Composition Forum 45, Fall 2020
http://compositionforum.com/issue/45/

Review of Aneil Rallin’s Dreads and Open Mouths: Living/Teaching/Writing Queerly

Nick Marsellas

Rallin, Aneil. Dreads and Open Mouths: Living/Teaching/Writing Queerly. Litwin Books, 2019. 216 pp.

“He loses consciousness. When he comes to, his body is dismembered. All the body parts are labeled ‘paragraph.’ A voice instructs, ‘you have five minutes to put the paragraphs together in logical order.’” (51)

To be completely candid, before opening Dreads and Open Mouths: Living/Teaching/Writing Queerly, I had every intention to skim it. This is the way many academics have been taught to read academic texts. An inhospitable approach that treats the genre of the academic book as an artefact of scholarly overwork and credentialing rather than a generous offering. I planned to read most of the introduction and conclusion, then spend a short afternoon taking notes on what I imagined would be 3-5 additional chapters that supported the broader thesis of the book. I can say with pleasure that Rallin made this impossible. Intending to get a start on the book’s first few pages, I had read six of the book’s twelve chapters before I realized that I was captivated and might need to set the book down to let the ideas settle. This book is a work of queer composition. Transgressive and incisive. Simultaneously unstable and unshakable. But above all, seductive.

Dreads and Open Mouths is a beautiful examination of teaching and writing towards liberation. Aneil Rallin’s writing is deeply intimate. If you are uncomfortable with that closeness, you’re welcome to call it autoethnographic at first, but Rallin’s written embodiment of queer of color critique demands intimacy as critical methodology. Their writing explores the contradictions that come of intimacy as methodology in an institution and culture that demand isolation—as they painfully show in their witnessing of racial profiling on their commute. “I want to stay with the boy, to affirm that the boy was not resisting. But as my stop approaches, I think of the classes I have to teach and the students waiting for me.” (135) On the train, they are thinking of their responsibility to their students, but in class they are unable to shake their responsibility to the boy. Their writing asks us to take responsibility seriously not just as an facet of our professional responsibilities but as a tactic of resistance against systems that benefit from our isolation.

Throughout Rallin’s book, they write deftly on the connections between writing pedagogy and resistance against state violence. Finishing this book just before the beginning of the George Floyd protests, I am reminded that the work being done in our classrooms is just as political as the work being done in the streets. That the taking apart of the English language—understanding its internal logics, unmaking it, and refashioning it for our own purposes—can itself be decolonizing and liberating work. Dreads and Open Mouths is an examination of the university as a site of linguistic coloniality, racism, and domination, yet also a celebration of the work that can be done despite the university’s participation in violent systems. Rallin presents excerpts of writings by Meena Alexander, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cherríe Moraga, bell hooks, Anu Aneja, Jasbir Puar, Gloria Anzaldúa, June Jordan, Claudia Rankine, Toni Cade Bambara, M. NourbeSe Philip, and so many others, as a way of paying homage to the lineage of liberatory thought that has flourished in the shadows of the university.

“Taking risks in writing is not a cliché. […] Risky writing enacts its own rhetoric. The risk shapes the rhetoric. [Students] imagine taking risks and confronting the consequences. There are always consequences. The consequences are not the same for everyone.” (104)

I think also on Rallin’s work in conjunction with the looming COVID-19 crisis on university campuses. Rallin reminds us that risk is very real, and that writing and teaching writing is full of potential pain, some invited and some unexpected. They ask us to consider the pain of language work, both the pain imposed from others and the pain of unmaking and rediscovering ourselves outside of the stories told about us. This pain can be helpfully or detrimentally destructive—and Rallin spends much of their book contemplating the nature of risk as it pertains to writing and the teaching of writing. They also highlight disappointment with universities, concerned not with supporting students and teachers as they navigate their own sense of risk but instead concerned only with risks to the institution. This book speaks presciently of the risks to which not only our universities but also our professional organizations and departments of longstanding colleagues are willing to subject us in the name of order, decorum, convenience, and the bottom line.

