“So, where you folks headed?” asked the driver of the Avis Rent-A-Car shuttle at Metro Airport in Detroit, as he hefted our six overstuffed duffels onto the bus.
“Northeast Kazakhstan.”
Blank stare. “Well, it’s southern Siberia.”
“HA! So, what’d you do wrong?” By that time, this man’s wisecrack was an old joke, but we laughed anyway—somewhat more nervously than we’d done in the past. The heavy flakes sticking in our hair were an omen of what lay ahead. Semey (formerly Semipalatinsk) was a Czarist outpost for deportees (Dostoyevsky spent five years in the city), the adopted home of populations deported by Stalin, and finally a no-man’s land used for nuclear testing, which blinded whole villages and caused generations of birth defects and cancer. I was going on a Fulbright lecturing grant to teach literature at a teachers’ college that had no literature program. I had been awarded the grant for a proposal in which I expressed my desire to understand what role literature could play in the public life of a post-Soviet nation developing its own identity.
When we returned in July, most people said things like “I bet it [the experience] made you appreciate what we’ve got here.” It didn’t. In fact, despite the regularly 30-below winter temperatures, I loved it there. Coming home was the hard part. Fall semester was the hardest teaching experience of my life. Having had some time over Christmas break to reflect, in between frenetic preparations for three new classes, the reason seems obvious: I simply loved everything about life there. I loved the students, I loved learning from and with them, I loved that every moment of my day was a passionate grope toward knowledge. When I returned to the United States, the common language, the ease of life, the endless array of pointless choices (I mean of breakfast cereals and toilet paper), the facile small talk, the obsessive need to plan and schedule every moment of one’s day, and the specialized discourses in schools about objectives, outcomes, and strategies stifled what I’d experienced viscerally in Kazakhstan, that teaching is learning and learning is fundamentally about love. I’m writing this letter in partial protest of the ways that organization (of the bureaucracy and even of my own daily lesson plans) inhibits my spontaneity, pursuit of my own purposes, and my readiness to learn from the unique minds that face me in my classrooms. But mostly I’m writing this letter to share with you an experience I loved—teaching strangers—in order to remind all of us of a fundamental reality: We are all strangers to one another. My Kazakh students filed out of our classrooms, and everyday almost everyone said, “Thank you for you.” I learned to repeat those words to them. No one says that to me at the end of classes at UM-Flint. But I still long to hear the words, and sometimes I manage to ineptly express my gratitude to the student who speaks, who writes, who begins to think for him or herself.
“So, when you were in Kazakhstan, you saw that people made ‘religious’ pilgrimages to sites associated with literary figures. How did this relate to your grant proposal—the investigation of literature and the public sphere?” Jason Herrod (UM-Flint Writing Center tutor) asked this incredibly astute question after my husband and I had gotten to the end of a talk “Looking for Religion in Kazakhstan.” We’d shown slides of the trip my travel-writing class took to Zhidebay (homes of the first Kazakh dramatist, Mukhtar Auezov, and Abai Kunanbayev, the Kazakh national poet). The girls in my class covered their heads and prayed at these various sites. Mukhtar Auezov wrote the first Kazakh drama staged in a double yurt about two lovers from rival tribes (he was, indeed, influenced by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and had translated the play into Kazakh). On our class trip, we stopped at a monument depicting an event in the life of these legendary lovers. Students prayed silently, made wishes, and left stones on the marker. We’d heard that poets were the third wave of great men who’d come to the steppe, preceded by Sufi saints and zhyraular (bards who sang epic ballads); and all had found the same message—only the heart matters. The spiritual world is all.
Most Kazakhs—even the very modern young students I taught—believe in the power of mazars. Mazars are sacred places that may be natural (springs, mountains, forests, trees, stones, ant hills) or manmade (mausoleums), which are visited for their healing properties or spiritual power. I’d read about one man who visited mazars regularly because he wanted to write. This desire, coupled with his inability, finally made him ill, and he sought the “consciousness and energy” he felt he needed at mazars. “What I am looking for is an invisible and untouchable world. I do not know when this process finishes but only life can define it. I imagine real life and living as a true man are possible only in paradise, that is why I am constantly in search of that world.” Sites associated with legends—especially legendary loves—are visited for the wish-fulfilling and spiritual power they may convey.
