Asking Questions and Outsiderness
Megha Baikadi
985 archives and feelings
Dr Alexis Lothian
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 Writing Assignment Three, 11/5/2013
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Write a brief critical memoir, analyzing an aspect of your experience inside or outside the academic world. Use one or more of the readings from unit 3 as models, and explain how you are doing so either within your text or in a short additional paragraph at the end. 1500-2500 words.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 There are two confessions I should make, as opening this critical memoir. One is that I don’t much like Literature. This may not make sense based on other things I’ve written or said, but should come clear in the fullness of time (or this essay, whichever comes first). The other is something, a personal strangeness, I realized when I was maybe-six, that took another fifteen years or so to find a name to put to – therianthropy (integrated anthro-fossa therian, if it matters). Why and how these things are related, is what I plan on spending the rest of the essay doing.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 1 I was about six when I realized I was weird. Or, at least, the first of my ways of weirdness. One moment I was running around with dirty palms from scrabbling at the earth, the next I had something of a quiet identity crisis. At its simplest (and least informative), I might say the issue was that my instincts do not align with assumed human norms. Or, more broadly, I might say that everyone has a beast, those instincts and impulses that are so often contrasted against the ‘rational’ or ‘civilized’… and my inner beast happens not to be a monkey like most everyone else. Or, simpler yet, I’m kinda a cat, a greater cat, inside my head. Six or so, and I was realizing a human body couldn’t move the ways my instincts said it should, I couldn’t run four-footed, and no human child should have thought it possible on any level but outright play-acting. This isn’t the same thing as clinical lycanthropy (involving hallucinations among other things), but it tends to be the closest term otherwise. This isn’t the only thing that has labeled me, over the years, strange, outsider, freak… but it is one of the earliest, and perhaps the deepest.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 This is something that has followed me my entire life. I was told I was bright, so my less than satisfactory grades must be from laziness, carelessness in the way I was always asking dumb questions and not knowing things all the other kids had figured out and not able to understand why things were, as they had always worked just fine before. I’ve imagined that much of that extra brainpower is spent running a human translation program, leaving me a little slow, a little stupid for most of the everyday life things, but who knows. In classes, I always seem to be the one with questions, who doesn’t get what is going on – and I don’t mean not understanding what I read or hear, but not getting why, or what underlying assumptions, or what further implications that one fact is supposed to have.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 2 Somewhere along the way, I got a bit suspicious about ‘normal’. Normal ideas, normal attitudes, and normal answers. I’m not a pack creature, not a herd creature, and I never understood believing by consensus. I will disagree (or more politely, question) something I don’t agree with, even if everyone else agrees, even if the authority (teachers, professionals in the field, those in charge) will tell me just to agree. I always have to question it, even if this questioning increasingly began happening out of other people’s sight. Categorization especially, there’s nothing like knowing I don’t fit in other people’s categories anywhere to make me wonder how ‘natural’ or ‘right’ these assumptions really are. And I might cringe at hearing this making categories and assumptions and stereotypes is natural to humans, everyone does this – I don’t, but I also don’t think I’m particularly human, so I guess it still works. I was suspicious and confused by the stereotypes and assumptions people made about others, about the ways people based their identities on the most superficial (and changable) things. No amount of marking me down as Asian-Indian descent or female or age could describe the being I saw in myself. No amount of people glorifying this experience or that text or this other activity made any of it appealing, or fun, or meaningful to me. It seemed I was always pushing for more complicated answers, making problems where there hadn’t been any, ignoring the majority of cases where a theory or understanding or answer is good enough to poke at the places where it isn’t, or just refusing to play along with the things they thought were absolute, and I couldn’t even find.
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 2 Maybe the fact I didn’t like Literature came from there. I read a lot, all the time, practically every storybook I could get my hands on. But the capital-L Literature, the Canon, the stuff that teachers and critics and history itself cried as the best of the best, never really clicked for me. Many of them I found myself not liking the style of writing, or the tone, or the themes, or pretty much lots of it. Even the pieces I did like (this plot line, that mechanism, bits of description) were overwhelmed by the things I would have liked better if done differently. Predictably, the more I found the line between things I liked to read and those I was required to growing, the less I got out of them. I would sometimes skimp on the reading, or take shortcuts, or just not get very invested in the texts. Most of my English classes were things to get through quickly so I could get back to the things that really interested me. And they lacked a reason, or at least never made understandable to me, why we were learning it, why it mattered, or what we were to do with these texts, dry and difficult to me, that we had to keep reading.
