The Literate Surfer
by Sam B. Awklamb*
It’s Sunday night and we’re driving home from a lackluster session. We’d settled on a spot just down the point from a better-known wave. And sometime, around sunset, the packed-in lineup had grown tense all because of one kid… shaved head, garishly colored wetsuit, his board covered in stickers for companies I’ve never heard of… The break itself was nothing to get territorial about… Clearly he thought it was his break… because he’d spent the whole session backpaddling the lineup… He’d waste whole waves spastically pumping up and down the line, all in service to these little credit card airs… (Brad Melekian, “Kook,” The Surfer’s Journal, Winter ‘14)
What makes a surfer literate? Is it mastery of the lingo, the terms or specialized jargon of the community? Deploying terms like point, break, lineup, backpaddling, airs, closeout, and session in the right ways — and at the right times — is certainly part of it. But talking the talk can’t be all there is to surfer literacy.
In his 2014 essay “Kook,” Brad Melekian stumbles into this question of surfer literacy as he and his buddy debate the definition of “kook” in front of the Cardiff Kook, a statue in Cardiff-by-the-Sea:
Melekian: Man, that kid was a kook.
Buddy: What are you talking about? The kid who was cutting everybody off? He was a jerk, for sure, but he could surf alright.
Melekian: What’s that got to do with anything? Whether or not he could surf?
For Melekian, this brief exchange becomes the focal point for a meditation on the meaning of a basic term within the surfing community. Is the term “kook” reserved solely for newbie surfers? Does it encompass something larger? We take this exchange — and Melekian’s meditation — as an opportunity to consider literacy through the lens of the surfer community.
James Paul Gee, a linguist and member of a group of scholars shaping a discipline called “new literacy studies,” sees literacy as involving mastery of something he calls a Discourse — with a capital D. In expressing the characteristics of a subcommunity, what Gee calls a secondary Discourse, “Kook” enables surfers and nonsurfers alike to consider what it means to be literate. And the central role of the “Cardiff Kook” in Melekian’s essay sheds light on ways that elements of a Discourse can change.
Discourses are a part of how we think, act, feel, speak, and believe. In “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction,” Gee describes Discourses as an “‘identity kit’ which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize”(7). For Gee, there are two divisions of discourses, primary and secondary, and both emerge over time. A primary Discourse is the foundation of one’s beliefs, actions, attitudes, and values. It is the first set of interactions one has with the world and encompasses that person’s family and peer group as a young child (Gee 7–8). A secondary Discourse involves the addition of characteristics that are shared among a similar group, outside of their primary Discourse.
Gee’s ideas of a secondary Discourse are illustrated in Melekian’s “Kook”. According to Gee, “failing to display an identity is tantamount to announcing you don’t have that identity, that at best you’re a pretender or a beginner” (10). For Melekian, kook is a “derogatory term for those who wouldn’t understand just how far on the outside they were” (15). The “kook” in Melekian’s essay, with his “shaved head, garishly colored wet suit,” was trying to fit into the surfer community. He had stickers and Sharpie all over his board, and he was cutting in front of people to make sure that he got to ride the wave; in doing so he failed to exhibit proper surfer etiquette. He is proficient at surfing, to be sure. Melekian’s buddy noted that “he could surf.” However, many of his actions show that he is pretending to play the part of a real “surfer community member.” Unfortunately, that’s all he really can do, because he is not literate in the surfers’ secondary Discourse.
Illiteracy leads to conflict between the kid Melekian labels a kook and the other, presumably literate surfers in the lineup. He is breaking the “rules” of the Discourse due to his lack surfer etiquette. He fails to bring together the “saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations” that Gee sees as markers of one’s membership in a Discourse (6). The kook’s inability to make these combinations fit together prevents him from being accepted into the surfer discourse.
What is a Kook?
The surfer culture of Melekian’s essay is a secondary Discourse. Melekian’s kook makes a bad impression on the natives by coming off as rude and uncaring. He has not mastered how to act like a surfer and therefore comes off as someone Gee might call a “mushfaker.” According to Gee, a “mushfaker” is someone who makes “do with something less when the real thing is not available” (13). As the “mushfaker” tries to express that he is an experienced surfer, he unintentionally pushes himself farther out of the surfer community by not knowing the proper surfer etiquette and surfer style. His overcompensation for his position outside the community comes through an attempt to express a sense of superiority. When one of the surfers in the lineup grows tired of being cut off — again — and challenges the kid, the kook comes right back at him:
Surfer: Did you not see me? Or do you just not care?
