Codes and Community in TLP: Looking at Jed (and Jackrabbit)

So, we've been talking a little about how language is often a marker of certain social groups, that what we say, and how we say it, changes with one group to the next.  We code-switch into the codes of one social group into another.  When there's tension between those groups, like, say, the "town and gown" conflict in Laramie, choosing one's language is important because navigating between groups gets perilous.  And, if there's one character who is literally stuck in this divide in The Laramie Project, it's Jed Schultz.  

Jed interests me because I totally understand his plight.  Before I say anything else, let me assure you that Jed was a good kid when I knew him; he was always extremely outgoing and energetic, fun, easily overemotional, and he had a craving to fit in socially with the people he was around.  He also loves his parents.  Never doubt that.  I knew him a little bit from high school, but after I was baptized and attending The Baptist Church, I'd see him come to church with his dad occasionally.   I found him... interesting.  Jed still knew all the codes, from the shiny polyester button-down shirt and pleated slacks to the monogrammed Bible he carried in its nylon zip-up cover and handle, but he never seemed quite at ease.  Before that point, I had never known Jed to seem ill at ease anywhere. 

That sense of ill ease is where I can sympathize; I'm not in the SBC anymore, probably for the same reasons that he was uncomfortable in that church back then.  At the time of the first play, Jed was caught between two different societies, transitioning out of one and into another.  On the one hand, he was born into a Southern Baptist Convention culture with some pretty legalistic ties and proud of its religious independence and political conservatism.  I should know-- I was there.  On the other hand, he was heavily involved in theater in high school, which tends to be a fairly counter-cultural group anyhow, and then he was a theater major at the college.  Those two worlds can't be more opposite.  Again, I should know.  I spent most of my spare time in Fine Arts, just like Jed, and most of my friends were in dance, music or theater.  And in the course of the play, I think that Jed is trying to keep a foot in each world and having trouble figuring out where to stand.  His language, I think, betrays a little bit of that attempt to fit in.  Jed has to switch codes between different groups as he tries to navigate from one to the next. 

Why conservative Constitutional values might just be great for gay marriage...

Okay, so even though I'm moving to the center and even left-of-center on a lot of social issues (and especially those important to the GLBT community), when it comes to Constitutional law I can't help but see the world through conservative-colored glasses.  It's just the sphere I was born in, and I really do think that if you give the Constitution a fair chance, it's going to uphold equality and equal justice for everyone.

With that in mind, I just read a really interesting report in the Metro Weekly about the two new federal court rulings regarding the state/federal conflict regarding gay marriage and domestic partnership benefits.  The two cases are Gill v. Office of Personnel Management and Massachusetts v. U.S. Dep't of Health and Human Services.   The Metro article naturally focuses on the violation of equal protection by the federal DOMA regulation, but there's another, much more interesting argument here they don't mention: the federal government doesn't have the right to regulate or define restrictions on covenants.  That's specifically in the rights of the state.  So, if the federal government has to pay pensions or benefits to same-sex marriage in a state that says that marriage can consist of same-sex couples, they can't do a thing about it.  They don't have the right do define the terms of that covenant; they just have to pay out. 

That's right: Conservative arguments about state's rights prevent a federal DOMA restriction that short-circuits the state's right to define contracts.  Sure, it means that you can't just pass a federal gay marriage statute to force equality, but it means that if you win the fight on the state level, it might just stick. And conservatives, if they're really good conservatives, can't really fuss about it. 

So... um, here's for state's rights!  Woo-hoo!

Links: The "10 Years Later" Q&A Session, covered by The Daily Planet

To be straight with you, I spent most of the 45 or so minutes following the reading of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later chatting with our cast here locally, so I missed something like eighty percent of the live linkup to New York.  I haven't found a full transcript or recording of that time yet, but the Twin Cities Daily Planet did a nice job giving a summary of the main questions and how Kaufman and Tectonic responded.  For those of you who would like to look over these again, I've linked it below. 

The full reporting of the Q&A session is here, and it goes through most of the Twitter session fairly carefully.  Enjoy! 

Source:  Everett, Matthew A.  "The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later—An Epilogue (Q&A session)."  Twin Cities Daily Planet 17 Oct 2009: n.p.  Web. Also linked here for reference.

