Dialogue

On the Purpose of Learning

Four writers are in the midst of a discussion on the purpose of the work they are doing. They discuss the inspiration for their professions and the circumstances that created who they are.
Leigh Phillips: “If writing isn’t written out of desperation, I’m not sure I’ll ever have any interest in reading it.”
Min-zhan Lu: Sounds about right.
Sherman Alexie: I agree.
Andre Lorde: Sure.
Leigh Phillips: Well I don’t.
Sherman Alexie: Sorry?
Leigh Phillips: I used to believe that all writing was out of some sort of innate struggle for existence or meaning in the world. To free themselves from sort of pressure placed upon them before they were even born.
Min-Zhan Lu: Well then you were completely right. I was born in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. I, like some others, were driven by the will to read and write in the name of a better life promised by Dickens, Hawthorne, Bronte and Austen.
Sherman Alexie: I learned to read from a Superman comic.
Min-Zhan Lu: Not quite the same…
Sherman Alexie: Exactly the point, I learned to read on the basis of piecing things together. I had no innate drive at three years old to read. I knew my father liked reading therefore I liked reading.
Audre Lorde: Is the alphabet responsible for the book?
Leigh Phillps: What?
Sherman Alexie: She’s right. The building blocks of how we learn have no relationship to what we will later share, teach and write. I first learned how to read in symbolism. I’d look at a strip of comic as a paragraph. A sort of fence of words that allowed me to focus solely on such, however those paragraphs now have nothing to do with the full essay.
Min-Zhan Lu: Which is?
Sherman Alexie: Which is now I am a teacher. A representation of the greater good a person of my background can be if they apply themselves to literature.
Audre Lorde: Well we can all agree on that.
Min-Zhan Lu: Still, I disagree. I was born into class struggle. A word I hadn’t heard of before I had known English. Moved by what I had read and did everything I could to make a life for myself in a land that accepted such peoples.
Leigh Phillips: I think we all were. But the point I think were now taking in is that people don’t really know what they’re going to be until confronted at the crossroads of their lives. Perhaps at a confirmation of what they already knew they would be.
Sherman Alexie: See I agree with everything but that. I was born a Spokane Indian. I knew the moment that I figure out Superman that I was to be much more than what I was destined in a typical reservation.
Lorde: When I was young, I attended Church School. Sister Eymard would batter our knuckles. Forcing literature upon us. We knew she was crazy, she would later die in a madhouse. But I was left a writer and left a poet.
They pause and look at Lorde.
Lorde: Even if we can’t admit it. Someone made us who we were.
Lu looks down. Holds and then smiles in defeat.
Min-Zhan Lu: You know I forgot.
Leigh Phillips: Forgot what?
Min-Zhan Lu: When I was young there was a teacher. Who affirmed English as not just a language of learning, but a language of Liberty.
Sherman Alexie: Literature and intelligence is a dangerous thing. They make for a dangerous person, one different from the others. A sort of life vest from ignorance.
Audre Lorde: A bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.