Abstract
Presented as a collection of diary entries by “at risk students” from Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, The Freedom Writers’ Diary demonstrates the subversive nature of diary writing which allows voiceless minorities to express their social distress. As it illustrates a new literary and editorial development in contem- porary American culture, the book is part of what I call testimonial texts of social empowerment. Testimonies, the protean text par excellence, have come to be part of the American cultural and literary scene by appropriating different literary genres to which they append their specificity and struggle for social awareness. In the Freedom Writers’ case, which I will analyze, the diary, which here represents the choral cry of a minority craving for social recognition, challenges its reader to a reassessment of the diarist, his text and the reading it should induce.
Résumé
Recueil d’instants intimes empruntés à la vie (et aux textes) d’élèves « à pro- blèmes » d’une école californienne, le Freedom Writers’ Diary prouve à quel point le journal intime peut apparaître comme un genre subversif offrant aux ‘sans-voix’ une possibilité d’exprimer un malaise social trop longtemps ignoré par leurs contemporains.
Exemple symptomatique d’une mouvance littéraire de la culture contemporaine aux États-Unis, il s’inscrit dans le genre de ce que je nomme textes testimoniaux visant un empowerment social (Testimonial Texts of Social Empowerment). Le témoignage entre dans la littérature et la culture états-uniennes contemporaines par le biais d’une appropriation de différents genres littéraires, leur accolant à la fois sa spécificité propre et son dessein de révolution sociale. Dans le cas que je me propose d’analyser, le journal intime, se faisant porte-parole d’une collectivité minoritaire cherchant une reconnaissance sociale, pousse le lecteur à une réévaluation du diariste, de son texte et de la lecture qu’il doit en faire.
Audrey L
ouckxThe Freedom Writers’ Diary
An Example of Testimonial Texts of Social Empowerment
To refer to this article :
Audrey Louckx, “The Freedom Writers’ Diary. An example of Testimonial Texts of Social Empowerment”, in: Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, November
Geneviève Fabry (UCL) Anke giLLeir (KULeuven) Gian Paolo giudiccetti (UCL) Agnès guiderdoni (FNRS – UCL) Ortwin de graeF (kuLeuven) Ben de bruyn (FWO - KULeuven) Jan Herman (KULeuven)
Marie HoLdSwortH (UCL) Guido Latré (UCL)
Nadia Lie (KULeuven) Michel LiSSe (FNRS – UCL)
Anneleen maSScHeLein (FWO – KULeuven) Christophe meurée (FNRS – UCL)
Reine meyLaertS (KULeuven) Stéphanie VanaSten (FNRS – UCL) Bart Vanden boScHe (KULeuven) Marc Van Vaeck (KULeuven) Pieter VerStraeten (KULeuven)
Olivier ammour-mayeur (Monash University - Merbourne) Ingo berenSmeyer (Universität Giessen)
Lars bernaertS (Universiteit Gent & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Faith binckeS (Worcester College - Oxford)
Philiep boSSier (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Franca bruera (Università di Torino)
Àlvaro cebaLLoS Viro (Université de Liège) Christian cHeLebourg (Université de Nancy II) Edoardo coStadura (Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena) Nicola creigHton (Queen’s University Belfast) William M. decker (Oklahoma State University)
Dirk deLabaStita (Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix - Namur)
Michel deLViLLe (Université de Liège)
César dominguez (Universidad de Santiago de Compostella
& King’s College)
Gillis dorLeijn (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
Ute Heidmann (Université de Lausanne)
Klaus H. kieFer (Ludwig Maxilimians Universität München) Michael koHLHauer (Université de Savoie)
Isabelle krzywkowSki (Université de Grenoble) Sofiane LagHouati (Musée Royal de Mariemont) François LecercLe (Université de Paris IV - Sorbonne) Ilse Logie (Universiteit Gent)
Marc mauFort (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Isabelle meuret (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Christina morin (Queen’s University Belfast) Miguel norbartubarri (Universiteit Antwerpen) Olivier odaert (Université de Limoges) Andréa oberHuber (Université de Montréal)
Jan ooSterHoLt (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg) Maïté Snauwaert (University of Alberta - Edmonton)
conseiLderédaction - redactieraad
David martenS (KULeuven & UCL) – Rédacteur en chef - Hoofdredacteur
Matthieu Sergier (UCL & Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis), Guillaume wiLLem (KULeuven) & Laurence Van nuijS
(FWO – KULeuven) – Secrétaires de rédaction - Redactiesecretarissen Elke d’Hoker (KULeuven)
Lieven d’HuLSt (KULeuven – Kortrijk) Hubert roLand (FNRS – UCL)
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reedomW
riters’ d
iaryAn Example of Testimonial Texts of Social Empowerment
Fall 1994, Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach California, in the midst of the LA riots, racial violence is at its highest. Young English teacher Erin Gruwell, hoping to gain her credentials, enters room 203 in which she is faced with a group of “at risk, unteachable”1 students. These teenagers living in the
‘hood’ are each day ‘bused in’2 to the preppy environment of Wilson High in the name of integration policies. A true idealist, Erin Gruwell believes in the legitima- cy of such policies and wishes to follow her “meticulously planned lessons”3 to the letter. She quickly realizes that her students instinctively reproduce within the class- room the segregated environment they live in. The students regard school as either an alternative to rehab and even boot camp or some kind of societal dead end for them to endure in order to survive longer, even remotely. Yet, a pivotal event is to change Gruwell’s and her students’ lives forever. When Gruwell intercepts a racial caricature circulating the classroom, she “[goes] ballistic”.4 Comparing the sketch to Holocaust propaganda, she hopes to eventually open her students’ eyes on their contemptible racial hatred. To her amazement, she only reaps up puzzled looks. None of her students knows what the Holocaust is, though most of them have already been shot at. Gruwell instantly decides to “make tolerance the core of [her] curriculum”.5 She offers each of her students a notebook and prompts them to write one page a day: “Everyone has their own story. And it is important to tell your story, even to yourself ”.6 These events are the birth of the Freedom Writers’ Diary.
