What we've got here is failure to imaginate

Not a standard word, of course, and there's really no reason for imaginate to exist when imagine works perfectly well, but this morning in class I was thinking what we've got here is failure to communicate. I didn't dare quote the line because I feared that none of my students would be familiar with Cool Hand Luke--and why should they know anything about a film that came out decades before they were born?

I don't know who I represent in this scenario--the prisoner or the brutal captain--but I know I struggled to get students to imagine themselves in the starkly unfamiliar scenario presented in Natasha Trethewey's poem "Native Guard." I had to stand there and endure the awkward silence when they refused to look up unfamiliar words or read footnotes about unfamiliar historical events, but the most awkward silence occurred when I asked them to find the first mention of the word history in the poem. I had told them that Trethewey loves to examine gaps and erasures, stories left out of received histories, and I wanted them to think about how the poem employs history itself. It's a long poem, but history first appears in the tenth line:

Yes, I was born a slave, at harvest time, 
in the Parish of Ascension; I've reached
thirty-three with the history of one younger
inscribed upon my back. 

I endured the long silence as my students stared at the text hoping someone else would find the line, and then the silence grew even more awkward when I asked what sort of history a former slave might have inscribed on his back and how we might go about studying that sort of history.

I get it: it's the wrong time of the semester to ask students to think too much. They're tired. We're all tired. But we started the semester with Walt Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser," which took us on a guided tour of a hospital ward full of soldiers wounded in the Civil War, and I like to end the semester by taking another look at the Civil War to see if there's still anything left to learn. 

There is, but it requires some imagination. Trethewey suggests that poetry can help us understand gaps in the historical record by drawing us deeply into imagined lives, but do I really have to drag students kicking and screaming into engagement with imagination?

Some students you just can't reach--and I don't like it any more than they do.