Liveblogging how the word is passed
Apr. 4th, 2023 11:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutThis is _such_ a great book. Go read it.
Anyway.
On Goree Island, in Senegal, the author is talking to Hasan who is a teacher at a boarding school there.
“Hasan said it is important that the country develop a curriculum so students can develop a holistic understanding of what slavery and colonialism did to their country and their continent. This, he said, is essential because knowing their history helps them to more effectively identify the lies the world tells about Africa. It equips students with the intellectual and historical tool kit, so they won’t accept and internalize the idea that Africa has no history, that Africa’s poverty is its own fault, that Africa would be better off if it were under European control. “If they know that the arguments are false,” he said, “they will know that all the rest also is false.””
“I was struck by the parallels between how Ibrahima Seck, the director of research at the Whitney Plantation, spoke about the role of history and how Hasan was speaking about it now. They had similar conceptions as to how teaching history, a full history, would shape how students navigated the world. They were acutely aware that this knowledge gave their students new eyes, a new sense of freedom and understanding — the ability to know the lie, so they could not be lied to anymore. I told Hasan that was he was telling me made me think of my trip to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, and his eyes got wide. He asked me if I knew Ibrahima Seck.”
“I told him I had indeed met Seck, and that I had spoken to him when I went there in those months before coming to Goree.”
“Hasan smiled. That’s my best friend, he told me. He and Seck used to teach together at a high school in Dakar.”
History as an industry is documentarian — it’s about what is documented, what is written down. Industries can change, tho. And when they do, the incumbents in the industry resist, except for a few, who are the ones who innovate, who reform, who make the new form of the industry. A document based approach to history makes it almost impossible for us to “do” history in the absence or paucity of documents, and also when we come to understand that the primary documents are demonstrably false. Knowing something is not true does not always tell us what _is_ true. We’re starting to see the past understood through lenses of genetics and language and artifact. We are also starting to understand that what is written down contemporaneously may not be as accurate or helpful in understanding the past as what is passed down as lore and heard from a member of a group in the present. The approaches we must take when documents do not exist are starting to illuminate the many problems with history being documentarian as an industry.
Reading Clint Smith’s _How the Word is Passed_ is a delight for so very many reasons: the evocative detail of the setting in which his conversations take place, his feelings, the emotional tone of the people he listens to, the clothing people are wearing. It is also a delight because he is sorting through a universe of threads of how to think about, talk about, write about, teach about and live with the presence of the past in our present day.
Also, in this particular case, reading about Smith meeting Ibrahima Seck and Hasan months apart, and hearing how their thoughts run together across time and distance, forcefully reminded me of the importance of talking together and teaching together. Our ideas develop and clarify and ripple out into the world as a result of our conversations and our work together communicating our ideas.
Never question the value of figuring out something with your best friend. It may never be _as_ amazing as this friendship, but it’s absolutely worth the effort.
ETA:
Another long quote, from the end:
“I have come to realize that those conversations with my students [as a high school English teacher in Prince George’s County, Maryland], now a decade ago, about how we might begin to understand our lives in relation to the world around us were some of the earliest sparks of this book. I tried to write the sort of book that I would have wanted to teach them. I hope I made them proud.”
Indeed. How lucky we are that he wrote this book. Really, go read it. It is amazing.
Anyway.
On Goree Island, in Senegal, the author is talking to Hasan who is a teacher at a boarding school there.
“Hasan said it is important that the country develop a curriculum so students can develop a holistic understanding of what slavery and colonialism did to their country and their continent. This, he said, is essential because knowing their history helps them to more effectively identify the lies the world tells about Africa. It equips students with the intellectual and historical tool kit, so they won’t accept and internalize the idea that Africa has no history, that Africa’s poverty is its own fault, that Africa would be better off if it were under European control. “If they know that the arguments are false,” he said, “they will know that all the rest also is false.””
“I was struck by the parallels between how Ibrahima Seck, the director of research at the Whitney Plantation, spoke about the role of history and how Hasan was speaking about it now. They had similar conceptions as to how teaching history, a full history, would shape how students navigated the world. They were acutely aware that this knowledge gave their students new eyes, a new sense of freedom and understanding — the ability to know the lie, so they could not be lied to anymore. I told Hasan that was he was telling me made me think of my trip to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, and his eyes got wide. He asked me if I knew Ibrahima Seck.”
“I told him I had indeed met Seck, and that I had spoken to him when I went there in those months before coming to Goree.”
“Hasan smiled. That’s my best friend, he told me. He and Seck used to teach together at a high school in Dakar.”
History as an industry is documentarian — it’s about what is documented, what is written down. Industries can change, tho. And when they do, the incumbents in the industry resist, except for a few, who are the ones who innovate, who reform, who make the new form of the industry. A document based approach to history makes it almost impossible for us to “do” history in the absence or paucity of documents, and also when we come to understand that the primary documents are demonstrably false. Knowing something is not true does not always tell us what _is_ true. We’re starting to see the past understood through lenses of genetics and language and artifact. We are also starting to understand that what is written down contemporaneously may not be as accurate or helpful in understanding the past as what is passed down as lore and heard from a member of a group in the present. The approaches we must take when documents do not exist are starting to illuminate the many problems with history being documentarian as an industry.
Reading Clint Smith’s _How the Word is Passed_ is a delight for so very many reasons: the evocative detail of the setting in which his conversations take place, his feelings, the emotional tone of the people he listens to, the clothing people are wearing. It is also a delight because he is sorting through a universe of threads of how to think about, talk about, write about, teach about and live with the presence of the past in our present day.
Also, in this particular case, reading about Smith meeting Ibrahima Seck and Hasan months apart, and hearing how their thoughts run together across time and distance, forcefully reminded me of the importance of talking together and teaching together. Our ideas develop and clarify and ripple out into the world as a result of our conversations and our work together communicating our ideas.
Never question the value of figuring out something with your best friend. It may never be _as_ amazing as this friendship, but it’s absolutely worth the effort.
ETA:
Another long quote, from the end:
“I have come to realize that those conversations with my students [as a high school English teacher in Prince George’s County, Maryland], now a decade ago, about how we might begin to understand our lives in relation to the world around us were some of the earliest sparks of this book. I tried to write the sort of book that I would have wanted to teach them. I hope I made them proud.”
Indeed. How lucky we are that he wrote this book. Really, go read it. It is amazing.