Sex Roulette My Soul's Lament

I recall the day I enter the first floor of Broad Hall, named as it is for Eli Broad, it makes sense it's sterile, inhuman, drenched in excessive A.C.  I note the way the walls mute the peaceful sounds of students gathered about on the grounds of Pitzer College.  I take the central hallway to a door near the back and stand in front of it for a moment.

I feel like a strange combination of animal and machine.  I know I am alive but I no longer feel I am.  The head games and the sex games of Pitzer have taken their toll.

All faces turn to me.  I feel naked, afraid, ashamed.  This feels like going to a dentist who plans to remove your jaw.

Two psychologists are present.  One of them is a social psychologist and the other practices. "organizational studies."  The former is a gambler with an eye for hot ladies. The latter is some twisted up version of Bert combined with Ernie minus all the good.

They ask questions, they don't listen to answers.

The Bert/Ernie chimera who has overseen all of my sexual harassment investigations has a nasty habit of visually undressing you as he passes you in the narrow hallway. Along with the fact he is a twin, he is also the son of Jerry Lewis, a local GOP politician.  But more than anything else that you may remember about him, are his bulbous eyes fixated at breast and thigh level.  "There's nothing more I can do for you," he will say to me when I receive the unsurprising news that his investigation has proven "inconclusive."

I found it rather telling that neither the Psych nor the Philosophy department offer anything whatsoever in the major foundations of 20th Century thought in their fields.  Lacking continental philosophy AND psychoanalysis, the social sciences are shot to hell and replaced with Sex Roulette.

I struggle to keep myself intact as we enter into the topic of my harassment.

A sound that's part animal and part machine, emits from my mouth.  I have never heard my body make this sound, not even in childbirth.  For I don't recognize it as my voice even as it takes my breath away. Then I double over in pain.

Sex Roulette My Soul's Lament

I recall the day I enter the first floor of Broad Hall, named as it is for Eli Broad, it makes sense it's sterile, inhuman, drenched in excessive A.C.  I note the way the walls mute the peaceful sounds of students gathered about on the grounds of Pitzer College.  I take the central hallway to a door near the back and stand in front of it for a moment.

I feel like a strange combination of animal and machine.  I know I am alive but I no longer feel I am.  The head games and the sex games of Pitzer have taken their toll.

All faces turn to me.  I feel naked, afraid, ashamed.  This feels like going to a dentist who plans to remove your jaw.

Two psychologists are present.  One of them is a social psychologist and the other practices. "organizational studies."  The former is a gambler with an eye for hot ladies. The latter is some twisted up version of Bert combined with Ernie minus all the good.

They ask questions, they don't listen to answers.

The Bert/Ernie chimera who has overseen all of my sexual harassment investigations has a nasty habit of visually undressing you as he passes you in the narrow hallway. Along with the fact he is a twin, he is also the son of Jerry Lewis, a local GOP politician.  But more than anything else that you may remember about him, are his bulbous eyes fixated at breast and thigh level.  "There's nothing more I can do for you," he will say to me when I receive the unsurprising news that his investigation has proven "inconclusive."

I found it rather telling that neither the Psych nor the Philosophy department offer anything whatsoever in the major foundations of 20th Century thought in their fields.  Lacking continental philosophy AND psychoanalysis, the social sciences are shot to hell and replaced with Sex Roulette.

I struggle to keep myself intact as we enter into the topic of my harassment.

A sound that's part animal and part machine, emits from my mouth.  I have never heard my body make this sound, not even in childbirth.  For I don't recognize it as my voice even as it takes my breath away. Then I double over in pain.

When Professors Misbehave, or Beauty is the Defiance of Authority

By the time I would unveil my research on William Carlos Williams for the faculty of Pitzer College, March 6, 2009, I was once again under their investigation.  It was nothing new to me, and however Kafkaesque it may seem to you, I knew, like Gregor, how to wield a carapace.

I launch Power Point, pass around my hand-outs, then can't resist writing a poem on the chalkboard.
Two of my harassers are in the audience; among them are members of committees that follow their lead.

Despite the negative climate, my research is flowering.  It lines the bookcases of my offices, at home and at work. My Williams collection started off greatly blessed by the contribution of three or four books by Jack Agüeros.  I can still here him say, "don't call them professors, call them torturers," when he reflected on some of his own struggles with academics.

I have a great memory of walking with Jack through East Harlem, and he's telling me how he was often compared to Williams based on his appearance.

