Janice R. Brooks
- Title
- Janice R. Brooks
- Quote
- "Humanities is the discipline that takes in everything else; we’re the spoke on the wheel."
- Story
-
I would say that in so many ways, the curiosity of language—the written word—was always something I remember.
I remember when I was in fifth grade. It was the year that the sixth grade was integrating. And so, I wanted to read and collect newspaper articles, because we were a family that would read the paper at five o’clock. Although my dad worked in the gaming industry, my cousins lived across the street from us. And I look back thinking it’s probably my mother wanting quiet time. But everybody had a piece of the paper; some people read the obituaries, and the comics, or whatever.
But I would start cutting things out. I wanted to create my own little files of things. And my mother went along with it. And so, I was collecting things; it was around the early 1960s. And I would circle the names of those being written about.
Fast forward to when I was in junior high school, and my theater teacher was Miss Pink. Miss Pink would offer the most interesting assignments. We would write out our thoughts, and then perform them as plays.
She was the first person who ever used the word “humanities” in the way that I think I understood it was knowing how everything works; how the world. How everything is linked.
So, Miss Pink was the person who just opened a window to that in my mind. And I sit with her, and maybe we were talking about something about the law, the 1964 Civil Rights Amendment. And she would say, “But what started before that? What started before that? What started before that? And who else was there? And who else was there?”
And then as I got older and more mature in junior high school and started being involved in student government, I could just hear her in the back of my mind. Even now sometimes I hear, “What came before that? What was that? Who’s part of the story? Who else was there?”
And that was my understanding of that intersection of everything that the humanities bring. And I was fascinated with the human being.
And so, anything that had the word “human” and “manity,” you know: “mana:” life force. So, I always consider the human life force and how we exhibit it, in terms of what we ingest as knowledge, and how it turns around and goes back out into the world. - Date
- July 30, 2024
- interviewer
- Randy Williams