Holy Toledo, by Joseph Geha
Works Cited
Works Cited
Holy
Toledo, by Joseph Geha, is a complex tale that examines notions of home
(homeland, homelessness), family, and culture liminality, specifically in the
context of the Arab American community.
As A.J Wardi and K. Wardi Zonna point out in their article “Memories of
Home: Reading the Beduoin in Arab
American literature, “Geha reminds readers that home is a complex negotiation
of place, geography, memory and politics.”
Movement,
and the ways in which notions of home are both fluid and moored to specific
cultural practices, is symbolized and expressed in many ways within this short
story, not least of which is the use of the “charm against the Evil Eye”—the
search for which takes up a great deal of this story. The amulet is a complex metaphor—it serves as
a physical marker of cultural permanence even in the midst of movement (this is
a small glass bead, worthless perhaps, but which continues to signify something
over the course of generations and physical removal from its original
“birthplace”), as well as a symbol of how things that are lost (even tiny
little things, like the children in the story) often seem to eventually be
found. The amulet is always lost in
Sitti’s house, “but despite the clutter of this house . . . it was forever
turning up again too.” Similarly, the appearance of this amulet was also a
similar tale of loss and finding – “A Lazerine monk claimed he’d found it lying
amid the rubble of an ancient excavation,” and even after Sitti’s uncle had
been given it, it “was forgotten, mislaid until after his death when it turned
up again among his things.”
The
amulet serves as well as a reminder of the perdurance of tightly-held cultural
beliefs (and superstitions). Like a
sharp pebble in a shoe (interestingly, and on a side note, the word “scruple”
comes from the Latin word for a small, sharp stone (scrupus à
scrupulous), and was used metaphorically by Cicero to describe our modern sense
of a “moral misgiving”), this little piece of ceramic beading will not seem to
disappear. Sitti’s uncle may find no
value in this pebble (“Nothing more than a drop of porcelain painted to look
like a miniature eyeball”), and yet this “drop of porcelain” means a great deal
to Sitti, and travels with her from Syria to the United States. Later, when her son Eddie heads off to sea,
he takes it with him as a protective item, even though it “was usually just the
old people” who gave importance to such things.
Within the context of the events taking place in this story, we see to
how Nadia, attempting to help Sitti (and get her to stop moaning so loudly),
spends a great deal of time searching the house for the missing apotropaic
symbol.
While
this amulet may symbolize many things, the concept of “home” is one of the most
important of these. For Sitti, this
necklace, like the “pages from Arabic prayerbooks, shreds of holy palms plaited
years ago into the shapes of crosses and crowns of thorns,” is a piece of the
homeland that has accompanied her on her journey to America. For Uncle Eddie, it is a reminder of home
(now in America) while he is at sea. A
sense of home, as mentioned above, is the overarching concern of this narrative
and the one that most directly seems to apply to the young protagonists of this
story. For these children, many of the
familiar signs of “home” are no longer present—their mother is dead, their
father has abandoned them, and they have moved from one house to another
(though they are so similar as to be nearly identical). For these two children, who in the end of the
story finally establish a common front against their Munchauseny grandmother
and abusive uncle, home doesn’t seem to be a place that offers comfort or
protection (quite the opposite), and rather than finding solace in the physical
home or the home rooted in a sense of “culture,” they dream of heading off to
“America,” much as their father has done.
In the final lines of the story, we read of them “lost in the American
homesickness,” and of how Nadia “tried to imagine America, how it will be, and
what they should take with them when they go.”
This
clever re-imagining of “America” lays at the center of much of what is taking
place in the story. These children are,
of course, in America. They are in
Detroit, and yet when they look at the world outside of their own immediate
environs, that is what they consider “America.”
When their father disappears, Sitti will only tell them that he has gone
to “America”—he is “gone, swallowed up somehow by the vast America beyond these
streets, alive, forever luckless, and free.”
When the “college mums” come to shop in the streets of Little Syria,
Nadia “wish[es] that she were one of them, returning with them into that huge
strangeness, America, luring her despite the threat it seemed to hold of loss
and vicious homesickness.”
Homesickness,
like a sense of home, is an interesting concept within this story, for as the
above quote shows, for Nadia (and perhaps for her brother Mikhi), homesickness
is an enticing (and frightening) notion.
