So, now that I've decided to go whole hog on this Story Time ESL Listening Project, I've decided I wanted to integrate my love of ancient history into the mix by creating some Story Time's about ancient Roman history.
(I'm going to alternate these in with Aesop's Fables and Brothers Grimm. Obviously the more series I start, the more thin I'll be spreading myself. But I'll just chip away at these projects when I have time. It might take me years to build up an archive of decent materials, but that's okay.)
Eventually what I want to do is slowly work through the history of Rome in chronological order--starting with Aeneas and then going forward from there. (Ancient Romans traced their ancestry all the way back to Aeneas from the Trojan War. I was initially thinking that in order to be really thorough, I'd have to go through the whole history of the Trojan War. But I think I might just briefly skim over it instead. Nevertheless, all the thinking I've been doing the past few weeks on the Trojan War and its connection to Greek and Roman history was the inspiration for my vlog series on the Trojan War a couple weeks ago.)
Whilst I was thinking about this project, I also remembered I had two speeches on Roman history already written from my high school forensics days: The Etruscan War and The Mutiny in Pannonia. So I decided to just film these to get the ball rolling.
These are decidedly NOT graded for ESL learners. But since I already had these pre-written and laying around, I figured I would just throw them up.
This is similar to how I started my Story Time ESL Project--the first thing I did was just go through my archives of all my previously pre-existing material before I started trying to write new and more appropriate graded material.
...although actually, the fact that I was such a bad writer in high school, and over-relied on so many cliches, might actually have value in an ESL context. In ESL, "cliches" are "useful collocations", "formulaic language", "lexical items", etc, and as such are useful for learners.
Both of these speeches were written before I became political. In Mutiny in Pannonia, I followed the lead of my source material, Tacitus, and portrayed the working class soldiers as common rabble, and the upper-class officers as the heroes. I find this somewhat embarrassing now, but I didn't bother to re-write the speech and just filmed it as 16 year-old me had originally written it.
The Etruscan War is a bit over the top in its nationalism, but it's also arguably progressive. These stories of heroism in early Republican Rome became popular again during the French Revolution. The Republican French Revolutionaries saw parallels between the Etruscan attempt to reinstate the monarchy in ancient Rome, and the European Coalition's attempt to reinstate the monarchy in France.
Or in other words, for anyone keeping track: one reactionary story, and one progressive story. Hopefully they cancel each other out.
(TESOL Worksheets--Present Passive)
Google: docs, pub
(In my class, I start with an example: "The best songs are sung in English". Get my students to agree and disagree. Then hand out the top part of the sheet. They discuss in groups, and class feedback. Then the second half of the sheet they make their own sentences, which they later present to the class. Class votes agree or disagree.)
Why I Read This Book
We read this book as part of our professional development bookclub at work.
Usual, we try to stick to the books on the DELTA Reading list (official Cambridge list HERE).
But one of the members asked if we could go off the book list temporarily and read Teaching Unplugged. And we all said: "sure".
To be honest, I'm not sure if Teaching Unplugged is recommended reading for the DELTA or not. I can't find it on any official DELTA reading lists. And yet, the Dogme approach is well-known enough that it's often referenced in DELTA related materials. (When I did the Module 1 distance DELTA, this book was referenced in their reading on "Methods and Trends in ELT"). And I understand that in Delta Module 2, you can do a dogme lesson for your experimental practice. So I think I'm going to go ahead and count this as a part of the DELTA reading list anyway.
A Bit of Background: What is Dogme?
Dogme is a teaching style in English language classrooms. It gets its name from the Dogme 95 movement in filmmaking (W).
I don't know a lot about filmmaking history, so bear with me, but my understanding is that Dogme 95 was a reaction against the over-dependence of special effects in films. Dogme 95 wanted to return focus to the characters and the story in filmmaking. And so they produced a list of rules for Dogme films, such as...
1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot.)
3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted.
The Dogme 95 movement was started by the Danish film directors the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, and "dogme" is Danish for "dogma". I guess because the rules of the movement are quite dogmatic? I don't really know. Like I said, i don't know much about the history of filmmaking. (I'm cribbing a lot from Wikipedia right now).
But I did once work with a cinephile--someone who was obsessed with films and filmmaking--and he once met Scott Thornbury in person at an ELT conference. And when he came back and told me about it, the thing he was most excited about was that he had met someone tangentially connected with the Dogme 95 movement. (He was telling me excitedly about how Scott Thornbury had imported the principles of a revolutionary filmmaking technique into English language teaching). So I guess it is a big deal to cinephiles, and especially cinephiles who end up teaching ELT.
