Mobley 1

A Tale of Two Identities

I cannot remember a time when I was unable to read. Of course Im not under any
delusions that I came out of the womb a fully functional literate entity. Instead, my relationship
with literacy has been embedded in the farthest reaches of my accessible consciousness making it
as much a part of me as the faint chicken pox scars stippled across the back of my hands.
Although I know they have not always been there, they are now intricately woven into my being,
inseparable from my identity.
Some of my favorite childhood memories are of impromptu trips to the bookstore with
my mom, browsing rack after rack of colorful covers, running my fingertips over spines and
bindings, inhaling the delicious, fresh off the press, never been read smell when I open them for
the first time, consumed by the worlds hidden within, as I devour story after story after story. My
days were filled with the endless adventures that books afforded me. I could go anywhere, be
anything, without ever stepping outside my front door. I never experienced the modern invention
of boredom. When my parents were exhausted by my antics, when my brothers activities
inevitably devolved into boy stuff unsuitable for a young lady, when my friends were nowhere
to be found, I would turn to the secret worlds that silently waited for me.
Reading was my first love.
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Writing on the other hand, was born out of tragedy. When I was nine and my mother had
a stroke that rendered her mute and immobile and resulted in months of hospitalization, writing
was my only comfort. It was the only way I knew how to direct the streams of emotions that
raged through my mind but could not breach my lips. When I was fifteen and bullying and abuse
struck me dumb and my tongue useless, writing became my language of choice and necessity.
Writing done outside the confines of the classroom was my lifeline. My creative writing was the

Mobley 2

result of a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings that I could never reconcile with the
scheduled formation of my academic writing.
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As I sit in the front row, fluorescent lights beam down on Mr. Smiths receding hairline,
tinging his frustrated scowl a pallid yellow. His metal-framed eyes roam the classroom as he
vents his disappointment about the substandard level of our first ENC1101 essay. I cant hold his
gaze any longer than a few seconds as I pass my pen from sweaty palm to sweaty palm.
Of course I should have expected this, I silently tell myself. Ive been out of school
for three years. My writing must have suffered. As long as I earned a C, there is hope.
I wait as Mr. Smith marches from station to station, returning papers to their reluctant
owners, leaving a wave of sighs in his wake, but he passes by me every time. He dismisses the
class with a quick reminder of upcoming homework and asks me to stay behind, my paper still
clutched in his freckled hands. My heart sinks as my classmates file out of the room, leaving me
to face my fate with nothing more than an occasional curious backwards glance toward me. Mr.
Smith hands me my paper, and I hesitantly search each page for harsh comments scrawled in
dreaded red ink. When I finally get to the fifth page, I see a large red A with comments about
how excited he was to read my essay. He must have registered my surprise, as he explained to
me that my essay was the best he had read in his time teaching first year composition. I could not
believe it.
***
Entering college, I quickly realized that there was so much I did not know. To my
surprise, this absence of prior knowledge worked in my favor. Since I already knew that I did not
know everything, I was open to instruction and to learning the conventions of college
composition. Over the course of the semester, Mr. Smith introduced me to brainstorming and
drafting, two stages in the writing process that were new to me. I learned pre-writing activities

Mobley 3

and revision strategies. I learned that going to school in Florida was radically different from
going to school in my homeland.
I started college in the United States after going through a rather strict and restrictive
education system in the Caribbean. The shift was palpable: going from a pedagogy that closely
followed the prescriptive strategy of a teacher-centered Storehouse to engage in a Burkean Parlor
environment that encouraged discourse and collaboration was a difficult transition. It still is. The
legacy of my restrictive educational past lives on in my tendency to listen to everything that
transpires in class discussions and silently come to my own conclusions instead of actively
participating in the discourse.
Consequently, my freshman composition courses were a far cry from my point of
departure. I lived much of that first year in tentative uncertainty, but my professor, Mr. Smith,
was instrumental in uncovering my potential and molding my abilities. Five years later, Im still
thankful to him for guiding me to this path that I stubbornly stumble down. My goals as a teacher
and a tutor stem from my experience having him as a professor. My desire is to reassure students
that there is a writer inside each of them and to encourage them to find their own unique voice.
***
Although I did not quite believe him at the time, by the end of the semester, Mr. Smith
had convinced me that I had a talent for writing. So I switched my major from Education to
English, and since then I have always anticipated the beautiful red designs that professors make
on my papers.
******************************
With the publication of select poems and an excerpt from my memoir under my belt, I
was finally able to admit out loud, without apprehension, that I was indeed a writer. My years of
journaling were not in vain. Or so I thought until I encountered a novel whose impact still
reverberates through my literary veins.

