Week 8 Readings and Responses

Response to "The Black and White Galaxie" by Afaa Michael Weaver

            “The Black and White Galaxie,” by Afaa Michael Weaver (formerly, and in this collection, known as Michael S. Weaver), is a poem that on its surface tells of a young man washing his uncle’s car, yet which meditates upon the nature of lessons passed from generation to generation within a family.  Using the vehicle as a vehicle, the speaker hints at the ways in which his Uncle Frank provides him with lessons about how a young black man should act and present himself to the world in order to avoid danger and misfortune.

            It is, of course, no accident, nor mere coincidence, that Uncle Frank’s car is black and white, nor that the car is a Galaxie.  The title of the poem itself presents us with this double image – we are speaking of a car, and yet we are not speaking of a car – we are talking about the world, about the whole galaxie and the ways in which black and white are a part of that entity. 

            From the start of the poem, we see that this car must be treated gently—the opening stanza is both delicate and somewhat sexual, and reads like a how-to guide on cleaning and seduction:

                        The rag was soft enough to caress her

                        but raise the dirt from her skin.

                        The soap was strong yet weak so

                        it wouldn’t make her complexion crack.

This anthropomorphizing of the poem’s subject—this vehicle—present from the first the idea of a labor of both love and great care (and brings to mind as well the objectification of women as objects to be “hailed.”)  The way in which Uncle Frank both leads and allows for freedom in this process hint at his method of instruction:

                        When he trusted me, he watched me

                        from afar.  Then he let me go alone,

                        having given me a tenet of his wisdom—

                        a black man gotta make his car shine.

This “tenet of wisdom” is to be followed by other similar tenets, some of which, on the surface, seem directed at teaching the young man how to court women and find success in the dating world.  The speaker writes, for example:

                        I checked to see if it was clean enough

                        to hail a woman’s aloof eyes and lips.

                        Uncle Frank told me what women wanted—

                        a black man gotta look like money.

It is clear, however, that Uncle Frank’s role, and the lesson that he wishes to confer upon this young man, is way more important, and way deeper, than a how-to guide on the seduction of women.  His lessons are an instruction in the ways that a “black man” must act in society, the ways in which he “gotta look,” the face that he must present before the world.  The first three lines of wisdom are in fact all concerned with how a “black man gotta look,” and not with how or who a black man should be.  In addition to the lines mentioned above, we also read that “a black man gotta wear suits and ties” as well.   These lessons, which impart a “wisdom” heavily dosed with materialism and the objectification of women, are perhaps not the wisest of lessons, and yet reflect a particular feeling of what it takes to be successful in society.

            It is in the final stanza that Uncle Frank’s lessons seem to achieve the weight with which they are imparted, for we read:

                        Uncle Frank threw in professionalism

                        to keep me out of Baltimore’s apocalypse—

                        a black man gotta wear suits and ties.

           

                        A black man gotta have a private world.

At this moment, the car achieves a much greater symbolism, for the car is not only the reflection on a “galaxie” populated by whites and blacks, but also a space—a physical and metaphorical space—in which a black man can “have a private world,” and exist on his own terms and within his own dreams and aspirations.  In this respect, the car becomes “an intimate space of hushed conversations.”  It is both the ways in which black men present themselves, as well as the possession of a place of private thoughts and actions, which will help them to stay “out of Baltimore’s apocalypse.”

            This concern for the ways in which knowledge is passed on within a family is a hallmark of Weaver’s poetry, as George Elliot Clarke points out in his review of Weaver’s collection of poems entitled Multitude. He writes, “For Weaver, it is not the archive that matters, but ancestry, not existentialism per se, but existence. Biblical in intent, he limns genealogies and the apocalypses of daily being.”  Seen in this way, we see that the speaker’s uncle, the “wise man” standing aside, allowing for freedom while giving direction, is providing a map for existence and a method to avoid the “apocalypses of daily being."   

             

Works Cited

Clarke, George Elliot.  Review of Multitudes: Poems Selected and New by Afaa Michael Weaver.  African American Review, Vol. 35. No. 3 (Autumn 2001), p.p. 494-497

Response to "Drowning" by Mary Bucci Bush

                The piece entitled “Drowning,” by Mary Bucci Bush, is in fact a chapter of the book Sweet Hope, a novel that depicts the lives of Italian and Black families working on a plantation in the southern United States in the early 1900’s.  As Bush discusses in a variety of places (her website included), the novel is based on her grandmother’s experiences at the Sunnyside Plantation, where black sharecroppers worked alongside Italians who had been tricked into working at positions as indentured servants (Bush).  In this particular excerpt, we read of how two young girls (an Italian girl, Isola, and an African American girl named Birdie) witness the brutal rape of a young African American woman at the hands of a white overseer. 