And up at the Paterson falls, I was also made out to resemble a Williams character.  When in one of her spontaneous observations Dr. Theodora Graham (or as she prefers Teddy Graham like the chocolate covered cookie) looked me dead in the eyes saying, “you’re just the type of woman Williams would have loved, a Latina like Elena."  

Though I didn't talk about it at Pitzer due to the chances it would be skewed, Williams loved to love the human form and would not shy from drawing portraits of nudes in his work: himself, Elsie, Flossie, mothers in labor, housewives in slippers, newborn infants, the erotic dancer in "The Desert Music." 

--

It’s been a long week.  I’m wearing my usual: a suit. I enter the stuffy room. It’s late afternoon.  I see all around me, the faculty of Pitzer College.  Reaching for their conscience, I tell them Williams came under an investigation for the same work I present to you today.

Just for the simple pleasure of it, I look at Alan Jones and say, "did you notice those lines there? Can you read them out loud for me?"

"Beauty is the Defiance of Authority, " I hear him say as he repeats after Williams.

Later that year and half way through fall semester, when he comes to my office to notify me that I am not to return to my courses, by decision of the faculty, he adds that as he censors me, he "must wear another hat."

With that miserable announcement, all I can see is a surreal joker's hat in two tone colors.  In a flash, it appears and in the next disappears.  He casts a mock piteous glance at me, while I cling to my students' research proposals.

Like my own research, my students' research, is now undergoing a process or dimension of censorship. I think of Ovid's Persephone, as the pain of my own and my students' research are effectively silenced by Pitzer professors: "I cried for myself but more for my flowers!"

Gold Chain On Her Chest

As I had written before, Laura Harris is less than 5 feet tall.  But don't let her size fool you.  The formula that applies here is:  the smaller the size, the greater the rate of vengeance.  She's so short her shadow is taller than her.  This also held true for the fiercest avenger on Pitzer College's payroll as I hope you will come to see in this post.  She was about 4 and 1/2 feet herself.

Given that we are now no longer "whistleblower" versus "boss" but also "plaintiff" and "defendant," I am thrust into a realm of higher order mental malice.  This new ferocity comes in the figure of Arlene Prater, a leading attorney in the firm, "Best, Best, and Krieger,"  a corporate callous could not be better founded on the warts that protrude from this monstrosity.

I arrive at the appointed place early one morning in the winter of 2011 for my deposition.  Things are glum.  My own attorney whose name I  will spare, looks ashen and dumbfounded.  Not only was this a battle well-furnished by the hard, cold, cash of Pitzer but it's become a daily nightmare for his office.  She is most comfortable with threats, and as I note throughout the process, reveals her intellectual shortcomings.  Not only is she shorter than Laura Harris, but she is more willing to prove that evil is smarter than wisdom.

Prater wears a fat gold chain around her neck.  Looking at her causes me to want to double over with misery.  She's viciously slutty.  Her shirt is unbuttoned to reveal a flat, bony chest, the uppermost nodes of her ribcage are visible and what little bosom she has she reveals.  The sight of her highly sexualized comportment, coupled as it is with a merciless nearly intoxicating reliance on a talent for abusing trauma survivors, is a form of legal terrorism whose specter I could only barely glimpse through the administration's bravado when they pursued their retribution over my reporting of sexual harassment.

Commando Prater leaves nothing to the luck of the law and incinerating the employee rights of sex harassment victims is her forte.  We all take our seats at the table.  Meanwhile, Prater begins requesting sexual attentions by the video technician running the camera by insisting he adjust the microphone she placed next to her clearly visible miniature nipples. I silently gasp while I await what spews from her jaws: "Miss Vasquez, isn't it true you never complained about your sexual harassment at Pitzer College?"

Red Letter Confidential

Revulsion was the first followed by ridicule, confusion, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.  Each new response to each new experience, seemed to add to the previous.

"Confidential," stamped in red ink on officious letters sent down the hall from one mailbox to another, now sound pettier than when originally sent to me.  "No means no, " I said to myself like Queen Latifah in "Bringing Down the House."

However, being placed in jeopardy brought out my courage.

Hope was an extract of pain.

The greater the indifference of bystanders, the more intense the pain.  So working in a sexually hostile environment requires a lot of courage and discipline.  Teaching in it means you are teaching yourself how to overcome pain.

Ethically, you are forced to decide things under a tremendous amount of pressure and the indifference of others to your plight, adds additional strain.  At times, these double pressures seem to box you in and your perspective undergoes alterations.

You begin to watch everything carefully, fearful that things may worsen, and making sure to communicate that you are not going to be taken down easily in the event someone is imagining they will forcefully penetrate you.