In this paper, I wish to propose a generic approach of the Freedom Writers’
text. Though it displays the characteristics Alain Girard assigns to literary diaries, the Freedom Writer’s work can also be attached to a renewed use of testimonial literature in contemporary American culture. Illustrating a new literary and edito- rial development, these testimonials seek to raise public awareness on situations of social injustice through the disclosure of the witnesses’ first-hand experience of discrimination. Several collections of testimonials published over the last two
1. Erin gruweLL and the Freedom Writers, The Freedom Writers Diary. Broadway Books, New York, 1999, 5.
2. A reference is made here to the specific integration policies according to which students from racial minorities are driven by bus from their underprivileged neighborhoods to previously predominantly white schools.
3. Ibid., 3.
4. Ibid., 2.
5. Ibidem.
6. Quote extracted from Richard LagraVaneSe’s 2007 movie Freedom Writers, United States of America.
decades on miscellaneous subjects share a fervent and earnest social project.
Their editors and authors consider writing as a genuine way to act within the ur- gency of a situation of social injustice. I define these texts as follows: collections of narratives in any written form (including transcriptions of oral testimonies) of painful episodes of life experience involving a perception of injustice by their narrator. The subjects through their narration are posited as witnesses portraying their experience as members of a collectivity undergoing a situation of social injustice. That collectivity is presented as a social minority, that is, a community in a situation of inferiority and most probably subordination. The witnesses are urged to narrate in the hope to denounce and exorcize that present oppressive condition, leading to their own both social and psychological empowerment and that of the collectivity as a whole. The witnesses’ narration, although telling first and foremost a personal story and serving personal goals through self-disclosure, is part of a project carried out in order to induce readers to engage in restoring social justice. In the case of the Freedom Writers, the format of the diary is then perceived as going against basic assumptions about the genre of the diary. The diary, a private, intimate, even sometimes secret activity, is adopted as a means to spread a social message and call for action.
As I will demonstrate in this paper, testimony, the protean text par excellence, comes to be part of the American cultural and literary scene by appropriating different literary genres to which it appends its specificity and struggle for social awareness. In the case of the Freedom Writers, it is the form of the diary which serves as a cultural springboard for racial minorities to express their distress. The text thus emphasizes its expressive or rather perlocutionary function as derived from and supported by its formal characteristics. I will begin by presenting the Freedom Writers’ text through the lens of Girard’s consideration of the external (formal) characteristics of the diary, calling for theoretical remarks from other scholars like Françoise Simonet-Tenant, Philippe Lejeune, Patricia Meyer Spacks or Sébastien Hubier to clarify the possible discrepancies between diaries and tes- timonies. I wish then to approach the functional aspects of the text, notably through the notion of journals as an educational practice, and explain what can be labeled a generic shift displayed through the different entries of the Freedom Writers Diary. Through a description of Kimberly Nance’s delineation of Latin- American Testimonio, I wish to argue that authenticity, which is developed through sincere and direct descriptions of the situation of social injustice,7 is at the core of the testimonials’ capacity for gaining their readers’ commitment through the impact of empathy. As authenticity is often considered an intrinsic characteristic of diary writing, the process of the generic shift works so as to put in the fore- ground the functional (perlocutionary) power of some of the formal characteris- tics testimonials are borrowing from the genre they are assimilating. I will finish with remarks on the editing and publishing processes which gave birth to the Freedom writers’ Diary, as they will allow me to expose the actual implementation of the generic shift within the text and its consequences for reception.
7. Nance’s own term is « situation of suffering ». Kimberly A. nance, Can Literature Promote Justice ? Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio, Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 2006, 72.
1. d
iaryIn the proceedings of the 1975 Conference on the Journal Intime in Grenoble, the interveners, who were engaged in a debate on the possible definition of this
‘new’ literary genre, insisted on the fact that it had to be defined according to its form rather than according to its content which, as it carries the private premises of the genre, is likely to be highly extensive. Form, then, that is – the dated format – and function – the recurrent daily process of recording – are the journal’s founding characteristics. Philippe Lejeune in his work ‘Cher Cahier…’ Témoignages sur le journal personnel contends that the habit of journal keeping, and more precisely when one considers its intimate variation, can be defined not by its content but by its function, whether considered as an objective (recording facts) or a subjective (commenting feelings) practice.8 The Freedom Writers’ Diary apart from its title displays several formal features of the genre. Though Alain Girard9 focuses on literary journals in his work Le Journal intime, he proposes a list of specific external defining characte- ristics which allows first a formal and second a functional approach to the Freedom Writers’ text.
1.2. Diaries are a day by day practice
Interestingly, Girard considers this characteristic as “the most obvious and the less contentious one”.10 As Françoise Simonet-Tenant remarked in her contri- bution to the Conference Le Journal d’écrivain,11 the diary’s correlation to time is expressed through its dated format; the entries follow a daily temporal logic. Yet, it might be objected that in the case of the Freedom Writers’ Diary the day by day for- mat is not totally and overtly respected. This is due both to its choral form and to its publication: the editing process implied selecting entries from the different diaries allowing all of the students’ voices to be heard. The entries, though chronologically organized, are not dated and consequently do not always seem to follow the day by day rationale. Nevertheless, when reading more thoroughly specific entries, it is possible to unfailingly recreate the necessary temporal logic, in spite of the fact that the reader hears different voices: “[Diary 114] I was very enthused and ready for the trip [to New York], so I decided to call my father and explain that I was leaving tomorrow”.12 “[Diary 116] The first night in New York was exciting. We arrived and all I could think about was bumping into somebody famous”.13 The diaries, here, present the logical course of events when describing a journey. Even though the figure of the author is multiplied in a choir of voices, the temporal day-to-day
8. This is the disctinction between what Lejeune calls “carnet de bord” and “journal intime”
in Cahier de Sémiotique Textuelle, 17, Philippe Lejeune (ed.), “La Pratique du Journal Personnel : Enquête”, 1990, 54. All quotes from Lejeune are my translation.
