adults seemed to know how to be in the right place at the right time so that no kid looked lost, confused, bored, listless...I'm finding it hard to describe now, but the effect was pretty impressive.

Also worth noting is that one of the most common things I heard the teachers say was, "Go find [other student's name] and ask for help." Since there's a relatively wide age range present in the room, there'll be kids who've already surmounted the challenges that the youngest ones are working on, and so there's a natural mentoring between them that goes on. I saw plenty of kids teaching each other, which needless to say was also pretty cool.

These notes I'm taking are all rather redundant—nothing I'm observing here is new. Actually it's all quite old. Still I feel it's worth blogging about my first impressions of such a diametrically different version of "school" from what I've just slipped out of. And a night or two after my visit, as if to underscore the contrast, I had a teaching anxiety dream—I still get them regularly—which culminated in my screaming as hard as I could at a class of rowdy teenagers, EVERYBODY SHUT THE FUCK UP! (It didn't work.) Thank you, subconscious, for driving the point home.

A Visit to Outer Space

...That's about how I'm imagining the trip I'll take tomorrow morning on a mission of curious observation to a Montessori school in this area. It's the first of several I'm trying to arrange for myself, on the theory that I should use this time of suspended animation to learn a thing or two. Hence the 18-month-olds. Yep, this school packs some serious younguns! I'm very curious about how the Montessori methods look in action for such wee ones; actually I'm curious to see it at all.

Had a very informative and helpful conversation with a woman who works there, which gave me a quick sense of just how much more complicated the reality of Montessori education looks like on the ground. How purist do you want to get? Some Montessori schools just have the tools around, but none of the teachers know or use the methods that go with them. Some only hire teachers trained to do the Montessori thing, she said. (That's far from an exact quote.)

My plan is to be as unobtrusive as possible and soak in the experience like a sponge. No note-taking equipment is coming with me, in other words. I'll just see what I see, and overthink it later...

Joseph's Response, Part 1 of 5: Deadlines

Many thanks to Joseph, who stepped up to my invitation as I knew he would. (Heh, heh. You know I'm lovin' the Occupy reference, right?)

When the words "blog school" came to me I was literally thinking a school for bloggers: anyone who blogs knowing for sure at least one person is on the other line ready to give feedback and writing tips. The influence of ears is great. The questions you asked on your blogs are keen; I haven't thought about it in depth like that.. but I'm ready; Not even metaphorically: let's Occupy this space virtually.

I'll return his brainstorming volley by zeroing in on a particularly pregnant point, referring to the Writing Assignments section of my class site (numbers and emphasis added):

Writing assignments- Like school where there are desks & pencils: some people come for the first few days and then never come back. Though this is not a traditional school I think discipline to dedication would be a motivation to write. This sounds harsh & definitely needs more expanding but example: 1. "If you miss more then 6 deadlines, I'm going to have to let you go." Never the less, 2. It's not the law to go to blogging school so I think it would be filled with people who just want to be there. I bet a great number of future seniors are worrying about their 3. college essays and such too, this would be a great way to offer assistance. Freedom of choice is good, 4. books would be an idea too: reviewing a book and keeping thoughtful logs through blogs and whatnot. 5. Feedback from other people to other people would be delightful.

There's lots to excavate in this passage—multiple posts' worth, it would seem. And the excavation has to do (as usual) with upending some traditional ideas about the roles of student and teacher and the meaning of the word "school." I'll dive in, taking the highlighted bits one at a time:

1. "If you miss more than 6 deadlines, I'm going to have to let you go."

Hmm. What deadlines? Whom do the deadlines serve? What are they for? Sometimes deadlines are extremely useful and necessary. On the other hand, I've recorded and published music for years now, avidly and with ever-deepening motivation and understanding, all for the love and without any schedule. (Let alone the hundreds of pages on this blog, none of which were on anybody's clock.) I'm not in the market for a music teacher at this point, but if I were I'm not sure I'd want deadlines for my next beat/song; I'd want dependable access to expertise in the craft from a trusted source.

