Week 15 Readings and Responses

Red Velvet Dress, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Response to Naomi Shihab Nye

Red Velvet Dress, by Naomi Shihab Nye, is something of a blunt instrument--it reads like (and I imagine and hope that it is) a children’s story.  While there is undeniable subtext, certain subtleties, and a certain complexity in spots, the story is pretty “in-your-face” in its presentation of a “moral.”  That moral is, of course, the idea that people are people, not to be defined solely on the basis of their race, culture, or ethnicity; as well as the idea that such divisions as race, culture, and ethnicity are characterizations that may also be rich sources of beauty and wisdom.  By finding a balance between seeing past cultural divisions and understanding different cultures, Nye seems to be saying, we can find a peaceful and open way of dealing with those around us.    

For the young narrator, her manner of describing the neighborhood children emphasizes individual characteristics and “quirks,” rather than any sort of broader cultural category.  “The Collins boys and the Parker boys,” for example, are simply boys with whom Lena picks berries, who have a “lizard collection” and a “turquoise stone . . . in a pouch inside an egg carton with old pennies worth ten dollars each and the rusted key . . . dug out of the ground.”  They are not “black” children, but rather simply children.  

This particular “lesson,” while seemingly already a naturally understood one, is brought into relief with the arrival at the door to Lena’s house of two children asking (innocently enough, it seems) to see “the Arab.”  While Lena knows that they are speaking of her father, she informs them that they “don’t have one.”  This experience of denial serves as a sort of existential moment of epiphany and guilt.  Lena feels guilty for having denied her father’s presence, yet struggles against the idea that her father is an “Arab,” for she defines him not by his “Arabness,” but rather by the role that he fills in her life--father, man who burns brush in the backyard even though it might get him in trouble, catcher of balls with her brother, speaker to bats, etc.  

Her father, however, sees this event not as one to be taken seriously, but rather as the innocent gesture that it appears to be.  He is good-natured in his reaction, and even tells her that he should have exaggerated his own “Arabness” in order to make the intruding children happy.  “‘I could have put on my headdress for them! You could have pretended I didn’t speak English.  Maybe they’ll come back and we can make them happy.’”

Lena’s father’s own nonchalance about the episode, paired with the arrival from the Middle East of a gift of a dress that has been made by Lena’s family, lead her to embrace her Arab heritage and proudly show it off at school, telling people that, “It is my Arab dress from my Arab relatives far across the sea.”  She learns that she can both embrace her father’s culture and American culture (as well as her mother’s German ancestry and the ancestry and cultures of all of those around her): “It meant they were connected, just as she felt connected to all the people on her block and her friends lining their lunch sacks up beside her own.  Now when she pledged allegiance, it was secretly to everywhere.”

Notes:

* As Sharif S. Elmusa points out in an interview with the author, she has “achieved a veteran status, working for thirty years . . . on children and young readers’ poetry.”  Perhaps if I keep this in mind, the story seems somewhat better.

* I’m confused, I admit, by the scene in the grocery store, in which “Lena’s mother stared” at a woman in the grocery store, and says, “I should have been her.”  I really have no idea what is going on here.  I’m very interested to hear the opinions and ideas of others on this matter.

* One part of the story that I do indeed like is Lena’s conversation with her father, which reminds me (in its tone) of the speaker’s conversation with her father in Nye’s poem Blood.  His response to her in this story that “All the questions have more than one good answer,” is really nice, and adds some hint of complexity to this story.

Works Cited

Nye, Naomi Shihab. Interview by Sharif S. Elmusa. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics , No. 27, Childhood: Creativity and Representation  (2007), pp. 107-113

Week 14 Readings and Responses

Sherman Alexie - This Is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona

This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona, by Sherman Alexie, is a quirky, humorous, heart-rending short story from Alexie’s collection of short stories/novel The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.  Like other stories from the collection, this story focuses on the importance of forgiveness and community within an environment of broken dreams, broken community, and self-destructive behavior. 

The picture that the narrator provides of the reservation on which Victor lives is not a pretty one.  We see that the environment is one of poverty (“Who does have money on a reservation, except the cigarette and fireworks salespeople?”) and alcohol abuse (“The only real thing he shared with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams.”). The sense of community on the reservation has been lost (“Whatever happened to the tribal ties, the sense of community?), a fact that is highlighted by the fact that Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the resident storyteller of the reservation, is someone that “nobody wanted to listen to” (288).

As Benedict Anderson has shown in his seminal book Imagined Communities, communities (in most of his explanation, nations) are “imagined,” in that they are defined and held together by unifying narratives that assist the varying members of a community in seeing themselves as inextricably linked to their fellow citizens.  It would follow, then, that we can see the fact that Thomas (and his stories) is ignored as a sign that a certain sense of community, a shared feeling of belonging, has been lost in the community under discussion here.  As we see, for Thomas to be ignored is “like being a dentist in a town where everybody has false teeth” (288).

That this community is obviously falling apart does not mean that it has completely fallen apart, for Thomas, though ignored by all others, does not fall beneath the weight of such a futile and seemingly useless task and “profession.”  As he tells Victor, “Mine are the stories which can change or not change the world.  It doesn’t matter which as long as I continue to tell the stories” (299).  Thomas is something of a martyr in this story, as well as something of a Cassandra figure, doomed to tell the future (or even just the present), while nobody listens to him.  His very hope and courage are an affront to his fellow community members, who, jealous of his conviction, mock him and beat him.  “They hated Thomas for his courage, his brief moment as a bird,” we read.  “Everybody has dreams about flying.  Thomas flew” (297).

What is most important, however, in regard to this specific story under discussion, is that Victor, faced with little room for decision, needs Thomas’s help in order to recover his father’s body and belongings.  This trip in itself is of course important, for it is clear that Victor’s relationship with his father is, at best, ambivalent (he hasn’t seen him in years, and has barely spoken to him), and to embark upon a journey (a quest? An important “Indian” symbolic act?) to (re)claim his father is in itself a cathartic and important act.

It is in this journey that the power of Thomas’s storytelling becomes clear, for through his remembrances of Victor’s father and his providing of the information that Victor’s father has asked Thomas to “watch out” for him, he offers Thomas the chance to forgive his father and see him in a different light:

Victor was quiet for a long time.  He searched his mind for memories of his father, found the good ones, found a few bad ones, added it all up, and smiled (296).