Though fear seems to pervade your environment, for certainly, your nerves are tense and your perceptions become more acute, you also notice that you're gaining a power you formerly did not know you had.  It is the power over your emotions. 

Whatever the aggressor is certain of is his/her own need to feel no mercy in their actions.  It makes little sense for you to ponder how they can carry out their own negations in a way that won't ultimately serve in your favor as you become so strong in your ethical and emotional posture, that you understand that your PhD has been all but theoretical until now.

You are your thesis now, tried and tested, pushed to full exposure, and wrestled-against.  You become you, your character bears what it does for your ideas, for your students, for your research, to reach a new platform from which to begin anew.

In the Hallways of Hell

When the ugly, arrogant, ignorant, aggressive dudes at work hit on you they hit hard.  It's sex and nothing but sex that they have on their minds.  After all, they are all married men, and one of them is married to my boss. But since I am brown, they see me as servant unable to refuse them.

The hellish images of their sexual appetites I tried to block from lodging in my mind were horrible enough on their own. When other women assumed the same gaze of compulsive sexual objectification toward me, the hellfire's flames grew more and more extreme.  It was shocking that two female supervisors (both English professors) would do nothing but worsen the trauma of these indignities for me.

As a kid like many kids of my generation, I enjoyed watching a TV show called "Land of the Lost." It's mild horror sequences were about right for my level.  I can count on my fingers the number of times I've actually watched a real horror film (without lifting one finger).

As a victim whistleblower, Pitzer College was a place of small, medium and large horrors.  As previously when noting that her stature was at or below 5 feet tall, Laura Harris was despite or because of her physical height, a hardened victim baiter and Laura Trombley though unwilling to engage me directly, oversaw my abuse with supreme indifference even when it occurred at the hands of her own spouse.

While the dudes were rather frightening, the female onlookers were more vituperative and desensitized than I'd ever expected  other women to be: Harris blamed her lack of humanity on her "blackness," and Trombley's actions might be chalked up to greed and convenience.

All in all my inability to comprehend and the dissonance resulting, came down to the fact of my own female biases.  I didn't think other women were capable of doing this.

Dealing with the everyday chauvinist or superficial racist is bad enough but dealing with the trolls and trollettes at work is something much more adverse.  She touted an extremist black-centric perspective she neither could attest to nor ever comprehend even intellectually.

I recall the day she said that when she lived in town, she was often mistaken as a Latina.  She then suggested that I was probably enjoying unwanted male attention.  Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth--anti-immigrant hysteria was at its worst I'd ever seen in my life--and my daily life was everything but an experience of tolerance much less flattery or invitations to socialize.

"Do a lot of men ask you out around here?"

"No," I answered with my head more than with my mouth as I heard a deeper question rise in my head, "what world does she live in?  Does she even watch the news?" 

I found it very odd and even slightly disgusting that Harris would intone to me that being a Latina must mean something highly sexual rather than risk for abuse or mistreatment.  Again, her preoccupation with sex was imbuing my work with a tinge of hellishness.  And her cries of mad and insane oppression for her blackness were hard to stomach.

"Go back to where you came from!" I hear a man shout at me as I drop my kids off at school.

I suck it up.  I drive to work. Then pulling up to a parking spot at Pitzer, I stop and gaze outside my window.  I see a few students linger about or race to their next class. Normalcy seems to abound from all directions.  It is not a scary and horrible day at all.

I reach for the straps of my briefcases.  They contain my books, my notecards, laptop, audiovisuals, student essays, research bibliography, poetry sketches, and conference paper drafts.  With the strength of my upper and lower arms, my wrists, and my back, I face another day in the hallways of my hell.

Revenge is the Best Success, Essay on Censorship

Censorship is painful on many counts.  In its aftermaths, the greater truths of art once censorship has taken place, can't be discovered without some amount of resistance. I write things I'd never before dared to write much less publish.

The exertions of a censorship--including those of its mechanisms and its target, the writer or potential writer, are not so dissimilar from the demands of the work itself.  With repeated censoring, the act and experience of the censorship on the one censored leads to an internal and external challenge.  It's hard to distinguish between the "internal critic" and the motives of control exerted by censors.

You have more to say once you are silenced.  And as you overcome each act of silencing, you gain greater ability for courage to continue.  But silences can be frustrating they are mostly very productive to the work overall.

The best friend of a writer is the one who censors.  None can be as persistent and dedicated as the one who censors you in regulating your work flow.  As you never know when it will strike, the inert drama of writing becomes oddly imbued with its own insecure insistence to prevent the damage created by censorship.  Censorship is not something you want but once you have had to deal with it, you sense you may always have to.  Censorship is a form of transcendental fodder.

