Decolonizing the Mind Reflection Paper You’ve read many literacy narratives, including the ones we will be discussing on Wednesday. What is one that especi

Decolonizing the Mind Reflection Paper You’ve read many literacy narratives, including the ones we will be discussing on Wednesday. What is one that especially spoke to you, and how does it intersect with your own experiences? Select a quote from that narrative that is a good example of something that especially struck you and use your answer to analyze the passage you’ve selected. Please reading 1-3 PDF, there are the book, and please look the 3 people examples in PDF 4. Please writing like that. Please write 300 words. I
saw the circle before I saw the kid in
the middle. I was nine years old, the
summer of 1978, and Marcy was my
world. The shadowy bench-lined inner
pathways that connected the twenty-seven
six-story buildings of Marcy Houses were
like tunnels we kids burrowed through.
Housing projects can seem like labyrinths
to outsiders, as complicated and intimidating as a Moroccan bazaar. But we knew
our way around.
4 I DECODED
THE STREET
SIGNS FOR
FLUSHING,
MARCY,
NOSTRAND,
AND MYRTLE
AVENUES
SEEMED LIKE
METAL FLAGS
TO ME:
BED-STUY
WAS MY
COUNTRY,
BROOKLYN
MY PLANET.
‘I
‘I
I
‘I
I
Marcy sat on top of the G train, which connects Brooklyn to Queens,
but not to the city. For Marcy kids, Manhattan is where your parents
went to work, if they were lucky, and where we’d yellow-bus it with our
elementary class on special trips. I’m from New York, but I didn’t know
that at nine. The street signs for Flushing, Marcy, Nostrand, and Myrtle
avenues seemed like metal flags to me: Bed-Stuy was my country, Brooklyn
my planet.
When I got a little older Marcy would show me its menace, but for a
kid in the seventies, it was mostly an adventure, full of concrete corners to
turn, dark hallways to explore, and everywhere other kids. When you
jumped the fences to play football on the grassy patches that passed for a
park, you might find the field studded with glass shards that caught the
light like diamonds and would pierce your sneakers just as fast. Turning
one of those concrete corners you might bump into your older brother
clutching dollar bills over a dice game, Cee-Lo being called out like hardcore bingo. It was the seventies and heroin was still heavy in the hood, so
we would dare one another to push a leaning nodder off a bench the way
kids on farms tip sleeping cows. The unpredictability was one of the things
we counted on. Like the day when I wandered up to something I’d never
seen before: a cipher-but I wouldn’t have called it that; no one would’ve
back then. It was just a circle of scrappy, ashy, skinny Brooklyn kids
laughing and clapping their hands, their eyes trained on the center. I
rp.ight have been with my cousin B-High, but I might have been alone, on
my way home from playing baseball with my Little League squad. I
shouldered through the crowd toward the middle-or maybe B-High
cleared the way-but it felt like gravity pulling me into that swirl ofldds,
no bullshit, like a planet pulled into orbit by a star.
His name was Slate and he was a kid I used to see around the neighborhood, an older kid who barely made an impression. In the circle,
though, he was transformed, like the church ladies touched by the spirit,
and everyone was mesmerized. He was rhyming, throwing out couplet
after couplet like he was in a trance, for a crazy long time-thirty minutes straight off the top of his head, never losing the beat, riding the
handclaps. He rhymed about nothing-the sidewalk, the benches-or he’d
go in on the kids who were standing around listening to him, call out
someone’s leaning sneakers or dirty Lee jeans. And then he’d go in on how
clean he was, how nice he was with the ball, how all our girls loved him.
Then he’d just start rhyming about the rhymes themselves, how good
ONE EYE OPEN I s
they were, how much better they were than yours, how he was the best
that ever did it, in all five boroughs and beyond. He never stopped moving, not dancing, just rotating in the center of the circle, looking for his
next target. The sun started to set, the crowd moved in closer, the next
clap kept coming, and he kept meeting it with another rhyme. It was like
watching some kind of combat, but he was alone in the center. All he had
were his eyes, taking in everything, and the words inside him. I was
dazzled. That’s some cool shit was the first thing I thought. Then:
I could do that.