            Thomas’s most important lesson that he shares, however,  relates to the need for the community to “take care of each other,” which he does by providing Victor with assistance, forgiving Victor for his earlier cruelty as a young man, and providing Victor with a space to forgive himself and his father and to ask Thomas for his forgiveness.  As is clear from Victor’s thoughts toward the end of the story, this lesson sticks:

Victor was ashamed of himself.  Whatever happened to the tribal ties, the sense of community? The only real thing he shared with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams.  He owed Thomas something, anything.

            As is clear from this text, Alexie puts great stock in to the role of the storyteller as one who maintains the sense of community for a community, and who speaks from a moral standpoint for the community.  This self-reflexive writing also presents the idea that a storyteller’s duty is to provide a community with a sense of the holy, a sense of something greater than themselves, and to tell a tale that raises the mundane to something much greater.  We see, for instance, how Thomas tells Victor what he plans to do with his half of the cremated remains of Victor’s father, and how he tells Victor, “your father will rise like a salmon, leap over the bridge, over me, and find his way home.  It will be beautiful.  His teeth will shine like silver, like a rainbow.  He will rise, Victor, he will rise.”  It is, of course, no coincidence that Victor plans to deposit his half of the ashes in the same place, but that before hearing Thomas’s description of the mythical nature of the event, he had seen it differently, he “didn’t imagine [his] father looking anything like a salmon . . . thought it’d be like cleaning the attic or something” (300).  Thomas’s value here is that he shows Victor that “nothing stops,” and that his actions are much bigger, much more important, than “letting things go after they’ve stopped having any use” (300). 

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. Print.

Response to Today We Will Not Be Silent, by Victoria Lena Manyarrows

                Today We Will Not Be Silent, by Victoria Lena Manyarrows, acts, as Mr. Farmer points out, as a “forceful declaration.”  By establishing a connection between the distant past, the recent past, and the present, the speaker develops an understanding of a historical, and ongoing, struggle, placing herself, and others like her, into that struggle as forces of resistance.

            When the speaker declares that “we  will not be invisible or silent,” it is as first unclear who this “we” really is.  It quickly becomes clear, however, that this “we” is a vast group of people, held together not by their inherently shared qualities, but by their shared resistance to (and suffering under) the colonization, genocide, and exploitation of the United States class of (white) power.

            The first connection to the (distant) past that we see is in the reference to the “pilgrims of yesterday,” which establishes a connection between the first white settlers in North America and those in power in North America today.   This act of connection continues with the recent past, making a connection between the Native people of the US and the citizens of Nicaragua, Chile, Guatemala, and El Salvador, all countries that have suffered under the yoke of oppressive military meddling by the United States (see the Contras in Nicaragua, the CIA-supported military takeover in Chile and the subsequent 17-years of dictatorship, the CIA organized coup in Guatemala in 1954—which led to an over 30-year civil war, and the US support of the military junta during the civil war in El Salvador, which was characterized by the murderous tactics of death squads and mass murder).  By making such a strong connection (and one that is characterized by the US meddling in foreign affairs), the speaker establishes the US government within the US as a similarly foreign power, responsible for genocide and “elimination” of the Native/original population.

            The poem also references geography and the physicality of the land, ignoring, in a way, the arbitrary and artificial borders established by the European powers, in order to make the case that there is little difference between the people of the “Americas,” who have all been oppressed by the European  people and their descendants.    

            Such preoccupation with the geography of the Americas is not unique in this poem . Much of Manyarrow’s poetry shows a similar concern for the geography of the American continent and makes a metaphorical connection between this geography and the essential unity of the continent.  We see, for instance, how in America/Love Song to the Native Lands, Manyarrows describes geography in a sensual, sexual language, describing her desire to demonstrate her love for the Americas:

                        America

                                    my native land

                        will you ever know how much i love you?  (Manyarrows 9)

Works Cited

Manyarrows, Victoria Lena. "America/Love Song To The Native Lands." Hurricane Alice 10.2  (1994): 9. Humanities International Complete. Web. 25 Nov. 2013.

Week 13 Readings and Responses

Holy Toledo, by Joseph Geha

Holy Toledo, by Joseph Geha, is a complex tale that examines notions of home (homeland, homelessness), family, and culture liminality, specifically in the context of the Arab American community.  As A.J Wardi and K. Wardi Zonna point out in their article “Memories of Home: Reading the  Beduoin in Arab American literature, “Geha reminds readers that home is a complex negotiation of place, geography, memory and politics.”

            Movement, and the ways in which notions of home are both fluid and moored to specific cultural practices, is symbolized and expressed in many ways within this short story, not least of which is the use of the “charm against the Evil Eye”—the search for which takes up a great deal of this story.  The amulet is a complex metaphor—it serves as a physical marker of cultural permanence even in the midst of movement (this is a small glass bead, worthless perhaps, but which continues to signify something over the course of generations and physical removal from its original “birthplace”), as well as a symbol of how things that are lost (even tiny little things, like the children in the story) often seem to eventually be found.  The amulet is always lost in Sitti’s house, “but despite the clutter of this house . . . it was forever turning up again too.” Similarly, the appearance of this amulet was also a similar tale of loss and finding – “A Lazerine monk claimed he’d found it lying amid the rubble of an ancient excavation,” and even after Sitti’s uncle had been given it, it “was forgotten, mislaid until after his death when it turned up again among his things.” 

            The amulet serves as well as a reminder of the perdurance of tightly-held cultural beliefs (and superstitions).  Like a sharp pebble in a shoe (interestingly, and on a side note, the word “scruple” comes from the Latin word for a small, sharp stone (scrupus à scrupulous), and was used metaphorically by Cicero to describe our modern sense of a “moral misgiving”), this little piece of ceramic beading will not seem to disappear.  Sitti’s uncle may find no value in this pebble (“Nothing more than a drop of porcelain painted to look like a miniature eyeball”), and yet this “drop of porcelain” means a great deal to Sitti, and travels with her from Syria to the United States.  Later, when her son Eddie heads off to sea, he takes it with him as a protective item, even though it “was usually just the old people” who gave importance to such things.  Within the context of the events taking place in this story, we see to how Nadia, attempting to help Sitti (and get her to stop moaning so loudly), spends a great deal of time searching the house for the missing apotropaic symbol. 

