Kuknalim.com talks to Dr. Paul Pimomo
Dr Paul Pimomo is currently Professor of English at Central Washington University, U.S. He has a vast experience in teaching. In an e-mail interview with kuknalim.com’s Yan Murry, he shares about his journey to the States, his experiences as a teacher, about the Virginia Tech Killings, about the American system of education and many other things...
Kuknalim.com: Tell us about your journey from Nagaland to the States.
Dr Paul: Well, the short answer is that in the summer of 1984 I took a plane from Shillong to Kolkota, then to Mumbai, London, New York, and St. Louis, and finally landed in Carbondale, Illinois. It was a long, uneventful series of flights half way around the world.
There’s another way to look at my journey of course, as the logical response to an unfavorable career situation back in the mid-1980s. After teaching English at North-Eastern Hill University for six years, it became clear to me from the academic and political environment prevailing there then (things must have changed for the better since) that I wouldn’t be professionally happy and fulfilled. So with help from a couple of good friends, I headed for the United States to try my luck at serious academics in English literature. My professional goal was clear from the start: I would complete the PhD and become a professor of English, anywhere in the world, including of course the possibility of returning to the Northeast. With that in mind, I bought a one-way ticket out of Shillong to the States. Two degrees, three universities, and twenty-two years later, I’m still professor of English at Central Washington University, Ellensburg, in the lovely Pacific Northwest region of the United States. So you could say that the journey from my ambition of becoming a professor of English to my being one followed a fairly direct and simple route.
The real-life journey was, however, more circuitous and complicated. Obviously, professorship should not be a life’s destination. Like other professions, it is merely a path to an end, a means to a purpose in life that takes a whole lifetime to complete. But finding a good path is important, and for me the process started as a little boy in Akuk village in Nagaland. I had just completed my first year at the village school, and was still too young to walk to the jhum paddy fields by myself, but I decided that it was time to leave the village for something bigger. I had heard of bigger things from Fr. John Larrea, a missionary, with whom I still keep in touch. So one day I left home for Don Bosco school, Golaghat, Assam. I couldn’t walk for long despite my determination and excitement, so my dad carried me on his back. At Don Bosco, I learned to read and write English and got to love the language. Three years later, I was in a Catholic minor seminary called Savio Juniorate, Shillong, developing my reading and writing skills in English, besides learning Latin, music, and the usual menu of foundational subjects for a liberal education. I matriculated in 1968 and left for Dibrugarh. I took B.A. Honors in English at Kanoi College, after which I taught English in Don Bosco High School and completed a Master’s in English from Dibrugarh University at the same time. I did a stint as a lecturer in Dibrugarh University, then joined the English department in NEHU. As I said earlier, six years into that position I left for Southern Illinois University. My family joined me in Carbondale, Illinois, the following year in 1985.
Looking back, my journey from Akuk village to the United States seems long and uncommon. It sometimes feels like the boy who walked, barefoot, out of my parents’ village hut that day wasn’t me, or if it was, then it belonged to an earlier life in another world. The two worlds are so vastly different. But at other times, I feel more intimate with the little village boy in me today than I feel with any other version of me since, such was the formative power of my childhood.
Kuknalim.com: You have been a student as well as a professor in both India and the States. What differences have you experienced in both the countries as a student as well as a teacher?
Dr Paul: You’re right, my first two degrees were from India, the last two from the States. And I taught in two Indian universities before coming out here, and have taught in three here, so I should know. But I’m afraid I haven’t thought about the subject seriously enough. Let me therefore describe my experience and let people draw their own conclusions. Differences as a student? I’d say not that much in my case. I worked to pay for my higher education in both countries. But it was harder in India to align the demands of teaching and of studying for a degree. I had to come up with my own devices to resolve the conflicting class schedules of the school I taught in and the university I attended. In the States, on the other hand, I merely followed an existing institutional system that was already in place for graduate students to work and study for a degree at the same time. So I’d say universities in the States have a clear advantage over those in India in providing graduate students with opportunity to pursue higher education without having to depend on parents and other sources for funds.
From the teacher’s perspective, too, I prefer the combination of lecture and student participation in the American classroom to the rather formal lecture mode of teaching in India. I can’t imagine delivering an hour’s worth of lecture everyday to the same group of students here (which is what I used to do in India), without being criticized as a boring professor who doesn’t care whether or not the students learn. Don’t get me wrong, lectures do have a respectable place in America education. The idea in the States generally seems to be that whatever pedagogy works for students is worth a try, whereas in India both professor and students seem jointly responsible for making the lecture format the preferred form of education.