                The title of the chapter—Drowning—is an especially apt place to begin in a discussion of the major theme of this piece.  As the chapter opens, we read of how the two girls, Isola and Birdie, are both shirking their responsibilities, attempting to get a glimpse of the corpse of a man that has drowned in the nearby lake.  While this specific death sets the background for the story, the theme of drowning is prevalent throughout.  We read for instance a description of the area (the Mississippi Delta), and see that water (and the dangers inherent in it) is everywhere:

Here, the water was wild.  One day it was quiet and sweet and low; the next day it was pulling down houses and carrying mules away, or it was crashing from the sky in sudden, terrifying thunder and lightning storms, or it was seeping into everything through the ground that wasn’t the solid ground it seemed to be; or like with the puddles in the bosc’ a lake would form overnight where there’d been only dry land before.  Even the air was full of water, humid, stifling in the summer.  You could choke just breathing it, Isola’s father said.  (139-140)

As we see, the danger of “drowning” is everywhere and omnipresent.  Even in the case of this man whom has drowned, the death is seen as somehow random, a strange and violent fate that perhaps could happen to anyone, for “Everybody went fishing in the lake, and swimming sometimes too, and they all crossed the lake on Primo’s ferry, or in the priest’s rowboat” (139).

                Drowning presents itself too as something to be experienced, played with, discovered by the young Isola and Birdie, as they (particularly Isola) work to discover the contours of their existence.  We see how the two young girls, having come upon a temporary pond in the woods that appears when there are big rains, accidentally catch a fish (it gets stuck in Isola’s skirt) and play with it out on land.  Watching the fish gasp, and attempting to give it some small amount of water in a makeshift pool that they have created, Isola contemplates the fish’s difficulties:

                “A fish drowns in air,” Birdie told Isola.

                Isola watched the fish, its mouth and gills opening and closing.  She had never thought of it that way.  She tried to imagine what it was like in the night for the black man whose boat had tipped over.  Did he work his mouth in the water the way the fish worked its mouth in the air? She took a deep breath, wondering what it would be like to have water come in and fill your lungs when you breathed.  She couldn’t understand how breathing could kill a fish.

                “A man drowns in water,” Isola said.  She laughed, then stopped.  (145-146)

                Drowning, however, is merely symptomatic of the larger problem—namely that life for these two girls is constantly filled with danger.  Like the man who has drowned in the lake, or the fish who has suddenly been plucked (accidentally) from its pool, death and misfortune and danger seem to lurk everywhere, and strike without warning the victim.  We see, for instance, how Birdie’s cousin Lecie Titus is raped by Mr. Horton, one of the boss’s men.  This a life in which snakes hide in the nesting boxes of chickens, men drown, women are raped, and people worry about the punishments of the boss.  Above all of these dangers lurks too the dangers of divine retribution, as Isola’s mother fears will happen to Isola when she tells her, “Get down there and pray before the devil takes you to go live with him for good” (137).  

                The fact that danger (and drowning as a prime example of said danger) seems so omnipresent is further stressed by the way in which not even the land itself can be trusted.  Water, when it comes, comes “from everywhere,” making even the most simple of propositions—that land is indeed land—something to be doubted.  For these newcomers (the Italians), as well as local sharecroppers, this is life –shifting, dangerous, and unpredictable:

The water came from everywhere.  The river swelled and once, came within inches of the top of the levee, powerful and deep and dangerous.  Puddles formed in the woods, the bosc’ her family called it, big puddles like ponds, and fish swam in the water, fish from nowhere.  The land itself turned into a patchwork of streams and ponds and puddles.  Even stepping on what looked like dry land became a risk: put your foot on a grassy spot and you might find yourself in water over your ankles.  (136)

                This blurring of distinctions between dry land and water works as a literary device in other ways as well, as do some of the other symbolic elements that we have mentioned above.  Just as even the land here is at times false, not to be trusted, boundary-less, so too are the distinctions made between people.  Birdie, we see, views herself as different from Isola (or at least declares that they, and their respective cultures are seen as different).  “You dumb or something?” she says, “White folks don’t shoot white folks.”  For Birdie, Isola belongs to the ruling class of “White folks,” though for Isola, this is not the case at all.  “But we’re not white . . . We’re Italian,” she says.  For Isola, whose family is in a terrible position of indentured servitude, distinctions between Italians and Blacks seem absurd, and not at all relevant to the situation.  For Birdie, however, the distinction between Black and White is, well, black and white, and she is unable or unwilling to see the ways in the which these distinctions can at times be blurred, made gray.  We see this viewpoint most clearly at the end of the story, when Birdie, upset by the rape that the two friends have just witnessed, turns on Isola in anger, insulting her and calling her a “Stupid Dago.”   

Works Cited
Bush, Maria Bucci.  Maria Bucci Bush. 2011. Web. 28 September 2013.             

