One or Two Things I Learned for Sure at the KSU English Department
(After Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for Sure)
There’s one or two things I learnt for sure at KSU, and one of them is that I can cry.
It’s not something I was sure of before. I always thought I was incapable of being moved to tears except in extreme anger. But I learnt this on my way to Manhattan, in the airport in Colombo, Sri Lanka. I found myself crying for myself, for what I was leaving behind, and perhaps, for what I was coming towards. I had dreamed of doing an MA for so long but now as I was about to embark on this dream, I was overcome by what it meant to leave your home behind, to be away from my support networks, to become part of a diaspora in a space that I didn’t know or really understand. I cried also in hope and expectation of what I might become and be. It’s a lesson I keep coming back to each time I step away from a space I mark as home. When I cry now, I don’t cry for a country or a state. But always for a person I journey to and away from and for a space for becoming.
There’s one or two things I learnt for sure at KSU, and one of them is that I had to learn how to write.
This was a lesson that I came to very late, as I was finishing my MA thesis. I had to learn that I wrote so well that I could hide myself behind academic conventions and theories and never come out. It was Tushabe, my friend and committee member, the one who I constantly disagreed with in her African Feminisms course but still wanted on my committee, that pointed this out when she read the last draft of my dissertation. I’ve sat with this comment for years now. I am still trying to learn how to not use my writing as a shield, to be brave, and open. And that to do this, I needed to bring what I learnt in Traci Brimhall’s poetry writing course at KSU into my academic writing. So, now I write with prompts, in experiments, as openings, and hopefully, as invitations not just to others but also to myself. Be brave, I tell myself now as I sit in front of my computer and stare at the blinking cursor on my black page.
“You’re an unteachable student,” Prabha Manuratne a close friend who was also my teacher a long time ago tells me. To her I might say, she was a tough act to follow at KSU. When I came to the English Department at KSU nine years after her I was often introduced as “Prabha’s student.” Being her student was one of the first things I discussed with her (and eventually my) wonderful supervisor Greg Eislein when we first met. If I’m honest, I would tell you that I think a lot about being an unteachable student. About how learning and teaching are such different things, and how to make space for all kinds of learning journeys, particularly the ones you can never plan for or direct. I’m now a(n unteachable) student again and I’m grateful that I’m still learning today from amazing teachers both formally and informally. But there’s one or two things I learnt for sure at KSU, and one of them is that it takes a wonderful mix of kindness, confidence, and smarts to teach unteachable students like me. I know this because this is how I learnt at KSU.
There’s one or two things I learnt for sure at KSU, and one of them is that I had to learn how to wrestle.
No, not wrestle as a sport. But wrestle with theory. I learnt this from Stuart Hall, who passed away the year I started at KSU and whose work we read as part of the Cultural Studies Mini-Seminar that year. It was there that I learnt from Hall that “the only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency.” I’ve kept coming back to Hall and to this understanding of theory even as I keep working out how to wrestle with theory and the detours it forces me to take. I’m still a “theory junkie” but I’ve learnt that it’s ok to let some theories go and it’s ok to keep coming back to some theories over and over again. That the theoretical work that matters forces us to continuously wrestle both with the theories we grasp for and the specific contexts that keep moving us and calling us into being. I’ve learnt that theory both transforms us and is transformed by us, and that that’s ok. We just have to keep wrestling.
There’s one or two things I learnt for sure at KSU, and one of them is that your community always finds you, particularly when you are at your most vulnerable and feel most alone.
I learnt this even before my orientation to the English MA programme at KSU began. I was sitting alone, wondering how to open a conversation with anyone else in the room when Liz Culpepper walked in, scanned the room, walked up to me, introduced herself, and sat next to me. From her, I learnt that the most important people in your life, the people who see you through the most challenging times and experiences, are the people who find you and sit next to you, where you are, and despite everything else that’s going on around you. And I am grateful to the other people in my community who have kept finding me, and who have sat and keep sitting with me. I don’t know where I would be without you.
It’s hard to imagine that it’s now nearly a decade since I came to the Little Apple and to the English Department at KSU. I’m now in a place that feels a world away from the white limestone buildings and the Konza prairie. But I have carried and will always carry the lessons I learnt at KSU with me, here and always.
I can’t really tell you what you will learn during your time at KSU. But there’s one or two things I learnt for sure at KSU, and one of them is that your actual journeys will always be more incredible than you could ever imagine or plan for.
— Andi Schubert (MA ’16)
Andi Schubert is currently a Ph.D. Student at the Faculty of History of the University of Cambridge with the support of a Gates Cambridge scholarship. He was an MA student at the Department between 2014 and 2016.
K-State English 