“[The note form] offers no predetermined resolution, no unequivocal results. It allows me to question the uses of language, to explore the possibilities of linguistic and intellectual pleasures, the axes of power, the politics of nation states and institutions. I present these notes together to create the effect of synchrony, not equivalence.” (21)

Rather than a traditional academic text written around a central thesis and each chapter acting as rhetorical support for that thesis, Rallin writes Dreads and Open Mouths in the form of notes. Each chapter is ten to twenty pages of notes braiding pedagogical responsibilities, the queer dissolution of the self, ontological similarities between authoritarian states and authoritarian classrooms, and a decades-long captivation with the sensuality of language. The note form, untethered to responsibilities of “clarity of central argument” and “responding to a skeptical audience,” is able to captivate, allowing readers the pleasure of noticing the connections between sections. If the typical academic form is an author drawing our attention to the sky and pointing out constellation after constellation, Rallin invites us instead to an evening of stargazing. We are invited to witness moments of deep joy, pain, disenchantment, fidelity, and a host of other engagements with writing and teaching towards justice. To attempt to wrangle these disparate notes into a single rhetorical gesture would do a disservice to the breadth of scope that the note form allows.

“The boy says I want to have an ongoing affair with language. I can tell, he says, your body obsesses over language, is addicted to language. You desire the love of language.” (81)

I’m grateful to have been reintroduced to Rallin, particularly at this moment. I had all but lost faith in writing by academics, myself included. Dreads and Open Mouths is a powerful reminder that our work can still be done with playful wit, rhetorical grace, and uncompromising convictions. Dreads and Open Mouths reaffirms that there is still something of deep value in these academic communities and writing practices, even as neoliberalism tightens its grip on the university system. It’s clear that Rallin is in deep, passionate love with language and that they are shattered and transformed (as are we) through their communion with the page.

“The teacher says if you learn the language well enough, there will be no need to fear it. He doesn’t tell the teacher that is what he fears the most, that he will learn the language of the state, the language of the oppressor, the language of the patriarch, the powerful, too well.” (58)

The basic purpose of a book review is to convey and evaluate the following:

Authorial Expertise: I only know Rallin as well as anyone who has read this book. I initially felt deeply skeptical of their flirtations on the page, perhaps an internalization of the “gay predator” myth that stratifies the queer community by age, or of the long history of exorcising the intimate (especially the erotic) from university spaces. Yet, by the end of this book, I trust Rallin. And I long for more writing like theirs that brings with it decades of experience enacting intimacy and vulnerability and care as a way of understanding our relationship to language and to each other.

Strengths of the Book: In addition to plentiful highlighting, I drew twelve stars and four hearts in the margins of this short book. I feel bashful to admit this, like a child who has been discovered doodling the name of a crush in their notebook. “Nick <3’s queer of color composition pedagogy.” Bashful but grateful for the permanence of the marginalia when I set the book down to do the work it asks of its readers.

Engagement with the Field: There are roughly 100 self-standing invocations of other writers, about one every other page. Something between an epigraph, a block quote, and a tender embrace. There is no “they say, I say” shoehorning,{1} just appreciation of intellectual community and a dance of many voices harmonizing.

Suggested Improvements: That this book would not be seen as “risky” by academic publishers. That Rallin was already established as a canonical figure in the field of queer pedagogy. That I was assigned this book in the first year of my graduate program rather than finding it just as I am leaving.

Suggested Audiences for the Book: Teachers with a fondness for uncertainty and play. Writers who feel disassembled by their process. Students attempting to wrest control of themselves from a language intended to destroy them. Scholars disenchanted with an institution set on replicating hierarchies of privilege. Activists committed to the seriousness of language and intimacy as sites of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation struggle. Your mothers. Your lovers. Appreciators of beautiful and purposeful prose.

Notes

1. Forgive my poking fun, I’m sure Graff can take it.