Today there is a headline that reads that Arpaio wants to make amends with the community he has most betrayed and oppressed.  The "good guy" in him -- the jolly silver-haired chubby one--never seemed capable of the policies he promoted.  He seemed as distant from the violence, legal and "extra" legal, that had surged rhetorically and actually, as Ronald McDonald's, Colonel Sanders, or even Big Boy Bob.  This week the homicidal shooter who conducted a killing spree and wounded a congresswoman, was sentenced and Arpaio re-elected.

Meanwhile in Tucson, the youth had been actively producing in themselves and others willing, a number and variety of artistic and social media.  Live shows, online media, political campaigns, direct actions, visual arts, and arts, surged with the political pressures brought to bear on Arizona as a state, federal, and local entity or province.  Laws introduced and passed and protested enacted a cultural reformation policy directed as an order to assimilate (or else) de jure.  Laws for the sake of lawmakers' offices bedeviled representative democracy, and the evidence is in his re-election.

It may be the case that the public is in reelecting him expressing a view that government is not so bad as government without government.  People may believe that it's best to preserve what can be preserved of a social experiment with disastrous precepts rendered insignificant after all, than to suffer along with Arpaio a fall from grace that could cause too much change too suddenly in the state.  The people there have fallen into some form of legislative season in hell. They know that when Arpaio descends from his position, the whole house of cards will crumble.  If this thesis is true, it would only be so because of the results of the censorship episodes imposed on the public by its own offices and officers of the same.

Censoring ethnic literature which as immature and ineffective as it sounds will only embolden it.  If there is anything it serves most to ensure it is the humanization of others even in its threatened state.  Censorship is a mandate to the imagination: Fly!  No Fear of Heights Can Stop You!  These are the messages that arrive in the countless thoughts and impulses of persons who are censored.

Ripening a New Beginning (Imitation WCW)

When old acquaintances, good byes are sent,

we may run into each other somewheres,

in a restaurant in a store or where

what was lost remains while we're beginning

Weather is no metaphor more able

than a poem to disclose itself

the buttocks are larger than a smile

and naked as on that first day alive

no longer prescient but fully awakened

ready to express something important

the pregnant pauses let mercy resume

as a baby is as benevolent 

made up of a core and a radiant,

filaments when glowing the ripening.

Phlunk Magic Realism Cuck Hold

"But what are Indigenous people?  Aren't Indigenous people just less civilized?" I heard the sociologist, Puckerman, say in response to the question of how to define a Native American at the faculty retreat which involved a bagel breakfast followed by an exercise designed by a self-styled "philosopher," Breeley, which was known as the octagon. This octagon was a discussion method utilized to glean what people felt about issues of race in hiring.

When I heard the words "less civilized," not only was I disturbed but I was beginning to take note of the prevailing acceptance of gross stereotypes not only in place of valid information and civil discourse, but as a form of comedic entertainment for the faculty.  It was not unusual for bigoted views to pass as valid points of departure for what would progressively become a bumbling set of rationalizations for everything from sexual violence to bitter racism and the usual misogyny and lust.

While other women could compromise themselves in the scalding sexist and misanthropic environment systematically managed as a scheme of the "science of the mind" by Breley, Bones, and others, the caustic agenda for racial engineering supplanting legitimate disciplines, fields, and materials, was outrageous.  Pitzer professed a long term agenda for what I can only ascertain as a peculiar form of intellectual eugenics.

I took my place at the octagon and vociferously disagreed with Puckerman's comments.  Arnold Paycheck, the wry but knowledgeable VP of Admissions, suggested that it was best not to invite a Native American into such an environment that held forth at [expletive].  He'd worked with Native students at Evergreen and his experience should be a warning that Native American students had better outcomes when they were in supportive environments.

Nevertheless,[expletive] would attempt a Native American studies program and the administration was adamant it could not include any Native American faculty that they argued would require a "superior candidate" for an Affirmative Action hire, a more useless pursuit they implied could not ever be found.

I remember when this agenda surfaced in a teacher-student relationship I had with a student.   She'd been referred to me by her adviser, Gorgon.  (Think here: an Afro-Uruguayan with bleached blonde hair passing as white and who herself made comments about the skin color of Mexicans yielding a degree rumored to have come through a mail order service, but one of many anthropologists passing as humanities or interdisciplinaries.) For example, anthropologist Detail argued that there was no such entity as Native American history and that there was a valid study he called the "anthropology of history."