...anyway, Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings and their friends imported the name dogme directly from the Danish filmmakers, and used it to describe their new style of language teaching. Wikipedia says...
Although Dogme language teaching gained its name from an analogy with the Dogme 95 film movement (initiated by Lars von Trier), the connection is not considered close.
...and yet, the connection is there. Like the filmmaking movement, no outside props are used. Teachers do not go into the classroom with textbooks, or worksheets, or target grammar points. Instead, they simply listen to what the students are saying, and react to it. (...Kind of. Actually I'm oversimplifying a bit, but that's the general idea.)
Sidenote: Scott Thornbury, in addition to being one of the main people behind Dogme in ELT, has a reputation for being one of the most prolific authors in ELT, and for writing on just about everything. In fact I've reviewed 3 of his books previously on this blog: About Language, Uncovering Grammar, and Beyond the Sentence. (I've reviewed Beyond the Sentence twice actually). And I'm actually currently reading another Scott Thornbury book: An A-Z of ELT. Luke Meddings I've never heard of before, so there's a temptation to only reference the more famous co-author, and refer to this as Thornbury's book. I'll try to avoid that.
Readability
So, this book probably was never meant to be read cover-to-cover. Once you get past the first chapter, it's really more of a reference book, or a list of classroom activities.
It's good for what it is, but it's probably not the best book to do for a book club.
(When we met up to discuss it at the end of the month, the person who had suggested the book apologized. "It's okay," I told him. "We end up reading a lot - of these - references books for this bookclub. It's the problem with trying to find engaging books on professional development.")
The book starts out with a bang.
The first chapter (p.7-22) is a blazing indictment of textbooks, grammar syllabuses, commercialization and the state of English Language Teaching generally.
It really pulls no punches.
...although, re-reading it before this review, I realized that all the best and most memorable parts of chapter 1 were when Meddings and Thornbury were quoting from other people. Chapter 1 is really quote heavy. They even fill the margins in with quotes, in addition to all the quotes they jam into the main text.
Top of page 12. Notice the two quotations in the margins? Typically of how all of chapter 1 is laid out.
The quotes in the margins were actually kind of distracting. (I was never sure if I was supposed to read those alongside of the text on that page, or before the text, or after. My eyes kept darting over to the quotes when I tried to read through the text.)
But to give credit where it's due, the authors have managed to assemble a list of really memorable quotes, and put together a powerful indictment of the state of ELT currently.
(Sidenote: The indictment of ELT as an establishment reminded me a bit of the tone of some of Geoff Jordan's blogposts. Ironically, Geoff Jordan occasionally sees Thornbury himself as part of the establishment, and attacks accordingly. See HERE and HERE. )
But then, the bulk of the book is just a list of activities.
Because I've got a certain personality (I like to get a sense of completion by finishing the whole book), I forced myself to read the whole thing before our book club meeting. But boy, did I have to fight to keep myself from dozing off as I read through the whole thing.
I think the correct way to use this book is to try some of these activities out in your classroom, and then reflect on how well they worked. (That approach would probably have given me more material a more interesting review as well).
And actually, that is what I intend to try and do going forward. I was thinking each week I would try out one new activity from this book, and see how it worked.
Actually doing the activities would give me a lot better understanding of this material than just reading through it in a coffee shop (which is what I did.)
And maybe I'll report back in 6 months or so to tell how the new activities worked. But for now, I'm just going to review what I read.
My Thoughts
So, in no particular order, here are a few of my thoughts on the whole thing.
Over-all
There's much to like about the Dogme approach. Certainly, Thornbury and Meddings are right that most ELT textbooks in use are dreadfully boring, and unhelpful to the students.
Short Digression: It continually amazes me how boring most ELT textbooks are. When you look at the reading and listening exercises in ELT textbooks, it's almost as if the textbook writers were trying to make these books bland and boring on purpose!
The travesty of it is that foreign language study is the one school subject where you have complete freedom to use whatever material you want. Other subjects have to focus on their subject material. (A math or science class almost has to be boring by necessity, because you have to focus on the math and science.) But in a foreign language classroom, you could practice the foreign language through whatever medium or story you wanted. You don't have to do reading and listening exercises on the carbon cycle, you can do them on superheroes, or dragons, or double secret agents.
