writer of all sorts of things
Read an interview with J.L. Powers at Through the Tollbooth!
Q: What about this novel makes you most proud?
There is absolutely nothing on the market like it! It is young adult magical realism, set in a poverty-stricken township of South Africa. It is a love story but it also deals with the clash between science and traditional medicine in Africa, and it highlights and focuses on the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the part of the world with the highest rate of HIV infections—the heart of the epidemic.
On Thursdays, I teach a creative writing class to elementary-school kids. Lately, all the kids–most of them guys–have been showing up at my house wearing these crazy bracelets, animal shaped bracelets of different colors. 
One of the kids told me that he has classmates who have so many bracelets, they stretch from the wrist to the elbow.
It reminded me of friendship pins, a craze I participated in during 3rd grade. Friendship pins were nothing more than safety pins with a few beads strung on them, in different patterns. We wore them on our shoes, where the laces cross over, and I remember that my shoes were entirely covered by friendship pins. Not that I had that many friends, mind you. I made most of them myself. I just fell in love with the idea and the rest is history.
But I haven’t gotten invested in any other crazes. In high school, I was pretty much a dork, with zero fashion sense. I actually believed it was cool to be myself, but that meant I didn’t have a lot of friends because being myself in high school was actually really hard to do. I do remember one fashion craze at the time was wearing two different colored socks, for example, blue on top and red on bottom. I mixed it up a little. On one side, I wore blue on top and red on bottom, and on the other side, I wore red on top and blue on bottom. A girl in my youth group ridiculed me for it, which meant I had to keep doing it because I couldn’t possibly pretend that I cared enough to conform.
The adult world has plenty of fashionistas, and we didn’t seem to leave those crazes behind. Still, I don’t see as many of them, and we don’t participate in quite the same way. A few years ago, a friend gave me a Stephen Colbert Wriststrong bracelet, but his eyes were snapping with humor when he did it. 
Sure, I’ve worn it. But always with a sense of irony.
I’ve always been attracted to books that explore the darkness of humanity rather than books that explore sweetness and light. When I’m compelled by a romance within a book or a movie, it’s because the romance offers a three-dimensional understanding of how relationships work—the dysfunction and darkness riddled through with grace and redemption, or vice versa.
I think this is one reason why Flannery O’Connor’s work is read widely by people in the world and misunderstood by religious people. She saw grace emerging right in the middle of sin, mushrooms growing in manure, and she didn’t try to mitigate the ugliness of evil even while she demonstrated the human capacity for redemption in the midst of it. Her stories are completely believable, whereas the message that the church sent me while I was growing up—that redemption is found only in places and people that have already been cleaned up and redeemed and sanitized—I discovered to be patently false as I grew older.
Lately, I’ve been reading a ton of mysteries and thrillers. The central mystery of my life—the human need for redemption, the fact that some people seek it and others run away from it—revolves around deeper things than murder or kidnapping or the myriad of crimes that crop up in mysteries. Yet crime plays a huge role in my understanding of redemption.
I’m terribly concerned by what I see all around me: how our society punishes people for being poor; how it ghettoizes poor people and then lets those neighborhoods rot and wallow in crime; how imprisonment is part of the status quo for young people growing up in poor neighborhoods, not because those kids start off bad but because there are few alternatives open to them beyond crime and gang life; how we feel justified in harsh prison sentences—after all, we’re protecting the rest of society from the bad guys; how we offer little that could uplift or redeem people out of violence and crime and poverty.
We offer neither mercy nor justice through our legal system or our welfare system or our education system. And we don’t uplift through those programs either. Though like anybody, I want to be protected from violent and evil people, I also understand the terrible cycle our society has created: though not solely responsible for what humans will do, we help create and maintain the criminal elements, and then we punish it. I’m horrified by the fact that we (both liberals and conservatives) pay enormous amounts of money for (and agitate for) systems that perpetuate the problem rather than alleviate it.
I’d like to see more redemption and less darkness. But I don’t know how to achieve it in human society, which often seems hopelessly corrupt to me. Yet I do see art as a shot of light in an otherwise dark situation. All forms of art—literature, music, film, paintings, etc—have the ability to reveal the truth of both darkness and light in a way that our political, legal, and educational systems can’t.
I guess that’s why I never became a political activist and, instead, spend my days reading and writing.
