Bricks by Angie Chatman

I teach at the local community college. I’m assigned a combination of the intro to composition courses, I and II, and sections of ABE – adult basic education – reading and writing. ABE students include single mothers, former guests of the state’s prison system, displaced factory works, and new immigrants from worn torn countries like Bosnia, Sudan, and Somalia. At the urban branch of this central Iowa academic institution, the population is diverse economically and culturally. Approximately sixty different languages can be heard in the hallways. At my job I am continuously reminded about the ways in which we communicate – language and meaning.

As an exercise in my class, I often use the prompt where students generate, then choose one word from a list of nouns and another from a list of verbs, and write a short piece which incorporates both words. This time ‘brick’ and ‘build’ were on the lists. To my surprise very few essays had anything to do with housing construction, or that yellow road in Oz. Instead, a handful of students wrote about illegal drug dealing, specifically a drug deal gone awry since they had already learned, and generally adhered to the maxim ‘write what you know’.

A brick is a package of cocaine. Large distributors stack these bricks in consistent-size pallets just like any other product for sale at Costco or WalMart. I did not know this. I shared my ignorance with my class who thought me hopelessly bourgeois, although that is not the word they used. I redeemed myself somewhat by explaining that I grew up on the south side of Chicago before Mr. Obama’s change in status brought the Secret Service into the area.  And, I return home often to shop on Michigan Avenue, and to update my ghetto pass.

After this brief digression, I took advantage of the ‘teachable moment’ to facilitate a discussion about metaphor. Fundamentally, metaphor is a comparison of two objects. As described in the text, Introducing Metaphor by University of Birmingham (UK) lecturers, Murray Knowles and Rosamund Moon, metaphor consists of three parts. There is the vehicle –brick, the meaning – a physical, quantifiable unit, and the connection between the hard, red material used in manufacturing buildings, and the packs of white powder. In this case their shared characteristic is stackability. It’s the third part that reflects experience. Before this class, I didn’t make the same connection between the two kinds of bricks. Now I do.

Hopefully, what my students learn from this exercise is that their experience is as valid as anyone else’s. What is important in a writing class is how that experience is translated onto the page. Even if I didn’t get their metaphor, that doesn’t mean that they’ll get a bad grade.

Unfortunately, this has not been the same response from the publishing industry.

In my journey from writer to published author, I recognize that my language needs to appeal my ‘ideal reader’ (to borrow a phrase from Stephen King’s On Writing) as well as to the gatekeepers of the traditional industry – agents and editors. Figurative language is one way the publishing industry delineates books. This is an issue because I’m an African American writer whose primary characters are African American. But, it’s also because I grew up in Chicago, live in Iowa – where an elevator is not just a car that goes up and down in a building – and came of age in the 1970’s. Or, as my white, southern, friend and teacher, Ashley Warlick once shared with me when I whined about this situation over lunch, “Sometimes I get sick and tired of explaining what a double-wide is.”

But publishing is a business. Writing is an art. My bliss, my joy, comes from the art. So, in revision I ask myself the following questions:

• Where in my experience is the metaphor coming from?
• What connection am I trying to make between the two objects?
• Have I been successful?  Will my ‘ideal reader’ understand? Or, is there a better way to communicate what I’m trying to explain?

The first question is the most difficult because sometimes I have no idea where the metaphor came from. Those are usually the best ones. Creativity happens in the spaces between memory and mastery of craft, between experience and exposition. The key is to own that experience and present it authentically. Even if people don’t ‘get’ a metaphor, without a doubt they ‘get’ sincerity, integrity and honesty. So, as one student , “Man up and be real.”

My job as a teacher is to help my students learn about metaphor and the techniques of exposition. But most of all, my job is to reassure my students that their experience matters. And oftentimes, especially when one of those rejection slips comes in the postal or electronic mailbox, I have to reassure myself.