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DIALECTICS OF TEXT AND CONTEXT:
THE POETRY WORKSHOPS OF NICARAGUA AND
A PEDAGOGY FOR A CONTEXTUAL LITERACY IN THE U.S.A.
by
Karyn Lee Hollis
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOS PHY
(English)
May 1987
UM I Number: DP23120
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL U SERS
T he quality of this reproduction is d ep en d en t upon the quality of the copy subm itted.
In th e unlikely event that the author did not se n d a com plete m anuscript
and th ere are m issing pag es, th e se will be noted. Also, if m aterial had to be rem oved,
a note will indicate the deletion.
Dissertation Publishing
UMI D P23120
Published by P roQ uest LLC (2014). Copyright in the D issertation held by th e Author.
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unauthorized copying under Title 17, United S ta te s C ode
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789 E ast Eisenhow er Parkw ay
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CAUFORNIA 90089
This dissertation, written by
......................Hollis.............
under the direction of h$x Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted b y The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents for the degree of
D O C TO R OF PH ILOSOPH Y
Dean o f Graduate Studies
Date February 2 6 , 1987
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson S
E
H7^2
S a- 3, | :
To my Mother, whose love and support
has sustained me throughout
ii
Table of Contents
Page
Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1
Chapter One: Literacy, Context and Composition Scholarship..........................6
Review of Literature in Literacy Theory:
The Cognitivist Perspective
The Contextualist Perspective
A Dialectical Perspective
The Literacy-Context Dialectic and Composition Scholarship
Chapter Two: Context and the Nicaraguan Poetry Workshops..........................26
Pre-existing Cultural Context
Sandinista Cultural Context
Political and Economic Context
Immediate Historical Context of the Workshops
Workshop Administration and Pedagogy
Declaration of Principles of the Association of Poetry Workshops
Effects of Context on Workshop Praxis
Chapter Three: Debates of Text and Context:
Nicaraguan Workshop Poetry...........................................56
Cardenal and Exteriorism
Two Workshop Poems
The Debate Over Workshop Poetry
La Yentana vs. the Workshop Poets
The Workshop Poets Respond
More from the Critics
A Final Defender
A Defense of Workshop Poetry with Textual Examples
Non-revolutionary Love Poetry
Non-revolutionary Pastorals
Revolutionary Poetry: The Revolution as Primary Subject Matter
Revolutionary Poetry: The Revolution as Subtext
Revolutionary Poetry: The Revolution as Setting
The Criticisms of Content and Style
Formal Analysis
Poetic Closure
The Effects of Context on Workshop Poetry
Sandinista Cultural/Political Context
How Workshop Poems Affect Their Context
Chapter Four: A Pedagogy for Critical Literacy in the U.S.A........................... 85
The Classroom Rhetorical Situation
The Poetry Workshops: Unalienated Literacy iii
Lukacs' and the Essay as Reified Commodity
A Pedagogy for the De~Alienation of Classroom Literacy
The De-Alienation of Language/Literacy
Marcue’ s One Dimensional Language
The Deconstruction of Literacies
De-Alienating Contexts for Critical Literacy
Contextual Critique: Paulo Freire
Contextual De-Alienation: Henry Giroux
Contextual Literacy: Raymond Geuss and Constructing a
Critical Theory
Conclusion...............................................................................................................114
Notes............................................................................................................................ 118
References................................................................................................................... 121
Appendix A................................................................................................................ 132
Appendix B.................................................................................................................149
Appendix C.................................................................................................................151
1
Introduction
2
The purpose of this dissertation is to find ways to develop a contextual
motivation for critical literacy or "contextual" literacy in the American college
classroom by studying its evolution in another setting— the poetry workshops of
Nicaragua— and by applying insights gained from literacy scholarship to this endeavor.
I begin my project from a broader perspective than is usual among compositionists,
examining the work of many scholars who have studied literacy in a wide variety of
cultural contexts. This examination reveals that literacy and by extension composition
pedagogy exists in a complex, but interdependent relationship with its socio-cultural
context. In effect, I propose a dialectical paradigm of text-context interaction for all
literacy events. Evidence from my Nicaraguan case study offers further support for
the existence of this paradigm and more insights into its workings. Ultimately, my
rationale for the deconstruction and reconstruction of literacy pedagogy in the United
States is based on the concept of alienation. I maintain that the context and practice of
literacy in the American classroom is an alienated one which calls for the reforms and
pedagogies I will propose. Furthermore, I will also argue that the context and practice
of literacy in Nicaragua-at least in the poetry workshops— is an unalienated one, and
for that reason, merits our closer observation if not our emulation.
In the first chapter I show that literacy events, whether in school or in the
poetry workshops of Nicaragua, are not isolated phenomena, but are related
dialectically to the experiential context from which they emerge. Historically, many
different kinds of literacies have existed, situations that scholars have variously
referred to as "restricted literacies," "essayist literacies" or "secondary oralities.”
These types of literacies have been paradoxically both a response to and an influence
on their wider cultural contexts. In other words, a dialectic exists between literacy (or
text) and its context. This has important implications for composition scholarship and
pedagogy, but compositionists have only recently begun to deal with effects of context
3
on writing. And even now, for the most part, their efforts take only the narrowest
classroom or rhetorical context into consideration, ignoring the wider cultural and
socio-economic arena. In the U.S.A., this means ignoring (or repressing) the
alienated conditions in which text is produced as well as the alienated product itself.
If we want to develop in our students a critical/contextual literacy, a literacy that
is well-informed culturally and historically, self-reflexive and analytical, research
suggests that we must act and teach on both sides of the text-context dialectic. This
would include, first of all, creating a de-alienating context in the classroom (and
ideally, through it, in the wider cultural arena) that calls for and supports a critical and
de-alienated literacy. Secondly, such a project must include promoting forms of
literacy and their corresponding textualities that are, in turn, likely to affect their
context critically.
In Nicaragua, perhaps more than in any other contemporary society, the
literacy-context dialectic is open to reconstruction, and an enormous effort is being
made to create an emancipatory culture of critical literacy. The poetry workshops are
one example of this effort. An understanding of the textual and contextual dialectic
unfolding in the workshop movement offers important insights for the development of
a pedagogy for contextual literacy in the United States. In fact, the workshop praxis
offers a model of unalienated text and contextual interaction.
My second chapter is an analysis of the Nicaraguan context. It includes the
theories of cultural construction and democratization of Ernesto Cardenal, Sergio
Ramirez and other Nicaraguan "culture workers." The poetry workshops are shown
to have evolved from these theoretical principles as well as from a particular political
and literary history. Efforts by the current government to foster the growth of the
workshop movement by encouraging receptive social and institutional contexts are
detailed.
4
An examination of workshop literacy follows in Chapter Three. The concrete,
prosaic style that has become characteristic of workshop poets and poetry is studied in
terms of its aesthetic and cultural effectiveness. Debates are presented that have
occurred on the pages of Nicaraguan newspapers over the workshop movement. Many
established Nicaraguan poets have accused the organizers of limiting workshop
production to poetry written in the simple, concrete style of Ernesto Cardenal's
exteriorism. Others have objected to its frequent revolutionary themes. I maintain that
the form and content of workshop literacy is not due to a mere imitation of Cardenal's
poetics, but is rather an astute, rhetorical response to a revolutionary context, in short
an example of the text-context dialectic at work.
In Chapter Four I begin by analyzing the American classroom rhetorical
situation using Marx' concept of alienation. Lukacs’ later elaboration of the concept
provides a theoretical perspective which helps explain why the research findings of
certain compositionists have not yet had the effect on classroom practice which they
should. I attempt to show that the essay has become in Lukacs terms a "reified
commodity," alienated from its student creators. According to Lukacs, a "mediated"
study of reification which relates the commodity form to the social "totality"
surrounding and supporting it will free us from alienation as we will be led to remake a
society in a more humanly satisfying form. These mediations must include
epistemological, rhetorical and linguistic components in the case of classroom literacy.
A critical pedagogy for North America can be formulated by drawing together
insights from the literacy research , the Nicaraguan poetry workshops and critical
theory. In keeping with the dialectical nature of literacy and its context, one element
of this pedagogy focuses on eistemological questions of language, literacy and text.
The chapter offers tools for exposing linguistic manipulation which include Derridian
deconstructions and techniques of linguistic analysis developed by Marcuse.
5
The second element of this pedagogy focuses on developing a contextual
motivation for critical literacy. The work of Freire, Giroux and Geuss is
epistemologically based in a cultural context and lends itself to this task. The chapter
concludes with the hope that a less alienated literacy will appear in our students' texts
when, among other things, students and teachers begin to value their own cultural
capital as a resource for writing— as is the case in Nicaragua. Fortified by a heightened
awareness of the linguistic potential for origination as well as dissimulation, perhaps
our students will be able to produce the kind of confident and critical response to their
cultural context that we could call a "contextual literacy."
6
Chapter One: Literacy, Context and Composition Scholarship
7
In setting the stage for the development of a critical pedagogy and study of
Nicaraguan poetry workshops, this chapter will review some of the major work in
literacy scholarship. For the purposes of this study, the theorists will be shown to fall
into two broad types, "cognitivists" and "contextualists." The first group, comprised
of Jack Goody and Ian Watt, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, A.R. Luria and David
Olson, have focused their work on the cognitive consequences of literacy. The other
group-Goody (later work), Kathleen Gough, Harvey Graff and John Oxenham— have
focused on the social ramifications. They believe that context or experiential context
(defined broadly as economic, cultural and socio-political institutions and beliefs)
seems to determine what kind of and to what extent literacy will flourish in a culture.
Like all schematizations, this one has important limitations. For example, theorists in
the first group such as Ong or Luria who have made vast claims about the effects of
literacy on human cognition follow their logic to make claims about the consequences
of literacy and illiteracy in society. Similarly, those theorists who have concerned
themselves primarily with literacy as a social phenomenon (e.g., Oxenham or Graff)
are also interested in the effects of literacy on cognition. Clearly then, the division
between the two groups is not clear cut, but one of emphasis in theoretical approach.
I propose that a reliance on either the cognitivist or contextualist perspectives
alone is inappropriate for composition scholarship. What these seemingly opposing
views actually reveal is a dialectical unity between literacy and its context. The
empirical studies of Scribner and Cole support this view. When one perspective is
missing from composition studies, typcically the contextual, the results, be they for
pedagogical, theoretical or descriptive purposes, will be inadequate. Decidedly, both
perspectives must be taken into account to develop a pedagogy for a critical literacy.
Accordingly, the chapter will conclude with a critique of composition theory,
pedagogy and research which fails to take the literacy-context dialectic into
8
consideration. Jakobson's and Kinneavy's models of discourse will be critiqued
along with "current traditional" pedagogy and much composing process research.
Review of Literature in Literacy Theory: The Cognitivist Perspective
Early literacy studies tend toward a perspective which emphasizes the
important cognitive and cultural consequences which result from the introduction of
literacy into a society. Goody and Watt were among the first scholars to make strong
claims for linking literacy to the habits of mind and culture associated with Western
tradition when they published "The Consequences of Literacy." In their analysis,
based on the literacy of ancient Greece, they write that the genesis of an alphabetic
writing system "was more than a mere precondition of the Greek achievement; it
influenced its whole nature and development in fundamental ways" (352). When
individuals acquired facility with written script, they acquired a more abstract way of
thinking due to the symbolic nature of words. For one thing, they were able to closely
examine writing on a page, and Goody and Watt with rather difficult reasoning, argue
that familiarity with the linear, consecutive appearance of words in lines on a page in a
temporal and spatial sequence led to a similar linear concept of time. Close textual
examination also led to a concern for the credibility of propositions; thus, claim Goody
and Watt, came logic and syllogistic reasoning. The ability to reflect on alternate
accounts of cultural and physical phenomena led to the distinction between history and
mythology, science and superstition. Because reading and writing are essentially
private activities, individuality in thought and literature became the norm. Further, the
existence of large numbers of well-informed individuals led to the possibility of a
democratic system of self-government.
Similar views were published the same year by Eric Havelock in Preface to
Plato. Although his work documents the advanced state of oral culture attained by the
9
Greeks, he attributes the brilliance of their later civilization to the development of
writing. In a comparison of oral and written communication, Havelock concludes that
different modes of thought emerge from each. Oral communication unifies
consciousness in its assumptions of shared knowledge and context. Written language
forces abstract operations which separate the reader from the text, providing the basis
for the replacement of imagistic representations by true concepts.
Sharing Havelock’s notion of the unity of consciousness in oral cultures, Walter
Ong has described some of the cognitive and cultural consequences in the shift from
"primary orality" to "primary literacy" and "secondary orality" ('Interfaces!. Ong states
that only by writing can one develop a logical, causal, analytically sequential
explanation. "This constitutes a new kind of noetic structure, not realizable until the
mind had interiorized writing, made writing part of the support and fabric of its own
intellectual procedures" ("Reading" 186-187).
In an empirical study conducted in 1932 but not available in English until 1976
and which has since been cited frequently in composition scholarship, the Soviet
psychologist A.R. Luria compared literate and non-literate peasants performing
various cognitive tasks. He found that the literates tended to group objects according
to abstract or linguistic categories while the illiterates grouped objects according to
perceptual and functional aspects of things. The illiterates seemed to be able to deal
only with concrete objects and were very context bound. Luria’ s studies have been
criticized by Scribner and Cole (189) for conflating the variables of schooling and
literacy. However, Frank D’ Angelo, one of the few composition theorists to make use
of work in literacy, uses Luria’ s research as evidence for his argument that the "most
important forms of cognitive activity, such as perception, classification, comparison,
cause and effect, and deduction, change noticeably as a result of literacy. . ." (155).
Indeed, he argues that these modes of thinking can only be acquired through literacy.
10
A final scholar in this perspective, David Olson, argues for a progression on
the individual and cultural level in western societies from meaning as extrinsic to
language which he calls "utterance," to meaning as intrinsic to language which he
terms, "text." This seems akin to what is more commonly described as a development
from oral to literate culture. The advantages of acquiring skill with "text" are many.
Besides summarizing those cited by Goody and Watt (1963), Havelock and Ong,
Olson asserts that
The bias of written language toward providing definitions,
making all assumptions and premises explicit, and observing the formal
rules of logic produces an instrument of considerable power for building
an abstract and coherent theory of reality. The development of this
explicit, formal system [the British essayist technique] accounts, I have
argued, for the predominant features of Western culture and for our
distinctive ways of using language and our distinctive modes of thought
(278).
The Contextualist Perspective
In his 1968 anthology of ethnographic studies, Literacy in Traditional Societies.
Goody modifies his cognitivist position to attribute more influence to context. He
states that his original article "should perhaps have been entitled the 'implications'
rather than the 'consequences' of literacy. . ." (4). He points out that studies in this
later volume deal with societies which did acquire the alphabet, but remained in a state
he calls "restricted literacy." To understand why none of these societies put the
alphabet to use in a way comparable to ancient Greece, Goody proposed to analyze the
"uses made of writing in a particular social setting, to approach the question from the
standpoint o f . . . the field worker with experience of the concrete context of written
communication" (4).
Thus, in a detailed study entitled "Literacy in Northern Ghana," he attempts to
unravel the mystery of the restricted literacy of the Ganja people who have acquired
Arabic script but haven't realized the full potentialities of literacy. He discovered that
11
the tendency to secrecy, to limit the circulation of books, was one characteristic of
restricted literacy. This frequently occurs where certain groups have an interest in
maintaining a monopoly of the sources of their power. For example, in certain Islamic
communities across India and West Africa, only certain castes and sects have access to
the sacred scriptures of the Koran. A similar guru tradition was in place in Gonjan
society. Combining characteristics of oral and written culture, the guru tradition
militates against independent study. Only those authorized to teach have the ability to
guide others through books. The religious nature of education also acts to inhibit
individual scholarly study. The Imams (priests) guard "The Book" carefully, not
wanting to enlarge or criticize it, but only to explicate it. Students aren't thought to
have mastered a passage unless they can commit it to memory; the students don't
compose on their own and aren’ t exposed to secular texts. Furthermore, since the
main use of the script is religious, lay people are little motivated to learn it (11-13).
In another essay in Goody's anthology, "Implications of Literacy in Traditional
China and India," Kathleen Gough argues against many of the claims made in Goody
and Watt's first article. Studying literacy in ancient China and India, Gough concludes
that widespread literacy does not necessarily lead to the separation of myth and
history. Indians, concerned with other-world reality, kept their myths and did not
produce histories, geographies, accurate measures of time or much new knowledge in
physics or chemistry. The Chinese did develop history, geography and an exact
measure of time, but this was because as a culture, they were interested in the
intricacies of social relations in the here and now. Furthermore, Gough points out that
in neither China nor India did literacy lead to the separation between science and the
supernatural as Goody claimed it had in Greece. Cultural and economic factors which
separated mental and practical workers were what actually prevented the development
of modern natural science.
12
Finally, Gough shows that widespread literacy did not lead to democracy in
China or India. In India, the most democratic assemblies were found among the
illiterate castes. Individuation did not automatically follow from widespread literacy
either. Most literati in both China and India conformed to the mores of their class and
were discouraged from expressions of individual experiences. Gough's conclusion,
drawn from her research on both Indian and Chinese as well as Keralan literacy, has
been widely quoted and is worth repeating here:
Literacy is for the most part an enabling rather than a causal factor,
making possible the development of complex political structures,
syllogistic reasoning, scientific inquiry, linear conceptions of reality,
scholarly specialization, artistic elaboration, and perhaps certain kinds of
individualism and of alienation. Whether, and to what extent, these will
in fact develop depends apparently on concomitant factors of ecology,
inter-societal relations, and internal ideological and social structural
responses to these ("Literacy in Kerala" 153).
In an essay which summarizes much of his earlier work, Harvey Graff, another
historian of literacy, concurs with Gough. He states that neither "writing nor printing
alone is an agent of change; their impacts are determined by the manner in which
human agency exploits them in a specific setting" ("Literacy Past and Present" 307).
This conclusion is based largely on the research he did for The Literacy Mvth:
Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth Century City. Here Graff studies the
role of literacy in the lives of 19th century immigrants to Canada. His purpose is to
use empirically based historical research to strip literacy of its exaggerated reputation.
Graff strongly objects to those, like Goody, who attribute major cognitive and
cultural developments solely to literacy. He argues that little evidence exists for such
claims, and that when it is possible to examine the effects of literacy on the lives of
individuals in a social context, a different picture emerges. Graff criticizes earlier
inquiries for their informal and anecdotal approach. He points out that such research is
flawed because it is based on estimated literacy levels of social elites such as aristocrats
13
and royalty, preachers, upper middle-class library subscribers, etc. Other equally
misled researchers deduced levels of literacy from such indirect sources as volume and
types of publications, growth in school facilities and contemporary assesments. All
this is to say that the evidence used to link literacy with many of its supposed benefits
is dubious.
Graff bases his study on more direct assessments of literacy in its social setting
and from historical and public records and documents: wills, census data, deeds,
inventories, depositions, marriage records, criminal records, and applications.
Assisted by the computer, Graff analyzes this information in conjunction with the
personal literacy experiences of immigrants to three 19th-century Canadian cities to
produce what he believes is a far more accurate description of the role of literacy than
has previously been published.
Graff finds that the "role of literacy in the life of individual and society is
contradictory and complex" (Literacy Myth 19). He did not find the expected direct
correlation between level of literacy and individual or social achievement, mobility or
economic development. Rather, the value of literacy "depended heavily on other
factors from ascribed social characteristics such as ethnicity, sex or race to the
institutional, social, economic and cultural contexts in which it was manifest" (Literacy
Myth 19). Graff writes that not everyone who was literate accrued special benefits
from the skill, and on the other hand, not all illiterates were disadvantaged either. In
many instances, Graff notes, literacy reinforced social hierarchies and became a
conservative force for order. Graff sees literacy, then, in a "relativistic position,"
because "material, economic, social and cultural needs for literacy vary from group to
group, person to person" (Literacy Myth 293). Graff also points out the
contradictions between the supposed benefits of literacy, promulgated in the literacy
myth, and its frequently more restricted role or even its use as an instrument to
14
reinforce the cultural hegemony of privileged classes. He continually emphasizes that
in his research, "social realities contradicted the promoted promises of literacy"
(Literacy Mvth 320).
In his later essay, Graff articulates what he believes to be the major shapers of
literacy:
The role of class and group specific demands for literacy's
skills, the impact of motivation, and the growing perceptions of its
values and benefits are among the major factors that explain the
historical contours of changing rates of popular literacy ("Literacy Past
and Present" 325).
In another broad social, political and economic account of literacy based on
extensive research, fieldwork and personal experience, John Oxenham provides
further support for a literacy-context dialectic. Oxenham points out that literacy is a
means to an end, a tool, and it will only be acquired in a society where literacy is
required for successful daily living. If an individual perceives little benefit to be had
from mastering the skills of reading and writing, he/she will most likely not bother to
acquire such skills. The lack of applications for literacy skills results in the failure of
many Third World literacy campaigns. "It would follow then that any pressure to
promote literacy would usually accompany some larger purpose" (6). Like Gough and
Graff, Oxenham believes, therefore, "that the presence and utilization of literacy
depend on the nature of the society in question" (7). From illiteracy, to restricted
literacy to mass literacy, the degree to which individuals master reading and writing
will depend upon contextual conditions. Among the conditions that have encouraged
mass literacy in the West, Oxenham cites the development of worldwide commerce,
technologies such as the printing press, government administration over wide-ranging
territories, religious motivation such as the Protestant desire to experience the Bible
through personal reading, and finally, a desire for the kind of cultural knowledge
gained through literature and newspapers.
15
Turning to a more detailed examination of the relationship between literacy and
social context, Oxenham makes more explicit the conditions under which literacy can,
paradoxically, accompany both periods of intellectual advance and periods of
intellectual stagnation. He writes that literacy is contingent on certain forms of society
for its growth. It is also a necessary condition for certain forms of intellectual
advance, but not a singular sufficient cause. Tracing the advance and decline of
several important civilizations, Oxenham argues that if "literacy is adopted or
developed merely as a neutral technology which facilitates or promotes functions
which are already allocated between different groups in a society, its effects are likely
to be conserving and stabilizing" (65). An example would be a society like that in
certain Moslem communities in which a religious elite begins to use literacy among its
members for discussion of sacred texts. The elites' privileged position is already in
place before the introduction of literacy, and literacy is not used to foster the
questioning of textual authority. In other words, where the present social environment
is oppressive or fearful of change, literacy will not become a stimulus for change or
intellectual creativity. On the other hand, a society which values speculation and
supports a critical attitude toward established authority may develop into a Classical
Greece or Renaissance Italy.
Focusing on the individual and his/her relationship to the social context of
literacy, Oxenham states that literacy can increase an individual's sense of control over
his/her own life. Research indicates that literates are more willing to work for social
improvements, and they are less likely to be swayed by magical or superstitious
beliefs. They may even be more apt to play a role in political institutions or
community organizations. Oxenham cautions, however, that these perspectives are
largely identical to those of the people who teach in schools, organize literacy
16
programs or write textbooks, and so the assumptions of new attitudes on the part of
literates may be the results of schooling or modernization.
Crediting McLuhan as the source of his concern, Oxenham turns to an
examination of possible negative effects of literacy on the individual. He warns that
readers may tend to become passive receivers rather than active producers of ideas. In
reading, he explains, the higher mental faculties are occupied with the cognitive
process of taking in information; this can inhibit critical assessment. For this reason,
he writes, university trained faculty have always had to teach and encourage critical
reading of literature. Finally, Oxenham speculates that there is a relationship between
the type of society one reads in and the type of reader one becomes. An authoritarian
atmosphere would seem to stifle critical thought in individuals. A society in which
there is debate among a plurality of viewpoints might encourage it.
A Dialectical Perspective
Scribner and Cole's more empirically based study on literacy takes a dialectical
perspective with regard to the cognitive-context issue. They describe the physical
locale and cultural context of their experiment as well as the influence these factors had
on their experimental results. Interestingly as well, they conclude that literacy has
some impact on cognitive functions. Their claims in this respect, however, are quite
modest and, importantly, they connect these cognitive changes to the context in which
they occur.
In an attempt to differentiate the influence of literacy from that of schooling on
the individual, Scribner and Cole undertook their famous study among the Vai people
of Africa. These researchers developed what they called a "contextual view" of
literacy which reinforces the dialectical view put forth here (252). They write that "the
more purposes served by literacy [in its social context], the more literacy practices
become varied and complex" (256). They found that literacy as well as schooling has
17
some identifiable cognitive consequences, but in no case did they find "deep
psychological" differences between schooled and non-schooled literates (251). The
schooled literates did seem better at meta-linguistic activities in which they talked about
talk or writing, but the authors conclude that based on their evidence, it is not possible
to claim that schooling or literacy stimulates growth of overall cognitive ability.
