In the beginning was the word ... Donda West--an English professor who has written a book about raising her hip-hop superstar son, Kanye West--reflects on issues of language, literacy and creativity.

I WILL NEVER FORGET THAT DAY IN MARCH 2003 WHEN MY longtime professional colleague Dr. Donda West and I realized that our sons not only knew each other, but they actually were performing together on tour. She and I are both veteran professors of English--Donda taught at Chicago State University (she retired as English department chair in 2005), and I have been at Brooklyn's Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York.

Our mutual involvement in the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) first brought us together years before. Donda and I had both served on a number of NCTE committees, working together on critical issues that affect the teaching of English language arts, in particular, to students of color. For a number of years, Donda was also president of NCTE's Black Caucus.

That spring, we were meeting in a New York City hotel suite as members of the CCCC's Black Caucus. During a break, NCTE Staff Liaison Sandra Gibbs said to me, "You know, Donda's son is a hip-hop performer, too." I turned to Donda, who said proudly, "My son is Kanye West. He is on tour now, opening for Talib Kweli."

"Talib Kweli is my son!" I exclaimed in surprise.

Talib Kweli is the elder of my two sons. Their dad (also an English professor) and I named our firstborn Talib Kweli Greene. (Our younger son, Jamal Kwame Greene, is the one who stuck more closely to his parents' academic path. A Yale Law School graduate, Jamal clerks for a Supreme Court Justice and is an emerging scholar of constitutional law.)

"Talib told me about this young tapper/producer who was opening for him--he said that he loved the stage," I continued in excitement. "I had had no idea he was talking about your son."

How ironic that we two educators were attending an academic conference focused on the teaching of English composition, while our sons were on tour performing original lyrics before arenas filled with thousands of eager young fans bobbing their heads to hip-hop beats.

Now Donda West is the first of our informal network of hip-hop mothers (which includes Dr. Mahalia Hines, mother of Common, and Sheron Smith, a nurse by profession and mother of Mos Def) to write a book about raising a son who has become a powerful user of language in our popular culture. I was pleased to be asked by Black Issues Book Review to read Raising Kanye: Life Lessons From the Mother of a Hip-Hop Superstar by Donda West with Karen Hunter, including a Preface by Kanye West (Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, $24.95, ISBN 1-416-54470-4) and to interview Donda about our common experiences with the hip-hop generation--both as mothers and educators.

The story of Donda and her son Kanye will be inspirational for many, especially urban single mothers who have ambitions for their children and for themselves, too. (Kanye's parents divorced when he was four; he lived with his mother during the school year in Chicago and spent summers in Atlanta with his father, an academic administrator and photographer.) Donda and Kanye often took trips together and even lived in China one academic year while Donda held a teaching fellowship.

I enjoyed my conversation with my sister educator/hip-hop mom about how we both educated ourselves, our children and our students-and the work we all still have to do to instill confidence, pride and the gifts of literacy, creativity and innovative expression in children and students for generations to come. What follows is an edited transcript of our Brooklyn-to-LA phone call.

GREENE: I really enjoyed Raising Kanye. It resonated with my own memories of raising Talib. What motivated you to write this book?

WEST: A lot of encouragement from so many people. Everyone said, "You ought to write a book." But when I was approached by an agent Ian Kleinert [who also represented journalist Karen Hunter, West's eventual coauthor] and found out that Simon and Schuster wanted the book, I started thinking seriously about writing it. I guess all English professors think about writing a book, but I had not thought about writing about raising my son. I had thought about writing about other life lessons and my own personal stories.

GREENE: As an English educator, a lover of language, you obviously are a reader and writer. Who are some of the people who have influenced you?

WEST: I've always enjoyed literature in general and a wide spectrum of writers. I liked the American writers the best--from Maya Angelou to Walt Whitman. I enjoyed writers who expressed their concerns about the quality of life on this earth. I liked reading that could make my life better. I was very much influenced by some of the writers we often memorized as children, like Rudyard Kipling, who wrote the poem "If." And writers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Only later, as an adult, did I become more conscious and start concentrating on writers from my own culture.

GREENE: Whitman, Thoreau and Emerson are the writers who were in the schoolbooks we studied. Those were the people we were exposed to coming up. I remember how I felt when I was asked at a conference to name books that I read in school that were written either by a black writer or by a woman. I really didn't come into contact with black writers myself until college, when I took courses on black literature. Can you think of books written by black writers or by women that you read in school?

