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.