Student's Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, Vol. 5: 1970 to the Present

STUDENT’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS Volume V: 1970 to the Present

PATRICIA M. GANTT

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, 1970 to the Present Copyright © 2010 by Patricia M. Gantt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Facts On File, Inc. An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Student’s encyclopedia of great American writers / Patricia Gantt, general editor. â•…â•… v. cm. â•… Includes bibliographical references and index. â•… Contents: [1] Beginnings to 1830 / Andrea Tinnemeyer—[2] 1830 to 1900 / Paul Crumbley—[3] 1900 to 1945 / Robert C. Evans—[4] 1945 to 1970 / Blake Hobby—[5] 1970 to the present / Patricia Gantt. â•… ISBN 978-0-8160-6087-0 (hardcover: acid-free paper) ISBN 978-1-4381-3125-2 (e-book) 1. Authors, American—Biography—Encyclopedias, Juvenile. 2. American literature—Encyclopedias, Juvenile. I. Tinnemeyer, Andrea. II. Gantt, Patricia M., 1943– â•… PS129.S83 2009 â•… 810.9’0003—dc22[B] 2009030783 Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfile.com Text design by Annie O’Donnell Composition by Mary Susan Ryan-Flynn Cover printed by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Mich. Book printed and bound by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Mich. Date printed: June 2010 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents List of Writers and Works Included

Pat Mora

244

Series Preface

Toni Morrison

253

Volume Introduction

xii

Joyce Carol Oates

276

Tim O’Brien

285

Julia Alvarez

Mary Oliver

294

Rudolfo Anaya

Simon J. Ortiz

306

Maya Angelou

Robert Pinsky

316

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Ishmael Reed

326

Toni Cade Bambara

Adrienne Rich

340

Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. Leroi Jones)

Leslie Marmon Silko

352

Raymond Carver

Gary Snyder

364

Sandra Cisneros

Judith Ortiz Cofer

Billy Collins

103

Rita Dove

113

Louise Erdrich

127

Carolyn Forché

141

Nikki Giovanni

151

Joy Harjo

166

Barbara Kingsolver

176

Maxine Hong Kingston

188

Yusef Komunyakaa

201

Chang-rae Lee

214

Cormac McCarthy

225

Larry McMurtry

235

Gary Soto

373

Amy Tan

386

Helena María Viramontes

399

Alice Walker

410

August Wilson

425

Appendix I: Alphabetical List of Writers Included in All Volumes of the Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

445

Appendix II: Chronological List of Writers Included in All Volumes of the Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, by Birth Date

448

List of Writers and Works Included Julia Alvarez (1950–

)

Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995)

“How I Learned to Sweep” (1984) How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) “Daughter of Invention” (1991) “Hold the Mayonnaise” (1992) In the Time of Butterﬂies (1994) “Queens, 1963” (1995)

Rudolfo Anaya (1937–

Gorilla, My Love (1972) “Medley” (1977) The Salt Eaters (1980)

Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. Leroi Jones) (1934– )

)

“Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” (1961)

“In Memory of Radio” (1961)

Bless Me, Ultima (1972) Tortuga (1979) The Sonny Baca Mysteries (1995–2005)

“Notes for a Speech” (1961) “An Agony. As Now.” (1964) “A Poem for Willie Best” (1964) Dutchman (1964)

Maya Angelou (1928–

)

“Ka’Ba” (1966)

“Will They Cry When You’re Gone, You Bet” (1969)

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) “My Brother Bailey and Kay Francis” (1969) “Woman Work” (1978) “On the Pulse of Morning” (1993) “Africa” (1997)

“AM/TR AK” (1979) “Wise I” (1990) “Monday in B-Flat” (1994)

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) Jimmy Santiago Baca (1952–

)

“Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” (1976)

Martín and Meditations on the South Valley (1987) Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems (1990) Working in the Dark: Reﬂections of a Poet of the Barrio (1992) A Place to Stand (2001) The Importance of a Piece of Paper (2004)

“Furious Seasons” (1977) “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” (1981) “Cathedral” (1982) “Where I’m Calling From” (1989) “A Small, Good Thing” (1989)

List of Writers and Works Included

Sandra Cisneros (1954– )

My Wicked Wicked Ways (1987) The House on Mango Street (1984) “Hairs” (1984) Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) “Bread” (1991) “My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn” (1991)

Judith Ortiz Cofer (1952–

)

The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) “Geometry” (1980) “Parsley” (1983) Thomas and Beulah (1986) Mother Love (1995) On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999)

Carolyn Forché (1950–

)

141

Gathering the Tribes (1976) The Country between Us (1982) The Angel of History (1994) Blue Hour (2003) “On Earth” (2003)

Nikki Giovanni (1943–

103

“Consolation” (1995) “Nightclub” (1995) “Forgetfulness” (2001) “Marginalia” (2001) “Osso Buco” (2001) “Tuesday, June 4, 1991” (2001) “The Lanyard” (2005) “Building with Its Face Blown Off” (2005)

Rita Dove (1952–

127

“The Red Convertible” (1981) “Jacklight” (1984) “A Love Medicine” (1984) “Dear John Wayne” (1984) Love Medicine (1984) “Fleur” (1986) The Beet Queen (1986) Tracks (1988)

The Line of the Sun (1989) Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990) The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women (1993) An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio (1995) The Meaning of Consuelo (2003)

Billy Collins (1941–

Louise Erdrich (1954– )

vii

)

151

“Nikki-Rosa” (1968) “Ego-Tripping” (1970) “When I Die” (1972) “Stardate Number 18628.190” (1995) “Train Rides” (1999) “Possum Crossing” (2002) “Have Dinner with Me” (2002) “Quilts” (2003)

Joy Harjo (1951–

)

166

She Had Some Horses (1983) Reinventing the Enemy’s Language (1997) How We Became Human (2002)

113 Barbara Kingsolver (1955– The Bean Trees (1988) Animal Dreams (1990) Pigs in Heaven (1993) The Poisonwood Bible (1998) Prodigal Summer (2000)

)

176

viii

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Maxine Hong Kingston (1940–

)

188

“No Name Woman” (1976) The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976) China Men (1980) Tripmaster Monkey (1989) “Restaurant” (1981)

Toni Morrison (1931–

)

253

The Bluest Eye (1970) Sula (1973) Song of Solomon (1977) Tar Baby (1981) “Recitatif” (1983) Beloved (1987) Jazz (1992)

Yusef Komunyakaa (1947–

)

201

“Tu Do Street” (1988) “Prisoners” (1988) “Thanks” (1988) “Facing It” (1988) “Blackberries” (1992) “My Father’s Love Letters” (1992) “Ode to the Maggot” (2000)

Chang-rae Lee (1965– )

The Nobel Lecture in Literature (1993) Paradise (1998) Love (2003)

Joyce Carol Oates (1938–

)

276

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1970)

214

Native Speaker (1995) A Gesture Life (1999) Aloft (2004)

You Must Remember This (1987)

Tim O’Brien (1946–

)

285

Going after Cacciato (1978) The Things They Carried (1990)

Cormac McCarthy (1933–

)

225

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Reduces in the West (1985) All the Pretty Horses (1992) The Road (2006)

Mary Oliver (1935–

)

294

“The Black Snake” (1978) “In Blackwater Woods” (1983) “Wild Geese” (1986) “Landscape” (1986)

Larry McMurtry (1936–

)

235

“Goldenrod” (1991) “Why I Wake Early” (2004)

The Last Picture Show (1966) Terms of Endearment (1975) Lonesome Dove (1985)

Simon J. Ortiz (1941–

)

306

“Speaking” (1977)

Pat Mora (1942–

)

“Borders” (1986) “Sonrisas” (1986) “Immigrants” (1986) “Gentle Communion” (1991)

244

“Earth and Rain, the Plants and Sun” (1977) “Vision Shadows” (1977) “Poems from the Veterans Hospital” (1977) “Travelling” (1977)

List of Writers and Works Included

Robert Pinsky (1940–

)

316

Leslie Marmon Silko (1948–

“The Street” (1984)

“The Man to Send Rain Clouds” (1969)

“A Woman” (1984)

“Lullaby” (1974)

“Shirt” (1990)

“Yellow Woman” (1974)

“At Pleasure Bay” (1990)

Ceremony (1977)

“The Figured Wheel” (1984)

)

352

Storyteller (1981)

Ishmael Reed (1938–

)

326

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969)

Gary Snyder (1930– )

“I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra” (1970)

364

“Milton by Firelight” (1955) “Riprap” (1959)

Mumbo Jumbo (1972)

“Straight-Creek—Great Burn” (1974)

The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974)

“The Blue Sky” (1996)

Flight to Canada (1976) “The Reactionary Poet” (1978)

Gary Soto (1952–

“Poetry Makes Rhythm in Philosophy” (1978)

)

373

“The Elements of San Joaquin” (1977)

The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes (1982, 1989)

“Mexicans Begin Jogging” (1981) Living up the Street: Narrative Recollections (1985)

Reckless Eyeballing (1986) Japanese by Spring (1993)

Adrienne Rich (1929–

Almanac of the Dead (1991)

“Like Mexicans” (1985)

)

340

“Oranges” (1985) Baseball in April (1990)

“Storm Warnings” (1951)

“Home Course in Religion” (1991)

“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” (1951)

“Bodily Responses to High Mass” (1997)

“Living in Sin” (1955) “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” (1963) “I Am in Danger—Sir—” (1966)

“Teaching English from an Old Composition Book” (1999)

“The Observer” (1969)

Nerdlandia (1999)

“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971)

Amy Tan (1952–

)

“A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” (From A Will to Change, 1971)

The Joy Luck Club (1989)

“Power” (1974)

“A Pair of Tickets” (1989)

“If Not with Others, How?” (1985)

The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991)

“Transcendental Etude” (1977)

The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001)

“Two Kinds” (1989)

386

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Helena María Viramontes (1954– ) 399

August Wilson (1945–2005)

“The Moths” (1985) “Cariboo Cafe” (1985) “Miss Clairol” (1988) Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) Their Dogs Came with Them (2007)

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1981, 1985) Fences (1986) Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988) The Piano Lesson (1990) Two Trains Running (1993) Seven Guitars (1996) Jitney (1979, 1982, 2000) The Ground on Which I Stand (1996, 2001) King Hedley II (2001) Gem of the Ocean (2003) Radio Golf (2004)

Alice Walker (1944– ) “Everyday Use” (1973) “Expect Nothing” (1973) “Revolutionary Petunias” (1973) Meridian (1976) “Nineteen Fifty-ﬁve” (1981) The Color Purple (1982) In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) “I Said to Poetry” (1984)

410

425

Series Preface

raphy and then subentries on the author’s major works. After each subentry on a work is a set of questions for discussion and/or writing. Another set of broader discussion questions appears near the end of each author entry, followed by a bibliography. The entire ﬁve-volume set therefore contains more than 1,000 discussion questions. These questions make up perhaps the most important and useful features of the set, encouraging further creative thought and helping students get started on their own writing. Many of the questions reference not only the subject literary work or author but also related works and authors, thus helping students to make additional literary connections, as emphasized by the literature standards. The authors and works included in the set were selected primarily from among those most popular in the high school classrooms—that is, those often featured in secondary-school literary anthologies and textbooks; those often appearing on age-appropriate reading lists; and those most often searched for in Facts On File’s online literary database Bloom’s Literature Online, used primarily in high schools. In addition, we have endeavored to include a range of writers from different backgrounds in all periods, as well as writers who, though not perhaps among the very most popular today, appear to have been unjustly neglected and are gaining in popularity. No selection could be perfect, and those writers favored by scholars and critics are not always as popular in the high school classroom, but the general editor and volumes editors have attempted to make the set’s coverage as useful to students as possible. Above all, we hope that this set serves not only to instruct but also to inspire students with the love of literature shared by all the editors and contributors who worked on this set.

he Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers is a unique reference intended to help high school students meet standards for literature education and prepare themselves for literature study in college. It offers extensive entries on important authors, as well as providing additional interpretive helps for students and their teachers. The set has been designed and written in the context of the national standards for English language arts, created by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association, the two professional organizations that have the most at stake in high school language arts education (see http://www.ncte.org/standards). The volume editors and many of the contributors to this set not only are university scholars but also have experience in secondary school literature education, ranging from working as readers of Advanced Placement examinations, to developing high school literature curricula, to having taught in high school English classrooms. Although the volume editors all have extensive experience as scholars and university professors, they all have strong roots in high school education and have drawn on their experience to ensure that entries are stylistically appealing and contain the necessary content for students. The set’s ﬁve volumes are organized chronologically, as many literature textbooks and anthologies are. This system is convenient for students and also facilitates cross-disciplinary study, increasingly common in high schools. For example, a section on the Civil War in history class might be accompanied by the study of Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane in English class. To help students ﬁ nd what they need, each volume contains two lists of all the authors included in the set: one organized chronologically and the other alphabetically. Within each volume, authors are presented alphabetically. Each author entry contains a biog-

Patricia M. Gantt

Volume Introduction

ries . . . / They aren’t just entertainment. / Don’t be fooled. / They are all we have, you see, / all we have to ﬁght off / illness and death. / You don’t have anything / if you don’t have the stories.” We have come to see through an ever-broadening array of media how the globalized world is interconnected, but we have also been forced to confront the unsettling realizations that have dissolved the optimism of the postwar age and left us with a profound and perplexing skepticism. Such crises are both reﬂected and challenged by postmodern American literature. Postmodernism is a loaded word, rife with conﬂ ict; there are numerous deﬁ nitions for the term. In essence, postmodern works reﬂect what all writers seek: an engagement with the world and a desire to communicate. Like all literature, postmodern works—even in their various forms, parodic and ironic stances, understanding of reality, critiques of power structures—are deeply engaged in life and written with care and concern for the world. We see this in the minimalist forms of Raymond Carver, the magical realism of Toni Morrison, the satirical and playful voices of Ishmael Reed, the souls seeking solace through cultural understanding in the ﬁction of Rudolfo Anaya and Julia Alvarez, the women seeking to come to terms with the world and to love each other in Adrienne Rich’s poetry or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, the ecologically conscious, nature-turned imaginations of Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver—all attempting to bring readers into dialogue with the postmodern condition. Our postmodern age brings with it a lack of consensus about codes of ethics, philosophies, and religious systems of belief. Many of us distrust any one point of view, believing reality to be many-sided, while fearing that our inability to see multiple perspectives marginalizes those who may not share the dominant ideology or social back-

merican literature from 1970 to the present encompasses a multitude of perspectives; it is both inclusive and innovative. In this period more than ever before, writers have come in from the cultural margins to add their voices to the literary discourse. It can truly be said that there is no modern perspective that is not represented in the literature of the last 40 years. No cultural or literary monolith exists; a reader can select a perspective and ﬁ nd it expressed in literature and then stand back and listen for a voice that counters that perspective. No writer can speak with authority about “the” woman’s perspective or “the” Native American experience. Each is multifold. As Walt Whitman proclaimed in an earlier time, “There is that lot of me, and all so luscious.” Readers are now privy to more ways of looking at life than ever before. Even genres themselves have become shape-shifters, as the current controversy over what constitutes memoir can testify. The writing of this period reﬂects the insistent wrangle for truth in a postmodern age marked by ceaseless questioning. For example, in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), a father and son trek through an apocalyptic future similar to one Americans might confront should our important questions go unanswered, leaving us unable to understand and feel for one another in a barren world. Other works, such as McCarthy’s western ﬁctions, bring readers to rethink history but also make us aware of the precipitous position in which writers and historians ﬁ nd themselves, each reliant upon narrative—some mode of ﬁtting together shards to tell stories and make sense of our existence. Yet we have come to distrust ﬁction, and history as well, knowing what we do about how selective the process of inclusion and exclusion must be. It is difﬁcult for us to trust stories. We can sense the doubt even in such afﬁ rmations as Leslie Marmon Silko’s in Ceremony: “I will tell you something about sto-

xii

Volume Introduction

ground. We seek to guarantee that everyone has an opportunity to live the American Dream, while being aware that the American Dream, to a great extent, is an artiﬁcial construct that often leads to disillusionment and exclusion. Our intellectuals are increasingly preoccupied with our cultural limitations. Modern society is fast, visual, and technological, with increasing linguistic demands. Yet our culture, from many perspectives, has become less literate. The question becomes: What is the nature of language in a postmodern age? To what extent is language—and literature—necessarily political? For deeper understanding, we can turn to a powerful American presence, Toni Morrison, a Nobel laureate deeply engaged not only in exploring the signiﬁcance of the word but also in the emancipatory potential of artistic expression. In her Nobel Lecture, Morrison tells the story of an old woman who lives on the margins of society, a wise ﬁgure appearing before a group of game-playing children. The children ask the old woman to tell them whether the bird they hold is dead or alive. After telling this brief story, Morrison then interprets. She views the bird in hand as language. Morrison laments that language is subject to death and erasure if it is viewed as an abstraction. For her, language is agency or power, a view shared by many of the contemporary novelists, poets, and playwrights discussed in this volume. From Maxine Hong-Kingston and Amy Tan, for example, we have compelling explorations of identity in a contemporary America where the pressure to assimilate endangers cultural heritage. From the prison poetry of Jimmy Santiago Baca to the works of Maya Angelou, contemporary literary art is invested with a view of language in which words are liberating, speech-acts afﬁrm our identity, and self-expression is perhaps the most potent mode of resistance left to those who have been marginalized and alienated. Later in her lecture, Morrison outlines the theory of language that her 1992 novel Jazz metaphorically depicts. She sees language as a vital thing whose power lies in its ability to render the actual. The act of using language and of making meaning is, according to Morrison, central to our humanity. It is a grave responsibility.