“I had hoped that [Ted] Haggard [the former head of the National Association of Evangelicals, caught with a male prostitute in 2006], upon feeling the overwhelming shunning wrath of his Christian brothers and sisters after his revelation, would come to an intimate understanding of how the gay and lesbian community feels about the church—how those who claim to follow Christ will turn their backs on you when you need them the most. In that shunning, I had hoped that Haggard might arrive at a new place—where he would realize how painful that is for the person shunned and vow to never, ever do that to anyone if he were ever back in the position to lead a church.” –Candace Chellew-Hodge, Religion Dispatches
It never fails to happen. It also never fails to make me mad. I have, once again, caught a student plagiarizing. This happens so frequently (comprising anywhere from 5-15% of my students each semester) that maybe I should be over it, but I get furious every time. What is wrong with our society that so many of our young people don’t give a damn about cheating? And why is it that so few teachers care?
I remember when I was in college at New Mexico State University, a student turned in a plagiarized paper to one of my English classes. He disappeared from that class with an F and there was a rumor that he might be expelled. I was amazed more than shocked. Who in the world would even have the idea of turning in someone else’s work as their own? The concept had never occurred to me. I didn’t know it was even possible to do such a thing. Once I realized it was possible, I couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to do that. I liked writing. I liked learning things.
But I was also naive about plagiarism in other ways. A fellow student in one of my classes, an older gentleman in his thirties, told me he’d had a great idea for a paper until he went to the library and found out that somebody had already written that argument. “I had to toss that paper,” he said, “because turning it in would be plagiarism.” I assumed that if the idea was original to you–meaning, nobody had suggested the idea, and you hadn’t read it elsewhere first–you could write about it. Maybe part of the problem was that I didn’t spend much time in the library as an undergraduate.
As a teacher, I see egregious versions of plagiarism every single semester. Usually, the students have simply bought one of those free essays online, all too easy for me to find. Also frequent, but less common, a student will cut and paste sentences from several different sources, cobbling together a paper of sorts. I usually have my students write an honesty pledge but it doesn’t stop them. Once, my students signed an honesty pledge that included a sentence reminding them that “cutting and pasting” sentences from other sources without proper attribution was plagiarism. An older student, in his forties, turned in a paper that I found word for word on the internet.
“But I didn’t cut and paste,” he protested. “I printed it out and then re-typed it!!!”
I was dumbfounded. “And you really can’t see that typing somebody else’s essay and turning it in as your own is cheating, just as if you’d cut and pasted it into a document?” I asked. Several times, I admit. I was really shocked that he couldn’t see the difference.
“No,” he kept saying, and finally, “You’re making me feel really dumb.”
“I don’t think you belong in a college level writing class yet,” I said, and directed him to drop the class and enroll in a remedial writing class.
I still don’t understand why so many students cheat. But the truth is, they get away with it a lot. I still care, and I still do what I can, but there is nowhere I have taught–including Stanford–that makes it simple and easy to deal adequately with a clear case of plagiarism. Most community colleges limit what punishments you can mete out. Most of them allow you to flunk that paper or assignment, but you cannot flunk the student for the entire class. And expelling a student? Forget about it!
The most demoralizing experience I had as a professor was how one community college dealt with a case of plagiarism I discovered late in the semester a few years ago. The student in question–female and Asian (an important fact, as you’ll see in a minute)–had completely and totally plagiarized her research paper, which was worth 50% of the class grade. There was no question about the fact that she had plagiarized it. I was so mad that I went back and checked her other assignments and sure enough, she’d plagiarized every single assignment she’d turned in, all semester long.
When I informed her that I would be failing her and recommending that she be expelled (this was still an option at that point), she accused me of being racist and sexist. “I’ve had problems with other professors who don’t like that I’m female or Asian,” she said. She demanded that, in order to prove that I was fair-minded, I must go back and check all the other assignments turned in by every other student.
“None of them plagiarized their research paper,” I told her, “so no, I’m not going to do that.”
She decided to protest the findings. Regardless of the fact that the case of plagiarism was clear and uncontestable, a student has the right to a hearing by a board consisting of students, professors, and administrators. I believe students absolutely have the right to appeal, but I couldn’t believe what happened in this particular case. She demanded the restitution of an A grade and, while the board didn’t go quite that far (they couldn’t, because the evidence of her plagiarism was so overwhelming), they did decide to give her a W. She faced absolutely no repercussions for her clear and flagrant disregard for academic honesty.