Home Again

Well, it's back again to Appalachia after about three weeks reveling in the grass and hills of my real home.  I flew back into town yesterday from Casper, and I'm now trying to get ready for the rest of the summer at a photon's speed-- teaching, studying for exams, copy editing, writing-- and it's so hard when all I see when my mind wanders is the sky on fire, and the way the clouds broke over Pilot Peak after the thunderstorm.... I'll have a lot to write about the whole trip-- about Montana as well-- which I'll do as I have time.   That time I spent alone in the smells and sights I love was extremely revealing to me.  I learned a lot about my family.   And I learned a lot about Laramie.  But mostly, as I stood alone in the wilderness and remembered what the fleshy heads of wheatgrass smell like in the chilly evening breeze, I learned a few new things about myself. 

Yesterday was, admittedly, a sad day for me when my red-eye flight left from Casper to DIA just as the sun was coming up. 
As my little jet plane skated over the tops of the clouds at a low cruising elevation,  I stared despondently out the window at the terrain beneath the wing: Pathfinder and Alcova reservoirs shining, like gold leaf, in the early dawn light, clouds lapping around the mountain peaks like the tide around islands, a lonely Interstate 80 stretching south in a double-thread towards Colorado.  I saw the prairie lakes, which had been dry since I was a teenager, bight as diamonds, scattered over the fields.  And then suddenly I saw it: a town divided in half by rail lines, a cruciform intersection of two wide roads, the Interstate skirting to the south and east.  War Memorial Stadium was unmistakable even at that elevation-- we were flying directly over Laramie, my last view of Wyoming for a long time to come.

And, as I snapped this picture of my final glimpse of home, I realized that I could see so many locations that continue to define me.  I could see what was left of the field where I found my faith, watching the stars with my best friend; it has mostly turned into subdivisions now, and the houses are so close that stargazing would be nearly impossible anymore.
I could also see the college where I grew too quickly into an adult.  I could see the Interstate winding to the little knot that tied in to Happy Jack Road, the place where I fell in love with my husband under a summer's sky on Pilot Hill.  And I could also see the exact spot where Matt was murdered at the place where two unmarked dirt roads nearly meet, like creases in a crumpled map.  All of them were tied together by the same relentless stretch of land-- not just in the land, but in my mind, too, and I couldn't pick one place over the other.  From the air, they're all part of the same long stretch topography marked in shades of green, brown and red. 

That moment made me realize once more how much my search to understand Laramie, and The Laramie Project, is really an attempt to understand myself, those darkened places in my landscape which I want to forget but to which I have to be reconciled.  I can never be a passive observer of this landscape because those valleys and clefts carved out by that tragedy are a part of me, too.

Yeah, You Betcha Dere: the Power and Politics of Code Switching

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I want to know... whether they are deranged freaks, murderers who committed crimes in the name of the government, or whether they are forcing the Afrikaner to confront himself.  More to the point-- what do I have in common with the men I hate the most?...

I interview them one after the other in a quiet corner of the Pretoria Synod hall.  "You know, your whole body language and tone of voice change when you are with these men," says an English-speaking colleague.  "I couldn't hear what you were talking about, but there is a definite intimacy..."  I say nothing.  I did use all the codes I grew up with, and have been fighting against for a lifetime.  But now I want a good story and I want to understand them.  (117-118)

--Antjie Krog, talking about the Vlakplaas Five, in Country of my Skull 117-118)

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Choosing one set of codes over another can often involve power relations among certain classes or cultures.  Social codes can have political or personal cachet-- delineating who's in the club, who's on the outside, or who has the superior social role, for instance.  As somebody navigating through a culture whose cultural layers are also divided into linguistic layers, Antjie Krog's code switches-- and power plays-- often fall along linguistic lines.  She switches into the verbal and non-verbal intimacy of Afrikaans when talking to the Vlakplaas Five in order to gain their trust.  A certain inflection in Afrikaans over the phone is enough to provoke panic even before the death threat is pronounced.  And sound of an English accent against her Afrikaans is enough to put her at a rhetorical disadvantage in a philosophical debate.  The language you use and codes you employ-- or have employed against you-- can have a profound effect on one's social positioning. 

For an extreme example, my first teaching job in the deep South was on the coast, and one or two of my students spoke the Sea Island Creole dialect (also known as Gullah).  It's not a matter of bad grammar; Gullah has distinct western African parallels and, if  you learn the rules, it makes perfect sense.  But these kids were effectively told that their home English was not welcome at school because the grammar rules they followed were "wrong."  I only worked in an after-school tutoring program in the inner city for one afternoon because I couldn't stand listening to their otherwise well-intentioned and sweet volunteer teacher constantly scolding the kids for their "gutter"  English.  In short, the kids were forced to "talk white," as some of them put it, and they resented it.

