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An interest in African American literature led Susan Blake, professor of English and department head, to visit Africa on her own in the late 1970s and return five years later as a Fulbright Fellow to teach at the university in Lomé, Togo, a country in West Africa on the Gulf of Guinea. As a yovo, a white woman, Blake was struck by the contrasts between the haves and have-nots, and issues of class, race, culture, and nationality.
The experience led to her book, Letters from Togo, and a lifelong interest in travel narratives as a genre, particularly women’s travel narratives and British colonial narratives.
“Landing in Lomé was like falling down the rabbit hole. Six soporific hours on the plane—then down the stairs to heat, glare, noise, and color on fast forward,” writes Blake. She paints a vivid picture of life in Lomé for an outsider, from buying a car and dealing with impoverished beggars to finding student books for literature courses and attending faculty meetings on the unrealizable criteria for promotion and tenure.
“Although it was brief, and twenty years ago,” says Blake, “my year in Togo is still part of my life. It compelled me to write in a genre, autobiography, that I hadn’t dreamed of before, which taught me a lot about myself as well as about reading autobiography and writing in general. It gave me experience of being an alien, of adapting to a foreign environment, of life under a dictatorship, of the way the United States works and is perceived in a Third World country. Indelible images such as students clustered under a streetlight to study give me a context for news articles about war, famine, and political crisis in Africa and a perspective on American society. Friends in Lomé keep me in touch with life there, and Togolese friends here give me insight into the experience of African immigrants in the U.S. “
“One thing I like about Lafayette is the ability to adjust teaching areas as your interests evolve,” says Blake. “We all teach English 110 (College Writing) and 200 and 300 level courses. But we have the freedom to explore new areas, and then teach in them. I started out in African American literature, and the most recent course I developed is on the romance plot, which comes out of my work on colonial romances about Africa. I also love working individually with students on honors projects.”
Blake is now the senior female faculty member on campus, having arrived in 1974. “There were very few women faculty when I came, probably only about ten,” she says. “The college had just gone co-ed (in 1970). So we were the ones who grappled with issues like day care and maternity leave while trying to get tenure.”
“The texts I was exposed to by Susan Blake were life-altering books to read,” says Yolanda Wisher ’98, an English and interdisciplinary studies graduate who teaches ninth and tenth-grade English at Germantown Friends School, Philadelphia. “Many of them were my first in-depth exposure to the complexities of American identity. I currently teach several of the same books in my classes. Susan is a devoted teacher who has kept abreast of my growth as a writer and educator since I graduated. Her work as a scholar continues to inspire and influence me.”
“Professor Blake is a wonderful teacher,” says Colleen Gleeson ’00, an English teacher at Bellefonte Area High School outside State College. “I took a class with her my freshman year; I can honestly say that after taking this course I knew that I wanted to be an English major. She challenged my thinking of literature and writing in a profound way. I am very grateful for her support and guidance while I was at Lafayette and beyond.”
“It was absolutely delightful to take on an English thesis with her,” says Philip Wingert ’01, an English and chemical engineering graduate who is a doctoral student in chemical engineering at Notre Dame. For his honors thesis, Wingert wrote a travel narrative, based upon his study abroad experience in Belgium. “Our working together was great since she always tried to make time for me, knowing I had so many time commitments due to engineering. When it came down to the actual thesis, there’s no one with whom I would have rather consulted. She always told me what she liked and she always told me clearly what I could be writing in a better way. I really miss her and think she’s simply one of the best at what she does.”