Rather, cognitive consequences are highly specific and closely tied to actual social
practices with particular "scripts" or texts. Scribner and Cole stress that other life
experiences such as moving from a rural to an urban environment seemed to be the
deciding factor in ability to perform abstracting functions.
Scribner and Cole object to research into literacy which focuses on the
technology of literacy and its reputed consequences without treating it as a set of
socially organized practices, or in other words, without taking its context into
consideration. They write that literacy "is not simply knowing how to read and write a
particular script but applying this knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts
of use" (256). The cognitive and cultural consequences of literacy are then seen as
responses to specific social needs. The authors conclude:
Thus in order to identify the consequences of literacy, we need to
consider the specific characteristics of specific practices. And, in order
to conduct such as analysis, we need to understand the larger social
system that generates certain kinds of practices (and not others) and
poses particular tasks for these practices (and not others). From this
perspective, inquiries into the cognitive consequences of literacy are
inquiries into the impact of socially organized practices in other domains
(trade, agriculture) on practices involving writing (keeping lists of sales,
exchanging goods by letter) (237).
Rather than choosing between the findings of scholars of the cognitivist
perspective or those of a more contextual position, a dialectical approach to the issue
allows for a relative acceptance of both. The arguments put forward by both camps
are convincing, and the empirical research suggests that there are certain elements of
truth in both approaches. In other words, the acquisition of literacy by an individual
18
both affects and is affected by his/her wider cultural context. Thus, there is an
interaction, a mutually dependent relationship, a dialectic, between literacy and its
context.
The Literacv-Context Dialectic and Composition Scholarship
Although most teach from what I have termed a cognitivist perspective
regarding literacy and believe strongly in the beneficial effects of learning to read and
write, composition scholars have not recognized the importance of the dialectical
relationship occuring between literacy and its context. In fact, they are only beginning
to recognize the implications of literacy studies in general for composition pedagogy.
It seems as though these studies would lead them inevitably to studies of context, for
as Ross Winterowd has said, "Literacy is radically scenic" (in the Burkean sense of the
term). But with a few exceptions compositionists limit their studies to the context of
the classroom or the academy .2 For the most part, composition scholars have not
recognized the research in literacy studies which shows that cultural context will
largely determine the extent and quality of literacy that develops in a society. Perhaps
they are reluctant to consider classroom literacy as a response to a larger cultural
context because of the daunting nature of any attempt to affect this context.
Nevertheless we cannot expect a more critical literacy than currently exists, unless we
concern ourselves with both sides of the literacy-context dialectic. We must help
individuals become more critical readers and writers in the classroom and work in the
wider social arena to encourage a cultural context that promotes more than passive
acceptance of the status quo.
Formulating certain axioms at this point will help to emphasize the extreme
importance of context in questions of literacy. Literacy is context-determined, context-
directed and context-constitutive: context-determined because as research by Gough,
Graff, Oxenham and Scribner and Cole has shown, literacy is a response to certain
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contextual needs. The type of literacy that predominates in a culture, as well as the
meanings it communicates, will depend on these contextual needs. Literacy is context-
directed since it seems to be acquired only when it is perceived by individuals to be
useful in some way to their lived experience (Graff, Oxenham).
Third, literacy is context-constitutive since it forms a part of the very context to
which it responds. Many literate conventions are prerequisite knowledge for
comprehending literate meanings. Prerequisite world knowledge cannot readily be
demonstrated by illiterates, nor do certain cultural/social behaviors and institutions
develop in illiterate societies (Goody and Watt, Goody, Oxenham). Ignoring the
debate over the extent to which cognitive mechanisms are actually developed, altered
or merely put to use by literacy, it does seem to be the case that many manifestations of
thought such as high level abstractions, classifications, deductions and analyses are
often apparent only by means of written language. Literacy, therefore, is context-
constitutive in that it is used to amplify and extend the power of human thought
patterns in discourse, thus producing new knowledge. It is constitutive of the very
prior knowledge that is necessary for its comprehension. Paradoxically, the context-
constitutive nature of literacy can be identified with the cognitivist perspective,and
again, we are led to view the literacy-context relationship as a dialectic.
These characteristics of literacy combine with the shaping nature of literacy
itself in a dialectic of interaction and influence. The contextual factors, I maintain, are
especially critical in developing motivation; they provide the reasons why many people
will learn to read and write.
But a look at composition scholarship reveals that it does not recognize the
function of context, nor does it provide us with the tools we need for analyzing and
teaching the logocentric nature of writing. I will now look briefly at some major
studies and theories in three areas of composition scholarship— composition or
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rhetorical theory, composition pedagogy and the psychology of com position-to
illustrate this neglect of context and its consequences. In Chapter Four I will return to
some of this research in an analysis of the classroom context and the "academic
essay," which will reveal the alienated and estranged nature of both. Since research in
the field is pointing toward recognition of this alienation, its denial (in the form of a "
contextual blindspot") seems to be a question of ideological repression rather than
ignorance.
For example, one of the most frequently applied models of the discourse
situation, Jakobson's diagram of the speech event, completely omits context as a
shaping factor of discourse. The factor labelled "context" does not refer to the
pressures of external social realities and power relationships or even internal
psychological ones at all, but rather to the subject matter. In her widely used text, A
Rhetoric for Writing Teachers. Erica Lindemann writes that in the Jakobson model
"... we can define 'context' to mean an entire world of subject matter or topics which
writers develop into messages" (14).
According to Jakobson, there are six main constitutive factors in any speech
event. If a verbal message is found to focus primarily on one of the six factors, that
focus constitutes the main function of the verbal message. He diagrammed the
situation in this way. (Functions are in parenthesis.)
Context
(referential)
Message
(poetic)
Addresser _______________________________________________ Addressee
(connative) (emotive)
Contact
(phatic)
Code
(Metalingual)
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Students are often taught to analyze discourse in the above terms, focusing
heuristically on each component of the speech act to stimulate ways of writing more
effectively. For example, in writing a letter to the editor, the student would be taught
to examine the stylistic and organizational requirements of the type of "message" being
sent; facts and evidence about the subject matter— "context"— would be chosen
according to their effectiveness with a particular "addressee"; the persona the
"addresser" projects in the text would be thoughtfully constructed. While this use of
the model provides very useful information, there is no place for the influence of
contextual factors, to be evaluated. Thus, the largely context-determinant nature of
language and literacy is not illustrated by Jakobson's model.
The same point can be made about using the rhetorical triangle as an explanatory
model of the components of discourse. Presented as Kinneavy diagrammed it (19),
the communicative act has four components:
Encoder ^
(expressive)
Decoder
(persuasive)
Style
(literature)
Reality
(referential)
There is a dominant function associated with each component as with Jakobson's
model, but Kinneavy assumes that the "aim is embodied in the text itself" (49) and
influences all other elements of the discourse. Kinneavy qualifies this assertion with
the warning that one must take into account "the qualifications of situation and culture"
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(49), but there is likely no mention of such qualifications when the triangle is offered
to students as a means for discourse analysis. An objectivist theory of text is by its
very nature acontextual.
If Graff and others are right, and the value and effectiveness of literacy for
individuals depends on factors such as age, sex, race, socio-economic status and
access to formal and informal and loci of power (Literacy Myth 19) then students must
be led to examine these factors in their use of discourse. These considerations would
have an effect on all the components of both Kinneavy's and Jakobson's models, but
especially content and style.
Pedagogical technique and theory is another important area of composition
scholarship that ignores the context for writing. James Berlin has carefully analyzed
and described today's most common pedagogies in his article, "Contemporary
Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories." The "current traditional" model, by
far the most popular, denies contextual information so totally that it seems calculated.
Berlin explains that in this type of writing instruction, truth is assumed to exist prior to
language, which is considered a socially neutral code. Such an approach denies the
context-constitutive or social nature of language and knowledge. Students are urged to
efface their psychological and social concerns as writers in order to perceive an
unobstructed empirical reality. The audience is to be as "objective" as the writer, both
divorcing themselves from the biases of language, society and history (769-770).
Berlin writes that in this way, writer, audience and language are subservient to the
"myth of an objective reality" (777). In other words, a common context is assumed
for every writer, despite the very different personal, social and economic situations
that engender writing. Since language is context-constitutive, i.e., it both shapes our
perceptions and constitutes at least part of the reality that we perceive, students should
be suspicious of writing in its logocentric quests for context-stripping ultimate truths.
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Berlin asserts,that we do our students a disservice if we continue to propagate notions
of language and reality that even the empirical sciences no longer subscribe to (777).
The area which I call the psychology of composition is probably the least
concerned with context. Studies of the composing process and cognitive functions of
writing predominate here. For the most part, researchers in these areas have chosen to
concentrate on the acontextual mind of the writer (as if there were, in reality, such a
construct). The early exception to this tendency was Janet Emig, whose pioneering
case study of twelfth graders’ compossing processes revealed that students felt a
stronger commitment to self-initiated or "reflexive" writing than they did towards
school-sponsored or "extensive" writing. Students also spent more time on reflexive
writing (91).
Later researchers chose not to continue studying these different context-
dependent composing processes and have focused almost exclusively on careful
analysis and description of a very decontextualized composing process. Studies by
Stallard (216), Pianko(20) and Perl (330), for example, show that better writers plan
more, write longer and revise more. Perl's less skilled writers were hung up on
mechanics (333). Sommers' inexperienced writers had no holistic concept of their
papers, and revisions didn't carry over from draft to draft (383). Sommers also
assumed that certain sequences of activities in the revision process should be common
to all writers, i.e., differences in their finished products would only be the result of
qualitative differences in ability to revise. However, in similar research on revision,
Faigley and Witte did not find a best way to revise (410). They noted much variation
among revision strategies and concluded that the best methods were those that adapted
the writing to its larger rhetorical and situational contexts.
The assumption that all writers could share a common revision or composing
process parallels the assumption that all writers share a common context for writing.
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This is simply not true. The unequal status among writers regarding their prior
knowledge, personal psychologies and cultural and economic capital makes for
differences in the composing processes that this acontextual research can never reveal.
Also, in all of the previous studies, some writers were much more highly motivated
than others and, as a result, were much more willing to spend time perfecting their
writing. W hat was responsible for this difference in attitude? The theoretical
underpinnings of most of this research doesn't even lead researchers to pose these
obvious questions, or if they do, they find the answer in technique, not motivation.
This blindness to experiential context and the social and psychological power
structures involved in language production also leads to an emphasis on form and
technique (or process) over content. What a student writes becomes less important
than how he/she actually goes about writing it. This process myopia has led to some
very elegant and detailed models of the composing process, e.g., Flower and Hayes
(370), but the critical literacy we desire for our students is never acknowledged as a
goal in this research. I do not wish to suggest that we abandon composing process
research, for it has helped us to dispell much superstition about the act of writing. But
the questions it leaves unanswered are crucial. Writing as a context-directed activity is
not the same across contexts, and, therefore, acontextual research probably distorts as
much as or more than it clarifies.
An attempt to answer "why" we have ignored context also makes for interesting
speculation. Literacy scholars have demonstrated that literacy is a social issue as well
as an individual one. And as we will see in Chapter Four, much composition research
leads to an inditement of the school writing context and product. An alienated context
will lead to an alienated literacy and vice-versa. But dealing with context demands that
educators go beyond the narrow confines of the classroom and recognize complex
struggles of power and ideology. Many may prefer to leave these areas alone, but
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until we as a profession begin to understand and manipulate the literacy-context
dialectic, we will never see our students reach their full potential as writers.
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Chapter 2: Context and Praxis of the Nicaraguan Poetry Workshops
27
As we have seen in Chapter One, a thorough analysis of any literacy event must
emphasize context since context affects so much of what gets written in a society. At
the same time, we have also seen that neither a contextualist perspective nor a
cognitivist perspective is correct in isolation: a dialectic exists between them. Literacy
affects and is affected by its wider cultural context.
In an effort to analyse the production of the Nicaraguan poetry workshops and
determine their relevance for writing pedagogy in the United States, I will examine
several of the contexts that have shaped workshop poetic literacy. This will be
followed by a look at workshop praxis (theoretically informed methodology) and a
discussion of how the context has shaped this praxis which becomes another context
itself for the poetry produced.
Finally, it seems necessary to state at this point (even though it is properly the
subject of my next chapter) that there are many parallels between a new government's
determination to build or reconstruct a popular culture and a writing teacher's desire to
create authentic voices and assertive self-confidence among his/her students. The
parallels seem especially appropriate when the students are from minority groups or
are otherwise disempowered and, like the Nicaraguans, have seen their own culture
denigrated in favor of another more powerful one. The self-affirming steps the
Nicaraguans are taking in reclaiming their own culture can, I think, provide us with
some insights into creating an empowering writing classroom.
In Nicaragua, post revolutionary leaders have declared the building of an
independent, democratic culture as one of their long term goals. One element in the
construction of this emancipatory culture is the poetry workshop, a literacy event that
strengthens literary as well as literacy skills. In November of 1982 there were at least
66 poetry workshops meeting regularly. There are fewer now due to the contra war
and economic hardships. But they continue to be found in cities and towns and in
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smaller, more isolated areas. It is the rare community that does not have one. Both
organizers and participants see themselves as taking part in a social transformation
which will democratize culture in Nicaragua. The aim is for large numbers of people
to become discriminating producers of culture as well as consumers. Since they are
historically unique, the success of Nicaragua’ s poetry workshop movement is hard to
evaluate. However, judging by the proliferation of workshops and the amount of
poetry that they continue to produce and publish, it appears that they are enjoying a
popularity greater than even their creators had imagined.
At the first National Meeting of Poetry Workshops in Palacagiiina, December
18-20, 1981, Mayra Jimenez, then National Director, said that after the Revolution she
first thought to create six, eight or maybe ten workshops in certain hard-fighting
barrios of Managua. However, in just one year, "hundreds of poets [were] in
workshops that abound all over Nicaragua: in Leon, Granada, Palacagiiina, Condega,
Diriamba, Cuidad Darfo, Jinotega, San Carlos, Bluefields, barrios of Managua, in the
Police Department, the Armed Forces,. . . and the Milicias" (2).
Pre-existing Cultural Context
One reason for the apparent success of the workshops could lie in the favorable
cultural climate that existed in Nicaragua long before the Revolution. In Nicaragua, as
in most Latin American countries, poetry is a vital art form, and the habit of writing
poetry is quite common. But even among these poetry-writing nations, Nicaragua has
enjoyed a special status, producing more good poets than might be expected given its
small population (now 3,000,000). Among those who have reached international
acclaim are Ruben Dario, Jose Coronel Urtecho and Emesto Cardenal.
In an attempt to explain the proliferation of Nicaraguan poets, Cardenal has
written that it has long been a tradition for the older, more established Nicaraguan
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poets to tutor and encourage the younger ones (Talleres de Poesfa 8). In this way,
Dario taught what he knew to Alfonso Cortes, for example, and later Cardenal would
teach the younger poets of his day. This spirit of cooperation and support between the
generations is not always the case in other countries. Thus, writes Cardenal,
"Nicaragua has always had poetry workshops (Talleres de Poesfa 8). Margaret
Randall, in a recent book of translations of Nicaraguan poetry, Risking a Somersault
in the Air, points out that Nicaragua is the only country she knows of which gives
poets a title (4). Nicaraguans say "Poeta Cardenal," Randall explains, to show the
love and respect they have for their poets. Not only famous poets are accorded the
epithet, but many workshop poets refer to each other in this way as well (4).
Robert Pring-Mill, an Oxford scholar who published some of the first studies in
English of the poetry workshops, places the poetry in a broader Latin American
context helpful to understanding its evolution. In "Mayra Jimenez and the Rise of the
Nicaraguan 'Poesfa de Taller'," Pring-Mill states that workshop poetry
fits into a well established socio-political "niche" in the general system
of Latin American Literature, for all its novel features. Specifically,
"committed" poetry plays a prominent part in Latin America: recording
events, praising heros and denouncing tyrants, protesting against
abuses, spreading new ideas or crystalizing ideals--i.e. not just
portraying "reality" but acting upon it, since poets use their poems as
actual instruments of social change (1).
In other words, poetry in Latin America has always played an extremely
important political role.
Sandinista Cultural Context
In the Nicaraguan case, Zimmerman and Banberger conclude that poetic
production, since it contributes to the formation of a revolutionary culture, "distinctly
contributed to the overthrow of the Somoza regime" (63). Today, in fact, many
Nicaraguan government leaders have considerable experience not only in winning
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battles but also in writing poetry. President Daniel Ortega's prison poetry is known
throughout Nicaragua. Vice-President Sergio Ramirez is an outstanding poet, novelist
and critic. Poet members of the Frente Sandinista de Liberation Nacional (FSLN)
National Directorate include Comandante Tomas Borge and Jaime Wheelock. Other
published poets occupying government positions are Beltran Morales, Michele Najlis,
Omar Cabezas, Gioconda Belli, Daisy Zamora, Julio Valle-Castillo and, of course,
Emesto Cardenal. There were also young poets such as Leonel Rugama and Fernando
Gordillo who died fighting Somoza. Zimmerman and Banberger write that"... the
romantic and radical vision of the revolutionary poet whose poetry is best fulfilled in
acts of militancy, even to the point of death, became a fundamental motif of Sandinista
culture" (64). Evidence from recently published writing indicates that the desire to be
a poet revolutionary is still strong among Nicaraguan youth.
The Nicaraguans are very consciously trying to reformulate their culture. They
have decided to examine their roots and emphasize certain native characteristics in
creating new forms of cultural production which are more in keeping with the ideals of
the Sandinista Revolution. This effort began the day after the liberation of the country
when Ernesto Cardenal became Minister of Culture. Cardenal's staff and associated
artists are grouped under the Association of Sandinista Cultural Workers (ASTC).
Centers for Popular Culture (CPCs) have been established throughout the country to
aid the Association's work in creating a culture by and for the people. Julio Cortazar
has expressed the truly popular character of the Nicaraguan concept of culture in this
very figurative but perhaps all the more accurate way:
. . . scarcely does one arrive in Nicaragua— the Nicaragua of 19 July, of
course,— when the word "culture" commences ringing in one's ears,
forming part of an extremely varied thematic program, and it takes very
little time to notice that this word, here, has a connotation that is lacking
in countries where it is used only on a level that some would call
privileged. . . . they have pushed the word "culture" out into the street
as though it were an ice cream cart or fmit wagon; they have placed it in
the hands and the mouths of the people with the simple cordial gesture
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of one who offers you a banana; and this incorporation of the word into
the common, everyday vocabulary expresses what is truly important,
which is not the word itself but what it carries as a charge; its explosive,
its marvelous, rich, actual and potential charge for each inhabitant of the
country (53).
Sergio Ramirez, Nicaraguan Vice-President and noted literary scholar, has also written
about the important role culture plays in the new Nicaragua. In a widely published
address to Nicaraguan culture workers, "Los intelectuales y el futuro revolucionario,"
Ramirez makes five points about cultural development in third world countries which
have been politically and economically dependent for decades and are attempting to
surmount this dependence. First, Ramirez emphasizes that the culture created by the
dominant class in Nicaragua prior to 1979 was an abysmal failure (168). It was a
failure because this culture was not authentic, but borrowed or masqueraded.
Nicaraguans were shown the art and fashions of Miami, for example; other times
native creations were presented in unflattering combination with more commericalized
art forms. It was a culture "disfigured" by the political, social and economic
oppression the country experienced. "There were authentic Nicaraguan cultural
manifestations," writes Ramirez, "but these were the results of a truly dialectical
struggle between a popular culture that wanted to be appreciated and an elitist,
commercialized culture that the class in power tried to impose on all of Nicaragua"
(168).
In building a new culture, Ramirez warns the culture workers to be wary of this
past legacy. It is not a question of ignoring or denying this oppresive past. However,
it must be carefully examined and reinterpreted before it can provide an organized and
coherent reflection which provides a dependable foundation for future creations.
Secondly, Ramirez points out that the new culture must be one having deeply
popular roots. It is a mistake to equate elitism with quality, he insists. The Somoza
culture was elitist, but nonetheless generally of poor quality (170). Ramirez
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challenges Nicaraguan artists to look carefully at the life around them for their artistic
themes and, in so doing, he believes, they will create a revolutionary culture, since
revolution is literally occurring in daily life. As a current example of Nicaraguan
popular culture, Ramirez mentions the poetry of the poetry workshops:
a poetry of young soldiers, a poetry which is anonymous much of the
time, a poetry derived from events of daily life, of reality, and which
appears to me much more valuable than poetry produced by a dilettante
elite who is not participating in our national affairs (171).
The third point Ramirez makes is that the concept of culture should not be
restricted to mere individual creation nor be stripped of its political origins and role.
We must be careful not to romanticize the idea of the isolated poet writing from an
exalted position above the concerns of ordinary people. This is an elitist idea inherited
from past regimes, explains Ramirez, which falsely isolates art and the artist from life.
Since the vast majority of Nicaraguans participated in the Revolution, it was truly a
popular revolution, and its subsequent political and economic effects have a popular
character. Most Nicaraguan artists participated in the Revolution, too, and have
benefitted from it. Thus, culture, the artist and popular politics are all intertwined. As
the Revolution aims at transformation, so should revolutionary culture (171). Denying
the political and social aspects of culture is a type of repression that can no longer be
tolerated, he writes. He calls on artists to take part in this national transformation
which is both collective and individual. It is the individual who must undertake the
struggle to create new attitudes, habits, mentalities and vision in him or herself and
others and, in so doing, become part of a mass of people capable of effecting change.
Ramirez’ fourth point is that a revolutionary culture calls for authenticity and
quality. He warns that popular culture should not mean facile expressionism or
political sloganeering. More than ever, artists must call on their creativity, originality
and intellectual discipline. "It is not simply a question of amplifying or adorning our
empoverished cultural tradition," he writes. "A revolutionary culture must find ever
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new ways of transforming our limited historical resources into an authentic popular
culture of high quality" (173).
Finally, Ramirez explains that, paradoxically, a search for authenticity in
revolutionary culture will take Nicaraguans far beyond their national frontiers.
Finding the authentic does not mean enclosing oneself solipsisticly in one's own
vernacular or folklore. The first impulse should be toward the national, but the
"universal dimension is essential to all cultural development," he writes (174).
Ramirez advises cultural workers to participate in the great structural changes taking
place in Nicaraguan society or miss the opportunity to record and appreciate their own
native energy. He believes that in looking closely at their own situation, they will see
that the country doesn't yet have the preparation or foundation to project itself
universally— but paradoxically, "this is the condition of Nicaragua's universality"
(174).
Airing similar opinions in an address entitled "The Democratization of Culture,"
delivered before UNESCO in April, 1982, Ernesto Cardenal stated that "The cultural
liberation in Nicaragua has been part of the struggle for national liberation" (350).
Under the Somoza regime, the prevailing view seemed to be that what was native to
Nicaragua, nationalistic or indigenous, was also subversive and to be banned.
Literature, theatre and music were, therefore, strictly censored. Since the Revolution,
a concerted effort has been made to seek out and preserve everything Nicaraguan: folk
art, song and dance, Indian customs and languages, folk cuisine. Popular heros like
Sandino have also been revived.
Cardenal reminded his audience that the literacy campaign of 1979, which
reduced illiteracy from 57% to 12%, was also designed to rediscover long forgotten
cultural riches. The teenage "brigadistas" who were enlisted to teach the peasants to
read and write also learned as much as they could from their pupils. "Among other
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things, we collected an oral history of the War of National Liberation, and collected
flora and fauna, noting typical foods, medicinal herbs, archeological sites and mineral
deposits, and gathered handicrafts, myths, legends and popular songs" (353).
This approach to literacy instruction typifies the best of the revolutionary spirit in
Nicaragua: a significant amount of energy goes into breaking down traditional barriers
between people. A conscious effort is made to transform oppressive hierarchies into
situations of reciprocal learning; hence, teacher-pupil, male-female and artist-audience
relationships take on new dimensions.
Cardenal's oft-quoted dictum that "the Revolution is culture and culture is the
Revolution" refers to the fact that the Revolution in Nicaragua has transformed and
continues to transform reality. For Cardenal the primary transformation is cultural. A
learned man, he reminds us that even the "purpose of philosophy for Marx was to
transform reality," by which Cardenal means that to eradicate the exploitation of
humans by humans, economic reformation alone is insufficient. He explains further,
"I also believe that theology should transform reality. And that poetry should
transform reality" ("Cultura Revolucionaria" 181).
In the same vein, Cardenal writes that for "Christians, everything must be
subordinate to God. But the authentic Christianity teaches that God is love of
humanity. That means that all we do should be subordinate to the love of humanity;
art for art's sake does not fit into this scheme; art must be created which shows love
for all of humankind— this is the Revolution" ("Cultura Revolucionaria" 179).
