Editor’s note: this piece deals with rape.
This ancient mayfly, trapped 100 million years ago in amber, is a new species named Vetuformosa buckleyi. Photo by George Poinar, Jr., Oregon State University, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Off Camera
In my academic work on biographical writing and life-writing more broadly, I’ve written quite a bit about Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007-2021) and reality TV. I’m especially interested in the tensions between the stories told and those that remain “textually invisible”—the things the audience may be aware of from extra-textual sources but which the show does not cover.1
Not necessarily hidden, these things (like Lamar Odom’s near-fatal 2015 overdose and Kanye West’s mental health hospitalization in 2016) perhaps even leak in and affect the action portrayed on the show while still not being directly addressed. So that you could not know what was happening but maybe also, when you find out, you’re not surprised.
While the Kardashians are often seen as having wholly sacrificed their private lives and put everything out there for public consumption, this is not the reality. More than anything, their contribution seems to be a reconfiguring of backstage, so that, over the course of the show, the work of the domestic sphere—beauty labor, mothering, and sisterly relationships in particular— casually, naturally shifted towards the foreground.2 I mention the Kardashians because, as a contingent academic, accustomed to running from school to school, moving all the drama into my tiny basement flat and unexpectedly welcoming ninety college students into the room in which I sleep has given me a greater appreciation for both the sanctity of the curtain and the tensions of that burlesque.
Out of necessity, things must remain “textually invisible.”3 But they lurk there, just under the surface, rippling out and reshaping the path forward.
On 16 January 2021, a man raped me on a third date. Ten days after the insurrection and two days before the start of the Spring 2021 semester. My students remain unaware of this. It would be wholly inappropriate to tell them. Though they do not know it, they are affected by it throughout the semester.
On lunch breaks, I have emergency therapy sessions. I return to teach my afternoon classes utterly depleted.
When I move during the second half of the semester to get out of the apartment where I’d been raped, I fall horrendously behind on grading.
In the final month of teaching, I undergo something of a mental collapse. To accommodate this, I dole out mental health days like candy. My students are grateful. To them, I appear to be one of the few teachers who recognize the difficulty of what they are experiencing in navigating their first year of college, online, during a mass death event and the Covid winter surge. I recognize the difficulty, but the reshaping of my teaching is done to protect myself. They benefit from it, but it is, in reality, a mode of coping with the mental anguish I am experiencing off-stage—a recovery from the recent sexual violence of which they remain entirely unaware.
There was a day during that semester—I recorded the date because I recognized its significance, and now I cannot find it—that I had to write down the name of every one of my students who was recently bereaved. Because there was a new one every day, and I could no longer keep track. So many friends and relatives and loved ones are dying among us that I need to write it down to remember.
On Camera
I can confidently say that, during this period, I produced the most student-centered teaching of my life.
Of her life post-divorce, the memoirist Deborah Levy wrote, “At this uncertain time, writing was one of the few activities in which I could handle the anxiety of uncertainty, of not knowing what was going to happen next”; teaching in the pandemic functions much the same for me.4 It is reliably unpredictable, in that, it is consistently unpredictable and unpredictable in reliably familiar ways. As an international doctoral student and then an adjunct, I had been accustomed to independently solving problems, and I was used to the endless internal quaking of precarity. I quote it in everything I write on the topic of immigration, so it’s a bit of a cliché within my own oeuvre now but, in The Shape of a Pocket (2001), John Berger writes of a science experiment:
The mouse enters the cage to take a bite. No sooner does he touch the morsel with his teeth than the tripwire releases the door, and it slams shut behind him before he can turn his head. It takes a mouse several hours to realize that he is a prisoner, unhurt, in a cage measuring 18cm. by 9cm. After that, something in him never stops trembling.5
That’s trauma.
In the pandemic, we are all, similarly, distanced from the institution and its protections—vulnerable each in our own way and on our own. This circumstance existed pre-pandemic both inside and outside of higher education. “Work is no longer a secure base,” Ivor Southwood writes in Non-Stop Inertia (2011), “but rather a source of anxiety and indignity, both a matter of life and death and utterly meaningless, overwhelming and yet so insubstantial it could run through our fingers.”6
Every semester I’ve ever taught in America has felt like life and death at its conclusion. The difference with Spring 2021 is that it felt like life and death throughout. Students lost loved ones. I lost loved ones. The influx of pandemic death having been normalized to some degree, I became accustomed to regularly receiving emails about recent losses, recent hospitalizations, recent mental breakdowns. The trauma of my own experiences existed alongside the trauma of my students as we struggled our way through the worst semester in memory.
My end-of-semester reviews are glowing—the best of my career. Let’s be real—I’m contingent faculty; they matter very little. But this is, nonetheless, some of the best teaching of my life. In significant part, perhaps, because I was barely holding it together myself.
“Hers is the only class I could say this about: I never dreaded coming to class.”
