History as a Weapon: The Question of Class, by Dorothy Allison

 

Source: Berry College

Many years ago, when I first began teaching writing, I had the opportunity to design an introductory writing (essay) course, in which we read and discussed theory and criticism as well as original creative works. I thought for a long time about what I might do. I had done similar courses in the past,with safe topics like good and evil as seen through technological advances,that kind of thing. I wanted to branch out and give my students--mostly upper-class kids--something that they might not get in regards to the rest of their educations in class differences and isms of all kinds. I called it White Trash Literature.

Having come to Boston for grad school, light years away from  the small rural community in Appalachian Pennsylvania that I grew up and went to college in, I suffered more than a bit of culture shock. I sat in my first grad workshop with a ballcap on that I'd stolen from my brother-in-law. The cap said 'Redneck Express Trucking.' I had on a flannel shirt over a pocket t-shirt, old jeans, and some high-top sneakers, a look coming into style then courtesy of the grunge movement located in Seattle. I was sort of hip, until people found out I'd been dressing that way my entire life. Then I became strange, or felt that way, anyway. The point being, I lived the life we discussed in class.


In hindsight, I probably should have prepared better and read more before teaching this, but I was 22 years old and determined to find my place in this new world, if indeed I had a place at all. I developed a syllabus, found texts that covered a lot of ground, and gamely went in to teach, jumping in with all my literary limbs flying, in that wind that can blow you down Tremont Street in Boston if you're not careful. The first day, I began pointing out signs of classism: TV, movies, literature, life, Jeff Foxworthy, etc. Once we'd covered a whiteboard with material, I set them at work writing about what they knew regarding people called rednecks or white trash or hillbilly. I anticipated papers full of cogent sets of examples and a great discussion forthcoming. Then a comment came, the next day, within the first five minutes of class, and froze me up.


"Why are we studying this stuff ? These people aren't an important part of history or literature."


I wish I could say I responded well, but I didn't. Someone mercifully pulled me back into the discussion by calling the commenter in question a fucking idiot, at which the class laughed a bit, uncomfortably, which gave enough time to pull myself together and toss the question out for discussion. I hadn't expected someone to challenge the course so boldly the first day. Every day after that I went in loaded for bear, swearing I would never be so caught dry and ham-fisted again. One of the big reasons I survived teaching that class was Dorothy Allison's baldly autobiographical fiction, and the equally eye-opening essays I found along the way looking for secondary sources.

After reading her, I knew it wasn't just me, though I certainly felt like I was the only quasi-redneck in this school most of the time. What mattered was that overwhelming sense of otherness you can only get in rooms full of white people, supposed peers, with whom you have little or nothing at all in common. The following essay (Allison's) is worth reading not just because she describes what I and others who travelled from the lower middle class to the halls and classrooms of academia go through practically, but also what it's like mentally. It's a lot more than 'which fork to use for what,' though I had that problem too. Read it and see what you think.

A Question of Class

The first time I heard, "They're different than us, don't value human life the way we do," I was in high school in Central Florida. The man speaking was an army recruiter talking to a bunch of boys, telling them what the army was really like, what they could expect overseas. A cold angry feeling swept over me. I had heard the word they pronounced in that same callous tone before. They, those people over there, those people who are not us, they die so easily, kill each other so casually. They are different. We, I thought. Me.

When I was six or eight back in Greenville, South Carolina, I had heard that same matter-of-fact tone of dismissal applied to me. "Don't you play with her. I don't want you talking to them." Me and my family, we had always been they. 'Who am I? I wondered, listening to that recruiter. 'Who are my people? We die so easily, disappear so completely—we/they, the poor and the queer. I pressed my bony white trash fists to my stubborn lesbian mouth. The rage was a good feeling, stronger and purer than the shame that followed it, the fear and the sudden urge to run and hide, to deny, to pretend I did not know who I was and what the world would do to me.

 My people were not remarkable. We were ordinary, but even so we were mythical. We were the they everyone talks about—the un-grateful poor. I grew up trying to run away from the fate that destroyed so many of the people I loved, and having learned the habit of hiding, I found I had also learned to hide from myself. I did not know who I was, only that I did not want to be they, the ones who are destroyed or dismissed to make the "real" people, the important people, feel safer. By the time I understood that I was queer, that habit of hiding was deeply set in me, so deeply that it was not a choice but an instinct. Hide, hide to survive, I thought, knowing that if I told the truth about my life, my family, my sexual desire, my history, I would move over into that unknown territory, the land of they, would never have the chance to name my own life, to understand it or claim it.