And even if I did ask for deadlines (some folks thrive on the pressure), I might not want to be "let go" if I missed 'em. If I blow a bunch of deadlines, maybe that means they aren't working for me, rather than meaning that I'm just lazy and undeserving. If my creation takes a day, a week, a month, or a year to finish, who cares?

Let me imagine myself as a writing student, looking for a good writing teacher/workshop. Maybe I have the seed of a short story in mind, or of a novel. Deadlines could be optional. I might want to work my project out in "blog school" at a varying pace—sometimes getting tons done at once, sometimes getting blocked and working more painstakingly. When I'm finished, I graduate myself and stop subscribing to the school (unless I have another project in mind and want to keep going.) On the other hand, I might indeed want an ass-kicking deadline. In either case, I would want some choice in the matter. Blog School ought to encompass this, it seems to me.

Furthermore: Who lets whom go, and why? A student lets a teacher go when they've outgrown that teacher, or when their style isn't working. Or for plenty of other reasons. This can be hard to do, because we're used to thinking of teachers calling all the shots. (When I let go of my first piano teacher, for example, it was a very personal and emotional decision that had repercussions for both of us.) "I'm going to have to let you go" suggests an authority structure that is a bit more top-down than I'm aspiring to...

But if there's no set schedule, then how does a Blog School calendar look? I have some ideas about that which I'll find time to post here at some point soon—now that I'm enjoying early and temporary retirement. But next up: 2. "It's not the law to go to blogging school..." I'll return to Joseph's points tomorrow. Before I do, let it be clear: Inasmuch as I may differ, don't let me come off as "correcting" him. What he says is all legit, and greatly appreciated. It's just that I am hoping to help build something that addresses current educational dysfunction by sidestepping it, Judo-style, not by perpetuating it in an online forum. It is not the technology that makes a difference, pedagogically. It's a devotion to facilitating genuine relationships between teacher(s) and student(s), not constipated by outdated institutional norms.

Again, thank you Joseph for your help and good ideas! I can't think of a better pool of allies to share strength with than my students...

What Happened to Occupy Oakland?

Now I'm going to do the very thing I used to bemoan when other people did, which is to talk about Occupy Oakland without having been there. Because I haven't, not for quite a long time at this point, and so I know that I don't know what the hell is going on. Meanwhile, the good folks I was working with earlier on some educational initiatives have, helpfully, been e-mailing and texting me to invite me back into the fold. And I've been "too busy" (or so I tell myself) busting out of my day job to pick the torch back up. So: Hypocrite alert! And with that, here goes:

My abiding impression of Occupy Oakland—the first phase of it at least—was positive. Over-the-moon positive, I might even say. While there were tough problems from the start, the first lesson that's lasted is that when people in a community break through surface differences, we can discover common ground we wouldn't have imagined before, and a motivation to get work done together. Yada yada yada and kumbaya, right? Sounds too granola to be true, but for a minute there it was. The early weeks of O.O. felt to me like peering through cracks in a wall that had blocked a much more empowering view of my neighbors and my city. Whole new ways of living together suddenly seemed possible if we were willing to keep the thing going somehow. Since those heady days, the focus has shifted onto anti-police actions—and not without justification. Robert Gammon nailed this in the East Bay Express recently:

The beginning of Occupy Oakland's downfall can be traced to October 25, 2011, the day that Mayor Jean Quan green-lighted the first police raid on the City Hall encampment. That brutal — and at the time, unnecessary — crackdown launched the transformation of the local Occupy movement from a protest over economic inequality to an ongoing battle against Oakland police. OPD's overreaction that day, firing teargas and other less-than-lethal projectiles at a mostly peaceful crowd, made international headlines and sparked global condemnation. It also polarized Occupy Oakland, empowering a hard-core group of protesters who embrace vandalism, so-called Black Bloc tactics, and seem to revel in violent confrontations with police. This group has enjoyed substantial influence over Occupy Oakland ever since.