The young white woman, a supposed double major in English and Spanish, announced that she was writing her Honor's thesis on "white magic realism."  It was her contention that African and Latin American and African American had long been taking too much credit for the advances of this literary aesthetic, and that with 2 popular novels by a white female writer, she was going to prove the existence of white magic realism.

She attempted one version of this ill-fated thesis.  With her first and final trip to the library, she learned there was no such topic. Though I spent a lot of time narrowing its claims and providing alternatives, she never revised, edited, or completed it. I stood firm on my intention that this honor's thesis was not only a fallacious but that the student improperly demanded honor's for it and was assisted in doing so by her adviser, Gorgon.  Meanwhile, the Spanish language teacher (Jorge's subordinate) expressed dire concern that though the student could not only not pass the basic oral examination required before graduation but had failed it miserably. The registrar's office wrote to me asking for clarification as to why the student was not granted honors, and much to my chagrin and dismay, the registrar's staff seemed reluctant to accept the fact it had not earned honor's much less been written at all.

For wise to what she was doing in demanding unearned honors, the student had researched this topic and found amidst hundreds of peer-reviewed research, only one article that suited her and it was on the origins of fantasy in German literature.  She was from Ventura County where white supremacy was a legacy that had clearly influenced her and which served her well in the racial chimera of [expletive] College.

After the octagonal discussion held at the retreat, I thought I did all I could to clarify how harmful it was for those who did not enjoy racial humor, to suffer the uncomfortable racial environment  But, after the retreat, not only did the racial comments continue, but soon they became implicit orders for enforcement as Gorgon approached me asking to grant honors to the thesis on white magic realism.  I informed her that it was not eligible for distinction nor was it even completed by the student demanding honors in English and Spanish--a language she could not speak much less read or write.

It was clear to me that Pitzer College was a safe haven for extremist views concerning racial inferiority and superiority, and that identities in this environment were subject to fiction.  Such as the secretary to the Boness who claims Romany ancestry and the usual fair of flapulence

Niko gets his first car: red civic honda 94

 It's my son's 18th birthday. My 15-year old is asleep in his bed.  Since I wake up early and they have opposite schedules, there's always someone awake. For now, Reggie, short for Reggio Emil--named by his father for the city in Italy that reminded him of Redlands CA where he was born in the community hospital.

Niko, short for Monico, was born September 17, 1994 which is the birth date for the OWS movement and for William Carlos Williams, a poet whose work I have researched with the intent of publishing a book or even starting an institute.  With the colleagues and friends I have, we might one day even aspire to that, a School of William Carlos Williams. I don't see why not.

I get up and do what I do everything: I ask myself my question of the day. All joking aside, I am just like any other person, someone who wakes each day with a feeling of a new try at life. Today is my son's 18th birthday! This is a day that means everything to me, if everything could ever be amassed into one thing, it could be held in the bodies of my children. Much like any other mother or parent, our loved ones are no burden to us. In fact, they are a blessing, a gift, to us, to themselves and to others.

Upon embrace of the early morning tender heat, I feel my heart extend as though from one horizon to all of them. I feel the gratitude of my young son's adulthood. Let it be as filled with the beauty of the world that I see today in my entire being as it's embodied and reflected on the wide surface of the earth. If it were a prayer that's what it would say.

I jump in the car for some Starbuck's Garey and Mission. As I do so, I see a ruby red car with a for sale sign on it and I make my way over to check it out.  I park and cross the street then punch the telephone number into my cell.  I peer inside the windows without any reluctance. I want this car for my son.  For it seemed like I was back in my early days with him when I might buy him a Transformer on shopping trips to Toys R Us.

I realize I have a credit card with just the amount of money it costs: $2000.00.  Oscar, the young man who sold it to me needed an automatic for his wife and though he loved his car, she could not drive it as it was a standard stick.  I was so happy to find it was mechanically perfect, had a few little things with the body, needs a new motor in the driver's side window switch, but it uses very little gas and it's a STANDARD.  Niko will love it!  He will come to adore it as a machine. A machine of all things and it's red after all.

When he turned 18, I surged with the joy that my son whose life was taking on a new level of responsibility and independence that I knew he was eager to do Next is Reggio turning 16 in February. Two pivotal ages, 16 and 18, my boys are everything that could ever exist contained inside two bodies.  And I am just like any other mom.

Music as Survival: Parenting through Sex Assault

I arrived in Claremont CA to assume the job at Pitzer College teaching Chicano and American Literature.  I remember when I was told by a politics professor and Alan Jones, the Dean, that the local K-12 schools were excellent.