            While this amulet may symbolize many things, the concept of “home” is one of the most important of these.  For Sitti, this necklace, like the “pages from Arabic prayerbooks, shreds of holy palms plaited years ago into the shapes of crosses and crowns of thorns,” is a piece of the homeland that has accompanied her on her journey to America.  For Uncle Eddie, it is a reminder of home (now in America) while he is at sea.  A sense of home, as mentioned above, is the overarching concern of this narrative and the one that most directly seems to apply to the young protagonists of this story.  For these children, many of the familiar signs of “home” are no longer present—their mother is dead, their father has abandoned them, and they have moved from one house to another (though they are so similar as to be nearly identical).  For these two children, who in the end of the story finally establish a common front against their Munchauseny grandmother and abusive uncle, home doesn’t seem to be a place that offers comfort or protection (quite the opposite), and rather than finding solace in the physical home or the home rooted in a sense of “culture,” they dream of heading off to “America,” much as their father has done.  In the final lines of the story, we read of them “lost in the American homesickness,” and of how Nadia “tried to imagine America, how it will be, and what they should take with them when they go.”

            This clever re-imagining of “America” lays at the center of much of what is taking place in the story.  These children are, of course, in America.  They are in Detroit, and yet when they look at the world outside of their own immediate environs, that is what they consider “America.”  When their father disappears, Sitti will only tell them that he has gone to “America”—he is “gone, swallowed up somehow by the vast America beyond these streets, alive, forever luckless, and free.”  When the “college mums” come to shop in the streets of Little Syria, Nadia “wish[es] that she were one of them, returning with them into that huge strangeness, America, luring her despite the threat it seemed to hold of loss and vicious homesickness.” 

            Homesickness, like a sense of home, is an interesting concept within this story, for as the above quote shows, for Nadia (and perhaps for her brother Mikhi), homesickness is an enticing (and frightening) notion.  Revisiting the family’s explanation of Nadia’s father’s whereabouts, we can see that he is both considered “luckless” and “free.”  For Nadia’s Uncle Eddie, being away from home seems quite difficult (he repeats again and again how he was “lost the whole time,” and how it’s “great to be back), and yet his sullen and violent behavior in the months following his return seems to hint at some ambivalence and confusion in his emotions upon returning home.   

            For Mikhi, perhaps the most intriguing and complex character in this story (though all of them, to be honest, vie for that title), a similar ambivalence seems to reign in his psyche.  He is, of course, like Nadia (even more so), anxious for escape—he plans to go somewhere “away,” though he isn’t sure when or where.  He is also “irreverent” toward the symbols of the past (the amulet and such customs as the kissing of a fallen piece of bread) and it seems that such symbols of the old world have lost power for him.  At the same time, at certain points in the story (in particular while in the basement), we see too that this nine year-old child is frightened by a total loss of “home,” afraid that his grandmother will die, upset when his grandmother appears to have fallen upstairs. 

            Everyone in this story, it seems, is trapped in a middle ground – stuck between the past of the “old world” and the present/future of America.  The difference is in their reactions to this confusion—Nadia’s father abandons the family to head off into “America,” Uncle Eddie leaves but returns, yet seems trapped by his decision and its consequences, Sitti seems trapped by her old ways and yet must use a variety of manipulative techniques to make those around her give her the attention that she desires, and Nadia and Mikhi are totally afloat, lost in death and abandonment and the unrealized dreams and desires of almost America. 

Works Cited

Wardi, A. J., & Wardi-Zonna, K. (2008). Memories of Home: Reading the Bedouin in Arab American Literature. Ethnic Studies Review, 31(1), 65-79,9. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.jproxy.lib.ecu.edu/docview/215486016?accountid=10639

Wing Tek Lum - Going Home

            Wing Tek Lum’s poem Going Home approaches a topic with which we are now quite familiar – that of a (presumably) second generation Chinese American who is both intimately connected and woefully disconnected from her “cultural roots.”  Like the narrator in Gish Jen’s What Means Switch, the speaker of this poem has a very limited linguistic knowledge of Chinese—the phrase that speaks at the beginning of the poem (which we can assume means something like “Where do you live?”) is “the only phrase” that she knows “besides the usual menu words.” 

            While the old man in this poem appears to be the focus of the poem, it is in fact the speaker who is our most important subject to consider; in seeing her attempts to help this old and confused man find his way home, we are afforded a glimpse into her own inability to find “home.”  Like this lost man, it appears that she too is lost.

            Language is of course of great importance in this poem, and serves as both a symbol and as a more concrete example of the interstitial, liminal space often evoked in the poems in this collection.  As a symbol, the language in this poem calls to mind the confusion and sense of anguish that might be caused by an existential search for one’s place, the culture to which one belongs.  We read, for example, that the speaker is “still able to hear those familiar, / yet no less incomprehensible sounds.”  There is a sense of belonging and familiarity that we can glean from this, but meaning, we see, is still out of the speaker’s grasp.

            From a very real point of view, language is important here as well, as the speaker’s inability to speak the language of her ancestors prevents her from helping this man, from helping him (and herself) find home.  The futility of her attempts, and the anguish caused by this futility, send her running from the situation and leads her to “hastily cross the street.” 

            The final lines of the poem open the poem to an even wider theme, and greatly complicates the poem.  Leaving the scene, the speaker wonders, saying aloud that “Chinamen aren’t supposed to cry.” This line, which demonstrates both  confusion and disconnectedness, also demonstrates that the speaker (like so many of those in the “outside” world), in her disconnectedness, has reduced “her” people – “Chinamen” – to a simplistic and reductive stereotype (the “Chinaman” in her mind, I presume, should remain “mysterious,” their emotions unseen in facial movements and external signs). (This particular stereotype, that of the "inscrutable" Chinese, is a rather common and pernicious one, and is explained well by Rey Chow, who writes, "the failure of . . . outsiders to comprehend Chinese (facial) expressions—a kind of corporeal writing—is projected retroactively onto the other as the other’s essential quality, inscrutability” (71).  Unfortunately, for the speaker, there do not currently appear to be any “young fellows” to guide her in her search, and she is left heading to the only “home” that she still knows, still lost. 