Reveling, indeed:

Come on, folks. Does this really seem like a long- or even short-term strategy for addressing social inequities? Again—OPD does some shady shit and for those segments of Oakland's populace which are in much more constant and close conflict with law enforcement, this mass expression of rage might feel right on. (Quick question, though: How many of the people marching behind that sign actually live in the neighborhoods where the cops act their shadiest?) I for one cannot march behind such a banner and be true to myself, even if I hate the fact that I live in a prison state that can't even afford its own jails. So...I haven't.

Here is Chris Hedges in a recent post on truthdig:

The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. [...]

Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems.

Because Black Bloc anarchists do not believe in organization, indeed oppose all organized movements, they ensure their own powerlessness. They can only be obstructionist. And they are primarily obstructionist to those who resist.

And here comes one of my pet themes: Anarchism! It's these f-word abusing, non-showering, all-black wearing Black Bloc types who convince me that what anarchism needs to succeed is a total re-branding. Needlessly baiting cops and tossing bricks through small local businesses' windows gives anarchism a bad name and means that if we're to look for a truly egalitarian social philosophy people can actually unite around, we're going to have to scrap the name and find another. (Off the top of my head, I'd nominate "social ecology," although it's admittedly cumbersome.) Back to Mr. Hedges...An interesting thing about his post is that he quotes Derrick Jensen—on whose work I was recently OD'ing—about strategy and tactics for resistance to the global machine.

"The Black Bloc can say they are attacking cops, but what they are really doing is destroying the Occupy movement," the writer and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me when I reached him by phone in California. "If their real target actually was the cops and not the Occupy movement, the Black Bloc would make their actions completely separate from Occupy, instead of effectively using these others as a human shield. Their attacks on cops are simply a means to an end, which is to destroy a movement that doesn’t fit their ideological standard."

"I don’t have a problem with escalating tactics to some sort of militant resistance if it is appropriate morally, strategically and tactically," Jensen continued. "This is true if one is going to pick up a sign, a rock or a gun. But you need to have thought it through. The Black Bloc spends more time attempting to destroy movements than they do attacking those in power. They hate the left more than they hate capitalists."

Though I did run into Naomi Klein at one point down at City Hall, it turns out I missed Jensen's appearance in Oakland. It's too bad, because I'd been wondering what his thoughts were on the movement and on its actions. Thank goodness for YouTube:

Let me finish this with a measured voice from recent Occupy actions—it seems only fair. Meet Jeb Purucker, who, with tougher cojones than I sport, got himself arrested and tossed into jail for a day:

For the most part, the atmosphere in my cell was not one of defeat, but rather of rigorous self-criticism. This is a necessary moment in the growth of any movement – coming up against the limits of the premises that underlie a practice – and it seemed to be getting underway just hours after that practice had collapsed on the streets of Oakland. This was decidedly not the unreflecting group of militants that Chris Hedges has recently accused of a pathological aversion to strategic thought.

[...] To focus on the brutality of the experience as though this is somehow exceptional is to misunderstand the basic function of jails and police forces in society. The violence that we came up against on Saturday is the violence that is required daily to maintain and reproduce society as it is presently constituted. What we experienced for a few nights, while awful, is simply daily life for the unpaid prison laborers who cleaned out our cells when we went home.

I know that this will not strike most of the people that were arrested on Saturday as a particularly controversial point. Many of them are no strangers to the penal system themselves. Indeed, Oakland’s radical edge within the Occupy movement largely comes from the fact that the quotidian violence that is required to reproduce capitalism is closer to the surface here than in many other communities.

