“teatro do oprimido pdf”  on google said Ricardo, when I asked him where to find original un-translated copies of the two authors we had assigned for Monday.

“do?”

“yes, do”

I don’t speak Portuguese yet, but in my practice of learning language to make clear what translation blurs and erases in academia, the Universe is signaling to me in my journey of Decolonial Practice that Portuguese, being that it is the language of what was historically the largest slave owning nation in South America, is one important to hear sonically and within theory in the Academic Oppressive classroom of North America.

Excuse my spellings of your name, and please peer-edit, as I tell a story about the “Decolonial Classroom” in light of reading Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and being so drawn to Chapter two, during my difficulty adapting as a Master’s student while leaving my black indigenous child’s radical home-schooling to my gracious babysitter to enter the academic workforce. While what my advisor in the department of Performance Studies, Vasquez, noted is the “banal” guilt and anxiety of leaving your child to work, I want to stress that all my writing within this academic structure is to gather abundant knowledge and life-long research skills to transcend the oppressive hierarchies of Colonial education for my son: Judah, so that he may never feel the continuous hegemony of being in a classroom founded on colonial principles and the teacher that “knows everything” and the student that “knows nothing” (Freire, 73). What Freire is proposing in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is a call to action, and the necessity of commitment to action, to further conversations and practices that question the Source of oppression and thus imagine a difference, what he calls problem-posing education (Freire, 40). In light of Donaldo Macedo’s introduction to the book, in which he discusses Freire’s critics that accuse him of speaking in jargon, and how academia proposes “language clarity” while really ignoring how this call for clear language is used to “make social inequality invisible” (Macedo 20). As an immigrant student to NYU, and one of the only native to her region within her American high-school, I feel Macedo’s cry to eliminate this academic “clarity” assumption. Within a classroom is the capacity for not just the reading of pedagogy, but the creation of it, if collaborative practices of sharing and understanding and language communication are explored and fought for, instead of the abusive monogamy that the University currently relies on (Moten). This weekend I was unable to dive into a close reading of what the above mentioned by Friere inspired for Augosto Boal in his book, Theatre of the Oppressed, because of our beautiful collaborative practice on Saturday. My day to study and read as a mother was filled with the exhaustion of my commute, and the Exhilaration of going to school and not needing my books, or worse, my laptop to keep track of theory archived in PDF. In order to fight the orders we are under, we must have a clear and conscious imagination of what we are and what the world around us is: which I can imagine is part of Boal’s theory after analyzing the movement practices we took part of yesterday. As for our reading on Césaire and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, I also am looking forward to how our classroom seminar allows me to still take part in the reading even if as a mother-student, I am now racing with time to order and Read this abundant wealth of knowledge week to week, while still paying my bills in gentrified Nyc.