Works Cited

Chow, Rey. How (the) Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory. PMLA , Vol. 116, No. 1, Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies (Jan., 2001), pp. 69-74

Week 12 Readings and Responses

Enid Dame's Drowning Kittens

                Drowning Kittens, by Enid Dame, is a story rich in metaphor and symbolism. Perhaps the strongest of the many symbols that make up this story is that of the Persian cat, “a placid aristocrat with large feet, tufts of hair in her ears, and guileless blue eyes.”  This cat, which appears (both in an original version, as well as a “reincarnated” one) throughout the story, serves as a strong symbol of male domination, female rebellion, sexual liberation, and historical memory, as we see in both the ways in which the cat itself behaves as well as the ways in which the characters in the story behave in relation to it.

                When we first are introduced to the cat, we learn that the narrator’s grandfather has received the cat as payment from a customer unable to pay, and that the grandfather, not a lover of the animal, sees it as a means to making money.  The grandfather, in effect, wishes to impose his own desires on this animal, which he sees simply as a kitten-making device (which should translate to a money-making device).  He acts, to put it simply, as a cat pimp. As we see, however, this cat (her name was Dinah) acts in a way contrary to the grandfather’s interests, rejecting the purebred male cat that he brings for her, and instead choosing to mate with a “striped, marauding tom with one ear missing.” 

                This behavior is important, of course, for we see how this “liberated” feline’s behavior enrages Jake, the narrator’s grandfather.  Also important, however, is the fact that Renee, the narrator’s grandmother, is pleased with the cat’s behavior, revealing a rebellious and liberated streak of her own that is generally obscured by her skill at “becoming invisible when necessary.”  We read: “She was pleased when Dinah rejected his advances, giving him a sharp rap just below his hairy right ear.  She drew blood, and Sultan sulked in a corner.”

                Renee’s own liberated stance in life is not a complete secret, of course.  At other points in the story, we see the manner in which she makes decisions and takes action in a way that reveals an inner strength, fortitude, and willingness to “fight.”  We see, for instance, how she elopes with Jake, going contrary to general societal expectations by spurning the man to whom she is engaged. 

                Jake’s reactions to Dinah’s pregnancy, and the appearance of her kittens, goes further in illustrating his somewhat tyrannical, patriarchal attitude, for we see how he wishes to destroy/murder the kittens, who are the fruits and proof of an un-sanctioned coupling.  We also see, in Renee’s reaction to Jake’s fierce act, the ways in which she is able to make use of subversive and clever means to getting what she wants.  Hiding within the guise of subjugation, she subverts male privilege by allowing Jake to think that he is saving the kittens because of their incredible talents, when in fact he’s saving them because of his own ignorance (and Renee’s knowledge) of normal feline behavior. 

                Renee is simultaneously, of course, not like Dinah in many ways, for though she chooses to elope with Jake rather than marry the more suitable man (“maybe he just isn’t her type”), she proceeds within her marriage in a more subdued, quiet fashion, and certainly is not giving anyone a “sharp rap just below his hairy right ear.” 

                Annie (Renee’s daughter, and the narrator’s mother), from the little that we know of her, seems to act in way much more in line with the Dinah’s behavior.  Like the cat, she seems to act in life in a way that is much more direct.   She is angry with her mother’s “long-game” manner of saving the kittens, and enraged that she could “take such changes with the great, stupid, dangerous forces.”  We see that she becomes political, and involved in strikes, and that even later in life is somewhat iconoclastic, mistrustful of marriage and in support of women being liberated and independent (“Every woman needs a little money of her own”). (As Burt Kimmelman points out in his article "Enid Dame's Householdry," relationships between daughters and mothers come up often in Dame's work.  He writes, "At the heart of Dame's understanding of fate lies her vexed relationship with her mother" (Kimmleman)).    

                This feline symbol, however, should not be considered solely as a quid-pro-quo type of symbol, though it is important in that way too (as discussed above).  Rather, we can also consider the use of the cat as a symbol deliberately employed by the characters in the story (in particular Annie) to express the ideas delineated above.  Said differently, this is a literary symbol that isn’t just literary—it is a real symbol within the world of the story, and the characters seem to see it that way.  It is for this reason that Annie gives her daughter a Persian cat, which she very importantly pairs with another gift – the very story that the narrator tells us about the cat.  “The story of the attempted drowing [sic],” when paired with the physical animal, serve as a means by which Annie can pass on her personal history, and that of her mother, to her daughter.  It serves as a living memory of the story, a constant reminder of the lessons that the story is meant to impart, and a symbol of the strength of women and the power of the dispossessed “undercat.”  

Works Cited
Kimmleman, Burt. "Enid Dame's Householdry." Rain Taxi Online Edition. Summer 2009. Web. 5 November 2013.

Powwow Polaroid, by Sherman Alexie

                 Sherman Alexie’s poem Powwow Polaroid examines the powwow as a simulated event that “freezes” Native American cultures in a timeless and false past upon which the “gaze” of the outside world has its way.  By purposefully confusing the actual movement of the dancers in the poem with the frozen image captured by the camera of a tourist, Alexie calls into question the relationship between the performer and those for whom he is performing.

            There is something surreal about this poem, and we as viewers must accept the alternate reality presented here – a reality in which a photograph literally captures someone (Alexie is also, it seems, playing with popular conceptions of Native American beliefs here – the old “photograph will take your soul” trope).  This photograph is something magical (not in the sense of a wonderful thing, but something possessing power) and stops the movement of reality:

She took the picture, the flashbulb burned, and none of us could

move.  I was frozen between steps, my right foot three inches off

the ground, my mouth open and waiting to finish the last sound.

In this case, the photograph, which by its very nature is reductive and limiting, capturing only a moment within a constant and never-ending stream of movement, is seen doing what it always does—separating moments, examining them out of context and by themselves. 

            What perhaps makes this even more complex is the fact that a powwow such as this one, attended by camera-toting tourists, is already something separate, something taken out of context.  It is already a simulacrum, a copy of something that may have once existed, but which at the moment is simply an image out of time presented for the outside population.  In this sense, the photograph is a copy of a copy (of a copy of a copy, perhaps). 