Political and Economic Context
An account of the post-revolutionary political and economic situation in
Nicaragua will facilitate an understanding of the interactions between Nicaraguan
politics and culture. The quest for economic and political institutions that are
35
egalitarian and empowering for the majority of Nicaraguans parallels a similar mission
on the cultural level. As in many Latin American and Western European countries,
banks have been nationalized along with the major energy-producing companies, but
seventy percent of the country's industrial wealth remains in private hands. Post
revolution land reform, which entailed returning to tenant farmers land formerly
owned by the Somoza family, left eighty percent of the land to private farmers and
only twenty percent to government-sponsored cooperative farms. The biggest change
in the country's economic planning has been the amount budgeted for programs which
relieve poverty and disease, increase educational opportunities, and increase capital
investment in agriculture and industry.
A relatively large portion of Nicaragua's national budget goes for cultural
activities. This is rather remarkable considering the fact that the country must put ever
increasing amounts of material resources into the fight to maintain its frontiers. In
1980, defense spending consumed seven percent of the national budget. Today that
figure is up to forty-five percent (Marchetti 15).
According to E.V.K. Fitzgerald,3 Professor of Development Studies, Institute
of Social Studies at the Hague, and Economic Advisor to President Ortega, the country
is currently experiencing great economic austerity, but the effort to create alternative,
democratic institutions continues. While the final form of those institutions is not clear
at this time, the political direction is definitely leftward. It is not thought, however,
that an extremely centralized economy is viable or desirable in Nicaragua, and leaders
are certainly hoping to eschew a Cuban type "solution." The regime is firm in its
commitment to four broad goals: to relieve poverty, to maintain a mixed
(private/public) economy, to encourage political pluralism and to maintain political
non-alignment.
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Immediate Historical Context of the Workshops
The precursors of the present workshops were set up on the island of
Solentiname, a contemplative community that Ernesto Cardenal helped to establish in
1966. Cardenal and the people of the island attempted to improve their spiritual,
material and intellectual lives by reorganizing their energies along collaborative lines.
They organized farming co-ops, pooling their money for machinery and seed. They
built health care facilities and schools and even began training themselves as painters
and sculptors. Their primitive paintings began to sell nationally and internationally,
bringing in funds for other community projects. Their study and revolutionary
interpretation of the Gospel has been published as The Gospel of Solentiname in four
volumes. Poetry workshops were organized by Mayra Jimenez, a poet from Costa
Rica who had been invited to the commune by Cardenal.
Cardenal explains that he had been on the Island of Solentiname for 10 years,
and although the peasants there had mastered many new skills, they didn't know his
poetry. He thought it would be too difficult for them, even though he had always
tried to make it accessible. Jimenez, however, thought otherwise. She had had
experience in Costa Rica doing workshops with children, and she was determined to
try a similar approach in Solentiname. Before too long, her workshop poets were
reading the best Nicaraguan, North American and even ancient Greek poetry(detailed
hereafter) and writing in the concrete, imagist style of Cardenal's "exteriorismo."^
The serene productivity of the commmune was not to last, however. As
members began to examine their place in Nicaraguan society, they became increasingly
aware of the injustice of the Somoza dictatorship. Many joined the Sandinista
struggle, and after an ill-fated attack on the National Guard barracks of San Carlos in
1979, their commune was destroyed in a retaliatory raid. As soon as the FSLN was
victorious in 1979, however, and Cardenal became Minister of Culture, he called
37
Jimenez back to experiment with more of the workshops. The first post-revolutionary
workshop was set up in Monimbo, a city whose Indian residents had fought
courageously in the Revolution. This first workshop had thirty-two participants, some
of whom were illiterate. These were taught to dictate their poems. The second
workshop was organized in another Indian community, Subtiava; others followed in
the working class barrios of Managua. "And after that," continues Cardenal, "we set
them up in other cities, and small towns, in batallions in the army, police departments,
the air force and the Ministry of the Interior.. .. and we did something in Nicaragua
that had never been done before in the world: we had workers, indians, peasants,
domestic employees, soldiers and police writing poetry, and good, modern poetry"
f'Talleres de poesfa" 10).
Workshop Administration and Pedagogy
In 1984, the poetry workshops were administered by the Ministry of Culture
headed by Cardenal. Working with Cardenal is Julio Valle-Castillo, head of the
Literature Department and editor of Poesfa Libre, a ministerial journal which publishes
workshop and other poetry. Although Jimenez was responsible for starting the first
workshops, she has now returned to Costa Rica. Five "poetas orientadores" or poet-
organizers, trained by Jimenez and working out of the the National Headquarters of
the Centers for Popular Culture, facilitate the workshops. These young organizers, all
in their twenties, were chosen by Jimenez and Cardenal for their ability as poets, their
service and dedication to the Revolution and their popular origins. The poet-
organizers also serve on the Poesfa Libre editorial board.
Currently the organizers include Carlos Calero, lead organizer, who recently
finished his Licenciatura in Letters from the Universidad Nacional Autonomfa de
Nicaragua; Juan Ramon Falcon, campesino-poet, who is attending engineering school
38
at night; Gerardo Gadeo, member of the Nicaraguan Armed Forces; and Gonzalo
Domingo, a member of the Milicia. Previously, one woman, Cony Pacheco, was part
of the team. The organizers are active on other fronts as well. Gadeo is frequently
called to military maneuvers in the north; Falcon regularly picks coffee beans; they all
belong to the civilian militia, which has frequent mobilizations. The organizers also
leave Managua, of course, to perform their organizing duties. For administrative
purposes, Nicaragua is divided into six regions and three zones. Each organizer is
responsible for dealing with the workshops in a designated geographical area, but as
the workshop poets themselves gain experience, they take over many of the
organizers' duties.
At the high point of the workshop movement, November of 1982, 66 had been
formally organized with a total of 627 poets. ^ Cardenal estimates that at least 2,000
different people have attended workshops since their inception ("Conversando" 1).
However, because of the ever more difficult situation the country has found itself in
militarally and economically, the numbers of workshops organized in the last two
years has diminished. Cardenal believes that there may be only half as many
workshops meeting regularly now as in the past ("Conversando" 1). He adds,
though, that the workshops are not meant to be permanent. It is expected that after
practice in the workshops, many poets will feel experienced and confident enough to
continue working on their own.
To initiate a workshop, the organizers first inform as many people as possible
of the date and place of the first "orientation" session. They frequently announce the
workshops using cars with loud speakers, radio broadcasts and leaflets. There is
much interaction with the local CPC which helps in notifying people with posters and
announcements and finding a suitable place to meet. Meetings are often held in the
homes of local resident or in the CPC itself. The workshop is also announced in the
39
n e w s p a p e r ^ and promoted through local branches of mass organizations: AMNLAE
(the women's organization); the CST (the Sandinista Union); the Juventud Sandinista
(youth organization); ANDEN (the teachers' union); etc.
Orientation sessions typically attract about twelve poets who come from all walks
of life— peasants, maids, nurses, bakers, and manual laborers, for example. They are
predominantly from the poorer sectors of the population. Many are members of the
army or police force. Both male and female, they reflect the youth of the general
population, being mainly in their teens or early twenties.^ Some are recent literates,
having learned to read and write in the literacy campaign of 1979.
The poets are encouraged to meet once a week or once every two weeks.
Meetings usually last three to five hours. After the orientation session, meetings
proceed without the presence of the organizer. Some workshops continue meeting
regularly for years, while others meet for shorter periods, then disband, as the poets
involved are taken away from the area by other obligations, typically military or
scholastic ones. However, if the workshops are formed under the auspices of a
military organization, as is often the case, they become "mobile" workshops,
occurring wherever the military unit is stationed.
Organizers communicate with the workshops as regularly as possible. They
encourage workshop poets to continue their study of both contemporary and other
poetry by keeping them supplied with issues of the Ministry of Culture's bi-monthly
publication, Poesfa Libre, which also contains some of the workshop poetry.The
circulation of Poesfa Libre is from 3,000 to 5,000, depending on the popularity of the
issue.8
The organizers are also responsible for gathering workshop poetry and having
it published. Besides Poesfa Libre, it frequently appears in the Chachalaca. the
monthly magazine of the CPCs; Nicarauac. a serious intellectual quarterly published
40
by the Ministry of Culture; La Ventena. the arts supplement of La Barricada. the FSLN
newspaper, as well as in the pages of La Barricada itself; and in the independent
newspaper, El Nuevo Diario. There have also been anthologies of the poetry
published, for example, Talleres de Poesfa (first printing, 6,000 editions) and another
smaller volume entitled, Poesfa de las Fuerzas Armadas. [Poetry of the Armed
Forces]. A larger volume of poetry from army workshops is soon to be published. 9
In addition, workshop poetry has also been researched and published internationally 10
and has appeared in Nicaraguan basic education texts. 11
In addition, the organizers produce poetry programs which are broadcast on
various radio stations throughout the country. In Managua, workshop poetry is
broadcast weekly on Radio Sandino and Radio Continental; in Leon, it may be heard
on Radio Venceremos. Poets are encouraged to listen to these broadcasts when they
are available in their area. A program of public poetry readings, "Poesfa en los
Barrios," has been initiated to enable more people to appreciate the poetry. These take
place every Saturday in various plazas, CPCs, military outposts, etc. across the
country.
The poet-organizers also assist in local, national and international poetry
contests sponsored by the Ministry of Culture. There are frequent "Popular Poetry
Contests" that organizers help to run. Additionally, on Ruben Darfo's birthday, a
poetry marathon is held in the city of his birth. Poetry is read throughout the day and
the Latin American Ruben Dario Poetry Prize is awarded.
Various accounts of the workshop pedagogy have emerged, attesting to a great
flexibility. There are many commonalities, however, as I will show below. Mayra
Jimenez' method of collective teaching and learning will be presented as well as a
description and observation of it by Pring Mill, the British critic of Latin American
41
poetry. Additional information about the pedagogy has been obtained in interviews
with Cardenal and the poet-organizers.
The poet-organizers have decided to meet all day every two weeks to discuss
problems they may have with the work of a particular poet and to get advice from each
other. They also discuss the poetry and poetics of artists they will, in turn, present at
orientation sessions. According to Falcon and Calero, the group's studies have
included a very wide range of poetry and criticism, much of which has appeared on the
pages of Poesfa Libre. Mentioned as subjects of these training sessions are: ^
North Americans
William Carlos Williams
Carl Sandberg
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Allan Ginsberg
Lawrence Ferhngetti
Edgar Lee Masters
Nicaraguan Poets of the Past
Ruben Dario
Manolo Cuadra
Azarias H. Pallais
Salomon de la Selva
Alfonso Cortes
Contemporary Nicaraguan Poets
Leonel Rugama
Ernesto Cardenal
Fernando Silva
Jose Coronel Urtecho
Carlos Martinez Rivas
Emesto Mejia Sanches
Ernesto Gutierrez
Pablo Antonio Cuadra
Rosario Murillo
Daisy Zamora
Giacondi Belli
4 -2
In addition, very broad categories of poetry have been objects of study: Chinese
and Japanese poetry, primitive poetry, classical Latin and Greek poetry, and Latin
American poetry. The criticism examined includes that of Brecht, Karel Kosic, Marx,
Lenin, Lunacharsky, Galvano de la Volpe, Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez and Ezra Pound.
The poet-organizers also select and discuss the poetry which they will use in
upcoming workshop orientation sessions. This can include workshop poetry as well
as that of "professional" poets. They will sometimes mimeograph materials and
sometimes rely on Poesfa Libre or La Chachalaca as their texts for study. The
selection of the poetry discussed by the organizers owes much to the translations as
well as the personal taste and poetic of Cardenal who has even published "Some Rules
for Writing Poetry" in La Barricada. Cardenal has said that these rules were derived
from many of the general principles of composition and advice on writing found in
Ezra Pound’ s ABC of Reading ("Conversando" 1). Pring-Mill reports that these rules
were distributed on mimeographed sheets to those who would be setting up new
workshops in Bluefields, the English speaking area on the west coast of Nicaragua
("Mayra Jimenez" 12). Pring-Mill's translation appears below ("Workshop Poetry"
18). (The parenthetical material in the following text was printed in Cardenal's
original. The bracketed material is Pring-Mill's.)
Some Rules for Writing Poetry bv Ernesto Cardenal
Writing good poetry is easy, and the rules for doing it are few and
simple.
1. Verse need not rhyme. If one line ends Sandino. do not try to
end another with destino: if one ends Leon, there is no need to make
another end in corazon. Rhyme is a good thing in songs, and very
suitable for slogans ("WE WON IN THE RISING - WE SHALL WIN
ALPHABETISING), but rhyme is not a good thing in modern poetry.
Nor is it a good thing to have regular rhythm (all the lines with the same
number of syllables): verse should be completely free, with long lines or
short, as the poet chooses.
43
2. One should prefer more concrete terms to vaguer ones. To say
"tree" is vaguer or more abstract than saying guvacon [lignum vitael.
guasimo [a sturdy tropical tree], malinche [flamboyant],which is more
concrete. "Animal" is more abstract than "iguana," "rabbit," culumuco
[Felis jaguarondi]. And it is more abstract to say "liquor" than to say
"whisky," "champagne," cususa [a strong alcoholic drink of varying
composition]. Good poetry is usually made out of very concrete things.
3. Poetry has an added appeal if it includes proper names: the
names of rivers, towns, and villages. And people's names. Part of the
charm of Carlos Mejia Godoy's songs lies in the wealth of proper names
- complete with surnames and even nicknames - to be found in them: "la
Amanda Aguilar," "Tirso Mondragon," "Quincho Barrilete," "the almond
tree at Tere's place."
4. Rather than being based on ideas, poetry needs to be based on
things which reach us through our senses: which can be felt with the
touch, which can be tasted with the palate, which can be seen, which can
be smelt. It is good to make a point of saying that corrugated iron is
"rusty," that a river stone is "shiny," that an iguana is "rough-skinned,"
that a macaw is "red, yellow and blue" (and to try to describe the sound a
macaw makes). The most important images are visual ones: most things
reach us through our eyes.
5. One must write as one speaks. With the natural plainess of the
spoken language, not the written language. To put the adjective first, as
in "los senderos sombrfos [the shady paths], is not natural in our
language, but rather: "los senderos sombrfos." By the same token, it is
preferable not to use tu but vos [i.e. for the second-person singular] in
our Nicaraguan poetry since that is how we speak in daily life. The
greater part of the new Nicaraguan poetry is now using vos, and it is also
rightly being used in advertising, mottoes, slogans, etc. (Vos is used in
almost all of Latin America, but there are few places where it is used as
much as in Nicaragua; the new Nicarguan poetry is going to impose the
use of vos throughout Latin America.)
6. Avoid what are called commonplaces, cliches, or hackneyed
expressions. In other words, whatever has gone on being repeated in the
same way for a long time. For example: "burning sun," "icy cold,"
"cruel tyrant," "heroic fighters," etc. The poet should try to discover
new ways of putting things; if what he writes is made up of expressions
blunted by use, it is not poetry.
7. Try to condense the language as much as possible. In other
words, to abridge. All words which are not absolutely necessary should
be left out. If there are two ways of putting something, one should
choose the shorter. One should economise on words as though one were
writing a telegram; or as in the phrases on the roadside billboards, which
are made as short as possible. The real difference between prose and
verse is that prose uses many words, while verse uses few. An editorial
or a news story in Barricada is prose because it is written with many
words; if the same thing were condensed into just a few lines, it would
44
be "verse." A poem may be a very long one, but each of its lines should
be in very condensed language.
As will be discussed in the next chapter, some contemporary Nicaraguan poets
have been critical of Cardenal's "rules," and the "imposition" of his exteriorist poetics
on the workshop poets. However, Cardenal has described these rules as mere
guidelines useful to very inexperienced poets, but "in no case are they meant to be
taken as the imposition of a single method of writing" ("Conversando" 2). When I
interviewed them, the poet-organizers defended the soundness of Cardenal's rules,
and said that they did encourage poets to write in this concrete style. They did not,
however, go so far as to hand out copies of the rules or to refer to them explicitly by
number at workshops.
This was confirmed by Pring-Mill who observed the two opening sessions of the
workshop begun in Bluefields under Jimenez' direction. His account of what was
probably a model workshop provides insights into the process in general. In "Mayra
Jimenez and the Rise of the Nicaraguan 'Poesfa de Taller’ " (15-16), he writes that
On the opening evening, there was a general "pep talk" in which
all those who attended were urged to commit to paper their personal
reactions to some socially significant event (or attitude) within their own
experience for discussion at the second session. They were also
cautioned against the use of rhyme (Rule 1) as well as to prefer the
concrete to the abstract (Rule 2)--including the deliberate
particularization of a text by the insertion of proper names (Rule 3)~and
also to prefer the recording of "cosas que entran por los sentidos"
{experiential perceptions} 13 to conceptual statements (Rule 4).
Furthermore, they were told always to use natural speech in preference
to "el lenguaje escrito" {written language} 14 (Rule 5) with much stress
being laid on the avoidance of set phrases (Rule 6) as well as the need to
eliminate unnecessary words (Rule 7).
Then Pring-Mill reports that Jimenez read a few examples of published poems she
liked which were written by other workshop poets.
Pring-Mill refers to a three-part method Jimenez used the next evening to
encourage revision of the poetry. As much as possible, suggestions for alterations
were elicited from the students themselves rather than being explicitly suggested by
45
Jimenez. The first stage in her methodology involved eliminating any artificial
sounding or cliched phrases. The second stage consisted of making the verse more
concrete and precise, while the third stage Pring-Mill identifies as "heightening the
element of 'social relevance'" ("Mayra Jimenez" 16). According to Pring-Mill, the
poem "could either gently contribute to the process of raising popular awareness
(Cardenal's Christian term would be conscientizacion') or else contribute to fostering a
special sense of Nicaraguan national and cultural identity— within the ideological
context of the Sandinista revolution— in a much more explicitly political way" ("Mayra
Jimenez 17).
When asked about the methodology they used in setting up a workshop, none
of the four poet-organizers interviewed at the National CPC were familiar with
anything so structured as Pring-Mill's description of Jimenez' three-part pedagogy.
They did, however, confirm that they followed the general direction and content of this
procedure.
In her most recent published account of what happens at a workshop in Talleres
de Poesfa Antologia. Jimenez writes that the young workshop poets are learning the
hard way— on Saturdays, Sundays, nights and afternoons— that poetry is a difficult
craft. When they discuss the problems of a particular poem, it's expressive form, its
political content, its imprecision, the distance between what is said and what is desired
to be said, its vacuity, frivolity or lack of beauty or profundity, they learn difficult
lessons and become, finally, "artisans of the word" (6).
She also praises the intellectual rigor of the workshop process which consists
of analysis, discussion, criticism and self criticism. She believes that this process
develops in those attending a sharpened analytical and "scientific" ability, leading to
the improvements in their capacity to function as poet-police officers or poet-soldiers,
for example (30-31).
46
What is not done at the workshops is also described by Jimenez:
We don't usually study tropes, nor alliterations; we don't measure
verses to determine if they are in decasyliables, nor do we concern
ourselves with worries about the hiatus or synalepha, or what a
hyperbole or hyperbaton consists of. We use free verse. We study
imagery, similes and problems of rhythm. We make reference to
diverse literary movements and fashions, but we insist on "el signo
ideologico" and the importance of the process of communication. None
of these however, are strict regulations" (30).
Falcon, said he usually begins his workshops by reading some poetry— it could
be national or international. Once the poetry is discussed and analysed, the workshop
turns to the poetry of those present. An effort is made to criticize it collectively. "I
don't do all the talking," said Falcon. He was careful to point out that in his opinion
the workshops are not like "schools for poets." The poet-organizers try to help
everyone understand that there is no end to learning about poetry, whether writing it,
reading it, reading about it or discussing it. There is always more for everyone to
learn, always a possibilty of editing or rewriting a poem. Language can always be
critiqued, altered, improved. Thus, in a way, the workshops promote a linguistic
indeterminacy which engenders confidence.
Calero mentioned that he encourages poets to follow the presentation of their
poetry with a self-critique, pointing out places where they couldn't think of the right
word, for example, or phrases that seem awkward. The group can then respond with
immediately useful suggestions. Thus, comments Calero, workshop poetry is
presented individually, and then given a collective critique.
The workshop I attended was somewhat a typical. Five people were there, but
only two had time to read and analyse their work. Grethel Cruz (14 years old) read
her poetic reflection on the countryside around her home, and Oscar Alonso (age 20)
wrote verses about the custom of the women in his village of washing clothes together
in the river on Saturdays. Each poem was then analysed line by line with Falcon
trying to elicit as many suggestions for improvement as possible from the poets
47
themselves. No one remarked on the lack of political content in either poem. Below is
a transcript of what occurred, as Oscar Alonso presented his poem to the group
(OA=Oscar Alonso, JRF=Juan Ramon Falcon, GC=Grethel Cruz, KH=Karyn
Hollis). I have translated the conversation into English.
JRF - Well, let's hear your poem, Oscar
OA - El Giiis
Que cante el guis
asf es los sabados
Elios saben que ellas bajan a lavar
No les tires a ellos
Dejalos que se miran bonitos
Cuando se sueltan de las ramas
y tocan sus alas en la fosa
dejalos
que la primera de las muchachas que
lavan
y los vean
tendra visita man ana domingo
de un enamorado que viene de largo
la Carmensa lo asegura que es cierto
The Guis [a native bird]
The guis begins to sing
like this on Saturdays
They know that they will go
down to do the wash
Don't shoot at them
Leave them alone to look pretty
When they fly from the branches
and flap their wings in the cave
let them alone
so that the first girl who washes
and sees them
will have a visit on Sunday
from a far away lover
Carmen is sure this is true.
JRF - When did you write this poem?
OA - Yesterday
JRF - So now you have nothing to say about it? What can you say about it?
48
OA - [silence]
JRF - Do you have any self-criticisms of it?
OA - 1 can see a lot of redundancy.
JRF - Where?
OA - [reads the entire poem again]
JRF - 1 think that the basic elements are here, right? Can you read it again?
OA - [reads the poem a third time]
KH - 1 don't understand it too well.
JRF - You can understand it right? No? You didn't understand it? OK, then I'm going
to read it again. There is something very interesting in this poem and I think that with
a second reading we will be able to understand it better.
Let's take our "el guis" and change it to "los guises." It's a bird.
El Guis
Que canten los guises
Asi son los sabados
[continues to read the rest of the poem]
KH - What is "la Carmensa"?
JRF - It's a woman.
GC - It's more or less a .. . . It's a kind of a legend, right?
JRF - Yes, that's right. It's a belief, a folk tale.
KH - This is a belief the people have?
JRF - Yes, the legend of "La Carmensa" is there. The poet doesn't invent it, he writes
about it.
KH - And who is "La Carmensa"?
JRF - She is a woman among those who are going to wash.
49
Well, then let's look at the poem. It seems to me that the beginning of the
poem weakens it. Instead of "the bird" you are talking about "the birds,"no?
OA - Que canten los guises? [the birds sing]
JRF - Yes, speak of them in the plural. The problem is that if you would have worked
on it more, if you had had more time, you would have noticed the mistake. You
probably haven't read it since you wrote it. So, I don't know if. . . .you want to
change it to "the birds" instead of "the bird"?
OA - Yes, "the birds." That's better. We're talking about the plural.
JRF - So leave this and take out this where you say "los guises."
Elios saben que las mujeres bajan a lavar [They know that the women are
going to wash]
Or say: Elios saben que ellas bajan a lavar [They (masc) know that they
(fern) are going to wash.]
No le tires. [Don't shoot it]
No les tires [Don't shoot them]
Let's look at it again.
What do you think?
OA - About what?
JRF - About saying,
Elios saben que ellas bajan a lavar.
Is it understandable?
OA - Yes
JRF - Then let's do this: Take out the first two lines, they're redundant.
Elios saben que ellas bajan a lavar.
No les tires
50
Let's take out the "a ellos" because we are talking of them. It's understood. I
think there is a problem. It's that you forget the ....
But there is this one thing. Why are you using the 2nd person singular familiar
form here? Are you particularly interested in using "tu" [you] here? What do you
think would be better?
OA - To use "usted"? [the you, 2nd person singular, formal]
JRF - What if we put "dejalos" instead, using el "vos"? [2nd person popular form]
OA - That's good.
JRF - [reads it again, changes line 7]
y con sus alas tocan la fosa [and flap their wings in the cave]
This is it, right? Is that all right?
dejalos [let them alone] We'll put that in
que la primera de las muchachas que viene a lavar
y los vean
Change that to--Que la primera de las muchachas que lo vea [the first of the
girls to see it]
Tendra visita manana domingo
OA - It's an important opportunity to talk about an area near my hometown, about a
belief of the peasant regions. When the young peasant girls go to wash on Saturdays,
they have to go to a Jubrade . They start washing, and when they see a guis they say,
"One of us will have a visitor."