And yet, what do the texttbooks always do? Without fail, they always pick the most boring topics imaginable. (Topics that have appeared in my textbook recently: tunnels and bridges, the history of audio recordings, the history of newspapers, endangered animals, etc.) I mean, if you were actively trying to create an environment where your students hated studying English, could you do much worse?
...all that being said, I do have to confess to being overly reliant on my textbooks. I try not to use them for the whole 2 hours. (The first hour I usually try to do supplementary readings or listenings on topics I think the students would be more interested in.) But I just can't kick the textbooks completely. I like the feeling of completeness that I get from working through a whole unit of the book. I like the feeling of structure that the textbooks give me. (And I suspect at least some of my students have this same personality quirk. Some of them like the structure and security of a textbook.) So even though I frequently have conversations in the staffroom about how awful the textbooks are, I continue to keep using them.
So I'm a bit conflicted on the issue. But a large part of me is sympathetic to what Thornbury and Meddings are saying. Textbooks suck. They don't meet the actual needs of the students, and teachers are overly reliant on them. Better to react to what the students in the class are actually saying.
This is what I've been trying to do more and more over the past couple years, even before I read Teaching Unplugged. And actually, it turns out that I've been doing a lot of the Dogme approach without realizing it.
These "Telling Your Stories" speaking activities that I created last year are actually a lot more Dogme than I realized. My inspiration for doing them was, in part, an episode of The TEFL Show podcast where the presenters talked about how many teachers rigidly follow the grammar syllabus instead of reacting to the language in the classroom. The problem with the grammar syllabus, they argued, is that it doesn't necessarily correspond to the grammar your students are ready to acquire. The grammar lesson on the syllabus for any given day could be a grammar point that your students have already acquired. Or it could be a grammar point that they aren't ready for yet. So it's better for the teachers to just listen to the language points that their students are trying to produce, and react to that.
And so that's what I tried to do with Telling Your Stories. I gave the students a topic, had them talk about it, and tried to react to the language I heard in the room. (I used this as a supplement, not a replacement, to the textbook. But that's not entirely out of step with what Meddings and Thornbury are advocating. The authors say that Dogme doesn't need to be an all or nothing approach. You can have Dogme moments in the classroom even if you have to follow a textbook.)
I was both pleasantly surprised, and a little bit disappointed, to discover how much of Teaching Unplugged was what I was already doing. I was pleased because it meant I had been on the right track all along. But I was disappointed because I was expecting something a bit more revolutionary or mind blowing. Meddings and Thornbury have a long list of Dogme lesson plans in Teaching Unplugged, but most of them amount to the same thing--give students a topic to talk about, and then react to the language that you hear.
In my less charitable moments, I was tempted to regard Dogme as not a new approach, but just a list of conversation topics (But then, is there anything wrong with that? Maybe that's what students want and need?)
Taken as a supplement to the traditional curriculum, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Dogme. No doubt, working with students on their emergent language instead of the grammar syllabus is what the students need.
But although the authors state that teachers can use Dogme as a supplement, they are also arguing that, really, it would be better if you ditched the traditional curriculum completely and just did all Dogme all the time.
And here's where problems could arise.
...Potentially.
...I don't know actually, all of this stuff is still a matter of debate. But here are some causes for concern.
Potential Problems with Dogme
All Language Comes from the Learners--No Input
The authors seem to be arguing that the learners don't need a lot of outside input to expand their language. No place in the classroom for extensive reading and listening. Rather, the teacher listens to what the students are trying to say, and helps them expand it into more correct or more complex language. And this is where the language development comes from.
But is this enough? Can you get from simple sentences to complex sentences without a lot of exposure to it in the input?
Problems with Monitoring
Part of the Dogme approach is that the teacher is monitoring what the students are saying, and then responding to it. But in my own experience, I have often have trouble monitoring what the students are saying in larger classrooms. It may work fine for a group of 6 students, but what about a group of 19 students? It's hard to hear what individual students are saying about the roar of background conversation.
Also, I've noticed that it's easy for me to spot mistakes and emergent language with elementary learners, because they are all using simple sentences, which makes errors easy to spot. With advanced learners, it's hard for me to notice errors in complex sentences. Especially if I'm only overhearing half of a sentence while I try to monitor the whole class. To pick up on the problems in complex sentences, I find I have to listen to one learner really closely for an extended period of time. Which is difficult to do if you have a lot of other students to attend to.
