On Violence and Teaching and Rhetoric and Power

March 3, 2008

Right or wrong, as I am getting ready for my class this afternoon, I imagine I am preparing a sermon. Maybe it’s the Martin Luther King reading. Maybe it’s the subject: Violence. But I find myself less interested in the matters of critical reading and writing and grammar I usually try to instill, and more interested in saying something that might strike the soul. (Yes, I said it: strike the soul.)

Too often with teaching, this is a conflict with me. I cling to the convenient facts, or skills, that the office of teaching provides me with the duty to impart. Thanks to seven years of good planning, I can whip up a developmental lesson on almost anything in a jiffy. And yet so often, what I love about literature (its transcendaental power, its beauty, etc, etc) remains uncommunicated, untouched.

The poem Power by Audre Lorde comes to mind. There she asserts the difference between poetry and rhetoric, a difference which speaks to two different modes of power as well. I feel these modes as a teacher. I have power by virtue of my position, my experience, school rules and guidelines, duty, etc– all matters of rhetoric. Then, there is dimension of power that I am often too afraid to employ. That power feels like the power to inspire, and when I feel it, it seems real.

So, if I don’t go into class this afternoon and talk about the structure of John Berger’s essay “Hiroshima” or explainall the allusions in MLK’s “Pilgrimmage to Nonviolence” (skills and information which would indeed offer a kind of power), then what do I do? I feel like breaking down violence in all of its slippery disguises: Institutional, personal, verbal, physical, racial, geographical, political, strategical, medical, environmental, sexual. By doing that, can we look past the rhetoric that bolsters violent acts, rationalizing them in one instance while condemning them in another? Can we begin to look at violence less as a situational phenomenon and more as a function of human nature that can be purged and confronted with nonviolence? (In his essay in the March/April 2007 issue of Orion, author Mark Kurlansky talks about how language has no way to define ‘nonviolence’ except to define it by what it is not.) MLK describes nonviolence as a calculated, deliberate mode of consciousness. He talks about nonviolence as an elevated state, a power that to me sounds less like rhetoric and more like poetry.