Sarah,
I remember the first impressions that I had
of you. I don’t remember when exactly it was, but I overheard some conversation
where you said that you really liked to debate, and that was something that was
very apparent to the way you intervened in class. It wasn’t because you
incessantly pushed your opinion, but instead you used your ability to “embrace
polarity” (as you said in your “Waiting” post, and which I’ve interpreted as
your tendency to embrace an opinion and defend it. Sorry if that’s wrong) to
seek some sort of truth. You constantly found ways to push arguments that went
against the trajectory of the class, and through that we either managed to get
a more solid conception of the topic we were discussing as a whole, and not
just through the focus Deb had intended for us. I admired your bravery in just
jumping in with arguments, not always entirely sure of where you would end up,
but always valiantly making your way through the ideas, supporting what you
said with the texts and recognizing when you were wrong.
Reading your blog from the oldest posts to
the most recent ones I could see this attitude remained throughout. I could see
your style of writing grew and changed as I progressed through your blog, but
this amazing ability to mobilize ideas to support what you say so effectively
remained constant throughout. But what stood out to me the most from your blog
was the way it changed as I progressed through it. Your initial posts were
tough for me to chew, despite your ideas being easy to swallow. Your writing
style was dense and I went on google two or three times to find definitions of
words you had used. To inexperienced freshman me, it all just sounded amazing.
So amazing that I found it difficult to see where Deb was coming from with much
of her criticism in your earlier posts.
But as I read more and more of your posts
your style began to change. It first hit me when I read you Yellow Brick Road
post. When you wrote about a scene being “d r a w n o u t” and I found myself
smiling at the sight of the space in between each of the letters that made me
in my head read the word in a drawn-out way. Then your post on Stew felt like
it could have been written by a different person. I mean, just by looking at
this paragraph:
James Baldwin. An American novelist and activist who,
in his essay collection Notes of a Native Son,
explored the all-important intricacies of the issue of racism. Stew. A black
rocker-turned-theater-artist-stroke-playwright who, in his lifetime, has
claimed to long be inspired by James Baldwin. Notes of a Native Song. A song
cycle that is manifest of the intersection between Baldwin and Stew.
With all its pauses and proper
nouns-turned-sentences, it contrasts so greatly from what you had written
before. And that’s only one example from this extensive post which is definitely
one of your best. I felt like from these two posts (YBR and Stew) onward I was
no longer just reading insightful comments by a student trying to get a good
grade, but I was reading the blog of a student who was really trying to come to
terms with ideas not only in relation to the content of the class, but also in
relation to herself. More of you and who you are started to become apparent in
these further blogposts.
Like when you wrote about your
typical bickering with Mira.
Or when you wrote about your
experience in Little Mexico and how it had stuck with you for so long and had
brought you closer to your identity as a Lebanese.
You began to loosen up with what you
would include in your blog. You began to trust that departing from strict academic
style of writing could have its advantages, like when you went ahead and quoted
yourself. That really made me smile and be more engaged in what I was reading. And
I feel like it all came to a strong conclusion with the Judith Butler piece.
You incorporated both sides of the “you” that I had seen in your blog: the cold
and calculating academic Sarah from the first posts and the more risk taking
and trusting Sarah from the later posts. While those images on my screen were
hard to read, I could feel the writing on the paper flowing, as you
transitioned from using capital letters, to writing in your own handwriting, to
showing annotations of the paragraphs Butler wrote.
I get the impression from your blog
that it was all a journey, with a very distinct starting and ending point. I
then find it interesting to consider your blog as a “selfie,” since we always
perceive selfies to be a single image. It’s as if a whole semester of struggle
and success is condensed into a single image. An image that is literally worth thousands
of words. You’ve performed yourself firstly as a dedicated student who was
trying her best to (and succeeding in) present(ing) well-argued essays, then as
a girl exploring her relationship to the work in the class, which concluded in
this image of you as a sort of elevated master of a craft. At least to me it
seems that way. But at the same time you also come across as a peer to me, as
someone I can identify with. Your blog really is a performance of this journey
that the class took you through, where you have grown and found a new part of
yourself.
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