Sunday, June 17, 2012
Dear Students:
Instead of being out enjoying this hot summer day, I am sitting propped up in my bed since 7 a.m. writing a syllabus, sketching out a plan for the next six weeks we can all live through and now writing one of my famous letters (smile).
All of us must be a little insane—I can’t imagine why anyone would voluntarily agree to a 7:30 in the morning freshman comp class, but as there is a waiting list—we certainly are not alone in this bewilderment as if insanity in great numbers is a consolation door prize (smile).
Most of you are probably among the many students who would have gone straight to Cal or one of the UCs if they hadn’t decided to restrict their admission of first and second year students. Some of you might be just out of high school as high schools often groom overachievers who sport GPAs like 4.9. These new graduates from school, often on their own for the first time, are used to getting up early and cramming, so why not continue the grueling practice of academic bench pressing? These young people have decided to join those of us who don’t qualify for John George –yet (smile), adults who are looking to change their circumstances for the better—
Kidding aside. I hope this summer course proves to be both fun and rewarding. I am one of those teachers who loves to read and write and does not cut any slack even when condensed milk is all we have in the ‘fridge. It is going to be a six week jaunt through four or five books and four essays with two presentations, no office hours and very little time to sleep.
But you will survive.
Isn’t there a Gloria Gaynor tune with that line? We’re not talking about love walking out the door, as Alice Walker shares in the collection of essays, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness, that as long as we don’t walk out on ourselves everything will work out okay.
The character in the song tells her lover who comes back:
“Go on now, go walk out the door
Just turn around now
('cause) you're not welcome anymore
Weren't you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye
Do you think I'd crumble
Did you think I'd lay down and die?
Oh no, not I. I will survive
Oh as long as I know how to love I know I'll stay alive;
I've got all my life to live,
I've got all my love to give and I'll survive,
I will survive. Hey hey” (http://www.lyrics007.com/Gloria%20Gaynor%20Lyrics/I%20Will%20Survive%20Lyrics.html).
So if you have any doubts, now is the time to send them packing. You will not have time to placate self-doubt while you read books about women who have beaten so many odds that one can only say, well I might have it bad, but that woman over there, that girl-child over there, has it a lot worse.
I visited San Quentin State Prison on Friday, June 15, to see Hamlet, performed by inmates who are a part of a Shakespeare company behind bars. The play adapted by Lesley Currier, Marin Shakespeare Company, directed by Suraya Keating and Lesley, is I believe Shakespeare at San Quentin’s eighth production. Not only did the actors perform their roles, they also wrote a parallel play inspired by Hamlet which they will perform in August this year. It was my second time at Shakespeare at San Quentin. I was present at another performance last August, Twelfth Night, a comedy set in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury in the '60s.
I dashed up to the prison after completing my Friday morning Internet radio show broadcast, just a day after BART was shut down after a fire, the same week a patron committed suicide. I know the train operator, who texted me just after it happened last Monday morning at the Bayfair BART Station. The day was lovely, last Friday—it is amazing how lovely the view is from the prison. I’d last been there February 20, 2012, for the national prison occupation. Years before I’d witnessed an execution, not literally—I was in the yard when Stanley “Tookie” Williams, was executed.
Hamlet is a tragedy. A young man away at school gets notice that while away his dear father has died. When he returns for the funeral, he finds his uncle the new king, having married his brother’s wife. Later on, the king’s ghost haunts the manor and Hamlet not only sees the ghost—it speaks. It tells Hamlet that his father was murdered.
Now no one can see the ghost except Hamlet, which is unfortunate, because soon the rumor circulates that the heir is crazy—perhaps he’s just sad, grief stricken and angry that his mother and uncle have usurped his father’s memory without proper or just ritual.
Hamlet is a play about grief and rage and revenge and forgiveness. All themes the men in blue face daily as some with indeterminate or life sentences try not to dwell on the fact that they may never see life outside the institution.
If one is familiar with the Shakespeare tradition, one knows that male actors played all the roles. One person in the Q&A asked the actor who played a female character how he was man enough to do so given traditional prison culture? This was the prisoner’s first time in one of the plays too. The actor laughed and said that his initial trepidation was alleviated through the support he received from the cast and his desire to do the best he could with the role.