That night, I started writing rhymes in my spiral notebook. From the
beginning it was easy, a constant flow. For days I filled page after page.
Then I’d bang a beat out on the table, my bedroom window, whatever had
a flat surface, and practice from the time I woke in the morning until I
went to sleep. My mom would think I was up watching TV, but I’d be in
the kitchen pounding on the table, rhyming. One day she brought a
three-ring binder home from work for me to write in. The paper in the
binder was unlined, and I filled every blank space on every page. My
rhymes looked real chaotic, crowded against one another, some vertical,
some slanting into the corners, but when I looked at them the order
was clear.
I connected with an older kid who had a reputation as the best rapper
in Marcy-Jaz was his name-and we started practicing our rhymes into
a heavy-ass tape recorder with a makeshift mic attached. The first time I
heard our voices playing back on tape, I realized that a recording captures
you, but plays back a distortion-a different voice from the one you hear
in your own head, even though I could recognize myself instantly. I saw it
as an opening, a way to re-create myself and reimagine my world. After I
recorded a rhyme, it gave me an unbelievable rush to play it back, to hear
that voice.
One time a friend peeked inside my notebook and the next day I saw
him in school, reciting my rhymes like they were his. I started writing
real tiny so no one could steal my lyrics, and then I started straight
hiding my book, stuffing it in my mattress like it was cash. Everywhere
I went I’d write. Ifi was crossing a street with my friends and a rhyme
came to me, I’d break out my binder, spread it on a mailbox or lamppost
and write the rhyme before I crossed the street. I didn’t care if my
friends left me at the light, I had to get it out. Even back then, I thought
I was the best.
ONE EYE OPEN I
7
I’m the king of hip-hop I Renewed like Reeboks I Key in the lock I Rhymes
so provocative I As long as I live
There were some real talents in Marcy. DJs started setting up sound
systems in the project courtyards and me and Jaz and other MCs from
around the way would battle one another for hours. It wasn’t like that
first cipher I saw: the crowds were more serious now and the beat was
kept by eight-foot-tall speakers with subwoofers that would rattle the
windows of the apartments around us. I was good at battling and I practiced it like a sport. I’d spend free time reading the dictionary, building
my vocabulary for battles. I could be ruthless, calm as fuck on the outside,
but flooded with adrenaline, because the other rapper was coming for me,
too. It wasn’t a Marquess of Queensberry situation. I saw ·
get
swung on when the rhymes cut too deep. But mostly, as dangerous as it
felt, it stayed lyrical. I look back now and it still amazes me how intense
those moments were, back when there was nothing at stake but your rep,
your desire to be the best poet on the block.
I wasn’t even in high school yet and I’d discovered my voice. But I still
needed a story to tell.
FIRST THE FAT BOYS GONNA BREAK UP
Hip-hop was looking for a narrative, too. By the time the eighties came
along, rap was exploding, and I remember the mainstream breakthroughs
like they were my own rites of passage. In 1981, the summer before seventh grade, the Funky Four Plus One More performed “That’s the Joint” on
Saturday Night Live and the Rock Steady Crew got on ABC Nightly News
for battling the Dynamic Rockers at Lincoln Center in a legendary showdown of b-boy dance crews. My parents watched Soul Train every Saturday
when we cleaned up, but when my big sister Annie and I saw Don Cornelius introduce the Sugar Hill Gang, we just stopped in the middle of the
living room with our jaws open. What are they doing on TV?