9. All the following quotes from Girard are my translation.
10. Alain girard, Le Journal intime, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1963, 2nd edition 1986, 3.
11. All the remarks are taken from Françoise Simonet-tenant’s presentation, « Lettres et journal personnel: rivalité ou complémentarité ? », during the conference Le Journal d’écrivain : Enjeux et mutations d’un genre hybride, Université Catholique de Louvain, 19-21 May 2011, my transposition in English (see, in this special issue, Simonet-Tenant’s article : pages 59-72).
12. Erin Erin gruweLL and The Freedom Writers, The Freedom Writer’s Diary, 223.
13. Ibid., 227.
form is carefully respected in order to re-create a necessary temporal atmosphere of “dailiness”.14
1.2. Narration is governed by the pronoun “I”
Girard considers the author figure as both “the center of observation and the center of convergence”15 within the text. Once again, in the case of the Free- dom Writers’ Diary, this ubiquitous characteristic seems to be stretched beyond its usual boundaries. Where Girard and all other theoreticians see the author figure, the actual persona, as the defining and converging center of the diary, here the pronoun
‘I’ comes to fulfill that same pervasive function. In literary journals in their usual form, the person writing appears as the actual unique center of the text speaking through the pronoun ‘I’. Here, the pronoun itself becomes the center allowing a plurality of voices to converge on one specific message to be conveyed. The voice in each entry is a very different one but all of them are leveled out by the use of one unique pronoun encompassing gender and racial differences, identical even though always projecting a defined specific identity. This use of one same pronoun aims at emphasizing the universality of the experience presented in each entry.
1.3. Observation has to be focused on the writer16
Since diaries are labeled ‘intimate’ in the French language, Girard contends that texts must concentrate on the author’s private life. Intimacy which apparently needs to be at the heart of the diary is notably expressed through ordinary “dai- liness” as contend Patricia Meyer Spacks and Jennifer Sinor.17 Jennifer Sinor, in her article, offers to read the “ordinary diary”, that is a diary “that seems boring, barren and plain”,18 a diary which foregrounds “dailiness [as] the act of writing in the days rather than of the days […]”and “forces the reader into the immediate present”.19 Such a remark echoes the idea that the diary is a writing of the here and now. By the same token, Spacks distinguishes three possible forms of the diary based on their content and the delight they might offer to the reader. The first two seem obviously delightful either because they tell a compelling story (she mentions Boswell as an example) or because they offer spicy revelations (Pepy’s diary). Yet, the third cate- gory, which she names “commonplace diaries”, “contain[s] no obvious revelations and tell[s] no clear story […] [but] can also offer delight to an imaginative reader”.20 For Spacks, the commonplace diary epitomizes the “most obvious appeal of diaries,
14. Patricia meyer-SpackS, “How to Read a Diary?”-Joint Meeting of the Academy and the
Boston Athenaeum, in; Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston, American Acad- emy of Art and Sciences, 2003, 56, 4, 58.
15. Alain Alain girard, Le Journal intime, 3.
16. Though Girard considers this characteristic as being part of the diary format, the limit Though Girard considers this characteristic as being part of the diary format, the limit between form, content and function will appear here as being blurred as some other scholars con- sider intimacy to be part of the content of the diary entries and their possible function as delightful readings.
17. Girard also mentions the necessity of dailiness when considering the familiarity of the Girard also mentions the necessity of dailiness when considering the familiarity of the relationship into which the author and the reader enter.
18. Jennifer Jennifer Sinor, “Reading the Ordinary Diary”, in: Rhetoric Review, 2002, 21, 2, 123.
19. Ibidem, Emphasis in the original.
20. Patricia Patricia meyer-SpackS, “How to Read a Diary?”, 47.
[…] that of metaphorically looking over someone’s shoulder”.21 She likens the pro- cess to the tendency people may have of “listen[ing] to fragments of other people’s conversations in restaurants”.22 In these cases, “the story depends more on the reader than on the writer, though the reader would not be in a position to construct it without the writer’s clues”.23 According to Spacks, this is the real and peculiar sense of intimacy that a diary may offer to its reader, “sharing the trivia of the everyday”24 allows the reader to feel in touch with the writer and to share his or her experience. She insists that this might be the real reason which drives the audience to read diaries, more or less “imaginatively sharing experiences”,25 feeling “reassur[ed] about the contours of that humanity we share with people from other times and spaces”.26
In the case of the Freedom Writers Diary, this notion of the ordinary or the commonplace defining intimacy is overwhelmingly present. Yet, the ordinary seems to always be on the verge of what might be called the extra-ordinary at least in the etymological sense of the term describing situations out of the ordinary, “outside the normal course of events”.27 Though the readers may have the expectation of sharing the experience of seemingly ordinary kids from a college in Long Beach, California through “their story [and] their words”,28 they rapidly realize that these kids live extra-ordinary lives:
Dear Diary, For many it’s the start of a new day, but for me, it’s the continua- tion of a nightmare. Every day before I leave my mom me percina with the sign of the cross, praying that I come home safely. […] I’m fourteen and people think I should be scared because I’m surrounded by violence, but around here it’s an everyday thing. The first thing I see when I get off the bus is graffiti on walls, beer bottles filling trashcans, empty cigarette packs, and syringes. On the way home, I get chased mostly by older fools with bats and knives. I try going different ways but they always notice me and chase me away.29
Nevertheless, the Freedom Writers’ project is unmistakably to insist on the ordinary or commonplace status – the dailiness – the extra-ordinary has come to acquire.