After rehearsing since August last year, the men performed to a full chapel, every seat taken, San Quentin television filming the performance for those inmates who would not be able to attend, reporters interviewing guests including me. Only certain inmates are eligible to attend the performances. I met quite a few men who are being released soon, one young man was just 21 and he’d been incarcerated since he was 16.
California Lawyers in the Arts or for the Arts (smile) was there and have been able to keep this program active after threats to its funding meant certain death. For many men in the audience, it was their first time seeing a Shakespearean play. One man spoke of how he’d dropped out of school and hadn’t had the opportunity to complete his education. I met men who were just learning to read. One man proudly shared the first book he’d completed: orator and free fighter, Frederick Douglass’s 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. I promised to write him. Douglass is well known for a speech he gave where he looked at the irony and hypocrisy of a nation founded on such lofty principals as ours yet endorsed and supported enslaving its citizens. It is called: “What to the American Slave is the Fourth of July” delivered July 5, 1852: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2927t.html and http://edsitement.neh.gov/launchpad-frederick-douglass-http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifwhat-slave-fourth-july .
I mention Hamlet because I started this conversation with a question about choice and sanity. Given a choice none of us would spend our mornings and evenings cooped up in a building writing essays about women who have learned not to let anyone hold them down, as Elphaba says to Glinda in her song, “Defying Gravity.” I heard Ben Vereen sing this tune at a concert at the Rrazz Room at Hotel Nikko last week as well. He played the Wizard in Wicked on Broadway.
Certainly grave events impact our lives daily, yet, like so many of the women we will meet this summer like Leymah Gwobee who ended a war in her country that had been waging off and on for decades, that one can function despite dysfunction. One can find something to laugh and smile about even when one is not physically free. Just think about Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi finally accepting her award 21 years after she won it while under house arrest in 1991.
She said, “'Often during [her] days of house arrest it felt as though [she] were no longer a part of the real world.’”
“Receiving the Nobel accolade in 1991 ‘made me real once again,” the Burmese opposition leader told the Norwegian Nobel committee in Oslo's City Hall” (googlenews.com).
See http://www.rfa.org/english/news/burma/nobel-06162012170101.html and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18464946, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1991/kyi-lecture_en.html (the entire text of the speech) lecture http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1809 (29 min. live).
She spoke last week of compassion fatigue, which she says is expressed by the lack of concern for those who are suffering. Sometimes those who have resources think the ills of society will never end, yet Aung San Suu Kyi says we all have a role to play in peace making. She speaks about how forgotten those who are locked away as prisoners feel.
“’To be forgotten. The French say that to part is to die a little. To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity. When I met Burmese migrant workers and refugees during my recent visit to Thailand, many cried out: “Don’t forget us!” They meant: “don’t forget our plight, don’t forget to do what you can to help us, don’t forget we also belong to your world.’”
It is my hope this semester that you make friends for a lifetime and meet people along this literary academic journey who will spark something within you that fuels your journey and gives perhaps an inarticulate life direction.
Often the essay is the first step in such articulation. The word comes from the "M.Fr. 'essai' which means “an attempt or try” (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=essay). One doesn’t have to know all the answers. One doesn’t have to be an expert to feel passionately about certain issues. However, the scholar backs up what he or she believes with strong reasons.
It is my intention this summer session to equip students with tools to think a bit more clearly, learn how to ask questions, evaluate sources, and write an academic essay that expresses the writers’ intention as we hold onto our hats and the seats of our pants (smile).
Peace and Blessings,
Wanda Sabir
Dear Students:
Instead of being out enjoying this hot summer day, I am sitting propped up in my bed since 7 a.m. writing a syllabus, sketching out a plan for the next six weeks we can all live through and now writing one of my famous letters (smile).
All of us must be a little insane—I can’t imagine why anyone would voluntarily agree to a 7:30 in the morning freshman comp class, but as there is a waiting list—we certainly are not alone in this bewilderment as if insanity in great numbers is a consolation door prize (smile).
