The Third Eye:
An Exhibit of Literacy Narratives from Nepal

The Third Eye:
Understanding Literacy Narratives from around the World

“[T]he particularity of multimodal narrative lies in the fact that the whole of the narrative is a result of the semiotic interplay of different modes and media: they are fully integrated in the narrative discourse, part of the storyworld and an integral part of the reader’s construction of the narrative” (p. 149).
-- Sandra Heinen & Roy Sommer, Narratology in the age of cross-disciplinary narrative research (2009)

On each of the four sides of every Buddhist monastery and shrine in Nepal is carved or painted a pair of eyes. Between the two mysterious-looking eyes is a round circle, a third eye. This icon—which is interpreted differently by Buddhism, Hinduism, Theosophy, Gnosticism, Mormonism, Taoism, Japanese martial arts, and even scientific study of the pineal gland located between the two hemispheres of the brain—almost universally symbolizes a domain and perspective that is outside what the two physical eyes can see. This idea of a third perspective also reminds us of the need to understand complex phenomena by going beyond the discourses of opposition between the personal and social, the global and local, mere "stories" and "scholarly" material, and so on. I begin this theoretical discussion of these literacy narratives by invoking the metaphor of the third eye in order to highlight the semantic richness of such multimodal stories from around the world. I believe that we can only recognize the complexity of ideas and experiences, voices and images, language and gestures of these stories if we are ready to go beyond the conventional oppositions. We need to use a third angle in order to experience the overlapping of one side with the other, the emergence of syntheses from the apparent opposites.

Because stories like these that originate from societies and cultures where the underlying themes and ideas about literacy narratives, as well as the genre and scholarly discourses about them, are either different or absent, it is easy to misunderstand the structure, content, and perspectives of the narratives. Personal stories about the experience of literacy and education have become an important part of both academic and social cultures in the US and western societies in general. In the US, the mention of literacy narrative is likely to evoke the names of historical figures like Lincoln and Edison, who transformed their lives through their commitment to learning. In the field of English studies and composition in particular, the phrase could even evoke the names of scholars like Richard Wright (Black Boy, 1945), Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969), Richard Rodriguez (Hunger Memory, 1982), Maxine Hong-Kingston (The Woman Warrior, 1985), Mike Rose (Lives on the Boundary, 1989), Keith Gilyard (Voices of the Self, 1991), Victor Villanueva (Bootstraps, 1993), Sharon Hamilton (My Name is Not Susie, 1995), and bell hooks (Bone Black, 1996). As Margaret Willard-Traub (2007) states,

Over the last fifteen years, in fields ranging from English studies to anthropology to law [in the US], approaches to writing that incorporate autobiography and personal narrative are being used by scholars not simply as means for mediating on lived experience but also as methods of scholarly analysis and argument. (p. 188)

In contrast, while the narratives of education as the cause of individual and social progress are not in themselves unfamiliar in Nepal, the literacy autobiography is not a familiar concept or practice in academic and social discourses in this society. In fact, as this set of literacy narratives by Nepalese scholars of literacy education show, “literacy” itself is defined quite differently in Nepal than it is in mainstream western culture and scholarship. Some narrators in this group consider literacy and formal education as synonymous, and others do not use the term “literacy” at all; the younger scholars also complicate the notion of “literacy” by using it interchangeably with broader and more abstract concepts of “learning” and “knowledge-making.” It is worth noting here that school-based education has not only replaced the traditional Nepalese notion of literacy as “learning to read and write” letters, basic legal documents, and religious texts; it has also increasingly excluded content from local culture, society, and the occupations in favor of creating a new citizenry that is attuned more with the global/western culture and epistemologies than to local realities.

Scholars in this group who identify literacy with education define either of these as an absolute means for progress for the individual and society; their stories follow the classical intellectual "rags to riches" format. Their stories fit what Gergen and Gergen (1997) call a "progressive narrative" (p. 258). Framed more as stories of formal education than of becoming literate, these narratives focus on the successful professional lives of the scholars as intellectuals and educators in a developing country at a time when formal education was available only for the privileged or exceptionally committed learners. They are based on the Enlightenment logic of progress.