Although this design is directly linked to the testimonial status of their text and its belonging to the genre of testimonial texts of social empowerment, the form of the diary seems most appropriate, since, as Sinor mentions, “dailiness […] is the single quality that marks the diary as a distinct form of writing”.30 Exposing their daily involvement with extra-ordinary events is essential for the Freedom Writers since their purpose is to insist on the necessity for this situation to change. Such a project is achieved through the diary’s repetitive format which efficiently emphasizes the need for change. Moreover, Spacks’
assumption that dailiness allows for a reassurance about the contours of our
21. Ibid.,48.
22. Ibid., 55.
23. Ibidem, my emphasis.
24. Ibid., 59.
25. Ibid., 48.
26. Ibid., 55.
27. Oxford Dictionary of English, London, Oxford University Press, Second Edition Revised 2006, 614.
28. Freedom Writers’ Motto. Freedom Writers’ Motto.
29. Erin Erin gruweLL and the Freedom Writers, The Freedom Writers Diary, 12.
30. Jennifer Jennifer Sinor, art.cit. ,123.
shared humanity is of undeniable significance both to the students themselves – though experiencing extra-ordinary events they realize that they are human beings as anybody else, hence susceptible to hope and act for change – and to the readers – inducing a necessary empathy for the authors and responsibility in the process of change.
However, this dailiness is sometimes closely intertwined with larger events, events which have come to be part of the whole nation’s and possibly the world’s daily life. Girard contends that journals concentrate on the author’s private life, but he adds that if larger events are to be mentioned, it would be done through the specific prism of the author’s place or role in these events.
Yet, Girard remarks that “trying to escape time” is also a characteristic of diary writing and “an enduring need of human beings”; “it is a function of writing to help men record what seems to deserve remembrance. Stricken by a fact, they write it down, so that memory won’t lose its trail”.31 And Françoise Simo- net-Tenant agrees, insisting that copying letters in a diary is symptomatic of “a distinction of what is going to become the momentous”.32 By the same token, Sébastien Hubier, in his work Littératures Intimes: les expressions du moi, de l’auto- biographie à l’autofiction, observes that personal changes, wich he considers to be at the heart of the diary practice, are part of contemporary historical changes.
Larger events are consistently mentioned in the different entries of the Freedom Writers’ Diary, yet, as Girard advocates, these are always presented through the very specific point of view of the authors and the possible repercussions the event may have on their life.
Dear Diary, Everybody was talking about Proposition 187 and the planned walkout in school today.[…] If it passes, the government can take away health care benefits and any other public program, like school, to all illegal immi- grants. I’m scared because it will personally affect my family, since my mom came here illegally.33
The presence of contemporary historical, larger events within the text fulfills two specific purposes in the case of the Freedom Writers’ Diary. These larger events first serve as direct links to the actual spatiotemporal context in which the journal has been written. The delineation of historical events is part of the characterization of the diary as it allows both to place the text within history and to distinguish what the author wishes to remember. Secondly, the presence of these events reinforces the contextualization of the situation of social injustice the Freedom Writers seek to denounce. Each of these events is directly linked to their contemporary social controversies (all of them questioning the very notion of justice itself) – O.J. Simpson’s trial, Proposition 187, the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, the L.A. riots. By exposing their considerations on such issues, the students’ aim is not solely to show that these events are part of the memorable but also that their daily grievances over social injustice and racial violence need, for everybody’s sake, to be directly addressed.
31. Ibid., 7.
32. Op. cit.
33. Erin Erin gruweLL and the Freedom Writers, The Freedom Writers Diary, 22.
1.4. Diaries are a private activity
“[I]n the narrowest sense of the term”,34 Girard adds. Diaries are, at least in their primary form, not meant for an audience. They are to be considered as a dialogue with the self, as what Françoise Simonet-Tenant calls “a sound box for the soul”;35 the author doesn’t acknowledge the presence of the other. Many theoreticians seem to disagree with Girard’s rather controversial point of view.
Philippe Lejeune proposes communication as one of the major functions of the diary in La Pratique du journal personnel. Hubier acknowledges this commu- nicational practice insisting that sometimes the diary itself becomes the author’s addressee, because “through the diary, the writer seeks to overcome a loneliness which is both a source of suffering and a source of knowledge”.36 Françoise Simonet-Tenant adds that talking to one’s journal is akin to talking to oneself.
This intrinsic and seemingly necessary communicational function of the diary is developed by Pierre Hébert in his study about the different ‘narratees’ of the journal. These narratees “design[ing] the addressees lying in the text,[…] which are radically different from the physical addressee [that is] the receiver”37 might be of two kinds, namely internal – the narrator him or herself – or external – an addressee who is “obviously ‘condemned to virtuality’”.38 The internal narratee, according to Hébert, might sometimes be the diary itself. And this practice seems to be quite extensive: Anne Frank and Zlata Filipovic epitomize both the neces- sary presence of the narratee and the communicational function of the journal by naming their diaries. In the case of The Freedom Writers, for whom Zlata and Anne are avowed leading examples, each entry begins by the same formula, as if the metaphor of the ‘magical ritual’ mentioned by one of Lejeune’s interviewees in Cher Cahier was here instantly making sense. Each voice is introduced by the same unchanging address – “Dear Diary” – as if, flouting gender, racial, social and age differences, the diary was the only place where “people [could] hear […]
[the writers’] voice[s] and [where] [their] opinions were never judged”.39 Likewise, Del Litto contends that the diary is “not a dialogue between self and self, but between self and the other; there is an imaginary presence of the other within the diary”.40 Drawing on this observation, he adds that the expected step to follow would be publication in which the presence of the other is actually accepted.
The figure of the other in the Freedom Writers’ Diary is central in a most unexpected way. Interestingly enough, the presence of the other – that is to say the external narratee – seems to become more and more vivid as the text and its nature evolve. Once again, the choral form of the work underlines the notion of otherness. The audience hears the voice of each author individually. ‘I’ is the only pronoun through which narrators can talk. Yet, this ‘I’ is in constant com-
34. Alain Alain girard, Le Journal intime, 4.
35. Art. cit.
36. Sébastien Sébastien Hubier, Littératures intimes : Les expressions du moi, de l’autobiographie à l’autofiction, Paris, Armand Colin, 2003, p.60.
37. Pierre Pierre Hebert, « Les Narrataires du Journal Intime : L’exemple de Lionel Groulx », in: The French Review, 2001, 59, 6, 850.