For those of us who are adjunct professors anywhere, our employment is tenuous enough that I understand why so many of us choose not to rock the boat and why so many of us just ignore plagiarism when it’s staring us in the face. When the administration doesn’t care, and the penalty for cheating is laughable, and we need to both retain students and not fail very many students, why should we do anything at all?
With the student I just discovered plagiarizing, I gave him a zero for the assignment. I told him he cannot revise the essay and turn it back in again. Like my other students who cheat, he signed an honesty pledge at the beginning of the semester, promising not to plagiarize. Will he flunk the class? It all depends on how he does with the rest of his assignments. The essay is worth 10% of his grade. If he averages a B- for the other assignments he turns in, he’ll be fine.
Makes me mad. But there’s very little I can do about it.
Because I’ve been reading a lot of biographical picture books lately, and because I’m working on one of my own, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between history and our personal identities.
In January, I had a conversation with a gentleman who was reading a book called “God’s Miracles.” It was a collection of stories that revealed moments of American history when, according to the book, God performed a miracle that allowed the new nation to thrive. The story he presented during our conversation was how the people of Jamestown were literally getting into their boats to leave when ships from England arrived, “saving” them and “saving” Jamestown.
The idea that America’s destiny was maneuvered, manipulated, aided, and abetted by the Powerful Most High is always one that disturbs me. Was it a “miracle” from God that Jamestown survived….only for the obliteration of the Native American peoples in that area to occur? Ascribing God’s hand into the American Story gives a lot of people a sense of destiny, a belief that the American Way is God’s Way, but the flip side of that is the question: Was it therefore the destiny of the Native American peoples to be killed, herded onto reservations, and left to rot—all the way up to the present day? Is that, too, God’s Way?
As a historian, I’m aware that most of history is made up of questions, not answers; it is made up of perspectives, not facts. Those of us who are white and grow up in America see our founding fathers as heroes; that is our perspective because they built a society for us that enables and encourages us to succeed. But this perspective holds very little moral authority for me when I see how they built the country at the expense of so many people’s lives.
History ends up being very similar to religion. Like our religious heroes, our historical heroes give us a shared sense of destiny with people who have very little in common with us. We can all wave our flag of patriotism because “we” are Americans.
An American friend of mine, an African historian who lives in South Africa, recently told me, “Everybody recognizes South Africa’s history as a racist history. We don’t tell the American history as a racist history because whites are the majority people.” He’s right. Yet the story of America is a racist story—from the arrival of the Pilgrims, to slavery, to the notion of Manifest Destiny, to our attempts to colonize the Philippines, to our ongoing refusal to grant Puerto Ricans full citizenship (what’s up with that? They’re “American citizens” who can’t vote? Wait…WHAT?), to our recent building of a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. It’s true that racism is only part of the American story—but it’s an enormous part, something we fail to see because we try so hard to build pride in our young folks. We teach “propaganda” and call it history, not even realizing that our unconscious goal is to instill patriotism, and we do so by telling lies.
How to balance all of this when writing a picture book for kids based on a historical figure? I’m not sure. I think it’s one reason why my first biographical picture book was about a relatively unknown dude—a blind artist, Mexican-American, who has a very rare form of blindness that he describes as a “constant LSD trip” and so he paints what he sees. That was a fun book to write, but it hasn’t sold yet. I’d like to write a biographical picture book about my father, not because he’s famous but because he’s a man I care about deeply. And I’m currently working on a biographical picture book about Nelson Mandela’s chef…the man who cooked meals for him the last 15 months he was in prison, when the apartheid government was negotiating with him and so he had a cushier life than the previous three decades he’d spent on Robben Island.
Am I contributing to South Africa’s ongoing myth-making by writing about one of their heroes at the moment he was released from prison? Perhaps. It’s not that I believe there are no heroes in history. It’s just that I believe our heroes lived messy lives, full of both courageous and horrific deeds, and we’re better off telling the truth, rather than trying vainly to instill pride in a false vision of what America is, who we are, and what our purpose is in the world.
