Liminality: Response to Judith Ortiz Cofer's "American History"
Works Cited
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"
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 14th 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 14th Street, is also of course bigger than
just the loss of a street. As portrayed
within Clarke’s poem, the burning of 14th 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 14th
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).
[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.
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