Dungeons and Dragons in AP Lit – Addendum to Part 1 – White Supremacy – What Counts as “Literature”

“What do D&D, the Odyssey and Hip-Hop Have in Common?” This question may feel strange because your vision of D&D may conjure up some very specific images of a very specific type of white male. Wanting to press at this a little, when I first posed this question to my class, I then I asked my class if anyone knew how to freestyle.  I readily admitted that I myself did not, but that I respected the skill, and thought it could teach us a lot about what I was trying to share about orality and literature.  Everyone looked at each other awkwardly – this is an overwhelmingly-majority white AP class, and gives all the vibes that classes like that often give, at least initially.  Think “Lutheran church on a cold Sunday morning.”  it’s not that they don’t want to learn – they do – but they also have been deeply influenced with the idea that good students sit quietly, listen, take notes, sometimes perhaps raise their hands but generally consume information, don’t produce it until formally asked. 

One of the three Black students in the class raised her hand and said, ‘well yeah I do, you want me to try?”  She rattled off a few clever bars about playing D&D in English class, and learning about oral poetry.  Everyone was impressed.  I asked her to talk a little about how she did it.  She said she wasn’t super-clear on the process but knew rhymes and timing were really important.  Soon after that, when I asked the class to share about poetic, story or singing traditions that were important in their family or culture, a second Black student in the class (there are 3) raised her hand and started talking about Yoruba aphorisms and what it means for her elders  to share wisdom through these little metaphorical sayings, and how hard it is to translate them into English.  One white kid said that jokes exist within his family (he said they were Irish), but wasn’t willing to share any jokes himself.  One white Jewish student talked about a song they sing at shabbat sometimes.  Most of the rest of the white kids honestly did not seem to understand what I was asking.  Or maybe they understood but just did not have any examples they could share.  Someone else mentioned the “happy birthday” song.  

My schools often runs racial-equity focused professional development experiences, and encourages us to carry those resources into our classroom in creative ways.  At several workshops we’ve read Tema Okun’s article “White Supremacy Culture Characteristics.”  In that, Okun identifies “worship of the written word” as just such a “white supremacy cultural characteristic.”  If you just rolled your eyes, and want to start talking about how she’s white and “woke is broke” and you think somehow this is suggesting that Black people can’t read or write or whatever other things you’ve heard about what she’s saying or why you shouldn’t listen, I beg of you, give me a few paragraphs.

First – it’s okay that she’s white.  White people can evaluate white supremacy as a culture as well.  In fact many Black authors and other authors of color have insisted for years that white people are going to need to be important voices in the conversation, that it’s not Black peoples’ job alone (or even primarily) to take apart the system that oppresses them.  

If you think “woke is broke” honestly I’d be surprised if you’re still reading but let me say this: I have spent years studying “the classics” – Greek and Latin, western philosophy, political theory.  I am not sweeping all of anything by saying that I think Tema Okun is onto something.  In fact, in the first entry here I cited almost exclusively “mainstream,” even conservative Classics and Indo-European philological scholarship to ground my approach.  One of those mainstream scholars, Alfred Lord, writes the following, in the opening pages of his 1954 book The Singer of Tales:

“The term ‘literature,’ presupposing the use of letters, assumes that verbal works of imagination are transmitted by means of writing and reading. The expression ‘oral literature’ is obviously a contraction in terms… [but] We ought to take a fresh look at tradition, considered not as the inert acceptance of a fossilized corpus of themes and convention, but as an organic habit of re-creating what has been received and is handed on.  It may be that we ought to re-examine the concept of originality, which is relatively modern… There may be other and betters ways of being original than that concern for, the writer’s own individuality”

I think there’s a lot going on here that resonates very clearly with Okun’s idea of “worship of the written word.”  The idea is not to say that writing is inherently white-supremacist, that people of color only know how to talk and listen, while only white people read and write, or anything like that.  To me the issue is not with the written word, but with the ‘worship” of it – the veneration of it vis-a-vis other forms of cultural expression.  We can even root this in as mainstream of a guideline as the common core’s English standards: English Language Arts classes are supposed to teach “writing” and “speaking and listening.”  Honestly how much of the time does “speaking and listening” get its way in there?  Maybe you had an awkward “persuasive speaking” unit where you taught the class how to tie a tie (or even a whole “public speaking” semester or year-long course), some discussions – but when did you ever learn about oral composition as a vital modality of culture?