I remember the 12-inch ofRun-DMC’s “It’s Like That” backed with
“Sucker M.C.’s” being definitive. That same year, 1983, the year I started
high school, Bambaataa released “Looking for the Perfect Beat” and shot
a wild-ass video wearing feathered headdresses that they’d play on the
local access channel. Annie and I would make up dance routines to those
songs, but we didn’t take it as far as the costumes. Herbie Hancock’s
“Rockit” came out that year, too, and those three records were a cultural
trifecta. Disco, and even my parents’ classic R&B records, all faded into
Spanish Lessons: On Language Loss and
Recovery
By Claire Jimenez on December 28, 2015 in Language
The Toast: http://the-toast.net/2015/12/28/spanish-lessons-language-loss/
I am nineteen, and my best friend Franny has dragged me uptown and onto the roof of her
boyfriend Oscar’s building. Franny and Oscar met when she caught him stealing jewelry at a
store she worked at in SoHo. He’s a tall, skinny, twenty-something Dominican kid with a goatee,
who still lives with his grandma and wears big belt buckles and the type of man-jewelry you
might expect to find on an 18th-century pirate. I have no idea why Franny is with this kid when
we could walk into almost any bar in New York and some fool would scramble up to us, offering
to pay for Franny’s drinks – mine too – just for the opportunity to talk to her.
Franny had orchestrated a double date for us. We meet Oscar at this bar uptown that doesn’t ID.
My date is one of Oscar’s cousins; let’s call him Damien. He is the type of green-eyed, lightskinned Dominican kid who has been told exactly how handsome he is his whole life. I can tell
that Damien isn’t pleased about this match. I am the opposite of Franny – five-feet-two, with a
thirteen-year-old’s face. I still have braces and just recently had a hard time getting into an Rrated movie. On this blind date, I am the obvious dud.
We start by playing an hour and a half of unsuccessful pool — unsuccessful mostly because I
stop playing. I can’t get past how pool is just an excuse for some guy to creep up behind you, slip
his hand along your arm to reposition the cue, and then press his body against yours. I’d seen this
same scene play out in real life and in movies a dozen times, and the clichéd gesture is enough to
make the whole night feel irredeemable and corny. I drink one cheap beer after another just to
forget that I am bored.
Two am, we travel back to Oscar’s building. Damien and I sit, drunk, on the edge of the roof,
watching the city tilt and whirl while Franny and Oscar smoke and make out on the stairs. The
conversation between us lulls, and we keep looking longingly at our friends, hoping they will
stop kissing so we can all crawl back home before dawn breaks. At one point Damien calls out to
Oscar, and Oscar turns around, annoyed, and says: “Just kiss her already, man.”
To which Damien whimpers, “I can’t. She wants to go!” Which makes me sort of feel bad for
him. Damien is far more handsome than his cousin Captain Hook, but it’s obvious that Oscar is
the one calling the shots.
“It’s okay,” I say, then try to commiserate with Damien while looking out at the city. I want to
feel inspired at that moment by the landscape, but instead I just feel blah.
Damien starts to speak Spanish, and I don’t understand what he is saying. When he realizes this,
he looks at me with surprise and mild disgust. “You don’t speak Spanish?”
“Not too much,” I say. “A little bit.”
“But aren’t you proud of who you are?”
All my sympathy for Damien evaporates at that moment, replaced by something murky and grey.
You can’t understand how much I want the language, I want to tell him, how I love it maybe even
more than you do, because you have the words, and I don’t.
Some version of that conversation has played out over and over again in my life.
I can remember being nine years old, wading with my little sister in the water at a beach in
Puerto Rico. Our mother had sent us to live with our grandparents for the summer while she
underwent surgery. We were obsessed with the water, the way that we could see the sand
crumbling around our toes. There was nothing like this water in New York. So clear. So blue.
A group of kids surrounded us, wanting to play. One, with hair curling around her face, figured
out quickly that we couldn’t speak Spanish.
¿Pero, de dónde eres tú?
The beach was loud with music and people.
“New York,” my sister and I shouted.
And then the kids surrounded us, splashing water in our faces. “Nueva York,” they shouted back,
slapping the water with their tiny hands.
They circled around my sister and tried to dunk her, and I pushed them away. There were too
many of them, though, and at one point I found myself pushed underneath the water, where their
words were muted, unknowable, warped by the waves.
My mother and I argue over whether I can speak Spanish. It’s a common argument, and it goes
something like this:
“Yes, you can,” she says. “You spoke Spanish till you were four.”
And then I say something like, “I’m pretty sure that I can’t.”
In another version of this argument, she says, “I always tried to teach you, but you never wanted
to learn.”
Me: “I always wanted to learn.”