Topics Too Personalized?
My CELTA tutor once told us that lessons go best when the students are allowed to talk about themselves. Everyone is obsessed with themselves, everyone's favorite topic is themselves, everyone wants to talk about themselves, so if you give the students ample opportunity to share about themselves in class, they will always have a positive experience.
Dogme appears to be built on this assumption as well. Almost all the Dogme topics are personalized and learned centered.
If my CELTA tutor was right, then this approach is perfect. But I sometimes wonder--was my CELTA tutor right? Does everyone want to talk about themselves all the time, or is that only a certain personality type? Are some people more interested in the outside world of ideas or fantasy? Does everyone feel comfortable always sharing about themselves in the classroom? Will learners get bored talking about themselves after week 3?
Grammar Syllabus
I think Meddings and Thornbury are right in the sense that you can't force learners to produce grammar points before they're developmentally ready. The evidence for this is overwhelming.
There is, however, arguably some value in teaching learners to recognize receptively grammar points that they may not be ready to produce actively. (Rod Ellis argues for such an approach in SLA Research and Language Teaching.)
In addition to increasing students' ability to read and listen receptively, there's a theory that this will also help them to notice the grammar structures in the input, which will then speed up their rate of acquisition. (Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis).
This would be the argument for some sort of structured grammar syllabus as a supplement to Dogme. Not a grammar syllabus that focused on production, and hopefully not a grammar syllabus that took the majority of the class time. But it may be useful to spend sometime making sure students understand receptively the grammar structures, in addition to providing them regular opportunities to speak.
And Thornbury knows this, because he discussed this in his book: Uncovering Grammar
Other Notes
Reflections on Chapter 1
So, as I mentioned above, there are some real kickers in chapter 1. Most of them are quotes of other people, but they are perhaps worth mentioning here and commenting on.
There's some very provocative stuff about how the ELT industry generally, and textbooks specifically, are fueling a culture of global capitalism. And this comes out especially on pages 12 and 13.
Over twenty-five years ago, Gillian Brown noted that coursebooks promoted a kind of English that she called "Cosmopolitan English" because it assumes a materialistic set of values in which international travel, not being bored, positively being entertained, having leisure, and above all, spending money casually and without consideration of the sum involved in the pursuit of these ends, are the norm. ... the consumerist nature of coursebook content also reflects the aspirations of many learners of English, who view the acquisition of English (rightly or wrongly) as a passport to material well-being and international travel.
Depending on your own ideological position, you may be happy to support learners in achieving these goals. On the other hand, you may feel that learners' aspirations are being manipulated in the interests of globalisation and/or the hegemony of English, and that coursebooks simply serve these wider interests. As B. Kumaravadivelu notes:
Because of the global spread of English, ELT has become a global industry with high economic stakes, and textbook production has become one of the engines that drive the industry. It is hardly surprising that the world market is flooded with textbooks not grounded in [the] local sociocultural mileu.
Teachers, like it or not, are complicit in these globalising processes. As Alistair Pennycook points out, "English language teaching beliefs, practices and materials are never neutral. ... It might be said that the English language class may be less about the spread of English than about the spread of certain forms of culture and knowledge." Pennycook identifies these forms of culture and knowledge as being essentially Western, capitalist, and neo-colonialist. The most concrete embodiment of these forms of culture and knowledge is, of course, the coursebook. (p.12-13)
Wow, huh? This caught my attention, and I wasn't the only one. At bookclub, someone else had also highlighted this and wanted to talk about it.
It is definitely true that the English Language Teaching profession is connected to the spread of global capitalism. This is something that I've definitely noticed since coming to Cambodia and Vietnam, where the primary reason for studying English is to get a good job in an international company. (This was less noticeable in Japan, where English language proficiency wasn't necessary to get a good job, and most of my students were bored housewives.)
It has been a source of conflict for me over the past few years. I want to teach English so that my students can have access to literature and culture, but many of them (or their parents) are simply obsessed with passing standardized exams.
It is also noticeable how heavy most of our textbooks skew towards either exam tasks or business English situations.