38. Ibid., quoting Rousset, 851.
39. Erin Erin gruweLL and the Freedom Writers, The Freedom Writers Diary, 22.
40. Victor deL Litto, in: Le Journal intime et ses formes littéraires : Actes du colloque de septembre 1975, Paris, Centre d’études Stendhaliennes, 1978, 21.
munication, in a continuing dialogue with the ‘I’ of the other writers. Several
‘I’s’ seem to converse within the whole text; some diaries actually answer to one another, offering several perspectives on one same event. Yet if ‘I’ is to repre- sent the self, the pronoun ‘you’ is of course symptomatic of otherness. And it is through the evolving referents of the ‘you’ pronoun that the actual generic and functional nature of the Freedom Writers’ text will progressively unravel. Where the ‘you’ is first understood to represent the diary as an extension of the opening formula – “Dear Diary, […] I have about four hours before we land in LAX, so I’m going to sit here and tell you a story”41 – it rapidly comes to represent the reader himself:
To illustrate this point, picture living in a small town filled with normal people, just like you. Every day, loaded trains come in, make their deliveries, and leave.
Factories constantly bellow smoke. Then one day, you notice the trains aren’t making simple deliveries anymore. And the factories aren’t bellowing mere smoke. Would you rock the boat and speak out, or would you remain silent, as the people of Auschwitz did?42
This quote might be considered as one of the breaking points in the diaristic nature of the text. Though the diary keeps the external form of a journal, it comes closer to the genre of the testimony not only acknowledging the presence of the other but also insistently calling for his or her collaboration.
1.5. “The author does not deliver his book to the printer”43
Girard, though working exclusively on literary journals, observes none- theless an evolution in publishing practices. Literary journals were first posthu- mously published, yet the tendecy evolved in the course of time which indicated a ‘‘radical change in (the writers’ and editors’) point of view’’.44 He insists that journals are published “when minds are ripe to grasp the significance of the testimonies they display. They induce, then, a psychological transformation and the promotion of a collective realization of the individual’s status in contemporary society”.45 Though Girard is here describing the crisis of the individual of the XIXth century, his remarks can easily be enlarged to broader considerations. The Freedom Writers’ Diary’s purpose is to denounce situations of injustice which seem to be recurring in contemporary society. This exposure is only possible through circulation which obviously requires publishing. And it is through the testimo- nial capacity of the genre of the diary that the Freedom Writers’ denunciation is possible. By publishing their diary, the Freedom Writers not only engage in actual social struggle but also display a real confidence in their audience’s capa- city to realize the necessity and urgency of such a struggle. Such purposes carry out Girard’s engagement regarding the capacity of diaries to promote collective realization.
41. Erin Erin gruweLL and the Freedom Writers, The Freedom Writers Diary, 179.
42. Ibid., 185, my emphasis.
43. Alain Alain girard, op.cit., 4.
44. Ibidem.
45. Ibid., XVII, my emphasis.
1.6. Interiority is the dominant characteristic of the content of the diary Girard argues that in the case of intimate diaries, “introversion takes over extra- version in the nature or the mind of the writer”.46 Further on in his description of the genre, he adds that diaries tend to “intermingle universal tendencies [like] looking for one’s identity in the twists and turns of a still cherished past, looking for one’s identity in the complexities of life, [or] constructing one’s personality in accordance with one’s self representation”.47 And as Steve Rendall contends: “the goal and at the same time the raison d’être of the journal, its end-point and its beginning hypothesis is the creation and deployment of that entity writers call, depending on their philosophical convictions
‘self’ or ‘soul’”.48 This quest for the self is even more fervent in the case of the Freedom Writers’ Diary. As adolescents, the authors are experiencing a crisis of the self which often sparks off the practice of journal keeping. Though theoreticians agree that jour- nals might come into existence at any moment in life, both Lejeune and Girard seem to agree on the importance of Maurice Debesse’s survey of carried out on the practice of journal writing among adolescents. Debesse declares that what seems to drive young individuals to the diary is its ease of use to express the inconvenience of adolescence. As Lejeune remarks “[f]or me, as for most 20th century adolescents, the diary is by defini- tion anti-institutional, it is the place where one recovers and constructs one’s identity against parents, against school, etc.”.49 This quest for a renewed, more assertive self is ever pre- sent through the entries of the Freedom Writers’ Diary. Though the first entries might give a rather gloomy impression of the students’ self-considerations, the teens rapidly seem to realize what the “power of the written word”50 might offer them:
Growing up, I always assumed I would either drop out of school or get pre- gnant. […] Like they say if you’re born in the ‘hood, you’re bound to die in it. So when Ms G. kept saying that ‘I could do anything’, ‘go anywhere’, ‘be anyone’, […] I thought she was crazy. […] How did she expect me to go to college? After all, I live in the ghetto and my skin is brown. […] In class today, she made us do a speech about our future goals. […] I began to think that I could teach young girls like me that they too could ‘be somebody’. […] For the first time I realized that what people say about living in the ghetto and having brown skin doesn’t have to apply to me. So when I got home I wrote this poem: They Say, I Say.51
46. Ibid., 4.
47. Ibid., 36.
48. Steve Steve rendaLL, “On Diaries”, in: Rhetoric Review, 2002, 21, 2, 60.
49. Philippe Lejeune, Le Moi des demoiselles : enquête sur le journal de jeune fille, Paris, Seuil, 1993, 19, my emphasis.
50. Erin Erin gruweLL and the Freedom Writers, The Freedom Writers Diary, 141.
51. Ibid., 203-204. 203-204.
They say I’m brown I say
I’m proud.
They say I only know how to cook I say
I know how to write a book So
Don’t judge me by the way I look.
They say I’m brown I say
I’m proud.
They say I’m not the future of this nation I say
Stop giving me discrimination Instead
I’m gonna use my education To help build the human nation.
Through their writing, the students manage to grasp the evolution of their self- esteem and realize that self-respect goes hand in hand with empowerment and the possibility to go against society’s prejudices and administrative authoritarian dead ends.
