Jan Morris, The World, Life and Travel 1950-2000:  Exploring place, point of view, and post-colonialism in Part 4

Selecting Part 4 texts lends itself to going down the rabbit hole of our high school reading experience. The texts that we love, feel close to, and are confident in delivering offer a pragmatic approach to teaching. However these same texts are often rooted in our own set of beliefs, our own politics (or our teachers’), and it’s difficult to separate ourselves from the powerful relationship we have formed with authors, genres, and plot lines. Hence the introduction of Jan Morris travel essays as a Part 4 text. She, who was once a he, defamiliarizes our notion of prose through non-fiction and offers rigor, creativity, essence and style in the same literary spirit of other canonical “fiction” texts that are more widely used in the classroom.

The story of her life is robust and possibly controversial for your classroom. She is a transgender 91 year-old-woman who summited Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary, served as a journalist and a soldier, father and mother, and travelled the world’s cities over. She considers herself a free-spirit, however takes great pride in, and a didactic tone towards, romanticizing about the British Empire and its colonial rule. Students will quickly pick up on how her love and disillusionment of “Empire” both enhance and betray her relationship with the reader.  For example, in her essays on Hong Kong and Singapore, she offers a rich history of Britain’s rule, solidifying her position as a historian and authority. She intertwines this history with her own experience of “place” using vivid imagery, syntactical structures (usually polysyndeton and asyndeton), and the positioning of reader through synthetic personalization. However her praises and allusions take on a tone of condescension and ego. Hong Kong is “unique,” in a way that its people “work like automation” and their “babies are beyond computation.” The intention is complimentary, but the reception? That is up for your class discussion. And this is the beauty of Morris for the Individual Oral Commentary. It offers space for speculation, hypothesizing, criticism, and rich discourse. Some may ask, “Is it literary?” The answer is that it is literary enough to give students full opportunity to succeed in criterion B. In addition, because of Morris’ character, her work organically reveals a bit of mischief that students can exploit for criterion A—to make their response more bold and introspective rather than purely prescriptive.

Morris allows students and teachers to bring in their own experiences of travel, to question travel writing and it’s place in art and literature, and to review the literary and stylistic features that make writing impactful and provocative. Her style echoes throughout her essays and her employment of varying narrative arcs offer opportunities for thoughtful and intellectual Individual Oral Commentary responses. Reading Morris is an aesthetic experience and a challenging, not impossible, encounter with a new text.

Review of Persepolis as a part III work

Whether it’s because of effective marketing strategies for young adult fiction like The Hunger Games, or because malaise and cynicism are integral aspects of our zeitgeist, dystopian works are popular with my DP students. While 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale are obvious choices for this genre, I also found Persepolis to be effective because it is contemporary, it allows students to make connections with current issues relate them to familiar themes, and it also develops their ability to analyze graphic novels.

The themes Satrapi explores in Persepolis, such as coming of age and the fraught idealism that forms the basis of so many utopian aspirations resonate with teenage readers. Especially since I teach in a predominantly Muslim country, the conflict Marji experiences as a result of her identify as a Muslim Iranian woman is one that encourages provocative discussion. For those students who are not in a similar demographic, the conflict is still relevant because the concept of Muslim identity is one that dominates the media discourse. Furthermore, many of my students empathize with Marji simply because, like her, they are also trying to discover themselves in an environment that bombards them with conflicting messages of what they should be.

The students also find the discussion of idealism to be relevant. Teaching in Morocco, many of them are hyper-aware of the complex and often tragic motivations and consequences of the Arab Spring.  For my non-Moroccan students, the challenges to democratic ideals that countries such as the US are currently experiencing also seem unnervingly familiar to the discontent Satrapi presents in Persepolis. 