     

Week 7 (Presentation Week)

Week 6 Readings and Responses

Liminality: Response to Judith Ortiz Cofer's "American History"

Liminality, which derives from the Latin word “limen” (threshold), is defined as “the condition of being on a threshold or at the beginning of a process.”  The term is often used in anthropology and sociology to describe an undefined, middle period, especially during a rite of passage, and suggests the idea of a person straddling various roles in society and yet not quite belonging to any of them.  Elena, the narrator of Judith Ortiz Cofer’s story “American History,” stands quite clearly in an incredibly liminal space.  She is the child of immigrants from Puerto Rico who live in Paterson (yet wish to move to Passaic and eventually return to Puerto Rico).  Linguistically, she exists between the Spanish of home and the English of her school and outside life (the sheer repetition of statements like “My mother said this in Spanish,” which occur at least three times in the story—perhaps a bit too often to not sound somewhat clumsy—makes clear the importance of this linguistic difference).  She lives in an apartment in “El Building,” a tenement in the city, yet prefers to sit outside on the fire escape and stare at the one house with a yard in the neighborhood (in a rather strong “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” reference), straddling quite literally the space between her crowded and loud existence and the quiet, pastoral scene that she dreams of.  Her family is Puerto Rican, and yet she can’t seem to understand Puerto Rico, and would even prefer to be in Paterson, a place that she hates.  She is a straight-A student who is not allowed to enter Honors courses.  She has just experienced menarche, and is neither a girl nor a woman.  I could continue, but perhaps I will stop there.  Suffice it to say (at this late point) that liminal is a good term to describe the position of this young woman.

                We as readers first encounter this young narrator (Elena) at the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a man revered by the Puerto Rican community of Paterson, whose “photograph would be hung alongside the Sacred Heart and over the spiritist altars that many women kept in their apartments” (93).  As we see above, Elena exists in a middle ground, a liminal space, not quite belonging anywhere.  Feeling alienated at school and teased by her classmates, she has found “only one source of beauty and light . . . that school year,” a young man named Eugene who has recently relocated to Paterson, NJ, from Georgia (94). Eugene, much like the older Jewish couple who until recently lived in his house, is different from all that Elena knows, and lives in the seeming paradise of a small house with a yard that sits in the shadow of El Building.  This house, which sits directly beneath the fire escape of Elena’s family’s apartment, is a sight of beauty and color in a gray and dark space.  While El Building is a “monstrous jukebox” and “gray prison,” his house is a place of flowers and trees, with a green door that promises esperanza—hope.  Unfortunately, as we see, “El Building blocked the sun to such an extent that they had to turn lights on in the middle of the day,” and esperanza is not something likely to be found behind that particular green door (100).

                The hinge upon which this story turns is, of course, the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  In the midst of this very public tragedy, felt greatly by those in her immediate community, Elena experiences her own private tragedy, when she is turned away by Eugene’s mother, who communicates clearly and harshly (though in a “honey-drenched voice”) that Elena is not wanted.   A threshold this is indeed, as Elena has just rejected her mother (importantly, her books get in the way of her mother’s embrace), who has told her, “You are forgetting who you are Niña . . . You are heading for humiliation and pain” (100).  She is, in a very real way, totally alone at this moment, neither here nor there, leaving one place and being rejected at her destination. 

                Importantly, we see that this public tragedy, the death of a beloved politician in a very public event, fails to have a great impact on Elena, as her private misfortune is too strongly felt to be overshadowed.  And, while her mother can share her won sorrow in “someone else’s kitchen, seeking the solace she needed,” and “talk sadly about the young widow and her two children, as if they were family” with Elena’s father, Elena hides in her room, alone and faking sleep.   For Elena, this moment in “American History” is indeed important, though her individual history is much more important that the “History” that those around her are witnessing. As Cofer herself notes in an interview with Margaret Crumpton, situating this private misfortune at the crossroads of a national misfortune allowed her to consider this distinction between private and public, and the explore how the young narrator would respond in such a confusing environment (Cofer 98).

                In the final scene of the story, we see Elena, staring out the window at the “white snow falling like a lace veil” over the “face” of the light (102).  This image is a beautiful one, and seems to offer a variety of interpretations.  Perhaps the clearest of these is that the veil demonstrates both Elena’s sorrow and the sorrow of the outside world, mourning their own separate tragedies, though  I’d argue that perhaps this take on the image only partly works, since one would normally wear a black veil in mourning, not a lacy, white one.  One can also look at this in other ways, for the point at which Elena sees the snow—neither in the clouds, nor on the ground—is also a threshold of sorts, a middle point.  In staring at the snow at this point (at which it surely is quite beautiful), Elena makes a conscious decision to avoid seeing the ultimate fate of the this particular snowfall, bound to “[turn] gray as it touched the ground below” (102).  The imagery of snow occurs at other places in the text, most importantly on page 97, in which Elena describes Clifton and Passaic, suburbs of Paterson, as places “where people mowed grass on Sundays in the summer and where children made snowmen in the winter from pure white snow, not like the gray slush of Paterson, which seemed to fall from the sky in that hue” (97, my italics).  Taking this into account, we may even be able to eke out a somewhat hopeful, optimistic ending to this story, for the veil that Elena witnesses outside her window is not falling “from the sky in that hue” (gray), but rather appears white, if only for a moment, full of promise and beauty.      

