As one listens to John Coltrane’s “Central Park West,” one’s mind begins to wander to distant places. Personally, it brings me to a cold night, any cold night, ambling around the street of that same name, looking for life, peace, warmth, quiet, loneliness, happiness, those things that keep us all going in one way or another. But then the track changes, from the second iteration to the third, a song called “Liberia,” a nation for which my heart has poured over many years now. The beat shifts, the modal scales explode, and suddenly, no longer cold and ambling, the mind feels the sun, and starts to move.
It’s amazing what the mind can do with a simple prompt, when it gets the first, even the most simplistic, whiff of creative energy and dedication. The point is this: Coltrane didn’t write “Liberia” in that country. Indeed, oddly, he didn’t write “Central Park West” on Central Park West. He wrote both songs to express the reality of those places, the feelings he, at least, felt upon visiting or thinking or talking about those places. Coltrane never went to Liberia. He wrote the song after meeting a group of Liberians at a nightclub in New York. But he captured their nation, their spirit, without words, and in a way that, for a jazz saxophonist in 1964, no one had ever imagined.
My class did the same thing this semester, and I’d like to say that I helped. If you recall, some weeks back, I wrote a post about The Country Project™ (patent pending)—an immersive, creative project in which groups of students invented and detailed a historically accurate, but entirely made up, nation or colony. Those projects, at long last, came due this past Monday, and as I read over the results—PowerPoints of capitals, maps, flags, and languages I, or anyone else on the planet, had never seen or heard—I got the same feeling I get when listening to those two opposite-but-neighboring tracks on Coltrane’s Sounds. I was transfixed, immersed, transported, and any other trans-based word roughly meaning “fascinated” or “moved.”
Some of the projects were extraordinary, clearly the works of mad geniuses, cosplayers, and/or alternate history message boarders. The maps were so real that, I admit with more than a little shame, I had to look at a globe to make sure it wasn’t actually there. From the Catholic South American hamlet of Pernambuco, with its 6% Jewish population and odd cultural relationship with neighboring Dutch Suriname (largely the result of its Jewish population), to the Portuguese-dominated, Catalonian-despised Kingdom of Iberia and its New World colony of Lodaçal in Portuguese Louisiana, I found a world dissected, analyzed, then changed by a group of students genuinely entertained by a school project.
And that got me thinking. What I was reading moved me in a way no other assignment or experience in my young career has yet to do. For the first time, I saw my students understand the point of studying history. They recognized the need to look elsewhere for roots of local influences and realities. They didn’t simply escape the work of analysis and creation by inventing a series of colonies under the control of established and known monarchies, without constitutions, and without any effective local or indigenous life. They didn’t cop out. They engaged the assignment, and invented. They thought. They researched. Good Lord did they research! They spanned the globe to find the most interesting, timely, historically-accurate-but-entirely-made-up demographics, influences, trends, trade networks, and linguistic combinations. Indeed, instead of reducing every colonial language to a generic and ill-defined “Creole,” they flatly invented new languages that actually made sense! For example, Mughalia, a liberal and distant member of the expansive Russian empire of the 18th century, bordering the weak and decentralized Mughal empire of the Indian subcontinent, spoke the Mughali language—a combination of Urdu, Turkic, and Hindko with Russian grammatical structures. What it lacked in nominal value, it made up in substance. And this wasn’t even the most creative example.
Of course, there are always problems with projects like this. One could reasonably question the value of historical invention, citing a rather large number of terrible, terrible alternate history novels (I’m looking at you, Harry Turtledove), message boards, and conspiracy theories. There’s really no argument there. Yes, what my students created was just that—a creation, ahistorical by nature, fake, made up, untrue, false, invented. But it brought them closer to the subject than I ever could in a lecture, or even through a monograph specifically on the languages of the Mughal Empire, or the political relationships of the new states in the Early American Republic. It brought them to the level of invention, the level of understanding necessary for creating something an expert (Ha!) sitting in judgment would believe, buy, and appreciate. This, my dears, is the anti-memorization, the anti-regurgitation, the anti-multiple-choice exam.
This is our goal, isn’t it? To get students to find a legitimate, if fleeting and localized, interest in the subject of history? To recognize the importance of historical analysis and study in the face of more lucrative, professionally attractive fields like business, finance, and accounting? To create a nation or a colony based on the context of a given era and space, one must understand how that era and space worked, how the appearance of this new political entity would affect the nations and colonies that already, and actually did, exist around it. The student must understand how governments of the time worked, and how/if the people of his or her nation or colony would know about a certain type of organization—i.e. was a republic possible in 18th century Central Asia or Africa? Possibly, depending on an enormous number of variables. Everything had/has variables to engage, discuss, and analyze, all of which were rooted purely in history.
And that’s the point. The creative aspect was secondary. It was the enjoyable end of an intense, research-based project. The students came out of the project as experts, truly, on a made up state; but they also arrived at that expertise with an understanding of the past that no exam, essay, or quiz could ever produce. To design a flag or sigil that fits every design and symbolic base standard to a given area and time says infinitely more than an essay on vexillogical structures in the 18th century colonial world. And, frankly, it’s more fun.
I never thought I’d leave spacetime this semester. I never thought I’d be impressed with so many people. I never thought I’d enjoy grading anything, much less a major project. I never thought a lot of things. But that’s the fun of it all—the unexpected flurry of a saxophone shredding a scale, a sudden burst of distorted bends and frills in the loneliest Delta dirge, or the sudden and moving realization that your students have taken you on the trip of a lifetime. This is why we do it. And I couldn’t feel warmer.
Love, as always,
Andrew