xiii

Morrison says, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” At the end of her lecture, Morrison returns to the next part of the story, in which the children demand that the old lady tell them a tale. Morrison presents the children as askers of questions, who come to a writer for answers. This writer supplies images, challenges, and multiple possibilities for interpretation, but she is powerless alone. What forms the creative act is the transaction between the children and the old lady; it is the act of reading that creates art. It is no coincidence that the closing words of the old woman in Morrison’s Nobel Lecture parallel the closing words of the narrator in her novel Jazz. Both describe a similar phenomenon. This phenomenon, whether in music or in text, is a complex transaction that produces meaning. Morrison sees all narrative acts as calls to action and social responsibility. How the listener chooses to be involved in the music has everything to do with the life the listener has or will experience. Morrison’s exploration of narrative perspective enlarges our own sense of it, helping us to cultivate our narrative imaginations. She, like other visionary African-American writers, struggles to make sense of the contemporary African-American experience by facing the horrors of slavery, racism, and bigotry while at the same time recording the triumph of memory. From the incendiary plays and poetry of Amiri Baraka, to the autobiographical narratives and award-winning poetry of Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, and Nikki Giovanni, to the cries for social justice in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980), to August Wilson’s masterful Pittsburgh cycle of plays, African-American authors since 1970 have offered their readers inspiring literary responses to horriﬁc concrete experiences while giving voice to a culture often elided by history. In addition to these, authors from many other cultural backgrounds have stepped forward to speak about the complexities of living between cultures. Sandra Cisernos’s short stories; Judith Ortiz Cofer’s essays, plays, and novels; Gary Soto’s poems; and Helena Maria Viramontes’s short

xiv Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

stories all provide readers reﬂections on their experience of American life seen from within Latino culture. Likewise, Native American writers such as Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Simon J. Ortiz, and Leslie Marmon Silko examine their own contemporary lives as well as the history of forced cultural assimilation and the annihilation of many Native cultures. Their works capture the need to heal, reconnect, and move on and are aware of the irony of using the colonizer’s English to articulate the American Indian experience. These authors, all part of what Kenneth Lincoln calls “The Native American Renaissance,” offer fresh perspectives on the complexity of recovering a sense of Native identity. They bear witness, listening to the howling wind, hearing voices in distress, and forging a poetics of liberation. It would be a mistake to infer, however, that ethnic or racial protest is the dominant theme of American literature since 1970. As important as this impulse is, another force is inherent to the works created within this period—the simple need for story that has driven human beings since they sat around a ﬁ re in a cave and whiled away the long, dark hours with tales of exploits, emotions, and the search for answers to the eternal questions. The urge to tell and to hear a good story has been with us since the beginning and will remain when the period covered by this volume is a distant memory. However complex or conﬂ icted the stories these writers create, they are at their core an imaginative response to the desire to share action and thought

with other people, to tease out meaning from experience, to laugh, to feel passion, to share ideas, to wonder about our place in the scheme of things, and to explore at the deepest level what it means to be human. While they may differ in style and outlook, the works examined in this volume often place great demands on the reader. While previous American literature may have imagined that the American experience was somehow universal, postmodern literature deals with the sort of messiness we have to endure when we begin to think about reimagining our society and giving the voiceless a voice. To begin this difﬁcult process is to know the pain of birth, or of literary composition: the daily ritual of confronting, examining, representing, proclaiming, critiquing, and satirizing that describes the creating of literature previously unimagined. More explicitly than ever before, the literature of this period is wedded to our society. With this close cultural relationship in mind, this volume examines the stunning aesthetic creations of our time and their response to and inﬂuence on the American way of life. The works analyzed in these pages attest to our ability to share our stories and to understand that each story cannot be taken in isolation. Note: Portions of the entry on August Wilson have been adapted from Patricia M. Gantt’s essay “Putting Black Culture on Stage: August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle,” published in College Literature. Patricia M. Gantt and Blake Hobby

Julia Alvarez (1950–

)

¿Qué es Patria? ¿Sabes acaso lo que preguntas, mi amor? (What is a homeland? Do you know, my love, what you are asking?) (In the Name of Salomé)

of an underground student movement to oust the corrupt dictator and was forced to ﬂee to Canada for nine years. Her mother, who had wealth and political connections that are echoed in Alvarez’s books, helped her husband and four daughters to safety during these tumultuous times. While living in the Dominican Republic, the Alvarez parents insisted that their daughters learn the English language; it is through the blending of two languages and many cultures that Alvarez draws the meaning of things. In an interview, she explains, “I am a Dominican, hyphen, American. As a ﬁction writer, I ﬁ nd the most exciting things happen in the realm of that hyphen—the place where two worlds collide or blend together” (quoted in Schafer 1). The series of collisions that Alvarez experienced were both difﬁcult and rewarding. Wading through the discrimination and racism she and her sisters confronted back in New York, she soon became enraptured with the magic she could create through words. She writes that the English language became a “ﬂuid mass that carried me in its great ﬂuent waves, rolling and moving onward, to deposit me on the shores of my new homeland. I was no longer a foreigner with no ground to stand on. I had landed in the English language” (Something to Declare 29). Her infatuation with language and writing soon became her passion. After her family immigrated to New York, she attended boarding school and then

ulia Alvarez opens her book of essays, Something to Declare, with a series of declarations to her grandfather. She tells him she wants to be a bullﬁghter, a cowboy, an actress, an astronaut, and an ice-cream vendor, among other professions. Her grandfather chuckles with the knowledge that her dreams will soon settle on something more achievable, and when Alvarez tells him she wants to be a poet, he surprisingly smiles, saying, “A poet, yes. Now you are talking” (11). As a poet, novelist, and young-adult author, Alvarez fulﬁ lls her declaration. It is also as a bullﬁghter, cowboy, and a multitude of other ambitions that she takes on historical, gender, and political borders within her works. Though she was born in New York City on March 27, 1950, Alvarez spent the ﬁ rst 10 years of her life in the Dominican Republic. However, because her family supported a rebel faction instead of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, they escaped the country in 1960 and Alvarez found herself back in the United States. Trujillo and his police state become the central historical setting for much of Alvarez’s work, while her own experience provides vibrant, raw material for her themes of displacement, struggle, and activism. Through her work, she gracefully crosses over boundaries and the ensnaring borders of the politics of expectations. Her parents, Eduardo and Julia Tavares Alvarez, equally contributed to Alvarez’s sense of protest and determination. Earlier her father had been part

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Connecticut College from 1967 to 1969. While in her last year, she was recognized as a poet and participated in the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont. After transferring, she received her B.A. from Middlebury in 1971, graduating summa cum laude, and then attended Syracuse University for graduate school. After receiving her M.F.A. in 1975, she held a Poet in the Schools appointment in several states and taught English at Phillips Andover Academy from 1979 to 1981. She has also taught at the University of Vermont (1981–83), George Washington University (1984–85), and the University of Illinois (1985–88). It was while she was teaching at the University of Vermont that Alvarez wrote her ﬁ rst book of poetry, Homecoming (1984). In the afterword of her second edition, which was published in 1996 when she was “three books braver” (118), Alvarez writes, “In writing Homecoming, I can see now how ﬁercely I was claiming my woman’s voice. As I followed my mother cleaning house, washing and ironing clothes, rolling dough, I was using the material of my housebound girl life to claim my woman’s legacy” (119). Her early poems emphasize the depth of the feminine and construct/deconstruct gender expectations. Her woman’s legacy is the dominant theme in many of her works, works containing empowered women young and old. Yet in her afterword, Alvarez also admits the original collection lacks the political awareness of a woman at 33, the author’s age when she began writing the poems. Compared to her later works, her accurate self-criticism punctuates her current social activism. However, in the 41 original sonnets under the section titled “33,” she deftly argues for feminine independence and sovereignty from traditional gender roles. “Tell me what is it women want the most?” she asks in one of the sonnets; “Is it what everyone says, a man, / a rich, kind, liberated man / who ﬁgures out what we want? Be honest / now, whatever our public politics, is that it?” (68). By the time Alvarez was 29, she had married and divorced twice and felt that she was unable to fulﬁ ll the traditional roles prescribed for the female gender and the familial expectations whose pressure she felt.

These “knockabout years” (Something to Declare 114) are reﬂected in the meaning and the nontraditional form of the sonnets: free verse and differing slant rhymes. She explains: As a writer, I especially found my vocation at odds with my training as a female and as a member of la familia. It was a woman’s place to be the guardian of the home and the family secrets, to keep things entre familia, to uphold the family honor. . . . A woman did not have a public voice. She did not have a public life, except through her husband, her brothers, her sons, and her endless stream of male cousins. (122)

In another sonnet, she writes, “Mami asks what I’m up to, that means men / in any declension except sex; it / means do I realize I am thirty- / three without a husband, house, or children / and going on thirty-four?” (59). Although Alvarez laments her lack of political gumption in these earlier poems, she creates notions of tearing down the boundaries that deﬁ ne and conﬁ ne families and individuals. Her struggles, evident in the altering emotional connections to her domestic subjects, create the skeleton of her future works, works that are more politically charged and daring. In Something to Declare (published in 1999), she provides an autobiographical background to the Homecoming poems. In one essay, “I Want to Be Miss América,” Alvarez describes that she and her sisters “were being groomed to go from being dutiful daughters to being dutiful wives with hymens intact” (42). Her poetry and essays contribute powerfully and wisely to current Chicana and third-world feminism, as she points out the unique hardships and differences faced by nonwhite women. She places emphasis on the challenges that women of color directly experience, which many white feminists failed to recognize. In her 1996 collection of poetry, The Other Side/El Otro Lado, she focuses on subjects that place cultural splits in the foreground. In her ﬁ rst line of the collection’s opening poem, “Bilingual Sestina,” she proclaims, “Some things I have to say

Julia Alvarez 3

aren’t getting said / in this snowy, blond, blueeyed, gum-chewing English” (3). The section that immediately follows is titled “The Gladys Poems” after their Dominican maid, Gladys. Alvarez grapples with class divisions and the thorny recognition of one person’s participation in another person’s dis/placement. While some readers surmise that Alvarez focuses her work mainly on ﬁctionalizing Trujillo’s absolute rule, she writes in such a way that readers, regardless of their gender or culture, identify with friendly and surly truths. Her search for self becomes the reader’s search for self. Indeed, she claims that the pretext to her essays is that “we have something to declare” (Something to Declare xiv). For her, language and writing are essential to exploring and ﬁ nding places of connective belonging. She argues that writing and “entering into the writing of another” make for better people, adding: Writing is a form of vision, and I agree with that proverb that says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” The artist keeps that vision alive, cleared of the muck and refuse and junk and little dishonesties that always collect and begin to cloud our view of the world around us. (299)

During the years between Homecoming and The Other Side/El Otro Lado, Alvarez wrote two books, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and In the Time of Butterﬂies (1994), and married her husband, Bill Eichner, a doctor from Nebraska, in 1989. In 1997, she published ¡Yo!, a novel in which the main character, Yolanda García from How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, is reminiscent of Alvarez herself. Not only is Yo Spanish for “I,” Yo’s character is also a successful author who bases her writing on her own experiences and has endured some of Alvarez’s personal hardships. In the prologue, Fiﬁ, Yo’s sister, details their family’s harsh reaction to Yo’s ﬁ rst book, which, like Alvarez’s, is largely autobiographical. The structure of this book pushes Alvarez’s deep convictions of the power of writing even further, as the story is not recorded by Yo, but rather by a multitude of

people who all become connected in their involvement through language. In addition to ¡Yo!, other Alvarez novels—including How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of Butterﬂies, and Before We Were Free, a young-adult book published in 2002—contain strong female characters whose main purpose is to convey multitudes of truths and injustices. Their ability to tell these stories is signiﬁcant to one of Alvarez’s main purposes. In an interview with Salon.com, she explains: I come from a culture where women are not encouraged to speak. [Instead, they are encouraged] to keep their mouths shut, to keep things in the family, to be the guardian of the stories and to be very careful who they’re released to. It’s a way of understanding that stories are powerful. You know, in the world we lived in, people “got disappeared” for saying the wrong thing. What people said mattered. I was raised in that world, and suddenly here I am—a woman with a voice in another language, one that we’re supposed to keep things from, you know, the gringos and the Americans. And I have a voice and I’m saying things about women and women’s experience which are not nice. That women have mouths and needs and bodies and problems and breakdowns and all of the stuff that is not nice to admit and certainly not to the [Americans]. (Garner)

Along with this gathering of women storytellers, her other works take on interesting storytellers, both male and female, who generate further awarenesses of today’s realities. She claims her book A Cafecito Story, published in 2001, is a modern “eco-parable” based on a project she and her husband created (juliaalvarez.com). In 1996, she and Bill purchased a 260-acre farm in an impoverished area in the Dominican Republic. Naming the farm after the country’s protector, La Altagracia, they hired workers to reharvest coffee plants. Today the successful farm sells organic coffee and houses an educational center where volunteers from the DREAM Project (Dominican Republic Education and Mentoring) help educate local people. On her

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

personal Web site, Alvarez emphasizes, “Beyond growing coffee, we chose to work for all the social, environmental, spiritual, and political issues that comprise sustainability” (juliaalvarez.com). The connections between her own experiences and activist pursuits are evident in each of her works, which now include another book of poetry, The Woman I Kept to Myself; several young-adult and childrens’ books; and novels. In 2006, she published Saving the World, a novel divided between two stories, both centering on epidemics. Her vision is again ambitious. In describing the book, she explained, “Where do I get off naming my novel, Saving the World! What can I tell you? I’m not feeling very optimistic as to where we are headed as a human family. But as the Seamus Heaney poem says, hope and history can sometimes be made to ‘rhyme’ ” (juliaalvarez.com). Collectively, Alvarez’s works all focus on this theme of hope and history, and the power of the storyteller, whose job it is to draw truths to the reader’s attention.

“How I Learned to Sweep” (1984) One of the opening poems of Homecoming, “How I Learned to Sweep” is a prime example of Alvarez’s weaving of her woman’s voice and the layers found within domestic work. This poem is perhaps one of the most political in the collection and relates sweeping to war and peace. Though the time setting is vague, Alvarez, or the narrator of the poem, is watching television when her mother tells her to sweep the room bare. Alvarez writes, “I knew right away what she expected / and went at it. I stepped and swept; / the t.v. blared the news” (7). She watches news coverage of the president of the United States delivering a war speech: “in the Far East our soldiers were landing in their helicopters / into jungles their propellers / swept like weeds seen underwater” (7). As she watches the sweeping destruction of war, she, too, sweeps with new vigor, resweeping again and again as she watches and imagines the soldiers dying “as if their dust fell through the screen / upon the ﬂoor I had just cleaned” (7). When her mother inspects

the room, she ﬁ nds it beautiful—“That’s beautiful, she said, impressed, / she hadn’t found a speck of death” (8). While the war in the poem probably refers to the Vietnam War, Alvarez has constructed the details so that it could be one of several wars, regardless of the poem’s date of publication. When the selection of poetry was revised and published again in 1996, the list of possible wars had become longer, including the cold war, the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88, and the Persian Gulf War. The poem’s meanings are numerous and varied: death and the swift cleanup, a frustrated nation with an ever-silenced voice for peace, the reactions to a televised war, censorship and the paciﬁst’s angst, immigration and patriotism, and traditional gender roles and war. While “How I Learned to Sweep” remains a versatile poem, Alvarez’s childhood is entrenched in most of her poetry, especially in the Homecoming poems. Through “How I Learned to Sweep,” Alvarez creates the distinct voice of youth familiar with war, war so common it lies on the ﬂoor in the living room. Death and violence accompanied with responsibilities and chores are combined to create the realties of those who are both the victims and the victors.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Some Dominicans view Fidel Castro as a hero who pulled Cuba away from the terrible realities that faced Dominicans under the reign of Trujillo. Think about this poem, the Cuban missile crisis, and how Dominican Americans would have seen Castro—portrayed as villain in the American media. How does Alvarez depict war as a political conﬂ ict as well as an individual one? 2. In his Bay of Pigs invasion speech in 1961, President John F. Kennedy declared, “The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined, only the courageous, only the visionary who determine the real nature of our struggle can possibly survive.” How would the narrator’s family feel upon hearing these words?