But there comes a point at which these conversations can hinder further thought. I don’t want to normalize or apologize for the brutality of the system, nor do I want to lapse into a debate over what constitutes an “authentic” experience of this brutality. Nevertheless, we as a movement have to stop and ask ourselves what conversations are being displaced by this exclusive focus on police brutality. More than that, we have to look at this focus as itself a symptom of deep contradictions in our practice, which we have been unable to come to terms with. [...]

Worth a read in full. Meanwhile, Oaklanders continue struggling with how best to re-invent this city, and this world, by Occupying it. (Or not?) For myself, I long for those granola days of planning for guerrilla gardens, meeting other radical teachers, facilitating directly democratic assemblies, and the like. I'll either pull my weight to make it happen or I won't; the second abiding lesson I learned from Occupy boils down to one of those ever-useful Zen sayings...If not me, who? If not now, when?

Writer's Block Cure #17: The Quickwrite

Another strong trend evident in my students' last reflective essays was the comment that "quickwrites" helped get through blocks. What's a quickwrite? It's when you decide on a period of time—say, 10-15 minutes—and write on a given or chosen topic as steadily as possible during that entire time. In other words, once you start writing, you don't stop.

So what happens when you get stuck while quickwriting? It sounds strange, but you keep writing anyway. Write about being stuck. Write about the topic your mind just wandered off to. Write down whatever the voices in your head are saying at that moment. Re-write the last sentence you just wrote, or start the paragraph over again. It doesn't matter; write anything. Ignore the block and just keep writing.

The best-case scenario is that after a few moments, the train of thought you had rolling on your original topic will pick up again, you'll re-focus, and presto—you've cured the block. (And if you've really got yourself on a roll, nobody's stopping you from continuing beyond your allotted time of course.)

But that might not happen. You might wander from topic to topic, never getting past a few sentences on each. Or you might just end up with a page of nonsense. Or you might write something really cool and useful, on a completely different topic than you started out from. You never know what you will end up with when you quickwrite. The good news is that it doesn't matter; in the long term, if you make a habit of practicing with quickwrites, you should notice yourself writing more fluently. It gets easier to produce raw writing in decent quantity, so that you can have more material to work with from the start.

A particularly dedicated writer might make quickwriting part of a regular practice routine for this reason, although this trick is still effective as an in-the-moment block-dissolver. Lots of times when I've coached students through moments of stuckness, we'll talk together for a minute or two about the basic ideas they're trying unsuccessfully to express, and then I'll say, "Treat it as a quickwrite. I'll be back in ten minutes—write about what we just talked about and don't stop. See ya." More often than not, this helps tons.

It's a trick I've long known students can benefit from—but what surprised me hearing about it again in this recent round of reflective essays was that it worked even though we hadn't done nearly as many quickwrites in class as I'd done with previous years' classes. So it would appear to be a simple and effective technique for de-blocking even if you haven't practiced it a whole lot...Which makes for a winner of a writing strategy, no?

Related: Writer's Block Cure #10

A flattering student portrait of me, doodled while quickwriting

The Samurai and the Socialite, Part 2

The second of two autobiographies I've rather arbitrarily dipped into recently is from Senegal via Belgium, and takes place mostly in the 1970's. Unfortunately I can't find too many nice things to say about it, which begs a question about this reviewer: What is it that makes me finish books even when I don't like them?

Ken Bugul describes The Abandoned Baobab and other self-referential works she's written as "autobiographical novels," according to the afterword in the edition I've got, and apparently not everything she says about her life can be taken at face value. (This by the way is the only one that has been translated into English.) Fine. So we'll take this as the author's remixing of her own life into whatever statement about feminism, colonialism, Africa, history, and culture that this is meant to be. Alas, much of it was lost on me.

There is a brief opening section called "Ken's Prehistory," which I really liked. It describes a semi-mythical Senegalese village called Gouye, and sketches some generations of people who lived there. The resemblance in these few pages to the cyclical-history of Macondo is so strong I suspected it to be a sort of homage to Marquez's famous novel, but it stops short of direct allusion. Still, you get the same sense of a place where time loops and families give birth to themselves over and over, village disasters notwithstanding. (Gouye is destroyed when a cooking fire breaks out in one of the huts on a windy day. Which sounded familiar.) In this opening section, Bugul establishes the archetype of "the mother," who haunts the rest of the story...

