You gotta be ready for some serious truth to be spoken.

Busman, Debra

WHEN YOU ASK STUDENTS TO BREAK SILENCE, TO BEAR WITNESS, TO CONNECT the meaning of their own personal lives within the larger societal frame, you gotta be ready for the truths that fly out, crawl out, peep out, and scream out from underneath the thick walls of practiced silence. You gotta be ready for stories of border crossings, coyotes and cops, night beatings, wife beatings, baby beatings, date rapes, gang rapes, daddy rapes, gunshots and chemo, pesticides, HIV, AZT, protease inhibitors, and the pink-cheeked 19-year-old who says, "Hey, next Tuesday I'll have five years clean and sober; can we have a cake in class?" You gotta be ready for stories that start out, "Ese pinche Columbus didn't have no stinkin' green card." You gotta be ready for the straight A student who has to leave school because her INS paperwork hasn't come through yet, the social security number she gave at registration was the first nine numbers that came to her mind, and she cannot get financial aid because she is "illegal."

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means you gotta be ready for all the stories, whether you want to hear them or not. When you ask students to speak the truths of their lives, you gotta be ready for the Stanford-bound future teacher of America who writes about being kicked out of the Navy for being too racist. You gotta be ready for the sweet-faced, curly-haired lover of Jesus who writes stories of his days as a violent skinhead, beating up Blacks, Jews, and queers. You gotta be ready for the stories the young man cannot yet share in class, scribbles slid under your office door, 4:30 A.M. e-mails, telling of his father's rage, the belt, the whiskey, the steel pipe slammed down hard on the body of the thin nine-year-old boy. The father's last words, before he left the child cowering in the corner, his back broken in two places: "Be a man, you pussy. I better not see you cry."

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action, you gotta be ready for these stories to share classroom space with the one by the retired prison guard, now a minister and college student, who writes of his experience as a young African American police officer on the scene with five white sheriffs in 1960's rural Mississippi when a 17-year-old gas station robbery suspect, a young Black man whose family he knew, was thrown into the back of a squad car, handcuffed, and locked inside with a 120-pound German shepherd police dog that was ordered to attack. Then, when the writer describes the ensuing screams, the beer bellies, spit, and cigars, the white laughter, the blood, the horrific carnage told 40 years later with such immediacy and precision, you can only hold your heart and say, "Oh, good lord, why did I ever stress the importance of using sensory details, concrete language, and vivid imagery?"

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means you gotta be ready to hear the stories held in private silence the past four years by a young woman working with the local Rape Crisis Center, stories about rape, domestic violence, and child sexual abuse--things she says she didn't think you were "supposed to talk about in college," at least not until she took a women's studies class and Intro to Creative Writing. It means you gotta be ready for the young Japanese-American student who kind of drifts through class, quiet and respectful, suddenly shocked into consciousness by the poetry of Janice Mirikitani, suddenly alive and angry and writing poem after poem after poem about Executive Order 9066, model minorities, identity, resistance and rice, practically busting down your office door one day in his excitement to tell you he finally realized what he would write his senior capstone paper on. "The camps," he says. "I'm going to write about the camps. Both my grandmothers were sent to the internment camps. I'm going to interview them over break, get their stories, get the truth of my history." Then, you gotta be ready when he slumps into your office following spring break, crestfallen. "They wouldn't talk about it," he says. "They told me everything else, all about their lives before the war, how they decorated their houses, how they fell in love with their husbands; they told me all about my parents when they were babies, about their family businesses. But they wouldn't talk about the camps. They just shut up, looked at me funny, and said, 'There is nothing to say.' It's weird; it scared me. Like whenever I brought it up, they just turned into some other people, like they weren't my grandma's any more. They are 80 years old. I don't want to hurt them, so I had to stop asking. What am I going to do? My project is ruined. I have no stories." And you have to tell him, "No, your project is not ruined. There are worlds within those silences. Your story is just beginning."

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means you gotta be ready for the young blonde girl from a private high school in Sacramento's suburbs who rolls her Maybelline eyes the first day of class and says, "Is this going to be one of those courses where they try and ram that multicultural crap down your throat?" The same girl who, weeks later sits weeping in class, heart and mind open, listening to shared stories of INS thugs and deported grandfathers, and pesticide-poisoned baby brothers, wheezing from asthma. Stories about cousins orphaned by police bombs dropped on fellow family MOVE members, seven-- and nine-year-old brother and sister taken from their home, sitting in the Philadelphia police station, surrounded by cops watching the bombing live and in color on TV news, laughing, telling the children, "See those flames. See those tanks. That's your daddy inside there. That's your daddy we finally got right where he belongs." And the young, blonde, private high school student, who truly believed that Ca lifornia always belonged to the United States and that racism ended with the abolition of slavery, or at the very least after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech, turns her face to the class, Maybelline running down her cheeks, and says, "I'm so sorry. I didn't know. They never taught me about any of this. I'm so sorry. I just never knew." And her workshop buddy, Aisha, the self-described Pan Africanist revolutionary, takes the girl in her arms and rocks her softly. And Carlos, sitting in the back, can't help but shake his head, muttering: "Damn. And they got the nerve to tell me that my people are "under-prepared" for college."

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means you gotta be ready for the student who, having just listened to your best rap on the wonders of metaphoric imagery, says, "You know, Professor Busman, I mean I don't mean no disrespect or nothing, but, you know, all that stuff you been saying about metaphors and similes and shit, I mean, it's cool and everything, and I can see it working good in some poems, but my poem, you know, when talk about that cop smashing the side of Bobby's skull with his stick, well, I don't want people to think that that noise sounds like anything other than the sound of a motherfuckin' pig's billy club crackin' up against the side of a brother's head. I mean that's the sound. It don't sound like nothing else. I don't want people thinking it sounds like something else. And, that line where I put my fist into that concrete wall out behind County General, I don't want people thinking that that feels like anything other than a fist into a concrete wall. Sometimes things ain't 'like' an ything else; they just are what they are and the reader just gonna have to deal with it. You know what I'm saying?"

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means that you gotta be ready to learn atleast 15 times more than what ever it is you think you have to teach. It means you gotta be ready to accept the fact that you can never really be ready for all the confusion, the grief, and the wonder that enters the classroom when students take you at your word and believe you really do want to hear the full and messy truths of all their "wild and precious" lives.

DEBRA BUSMAN is a writer and activist from the Salinas/Monterey, California area. The Coordinator of Service Learning for the Institute of Human Communication at California State University, Monterey Bay (e-mail: [email protected]), she currently teaches Creative Writing and Social Action, literature, and composition.