They did not mention that there were about a half dozen men who daily hunted for ass on the Pitzer campus: Ntongela Masilela, Gregory Orfalea, Neslon Trombley (the President's husband), David Furman, Jim Marchant (Dean of Student Affairs). Leading the gang was the Dean Alan Jones whose major responsibility was that of punishing anyone who dared speak of these harassment rituals.

Venturing around the small campus was tantamount to being "An American in Italy."  These men would feast on the very image of a woman and salivate at close range.  They shared information with each other as was clear when as a victim, I was handed from one harasser to the next by the administration and in full and complete view of many so-called feminists who did nothing to change things but through tacit agreement, allowed and perpetuated sexual assaults.

I remember searching desperately for a way out of the situation, trying to get a new job, and taking on the major part of the teaching responsibilities for an entire department.  At Pitzer they are called "field groups," which might better be called "jump ins."  Each one of these field groups represented tactical units for punishing victims of the Evil 5 Fingers --the hard boys who did all the handling: Marchant, Furman, Orfalea, Trombley, Masilela, and Jones, their "guy."

I remember my days of constant fear, dread, revulsion, and pain.

In the beginning, my two sons were just 8 and 10 years old: Niko and Reggie, my heart and my soul.
In our private time I called them, "corazoncitos de mi alma," the little hearts in my soul.  When things were normal, singing, reading, storytelling, and children's rhymes were daily activities I employed to get the kids to sleep at night, pumping their imagination with Spanish and English traditional lyrics, tales, fables, and some that I would invent.

By the time things got ramped up with the harassment at work, the kids were just entering early adolescence.  My life had become a gruesome adventure; between staving off the men at work and teaching in the proximity of Laura Harris--the flesh-eating miniature raptor--and run ins with Laura Trombley, a so-called Mark Twain expert fixated on finding non-existing evidence of marital affairs by Twain while sharp-shooting at women her husband forced himself on including undocumented workers.

I recall my arrivals at home as finding my way back to a temporary safe zone.  I stress the word temporary because as the years progressed, and Pitzer found out where I lived, the harassment would follow me home, too.

All I can say is that Niko, who had taken up guitar (first on his own) and later studied music at school, seemed in his empathic way to perceive that my soul was in deep and miserable pain and torment.  Collapsing in my bed at night, I could hear him from the next room as he would take up his guitar and play the sweetest and softest notes and melodies that I had ever heard.

Instead of the other way around, he was now the one lulling me to sleep, and with the power that his healing touch brought down on the strings of the guitar, I was lifted up and away and beyond the pain.

B for Beloved: "They Stole my Milk"

I was teaching in Scott Hall on the second floor which I called the hall of my torments.  A number of those professors were dangerously misanthropic.  For their various reasons of mental suitability to such or due to insecurity, egotism, and other impulses of the like, whatever they could not submit to their narrow interest and schtick -- of which desired interests among them they could feign with distinction--they would go to extensive efforts to eradicate.

We're talking here people who grammar-check their prepositional phrases as a way to pretend they are intellectuals.

"I think to think of it with the thinking I've thought..." could open any number of equally annoying successive rejoinders without a subject.

It was also where the sexual games took their toll.  I tended to avoid it at all costs as I did every other hallways, but something far murkier had its place there.  It sits adjacent to the Broad Center where the president serves her duties.  From one door of it to the next, its quadrants were laid out to expose whoever walked within it to the looking up into skirts, the gazing down onto breasts, and the elbows prodding you past.

We were reading Toni Morrison when our class was aborted. Sure Laura Harris would cover it but only in the way she covered any other writers whose humanity she could not comment nor comprehend. All that she understood was power, the abuse of power, and more abuse of power.

Surely, I thought, African American literature deserved more.  The fact I taught BELOVED I have no doubt she was infuriated not because I shouldn't have but because I'd do it better.  I'd do it with the knowledge that art is mercy and that art is moral.

The last day of my class touched on the reasons that the townspeople don't warn the runaway slave that her owner has arrived to retrieve her from Ohio back to her enslavement and her rapists. The reasons you can read about in the novel include: she was too openly happy and she'd only prior to her rape ever had sexual relations with her young husband.

I remember when the Dean told me I was removed from class for discussing the novel and for other charges all exaggerated and false, I turned to Harris to ask her for a response from the "African-Americanist."

Instead of responding she took over my class.  I do not doubt that when I left all of my beautiful students after taking my course, taught her more about women's literature than she ever could have fathomed on her own.