...Which begins with her departure from the village where she was born. At this point, the poetic language and storytelling of the "Prehistory" section abandon ship completely. (This is the funny thing about that samurai book I read, too; the intro gave a very wrong first impression of what was to come!) Now we travel with her to Belgium, where she's an international student. But she quits school before long and takes up a bohemian lifestyle, schmoozing with artists, circulating through clubs and various social scenes, doing lots of drugs, and apparently enchanting everyone she meets.

Along the way we get some flashbacks to the village, and haunting memories of "the mother" (she's never called "my mother," and never named as I recall—the same is true for "the father") who was left behind. Also similar to Musui's Story, the events seem to pile on one after another with a fairly loose sense of direction—though there's probably more of a deliberate plot here than there was with Mr. Samurai. Things escalate to a feverish pitch towards the end, when she ends up on a bad acid trip...and then later, more or less on the spur of the moment, ends up prostituting herself for an expensive mink—apparently just because she can.

I'm sure I'm being unfair in this assessment, but given the vagueness with which so much of her story is described, it was hard for me to tell much better than that what her motivations were for going into that hotel room in the last few chapters. The trouble was two-fold. Firstly, sometimes characters are simply left unnamed, so you get passages like this:

After greetings and a meal, the mother told the sister that she had come to get me for the holidays. What a blow for the sister! [...] That same day I left with the mother and didn't return to the sister's house. The mother kept me with her.

[...] The brother in the city had remarried. He had a wife who took care of him, of his children, of his house. There was nothing left for me to do, especially at the time, since two or three divorced sisters were living there. When a sister was divorced, she'd go and live with her older brother until the next husband came along. As soon as a woman was faced with sisters-in-law under the same roof, I preferred to keep my distance. That's how I avoided having regrets about not communicating with the sisters. [...]

The saving brother arrived and once again I found myself in the little town where I'd done my apprenticeship through the good graces of the sister.

I'd have survived pages like this a lot better if I could keep these folks apart in my head. You get characters who are named, of course—but then the weird thing is that there seems to be no connection between whether they will have an important role to play in the story and whether they're named. So some folks who show up only briefly get identified, while others who return again and again aren't. What's up with that? It gives the whole dramatis personae a dreamy unreality which I found hard to follow.

Then secondly, there was Bugul's use of adjectives like "neocolonial," as in, "What irritated me most in him was the fact that he was the neocolonial subproduct which I unconsciously rejected." Perhaps thirty years ago (and in French), this kind of language made sense. And I suppose I have some idea what might be intended in a description like this, given that the whole book echoes with Bugul's lamentations about the fractured cultures of Africa left in the wake of Europe's oppression and exploitation. I still didn't feel the stories she was telling and the historical lens she told them through quite connected somehow. Here's more of the kind of thing I'm talking about:

We didn't manage to find a formula appropriate for emancipating ourselves. We were following the same procedure as Europe although we weren't living the same realities; we hadn't lived the same historical, cultural, social, or emotional process.

Fair enough, but passages like this sound like psychobabble to me without a deeper grounding in the narrative. And the narrative was, as I've said, quite vague to begin with. This book just never added up...

I have a feeling this crap review is more a function of my own cultural disconnect from the author and her time and place than necessarily a critique of her writing. I'm sure plenty of other readers have gotten way more out of this than I did. But if one were interested in reading autobiographical statements about feminism, colonialism, Africa, history, and culture, I can think of no better place to start than the two-volume masterpiece, Hustling Is Not Stealing and Exchange Is Not Robbery. (Which I've recommended before, but not in any detail. I still haven't reread them in a while...)