Another major difference is that professors here have greater flexibility in developing and offering courses than do professors in India. American professors decide the content and the pedagogy of the courses they teach, while Indian professors for the most part teach courses readymade for them by the department, down to the specific texts, authors, and coverage. The result of this difference is that graduates of an Indian program come away having read the same works taught by the same professors, while American graduates of the same program could have encountered different course contents depending on the professor they took the courses from. In other words, uniformity and coverage are valued more in Indian education than in American education. In the States, availability of multiple curricular choices is considered a strength in any program.
Another difference that affects both professors and students has to do with the way departments in India and in the States approach a discipline -- not so much in the curricular contents but in the approach. Take English literature for an example. We live in a global society, so the English Literature curriculum has come to represent, at least in theory, literature written in English around the world, plus Theory, and some key non-English works in translation. In reality, the curriculum starts with British literature, where it all began, and ends with American literature, where everything seems to converge these days. Between these two giant bookends of English Studies can be found the literary staples of the discipline, whether you’re studying English at Oxford, Indiana, New Delhi, Singapore, Johannesburg, Melbourne, Pec, or Tokyo. English literature from the rest of the world is scattered around and about this literary table, as it were, and some writers and scholars try to insert this text or that author, sometimes successfully, into an already packed row of British and American books and authors.
The point I was making, though, is that the scope of English literature has become huge, and universities in the two countries deal with the challenge differently. American departments generally take a laissez faire approach when it comes to the study of the development and spread of the English language and of English literature. There’s little time, and even less patience in this country, for a systematic historical understanding of English literature from its beginnings to the present, not to speak of English literature at the global level but even of individual national literary traditions. On the other hand, a sustained historical comprehension of the discipline was the goal, even if often not the result, of English literary education in India when I was a student. In place of a comprehensive approach to literature, for which there’s neither the time nor the cultural inclination, American students are expected to quickly find an area to focus on and specialize in. This system turns out experts in single authors, themes, historical periods, literary movements, and so on. The academe is full of authorities in every aspect of every field; indeed the principle behind a department’s faculty personnel decisions is precisely to bring together such people in the discipline so that the department comes to represent a formidable intellectual community. This environment can work wonders for the top-tier, research oriented departments. The downside is that because this piecemeal and discrete approach to knowledge has been institutionalized at the national level, it tends to produce, at best, wonderfully half-educated individuals, and at worst, just plain half-educated citizenry, some of whom are over-confident in their knowledge and see the world through the limited prisms of their specialization, a quality undesirable in any global citizen, but especially so in citizens from the only remaining superpower in the world.
Kuknalim.com: What subjects do you teach in your University? Which subjects do you like teaching?
Dr Paul: There are mainly three course levels in American colleges and universities: General Education subjects, or breadth courses, which all students must take to graduate; Undergraduate courses in the major, the equivalent of honors courses in India; and Graduate courses. I teach courses at all these levels, and have taught them for long enough to realize that I need to make changes to a course when I cease to enjoy teaching it. It goes without saying that students can’t enjoy a class that the teacher does not.
Let me mention a course at each level that I enjoy teaching. “Introduction to Literature” is a basic literature appreciation course. The teacher’s job here is to show how literature teaches us to think and feel our way through life by addressing both our heads and hearts, as well as how to recognize the kinds of strategies good writers use to communicate significant ideas about life. Literary works therefore have to be persuasive, imaginative, and relevant, whether they are poems, stories, plays, or essays. I like the challenge of presenting literature to amateurs. I try to show that literature at its best is a mode of seeing and living that engenders a sense of common humanity and respect for the individual.
There are several courses in the major I love to teach. African American literature tops the list. I can’t think of another literary tradition that simultaneously, and as powerfully and variously, captures a people’s capacity for suffering and for creative expression in the face of the severest of conditions from which African Americans rose and triumphed. I think the better part of who I am comes partly from the study of African American literature.
At the graduate level, I teach courses in British, postcolonial, and world literatures, as well as theory and criticism. One of my favorites is a course called “Literary Counterpoints,” where I bring together masterpieces of Western literature, old and new, on the one hand, and their contemporary and postcolonial rewrites on the other. This allows for a systematic exploration of literary themes that had their origin in the ancient world but still matter in ours today. As the course title indicates, the intent is to engage significant works of literature as a conversation among writers across literary periods and cultural traditions, rather than as monologues stuck in their respective times and places.
Kuknalim.com: What according to you are the merits and demerits of the education system in India and the States?
Dr Paul: I think I’ve touched on this while answering an earlier question. But one clear merit of American education is the freedom for both faculty and students to experiment with the knowledge material they are engaged in. The willingness to experiment also involves pedagogy, effective methods of delivering knowledge to diverse audiences. Indian education does not ignore innovation, I’m sure, but it tends to underplay it. It is generally geared toward passing one kind of exam or another: UPSC and any number of entrance exams into medical, technology, business, or engineering colleges. Indians have prodigious minds for retaining information and sometimes forget that information gathering is only the beginning, not the end, of education. In short, Indian education may be systematic and comprehensive in coverage but serves too limited a goal, while American education, though spotty and narrow, promotes innovation and professionalism. In the end, though, they share the same difference. The two approaches are both driven by the same goal: a job that pays the highest salary, in India or in the States. “So what?” and “What then?” are American and Indian questions that may have become obsolete in our age of global capitalism.
