I’ve been thinking lately that history might be the most undervalued discipline of all academic fields and all studies of the mind variety. With a tendency toward masochism, I must admit that I’m quick to beat myself up, or have others beat me up, about things I haven’t done well. Paying attention to history lessons in high school is almost top of that “reasons for thinking I’m a jack ass” list. I’ve been mourning the loss of “World History,” “American History,” and the far-stretched, yet disciplinary included off-spring of the two: “Government and Economics” ever since I stepped out of Academe and into the world of not-so-compartmentalized realities.
Back in high school I did what I needed to do to get Bs and Cs. Occasionally, when the teacher was good I’d memorize a whole bunch of names, dates and other corollary facts but as Freire reminds, that’s not learning, that’s a banking/depository system. Besides, even if I had learned of our world’s contingencies in an authentic way, I was so high during most of my adolescence that any quality information picked up probably would have melted like the snow of Mt. Baldy come first day of Spring. To the point: I’ve been kicking myself about this negligence for years especially when I get the chance to study the history of something in particular (right now: Anabaptist schisms) and realize how dope it would be to know more particulars and less generalities.
But lately there’s been a shift. I’m not so quick to kick myself. What if one only recognizes the brilliance of studying history at large when one has accumulated a personal history of one’s own? Yes, this is a Gestalt theory.
Do you agree with me? Historians in particular: what do you think of this proposal??
It’s hardly possible to consider your life your own when you’re still being mandated to live within the domestic confines of the family and participate in the educational system as a child/adolescent. It isn’t until you’re given a relative degree of freedom to make choices that you begin to understand the contingencies of yesterday and tomorrow, understand how the simplest choice can result in the most complex consequence. And when that realization hits—and let me speak personally here—I begin to look at all present moments with new curiosities for what’s been before and what’s being made possible herein. As I come to know the power of the past upon my present, a present that is not my own, for sure, but one I perceive as such, I desire—deeply—to know more about the histories of my lovers, associates, aggravates, their lands and former “Lords,” the social and political ticking-bombs of their revolutionaries and the prayers their people most fervently prayed.
Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, maybe I was off getting high in the parking lot because I was trying to break out of the confines and mandates that blocked me from loving the very class I most appropriately loathed given my stage of development. Maybe they should save history classes for people in their late twenties or early thirties, a time when most of us have fucked up our lives enough by running from the past that we now comprehend the value of studying it.
Like most white people of euro/american descent, I was raised on a systemic estrangement from history that often (when I’m not being set straight by people loving enough to call me on it) results in non-accidental amnesia. This amnesia seduces one into all kinds of isms but particularly colonizer type dominance/arrogance and racism. If I learn the history of my people, I must face up to those racialized and border-line dependent acts of arrogance, oppression and violence. And if I'm a human being, I'll let that history make an impression on my heart and hopefully I'll be less likely to perpetuate racism and arrogance myself. On a more global scale, one sees this type of forgetfulness in the similarities of the invasion and occupation of Vietnam in the 60’s and the current U.S. imperial/violent occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Did we not learn or are we just pretending not to remember?
This kind of amnesia can also, unfortunately, lead to all kinds of bewilderment and self-judgment about things that appear ‘out of nowhere,’ things that have been around in the ancestral struggle for years and years but no one was willing to talk about. After hearing for decades that my maternal grandmother was a rather pathetic and depressed woman, I recently found out she had four miscarriages and two rounds of electroshock therapy (think: Changeling) before her first child was born and then gave birth to four daughters in 7 ½ years, one of whom was paranoid schizophrenic (in the 1950’s fundamentalist christian Midwest also known as “possessed by the Devil”). I’m sure they used the word “hysteria” to describe my grandma’s ‘condition:’ I’m amazed and proud she made it to her 80’s with all that suffering. Further, I think my mom is a warrior, a straight up saint, given the circumstances of her upbringing. As I struggle to maintain balance between healthy empathy and total despair in the face of the world’s pain, it’s good to know I’m not the first woman in my family to find that balance challenging and I won’t be the last to push through. Learning the history validates the difficulty and gives substance to hope.
And on that happy note: you can believe I'll be taking history courses at my local community college for the rest of my life. I owe it to the world.
Shalom,
Ejoye
4 comments:
I commented on your facebook - glad to see the lively conversation you started there (and hopefully it extends out into the real world, too!)
I've started thinking recently that perhaps history seems irrelevant because it's being taught chronologically. If more recent events were presented first and then one worked backwards in time, it might seem more worthy of one's attention. For instance, the story of the man who wished to auction himself off on eBay could be presented to introduce the whole concept of the indentured servant. This "thread" could be taken back at least as far as the time of Joseph in Egypt during the famine. People who had no resources sold everything to buy food and when it was all gone, they sold themselves to Pharoah. As far as feeling bad about not learning more history when you were younger: those opportunities are over--don't dwell on them more than what you can use to motivate you now.
Your grandmother, by the way, was a wonderful person, albeit a little "ditzy". She and your grandfather were (and are) both very significant parts of who I am today.
Steve
thanks Steve C. really, thank you.
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
Gustave Flaubert
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