            The response of people is illustrative as well, in that this captured moment is a point of success for the photographer-tourist—she is triumphant at this moment, but for others in attendance, as well as the now frozen dancers, this is a frightening event.  For the other members of the community, the speaker’s aunt for example, this is also frightening – the aunt weeps “into the public address system.” 

            Importantly, at this moment, frozen in time, as the crowd flees and the dancers remain still, the only ones moving, the elders, are those expressing sadness and, importantly, as the uncle says, “forgiveness.”  As Jennifer Gillan has convincingly shown, in her article Reservation Home Movies: Sherman Alexie’s Poetry, these final lines serve to both express the continued community of the tribe, but also a “reconciliation with the Anglo world,” which she (wisely) categorizes as “tentative.” 

Works Cited

Gillan, Jennifer.  Reservation Home Movies: Sherman Alexie’s Poetry. American Literature , Vol. 68, No. 1, Write Now: American Literature in the 1980s and 1990s (Mar., 1996), pp. 91-110

Week 11 Readings and Responses

Response to "Dinner With Father," by Bruce A. Jacobs

 As Bryant Scott points out in our online discussion, Dinner with Father, by Bruce A. Jacobs, “is primarily concerned with indoctrinations, ideologies, and various standards of what can be called the traditional “white” capitalist system.”  The piece also (I believe) confronts paternalism, and expands ideas of the “white” capitalist system to include an examination of the ways in which this system is often accepted by those outside of the standard “white” capitalist class.

“Father” in this story is the father of the narrator’s friend—he is a retired Princeton professor who, at least according to the narrator, believes himself to be far more intelligent than anyone else – “He himself, however, does not think; he knows,” we read.  For this man, hard work, the familiar Protestant work ethic, is of paramount importance; even in retirement, he can’t seem to stop working, though his work now seems to revolve around imposing himself on the lives of his children in overbearing and critical ways – “He works at letting his two sons know that they do not know the meaning of work.  He works at reminding his daughter that although she works hard . . . she does not work intelligently.”

All that we learn about this man is filtered through the lens of the narrator, who sees “Father” as a representative for the “white capitalist class.”  He is the standard bearer for the “system,” the same in action and thought as the original colonists and settlers, overly sure of their own reason and rights, quick to forget their mistakes, blind to their misjudgments and ignorance, and unforgiving of those who do not act as they see fit:

I see him  at the first Thanksgiving, accepting gifts of fur and pumpkin and corn, an ill-clad, starving settler who would soon forget how his own science had failed him.  I see him making soundly considered decisions: bison are limitless, wolves are an enemy, beef is a core nutrient, straight lines are natural.

This manner of seeing the world, for the narrator, is portrayed as something inherently white, and placed in direct contrast to how the narrator and his ancestors would have seen the world.  It is also, importantly, far different from the way in which the man’s daughter sees the world (In “Father’s” view, women and “most blacks” would be his “inferiors,” a vision of superiority that would mirror the narrator’s own view—and presumably that of the daughter—of his own superiority).  The narrator, in his imagining of “Father” as a pilgrim and settler, can also imagine his own ancestors and the way in which they would have viewed this overly confident and self-assured man:

I see my wizened black great-grandparents shaking their heads on porches about the way that white people think, the way that white people act, the things that white people believe.

                Interestingly, for this narrator, this particularly “white” way of thinking seems curiously color blind.  While “Father” represents this paradigm, his children, for instance, don’t seem to accept a similar worldview.  His daughter, we see, won’t answer the phone during dinner, and “Father’s” way of viewing the world (when filtered through the narrator’s understanding) is that “the sorts of people who ignore telephones to savor good food or good conversation do not value work.  They  are, ultimately, lazy.”   Similarly, just as the narrator does not see all whites as following this patriarchal and narrow viewpoint, some African Americans do indeed buy into the system represented by “Father.”  In the narrator’s mind, his own father has lived within such a paradigm, and it has, it appears, killed him:

I see this Father running for messages, running for deals, running for City Council, running for some kind of glint of respect in the gray eyes of white Fathers, running for rabbits named Sparky on a quarter-mile oval track, running to outpace the squeezed rush of his own metered blood until science gives way and the brain bleeds on itself, the movie monster collapsing on a city skyline in a cloudburst of red.

Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, while the narrator’s obvious sympathies lie with the daughter in this instance, and against the work-obsessed vision of life of “Father” and all those whom he favors, it is clear in the final paragraph that his own psyche is not unaffected by the dominant “white” vision of the world.  He too, like his father, seems to be affected by it, and to be drawn to it in some way.  We read in the final paragraph of the narrator, upset by the scene around him:

I bend over my plate with a ringing in my ears, a high, thin pulse in my skull, and I ask myself, why doesn’t someone answer that phone, and why does my fork have the weight of ten men?

The stand against the answering of the telephone, this strong metaphor throughout the story that has represented a stance against all that “Father” stands for, seems to melt away here.  The pressures being what they are, the narrator wishes for  “someone [to] answer that phone,” showing that he is not immune to the demands of “Father”—that he too may in some way yearn for a “glint of respect in the gray eyes of white Fathers,” that perhaps the “large foot in the eight-year old son’s ass” has left a mark that has not yet fully healed. 

[For further insight into Bruce A. Jacobs and his views on race relations, the video below is a good source to reference.  In this video, Jacobs discusses bigotry, race relations, and the causes--and effects--of these phenomena]



Response to "Blood," by Naomi Shihab Nye

As Ibis Gomez-Vega points out in her article on Naomi Shihab Nye’s essays and poems, Shihab Nye is a poet who is concerned, without remorse or reservations, with politics and with the representation and image of Arabs throughout the world (and in particular within the United States).  She is, however, as Gomez-Vega also discusses, a very personal poet, and the fact that politics bleed into her poetry does not make her a primarily “political poet,” but rather one for whom the “political is personal.”  This poem in particular, entitled Blood, explores this nexus of the political and the personal, and attempts to answer (or at least search for an answer) the question, “What does a true Arab do now?” 