It is, however, debatable how much ELT is active in spreading capitalist beliefs. I think it's possible to argue that the spread of ELT is connected to global capitalism, but that ELT itself isn't particularly ideological. Although it's impossible to say really, because it's impossible to make generalizations. It varies from school to school, classroom to classroom, lesson to lesson. Onto other notes:
The Lexical Approach
* Somewhat surprised to see an excerpt The Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis favorably quoted on page 9. (Michael Lewis is one of the authors that Thornbury and Meddings bring in in support of their approach). I'm surprised because Thornbury gave a very skeptical review of the Lexical Approach in his 1998 article: The Lexical Approach: A Journey Without Maps? (available online HERE). In the review, Thornbury rejects Lewis's emphasis on lexical phrases alone: "...phrasebook learning without the use of syntax is ultimately impoverished. All chunks but no pineapple. It makes sense, then, for learners to keep their options open and develop and to move between the two systems and not to develop one at the expense of the other."
But I suppose it's not a total contradiction. Thornbury clearly says in his review that there's elements of The Lexical Approach that he likes, so perhaps he's allowed to quote selectively.
Krashen
* Another author that I'm a bit surprised to see quoted is Krashen. (Quoted by Thornbury and Meddings on page 17). Like Thornbury and Meddings, Krashen is against the grammar syllabus. But Krashen is also against forcing speaking. And Thornbury and Meddings seem to be all about speaking.
They say: "The success of immersion programmes in bilingual contexts such as Canada added supportive evidence to Krashen's claims for the value of input, and the need for a 'silent period' before productive skills kick in."
Indeed, this is what Krashen argues. But did I miss something, or is there no allowance for a silent period in the Dogme approach?
...actually come to think of it, there wasn't much at all in this book for beginner students. All of the speaking activities in this book seemed to assume some level of speaking fluency on the part of the students. What do you do with absolute beginners?
Dogme versus Task-Based Learning
And actually, speaking of input...
There's a lot in the Dogme approach that is similar to task based learning. While I read this book, particularly the list of activities, I was reminded of our previous bookclub book: A Framework for Task-Based Learning by Jane Willis. Both approaches involve giving learners a topic to talk about, and then dealing with the emergent language in the feedback. Thornbury and Meddings are familiar with this similarity, and address it on page 17. "...Where a Dogme approach parts company with a task-based approach is not in the philosophy but in the methodology. As we have argued, naturally-occurring talk is sufficiently fertile context for language development, obviating the need for the somewhat artificial and cumbersome tasks associated with a task-based approach."
There's an element of truth here. Some of the tasks suggested by task-based learning advocates are pretty artificial and stupid. But then this is to take task-based learning at it's weakest. Although some of the tasks advocated by Jane Willis and others are less than engaging, not all of them are. A number of the tasks they suggest are personalized around the students--very similar to the list of topics that Meddings and Thornbury suggest in Teaching Unplugged.
To me, the biggest difference between task-based learning (as outlined by Jane Willis) and Dogme is that task-based learning has an input stage. In task-based learning, learners first listen to a recording of proficient speakers doing the same task, and analyze the language used by the proficient speakers before they do the task themselves.
The language input seems like an important part of the process, and I'm a bit worried that it appears to be missing from Dogme.
I think that Thornbury and Meddings are arguing that all of the language should come from the learners. The teacher should take whatever language is emerging from the learners, and work on expanding it with them.
But... while this would work fine with simpler language points, would it work well with complex sentences. Will this naturally just emerge on its own without a lot of input?
All that being said, the main problem with the input stage in Jane Willis's approach is that it is SO labor intensive on the part of the teacher. (I've experimented with it myself. I got a couple of colleagues to perform a task, recorded it, and transcribed it for use in the classroom. To arrange a time to meet with my colleagues, to the recordings, and to do the transcribing took me hours.)
The beauty of Dogme is that it's all zero prep or very low prep. How can you beat that?
Other Notes
* While I was finishing off this book, a colleague approached me to get some ideas for an end of course lesson.
"Here, try this book out," I said. "There are lots of good ideas in here."
Later, when I saw her after class, I asked her, "How did it go?"
"Great," she said. "I did Everyone's a Teacher," (p. 29--a Dogme lesson in which the students translate proverbs or idioms from their own language into English, and teach them to the teacher proverbs or sayings from their language.) "In fact it worked too well," she said. "They didn't want to leave at the end of the lesson, they were so excited to teach me all these phrases."
...yet another reason for me to try out these activities myself...
* Email from my manager:
"This is the only time I'll interfere with the book club: Make sure that it's clear to teachers attending that this does NOT mean teaching unplanned or improvising (as Meddings seems to suggest). It's a very good book for teaching teachers to respond to student production in the lesson, though. Interested to hear how this goes."