1.7. Diaries stretch over a significant time span
Girard considers that a “usually extroverted”52 man might come to keep a diary because of a specific emotional shock or crisis; the diary will then develop over a rather short period (whether for a few days or a few months). According to Girard the diary “even if it doesn’t cover life as a whole, endures and lingers with a rather great regularity”.53 Similarly, Steve Rendall, trying to answer the question of the continuity of the diaristic activity, insists on the fact that the “only ‘natural’
terminus”54 should be the death of the diarist. The diary “cannot therefore, include its own end; it cannot conclude”.55 And quoting the last words of André Gide’s journal, Rendall adds: “there is no closing gesture, no attempt at summary or final judgment”56. Yet, interestingly enough, Lejeune in both his surveys on the practice of journal keeping asks the question of a possible conclusion or end of the journal, as he seems to assume a somehow necessary closing process. In the case of the Freedom Writers’ Diary, the diary comes to an end on a very specific closing event, i.e.
graduation. The diary in this case is the diary of a specific endeavor which implies the quest for a renewed empowered self. The time span is therefore limited and socially constructed, as it represents the four years of High School education. And contrary to Gide’s, the last entry is definitely an attempt to both summarize and bring a conclusion to the project:
I’m going to miss all of those things, but what I’m definitely going to miss the most is our classroom, Room 203. That room was not only a room, though, it was our attic, our basement, and our ‘kick it spot’, like Miss G. used to call it.
[…] The room is definitely never going to be the same. […] It will probably never see a group of kids who went from little bad-asses to role models, pro- ving everyone, even themselves, wrong. Our lives were shaped in this room and now it will never again be the place of people crying, hugging, hating, commiserating, or tolerating, but who knows? It’s always been said that ‘All good things come to an end’, but I’m learning that they don’t have to.57
2. Testimonial Text of Social Empowerment
The Freedom Writer’s Diary might then be defined as the story of an educational venture. Several theoreticians and educationalists seem to favor the use of the diary as a means for education. Philippe Lejeune in Le Moi des demoiselles insists on the fact that “the journal is an educational practice among others. It has to contribute to moral education (as a daily self-examination) and it has to teach writing (as a com-
52. Alain Alain girard, Le journal intime, 4.
53. Ibid., 5.
54. Steve Steve rendaLL, “On Diaries”, 61.
55. Ibidem.
56. Ibidem.
57. Erin Erin gruweLL and the Freedom Writers, The Freedom Writers Diary, 271.
position exercise)”.58 Lejeune is of course depicting a century-old practice, yet the diary as a writing exercise is still part of several contemporary education programs, though probably in different forms. Sandra Kerka in her article about journal wri- ting and adult learning insists that journal writing is “[a] useful learning tool[…]”
which allows for specific educational goals such as “coming to voice, the capacity for critical reflection, and making meaning”.59 By the same token, Roger Hiemstra lists numerous benefits of journal writing for educational purposes. These bene- fits include both personal – self-development, intuition and self-expression, stress reduction and health benefits60 – and social skills – problem solving, reflection and critical thinking.61 In the case of the Freedom Writers, the educational purpose seems obvious. These students have first been assigned the task of keeping a diary in the classroom environment putting emphasis on the writing exercise, but the other benefits rapidly surface. Examples of coming to voice abound and self-deve- lopment as well as moral self-examination are at the heart of their texts as demons- trated in some of the examples above.
Yet, the most interesting angle of their approach to diary writing might ap- pear as unexpected: “I would like the opportunity now to educate people on what is happening in my ‘America’ because until this ‘undeclared war’ has ended, I am not free!”62 The diary as a means for its author’s education is now turned inside out. The reader, here, is the one who needs to be educated. The text, as it puts forward the perlocutionary aspect of the speech act it carries out, becomes an indirect directive, encouraging the reader to react to the content of the testimonies and to act in the real world. The Freedom Writers’ diary literally enacts Spack’s assumptions that com- monplace diaries emphasize the reader’s rather than the author’s role. Interestingly enough, this perlocutionary approach – that is the actual effect upon the actions, thoughts and feelings of the addressee – can be likened to Sébasien Hubier’s first project of a generic typology of the Littératures Intimes. Hubier distinguishes first- person pieces of writing which “do” – which try to perform something by trans- mitting values to the readers – from first person pieces of writing which “are” – of- fering a descriptive narration.63 Hubier thus questions the term ‘intime’ and reopens the long-lasting debate of publication.
In the Freedom Writers’ case, questions about publishing and having the diary shared with the other which seemed so problematic for usual journaux intimes are nullified. Publishing is unavoidable and fundamental. The necessity for publi- cation is overtly mentioned in different entries of the diary as first shown in Erin Gruwell’s entry n° 6.64 Such written speech acts acknowledge a generic shift in the text. I already mentioned this generic shift through my approach of the evolution
58. Philippe Lejeune, Le Moi des demoiselles, 20.
59. Sandra Sandra kerka, “Journal Writing and Adult Learning”, in Eric Digest, Columbus, ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult Career and Vocational Education, 1996b, (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 399 413), [online], <http://www.ericdigest.org/1997-2/journal.htm>
60. Interestingly, Hiemstra is here reaching conclusions akin to the ones mentioned by James
W. Pennebaker, regarding writing as a means for emotional disclosure. See Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, New York, The Guilford Press, 1997.
61. Roger Roger HiermStra, “Uses and Benefits of Journal Writing”, in: New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 2001, 90, 24.
62. Erin Erin gruweLL and the Freedom Writers, The Freedom Writers Diary, 79.
63. Sébastien Hubier, Littératures intimes, 30.
64. Erin Erin gruweLL and the Freedom Writers, The Freedom Writer’s Diary, 139.
of the use of the ‘you’ pronoun, which proves that the reader is then conside- red as an intrinsic part of the writing process. The need for this generic shift is enunciated by the very educational purpose of the text. The actual implementation of this didactic purpose is twofold. First, the Freedom Writers’ text can easily be associated with the genre of the diary though it displays several discrepancies with some of the previously listed characteristics. Yet, its most notable similarity to the genre is the fact that the Freedom Writers’ writing serves as a didactic means for empowerment and self-development through self-disclosure and self-examination.
