push b(l)ack unicorn

The Black Unicorn

by Audre Lorde

The black unicorn is greedy.

The black unicorn is impatient.

'The black unicorn was mistaken

for a shadow or symbol

and taken

through a cold country

where mist painted mockeries

of my fury.

It is not on her lap where the horn rests

but deep in her moonpit

growing.

The black unicorn is restless

the black unicorn is unrelenting

the black unicorn is not

free.

In the brilliant, heartbreaking novel Push, the young, black Precious protagonist writes in her journal:

Ms. Rain say we got to write in now in our journals. Say each of our lives is important. She got us a book from Audre Lorde... Say each of us has a story to tell. What is a black unicorn? I don't really understand the poem but I like it." (p. 96)

Reading Push was something like that for me, finding someone else's story, wanting to understand, like Precious, liking the idea of the black unicorn who pushes against oppression, who is restless, who resists and challenges myth...

I almost wish I could say that I read this book aesthetically first. I started to anyway... I closed my door, pulled up the covers, and prepared to enter this fictional world, looking forward to getting absorbed in the novel, much like someone offered me an afternoon off from my life, to see through someone else's eyes. Nothing like a good transaction. And I did, at first, couldn't put it down, lived in it all afternoon. But in truth, I couldn't stay in that lived through moment. No purely aesthetic experience... no escape fiction here...

Instead I found myself thinking about the teacher's role (like Treavor), stepping out of the book into my educator stance, admiring in an efferent way Ms. Rain's culturally-relevant model of literacy acquisition. I was all over the place, aesthetic here, efferent there, caught in Rosenblatt's two concurrent streams of response, evoking, reacting, marking things I loved, feeling my heart swell, then finding patterns, then crying, then wondering what I'd post (yes, that bit from school that you can't forget - that you'll be doing something with the book afterward, couldn't help but shape my reading experience).

I felt so small when I was done reading, so tiny, so protected and naive. I didn't want to post right away. I wanted to let it settle, to create some space between that lived through experience and see what would become of the book as it grew in my mind. And then comes the interpretation...

I'm still working through that, finding connections. mostly to how the experience of the book might change who I am, how I see difference, how I teach, what I teach... Like Anna, I found some connection with Peter Johnston, who spoke to us on Saturday about the value of putting yourself next to someone who is different than you, opening up to difference as a place for learning from each other, doing democracy now in our classrooms, so that our students can do democracy in the future. It's what Precious does in this book as she grapples with understanding drug addicts and Rita who has AIDS, who "Was one of dese pepul an she is GOOD. I luv her." (p. 106). And then I come back to Rosenblatt, to the empowerment of the reader in a democracy, who learns to make a critical reading of his wor(l)ds.

I don't fancy myself a literary critic (I don't think I meet Rosenblatt's qualification of greater proficiency and professionalism - p.161), but I did do some "shuttling between the two modes" for sure. I did "mingle" the "aesthetic evocation with efferent analysis" (p. 173). In my interpretation of the transaction, I couldn't help but want to step outside of the book, to find out what the black unicorn was, to feel that resistance, to ask what Precious has to do with me, to discover what kind of teacher of teachers I'll be in this democracy.

"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives." - Audre Lorde

Push.