I can honestly say I never dread teaching. There are just times that I can’t, and so I cancel class and institute a mental health day or move our work to an asynchronous session. Only when the cat is hospitalized amid my moving house to get away from the home in which a man raped me do I explicitly provide a reason for canceling class. That day, I freely admit, is for me, though, obviously, my explanation entirely blames the cat. Later, as I increasingly rely upon asynchronous sessions, I’ll say it’s for their benefit, though it is still, hugely, for mine too.
On 22 April 2021, towards the end of the semester, I recorded a video entitled “Things to Know,” intended to update my students on what to expect at the semester’s end. In this video, I say: “Congratulations, we have survived. It felt very touch-and-go there for a while, but it is very exciting.”7
Watching this video months later, I’m astounded by my own composure on screen. I’m keenly aware that my PTSD is peaking during the time of this recording.
“allowing us to be human at such a hard and stressful time in our lives”
Some years ago, during my Ph.D. research, I scrawled the following phrase: major historical dread on a piece of paper. I thought enough of this expression that I posted it on Instagram, though I failed to record where it came from, and I’ve never, subsequently, been able to identify the source. I’m 65% certain it was not my original thought but, rather, something I recorded when I was writing about nuclear anxiety and nationalized fear and reading a lot of Gore Vidal.
Major historical dread meant something to me then, in that context, lifetimes ago, back in 2014. Oddly, though it would seem backward-facing—History most often being behind us—the phrase’s appeal to me lay in the sense that it described the position it felt we were occupying then—this was 2014, 2015, 2016—in relation to the future. It was an anticipatory dread of a history we had not yet lived.
The dread has been with us for a while, you know; the dread is not new. As Adam Gopnik wrote in the New Yorker upon the changing of the year from 2013 to 2014, “It is, perhaps, essential to life to think that we know where we’re going when we set out—our politics and plans alike depend on the illusion that someone knows where we’re going.”8 True story: no one knows, ever.
“We had less fear […]”
On 14th April, I wrote this on my blog:
i wake up and i don’t know what i was dreaming but i know i heard a knock. and i know no one was actually knocking on the door at 2 am but then i distinctly remember the knock. the knock is what woke me up, not the dream, and the knock didn’t seem to be in the dream. i don’t recall the dream. but i wake up to the knock and find my right arm is in a triangle, at a 45° angle beside me, hand beside my head, and my left arm is down, head turned skyward. […] so i was sleeping and there was a knock and i awoke to find that i was lying in bed as though i were ready to be raped. not the exact position of when i was raped but certainly evocative. in that the major difference was that, when i awoke, i wasn’t looking over my left shoulder (as i had been when raped) but up at the ceiling.
I know from my diary that I graded Essay #3 later that day, held office hours for Howard, and taught a class on necropolitics as an adjunct at NYU.
“As a first year, I needed her, and I’m glad I got her.”
In an annual performance review with the department chair—a conversation which lasts all of seven minutes—they say my student evaluations of teaching are within the top 99 percentile. They say they are going to recommend me for another contract year.
Another year. My second. We get seven, and then the university dispenses with us due to an arbitrary rule and some nonsense about “fresh faculty”—as though the lot of us were lettuce and experience were mold.
On Mute: [INSERT LAUGHTER]
My research focuses on how people write in the present—how we tell the story when it is still unfolding and we do not know how it will turn out, do not know its outcomes.
My research focuses on trauma. On how traumatized people live within a dual reality— “the reality of a relatively secure and predictable present that lives side by side with a ruinous, ever present past.”9 While this is undoubtedly true, the equation doesn’t quite seem to work in the present pandemic context, where the trauma appears to come from a ruinous, ever-present present. Same for the contingency crisis in higher education, which Herb Childress has likened to “a species die-off.”10 This is not a ruinous past but a ruinous present, a species die-off. Forgive me, I lack the academic lens through which to consider that.
My research, thus far, has taken into account how people exist and operate within presents of the past— a present which, looking backward, can be seen to be of limited duration. What I have failed to take into account is the ways in which that present, however limited its duration, may have felt limitless, may have stretched impossibly, uncertainly, on.
The other day, I saw this Tweet: “Remember back in season one of Covid, when we thought maybe we’d be in this for just five seasons like Breaking Bad, and now it’s like, surprise y’all, this is Grey’s Anatomy.”11 Surprise! Stay tuned!
Months and months of teaching without laughter. I wonder if that is how I will remember this time.
On the screen, I see myself laugh at myself. They can see and hear me laughing at myself. Sometimes, when they are on camera, I see them laugh. But they are always on mute.
In late February 2021, someone unmutes themselves to laugh aloud in my class. This may have been the proudest moment of my pandemic teaching career. In my pandemic teaching career so far, this was the one time that happened.
I teach first-year writing. My goal isn’t to help them find their voices—they don’t need finding; they already have them and use them. My goal is to give them space to try and fail, to provide words for experiences they’re having, and help them gain confidence in using the voices they already have in different ways. So, essentially, the opposite of being muted. And yet, here we are: cameras off, on mute, exhausted, depleted, doing it all over again after a break that is never long enough to recover from what we’ve just done.