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 2 I am not well grounded in the canon. I’ve read (I think) quite a few canonical books, I taken classes which taught them, and I’ve seen and heard and read a lot, a lot, about them. But I’m really not so familiar with those great works, the capital-L Literature that is theoretically the basis of my studies. And where I have read them, I rarely think they’re really worth being elevated above so many other authors and texts which are likewise really good and have so much going on to think about. [waits for slings and arrows of outraged Lit people]. Shakespeare wrote a lot of nice works, but others have written lots of good works without being so exalted as the Bard. There’s some derision in places about ‘low culture’ and popular books (and even internet stories) that are considered not at the same level as ‘real’ Literature, but which speak to me so very strongly. There are plenty of people who feel very strongly that I shouldn’t question the great works, it’s not my place to disagree. Why, why the one and not the other? Maybe it would make more sense to me if I were more human.
¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 3 Theory also doesn’t fare quite so well under my hands. Much of it (alright, maybe a little bit of all of it) tends to feel simplistic in my hands, unfinished. It makes a point or explains a category system or talks about one way to understand something, and none of it is complicated enough, messy enough, or flexible enough to withstand my prying away at every edge and corner. An essay would likely be considered extremely thorough with three ways of thinking built in, and well balanced with two, and enough have only one way of looking at the issue inside. A ‘yes this idea’ for simple, and idea and counterarguments (yes and no) for balanced, and an idea and counterarguments and an alternative (yes no and maybe) for really well done. Dichotomy everywhere, it is only yes and no, no and yes, this or that, and no place for the myriad others I took for granted had to be there. I tend to start with five, and get more complicated from there – yes and no, both and neither, and that something else which says maybe asking the wrong question. Its hard to see an idea and maybe counterarguments for balance and not want to poke at it till it falls over, even though most people most of the time find it works really well. And while I’m still complicating the issue, they’ve won the debate on grounds of understandability and moved on.
¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 So on the one hand, I’m not terribly well versed in Literature. And on the other, I’ve never met a theory I didn’t try poking into multiple pieces. So, yeah, I’m not the ideal student to have in class. Often enough, I end up being ‘that student’. The one who is always derailing the conversation, who makes the same point (it is more complicated than that, this is too simple a way of looking at it) every time a new theory is called, who seems to maybe disagree for the sheer sake of disagreeing, who clearly has some kind of chaotic agenda, who just won’t bend. That student who knows the terms but doesn’t get quite what you mean when using them unless you explain. That student who will draw on outside sources (history, psychology, anthropology, art) to make points that those in the field aren’t making, so why should we care? That student who dares to dislike the great works and disagree with the great theorists. Who maybe-occasionally grumbles that human-people are crazy. That student, you know?
¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Part of it is my way of looking at the world is weird, and part is just with myself so often being the thing looked over, the option that nobody even though to ask, I try to be really careful not to overlook or forget the possibility of other options, other ways of looking at it. Part of it is just an unwillingness to just accept the majority vote, or follow blindly when I’m not myself sure of what my answer should be. Part might be that I’m a bit chaos-worshiper at heart. Part may be that I’m just too invested in being the outsider. And some part, small that it might be, just wants to know if I ask the questions, if can uncover that thing which is tripping me up, could I finally find an answer which makes sense to me? And find common ground? (and not be quite so freakish)
¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 Nowadays, in more advanced classes and with theories and classrooms increasingly incorporating marginalized and overlooked subjects, I’m beginning to fond more and more ideas that edge into the territory I’ve been in so long. People are looking at the strange and unusual, the ways of being backwards or wrong, of not finding what was ‘supposed’ to be found, of options that don’t fit elsewhere. I still haven’t found one that quite fits me, that encompasses my particular brand of outsider-ness (I may have to write my own, how vulnerable), but it gives me hope that I might, even as it gives me ways to start talking about some of the things I’ve been thinking without words to say them with.
¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0
¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 From the readings:
¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 I found myself drawing on Samuels quite a bit for this essay, in talking about the invisible differences, the ways of being marked (or not marked) as different and the ways in which it might be harder not to be marked, not to have the easy identification even if it means not being stigmatized in quite the same way. And Chen, just in the way my personal and professional so profoundly overlap. I also drew on Hartman, in both the ways in which my personal history and viewpoint shape my work and my understanding of the work I do, and in the way I am aware that most people will not understand where I’m coming from. My experience isn’t something common or even something sympathetic, like some of the other readings – it is fairly solidly stuck in the area of self-involved and likely untranslatable. And a bit left over for Bechdell, who spends quite a bit of time looking for ways to explain and understand herself, to find her own answers and ways of dealing with the questions she is wrestling with. Some of the ways I was thinking about the intersection of the personal and academic comes from this text, how I can think about looking for my own answers and also trying to figure out how it influences the myself as an academic and a literature student.
Sorry for the delay, it wasn’t posting right.