Julia Alvarez 5

How is the poem a reaction to these words speciﬁcally?

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) Identiﬁed as a novel but really a collection of 15 interrelated short stories, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents centers on the experiences of four sisters, Carla, Sandra (Sandi), Yolanda (Yoyo, Yo, or Joe), and Sophía (Fiﬁ), and their exile from Trujillo’s regime in the Dominican Republic. Largely autobiographical, the stories focus on several topics of the sisters’ perpetual dislocation, adjustment, and certain inﬂuence on the two worlds they maneuver. Yoyo’s character mirrors Alvarez: a poet/writer who invents stories and re-creates oral histories, using her experiences as fertilizer for meaning and movement. Her grandfather, like Alvarez’s, is connected to the United Nations; her father is involved in an underground movement to overthrow Trujillo; the maid’s name is also Gladys; the similarities are many, and readers will have a difﬁcult time separating the García girls’ realities from Alvarez’s. The duality of Yolanda and Alvarez emphasizes her reaction as a writer to being placed outside mainstream American experiences. In an interview with Dwight Garner, she explains her perception as a writer: “I’m that mixed breed. I’m that hybrid. I think of myself very much as someone who is putting together different kinds of worlds and a different understanding of language from having those two worlds. I think that being American, of this hemisphere, is about that encounter.” The encounters that the García girls experience are numerous, usual, and unusual. The book is divided equally into three sections of ﬁve stories focusing on the girls as adults, then adolescents, and ﬁ nally children. The ﬁ rst story of the book takes place back in the Dominican Republic, where Yo (which in Spanish means “I”) has returned in search of some sort of union with her dissected self. Her ﬁctional journey equates Alvarez’s metaphorical journey of self back into language and storytelling. Yolanda appears to be innately

homeless as she departs her family’s compound and heads into the hills her cousins and aunts warned were dangerous. The narrator comments, “This is what she has been missing all these years without really knowing that she has been missing it. Standing here in the quiet, she believes she has never felt at home in the states, never” (12). Yet as she contemplates the identity of her mother tongue (English or Spanish?), Yo awkwardly settles into English when she is confronted with tension. The constantly shifting narrator(s) adds to the book’s autobiographical feel as Alvarez seems to struggle through the identities of each of the sisters as they experience mental breakdowns, drugs, sex, defeat, and quiet triumphs. Each sister’s experiences combine with the others’ to create an entire collection of understanding. In another interview, Alvarez emphasizes the importance of storytelling and truth telling. The structure of her book follows her philosophy precisely. She states, “It is something you get at, that’s right there, but the truth is all the points around the truth, around the circle. Each little perspective somehow is what the truth is” (qtd. in Schafer). She further adds: A lot of what I have worked through has to do with coming to this country and losing a homeland and a culture, as a way of making sense, and also it has to do with the sisterhood of my sisters and myself. They were the only people I really had as models. We were moving in a circle, because none of us knew any more than the other one but all we had was each other, not feeling part of this world and not really feeling part of the old world either. (qtd. in Schafer)

In one of Yolanda’s stories, she recounts the time when she crossed over from being a verbal virgin into the worlds of poetry, metaphorical meaning, and crude, sexual nouns with her college classmate Rudolf Elmenhurst. As she tells the story, she emphasizes, “There’s more to the story. There always is to a true story” (102). Her storytelling and talent for invention characterize the García mother, Sofía, or Mami, to the girls. Her stories, working as oral histories for her girls, recreate new

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

meanings, given the circumstances in which they are told even for the 1,000th time. One chapter ends with her beginning another story and the narrator reminding the reader, “Everyone listens to the mother” (67). Yet the girls also contribute their own stories and their own oral truths. The chief tools that Alvarez uses to ﬁ nd the truths of her experiences are the same tools the García girls struggle with: words. The subject of language is constant within How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. In her adult life, Sandi suffers a minor nervous breakdown and is committed to a mental institution when she becomes a voracious reader who believes she will soon turn into an animal, “turned out of the human race” (54). Sandi’s mother tells the doctor that one day Sandi no longer answered to her name and made “awful sounds like she’s in a zoo” (55). Alvarez does not share the story of her recovery, because it is not what is important. Later, while the entire family is visiting Fiﬁ and her new baby girl, Sofía makes clucking sounds to the little girl, cooing in her ear. Sandi lashes out, saying, “God! You sound like a goddamn zoo” (66). Her mother scolds her, saying, “Your language,” and then “as if the words were an endearment, she coos them at her granddaughter, ‘your language’ ” (66). The double meaning in the phrase is not accidental. Alvarez consistently plays out the struggle with language and its power in constructing/ deconstructing identities. Yolanda also experiences a sort of breakdown when she is no longer able to communicate with her husband, John, playing out a current-day tower of Babel. Their relationship wanders from playful rhyming phrases to absolute noncommunication. After she leaves him to live with her parents, she talks compulsively: “She talked in her sleep, she talked when she ate despite twentyseven years of teaching her to keep her mouth shut when she chewed. She talked in comparisons, she spoke in riddles” (79). But Yolanda seems to be afﬂ icted with an allergy to words. Her obsession with words and her subsequent suffering strongly correlate to the language war that many non-Anglos confront within the United States. The Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa asks “for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard

. . . Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language?” (Borderlands/La Frontera 55). She adds that these border dwellers must have “[a] language which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating with the realities and values true to themselves—a language with terms that are neither espanol ni ingles, but both” (55). What Alvarez creates through the sorting of language, she also creates through her female characters. Just as Anzaldúa suggests the creation of the hybrid, a new reality, each of the García women has her own revolutions that create space for altered realities. Revolution is a theme in this book in many senses. Not only has Carlos, the father, participated in his country’s underground revolution, but his daughters and wife also subversively ﬁght against their own dictatorial circumstances. One of the stories, entitled “A Regular Revolution,” contains several female uprisings. The daughters rebel against their controlling, conservative surroundings through unique insurgencies: smoking pot, “experimenting with hair removal cream,” reading books centered on understanding the female body, hiding love letters, and sneaking out. The narrator relates, “It was a regular revolution: constant skirmishes. Until the time we took open aim and won, and our summers—if not our lives—became our own” (111). Sometimes the sisters share the same side, and at other times they plot against one another to help liberate the sister who is held down by tradition or misogyny. When Fiﬁ, banished back to the Dominican Republic for possession, becomes “brainwashed” (126) and engaged to a machismo cousin, the three sisters stage a coup in a place where another coup took place 10 years earlier. As these women plan, struggle, and conquer, they create a new generation of feminist revolutionaries who are echoed in many of Alvarez’s works. Alvarez has earned several prizes for How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, including the Notable Book award from the American Library Association in 1992 and the Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for the book’s multicultural viewpoint. It has also been translated into several languages.

Julia Alvarez 7

For Discussion or Writing 1. Yo, in another of Alvarez’s books (¡Yo!), claims that “language is the only homeland. . . . When there is no other ground under your feet, you learn quick.” With this idea in mind, discuss the repercussions of the title How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. How does language become a landscape of borders and border crossings? How does the title ﬁgure into each of the stories? Explain your responses. 2. Alvarez talks about how storytelling arrives at truth. What are the “truths” that each of the García girls tells in her own stories? How do others perceive these truths? What differences do their perceptions make? Explain your answer fully. 3. What does it mean to the novel that the main character wants to be a writer? Explain your answer with references to speciﬁc incidents in the book.

“Daughter of Invention” (1991) “Daughter of Invention,” a short story contained within the framework of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, centers around Mami and her daughter, Yolanda. In this story, Alvarez explores multiple levels of feminism and sexism as well as the role of the female minority writer. The autobiographical connections between Yolanda and Alvarez are especially apparent within the events of “Daughter of Invention.” In the United States, Mami becomes a self-proclaimed inventor, busily scribbling ideas on a pad of paper only after she has “settled her house down at night” (134). Though none of her gadgets actually is patented, she unwittingly invents new meanings within her map of language, and language becomes the primary focus for the story. Speaking English as a second language, Mami alters idioms, changing their former meanings and creating new ones: “When in Rome, do unto the Romans”; “It takes two to tangle”; “There is no use trying to drink spilt milk” (135, 140). When Yolanda suffers from writer’s block while trying to write her speech for

the Teacher’s Day address, Mami alters Plato’s words from the Republic, saying, “Like the Americans say, Necessity is the daughter of invention. I’ll help you” (142). Her alteration of necessity as the daughter rather than the mother of invention draws attention to the relationship between the two words. Yolanda’s resulting speech reﬂects her own mother’s practice of invention as Yoyo adopts the words of Walt Whitman and writes her own song of herself. While Mami is unabashedly proud, Yolanda’s father, Papi, is furious. Within a short space, Alvarez creates an arena where masculinity and tradition snort and stamp with contempt for cultural feminism. Papi tears the speech into pieces, forbidding Yolanda to deliver it. She in turn accuses him of being just like Trujillo. Within the scaffold of language, Yolanda works to confront the suppression she feels as a female from both sides of her biographical border and the insigniﬁcance she struggles against as a minority student. Through her speech, she invents a place of power for herself. The Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga explains the method Chicana feminists use in writing themselves into places of power: “When we write for ourselves, our deepest selves, the work travels into the core of our experience with a cultural groundedness that illuminates a total humanity, one which requires a revolution to make manifest” (Loving in the War Years 148). She adds, “Our truest words and images are suppressed by the cultural mainstream” (148). As a result of her father’s suppression, necessity does become the daughter of invention as Mami and Yolanda are forced into drafting a more “appropriate” speech. However, Plato’s quote reverts to its original by the end of the story, with Yolanda as the victor when Papi presents her a typewriter—a symbol and tool to facilitate her own underground and open revolution in the United States as a female Dominican.

For Discussion or Writing 1. As characters who are forced into positions of “outsiders” from mainstream Americans, how do Soﬁa and Yolanda subvert and deconstruct their forced categories?

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

2. In The Souls of Black Folks, W. E. B. DuBois discusses the idea of double consciousness: the double self of two cultures and two hierarchies of expectations that African Americans wrestle with on a daily basis, attempting to merge the two halves into a “better and truer self” (11). Analyze the double self of Mami and whether/ how she attains or portrays her truer self.

“Hold the Mayonnaise” (1992) First published in the New York Times Magazine, then in the anthology New Worlds of Literature: Writings from America’s Many Cultures, Alvarez’s essay “Hold the Mayonnaise” takes on the complexities of multicultural families and what Alvarez calls the “stepworld” (New Worlds 701). As a young girl, Alvarez trembled at the possibility of having an American stepmother, who would force her to eat mayonnaise. The only way this foreign terror would become an actuality would be if her mother died: “We were Catholics, so of course, the only kind of remarriage we could imagine had to involve our mother’s death” (699). Mayonnaise became for her a cultural symbol of having had her home culture erased. Years later, Alvarez ﬁ nds herself in an ironic twist of her mayonnaise nightmare: Upon marrying her husband, Bill, she herself becomes a “foreign stepmother in a gringa household” (700). Her task of being a stepmother to her “husband’s two tall, strapping, blond, mayonnaise-eating daughters” is uniquely informed by her past as an outsider. Her previous fears and experiences give her some insight into her stepdaughters’ supposed pains. She explains, “On my side, being the newcomer in someone else’s territory is a role I’m used to. I can tap into that struggling English speaker, that skinny, dark-haired, olive-skinned girl in a sixth grade of mostly blond and blue-eyed giants” (700). She admits, however, that in connection to her childhood of displacement, she creates a place outside her own stepfamily. As her stepdaughter wonders why her stepmother will not publicly identify her as a stepdaughter, Alvarez explains that she

did not want to presume. The stepworld and the world of the minority share similarities—“It feels as if all the goodies have gone somewhere else,” she writes. The essay’s conclusion makes unique connections to assimilationist and antiassimilationist approaches. Indeed, the controversy over whether to accept the dominant culture to the point of erasing one’s own (assimilation) or to add aspects of the dominant culture to one’s own home culture (acculturation) remains a controversy in cultural studies today. Alvarez makes it clear that while assimilationist traditions and advice are negative for Latinas/os today, they simultaneously become good advice for the stepworld. Continuing with her imagery of food throughout the essay, Alvarez creates a melting-pot metaphor: “Like a potluck supper . . . [y]ou put what you’ve got together with what everyone else brought and see what comes out of the pot. The luck part is if everyone brings something you like. No potato salad, no deviled eggs, no little party sandwiches with you know what in them” (701). Her version of the melting pot has been transformed from the traditional assimilationist pot of whitewash. By recognizing her own similarities and differences, she acts as an advocate of border crossing and cultural mixing where items still retain their distinctive qualities.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In Something to Declare, Alvarez discusses the pressure for women to become mothers, stating, “For all our talk of feminism and prochoice, willful childlessness continues to have a bad reputation” (99). She further argues that within Latin culture “being a woman and a mother are practically synonymous. Being childless—by choice—is tantamount to being wicked and selﬁsh” (99). Alvarez combats these ﬁ xed beliefs by creating the notion of “imagined motherhood”—being able to grow as a mother through the imagining of being one. Keeping this idea in mind, how does Alvarez create new spaces of experience through the mind? Why are her notions important for her experiences in “Hold the Mayonnaise”?

Julia Alvarez 9

2. Alvarez uses mayonnaise to symbolize the unfamiliarity of the United States. What other objects do people use to represent or generalize other groups of people? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this practice? 3. Set up a debate in your class, with the following proposition: People entering the United States to live should be acculturated, rather than assimilated. After the conclusion of the debate, write a brief (two-page) response to it, expressing your own opinion and supporting it with speciﬁc examples.

In the Time of Butterflies (1994) In 1986, two years after Homecoming was published, a women’s press invited Alvarez to write a paragraph about a Dominican heroine for a series of postcards. Immediately she knew she wanted to write about the Mirabal sisters, three women who were murdered by Trujillo’s regime on November 25, 1960 (a day now recognized as the International Day against Violence towards Women). After extensive research, Alvarez wrote a ﬁctionalized account of the Mirabal family. Regarding the novel, she wrote, “I wanted to immerse my readers in an epoch in the life of the Dominican Republic that I believe can only ﬁ nally be understood by ﬁction, only ﬁ nally be redeemed by the imagination. A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart” (In the Time of Butterﬂies 324). The Mirabal sisters were leaders of the same underground movement in which Alvarez’s father participated. Three of the four sisters, Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa (Mate), were killed four months after the Alvarez family arrived as exiles in New York. Haunted by their stories, Alvarez set out to write a novel that would introduce English-speaking readers to the sisters’ story and courage. In her postscript, she tells Dominicans, “I hope this book deepens North Americans’ understanding of the nightmare you endured and the heavy losses you suffered—of which this story tells only a few” (324). The structure of the book, similar to that of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, is centered

on not one narrator but many. Combining journal excerpts, newspaper clippings, letters, and drawings, each of the book’s ﬁ rst three sections consists of interwoven stories from the sisters, including the surviving sister, Dedé. Mate, the youngest, gives expression to the power of uniﬁed female voices as she writes in her prison journal, “There is something deeper. Sometimes I really feel it in here, especially late at night, a current going among us, like an invisible needle stitching us together into the glorious, free nation we are becoming” (239). Alvarez’s use of female collective memory resonates with notions of third-world feminism and what Emma Pérez identiﬁes as the “decolonial imaginary”: women’s experiences that have been negated and usurped by a masculine universalist narrative. Alvarez creates sisters who speak uniquely from different spaces, showing the individual paths they have plowed in their journey of political consciousness and revolution, a subject with few female narrators. She writes, “I wanted to understand the living, breathing women who had faced all the difﬁcult challenges and choices of those terrible years. I believed that only by making them real, alive, could I make them mean anything to the rest of us” (Something to Declare 203). All of the sisters, including the surviving Dedé, create and represent unique roles of the revolution as they speak over decades of experience with mother- and sisterhood, love, school, religion, secrecy, prison torture, and bomb making. In the ﬁ nal section of the book, an epilogue with Dedé speaking in 1994, Alvarez opens the novel’s scope of political consciousness further by raising awareness of current world conditions. Dedé questions the notion that the full story has ended and wonders whether the sacriﬁce of her sisters ends in the conditions of today. By leaving room for future female heroines and revolutionaries, Alvarez creates a novel that unites past and present with difﬁcult, complicated questions that run through the course of her works.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In her postscript to the book, Alvarez argues that as ﬁgures are gloriﬁed and mythiﬁed, they

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

become inaccessible; this process is also a dangerous method that makes tyrants like Trujillo untouchable. How, then, does ﬁction counteract this? How is Alvarez successful in recreating the truth of historical events through her ﬁction? 2. What other texts use multiple authors to recount important events? How do these compare to In the Time of Butterﬂies? What events should be told from multiple perspectives? Justify your answer.