The “personal” of this story finds its home in the character of the speaker’s father, a man who seems to regularly spout quaint and humorous definitions of “Arab-ness.”  The first three stanzas of the poem (including the second, which does not explicitly mention the speaker’s father) approach the question of what makes one a “true Arab.”  The answers to this question are humorous, as we see in the first stanza:

“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,”

my father would say.  And he’d prove it,

cupping the buzzer instantly

while the host with the swatter stared.

There is, of course, something quite ludicrous in the father’s statement here, for such a skill as the hunting of insects mano a mano is quite obviously not one of the defining characteristics of an Arab, and yet these lines serve well to introduce the father to the reader, providing a description that speaks to his humanity and his humor.  Obviously as well, the entire premise is ridiculous, for there can be no such thing as  “true Arab,” unless the definition of this “true Arab” be wide enough, complex enough to encompass the entirety of the Arab experience.

We learn as well from the speaker (who has presumably learned from her father) that “True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.”  Curiously, we see that this belief is something flexible—speaking perhaps to the speaker’s own liminal status as an Arab American, for the means by which “watermelon could heal” are “changed . . . to fit the occasion.”

For the speaker, her father seems to serve as the moderator for Arab identity – it is he who explains to her (and others) what a “true Arab” does and says, and it is he who tells her, when she asks an astute and clever question as a young girl, that “that’s what a true Arab would say.” 

All of the sureness and certainty of the first three stanzas, in which we are presented with an image of a “true Arab,” and a sense (somewhat flippant, ironic, humorous though it may be) of how a “true Arab” acts, is lost as the poem continues, and the “tragedy with a terrible root” appears.  Whichever act of violence this may be (the speaker is not explicit), it is clear that we are faced with an event that has led to bloodshed in the Middle East.  Even the speaker’s father is rendered mute by the events—“It is too much for him, / neither of his two languages can reach it,” and the speaker, left without her familiar defining force of “Arab-ness,” is left mired in confusion. 

This confusion leads the speaker to “drive into the country,” searching for some meaning to the events, to some explanation for why such things happen, for some answer to the questions that Arabs (and Arab Americans) must now face.  We are left with the speaker’s confusion; unanswered questions remain that neither we, nor she, can answer:

Who calls anyone civilized?

Where can the crying heart graze?

What does a true Arab do now?

 

 

Works Cited

 

Gómez-Vega, Ibis. Extreme Realities: Naomi Shihab Nye's Essays and Poems. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics , No. 30, Trauma and Memory‎ (2010), pp. 109-133

Another response to "Blood," by Naomi Shihab Nye

19Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals

-Genesis 19, 20

            The act of “naming” something implies a power over that which is being named, as well as an understanding of the world – essentially, to name something is to place it within the world, to establish its location, its role within the social and natural order.  In 100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, we see, for instance, how José Arcadio Buendia, faced with a plague of insomnia and amnesia in the town of Macondo, sets about naming (and in some instances, re-naming) and labeling everything in the town.  Similarly, Adam (of Biblical fame) is allowed the power to name everything in the animal kingdom – “the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.”  In doing so, he establishes his power over them and his understanding of their place in the world.

            Such an understanding is unavailable to the speaker’s father in Blood, by Naomi Shihab Nye.  Faced with unimaginable violence for which there can be no understanding, the father is unable to name it, to explain it, to describe it – “neither of his two languages can reach it.”   This impotence and muteness is important, and unexpected, in this poem, for the father, throughout the rest of the poem, acts as the arbiter and explainer of what it means to be an Arab. He seems to possess the ability to explain what an Arab is and to establish and label “Arab-ness” in others: “A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,” he says, and later tells the speaker, in response to her clever commentary that “that’s what a true Arab would say.”  He is the “namer” of Arabs, in effect, defining “Arab-ness” and bestowing the label of Arab upon his daughter (who, if she is like the poet, is only “half” Arab). 

            Language is also, we see in the poem, a fluid and vibrant creature, mutable and subject to important changes.  “True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways,” we read, and yet we also read that the speaker “changed these to fit the occasion.”  These beliefs, and our/their muttering of them, are changeable.  To be named is to be labeled, though even this is not final, as we see with the father’s name, which is “a good name, borrowed from the sky,” about which the speaker asks, “When we die, we give it back?”

            This tragedy, however, which is not explicitly named in the poem, renders impotent the power of language—“headlines clot” in the “blood” of the speaker and images, such as that of “A little Palestinian [dangling] a truck on the front page” take over.  The event is too large to be contained by language, even when one (like the father) possess two languages; neither of them can encompass the pain – “this tragedy with a terrible root / is too big” for the speaker and her father.

            Faced with this quandary, for which language has no words, no answers, the speaker is left wandering in the countryside, searching for “sheep, cows,” (which we can interpret both as a return to nature and simplicity, or, stretching perhaps a bit too far, as an attempt to return to something easier to name—like Adam—and to understand) and “[pleading] with the air,” looking for answers.  “Who calls anyone civilized,” the speakers asks—a question that highlights two unmistakable points: First, that to call anyone civilized, in light of a tragedy such as the one affecting her at this point, seems ridiculous, for nobody who could be called civilized would do such a thing, make such violence occur; and second, that a naming of this particular type, which carries inherent in it the specter of its opposite (for there to be someone civilized, there must be someone else who is uncivilized, and therefore worthy of destruction, or at the very least, instruction) carries great power with it.  Such rhetorical power—to name and give value to a civilized people—both belies and creates real power, of the type that equates to bombs being dropped, people being slaughtered, and (un?)civilizations beings destroyed.

            

Week 10 Readings and Responses

          Myrna and Me, by Laura Boss
        Laura Boss is a poet and short-story writer from New Jersey.  An award-winning poet, as well as the founder of a poetry magazine (called Lips), Boss's work shows a preoccupation with loss, as we see in the short story under discussion here (Boss).  Myrna and Me is a short story that examines notions of cultural fidelity, friendship, and the negotiations that one must make between one's personal views (of interests, of what is right and wrong, of whom to surround one's self with) and the views that form the cultural paradigm of one's culture.  More specifically, in this story, we see the way in which a friendship between the narrator and her "friend" Myrna, is forged on the shaky foundation of a shared cultural heritage (they are among the few Jewish girls around) and how the friendship fails to flourish on this shaky ground.