Works Cited

Cofer, Judith Ortiz and Margaret Crumpton. An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer. Meridians , Vol. 3, No. 2 (2003), pp. 93-109

Response to Frank Chin's "Railroad Standard Time"

                Frank Chin’s short story “Railroad Standard Time” is complex and intricate—like the workings of the watch that keeps the “Railroad Standard Time” of the story’s title.  Using the symbol of the railroad and the railroad watch, Chin’s narrator describes a struggle with history, genealogy, and inheritance characterized by a fight against the constraints of simplistic notions of race and ethnicity.  The narrator details a confusion with the meanings of cultural markers and a personal rebellion--acts of “outlaw” status, best characterized by his use of the inherited watch, which is “two jewels short of new railroad standard and an outlaw watch that could get [him] fired” (85). 

                As the title shows, the theme of time (and by metonymy and metaphor, the watch) is of great importance in this story.  The watch, given to the narrator by his mother upon the death of his grandmother, had formed part of the collection of railroad watches owned by his grandfather, a man whom the narrator has never known.  The watch, he tells us, is with him throughout the important events of his life:

I wore it braking on the Southern Pacific, though it was two jewels short of new railroad standard and an outlaw watch that could get me fired.  I kept it on me, arrived at my day-off courthouse wedding to its time, wore it as a railroad relic/family heirloom/grin-bringing affectation when I was writing background news in Seattle, reporting from the shadows of race riots, grabbing snaps for the 11:00 P.M., timing today’s happenings with a nineteenth-century escapement. (Ride with me, grandmother.)  I was wearing it on my twenty-seventh birthday, the Saturday I came home to see my son asleep in the back of a strange station wagon, and Sarah inside, waving, shouting through an open window, “Goodbye, Daddy,” over and over.  (85)

The watch is also with our narrator in the most recent events of the narration, as we read of him traveling south to his mother’s funeral, driving down the West Coast – “The watch ticked against my heart and pounded my chest as I went too fast over bumps in the night and the radio on, an all-night run down coast, down country, down old Highway 99, Interstate 5.  I ran my grandfather’s time down past road signs. . .” (88).

                The watch, as we see, is a powerful symbol – it is an inheritance from a grandfather, a rebellious gesture against the movement of time, a link to his mother and grandmother and all the memories and symbolic power that they embody.  There is a sense that the watch, as a symbol, is much more than just a “railroad relic/family heirloom/grin bearing affectation,”—it rather something much more important, much more weighty.   Perhaps most importantly, the watch is like connective tissue that links him with a past from which a certain severing has occurred, and with which the narrator is not truly familiar.  The inheritance, after all, comes from a man whom the narrator has never known, but who he has imagined in a way that best suits his needs, and in direct contrast with how he has been described to him by the women in his life--“I like to think he was tough, had a few laughs, and ran off with his pockets full of engraved watches. Because I never knew him, not his name, nor anything about him, except a photograph of him as a young man with something of my mother’s face in his face, and a watch chain across his vest.”

                This sense of a severed past and a difficult inheritance, which is nonetheless present (perhaps too present), is evident in other details in the story.  In the opening scene of the story, we see Ma, after the death of her own mother, giving the narrator his grandfather’s watch in a scene that is loaded with rich, powerful imagery.  Speaking to him in Chinese—“As if my mother would say all the important things of the soul and blood to her son, me, only in Chinese from now on”—Ma presents him with this inheritance,  speaking to him in a way that recalls “familiar scenes new to me, and ancient” (83).  The scene, heavily weighed down with solemnity, is interrupted by the narrator’s questioning of his grandfather’s name:

I asked her what her father’s name had been, and the manic heat of her all-night burnout seemed to go cold and congeal.  “Oh,” she finally said, “it’s one of those Chinese names I . . .” in English, faintly from another world, woozy and her throat and nostrils full of bubbly sniffles, the solemnity of the moment gone, the watch in my hand turned to cheap with the mumbling of a few awful English words.  (84)

                This sense of a genealogical breakdown is evident too in later generations, for we see the narrator’s family leave him, driving off in an unfamiliar vehicle to live with another man.  The watch, which we see that the narrator is wearing at this moment, gains greater importance in its symbol as an heirloom for its current owner to pass down to the next generation as well.  This symbolism is only heightened by the breaking down of this natural passage of the  treasure:

I kept his watch in good repair and told everyone it would pass to my son someday, until the day the boy was gone.  Then I kept it like something of his he’d loved and had left behind, saving if for him maybe, to give to him when he was a man.  But I haven’t felt that way in a long time.  (88)

                In general, this sense of a broken genealogy, of a link that has failed to materialize or has become confused somehow, is in evidence throughout the story, as we see with the narrator’s thoughts about his own sense of what being Chinese means to himself and to how those in the US view a Chinese-American man.  In a sense, this breaking of a connection is a conscious act, in which the narrator seeks to change how he interacts with the world and how the world portrays and sees him.   We see, for instance, that when his wife leaves him, taking his children with her, he stands there, impotent, and yet is angry with himself for acting in the way that would be expected of his as a Chinese man:

I stood it.  Still and expressionless as some good Chink, I watched Barbara drive off, leave me, like some blond white goddess going home from the jungle with her leather patches and briar pipe sweetheart writer and my kids.  I’ll learn to be a sore loser.  I’ll learn to hit people in the face.  I’ll learn to cry when I’m hurt and go for the throat instead of being polite and worrying about being obnoxious to people walking out of my house with my things, taking my kids away.  I’ll be more than quiet, embarrassed.  I won’t be likable anymore.  (85)

The narrator has been raised in a world in which his lessons on how to act, to speak, to communicate in the society in which he lives have been consistently lessons of how to act as a Chinese-American man “should” in American society:

When we ate in the dark and recited the dialogue of cartoon mice and cats out loud in various tones of voice with our mouths full, we looked like people singing hymns in church.  We learned to talk like everybody in America.  Learned to need to be afraid to stay alive, keeping moving.  We learned to run, to be cheerful losers, to take a sudden pie in the face, talk American with lots of giggles. (87)

                These two lessons, of how to act in the world as a Chinese-American male, are of course very different ones , for he has learned to be a “cheerful [loser],” but now, in an act of rebellion against simplistic notions of the Chinese male as a peaceful, contemplative, impotent figure, he would rather fight back, to not “be likable anymore.”  As others have pointed out, this preoccupation with Asian American masculinity is something of a hallmark in Chin's work.  As Wenying Xu writes, "His main objective in literary production is to dismantle the hegemonic, emasculating representations of Asian American males in the United States" (Xu 78).

                It is this sense of something new, that leads the narrator to impugn both his own novel and the works of other Chinese-American writers, whom he sees as telling the same story, as “sweat[ing] out the same exact Chinatown book, the same cunning “Confucius says” joke . . .” In his telling of it, these novels make Chinese culture something exotic, something alien and “oriental”—“The thousand-year-old living Chinese meat makes dinner a safari into the unknown, a blood ritual.  Food pornography.  Black magic.  Between the lines, I read a madman’s detailed description of the preparation of shrunken heads” (86). 

                Interestingly, it is the death of Ma that has this effect on the narrator, for it is not until her death that he hates his own novel and the company that it keeps, that he finds it be a part of a clichéd list of Chinese-American literature that fails to capture the essence of life and instead recycles tropes of the “Chinaman” and what such a label means.  As he sees it, these novels, his included, play into familiar stereotypes of Chinese-Americans, and affect the way in which Chinese-Americans see themselves and how the rest of the world sees them – these are stories “to make the dykeish spinster teacher cry” (86).  To break from these stories is an act of individualism that demands calling everyone out, those of his “community” included.

                It is also, of course, the death of Ma that leads the narrator on his epic trip south, riding along the coast in a whirl of memories and recriminations, keeping time still with his grandfather’s watch.  This epic trip south, to return home to commemorate yet another break in the genealogical chain, of course also fits neatly within the familiar automotive journey trope of American literary and cinematic tradition.  Importantly, the rhythm that carries the narrator south is made up of the beats of both the ancestral watch (“The watch ticked against my heart and pounded my chest as I went too fast over bumps in the night”) and the sanitized, aggravating, and also nostalgic beats of country and western music :

The music’s run through Clorox and Simonized, beating so insistently right and regular that you feel to sing it will deodorize you, make you clean.  The hardhat hit parade.  I listen to it a lot on the road.  It’s that get-outta-town beat and tune that makes me go. (90)

It is, we see, the combination of these rhythms, the family/Chinese rhythm and the American, school-learned beat of country music, that lead the narrator home along a path that leads “past what’s left of Oakland’s dark wooden Chinatown . . . parallel all the time in line with the tracks of the Western Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads” (90).  It is through this combination of influences, individual and unique, that the narrator finds himself, and finds his way home.  This is no peaceful, easy journey, however, but rather one in which our narrator drives, “riding a mass of spasms and death throes, warm and screechy inside, itchy, full of ghost-piss.”  

Works Cited

Xu, Wenying. Masculinity, Food, and Appetite in Frank Chin's "Donald Duk" and "The Eat and Run Midnight People." Cultural Critique , No. 66 (Spring, 2007), pp. 78-103

Response to Gregg Shapiro's "Tattoo"

                Greg Shapiro’s Tattoo is a straightforward and touching poem (as opposed to Levine’s The Survivor, also a poem for this week, whose subject matter is also the Holocaust, and which is a terribly beautiful and distressingly difficult poem) in which the speaker laments the pain that his father has suffered (and continues to suffer) and expresses a sort of latter-day survivor’s guilt for his own relative lack of wounds.   As we see, however, the speaker himself has also suffered greatly, and bears (perhaps without even knowing it) the scars and wounds of the Holocaust. 

                The tattoo of the title is a strong symbol, for it stands in as a physical mark left upon the speaker’s father—proof in ink of the pain that he has endured.  This is not the only sign of the violence that he has suffered—we see as well that: “There were stories in the lines on his face / the nervous blue flash in his eyes / his bone crushing hugs”—the tattoo is perhaps merely the clearest of all the signs, for it stands out, “blue as blood on his left forearm . . .” (34, 35).  The speaker’s wish, in light of what he considers his luck at having escaped his father’s fate, is to heal his father, to somehow “scrub the numbers from his flesh / extinguish the fire and give him back his life” (35). 