I was torn on this.  On the one hand, my job was to teach college freshmen to express themselves in their own language.  For me, that means writing to their own community in an expressive, idiomatic Gullah.  On the other hand, I was also supposed to teach them how to write papers for college classes.  That meant teaching them the language codes of the university and forcing them to write in standard English.  I was supposed to teach them the language codes required to be a part of and an agent within the "academic" social set. So, I marked anything outside of standard English wrong-- and I felt like a heel while doing it. 

Although these are heavily politicized examples in America, almost every person has some experience with this issue of navigating through different social spheres with different language.  Many people speak completely different languages at home or work; others have a vocabulary for certain exclusive societies.  We have to switch in and out of these social circles linguistically to navigate.  Language is power. 

My own experience has been far more mundane than my students from the Sea Islands, as it's only an issue when navigating between my home culture and academia.  For instance, when I was in Montana a few years ago on my way to visit my grandparents, we stopped in a town we used to live in to visit some friends.  My parents caught up with two of their friends, the "Fosters" at an old cafe on the edge of town, a standard burger-and-steak joint with a fiberglass mustang out front.   Mrs. "Foster" has Blackfeet heritage and her husband was a retired rodeo bull rider.  They raised three plucky, strong-willed daughters whom I used to play with when I was little.  After my father cheerfully explained to Mr. "Foster" that I was still in school for my PhD, my mother joked, "In a couple more years she's going to be too educated to speak to us anymore."  Ouch.  The "Fosters" both laughed.  I looked over at my mother, set my jaw, and said in my best high line accent,

"Hey now, hold on dere-- I don' wan' no sheepskin 'f it means I can't be a normal person."

 The speed at which I unconsciously switched into this gear surprised me.  When my parents tried to suggest I was falling out of their collective society, the only way I felt I could respond was by changing my language to demonstrate otherwise.  Judging by the raised eyebrow and grin I got, I think Mrs. "Foster" (who was born twenty miles from my birthplace and whose accent is similar to mine)  got the point.   

In this case, my code-switching was mainly an issue of reinforcing my place in my community in a way my parents would understand.  But many times, this code-switching is more about power relations than belonging.  The powerful set gets to determine which codes are acceptable and which aren't allowed.  Think back to the Krog example I shared with you at top; Krog's Afrikaner accent puts her at a disadvantage with English South Africans, but it lets her move freely among the Vlaakplas Five because she's part of the group.  If you follow a different set, then you're out of power.  Although the writing is a little bit questionable, Ellen Cushman's book The Struggle and the Tools was an important first step to understanding the politics of language and code-switching from a compositional standpoint.  The community she studies is an inner-city minority community, and she follows its linguistic strategies (like code-switching) for survival against the local bureaucracy. 

But the struggle for power and language is everywhere-- not just the inner city.  Everybody wants to fit in somewhere, and everyone learns and uses the languages of certain groups to their own advantage.     Usually I unconsciously switch out of my Montana high-line accent when I'm talking to my professors, and I especially did it when Sarah Palin was running for VP back in 2008 because her so-called "Mooseburger" accent (and by extension, mine) had been branded by the literati as "ignorant."  I just couldn't stand the funny looks.

But I was surprised to catch myself babbling on angrily in my tepid Canadian wannabe accent in the middle of class shortly before the election was over.  The class discussion had wandered off-topic for a few minutes to politics, so the professor proceeded to explain how all people who voted a certain way (people like my father) were all a bunch of rifle-toting, truck-driving trailer trash with GEDs and questionable religious beliefs.  (Well, it was something along those lines.)  Even though I didn't respond back to his flaming remarks directly, I did spend the rest of class glaring a lot and sounding like a stage extra from Fargo while throwing out words like "ain't" and "ya know" and "you betcha."  Why did I do it?

It took a little while to figure it out: even though I didn't want to challenge him openly in class,  I still wanted to create distance between him and myself, between his views and my world.  So I code switched out of an academic register and in to the social class he was mocking to show where my loyalties lay.  I linguistically walked out of the academic sphere, so to speak, and slammed the door behind me.  

So, people often switch in and out of groups by switching in and out of certain registers or the ways that they talk.  People can choose to identify with or against communities with their language.  This gets really interesting, for instance, if you start digging through The Laramie Project.  Who is identifying with whom? Can we get a sense of community or alignment based on the linguistic codes each one follows?  Are the interviewers or interviewees trying to place themselves within social groups, or without? 