I have also found Persepolis to be an effective text for studying graphic novels.  Frustrated by my students’ difficulties discussing works that weren’t typical literary texts, I wanted to guide them in analyzing multi-modal ones, besides the usual advertisements or websites. In studying Persepolis, I was pleasantly surprised to see how quickly they could, for example, compose a paragraph about how, while Orwell uses metaphors to express his characters’ feelings, Satrapi uses emanata. Additionally, they were able contrasts Atwoods’s use of flat characters that serve as symbols for certain ideas with Satrapi’s use of a subjective or universal drawing style to portray the same.  I was even more pleasantly surprised when the students applied these concepts to paper 1 texts, such as comics or political cartoons.

As a teacher, I am accustomed to trying any trick available to keep students engaged. For good or ill, there is currently an obsession with dystopian texts. Persepolis is an especially accessible example of this genre, but it also connects almost effortlessly with some of the themes in 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale. Finally, the fact that Persepolis is a graphic novel allows the students to think about literature differently, specifically how authors can portray the same human struggle for identity and freedom in a traditional, linear novel like 1984, in a modernist fragmented novel like The Handmaid’s Tale, and what is could be argued is a post-modern, graphic novel like Persepolis. 

When I read about the United Airlines leggings controversy this past March (the incident in which a few young women were not allowed on a flight due to wearing spandex pants called leggings, eclipsed later, of course, by the Dr. David Dao incident in which Dao would be dragged off a United Airlines plane for not giving up his seat on an overbooked flight) I did not initially see it as an opportunity for my IB Language and Literature class. But when I started reading the Twitter feed exchanges that followed—this was between, seemingly, every person on Twitter and a United Airlines spokesperson—I saw an opportunity. As everyone knows, Part Two of the course, which focuses on Language and Mass Communication, requires students to understand the way in which language can be used in mass media to achieve different purposes. Informing, persuading, teasing out biases and deciding how the context of the information is important with regard to how it can be received or produced is accomplished through myriad readings and exercises. So, I thought, why not use this Twitter exchange? Debate? Word mashup? As a chance to engage the students with these key concepts in an easy to use, understandable way? We started by scrolling through the responses to read for entertainment—I find this helps students approach assignments with the mindset that we need to have fun as well as learn. And indeed, it was fun to read everyone weigh in. From celebrities such as actress Patricia Arquette to comedian Seth Rogen to the woman with the Twitter-handle “Crooked Butters 2.0” @united @baddestmamajama a “35 y/o woman who is 8 months pregnant & exclusively wears leggings” who posed the question “Should I cancel my flight w/u next week?” Fun aside, the students quickly picked up on the way in which audience and purpose, a couple of the key tenants of the big five, were realized in the syntax and diction of the critics. Conversely, the bureaucratic responses from United, in which the dry tone of a person trying desperately to remain passionless, was a great way to study attempts at objective communication as a means of combatting bias. Twitter exchanges like this offer many ways for students to consider the relationship between printed text and visual text, as more than a few tweets often feature photos. Moreover, the relationship between what is said and how it is received is easily identifiable on Twitter. This is because the data about likes and retweets readily available. Whether you go on to break the language into verbal clusters, or even study the euphemisms and hyperbole behind the pronounced statements, these Twitter exchanges offer gifts aplenty. Like it or not, in an age in which Twitter is becoming more and more relevant as a means of communication a la American President Donald Trump, Twitter is a text that grabs student attention and teaches them important lessons in the process. 

Revisiting Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five: The Significance of Cultural context

Having recently read this iconic novel for the fifth time; teaching it as a Part 4 text for the second time, I was struck by how clearly and ineluctably the cultural context (CC) footprint was stamped into the creation of this novel.  We insist our students know this about every text studied; akin to a Law of Physics: No novel is created in a vacuum; except perhaps one penned by Kilgore Trout.  Vonnegut (V) like Heller seven years before him was able to capture the zeitgeist of his time, alternately entertaining and horrifying us with the black humored absurdity of war and the vapidity of suburban life. Death stepped into his CC before his hellish POW train ride to Germany did. His mom took her life just before he shipped overseas in 1944. In 1958 his brother-in-law died in a horrific train crash, followed by his sister two days later. No wonder, KV’s mantra in the novel is “So it goes.” He glibly notes the death of everyone and everything. Death was in our living rooms in 1968.  We watched as the weekly corpse count from Vietnam kept mounting. By then, many Americans knew that the Vietnam War was being waged without purpose; we knew what KV witnessed first hand in Germany, that senseless killing and wanton destruction was an affront to dignity.

