Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

paradox of faith and freedom. Calypso had offered Odysseus immortality.
He said no; he chose mortality. This is a powerful choice. A question for an
essay might be, “What did Odysseus lose by choosing mortality and what
did he gain by this choice?” What’s the advantage of knowing you will die?
The Odyssey continues to speak to 10 th graders, as does Peter Abrahams
Tell Freedom. The language in Tell Freedom is simple and powerful. Abrahams,
a South African, learned simplicity from reading the Bible. The book contains
the story of the first twenty-one years of his life, in the colored section
of Johannesburg. It begins with an image of Peter being inside a raindrop
that shatters when his father dies. He wakes up to racism, discrimination,
and all the horror of the political reality of South African apartheid. Nevertheless,
it is a book full of fascinating characters, warmth, and humor. The
narrator is trapped in this world, because, like everyone else, he has bought
into the image that the white community has of the blacks. There seems to
be no escape from this reality until he is sent on an errand and encounters a
Jewish woman in an office who speaks to him as if he were a real person; she
reads to him part of the story of Othello from Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.
She asks why he hasn’t gone to school, that school is where he would learn to
read such stories for himself. He replies, “Nobody told me about the stories.”
This meeting was life changing. He has encountered another reality
that begins to grow in him, and eventually he becomes a writer.
In Grade 11 this year, I am introducting An Imaginary Life by David
Malouf. This is the story of Ovid who was exiled in the first century and
sent to the edge of the Danube, to the edge of the steppes, on the boundary
of the Roman reality and the other, “barbaric” one. The story involves a
young boy who ends up transforming Ovid rather than the other way around.
Ovid writes of a dream experience of horsemen from out of the steppes who
seemed to him gods: “Let us into your world . . . believe, believe.” An Imaginary
Life is concerned with boundaries on many levels – geographic, cultural
and linguistic, interpersonal and personal/spiritual.
We need to continue to ask ourselves which novels, stories, poems,
plays, and essays reveal the unveiling mirror in relation to the stages of development
from Grade 9 to Grade 12 and in relation to a particular generation
of students. As teachers we, too, can share our own stories that interweave
with the literature that we choose for our students. The breathing in
the room changes when we share our stories or betray our love affair with
language and how it reveals our selves as we are and as we could be.
* * *
Addendum: An Imaginary Life worked well with this year’s Grade 11 class.
The essay I assigned was as follows:
“The moment we stand at the boundary, the boundary has been crossed.”
Georg Kühlewind
Explore the above statement, drawing upon your reading of An Imaginary
Life.
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