The One-Eyed King and Holden Caulfield
Read with Sister Spit Next Generation Tour at Hugo House in Seattle, WA: March 2014
A professor I once
had in grad. school went off about the old saw: “In the land of the blind, the
one-eyed man is king.” They
pointed out how offensive it was, and connected it to colonialism and racism. Their
basic premise being that the blind don’t need some one-eyed asshole to lead
them. That exploitation was in the
fabric of the thing. To truly lead
the blind toward their revolution, the one-eyed king would need to put out his
sighted eye and really join the team.
I sat with this (I really enjoy an extended metaphor) and toyed with it,
and ultimately thought, “Oh yeah, this is familiar. I know all about being a one-eyed king of a fascist
state. I am one.”
Every teacher is a
one-eyed king of a blind kingdom.
We have a little more information than those we rule over. We have outsider status. We are resented and feared for the
privilege that adulthood and the power of the system bestows upon us. And an astonishing 83% of us are white
and in the way of whites, I assume that most of that 83% are pretty deep in the
privilege. Note that I do not style the teacher as a fully sighted king. We understand the ways of our subjects,
but it is a hazy understanding.
Close your eyes and picture yourself at fourteen. Now, how do you feel about being
fourteen? For me it’s kind of a
murky sense of anxiety and dissatisfaction. I don’t really remember it. I certainly don’t really know what it is like to be a
14-year-old person of color, regardless of sex. I do however, know this: The
reality of 14 year olds is that they are all somewhat sociopathic. Truthfully. They are incredibly obtuse in most ways, intensely
vulnerable due to that lack of knowledge and experience and outrageously
self-involved. Some of them are
insecure bullies and almost all of them are anxious raw nerves walking around
under the heady influence of an almost unbearable amount of hormones. Throw a single adult into a room of
thirty of these developing humans and some interesting things happen. Daily insurrection, chronic rebellion
and occasionally, that thing of rare and incredible beauty: learning.
Generally speaking,
I hated my teachers. There were a
few who escaped my total wrath and one that I was madly in love with (in second
grade) but for the most part, I hated their guts. They were despots.
They abused power. Some of
them were sexist, many racist, most classist and homophobic. They were clueless
about what actually interested us.
They assigned stupid work.
They were horrible people sent to torment children. And what’s more, they enjoyed the
torment. It was clear. Why else would they be teachers? They were old sickos who got off on
tyrannizing the young. Nothing
they wanted me to do was worth doing. No book they ever assigned was worth
reading. The Catcher in the Rye? What a piece of shit. Are you kidding me? You think that this self-involved,
upper-class jerk has anything to say to me? You think he resembles my experience at all? Fuck you. You don’t know me.
It was my 11th grade English teacher who assigned The Catcher in the Rye that gave me the
teacher curse. I remember her
saying that I should “be a teacher” after I took my bitter tongue to Holden
Caulfield’s class privilege one day. I’m sure I shuddered at the thought.
So, I just started
teaching The Catcher in the Rye to my
10th graders a month ago. Hilarious, isn’t it? I would love to tell you the story of how I became a
teacher, but I’m still working it out, so you’ll just have to make the leap for
now. The road from despising
both teachers and Holden Caulfield to being a teacher who teaches J. D.
Salinger was rocky and winding and strange. But now I’m here. Or rather, I’m there. At the front of the room. I’m not a total sellout okay? Holden Caulfield still is a classist
asshole and it is still a ridiculously chauvinistic book in a disgustingly
white and male canon. I try to
teach at the fringes of that canon as much as possible. My Freshies, for instance, are reading I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings and we
have regular awesome, intense and sometimes uncomfortable conversations about
Jim Crow, white supremacy, misogyny and rape. As a teacher, I’m all in.
So what led me from Octavia Butler, Maya
Angelou, Gary Soto, Sherman Alexie and James Baldwin to J. D. Salinger? Excellent question. It started with other teachers that I
admired. They just kept teaching
the fucking thing. I’d ask “why?” they’d
say it was great, I’d roll my eyes, and so on. After one brilliant teacher at my first high school told me how it
was most often the book her students said was their favorite, I asked her to
tell me how she taught it. It was
complex and brilliant, starting with background on the cold war and the social
restrictions of the ‘50s and the fear of juvenile delinquency. Her guiding questions for the unit was:
How is adolescence a kind of apocalypse?
Okay, I was finally hooked, so I
read it. I would say “again,” but
I’m not sure I actually read more than the first chapter or two back in
1991. I read it in a few days over
Winter Break and it made me laugh out loud. It made me roll my eyes, and it sure as hell reminded me of
teenagers. I realized that this
book was like them in a way that they might not want to see, that I hadn’t wanted
to see when I was one of them. And
sure, it was about a privileged white male in the 1950s, but it was also about every single one of my students (not one of them a privileged white male). I still didn’t teach it. Honestly, I felt like it had taken me
two decades to appreciate it, I wasn’t in a hurry to try and teach it.
The next year, I
changed schools and met one of the prickliest teenagers I have ever known at my
new high school in San Francisco. I
took over an Advisory class of sophomores after their former teacher got fired
for disagreeing with the new principal.