WEST: Not women writers, but there were black writers like Paul Laurence Dunbar. But I was not exposed to that many black writers growing up either--not in junior-high school, high school, or even to some degree undergraduate school. Kanye graduated from high school in 1995, and that wasn't so long ago. It appears that my experience and his two or three decades later were not that different--not a great statement to make about our current educational system!

When Kanye was in high school, I remember going to the school and saying, "There's something wrong with this picture: You're not teaching any African American writers." I remember the teacher saying, "There's so many ethnic writers; we don't have time to focus on all of them:' Of course, I hit the ceiling, as you can imagine, and they changed the textbook. They read at least two black writers, but that was it. It seems to me that now we're finally embracing our own culture and insisting that we tell our own stories and share them with others.

GREENE: I think the situation is slowly evolving and improving. We still have so much work to do. I noticed that some of your personal poems are interwoven in the narrative of Raising Kanye. Do you enjoy writing as much as reading?

WEST: I consider myself a writer of verse, a versifier. I look at some of the great poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and others, and I wouldn't dare compare myself to them or even think that I have that kind of talent. But I do have some talent as a versifier.

I think that my true gift may be in understanding the importance of embracing your culture and loving yourself. And I've certainly learned how to manipulate words as an English professor--I'm able to do that well enough. But Kanye, Talib and their crew are so skilled when it comes to poetry and metaphor. Brenda, haven't you just marveled at the lyrics our sons come up with?

GREENE: Where does it come from? I'm just amazed listening to the language. What do you think influenced them? What is different about what is happening in their generation? Or is it just these particular young men?

WEST: I think it's a combination of factors. Like you've said to me before, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. I don't say that just to commend you, me or Ann Hines [Common's mom, Dr. Mahalia Hines, is called Ann by her friends] can pat ourselves on the back. But we are all professionally trained educators in English; we all have sons who became rappers, and I don't know whether we contributed to their skills consciously or subconsciously. I do know that all three of us always pushed the language with our sons.

With Kanye, I frequently played word games with him where we rhymed. I'd say "sky," he'd say "bye"; and we would keep going until we ran out of words. It's that kind of involvement with your children--playing word games and helping them to understand the power in being able to manipulate the language in a good way, with a morality and a social consciousness behind it. At the panel we all did together for the Gwendolyn Brooks Conference at Chicago State, remember that Kanye commended Talib for being the one rapper he knew who did not debase women in his work.

GREENE: And I learned so much more about Kanye in reading your book. I'm always curious about the process the creative artist uses. when did he begin composing lyrics?

WEST: My first recollection of his poetic expressiveness was when we were taking a road trip from Michigan into Chicago. He was a little boy, no more than six or seven. It was getting dark, and he was looking out the window and said, "Look at the trees! The trees and the leaves are melting black." From the mouth of a six-year-old!

He was describing exactly what was happening; and that's what good writers have to do, they have to bring you right into the moment, to describe things in such a way that you feel as if you were right there. I saw this talent in him when he was just six years old.

He's always been brilliant in anything involving creativity, whether it was putting words together, or even in the way he would play. If he were pretending to be a fireman, he would always put on the fireman's hat, coat, boots--he would find something from his closet so he could make the complete statement! Writing is such an individual and creative process, and it seems to fit right in with his talents and motivation.

GREENE: So he was immersing himself in language at a very early age. Do you remember what he was reading?

WEST: Kanye was never an avid reader of books. He wasn't the kind of kid who immersed himself in the library and buried himself in novels or other long narratives. He was always the kind of person who would read books with illustrations. He liked magazines and comic books. To this day, he's a master at one-liners.

GREENE: He was skilled as a visual artist, at writing lyrics and one-liners. Then Kanye started producing beats, but he wanted to perform, to be onstage. How did he come to that point, connecting all the components of the hip-hop artist--the producer, the writer, the performer?

WEST: Kanye always wanted to be a rapper. He's a ham. He wanted to rap and to be on stage before he wanted to be a producer. He started writing raps in third grade. He was driven to produce music so that he would have something to rap over, but his first love was to be a writer and a rapper. We saw that performance bug very early in him: When he was six or seven, my best friend and I took our kids to Walt Disney World. I'll never forget how Kanye performed karaoke on that trip, and he really got into this Steve Wonder song. I'll never forget that. So while he was able to break into the industry through his production--his music for other people really got him in the door--he wanted to be a rapper long before he did production work. Kanye really loves Talib for giving him the opportunity to go on tour that first time, and he wrote about that in a song. Of course, hip-hop doesn't get the best press. It took me a little time to realize that your son doesn't have to be a doctor or lawyer for you to be as proud as any mother.