In Conclusion
I teach first-year writing. It’s a field with the distinction of being one of the academy’s most adjunctified, contingent-heavy fields.12 The constant during my experience of the pandemic has been that each semester, I will welcome 75+ first-year students into my home, and we will—however gently, however slowly, dependent upon the status of the chaos—keep writing. Amid the superfluous tides and foams and noise—which are, ultimately, the fundamental rhythms of lived experience in everyday life, no?— we will read writing, think about writing, talk about writing, and write. Ultimately, over the course of a semester, we will produce far more writing than my students ever did pre-pandemic.
In my classes, I emphasize vocabulary. Because when I ask them in our first week what they most want to work on each semester, the majority mention developing their vocabulary. But also because words are powerful—they play a critical role in shaping and validating our understandings of ourselves and what has happened to us and our perceptions of the world and what is possible within it.
At the end of every semester, I give them this word like a gift: galvanize. A verb, it means to shock or excite (someone) into taking action. I like this word, I always tell my students, for the entirely superficial reason, that it has the word “gal” in it. So it’s always seemed to me somehow subversively feminist. But that’s the connotation, not the denotation, which is powerful too. I love this word because it suggests the critical need for action and how we are moved into action, the action being a channeling of energy from someone or something.
However, left out of the definition is the break that I believe such a process requires. To be galvanized is to be shocked or excited into action, but in a year—or a lifetime—of shocks, we must also be kind to ourselves. Because shock so often leads to exhaustion. We’re physiologically wired for this, right? After a stressful time, the body needs to restore itself, unclench, relax and recover.
Galvanize. I take this word as a gift. We are shocked! We are excited! We are going to act! And yet, AND YET… now, for the moment, we have the gift of a time to repair. We can rest assured in the action to come, the good trouble ahead, and pause, however briefly in the semester’s break: to restore ourselves, regain our strength, in preparation for the work of the times we find ourselves in now and the future we are forcing into being.
Every one of us is a part of that future, students and educators alike. Each of us brings our unique perspective and voice to the mission of forging that future. I so look forward to living in that future, and I know it’s a tall order, but I still have hope: that, in that future, we will all feel safe and secure and protected and beloved, empowered to use our beautiful voices freely, loudly, confidently, boldly, joyfully, collectively.
Writing this piece in 2021, I was cynical about academic institutions but drew hope from our extraordinary students. That cynicism has only deepened in the intervening years, as we’ve watched university administrations repeatedly respond with violence to student and faculty protests against the genocide of the Palestinian people and the concurrent scholasticide. And yet, the hope remains too. Semester after semester and essay after essay, my students—in the United States and around the world—enter the classroom with curiosity, boldness, and moral clarity.
While a contract approved in 2025 means that labor conditions at Howard University now provide a potential pathway to long-term employment beyond the initial seven years, this route is tethered to new publication requirements in the discipline of the Study of Teaching and Learning (SOTL). An academic discipline unto itself, SOTL is a field in which a tiny minority of contingent faculty at HU are trained. Its inclusion in the requirements for promotion of non-tenure track faculty suggests administrators’ eagerness to extract additional labor in the form of non-teaching work from positions in which teaching has historically been the sole priority and without the reduction of course load from which our tenure-track/tenured colleagues benefit.
Quite honestly, publication of this piece is an effort to meet that publication requirement. Publication of this piece also, I hope, provides a record of some of the circumstances through which we contingent faculty have worked in the last six years of the Covid-19 pandemic—a time during which many of us have felt unsupported, unprotected, and alone. And a time that, with the return to “normal” and the default back to being “in person,” as the continuing mass death and the mass disabling along with it, continue, we must remember. Because this is also a time that is still not over, because time, like pandemics, does not work that way, with clear beginnings and endings. Though we may declare the pandemic over, though we may take off our masks and try to forget, still the “superfluous foams and tides and noise” have already burrowed deep within us, into our brains and hearts and cells and pasts. We carry this with us, always, into the future ahead.
- Meredith Jones, “Je Suis Kim,” Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty 7, no. 10 (December 2016): 139, DOI: 10.1386/csfb.7.2.129_7.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 139.
- Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living (Bloomsbury, 2018), 29.
- John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket (Vintage, 2001), 191.
- Southwood, 76.
- “Things to Know!” 22 April 2021, https://youtu.be/bN9up9UlEW0
- Adam Gopnik, “Two Ships,” The New Yorker, 6 January 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/06/two-ships.
- Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (Penguin, 2014), 197.
- Herb Childress, The Adjunct Underclass (University of Chicago Press, 2019), 141.
- @AnthroBalkans, 25 November 2021, 20:51, https://twitter.com/AnthroBalkans/status/1464049237918986243.
- Childress, 27.