JRF - Y la primera de las muchachas que los vean
tendra visita manana domingo.
But this only happens on Saturdays? Can it be any other day?
OA - They believe it only occurs on Saturdays. They don't work on Sundays.
JRF - Tendra visita manana domingo [she will have a visitor on Sunday]
51
de un enamorado que viene de largo [by a lover coming from afar]
La Carmensa lo asegura [Carmen assures it]
Let's take out - que es cierto. If she assures it, then it is certain, right?
OA - [laughing] Yes.
JRF - So, I'll read the poem as it is now. I don't know if you will like it like this.
[Reads it again-amended version]
Los Guises The Guises
Elios saben que ellas bajan a lavar The birds know the girls will
/come down to wash
No les tires Don't shoot at them
Dejalos que se miran bonitos Leave them looking so pretty
Cuando se sueltan de las ramas When they fly from the
/branches
y con sus alas tocan la fosa and flap their wings in the cave
dejalos Let them alone
que la primera de las muchachas That the first of the girls to see
que los vean them
tendra visita manana domingo will have a visit on Sunday
de un enamorado que viene de largo from a lover coming from afar
la Carmensa la asegura Carmen assures it.
Maybe it would be better to use - mates - not -tires.
Which do you think would be better, Grethel? -mates or tires?
GC - No, I like it OK with - tires.
JRF - So, this is the poem you like?
OA - That's it.
52
Even in this abbreviated workshop, one sees many of the characteristics
discussed earlier in this chapter. The focus of the workshop is on the poem and the
poet, with all present contributing their opinons as to what might be changed,
amended, or elaborated. It is important also to note just how many times the poem in
question was given a public reading: at least seven times in its entirety. It was read
four times before any changes were made-validating it as a unique and complete work
that was paradoxically ready to be amended and improved. As the amendments were
suggested and made, the poem was read again to test their effect on those present.
Sometimes suggestions were rejected by the audience as was the case with tires
above. Juan Ramon Falcon, the poet-organizer, guided the workshop according to
the pedagogic principles he and the other poet-organizers elaborated earlier. He
praised the subject matter of the poem for its authenticity and its folkloric value. He
encouraged the use of the more popular vos in place of tm He tried to elicit reponses
and suggestions from everyone present, but gave the poet the first opportunity for
criticism/self criticism.
The poet-organizers, in fact, have recorded their pedagogy and aims in a
formal statement of Principles.
Declaration of Principles of the Association of Poetry Workshops
After the first year and a half that the workshops had been in existence, the First
National Reunion of the Association of Poetry Workshops was held in Palacagiiina.
By then the larger experiences in the cultural-political context as well as experiences in
the workshops themselves had led the workshop poets to write a "Declaration of
Principles of the Association of Poetry Workshops." The principles, coming out of
workshop practice and revolutionary experience provide the theoretical guidelines for
future poetic practice. Developing out of the larger context, they become contextual
53
themselves, influencing the textual production of the workshops. The tone of the
Declaration is at once altruistic, optimistic, intense and even dogmatic— all youthful
characteristics that are present in workshop poetry.
The Declaration of Principles of the Association of Poetry
Workshops^
The Association of Poetry Workshops:
1. supports the principle that poetry has an eminently social function
which contributes to the people'e transformation and helps in the
consolidation of the Revolution.
2. declares that poetry is not merely an amusement.
3. declares that just as the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution has
created conditions which offer a chance to develop new economic
organizations, it offers the people a chance to define and develop a new
poetry.
4. promotes the change of bourgeois and neocolonial cultural forms to
a Sandinista model: art for the people and from the people.
5. declares that the Association is eminently proletarian or popular in
character.
6. maintains that poetic technique and formation have political
dimensions.
7. declares that poetry is part of daily reality in Nicaragua. The
association urges the revolutionary poet to make good use of this daily
reality and language of the people.
8. declares that poetry in its social function provides knowledge of life
and contributes to the education of the people.
9. urges the revolutionary poet to play a role which is ideologically
consistent with the Revolution.
10. believes that truly popular poetry is written by the poet who writes
of lived experience in heroic, epic and lyrical forms and recognizes that
in so doing is contributing to the people's liberation.
11. declares that the Association is not against any generation of poets
nor literary movements as long as these are not against the Revolution.
12. declares that since its members are revolutionary activists the
Association has a particular character, platform and direction.
13. recognizes the revolutionary work of the "internationalistas"
[foreigners who have worked for the Nicaraguan Revolution] and
accords them due respect.
14. honors the heroes and martirs of the Revolution.
15. declares as a fundamental principle of the Association that if faced
with aggression, all revolutionary poets are ready to die for the
Revolution.
Effects of Context on Workshop Praxis
The effects of the various overlapping contexts (socio/political and cultural) on
the poetry workshops can be seen in the workshop praxis itself. To summarize, as
Cardenal has said of past generations of poets, there is a cooperative spirit among the
workshop poets who help each other as much as they can. The underlying political
purpose of much of the workshop poetry is to hasten social change and the goals of
the Sandinista Revolution. As Cardenal has emphasized, the poetry is geared toward
the persuasive and testimonial in an effort to change reality or recount how this has
already been accomplished.
In keeping with the renewed self-confidence and creativity engendered by the
success of the Revolution, the workshop poets come from many sectors of the
population that previously were silent. The democratization of Nicaraguan culture has
also encouraged selecting poet-organizers who are "of the people" rather than
university trained "professional" poets. Likewise, the workshops are publicized
through the popular organizations and the press, not "connected" intellectual circles.
Another effect of the egalitarian commitment is the frequent publishing of workshop
poetry. Nothing affirms the value that the Nicaraguans accord this poetry more than
its high visibility in the Nicaraguan popular and literary media.
Just as in the political and economic realm there are no historical models for the
Nicaraguan experience, in the creative realm Ramirez has urged artists to be
innovative. Workshop poets hope to develop their own organic style and expression
55
in poetry while remaining true to the ideals of the Revolution. Cardenal likes to refer
to this unique mixture of individual and collective effort the "socialization of the means
of poetic production ("Talleres de poesia" 12).
The economic and military hardships the country currently endures have hurt
the workshop movement, but at the same time confirmed its democratic roots. The
workshops have increased their numbers in areas where more people are now found—
the army, for example. Valle-Castillo, Editor of Poesia Libre, said that the Ministry
encourages workshops in the army because "they will make the arm- bearing
individual sensitive, lucid and critical— not an unreflective robot" (Interview). He
believes that the army poetry has not led to the militarization of poetry so much as to
the humanizing of the soldiers.
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Chapter Three: Debates of Text and Context: Nicaraguan Workshop Poetry
57
The chapter begins with a discussion of Cardenal's exteriorism and its
relationship to workshop poetry. Next, the much publicized (in Nicaragua) criticisms
of workshop poetry and poetics is presented followed by the response of the
workshop organizers and poets. Sixteen poems are then analyzed and discussed in
terms introduced in this debate in order to refute the charges made against the
workshop p o e t r y . 14 part of this analysis includes a formal and thematic classification.
And, finally, the poetry's relationship to its wider cultural context is explored.
Cardenal and Exteriorism
Jonathan Cohen writes in his recent translation of Cardenal's poetry that
"Ernesto Cardenal is not only the best-known living writer of Nicaragua, but also
probably the most widely read poet writing in Spanish today" (1). An understanding
of Ernesto Cardenal's exteriorist poetics is essential background for examining
workshop poetry. Since he is an internationally renown poet as well as the Minister of
Culture in Nicaragua, his influence on the style and content of workshop poetry has
been great. In fact, as we shall see later, some believe it has been too great.
The development of Cardenal's poetics began in the early 1950's when he
returned from study at Columbia University in New York to work with the older
Nicaraguan poet, Jose Coronel Urtecho. In their poetry both had reacted against the
modernistas. who created a cosmopolitan, symbolist and elitist style following Ruben
Dario— him self inspired by Baudelaire and Verlaine as well as by the French
Parnassians.Later Cardenal and Coronel Urtecho were to adopt some of the
nationalism, but not the reactionary politics, of the Nicaraguan vanguardists. To
distinguish their poetry from that of the latter group, Coronel Urtecho called it
"exteriorist." The two poets collaborated on translations of many North American
poets: Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Josephine Miles, William
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Carlos Williams, Thomas Merton, and especially Ezra Pound. Cardenal has called
Pound "the most important poet of North America and the world" (Entrevista" 121),
and Pound's influence (stylistically) was important in Cardenal's own poetry. When
Cardenal and Coronel Urtecho translated and published Pound's "A Few Don’ ts" as
"Varios 'No'" in 1961, it became a sort of exteriorist manifesto and greatly influenced
Nicaraguan and Latin American poetry. The similarity between this document and
Cardenal's "Rules for Writing Poetry" (see pages 16-18, Chapter Two) has already
been noted. Cardenal has defined exteriorism in this way:
El exteriorismo es la poesia creada con las imagenes del mundo exterior,
el mundo que vemos y palpamos, y que es, por lo general, el mundo
especffico de la poesia. El exteriorismo es la poesia objetiva: narrativa y
anecdotica, hecha con los elementos de la vida real y con cosas
concretas, con nombres propios y detalles precisos y datos exactos y
cifras y hechos y dichos f (Poes fa Nueva 9).
[Exteriorism is the poetry created with images of the exterior world, the
world in which we live and breath, and which in general, is the actual
world of poetry. Exteriorism is objective poetry: narrative and
anecdotal, made from the elements of real life and of concrete things,
with proper names, precise details and exact dates and with figures,
events and sayings.]
Two Workshop Poems
Before going into the debate over the style and content of workshop poetry, we
will look at two poems that seem fairly representative of the oeuvre in general. Both
poems (see Appendix, Poems 1 and 2) contain elements that could be attributed to the
exteriorist influence.
In the first, "Aqui en la frontera" ["Here at the Front"] by Manuel Urtecho, the
Revolution serves as the distant background for a love poem: a young soldier on
guard duty describes how unsatisfying the natural environment has become since he is
far away from his loved one. This first-person testimonial, addressed to an absent
lover, is a frequently used technique. Unlike the heavily metaphoric poetry of Ruben
Dario or Pablo Neruda, the free verse (with its juxtapositions and concrete language)
59
calls to mind certain imagist poems by Pound and Cardenal. Using the last line as a
"clincher" or "punch line" is also a common device, present in about 75% of the
poems examined. There is an absence of abstract commentary on the objects or events
referred to. The language is concrete, including proper names, dates, times and
subject matter from daily life. Written in free verse, the poem tends to correspond to
Cardenal's "Rules." Most of the nouns are specific and concrete. The "Black River"
is explicitly named, for example; however, "the birds" are not. The poem's effects are
acheived by imagery and language that appeals to the senses rather than the intellect:
"nos banamos," ["we bathe,"] "ruidos," ["noises,"] "el suelo mojado a causa de la
lluvia," ["the floor wet from rain"]. The syntax is speech-like in its direct simplicity,
and the poet uses the popular Nicaraguan term "vos," ['you"] as it is actually used in
Nicaraguan speech. Finally, as Cardenal recommends, the poem is highly condensed,
composed of short verses will little adjectivization.
Much of this is also true for the second poem, "En la hacienda de San Jose" by
Sergio Viscaya. The narrative structure and prosaic language of the second poem also
make it representative of workshop production. While the poet uses the less typical
device of a first-person narrator, his use of proper names and attention to the details of
peasant life (e.g., "los hachones de ocote" ["the pine torches"]) are characteristic of
workshop poetry. Suspensefully, the poet recounts events which hinder the
brigadistas1 efforts to teach. These frightening events, Contra intimidation, the
assassination of Georgino Andrade, getting sick after the harvest, interrupt the
narrative line, until, as in a sort of denouement, the poet boastfully declares the
brigadistas' success in the last two verses. One notices the sensory imagery: "aullaron
los perros,"['barking dogs,"] "la brisa cada vez mas fuerte," ["the breeze, stronger and
stronger"] "golpes en la puerta" ["knocks at the door"]. The poet uses the proper
names of both his companions and the slain literacy worker, "Georgino Andrade,"
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and he provides us with the details of the peasant's crop. However, the repeated
refrain that "nadie deserto"["no one deserted"] adds an abstract moral to the story, as
do the last lines of both poems. Workshop poetry is typically more idea-directed in
this sense than Cardenal's Rules might suggest. The significance of this characteristic
will be examined more closely later in this chapter.
The Debate Over Workshop Poetry: La Ventana vs. the Workshop Poets
A reaction to the type of poetry coming out of the workshops made its public
appearance on the pages of La Barricada's literary supplement, La Ventana. in 1981,
one year after the inception of the workshops. Since very little has been published
about the debate outside of Nicaragua, it will be fully recounted here. The first article
in the series, "Entre la libertad y el miedo," ["Between Liberty and Fear"] was the
written result of a discussion between the La Yen tana's editorial board and some
foreign poets concerning the state of literary arts since the Revolution. The editorial
board included Giaconda Belli, Lizandro Chavez, Francisco de Asis Fernandez,
Guillermo Rothschuh Villanueva and Rosario Murillo, mostly young, but established
poets. The visitors were Claribel Alegrfa a Costa Rican poet who now lives in
Managua; Eduardo Galeano, Uruguyan; and Juan Gellmann from Argentina. The
major concern at this meeting, voiced mainly by members of the editorial board, was
the idea that exteriorism limited poetic creativity (2). Because the exteriorist style was
said to be the "official style," some editors claimed poets were deterred from writing
poetry in other modes or styles. Others thought that poets were required to address
only revolutionary themes (5).
Another concern was that workshop poetry painted a falsely "paradisical"
picture of the Revolution and failed to express suffering, fear and sacrifice. It was
thus thought by some that,ironically, the revolutionary reality might be robbed of its
61
heroic nature if an accurate record of what it takes to construct a revolution was not
documented literarily (12).
Therefore, the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers (ASTC) was called
upon to encourage a greater diversity of styles among poet-organizers. Experienced
poets were urged to become more involved in the process of training new poets, and it
was suggested that the ASTC formally engage in an examination and critique of the
workshop process and poetry (5).
The Workshop Poets Respond
In their collective response to the accusations in La Ventana. sixty-six workshop
poets and organizers wrote a letter voicing their disagreement with some of the critics
who, by their own admission, had never attended a workshop session nor spoken
with those involved (7). In defense of the workshops, they stress the wide variety of
poetry that is studied by workshop participants and themselves. 17 (Some has been
cited in Chapter Two; for a complete list of that referred to here, see endnote.) The
defenders also maintain that "poets are free to read the poetry that they like the best"
(7).
Furthermore, they deny that workshop poets are coerced into writing about the
Revolution, explaining that the prevalence of revolutionary themes is due to the fact
that many personal events are connected tothe Revolution (friends killed, lovers left
behind, battles fought). Recent events naturally become frequent topics in this poetry.
The defenders point out that since the participants bring their completed poems to the
workshops, their subjects cannot be closely regulated. They deny that there is any
prescribed way to treat revolutionary themes, and emphasize that poems can be found
which contain suffering and pain as well as happiness and hope. They then list the
great variety of subjects that have been addressed in the workshop poetry published in
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Poesia Libre and La Barricada. 18 Additionally, they point out that they consider the
Revolution to be an ongoing process which they hope to support through their poetry,
and that as revolutionaries, they subscribe to Fidel Castro's saying that "Every
revolutionary must be an optimist" (7).
They also state that "all our poetry is political" in the sense that, as Sergio
Ramirez has explained, it is of the people in revolutionary times (7). They affirm that
We are the people: the cobblers, maids, sons of craftsmen, bakers,
clothing sellers, peasants, students, Sandinista police officers, soldiers,
militia members; a doctor from Jinotega, members of the air force,
peasants from the San Juan river, Palacagiiina, San Juan de Oriente, etc
(7).
Thus, the workshop poets assert that while they write on a great diversity of themes,
they do not forget their class origin or their duty as revolutionary artists. In
conclusion, they accuse the editors of La Ventana of publishing barbed criticism "in a
language that is confusing and pretentious," while the workshop poets use "the simple
language of our people"(7).
More from the Critics
An editorial in the same issue of La Ventana entitled. "Ventana Abierta," ["Open
Window"] contained a response to the above letter. F irst, the editors were careful to
stress that they were not calling the need for the workshop project into question, nor
were they doubting its revolutionary appropriateness. Rather they hope to provide a
constructive critique and to encourage a dialogue with the directors and others
involved. They regret that the workshop poets had decided not to meet with the
editorial board, but rather had responded in an open letter which the editors claim
emphasized the poets' class origins and revolutionary credentials in order to avoid
substantive issues (2). The editors "object to the orientation of the workshops
which, they claim, results in such a "uniform poetic creation that it can be read as the
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work of one individual." They reiterate their alarm about the extent to which
workshop methodology may "limit creativity, ingenuity and the capacity to recreate an
immensely rich and vital reality— and about the extent to which exteriorism is being
promoted as the only form of revolutionary poetic expression" (2).
In a continuation of the debate, the workshop poets were chastised the
following week by Giaconda Belli, poet and editorial board member. In her article
entitled, "Entre la realidad y la fantasia quedemosnos con los dos," ["Between Reality
and Fantasy, Let's Choose Both"], she states that in revolutionary times, more than in
any other, one has an obligation to be critical of the status quo (8). She reminds her
readers that even in times of political repression, Nicaragua produced excellent poetry,
and that now, when Nicaraguans are free for the first time, they should be creating
new ways of describing the reality they are living. Instead, she maintains, new types
of limitations are being put on their creativity in the name of the Revolution (8). She
quotes Mayra Jimenez in Poesfa campesina de Solentiname who praises the poetry of
Solentiname for its lack of "imagenes metaffsicas, . . .[y] babosadas literarias"(8)
[metaphysical images and useless literary devices]. Belli considers this a dangerous
attitude coming from the original director of the workshops. She contends that
Jimenez discourages all use of language which seems "more flexible, more
imaginative, more metaphorical, more elaborate" than what is usual in exteriorist
poetry. She accuses the workshop organizers of falling into a "populist simplicity,"
believing the "less educated 'companeros', peasants, or workers to be incapable of
reflecting a great richness of language, or imagination." Or if they do attempt to
manipulate the language, they do so bombastically in a baroque style(8).
Belli, a fan of metaphoric poetry and the Hispanic poetic tradition, speculates
that the beginnings of poetry occurred when primitive people found everyday language
insufficient for expressing their emotions, asserting that
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. . .the metaphor was the first "artifice" that our ancestors used to
compare qualities or to transfer them from one object to another. The
metaphor, the image, so undervalued today by those who plead for a
"realistic" poetry, was born precisely from the necessity to enrich our
expression (8). . . . The attempt to create a poetry devoid of "images"
because they "invent" something that is not part of "reality" is to limit the
legacy and creativity of future writers (9).
In responding to the position of the workshop poets, she counters that it is
individual perception and expression which enrich the collectivity, and that literary
quality does not depend on political function any more than revolutionary literature
depends on themes of political revolution. "In a process such as ours," she contends,
"the Revolution is everywhere, and if we are revolutionaries, it will permeate all that
we do, without our having to label all of our actions as 'revolutionary' " (9).
The accusations continued in two later articles. Vidaluz Meneses, another poet,
published her observations of a workshop led by Jimenez in the city of Bluefields (9).
She reports that Jimenez encouraged the use of a "popular language" that had to be
very clear. Certain metaphors, similes, and other rhetorical devices were considered
"obscurantisms" that people wouldn't understand. She also says that Jimenez refused
to discuss the concept of "anti-poems" broached by two of the poets attending the
workshop. Mayra did not not recognize the previous experience of those attending in
any way, and insisted that "calling things by their real names" was the only
appropriate manner of expression (9). Finally, Meneses concludes by saying that if
indeed it is exteriorism that the workshop poets are imposing, it should not reduce
poetry to the epistolary, the descriptive note or the testimonial fragment (9).
A Final Defender
The last article in the series was a strong defense of the workshops by Jose
Coronel Urtecho, one of the oldest and most respected poets in Nicaragua and
Cardenal’ s longtime colleague. Coronel Urtecho asserts that some, but not all, of the
65
workshop poetry is first rate. Yet he maintains that this is not the most important thing
to keep in mind. What is unique about the workshop movement in his view is that for
the first time, a government is putting its resources to work in the area of poetic
production, making it possible for everyone to learn to exercise his or her talents in
this area. This potential for artistic development is what most interests Coronel
Urtecho as it does Cardenal. He considers the project only a beginning that will
eventually lead to greater numbers of first class poets and poetry readers in Nicaragua
and to"other benefits that are not even imaginable at this time" (7).
A Defense of Workshop Poetry with Textual Examples
I will now evaluate workshop poetry in light of the charges levied against it by
the La Ventana critics. All the poems published in Poesia Libre since its first issue in
1981 to issue #14 published in 1984, (a total of 284 poems) are analyzed. This
analysis provides the basis for an evaluation of the criticisms leveled at the poetry
and also reveals important thematic and formal characteristics. Sixteen poems have
been selected from among those analyzed as representative of the poetry in general.
These poems are quoted liberally in this chapter and can be read in their entirety in the
Appendix. The poetry tends to fall into five thematic categories. These are described
below and examples of each are given. It will be argued that, in keeping with the
nature of literacy in general, workshop poetry is more than just an acquiescent
acceptance of exteriorism. Both its style and subject matter are a natural outcome of a
revolutionary cultural context which it, in turn, has begun to influence.
Non-revolutionary Poetry of Love
An analysis of the poems published in Poesia Libre disproves one of the first
concerns expressed by the workshop critics, that the poetry must be about
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revolutionary themes. In fact, a little over half of the poetry does not refer in any
way to the Revolution. This poetry is mostly about romantic love. Typically the
poet writes in first person and addresses his/her lover directly and informally as "tu"
and/or uses the popular term "vos." Sometimes the lover is mentioned by name.
Frequently he/she is described physically, perhaps along with the countryside; this is
followed by the narration of a significant event which affects the relationship for better
or worse. The event is often revealed or evaluated in the last line of the poem. This
poetry may also take the form of an impassioned reflection on the loved one.
A composite of those characteristics may be seen in this poem by Juan Ramon
Falcon, one of the poet-organizers. "Las Tres Muchachas," (Poem 3) is a brief
narrative-descriptive anecdote written about someone obviously very special to the
poet. It uses many conventional poetic devices, such as metaphor, alliteration and
rhythmic prosody, but in a style remarkably concrete. Phrases seem to accompany the
rhythm of the girls' steps and, in conjunction with its sensory imagery, i.e., the "brief
laughs" and "violin symphony," the poem evokes a natural and authentic freshness.
Contrast is a major structural device in this poem as it is in much workshop poetry.
The carefree chatter of two of the girls contrasts with the quiet serenity of the third.
The last line puts a stop to the forward movement of the poem at the same time as it
identifies the poet as the quiet girl's object of desire. Only then do we understand why
he has singled her out for description.
His comparing the girls to "three flowers on the same stem," and claiming
that his love is as serene "as a violin symphony," disproves the contention that
workshop poetry is strictly non-metaphorical. In fact, Falcon and other
poet-oragnizerzs claim that metaphor is indeed studied in the workshops (Interview).
Jimenez, the original director of the workshops, has written that, "we study imagery,
similes and problems of rhythm," in a description of workshop methodology ( Talleres
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de poesia 30). The allegation was also made that Jimenez was too prescriptive in her
approach to the workshops; she has written, however, that none of the her poetic
preferences are "to be taken as strict regulations" (Talleres de poesfa 30). In any case,
Jimenez is important only as a precursor; she is no longer living in Nicaragua, and
newer organizers have denied that they use any such approach. Cardenal also denies
that Jimenez equated a "correct political line" with good poetry. When questioned
about this, Cardenal said that Jimenez is perfectly aware that what is important in
poetry is that it be good poetry. "Just because a poem is written by Che Guevara or
Sandino or Ho Chi Minh doesn't mean that it will be good, [and on the other hand]
she herself has written much poetry that isn't political" (Interview).
Non-revolutionary Pastorals
Another category of non-revolutionary poems celebrates the Nicaraguan
countryside or the native flora and fauna. Poem 4, "Llego diciem bre^," is written
by a cam pesino poet whose reading and writing skills were acquired during the
Literacy Crusade organized by the Sandinista government soon after the overthrow of
Somoza. Notice the originality of metaphor and simile in this simple poem:
4). "Llego diciembre" "December Arrives"
by Jose Domingo Moreno
Jinotega Workshop
Los caminos estan bordeados The roads are lined with flowers
/de flores
amarillas y color de cielo. yellow and sky-colored.
En los arbustos In the bushes
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los pijules extienden sus alas
imitando negros abanicos.
Se ven vagabundas mariposas
se oye el piqueteo de un carpintero
the pijule birds extend their wings
like black folding fans.
