Davon Loeb was born and raised in New Jersey. He earned his BA from Montclair State University in English Education and Creative Writing. Davon's poetry and artwork has appeared in the literary journals: The Normal Review and Nefarious Ballerina. He also writes essays, screenplays, and short stories. Besides writing, he is a middle school English teacher, a painter, and a photographer.

DocumentedEssay: Contradictions and Compliments with Frictions

It is imperative to understand self-reflection and close reading, to try and fully comprehend the issues of humanity; I plan to implicate these processes with my pedagogy. These steps are vital because they have led me to appreciate humanity in a different way. It is ignorant to merely perceive an issue based on superficial assumptions. These assumptions come from ideologies that surface from subjectivities. One’s response to an event can solely be interpreted by their subjectivities. Some of these subjectivities include: race, gender, sexuality, religion, social class, nationality, ethnicity, and age. Though subjectivities create identity, it does not mean they should hold us prisoner. For students to liberate their minds, they cannot be incarcerated by their subject positions. Ignorance is not bliss; like Aurde Lorde said in Sister Outsider, “My silence had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” (Lorde 41).  Audre Lorde is saying, being ignorant and pretending issues like racism does not exist will not protect my students or me. I have to break these ideologies rather than ignore their existence. So what I do is, raise my consciousness by self-reflection.
           
This consciousness raising is accomplished by questioning the structure around me. It is the first step in reflection: stepping back and observing the structure in retrospect. It is I not being silent.  And if I am not silent, then once I teach, I can raise the voices of my students. My first step was finding a dent in the structure, an imperfection that stood out to me. It also had to have features outside of my subjectivities so I could not say, “I can relate.” The problem with “I can relate” is that it is not challenging my misunderstandings. Misconceptions are vital because where I am unaware is the best place to grow. Being unaware leads to fear. The problem with fear is people are too afraid to challenge common ideals. So they drown in the structure’s illusions that everything is okay. Aurde Lorde speaks of fear, “And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger” (Lorde 42).  It is frightful to realize how naive I am, especially because my job will be to teach students to grasp the world around them. I realized this, when I took a class that focused on African American Women Writers. I realized how much I did not know, even though some of these women had the same subjectivities as I. It is easy for someone to be overly intimidated and shutdown from courses like these, particularly if they cannot relate. Instead of shutting down because I was fear, I opened up. I let my ignorance hit the air like raw flesh. This is where I began to learn.

I struggled first with trying to understand the Combahee River Collective Statement by Zillah Eisenstein. Here I began to work with misconceptions, like I was untying a shoe I was so comfortable walking in. I realized I knew nothing about the Black Feminist movement.  I asked myself questions. Where did I get these images of Feminists? Why haven’t I challenged some of these images? What about my subjectivity has misled my understanding of Feminists? This was the start of my consciousness-raising. Zillah Eisenstein said, “…We began to meet again late in the year and started doing an intense variety of consciousness-raising.”(Eisenstein 6).  This stage of consciousness-raising was like the beginning of the semester for African American Women’s Writers. I started challenging ideals that were already scripted in my mind. I spawned a new image of Black Feminist. But before, I perceived them as: radical bra burners, butch lesbians, and man haters. Once I identified the conceptions, I searched to find why I made those assumptions. They were from the institutionalized representations of Black Feminist. Ideologies from media, education, family, and government, had influenced my conceptions. Next, I educated myself by reading Eisenstein and doing the action of self-revelation. Through this process, I learned that liberating misconceptions was entirely up to me. I had to liberate them by questioning then educating myself. It was similar to the Feminist movement, the notion of liberation. “We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us.” (Eisenstein 3). It was up to me, to liberate my own mind, to adjust the faults in my knowledge. And yes, I had help from my teachers and books I had read, but it was ultimately up to me to adjust it. The “auto-focus” disguise had to end. Eisenstein realized a problem in society. Eisenstein and other Feminists were critiquing the structure they filled; they denied its normality and its sensible functions. “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” (Eisenstein 1). There was an interlocking connection between my ignorance and the mistreatment of Feminists. Success, in their plan had to be collective and it could not be collective if people did not understand their cause. “In "A Black Feminist's Search for Sisterhood," Michele Wallace arrives at this conclusion: “We exist as women who are Black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle—because, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world. [2]”(Eisenstein5). These women would fight the world if they thought they could succeed. If I can educate the youth of these women, then the world will possibly be part of their movement; their struggle will be the struggle of all inhabitants of the infrastructure.