Other narrators, especially those from the younger generation, draw more directly on contemporary critical theories about language, literacy, English studies, and pedagogy; as a result, they argue more vocally in favor a socially relevant education that should not sacrifice local knowledge for the sake of educating the citizenry within a global model of education. They contend that the global model of education comes prepackaged with cultures and perspectives that may be alien to the local society. Some of these scholars draw explicitly on critical pedagogy and postcolonial discourse of education with a focus on the need to “rediscover the local” through the implementation of better educational and linguistic policies (Canagarajah, 2005, p. 9). They position themselves as educators who are anxious about the "still birth" of local epistemologies, even while being conscious that their own personal and social successes are owed to the prevalent mode and medium of learning.

One of the most prominent issues in all the narratives here is that of English as the medium of instruction, which often gets confused with “English education.” Some narrators maintain that English has brought about unprecedented opportunities for the Nepalese society; other narrators also contend that English has effectively sealed off the fates of many other segments that are generally unable to overcome the hurdles of “passing” in English at every level of education. It must be noted here that after the gradual and largely unsuccessful establishment of democracy in Nepal, the increasingly popular private, English-medium school system has continued to all-but-literally wipe out the public school system based on Nepali language. This English-ization of education has also increasingly displaced content from local life and culture from literacy curricula. While the government recently adopted the policy of promoting local languages as the medium of elementary education, neither public policy nor mainstream scholarly discourse seems to consider the question of negative impact, relevance, or ways to improve the use of English and imported models of education system very seriously. Thus, the success stories and critiques of formal education in this set of Nepalese literacy narratives exemplify an important theme about literacy and education that any scholar and researcher of literacy education will find relevant; they demonstrate that literacy and education can mean different things when seen from different perspectives, even within the same socio-cultural setting, and not just in different places, times, cultures, and societies.

These stories show us why it is necessary to go beyond conventional meanings of literacy and develop a much broader meaning that does not limit literacy to the idea of encoding knowledge (in letters) but also includes the creation of knowledge, whereby the need for acquiring and producing new knowledge should be the focus of literacy education. They also complicate the conventional notion of literacy as a phenomenon that is often defined in global terms, without reference to what and why people learn when they “read and write” or “go to school.” By pointing out both the benefits of learning to read and write in ways that may be materially beneficial to the individual and society and the necessity to look beyond material benefits to social and cultural significance of global models of education, these personal-social stories about becoming literate and educated raise a long overdue question for literacy scholars: should literacy be simply seen as a matter of reading, writing, and learning per se, or should we also consider the modes, means, and content through the lens of their usefulness and relevance to the learner and their lives, societies, and cultures? These stories encourage literacy educators to look at literacy and education as socially and politically situated practices that may have not only benefits but also pitfalls. They help us understand that “literacy” means different things in different societies and cultures—an understanding that seems as necessary for scholars of literacy at the "center" as it is for those in the "peripheries."

The tension between global and local notions of literacy and learning are either not relevant or not so pronounced in societies like the US. Even though scholars like Gee (2004) have vigorously critiqued formal school for similar reasons, it seems to me that average citizens in advanced western societies like the US do not perceive a similar gap between learning and “getting an education.” By comparison, because the modern institution of education in Nepal did not organically evolve from or depend upon the practical needs, professions, and epistemological resources of the traditional Nepalese society, the average Nepalese citizen perceives “education” far less as a way of “knowing about reality and the world” than as a way of being certified as “educated.” This intellectual schizophrenia underlying the contemporary Nepalese education is manifest in the critique and reflections about their formal education by some of the scholars in this group. Their stories suggest that when education is increasingly “foreign” in its medium, content, and underlying epistemology, it is hard to get a handle on the relationship between schooling and learning.