Kook: Don’t care.
What makes one a kook? For Melekian, “kookdom” is based off of a lack of participation in common values. For his buddy, it is based on skill: A kook is a person who cannot surf. As Melekian sees it, divergence from the surfer community’s norms and beliefs makes one a kook or kooky. In expressing kookdom as an either-or — it is either defined in terms of values or in terms of skill — Melekian’s essay overlooks the importance of both elements in determining literacy. Literacy involves behaviors (including skill) and values.
Both Melekian and his buddy are right, but both are also wrong. The kook does not have the literacy Gee discusses, the “fluent control” or “mastery” of this discourse, because he isn’t bringing the right “saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing” combination. As Gee puts it, “Someone cannot engage in a Discourse in a less than fully fluent manner. You are either in it or you’re not” (9). Being “in it” requires one to bring all elements together.
At the same time, the fact that Melekian and his buddy can deliberate (and disagree) about whether the kid was really a kook — effectively debating the very meaning of the word — surfaces a limitation in Gee’s the view of Discourse in “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction.” The debate over the meaning of “kook” in Melekian’s essay reveals an important instability within elements of a Discourse. Gee’s “in it or not” framework has no room for this instability and any deviation from the discourse would stand out to others and brand you as a “pretender”. There’s no evidence that Melekian or his buddy are pretending to be in the Discourse or that they are mushfaking, yet on the matter of “kook” they clearly have different “saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations.” Melekian’s article “Kook” is a prime example of Gee’s idea not being flexible enough.
By acknowledging that the rules of a Discourse allow for these small degrees of variation, the concept becomes malleable in ways that enable it to better describe events. Those literate in the Discourse participate in “saying-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations” that are not locked in. These viewpoints will be passed around its members and influence their beliefs in different ways. Melekian’s essay offers the reader a window into this intra-Discourse negotiation.
Malleable Discourse and the Cardiff Kook
Created by sculptor and surfer Matthew Antichevich, the “Magic Carpet Ride” was placed along Highway 101 in Cardiff-by-the-Sea in 2007. The creation of the statue was to acknowledge the area’s attraction to beginner surfers and to represent the happiness and clumsiness of beginner surfers. Although the statue was made for the area’s attraction, immediately residents of the town shunned and disliked the statue. People believed the statue did not look enough like a surfer. It looked more like a ballet dancer than a rider of the waves. The statue’s the poor representation of the ‘true’ surfer form led to the locals naming it the “Cardiff Kook”. It could be the limp wrists, the strange posture, or the portrayal of the boy riding a small spray rather than an epic wave that led locals to rename the statue.
Though created by a Cardiff local, the “Cardiff Kook” is an example of an outsider. The townspeople did not want this statue in their hometown. As Melekian writes, “The [Cardiff] Kook had affronted their insider-dom, had punctured a tiny little hole in the homogenous, one-inch-wide view of what is and is not acceptable” (15). The townspeople, steeped in surfer Discourse, did not accept such a clearly inexpert surfer as a representation of their secondary Discourse. As Melekian would have us believe, the Cardiff Kook remains an affront to the surf culture and lifestyle of Cardiff-by-the-Sea.
What is perhaps most interesting for our purposes is the community’s embrace of the Cardiff Kook. Instead of rejecting the statue, the townspeople have made it a focal point for celebration. A Google image search reveals dozens of ways the Cardiff Kook is integrated into the town.
Birthday announcements, welcome home notices, and even more elaborate decorations all point to an inversion of the town’s initial disdain for “Magic Carpet Ride.” From interloper to near insider, the very renaming of the work of art suggests an embrace of the sculpture, as the town connects its own name to the kook.
An annual “Cardiff Kook Run” brings community members together on Super Bowl Sunday. It includes a costume contest homage to the emergent tradition of decorating the Cardiff Kook statue for special events. The Cardiff Kook has his own website, and one can even purchase the annual Kook Calendar to mark each month with a stunning image of the Cardiff Kook’s homegrown attire.
In a profound juxtaposition of incongruities, the Cardiff Kook himself delivers “The 10 Commandments of Surfing” to the community (image at left). Each commandment speaks to a cultural practice within surfing. The outsider has emerged to deliver key principles for those who would be in the Discourse.