One sees vagabond butterflies
and hears the hammering of a
y sobre la arboleda el viento
/se pasea
meciendo los ramales.
/woodpecker
and above the plantation the
/wind blows,
rocking the branches of trees.
The present tense description of this Nicaraguan summertime scene captures the
vibrancy of nature in full activity. The poet offers no commentary on his subject
matter, but chooses to present it in a simple, direct language with visual and aural
imagery, e.g., "flores amarillas," "el piqueteo de un carpentero." The manner of
presentation underscores the immediacy of the scene depicted, and like much imagist
poetry leaves the reader with feelings or emotions to contemplate rather than ideas.
Revolutionary Poetry: The Revolution as Primary Subject Matter
In the large sample of poetry examined, a little less than half refers to the
Revolution. This revolutionary poetry falls into three broad categories: that using the
Revolution as background or setting, that using it as a secondary theme and that using
it as principle subject matter. This latter category, the Revolution as primary theme,
accounts for less than 10% of the poetry examined but includes some of the most
vibrant. A typical poem of this type praises the Revolution for the positive experiences
it has engendered in the poet's life or in the lives of the general public. Often
presented as a personal reflection, these poems refer in a natural way to social gains
achieved since the Revolution, although the tone is rarely declamatory.
69
Consider, for example, "Desde el balcon del teatro popular Ruben Dario"
(Poem 5 ) by Raul Gavarrete. The most obvious thematic-structural device is the use
of contrast: pre-revolutionary Nicaragua is compared to the new. As if inviting the
reader to judge the evidence, the poet contrasts the smelly stalls that the poor market
women vendors used to occupy with the newly constructed ones. Fields of rubbish
contrast with newly claimed parkland. The poet continues by comparing the present
with the future, inviting the reader to share in his visions of "anchas avenidas con
arboles," "buses en buen estado," or "bibliotecas y centros deportivos." Each image
leads to a heightened feeling of pride in the new country. The last verse frames the
poem by referring back to what inspired the poetic reverie in the first place, "El Himno
Nacional."
Other poems support the Revolution in surprisingly subtle ways, as in the
gentle reference to literacy in the following poem by a very talented 14-year-old girl,
Grethel Cruz.
6). "Guenillero" "Guerilla Fighter"
by Grethel Cruz
Cuidad Dario Workshop
Lirios para la iglesia Lilies for the church
y un lapiz para escribir tu nombre. and a pencil to write your name.
Again, contrast is a prime element in this evocative haiku-like poem. The bellicose
title, "Guerrillero" or "Guerilla Fighter," contrasts with the peaceful allusions to
church and literacy. The natural and otherworldly is juxtaposed with the material and
70
anthropological. The effect is, perhaps, to give a sense of the scope and complexity of
the revolutionary undertaking.
Revolutionary Poetry: The Revolution as Subtext
In the second category of revolutionary poetry, the Revolution is an implicit
theme or subtext for the description of a related but more important event, person or
place. In a testimonial tribute to a fallen friend or loved one, for example, the friend’ s
devotion to the Revolution is often emphasized and his/her heroic actions recounted.
In Poem 7, "Sergio," by Juan Jose Jimenez, a first-person plural narrator speaks for a
town (or, indeed, all of Nicaragua) and eulogizes a young man who has died for the
Revolution. A narrative structure shapes the poem as we learn of the revolutionary
dedication which ultimately leads to his death. Early in the poem we are advised of the
exact date of the incident. This historical accuracy increases the poem's credibility.
Next the events leading up to the death are recounted in some detail: the townspeople
are awakened by "balazos de Garand, de Enfield, de matralla," slogans are heard and
shots from a 22 ring out. Then "todo quedo en silencio." The brutal treatment of the
dead guerrillero is emphasized by the vulgar speech of the Guardsman. This poem,
too, is full of contrasts and contradictions. The carefree life of a young football player
contrasts with his serious role as a guerrilla fighter. The rifle shots and sloganeering
contrast with the dead silence which follows, and the verbal abusiveness of the
Guardsman is set against the determined silence of the townspeople. As is common in
workshop poetry, the last line plays a special role. It offers a surprise ending as the
plaza becomes a richly ironic symbol of repression, intimidation and freedom.
Also falling into the second category of revolutionary poems are those written
by or or about the brigadistas who worked in the literacy campaign. This political
experience typically becomes a secondary theme or provides the setting for poems
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which carefully record the activities of the literacy workers and/or their peasant
students. The poems also frequently refer to romantic attachments made during the
literacy work. The entire workshop section of Poesfa Libre # 1 1 is devoted to these
poems. We will look at three examples.
The poet Eliseo Jerez Guadamuz probably speaks for a great number of his
readers in Poem 8, "Ivania," when he proudly recounts the exploits of his daughter
who along with some 60,000 young Nicaraguans traveled into rugged, isolated areas
of the countryside to teach reading and writing in the Literacy Crusade. Again, the use
of the exact date of the letter,"el 5 de mayo," and the names of the locations where the
action occurs gives the poem an air of realism. As is the case in the majority of the
poems examined, the poet writes in the first person, and addresses his subject directly.
An element of surprise comes at the end of the poem as the poet ironically reveals his
own identity by revealing that of his daughter. The last line contains the major
message of the poem in a metaphor: "como en una Nueva Escuela."
In Poem 9, "En la communidad de la Cruz de Pire," the poet Carlos Pineda
faithfully records a morning in the life of a peasant woman. Using the vocabulary of
the region, the poet describes the objects common in such households. The poem is
rich in visual images and detail: "la cama cuja," "una sabana blanca", "el humo
negro." There are touches of irony and humor in this poem too: the candle in the
Texaco Motor Oil can and the husband who remains in bed. The use of sensory
imagery increases the immediacy of the poem's effect. Finally, the last lines are very
important in the poem: "y comence a sentir el olor / a tortilla caliente." This
concentrated image appeals to our senses of sight, touch, taste and smell, as the poem
records the work of an early morning nurturer.
In a similarly direct style, Gerardo Blandon, a literacy worker, invests his work
with a tone of emotional honesty as he tells of his sadness at leaving his mountain
72
village and girlfriend. This was probably a common experience for many of the
brigadistas. His poem is a short narrative, which records the date of the poet’s
departure and the description of the scene as he remembers it. The last line carries
crucial information necessary to understand why this departure was especially
difficult.
10). "De regreso de la alfabetizacion" "Leaving the Literacy Crusade"
by Gerardo Blandon
Guayucalf Literacy Worker
Antes de vinirme aquel 18 de agosto
con mi mochila
y vestido de brigadista
Todos estabamos tristes,
los campesinos lloraban,
vos tambien.
Yadecam ino
desde donde se divisa el valle
vf que un panuelo se agitaba.
Eras vos amor.
Before leaving on that 18th of August
with my backpack
and brigadista uniform
We were all sad,
the peasants were crying,
you were too.
As I walked down the road
and looked back at the valley
I saw a handkerchief waving.
It was you, my love.
Revolutionary Poetry: The Revolution as Setting
The third type of revolutionary poetry finds the Revolution providing a distant
background or setting for a more prominent event or character. The problems of
lovers in a Revolution is a theme of numerous poems, such as the first and last ones
discussed. As in most love poetry, the poet typically uses first-person verb forms and
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addresses his/her lover directly and informally as "tu" and/or uses the particularly
Nicaraguan "vos." Sometimes the lover is mentioned by name; frequently he/she is
first described physically, perhaps along with the countryside. Often the poem is
based on the narration of a significant event which affects the relationship for better or
worse. The event is often revealed or evaluated in the last line of the poem. A good
example is Poem 1 1 , "Carmen," by Carlos Manuel Galan.
The poem below has been compared to Cardenal's early epigrammatic w o r k 20
Addressed to a past lover, it is less imagistic than previous poems studied here and
offers a touch of sarcastic irony in the title. The poet also makes use of a long periodic
sentence structure to strengthen the taunting revelation in the last line: that Roger is a
Sandinista.
12). "Cuando sepas" "When You Learn"
by Cony Pacheco
Condega Workshop
Cuando leas los poemas que he
escrito para vos
te sentiras orgulloso.
Pero que diras cuando sepas
que los escribf para hacer
/referenda
de un pasado
y que hoy
a quien doy mis besos y mas es
/Rogelio
When you read the poems that
I wrote for you
You will feel so proud.
But what will you say when you learn
that I wrote them to refer
to a past,
and that today
the one I give my kisses to and more
/is Roger
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el Sandinista. the Sandinista.
The Criticisms of Content and Stvle
We have seen that one charge made by workshop critics, that the workshop
poetry paints a "paradisical" picture of the Revolution ignoring its difficulties, is not
valid. There are poems of death and destruction, homesickness, loneliness and
hardship. Poets express the sentiments of the entire nation when they mourn the loss
of friends and lovers, or pledge to rebuild the cities and continue with the goals of the
Revolution.
Another concern, that there is an "official style" of workshop poetry and that
poets are pressured into writing in this style, seems to be an overstatement. Actually,
workshop poetry comes close to deserving the term "multi-generic" in that it exhibits
characteristics of several poetic genres: lyric, narrative, elegy,and pastoral; it also
makes use of several prose modes: narration, argumentation, exposition, persuasion.
In fact, it is a curious mix of poetry and prose which serves a multitude of personal
and public functions.
According to Cardenal himself, Margaret Randall once criticized his conception
of exteriorism for being so broad as to have become nearly meaningless (Hispanfa
121). He responds humorously that it is indeed broad and that, in fact, all poetry can
be divided into two categories: that which is exteriorist and that which isn't. Almost
all of the poets mentioned in Chapter Two as precursors for workshop poetics, e.g.,
Williams, Dickinson, Dario, are praised by Cardenal for practicing exteriorist poetics.
There is quite a range in style here. Other poets he cites as being exteriorists are
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Whitman. He also includes poetry as diverse as that
of China, Japan, Ancient Greece and Rome, medieval poetry and all primitive poetry
in the category. In opposition to exteriorism, he places all poetry that is "hermetic,
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surrealistic, dream-like, and automatic (121)" and cites the work of Wallace Stevens
and Edgar Allan Poe as examples. Thus it seems that, according to Cardenal,
exteriorism is not limited to a very few stylistic or thematic elements. He seems to
favor a much wider range of poetry than his critics give him credit for.
However, it is true that most of the poetry is written in the clear, direct,
concrete manner that the workshop leaders say they prefer. Thus, some poems by
different poets may sound similar in tone or use a similar lexicon. Also, the fact that
many of the poets are writing about common experiences means that a certain number
of themes are going to repeat themselves. But this phenomenon occurs, when any
poetic form becomes popular for whatever reason. Most sonnets written on the
Petrarchan model have similarities, for example, or folk songs written in Bob Dylan's
early style. The lack of skill and experience on the part of fledgling poets can also
result in poems that may sound too prosaic for readers with more sophisticated or
elitist tastes.
Consider the two poems 13 and 14, "Jose David Zuniga" by Pastora Palacios
and "Tu partida" ["Your Departure"] by Erwin Antonio Alvarado. They would be
likely candidates for the above criticisms. Their subject matter is commonplace— but
nonetheless obviously important to the young poets. The references to the military
equipment and locales seem heavy-handed. Both poets use a periodic sentence
structure to describe a scene and/or an individual that is introduced by name at the end.
They both include parenthetical material. Both poems are narratives which make their
points in the last lines. However, it is doubtful that a close stylistic analysis would
suggest a common author. The sentence structure in the second poem is more
complex than in the first and the modification more deeply embedded. But more
important are the differences in content between the two: the lovers have different
names, and the settings are different, not to mention the different identifications of the
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authors themselves. Perhaps only a rather jaded literary critic would worry about
whether the two poems sounded like they had been written by the same person
anyway. For the general public that these poets claim as their primary audience, the
obvious differences in the content of the two poems would preclude any such notion.
The debate appears to have subsided somewhat in the last couple of years, due
probably to the fact that there are now much more pressing concerns Nicaraguans must
face. But many of the critics have softened their stand on the issue, having seen from
the poetry published in Poesia Libre (and subsequently anthologized in translation in
many foreign countries including Europe and the U.S.) that some of their fears were
misguided. Cardenal, however, continues in his staunch defense of exteriorism
broadly defined, and one suspects that his opinions still have much influence since he
still holds his post as Minister of Culture, and his own international reputation
continues to grow. But the important point is that the debate did and is taking place,
and it took place in front of the Nicaraguan people. There was no attempt to hide the
fact that many intellectuals were unhappy about the way the workshops were being
handled. The criticisms were direct and severe and did not skirt the political issues.
Like the poetry itself, the debate attests to the Nicaraguans' commitment to open
discussion and revolutionary ideals.
Formal Analysis
Although the workshop poetry is far from being formally consistent, it does
exhibit several characteristic structural devices. The last three poems above illustrate
well the versification pattern of workshop free verse. For the most part, lines are
divided into naturally breaking syntactic units, whether long or short. There are few
fragmentary or broken lines. Frequently, a word or two will be on a line by itself for
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emphasis. In general, the verses are divided smoothly and syntax flows easily as in
oral forms of poetry.
Probably the most common formal structure found in the poetry is that of
narrative. Many of the poems contain the traditional narrative devices of creating
suspense, building up to a climactic incident and untying the complicating knot in the
last line of the poem. As was pointed out, Poem 2 is an apt example, as are 8 and
10. Poem 3 is basically narrative in structure but, as frequently happens, there is
some descriptive verse in the first part of the poem, and the following narration is
limited to a brief recounting of one incident. Almost without exception both kinds of
narratives will "make a point" or have clearly expressed ethical underpinnings.And
again, almost without exception, an explanation, result, reaction or summary in the last
line clears up any ambiguities or reinforces an important element. (Incidentally,
"summation" is not called for in Cardenal’ s Rules.) Another less common group of
workshop poems represented by Poem 4 are mainly descriptive sketches, composed of
sparce but well chosen adjectives and economical, active verb phrases. Yet another
structure that is seen fairly often among the workshop poems is the personal reflection.
This mode is almost a composite of the above structures in that the thinker/poet will
use sections of narration, description and lists of events as his/her musings are directed
toward some end. This pattern can be seen in Poem 5.
Poetic Closure
A final structural element that has been frequently pointed out is the poetry's
emphasis on closure. As we have seen, almost all of the poems have important formal
and thematic elements in their last lines. There is frequent use of periodic sentence
structure with revelatory endings which coincide with the last lines of the poems.
Many of the major organizing structures for the poems, especially narration, are
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constructed so as to lead the reader to expect a formal closure, and the expectation is
almost always met. Important thematic information is often withheld until the last line
of a poem, or information may be repeated for emphasis there.
This emphasis on the last line is evidence of the strongly rhetorical nature of the
poetry in spite of its simple diction and minimal use of traditional rhetorical devices.
W hat seems clear is that the poets feel a need to leave the reader with a lasting effect.
In the major critical study of poetic closure, Barbara Herrnstein Smith remarks that
closure increases a reader’ s sense of completion and finality in a work of art (36). In
meeting such reader expectations, the poet reinforces the validity and truth value of
his/her work. The poetic statements he/she makes gain credibility and authority by
their association with the coherent unity of the balanced artistic creation.
In discussing the epigrammatic form, a form that Robert Pring Mill has
observed in some workshop poetry such as Poem 12 by Cony Pacheco, Herrnstein
Smith writes of "hyperdetermination," or conditions of maximal closure (204). These
occur:
not only when the conclusion of a poem is strongly determined by the
entire structure that precedes it, but when it is also reinforced in that
particular form by special closural devices— when, in other words,
structural completeness coincides with an unusually high degree of
nonstructural [thematic] order or control.
Since closure is both them atic and structural here, the term
"hyperdetermination" aptly describes workshop poetry. W hat does this mean?
According to Herrnstein Smith, maximum closure lends a final authority to a
statement, a last word on the subject (207). There are moral implications here too, for
in expressing such indications of confidence in his/her words, the poet attempts to
unify the aesthetic and the ethical. Indeed, this is an explicit goal in the "Declaration of
Principles of the Poetry Workshops." Implicit in the workshop poetry is the fact that
the typical workshop poet is not a linguistic or an ethical relativist. He/She believes
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that language is a vehicle for truth and that truth can be united with beauty. He/She
believes in the Revolution and its stated values and in the capacity of language to relate
to a material reality that needs to be changed. These young poets also believe in the
power of poetry to envision and inspire revolutionary social transformations. Theirs
is a world of commitment and transcendence, commitment to the egalitarian principles
of their revolution and transcendence when these principles lead them to the
construction of a better reality or to die in the attempt. Thus, one final element in much
of their poetics of closure is a hint of transcendence. It is present in Poem 7 when the
poet speaks from the Plaza commemorating the death of his friend. And it is present in
the reference to the "Nueva Escuela" of Poem 8. As Marc Zimmerman has put it in his
excellent discussion of the history and development of poetic production in Nicaragua,
"exteriorism [is] for all its surface realism, for all its materiality and concreteness, the
expression of a core idealism with respect to life, possibility and hope" [Nicaragua in
Reconstruction 19).
The Effects of Context on Workshop Poetry
As was discussed in the previous chapter, Nicaraguans have always been a
people receptive to and supportive of poetry. Furthermore, "committed" poetry has a
long history in all Latin American countries, and Nicaragua is no exception. Verses
against tyrants, colonial domination, political oppression and poverty are common not
only in"high art," but in songs, in newspapers and on walls. As Banberger and
Z im m erm an 2 1 have concluded, Nicaraguans believe that words and poetry can make a
difference. Their attitude toward language is pragmatic and utilitarian: it is a vehicle
for action. Perhaps John Beverley has explained it best in an article on "Sandinista
Poetics":
Poetry has a different specific gravity in countries like Nicaragua, which
is the same as saying that it has a different class referent, a different
relation to history.. . . The political centrality of literature and of poetry
in particular, is due among other things to the paradoxical effects of
capitalist combined and uneven development in Latin America, which
together with the introduction of a bourgeois commercial mass culture,
leaves intact elements of earlier strata of cultural expression: for
example, the rural tradition oral songs and storytelling with roots at once
in the survivals of the pre-Columbian Indian civilizations and popular
Catholicism; or the role of the writer consecrated by Liberal
Romanticism in the epoch of the Wars of Independence as a sort of
Moses, "informing" through his rhetoric the processes of national
liberation and identity-formation (128).
Cardenal has even said that "poetry should transform reality" ("Cultura
revolucionaria" 181). This revolutionary attitude is reinforced by both Sandinista deed
and the political rhetoric of social change and popular empowerment. Thus, the
poets' urgent desire to communicate, their faith in the power of words to change the
world, as well as the oral traditions which feed the new literacy, could explain the
preference for the clear, direct, and concrete rather than the flowerey or ahistorically
abstract. Even without direct exposure to an explicit exteriorist poetics, many of the
traits of workshop poetry would be logical outcomes of the particular social and
economic context. The urgency to communicate and faith in the power of words to
contribute to change could, as well, explain the preference for the clear, direct and
concrete rather than the flowery or ambiguous.
Sandinista Cultural/Political Context
The cultural context supports the poetry both implicitly, as described above,
and explicitly through theoretical pronouncements by Sandinista leaders. For
example, certain characteristics of the poetry almost seem to be direct responses to
Vice President Sergio Ramirez' call to create a new Nicaraguan culture. In fact, in
their response to their critics, workshop poets have cited their allegiance to Ramirez'
five point plan for cultural development ("Los talleres" 7). He has urged a continued
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reinterpretation of the past, for example, and we see the workshop poets depicting the
hardships of life under Somoza or referring to the brutalities of his National Guard.
Some of the accounts of what life is like as a guerilla fighter, a literacy worker or
militia member are, in a sense, creating a new history, one uniquely Nicaraguan.
Ramirez' call for a culture with "deeply popular roots" reinforces the workshop
poets’ tendency to individuate themes such as love, death, and other significant events
which are common to everyone. The workshops’ "Declaration of Principles" also
makes it clear that the poets are dedicated to maintaining the popular character of the
workshops both in subject matter, form of the poetry and class origin of the poets
themselves, thus the prevalence of native, informal, conversational constructions and
grammatical forms. The conversational poem often has a dialogic form, as in Poem
15, "Me cuenta mi abuelo Salvador." In this text by Javier Ortiz, an eleven year old
boy, the structure is a conversational dialogue which offers a reinterpretation of the
past in the words of someone who lived it. Under the Somoza regime, Sandino's
efforts to liberate Nicaragua could not be openly discussed, but now, a grandfather
can tell his grandson that "Sandino pleaba contra / el yanqui." Thus today's
Nicaraguans are recapturing legendary exploits for the collective cultural heritage.
The amount of thematic matter concerned with the events of daily life is also, in
some sense, a response to Ramirez' call for the creation of a truly popular culture.
Agreeing with Ramirez, for the most part the workshop poets refuse to depoliticize
their art, arguing that all art is political anyway ("Los talleres" 7). The range of the
"political," however, can go from explicit praise for the Revolution to a poem
celebrating the Nicaraguan countryside which is political only in the sense that it
chooses to celebrate what is native.
The workshop poets' steadfast loyalty to the exteriorist style may also be
thought of as a political act. The style is under attack from established poets, and
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conservative critics and academics. Because it defies much of the Hispanic poetic
tradition, and is ironically closer to the North American colloquial modernist tradition,
it also meets Ramirez' demand for authenticity and universality in the new culture.
Workshop organizers generally see the exteriorist style as having developed out of the
both the Nicaraguan literary tradition and the revolutionary situation.
We have also seen that Cardenal has urged cultural workers to seek out and
preserve everything Nicaraguan. Collections of folk song and dance, cuisine, and
customs have been encouraged by the Ministry of Culture, and as we have seen, much
of the workshop poetry has referred to ways of life that are particular to Nicaraguan
peasants. This poet /literacy worker seems to have had such an anthropological motive
when he wrote Poem 16, "Donde los Mairena." He carefully describes how the
country house is made of "varas de corteses rellenadas con mierda de vaca y barro,"
and has a "techo de chaguite." Ways of the local women who fetch water in "tinajas
para la nesquiza" are recorded along with the peasant who sharpens his machete on the
"molejon."
How Workshop Poems Affect Their Context
The revolutionary zeal that permeates much of the poetry could in a large part be
responsible for many of the thematic and stylistic characteristics attributed to the
exteriorist influence. The concern for the reader is readily apparent. There is a strong
emotional affect in much of the poetry and this comes across in the choice of thematic
material. The reader is invited to mourn those killed by the Guard, feel proud of the
success of the literacy workers, or marvel at the beauty of Nicaraguan mountains. The
universality of thematic material (love, death, the struggle with nature) assures that the
reader will identify with these emotional experiences and be more likely to continue the
revolutionary struggle. At the same time, the particularity of detail lends the poetry
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credibility and increases its interest value as readers recognize and learn about specific
locales and customs of their country.
Since the poetry is directed to the ordinary citizen, and in Nicaragua that means
many people with low-level literacy skills, an attempt to keep the poetic language
simple and familiar is understandable. To many of the poets themselves any other
kind of language would be unnatural. As has been demonstrated, the versification is
very readable with lines corresponding to syntactic units. The simple unadorned
language creates a tone of humble authority and quiet confidence, attractive packaging
for a system of revolutionary ethics. The structures used to order the poems are
among the most accessible, narration and description. Periodic sentences and strong
systems of closure lure readers in a pattern of desire and gratification. The frequent
use of contrast is another indication of the poetry's rhetorical nature. Its paradoxical
mix of the concrete and transcendental promise the reader a better life in this world.
As for concrete effects on this world, there appear to be several things that
workshop poetry can claim for itself. First of all, the poetry validates the voice,
speech and concerns of ordinary people. They see themselves and their language in
the poetry, gain confidence in their abilities and begin to see their own needs as
legitimate. The popular expression "vos," for example, is now used with pride by all
segments of society. The poems are also an easy way to register important national
events and their effects on individuals. In some respects the poetry approaches the
epic genre in this role. Nicaragua will have a documentary-like record of personal
testimony revealing what it was like for the average person to participate in events of a
national importance. In this sense, the poetry can provide a psychological service of
cathartic release on the individual and collective levels. Relatedly, the poetry provides
both interpretations of current events and reinterpretations of historical events in light
of a new system of values which privileges democratic norms. Thus, many will learn
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how to "review" their own world and literally begin to read the word and the world
differently after having learned how to read and write this poetry.
85
Chapter 4: A Pedagogy for Contextual Literacy in the U.S.A.
