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.

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.