Part IV: After September 11 or Rhetoric and the World

In the fall of 2001, our cross-cultural discussion was delayed for a few weeks as a result of the September 11th event but continued without any interruption to the end of the semester. We thought it better to talk to our students on the complexity of the political conflicts we lived in and the human spirit caught in the crossfire before launching any discussion. As a result the students’ responses remained simple, their exchange extremely cautious and alert to each other’s sensitivities, and their evasion of broaching 9-11 issues only too obvious. With the prompts (using Achebe and Bateson), we were careful not to demand that students discuss September 11 and the related news, but the prompts certainly opened the door for discussing this world-consuming event. The near silence of our students on this matter gives us much to think about.

As we look back at our discussion, we are fairly sure that our students were quieted by worries about audience. Peter Elbow's article "Closing My Eyes As I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience" has given us some avenues for reflecting on our students reticence following 9-11. First of all, even though Elbow is critical of the overemphasizing audience, he acknowledges the usefulness of bringing audience into the writing dynamic as we tried to do. For our part, we saw audience as a mind opening tool, a way to broaden our students' thinking. But even in this rather optimistic conviction, audience sounds like a force that works on writers--and not always productively. Audiences range, says Elbow, from the "inviting or enabling" to the "powerfully inhibiting" (51) with many possibilities in-between. He gives one example that resonates with our experience: "When we have to write to readers with whom we have an awkward relationship, we often start beating around the bush and feeling shy or scared, or start to write in a stilted, overly careful style or voice" (52). In terms of voice, our students remained personal and forthright, perhaps because it was a discussion forum, but "overly careful" describes their choice of subject matter fairly well.

Initially, the cross-cultural nature of the the audience seems to be the force the students had to reckon with--Egyptian students being cautious of the emotional impact of September 11 on American students, and American students worried about making remarks that might show prejudice or reveal a naive understanding of world politics. But the rhetorical situation we placed our students in was considerably more complex than that. Cairo students would not only have to imagine their Kansas City readers but would have to consider what their AUC peers thought of their ideas. And Rockhurst students writing about 9-11 issues would have to consider how their words might sound to fellow Americans at a time when public discourse in the United States was the most prescribed it has been in recent memory.

At about the time of our on-line discussion, a journalism professor was publicly rebuked by his university president for an op-ed piece that appeared to show no sympathy for the United States. The professor had said the September 11 attacks were no worse than "the massive acts of terrorism" perpetrated by the United States in countries like Iraq (Fletcher). Expressions of United States nationalism were all over the television, radio, and local newspapers. The pressure went the other way at times, with individuals criticized for their exuberant expressions of patriotism. The rhetoric of the day was often bellicose, catastrophic, and highly emotional. It is not hard to imagine the stifling effect of such a charged environment.

We do not think anyone would fault the students for their choices. Indeed, they may have shown a great deal of wisdom in deciding that they were not ready to address this topic in the complicated arena of our discussion group. They needed the time and they needed the quiet of their own minds to reflect and form their thoughts. Elbow suggests that we need to talk to ourselves before talking to others. He says, "this private discourse can also help public, social writing--help students finally feel full enough of their own thoughts to have some genuine desire to tell them to others" (Elbow's emphasis 65). Our students have unwittingly made us reflect not only upon the social nature of language but also upon the private places we sometimes go to in order to reflect and prepare the words we share with others. Both re-centering and de-centering at the right times could make the world a better place.

We don’t know for certain, even today, whether our extreme worry and fear over our discussion groups in suddenly taking a turn towards a heated political tirade had not in some ways curtailed the vitality and spontaneity of our students’ expressions and thoughts at the time. Their messages, nevertheless, remained focused, delightful, and certainly refreshing vis-à-vis the catastrophic rhetoric we heard from politicians worldwide. The two of us had worked on prompting them with attractive statements on the topic of understanding and the sense of connectedness towards the “other” which seemed to have affected their spirit somehow. In our e-mail conversations with each other, we two did nothing but exchange ideas on the politics of the day with great understanding and sympathy. Conversing outside the discussion forum certainly freed us from some of the constraints our students were under. But just as importantly, we had the benefit of a friendship formed over time. The great respect we had established for each other’s collegiality and human interaction over a year’s teaching collaboration had certainly prepared the ground for a more understanding relationship in times of such turmoil and sadness in the world. Amidst the blinding frenzy that raged through the world at large, it was really striking, in both our teacherly collaborations and in our discussion groups, how good feelings sparkled and thrived among our community of writers.