Not a good start. I was
generally reviled and mistrusted by all.
But there was one student who hated me more and trusted me less than I
had ever experienced before (or since).
Yesinia was the sort of kid who would cuss a teacher out for asking her
to please sit down or to take out her pencil. She would also cuss out other students, the principal, the
assistant principal and campus security.
In a nutshell, she just didn’t give a fuck. She told me that she “didn’t trust adults” and that “adults
were all phony assholes” during the first week I knew her. She also told me to fuck off and walked
out of class twice, in the first week I knew her. One thing about Yesinia though, was that she was a
reader. It’s a rare thing in this
day and age. A rare and beautiful
thing.
One of my
introductions to teaching Advisory was something that I privately called
“Teacher Torture” but that the school called SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) and
that I had to teach an hour of a week. Trying to get 20 students who hated my guts (and most
of whom hated books) to read was an insanely hard task. I spent most of my time dragging in new
books in an attempt to entice them, initially from our sad basement library,
but increasingly from one of the plentiful used bookstores by my house in
Berkeley. Early on, I tried out a
couple mopey, romantic YA novels on Yesinia. They were probably about vampires. She looked at them askance and said, “I don’t read that
crap, don't you have anything by J.D. Salinger?” I must have looked surprised, which she read as stupid,
because she then said, “he wrote The
Catcher in the Rye”, in a tone that implied I was an illiterate moron. “Oh yes, I know,” I managed to say, and
then I managed, “He didn’t write much else, but I’ll try to find you something.” I went to the used bookstore that very
evening and scored an extremely dog-eared copy of Franny and Zooey for $3.50.
I handed it to my grumpy little hater the next morning in Advisory. “I found you some Salinger,” I said, feeling
smooth. She looked at me in disbelief, reconciling her concept of me as a phony-asshole-adult and the fact that I had clearly just responded to an offhand
request like a genie in a bottle.
She snatched it from me and read it feverishly all during Advisory, asking, "Can I take this?" after class. "Please!", I said. The
next day after school she appeared by my desk. “Hi there,” I said and she glared back. She had the book in her hands. “What did you think?” I asked. She looked at me hard and then sat down
on the edge of my desk. “It’s not
that good,” she said. “Oh,” I
said. “Why not?” “Well, they just aren’t that
interesting, not like Holden.” So
I asked her about Holden. A huge part of me feeling extremely confused about how a 15-year-old
Mexican girl, with a discipline file as thick as a phonebook, growing up on welfare in
a gentrified Mission district, could relate to Holden Caulfield. She told me. “The fake-ass adults who pretend they are there to help.” Those prep school teachers, the creepy
psychiatrist, the condescending adults everywhere in Catcher, they were in her
world too: “Teachers (with an evil eye on me), Social Workers, Therapists. None of them could be trusted and they
were all out to fuck you over. I nodded along. “I hated teachers too, “ I told her. She looked at me like I was either
crazy or a liar.
I was Yesinia’s English
teacher her 11th grade year and we read what, in my estimation, were
some great books: Bless Me, Ultima, Kindred
and The Things They Carried.
But, every time I’d hand one out, she’d sigh and tell me it wouldn’t be
as good as Catcher.
When I moved to
Washington and began at my new school, I was almost knocked flat by the book
list. It was rotten. Okay, it had some good books, but (to
just give you an idea) a listed key 9th grade text was Ethan Frome. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Edith Wharton,
but I am not in a hurry to teach her to my 9th graders. There was so little of what I’d been
teaching, all the go-to books for the culturally sensitive, activist white
teachers of young brown people. I
spent a week looking despairingly over the list, just thumbing through the file
over and over. Of course it had Catcher. “Of course it does,” I said. Of course. But
I was scared to teach it. Finally,
I accepted the lack of options and put it on my 10th grade
syllabus. I located the 30
battered copies in the back corner of the book room (even though the computer
said we had 100) and girded my loins.
I called in all my old friends, emailing about that “adolescence as
apocalypse” stuff and what kind of essays did you do? and how did you handle
the really dated 50’s stuff? and how do you talk about its problematic whiteness?, and all that. Okay. I thought
of Yesinia, who now in her senior year in SF, occasionally sends me long
Facebook messages about how much she hates her life. I never get to hear about the good stuff and I send her back
short but profuse messages about how amazing and brilliant she is and how much
better it is to be an adult than a teenager. I think of Yesinia every day as we read aloud in class. I’ve really got a good patter down now,
when I read Holden. All those
goddams and chrissakes and irritatingly sarcastic “reallys”. And the students, mostly, are pretty
into it. Sometimes they accuse one
another of acting like Holden when they are being bitchy, which is funny and
sometimes they get disgusted by him, but generally they appreciate him and ride
his self-centered complaining and see what he’s really saying. That growing up is horrible and that no
adult can ever understand you. It
doesn’t matter that they “went through it themselves”; it doesn’t matter at
all. They are all stupid, one-eyed
kings, lording it over you.
Shadenfreuding their way through your pain and agony. Laughing at you, lecturing you. Assholes.
It’s horrible. Holden was right. Yesinia too. And Ida, back in 1991.
She was right too, even if she missed the boat on Catcher. Adolescence
is an apocalypse.
