"Grandpa's Baby"
Anokye, Akua Duku (2009-03-19)
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE: Because if I think about what I look like I am in trouble. 
>>INTERVIEWER: You are going to look gorgeous and here is how we are going to start. 
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  Okay.
>>INTERVIEWER: You say what your name is and maybe that you are a past Chair of the 4C -- and she is. 
>>UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I have been away from the 4C's for awhile. 
[unintelligible]
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  Absolutely. 
>>INTERVIEWER: And then say "Here is the story I want to tell", so.
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  Okay. My name is Akua Duku Anokye and I am an associate professor at Arizona State University, at the west campus, and a past Chair of 4Cs. Here is a story that I want to tell you. It really is what I have always thought of as my literacy narrative and how I came to be interested or care about reading and writing and how I first started. I come from a long line of story tellers; some folks calls us a long line of liars.
[Both laugh]
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  You know, though we always tell folk tales and jokes. We are just rhetors and orators. I was raises by my grandparents, my paternal grandparents. My grandfather, who had been born in Kentucky around 1876, graduated from Kentucky Normal Institute in 1903. I still have his diploma. 
>>INTERVIEWER: Was that HBCU?
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  Well they didn't call it that, then. 
[Laughs]
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  That is a more recent term, but yes it was. It is now Kentucky State, which is an HBCU. Yeah that was before that time. Once he finished he taught for a very short while there at Kentucky normal but realized that he could make more money working in the industrial North and worked in the foundry. Anyone who knows anything about the foundry, that is the deepest and the darkest of the worst part of the fires. When you think of the foundry you think of the furnace and --
>>INTERVIEWER: Hot?
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  Yes, very hot. But he could make more money in the North than he could teaching. It is not too different from our current story but we won't talk about that. But at any rate, very active in the church and he was always referred in our social circles, he was referred to as the professor.
>>INTERVIEWER: Ohh.
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  And so whenever there was a church meeting outside of the normal Sunday service, he was always called upon at the end of the service to profess something. It wasn't testimonial but they always liked for him to recite. His favorite poets were Wadsworth and Longfellow, Tennyson. He would recite these poems at the end of every service. That was what I grew up knowing and expecting. He started teaching me letters -- I couldn't have been more than three or four years old. We started out with nursery rhymes so I knew every nursery rhyme inside and out. His favorite was Who Shot Cock Robbin? I can't even find that one anymore. 
>> UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Hey, that's an old one!
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  Yes, that's a very old one. So, I was always very familiar with reciting. You know, my own interest now is still the connection between orality and literacy, the connection between oral tradition and literature tradition. It started from that point, knowing the nursery rhymes- 
>>INTERVIEWER: What's your favorite nursery rhyme?
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  Oh my goodness. I think Who Shot Cock Robbin.
>>INTERVIEWER: Can you recite it?
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  I can't remember anything but the first line.
>>INTERVIEWER: What's the first line?
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  Who Shot Cock Robbin.
[All laugh]
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  I just can't remember. I remember even the smell of the book, I remember the book; it was very old. But there was a fire in my grandparents home maybe about 25 years later and all of those materials were destroyed. So I don't have any access to those. As I have said, I have looked for that particular nursery rhyme -
>>INTERVIEWER: We will find it for you. 
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  and I can't find it anymore. So, rather than using the Bible to teach me literacy, to teach me letters, to teach me words; he used nursery rhymes and then quickly moved in to his favorite poems. One was Invictus- Out of the Night. I have always been very dramatic and I think it comes from his preparing me to recite in those ways. We were, as I said, very active in the church so there were always events. Certainly there were the Easter and the Christmas events where the children in Sunday school would get their little poems or their verses and then have to recite them at the program. I could never not know my lines. I mean it would have been the height of unforgivableness to stand up in that podium and not be able to recite my lines. I used to suffer with the other children but I was a little smart-A too, so, I was like I knew they couldn't say it. I have never forgotten my lines, to this day I cannot stand in front of an audience and not know my lines if there is a prepared script. I have to know it. So I feel like I can feel my grandfather flipping over in his grave: "That girl forgot those lines!" That was instilled in me very early, to be able to speak before an audience and to be able to recite my lines and to be able to have this love for that connection between the written word and the spoken word. 
>>INTERVIEWER: Tell me how that has affected your teaching?
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  Well, just my whole focus on the oral tradition and how it informs particularly an African American mind. As an undergrad I went to Michigan State University and my major was in Audiology and Speech Science. It was very interesting and it was at a time -- you know I am from Michigan -- so when I was active in the American Speech and Hearing Association, that is how I first met Geneva Smitherman. This was in the sixties so we go back that far in terms of that, you know, speech therapy. At that time Black English, or the language of African Americans, was a pathology. That is why I wanted to study speech therapy because I wanted to know more about Black English. I remember the first time I was interviewed by my college advisor -- this was during orientation; I hadn't even come to school and I had selected my major -- and she says "Well, why do you want to study speech pathology?" and I told her that -my sister gets upset whenever I tell this story -- I said "Well, I have a sister who can't talk." She gets so annoyed with me. She still can't talk. But, oh no no no. I mean, we were raised in the same family and yet here I was very conscious of how I spoke and she very much used the black vernacular every day. I can too, but I did not. I wanted to be able to help her. I haven't. 
[Laughs]
>>INTERVIEWER: Oh yes you have. You are a role model.