Last May, while I was traveling around South Africa, a relatively new Christian told me the story of his salvation. He knew God was real and God was good the day God gave him a beautiful house at a price that was substantially below market value; the person who was selling it cheap had fallen on hard times and needed to get rid of it pronto.
“Isn’t it screwed up that you’re thanking God that somebody else has fallen on hard times?” I asked.
I don’t think he understood my unstated point: that a gift from God for one person should not represent injustice or hard times for another person. Even if we assume that the person who had fallen on hard times made bad decisions about their finances, can we really give God credit for our ability to, vulture-like, swoop in when the pickin’ is good?
Such logic leads to genocide.
Such logic has led to genocide, many, many times in history.
***
The first book I remember reading by myself was a biography of Harriet Tubman, an African American slave who not only escaped slavery herself but became known as “Moses” because she returned to the South over a dozen times and helped over seventy slaves escape to freedom. I was absolutely captivated by the phrase, “the Underground Railroad.” I imagined a literal railroad carved out of rock, deep underneath the earth’s surface, with poor, tattered slaves creeping along in the dark, only a candle to light their way to freedom.
Perhaps because that book represented a pivotal turning point in my education—the ability to read by myself—it also shaped my political and social consciousness. The first novel I wrote as an 11-year-old was the story of a young woman trying to help a slave escape on the Underground Railroad. As an adult, I’ve spent years of my life in graduate school, studying African history. Justice for people of color worldwide has been one of my abiding political concerns. I am bitterly aware of the privilege of my white skin, just as I’m bitterly aware of the disadvantages I face due to my gender.
(As a caveat to the conservatives who read my blog: I don’t believe the government to be a panacea to the social ills of our time. But it is obvious to me that injustice is built into the very fabric of our society, and thus into the warp and weave of every bureaucratic and religious institution and every policy that our government espouses. As a result, I don’t think we can create a solution without addressing it from a political and religious standpoint. This doesn’t mean that I believe the solution should be top-down—government forcing the people to do something that’s not in their heart to do. God, no. I HATE INSTITUTIONS. Plus, I am a firm believer in grassroots movements for social change, from the people on up. But the very point of democracy, and of grassroots change, is that at some point, we must change institutional structures as well—from governments to churches to schools. Anyway, that was a little diversion to my main subject today….)
As I’ve grown older, my concept of justice has grown increasingly complicated. I’ve come to recognize that righting the wrongs of the past so that the future can be more equitable might mean that a lot of Americans—white people, wealthy people of all colors, and, ah yes, even the educated middle-class, which includes me—will have to give up things they currently enjoy. Yes. Among many other changes, justice will definitely mean that we in the U.S. will need to give up our boats, extra cars, and expensive vacations and spend more money on groceries, on housing, on other things.
My preference, of course, is that we could right the wrongs of the past without anybody currently living having to suffer. But I’m not sure that’s possible. It’s not exactly that I believe a lot of people must lower their standards of living in order for the very most poor to be able to raise their standards of living. But I don’t think it’s possible for those of us in western nations to continue to ignore the fact that our wealth is based on our power; and our power comes at the expense of other people’s power which, ultimately, leads to their poverty. A person in India or China or Mexico who is hungry and living in a cardboard shack on the side of the hill will not say, “I demand a fair, living wage.” No, they will take what they can get, and so we continue to pay millions of workers worldwide a non-livable wage so that we can get our cheap products. “It’s better than nothing” is the basic attitude that supports our ongoing economic oppression of the global south. Of course it’s better than nothing. But it’s not enough, and we who have too much need to take Jesus’s words to heart: “The worker is worthy of his wage.”
To right the global wrong of structural social and economic inequality will mean a dramatic decline in the material wealth of western, developed nations. Morally speaking, we cannot continue the system of demanding cheap labor that keeps millions poor around the world just so that we can enjoy cheap products. Morally speaking, I don’t see how middle-class whites in America can ignore the fact that every day, we still enjoy the benefits of slavery—and that millions of people of color still suffer because of it. Is it such a mystery that the worst schools in the nation are also in the ghettos, which were created by systematic racism that crowded people of color into small, crappy neighborhoods so white society could keep races segregated?
To stop oppressing people, we will have to give up some of our power and some of our wealth—and that will feel like suffering to a lot of people, even if it’s really not.