I came to feel that literature itself, because it made the inner world accessible, was experienced by my students to be something powerful and sacred. When one of my students, Aliya, emailed me her English translation of Auezov’s play Enlik and Kebek, she remarked in an epilogue of sorts: “And, Mary Jo, do you remember the monument of Enlik and Kebek, which is as abandoned as their love story? Why do all people tie white ribbons near this monument? I think this place is sacred, and if your intentions and desires are transparent, they will come true! Several generations passed through, but we still know and keep in our hearts the story of love which isn’t afraid of the wrath of the tribe, the cold nights in the mountains and steppe, or the death from painful arrows!”
It seemed that the experience of sharing literature in the classroom was something holy to my Kazakh students. Books in any language are scarce in Semey. There are only two poorly stocked bookstores in the whole city, which sell mostly textbooks for school children. Moreover, without a reliable postal service, it is difficult to order books online as we do. English language books are nonexistent. The director of the English Language Center tried to repossess the books I’d bought and shipped for my students. On the sly, I told a class of girls not to turn in their copies of My Antonia. They smiled and hugged the paperbacks to their hearts. The photograph of the Nebraska prairie on the cover might well have been a picture of the grassy steppe around Semey. On the bookshelves in our classroom there was one beautiful set of Everyman Classics (thirty-some books in all) donated by the British Council. But my students couldn’t use these books, since they were not allowed to take them from the room. Even so, the girls often handled them and read their titles aloud in tones that filled the room with the music of elsewhere and of hope.
In retrospect, it seems fitting that, for me, getting to that classroom involved a kind of pilgrimage not devoid of pain. Everyday last winter I walked along the Irtysh River and across the “old” bridge to the Institute in sub-zero temperatures and fierce Siberian winds. I passed a few regulars. All of us kept our heads down or our hands up to protect our faces. One morning, when the snow was coming down hard, I passed a Kazakh woman standing on the path, leaning against the railing halfway across the bridge and looking upriver. I wouldn’t even think of standing still and kept moving to save my extremities from turning into balls of ice. Yet here was this woman, prayerfully studying the bright spot glowing underneath a gray veil and falling flakes. Given these conditions, the classroom, with its orange curtains and worn oriental carpet, was a haven—albeit a haven with little heat. For most of the winter, the students and I kept our coats and gloves on inside the classroom. On the really frigid days, we huddled around a small plastic space heater with a rotating fan that whirred encouragement, as long as the power lasted. The American flag hung next to the Kazakh flag on the back wall.
On the first day of my travel writing class, which I gave to more advanced third- and fourth-year girls, I asked each student her name, what kind of a house she lived in, and how she travelled to school in the morning. I had crossed massive distances to reach them. They too were crossing distances just as vast to reach me, though we sat face to face. They had to imagine the strange worlds described by travel writers in foreign tongues. They had to struggle to put ideas about the readings into their own words and not be afraid of their linguistic insufficiencies. I learned their difficult names. They explained that many end with the syllable zhan because zhan means “soul.” I spoke very slowly and tried to give clear explanations. Aliya, who became my best and most dedicated student, later confessed that when she joined the class two days late and heard others speaking ideas in English, she felt depressed and shy—“I couldn’t do it”. Yet her desire proved stronger than her fear. Something more powerful than the director’s disapproval kept my first- and second-year students showing up for lessons, too. That something, I came to understand, was the primal need to communicate. My foreignness added to the excitement, the adventure, even the romance of school for them. They desperately wanted to talk with me, and I wanted to share ideas with them. This current of mutual desire became a more important common language than English. I even came to value the difficulties of our literal communication—the wrong words, faulty grammar, the lack of words that gave way to gestures, smiles and Russian—because all of these mechanical flaws made me intensely conscious of the passionate and emotive force that pushes human beings to use words to reach toward one another.
Coming to know felt a lot like falling in love. “All men by their very nature reach out to know,” says Aristotle. If this is so, it tells us something important about the analogous activities of knowing and desiring—both have at their core the same delight of reaching, and entail the same pain, that of falling short. Stationed at the edge of itself, or of its present knowledge, the thinking mind launches a suit for understanding into the unknown. So too the wooer stands at the edge of his value as a person and asserts a claim across the boundaries of another. Both mind and wooer reach out from what is known and actual to something different, possibly better, desired. Something else.[1] Think about what that feels like. No wonder I was depressed upon returning to a monolingual classroom. I missed the excitement of standing on the extreme verge and readying myself to leap. I missed that current of desire—the language of real exchange. By the end of fall semester, I’d knew that it wasn’t absent from classrooms at UM-Flint but, ironically, in classrooms where teacher and students speak a single language, it can be harder to tune into emotional syntax. Communication comes too easily here as do life’s necessities in the shopping malls and grocery stores of the suburbs. Thank God, I teach literature, and it’s literature that puts us in touch with the movement and music of our souls. “Movement is life,” says a Kazakh proverb.