Bookclub Notes (I posted these on the bookclub Facebook Page):
Hey gang,
First of all, I think I've contacted everyone who's interested, but we're meeting at 12:30 tomorrow. (Room number still to be determined.)
I waited until the last minute, as usual, but I did chain myself to my desk for a few hours this afternoon, and I actually did finish the book.
I wont lie, I found it pretty boring to read through. That's no knock on the content or the ideas in the book. I'm just not sure this book was ever meant to be read straight through. I think it's more of a resource for lesson planning.
How did you guys find it?
Hopefully we'll get some interesting discussion out of it tomorrow. But to try and jumpstart some of the discussion ahead of time, I'll just jot down a few observations here:
1) The first chapter was actually really interesting. (Before we got into just the listing of activities). I was particularly struck by their evaluation of textbooks. To quote: "Over twenty-five years ago, Gillian Brown noted that coursebooks promoted a kind of English that she called 'cosmopolitan English' because 'it assumes a materialistic set of values in which international travel, not being bored, positively being entertained, having leisure and above all, spending money casually and without consideration of the sum involved in pursuit of these ends, are the norm.'" (p.12-13).
Yeah, that sounds about right to me.
2) Also in the first chapter, I was surprised to find "The Lexical Approach" by Michael Lewis quoted approvingly in the first chapter, given Scott Thornbury's brutal take down of the book in his review: The Lexical Approach: A Journey Without Maps. http://nebula.wsimg.com/9129eed8a13130f4ee92cf2c3ce5b13e…
In his review, I got the impression Scott Thornbury was against the idea of abandoning the grammatical syllabus in favor of a lexical syllabus. Did he change his mind?
3) I was a bit underwhelmed by a lot of the activities in the books. The first chapter seemed to promise a revolutionary new way of teaching, but then once we got into the actually activities, it sounded to me like it was just a list of conversation topics. (Some of them better than others, to be quite honest). I feel like I've already been doing a lot of this--giving my students conversation topics, and then giving them feedback on the language they are using. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5QgMDk6npsRNEg0eFdHc2N3a00
4) Tangentially related:
This video is worth watching mostly just because it's interesting. https://youtu.be/j31Bj-XIFSk
(Scott Thornbury has a talent for making anything interesting.)
But it also does tie in with some of chapter 1. Particularly the part from page 10 about how Conversation Scaffolds Learning.
Post 2
Oh, I completely forgot to mention it, but also related is CAT: A framework for Dogme by Ken Lackman appearing in English Teaching Professional, Issue 87, July 2013. https://www.etprofessional.com/cat-a-framework-for-dogme
This is from Kasey and at one point it used to be hanging up in the Center 1 resource wall. (Perhaps we should bring it back?)
Why I Read This Book
So, I had never heard of this book, or this author, before someone suggested it for our book club.
Everyone else in the bookclub, however, was familiar with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. So perhaps it's just me? After so many years abroad, I'm out of touch? I don't know. (Let me know in the comments what your impression is. How famous is this book? Should I have heard about it?)
Anyway, point being I would never have read this book if someone hadn't suggested it for bookclub.
The nice thing about a bookclub is that you get exposed to all kinds of books you would never have read otherwise. But it does also mean that I'm reviewing it from a disadvantage. I've never heard of it before, this isn't usually my type of book, and I probably didn't appreciate it as much as someone in its target audience. So take my opinions with a grain of salt. But I'll try and jot down some of my thoughts about the reading experience.
The Reading Experience--Some Spoilers
The good news is that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie can write well. The prose flows easily, and I found myself effortlessly turning the pages even as I was unsure where the story was going.
For anyone who is as ignorant as I was, I'll give some background: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian who has spent many years living in America. Although it's unclear how much of the book is autobiographical, the book is about a Nigerian woman living in America during the time of Obama's election.
The first few pages start off with about what you'd expect--reflections on various conversations about race that the narrator has had with various Americans.
But the setting for the first several chapters (the framing device from which all the flashbacks occur) is a hair braiding salon. And a lot of the beginning of the book is description about the process of getting hair braided.
At this point, I was worried I was going to get bored with the book. I mean, how mundane! And as a white man, what do I care about hair-braiding? What does this have to do with my life? Where were the politics, big ideas and the epic adventures?