86
After having examined the research on literacy and its context, and after having
seen this dialectic at work in the poetry workshops of Nicaragua, it is time to look for
an approach to literacy which might help create a context at the American university
level which would lead to a critical literacy in the classroom and in the wider cultural
arena. Since ultimately such a literacy, would be contextually-determined, directed
and constitutive, I will call it a "contextual" literacy. This literacy would provide its
practitioners with a critical/self-critical perspective as well as enable them to
envision/revision themselves and their world through language. Pedagogies for
contextual literacy would be directed at both the literacy itself and its context. Since,
as we have seen, these influence each other, they must be acted on jointly in order to
effect change. Such a dialectical pedagogical approach which takes the findings of
literacy scholarship into consideration— especially the importance of context in
determining the type of literacy which flourishes in a society— will be developed in this
chapter. As was pointed out in Chapter One, it is not an approach that has been
advocated by many compositionists in spite of much research indicating its
appropriatenes s. 22
In this study I will rely on Marx' concept of alienation and Lukacs' later
elaboration to provide a framework for studying the context and production of the
composition classroom. However, before considering these areas, some qualifying
remarks are in order. There is a sense, of course, in which all human activity is
alienated, mind from body or object created from human design (or any of the other
popular dualisms). Furthermore, there are some aspects of alienation which may have
positive effects— as when in creativity theory the cognitive dissonance deemed
necessary for creative thought is likened to a feeling of puzzlement or alienation. In
fact, turning to literacy, every literacy event could be considered alienating in one
sense because writing makes external information that was once a part of the self (if
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inarticulated). In light of these considerations, perhaps human alienation is best
thought of as a continuum ranging from situations of very limited to very extreme
alienation.
The notion of the alienating effects of literacy was addressed by Goody and
Watt in their article on "The Consequences of Literacy." They spectulate that the
proliferation of knowledge since the advent of literacy and printing has made it
impossible for individuals to have a unified sense of the culture in which they live.
They also note that individuals can be divided from each other because of the "vast
proliferation of more or less tangible distinctions based on what people [have] read"
(58). As we might expect, Kathleen Gough, writing from a more contextualist
perspective, disagrees with Goody and Watt. She maintains that "alienation seems to
stem from particular forms of complex political and economic structures rather than
intrinsically from the spread of literacy" (82). Again, I will take a dialectical approach
and argue that the acquisition and practice of literacy can be an unpleasant, futile and,
thus, alienating experience, but this can happen only if literacy is acquired in alienating
social and economic conditions— which it,in turn, can render more alienating.
Fortunately, we shall see that this need not always be the case.
But just what exactly do we mean by alienation? In a section of his early work,
The Economic and Philosophical M anuscripts. Marx describes what he calls
"alienated labor" (120-134). In industrial production, the worker is shown to be
alienated from the actual activity of his^3 work, from the object he produces and from
his fellow men. The production process is almost always out of his control, consisting
of fragmented tasks dictated by others or by the technology itself. His actions, in a
sense, are not his own. Marx writes that "This is . .. activity as suffering (passivity),
strength as powerlessness, creation as emasculation" (126). In the end, the worker is
alienated from himself, and "the object produced by labor, its product, now stands
88
opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer" (122). In
History and Class Consciousness. Georg Lukacs argues that Marx's notion of the
commodification of human labor is the central metaphor for all human relations in
capitalist societies. "As the commodity becomes universally dom inant,. . . . The fate
of the worker becomes the fate of society as a whole" (90-91). Lukacs makes
escaping the resulting "reification of consciousness" the central endeavor of his
theoretical and political project, as we shall see below.
Applying the concept of alienated labor developed by Marx and elaborated by
Lukacs to the production of compositions in a writing class yields disturbing
i n s i g h t s . 24 Scholars, teachers and researchers have pointed out many of these
problems, but it seems that in spite of the best intentions of instructors and
administrators, the school writing context remains alienating, as does much of the
writing produced there. George Hillocks, for example, in his extensive research
review for the National Conference on Research in English (1986), finds that a
discredited writing pedagogy still prevails. "In the most common and widespread
mode (presentational), the instructor dominates all activity, with students acting as the
passive recipients of rules, advice, and examples of good writing. This is the least
effective mode examined. . . ." (246-47). Yet it does prevail, having acquired a
momentum all its own. As Lukacs said of the rationalized production process, "reality
disintegrates into a multitude of irrational facts and over these a network of purely
formal 'laws' emptied of content is then cast" (155). And in spite of our ability to
criticize the "facts" of classroom writing, we seem compelled to continue participating
in the irrationality of the whole endeavor: a disempowering rhetorical situation.
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The Classroom Rhetorical Situation
Irrational F a c t# l: Like factory workers, students are alienated from the activity
of their work. The decision to write is usually not up to them— write they must, like it
or not. Their composing process is frequently dictated by the imposition of an
idealized version of the ideal writer's procedures or by the time constraints of the
school schedule. As previously mentioned, Emig pointed out over 15 years ago that
students spent more time and energy on self-generated or "reflexive" writing than on
school-sponsored writing (91). We need to make more of an effort to motivate
students to write on their own.
Irrational Fact #2: Students, like workers, are alienated from the object of
their work. For many the essay has come to represent only a grade— an end in itself—
instead of a way to make discoveries, initiate change or apply knowledge. When the
topic of the essay is the instructor's choice, the rhetorical characteristics of form,
purpose, length, and tone become imposed requirements instead of organic elements
of a text. We were first warned about such possibilities in 1966 at the "Dartmouth
Conference," and later by Ken Macrorie in his book Telling W riting (1-4). More
recently Donald Graves has objected to these practices, commenting that "when
children control their subjects, they write more, gain greater practice in writing, and
ultimately care much more about the appearance of their letters on the page" (19-20).
S. H. Pianko echos his observations regarding older students (17).
Irrational Fact #3: Since they write alone, students are typically alienated from
each other during the writing process. If editorial collectives are formed, they are
typically ad hoc groupings rather than combinations of people with similar needs and
concerns, e.g., women or third world students. Naturally forming groups and
collectives that might serve to counteract the relatively powerless position of the
student writer faced with a teacher audience are not encouraged. Research has
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shown, however, that even students working in ad hoc groups produce better essays
than those writing alone when their responses to each others’ writing is combined with
teacher feedback, and there is some indication that peer feedback may "even exceed
the improvement that occurs under evaluation procedures carried out by the teacher"
(Beaven, 151).
Recent perspectives on language in society are also most often ignored.
Writing in isolation denies the social nature of language development described by
such theorists as Piaget, Vygotsky, Britton and M o f f e t t .25 And, as was pointed out in
Chapter One, James Berlin has shown that in the "positivist" or "current traditional
group". . . "which clearly dominates thinking about writing instruction today" (769),
language is taught as having an exact correspondence to external or mental reality
rather than as a medium that actually shapes what we see (774). Bruffee's argument
for the social construction and justification of knowledge based on the concepts of
Vygotsky, Thomas Kuhn, and Richard Rorty (160-165) is also ignored. Nor is there
any recognition of the fact that academic discourse, like all others, has evolved over
time into its present conventionalized form (Olsen 268-270). In fact, George Dillon
has argued that the essay should be explicitly taught as a set of conventions for writing
(21-41), but this doesn't happen in many classrooms.
Lukacs and the Essav as Reified Commodity
Thus, the whole dynamic of classroom rhetoric supports a structure of
constraints and rewards which students may master, but separates them from more
important concerns. Writing about reified labor, Lukacs states:
Objectively, a world of objects and relations between things springs into
being (the world of commodities and their movements on the market).
The laws governing these objects are indeed gradually discovered by
man, but even so they confront him as invisible forces that generated
their own power. The individual can use his knowledge of these laws to
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his own advantage, but he is not able to modify the process by his own
activity (87).
And even though we may become aware of the serious defects of such a
system, we see ourselves participating in it and thus reinforcing it as the
"reproductionists" in education theory have shown .26 Our students figure out ways
of "working the system." They "write what the teacher wants" to get a "good grade,"
but this is a motivator that is effective only within the school or institutional structure.
And while this motivator may relate in some ways for some students to the outside
world— getting into college, getting a job— for others it does not offer this rather
delayed form of gratification.
Continuing his analysis, Lukacs' explains how the commodity form facilitates
the "equal exchange of qualitatively different objects" (87). In other words, the human
labor that goes into the production of commodities is abstracted out in the form of
money or exchange value on the market. It is this abstracted human labor as money
that gives commodities their worth. Yet the quality of this human labor is
unexamined, hidden, repressed. Thus, many workers merely fill time for money;
indeed, their time becomes money as their labor is abstracted by the commodification
process. A more rational system might attempt to recognize the qualitative dimension
of time and pay a worker who produces a commodity which has value in human terms
more than a worker who does not— or at least provide some means of recognizing and
encouraging the former. But currently we see people making bombs being paid more
than those making books or those teaching others to write books. From shoes to
bubble gum to super glue to life insurance, all commodities can be bought and sold
with equal conviction since they are all worth money. Their ethical value or usefulness
in human terms is rarely at question— indeed it seems strange to even address this
crucial problem. Similarly,when writing is taught apart from any relation to content
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areas or purpose, as is frequently the case in strictly "composition classes," it is seen
by many students as merely an exercise in filling time for a grade, i.e., student
"money". In this situation, both students and teachers become divorced from the truth
and ethics of writing, and we have the "equal exchange of qualitatively different
objects." If writing remains unrelated to questions of knowledge or context, whether
an essay is true or false, right or wrong can make no difference to students or teachers.
Proponents of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement such as Elaine Maimon,
Toby Fulwiler, Art Y o u n g ^ 8 and others have made many of these points, yet
"contentless" writing courses continue.
Luk&cs writes, furthermore, that in the abstraction of human labor from the
commodity form "time loses its qualitative dimension" (90). In other words, the
quality of human labor that renders commodities exchangeable no longer matters. It is
the length in time required to perform such labor that becomes important. Time is
chopped up into segments deemed appropriate for each activity. The duration of these
segments is determined by things external to the worker, just as the length of time to
produce compositions is typically determined by factors alien to the individual student.
This is an unfortunate circumstance because much research has found that better
writing actually takes longer to produce. As I pointed out in Chapter One, Stallard has
found this to be the case (216). Others have found that better writers revise more
(Bridwell 220, Sommers 383-385), and take more time in planning and pre-writing
activities (Perl 330, Pianko 20). In addition, Matsuhashi found that students in her
study paused more when generalizing or persuading than during reporting— evidence
which indicates that writing requiring higher levels of abstraction takes longer to
produce (128).
Another curious finding regarding time in the composing process has been
pointed out by Hillocks. He is surprised by the rapid rate of student composing (nine
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words per minute) reported in much research and points out that Hemingway was said
to produce a much slower two pages a day (6). Hillocks concludes that "the data from
these various studies raise questions about the idea that writing is a process of
discovery" (7). He seems to feel that the rapid pace of student writing is evidence that
writing per se is perfunctory, not engaging. This is probably true in the school
writing situation. More like factory workers, students are concerned only with
"putting in their time," getting those required pages written and heading home.
However, the unfortunate reality of alienated school writing should not be taken as a
model for all writing. That writing is a heuristic has been demonstrated by almost
every composition researcher and scholar previously mentioned, but Donald Murray
has been especially articulate about this p o i n t . 2 7
Another unfortunate aspect of our rationalized conception of time is that in the
case of students, we refuse to compensate mere "effort" with high grades. A minority
student, for example, who has struggled hard to produce a "mediocre" essay in
standard written English— and has grown much in ability in the process— will receive a
"C" under our current methods of evaluation. However, the quality of time spent by
this student may be much more deserving of an "A" than that of another student who
produces "A" papers with little mental exertion.
Lukacs explains that the "human qualitites and idiosyncrasies of the worker
appear increasingly as mere sources of e r r o r ^ 9 when contrasted with these abstract
special laws functioning according to rational predictions," i.e., the so-called laws of
economics (89). Similarly, as I am attempting to illustrate, classroom composing
takes place according to the laws of an alienated rhetorical situation. When this
rhetorical situation is not recognized to be alienated and divorced from a real world
context, instructors may examine, grade, critique, and evaluate students and their
essays in light of an "ideal" essay or composing process. When this happens, the
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actual work and needs of individual students are considered superfluous or irrelevant.
Much evidence indicates that this is the case in many composition classes. Research
has revealed that students have been given rules and schedules for writing, revising
and editing which they often internalize in strange and unproductive ways. Mike
Rose has written of students whose composing process is stifled because of rigid but
ineffective composing rules learned in earlier English classes: "always catch your
audience," or "write grammatically" (390). Similarly, Pianko (20), Perl (333) and
Shaughnessy (79) have warned that inexperienced writers often pay so much
attention to grammar rules and surface syntax that their creativity is blocked, and they
don't achieve the fluency necessary to deal with larger considerations of meaning and
content. Student preoccupation with mechanical errors is also apparent from the
research on revision which shows students consistently making most revisions at the
level of surface syntax rather than at the level of content or audience requirements
(Sommers 383, Bridwell 221).
It is not hard to see, therefore, that the production of most classroom essays is
an alienating experience in Marx' and Lukacs' t e r m s .30 Many of the above criticisms
of composition pedagogy are not new. Britton decried the predominance of teacher as
audience for student writing over ten years ago (64) as did Emig before him (92).
Thus we come to fear that the classroom rhetorical situation will never be what we
want it to be. Some cynically respond that the false necessities of classroom rhetoric
mirror the "real world" powerlessness of most individuals. Thus instruction meets the
limited rhetorical needs of disempowered discourse. Yet most of us are not victims of
cynicism and our will to resist continues.
Lukacs argues that the way out of this alienated existence is in becoming aware
of the reification of the human enterprise. Much like the Freudian faith in the liberating
power of the unconscious made conscious, Lukacs believed that an awareness of how
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human needs and activities have been turned against their subjects will lead these
subjects to recognize their own powers and motivate them to change social structures
and relationships. "When the worker knows himself as a commodity his knowledge
is practical. That is to say, this knowledge brings about an objective structural change
in the object of knowledge" (169). Lukacs proposes that this recognition be brought
about through a process of "mediation" or examination of the commodity structure and
its relation to the "totality" of social structures and beliefs. A de-alienating pedagogy
must include this examination and demystification. In other words literacy must be
approached in relation to its context.
The Poetry Workshops: Unalienated Literacy
But before we examine strategies for examining and escaping an alienating
literacy, let us look at what defines the workshop production in Nicaragua as an
unalienated literacy situation.
First of all, unlike students in the American situation, the writers in the
Nicaraguan poetry workshops are in control of the activity of writing. The poets'
decision to write is uniquely their own in a social context of democratic participation
and encouragement. They choose their topic and manner of expression. In fact, their
continued adoption of the workshop style, as I have earlier explained, is a conscious
political act of popular assertion. Adopting the exteriorist style, workshop poets face
opposition from an important group of intellectuals and artists. Also their poem(s), if
they so desire, will be printed in a literary journal and distributed nationally for a large
public audience.
Secondly, the poets are less alienated from the objects of their literacy
production. Again the genesis and distribution of the poetry is in their control.
Furthermore, they see themselves instead of unrecongizable, dehumanized images in
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their work. The poems are full of individual and collective endeavor. As Joaquin
M arta Sosa has said, "the Sandinista Revolution has socialized the means of
production of poetry."31 Nicaragua’s revolutionary redistribution of cultural and
capital wealth has created the empowering context necessary for the flowering of an
unalienated literacy. Yet, the Nicaraguan literacy might be called a "contextual literacy
" in that its practicioners believe in their ability to affect their world through the written
word. They write critically of a past they wish to evaluate and reject, and confidently
of a future they will envision and build.
Third, workshop poets are not alientated from each other. Arriving, at a
workshop, usually with the rough draft of a poem, they help each other, critique each
other's work, and offer suggestions and comments. These may be incorporated into
the original poem or rejected. In any case, the original author claims the work as
entirely his/her own. The help received from others in the way of additions or
suggestions is not considered an aberration which violates the concept of personal
property, but as the way writing typically gets done in a cooperative society.
(Lunsford and others have made similar points about professional writing in the
United States 152). Contributions from other poets are expected and welcome. In fact
there is a sense of responsibility and commitment to each other. There is less of an
unequal power relationship between the workshop poets and the poet-organizers. The
organizers, for the most part, are not university trained, and as we have seen, after
they set up a workshop, the poets themselves must carry it on alone.
The workshop poet is also aware that his or her work will be taken seriously,
and will be read and welcomed by others. It may even affect a large number of
people. Some of the stylistic ramifications of this discourse situation have already
been pointed out: workshop language is simple, direct, and highly concrete. Its
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highly rhetorical nature reveals the writer's faith that his/her words will affect and
change readers. In this sense it is unalienated from the reality it describes.
Could we instill similar unalienated literacy in our students if we set up poetry
workshops in our classrooms? Probably not, because one factor of overiding
importance, apparent from the research on literacy, is the necessity of an enabling
context. In the United States today, we have a context in which most people use their
literacy skills only for simple lists, order forms, tax returns, and personal letters. In
her study of the black Trackton community, Shirley Brice Heath concludes that "there
are few occasions for reading of extended connected discourse and almost no
occasions for writing such m aterial," (Wavs with W ords 198). In the white
community of Roadville, the "notes and letters of Roadville women are the longest
connected texts written by adult community members" (217). In a similar inditement
of the kind of writing called for in our society, Erica Lindemann complains that
W e tell college students they must write well to complete job
applications when they graduate, when in fact someone in the personnel
office most likely will fill out the forms for them. Some of our students
will become members of highly paid professions without learning to
write well. Lawyers often consult books of sample letters and briefs
rather than write their own. Politicians outline their speeches along
certain lines but leave the actual drafting to paid staff writers. Members
of other professions do not compose letters, memos, or reports in
written form; they dictate them. Sales reports, requests for parts and
services, countless business transactions, are usually completed by
filling out pre-printed forms. Although our students cannot escape all
writing, many of them (more than writing teachers want to think about)
do get diplomas, degrees, and jobs without needing to write much or
well (4).
Without a context that has a place for thoughtful written analysis or in which such an
analysis from an ordinary individual could be socially significant, we will not likely be
able to motivate its production in the classroom. But while we may never be totally
free of classroom alienation, denying its existence won't help either. Perhaps we can
work both inside and outside the classroom for the systematic changes in power
structures and hierarchies that will return creative possibilities to the majority of our
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citizens. We must strive to reveal the inequalities inherent in our current socio-political
situation, so that our students will acquire the will to change them. Our form of
contextual literacy will be less celebratory and more negative than the workshop
production perhaps, but self confident and determined nonetheless. It will remain
alienated only to the degree that its context is alienating.
A Pedagogy for the De-Alienation of Classroom Literacy
Students are not generally aware they are emeshed in an alienating system.
Following a Lukacian approach, it is necessary to conduct with them an investigation
into the alienating aspects of their own language/literacy and culture to show them its
constraints. As we have seen, an alienating context goes hand in hand with an
alienating literacy. What is called for in a pedagogy of de-alienation is a penetrating
structural critique, extending beyond the typical "rhetorical analysis" of the
composition class. The epistemological, linguistic and rhetorical foundations of our
institutions, belief structures and discourse must be examined before we can
understand how our language and culture have come to be alienated.
At its most basic level, then, the contextual literacy that we are aiming for is
one of linguistic, epistemological and rhetorical sophisticatication. Its practitioners are
knowledgeable in such areas as the nature of language, epistemological issues related
to language and social and personal issues of power through language. This is
undoubtedly a tall order for a composition teacher, but as we have seen, a "rhetorical
analysis" of the Jakobson model simply will not reveal the inequalities present in the
practice of literacy in a social context— and these must be uncovered to provide the
motivation for teachers and students to move beyond our current limitations. Just as
Marx and Lucaks have described the fetishization of the commodity which conceals the
unequal social relations that go into its production, language must be analysed for
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similar inequalities inherent in its use, and pedagogies must be devised which are
adequate to this undertaking.
This section will look at theorists pointing the way to such pedagogies. I have
chosen these scholars because they take the dialectical relationship between language
/literacy and its context into account, and the implications of their theories for
composition pedagogy, except in the case of Freire, have largely been overlooked.
Scholars writing in the tradition of "critical theory" provide this structural critique in
ways that are accessible to students.
Students must also be wary of a naive faith in the ability of language to name
reality. Familiarity with post-structuralism is a proper antidote for this attitude.
Paradoxically, we have seen that the workshop poets are confident of language's
ability to mean and refer to events, places and people in the real world. In some ways
this confidence indicates an unfortunate ignorance of the futility of language's
logocentric quest as illustrated by Derrida and other post-structuralists. But it also
indicates an awareness of the power of unalienated language in its social context. As
Frank Lentricchia has recently written on this complex issue of language and
representation,
Deconstruction's useful work is to undercut the epistemological claims
of representation, but that work in no way touches the real work of
representation— its work of power. To put it another way:
deconstruction can show that representations are not and cannot be
adequate to the task of representation, but it has nothing to say about the
social work that representation can and does do (50). (My italics.)
Post structuralist explanations of language are based on a decontextualized text of
signifiers-relating-to-signifiers. Meaning is derived not from any kind of reference to
reality, but on the signifiers' "differance" from each other as they each name what the
other is not. We might diagram this relationship this way:
Text = signifier + signifier + signifier = system of "differance" = meaning
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While the above description does seem to correspond to much that we now
know about language, there is another way to describe the nature of language, an
unalienated way, and the way in which I believe the poetry workshop poets think of
their language. They place the above relationship in a social context. Along similar
lines, Robert Scholes writing about the limits of deconstruction, states that "I will not
deny that language is based upon difference; rather, I will argue that it is also based
upon reference, a dimension of the human use of language [my emphasis] that has
been systematically repressed or ignored by structuralists]" (87). The relationship of
signifiers in a social context constitutes Bruffee's "collaborative learning” or "social
construction of knowledge." It is Freire's collective naming of a problematized world.
It is Stanley Fish's "interpretive community."
In the following three pedagogical components, language is depicted as a
system of signifiers alienated from its social possibilities of meaning making. For
Marcuse this presents a problem to overcome. For Culler, it presents an opportunity
to achieve a deeper awareness of one aspect of language. Both are viable responses.
Marcuse’s One Dimensional Language
Herbert Marcuse fears that contemporary language propagated by the mass
media has had a very negative effect on our ability to conceptualize and think critically.
In a section of his book, One Dimensional Man. devoted to language (89-103), he
seems to write from what we have called a cognitivist perspective. Like the
cognitivists of Chapter One, Marcuse believes that language shapes thinking and
thinking leads to alteration of context. Marcuse condemns the very language we read,
write and speak today for subtly reducing our linguistic forms and symbols of
reflection, abstraction, development and contradiction. This occurs in conjunction
with the denial of freedom in other areas of the "one dimensional society." Marcuse
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provides a detailed analysis of this tendency and concludes that "The unified,
functional language is an irreconcilaby anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it
operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional
elements of Reason" (97).
This is accomplished in several ways. First of all, the operationalism that reigns
supreme in the empirical sciences pervades linguistic mechanisms and is applied
through them to other realms. This process results in what Marcuse calls "social and
political behaviorism" in which concepts are defined by their manner of functioning.
Most concepts (freedom, democracy, education) have become closely identified with
certain rather stereotypical, cliched actions and behaviors. Any response to them other
than the stereotypical is considered irrational. The meaning of the concept is thereby
closed, as more creative interpretations are excluded. For example, we often hear that
"Happiness is drinking Coke," or that "Democracy is free enterprise." People may not
believe in the statement of an operational concept, but they accept it anyway since it
seems to justify itself in action, i.e., in getting a job done or in buying or selling.
The constant imposition of images adds further imm ediacy to these
constructions. Images, in fact, are frequently substituted for concepts, and in their
directness impede conceptual thinking (103). Advertising as well as political
languages make use of other devices to subtly coerce, such as suggestive commands,
and prescriptive tones. The manner of address will also frequently be falsely familiar,
referring to "your kind of tobacco" or "your favorite car." Standardized products of
mass production are made "especially for you." Finally, thought-inhibiting language
is overwhelmingly concrete as it identifies the thing with its function and deals in
"facts," attributes, and stereotypical characteristics. Lack of transcending vocabulary
combined with the inability to challenge the established reality through conceptual
examination, goes hand in hand with the tendency of closed discourse to suppress
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historical reason. Comparison of the present with the past might lead to evaluative
considerations critical of the status quo and its administrative apparatus.
Marcuse also offers a brief explanation of what "critical language" is like.
Rather than inhibiting the meaning potential of concepts, critical language allows for
their open development. This is often accomplished in a dialectical relation of
opposites. "The discourse develops and states the conflict between the thing and its
function" (100). The subject is recognized "as an historical agent whose identity
constitutes itself in and against its historical practice, and in and against its social
reality" (100). Contradictions are to be "demonstrated, made explicit, explained...."
concludes Marcuse.
W hat we see in our classrooms is the product of a closed society's restrictive
language. Closed discourse is the language of an era without a past or a future. Its
concrete present negates our efforts to creatively compare or critically contrast. Such
language alienates us from our own history and retards our forward movement. The
goal of achieving a contextual literacy in the classroom demands that students see this
situation clearly and want to escape its control.
