Outsider Literacy (flash movie)[51] Those who have limited access to a library are forced to imagine its contents and to imagine what it means to have mastered it. The paradox of the list, the dictionary, the encyclopedia, the library, is that while such collections are most useful and helpful for those who are adept, they are sometimes the recourse of those who are not. When outsiders are in unfamiliar territory, they need maps, but when they are without a map they may resort to an address, or a series of addresses, i.e., a list. This list, which is really a series of disconnected addresses, is only useful if a guide (a map) supplies context. Getting from one address to the other is impossible without that guide. Nevertheless, those without maps of broad areas of knowledge sometimes resort to lists until they learn enough to develop an interiorized map. Better crippled literacy than no literacy. [52] The literature of people of color is filled with descriptions of fascination with dictionaries, encyclopedias and libraries. Descriptions of obsession with such repositories of knowledge appear in the work of individuals such as Malcolm X and Richard Rodriguez. Their narratives suggest that these fascinations are key moments in their development. [53] But obsession of this sort is not unambiguously positive. It is a manifestation of the anxiety that afflicts those who feel they are locked out of epistemologies of power. Driven to undo their ignorance, but unclear about what that would mean, they imagine a literacy which can be systematically and logically tracked down and acquired. Jean-Paul Sartre satirizes the folly of such an approach in his novel Nausea by inventing a character known to the reader as only "the Self-Taught Man." "The Self-Taught Man" handles books "like a dog who has found a bone." A pitiable character, he progresses through the library by reading every book alphabetically as it is shelved. After seven years, he has reached the "L"s. Today he has reached "L" --"K" after "J", "L" after "K". He has passed brutally from the study of coleopterae to the quantum theory, from a work on Tamerlaine to a Catholic pamphlet against Darwinism, he had never been disconcerted for an instant. He had read everything; he has stored up in his head most of what anyone knows about parthenogenesis, and half the arguments against vivisection. There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left: he will say to himself, "Now what?" (45)"The Self-Taught Man" exemplifies the awkward ignorance of the outsider. At the end of the novel, he demonstrates that his crippled literacy parallels his social ineptitude. A gross error of judgement leads to his disgrace. Clearly, no amount of de-contextualized study could have prevented it. [54] Similarly, Richard Rodriguez describes his own process of alphabetical reading in The Hunger of Memory: . . .I was not a good reader. Merely bookish, I lacked a point of view when I read. Rather, I read to acquire a point of view. I vacuumed books for epigrams, scraps of information, ideas, themes -- anything to fill the hollow within me and make me feel educated. (64)From a list of the hundred most important books of Western Civilization, he begins one of a series of reading programs. Although he does not understand many of the books he reads, he dutifully plows through them. Much later, while avoiding completing his dissertation in the reading room of the British Museum, he systematically attacks educational theory. In the process, Rodriguez reads Richard Hoggart's classic, The Uses of Literacy, and finds at last a depiction of his experience. Hoggart's description of "the scholarship boy" describes the agonies of outsiders whose education enables them to pass from one class to another. His systematic and encyclopedic education cannot produce a living map of the territory. Reduced to mimicry because his deficiencies cannot be bridged by dutiful reading alone, the scholarship boy is a "bad thinker." [55] Despite this crippling methodology, Rodriguez goes on to be the first Chicano to write a book which will reach The New York Times best seller list. In contrast, Malcolm X describes his encounter with the dictionary as pivotal to his intellectual and political development. Unlike Rodriguez, Malcolm X becomes a visionary leader and anything but dutiful. [56] True to paradigm, Malcolm X was motivated to increase his literacy because of his religious goals. While incarcerated, he begins a letter writing campaign to Elijah Muhammad because the Nation of Islam has fired his imagination. Malcolm copied his first one page letter to Muhammad at least twenty-five times. "I was trying to make it both legible and understandable. I practically couldn't read my handwriting myself; it shames even to remember it (169)." Malcolm had decoding skills, but his vocabulary left him without the ability to make sense out of the books he picked up. At this point, he fixates obsessively on the dictionary as the solution to both his handwriting and reading problem. He begins copying it page by page, down to the last punctuation mark. The first page took a day; after which, he memorized most of the entries. With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia.. . .That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary." (172) [57] He continued to read up to fifteen hours a day, after lights were out at ten p.m., till three or four in the morning by the corridor light outside his cell. This required hiding from the guards every fifty-eight minutes. Entering Norfolk prison with twenty-twenty vision, he leaves with astigmatism and a very different consciousness. "I still marvel at how swiftly my previous life's thinking pattern slid away from me, like snow off a roof. It is as though someone else I knew of had lived by hustling and crime. I would be startled to catch myself thinking in a remote way of my earlier self as another person (170)." [58] No ordinary intellect and with prodigious time and devotion, Malcolm X transformed the dictionary into a map. His insight allowed him to see the dictionary for what it was: a disguised encyclopedia. But unlike most, his stakes in opposing the ideology encoded in that dictionary motivated him to study against the grain. Unlike Rodriguez, he is not a scholarship boy. He reads with a determined point of view and an intense desire to uncover what was repressed about African and African American history. The first set of books which really impress him supply an archeological history of non-European peoples. Malcolm comes to books with a developed standpoint and high stakes in uncovering the hidden ideology in the racist discourses around him. His mapping is extraordinarily successful. He develops what Chéla Sandoval 12 terms an oppositional consciousness out of these studies, and he stimulates millions of others to do likewise.13 He memorizes the dictionary out of necessity, turning it into a virtue. It is extraordinary, but we should not expect to duplicate it via the dictionary as curricula.
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