Mobley 4

I was lucky enough to marry a man who shares my love for literature. Although we were
both students in the same department at the same undergraduate institution, we thought it best to
never take the same course at the same time. For me this meant exposure to a variety of texts that
I would not have the chance to study as a student.
One day I snuck into my husbands man cave to peruse his ever expanding selection of
fantasy novels and came across Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God. I had
heard of Hurston in the context of the Harlem Renaissance and her work as a cultural
anthropologist and folklorist, but I had only read a short excerpt from one of her non-fiction
pieces. Their Eyes Were Watching God was not what I had set out to read when I journeyed into
the forbidden kingdom. I know the adage dictates that I should not judge a book by its cover, but
the cover was beautiful: title emblazoned in gold script, woman painted in hues of warm amber,
head resolutely tilted back, eyes closed to reality, straddling the threshold of overwhelming pain
and sweet ecstasy. I needed to know her story. So I stole away to my reading nook wrapped in
my leopard-print snuggie, sunk into the sofa legs akimbo and began reading, Ships at a distance
have every mans wish on board.
I quickly became overwhelmed by line after line of eloquent prose speaking to parts of
me I thought long buried, since I thought I was way beyond the point where mere words could
send tremors through my soul. By the time I reached the end of the first page, I could no longer
handle it. I closed the book and became the girl on its cover: enraptured by the beauty that
imparts the painful realization of how my own writing paled in comparison to Hurstons
masterpiece. What little confidence I had accrued in my ability as a writer was swiftly
demolished by a single page of prose. Months later, once my ego was sufficiently removed from
the forefront of my mind, I finally finished the novel.
In retrospect, this experience taught me the importance of seeing writing as a recursive
process, one that can never be mastered since there is always room for revision and

Mobley 5

improvement. Embracing this novice mentality has been helpful in my development as a writer,
and it is something that I hope to convey to students in my role as a tutor and teacher. While I
readily accept this truth concerning my academic writing, it has been infinitely more difficult to
accept in my creative endeavors.
******************************
I hover uncertainly near the entrance of the Reading Writing Center and wonder how
many students have been in my shoes. I imagine its inception mired in the stigma we read so
much about, and I search for any cold, clinical artifacts that speak to its complicated past. My
investigation is cut short when a wispy voice calls out, Hi! Are you Clare? I look up to see the
welcoming smile of an ethereal platinum blonde tutor. Im Latifah. As I enter the safe house,
she guides me to the table where we sit side by side. She then asks about the reason for todays
visit. With nerves and an abundance of caffeine coursing through my veins, I tell her about my
assignment to craft a Literacy Narrative, a genre that I was wholly unfamiliar with. Possessing
nothing but undeveloped possibilities running through my head, I need as much help as I can get.
Through her conversational yet probing open-ended questions and collaborative brainstorming, I
realize that my literacy journey has been marked by a sharp divide between my attitudes and
approaches to creative writing and academic writing. I have a split personality, two separate
identities born of different circumstances and navigated in different ways. This split creates
tension and an ever changing binary where neither term occupies the seat of privilege
indefinitely.

Creative Writing
Creation
Writer
Reflection
Exploration of Self
Spontaneous/Improvisation

Academic Writing
Criticism
Reader
Analysis
Exploration of Others
Scheduled/Structural Strictures

Mobley 6

The tension causes anxiety because my educational pursuits made me choose one over the other.
How can a whole survive if only half is allowed to thrive? Did I make the write choice?
Theorists talk about the role of a tutor as a counselor. That is what Latifah provided for
me because it was what I needed in that moment. To be warm and friendly, to ask questions and
genuinely listen to the answers, to express personal views without drowning out the voice of the
writer is a skill I hope to develop with time, so that I too can be an effective tutor for a writer
who is equally as lost as I was when I entered the center.
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I often wonder if I will find a way to reconcile my two selves into one cohesive whole.
Perhaps this duality is a necessary part of my growth as a writer. Perhaps duality and multiplicity
are realities that all writers and all of humanity must learn to negotiate. Or perhaps I am simply
crazy, and life is my teacher and writing my therapy.