"Literacy = Identity: Can You See Me?" by Elisa Norris is an audio poem. This piece opens with a school bell, a teacher reading a classroom roll, and her own personal call and response, “Elisa Norris, Elisa Norris…is she absent today? No. Do you see her? No.” In this poetic text, an aural variation on a conventional writing assignment, Norris layers music, voice, and poetic images to create a composition that asks listeners to acknowledge her presence and the complex dimensions of her cultural identity. Through the sonic materiality of her own voice, Norris invites listeners to enter her life, and with her to resist the cultural erasure and racial stereotypes that shape her experience.

The poem’s intensity is underscored by the spare and insistent instrumental track, “So What,” from Miles Davis’ legendary album, Kind of Blue, an album that changed the nature of jazz in this country, as Norris talks of literacy as agency, juxtaposing references to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Tony Morrison, images of daisies from Madagascar, and memories of cars “riding on twenty inch rims.” These multiple references to the artistic and cultural contributions of Blacks, to the different communicative modalities Black artists have used to make themselves heard, and to the racist culture that continues to deny their existence, rise through the deep green substrate of this poem, accumulating at the surface of listeners’ attention, in Norris own words, “as subtly as Godzilla through downtown Tokyo.” The piece ends with the lyrics and music of “Outside,” a song by Staind, that contributes additional pathos to Norris’ message:

But I'm on the outside, I'm looking in
I can see through you, see your true colors
Cause inside your ugly, you're ugly like me
I can see through you
See to the real you.

This piece, which Norris later re-made into a digital video, compels us to listen to her words, to note the twin qualities of strength and pain in her voice, to image a classroom without her voice and without her presence, to see her by hearing her, and to pay attention to her perspective. To imagine how such composing tasks work fit into composition classrooms, we need only listen to Norris’ own words:

This audio essay, and the video essay, that followed, represent the promises and possibilities that the field of Rhetoric and Composition holds. They allowed me to bring together all of my passions—the visual, the aural, and the written—and construct a rhetorical argument that makes specific claims about my relationship to literacy. If we can imagine using these types of projects in our writing studios, we can open up that learning space so that all students have room to express themselves. Equally important, we can equip them with the analytical tools that can help them understand—and respond to—the historical, cultural, social, and political factors that influence their lives and their experiences. If we adopt these same attitudes about teaching every student who comes through our doors, we can’t help but be increasingly responsible and productive rhet/comp instructors and scholars.