When composing their diary, the students realize its didactical potential. As they managed to apply its educational process to themselves, they wish to bring their work a step further. By editing their texts and publishing their diaries, they hope to apply their didactic capacity to their audience. Their purpose is to inform about their current situation and the urgent need for change. The educational purpose of the text is now to induce on the part of the audience commitment to a cause and actual action.
As I have now delineated the perlocutionary capacity, i.e. educational purpose, of the Freedom Writers’ and other testimonial texts of social empowerment; the question of its possible efficiency is still to be addressed. It is when coming to terms with the texts’ reception that their need for the strong basis of renown efficient literary genres overtly develops. Though testimonial texts of social empowerment have not yet come under the scrutiny of literary criticism, their post-colonial match, the Latin-American genre of Testimonio enjoyed a wide coverage among scholars.
Most of them, unfortunately, appear quite pessimistic regarding their actual effi- ciency and impact on the readers. Yet, Kimberly Nance, in her book Can Literature Promote Justice?, seems to suspect otherwise. Basing her assumptions on psychologist Melvin Lerner’s findings in The Belief in a Just World in which he contends that some texts can promote social change, Nance insists that since “[b]elief in justice is widespread and powerfully motivating, readers are willing to act upon it, and […]
can be motivated by textual depictions of injustice”.65 She offers then a textual and rhetorical approach of different kinds of testimonies which will allow a lesser or greater influence on their reader’s actions. She distinguishes between “forensic, epideictic and deliberative testimonies”66: each of these displays a specific way of presenting the situation of injustice, the figure of the sufferer and the addressee.
In the case of the Freedom Writers, the diaristic format appears as a very efficient option for representing the different features which are mentioned by Nance. She considers that Testimonios and other texts seeking the greatest collaboration from their readers have to “work[…] through persuasion rather than through force”,67 thus placing empathy in the foreground. In this sense, the diary format appears to be of some help, since, as Kerka mentions, journals and diaries are “text[s]
written in the [author’s] authentic voice, […] [and such a] personal engagement adds a necessary affective element to the […] process”.68 Nance states that tes- timonials seeking actual action on the part of their readers tend to take a mixed rhetorical format. According to Nance, readers are not as willing to act as might
65. Kimberly A. Kimberly A. nance, Can Literature Promote Justice?, 67.
66. Ibid., 23.
67. Ibid., 75.
68. Sandra Sandra kerka, “Journal Writing and Adult Learning”.
be expected and she adds that “readers tend to be suspicious of victims who appear ‘too good’69 as might be expected from each of the three other models, consequently in testimonials seeking persuasion through empathy “suffering [is]
borne and revolutions made by insistently ordinary and fallible people”.70 The authors sincerely display their own ordinariness, as they confess their weaknesses as ordinary human beings. Such sincerity in self-descriptions appears as the best way to trigger empathy and consequently to gain commitment.
In the case of the Freedom Writers’ Diary, the ordinary dailiness of the diaristic form appears to be the best ally of the authors. When describing commonplace diaries, Patricia Meyer Spacks asserts that they grant readers a renewed assurance about the contours of the humanity they share with the author, thus sparking off empathy. She considers this sharing as a way through which one “can redefine authenticity”.71 Spacks’ approach of authen- ticity with regard to diaries is of tremendous importance in the case of the Freedom Writers’ Diary. As an instance of testimonial texts of social empower- ment seeking empathy and commitment on the part of their readers, the text’s use of authentic descriptions needs to be as persuasive as possible. Sébastien Hubier states that one of the actual projects of the Littératures Intimes is to recount one’s intimacy with sincerity. Yet, as he just introduced the notion of sincerity, he rapidly comes to nuance it with a need for authenticity. According to Hubier, authenticity does not necessarily imply sincerity: “authenticity is a specific form of [sincerity] through which one can give a genuine self-image by mistake or by mystification”.72 This genuine self-image is of course what Nance describes through her mixed rhetorical approach and the description of the way in which the witness is presented. As mentioned before, witnesses have to be presented as authentic human beings:
those who act [in this case, who write] are not sure, superhuman, and saintly, but fallible, sometimes depressed and often confused. They recount moments of discouragement and indecision as well as their convictions and hopes, and display their own ordinary desires and prosaic displeasure. The self-presenta- tion of these speakers is often marked by a thoroughgoing sense of tension – a conflict that is as much personal as it is social.73
This inner conflict is considered an intrinsic feature of diary writing. Diaries being a “sound box for the soul”, interiority is the most important aspect of their content and consequently permits the representation of confusion, fallibility, and plain hu- manity. Examples of these personal and social conflicts abound in the Freedom Writers’ text, as the authors insist that their first encounter with social injustice and their hostile environment is often dispirited and gloomy:
Dear Diary, You’re going to be disappointed in me. Actually I’m more disap- pointed in myself for the way I’m tricking people into believing that I’m so-
69. Kimberly A. Kimberly A. nance, Can Literature Promote Justice?, 75.
70. Ibid., 6.
71. Patricia Patricia meyer-SpackS, “How to Read a Diary?”, 55.
72. Sébastien Sébastien Hubier, Littératures intimes, 35.
73. Kimberly A. Kimberly A. nance, Can Literature Promote Justice ?, 94.
mething I’m not. […] I am a living lie. […] I can’t keep on hiding the fact that I’m an alcoholic. […] I know I need help, but how do I go about getting it?74 Dear Diary, Sorry, diary, I was going to try not to do it tonight, but the little bag of white powder is calling my name. […] [Miss G.] shouldn’t trust anyone who steals money from their family, begs friends for change, and digs through her couch just to support her drug habit. […] When I hear cheesy clichés like ‘Hugs not drugs’ or ‘Be smart, don’t start’, it makes me want to do it more. […] Come on, get real, how boring! Quite honestly, I’m just not ready to quit yet.75
There were twenty angry boys against one. […] they started kicking, and punching him in the ribs, face, and anywhere else they could reach. […] The boy lay unconscious, his arms, legs, and back were all broken. I watched as he was taken to the hospital and watched as the culprits were arrested. ‘Why didn’t I do anything to help him?’ I asked myself. Maybe it was because I was scared of the consequences. Most likely, I would have been mauled by the crowd. Even though I could have been hurt, I wish I had done something.76
Nance’s mixed rhetorical model of testimonials present the ordinary, commonplace authenticity Spacks mentions with Hubier’s sincerity. Its strength holds in the sin- cerity through which the witnesses tell each episode in which they are confronted with injustice. Drawing on the genre of diary writing, testimonial texts of social empowerment derive their efficiency from the characteristics of authenticity and sincerity intrinsic to the fundamental interiority symptomatic of a genre which has already been time tested.
