In response to research by literacy expert and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Deborah Brandt, our literacy class was asked to tell our story of how we became literate. I already had my story in mind because, having also been inspired by this research, I had just assigned a similar assignment to my freshmen. I'm writing here because I thought that the story I came up with would be fun to share, and to analyze.
First of all, allow me to qualify this story by saying that my memory is very imperfect, as the event in this post happened when I was only five years old. I have only a cloudy memory that has no doubt been colored by my also cloudy memory of being told the story later by my mother. She may be able to, but should not necessarily feel obliged to, correct any erroneous details. With my disclaimer out of the way, here is my first memory of performing a literate act.
I actually do not remember learning to read (I remember learning to love reading, but that's another post). My earliest memory of the act of writing comes from when I was in kindergarten (I think) and I was quite excited at having learned to write. I parked myself under my baby sister's crib, which must have seemed like a suitable hiding place, and wrote on her walls. In my memory, the writing was very colorful but I have no memory of what I wrote or what I used to write with. I only know, and I may only know this because of my mother telling the story, that I wrote my own name.
When my mother discovered the writing, I told her that it had not been me. Furthermore, I very logically told her that, since the writing was on my sister's walls, it must have been she who had committed this crime of literacy. Against this claim, my mother offered three pieces of evidence. The first was that Tina was not even a year old; she couldn't write. Of course, this proved only that it had not been Tina. It did not prove that it had been me. My mother pointed out that I was the only one of her three kids that had learned to write. Her final piece of evidence was ultimately the death knell of my story. I had written my name on the wall.
What's interesting about this story to me now is how well it fits into what Deborah Brandt has discovered, quite accidentally, in her research. She found that, while reading tends to be a very communal act where our earliest memories of reading are almost always centered around the family, early memories of writing often involve writing which is subversive or proscribed, and solitary (almost every literate person remembers having been read to by family members, but almost no one remembers writing with family members). It's interesting to me that it seems that I must have known that this type of writing would get me into trouble. After all, I chose to write under the crib, a place that seemed safe and cave-like to me. So, in an act strangely reminiscent of prehistoric cave art, I went to a lonely and secret place and wrote, what else, my name.
And this is the very curious thing about the way I chose to write. My act of writing was assertive because it was subversive; I broke the rules. Furthermore, it was my name that I wrote. Such an act seems to be a form of existential genesis. It was as if, by asserting my name, I was saying, "I exist. I have a name." And yet, I wrote it in a place where I thought it would be hidden from view, again, like a caveman who hides his art.
This is the curious irony of writing. It is an act of assertiveness, almost violence even - "here is what I am writing and you must read it. You cannot deny my name" And yet, it is an act of extraordinary solitude, and often loneliness.