“Queens, 1963” (1995) Alvarez’s collection of poems in The Other Side/ El Otro Lado differs from her earlier collection, Homecoming. As the title indicates, border dualities and the conﬂ icted combining of cultures in the United States are the focus of most of the book’s poems, particularly those of the third section, entitled “Making Up the Past.” Several of the powerful images within these poems focus attention on immigrant culture and the ways we divide and shape ourselves. In “Exile,” Alvarez ends with the image of herself and her father looking at a family of beachbound mannequins in Macy’s window. As they back away, they see both their reﬂections “superimposed, big-eyed, dressed too formally / with all due respect as visitors to this country” (28). In another poem, “Sound Bites,” Alvarez illustrates the pressure she felt to melt and dissolve into the right kind of person: “Give yourself over, girl, / to the blond, blueeyed possibilities / so that even as a brown-haired, / olive-skinned spic chick, / you can click with the gringas / you can jive, you can swing, ¡Epa! / like you are here on a personal invite / from the United States of America” (41). She exposes the myth of the joyful melting pot both personally and on a larger scale in “Queens, 1963,” where her 1963 neighborhood makes up the poem’s powerful yet practically silent cast. As she painfully remembers life prior to her family’s assimilation, when they “melted into the block” (31), she feels empathetic pains for the new black family, who, as the neighborhood’s racial target, suffer from not “being the right kind of American” (33). Alvarez,

however, does not just create poems exposing the injustice immigrants felt (and still feel) in their own neighborhoods; she also establishes the paradoxical complexities of the melting pot myth. The narrator’s global immigrant neighbors talk to one another about one another. Ms. Scott, who believes that “white and black got along / by staying where they belonged” (32), also discriminates against her Jewish neighbor but complains to the narrator’s Dominican-American mother, who responds in Spanish. Alvarez illustrates a neighborhood of iron curtains and harmful racial gossip that keeps neighbors talking and threatening. The black family is forced to leave, and the narrator looking out the window wants to offer a wave of welcome but gapes instead, remembering what it felt like before she and her family “melted / into the United States of America” (33). The poem closes with the image of the houses sinking back into the tall grasses, which were there “before the ﬁrst foreigners owned / any of this free country” (33). The ideas and accompanying images in this poem reﬂect a nation’s conﬂicted history of expansion, erasure, and the eradication of differences.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How do the neighbors both excuse and perpetuate the cultural divisions within their neighborhood? How does this happen locally and globally? 2. In Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity, David Gutiérrez suggests that those who see immigrants only in terms of their formal lawful status also see immigrants not as valuable members of the American community but only in two categories—either “legal or illegal, a citizen or an alien, an American or a foreigner” (211). How does Alvarez’s poem argue for and against this belief?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON ALVAREZ AND HER WORK 1. What does Alvarez mean by the legacy of Trujillo? In what ways do we participate in the

Julia Alvarez 11

legacy of Trujillo? Find other writings that are based on the legacies of former rulers. How is a novel based on history different from actual historical writing? Explain your answer. After Alvarez wrote the original version of Homecoming, she later published a revised version two years after the publication of In the Time of Butterﬂies in 1994. She claims that in writing the second edition of Homecoming, she had more political maturity. How do her added poems and ideas coincide with some of the major themes found within In the Time of Butterﬂies? In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa argues that as a Chicana feminist she ﬁghts multiple battles on cultural, gender, and sexual grounds. Many of these battles happen simultaneously. What simultaneous battles do Alvarez’s characters ﬁght? What sort of multiple causes are they ﬁghting for? In So Far from God, Ana Castillo, another Latina author, has written a book in which the main characters are four sisters. Compare and contrast the themes of this book and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Alvarez writes as an immigrant in the 1960s and 1970s, yet how is her writing a critique on immigration today? How do authors like Alvarez negate the culture of silence when it comes to contemporary immigration wars? Provide speciﬁc examples from her work and that of others. Mothers are often depicted as strong inﬂuences in works by what Alvarez calls “hyphenated” Americans. Find three works in which this is so and analyze the role of the mother in each. Include citations to each work in your analysis.

WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Alvarez, Julia. Before We Were Free. New York: Knopf, 2002. ———. A Cafecito Story. White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2001. ———. “Hold the Mayonnaise.” New Worlds of Literature: Writings from America’s Many Cultures,

edited by Jerome Beaty and J. Paul Hunter, 699– 701. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. ———. Homecoming: New and Collected Poems. New York: Dutton, 1996. ———. The Housekeeping Book. Illustrated by Caron MacDonald and Rene Schall. Burlington, Vt.: n.p., 1984. ———. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. New York: Plume, 1992. ———. In the Name of Salomé. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2000. ———. In the Time of Butterﬂies. New York: Plume, 1994. ———. The Other Side/El Otro Lado. New York: Plume, 1996. ———. Something to Declare. New York: Plume, 1999. ———. ¡Yo! Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1997. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Barak, Julie. “ ‘Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre’: A Second Coming into Language in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” Melus 23, no. 1 (Spring 1998). DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Echevarría, Robert González. “Sisters in Death.” New York Times Book Review, 18 December 1994, p. 28. Garner, Dwight. “Julia Alvarez.” Salon, 25 September 1998. Available online. URL: http://salon.com. Accessed May 23, 2006. Gutiérrez, David. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Johnson, Kelli Lyon. “Both Sides of the Massacre: Collective Memory and Narrative on Hispaniola.” Mosaic 36, no. 3 (June 2003): 75–92. Jones, Deborah. “Alvarez Brews Up Coffee with a Social Conscience.” Available online. URL: www. juliaalvarez.com. Accessed October 15, 2009. Luis, William. “A Search for Identity in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” In Dance between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature

12 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Written in the United States. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997. Martinez, Elizabeth. Review of “In the Time of the Butterﬂies,” Progressive 9 (July 1995). Literature Resource Center. Available online. URL: http:// galenet.galegroup.com. Accessed May 29, 2006. Moraga, Cherríe. Loving in the War Years. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000. Morales, Ed. “Madam Butterﬂy: How Julia Alvarez Found Her Accent.” Village Voice Literary Supplement November 1994: 13. Nas, Loes. “Border Crossings in Latina Narrative: Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” Journal of Literary Studies 19, no. 2 (June 2003): 125–137. Pérez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Rich, Charlotte. “Talking Back to El Jefe: Genre, Polyphony, and Dialogic Resistance in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of Butterﬂies.” Melus 27, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 165–184.

Rifkind, Donna. “Speaking American.” New York Times Book Review, 6 October 1991, p. 14. Rosario-Sievert, Heather. “Anxiety, Repression, and Return: The Language of Julia Alvarez.” Readerly/Writerly Texts: Essays on Literature, Literary/ Textual Criticism, and Pedagogy 4, no. 2 (Spring/ Summer 1997). Schafer, Andrea. “Julia Alvarez.” American Writers, Supplement VII, edited Jay Parini. New York: Scribner, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Available online. URL: http://galenet.galegroup.com. Accessed May 29, 2006. Stavans, Ilan. “Daughters of Invention.” Commonweal 119, no. 7 (April 1992): 23–25. Vela, Richard. “Daughter of Invention: The Poetry of Julia Alvarez.” Paper presented at Philological Association of the Carolinas, Spartanburg, S.C. 20 March 1998. Wiley, Catherine. “Memory Is Already the Story You Made Up about the Past: An Interview with Julia Alvarez.” Bloomsbury Review, March 1992, pp. 9–10.

Megan Inclán

Rudolfo Anaya (1937–

)

A novel is not written to explain a culture; it creates its own. (Rudolfo Anaya, neabigread.org/books/blessmeultima/teachersguide04.php)

hile it may be true, as Anaya states, that a novel creates its own culture, his works are deeply autobiographical. As such, they cannot help but reﬂect the culture in which he was raised. Born to a large family on October 30, 1937, in the small town of Pastura, New Mexico, Anaya was in many ways caught between cultures. There was the obvious struggle between the dominant American culture and his own Hispanic home culture, but even on a family level, Rudolfo faced conﬂ icting allegiances to the wandering ranching culture of his father and to the settled farm life of his mother. In his autobiography, Anaya recounts an early experience when the differing expectations of his parents became especially apparent: As he was beginning to crawl, his extended family gathered around him. Each person had an item representative of his or her wishes for the baby. Martín Anaya, missing the llano (open plain) of his cowboy days and wishing the freedom of a ranch life for his son, put a saddle in front of the child. Rafaelita (Mares) valued education and hoped her son might become a priest. She placed a paper and a pencil in the circle. As if in prophecy, young Rudolfo crawled toward the pencil. Antonio, the young protagonist of Bless Me, Ultima, Anaya’s debut novel, similarly faces a struggle to choose his own path, despite parents who would choose for him. Anaya comments on the similarities between his life and ﬁction in an interview with Rubén Martínez:

I have a very close relationship to the characters I write about because they come out of my life. At the same time you have to remember that ﬁction somehow transcends that reality, that experience and reality that we use as a basis, as the ground, from which to work. I then let it take off, let it spiral, let it create itself so that it is not a completely historical reﬂection. I am doing it partially as a reﬂection of where I come from, the people I came from, the towns I came from, the barrio in Albuquerque here where I grew up, but always allowing the element of the imagination to create ﬁction and to create art, to create some kind of pattern out of that total experience. (Dick 117)

Anaya’s mother encouraged a love for literature through the cuentos (folktales) that she told him. Sharing cuentos at gatherings is common in Hispanic culture and Anaya acknowledges the role of that oral tradition combined with the Saturday mornings he spent at the library: They surrounded him with “a milieu of words [. . . which are] important to stimulate the writer’s imagination; to respond to what is going on around him, to incorporate the materials and then rehash them and make ﬁction—to start at a point of reference which is close to one’s being and then to transcend it, that’s important” (Dick 15). Although Anaya had a love of learning, his early school years were difﬁcult. As was the norm within

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

the Hispanic community, his parents spoke Spanish in the home. It was only when Anaya entered school at the age of six that he was introduced to the English-speaking world and, with it, the discrimination that separated Anglo and Hispanic cultures. After World War II, many Mexican-American families moved to larger cities in search of work. Anaya’s family was no exception. When he was 15, his family relocated to the barrio in Albuquerque known as Barelas. He did well in school and enjoyed the life of a typical teenager—playing basketball and baseball, riding a bike—until he was injured in a tragic accident that could easily have killed him. He and his friends were at their favorite swimming spot, a deep irrigation ditch, when Anaya dove in and struck bottom. Two of vertebrae in his neck snapped, and he was instantly paralyzed. He would have drowned had a friend not dragged him to shore. In the months that followed, Anaya lived through a hellish recovery process that transformed him completely. To immobilize his neck, a pulley was strapped around his chin and counterbalanced with weights. When that was unsuccessful, a doctor “bore holes into his skull and placed pins to hold the ropes of the pulley that were attached to the headboard” (Baeza 7). Later he was driven to the Carrie Tingley Hospital, located in the middle of the desert, and placed in a full-body cast. He fought hard to recover, but he says, “The ‘Rudy’ of my childhood was dead—died in nights of tortured fever while he hung on ropes” (Baeza 7). The Rudolfo Anaya who emerged from the hospital to graduate with his class from Albuquerque High School in 1956 had built “a new faith inside the shell of bones and muscle” (Olmos 5). Anaya attended business school for two years, then switched his major to English and transferred to the University of New Mexico. Although he found the university to be a primarily Anglo environment, Anaya formed a small clique with several other Chicano students who shared his interest in art and literature. Together, they read and encouraged one another’s efforts. Anaya’s ﬁ rst attempts

at writing were poems, but he soon realized he “probably didn’t have the gift that some people are blessed with.” He switched to prose and immediately began to write novels, completing two or three while he was an undergraduate. He considered those early novels “exercises in learning to write” and burned them (Dick 14). Anaya describes the process of learning to write as difﬁcult, in part because of the lack of sufﬁcient role models: When I ﬁ rst began to work, I used Anglo American writers as role models. But I couldn’t get my act together until I left them behind. They had a lot to teach me and I don’t underestimate that—you’re learning whether you’re reading a comic book or Hemingway or Shakespeare or Cervantes—but I couldn’t tell my story in their terms. (Dick 108)

Yet no other “terms” were available. In all his years of schooling, Anaya had not read a single example of Chicano prose. No one had succeeded in publishing a novel that reﬂected the true Chicano experience. Upon completion of a B.A. in English and American literature at the University of New Mexico in 1963, Anaya became a teacher, instructing classes at both the junior- and senior-high levels. He continued his education, receiving an M.A. in English in 1968 and another in guidance and counseling in 1972. It was during his time in school that he met Patricia Lawless, a Kansas native also trained in guidance and counseling. They married in 1966 and Anaya felt he had found in her “the one person who believed I could be a writer” (Baeza 17). With encouragement from his new wife, Anaya spent seven years writing and rewriting a story about Antonio, a young Chicano boy growing up in the Southwest. While the story had autobiographical roots, Anaya found it difﬁcult to “uncover the symbols and patterns of his own culture.” The story felt ﬂat and lifeless. It was then that Ultima appeared to him: “That strong old curandera . . . came to me one night and pointed the way. That is, she came to me from my subconscious, a guide and

Rudolfo Anaya

mentor who was to lead me into the world of my native American experience” (Olmos 7). For Anaya, the symbol of Ultima became a powerful demonstration of how the myths and symbols of a cultural conscious could be inculcated by literature. Under Ultima’s watchful guidance, Anaya grew to realize that to write authentically, he had to write not as a Chicano trying to ﬁt his story into an Anglo framework, but as a Chicano giving birth to his own story, thereby laying claim to his full richness of heritage and language. Through this process of rebirth, the story of Antonio became more than a simple coming-of-age novel about a young boy; Antonio’s tale, now titled Bless Me, Ultima, represented la tristeza de la vida (literally, the sadness of life). At the same time that Anaya was struggling to write his novel, Chicanos all over the Southwest were rallying behind leaders like César Chávez, Corky Gonzalez, Ramsey Muniz, and Reyes López Tijerina. Chicanos were no longer content to be treated as aliens within the nation of their birth. They demanded more rights and recognition of their worth as individuals and as a culture. The political and social upheavals created a Hispanic community hungry for literature that reﬂected the truths of their lives. Publishers in New York were far removed from the political and social ripples of the Southwest. Unacquainted with the innovations Anaya’s work represented, they rejected his uniquely Chicano style, which did not ﬁt within their deﬁ nition of literature. Undaunted by the accumulating pile of rejection letters, Anaya answered a call for submission he had seen in El Grito, a literary magazine born of the Chicano movement at Berkeley. His novel was not only accepted by the newly formed Quinto Sol Publications, but also honored with the 1971 Premio Quinto Sol as the best novel written by a Chicano. Thus began Anaya’s fame as the father of Chicano literature. When the book appeared on the market, Chicanos everywhere recognized themselves within its pages. It was incorporated into classrooms as teachers and professors realized its potential. Most rewarding to Anaya was the fact that the “working

people” were reading it. The world had proven it was ready for a new kind of literature that reﬂected the multicultural experience of America. Still, the reaction to Bless Me, Ultima was not all positive. Anaya’s use of strong language, praised by many as lending an authenticity to the work, was condemned by some. Others objected to the inclusion of folk belief, which they interpreted as witchcraft, as a central theme. The scene in which the young hero observes his own birth—a wonderful introduction to the technique of magical realism— drew particular critical ﬁ re. Public schools were deeply affected by the controversy, unsure whether to embrace its innovations or to reject them outright. Many chose rejection. In 1981 an administrator at Bloomﬁeld High School in New Mexico burned the book, citing its use of corrupt language and the challenge it presents to sacred values of the Anglo-Saxon culture. Norwood High School banned the book, explaining that it was a double standard to use the book for mandatory assignments when school policy penalizes students for using similar profanity. In response to those who would ban his book, Anaya says, “There are still some very narrow views of what literature is and what literature should be taught in this country. . . . This country is multicultural and the more their children know about other communities not only the better off will they be communicating with those communities, but they will have a better life in terms of future work” (Dick 171). Anaya’s success with Bless Me, Ultima led to a position in the English Department at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. By then, Anaya was hard at work on his second novel, a story about a displaced family’s struggle to overcome addiction and violence. The story was published in 1976 as Heart of Aztlan and received praise for exploring the strong bond between the Chicano people and the mythical Aztlan. Just three years later, Tortuga was published, winning the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award and completing what is referred to as Anaya’s New Mexico Trilogy. Anaya’s trilogy is linked not only through the use of uniquely Anayan devices such as extended dream sequences, shamanlike characters, and the

