Eric Brubaker

Gloria Anzaldúa describes how, “living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an ‘alien’ element. There is an exhilaration in being a participant in the further evolution of humankind, in being ‘worked’ on.” This proposal is to present an original spoken word poem about a doctoral student’s ongoing journey to find home in a disciplinary borderland. The poem is a story, and the story is of isolation, integration, struggle, and friendship — in being worked on. Questions of identity (Who are you? Who do others think you are? Who do you pretend to be?) and community (To whom are you accountable? From what commitments do you come?) burn with salience. I am a work-in-progress, and like many at ESJP, I find home in the in-between spaces of disciplines. To contextualize the piece, a history of disciplinary division is woven throughout. Disciplines did not always have such a capital ‘D.’ Before World War II, art, for example, was an integral component of studies in many engineering, education, and humanities programs, but after the war, universities increasingly embraced departmental specialization and bureaucratization. Art departments were formed; the study of art became “Art;” and a new disciplinary border was constructed. This poem invites an examination of disciplinary borders, border crossings, epistemological faultlines, identity and dignity, and finds inspiration in poets Abisola Kusimo, Ed Mabrey, and Gwendolyn Brooks. I hope to embody Gwendolyn’s words as she exclaims: “This is the urgency: Live! … Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”