***
When I look at the global injustices, I quickly get bogged down with a what to do what to do panicky kind of feeling. The question I always ask is this: What is my individual responsibility to right global wrongs?
This morning, I received an email from a friend that had me asking another question about justice, one that represents a moral conundrum: What is my individual responsibility to right global wrongs when doing so may hurt another person?
In other words, where does justice begin and end?
My friend asked me whether she should sacrifice her career by staying silent about secrets she learned in the course of historical research, secrets that would shame an old woman and that woman’s children. Not revealing those secrets kills the basis of my friend’s argument in the monograph she’s writing. Revealing them allows her to explore important women’s issues within the context of religion. She wondered if she was serving the cause of justice by staying silent, in order to be merciful to this old woman and her children? Or was she furthering misogyny by staying silent? Which was it?
My friend is faced with a perplexing problem: two different definitions of justice, the personal (keeping somebody’s secret so that they can keep their dignity) vs. the global (advancing the cause of feminism). Which cause is more important? Many people would sacrifice one woman’s dignity in order to serve what they see as a greater cause, women’s issues or some other Big Cause. And okay, serving a Big Cause is important. But are we really serving a Big Cause if we sacrifice one person’s dignity in order to do it?
It reminds me of those old Life Boat Questions: Should we sacrifice one person’s life in order to save a million?
This is the logic of war, and it’s the logic of most political movements that advocate for one thing or another, but it’s a logic that leaves me cold. Its foundation is an either-or fallacy that fails to look for alternatives. Is it true that somebody must be sacrificed?
So I ask myself, Is it true that Americans must suffer a decline in living standards in order for developing nations to rise up out of the mire and muck of poverty? Or am I setting myself up with a political either-or fallacy?
My friend’s email went further. One of her friends had recently died in Zimbabwe because medicine for her cancer wasn’t available, and now my friend was wondering whether she was possibly serving the cause for justice if she spent most of her time making meals for her family, making sure they were cozy and warm with a fire at night, books, an apple pie for dessert.
She is not asking a simple question. On the surface, it may appear that she’s asking whether, instead of living a life of American comforts and domestic bliss, she shouldn’t be out there working 80-100 hours a week to get justice for Zimbabweans. And yes, she is asking that. But she’s asking so much more. The average American can’t link their daily life to the poverty of an African nation…but my friend can. Because she’s studied African history, I know she sees the many and varied links that connect the wealth of the westernized global north, including individuals like you and me, to the impoverishment of the global south, like her Zimbabwean friend who died of cancer because the medicine wasn’t available in her country.
So even more than asking whether she should be devoting her intellectual and creative career to the fight for justice, she’s wondering whether the very basis of her domestically blissful life is inherently flawed.
This is her question: If my good fortune comes at the expense of another, is it really good fortune?
If we Americans enjoy access to cheap medicine and cheap goods, and as a result, we have policies that destroy individuals, families, and nations around the world, resulting in a Zimbabwean woman’s inability to buy medicine for her cancer….can we really say we have good fortune?
I will not entertain the simplistic and foolhardy argument that Zimbabwe’s problems are Zimbabwe’s problems alone. Is Mugabe a maniac running his country into the ground? Yes. But are Zimbabwe’s problems a result of Mugabe alone? No. When you look at the history of that country, the political and other problems of Zimbabwe are directly related to colonial policies put in place first by Great Britain, then by the European settlers, and then, post-independence, exacerbated and compounded and made worse by World Bank and IMF policies. In fact, when you look at the history of every single impoverished country, they all have a symbiotic relationship with a wealthy country like ours, always to their detriment.
***
(P.S. This is becoming a book and I just meant to write a simple blog post on justice. Ha!)
***
And as to this question, “If my good fortune comes at the expense of another, is it really good fortune?”…well, I don’t have a simple answer to that either.
Back to my opening anecdote about the Christian who thanked God for his new house, even though it represented hardship for another person, and my statement that such logic has led to genocide….
When Americans thank God for the U.S., for the freedoms we enjoy, I wonder if we would still be so grateful if we thought about the millions of Native American who were killed so we could “get” this land? Or if we thought about the lives that are currently being destroyed because of Native American policies we created long ago, destructive policies that have never been rectified, but which were part of the very basis of our getting this land?