      Myrna, clearly, is a smug and mean girl.  She and the narrator are friends, though this is clearly only because they are two of the only three Jewish girls in their grade at School Number Eleven.  We see, for instance, that Myrna seems to believe herself superior (she gets around Sabbath restrictions by having the narrator pay for her, and then pays her back “with a sanctimonious smile on her face”).  She actively engages in mini-betrayals meant to get the narrator in trouble – telling her own mother in one case that the narrator has eaten ham at a birthday party, knowing that the news will get back to the narrator’s mother.  Her greatest betrayal, however, is her attempt (we don’t know if failed or not) to steal Richard Gold from the narrator.  It seems pretty clear that she knows exactly what she is doing and that’s just a mean person.

                Interestingly, it is mean Myrna that is the vehicle for the narrator’s freedom, and her behavior is an impetus for the narrator to break free from the rigid, controlled world in which she is confined.  Both of the girls exist within a rather traditional and controlling Jewish society in which they are expected to only marry (and only date, so that they “were not tempted”) Jewish men.   This self-exclusion, when combined with something of an exclusion on the part of the larger society (symbolized by the fact that they will never be asked to pledge for “Rainbow Girls”), results in their living within a totally separate society, essentially forced to make relationships with people whom they don’t really like.  Myrna’s meanness breaks this ‘invisible code’ and allows the narrator to “become friends with girls [she] really liked even if [they] came from different worlds.”

Works Cited
Boss, Laura.  Interview by Rebecca Gambale. The Dodge Blog.  The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. 7        June 2013. Web. 26 October 2013.

               

How I Changed My Name, Felice, by Felix Stefanile

        “How I Changed My Name, Felice,” is a very funny poem, and a light-hearted take on a theme of wide importance among immigrant communities.  The theme is fairly common – we can see it, of course, in other poems in this section (which is called “Naming”), such as Chin’s “How I Got That Name”—for names, as markers of who we are, are both very important and un-important.  They are filled with meaning and devoid of meaning.  They carry information about a person (ethnic identity, parental choices, etc), and yet it seems that most anyone can “grow into” a name.  A Harry becomes a Harry, and a Jennifer becomes a Jennifer.

                Part of the humor of this poem lies in the name itself, which Felix of course had little choice in (at least originally), but which serves the poem well, for “felice” means “happy” in Italian, and so there is a nice turn of phrase in the title of the poem, for we could think of it as “How I Changed My Name, Happ(il)y.” 

                Interestingly, the name is totally unimportant at first, and does not seem to be an issue at all.  “The teachers hardly cared,” we read, and the Italian boys don’t seem to find it strange.  They easily “code switch” like characters in our short stories this week, and pronounce the name differently in class (we imagine that they say “Fe-LEEse”) and outside of class, when they say “feh-LEE-tchay” (the proper Italian pronunciation).  The name only becomes a problem when the speaker commits a small “crime,” (breaking a widow’s window) and comes face-to-face with the American justice system, in the form of a police officer.  The name change, it seems, is something of the penance that this boy must pay for his crime (though he must also pay with shame).   This is his initiation, the point, perhaps, at which he becomes somehow more “American.” 

                What’s great about this name change, and works to further provide this poem with levity, is the speaker’s father’s reaction to the new name, which according to a book is a “Roman name.”  No connection, though, with Roman grand buildings, democratic traditions, theatre, or philosophy, for as the father points out, “no Roman broke a widow’s glass, / and fanned [his] little Neopolitan ass.”  This final, brilliant line, which seems "perenially lively and vigorous," (as X.J. Kennedy has described his work as a whole, in a review of The Dance at St. Gabriel's) seems perfectly nonchalant, humorous, and, of course, a touch violent, which seem like perfect terms to apply to the poem as a whole, which approaches what could be considered an important and serious topic, yet with a levity that deprives it of a heaviness that such an event does not, perhaps, deserve.  

Works Cited

Kennedy, X.J.  Review of The Dance at St. Gabriel's by Felix Stefanile. Harvard Review , No. 9 (Fall, 1995), pp. 169-170

Week 9 Readings and Responses

Response to Mericans, by Sandra Cisneros
The short story “Mericans,” by Sandra Cisneros, was first featured in the book Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.  This story, while quite short, engages with a variety of themes, including hybridism of identities, religion, and the relationship between the dominant white culture of North America and the “Other” upon which he “gazes.”

                All of the “action” of this story takes place either inside or directly outside of the famous shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, located atop the Hill of Tepeyac.  This shrine houses the tapestry mentioned in the text (“La Virgen de Guadalupe is waiting inside behind a plate of thick glass.”), which according to Catholic belief was found by the Indian Juan Diego.  Importantly, this hill was a holy hill for the natives before the arrival of the Spaniards, as it was meant to be the home of Tonantzin, the mother goddess of Aztec beliefs.  As Mary Pat Brady points out in her article “The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories,” the hybrid nature of the Virgin, as both a Catholic (Creole) religious figure and as a syncretic Aztec/Catholic figure is important to understand when considering the use of the Virgin as a symbol (in any work, or in Mexican culture considered more widely).  She writes, “The Virgin of Guadalupe emerges then not only as a means of evangelization and domination and a mechanism through which the Creoles appropriated the Christian symbols and religious power of the Spanish, but also a symbol of defiance and resistance to whom corridos would eventually be sung hailing her as the “Queen of the American Indians” (126).

                By situating this story at the site of the shrine to Guadalupe, Cisneros immediately introduces the idea of a “hybrid” or syncretic religious and cultural practice, thus highlighting the hybrid nature of the narrator’s (and her brothers’) culture.  The narrator (and protagonist) of this story is a young Mexican-American girl in Mexico, occupying the hybrid space of the “exile” who has returned to the native land.  She is one of the “grandchildren born in that barbaric country with its barbarian ways,” and is thus looked upon differently by the population of Mexicans that live (and were born) in Mexico. 