GREENE: Yes, I know. When my oldest son decided not to finish college, it was hard to accept--especially since both his parents were college professors. But then I realized that he was doing exactly what his father and I had said he should do. We raised our sons to be independent thinkers, to be critical thinkers, to be passionate about what they wanted to do, and to pursue their passion and dreams. How do you maintain the balance? How do you help young people to realize that there is value in schooling also and that they can use school to their advantage? I remember a quote from your book: "You really need to use school; don't let school use you."

WEST: That's a Kanye quote. As human beings we are broadly and diversely talented, so there is no one path to success. Of course, you have to be focused; you do want tunnel vision, but not to the point where you block out something that can be helpful to you. One of the things that I am fond of pointing out is that I have never heard anyone say, "Oh, I'm so mad that I got this degree," even if you don't use it. I don't feel as if something can ever be hurtful unless you let school use you, as Kanye says, rather than using school. There are some exercises we go through in getting those degrees that we don't necessarily see the value of it while we're going through it, but just the discipline it takes can be so helpful in life. We should be broad-minded and encourage our students and our kids to prepare themselves in all of the ways they can. But I'll never let go of nay attitude that education is extremely important.

GREENE: What can we tell teachers who have students in their classes who are in love with hip-hop and who are having difficulty staying in school? What can we say to help our students stay in school?

WEST: One of my favorite philosophers is John Dewey, and John Dewey said one hundred years ago or more, we should start with where the learner is. In our culture, the learner is in hip-hop culture. Hip-hop is a worldwide phenomenon.

The teacher is not so smart if she cannot get the student to be excited about learning. We educators might want to discredit hip-hop when we might be better served to use it to get students excited about learning.

There are so many ways. Brenda, we can use hip-hop as a way to help students understand that there are various dialects, and when it's appropriate to use them. I'm hooked on Ebonics. I love it. Where would we be if we didn't embrace the particular way that we speak? I've always told my students, language is situational. You don't speak in a way that doesn't relate to your audience. If you're singing the blues, you don't say, "My baby doesn't love me anymore." You say "no more." If you don't say that, then you don't have the blues. We have to build a healthy respect for all cultures. I say to educators, don't discount the value of a culture that you may not have grown up in. Hip-hop culture at its best is very political. And there's so many truths being told that our generation just didn't have the guts to put out there.

GREENE: There are many teachers who are incorporating hip-hop in the classroom. [See "School of Hip-Hop," on page 24.] We have a course at Medgar Evers College, "The Spoken Word in African American Written Texts." And the Center for Black Literature sponsors a course on the spoken word for high-school students. These are some of the ways that we are helping our students to become more critical about their use of language. What kinds of conversations can we engage our young people in, our sons, daughters, and students, about what they are hearing and seeing in the media? How can we help them to become more critical? Do we keep them from reading or viewing certain programs?

WEST: We don't help our young people by engaging in censorship. We can't shelter them from the truth. We must give our students opportunities to develop a built-in BS detector. We should encourage our kids to ask questions. It's always a challenge not to be cynical, to be positive and have a loving spirit, no matter what you are confronted with. We can learn a lot from our kids, and we have to get out there and help them with the truth and ask them critical questions.

GREENE: How much you learned from listening to Kanye comes across in your book. The artist is often a revolutionary, a visionary. Russell Simmons has a quote on the book Hip-Hop Poetry and the Classics by Man Sitomer (Milk Mug, 2004). "This book backs up what we all know: Hip-hop is the global poetic language of today's youth and the poetry of today will be looked back upon as the classics of our era" You have people doing academic dissertations on hip-hop. As we said earlier, it's amazing the way young people use language. The next stage, I would say, would be to document what they are doing.

WEST: I totally agree. You know the ways the slaves used to make their escape. They would sing "Steal Away to Jesus." The whites thought they were talking about Jesus, but they were talking about where we're going to meet tonight and how we're going to steal away from enslavement. I'm not certain that there aren't some of those hidden messages in hip-hop language as well.

Brenda M. Greene, Ph.D., is a professor of English and executive director of the Center for Black Literature at CUNY's Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York.