16 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

infusion of myth, but also more subtly through the carrying over of characters. Jason, whom readers remember from Bless Me, Ultima as the boy with an Indian friend, appears as the son of the protagonist in Heart of Aztlan. Similarly Crispín, the blind poet of Heart of Aztlan, sends his blue guitar as a gift in Tortuga. Even the boy known only as Tortuga possibly has his origin in an earlier novel as Benjie Chavéz, who is shot in the left hand and paralyzed when he falls from a water tower (Olmos 74). And where actual characters do not overtly bridge the gap between novels, character traits do in the form of archetypes. There are Antonio, Clemente, and Tortuga, all on spiritual quests for identity; and Ultima, Crispín, and Salomón, the spiritual guides who mentor them. Even the lesser characters have their base in Jungian archetypes: the strong “good mother” ﬁgures of María and Adelita, the “feminine principle” (ideal woman) of Cristina and Ismelda, the “shadow” (destructive force) of Tenorio, Sapo, and Danny. Novels may be Anaya’s preferred form, but he has by no means limited himself to long-form prose. Several of his short stories appeared in his collection The Silence of the Llano (1982). Anaya turned his attention to children’s books when he sat down to read bedtime stories to his grandchildren and realized “[Chicano] children who are pre-school age or in the early grades do not see themselves in stories, and they should. I thought it was really important to develop writing in that area” (Dick 175). To that end, Anaya began to write his own stories based on the cuentos of his childhood, publishing The Legend of La Llorona in 1984, Lord of the Dawn: The Legend of Quetzalcóatl in 1987, and other picture books focusing on Chicano traditions and legends. Lest Anaya’s adult readers feel neglected, in 1992 he returned to the novel with Alburquerque [sic]. As is evident from the altered spelling of the city’s name, Alburquerque is more political than his previous works, attacking the infrastructure of the city and raising questions about urban development. Still, in the words of John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanﬁeld War, the novel overcomes politics to reﬂect “a deep caring for the land and

culture and for the spiritual well being of people, environment, landscape” (Baeza 43). Caring for the land, Anaya claims, is a cultural attribute that stems from an early and long-lasting reliance on the land. He describes the Chicano people as “a communal group that for a long period of time relied on the earth for subsistence, thereby becoming very tied to the cycles of weather, of planting, of nurturing, of watering, of caring. It is easy to see why la tierra becomes la madre tierra [the earth becomes mother earth]” (Dick 123–124). The theme of the earth as mother is present in all of Anaya’s works but becomes especially important in Alburquerque as it examines the displacement of peoples and cultures in the Southwest. The 1990s ushered in a new chapter in Anaya’s writing with a shift to the detective novel. Detective ﬁction, as has most genre ﬁction, has largely been dismissed by universities as not worthy of literary study. But as Ralph Rodriguez explains, detective ﬁction is ultimately a quest for identity by an “alienated outsider, the moral man or woman in the corrupt world” (6), and provides a unique framework for exploring the underlying values of a culture. Rodriguez goes on to explain that the role of alienated outsider strikes a cord with many Chicanas/os, who are often portrayed as alien within their own country. It is not surprising then that Chicanas/os should turn to the detective novel as a platform for their own identity stories. Rudolfo Anaya is not the ﬁ rst writer to cast a Chicano in the role of sleuth. But where other mystery writers use the genre as a form for their Chicano heroes, Anaya redeﬁ nes it. From the relationship of the villain to the hero, his unique perspective on the nature of history, and the magical realism common in his earlier novels, only Anaya could have written the Sonny Baca detective series. In 1993 Anaya retired from the University of New Mexico as professor emeritus. Leaving the university afforded him more time for exploring the world and fostering the day-to-day relationships he says grow more important as we age. He travels to discuss his work with others and devotes time to mentoring new writers. Through it all, he has continued to write, experimenting with still another

Rudolfo Anaya

genre—the play. As Anaya himself has said, “One’s autobiography does not end; it simply moves into a new, and, one hopes, exciting plane of living” (González-T. 388). In her critical companion, the biographer Margarite Fernández Olmos credits Rudolfo Anaya with “inscribing the physical and spiritual landscape of Chicano culture onto the terrain of contemporary U.S. literature” (1). That ability to transcend class and culture, integrating all it means to be Chicano into works with universal appeal, has earned Rudolfo Anaya a lasting place in literature.

Bless Me, Ultima (1972) Heralded by literary critics as Anaya’s “opus of Chicano life and culture” (Baeza 25), Bless Me, Ultima was like nothing the literary world had ever seen. Few works by Chicano writers had been published previously; of those, none had the mass appeal of Anaya’s story about a seven-year-old boy’s search to ﬁ nd his identity within the complex world of the Southwest. It seemed the right book at the right time for Chicanos, who were battling to redeﬁ ne their status in the United States. Enrique Lamadrid describes the book as “serene in the face of this turmoil, full of conﬂ ict, yet non-combative, a portrait of the developing consciousness of the young protagonist, Antonio” (González-T. 464–465). The novel goes beyond Antonio to describe the developing conscious of the nation. Antonio, the protagonist of Bless Me, Ultima, guides readers through the complex terrain of his life. When he is a young child, Antonio’s parents speak only Spanish in the home; it is not until he goes to school that he is exposed to English. The narration reﬂects Antonio’s own language, a hybrid of his home/school community. The use of both Spanish and English, at ﬁ rst a barrier to publication, was recognized by Chicanos as an authentic representation of speech and a key literary innovation. Anaya did in his writing what millions of people do every day: He made language personal, functional, and representative of the multicultural nature of American society. This process, called

code switching, became a prevalent feature of the Chicano literary movement. Antonio tells us on the ﬁ rst page that we will “begin at the beginning . . . not the beginning that was in my dreams and the stories they whispered to me about my birth, and the people of my father and mother, and my three brothers—but the beginning that came with Ultima.” Ultima is left alone when war scatters her village. While the people appreciate Ultima’s abilities as a curandera, “a miracle-worker who could heal the sick,” they are reluctant to take her in because of rumors that she is a bruja (witch). Antonio’s parents overcome their concern and invite Ultima to live with their family. Ultima blends well with the Márez family, becoming an assistant to Maria, a conﬁdant to Gabriel, and a mentor to Antonio. Soon she becomes indispensable: When the murder of the sheriff means trouble for the Márez home, it is Ultima’s owl that warns them and Ultima herself who provides comfort to Antonio, a witness of the vigilante justice meted out by the townsmen. But Ultima represents more to the story of Antonio than the “good mother” of Jungian thought. She becomes a central ﬁgure when she is asked to cure Antonio’s uncle of a curse placed on him by Tenorio’s daughters. Ultima asks Tenorio to have his daughters lift the curse, but they refuse. Ultima uses her own powers to cure the uncle, with Antonio as a spiritual double. One by one, Tenorio’s daughters die and Tenorio vows vengeance upon Ultima. Meanwhile, Antonio has grown old enough to attend school. His mother hopes that the church’s teachings will lead him to become a priest, but as Antonio approaches the date of his First Holy Communion, the lessons he learns outside school fuel his doubts regarding the Catholic Church. Ultima’s power to heal an illness that God himself could (or would) not cure and the willingness of his family to turn to a curandera for help confuse him. To make matters worse, a friend introduces him to the golden carp. The boys believe the golden carp is a god who prophesized that “the sins of the people would weigh so heavy upon the land that in the end the whole town would collapse and be swallowed by water” (123).

18 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

The golden carp is only one of the myths incorporated in the heart of the story. Throughout the book, there are references to La Llorona, the wailing woman said to search in the night for the children she herself killed. The story of Antonio and his quest for spiritual truth could not be told without references to the myths that surround him. But religion and myth do not have to be polar. Anaya had this to say about myth: We often look at mythology as if it happened in the distant past. We say: “The Greeks had their mythology, and the Toltecs and Aztecs of meso-America had their mythology. Isn’t that interesting? It’s all in the past; it’s gone.” We tend to view myth as static. What I am saying is that it is not static. It’s working in us even now. Because those same archetypals that were discovered by the ancient people are in us today. And it is the creation of myth and that reference to that collective pool that we all carry inside of us that re-energizes us and makes us more authentic. (González-T. 464–465)

Antonio cannot reconcile what he is learning about power with the teachings of his church. He cannot reconcile the desires of his father that he be of the llano with the wishes of his mother that he be of the pasture. He cannot reconcile his own vision of himself with the expectations of friends who require him to be their priest. In his dreams, Antonio begins to face what he cannot consciously understand, and Ultima goes to him there, serving the same purpose as a “conciliatory force . . . guiding Antonio between the extremes of his parents and the myriad other tensions he must attempt to resolve” (Olmos 38). But as much as Antonio needs Ultima, he has learned from her that he must ﬁ nd his own truths. Ultima’s death is symbolic of Antonio’s readiness to “love life,” but even in her passing Ultima promises that Antonio will not be alone, telling him, “If despair enters your heart, look for me in the evenings when the wind is gentle and the owls sing in the hills. I shall be with you” (276).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Anaya created the myth of the golden carp. What purpose does the myth serve in the story of Antonio? Why do you suppose Anaya did not use an existing myth? 2. Discuss Bless Me, Ultima as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. How does the character of Antonio universally reﬂect the struggle of any young person to ﬁ nd his or her place within society? In what way is Antonio’s struggle unique to Chicanos? 3. Anaya says he looks at his own work through a sense of “the archetypal, about what we once must have known collectively” (Dick 422). Study the major archetypes and their attributes as described in Jungian theory. Create a chart of archetypes and the characters from Anaya’s New Mexico Trilogy that correspond with each archetype. How do archetypes affect story? Experiment with archetypes in your own writing. 4. Look up the term magical realism. How does the scene in which Antonio views his own birth operate as this form of writing? Support your response.

Tortuga (1979) Anaya’s third novel in his New Mexico Trilogy is based loosely on his own experience as the survivor of a swimming accident. The story begins with an accident victim’s being transported to the Crippled Children and Orphans Hospital of Agua Bendita by two colorful ambulance drivers. The drivers, Filomón and Clepo, tell the boy the story of Tortuga, the local mountain. Legend says the mountain is really a sea turtle that traveled north and became trapped beneath the earth’s layers when the oceans turned to deserts. Filo proclaims that it is only a matter of time until the oceans return and free Tortuga. Meanwhile the people who live in Agua Bendita beneﬁt from the rivers of “pee” that ﬂow from Tortuga because they believe the minerals in the hot springs possess a healing power.

Rudolfo Anaya

A doctor orders the boy placed in a full body cast to protect him while he begins physical therapy. The other children nickname him Tortuga because of his resemblance to the mountain: The cast surrounds and protects his body much the same as a turtle’s shell. The name Tortuga is symbolic as well. It represents the boy’s own entrapment and the hope that he, too, will one day break free of his cast and therefore his paralysis. Unlike Bless Me, Ultima, in which the main character is revealed to readers by his own narration and dream sequences, it is through the interactions with the other characters in the book that we learn most about Tortuga. He is surrounded by other children who are in the hospital because of their own injuries and maladies. There are Mike, who survived the ﬁ re that killed his family, only to be physically and emotionally scarred for life; Danny, who becomes more and more fanatical as his arm withers away from some inexplicable cause; Jerry, the boy who was taken from his grandfather by “the Indian Health people” and waits in never-ending silence for his grandfather to track him down; Franco, whom we never actually meet, but whose songs ﬂoat through the wards; and Salomón. Of all the characters, it is Salomón who affects Tortuga most profoundly. Salomón is also paralyzed, but he has learned to turn the pages of books by using his tongue to manipulate a plastic rod. His stories have made him a legend within the hospital, and Tortuga often visits Salomón’s room. Salomón is more than just another patient in the hospital. In “Journey into the Heart of Tortuga,” Maria Lopez equates him with Aristotle’s unmoved mover: “He is the immobile center of the hospital and those who dare must come to him” (González-T. 216). But before Tortuga can go to Salomón, Salomón goes to Tortuga in the form of a prophetic dream. As do Ultima and Crispín, he takes on the role of shaman, guiding Tortuga to his destiny. It is Salomón who leads Tortuga to the infant ward, a macabre room ﬁ lled with shriveled babies on iron lungs and feeding tubes. Salomón tells him, “That is why you have come here. . . . You must go

to the very roots of sadness before you let out this shout of life that bursts in your lungs” (117). The sight of all the children “more dead than alive” drives Tortuga into a suicidal depression, from which he emerges only when Danny and two others toss him into the hospital’s pool in an attempt at assisted suicide. The experience, characteristic of the death and rebirth of mythic heroes, leaves Tortuga free of his shell and transformed into a man capable of fulﬁ lling Salomón’s instruction, “Sing a song of love, Tortuga! Oh yes, sing of love” (196).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the role of nicknames in Tortuga. Why are Tortuga’s true identity and the cause of his accident withheld from readers? Why is it signiﬁcant that it is Danny, not Mike, who gives Tortuga his nickname? Explain your answer. 2. Salomón tells Tortuga, “When we are not of this time then we encounter absolute freedom” (54). Discuss how a person who is paralyzed may experience freedom. How have others deﬁ ned freedom? Is freedom absolute or relative? Support your opinion. 3. Mike describes coming to terms with the accident that killed his mother and sisters: “When I ﬁ nally realized that things just happen, that there’s no reason, that there’s no big daddy up in the sky watching whether you burn or not . . . much less caring, then it helped” (47). Tortuga admits that he still wonders why things happen. Does it help to have a reason? How might Mike feel comforted by believing there is no God, while others feel comforted by believing in God? 4. In Tortuga, the turtle is believed to be godlike, capable of curing maladies with its urine. As a class, create a mural depicting the animals prevalent in Chicano myths and the reasons for each animal’s importance. 5. As a class, make a chart of the qualities that cause stories to be deﬁ ned as character driven or plot driven. Apply your chart to Bless Me, Ultima and Tortuga. How do these stories ﬁt within the deﬁ nitions you have created?

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

The Sonny Baca Mysteries (1995–2005) Anaya begins his series of detective ﬁction with Zia Summer (1995), in which he revives Sonny Baca, a minor character from Alburquerque. Baca’s career as a private investigator is launched with the murder of his cousin, a case he resolves (as is typical of the genre) within the pages of the novel: Baca’s cousin, it turns out, was sacriﬁced by Anthony Pájaro, a cult leader intent on destroying the world by detonating a nuclear device in New Mexico. Unlike other detective series, where the hero is constant and the villains change with each successive book, in Anaya’s series both the hero and the villain remain constant. Pájaro comes to be known as Raven, a play on the English translation of his name and a more symbolic representation of his purpose in the series. Zia Summer is only round one in the ongoing battle between Baca and Raven, which is continued in the successive novels Rio Grande Fall (1996), Shaman Winter (1999), and Jemez Spring (2005). The battle between Baca and Raven is more than the typical hero-versus-mass-murderer fare. As is often the case in Anaya’s novels, the characters represent much more than is apparent on the surface. Baca’s concerns go beyond the cases he investigates; he worries about the state of mankind’s collective soul, fretting that “the beautiful people of Hollywood . . . [are] caricatures surrounding themselves with luxury, coated with a gold sheen but empty inside . . . all over the city we have the hombres dorados, men of empty promises” (Zia 362). Baca and Raven represent the forces of good and evil in their apocalyptic battle for control of humanity. Rodriguez contends that this conﬂ ict allows Anaya to examine “how, in the face of a persistent and commodiﬁed culture, it is possible to behave as a moral subject and thereby save not only one’s own life but also the life of one’s community” (108). Anaya also uses the resurgence of Raven as a vehicle for exploring history as a living presence and inﬂuence on Chicano identity. In Shaman Winter, readers are told that “history did not happen and then go away for the people of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, it festered and grew into the bones,

blood and soul. . . . People here lived and breathed history” (168). This view of history as living lends itself well to Anaya’s theme of identity formation. Throughout the series, he doles out details from the history of the Chicano people, details that are not meant to be read and forgotten, but build upon each other to explain the current context of social identity for not only Sonny Baca, but also for Chicanas/os as a people. Anaya further uses history as a “static context for present dilemmas” (Rodriguez 108). Through extended dream sequences, Baca is transported into the past to confront the forces that have shaped both him and his people. But as in Anaya’s other works, dreams are not meaningless wonderings of the unconscious mind; they are bestowed with the magical power to transport Baca into history, beyond his own existence to the times of signiﬁcant events within the formation of the Chicano culture. Raven appears in this past, and Baca must battle him on that plane as well, as Raven eventually tries to eradicate Baca by eliminating his ancestral bloodline. The transportation into the past is not the only magical device used by Anaya in the series. As the reader progresses through the cycle, the story shifts more and more toward Baca’s quest to become a shaman, the spiritual leader for his people. In that pursuit, Baca becomes an apprentice to the elders, learning the indigenous religious practices so that he may protect the New Mexican identity by saving its collective memories. As Baca moves closer to his goal of shaman, the magical elements within the story increase.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Napoleon Bonaparte is quoted as having said, “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” In Zia Summer, Elfego Baca makes the following claim: “Chicano heroes have been erased from the white man’s history. Forgotten” (299). In Shaman Winter, we are repeatedly told that history is written by the victors. Is there such a thing as “white man’s history”? How would you construct a more pluralistic history of America?