There are patterns of both similarity in theme and difference in perspectives regarding what literacy and education mean to this group of scholars. So, while it is possible to make certain generalizations about experiences of literacy and education from these stories as a whole, it is more important to recognize the difference in epistemological worldviews in them because such personal narratives are not only the result of “socially constructed processes” but also the product of “complex cultural, political, ideological, and historical contexts” as experienced and interpreted by individual narrators (Selfe et al., 2010, p. 1). From the perspective of readers and researchers, literacy stories from unfamiliar socio-cultural backgrounds are much more challenging than those from mainstream culture and society because it is easy to either overlook differences or not recognize similarities. Together, these stories remind us that we can make a reliable assessment of the literacy and educational experience in societies like this in the "periphery" only when we simultaneously recognize both the visible stories of success due to the opportunities created by the importation of educational models and the hidden failures caused by those imposed literacy/educational practices. In other words, in spite of the patterns that allow us to make generalizations about literacy in a particular society to a certain extent, we should also attend to the unruliness of not just individual stories but also that of the patterns among stories. Thus, when seen from one perspective, not only the narratives of the younger scholars but also those of their more experienced counterparts are unruly. The younger generation seems to have great leverage in defining literacy from a more critical, theoretically informed, and personalized manners; the scholars of the older generation defy expectations that their stories might be more embedded in the local socio-epistemological settings. Contrary to expectations, the latter scholars subscribe to the more autonomous view of literacy because they have a stake in the established global order of literacy education in the society instead of resisting that idealistic view in favor of trying to embrace and promote local epistemologies.

When viewed from a different perspective, there is also an unruliness in the big picture of how the society at large, including both the generations, defines and treats literacy: the unruly individuals become a part of certain narrative tensions which are shaped by certain sociohistorical forces and which in return more or less significantly shape larger narrative frameworks. As such, all of stories are shaped by such tensions and those tensions are more or less resolved. The older generation adopts a more autonomous view of literacy even as they situate their own stories within particular historical and therefore political settings; the younger scholars more deliberately embrace ideological explanations for their stories and the issues in the stories; for this reason, certain patterns among the stories could be discussed together; but the essential unruliness of the stories persist against my own urge to discuss those patterns. Stories, rather than essays and articles, help us attend to this meaningful unruliness; and as I discuss elsewhere multimodality further reinforces that unruliness and the consequent richness of meaning. Thus, while the younger scholars see a tension between global and local views and definitions of literacy whereas the older scholars see literacy as a means of more straightforward social as well as individual progress. When the older scholars say that they left behind the old world, they still do not see something left behind, so it is generally a progress and there is nothing political or ideological involved in that process; the younger scholars see both gain and loss in that process, and it is a politically and ideologically fraught process for them. In this sense, the older scholars are looking at literacy as a non-ideological phenomenon. As Bloome indicates in the Preface, this view is in itself a part of how the ideology of literacy functions. And, as Bloome further discusses, there are personal and social consequences of the different views and definitions. For instance, defining literacy as formal education leads to the overlooking of other types of literate activities and even the suppression of content and learning styles in the local society. A striking illustration of such consequence is the way in which private, English medium schools have virtually swept away public schools in Nepal in the last two decades. The new definition of literacy has not only allowed the Nepalese society to join the global community of newly educated generations but it has also greatly intensified class divisions because the new English-medium education is inaccessible to large majorities comprising of dozens of ethnic minorities and the lower socioeconomic classes. Local knowledge base is destroyed, and the dignity of being a "knower" (a Nepalese word for social status or profession involving the use of knowledge to solve social problems) on a local level has largely disappeared.

As some of the narratives here suggest, the concept of local literacy should be understood without the binary oppositions of literate/non-literate, oral/written, individual/social, vernacular/formal education, and so on. What is local and specific is not so much a function of absolute cultural values but the result of particular material, political, and social conditions of a society. As Pandey (2006) argues in “Literate Lives Across Digital Divide,” which is his own narrative about his literacy experience in Nepal, literacy learning should be seen as being “imbricated in the larger politics of a society. . . . Politics [and material situations] condition not only how conventional literacy learning takes place and to what use, but also the ways literacies in emergent technologies [or modes of education] are accessed and used" (p. 246).

As these stories will show us, there is neither an easily agreed-upon abstract concept of literacy nor a specifically local definition of it in Nepal, like there are no such things here in the US. That is, when we consider literacy narratives based on personal experience of real people in real social and cultural contexts, rather than try to define literacy as an abstract concept—as this exhibit will attempt to show—we see the need to adopt a perspective outside of the binaries, invoking the third eye of deeper intellectual awareness and sensitivity. As I will discuss in the following section, each narrator draws on his or her literate experiences and discourses about literacy in order to synthesize them, within his or her own worldview, and create a coherent and meaningful narrative.