coldhearted scientist وداد

I

As we know, I was always told not to be a professor. It was hard to make tenure because you had to publish. A girl, I would teach and not publish, so I would never make tenure. I heard this again and again. I would be on the street and have to get used to it, said the song repeatedly played (and I still break any radio that plays that song).

Earlier I had learned that you had to have a marriage or a job (not both; jobs rejected the married and marriages rejected the employed). Both were abusive, unstable, and dangerous. Either could leave you destitute in the street at any time. You had to hang on and hedge your bets. You would not do well, but you might survive. I had heard this again and again for a long time before I began to hear about my probable failure as an academic.

It was the same for Anne Moody’s sharecropper parents, I discern from reading her book, and I am fascinated to see that middle class people of the same generation felt the same way. This has to mean it was not really about money — it was about ideology here in the land of the free.

II

The best option, of course, was to marry a capitalist gentleman. Someone with a social position and an education, but who did not have to work for a living. That was why one was in school.

Since marriage itself was so dangerous, though, I thought the safest way to marry one  so the best way to marry a capitalist was actually to marry a corporation. That led me back to professordom which, however, was strangely similar to serfdom. And, as we know, the purpose of this blog is to emancipate me from mental slavery at least.

I am not a very successful professor, as my former stalker used to like to point out. I rail at myself about this. But in my experience the academic enterprise has most often like being in an abusive marriage and at least surviving. I think that is in part because I am so well trained to accept those sorts of conditions, but in part because those are the real conditions I have had.

I want shield myself better this year, evade the blows and strengthen myself. The key to that is to remember that it really is abusive and the problem is not just me. I can control how I process the abuse to some extent, but I cannot control the fact that it happens. It is really important to remember this if one is to recognize and deflect it.

That is what successful people do. To accept that abuse is your fault is really wrong. Much of the world does not understand this. I always thought successful people were those who could take a great deal of abuse and still lay golden eggs. Who could be in four point restraints and still win the hundred yard dash.

At the same time what I have never liked about the academic world is that being in it is like being a horse with a lot of horse power and spirit who has to stay tethered way back. Prancing one’s life away in a tiny stall.

III

One of our students imagines that the reason I prefer New Orleans to Maringouin, and California/New York to Louisiana, must be that I am a “snob” who wants to spend time in more moneyed atmospheres.

That is of course laughable on its face since moneyed atmospheres are far more easily accessible in Louisiana than in those places. But my issue with all plantation cultures is their extreme psychological violence, and the authoritarian nature of all their institutions. The Great House penetrates everywhere and … well, that is a sentence I should develop for one of my books.

The reason our student’s repeated injunction to love Louisiana more than I do (he has been here one year; I, twenty; I work full time for the state and I volunteer elsewhere; he is on a student visa) was so oppressive was that it was like being asked to kiss a lecherous uncle by way of apology for complaining about his inappropriate behavior. That is why I am still queasy at this student’s repetition of his request.

You have to note, though, that while I am technically trained for other things, my best literary research insights come from living in Louisiana and Brazil. I really, really love these research projects and really, really must hold my focus to them let them overtake me. Wash over me, rinse me clear.

Axé.