I labored over this. I did not understand how their fight affected me, and that was the problem. For me to care it had to relate to my self-interest. If I did not care then how would I be able to teach issues of humanity? But I then thought deeper about this issue. Why did I have to connect with their cause to care? Maybe it was because of the westernized perception that we are all out just to get ours, (dog eat dog) or that the commutative is null and egocentrism is everything. Then it became clear like I found the light switch from where I was desperately skimming the walls. I found that equality could not be measured-inequality was simply discrimination. Rather if it was slavery, hate crimes, or the disparity of equality in the institution, things would be either be equal or not. There was no gray. “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” (Eisenstein 6).  Their fight did matter to me, because it was the fight for humanity, not just the fight of Black Feminist. “The women who sustained me through that period were Black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence.” (Lorde 41). This is a process of realization. It is a reflection from something I read. It is I creating awareness and growing from it intellectually. It is I bettering my understanding of humanity by destroying my egocentrisms. If I can destroy my egocentrisms, then I can help bring down the institution through the institution of education.

The next step in my pedagogy would be the use of close readings or New Criticism. In the biography of a founder of New Criticism, Ivor Armstrong Richards’ defined it as, “Awareness of textual and psychological nuance and ambiguity when studying literature.” (Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia 1). I struggled with this process of close readings. I began with working with a passage from Toni Morrison’s Sula, the passage was the following: “But it’s high up in the hills,” said the slave. “High up from us,” said the master (Morrison5). What I was supposed to do is draw upon syntax, figurative language, and content to break down the passage. I could use no historical background knowledge to aid to my findings. This was a big problem because traditionally, students use inter-textual connections to evaluate a piece of text. The biographical and sociological was naught. I had to isolate the text and try to breakdown each word methodically.

Toni Morrison dealt with ideologies concerning race and economics. Morrison used dialogue between a slave and his master to illustrate this. The conversation dealt with ownership of land. The slave asked, “But it’s high up in the hills,” a sense of childishness was implied, like a little boy asking an adult male for something nervously, almost as if he was going to be punished for asking. “But it’s high.” There seemed to be a pause, a shakiness of uncertainty. Though the slave’s voice was uncertain, there still was a level of knowledge by the very act of asking the master about the land. The slave could differentiate between good and bad land. The slave had the audacity to question what the master was giving him, which was empowering.  Questioning showed that the slave had an awareness of some extent of the situation. The slave yanked back from the power struggle: the master and himself. Though the master’s power was overbearing, the slave still summoned the courage to ask why.
           
“High up from us,” was the master referring to him and another group of people. “Us” meant a collection of other masters. Those “masters” were the ones who necessitated the slaves to the hills; they were in control. Morrison took the nouns; slave and master then illustrated their contextual meaning through the exchange in dialogue. While the slave was uneasy to ask the question, the master was quick and conscious to respond. The master also distinguished between the slave and master by segregating If the slaves were “High up from us,” then they were segregated, since the masters were giving the slaves land; however, the slaves were to be slave no more.  

Something was wrong with the hills; nevertheless, the master felt it was important to give the slave that land. Negotiating the notion that the slave was less than the master, and he deserved less land. Putting the slaves up in the hills, away from them, would acquire to the slave’s feeling of solitude, because when it seemed like the slave would finally make it among the free, the slave was again marginalized. Another system of oppression was now established. The people at the top of the hill and the people at the bottom of the hill, the former slaves and their masters or an abbreviation of the both: black-slave and white-master, the superstructure and the infrastructure.

That was a close reading. I only dug through the passage. I did not refer to biographical or sociological. I had to separate myself from all my subject positions and illustrate an understanding based solely on the work itself. Allowing my subject positions to disappear made me only human. It striped me of my identity and I only used my “awareness of textual and psychological nuance and ambiguity”. This is imperative to my pedagogy because it teaches my students to see without their subjectivities. It shows them they can think without biases, stereotypes, and internal scripts. If they can evaluate literary text without these ideologies, then hopefully they evaluate situations in reality without them. That is ideal, for us to see without horse blinders, for our peripheral vision to replace our cyclopean vision. Once this change of vision occurs, then change can generate. “Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision…” (Lorde 42). This distorted vision all comes from the institutions. I plan to change this vision, by education, family, and media. If I can reach my students, they can reach their family, and eventually be the faces in media changing the world.
            “For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson- that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings.” (Lorde 42). Lorde is making a fascinating point about not being able to survive in the system. When she says survive, she means be without the cemented ideologies. When she says “Not as human beings” she means not as individuals. We cannot survive as individuals in this system. But we can survive and even change the “mouth of this dragon” by the very processes I plan to implicate in my curriculum. Just like how African American Women Writers, has changed my life. It showed me not to be afraid. That I could manifest my dreams before I drowned in my fears, that I could navigate through the ideologies that held shackled, I could rise above ignorance and become a contradiction, that I could habitually compliment with the friction, that I could learn to reallocate and re-arrange ideals, and that I could leave my comfort zones of all I that knew and all that I ever felt.

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