The Deconstruction of Literacies
As strategies for getting behind the language of administered thought,
techniques of deconstruction are im portant new tools in the pedagogy of
critical/contextual literacy. Jonathan Culler has outlined some of the most important of
these strategies for literary criticism in his book On Deconstruction. These can be
adapted for writing instruction as students examine texts from advertising, politics
academic disciplines or their own classrooms.
The first strategy Culler unveils is the search for the "logic of supplementarity,"
i.e., a value-laden hierarchy established in a text to promote one term at the expense of
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another (213). Students should be aware of the possibility that a marginalized,
negative or supplementary term is often the condition of possibility of a first. They
may find examples in many contemporary attitudes and behaviors. The defense
establishment criticizes "social spending," for example, when its clear that the ever
growing military budget could be thought of as a perverse form of "social spending."
Derrida's famous example of this process at work is his analysis of the
relationship between speech and writing proposed by Saussure. Saussure privileges
speech as the sign system closest to thought in its immediacy. Writing, he believes, is
a system of signs representing speech and so is one step further removed from
thought. Derrida, however, shows that the principle upon which writing works,
arbitrary representation in a system of "differance," is also the one which makes
speech meaningful to us. Therefore, speech can be thought of as another form of
writing, and the hierarchies of Saussure's text are reversed.
This illustrates Derrida's belief that text is unable to reach the correspondence
between truth and word, or "logocentrism," which it strives for and usually claims.
According to Derrida, both writing and speech are arbitrary systems whose terms
achieve their meaning in opposition to each other within a system. While this notion
can be carried to an extreme which robs the text of any firm reference to an outside
reality (see Robert Scholes' Textual Power 86-110), the experience of reality as a text
and the corresponding imprint that our language places on our perception of this reality
is a proper antidote to the positivist notion of the "objectivity" of language— an
important viewpoint for students to encounter.
Students must also leam to see textual contradictions. Thus, a second strategy
of deconstruction described by Culler is the discovery of "points of condensation" in a
text where a single term brings together different lines of argument or sets of values
(213). These terms are usually central to the argument of a text, but at the same time,
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the internal contradictions they embody serve to undermine its logocentrism. Third,
one should look for other areas in the text that are contradictory or reach beyond its
own arguments. "Any reading," writes Culler, "involves presuppositions, and the text
itself, .. . will provide images and arguments to subvert those presuppositions. The
text will carry signs of that difference from itself which makes explication
interminable" (214).
Fourth, Culler also points out that a text can describe some other object with a
term, image or figure which can be understood as a self-description. Showing how
these terms apply to the first text often illustrates that an object or procedure which was
purportedly criticized is actually part of the argumentative structure of the text itself
(214). Fifth, Culler illustrates that deconstructive analyses may attempt to find
oppositions within a text that give rise to contradictory interpretations. "What is put
into question are the presuppositions and decisions that convert a complex pattern of
internal differences into alternative positions or interpretations" (215). An obvious
example is the U.S. Constitution. An understanding that texts are not sacred and often
contain contradictory elements is important for a critical/contextual literacy.
Finally, students must learn to perceive subtleties of tone and prejudice.
Deconstruction of a text will often illustrate the paradoxical principles of
contextualization of meaning and the infinite extendability of context. Texts need to be
examined for underlying systems of metaphysical values which they cannot escape
(215). Students will be led to distrust texts as ultimate sources of truth, while at the
same time gaining a sophisticated understanding of the inescapability of logocentrism.
De-Alienating Contexts for Contextual Literacy
Only theories that influence context through criticism and reconstruction can
lay proper foundations for a contextual literacy pedagogy. The ones that follow build
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on each other to provide an ever more precise account of social, institutional and
personal relations of power and motivation. Thus, the activities designed around
these theories are a response to Lukacs' call to "mediate" or analyze the "totality" of
cultural artifacts in order to bring to consciousness the reification that surrounds our
creations. It is my hope, as it was his, that such mediations will reveal the
dehumanization of culture that needlessly diminishes our lives.
Contextual Critique: Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire developed his theories from experience in the Third World, but
they have applications of a much wider nature. From an acquaintance with many of
his ideas, students will begin to see themselves as individuals with the power of self-
expression. He summarizes his work in his latest book, The Politics of Education:
It formulates a scientific humanist conception that finds its expression in
a dialogical praxis [unity of action and reflection] in which the teachers
and learners together, in the act of analysing a dehumanizing reality,
denounce it while announcing its transformation in the name of the
liberation of man (57).
Thus we have another component to add to the contextual literacy curriculum:
the combined work of "teachers and learners." Freire emphasizes that a new non-
hierarchical relationship between teacher and student must take the place of the old one
in which teacher leads and learner pursues knowledge by him/herself.
Similar to the contextualist literacy scholars, Freire maintains that to be
successfully acquired, literacy must be perceived as a tool which will enable its users
to achieve various ends in their own experiential context. He believes that one of the
fundamental characteristics of humanity is a "transcendental intentionality" (93), the
capacity of human consciousness to surpass the limits of current reality. He therefore
refers to his as a utopian pedagogy. Since Freire believes that the acquisition of
literacy is a process that occurs most successfully in conjunction with the acquisition
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of the learner’ s world, or cultural context, he speaks of naming the word and the
world while gaining distance from both to stimulate critical reflection. This is the first
step in achieving what Freire refers to as "conscientizaton," a state that could be part of
a contextual literacy.
Freire explains that in Third World situations of oppression, a culture of silence
reigns where a few men and women have most of the rights to naming, i.e.,
appropriating the world. The others may not be able to distinguish the natural from the
cultural, fatalistically thinking that their current living situation is due to "human
nature" or "God's will." Similar to thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Freire writes that
in industrialized nations "Men begin thinking and acting according to prescriptions
they receive daily from the communications media" (88). But in both cases of
silencing, there has been a mythologizing of the status quo, insulating it from the
criticism and reflection of ordinary people. The literacy educator's role is to present
"problematized" situations for "analysis of dependence as a relational phenomenon that
gives rise to different forms of being, of thinking, of expression to those of the culture
of silence and those of the culture that 'has a voice'" (72).
In Freire's "dialogic" pedagogy, both teachers and students learn from each
other in the process of naming and transforming their reality. Teachers choose
"generative" or "danger" words from the environment of the learners. These words
represent "problematized" existential situations which Freire calls "codifications"
which the learners will come to see as surmountable when they are broken down and
demystified. There is a distance established between the codification of the context
and the context itself, enabling learners to look at their lives critically for perhaps the
first time. Learners strive to see a system, a whole and its parts as they progressively
deepen their analysis. Teachers frequently use student's own words as material for
classroom texts, thus validating student experience and knowledge.
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Freire believes that education is always a political act (188). This is so because
it serves to either legitimate the status quo or to analyse and correct current injustices.
It cannot do both. He differentiates between a "banking" method of education, in
which the teacher deposits knowledge into the minds of rather passive students, and
the "dialogic." This relates to his belief that true knowledge is a process involving
action based on reflection followed by further reflection, not just consumption of facts.
Knowledge then becomes experiential, relevant, critical. He proposes that the
epistemological cycle must be taken as a totality, "rather than splitting it into one stage
for acquiring existing knowledge and another stage for discovery or the creation of
new knowledge." A pedagogy which does not respect the epistemological cycle is
doomed to irrelevance because it ignores the context-directed intentionality of human
consciousness.
In fact, consciousness and the world are simultaneous according to Freire.
Consciousness creates the world and the world in turn informs consciousness. The
world is thus a reality in process that people, by interpretation through language, are
able to increasingly appropriate. The world or context of literacy, therefore, does not
exist apart from human subjects except in a situation of alienation or in a culture of
silence.
Continuing in a dialectical fashion, but this time from a cognitivist perspective,
Freire writes that "Education should help to establish a new thought-language" (22).
In other words, Freire seems to see the classroom as a place for exposing learners to
the abstracting and analysing skills of literacy so that they can use these skills in the
"real world." Freire is perfectly aware of the language-con text dialectic, which he
describes in much the same terms we have used to describe the one between literacy
and its context. He writes:
My language and thinking, I believe, are a dialectical unity. They are
deeply rooted in a context. So if there is a change of context, it will not
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be enough to mechanically propagate a distinct form of thinking
speaking; it will have to come about by necessity. I think one of the
tasks of critical education and radical pedagogy is to help the critical
thinking-speaking process to re-create itself in the re-creation of its
context (187).
Contextual De-Alienation: Henry Giroux
Another pedagogical theorist who takes the importance of context into
consideration is Henry Giroux. He has been very successful in adapting some of
Freire's concepts to North American culture and the North American classroom as well
as making his own contributions to contextual pedagogy. Giving simultaneous
attention to the skills of literacy and their contextual parameters, Giroux works toward
a theory and pedagogy of critical reading and writing for social change.
One of the first tasks Giroux advises for developing a critical literacy in students
is investigating with them the methods by which knowledge is constituted. Giroux
writes that
Knowledge becomes important to the degree that it helps human beings
understand not only the assumptions embedded in its form and content,
but also the processes whereby knowledge is produced, appropriated
and transformed within specific social and historical settings (Language
Arts 38).
Translated into classroom pedagogy, learners would be encouraged to inquire
into what constitutes the knowledge that is found in typical history or English
textbooks. What are the economic and political pressures that lead to the propagation
of certain types of knowledge found there? Who writes textbooks? Who publishes
them? Who buys them? Would the contents be different if other groups bought or
published them? Why? Have textbooks always been distributed the way they are now?
When and why have changes occurred? How might this system be improved? To the
greatest extent possible, written analysis of the above kind should be produced in
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conjunction with corrective action. Write letters to legislators, compile a textbook of
student texts, complain or praise the local PTA or schoolboard.
Similar to Freire, Giroux also encourages students and teachers to investigate
how their own group knowledge is situated in the wider society’s relations of
domination and subordination. Is there a type of knowledge particular to women, for
example? What sorts of knowledge does the wider society prescribe to women? How
is this knowledge reflected in women's language? The relations of dominance behind
different forms and modes of discourse should be examined.
Giroux believes that as students and teachers learn to negotiate in their own
thought-languages and those of the wider societies, they will be able to "appropriate
the most progressive dimensions of their own cultural histories as well as the most
satisfying aspects of the dominant culture" (Theory and Resistance 210). In this way,
students and teachers are motivated to transform the present.
Giroux also recommends new relationships between students and teachers and
between students and themselves. New forms of organization and social processes
need to be developed that encourage individual as well as collective participation and
avoid sexist, racist and class demeaning classroom messages. Learners can look for
alternative and more emancipatory forms of social structures in studies of people's
history, third world history, women’s history, the history of popular socialist
movements and in their own imaginations.
Contextual Literacy: Raymond Geuss and Constructing a Critical Theory
In The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School.
Raymond Geuss has presented an analysis of Habermas' work informed by certain
concepts common to other Frankfurt School scholars to show how a critical theory
might be developed by individuals attempting to build a more democratic and
emancipatory society. I will in turn extrapolate from Geuss' work to illustrate how the
110
attempt to develop such a theory might be an appropriate activity for the contextual
literacy classroom. Using such an approach, students would become social theorists,
trying to see through oppressive social constructions and the ideologies that support
them while researching situations that could be more humanly satisfying. Students
would, in fact, be developing critical theories.
Geuss makes three points about the nature of critical theories which will help us
to better understand such an enterprise. He writes that critical theories "have a
distinctive aim or use, a distinctive cognitive structure and a distinctive mode of
confirmation" (56). Critical theories "aim at emancipation and enlightenment, at
making agents aware of hidden coercion, thereby freeing them from that coercion and
putting them in a position to determine where their true interests lie" (55). Geuss
explains that this is very different from a "scientific" enterprise which aims at
successfully manipulating the physical world. If critical theories are to help people
generate less oppressive and more liberating forms of social structures and institutions,
the first task in encouraging critical theory is an examination of current social
structures and institutions. How are human creativity and freedom being limited? Are
certain unconscious needs and desires being frustrated by people’ s own compliance
with certain social institutions, for example? Answers to questions like these, which
essentially evaluate society and its artifacts, are to come from a people’ s own values
and beliefs. The people developing the critical theory and the people to whom it is
addressed must see that according to their own standards, certain social artifacts are
limiting their human potential. Critical thought emphasizes the human/ecological
genesis of culture and understands its implications: what people have made they can
change or improve upon.
Quoting Habermas, Geuss explains that "A social theory is said to have a
'reflective cognitive structure' if it gives an explicit account of its own 'context of
Il l
origin and context of application" (56). In the act of making explicit what constitutes
the good life, freedom, democracy, for example, people learn what their normative
epistemology includes. Sometimes in the act of discovering their implicit
epistemologies, people will be constructing an epistemology more in line with their
actual needs. At any rate, the discovery of social inequalities provides the motivation
to think critically. Another element of critical thought, then, is to present alternatives
to the status quo by encouraging utopian thought. Geuss explains that Habermas
stressed the importance of referring back to the utopian content of the cultural tradition
in our search for ever more liberating forms of human society. These utopian goals
could be incorporated into our current social planning.
This eye on the past again illustrates the "reflective" nature of critical thought.
Unlike scientific theories, which claim to be apart from the object they are describing,
critical theories are said to be "reflective, or self-referential" (55) and as such are aware
of their own historicity. Just like the social institutions they study, critical theories
have evolved over time in certain contexts for certain reasons, and as social creations,
critical theories are "always a part of the object-domain which [they] describe; critical
theories are always in part about themselves" (55). They do not attempt to be above
themselves. As we have seen, a central objective of the Frankfurt School was the
rescue of reflective knowledge, knowledge that positivist m entality excludes.
Scientific theory doesn't consider itself a part of the object domain that it describes.
The success of a scientific theory is determined by its ability to predict events in the
external world. It doesn't bother with the "why's" and "shoulds" relevant to this
manipulation.
Finally, critical theories differ from scientific ones in their prescribed methods
of evaluation and confirmation. Evaluative criteria in scientific research is empirical
and acquired through observation and experiment. Critical theories, must also be
112
empirically valid, but in addition, they must be freely and knowingly accepted by the
agents to which they are addressed, i.e., they must be "reflectively acceptable" (56).
If people adopt their tenets and change basic social institutions, they must agree that
they are better off with the changes. A critical theory will also try to provide evaluative
information for deciding whether the information it provides is acceptable. Thus,
critical thought is self-conscious. It reflects back on itself to reveal its own genesis,
development and relationship to empirical realities, as well as its "context of
application," i.e., why people ought to adopt it. People must find these explanations
acceptable if the critical theory is to be acceptable. This differs again from scientific
thought. The objects of its study are not asked to reflect on the correctness of its
tenets.
Geuss then goes on to describe the three main parts of a critical theory (76).
These could easily provide a framework for a "critical research paper." Students
would first choose a social institution, belief, etc., to critique. A part of the theory
would then attempt to prove that a transformation is "practically necessary," that is, an
analysis must be conducted which shows that the social entity in question is truly
causing human pain and suffering as it currently exists. It must also show by what
distorted set of beliefs and world view the agents currently see the social entity as
legitimate. The agents themselves must be led to acknowledge that only under such
unfree conditions as those which produced this distorted world view would they have
agreed to accept such an in appropriate social artifact. As explained before, the critical
theory must meet empirical and factual criterion for validity. The descriptions,
analyses and prescriptions offered must be factually accurate. The theory must prove
that under the proposed transformation people will be freer to pursue their true
interests, and it must also provide the criteria by which the people to which it is
addressed may evaluate its acceptablity.
113
The second part of a critical research project would describe the actual
transformation of a social structure, institution, lifestyle, educational practice, etc.,
addressed. The theory must show, in other words, that such a transformation is
possible. It must be clear that the energy, in both human and economic terms, exists
to carry out the proposal.
Finally, a part of the project should openly assert "that the transition from the
present state to the proposed state can come about only if the agents adopt the critical
theory as their 'self consciousness' and act on it," (78) thus adding an ethical
imperative to the project.
114
Conclusion
115
Based on my review of the literature on literacy, study of the Nicaraguan
poetry workshops and investigation of alienating and de-alienating literacies, I can
now draw a number of conclusions with regard to developing a pedagogy for
contextual literacy in the United States. Literacy theorists have shown how literacy
shapes the culture in which it flourishes by encouraging or enabling the development
of certain cultural institutions and, possibly, certain cognitive skills in literates. It is
also important to remember that as I have shown earlier, literacy is self-constititutive,
i.e., it becomes part of its own context, adding to the individual's store of prior
knowledge and decoding/encoding, interpreting and meaning making skills with each
page read and/or written.
What kind of literacy is best suited to stimulating a critical cultural climate in
the United States? One answer might be a literacy that depends on and encourages
critical evaluation of itself and the larger social institutions of which it is a part— it is
aimed at context. Providing our students with the analytical tools and practice
necessary to interrogate a language that may be deceiving on the levels of both form
and content will allow them to subvert powerful subtexts of racism, politics or
consumerism as discussed by Giroux. There is a considerable body of work in critical
theory which encourages a liberating critique of the society around us in order to reach
new heights of human potential. Through this analysis, students can be led to reflect
on larger social institutions, and specifically be brought to see the role played by
language and literacy in them. Also, practice with rhetorical deconstruction will show
students the limits of language and of the knowledge it conveys. Finally, of equal
importance is experience with the heuristic powers of language and writing. The
ability to use language creatively to discover imaginative solutions to contemporary
problems is just as important as self-reflexive criticism.
116
On the contextual side, if, as Paulo Freire advocates, students are led to
examine the unequal power relations in society that often result in a "culture of
silence," they will understand that the linguistic productions of certain social groups
(to which they may belong) are often considered less valuable than others. Henry
Giroux's adaptation of Freire's work to the North American context shows this can be
done. Through contextual critiques, students will acquire the desire to write carefully
and critically of that which will change the inequalities and oppression s of their daily
lives. Raymond Geuss1 description of the development of critical social theories lends
itself well to such a writing project.
A few other things are quite clear. First of all, we must strive to make our
classroom literacy break classroom boundaries as much as possible. Ways must be
found to make school writing effectual on a social level. Students should write to
more real world authorities— newspaper editors, politicians, manufacturers, unions,
neighborhood organizations, lobbying groups, etc. Within learning institutions, have
students take stands on issues of power— political, financial and social, and again,
write school or university authorities, publish articles for the school newspaper, or
correspond with students in other classes or schools. Also more writing should be
done in groups. These groups should be based on student needs and similarities rather
than on writing ability or last name.
Just as importantly, writing must be made relevant to personal and social
contexts. Such writing situations include: student-determined writing activities
connected to daily living such as love-life, family, grades, careers, academic
knowledge, sororities/fraternities, parties, etc/ writing as heuristic that helps students
come to know an aspect of reality with which they were personally familiar on a less
profound and signigficant level; writing to affect change in the classroom or wider
cultural context; writing exploratory discourse; writing to be creative and have fun
117
using language; writing about the paradoxical nature of words as carriers of meaning
through differance, and as simultaneous vehicles of truth and falsehood.
Finally,Students should have a greater hand in generating their own writing schedules
and evaluating their work. Grading contracts and evaluation schemes should be
devised that are responsive to individual student needs and concerns. Grades should
be related to student effort as well as the content and truth value of the writing.
The pedagogy for contextual literacy that I have described is predicated on
bringing to conscious awareness the conditions of alienation in which reading and
writing are usually carried out as well as the alienated nature of text itself in the United
States. This approach requires an analysis of linguistic, rhetorical and epistemological
dimensions. Implicit in the epistemological investigation is an examination of the
relations of knowledge and power that often go concealed in our universe of
discourse. Without such a thorough critique, our students won't find the motivation
they need to transform this reality by writing, and their essays classrooms will
continue to be commodities divorced from intention and experience.
118
Notes
ll have recently discovered that Brian V. Street in Literacy in Theory and
Practice has proposed a similar dichotomy for models of literacy which he terms
"autonomous" and "ideological." He praises the ideological model for many of the
same reasons that I praise a dialectical approach. Our two studies are nicely
complimentary. His critique is aimed at the pedagogy of adult basic literacy while
mine is concerned with more advanced composition scholarship and pedagogy.
^For example, there were four articles on literacy in College English in 1985,
up from none in 1984 or 1983 (except for a review of Ong's Interfaces! and two in
1982. The first half of 1986 has seen two more articles published. However,with the
exception of Holzman, Ohmann and Cooper, the articles do not deal with the wider
cultural context for literacy.
There is no mention of "literacy" in Anne Ruggles Gere's 1985 bibliographical
article in College English. "Teaching Writing Teachers." This is after an exhaustive
review of current "anthologies of published or previously unpublished articles,
theoretical works, texts for undergraduates and practical works by a single author" in
the field of composition (63). A work of central importance in her article, Richard
Graves' second edition of Rhetoric and Composition: A Sourcebook for Teachers.
ignores literacy also.
College Composition and Communication has hardly devoted any attention to
the issue of literacy. Besides an occasional book review* I found only one article on
dealing with the issue per se over the last five years.
^Fitzgerald, E.V.K. Speech. University of Texas. Austin, 22 April 1985.
^More on the controversies surrounding this style in the textual considerations
of Chapter 4.
5See Appendix B for a list of the workshops compiled by the Department of
Poetry workshops, Ministry of Culture, Managua. 1982.
6See Appendix C for a typical newspaper ad. (Obtained from Juan Ramon
Falcon
7Half the population of Nicaragua is under 15 years of age, and 75 percent is
under the age of 30 (Metzger 70).
8This figure was obtained from Julio Valle-Castillo, Editor, Poesia Libre.
Personal Interview. Ministerio de Cultura. Managua, 20 Aug. 1984.
9it too will be published by the Ministry of Culture and entitled, Poesfa de las
fuerzas armadas.
lOsee Eldin, Jimenez, Pailler and Pring-Mill for example.
119
See Calero, "En Nicaragua" in R eferences
l^This information was obtained in interviews (see R eferences ) with Calero
and Falcon, poet-organizers.
l^M y translation.
l^See Appendix A for these poems which I have translated myself.
l^Georgino Andrade was a young literacy worker or "brigadista" who was
slain by the contras during the Literacy Crusade of 1979-1980.
16When I interviewed Claribel Alegria, she stated that she fully supported the
workshop movement and that the editors had taken her remarks out of context.
Furthermore, she resented being cast as a member of a group that was critical of the
workshops.
17The following is the text of the letter detailing poets studied in the workshops
(my translation):
In the workshops we study North American poets such as Stephen
Vincent Benet, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg,
Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Merton and others;
we study latin poets such as Catulus and Marcial; Chinese and Japanese
poets; Arab poets, Cuban poets and poets from other Latin American
countries such as Cesar Vallejos and Neruda. . . It is obvious that the
workshops stress the best Nicaraguan poetry. We remember having
read "The Lulaby Without Music" by Carlos Martinez Rivas , "A Little
Song for Birthing" by Joaquin Pasos, "The Painters' Festival" by
Azarfas H. Pallais, or "Song for Free Nicaragua" by Jorge Eduardo
Arellano. We have also studied the poetry of Fernando Silva, Emesto
Gutiirrez, Mejia Sanchez, Julio Valle, Emesto Castillo, Leonel Rugama,
Fernando Gordillo, Coronel Urtecho y Emesto Cardenal.
The workshop poets said poems had been published about "women, the
Coco River, the Laguna of Masaya, the Kukra River, San Carlos, Jinotega,
Guayucalf,. . . .religious subjects.. .and poems had appeared that were merely social
or even epic" (2).
1 ^December in Nicaragua marks the beginning of the dry season. It does not
correspond to the North American month.
^ORobert Pring-Mill, "The 'Workshop Poetry' of Sandinista Nicaragua," page
23.
21 See Zimmerman and Banberger, page 10.
22See Note 2 above.
120
23since Marx used the generic "he," and I will be quoting from his work, I
will continue the practice in the rest of this section in order to avoid awkward
phrasings.
24see Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Linguistics and Economics. (The Hague:
Mouton, 1975) 195-96. Rossi-Landi called for an investigation into the reification of
language, recommending many of the same sources for this project (Lukacs,
Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse) that I have used here.
25See, for example, Jean Piaget's notion of "decentering,"in "Comments on
Vygotsky's Critical Remarks Concerning The Language and Thought of the Child.
and Judgment and Reasoning of the Child" in L.S. Vygotsky, Thought and
Language, trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1962) 4-5. Decentering is the process in which a child loses his/her
"egocentric" perspective on the world and becomes aware of the necessity of taking
other perspectives into account in linguistic expression.
Vygotsky's claim is that writing is "inner speech” or verbal thinking made
external or social again. See, L.S. Vygotsky cited above. Thus the process by which
one adapts linguistic production to the nature of an audience becomes crucial to
successful writing. Both James Britton in The Development of Writing Abilities 11-
18 and James Moffett in Teaching the Universe of Discourse make this point.