Rudolfo Anaya

2. In Zia Summer, Akira Morino argues, “All nations are products of colonization. . . . A new migration comes and a new culture is layered on the old” (300). How do these layers affect a culture’s identity? An individual’s place in society? Does a conquering nation have an obligation to help preserve a preexisting culture? 3. Take a poll within your school: What does the typical American look like? Examine the results. Why do you think people responded the way they did? Do you believe there is such a thing as a “typical American?” Debate what it means to be American. 4. Compare the alienation of Chicanos with the plight of the American Indian. How have the indigenous peoples of North America been represented in history books?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON ANAYA AND HIS WORK 1. Anaya is very interested in dreams. Choose three cultures and make a comparative analysis of the signiﬁcance of dreams within each culture. Use literature from each culture to support your analysis. 2. Anaya has been called the godfather of Chicano literature. What makes some literature speciﬁcally Chicano? What contribution has Anaya made to American literature as a whole? 3. In his book Stolen Continents, Ronald Wright has this to say about myth: The word myth sometimes has a debased meaning nowadays—as a synonym for lies or fairy stories—but this is not the deﬁ nition I intend. Most history, when it

has been digested by a people, becomes myth. Myth is an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patterns that resonate with a culture’s deepest values and aspirations. . . . They are the maps by which cultures navigate through time. (5)

What might Wright consider to be American myths, the maps that guide our present-day culture? What might Anaya? WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. Oakland, Calif.: Quinto Sol, 1972. ———. Heart of Aztlan. Berkeley, Calif.: Justa, 1976. ———. Shaman Winter. New York: Warner Books, 1999. ———. The Silence of the Llano: Short Stories. Berkeley, Calif.: Tonatiuh-Quinto Sol, 1982. ———. Tortuga. Berkeley, Calif.: Justa, 1979. ———. Zia Summer. New York: Warner Books, 1995. Baeza, Abelardo. Man of Aztlan: A Biography of Rudolfo Anaya. Austin, Tex.: Eakin Press, 2001. Dick, Bruce, and Silvio Sirias. Conversations with Rudolfo Anaya. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. González-T., César A. Rudolfo Anaya: Focus on Criticism. La Jolla, Calif.: Lalo Press, 1990. Olmos, Margarite Fernández. Rudolfo A. Anaya: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Rodriguez, Ralph E. Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Wright, Ronald. Stolen Continents: 500 Years of Conquest and Resistance in the Americas. New York: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1992.

Kathy Higgs-Coulthard

Maya Angelou (1928–

)

Courage is the most important of all the virtues. Without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistent without courage. (David Frost, “An Interview with Maya Angelou”)

While visiting her mother in St. Louis in 1936, Maya was sexually assaulted by Vivian’s live-in boyfriend, Mr. Freeman, setting off a chain of horriﬁc events that Angelou would later detail in her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). In 1940, Maya graduated at the top of her eighth-grade class at Lafayette County Training School in Arkansas. Vivian then took her children to San Francisco, where Maya attended George Washington High School. Artistically talented, she received a scholarship to the California Labor School in San Francisco, where she took classes in drama and dance. The school opened in 1942 and when it closed by 1948, “the remaining students continued to support a reduced number of classes on the cold war, McCarthyism, U.S. history, USSR and socialism, writing, literature and the arts” (California Labor School Collection). Although a good student, Maya was fraught with adolescent insecurities, especially after she moved in with her father in Los Angeles in 1943. She ran away for a month, living in a junkyard with other homeless children. She then returned to her mother and to school in San Francisco, where, as a gawky six-foot-tall teenager struggling with questions of gender identity, she found difﬁculty establishing herself. Her relationship with the most popular boy at school resulted in a teenage pregnancy, and her son, Clyde Guy Johnson, was born the same year she graduated from high school, 1944.

aya Angelou is legendary. She has achieved acclaim as an author, poet, playwright, professional stage and screen producer, director, performer, college professor, and singer. Add to these gifts those of chef, newspaper editor, community activist, dancer, and linguist ﬂuent in French, Spanish, Italian, and West African Fanti. Her autobiographies are often considered classics, and her poems personal anthems for living. Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the second child of Bailey Johnson, a naval cook, and Vivian (Baxter) Johnson, a gambler who ran a boarding house. Her parents divorced in 1931, when her brother, Bailey, was four years old and she was three. The children were sent to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas. In describing her home, Angelou wrote: “People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days he had to be satisﬁed with chocolate” (Caged Bird 47). Her brother, Bailey Johnson, was responsible for naming her Maya. “After Bailey learned deﬁ nitely that I was his sister, he refused to call me Marguerite, but rather addressed me each time as ‘Mya Sister,’ and in later more articulate years, after the need for brevity had shortened the appellation to ‘My,’ it was elaborated into ‘Maya’ ” (Caged Bird 66).

Maya Angelou 23

Johnson, also an author, has written two books, Standing at the Scratch Line (1998) and Echoes of a Distant Summer (2002). He has this to say about growing up under his mother’s shadow: The truth is, my mother scared me as a child . . . there was nobody else like her, anywhere . . . through my elementary and junior high school years, my mother wore her hair natural and regularly wore African dress . . . she would proudly proclaim at public gatherings that she was a “black woman.” It was almost more than I could bear. . . . As I look back on those times, I feel a bit embarrassed about my ignorance. She was a pioneer. She stood up to the glares, snide comments, and ridicule generated by our cultural ignorance. My mother says that “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, for without it one cannot practice any of the others with consistency.” . . . I am truly blessed by the gods to be Maya Angelou’s son. . . . My mother opened doors for me and held them open until I passed through. . . . “Old Moms was and is hot! Love that maternal instinct.” (Johnson “A Tribute to Maya” 44)

Even as a young person, Maya exhibited a capacity to do the extraordinary. In 1945, she became the ﬁ rst black woman streetcar conductor in San Francisco. This was a full 10 years before Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., led the year-long Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott from 1955 to 1956. Angelou also grew up around extraordinary cooks, and she, too, became skillful. In 1946, she cooked for $75 a week at the Creole Café in California, something she would refer to later in Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes (2004), a volume about the memorable meals and the good times she enjoyed growing up. The 1940s continued to be a time of personal upheaval for Angelou. In 1947, she worked brieﬂy as a prostitute. She returned to Stamps but was sent back to San Francisco by her grandmother, who feared her outspoken granddaughter would be hurt by the Ku Klux Klan. Back in the city, Angelou

worked as a nightclub dancer and continued prostituting herself until her frustrated brother stepped in and convinced her to stop. Still trying to ﬁ nd herself, she married a sailor, Tosh Angelos, in 1950. She told herself that Tosh was “Greek, not white American; therefore I needn’t feel that I had betrayed my race by marrying one of the enemy, nor could white Americans believe that I had so forgiven them the past that I was ready to love a member of their tribe” (Cudjoe 22). Her last name, Angelou, is an adaptation of Tosh’s surname. After the marriage failed in 1953, Angelou returned to dancing at the Purple Onion, a popular California club. In 1954, she joined a touring company of the African American folk opera Porgy and Bess, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. After a 22-nation tour of Porgy, Angelou became a dance instructor at the Rome Opera House and at Hambina Theatre in Tel Aviv. The following year she appeared in a play, Calypso Heatwave. Also inﬂuenced by the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, Angelou decided to express herself in writing, moving to Brooklyn, New York, and joining the Harlem Writers Guild. In 1959 and 1960, she served as northern coordinator of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), in place of Bayard Rustin, who choreographed the 1963 March on Washington. Angelou was proliﬁc during the Black Arts Movement, or BAM, the artistic arm of the Black Power movement from the 1960s to 1970s. She appeared in one of the most important off-Broadway productions of the era, The Blacks, by Jean Genet, and in Cabaret for Freedom, both in 1960. In 1962, she moved to Cairo with Vusumzi Make, a South African Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) freedom ﬁghter, and then moved to Ghana when their relationship ended. She worked as associate editor of the Arab Observer, an English-language newspaper; became feature editor of African Review; and contributed to the Ghanaian Broadcasting Company from 1963 to 1966. She was assistant administrator of the School of Music and Drama at the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

at Legon-Accra, teaching dance, when Kwame Nkrumah was president. Her theater credits from this time include Mother Courage at the University of Ghana (1964), Medea in California (1966), and The Least of These, also in California (1966). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, still Angelou’s most famous book, made its ﬁ rst appearance in 1969. In 1970 alone, she was named writer-in-residence at the University of Kansas, received a Yale University fellowship, and saw Caged Bird nominated for a National Book Award. A year later, a volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. With several off-Broadway productions to her credit, Angelou prepared for a Broadway show, Look Away (1973), which received a Tony Award nomination. Of her inaugural body of work, James Baldwin said, “You will hear the regal woman, the mischievous street girl; you will hear the price of a black woman’s survival and you will hear of her generosity. Black, bitter, and beautiful, she speaks of our survival” (“A Caged Bird She’s Not,” Washington Post Magazine). Her diverse contributions continued as she published Gather Together in My Name (1974); directed the ﬁ lm All Day Long (1974); performed in Ajax, a classical play by Sophocles; and was named distinguished visiting professor at Wake Forest, Wichita State, and California State Universities. Next she published the poetic Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well and received honorary degrees from Smith College and Mills College—all in 1975. In 1976, she published Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas; that same year, she directed And Still I Rise, which was published in 1978. When Alex Haley’s Roots changed the face of television forever by introducing the television miniseries, Angelou was a part of that, too, and received a nomination for best supporting actress in the production (1977). Angelou can make writing appear effortless, but she revealed her stoic creative process in a 1977 interview with the Black Scholar: Sometimes I will stay up in my room for a day trying to get two sentences that will ﬂow, that

will just seem as if they were always there. And many times I come home unable to get it so I go back the next day, 6:30 in the morning, every morning, 6:30 I go to work. I’m there by 7:00; I work till 2:00 alone in this tiny little room, 7 × 10 feet. I have had the room for two years and they have never changed the linen. I’ve never slept there. There is nothing in the room except a bed, a face basin, and that’s it. I write in longhand. (Black Scholar 40)

Between 1981 and 1987, Angelou continued her proliﬁc outpouring of writing with the autobiography The Heart of a Woman, the poetry collection Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?, the autobiography All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, and the children’s book Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship, closing out the decade with Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987). Honors and engagements, too, were as thick as publications. Angelou received a lifetime appointment as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina (1981), was named one of the Top 100 Most Inﬂuential Women by Ladies’ Home Journal (1983), won the North Carolina Award in Literature (1987), and directed a play written by Errol John, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, in London. By the 1990s, she had published I Shall Not Be Moved (poetry, 1990); Souls Look Back in Wonder (children’s book, 1993); Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (essays, 1993); My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me (children’s book, 1994); Phenomenal Women: Four Poems Celebrating Women (1994); A Brave and Startling Truth (poetry, 1995); and Koﬁ and His Magic (children’s book, 1996). In 1993, a pop-culture movie based on her poetry, Poetic Justice, was created, starring the singer Janet Jackson and the rapper Tupac Shakur. That same year, her writing touched the new administration of President William Jefferson Clinton when she created an inaugural poem, “On the Pulse of Morning” (1993). The Maya Angelou of the 21st century shows no signs of slowing down. In 2001, Eugene Redmond, poet laureate of East St. Louis, Illinois, and author of The Eye in the Ceiling, said of her:

Maya Angelou 25

I’ve known Maya more than 30 years. What may appear to be a meteoric rise has actually been a measured and powerful one. What hasn’t changed is that Maya is always growing. She is constantly studying and she plays games—word games, parlour games and card games, to keep her mind sharp. She’s 72 and she’s smokin’! (Angaza 32)

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) Angelou’s ﬁ rst book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, has become an American classic, read at almost every level of education. Nominated for a National Book Award, it was also a Book-of-theMonth-Club selection and has been published worldwide in numerous languages. The work, an autobiography, is about being black and female in the South during the depression. It addresses powerful universal themes, including rootlessness, abandonment, learning to love one’s self, the hurdles of humankind, and the role courage plays in the living of life. As Angelou said in an interview with the television talk-show host David Frost, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently” (Frost). This is Angelou’s genius: Her writing allows readers to grow philosophically. Through her novels, she imparts wisdom, all through the looking glass of her multitextured experiences. As she herself has noted: “I speak to the black experience but I am always talking about the human condition—about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and still survive” (Gross 90–91). The characters in the book are Marguerite Johnson (Maya Angelou), the narrator of the story; Bailey, her loyal brother; Annie Henderson, Maya’s God-fearing paternal grandmother; Mr. McElroy, the independent neighbor; Vivian Baxter, Maya’s beautiful mother; Bailey Johnson, Sr., Maya’s insensitive father; Uncle Willie, Maya’s disﬁgured relative; Mrs. Bertha Flowers, a literate neighbor; the Baxter family, which includes Grandmother Baxter and a group of uncles; Mr. Freeman, Viv-

ian’s boyfriend, who rapes and threatens Maya; Daddy Clidell, Maya’s worldly stepfather; and the white Mrs. Cullinan. To this long and varied list, Angelou adds numerous minor characters, who are in actuality not at all minor, as they memorably impact the book, regardless of how brief their appearances. The geographical settings, of course, mirror those of Angelou’s life in Arkansas, California, and Missouri, from the depression-stained 1930s until the time Angelou became a teenage mother. When the story opens, the reader ﬁ nds two small children, three-year-old Marguerite and four-yearold Bailey, literally thrown away by their divorced parents. Sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, the children feel rejected and only marginally accepted by their adopted southern town. “If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat,” Angelou has said (Yonge 25 May 2002). Threatened, yes, but Marguerite nevertheless manages to ﬁ nd two loves, both with the same name, William: her uncle Willie and William Shakespeare. She connects with Uncle Willie, who is crippled—enough to wish he were her real father—because she, too, feels uncomfortable and unpretty in her body. In Shakespeare, she ﬁ nds a deep attraction to his way with words, a gift she will also acquire. To her surprise, when Maya becomes an adult and is attending Uncle Willie’s funeral, she encounters a black man of note, an unlikely someone else who also loved her uncle: I had no idea this elegant man way up north in Little Rock had any idea . . . would know Willie. My uncle, he was so ashamed of being crippled that he wouldn’t even go to Louisville, Arkansas, which was ﬁve miles from Stamps and the County Seat. He said, “You know the State of Arkansas has lost a great man losing Willie.” I asked him, Willie Johnson? He said, “The United States has lost a great man in Willie.” I said, “W. M. Johnson?” He said, “The world.” He said, “You know, I was the only child of a deaf mother, and your Uncle Willie gave me a

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

job in your store, paid me ten cents a week in the ’20s. And, he taught me to love to learn. And I’m now—I guess you may want to know who I am—he taught me my times tables.” I said, “How did he do it?” He said, “He used to grab me by my clothes. . . . Because of him I am who I am. I guess you want to know who I am.” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “I am the Mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas.” (King 30 November 2003)

As in the work of the 1930s novelist Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), the narrator focuses on the general store, owned by the very strict Annie Henderson and kept by Uncle Willie. Owning the store allows Annie and Willie to stand slightly apart from their destitute black neighbors. They own something, and the children feel part of a family through the store and the chores involved there. Yet it is also in these early chapters that the reader learns of Marguerite’s pain over not being physically beautiful. She is often teased by other children for being so large and gawky, but Bailey always lovingly protects her. Early on, Angelou examines southern social rituals of the time, especially the habit of walking through town and speaking to everyone—something Maya ﬁ nds unheard-of in urban settings. Most of the whites depicted in the novel live on the other side of the segregated town, where, Maya discovers, blacks must maintain a subservient and submissive demeanor. Even when blacks are ﬂanked by rude white children who are disrespectful to them and taunt them at every opportunity, white society and law dictate that they must back down. Maya learns that if you are black and want to live a peaceful life, you have to “wear the mask,” as Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote in his poem “We Wear the Mask,” and must not allow fear to crack your public veneer. Angelou would grow to love this and other poems by Dunbar, reciting his work from memory. Nonetheless, she could never accept the second-class citizenship that was a daily reality for her grandmother and uncle.

