First Days 4

found this one later on:

Monday, August 22, 2011

I am in the student union at UWC. I am eating a sausage wrapped in puff pastry. It is a guilty pleasure that I can fob off on not knowing what to eat here. It’s the kind of sausage that will be back later. For now my keys on the keyboard are covered in greasy fingerprints. It has been so long since I was in a uni environment like this. Maybe as far back as when I was an undergraduate at Central Michigan. Kids (yes, sorry, they are) hanging out everywhere. They sit with friends in small clutches around table tops. There is a righteous domino game that encompasses three tables. Dominoes are slapped on the table when a play is made, and the space is three tall stories. The clap of the dominoes on the formica tabletops reaches to the ceiling, and then spreads to cover us all. I just bit into a “steak” pie. It is filled with an unknowable paste, and studded with bits of beef. The paste is spicy hot, like a black bean paste. Delicious, but not in the realm of a “steak pie.” I obviously cannot eat here. There is just too much stuff that will need to be sampled.

As I look around, furtively over my laptop, I can only smile. Every face is so different from those that I am used to. The stopping point for all of these attributes. Nobody looks like the faces of color I am used to seeing. It’s all mixed up. At some point, I may stop trying to categorize and get on with knowing people. The dominoes clap on.

The Dean’s Assistant spent some time this morning trying to explain Western Cape Afrikaans, which he intimated was a language separate from northern Afrikaans, When I suggested that it might be a dialect version, he again pushed for separate status of WC Afrikaans. He has an agenda here. Wonder why it is important to be a different thing than Afrikaans, which he labeled “the language of the oppressor” (LOTO) If he was using the common phrase in a wry or arched way, I still don’t know his stance. If the LOTO reference was prima facie used, then it is understandable why he would want separation. Felix Banda may be a mensche. He is willing to be in the background so that his students can have front stage time. He is easily provoked to laughter. It is pleasant to be around him. Chris Stroud brought me in this morning. I was a bit nervous. I recognized that he came in on a day within his sabbatical and thought if he was here he had a long list of things to do. So I got rid of myself, and was shown to MY office by a doctoral student named ____ He is from Zambia, where there are 72 languages spoken. When I asked about mutual intelligibility, he reduced the number to 24 or 25. Amazing. A second student told me about his dissertation. He is researching a newspaper from Angola. The paper is in exile and being published in Cape Town. He is doing a critical analysis of the text of the paper’s stance toward politics (?).

I can see myself getting  sucked into these very risky, relevant social causes that connect with literacy. But there is a note of caution with which I must remind myself. I wouldn’t want to exhort students into doing high-risk research projects so that I can feel social justice vicariously. Here, these are not just reading and writing issues, they are life (threatening) issues.  It makes me wonder back to the subaltern literacy practices of West Tampa. Are they just like Hyde Park? Are the differences different enough to recognize. What about East Tampa, between MLK and Hillsborough? Do I know how language and literacy function in these social contexts that may be very different from what I imagine happens in white homes? Where are the white homes? Presumed to be everywhere except where I designate a “high risk “ zone?

I must have gotten here at the end of lunch break. It is now 2pm and the place is clearing out, except for the dominoes. In fact, a third game has now sprung up, even closer to me. The clap of dominoes continues.

Before 4, I need to check with Avril about the card, the email password, the location of the Mowbray transport, a copy of the lectures.  I wonder how the lecturers will feel about me coming in and sitting through it. Should I say anything to them if I do? When am I coming back, how often do I want to be here? When there is something to do.