Before concluding, it seems necessary to dwell a little more upon the no- tions of publishing and editing themselves. In this case, the intimate diary becomes the diary of an editing, publishing and social project. Students edited the entries themselves, and this process presents the genesis of an anticipated impact on the readers:
Dear Diary, ‘As his penis twirled in my mouth, thought of the popcorn he pro- mised me ran through my mind…’ As I read these words, I began to wonder who the author of this story was. My mind began to think, ‘Damn I’ve been through the same thing’. […] Maybe someone will feel the same way after learning about my experience. I wanted to reach out to her to let her know she wasn’t alone. I wanted to tell her I know how she feels, to show sympathy, to be a true friend to her. I never found her. But now, I know that I’m not alone – and that has made a difference.77
This excerpt epitomizes the Freedom Writers’ hope to make a difference thanks to the sharing of their extra-ordinary experiences. The excerpt also raises the question of anonymity, since the students when editing do not know the author of the entry.
The only name appearing at the beginning of the entries is Erin Gruwell’s. She explains her decision of keeping the students’ anonymity as follows:
Since their fears are legitimate, I need to let them keep their anonymity. Some of their diary entries deal with subjects like murder and molestation. By using numbers rather than names when we compile our diary, I think they’ll feel 74. Erin Erin gruweLL and the Freedom Writers, The Freedom Writer’s Diary, 67.
75. Ibid., 99.
76. Ibid., 118.
77. Erin Erin gruweLL and the Freedom Writers, The Freedom Writer’s Diary, 151.
more comfortable and it will probably be safer for all of us. To ensure that no one embellishes or sensationalizes their stories, I’m going to ask them to sign a code of honor.78
The entries have then all been numbered, no name appears. For most of them, it is possible thanks to the content to decide the gender and the race of the writer. Nevertheless, and though the excerpts are dealing with very personal matters, emotions and questioning, the possible apprehension of the author is rather limited. Apart from Gruwell’s and her students’ concern for their own security, anonymity serves also another purpose namely that of “illustrat[ing]
the universality of the […] [students’] experiences” 79. The decision to number each diary entry rather than attach a name to them allowed the students to share their life experiences freely without inhibition. This concern for uni- versality and freedom of expression is linked to the social impact the authors hope to achieve. Again, the pronoun ‘I’ appears as the catalyst of the shared humanity of anonymity the aim of which is to inspire empathy and eventually action.
The concept of anonymity has been redefined by Fredric Jameson in his approach to the testimonial text. He considers this instance of the anonymous author as a “good anonymity”80 suggesting not “namelessness, facelessness [or the] indinstinction of the mass” but “what political people celebrate as genuine democracy or plebeianization”.81 In the case of testimonial texts, anonymity does not mean “the loss of a name, but – quite paradoxically – the multiplication of proper names”82 epitomizing the association and collaboration of individuals, a new “social concept […], a new conception of collectivity, of collective life”83. And interestingly enough, Girard seems to share a similar point of view in his conception of the persona within diaries, showing the possible social impact of diaries as documents of a time or civilization:
To put it differently, each of them represents an individuality, a precisely defined person, irreducible to any other, and all the more distinct since their physical and mental organization was more complex. But it is only through varied personas that it is possible to grasp an image of the person, as seen or felt by the people of a specific time or civilization.84
This ‘image of the person’ encompassing individuals expands the humanistic view of the witnesses of testimonial texts of social empowerment. Seeking empower- ment for their community, their conception of collective life and collaboration is such that their venture for empowerment comes to be broadened to society as a whole.
78. Ibid., 140.
79. Ibid., 6.
80. Fredric Fredric jameSon, “On Literary and Cultural Import-Substitution in the Third World: The Case of the Testimonio”, in: Georg M. gugeLberger (ed.), The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, Durham, Duke University Press, 1996, 185.
81. Ibidem.
82. Ibidem.
83. Ibid., 186.
84. Alain Alain girard, Le journal intime, 487, my emphasis.
*
* *
In contemporary American culture, testimonial texts of social empowerment have been flourishing for the last two decades. Borrowing their miscellaneous for- mats to previously existing literary genres, they nonetheless impart to the texts a generic shift which unmistakably puts forward the actual social purpose their authors wish to enact. In the case of the Freedom Writers, the social minority, these students suffering from daily discrimination and violence opted for the diary as a means of cultural expression. The diary, through its intimate yet also didactic characteristics allowed them to meet their hopes for self-development and psycho- logical empowerment. Not content with their own empowerment, they decided to extend their struggle for education and emancipation to society as a whole by indu- cing readers to take actual social action. Drawing on notions of authenticity and dailiness displayed by diary writing, they managed to create persuasive testimonials which put forward the necessity for all of us to carry on believing in a just world.
Through their “tropes of persuasion”85, testimonial texts of social empowerment seek to show how literature has the power to change and promote social justice:
I have learned that it doesn’t matter if your inspiration comes from negative or positive events. The most important thing is to learn and go on. Twenty or thirty years from now, when we have accomplished world peace, when we have succeeded in ending racism and intolerance, the world will remember that the Freedom Writers have kept their promise.86
Audrey Louckx Université Libre de Bruxelles audrey.louckx@ulb.ac.be
85. Kimberly nance, Can Literature Promote Justice ?, 22.
86. Erin Erin gruweLL and the Freedom Writers, The Freedom Write’s Diary, 264.