                Sadly, however, we see that the speaker is not unscathed, and though he has of course had the luck to have escaped, in a direct fashion, the horrors of the Holocaust, he still must bear, in his own way, the scars of the acts committed there.  The language used to describe this latent, genealogical pain is violent, even more so than the language used to describe the father’s own suffering.  We read, for example, how his father is “spilling his protection, like acid, until it burns,” how his hugs are “bone-crushing,” and how “Questions choke me” (34, 35).  Obviously, we see that the line in which the speaker speaks of being unharmed is quite untrue: “I am sorry my life has remained unscathed / His scars still bleed, his bruises don’t fade” (35). These wounds spread from generation to generation, transmitted perhaps through the “stories in the lines on his face” (35).

                Communication between father and son is perhaps one of the places in which the greatest harm has been done over generations.  The father and son, having lived completely different experiences, do not find a place of encounter, a place of common experience:

                                                We don’t breathe the same air

                                                speak the same language

                                                live in the same universe

                                                We are continents, worlds apart

And of course, as we see in the opening lines of the poem, though the father’s pain is clear, both due to the “stories in the lines on his face” and the tattoo upon his arm, the speaker’s father “won’t talk about the numbers” – he wishes to protect his son from the pain that he has lived through, though in doing so, he inflicts new wounds.  

Response to Cheryl Clarke's "14th Street Was Gutted in 1968"

In 1968, days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., riots broke out in Washington, D.C.  What initially began as a peaceful, though angry, demonstration quickly turned violent and destructive.  By the time the riots had ended, days later, the destruction to downtown D.C. was terrible, and the city has never truly recovered, as any visitor to the capital can clearly see (this was especially true up through the ‘90’s).  What was once a thriving and diverse city center has remained a wasteland of sorts, and those who once lived there fled long ago for the suburbs. 

                Cheryl Clarke’s poem 14^th Street Was Gutted in 1968 does a good job of capturing the violence and sadness of this moment, focusing on the burning of the buildings that the speaker and her community “had known all [their] lives.”  For Clarke, the loss of this primarily African-American community is compared to the “death of Otis Redding”—evoking not only the sense of catastrophic violence that characterized Redding’s death in a plane crash, but also the feeling of an ignoble and premature death for something/someone in the prime of creative output never allowed to mature to full potential. 

                This loss of community, of 14^th Street, is also of course bigger than just the loss of a street.  As portrayed within Clarke’s poem, the burning of 14^th Street becomes one more act of violence and loss in a series of actions by whites to take what they want by force.   We should consider, for example, that during this same time period (through the 1950’s and ‘60’s), the US policy of urban renewal, which James Baldwin referred to as “Negro Removal,” resulted in the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of African Americans.   Evicted from their homes, these people watched as their neighborhoods were destroyed and buildings torn down in the name of progress and the betterment of their lot.[i]  Stretching back just a bit further, we can of course also consider the conquest and colonization of the Americas, slavery, genocide of the Native American population, etc.  For Clarke’s speaker, the loss of 14^th Street is just one more in a line of familiar acts:

                                Since that time the city has become a buffalo

                                nearly a dinosaur and,

                                as with nearly everything else white men have wanted

                                for themselves,

                                endangered

                                or extinct.

                The surgical imagery that Clarke uses to describe her “sense of place” here is quite interesting as well. She writes:  “My sense of place was cauterized,” continuing within the metaphor (and real description) of burning with which the poem opens.  Cauterization, “the process of destroying tissue with a cautery,” is a process in which intense heat is used to close a wound or remove growths such as warts.  This is a practice used less today than in previous eras in history, and while sometimes successful in closing wounds that would not close up otherwise, it is carries with it a great risk for infection at the wound site.  In other words, cauterization destroys in order to heal, and yet can carry great risk with it.  Such a description could be placed on the processes of urban renewal and its ilk (destroy “blighted” areas so as to allow for healing, growth, etc), yet in this case the speaker uses the metaphor to refer to her “sense of place.” It is the very burning of the neighborhood that in some ways allows it to live on in memories, in “sense[s],” and in poetry, and yet it bears saying that there is a passivity on the part of the speaker in this moment, for we read that her “sense of place was cauterized,”  not “I cauterized my sense of place.”   There is little positive that we can take from this “healing” by fire, and in that line of thinking, Clarke’s speaker leaves us with the final words to describe this neighborhood – “endangered / or extinct” (41). 

                               

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[i] In my city, Asheville, this is easily recognizable—were there were once thriving neighborhoods of African Americans, replete with African American-owned businesses, community gardens (before they were “hip”), and healthy communities, there are now abandoned buildings and public housing projects. 

