Scenes of Instruction: A Memoir.

Michael Awkward. Scenes of Instruction: A Memoir. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. 208 pp. $24.00.

Probably because he is a scholar of literary narrative, Michael Awkward is more forthcoming than most autobiographers are about the goals and strategies of his new memoir, Scenes of Instruction. He tells us that he's writing a kind of "autocritography," "an account of individual, social, and institutional conditions that help produce a scholar and, hence, his or her professional concerns." He points out that each section has a graduation episode, offered while fully mindful of the often vexed graduation episodes in African American literature (think of those in, say, Ellison's Invisible Man and Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings) and of how graduations only purport to measure the end of some era or phase and the commencement of another. Awkward is also clear that his "autocritographical" act is an account of his past and present "attentiveness to his mother's narratives," which include tales of his father's abuse, stories which she told Awkward sometimes while drunk, and which he could always read in t he scars on her body. Having tried unsuccessfully before (at MLA meetings, for example, an unfortunate venue) to get an audience to comprehend the place of his mother's narratives in his professional work as a feminist and scholar of women's writing, Awkward asks, "What story might a black male tell of the origins of his feminist interests that would be better received ... ?" Possibly mindful of the old folk dictum "If you didn't understand that story, I'll have to tell it again," Awkward tells his story again, this time with a depth of feeling and attention to craft that was no doubt impossible during a stint at a podium.

The large shape of this memoir involves five sections, each with a commencement, starting with Awkward's graduation from elementary school. While he is duly attentive to searching these "scenes of instruction" for signs of intellectual development and of where he fits in "socially prescribed norms ... of racial, gendered, and heterosexual behavior," a less complicated activity is also afoot. Each scene asks if Awkward's mother is absent or present, and what the nature is of these presences and absences. Thus we move from the first graduation where the mother is loudly, embarrassingly present (and arguably absent since she is inebriated) to the last (graduate school) graduation, which the mother cannot attend since she has passed way (she died the day Awkward submitted his dissertation) and which Awkward doesn't attend either, partly because the thought of her not being there is unbearable. What's unforgettable in this narrative sequence is that the last graduation they attend together, Awkward's college comme ncement, is the first for his mother after she has gone sober.

The other large shape is the geographical journey, in and out of Philadelphia's housing projects and the surrounding turfs, to Massachusetts for both boarding school and college, then back to Philadelphia and on to Michigan for Awkward's first academic job, then back to Philadelphia for good--or for, at least, narrative closure. While Awkward has other, more "announced" concerns, he certainly writes of these journeys in a way that suggests that he has his own chapters to add to his family's migration stories (it is said of his father that he should never have left the Delaware family farm) and that he has his own version of his mother's wail "Take me home." Truly arresting in this regard is Awkward's memory, once he is a Penn professor, of being a boy and climbing out of the dark, urine-stenched, underground trolley station near Penn and seeing the gargoyles and high gates of the institution that years later would bestow upon him a doctorate and a professorship.

There is also careful work on a smaller scale, involving the interplay of italicized and roman type passages in almost all of the sections. In the first section, for example, entitled "The Mother's Mark," the opening italicized passage establishes Awkward's preference for situating literary and/or cultural commentary in italics, thus forcing the reader to wonder whether Awkward is (or isn't) breaking with the convention of using italics for one's most intimate thoughts. The roman type pages to come are the domain of the family story. The interplay between the two becomes clear when one realizes that the "mother's mark" is variously Awkward's mother's scar, possibly her alcoholism, too, and certainly his own scar (he was burned as a child in a kitchen accident), and that subtly we have been prepared for this by the discussion in italics of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. The circumstances aren't the same, but both Morrison's Pecola and young Awkward are "disfigured," stigmatized black children from dysfunction al families, taunted by their peers.

Scenes of Instruction is an up-from-the-ghetto book, as some readers have observed, but that designation hardly does it justice. Awkward has incisive things to say about the Million Man March, the black public intellectual, the infamous Benetton poster of a black woman nursing a (possibly) white child, the school cafeteria "black table" (and other "Chocolate Cities"), and a host of others things we've all thought about, but not necessarily in print. And while short, his remarks on authors including Morrison, Richard Wright, ntozake shange, Randall Kenan, and Paul Monette are fascinating precisely because Awkward's mission is to tell us how their texts have burrowed into the inner reaches of his life. But his higher mission is his work with the author who is his mother. While it is jarring to see words like discursive and interrogate in expressions of the most personal, heartfelt feelings, there can be no doubt that in this memoir Awkward is lovingly attentive to his mother's narratives--indeed, to his mother.