I had not prepared well for my teaching adventure. I especially regretted that the anthology I brought for my American literature students, Visions of American: Personal Narratives from the Promised Land, was much too difficult for girls just learning English. But even when the reading was too difficult, they still came to listen and to practice speaking. Interestingly, it was this class of real beginners who, more than my advanced students, regularly commented on the beauty of particular passages. That English prose, especially when read aloud, satisfied their need for cadence and rhythm was never more joyfully apparent than the day we discussed Vivian Gornick’s “To Begin With.”
I was dreading the class because the essay struck me as difficult—an evocation of Gornick’s childhood in Brooklyn among the passionate socialist friends of her family. To my great surprise, at the beginning of class most said they’d understood the essay, perhaps because they’d connected personally with the Russian immigrants—the Mashas, Goldies, and Hymies in Gornick’s essay, for whom the Soviet Union was utopia and Marxism a powerfully transforming abstraction. My girls, all of whom were born after Kazakhstan became independent, began the class recounting the ways their own parents and relatives idealized the Soviet past “when we were one people, belonging to one big state. Now everything is split.” They understood the essay because it spoke to them pretty directly about familiar concepts and shared feelings: Communism, the urge to belong, the need to talk in order to become one’s self.
I’d prepared a handout of passages that I felt were important. I wanted us to take turns reading aloud as a springboard for letting them share their ideas and feelings about the passages. I was shocked at how well the idea worked. After only two examples, it seemed that everyone wanted to read. “May I?” shouted at least six girls in unison. Tanya and Masha took turns reading the young Gornick’s excitement at sitting at her kitchen table where sewing-machine operators, truck drivers, and plumbers became thinkers, writers and poets. “Oh, that talk! That passionate, transforming talk! I understood nothing of what they were saying, but I was excited beyond words by the richness of their rhetoric, the intensity of their arguments, the urgency and longing behind that hot river of words that came ceaselessly pouring out of all of them. Something important was happening here, I always felt, something that had to do with understanding things. And ‘to understand things,’ I already knew, was the most exciting, the most important thing in life.” Brooklyn circa 1930. Tanya and Masha read. Then I repeated phrases that were especially moving. The girls repeated over and over “that hot river of words.”
“It is so beautiful!” exclaimed Tanya.
“Ideas are everything,” stated Lyudmila emphatically.
I had to pinch myself: We were in Semey, Kazakhstan. It was March 2010. By the time we got to the section of the essay that addressed the ways these passionate, talking relatives created themselves, my girls were articulating connections to our own classroom discussions. We read chorally: “Few things in life equal the power and joy of experiencing oneself. Rousseau said there is nothing in life but the experiencing of oneself. Gorky said he loved his friends because in their presence he felt himself. ‘How important it is,’ he wrote, ‘how glorious it is – to feel oneself!’ Indeed how impossible it is not to love ardently those people, that atmosphere, those events and ideas in whose presence one feels the life within oneself stirring.” We weren’t just reading anymore. We were declaring what we knew was true. We were feeling ourselves. The volume escalated. We were giddy by the time we got to the end of it. I told them that they had helped me feel myself. “You know, when I came into this room today and you all said that you found the essay interesting, I was so happy I felt like crying. Why? Because it meant that we could discuss. I did not grow up in a family that was passionate about ideas. For me the classroom is my kitchen table.” The following Monday was a holiday, International Women’s Day, and we congratulated one another. They filed out of the room, each one thanking me profusely on the way out. “Thank you for you,” said Dinara, “and for sharing all of this information,” although I could tell from the glow on her face that we’d shared much more than that! Let’s say it all together now: “Learning is a Love Experience!”