Kuknalim.com: How are the students like in your University? Tell us about your favorite students.
Dr Paul: We have 9000 or so students at Central Washington University. They come from a wide range of socio-economic and educational backgrounds. Most are Washington State residents and come from middleclass and working class families, including some first generation college students. There’s a sizable number of out-of-state and international students as well. The levels of their academic preparation vary greatly. The best could go to any university in the world and do well, some need extra encouragement and help, most belong somewhere in between. The majority of our students are between the ages of 18 and 23, but we have older, non-traditional students, a well as graduate students many of whom are married and have families of their own to support while pursuing their education. The majority of our student population is white, but we have a growing number of Hispanic students, as well as Asian Americans, African Americans, and Native-Americans.
Every teacher’s favorite students are hardworking, open-minded, personable quick learners. I’ve had the good fortune of teaching many such students in all the universities I’ve taught, in India and here. There are also students who start out as none of the above but make progress toward these laudable qualities, and in the process make themselves their teacher’s favorites. It is a pleasure to teach eager, bright students, and it’s easy, because here the teacher is really putting on a friendly show in front of a winning audience. But the real challenge of teaching is service, to be useful to students who need teaching the most, and this group can come from the academically unprepared as well as the most intellectually gifted, some of whom may seem un-teachable at first. But no student is un-teachable. At this point in my career, I like to stay away from the notion of favorite students and concentrate on being present to as many students as I can.
Kuknalim.com: Students in developed countries usually do part-time jobs while studying. This is said to make them ‘independent’ early in life. This is also said to imbibe in them a sense of ‘dignity of labor’. How much of this is true? Do you feel Naga students need to do part-time jobs too?
Dr Paul: Doing part-time job while studying is a good thing if it makes students self-reliant and instills in them respect for the working class. I think independence is another issue. It’s over-rated. Independence from whom, why, when in fact every circumstance of our existence on this earth depends on our connection with and dependence on one another and with things around us? So, yes, dignity of labor and self-reliance are convincing enough reasons for higher education in Nagaland to put in place a work-study program. Obviously, it should be done on a voluntary basis since there may be students who wish to pursue a specific ambition by devoting full-time to their studies, and others who may need all the time they can get to succeed in college.
Our Naga forebears were a sturdy, hardworking, self-reliant people. They had to be to survive the elements. Circumstances have changed for us, but the way to success, namely hard work, is the same. Diligence as a student, giving one’s very best to whatever it is one is studying, with or without part-time work, translates into upholding the admirable Naga tradition, I think.
Kuknalim.com: What do you have to say about the shooting incident in Virginia Tech University which killed 33 students?
Dr Paul: It is a tragedy, a horrific tragedy. Thirty-three families from seven countries, including the killer’s, suffered irreparable loss in a most violent, senseless way. The gruesome scenes will haunt the families and friends for the rest of their lives. Their pain will not heal completely, but we hope they will summon up the courage and wisdom to accept the inevitable, and learn to live with and find peace in the memories of the good times they shared with their lost loved ones.
Reports on Cho Seung-Hui’s life prior to the event tell the story of an extremely troubled young man going back to the early years of his life. One thing is clear. He suffered from a severe mental illness that did not get treated despite legal advice. The other issue is the easy availability of guns in this country. When you put the two elements together, namely a violent, paranoid schizophrenic mind and semi-automatic guns with plenty of ammunition, which was the case with this young man, then the result can be as predictable and horrendous as the Virginia Tech massacre. Shamefully, the national debate on gun control in the aftermath of the killings has gone, as usual, along ideological party lines. The weapons industry and its supporters, inside and outside of the U. S. Congress, are not about to yield an inch. Any change in the gun control law will therefore be cosmetic. So that’s that. The other critical issue, an effective national system of monitoring and treating mental illnesses, has been drowned out by the gun lobby.
The big picture into which the incident fits is the culture of violence. What happened on VT campus is part of a bigger whole, starting with abusive homes and schoolyard bullying to violent street crimes, holy wars, and wars of occupation. This culture of violence and domination on a global scale is the scourge of our world today. Discrimination, abject poverty, hatred, injustice, mass killings, genocide, hopelessness, one or a combination of these are the daily experiences of billions of people from America to Iraq, Palestine to Sudan, and many places in between. What is the role of governments, all governments, but especially the powerful and wealthy, in engendering this global malaise, and what responsibilities do they have to help solve it? And what’s the role of educational and religious institutions? What about individuals? Our capacity for knowledge, tolerance, and compassion? These are questions that could lead us to an understanding of the causes of pervasive violence in the world, but they are left unraised for the most part, and until we know the causes of the problem, we’ll not get anywhere close to solving it.