Week 5 Readings and Responses

Response to "A Half-Breed's Dream Vacation," by Tiffany Midge

A Half-Breed’s Dream Vacation, by Tiffany Midge, is an ironic, absurd, and disturbing story that reads as a poetic travel log.  The story, which details an eight-day visit to the reservation from which the narrator’s mother hails (as well as a road trip), suggests a world in which all is a simulacrum and all is absurd; and that behind every action there lies a history of confusion, re-appropriation, violence, and cultural misunderstanding.  The narrator seems to struggle to find meaning within this twisted and absurd cultural imagery, searching for un-ironic pride and cultural value.

The irony with which the narrator describes her trip permeates the bulk of the story’s description.  The tone is often flippant and disengaged, overly-clever perhaps, as when we read a description of the town of Poplar’s Independence Day celebration:

Crepe-paper floats are sailing through Main Street carrying 500 years of forgiveness, 216 years of red-blooded American pride, and 100 years of a prospector’s wet dream.  Smokie the Bear is lumbering behind a Dodge Dakota four-by-four filled with buffalo robes and Indian princesses waving sparklers.  The Poplar Junior High marching band is creeping behind the pioneer’s horse-drawn wagon to the tune of the motion-picture theme song “Eye of the Tiger . . . BIA agents in ten-gallon hats are dishing out miniature flags to a congregation of undercover AIM activists posing as nuns and  cheerleaders (69).

We can see the abundant cultural myths and markers here – buffalo robes, horse-drawn wagons, cheerleaders,  Smokie the Bear, etc., and note the way in which the narrator lists them all, absurdly mashed together, both telling every story and telling no story at all.  Nothing, furthermore, is exactly what it seems, as we see with the BIA agents (Bureau of Indian Affairs) who are disguised and in contact with the AIM (American Indian Movement) activists.  As R.J. Tudor points at as well, she makes frequent mention throughout the text of vehicles with Indian names, such as Dakota, Winnebago, and Apache, as we see above (Tudor 200).  Similarly, elsewhere in the text, we see the appearance of other bizarrely commoditized elements of Indian culture, such as “Indian bow, arrow, and knife set, wrapped up in a slick package of artificial African leopard skin,” on sale at a souvenir shop near the Crazy Horse memorial. 

                The flippant and disengaged manner in which the speaker describes these events is made even more obvious by the tone which she adopts when writing a postcard to her fellow workers back home:

“Hey guys! Today I witnessed 500 years crammed into a mini-segment of 60 minutes.  Andy Rooney would love this! After today, I know for sure that the melting pot is definitely melting.  Perhaps we should recycle it and repair the Liberty Bell.  Having a wonderful time.  Wish you were here.  (69)

                However, this disengaged and ironic tone is far from merely humorous (though it is that too) and is not nearly as disengaged as it may first appear.  As Tudor points out, “She suggests that an ironic view of life may be the only way to survive as a “mixed-up halfbreed” in a mixed-up world” (Tudor 200).  The pain, suffering, poverty, misery, and boredom that we see throughout the text are very real, even when engaged within an ironic manner.  

At times the narrator leaves the irony to the side. We read for instance, of “Alice Brought Plenty,” (note even here the clever use of names that sound “Indian,” such as one might come up with after a vigorous viewing of Dances With Wolves), who “arrives at the house delivering years of regret.  Her shoulders sag from balancing buckets of accumulated tears.  Her mother’s tears, her grandmother’s tears, her sister’s tears, her own tears” (70).  The description which follows, telling of how Cousin Cookie “repairs her damaged heart,” is neither disengaged nor ironic, but rather lyrical and incredibly moving:

Cookie gathers the fragments patiently, tenderly, as if she’s collecting fragile and valuable pieces of glass. Alice stands waiting at the door while Cookie repairs her damaged heart.  With surgical grace, Cookie bastes the brittle splinters using her own regretful years as a guide.  She stitches Alice’s heart with strands of her grandmother’s hair.  The needles she uses are slivers of her children’s bones.  She knots the ends of the threads with mercy, with blood. The vessels are secure the chambers sealed. (70)

                The narrator also spends a great deal of this story in detailing ways in which the outside world misunderstands the Indians.  In a particularly humorous example, a “cow-chip” lottery (a sort of bingo in which the winner is chosen based on the first square on which an animal defecates) is confused by the outside world with a holy shrine and a national security matter.  Oliver Stone, Jane Fonda, Mother Theresa, Elvis and Phil Donahue  all make an appearance and get involved in some way.   This very postmodern method of bringing in such a cast of characters succeeds in heightening the sense of misunderstanding and confusion between cultures, making what is truly absurd even more so.

                Sadly, much of life on the reservation seems merely boringly cyclical and repetitive.  “Ennui covers the most hopeful of days with a blanket of apathy.  Nobody knows what to do” (72).  What they do, in this case, is head off on a road trip, where they see a familiar cast of fear and misunderstanding and commoditization, “A once magnificent past . . . reduced to Hallmark cards postmarked galaxies away” (72).
 

