Memoir of a troubled childhood

Professor Michael Awkward's new book chronicles his experiences growing up in South Philadelphia. In person, the often reserved and always humble Michael Awkward hardly seems like the type of person who would write a memoir chronicling his childhood in a poor South Philadelphia neighborhood. Nonetheless, the Penn English professor has authored a detailed personal account of his troubled home life that is currently attracting the attention of his students, colleagues and numerous book critics. In the memoir, titled Scenes of Instruction: A Memoir, Awkward, 40, focuses on his relationship with his mother, who inspired his love for reading but also suffered from alcoholism and was a victim of domestic violence. "I don't know what I would have been had it not been for my mother. But I know a lot of what I am is because of her," Awkward wrote. Awkward, who spent 10 years at the University of Michigan before coming to Penn in 1996, placed his mother at the center of his memoir because she inspired his interest in the lives of African-American women. For Awkward, providing a personal account of his mother's struggles was, in some ways, a source of concern. Through the writing process, though, Awkward says he recognized that the act of memoir-writing is inherently personal -- and even risky. "If you are going to write a memoir and you don't expose things about yourself, then you shouldn't write it. You have to be prepared for exposure," says Awkward, who received his doctoral degree in English from Penn in 1986. Awkward is, his colleagues say, somewhat unique in his willingness to present his personal life to students, let alone to countless strangers. "Most professors reveal nothing of themselves," says English Professor Farah Griffin, the undergraduate chairwoman of the English Department. "It is incredibly courageous." Awkward, who also directs the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, insists that he wanted to write about how the literature he studies has affected him as a person and as a scholar. Increasingly, he says, the work done by literary scholars "isn't and doesn't pretend to be totally objective anymore." Indeed, Awkward readily acknowledges that contemporary classics like Richard Wright's Black Boy and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye influenced his memoir in their depictions of black youths struggling to come of age in a mainstream white society. "We all struggle to figure out who we are in society. We struggle in ways that we understand and sometimes don't understand," he says. "It is not an easy thing for anybody to define themselves." Struggling to find one's identity is an important part of the African-American literary tradition, Awkward explains, and it has been equally important to him in his own life. "If you are going to participate in that tradition, you've got to say something," Awkward says. "You have got to talk about the pain of growing up. I don't know too many people for whom growing up hasn't been painful." His memoir contains detailed descriptions of Awkward's life as a young black man who "took solace in reading" in the poor housing project in which he was raised -- a place, he says, that did not celebrate his intellectual abilities. "When I grew up, I had a very clear sense that being a man had very little to do with the things that I was capable of doing," he says. This realization, that the stereotypical definition of "manhood" contradicted the pursuit of education in his neighborhood, now hinders his optimism that this same attitude can be altered in areas similar to the one in which he grew up. "It's hard to imagine the social structure changing," he says. "The only way that the society can change significantly is to have different kinds of notions of what it means to be male and female." He also wanted to examine his own scholarship -- as a cultural critic, particularly of African-American female literature -- over the past two decades. College junior Nina Harris, a member of Awkward's "Filming Black Words: Hollywood Adaptations of Afro-American Narratives" seminar, said that while Awkward does not overtly express his feminist beliefs in class, he places a great emphasis on women in literature. "I like the fact that the literature is not male-centered. Academia is so male-dominated and women sometimes get lost," Harris says. "There are very few professors who work to get women actively involved." Awkward noted that he is grateful for the transformation of the academy over the past several years, which now accepts African-American literature as a valid genre in the literary canon. He noted that he rarely read African-American literary texts in class as an undergraduate. "If my book informs the tradition at all, it may be in legitimizing more creative forms of black autobiography," Awkward says.

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