Billy Pilgrim, (BP) his hapless protagonist, is forced to relive his past, present and future (a sci-fi feature mercifully unavailable to us). However, nothing is random in this intricately constructed novel. What appears as chaotic chronology (22 time jumps in CH 2) is meant to reflect the unstable mind of a veteran plagued by PTSD, an acronym yet to settle into the lexicon in 1968.  BP’s pacific demeanor, outrageous outfit and time tripping echoed the hallucinogenic, psychedelic experience of the counter culture. Like Lot’s wife referenced in CH1, KV summons the courage in 1968, to finally look back at the incomprehensible destruction of Dresden. Part memoir, part fiction, on a fool’s errand to make sense of a massacre.

His letter home to family, a must read for students, was written in France, three weeks after VE day, three months after surviving the firebombing of Dresden. It is eerily prescient of both the novel’s content and style. Dripping with irony and tinged with survivor’s guilt, he recounts the brutal transport and imprisonment, the gruesome work detail and liberation.  The penultimate sentence: “I’ve too damned much to say, the rest will have to wait…” are part of (KV’s) own personal and shared cultural context. Though he tried, it had to wait. Wait 23 years, till it all came together in 1968: the three book contract, the Guggenheim Fellowship which financed a trip back to Dresden, the obscene war machine and the growing anti-war movement, the assassinations.  It had to be then.

I first came across "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" around 2010, when I found a passage from the novel -the part where Changez talks about Pakistani food- as one of the options for unseen texts students have to analyse for Paper 1 in IB Language and Literature… or was it Paper 4 in IGCSE English Literature?  I can't recall which one exactly, but that's not relevant. 

What I do find relevant is that many years later I can still remember the exact extract that compelled my attention back then and led me to commit to memory the title of the book, look it up, buy it, read it in one sitting, enjoy it thoroughly… and end up with a feeling that I had come across a little gem as regards content and style.

Last year, when looking for a free choice book for Part 3 to read with my Language and Literature students –a particularly smart group of Argentinian boys and girls with a good command of the English language and a sense of humour- I remembered the book, re-read it and decided to give it a try it as a Part 3 text.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist consists of a one-sided conversation between a Pakistani and an American in a café in Lahore, Pakistan. The author, Moshin Hamid, lets us eavesdrop on this conversation that goes on in real time for some three hours, the time it takes us to read the book. We hear only the voice of the Pakistani, who directs and dominates the conversation from beginning to end.

The novel brings up one of the most important issues of our time, the clash of two cultures, two ways of seeing the world. It poses questions that cannot be overlooked in view of post 9/11 and current world events, and builds up enormous tension in the story, (mis?)leading us to a clever ending where we realize nothing is necessarily what we expected.

But it is not only the themes and the uncertainty that make it such a good read. Back when I came across that first extract from the book on an exam paper, it was the writing style that grabbed my attention; the two main stylistic elements  that I particularly enjoyed are the skillful and original narrative technique –dramatic monologue- and the language: Changez, the Pakistani protagonist, delivers his provocative and at times tongue-in-cheek observations with a deliciously old-fashioned turn of phrase and somewhat stilted politeness that is extremely effective in rendering the book memorable.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist also presents us with characters that –just like readers- are shaped and molded by the times and places in which they live.  Author Moshin Hamid gives us, as readers,  ample freedom to create and explore our own understanding of events, motivations, ethical stances and political values, which no doubt result in varied interpretations of the novel itself.

Isn´t this what the learning outcomes of Part 3 are all about?