Religion, too, plays a central role in the black community of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Faith is such a systemic part of the landscape that the character of Mr. McElroy, the Hendersons’ next-door neighbor, immediately stands in stark contrast with the rest of Maya’s world. Although he is always dressed formally in a suit, unlike the rest of the community McElroy never enters a church, a most unusual act for a black man living in the Bible Belt South. Unfortunately, the minister, the Reverend Howard Thomas, is the very representation of a sinner—a taker, glutton, and manipulator. Invited to dinner, Thomas sits at Annie’s table and eats everything in sight, never pausing to consider what the children will do for their meal. Because he rejects the behavior Thomas espouses, Maya’s kind friend Mr. McElroy becomes a hero for her, a symbol of independence. As depicted by Angelou, even religion is not safe from the evils of white supremacy. The children see the great contrasts between the lives that white people enjoy and the privations of their own community. Reasoning that since God was the giver of all—a lesson taught repeatedly from the Stamps pulpit—Maya naturally assumes that he must be white also. By his very actions, which leave the white and black communities both separate and unequal, he was intentionally leaving her out. She naturally assumes, “Of course, I knew God was white too” (Bloom 27). For the black residents of Stamps, fear as a means of control is a mainstay. When a local white woman has supposedly been “messed with,” all of the black men in town go into hiding. Even crippled Uncle Willie is hidden in the ﬂoor planks of the store, for fear of the vigilantes who hunt down black men without justice or due process. One of the most powerful scenes in the book takes place when Bailey, Maya’s brother, encounters the aftermath of a lynching. As a measure of intimidation, the drowned, decomposing body of a black man is placed in a jail cell full of black prisoners. Bailey comes face to face with this dead man and is terrorized beyond belief. As does Maya, Bailey experiences horrors no child should have to face.

Maya Angelou 27

The children’s relationship to their parents during these years is curious, to say the least. They do not see Bailey, Sr., and Vivian for some time but remain with their grandmother, never even receiving Christmas or birthday presents from their missing parents. One year, the children receive a major shock when their parents send gifts. They have more or less dismissed their mother and father, assuming that either they are dead or they do not love them—until the gifts prove otherwise. However, the gifts only usher in a new time of displacement for Maya and Bailey, who are subsequently tossed from relative to relative, including a spell with their maternal grandparents and their crowd of gamblers and blues singers, always willing to ﬁght. When Maya is eight years old and staying with Vivian in St. Louis, she is sexually assaulted by her mother’s live-in boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. This part of the autobiography is pivotal, just as it was in Angelou’s actual life, for the child’s essence is stolen, and she spirals out of control for years afterward. Maya ﬁ nally tells Bailey what has happened, hesitating only because Mr. Freeman has threatened that if she tells anyone, he will kill her brother. She testiﬁes in court, and although Freeman is put in jail, he is freed the next day. Within hours, his body is discovered, kicked and beaten to death. By the manner in which Grandmother Bailey accepts this news—as if she is well aware of what happened and who performed the deed—the reader can surmise that her “mean” and very tough and ﬁghting sons, acting as judge and jury on behalf of their defenseless niece, have taken care of Mr. Freeman. After his death, Marguerite concludes that her words have the power to kill and wills herself to a life of muteness. “Just my breath, carrying my words out, might poison people . . . I had to stop talking” (Gross 90–91). The children are then moved back to Stamps and mute Maya is taken under the wing of Mrs. Flowers, a literate and gracious black woman in the neighborhood who introduces her to poetry and makes cookies and lemonade just for her. She absorbs the poetry and recites it well. Finally, she has something of her own! “I was liked, and what

a difference it made. I was respected not as Mrs. Henderson’s grandchild or Bailey’s sister but for just being Marguerite Johnson” (Bloom 35). She emerges from her silence and enters another part of her life with Mrs. Glory, Mrs. Cullinan’s cook, who teaches Maya how to be in domestic service to a high-quality white family. Mrs. Glory shows Maya the ﬁ ner things in life, but Mrs. Cullinan decides that she will call Maya “Mary” because Marguerite/Margaret is too long. No manner of entreaty can change Mrs. Cullinan’s symbolic erasing of Maya’s identity. However, when Maya takes Bailey’s advice—to destroy her employer’s favorite pieces of glass and ﬁ ne china whenever she calls her by the wrong name—she wins both her identity and her dignity. Central to the book is a scene that denotes black community strength as well as the reality of a de facto American apartheid existing in the 1930s. It occurs when the store is used as a community center to listen to the radio broadcast of the Joe Louis ﬁght. Louis, known as “the brown bomber,” knocks out a white boxer, Primo Carnera—something unthinkable to whites at the time. A highly symbolic event to both blacks and whites, the victory becomes a cause for celebration among the community gathered around the radio, with soda, candy bars, and alcohol being passed freely around. These ordinary people, according to Angelou, do not know much of victory. If Louis had lost, she wrote, her Stamps community believed that black people would be “back in slavery and beyond help” (Lupton 59). After the ﬁght, however, little changes. Black families continue to stay off main roads, because they know bands of infuriated whites will be looking for black people to harm in retaliation for Louis’s victory. Still, they hold this symbolic victory close to their hearts. In yet another crucial scene, Maya prepares to graduate from the eighth grade. She feels pretty and successful, but a white visitor to commencement dampens spirits by detailing the improvements that will go to the white school. Ironically, the visitor stereotypes Maya and her classmates as being incapable of intellectual achievement, hinting

28 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

that their black school, the home of athletes, may receive a paved playing ﬁeld. The children, proud of their academic prowess as well as their other talents, are angered, but one boy stands and begins to sing the Negro national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” shaming the condescending visitor and making a collective and powerful response to the speaker’s news. A scene at the dentist’s ofﬁce is also painfully revealing of 1930s southern culture. The one dentist in town, a white man, does not accept black patients. However, he has borrowed money from Annie and still owes her. She and her granddaughter go for treatment but are turned away; he declares he would rather put his “hand in a dog’s mouth than in a nigger’s” (Lupton 58). Maya’s toothache is horrendous, so Annie confronts the dentist alone, hectoring him into paying back her 10 dollars so they can take the bus to visit the black dentist. This small victory gives the family a chuckle later that evening, one of the few they get at a white man’s expense—and an example of the ways in which Angelou depicts minor acts of courage in the ongoing struggles of life.

For Discussion or Writing 1. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a work of survival. Discuss this book, which takes place largely in the 1930s, in comparison with Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Consider such elements as their historical backgrounds, the depiction of the characters, and themes the two works share. 2. What is the relationship between Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy” and Angelou’s autobiography? Analyze the poem, discussing its key metaphor as the central theme of Angelou’s work. 3. Although I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is on practically every school and book club reading list, it has its detractors. In September 1999 in Harper’s Magazine, the novelist Francine Prose cited what she calls “the manipulative melodramas of A LICE WALKER (The Color Purple) and Maya Angelou”:

One can see why this memoir might appeal to the lazy or uninspired teacher who can conduct the class as if the students were the studio audience for Angelou’s guest appearance on Oprah. But much more terrifying than the prospect of Angelou’s pieties being dissected for their deeper meaning, is the notion of her language being used as a model of “poetic” prose style. . . . Who told students to [place] a dozen mixed metaphors in one paragraph? Where do students learn to write stale, inaccurate similes? (Angaza 32–33)

Do you agree or disagree with Prose’s assessment? Cite speciﬁc examples of Angelou’s language to support your argument. 4. What is the role of African-American music in Caged Bird? Select two of the themes of the book and discuss how African-American music informs the reader with regard to each. Support your answer with speciﬁc examples from the text.

“My Brother Bailey and Kay Francis” (1969) An excerpt from Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, this story focuses on the main character’s brother. The custom in their small southern enclave is for people to go into town, walking past the store for gossip and sweets. Maya’s grandmother, Annie Henderson, gives money to the children every week. Maya gives her portion to Bailey, who promptly heads to the movie theater in town, afterward purchasing cowboy books for his sister. One Saturday evening, Bailey does not return home as usual. Dark falls, and his aunt and uncle fear the worst—that he may have been harmed by white thugs. When Bailey ﬁ nally comes down the dark road, Maya notices he is not the same: He looks “tired and old-mannish. Hands in his pockets and head bent, he walked like a man trudging up

Maya Angelou 29

the hill behind a cofﬁ n” (Caged Bird 112). Because he cannot give an excuse for his tardiness, Uncle Willie beats him. Bailey does not even cry. When he goes to bed that night, he strangely reverts to his early youth and prays, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take” (113). Listening to him recount the childhood prayer, Maya knows Bailey has endured something terrible. It takes a few days, but he ﬁ nally talks to her. He did see a movie, but this time he sat through it twice, which is why he was so late getting home. He did so because he could not believe his eyes: “I saw Mother Dear. . . . It wasn’t really her. It was a woman named Kay Francis. She’s a white movie star who looks just like Mother Dear” (114). “Mother Dear” is Vivian, the children’s on-again, off-again mother. The children do not speak of her to Grandma Henderson or Uncle Willie because, as Maya writes, “She was our mother and belonged to us. She was never mentioned to anyone because we simply didn’t have enough of her to share” (114). Vivian is like a phantom to the children. Two months after Bailey’s beating, the Kay Francis movie returns to town. This time, both children go. From their segregated seats in the balcony, they watch as the show, a comedy, depicts white people as rich and black people as idiot servants. Maya cannot help thinking that this woman looks just like her mother, except that her mother is prettier. Further, as did her mother, this woman lived in extravagance. At the end of this show, Bailey, tormented by the loss of his mother, a person they barely know and who by all indication scarcely cares for them, tries to commit suicide on the railroad track. He is thrown into depression by a loss he cannot understand. The absence of his mother is more than he can bear. He no longer wants to live unless he can have his family intact, and that is why he has begun to chant the childlike prayer—something he learned when the entire family was together, when he was two or three years old and his mother was at least within his sight.

Maya’s reaction is quite different from Bailey’s. She feels that whenever the white theater patrons laugh at the buffoonery of the black actors and revel in Kay Francis’s beauty, they are in fact revealing their appreciation of a woman who bears a striking resemblance to her own mother. She understands that somehow, their response gives the Kay Francis/Mother ﬁgure the upper hand. Even though the white audience’s palpable hatred for black people rises from the ﬁ rst ﬂoor to the balcony in the form of sneers and hisses, she feels that the whites are inadvertently validating her mother’s beauty in all its blackness, something unheard-of in Stamps or anywhere in the South. Although their fancied representation of their mother tears the children apart because they live in such humble surroundings, they also remember that Vivian lives in sumptuousness, something even the white theater patrons here could never afford to do.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Most movies shown in southern theaters during this era depicted black people only as subservient stereotypes. From your local video store or on the Internet, locate a movie from this period and watch it. Critique the ﬁ lm, making comparisons about the depiction of African Americans in it and in Angelou’s story. 2. Compare and contrast the principal women in this story—Mrs. Flowers, Momma (Annie Henderson), and Vivian. Write a well-developed essay discussing what each character represents as a symbol, as a signiﬁer of class, and as an individual.

“Woman Work” (1978) “Woman Work,” from Angelou’s third volume of verse, And Still I Rise (1978), acknowledges and celebrates the place that women—as home managers, ﬁ rst teachers of a family’s children, and leaders of the sisterhood—have in society. She begins the poem with a list of domestic jobs historically associated with womenfolk. The rhythm of the poem is

30 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

like that of a marching band, setting to the sound of a drum roll the image of a woman rising early and marching a beat to attend to her duties: I’ve got the children to tend The clothes to mend The ﬂoor to mop The food to shop Then the chicken to fry The baby to dry. (lines 1–6)

The list is endless. The woman has no time—nor does she take any—to tend to her own needs. There is no time to nurture the relationship with her husband. She is mother and wife, a church sister who visits the sick and afﬂ icted, and a laborer who picks cotton or tobacco in southern ﬁelds. Alas, there is no time for anything—except in the next four stanzas, in which the speaker resolves woman is one with Mother Earth and waits to be blessed by Mother Earth, as a gift from the creator. She embraces the sun—“Shine on me, sunshine”— and asks the dewdrops to “cool my brow again.” She asks the storm to blow her from reality to ﬂoat, in a surreal state, “across the sky” until she “can rest again,” with an aura of otherworldliness that suggests going to heaven or being taken to the promised land. Strangely enough to some readers, the speaker expresses no bitterness over her load of responsibilities or for the isolation forced upon her by this schedule. The central character is simply content to be part of nature, who is her friend. Angelou begins “Woman Work” with a litany of chores but ends it with an afﬁ rmation, or possibly a plaintive cry: “Sun, rain, curving sky / Mountain, oceans, leaf and stone / Star shine, moon glow / You’re all that I can call my own” (Cape Verdean News 6A). Numerous critics have asserted that were it not for the immense popularity of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou’s poetry would hardly be given serious consideration. Her poems are thought by some to be thin in substance, lacking in poetic invention, and lackluster in language. Others, however, argue that her poems belong to a neglected

oral tradition, incorporating elements of AfricanAmerican slave songs and work songs, and can be seen as lyrics that require performance to reveal their depth and riches. As the critic Lyman B. Hagen has observed, “Angelou may rank as a poet of moderate ability, but her poetry is praised for its honesty and for a moving sense of dignity” (133–134).

For Discussion or Writing 1. In “Woman Work,” the speaker is a woman enveloped in both domestic life and nature. Is this a demeaning position? Why or why not? Discuss your answer fully. 2. W. E. B. DuBois—sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—believed that work was noble. Do you think the narrator of “Woman Work” feels the same way? Locate another poem about a working woman or man. Compare the two poems and analyze the tone and attitude toward work in each.

“On the Pulse of Morning” (1993) It was a windy, sun-ﬁ lled day, January 20, 1993, when President William Jefferson Clinton and Vice President Albert Gore were sworn into ofﬁce. Clinton, a native of Arkansas as well as former governor, selected Maya Angelou, a daughter of Arkansas, to create the inaugural poem. Back when Clinton was raised in the town of Hope and Angelou in nearby Stamps, the relationship between blacks and whites was malignant—thus the very act of inviting Angelou was political. In fact, there had been no inaugural poet since the late Robert Frost, who read for John F. Kennedy in 1961. The over-100-line “On the Pulse of Morning” constitutes a plea for peace and harmony among the world’s diverse peoples. It is a chronicle of the evolution of life on earth, beginning with its mention of “The dinosaur, who left dry tokens / Of their sojourn here / On our planet ﬂoor.” As Angelou names the descendants of this planet, she

Maya Angelou 31

enumerates “the African and Native American, the Sioux.” She establishes an entitlement for each, saying, “Each of you, descendant of some passed / On traveler, has been paid for.” Reprimanding listeners who have not been kind to the land, the speaker indicts the spoilers: Each of you a bordered country Delicate and strangely made proud Yet thrusting perpetually under siege. Your armed struggles for proﬁt Have left collars of waste upon My shore, currents of debris upon my breast. (lines 26–31)

As Mary Jane Lupton has noted in a signiﬁcant critique of Angelou’s poem, “ ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ ” gives more than a nod to concerns that were subjects of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (18). When Angelou was growing up, she regularly attended the CME (Colored Methodist Episcopal, later Christian Methodist Episcopal) Church, where her uncle Willie was superintendent of the Sunday school. It is only natural, then, that her poem bears the cadence of black ministers such as Martin Luther King, Jr.; Malcolm X; Jesse L. Jackson; and Louis Farrakhan: “But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully, / Come, you may stand upon my / Back and face your distant destiny, / But seek no haven in my shadow. / I will give you no hiding place down here.” In these lines, Angelou also recalls spirituals of determination sung in black churches throughout the South, such as the following, from “Ain’t Got Time to Die”: “ ’Cause it takes all of my time to praise my Jesus / All of my time to praise my Lord / If I don’t praise Him the rock’s gonna cry out / Glory and honor / Glory and honor / Ain’t got time to die.” As with her other work, religion is a central element. Angelou also calls for a newly infused dream, a revision of the one originally described by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963 in his historic “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. In a clear allu-

sion to that speech, Angelou writes, “Sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare / Praying for a dream.” She adds, “Root yourselves beside me / I am the Tree planted by the River / Which will not be moved”— another clear reference to the Civil Rights movement, with its memories of the old hymn sung by Dr. King and other demonstrators as they were attacked by southern law enforcement: “I shall not be moved / Like a tree planted by the water / I shall not be moved” (Negrospirituals.com). After his presidency, Clinton reﬂected on the poem and wrote in his memoir: “Maya’s poem, ‘On the Pulse of Morning,’ riveted the crowd. Built on powerful images of a rock to stand on, a river to rest by, and a tree with roots in all the cultures and kinds that make up the American mosaic, the poem issued a passionate plea in the form of a neighborly invitation” (172). The critic and poet Marjorie Perloff, however, was not so impressed: “Dreadful” was her pronouncement (Lupton 18). The former poet laureate R ITA DOVE said only a day after hearing Angelou’s inaugural poem, “I wouldn’t compare it to a poem I’ll read over and over again in silence. That’s not the kind of poem it was meant to be. It’s a song, really” (Streitﬁeld D11). Bill Eichenberger of the Columbus Dispatch confessed that he did not care much for the poem until he heard Angelou sing. Then, he says, his cynicism melted. Eichenberger sums up his feelings about her work: “For Angelou is, above all, an orator in the grand African American tradition. She is its rhythms and cadences, a powerful voice, the embodiment of persuasive fervor and, not least, the agent of humor” (Eichenberger 9H). Notwithstanding the divergent reactions to her work, “On the Pulse of Morning” reﬂects Angelou’s trademark, to “keep it plain.” In this poem, “metaphors predominate . . . spotted with familiar words, terms, and phrases. . . . The use of African American folk idioms emerges as a strength in Angelou’s poetry” (West 15). With “On the Pulse of Morning,” Maya Angelou offers an encouraging poem to a new administration that was also ﬁ lled with hope.

