Allowed to surface. To come up from our years of obscurity – our years of service teaching. Of paid-by-the-hour teaching. Of seminar teaching for the full-time lecturers.
Years of holding ourselves back. Of never speaking our own minds. Years of never giving our own takes on things. Years of never having had the floor, and now having the floor.
Let off the leash. Unmanacled. Muzzles taken off. Now what? What were we going to say?
What happens when the subaltern speaks? When our kind found ourselves at the lectern? What happens when we were allowed to pace the stage? To wield marker pen on whiteboard? To turn on the visualiser? To flick from PowerPoint slide to slide?
What, when we had people to listen? Our own audience! For the first time!
What, when we were entrusted with the students of the wealthy? With Russell Group students? Who actually showed basic literacy. Who could actually sit still for an hour.
To be listened to. To be heard. Isn’t this always what we wanted? To design whole modules. Whole classes. We had an audience. Students were listening. Notetaking!
And Cicero, herself listening. Cicero pacing up and down outside the lecture room, following what we were saying.
Raw at first. Sometimes, words strained. Sometimes, voices trembling. Sometimes, drops in volume. Whispers. The students had to lean in … Students were all but confidants … Build at other times, build. Mounting. Break-out. All but bellowing. Crescendos. Great peaks …
Following our notes at first, in those early months. Following our slides. And then? Putting aside our notes. Turning off our slides. Extemporising. Letting words come.
Pure pathos. Half remembered quotations. Citations ‘from memory’. Sudden … accelerations. Decelerations. Hushed speech. Exhortations. Enconiums. Hortatory stuff.
And all our lives in what we said. Our misspent lives! Our derailed lives! Our misplaced lives! Our humiliated lives! Our resentful lives! Our lives outside!
Our whole lives, offered up. Spoken. Not from on high. No ex cathedra. Not from the lectern, pretending we were at Oxbridge.
Lecturing from the pit! From the pit of our lives! From our suicidalism. From our years of whoring. From our being outside.
What we’d waited to say. What we’d always wanted to say.
Great sadnesses. Great isolations. Great dereliction. Mourning songs and abandonment songs. Great ululations from our years of humiliation! From exploitation!
But there was joy, too. Of having survived. Of having escaped.
All the joy of being allowed to speak. Unleashed.
Work in Progress 