The professor who handed back my essay without reading it.

by Michel Heitzmann

© Michel Heitzmann - On the ground, taken in Bassins, Switzerland - Leica Q3 43

São Paulo. 1981. First semester of university.

We had a Portuguese class. The assignment was to write an essay using a specific set of words. I was not paying attention to the instructions. I got the words. I used them my way. Whenever a substantive would not work, I made it an adjective as in “bandeira, bandeirolando” (flag, flagging). Apparently it was not allowed. Português do Brasil is flexible, and I flexed.

The professor starts giving back the graded essays. He reads some aloud. The outstanding ones. All marked 10. The room listens. Then he is done. He walks to my desk. Hands back my essay without reading it. Also a 10. He looks at me and asks: did you really write this?

I was 18. A slender teenager with not much sex success, if any. Full of doubts.

I did not answer. Insulted him without a word.

I did not know what to say. The question was not a compliment. It was a doubt planted in public by someone who was supposed to know better. A judgment.

In 81, I counted on my brain to make up for my appearance.

And that guy shattered my, also slender, confidence with one question.

I put it away. The way you store stuff when you don’t have the tools to deal with them. We had paper and pen at the time. I kept the one page essay for some time, proud but hidden. It got lost in the many moves.

I also carried it for a long time without knowing. I try to remember what that person looked like. I can’t. I buried it deeply.

It resurfaced when I started writing. Not with anger. With clarity.

That professor was not a bad person. He was a cog in a system that had taught him what students could deliver. My essay did not look like that. So it could not be mine. The system had no room for the thing I was doing without knowing I was doing it.

I have met that teacher again. Different names. Different places. The colleague who changed the topic after I spoke. The manager who promoted someone else. The organisation that called it a restructuring. Same question, different words. Did you really do this. Are you sure you belong here.

Each time I stored. Each time with a toll.

This is what I now know.

The systems and networks we live in and with which we act are not neutral. They are built to recognise a certain kind of output and reward it. Anything that doesn’t fit the pattern gets questioned. Gets slowed down. Gets asked to explain itself. Let alone they all have different interests.

Most people learn to fit the pattern. It is easier. It is safer. The rewards are real.

But something gets lost.

The side thinking. The compression. The essay that used the words differently. It does not disappear — it goes underground.

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I am sure that there are millions walking around with something they stopped believing was real because someone handed it back in silence and asked the wrong question.

The Quiet Frame exists because of that man when I was 18. Not as revenge. As an answer.

The answer is: yes. I really wrote it. I always did.

What did they make you stop believing you could do?