I sat in on some of those so-called remedial English classes offered by the public urban university, very different from the Columbia campus scene. I perceived the institutional incapacity, even when the teacher had the best will in the world, to come to grips with the actual play of the choice of English as the dominant tongue in the imaginations of working-class, new immigrant survival artists. This is very different from the place of English in India, altogether different. I am speaking of this end of the spectrum. I am involved in teaching English in New York City. The mayor and CUNY were going to banish this spectral light to the lesser colleges of the City University system. I had been asked to provide an alibi, I realized later, in order to be able to say that we had asked radical academics to come and give their opinion. There I was. But what did I know? I am an idiot. I actually went to these remedial reading classes, and that, indeed, completed my education, although it was for nothing. The Haitians and West Africans in those classes whose imaginations were crossing and being crossed by a double aporia, the cusp of two imperialisms, Creole, French, so-called pidgin, and English as a second language crossing into first, or Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and others ringing similar changes with Spanish, taught me that there was a kind of reading/writing that does not graduate into a writing that can be recognized as fully literate because the teacher may live on another planet. Of all the benevolent attempts to help these poor kids, et cetera, that’s the thing that riles me most. I mean, even in my Columbia class some student will say something clearly coming from a – I can’t call a student racist so let’s just say double standard – and then she will say, “Sorry, of course, I am speaking from privilege.” And I will say, “No. It is a failure of imagination. It is not privilege. Don’t look at it always as the benevolence of the privileged.”

Anyway, I remember sitting in one of those remedial classes and silently noting the students’ imaginative flexibility, so remarkably stronger than the Columbia undergraduates’, which latter is generally held up by the life-support system of a commercializing Anglophone culture that trivializes the humanities. And this ability to manipulate a life-support system is described as civilization.