Patrick James Response: David Borkwoski, Chapters 9-11

[Sondra Perl]

#677

In the tenth chapter of his memoir, Borkowski analyses the unique aspects of his experience in academia as compared to other working class academics, acknowledging the differences between “scholar boys” such as Richard Rodriguez and John Edgar Wideman and himself. “In the end,” he writes, “there was never much distance between friends and family while I was home because I’ll always be ‘the one who got shot’ (173-174). Once again, his traumatic experience with the police proves surprisingly beneficial, in that it gives him an unexpected freedom to embrace his working-class background within the ivory tower of the American university. Borkowski’s slow progression toward becoming a college professor allows him to remain strongly connected to his family and community. He doesn’t feel the need to reinvent himself, to baptize himself into an identity hinging on snobbery or cultural capital. And he seems to feel at ease with both his past and his present. “I wasn’t a Scholarship Boy and I came late to the academic circle” he states. “When I did arrive I may have been older (not necessarily wiser) than the average Scholarship Boy or Girl and a bit less prickly about my past” (175).

In reflecting on his past, Browkowksi engages with his early education at St. Charles, one of the more painful sections of his memoir. In particular, he describes the emotional and physical abuse enacted by the nuns, an especially harrowing example being an anecdote in which “Sister Louis Marie slammed classmate Jay (Pooh-Stain) Ruane repeatedly over the head with a hefty geography book because he’d scratched his initials on its cover” (187). From my perspective as a millennial, educated in public schools, the shame, anxiety, and violence permeating Borkowski’s early school days is shocking and difficult to understand. And what is particularly interesting is the manner in which this violence is, for the most part, unleashed on the male population of St. Charles. Borkowski writes, “I disliked teachers, especially the nuns, who seemed to enjoy belting kids, although the girls generally evaded their assaults. Any ‘bad boy’ might be slapped in the face or have his hands whacked with a thick wooden ruler” (186). This detail echoes Borwkoski’s statements earlier in the book regarding the inherent violence of male culture in his Staten Island community. In chapter three he writes, “I was raised by a big bully. I learned to ‘be a man’ at the feet of the Great White Father. Doubling its impact, this puffed-up period in American history developed alongside a culture long obsessed with guns and violence” (39). This violence was not only deployed in cultural representations of the military, but through the pedagogical efforts of the church as well. And as one considers the trajectory of his education, it’s interesting to consider the ways that violence weaves itself through Borkowski’s narrative: from the gunshots that operate as his conversion moment, to the face -slaps and head-slams of his Catholic school.

Borkwosi’s ability to engage with his past while simultaneously living out his present remarkably enables him to thrive as an educator. And if anything, I feel that this is where the memoir has been leading us all along: to his success in the classroom, where he realizes his true potential as a teacher. As an educator, Borkowski’s reflections on his background enable him to be acutely aware of the intellectual diversity of his students. Consequently, he stresses democracy, and he feels “obliged to invite all [his] students into the conversation, generating as many voices as possible” (202). And I believe it’s his own ability to access his constituent selves—the juvenile delinquent, the scholar, the teacher—that allows him to give his students the space they need to discover their voices as well. In a way, the memoir is a performance of this discovery.

The memoir concludes with a short, lyric chapter in which Borkowski meditates on the circular, paradoxical nature of his shooting: “Sometimes the best education begins at The End” (210) he writes, acknowledging the strange path he has taken as a scholar and teacher. Personally, I feel that after the long, analytical chapter on working-class academics, this chapter is especially beautiful. Here, Borkwoski’s writing voices enacts the wonder of his experience. “The here-and-now is the burning sun of enlightenment,” he writes. “Accepting it brings a groundswell of enigmatic energy and power” (210). For all his analysis and dissection, Borkowski cannot evade the more baffling aspects of his experience. And as he finishes his book, he does not skirt away from the holy mystery of what he has been through.

Having finished the memoir, I’d like to hear more about Borkwoski’s experiences in grad school, and his work as a scholar. In the book, we get much about his experiences teaching, but I’d like to know more about his time in his PhD program. I’d also like to hear about his family now—are they aware that he has written a memoir in which they figure prominently? What is it like to tell your story when it directly involves other people? Does their account of things differ from his, and does his point of view take on new authority now that it is being published?

[Sondra Perl]

#683

Dear Patrick, I am also fascinated by the issue of the actually publishing a memoir piece which, necessarily, involves one’s nearest and dearest. For me, the “mind-at-work” qualities of the writing that you’re talking about make the prospect seem even more agonizing, since having people see my mind at work is one of my pet paranoias. So the prospect of my friends and family reading, not just what I think about them, but the process of me thinking about them, seems absolutely terrifying.

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