Interview with Dorothy Allison

This is not my interview--I will have some up one of these days, though--but one by Susanne Dietzel from Tulane University, conducted in 1995.

When I taught a writing course using what I called White Trash Literature maybe ten years ago, nearly every author we read was met initially with skepticism and ennui--another themed writing class. Most of the students had taken the class because of the subject matter, though, thinking I don't know what--that it would be an easier grade? And for some of them it was--it was a tough class to keep on topic,because I had so much to say and and a captive audience. But the one book they were uniformly floored by was Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina. Like many inexperienced readers, students thought novels were true a great deal of the time, if not always, and this book, and the harrowing film made from it, stuck to their brains like burdock, and reinforced this mistake, and it took some talking to disabuse them. And the film showing was one of the few times I had multiple walk-outs. As I said, what struck them, always, was what they termed 'brutal honesty.' They respected the text too much to question or discuss it, except for a couple voluble quick wits who made fun of it. So I was glad to see Dietzel dealing with that aspect of Allison's work specifically in this interview.

This interview was conducted as part of the annual Zale Writer in Residence Program at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women at Tulane University in November 1995. This year the program committee had invited award-winning novelist Dorothy Allison, who is most famous for her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, to be the Zale Writer-in-Residence. Dorothy Allison's work is securely located on the borders of southern and working-class literature, with deep roots in feminist and lesbian-feminist activism and politics.

Dorothy Allison is the author five books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction and the winner of numerous literary awards. She grew up in Greenville, South Carolina and Florida and now lives with her partner, son, and dogs in northern California.

This interview was conducted by Susanne Dietzel, a Visiting Scholar at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women and doctoral candidate in American Studies and Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is now a Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Tulane University.

This interview was transcribed by Kelly Donald and Michelle Attebury, and (only slightly) edited by Susanne Dietzel.

Susanne Dietzel- Dorothy Allison is an award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist. She is also an activist in feminist and lesbian feminist politics and, later on I want to talk a little bit about the connection between writing and politics. She has published five books, the first was a collection of short stories called TRASH came out in 1989. Her second book is a collection of poetry called THE WOMEN WHO HATE ME, poems 1980-1990 that came out in 1991. Dorothy Allison is most famous for her novel BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA, which came out in 1992, and won the Lambda Award, and was nominated for the National Book Award. She followed that one up with her absolutley wonderful collection of essays called SKIN that was published by Firebrand Books in 1994 and here is her newest book, called TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW FOR SURE, which is a memoir about fictional and real families coming to terms with each other and with their history. Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina and Florida and now lives in Northern California with her partner, child and dogs.

Susanne Dietzel- What I find most striking about your writing is your brutal, but loving honesty. As a reader, you just come to love, but also hate your characters. Your fiction then is to some extent relentless, because you take your reader right into those experiences. But again, I kept coming back to the themes of honesty and love that I think are really the foundation of your writing.

Dorothy Allison- I have a theory about writing fiction. I often run into young writers who ask me the question "How can you tell those terrible stories about people? How can you make them seem almost real, or liveable or loveable?" And my theory is that if you create a character and if you tell enough about that character, even if you are creating someone who is a villain or someone who does terrible things, if you tell enough about them, then you have the possibility of loving them. And that if you tell enough about a character, even if you use a character based on people you know, you don't create an act of betrayal. It is when you use characters in small ways that you betray them. The key is to make the portrait as full as possible and it is not possible if you lie. It is not possible if you try to hide. And the thing that writers hide is themselves. I don't belive you can be any good as a writer if you're trying to hide yourself. So, I get told a lot that I'm brutally honest. I essentially think that I want to do it right, and I don't believe that you can if you try to shave off any margin of safety. If you're trying to be safe, you got no business writing. If you're trying to control what happens, you really don't have a whole lot of chance. The only thing you can control is to create as full a portrait as possible. Then you can make people seem human. But you don't really get any safety in that. And you don't get to lie - except of course that you are telling great lies.

Continue reading.