During her book tour of the East, Tennessee Reed did not reach the thousands that Wajahat reached with his challenge to age-old myths about Muslims, ones not only encouraged by the media but by academia. The play was covered by Al Jazeera, MSNBC, The New York Times and The Today Show and The Wall Street Journal. (The only dissenter was The Village Voice’s neo-con critic, Alexis Soloski, who objected to lines that criticized the Bush Administration.) CounterPunch contributor, Wajahat Ali, has been at it longer and the effort he made to get his play done east of the Rockies took a lot of energy and resources. He doesn’t sleep and while writing plays he has to support himself part time as a lawyer.
Nevertheless Tennessee’s East Coast bookstore appearances drew a lot of fans and one bookstore appearance was broadcast at a later date by C-Span. Those who showed up for her readings were startled by Tennessee’s inside look at how learning-disabled and black students are treated by American education. For example, I noticed some jaw dropping among some jaded New Yorkers when Tennessee recounted how the Oakland public school system and the University of California at Berkeley introduce students to African civilization by using Tarzan movies and how Reconstruction is taught from the point-of-view of Gone With The Wind. Heads also turned when she reported that some white teachers and professors award white students higher grades than blacks and Hispanics even though the quality of their work might be the same, or, in the case of whites, inferior to that of blacks and Hispanics. They seemed startled by stories about how some teachers humiliate learning-disabled students in front of their classmates. This information comes on the heels of a report that learning disabled are those who are most likely to receive punishment in the nation’s schools. Cuban, Puerto Rican and Peruvian-American students accorded her enthusiastic applause at Miami Dade College when it was reported that when she ran for Oakland school board she was the only candidate who insisted that black and Hispanic students receive the same treatment as those white students living in the affluent areas of Oakland. As a result of her visit to Miami she was invited to the Miami Book Fair and in October, she returned to New York to address The Girls’ Club and students at Brooklyn’s Boricua College. Her appearance prompted this poignant response from a young listener. Though her composition skills are flawed, her sentiment originates in the heart, and her paying attention to a young writer who shares her background and experience demonstrates once again that young people are inspired by such literature, which is still ignored, by the education establishment except for one or two tokens. The establishment’s idea of education is to convert students to the ways of the white man. Zoe’s letter:
Howdy, this is Zoe coming to you from Girl’s Club. Today was really cool, as always. Yesterday Reene said that an author was coming to the club to talk about her book. I honestly didn’t care to attend and listen to a writer because I’m not much a reader. Actually I rarely read for fun. I tend to read only if it’s for school. But surprisingly I had a really good time and now this experience has changed my perspective on a lot of things. so who’s this author that blessed me with her presence? Tennessee Reed is her name and she is the author of her intriguing book entitled Spell Alburquerque: Memoir of a “Difficult” Student. While discussing her work of art, Ms. Reed was so lay back and relexed and it felt as if i was just talking to my friend. So what makes Ms. Reed and her book so special? Well at an early age she was diagnosed with serval language-based learning disorders. Thus one would believe that the odds are against her. how can an individual with so many disorders write an interesting book? Ms. Reed stated “it took a lot of support.” Her mother, Carla Blank, and her father and publisher, Ishmael Reed, were Ms. Reed’s rock. Like any caring parents, “they did their homework” as Ms. Reed likes to say, about to how care and support their comely child. School was difficult for Ms. Reed nevertheless she made it through gradschool and even fought an educational system that often defined her disabilities as “laziness or stupidity”. with all the negative things in her life, she still did what she loves to do. this leaves me with my final words: if you put your heart and mind to it, despite all odds, you can do ANYTHING. signing off”
Posted by Zoe on November 7th, 2009 under Girlville.
Bill Cosby has been very critical of young people and in my letter replying to him I said that he was acting like an old koot. I’m one too. In fact the title of my new novel is Koots, which my agent says that American publishers won’t touch because one or two of the characters present scientific evidence to support the acquittal of O.J. Simpson in the criminal trial.
But even I who have been called a “sourpuss” by one blogger felt good about what I had seen during my three-week visit to the East. A cooperation between young people of different backgrounds, working together to challenge those slanders pushed by the media and in Mamet’s case, by film and mainstream theater as well. I was feeling all gooey. Like what’s that line about lighting one little candle? These young people in Wajahat’s crew and Tennessee did much to shine a light on bigotry and ignorance and Bill Cosby should see this show and use his power to insist that it get a wider audience. I was impressed by the energy of those kids, South Asian, black and white, joining forces to invite an audience into the home of a South-Asian-American household, of a family beset by issues that we all have experienced. And a young writer who overcame a teacher’s diagnosis that she would never learn to read or write through a present from Beat poet Ted Joans who found her a Scholastic Records 45 rpm of Arthur Rubenstein’s orchestral composition to “Three Billy Goats’ Gruff” in a flea market. She had a book with almost the same text, so she figured out how to read along. That was the breakthrough. She knows that the kind of caring support system that was available to her, tutors, understanding teachers, is denied millions of the nation’s children, who are dumped into special education classes, misdiagnosed, and misunderstood. I remember all of the days that Tennessee came home in tears over the way she was treated by teachers and classmates who dismissed her as lazy, slow and difficult. This lazy, slow and difficult student had produced three books by the time she reached college, after we were told that her learning disability was so severe that she would never read nor write. Her book, Spell Alburquerque, published by AK Press, positions her to advocate for students like her.