Maybe. I'm not really convinced that you can, but we'll look few interesting spots in the two TLP plays in the next few weeks nonetheless, just to see what we can find.  We'll keep these ideas about language, and codes, and code switching-- belonging, maneuvering, advantage and disadvantage-- to see if we can find different languages, and codes, in The Laramie Project.

Johnny Cash and my Grandmother

As I'm up here in Wyoming, I find myself thinking of my grandmother a lot.  My grandmother's "tall drink of water" wasn't my grandfather (who was, admittedly, a very "handsome fella" in his day).  It was Johnny Cash, the man who gave her rebellion a voice.  Every time Cash's name came up in conversation when I was a child, my Grandmother would get this funny little light in her eyes-- something mischievous, alive.  She didn't really speak in terms of hero worship or admiration.  She loved his music, to be sure-- but that's rarely the context I heard her mention his name.  She once defiantly announced in front of my grandfather that Cash "could park his boots under [her] bed anytime."  I remember stifling a childish giggle.  I don't remember my grandfather's reaction, however, but I bet it ended up with a fight.

I think it was a connection that went a little farther than Cash's resinous voice, gorgeous deep eyes or rebellious personality; rather, they were both shockingly beautiful, profane people needing redemption, and I think she recognized that.  In the midst of their personal turmoil and agonizing failures, they both longed for something stable and holy, something which they knew, for all their stubborn willpower and passion, they couldn't provide for themselves. 

And then there's this video.  I only ran into it recently when I heard it over the stereo at a local taco joint, and the sound of Cash's voice singing Nine Inch Nails over the hubbub stopped me in mid-bite.  It made me think of my grandmother.  I looked the whole song up on my computer a little while later, and I was just overwhelmed.   Oh my gosh, the psychological pain in this song is unbearable.

Even though I know how talented he is, I've never liked Trent Reznor; he's a good songwriter and can tap into pain (but little else) with a raw-edged clarity.  But Cash takes it and turns that anguish into something else-- it's a lament to Christ, for a seemingly wasted life. 

I don't know what my grandmother would have thought of hearing the discontented spokesman of her generation singing music from the discontented voice of mine.  Maybe it's something in the slight lisp in Cash's voice that betrays his last stroke (just like hers once did), but I think she would see something familiar in this song, something that would break her heart... 

Now there's a "Handsome Fella": Codes and Family Again

You know, after writing that last post, it's funny where I start thinking about code switching and my grandmother's codes for different kinds of masculinity-- and where those codes resurface.   I recently got back from Montana where I was helping to move my grandfather from his three bedroom  house to a retirement apartment complex in his hometown.  It's been a solid week of stress and tongue-biting as we have packed, re-packed, coddled him, begged him, and even browbeat him into doing everything he has to do for his own good, like leaving the house unlocked when the real-estate agent comes to show the house, or not swindling a relative in a car deal.  But, he's finally moved in, thank goodness-- the stress is over, and I'm happy to escape back to Wyoming for a few days before going back to Appalachia.

So, one thing we needed to do was to find and pack up all the family heirlooms and memorabilia before the estate planner came to sell the rest.  As my mother, aunt and I were digging down in the closet in the basement to get everything ready for a garage sale, we came across a box of old pictures.  Most of them were pictures from the Judith Basin of extended family now long since forgotten.  My mother and aunt looked through the pictures one at a time and tried to place faces.  "This is Mom's aunt's family, isn't it?"  Mom would ask.  "She looks like one of Edith's kids, doesn't she?"

Most were stiff, formal pictures of farmer's families and children taken in Harlowtown at the portrait studio in the next county over.  I have one of some unidentified second or third cousin from the twenties who is a dead ringer for my four year-old niece. 

One of the things we came across was this early photograph of my grandfather in his enlisted uniform, shortly before going off to the Pacific theater in World War II.   My mother laughed out loud as she pulled it from the box, and she and my aunt spent a lot of time reminiscing over it.  As they chatted about when it must have been taken and whether or not their grandmother was still alive at that point, I looked into those cold, blue eyes and face devoid of all kindness, and I felt a little queasy.  He might not swing a fist like he once did, but those eyes still burn with a cold heat that sears like frostbite.   And in every photograph I've ever seen of him as an adult, he never once genuinely smiles. 

Mom handed the picture over to me so I could have a closer look.  "Your Grandpa certainly was a handsome fella in his day, wasn't he?"  She asked.

"A real looker,"  My aunt agreed.  A handsome fella.  I suppressed a shudder at the coincidence of their words, and what those words actually meant to me.