The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized my aversion to the subject matter reflected my close-mindedness as a reader.
The beauty of reading is that it allows you to get inside someone else's skin. As a white man, I'll never get my hair braided in a hair salon in downtown Philadelphia. But in the hands of a skilled author, I can feel like I have experienced it.
When we were reading Palace Walk for book club last year (about a middle-class Egyptian family) my friend mentioned the quote "A reader lives a thousand lives. The man who never reads lives only one." That quote applies to Americanah as well. You get to see a completely different side of life by reading about someone else's experience.
What a pity that my initial reaction to hair-braiding was to become bored with it because it had no relationship to my life. The whole point is that it opens up a world of experiences that were completely alien to me.
In fact, it turns out that throughout the book, hair and hair maintenance are big themes.
I had no idea how much trouble hair maintenance causes black women. I had assumed that they just woke up in the morning, showered, and walked out the door just like I did.
But it turns out that in order to keep their hair manageable, they have to put lot of chemicals into their hair which are bad for their scalp. If they just leave it natural, then it grows wild, and invites rude comments from other people about how you've "gone jungle". Or, they can get it braided. But if they get it braided, then it looks unprofessional in corporate America. So if they want to get a serious business job, then they have to deal with a lot of chemicals.
Or at least that's the impression I got from this book. (Someone correct me if I'm getting it wrong.)
I had no idea before, but now I've learned a lot about what life is like for other people.
I think, however, that a lot of us are like me--we are attracted to books about protagonists who are similar to us, and are suspicious about books about people with different temperaments or experiences. I'm not sure why this is. (Some sort of built in evolutionary tribalist tendency?)
And indeed, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has had a different experience of America than I have-- her impressions of America were different than mine, which sometimes caused me to react with skepticism or defensiveness. But if you can catch yourself doing this, and try to push past your own close-mindedness, this book can represent a wonderful opportunity to see the world from someone else's perspective.
Okay, sorry for that digression. Back to the plot.
The beginning of the book is mostly told in flashbacks.
Gradually, the reader begins to realize that the relationships in the present day, and the relationship in the flashbacks, are different. Something must have happened to cause these relationships to change. But what?
Once I got hooked on this mystery, this kept me reading attentively for the first half of the book.
However, once the mysteries began to resolve themselves, I began to lose interest in the book again. It sat for a few weeks on my bookshelf untouched.
Until I had to finish it for bookclub, and then I pulled the book out again, and was able to finish it pretty painlessly in a few days.
Reactions / Impressions
The golden rule of reviewing is that you should never assume the narrator and the author have the same opinions. But... at the same time, you can't help but wonder.
The narrator of this book is very cynical about everyone.
American conservatives? Of course American conservatives aren't portrayed sympathetically. But even American liberals are viewed very cynically.
When a young American white liberal girl, Kelsey, gets her hair braided next to the narrator, the narrator immediately views her cynically.
She [the narrator] did not want to start a conversation. Especially not with Kelsey. She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.
Granted this is probably an accurate description of most American liberals. (I've noticed this reflexive defensiveness in myself whenever outsiders criticize America). But it's also the least-charitable lens through which to view Kelsey. I mean, I'm sure young Kelsey has plenty of good traits as well if you would just give her a chance.
And this is typical of the narrator. The narrator never has anything good to say about anyone. Aside from the main character herself, and her love interest, every other character in the novel is always portrayed in the least-charitable way possible. The narrator is constantly listing all their faults and shortcomings, and never talking about their positive points.
I suppose it reveals something about me that I only became annoyed at this when the narrator was doing it to white Americans. But then once I became annoyed at this, I realized it had been a theme all throughout the novel. During the flashbacks to Nigeria, the author had been criticizing corrupt Nigerian generals and naive Nigerian church-goers. During the sections on America, the narrator complains about everyone. She complains about black Americans, white Americans, and African expats. She complains about all the annoying habits of Nigerian businessmen living in America, and all the annoying habits of her teenage Nigerian girl friends at college. She complains about the expectations and affectations of the Nigerian returnees in Lagos, and also at the vapidness of Nigerian housewives who stayed behind, and the corruption of Nigerian businessmen, etc, etc, etc.
"What a hyper-critical person Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is," I thought to myself. "I'd hate to be friends with her. She'd always have an eagle-eye open for everyone else's faults."
But perhaps this is more of a personality preference. Another member of our bookclub said, "I'm super cynical myself, so I actually loved the way the narrator was always tearing people down."