From a distance I attempted to continue teaching my Kazakh students. I set up an experimental project with UM-Flint graduate students, which we named the Kazakh-American Reading Group. The idea was to read and discuss a book together, enabling the students to practice their English, develop their writing skills, and learn to analyze. For a variety of reasons, the project didn’t really work although we had two devoted participants. One of the graduate students, Krista Heiser, wondered in her final report if discussions failed to develop because the two groups respond to literature quite differently: “they [the Kazakh girls] tend to internalize it so much more than we do. We are trained to use literary analytical tools and discuss it more objectively.” I think Krista is onto something. I recalled the very personal feelings that my students appended to essays on My Antonia. The essays were, by the way, mostly handwritten and some students even “illuminated” their manuscripts with marginal floral decorations done in magic marker. Alina, for example, who wrote about the way the depressed immigrant father, Mr. Shimerda, finds a release for his soul in suicide, used the novel to forge a very different path (one more like that of the title character). At the end of her paper, she wrote: “My Antonia became a novel which I read without any stops. It was so gripping for me! American literature became not only just lesson, but something great, important. Day by day my speech becomes better. I also study to listen to other people, to understand and analyze their opinions. … It was a very difficult time in my life, because I’m alone here, in Semey, my relatives and my parents are in Taldykorgan, and I have to cope with all problems myself. But thanks for meetings with professor, thanks for My Antonia, I felt that I’m strong and I can do everything. I find the way to strength because my friends, my teachers, people who are around helped me. But Mr. Shimerda couldn’t find this way, because others didn’t want to help him. He was alone among the jungle of his feelings, problems, troubles, difficult thoughts and he couldn’t find a correct path to happiness and calm.” This kind of a response was the norm in Semey. Being able to speak about what they read in their own words, even though their comprehension was far from total, was as essential for their spirits as it was for language acquisition. A group of more advanced girls who watched my drama club’s performance of an original play based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet were moved to write and stage a piece of performance art inspired by Kazakhstan’s native story of the star-crossed lovers, Enlik and Kebek. They stood in front of our classroom and chorally chanted the text they’d written to musical accompaniment and a slideshow of images.
The Kazakh students’ mode of interpretation should not be viewed as simply naïve or unsophisticated, as I fear it might. In fact, it is quite similar to the way that men and women in early-modern England responded to plays and books. Charles Whitney, in his book Early Responses to Renaissance Drama, names this mode of response “interpretation as application.” Whether or not it begins with powerful emotion, the outcome tends to be a form of use and application, as myriad-minded audiences discover the copious resources of a text or a play for their diverse purposes, lessons, and interests. It is in our human nature to identify with characters and relate their dilemmas to those we experience in our own lives. Early-modern readers regularly looked beyond words, verbal images, and textual figures to life; stories were, to them, allegories of personified concepts, ideas, psychological states and experiences. In fact, for English poet John Milton (who provides an almost unique example in the history of capitalist society of an artistic intellectual’s attempt to put his theories into practice), belief in the autonomous power of representation is satanic—strong medicine for contemporary Americans who spend much of their lives tyrannized by images and unable to distinguish an objective reality beneath the hyper-real world of simulacra that constitutes our everyday experience. My Kazakh students reminded me, as do the authors I am blessed to read and teach, that literature is much more than a skillful arrangement of words and figures. I think it’s time that we acknowledged to you, our students, that it’s more than okay to use fiction, poetry and drama to help us live and to let the works we read inspire our own creations. It is, in fact, what we should be doing with literature and in literature classrooms. It is, after all, how Shakespeare became “Shakespeare”: He borrowed from other writers; he used what he read for his own purposes.
When I look back on my Fulbright teaching experience, I would have to say that despite having to teach with my coat on, huddled with my students around a space heater, I’ve rarely felt warmer in my life. I’m not suggesting we cut our heating budget or bundle up in furs, but I am suggesting that we reorient ourselves around the simple creed of loving our texts, our work and one another. Furthermore, I’m suggesting that the loving connections we create with the characters who teach us in and out of books be given a place in discussions of the purposes and values of humanities education. Stories are sacred, and the classroom may be a mazar for our needy souls trapped in an oppressively secular world. Jason Herrod’s probing question kicked off this path of reflections that has led me to understand a little better the value of literature for Kazakhs and for myself, too. In closing, I’d like to say to my students here what I said to students there: “No matter how hard the reading gets, we are here in this room to practice speaking. Everyone reads, talks, and forms an opinion. Ideas—your ideas—matter. We need to be our own ‘kitchen table’ for one another.”
Sincerely,
Mary Jo Kietzman
Flint, Michigan 2011