                Beyond occupying this hybrid place, the narrator also occupies a site of marginalization – she is a woman (girl) in a culture famous for machismo, which we see in the way that her brothers treat her.  For them, to call her a girl is her “brothers’ favorite insult now instead of “sissy.”  Their games, created with the seemingly sole intention of excluding her, are constantly changing, so that even as she learns the rules (and stands a chance to “compete”) they are changed.  We see, for example:

I’ve already made up my mind to be a German when Keeks swoops past again, this time yelling, “I’m Flash Gordon.  You’re Ming the Merciless and the Mud People.” I don’t mind being Ming the Merciless, but I don’t like being the Mud People.  Something wants to come out of the corners of my eyes, but I don’t let it.  Crying is what girls do.

As we see, this marginalized status has the effect of creating self-hatred within Michele—a phenomenon similar to that which Frantz Fanon describes in his writings, in which the oppressed person attempts to emulate the oppressor, having accepted their view of their own superiority.

                This relationship between men and women, however, is further complicated by the fact that all of these siblings occupy a space of marginalization and hybridity.  They are all banished from the religious shrine (though Michele does briefly venture in, only to be shooed away soon after).  Even the delights of the space outside of the shrine are forbidden to them:

We must stay near the church entrance.  We must not wander over to the balloon and punch-ball vendors.  We cannot spend our allowance on fried cookies or Familia Burrón comic books or those clear cone-shaped suckers that make everything look like a rainbow when you look through them.  We cannot run off and have our picture taken on the wooden ponies.  We must not climb the steps up the hill behind the church and chase each other through the cemetery.  (170)

This place of marginalization and hybridity is made most clear at the end of the story, in which a pair of visiting tourists, obvious to the narrator through clearly gendered visual cues (“Ladies don’t come to church dressed in pants.  And everybody knows men aren’t supposed to wear shorts”), approach the children, give them treats, and ask in broken Spanish to take their picture.  In a scene heavily reminiscent of one from Amy Tan’s “Rules of the Game,” it is obvious that they see these young children as something essentially “Mexican,” a sure cultural marker to be photographed, displayed, and viewed by others as proof of a “real” experience.  The spell of “authenticity” is broken, however, when the tourists realize that their young subjects speak English.  One can hear their confusion (and perhaps small amount of indignation) in their response to this realization: “But you speak English!”

                The response of the narrator’s brother – “we’re Mericans,” is enlightening, for it reveals, in one clever word, the liminal culture of these young children – not quite “Mexicans” and not quite “Americans,” but rather something hybrid, both a mix of the two words and a version of “American” that appears to be missing something. 

Works Cited

Brady, Mary Pat. "The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories."
American Literature , Vol. 71, No. 1 (Mar., 1999), pp. 117-150


Response to So The Mexicans Are Taking Jobs From Americans, by Jimmy Baca

Reading Baca’s (1977) poem, it becomes quickly obvious that much about the current political climate, the typical “dialogue” between various parties, the polemics related to immigration (illegal and otherwise), have not changed very much at all.  There are still many people who believe that Mexicans take jobs from Americans and others who claim that immigration strengthens our economy and results in a net increase in jobs.  In this poem, Baca inserts himself forcefully into the conversation, using bitter humor and sarcasm to make the point that not only are Mexicans not “taking jobs from Americans,” but more importantly, that such topics of conversation take our collective attention away from larger, more important, more pressing issues.

            The poem opens with a series of humorous (and violent) images, exaggerating a stereotypical representation of a Mexican, taking the accusation that “Mexicans Are Taking Jobs from Americans” to a new level of absurdity, thereby exposing the underlying absurdity of the original accusation.  We read:

                        O Yes? Do they come on horses

                        with rifles, and say,

                                                  Ese, gringo, gimmee your job?

            As the speaker supposedly goes “about trying to find” these job thieves, “asking just where the hell are these fighters,” he makes an important discovery that further reveals the absurdity of this basic accusation.  Essentially, he discovers that the important question, the important struggle, is not that of Mexicans vs. Americans, but rather a much more elemental story in which the poor (of all colors) are being taken advantage of by the rich.  The entire question of jobs being stolen by anyone, he seems to purport, is simply a “bait and switch,” and means by which to take attention away from the true crimes happening in the country.  We see, for example, that:

                        The rifles I hear sound in the night

                        are white farmers shooting blacks and browns

                        whose ribs I see jutting out

                        and starving children

We also read that these injustices are not only perpetrated upon the “blacks and browns,” but that poor whites are affected as well:

                        I see the poor marching for a little work,

                        I see small white farmers selling out

                        to clean-suited farmers living in New York

                        who’ve never been on a farm,

To a great extent, it seems that the speaker’s point aligns neatly with similar points made by Howard Zinn in his political writings, in which he points out that rich whites (the “powers that be”) have often encouraged racism and ethnic hatred as a means by which to foster division between groups that ultimately have much more in common than differences between them.  They do so, Zinn (and others) show, as a means of preventing any real challenge to their own hegemony.  In Chapter 3 of A People’s History of the United States, Zinn quotes Edmund Morgan, a scholar on American History, who writes:

"If freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything Bacon had done. The answer to the problem, obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous black slaves by a screen of racial contempt." (my italics)

            Essentially, this poem seems to make a similar point, namely that anger against Mexicans for “taking jobs” is a way for the rich elite to distract from the real problems for people other than themselves.  Everyone, it seems, who isn’t a member of the rich, elite class, is being taken advantage of by them:

                        Below that cool green sea of money

                        millions and millions of people fight to live,

                        search for pearls in the darkest depths

                        of their dreams, hold their breath for years

                        trying to cross poverty to just having something.

The real words, he tells us, behind their accusations, are much, much colder, and much more direct:

                        . . . let them die,

                        and the children too.

            Clearly this poem is overtly political and quite angry, as is much of Baca's work, including other poems that we have seen in this class.  As Leonor Ulloa points out, "If we encounter violence, bitterness, and denunciation in the poems that reveal to us scenes of life in prison or of the social disadvantages of minorities, we also find a sincere desire for change and a hope for justice in the future" (my translation).  While in this poem we don't perhaps see overtly the "hope for justice" (in his language), it seems clear that the denunciation and the "calling out" of political rhetoric seem to call out for a change, and for the hope that things might some day be different.

Works Cited
de Ulloa, Leonor A. Review of Immigrants in Our Own Lands by Jimmy Santiago Baca. Hispamérica , Año 10, No. 30 (Dec., 1981), pp. 150-151.