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  Right. Well, she didn't care. She says "Leave me alone!  I hate being around you, always correcting my speech!" But, by the time I graduated from Michigan State I realized that speech pathology was not the focus that I wanted. They were talking about African American children as being nonverbal, which was a tremendous insult to call a people whose oral tradition had founded and fostered all of their attention. To have them referred to as nonverbal was just a tremendous insult and was one of the reasons why I stayed away from Head Start. Because the folks who started Head Start, Bereiter and Engelmann, were the people who actually started Head Start, came out of that notion of helping nonverbal black children. So, that was the time; that was the height of the controversy about nonverbal black children and Black English. This was when Bill Stewart came out with Black English readers. It was all of these issues that were going on there. I later went on to have a double major as a masters. I got two masters degrees initially. The one was called Audiology and Speech Science and the second one was something that we called Urban Language. That was at Federal City College where I studied with Orlando Taylor and Walt Wolfrom. So I got this whole different intentional understanding of what it meant to be a Black English speaker and how English as a second dialect. Later on, World English was a part of the interest that I had.
>>INTERVIEWER: And when you became an activist. 
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  And when I became active -- well, I guess I was always activist of some sort. But I really wanted to tell you about my grandfather teaching me really to read using these poems as a kid. By the time I went to Kindergarten, my first Kindergarten teacher didn't appreciate my mouth. Can't imagine that. Really didn't understand our culture; she was a white woman in a school that was somewhat mixed but was predominantly African American and Mexican. She didn't get it and I didn't help her because I was a know-it-all. No, not me! But at that time they weren't teaching you letters in Kindergarten. She didn't know that talent that I had; that I already knew my ABCs and already knew words and I already had that sight recognition. 
>>INTERVIEWER: Low expectations?
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  Yeah. There were partly low expectations but that just was not the paradigm that we were being taught. In the fifties, that wasn't what they did in Kindergarten. That predated Sesame Street, that predated all of those kinds, it predated Head Start. So they didn't have that kind of -- that wasn't what we were focusing on in Kindergarten. We were playing with blocks and the sandbox and taking naps and doing all kinds of things. 
>>INTERVIEWER: And you were reciting poems. 
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  Yeah, I was reciting Tennyson but I didn't do it without being prompted. But she didn't know that about me. When I got to my first grade, my first grade teacher was Ms. Pecola Lee; I will never forget her. She recognized right away, oh, this girl can read. So, she realized that when I finished my work like fifteen minutes before everyone else, then she put me to work helping other people. So she knew how to keep me involved and I think that is where my activism became helping other people. She tells a story: at the end of the year she got married and her name became Pecola Rogers. She moved to the second grade so she could keep me in the second grade. She really gave, between my grandmother -- I mean my grandfather -- and Mrs. Lee-Rogers, they were the ones who fostered that excitement and interest in literacy because I already had that about orality. That has just played out in my career always. When I started working on my PhD. at CUNY, Bill Stewart was my dissertation advisor. I was going the route of second language acquisition, English as a second language, social linguistics, and particularly interested in World English as played out in Ghana. So I was interested in Ghanaian English. I actually met the man who wrote the first book about Ghanaian English, his name is Kofi Sey. He was at the University of Ghana Legon and I met him, I interviewed him, I collected all of these materials and I was all ready to write my dissertation and I went to my first conference -- Hey Gail! -- Oh, I am sorry. 
[Laughs]
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  I went to my first conference in Seattle and I think that was the conference that -- no, not I think -- that was Andrea Lunsford's conference as program Chair. I had talked to her the year before and said I would really like to do some sort of presentation. She said "Oh, honey!" you know, "Just send it in. I know you will do well!" And I gave a paper in Seattle where I talked about what I was doing at Queensborough Community College, where I was teaching an ESL course. I had my students doing stories. I had them telling stories but I didn't just have them telling stories I had them record the stories, then I had them transcribe the stories. So that was all that oral part moving into that written part. Then we had these really rich conversation about what does it look like when you write it down? What's good about it and what is missing and how can we make this literate? Okay, what can we do to make this literate? That was my whole teaching pedagogy at that time: taking the stories, moving from the stories to the transcription, moving from the transcription to something that could be actually written as a piece submitted for evaluation. 
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  I gave this paper and Ellie Kutz from UMass -- yes, UMass. Ellie said to me "This is wonderful, Duku!" We had just met and she said "Is this what you are writing for your dissertation?" And I was like "No. Is that linguistics?" She said "Oh, Duku, I can't believe you!" So I went back and I said to Bill "Bill, how would you feel about me changing my topic from Ghanaian English to Zorna Hurston's Mules and Men and how she made it literate?" He said "Yes! I was wondering when you were going to get to that! Well why didn't you say something? Well, you had to arrive at it on your own." So that is why I ended up writing my dissertation. I ended up actually having tapes from the American Folklore Society, where Alan Lomax and Zorna Hurston had gone and collected folk tales and songs and all kinds of things. So I actually had the oral text that I transcribed and then I explained the linguistic features in the discourse. I did a discourse analysis of that. Then, went on to talk about what she did to publish it in Mules and Men because she couldn't keep it in the same format. 
>>INTERVIEWER: How cool. How cool. 
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE:  So that is how I became involved and the rest is just what I have continued to do to work on that. 
>>INTERVIEWER: You are so good! Let me save this. 
>>AKUA DUKU ANOKYE: Oh, well thank you.