Cloud of Unknowing: Navigating Cultural Difference
This essay was published in Transnational Writing Program Administration, University Press of Colorado
*** Winner of the 2017 CCCC Outstanding Book Award
The first essay I assigned at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar was to define how our sense of place shapes us as people. The outcomes of the assignment and rubric were clear, but students found the task frustratingly open-ended.
“Professor, you ask us to write about place, but we must choose that place ourselves?”
“Yes. Bearing in mind the other essays and stories we have read and discussed as examples, I want you to define an important place and analyze the meaning it has for you in accordance with the requirements of the assignment.”
“But what is this meaning?”
“Yeah, what do you want us to say?”
“Well, you have to define that meaning for yourself. You need to integrate the ideas we discovered in the texts with your own thoughts, your own sense of history and belonging, the experiences that have made you who you are.”
“But what are the right thoughts?”
I hadn’t prepared for this question.
“Professor, if you tell me what you want me to do then I will do it. I will be successful because I have completed what you have asked. But if not, how do I know I’m finished? How do I know I have done what you have set for me to do? If the path is open, how do I know its end?”
Admittedly, I would have dismissed such questions from students in the United States as off-point, lazy, or grossly ignorant. But in Qatar, seven thousand miles from my former post, I could not deny how eerily these concerns spoke to my own.
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This is what I believe:
A) Writing is a recursive engagement with the scope and force of what it means to be alive.
B) Literature allows us to access the human experience in all its guises of culture, language, tradition, and conflict.
C) Through written engagement with textual content (social, historical, political, and literary), we become more aware of our own experiences, our own disguises.
D) As a result of this heightened awareness, we are led to an enriched understanding of our own voices and the words we place into written form.
Here was my problem:
Reflecting on the flurry of questions generated at the outset of our first assignment, I realized that much of the confusion derived not only from my teaching philosophy in practice but my own interpretation of self as well.
Moreover, I found myself dealing in a milieu that (seemingly) approached texts as fixtures not to be critically interrogated. Students at WCMC-Q have often expressed bewilderment in class at my prompts that readers are the ones who define the meaning of a story through close textual analysis. “But what about the writer?” they ask. “Only the writer can know for sure what the story means. Not us.” I do not pretend to understand the complexity of this disconnect, but I believe it has something to do with the fact that the Qur’an (the overwhelming majority of my students identify as Muslim) is not up for open interpretation (i.e. the text is “fixed”), and certainly never in a public and secular setting. However, through the acts of recursive reading and critical writing, most students gain a personal understanding that knowledge is created by a collaboration between artist and scholar (student, reader, or otherwise), as the rest of this essay will hopefully demonstrate.
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In Donald Barthelme’s riotous short story, “A Manual for Sons,” the author of the manual (the instructor, in fact) states, “Fathers are teachers of the true and not-true, and no father ever knowingly teaches what is not true. In a cloud of unknowing, then, the father proceeds with his instruction.” Without suggesting that I enact or fulfill some latent patriarchal role as writing instructor, I do try to reach a modicum of truth within myself about what I do and do not want to share with students. I always try to impart something ‘important’ (or rather, not ‘unimportant’) to the shape of their intellectual lives. Yet, like Barthelme’s fathers, I weigh this truth in my own cloud of unknowing, which, in Qatar, is compounded by the gulf between my own cultural understanding of self (a jambalaya of Emmanuel Lévinas, Bert Hellinger, psychoanalysis, and 20th century American literature) and the processes by which my students self-identify.
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I teach writing as an examination of the dialogue between self and story, where students synthesize narrative material into analytical thought and written argument-analysis; how the self perceives the story (textual and/or ideational) is an essential component to this writing process. Hence, in my experience at WCMC-Q, the challenge of a cross-cultural classroom is the myriad of perspectives, histories, epistemological matrices, and social competences (that is to say, the sheer volume of stories) I have to contend with among students.
Of all the distances between my students (as a general collective) and myself, the most pronounced is the way they tend to self-identify along the lines of family and religion versus any particular school of political thought, secular philosophy, or sense of personalized narrative. To bridge this divide, I direct my writing seminars to question the definition and function of family and religion. What do these terms signify? How do they work? What does it mean to be individual and yet still belong to a family as well as a religion? How do these tensions shape our decisions, our judgments? What are the consequences of our beliefs? By what template do we initiate or justify action? Finally, how do these questions manifest, complicate, and resolve (or not) themselves in literature?
My seminars go on to postulate the following:
1) We understand our lives and the condition of our living through story.
2) We create narratives to provide meaning to events and experiences.
3) By interacting with the narratives of others (via reading, writing, listening, watching), we enhance our ability to recognize the common humanity shared by all.
In response, students explore, through literature and writing, how human values and actions are subject to a slew of situational, historical, and political influences. As a result, students begin to see the world in larger, more flexible and tolerant terms—a perspective that allows them to better contextualize their own values and actions in regard to others. Much of the same holds true for their professor.
By integrating issues of self-identity with the prescribed outcomes of the First Year Writing Seminar, students have the opportunity to publicly investigate their lives in an academic setting—a wholly new and refreshing experience for many educated in rote systems of learning. While the students find the course intellectually stimulating and personally relevant, they also help me adjust for my own cultural disconnects and points of unknowing. They now approach the open-endedness of their assignments with rigor, armed with textual evidence and emboldened by a burgeoning ability to critically investigate constructions of the self. More importantly, they have given up the notion of “right answers” and “successful completions” and instead strive to create meaning for themselves.