Revisiting the family’s explanation of Nadia’s father’s whereabouts, we
can see that he is both considered “luckless” and “free.” For Nadia’s Uncle Eddie, being away from home
seems quite difficult (he repeats again and again how he was “lost the whole
time,” and how it’s “great to be back), and yet his sullen and violent behavior
in the months following his return seems to hint at some ambivalence and
confusion in his emotions upon returning home.
For
Mikhi, perhaps the most intriguing and complex character in this story (though
all of them, to be honest, vie for that title), a similar ambivalence seems to
reign in his psyche. He is, of course,
like Nadia (even more so), anxious for escape—he plans to go somewhere “away,”
though he isn’t sure when or where. He
is also “irreverent” toward the symbols of the past (the amulet and such
customs as the kissing of a fallen piece of bread) and it seems that such
symbols of the old world have lost power for him. At the same time, at certain points in the story
(in particular while in the basement), we see too that this nine year-old child
is frightened by a total loss of “home,” afraid that his grandmother will die,
upset when his grandmother appears to have fallen upstairs.
Everyone
in this story, it seems, is trapped in a middle ground – stuck between the past
of the “old world” and the present/future of America. The difference is in their reactions to this
confusion—Nadia’s father abandons the family to head off into “America,” Uncle
Eddie leaves but returns, yet seems trapped by his decision and its
consequences, Sitti seems trapped by her old ways and yet must use a variety of
manipulative techniques to make those around her give her the attention that
she desires, and Nadia and Mikhi are totally afloat, lost in death and
abandonment and the unrealized dreams and desires of almost America.
Wardi, A. J., &
Wardi-Zonna, K. (2008). Memories of Home: Reading the Bedouin in Arab American
Literature. Ethnic
Studies Review, 31(1),
65-79,9. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.jproxy.lib.ecu.edu/docview/215486016?accountid=10639
Wing Tek Lum - Going
Home
Wing Tek Lum’s poem Going Home approaches a topic with which we are
now quite familiar – that of a (presumably) second generation Chinese American
who is both intimately connected and woefully disconnected from her “cultural
roots.” Like the narrator in Gish Jen’s What
Means Switch, the speaker of this poem has a very limited linguistic
knowledge of Chinese—the phrase that speaks at the beginning of the poem (which
we can assume means something like “Where do you live?”) is “the only phrase”
that she knows “besides the usual menu words.”
While the old man in this poem appears to be the focus of the poem, it is in
fact the speaker who is our most important subject to consider; in seeing her
attempts to help this old and confused man find his way home, we are afforded a
glimpse into her own inability to find “home.” Like this lost man, it
appears that she too is lost.
Language is of course of great importance in this poem, and serves as both a
symbol and as a more concrete example of the interstitial, liminal space often
evoked in the poems in this collection. As a symbol, the language in this
poem calls to mind the confusion and sense of anguish that might be caused by
an existential search for one’s place, the culture to which one belongs.
We read, for example, that the speaker is “still able to hear those familiar, /
yet no less incomprehensible sounds.” There is a sense of belonging and
familiarity that we can glean from this, but meaning, we see, is still out of
the speaker’s grasp.
From a very real point of view, language is important here as well, as the
speaker’s inability to speak the language of her ancestors prevents her from
helping this man, from helping him (and herself) find home. The futility
of her attempts, and the anguish caused by this futility, send her running from
the situation and leads her to “hastily cross the street.”
The final lines of the poem open the poem to an even wider theme, and greatly
complicates the poem. Leaving the scene, the speaker wonders, saying
aloud that “Chinamen aren’t supposed to cry.” This line, which demonstrates
both confusion and disconnectedness, also demonstrates that the speaker
(like so many of those in the “outside” world), in her disconnectedness, has
reduced “her” people – “Chinamen” – to a simplistic and reductive stereotype
(the “Chinaman” in her mind, I presume, should remain “mysterious,” their
emotions unseen in facial movements and external signs). (This particular
stereotype, that of the "inscrutable"
Chinese, is a rather common and pernicious one, and is explained well by Rey
Chow, who writes, "the failure of . . . outsiders to comprehend Chinese
(facial) expressions—a kind of corporeal writing—is projected retroactively
onto the other as the other’s essential quality, inscrutability” (71). Unfortunately,
for the speaker, there do not currently appear to be any “young fellows” to
guide her in her search, and she is left heading to the only “home” that she
still knows, still lost.
Works Cited
Chow,
Rey. How (the) Inscrutable
Chinese Led to Globalized Theory. PMLA , Vol. 116, No. 1, Special Topic: Globalizing
Literary Studies (Jan., 2001), pp. 69-74
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