Most of you are probably among the many students who would have gone straight to Cal or one of the UCs if they hadn’t decided to restrict their admission of first and second year students. Some of you might be just out of high school as high schools often groom overachievers who sport GPAs like 4.9. These new graduates from school, often on their own for the first time, are used to getting up early and cramming, so why not continue the grueling practice of academic bench pressing? These young people have decided to join those of us who don’t qualify for John George –yet (smile), adults who are looking to change their circumstances for the better—
Kidding aside. I hope this summer course proves to be both fun and rewarding. I am one of those teachers who loves to read and write and does not cut any slack even when condensed milk is all we have in the ‘fridge. It is going to be a six week jaunt through four or five books and four essays with two presentations, no office hours and very little time to sleep.
But you will survive.
Isn’t there a Gloria Gaynor tune with that line? We’re not talking about love walking out the door, as Alice Walker shares in the collection of essays, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness, that as long as we don’t walk out on ourselves everything will work out okay.
The character in the song tells her lover who comes back:
“Go on now, go walk out the door
Just turn around now
('cause) you're not welcome anymore
Weren't you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye
Do you think I'd crumble
Did you think I'd lay down and die?
Oh no, not I. I will survive
Oh as long as I know how to love I know I'll stay alive;
I've got all my life to live,
I've got all my love to give and I'll survive,
I will survive. Hey hey” (http://www.lyrics007.com/Gloria%20Gaynor%20Lyrics/I%20Will%20Survive%20Lyrics.html).
So if you have any doubts, now is the time to send them packing. You will not have time to placate self-doubt while you read books about women who have beaten so many odds that one can only say, well I might have it bad, but that woman over there, that girl-child over there, has it a lot worse.
I visited San Quentin State Prison on Friday, June 15, to see Hamlet, performed by inmates who are a part of a Shakespeare company behind bars. The play adapted by Lesley Currier, Marin Shakespeare Company, directed by Suraya Keating and Lesley, is I believe Shakespeare at San Quentin’s eighth production. Not only did the actors perform their roles, they also wrote a parallel play inspired by Hamlet which they will perform in August this year. It was my second time at Shakespeare at San Quentin. I was present at another performance last August, Twelfth Night, a comedy set in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury in the '60s.
I dashed up to the prison after completing my Friday morning Internet radio show broadcast, just a day after BART was shut down after a fire, the same week a patron committed suicide. I know the train operator, who texted me just after it happened last Monday morning at the Bayfair BART Station. The day was lovely, last Friday—it is amazing how lovely the view is from the prison. I’d last been there February 20, 2012, for the national prison occupation. Years before I’d witnessed an execution, not literally—I was in the yard when Stanley “Tookie” Williams, was executed.
Hamlet is a tragedy. A young man away at school gets notice that while away his dear father has died. When he returns for the funeral, he finds his uncle the new king, having married his brother’s wife. Later on, the king’s ghost haunts the manor and Hamlet not only sees the ghost—it speaks. It tells Hamlet that his father was murdered.
Now no one can see the ghost except Hamlet, which is unfortunate, because soon the rumor circulates that the heir is crazy—perhaps he’s just sad, grief stricken and angry that his mother and uncle have usurped his father’s memory without proper or just ritual.
Hamlet is a play about grief and rage and revenge and forgiveness. All themes the men in blue face daily as some with indeterminate or life sentences try not to dwell on the fact that they may never see life outside the institution.
If one is familiar with the Shakespeare tradition, one knows that male actors played all the roles. One person in the Q&A asked the actor who played a female character how he was man enough to do so given traditional prison culture? This was the prisoner’s first time in one of the plays too. The actor laughed and said that his initial trepidation was alleviated through the support he received from the cast and his desire to do the best he could with the role.
After rehearsing since August last year, the men performed to a full chapel, every seat taken, San Quentin television filming the performance for those inmates who would not be able to attend, reporters interviewing guests including me. Only certain inmates are eligible to attend the performances. I met quite a few men who are being released soon, one young man was just 21 and he’d been incarcerated since he was 16.