Kuknalim.com: Besides teaching, how do you spend your time? (Hobbies, interests etc)
Dr Paul: Being professor in a university is a full-time job. I suppose it should be, but it leaves one with little time to do anything else. I do some volunteer work with the Faculty Union at my university and participate as often as I can in on-campus faculty forums on issues of national and international relevance. At home, I do gardening in the backyard and help my wife with chores for relaxation. I cook up an Indo-Naga storm once in a while, complete with dal and rice, dried fish and dhania chutney, chicken with bamboo shoot, beef tripe with ginger and basal. And I play ping pong with my colleagues for a couple of hours a week.
Kuknalim.com: Tell us about your family.
Dr Paul: My wife, Rose Richa, is Angami from Jakhama village. She went to St. Mary’s College, Shillong. She works in a university as Coordinator of Student Services, some 50 miles from where I teach. She loves her job, though the daily commute can be a drag. Mike, our son, is 29, and lives and works in the Seattle area, a 100 miles from where we live. He just bought a house and is busy settling in. He’s still single. Our daughter, Vonchi, is 26, has a master’s in Education and is a teacher; she’s married to Ben, an architect, whom she met in Washington University in St. Louis. They now live and work in Oregon. Rose has a sister and brother back in Jakhama, and I have my mom and several siblings back in Nagaland as well.
Kuknalim.com: I have noticed that you are quiet an active Internet surfer. How, according to you, has Internet shaped today’s world?
Dr Paul: I do surf the Internet for news and events from around the world on a daily basis but am pretty selective about the sites I visit. I usually check three websites on Nagaland, including Kuknalim, a few progressive sites in the States, and a couple from England. I don’t consider myself computer and technology savvy, so if even people like me have come to depend on the Internet for most of the day’s news and commentary we read, then it seems reasonable to say that the Internet has quite literally changed our medium of relating to the world. Print media, the radio, and TV will continue to be major sources of information, but most people want more than headliners and sound bites and so the Internet’s easy accessibility will only increase our reliance on it.
Obviously email and instant messaging have radically changed the way people communicate as well. I’m a real fan of the email. I use it several times a day, at work for getting professional stuff done, and at home to stay in touch with friends here and abroad. I co-authored a book with a professor in Japan entirely through email. We’re working on another book the same way. A related consequence of the Internet revolution has been the globalization of English. The British Empire may have launched the English language to one-fourth of the world, but it is the Internet that has disseminated it to the whole world. English used to be the language of diplomacy among nations and of trade in the metropolitan centers of the world, now it reaches every office and middleclass home via the Internet.
Kuknalim.com: How do you like kuknalim.com? Any suggestions for improvements?
Dr Paul: I like Kuknalim very much, and visit it everyday. Congratulations on the great work, and thank you for your uncommon service to our people. I know too little about websites to make suggestions. But what the heck! I wonder if Kuknalim would host an Internet Conference once a year on a significant issue touching Naga society. Topics and details can be worked out in time. For the first conference, panelists representing various walks of life can be invited to participate. We can begin with Nagas who have distinguished themselves in some way. Politicians, writers, scholars, scientists, doctors, lawyers, social workers, Naga national workers, administrators, student leaders etc. The conference proceedings would be published on Kuknalim. If the papers turn out well, they can be further expanded and improved for publication in a book form as well. If the event takes off really well, down the line, we can think of Kuknalim’s World Conference on Naga Life and Culture to be held each year in Dimapur or Kohima. That way, Kuknalim can act as the facilitator of as well as a clearinghouse for serious discussion, ideas, and work on Nagas.
“Never kill anyone for Nagaland, and don’t die for Nagaland either; instead, live and contribute toward a better Nagaland.”
Kuknalim.com: A word of advice for Naga students.
Dr Paul: Advising people one hasn’t met can be pointless, or worse. But in the time-honored Naga tradition of elders advising younger folks, here I go: 1) By all means, steer clear of fanaticism and extreme fundamentalism in all forms -- nationalism, religion, ethnic identity etc. 2) Cultivate the spirit and practice of tolerance, empathy, and compassion toward all human beings, without exception. 3) Never kill anyone for Nagaland, and don’t die for Nagaland either; instead, live and contribute toward a better Nagaland. 4) Respect difference and celebrate diversity. There will be disagreements, even irreconcilable differences. At such times, follow the dictum of the Israeli writer and peace-maker Amos Oz: “wherever right clashes with right, a value higher than right ought to prevail – and this value is life itself.”
Thank you, Kuknalim, for giving me this privilege.
Reproduced with the kind permission of Kuknailm.com