If the beauty of reading is that it gets you into other people's skins (as I said above), then perhaps that's true for personality types as much as it is for life experience. Perhaps it's valuable to get inside the mind of a super-cynical person, even if it's different from your own personality.
But there are also hints that the author is not the narrator. At one point, another character accuses Ifemelu (the main character) of being too judgmental:
"...you are such a judgmental bitch?" Doris screamed. ... "You sit there and judge everyone," Doris was saying. "Who do you think you are? Why do you think this magazine should be about you? It isn't yours. Aunty Onenu has told you what she wants her magazine to be and it's either you do it or you shouldn't be working here?"
Is that the author calling her narrator out? Maybe. Although Doris is portrayed so negatively through the book (everyone is portrayed negatively) that I get the impression we're supposed to sympathize with Ifemelu against Doris.
Other Reflections
In no particular order, here are some other random thoughts I had about this book.
Culture Shock
This is a book about culture shock. It's a story of a Nigerian who comes to America, experiences severe culture shock, and then goes back home and experiences reverse culture shock.
As someone who's lived for many year in multiple countries (8 years in Japan, 1 year in Australia, 4 years in Cambodia, 3 years in Vietnam), I'm very familiar with the culture shock cycle. I know that when you live for a long time in a foreign, you start to become hyper-critical of a lot of the habits and customs of the native people.
It seems to me that much of the frustration of the narrator is culture shock.
Where the book becomes complicated is that it's also about race.
And disentangling the one element from the other is where things get a little bit tricky.
One African student thanked me for writing the letter. He said, in what was becoming a familiar story, that he had signed up for the Mosaic floor simply because he thought as a black student he didn’t have a choice. Then he had found the endless discussions on racism a bit patronizing, because as an African, and not an African American, he did not feel that his identity was defined by being an ethnic minority. He had ended up asking to transfer out of the Mosaic Floor.
This was actually a theme in Americanah as well--how non-American blacks resented finding themselves thrust into in the middle of America's discussion of racism, because they didn't regard their identities as being defined by racism back home.
American Dress
When I lived in Cambodia, one of the things that surprised me there was how concerned young Cambodians were about dressing stylishly. There were no hippies or grunge fashion in Cambodia. Everyone wanted to dress as flashy as they could.
I then realized that the ability to dress like a slob is itself a type of middle class privilege--you are so secure in your middle-class status that you don't have to worry about how people will treat you if you dress slovenly. It doesn't exist in developing countries. (As a teenager, I once told my mother I wouldn't wear nice clothes anymore because it was a type of bourgeois respectability. But as it turns out, I got it exactly backwards. Wearing nice clothes is what the poor people have to do, and the ability to dress slovenly clothing is what is bourgeois.)
The same reflection is in Americanah. The narrator comments on American fashion on her blog:
When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. "We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall."
Other Conversations from Book club
Apparently my own criticism of this book, the fact that the narrator was too critical of everyone, has been echoed a lot by other people. At least that's what someone told me at book club--when I brought up the point, they said that a lot of Americans had made that complaint.
She said that in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's native Nigeria, apparently the main criticism of the book was it's portrayal of marital infidelity.
We got into a brief discussion/debate at book club as to whether the boyfriend made the right choice. I argued that he should have stayed with his wife and child. If there had been big problems in the marriage, that would have been different. But his wife was causing him no problems, so he had no reason to leave her. This whole "one true love" stuff is for teenagers. When you become an adult, you have responsibilities to your family.
Someone else argued that it was better to get out of a loveless marriage.
Someone else suggested that both the main character and her boyfriend were essentially selfish people. Neither thought about the other people in the various other relationships they had been in. So maybe they deserve each other.
This was something that hadn't occurred to me. (I thought that in each of these other failed relationship, the reader was meant to sympathize with the main characters, and sympathize about how their needs weren't being meant. But maybe we were supposed to be kind of repulsed by this selfishness all along?)
Blogging
The main character in the novel makes her living by writing a blog.
Do people actually make livings by writing blogs? And if so, where do I sign up? (I've been working on this blog for 15 years now, and haven't gotten a dime for it.)
He's now started up a youtube channel--HERE.
He's hoping to get his comedy youtube career off the ground, so you'd be doing the guy a solid by doing the usual watch, like, share or subscribe.
First video below. (My wife and I were at the taping of this episode in Saigon last month).