I recall the phrase again-- Toni Morrison's phrase, "they stole my milk!"

Tyrants and Sore Eyes

A lot of times when I told people where I worked they would ask, "what is that? Phizer or Pitzer? A bathroom or a chemical company?  I tired of answering it. It did not sizzle on my tongue when I thought of it or said it. Some people you might wonder if they weren't having acid or tweak flashbacks, this was especially true with a certain EWLLL professor, Laura Harris.  She had the normal brush and sweep gesture inhaling something invisible twitch in our meetings.

The main thing you notice about her (though you keep it to yourself) is her little fat ass.   You've seen black girls asses and you've seen Italian asses. Whatever her claims with her, it smelled like ass.  She had a pugnacious and blathering attitude about herself as she fought windmills that attacked her for her self-awarded "blackness."  You see the diasporics, you see the South African Indians, the Caribbean Asians, and yeah it makes sense.  These are black women.  But you see Laura Harris, and .... in truth she's hard to see at all even at her full height.

The only good I had heard of her from other feminists was that she claimed a minor connection to Alicia Arrizon and to Rosaura Sanchez, both of whom were well-known critical theorists, one a feminist and one a materialist feminist.  Both were bilingual UC Profs with identical fields as me: theatre with Arrizon and literary history with Sanchez.  So as I know they are both good scholars, I assume there is some standard of quality that would be found in Harris as well.

All I remember of the bitch are too many, far too many memories than I'd ever wished to have lived once but more than once is atrocious.  I tried to get rescued from the Tyrant Oh Sore Eyes Harris but it would be impossible as once having tasted blood, she seethed with eager and egregious rage in thirst of more.  She tried pulling the Spanish language accented version of Laura on me.  I just looked at her and with one look said "no." And that's when I liked her. 

The response to her is brought on by the autonomic immunse system.  You know how the doctor hits your knee to check your reflexes?  It's what happens to you when Harass speaks of James Baldwin.
 

The First Letter: M is for More Ass

When I was hired as her counter-part in American Literature, Laura Harris made her own preferences very clear.  Teaching anything prior to the 20th Century was for drudges.  She, after all, had the prime territory of the Harlem Renaissance.  And though I hardly saw in her any semblance whatever to the African American women who played a great role in my life as a feminist, archival researcher, scholar, woman, and writer, she was my senior colleague.  She published and republished the same article under three different titles, once in Italian.  She was an Italian-American posing from everything I could tell, as a black female.

That I was a self-taught expert in Langston Hughes, the poet with whom I shared my February 1st birthdate, Harris was vehemently territorial about a literature I highly doubt she should express such propriety interests in. That she was black or not racially mattered little to me.  She was not nor could ever be a sister by any stretch of the imagination.  No radical black feminist would publish a memoir of welfare fraud and proudly rest her academic laurels on the same.

Her vitriolic, sectarian, and bullying behavior was known far and near.  After she'd done everything in her power to disarm me in the context of sexual harassers by making my life a daily misery despite her knowledge I was being continuously victimized, her staunch feminist credentials gave her what she pursued with a passion for cruelty that distorted her features when in enraged outbursts she claimed the status of an oppressed woman while super-oppressing any oppressed woman she could.

Her large nose on such a squat body might not have seemed so large if not for the pale skin and large shaggy head of hair combined with a cavalier attitude I'd only previously noted in the owner of Damiano's Pizza where I waitressed my way through my last year of studies at UCLA.  He, like Harris, enjoyed the sight of young women in their 20's rushing around in a situation that made them servile sexual objects along with me.

The first scar came from my own name.  M.  My precious letter M.  M was for Morris, Evon Morris, my now 91-year old poet-father.

She began by repeatedly stating the word MORASS with a snide and gleeful guttural sound while laughing loudly and openly at my increasing fear and misery.

First on her mind was how she would assist the administration in punishing me for my whistle blowing activities to expose sexual harassment at the very top of the food chain at Pitzer.  "Anyone wanting to keep their job is going to find themselves in a morass."  

"How do we spell Morass? she blurted while jumping up on her 5 foot-tall stature, and seizing a dry erase marker increasingly adding gusto to the humiliating hazing behavior she was fully engaging in.

She wrote M then O then R then R.  

"How do we spell more ass? How can we make it plural?"

