This text is a response paper for the course The Rhetoric of Race in Writing Studies.It was contributed by Amanda Shepherd, a graduate student at the Center for Writing Studies, at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

Amanda Shepherd
Writing in the Margins and Opening a Can of Worms
A Reflection

Every situation affords opportunity for observation and analysis, which is especially the case in a large Midwestern research oriented university. A class with required reading entitled, Representing the "Other," "Race: The Absent Presence in Composition Research," "Reconsidering the Place of Lived Experience in Composition," and "Arts of the Contact Zone," is especially ripe for analysis. My participation in this class has given me a microcosm to experience life on the margins. "If I could write this in fire, I would write this in fire."  I wish those were my words. But they are the words of the Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff.  L.P. Aegerter speaks of her struggle for language in "Michelle Cliff and the Paradox of Privilege" (CE 59:8). "I have found it essential to enable my students to perceive possible connections between themselves and 'others' as they read post colonial and multicultural literature. The objective is to 'decrease the possibility of oppositional antagonism' and 'begin to understand the notion of multiple subjectivities, the paradoxes of privilege and oppression.'  Aegerter quotes Joan Didion, "we tell ourselves stories in order to live." In order for a class like this to come to life with meaning, it needs to start with the paradox. We need to know the answer to Melissa's question, "How is it that you can write with authority on this topic?" We all need to tell our stories. I need to tell mine in fire.

I have learned experientially, that if I am to be an effective teacher, I need to make my struggles and my gifts available to my students. Where I have power and where I am weak. The longer I teach, the more I realize how dysfunctional I am. I want to avoid conflict, yet I want every issue to be resolved. I am a contradiction in myself, but I am trying to get over it. When students begin to tell stories, I need to recognize that the class is not being reduced to narrative but that it has the possibility of being released through narrative. As Ruth Frankenberg illustrates in White Women, Race Matters, introspection and story-telling can be modeled in order to release telling points about a person's racist and discriminate attitudes. It's been very difficult to accomplish this feat in this class. It seems that our inability has caused grievous silence, at least from my perspective. I need to write myself out of that silence. 

I wish I could write this in fire.

I've learned the lesson of living on the margins, giving myself over to the power of the privileged. When I received my first "response" paper back, I felt the lessons of this class in my body. I was coming from a position of weakness and didn't know how to withstand it. I felt compelled to write in a mode of discourse that is foreign to me, nearly abandoning the subject of my deepest interest. I wanted to tell the story of my experience, Instead, I am trying to tell the story of an observed experience. I am trying to remember Mahala-Swilky's words, I need to "recognize how long reflection on and struggle with the culture that impose[s] on and work[s] through the writer" can make me a better writer, a better researcher (Lived Experience 366). But I also recognize that I didn't have to give myself over; I only understood that I needed to in order to survive. 

I wish I could write this in fire.

I consider myself a responsive person. My attitude of response reveals itself in my reading, my writing, and my teaching. When my usual response is threatened or denied, I go through stages of disappointment, sadness, depression, anger, and then considered power-power of discourse and action. Sometimes the journey is easier than others. As a poor, abused, under-educated wife and mother, it took fifteen years to get through the process. As a timid grad student, it only took three months. I feel fortunate. Age and experience have come to my side.

I can say out loud that I feel as if I've been in an experimental classroom this semester. I can reflect on my experience and say I've learned, in part, what it feels like to be on the margins, to be silenced and to come to a partial understanding of the elements that brought me here. Sometimes the silence in the classroom is painful. Many comments are disparate, response is rare. We need to tell each other our stories and have them heard. I need to tell my story with fire.

I want us to take Min-Zhan Lu's advice and discuss our commonalties and differences. I want to take the advice of Mary Louise [Pratt] and Suresh, and create a positive space of confrontation and understanding. I wish I wasn't so afraid of the fire.