California Lawyers in the Arts or for the Arts (smile) was there and have been able to keep this program active after threats to its funding meant certain death. For many men in the audience, it was their first time seeing a Shakespearean play. One man spoke of how he’d dropped out of school and hadn’t had the opportunity to complete his education. I met men who were just learning to read. One man proudly shared the first book he’d completed: orator and free fighter, Frederick Douglass’s 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. I promised to write him. Douglass is well known for a speech he gave where he looked at the irony and hypocrisy of a nation founded on such lofty principals as ours yet endorsed and supported enslaving its citizens. It is called: “What to the American Slave is the Fourth of July” delivered July 5, 1852: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2927t.html and http://edsitement.neh.gov/launchpad-frederick-douglass-http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifwhat-slave-fourth-july .
I mention Hamlet because I started this conversation with a question about choice and sanity. Given a choice none of us would spend our mornings and evenings cooped up in a building writing essays about women who have learned not to let anyone hold them down, as Elphaba says to Glinda in her song, “Defying Gravity.” I heard Ben Vereen sing this tune at a concert at the Rrazz Room at Hotel Nikko last week as well. He played the Wizard in Wicked on Broadway.
Certainly grave events impact our lives daily, yet, like so many of the women we will meet this summer like Leymah Gwobee who ended a war in her country that had been waging off and on for decades, that one can function despite dysfunction. One can find something to laugh and smile about even when one is not physically free. Just think about Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi finally accepting her award 21 years after she won it while under house arrest in 1991.
She said, “'Often during [her] days of house arrest it felt as though [she] were no longer a part of the real world.’”
“Receiving the Nobel accolade in 1991 ‘made me real once again,” the Burmese opposition leader told the Norwegian Nobel committee in Oslo's City Hall” (googlenews.com).
See http://www.rfa.org/english/news/burma/nobel-06162012170101.html and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18464946, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1991/kyi-lecture_en.html (the entire text of the speech) lecture http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1809 (29 min. live).
She spoke last week of compassion fatigue, which she says is expressed by the lack of concern for those who are suffering. Sometimes those who have resources think the ills of society will never end, yet Aung San Suu Kyi says we all have a role to play in peace making. She speaks about how forgotten those who are locked away as prisoners feel.
“’To be forgotten. The French say that to part is to die a little. To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity. When I met Burmese migrant workers and refugees during my recent visit to Thailand, many cried out: “Don’t forget us!” They meant: “don’t forget our plight, don’t forget to do what you can to help us, don’t forget we also belong to your world.’”
It is my hope this semester that you make friends for a lifetime and meet people along this literary academic journey who will spark something within you that fuels your journey and gives perhaps an inarticulate life direction.
Often the essay is the first step in such articulation. The word comes from the "M.Fr. 'essai' which means “an attempt or try” (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=essay). One doesn’t have to know all the answers. One doesn’t have to be an expert to feel passionately about certain issues. However, the scholar backs up what he or she believes with strong reasons.
It is my intention this summer session to equip students with tools to think a bit more clearly, learn how to ask questions, evaluate sources, and write an academic essay that expresses the writers’ intention as we hold onto our hats and the seats of our pants (smile).
Peace and Blessings,
Wanda Sabir
posted by Professor Wanda's Posse at 4:09 PM
3 Comments:
Saalihah Mays
Professor Wanda Sabir
English 1A
20 june 2012
What I received from the syllabus is that I am going to have to be prepared and organized to pass this class. I must have all my books and read a little more often then I usually would, also I see that I will have to be on top of things because there is no late or make u work that is accepted so I must make sure not to fall behind. I have no intentions on failing this class. So be pass I must make sure that all of my work is typed to read and study the books and make sure to be on time to class so that I won’t miss anything important.
Anthony Gamarra
Professor Sabir
English 1A
27 July 2012
After reading the syllabus, I then understood what was expected of me throughout the following six weeks. The amount of reading we would be doing now became evident, and the nightmare would only get scarier as time progressed. I have had no intention of failing this semester, and i knew i was ready to smile in the face of such a horror. Reading, writing and participation are key when trying to pass this English 1A class.
Marisol Mora
Professor Sabir
English 1A
27 July 2012
After reading the syllabus i was a bit overwhelmed about the amount of work that was listed. I really hope that I can make it through. I believe that with classroom participation and having a close relationship with the teacher will help me out a lot. Professor Sabir told us in the syllabus what is expected and i plan on trying my hardest to fulfil it.
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