Who knows which one of us is telling the truth? Maybe my mother is lying, due to guilt or
regret. For years, she was a bilingual special-needs preschool teacher. She loved Spanish – spoke
it all day, in the classroom and at home. I know that she wishes I could speak the language as she
does. Perhaps she feels guilty because I can’t.
I went away to graduate school. In the South I heard about some Latino immigrant families who
intentionally do not teach their kids Spanish, so their children will assimilate more easily. That is
an important story to tell, but I want to make it clear that it is not mine. When it comes to
language and culture, my family has always been proud.
No, this is more of a story about disappearance.
Once an old boss asked me smugly, “How come all the Puerto Ricans I know can’t speak
Spanish?”
I wanted to say, “What language do you speak, asshole?”
But I’ve thought about this question before. I can’t speak for anybody else, and I know quite a
few Puerto Ricans fluent in Spanish who’d bristle at his comment. But I also know a lot of
Puerto Rican kids like me who can’t speak the language, and I suspect it has something to do
with the Island’s long history of being colonized, the sterilization of Puerto Rican women in the
mid-twentieth century, the attempted Americanization of its schools, the bombings in Vieques,
the way thousands of Puerto Rican men were shipped off to fight during World War I, the
disintegration of the island’s economy. Perhaps this disappearance of language is just another
fucked-up effect of colonialism. Just one more death.
Maybe my mother is telling the truth. Maybe I did begin with both Spanish and English. One of
my earliest memories is of sitting in a shopping cart in Puerto Rico and extending my hand
towards a shelf, asking for chocolate in Spanish. And sometimes when I’m forced to speak the
language at a party or to a parent, I am surprised at how much I can say. The words float to the
surface, weirdly whole, from a deep, dark crevice in my brain.
Sometimes I can feel the language become more accessible to me, like a letter unfolding. I can
recognize each syllable. All of a sudden, the meaning has bloomed. Other times, I am aware of
exactly how much I do not know: the many mistakes I’ve made trying to speak. Perhaps there are
even more mistakes that I haven’t yet noticed. I begin to fear there is this version of myself I’m
projecting in Spanish that is all wrong, that is the opposite of how I feel inside. More often than
not I am mortified at the stupid things that come out of my mouth.
But, more than shame, I feel an enormous sense of loss.
When I speak on the phone to my great-grandmother, who has dementia and has lost almost all
of her English, I repeat the same things in Spanish over and over again: ¿Cómo te vas? Te
extraño. ¿Que estas haciendo hoy?
Inside I know that these words are not enough.
I finished graduate school last year, and — like most writers — ended up scrambling for jobs. I
tried at one point to get a gig at community center in Nashville that services Latino folks, but I
knew I’d have to improve my Spanish.
These days I’ve been trying to become more fluent by talking to my mother and my friends in
Spanish. It is humbling, having to stop every few seconds to figure out a word, knowing that I’ve
butchered the grammar, asking somebody to repeat something, one more time. Otra vez. Again.
Oh, dear, how could I have fucked up the gender? How could I have made such an obvious
mistake, one that a native speaker would never make? Obviously I am not at home in the
language of my own home. What does that even mean?
In English, I speak fast. I’m loud, perhaps even annoying, depending on who you ask. In
Spanish, I feel like I am perpetually blushing: polite, apologetic, and scared.
I explain this to my Honduran buddy Jero on Gchat. He is fluent in Spanish and is learning
Chinese. He says that he knows the feeling: “Whenever I have to write or talk in Chinese, I
always remember my mother and all of the immigrants who live in this country and can’t speak
English.”
Since then I’ve tried to force myself to speak Spanish with Latino folks with limited English,
something I’ve always intentionally avoided because I was afraid of what they would think, how
they would look at me, once they figured out how badly I spoke the language. But lately I have
started to think: Why put the awkwardness on them? To speak English well in this country is its
own privilege. Why not shift that discomfort onto myself?
“Solamente, necesitas practicar,”one woman explained to me. “Find as many teachers as you
can.”
I have. My friends, my mother, my grandmother…I am grateful for them all.
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