                All of this notwithstanding, there are moments of grace within this story, moments in which time seems to stop and that which is false, commoditized, and depressing seems to fall away.  We see one moment toward the end of the story—in the midst of a wild and seemingly degraded celebration, in which everyone eats “fry bread” (basically just what it sounds like—an incredibly unhealthy food, often consumed on reservations, which became popular in tandem with the destruction of the traditional native diet and the “commodity” welfare distribution of white wheat flour), drinks Coca-Cola, and the male dancers “are wearing Ray-Bans” while “The jingle dancers are chiming and clanging years of accumulated Copenhagen-chew top lids.”  In the midst of this very postmodern spectacle of hybridized “authenticity,” we see a “solemn ceremony” that rings with peace and calm, and which is described by the narrator with nary a hint of irony:

A tall Indian man with elk teeth dangling around his neck and deer antlers crowning his head slowly marches to the center of the arena.  Everyone watches, waits, listens to him offer a prayer to the spirits that preside.  He shakes a tortoise rattle over his head to each of the four directinos.  He sings a holy song in a barely audible whisper.  He leans down toward his moccasinned feet and tentatively, slow, slow, slowly plucks the fallen feather from the sawdust as if he’s recovering sharp glass amid water and graciously returns it to his owner.  The dancing resumes” (75).    
         

Works Cited

Tudor, R.J. Review of “Outlaws, Renegades, and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed” by Tiffany Midge

World Literature Today , Vol. 71, No. 1 (Winter, 1997), p. 200

Midge, Tiffany. "A Half-Breed’s Dream Vacation." Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American. Ed. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan. New York: Penguin Press, 1999. 68-75. Print.

Response to "Indian Boarding School: The Runaways," by Louise Erdrich

                 Louise Erdrich, the author of the poem “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways,” is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Indians, and one of the most important authors of the Native American Renaissance.  Interestingly, her father was a German-American, and her mother’s heritage was both French-American and Ojibwe.  Both of her parents worked at an Indian boarding school, creating what we might see as a very interesting take on this subject, considered by many to be a shameful attempt to “Americanize” the children of Indian nations, thereby eradicating Indian culture. 

                In an interview with Henry Louis Gates in the PBS series Faces of America, Erdrich discusses the cultural (and legal) importance of family history and land, both themes with which she engages in this poem, as she does in many of the other poems in the collection from which it has been borrowed (the name of the collection is Jacklight).  In particular, this poem examines the attempts by a student at an Indian boarding school to run away—that is, to run home, even in the seeming knowledge of the fact that to run away is a futile act that will result in (further) punishment.

                Movement is an important theme in this poem, as it has been of course in the turbulent history of Native Americans in the United States, forced to leave ancestral lands for reservations (at times forced to move again when reservation land was seen to contain a valuable resource).  In particular, the movement we see here is an attempt to move home, for while the poem refers to “runaways,” the imagery tends toward destinations rather than points of departure.  Furthermore, the process of heading home is unsteady and filled with peril—it is a dangerous and lurching journey.  We read:

                                Home’s the place we head for in our sleep.

                                Boxcars stumbling north in our dreams

                                don’t wait for us.  We catch them on the run. (26)

Movement in this poem is depicted as a painful process, an examination of old wounds and scars, so familiar to the speaker as to be intimate.  These old wounds are drawn across the very land itself, depicted like a physical body, something almost human.  These wounds too, so intimate and well-known, serve as proof of a past, a map which, when read properly, can lead the speaker home.

                                The rails, old lacerations that we love

                                shoot parallel across the face and break

                                just under Turtle Mountains.  Riding scars

                                you can’t get lost.  Home is the place they cross. (26)

                This movement toward home, however intimate and well-known, is still doomed from the beginning of the voyage.  From a physical and literal standpoint, this is because this voyage is a thing of dreams—“Home’s the place we head for in our sleep”—and reality awaits the sleeper upon wakening—“We know the sheriff’s waiting for us at midrun / to take us back.”  Furthermore, even considering that this act of running away is being re-lived in a dream, we see that the power of the law is strong, and that failure in the face of such power is a distinct and all too possible outcome.  From a more metaphorical standpoint, however, we see perhaps a retelling of the words that make up Thomas Wolfe’s oft-repeated book title—You Can’t Go Home Again—and can understand from this that attempts to return home, to truly return to a primordial home, are always doomed in light all that has been faced and defaced in the time of one’s absence.

                While this return to home is perhaps impossible, in the face of wounds, changes, and a violent and powerful authority, there are means to reconstructing home.  Dreams, we see, provide a powerful narrative of return, futile though it may be, and the very act of remembering has a certain power as well.  Remembering, we see, brings with it understanding, though this clarity is perhaps fleeting:

                                Our brushes cut the stone in watered arcs

                                and in the soak frail outlines shiver clear

                                a moment, things us kids pressed on the dark

                                face before it hardened, pale, remembering

                                delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves. (27)

It is these moments, when “frail outlines shiver clear,” which are perhaps the most important for the speaker’s return to home, for these are the moments in which she can take some real action, “remembering / delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves” (27).           

Works Cited

Gates, Henry Louis. “Interview with Louise Erdrich.” Faces of America. 2010. Web.
See Also

Faces of America: An Interview with Louise Erdrich Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4