I’m not trying to make an argument of “poor noble savage” against “rich greedy white capitalists.” I’m simply pointing out that it was wrong to kill millions of Native Americans 200 years ago, and that it is wrong that we still have policies that continue to impoverish millions of Native Americans by offering inferior education on the reservations and allowing the cycle of welfare to keep generations in its grip. It was wrong to enslave Africans 200 years ago, and it was wrong to create race-based ghettos a hundred years ago, and it’s wrong that we make only half-hearted efforts to change the situation today.
Is it really God acting on our behalf to give us a cheap house, cheap goods, cheap food, cheap cars…when millions of people worldwide work hard 50 or 60 hours a week to give us those cheap goods and cheap food and cheap cars but yet they still live in shacks and fail to have enough money to feed themselves and their families?
I’m full-circle back to the either-or fallacy: to change the system, to bring justice to millions worldwide, means some of us who have never suffered will have to suffer.
The Old Testament disturbs me because it shows a God who would encourage his people, the Israelites, to commit genocide, and then “give them” the land they had just vacated through murder and mayhem.
I’ve never understood the logic of this kind of justice.
But.
This is the same God my friend was thanking when he said God had given him a cheap house.
This is the same God that Americans thank for giving them this land, despite the millions of lives that were sacrificed as a result.
This is the same God that Afrikaners thanked when they went to war to take land from Xhosas, Zulu, the Khoisan.
This is the same God that Mormons thanked when they came to Utah and massacred American-Indians and then took the land as theirs.
And is this the same God we continue to thank for our good fortune as Americans….? Is it really good fortune if it comes at the expense of millions of people worldwide? I would like to believe in a good and loving God but I can’t believe in the “good and loving” God that many American Christians define as being on their side and helping them get the things they both want and need….not when it comes at the expense of other people. Either that’s a fucked up God or those people are sadly, sadly mistaken—they call it “God” when it’s really injustice operating in their favor. (Ah, here we are, back to my either-or fallacy….Is there a third option?)
***
Daily, my emotional level is kept on a low simmer as I contemplate the multiple ways that American culture, lifestyle, and politics perpetuates poverty around the world. I feel overwhelmed every time I go to the grocery store and realize that, no matter what, shopping means that I’m participating in global oppression.
I realize I must eat, and that the grocery store is my only option as long as I live here….
Where does an individual begin, if he or she wants to right wrongs that exist on a global scale and that we all participate in?
And what does an individual like my friend do when they realize that it’s wrong to expose one woman’s shame in order to change a global injustice?
I wish I had an answer.
My mother used to read books that had titles like People Pleaser: Learn How to Say No. She used to say this was a real problem for women—we struggle to say no, we want to please others. I don’t know if that’s really true for the majority of women, but my people pleasing mother certainly raised a people pleasing daughter. I feel tremendous guilt when I tell somebody, “No.”
I was the 16-year-old teenager who didn’t really want to have sex with my boyfriend…but couldn’t say no. And once you’ve said yes to having sex with your boyfriend, how do you go back and say no? I tried but it was impossible. There’s a line in one of my all-time favorite short stories, “Lust” by Susan Minot, that describes it perfectly: “Then they get mad after when you say enough is enough. After, when it’s easier to explain that you don’t want to. You wouldn’t dream of saying that maybe you weren’t really ready to in the first place.”
Why was I more afraid of saying “no” to my boyfriend’s insistent demands for sex than dealing with the emotional consequences of saying yes? Continue reading ‘Saying no to sex, Christians, and charities…saying yes to the eternal Why?’
What does it mean to have a home? Is it a place or the people in a place that make something “home”? I happen to think it’s both. Our attachment begins to the people in a place, but every place’s unique history produces a particular emotional and cultural aura.
For years, I’ve considered El Paso home. What I love about El Paso: my family, my two best friends and their families, my husband’s family, the gang at Cinco Puntos Press, the latino culture, the interesting and complex history of the Border region that is like no place else in the United States, the immigrant sensibility of “work hard and don’t blame anybody but yourself if you don’t succeed,” the Mexican food (!), J-Town, the mixture of Spanish and English, and the glorioius desert landscape of mountain and plain.
Lately, the idea of El Paso as “home” has been changing to “El Paso is my hometown.” Continue reading ‘Home and Community’