The first written texts we have are from about 3200BC.  The first spoken language, scientists think, probably emerged about 115,000 years ago.  The first humans probably evolved about 2 million years ago.  Going way back, cultural expression would have originated in dance and body language in that earliest period.  But that 113,000-3200BC part – that would have been a period when all world cultures were evolving modes of expression that were primarily oral.  There was some visual art in that period, but as Watkins (?) points out, it’s actually really simple visual art, especially if we compare it with oral texts we know existed by the time written language emerged.  

So what are we leaving behind when we focus nearly exclusively on “literature” in our course and exam titles (i.e, “Advanced Placement English: Literature and Composition”)?  To me, it’s a lot.  And if we look around the world in the present, too, we find a wide range of oral cultures generate things that are as rich (if in different ways) than Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy or any of your favorite 19th century authors or whomever you currently hold as the pinnacle of western civilized arts.   

Looking around in time and space, I think we can fairly say that if we only look at things that are written, we’ll miss out on a lot.  And to be honest at some level I think that’s all Okun is saying, at least as it applies to literature.  To build on the “white supremacy” idea, I think part of what she’s saying is that when we center written texts, we are generally centering texts created by rich and powerful and (mostly) white people.  Not because they’re somehow better at writing but that they have historically had more economic access to the means of written production, and more ability to control systems that lead to those texts’ distributions and preservation.  And of course, those texts have often obscured aspects of the truth that the white folks didn’t want to write down.  

I think Okun is pointing, first and foremost, to a power dynamic – Frederick Douglass, for example, learned how to read and write, but had to do so secretly and illegally.  Douglass’s earliest linguistic experiences were much more meaningfully oral – David Blight details this in his biography, discussing the role that underground Black churches in Baltimore did to shape Douglass’s syntax, diction and patterns of allusion.  When he wrote them down, in some ways, he was doing something similar to what whoever wrote down the Odyssey was – transcribing thoughts and feelings that he had composed orally along the way.  

This same point holds in other ways for many, many texts.  By centering orality, not only do we avail ourselves of a whole set of “texts” we might have ignored (texts, for example, that do not exist on paper but only in living traditions), but we also discover a new dimension in old texts.  Shakespeare comes alive, as another example, in a new way, when we remember that many of these plays began as semi-improvised roles that individual actors often embellished or developed.  When we remember that the folio was a posthumous collaboration among many people who had performed and expanded these texts orally.  We find whole new ways of understanding the internal logic of those texts.  Even 19th century English literature, the seemingly least oral-poetic body of work we have, existed in the important context of oral performance, books being expensive enough to make individual reading of them cost-prohibitive for large segments of the population, not to mention that well fewer than half even of English people could read or write when Dickens, for example, was writing.  Many people listened to these books read aloud in homes, public readings, etc, and many of the authors were well aware that this was the context in which their work would be consumed.  So when we engage with it in that way, we may hear new wrinkles.

If your first thought when I say “D&D” is to picture a room-full of white males on some television show you watched a long time ago, I get that. But think about this: D&D begins in the written word, but it helps students free themselves from its “worship” as they learn to extemporize around details that provide guide-lines, but not determinative experiences. They learn that extemporizing based on provided sources is something they already know how to do, and something they can engage with joyfully.   The Iliad and the Odyssey likely began in the absence of writing, and hip-hop began in a more hybrid context – writing, sometimes in public and sometimes in private, and sometimes illegal, mixed with sung and spoken lines that often unpacked layers of irony and interpretation.  Here I think Henry Louis Gates’ work in The Signifying Monkey is really important (in fact in its second edition, his introduction offers a brief celebration of hip-hop as “signifying on steroids”).  Hip hop also uses other “fixed” cultural artifacts, like records, samples, film clips, and riffs on them to generate rhythm and make space for improvisation that often impressive for its efficiency, dexterity and surprising juxtapositions, just the traits that make for a good DM or a good Homeric Bard.  I thought if my students could experience this, they might free themselves (just a little bit) from the grip of white supremacy culture.