26 S ee s . Bowles, and H. Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America. (New
York: Basic books, 1976). For an excellent critique of Bowles and Gintis as well as
others in this school of thought, see Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux. Education
Under Siege. (South Hanley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1985) 69-114.
2 7 see Donald Murray, "Internal Revision: a Process of Discovery."
Research on Composing: Points of Departure. Eds. Charles R. Cooper and Lee
Odell. (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1978) 85-103.
2&See f°r example, Elaine Maimon, "Talking to Strangers," C ollege
Composition and Communication 30 (1979): 364-369; and the essays in Toby
Fulwiler and Art Young, Language Connections: Writing and Reading across the
Curriculum. (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1982).
29Lucaks' emphasis.
30See "Alienation and Schooling" by Madan Sarup, in his Marxism and
Education. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978)129-148.
31 Ernesto Cardenal quotes the Venezuelan writer, Marta Sosa, in "Toward a
New Democracy of Culture," The Nicaraguan Reader. (New York: Grove Press,
Inc., 1983) 353.
121
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Appendix A
132
l)."Aquf en la frontera"
by Manuel Urtecho
"Here at the Front"
El Rio Negro
donde nos banamos en las
/madrugadas
los pajaros
los matorrales de zarzas
la montana llena de ruidos extranos
el suelo mojado a causa de la lluvia
y yo haciendo posta
pensando en vos, Malvina.
The Black River
where we bathe in the early
/mornings
the birds
the blackberry bushes
the mountain full of wondrous noises
the ground wet from the rain
and me on guard duty
thinking of you, Malvina.
2)."En la hacienda de San Jose"
by Sergio Viscaya
La noche con luna
los caballos se asustaron
y aullaron los perros
la brisa cada vez mas fuerte.
A las siete y media
se escucharon golpes en la puerta.
Los campesinos que comentaban la
"In the San Jose Hacienda"
A moonlit night
the horses were frightened
and the dogs howled
each gust of wind was stronger.
At 7:30
someone beat on the door.
The peasants who were in class
/clase
1 3 3
hicieron silencio went silent
apagaron los hachones de ocote put out the pine torches
/encendidos
y los golpes no siguieron. and the knocking stopped.
En la manana In the morning
en el piso y en el patio on the porch and on the patio
vimos las huellas de unas botas we saw the tracks of military boots.
/militares.
La Maritza y la Yinnf pensaron que Maritza and Yinni thought that they
/venfan a matamos /came to kill us
pero nadie penso en desertar. But no one thought of deserting.
En la tarde por Radio Sandino On Radio Sandino that afternoon
escuchamos que habfan asesinado a we heard that Georgino Andrade^
Georgino Andrade /had been assassinated
y en los valles and in the valleys
los campesinos temfan que nos the peasants feared that they would
/mataron a todos /kill us all
pero crecio el frijol junto al maiz but the beans came up along with the
/com
los meses pasaron y cosechamos months passed and we harvested
/yuca y sandfas /yucca and watermelon
nos cafa lluvia y nos enfermabamos the rains came and we got sick
pero nadie deserto. but nobody deserted.
Terminamos la cartilla de We finished the literacy primer
/Alfabetizacion
y todos regresamos a la plaza 19
/de Julio
gritando la consigna:
HEMOS CUMPLIDO
DIRECCION NACIONAL, ORDENE.
3. "Las tres muchachas"
by Juan Ramon Falcon
Poet Organizer and Condega
Workshop
Tres muchachas caminan
por uno de los andenes de la Villa.
Dos de ellas conversan sonriendo.
Los vestidos de las tres parecen
/finas capas de aire
repletas de colores.
Hablan en voz alta las que sonrfen
y la gente sentada afuera
/de sus casas
con curiosidad las ve pasar.
Las tres caminan juntas
y son como flores distintas
/en la misma rama.
Sus maneras son tiemas
134
and we all returned to the Plaza of
/July 19th
shouting the slogan:
WE HAVE FINISHED
NATIONAL DIRECTORATE, AT
YOUR /ORDERS.
"The Three Girls"
Three girls are strolling
down one of the street of the city.
Two of them are smilling and talking.
All seem to be dressed in
/fine wind-filled capes
of many colors.
The smiling ones talk loudly
and people sitting in front of
/their houses
curiously watch them go by.
The three of them together
are like three different
/flowers on the same stem.
Their ways are soft
y sus pasos informales.
Las que conversant casi juegan
y sus risas pequenas a veces
/me llegan como caricias.
La otra es como si no fuera con ellas
camina
y en sus ojos hay una expresion
/serena
como sinfonfa de violines
y pasa
despacio
delicada
entre todos
hasta quedarse dentro de mf.
4). "Llego diciembre^"
by Jose Domingo Moreno
Jinotega Workshop
Los caminos estan bordeados
/de flores
amarillas y color de cielo.
En los arbustos
los pijules extienden sus alas
imitando negros abanicos.
135
and their steps capricious.
The talking ones are almost playing
and their brief laughs sometimes
/reach me like kisses.
The other acts as if she weren't with
/them.
She walks
and in her eyes there is a serene
/expression
like a violin symphony
and she goes on
slowly
delicately
among them
until she comes right up to me.
"December Arrives"
The roads are lined with flowers.
yellow and sky-colored,
in the bushes
the pijule birds extend their wings
like black folding fans.
Se ven vagabundas mariposas
se oye el piqueteo de un carpintero
y sobre la arboleda el viento
/se pasea
meciendo los ramales.
5). "Desde el balcon del teatro
popular Ruben Dario"
by Raul Gavarrete
Barrio San Judas Workshop
Managua
Desde el balcon del teatro
de pie y firme
mientras todos escuchabamos
/respetuosos el Hinmo
Nacional pense en aquellos que murieron
en la Revolution
Imagine las vivanderas
que vendfan en tramos hediondos
del mercado oriental
y hoy venden en mercados nuevos
con andenes y jardines que parecen
136
One sees vagabond butterflies
and hears the hammering of a
/woodpecker
and above the plantation the
/wind blows
rocking the branches of trees.
"From the Balcony of the Ruben
Dario People's Theater"
From the balcony of the theater
standing at attention
as we all listened respectfully
/to the National Anthem
I thought of all those who died
in the Revolution.
I imagined the market women
who worked in the cramped,
/smelly quarters
of the oriental market
and now work in new markets
with walkways and gardens that look
/parques.
parks.
Recorde los escombros del
/terremoto
ahora convertidos en el parque
"Luis Alfonso Velasquez",
las barricades levantadas en la
/insurreccion
los brigadistas partiendo a las
/montanas
a alfabetizar;
el pasado y el presente,
desde Sandino hasta lo que vendra
Pude imaginar la Nicaragua del futuro.
Managua reconstruida
con centros de recreation donde
/jugaran los ninos,
donde las parejas discutiran
/de amor,
anchas avenidas con arboles
obreros con viviendas dignas,
buses en buen estado
ciudades como nuevas.
y bibliotecas y centros deportivos.
Todas las ciudades como nuevas.
En el campo los campesinos viviendo
137
dike
I thought of the fields of rubbish
/from the earthquake
now made into the Luis Alfonso
/Velasquez Park
the barricades raised during the
/insurrection,
the brigadistas leaving for the
/mountains
to teach reading and writing;
the past and the present,
from Sandino up to what is to come
I could imagine Nicaragua in the
Managua rebuilt
with recreation centers where
/the children can play,
where couples can talk of love,
wide avenues with trees
workers with satisfying lives,
buses in good shape
cities for the people
and libraries and sports centers.
All our cities like new.
In the country the farmers
/mejor
1 3 8
con luz electrica with electric lights
puesto de salud, escuelas. health centers, schools.
Entonces sentf lo que es el amor Then I felt a love for this land
/a esta tierra;
pense en lo que se ha hecho I thought about all that's been done
para vivir en paz. Todo eso pense to try and live in peace. I thought of all
this
mientras escuchaba el Himno Nacional. while I was listening to the National
Anthem.
6). Guerrillero" "Guerilla Fighter
by Grethel Cruz
Cuidad Dario Workshop
Lirios para la iglesia Lilies for the church
y un lapiz para escribir tu nombre and a pencil to write your name.
7). "Sergio" "Sergio"
by Juan Jose Jimenez
San Juan de Griente Workshop
Jugando al futbol te conocf. I got to know you playing football.
Siempre platicabamos We always talked a lot
pero no me dijiste que eras guerrillero. but you never told me you were a
guerilla fighter.
El 7 de junio de 1979 de madrugada
se oyeron balazos de Garand, de
/Enfield, de metralla
y tambien tiros de 22.
Se ofan las consignas y despues
/todo quedo en silencio.
En la manana todo San Juan de
/Qriente miraba
a los muertos.
Vos tenfas un balazo en la sien derecha
Pedro y Jose Luis, rafagueados
todavfa un guardia los pateaba y decia a
— Hijuelagranputa, con esto me
pago los tiros que falle—
wasted—
Despues te quito el reloj
pregunto si los conocfamos.
Nosotros no contestamos.
Estabas donde hoy es la Plaza
7 de Junio.
139“
On June 7, 1979 in the early morning
we heard shots from Garands,
/Enfields, and machine guns
and shots from a 22.
We heard revolutionary slogans
/and then all was silent.
In the morning everyone in
/San Juan de Qriente was looking
at the dead.
You had a bullet in your right temple
Pedro and Jose Luis were riddled with
bullets
Guardsman was still there kicking you
saying
— Son of a bitch, I'll pay you
back
for all those shells I
Then he stole your watch
He asked us if we knew any of you.
We didn't answer.
We were where the June 7th Plaza
is today.
8). "Ivania" "Ivania"
by Eliseo Jerez Guadamuz
Managua Workshop
En la carta que vos me mandaste
el 5 de mayo
me contabas de tu viaje a Ulasqufn
en el departamento de Jinotega.
En Pantasma
se atasco el vehfculo en medio
/del no.
(Los brigadistas con los pantalones
enrollados y lodosos,
pujaban,
ayudando a tres yuntas de bueyes
a despegar el camion).
Siguieron en otro vehfculo a Wiwilf
para llegar hasta Wamblan.
Vos seguiste a pie y despues en
bote de palance y remos
sobre el n o Coco.
(Dos dfas de camino hasta
/Ulasqum).
Te esperaban en la casa
/de Federico Suarez.
Hoy ensenas a manejar el lapiz,
140
In the letter you sent me
on the 5th of May
you told me about your trip to
/Ulasqum
in the state of Jinotega.
In Pantasma
the truck got stuck in the middle
/of the river.
(The brigadistas with rolled up,
muddy pants
pushed,
and aided by three pairs of oxen
started up the truck).
You continued on in another truck to
/Wiwilf
and from there on to Wamblan.
You continued on foot and then
by rowboat
down the Coco river.
(Two more days until you arrived
/at Ulasqum).
They were waiting for you
/at Federico Suarez' house.
Today you are teaching them how to
a leer y escribir.
— Hija, se que estas lejos, en la
/montana
como en una Nueva Escuela.
9). "En la comunidad de la
Cruz de Pire"
by Carlos Pineda
Cruz de la Pire Literacy Worker
Se levanto tosiendo
y las cabuyas tronaron en las grapas
de la cama cuja.
Cogio el candil
(una lata de Oil motor Texaco)
y el humo negro le dio en la cara
cuando encendio el cigarro de tusa.
En la cama solo quedo el esposo
cobijado con una sabana blanca
y desde mi hamaca de brigadista
0 1 el raspar de la mano de piedra
martajando el nixtamel
y comence a sentir el olor
a tortilla caliente.
141
to read and write.
— Daughter, I know you are far
/away, in the mountains,
as if in a New School.
"In the Community of Cruz de Pire"
She got up coughing
and the fiber ropes of the leather
hammock popped and creaked.
She took the candle
(in a Texaco Motor Oil can)
and black smoke rose in her face
when she lit the cornhusk cigar.
Only the husband remained in bed
covered with a white sheet
and from my brigadista's hammock
I heard the scrape of the mortar and
/pestle
grinding the corn mixture,
and I began to smell the aroma
of hot tortillas.
10). "De regreso de la alfabetizacion"
by Gerardo Blandon
Guayucalf Literacy Worker
Antes de vinirme aquel 18 de agosto
con mi mochila
y vestido de brigadista
Todos estabamos tristes,
los campesinos lloraban,
vos tambien.
Yadecam ino
desde donde se divisa el valle
vf que un panuelo se agitaba.
Eras vos amor.
11). "Carmen"
by Carlos Manuel Galan
Ajax Delgado Police Workshop
Por cada pregunta tuya
un beso mfo
y tu voz vuelve a romper el silencio.
Acaricio tus mejillas
y al decirme siempre
— Cuando volves
tomo tus manos
142
"Leaving the Literacy Crusade"
Before leaving on that 18th of August
with my backpack
and brigadista uniform
We were all sad,
the peasants were crying,
you were too.
As I walked down the road
and looked back at the valley
I saw a handkerchief waving.
It was you, my love.
"Carmen"
For each of your questions
a kiss from me
and your voice breaks the silence again.
I caress your cheeks
and when you repeat
— When you return. ..
I take your hands
te abrazo fuerte
te beso otra vez.
Sabes que soy Policfa Sandinista
officer y que estoy entregado a la
Revolucion.
No quisiera decirte cosas
que te entristezcan.
La despedida es
entre besos
triste
y me voy con la esperanza de
/volver Carmen.
143
give you a strong hug
and kiss you again.
You know I'm a Sandinista police
and that I'm dedicated to the Revolution.
I don't want to tell you things
that will make you sad.
Our good-bye is
between kisses
sad
and I leave with the hope of
/returning Carmen
12). "Cuando sepas"
by Cony Pacheco
Condega Workshop
Cuando leas los poemas que he
escrito para vos
te sentiras orgulloso.
Pero que diras cuando sepas
que los escribf para hacer
/referenda
"When you Learn"
When you read the poems that
/I wrote for you
You will feel so proud.
But what will you say when you learn
that I wrote them to refer
de un pasado
y que hoy
a quien doy mis besos y mas es Rogelio
el Sandinista.
13). "Jose David Zuniga"
by Pastora Palacios
Estelf Workshop
Con tu pantalon azul
una camisa a cuadros
y tu UZI en el hombro
asf te conocf
Euclides
asf me enamore de vos.
Estabas organizando un CDC
(los hoy Comite de Defensa Sandinista).
y tenfas un megafono en la mano.
Hoy despues de tanto tiempo
todavfa no me acostumbro
y tu nombre legal Jose David
y es que yo sigo enamorada
de aquel muchacho clandestino
que conocf.
144
to a past,
and that today
the one I give my kisses to and more is
Roger
the Sandinista.
"Jose David Zuniga"
With your blue pants
a checked shirt
and your UZI on your shoulder
I first met you
Euclides
and fell in love with you.
You were organizing a CDC
(today Sandinista Defense Committee).
and you had a megaphone in your hand.
Now, after so much time has passed
I'm still not used to it
nor your legal name Jose David
and I continue to be in love
with that young man in hiding
that I knew.
14). "Tupartida"
by Erwin Antonio Alvarado
Army Workshop Diriamba
Sola
con tu fusil B-Z
con tu mirada hacia los arbustos verdes
en tu pozo de tirador
alerta, vigilando el sector de fuego
/bajo el sol
en la Base Militar de Amayito
esa manana
me dirigf a vos
y me dijiste que te Uamabas Yelba
/Fatima.
A1 tenerte cerca contemple tu rostro
tus ojos gatos, tu pelo corto,
tu piel blanca bronceada por el fuerte sol
tus labios resecos.
Llego el domingo.
Partfas hacia Jinotega.
(Ya me habfa enamorado de vos.)
Fue corto el tiempo que te conocf
y no supe hasta cuando to volveria
/a ver.
145
"Your Departure"
Alone
with your B-Z rifle
looking towards the green shrubs
from your trench
alert, observing the firing range
/in the sun
at the Amayito Military Base
this morning
I walked up to you
and you told me your name was Yelba
/Fatima.
Having you near, I admired your face
your cat-like eyes, your short hair,
your white skin tanned by the hot sun
your parched lips.
Sunday arrived.
You were leaving for Jinotega.
(I had already fallen in love with you).
The time I had known you was so short
and I didn't know when I would see
/you again.
15)."Me cuenta mi abuelo Salvador"
by Javier Ortiz
Monimbo Workshop
Me cuenta mi abuelo Salvador:
— ffjate que me acuerdo
cuando Sandino peleaba contra el yanqui.
Yankee.
El yanqui mataba a los hombres,
/mujeres y ninos
y Sandino querfa una Nicaragua
con ninos, mujeres y ancianos.
— Y le digo yo a mi abuelo:
— Pero ahora ya tenemos
/una Patria Libre
como la sonaba Sandino
(y el se me quedaba viendo
/fijamente a mis ojos).
16). "Donde los Mairena"
by Erwin Areas
En la madrugada
y en lo semioscuro del rancho
el viento entra por las rendijas
1 4 6
"What My Grandfather Salvador Told
Me"
My grandfather Salvador told me:
— listen, I remember
when Sandino fought against the
The Yankee was killing men, women
/and children
and Sandino wanted a Nicaragua
with children, women and old people.
— And I said to my grandfather:
— But now we have a free country
like Sandino dreamed of
(and he continued to look me right in
/the eyes).
"The Mairena House"
In the early morning
and in the semi-obscurity of the country
house
the wind enters through the cracks
de la pared de varas de corteses
rellenadas con mierda de vac a
f y barro.
Y dormxa en la hamaca
mientras las sabandijas, los jejenes
/y las pulgas
me picaban el cuerpo.
La Amalia y la Payita encendieron
/el fogon del cocinero
y sobre el techo de chaguite
/el resplandor rojizo
como reflejando el movimiento
/de las llamas.
Las mujeres sacaron el agua
/de las tinajas
para la nesquiza
y el ruido de la piedra de moler
/se oxa en toda la casa;
el chillar de los chocoyos
/con hambre,
el aleteo de las gallinas que salen
/de la cocina.
Eusebio cogio su machete
y se fue al patio
y desde ahx se oxa el afilado sobre
/el molejon
147
of the wall made of logs
filled in with cow dung and mud.
I slept in my hammock
while the bugs, gnats and fleas
bit me all over.
Amalia and Payita lit the kitchen
/stove
and on the thatched roof was a
/reddish gleem
as if reflecting the movements
/of the flames.
The women fetched the water in
/large earthen jars
for the dried corn
and the noise of the mortar and pestle
was heard throughout the house,
the cries of the hungry chocoyo birds
and the flutterings of the hens
/leaving the kitchen
Eusebio grabbed his machete
and went out onto the patio
and we heard him sharpening it on
/rug
que en las tardes nos servfa de asiento.
La manana sin neblina, el sol caliente.
Chevo se fue por la quebrada
entre naranjos ceibas y ojoches con
/nidos de loras.
nests.
Despues pude imaginarlo en su trabajo
con la fuerza de un muchacho a
/sus cincuenta anos,
desyerbando, tapizcando
o en las faldas del Algodon
/asoleando frijoles
Pense:
cuando yo vuelva otra vez
/a la montana
este rancho ya no sera el mismo rancho,
sus hijos Agustrn y Evilia de
/siete anos
(que aman la Revolucion)
estaran organizados
y trabajando en las cooperativas agricolas
como tecnicos y duenos de sus tierras.
148
that we sat on in the evenings.
The morning was without clouds, the
sun hot.
Chevo left for the stream nestled
between orange trees and ojoche
/flowers with parrots'
Later I imagined him at his work
with the strength of a young man in
/spite of his 50 years,
weeding, harvesting
or in the hillsides of the Algodon
/drying beans.
I thought:
when I come back to the
/mountain,
this ranch won't be the same,
Augustin and Evilia, his seven year
/old twins
(who love the Revolution)
will be organized
and work in agricultural cooperatives
as technicians and owners of their land.
149
Appendix B
Mes de noviembre de 1982
Mayra jimenez, Responsable Nacional
Departamento Talleres de Poesfa
NOMINA DE LOS TALLERES DE POESTA EN TODO EL PATS
1. Taller de Poesfa de Reparto Shick 7 poetas
2. Taller de Poesfa de la 14 de Septiembre 10 poetas
3. Taller de Poesfa de la Colonia Centroamerica 3 poetas
4. Taller de Poesfa de la Policfa Sandinista de Tran si to 4 poetas
5. Taller de Poesfa del B atallon de Ingenierfa Militar 14 poetas
6. Taller de Poesfa de la Policfa Sandinista Batallon Ajax Delgado 16 poetas
7. Taller de Poesfa del Battalon Blindado 2 poetas
8. Taller de Poesfa de la FAS (Fuerza Aerea Sandinista) 23 poetas
9. Taller de Poesfa de San Judas 9 poetas
10. Taller de Poesfa de UPE (Policfa para Embajadas) 6 poetas
11. Taller de Poesfa de la UN AN 15 poetas
12. Taller de Poesfa Ernesto Castillo - Managua 5 poetas
13. Taller de Poesfa de la Primavera 4 poetas
14. Taller de Poesfa de la Tenderf, Nueva Mecatera* 8 poetas
15. Taller de Poesfa Monsehor Lezcano* 3 poetas
16. Taller de Poesfa Gaspar Garcfa Laviana* 7 poetas
17. Taller de Poesfa Ciudad Sandino* 23 poetas
18. Taller de Poesfa Escuela Militar Carlos Agiiero 6 poetas
19. Taller de Poesfa en MET AS A* - Managua 6 poetas
20. Taller de Poesfa en Batahola* 4 poetas
21. Taller de Poesfa Ministerio de la Construction - Norte 6 poetas
22. Taller de Poesfa Tercera Region Militar* 6 poetas
23. Taller de Poesfa Ministerio de la Construcion - Sur* 6 poetas
24. Taller de Poesfa Centro de Rehabilitation Gaspar Garcfa Laviana 6 poetas
25. Taller de Poesfa del I.N.S.S. 10 poetas
26. Taller de Poesfa del Elbis Chavarria 12 poetas
27. Taller de Poesfa de la Escuela Policial Walter Mendoza 10 poetas
28. Taller de Poesfa de Instituto Miguel de Cervantes 6 poetas
29. Taller de Poesfa del Instituto Nacional Tecnico Vocational 8 poetas
30. Taller de Poesfa del MINT 6 poetas
EN LOS PEP ARTAMENTOS
31. Taller de Poesfa de Subtiava - Leon 9 poetas
32. Taller de Poesfa de Masaya 10 poetas
33. Taller de Poesfa de Monimbo 25 poetas
34. Taller de Poesfa de Niquinohomo 29 poetas
35. Taller de Poesfa de Diriamba 10 poetas
36. Taller de Poesfa de Juigalpa* 15 poetas
37. Taller de Poesfa de Matagalpa* . 17 poetas
38. Taller de Poesfa de Estelf 14 poetas
39. Taller de Poesfa de Condega 13 poetas
40. Taller de Poesfa de Palacagiiina 8 poetas
41. Taller de Poesfa de San Carlos Rfo San Juan 16 poetas
150
42. Taller de Poesfa de Bluefields en Espanol 6 poetas
43. Taller de Poesfa de Bluefields en Ingles 3 poetas
44. Taller de Poesfa de Guadalupe - Leon 4 poetas
45. Taller de Poesfa de la Seguridad de Estado 6 poetas
46. Taller de Poesfa de INTECNA - Granada 21 poetas
47. Taller de Poesfa de CPC - Granada 10 poetas
48. Taller de Poesfa de San Juan de Oriente 5 poetas
49. Taller de Poesfa de Policfa Sandinista - Leon 7 poetas
50. Taller de Poesfa de Segundo Monimbo 7 poetas
51. Taller de Poesfa de Villa Sandino 15 poetas
52. Taller de Poesfa de Catarina* 5 poetas
53. Taller de Poesfa de La Providencia 9 poetas
54. Taller de Poesfa de Central Sandinista de Trabajadores Masaya 14 poetas
55. Taller de Poesfa de Bluff Costa Atlantica 6 poetas
56. Taller de Poesfa de Diriamba C.P.C. 4 poetas
57. Taller de Poesfa de Ciudad Dario 14 poetas
58. Taller de Poesfa de Jinotega 14 poetas
59. Taller de Poesfa de Primera Region Militar de Condega 10 poetas
60. Taller de Poesfa de Bonanza 8 poetas
61. Taller de Poesfa de Chinandega 7 poetas
62. Taller de Poesfa de Boaco 5 poetas
63. Taller de Poesfa de Barrio San Sebastian (Leon) 12 poetas
64. Taller de Poesfa del Terrero (Leon) 4 poetas
65. Taller de Poesfa de Malpaisillo 5 poetas
65 Talleres de Poesfa Con un total de 627 poetas
* Estos talleres han cesado sus reuniones por haber cumplido con las etapas
de trabajo.
Appendix C
151
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