Just as Melekian and his buddy reveal instabilities within a Discourse in their discussion about the meaning of kook, the evolution of the Cardiff-by-the-Sea community’s understanding of the Cardiff Kook’s place illustrates the potential for a Discourse to adapt to changing circumstances. As early as 2008, just one year after “Magic Carpet Ride” appeared, Brad Melekian himself, reporting for The Union Tribune, observed a notable shift in the surfer community’s view of the sculpture. Discourses, it seems, can adapt quite quickly.
Metaknowledge in the Discourse
By acknowledging both the instability within and the malleability of a Discourse, it becomes possible for individuals from different backgrounds to participate in a Discourse. Gee’s “in it or not” perspective on a Discourse makes it difficult to explain the varied interpretations surfers might bring to a situation like the one described in “Kook.” Where Melekian sees a kook and his buddy sees a jerk, the surfer who confronts the young kid sees a surfer who needs to be put in his place. We suggest that our malleable notion of Discourse can both account for change in a Discourse and admit variation within a community.
We see membership in a Discourse as perhaps the intersection of multiple Discourses, not unlike a Venn diagram. One must participate in a certain portion of a Discourse to be considered a member, but there is also considerable room for variation within the community. This view better represents the individuality of humans as well as their ability to share in discourses. It is entirely consistent with Gee’s distinction between primary and secondary discourses, his idea that we participate in multiple Discourses, and our effort to explain the uncertain meaning of “kook” within Melekian’s community. It enables one to consider how what Gee calls metaknowledge can empower: “Metaknowledge is liberation and power, because it leads to the ability to manipulate, to analyze, to resist while advancing” (13). It also positions Melekian’s kook as an apprentice of sorts and not the outsider he might appear to be.
In Melekian’s kook, we have a person who is trying to adapt to his or her surroundings. Although he “could surf alright,” he was mindful of neither his limits nor the culture of the local community. “He’d waste whole waves spastically pumping down the line, all in service to these little credit airs” (Melekian 14). The kook was trying to signal membership in a secondary Discourse by riding hard, but he seems to lack the meta-knowledge that would enable him to make sense of and critique what he brought to the break. Or, put differently, his approach is all negative and reactive, perhaps because he does not have enough experience to make this adaptation.
Melekian’s essay does not offer enough detail on the situation to know what motivates the kook’s actions, but it may have something to do with a disconnect between one of his secondary Discourses and the surfer Discourse. As Gee argues, “When such conflict or tension exists, it can deter acquisition of one or the other or both of the conflicting Discourses, or, at least, affect the fluency of a mastered Discourse on certain occasions of use” (8). The surfer is not necessarily a failure, just misunderstood. He is an apprentice or, as argued earlier, a mushfaker not yet able to employ metaknowledge to participate in the appropriate Discourse.
Brad Melekian, in “Kook,” shows us what metaknowledge looks like within a Discourse. Melekian is able to write about and critique his own Discourse by stepping outside it, if only partially. And in perhaps the strongest meta-level moment in the essay, he asserts that “calling someone a kook… is probably one of the kookiest things a person can do”(15). Melekian is aware of the ambiguity of the term kook and how his own use of the term is rather ironic and in the process illustrates one of Gee’s central ideas: “Exposure to another language, having to translate it into and otherwise relate it to your own language, can cause you to become consciously aware of how your first language works (how it means). This ‘meta-knowledge’ can actually make you better able to manipulate your first language”(12).
The hang loose gesture, derived from the Hawaiian “shaka” sign for solidarity, compassion, and understanding, is a core term of surfer Discourse. The literate surfer, like a literate participant in any Discourse, does well to keep this idea in mind. One must be “in” the Discourse to be literate. But any Discourse also requires the application of metaknowledge if it is to adapt and adjust. Absent adaptation, a Discourse is at risk of ossification or death, much like any dead or dying language. Solidarity with those in the Discourse, compassion for those apprentices (and mushfakers) not yet in it, and understanding of the need for adaptation combine to keep a Discourse alive and well. Of course, when one is confronted by such blatant disregard of the Discourse’s elements as found in Melekian’s kook, it might be appropriate to simply shrug and acknowledge that the individual is illiterate.
*Sam B. Awklamb is the name we have given to the eleven-person Maine-based writing collaborative that crafted this work over a three-day period in late August. Sam B. Awkland is Stephanie Soucy, Amber Cusson, Megan Perry, Britany Chamberlain, Alyssa Pobocik, Wyatt Eshleman, Katie Perry, Liam Kramer-White, Alex Boucher, Michael J. Cripps, and Briana Goud.
