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.