M-O-R-E  A-S-S

M-O-R-E ASSES

Punning between my name, "Morris" and "more ass" she scribbled thesletters on the board,

edited them once and again, each time laughing with derision and becoming more and more hysterical with the power of her pen to dominate the social space in which to vilify my name as a way to sexually degrade me.  I had a horrible nightmare -- a sexual one--a rape by Harris.  In the next couple days, when I ran into her as she lingered outside of my office door, she asked me to go out to lunch with her.  I rejected lunch with her.

Through her direct and other professors' follow-up, I faced constant ridicule over the fact that everywhere I went at Pitzer College, the men were after my ass and the women were there to assist them, or to do it themselves.

"What About My Students?"

I arrive at the appointed time to the first floor of Avery Hall, Pitzer College, Claremont CA.  First, I notice what I always notice about the sterile and completely soundless environment of that building.  From some point northward, I can hear the deafened sound of voices.  There must be a group of students lingering around the campus in the late afternoon. 

It's November 2nd, 2009.  I enter an even quieter room where 5 people who had arrived before me, are seated around a table.  It's the first week of my suspended teaching schedule.  It was half way through a 16-week semester when I was teaching two of my core classes: American Literature: Beginnings to the Civil War, and 20th-21st Century American Women Writers.  The greater pain I feel at this moment when I go to lift the heavy solid wood door, is that of having been censored by the Dean and the full membership of a Faculty Executive Council, for charges relating to my women's literature course and for allegedly missing "more than half of my courses."  

How I could be teaching offensive course material in a class I didn't attend, never seemed to occur to those faculty and administrators now in the advanced stages of violating my academic freedom through the most atrocious tool they had: sexual victimization.  Even today, the experience of being passed from one perpetrator to the next all the while knowing that there would be no one willing to help me but that on the contrary, the English department and the administration would embolden itself by violating what I believed was the near-sacred space of my classroom and the educational opportunities of my students, I entered the room, all faces turned to me.

The panel elected to examine the evidence and interview the victim and the accused, was led by two psychologists, one was an African American psychologist and one held a supposed expertise in "organizational psychology."  Because academic institutions and departments are hard to explain to those unfamiliar, I plan to discuss the psychology factor in a later writing.  Suffice it to say, the persecution of a poet was a free-for-all for any professor, and many professors played a role, whether they viewed themselves as scientists, social scientists, psychological scientists, or even other literature professors.  The most important thing to all of them was to establish their way of doing things as acceptable, as "selective," as judicious, as "socially responsible."  The last thing they needed or wanted was to see the failure and falseness of their claims evidenced in a woman, a woman well-equipped to document, describe, and ultimately expose the widespread sexual degradation of their utopia.

As utopias go, they either fail in details or fail in total.  Think of Hawthorne's novel, "The Blithedale Romance, " and you think of romance, of the unfeasible romance of ideas destined to be fetishized or betrayed.  Pitzer had no romance contributing to its decadence.  Romance had long gone by the wayside and been thoroughly mocked even as a goal.  Daily there were vicious e-mail attacks not only on ideals but on the right to possess or declare ideals even as such.  All that had remained of ideals decimated as unrealistic, un-profitable, and unsuitable, was a core of vengeance for anyone daring to as yet believe in them even as unlikely dreams.  In order to maintain whatever pretense to ideals was needed to operate at all, all idealism had to be clearcut from the forest to convert it into saleable units for P.R. propaganda.

I heard once irrevocably bound to a contract with all of the preparation of an elite UC degree to the private sector, that nothing but sexual harassment had been rendered out of its English department where harassment flourished like a mold in an incubator.  Life forms one never imagined would arise in such auspicious-for-evil circumstances….a negligent Board of Trustees, a recalcitrant Maoist Dean with expertise in victim scapegoating, and a President with a lecherous drug-addled husband fond of groping younger women to her jealous chagrin, and so-called literature professors with specialties without foundations, a virulent misogynistic rationale and racial preferences turned to persecution, nothing could be farther from the truth of liberal humanism.  This was the hunting ground. I was the quarry.

I remember it well-- the day Ntongela Masilela gave me an African dyed cloth of a giraffe.  Out of the blue, he would begin to present me with unwanted gifts, slowly and deliberately cultivating an unrequited special relationship with me.  Though he was the last, he was not the first of my harassers.  The others had done their damage and when detected, would stay clear of me.  But this harasser was different.  He began to lure me with comments about my children.  

When I walked in, I sensed the power of the institution as it was countenanced in the faces of those assigned to carry out "the procedure."

Jeffrey Lewis, the ringleader began.  He blank-faced read a statement that no retaliation would be carried out against me.  As he finished I stated, "I've been removed from my courses.  My courses are cancelled.  My students, what about my students?"