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

For Discussion or Writing 1. In “On the Pulse of Morning,” why does the speaker name all of those varied peoples? Who are they? Why is their naming important? How would you feel if your people were named on such an occasion? Explain your answers. 2. What is the signiﬁcance of an inaugural poem? Of the choice of an inaugural poet? Locate another inaugural poem and discuss its meaning for the occasion, comparing its themes and images to those in Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning.” 3. In what ways does “On the Pulse of Morning” make a political statement? Discuss your response in a well-organized essay, supporting your views with citations from the text.

“Africa” (1997) Maya Angelou is certainly not the ﬁ rst AfricanAmerican poet to acknowledge the continent in verse. Africa is motherland to people all over the African diaspora, those people of color who, rooted in Africa, range from African Caribbeans to African Germans and everyone in between. As such, the continent retains a special place in the hearts and pens of poets of the Harlem Renaissance (in the 1920s and 1930s), the Black Arts movement (in the 1960s and 1970s), and even as far back as Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784), who wrote in her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America”: “ ’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan Land; / Taught my benighted soul to understand / That there’s a God, / that there’s a Saviour too” (Gates 219). African diaspora poets have articulated numerous and varied perceptions of Africa. Countee Cullen’s famous poem “Heritage” asks, “What is Africa to me?” (Gates 1347). Langston Hughes, in “Danse Africaine,” denotes a continent whose rhythms “stir your blood” (Gates 1292). More recently, Haki Madhubuti wrote about Africa in “The Primitive”: “taken from the / shores of Mother Africa: / the savages they thought / we were— / they being the real savages” (Gates 1841).

In “Africa,” Angelou essentially incorporates the theme of all these poems: the relationship between Africa and America for African Americans. Her poem begins with an image of Africa as voluptuous and healthy, black and comely. This Africa departs from the biblical “black but comely,” needing no intervention or interference from anyone. It romanticizes Africa as a sexual temptress: Thus she had lain sugarcane sweet deserts her hair golden her feet mountains her breasts two Niles her tears. Thus she has lain Black through the years.

This view of Africa, while seductive, only establishes her vulnerability. The second stanza chronicles the inevitable—the arrival of land rapists, those who crossed the seas to kidnap the young and strong, to ﬁ ll their heads and pacify them with a man-mangled Christianity that suits the purposes of white supremacy, and to hold them in line with guns. The third stanza is a picture of the new America, now home to legal citizens who are heirs of those kidnapped Africans. It acknowledges changes from a once-brutal life but cautions the reader to “remember her pain / remember the losses / her screams loud and vain / remember her riches / her history slain / now she is striding / although she has lain.” In true Angelou form, the poems ends on a hopeful note.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What do you think of Angelou’s view of Africa? How does it resemble the images and impressions you have formed on the basis of your readings in social studies or what you have seen from news sources? Discuss your response, citing examples from your readings or viewings. 2. Read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and analyze the imagery in his poem. What do “Ozymandias” and “Africa” have in common?

Maya Angelou 33

How do they differ? Support your discussion with citations from both texts.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON ANGELOU AND HER WORK 1. Angelou has traveled to Africa, as well as written about it, and says she felt comfortable living there. Select two additional American writers who made their homes abroad for a short time. In a well-developed essay, discuss how each writer’s time abroad may have affected his or her work, citing examples from the texts. How does each writer reconcile perceptions of America from within and without? 2. Angelou has written and spoken of her love for the works of William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe. What do these writers have in common, and why do you think they, more than other writers, captured Angelou’s imagination? 3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been on the American Library Association’s list of “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books” as a result of its sexual content, offensive language, and other objections. How would you respond to a censor’s effort to suppress Angelou’s work? Discuss your response, enlarging the scope of your essay to include the general topic of censorship of works for young adults. Is it justiﬁed? If so, under what circumstances? If not, explain why. WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Aberjhani and Sandra L. West. Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Facts On File, 2003. “Ain’t Got Time to Die.” Intercity Gospel Train Orchestra. Available online. URL: www.intercitygospel.it/testi.htm. Accessed February 17, 2007. Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary. Available online. URL: Primus.arts.u-szeged. hu/American/American/volllno1/kotonen.htm. Accessed February 21, 2007. Angaza, Maitefa. “A Precious Prism Maya.” Black Issues Book Review, March/April 2001, pp. 31–33.

Angelou, Maya. Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes. New York: Random House, 2004. ———. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House, 1969. ———. “On the Pulse of Morning.” “The Inauguration.” New York Times, 21 January 1993, p. A14. ———. “Woman Work.” In And Still I Rise. New York: Random House, 1978. Available online. URL: www.poemhunter.com/poem/woman-work. Accessed February 19, 2007. “The Black Scholar Interviews: Maya Angelou.” Black Scholar 8, no. 4 (January/February 1977): 40. Bloom, Harold, ed. Maya Angelou. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999. ———, ed. Bloom’s Guides: Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. Bond, Julian, and Sondra Kathryn Wilson, eds. Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Celebration of the Negro National Anthem, 100 years, 100 Voices. New York: Random House, 2000. “A Caged Bird She’s Not: Maya Angelou.” Washington Post Magazine, 9 April 1978. Available online. URL: Lexis-Nexis. Accessed April 4, 2001. Clinton, Bill. My Life. New York: Knopf, 2004. Cudjoe, Selwyn. “Maya Angelou and the Autobiographical Statement.” In Black Women Writers 1950–1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 22. New York: Anchor Books, 1984. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Complete Poems. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1913. Eichenberger, Bill. “Angelou Can Lift Up Even an Unwilling Heart.” Columbus Dispatch, 11 October 2000, p. 9H. Available online. URL: Lexis-Nexis. Accessed April 4, 2001. Frost, David. “An Interview with Maya Angelou.” WNET/Channel 13, 1995. Available online. URL: www.newsun.com/angelou.html. Accessed March 3, 2001. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Gross, Robert A. “Growing Up Black.” Newsweek, 2 March 1970, pp. 90–91.

34 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Grindeland, Sherry. “Maya Angelou Paints a Rainbow for Audience: Has Them Crying, Laughing, and Giving.” Seattle Times, 15 March 2000, p. B3. Available online. URL: Lexis-Nexis. Accessed April 4, 2001. Hagen, Lyman B. Heart of a Woman, Mind of a Writer, and Soul of a Poet: A Critical Analysis of the Writings of Maya Angelou. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997, 118–136. Holy Bible. King James Version, Original African Heritage Edition. Nashville, Tenn.: James C. Winston, 1993. Hughes, Bill. “Maya Angelou Really Delivers.” Oakland Post, 24 January 1993: 76(1). Available online. URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb. Accessed February 5, 2007. “I Shall Not Be Moved.” Available online. URL: NegroSpirituals.com. Accessed February 17, 2007. Johnson, Guy. “A Tribute to Maya: I Am Truly Blessed by the Gods to Be Maya Angelou’s Son.” Black Issues Book Review, May/June 1999, p. 44. Johnson, Guy. Online chat on 10 December 1998, archived by BarnesandNoble.com. Available online. URL: authors.aalbc.com/guyjohnson.htm. Accessed February 7, 2007. King, Lise Balk. “Maya Angelou Graces Us with Her Presence & Her Poetry: ‘National Treasure’ speaks to educators at NIEA (National Indian Education Association) Annual Conference in Greensboro, N.C. 2 November 2003.” The Native Voice, The Women’s Voice Section C, Rapid City, South Dakota, 30 November 2003: C1. Available online. URL: http://proquest.umi.com. Accessed February 5, 2007. Lupton, Mary Jane. Maya Angelou: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

“Maya Angelou and Hallmark Debut New Inspirational Gift Line.” Cape Verdean News, New Bedford, Mass., 28 February 2002, p. 6A. Available online. URL: http://proquest.umi.com. Accessed February 5, 2007. Metzger, Linda. Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989. Neubauer, Carol E. “Maya Angelou: Self and a Song of Freedom in the Southern Tradition.” Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. Online Archive of California. Inventory of the California Labor School Collection, 1942–1957. Available online. URL: ﬁndaid.oac.cdlib.org/ﬁndaid/ ark:13030/tf0489n414. Accessed February 8, 2007. Streitﬁeld, David. “The Power and the Puzzle of the Poem: Reading between Maya Angelou’s Inaugural Lines.” Washington Post, 21 January 1992, p. D11. Thompson, Ericka P. “Maya Angelou Brings Courage to Butler University.” Indianapolis Recorder, 6 May 2005, p. C3. Available online. URL: http://proquest. umi.com. Accessed February 5, 2007. West, Sandra L. “Maya Angelou.” In Contemporary American Women Poets: An A-to-Z Guide, edited by Catherine Cucinella, 12–17. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Yonge, Gary. “No Surrender: A Conversation with Maya Angelou.” Guardian (London), 25 May 2002. Available online. URL: www.howard.edu/ library/Reference/Guides/Angelou/MayaIntro. htm. Accessed February 21, 2007.

Sandra L. West

Jimmy Santiago Baca (1952–

)

In the most difficult of circumstances, after working on a poem I walk out and feel that, whatever wall there is in front of me, I will go right through it like the saxifrage flower that splits the rock. (Moyers 42)

orphanage. Most of the boys in D-Home were there because of their criminal records. Their hardened attitudes and the small cells in which they slept made the facility feel less like a “home” and more like a jail. Baca was sent to school at a nearby junior high, but his inability to read and write made it impossible for him to succeed academically, and his status as D-Home resident caused him to withdraw socially. He instead found acceptance on the football ﬁeld, earning the respect of classmates. The coach took an active interest in him, inviting Baca to live with his family. The invitation triggered a deep confusion that Baca found impossible to articulate. His experiences on the street and in D-Home had instilled in him a distrust of Anglos: His mother had abandoned her family to elope with a white man; white men had repressed his people for hundreds of years; they had sent him to live in D-Home. Despite the fact that the coach and his family were sincere in their desire to help him, Baca felt he could not abandon his race by going to live with Anglos. He quit school the next day; later that year when his brother took him out for a day trip, Baca ran away from D-Home. According to his memoir, A Place to Stand, Baca and his brother spent the next three or four years “ﬁghting, drinking, and getting high” (34). They lived with friends, or on the streets, in and out of jail, until Mieyo enlisted in the military, leaving Baca to drift aimlessly around the country. Uneducated

hile many writers acknowledge poetry’s power to break down social and political barriers, the walls to which Jimmy Santiago Baca refers are also physical. His poetry cries out in protest of an America that can be “two societies standing in absolute opposition . . . two countries: a country of the poor and deprived, and a country of those who had a chance to make something of their lives” (Working 18). In order to understand the deep passion of his poetry, it is necessary to understand the context of the life in which it was written. Born January 5, 1952, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Baca learned early to fend for himself. Abandoned by his parents when he was very young, Baca and his siblings lived with their paternal grandparents until the death of their grandfather. His grandmother’s failing eyesight made it impossible for her to care for them, and he and his older brother, Mieyo, were sent to live at Saint Anthony’s Boys’ Home in Albuquerque. Being away from his family was hard, and although Mieyo was at the same facility, the brothers were separated except at meals and mass. Baca ran away frequently, always wandering back to where his family had lived, only to be returned to the home by one of his aunts or uncles. Eventually the police intervened, taking him to a detention center. Life in D-Home, as the residents called it, was very different from the time he had spent in the

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

and homeless, Baca found himself at the mercy of other people’s generosity, shufﬂ ing back and forth among friends and family and dealing drugs, until a home in which he was staying was raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The resulting shoot-out between the FBI and the drug dealer injured one FBI agent and landed Baca in jail. He was counseled to plead guilty to possession of heroin with intent to distribute or face worse charges. He was sentenced to ﬁve to 10 years in prison. Baca realized he had to turn his life around. Although his father had spent time in jail, Baca was the ﬁ rst person in his family to go to prison. He thought that if he could learn to read and write, possibly earn his general equivalency diploma (GED), then he would have a chance to change his circumstances. He wanted to stay clean, do his time, and get out alive, but prison did not allow the rehabilitation he had planned: Cons who went to Nam say it’s [prison] worse than jungle warfare. You live with your enemies here. There ain’t no going home. You live hour to hour with your enemy standing next to you, eating next to you, walking next to you. The only thing that keeps him from killing you is respect. (Place 120)

Life in prison was a contradiction: To earn privileges and keep his time to a minimum, Baca had to follow rules and avoid ﬁghts; to earn respect, Baca had to stand up to those who would make him their victim, ﬁghting whenever necessary. He fought to survive and in surviving lost what he was ﬁghting for; the reclassiﬁcation committee denied him school privileges. Baca was tired of playing their games. The rules could not be followed, and so he stopped trying. He stayed in his cell, refusing to work or line up for roll call, until the guards grew so exasperated with him, they took him to solitary conﬁ nement, and eventually to a place Baca describes as “a dark subterranean sewer” called “the dungeon” (Place 176). It was during his time there that Baca received his ﬁ rst letter. It took him hours to decipher the message, that a Good Samaritan was offering to

correspond with him. Baca immediately wrote back, asking for advice in learning to read and write. The man sent him a dictionary and religious pamphlets, written in English and Spanish, and continued to correspond with him until Baca learned to read and write intelligibly. He began to devote most of his time to reading and writing, trading his poetry with other inmates for books. He read everything he could get his hands on but found the most meaning in works by William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman, whose techniques ﬁt best with Baca’s developing sense of what a poem could be. Despite the escape Baca found in poetry, prison life continued to intrude, pushing him until he was forced to take a stand against another inmate who was trying to force him out of his own cell. As Baca stood over the man, shank in hand, he realized his entire life hinged on that moment: For a second, every horrible thing that had happened to me in my life exploded to the surface as if it had been building up to this moment. The blade in my hand, my legs spread over his chest, I loomed over him, staring into his eyes and then at his heart. While the desire to murder him was strong, so were the voices of Neruda and Lorca that passed through my mind, praising life as sacred and challenging me: How can you kill and still be a poet? How can you ever write another poem if you disrespect life in this manner? (Place 206)

Baca dropped the knife and began to search for deeper meaning. A fellow inmate educated him on the history of the Chicano people. By learning about their legends and folklore, their deep sense of family and connection to the earth, Baca began to understand that American society had redeﬁ ned his culture, labeled it “inferior and lesser in moral character” (Place 225). His writing began to reﬂect that deepening connection to his people. During this time he wrote the poem “Healing Earthquakes,” which reﬂects the quiet power one man can have to redeﬁ ne himself. Meanwhile, Baca’s poetry was drawing attention. Fellow inmates convinced him to submit his poems to magazines like

Jimmy Santiago Baca 37

Mother Jones, Illuminations, and Greenﬁeld Review, where he found editors who liked his work and encouraged him. Both Timberline Press and Rock Bottom Press asked for collections of his poetry for chapbooks. Baca’s vow to live the life worthy of a poet and of his people was continually challenged by a prison system that makes no attempt to recognize individuality. By the time he was released in 1978, he was 26-years old and his father had died of alcohol-related illness. He had lost every sense of how to function in the outside world and emerged from prison alone and afraid, yearning for the well-deﬁned space of prison life. Still, he continued to write and study poetry, and in 1979 he earned his GED. After a time he returned to Albuquerque and found a steady job working as a night watchman at a house for court-supervised adolescents, where he met a counselor named Beatrice who shared his love of books and poetry. They were married in 1981 and had two sons. Family took a primary role in Baca’s life and he reconnected with his brother, Mieyo, and his sister, Martina. When his mother reentered his life, everything seemed to be moving full circle. Although she was still pretending to be Anglo and living afﬂuently with the man who had convinced her to abandon her children, his mother seemed sincere in her desire to be part of Baca’s life. She spoke of leaving her husband and telling her white children about their half siblings. Before she could, her husband shot her and himself. Her death deeply impacted Baca’s brother Mieyo, who returned to drinking heavily. Within the year, he was found bludgeoned to death in an alley. In the past, Baca would have reacted to such overwhelming personal tragedies with violence; now he could pour his pain and anger into his poetry. Baca completed his B.A. in English at the University of New Mexico and was later awarded an honorary Ph.D. He has published several volumes of poetry, a memoir, a novel in verse, and a screenplay, Blood In . . . Blood Out: Bound by Honor, which was made into a major motion picture. While his work gives voice to the anguish of the oppressed and the despair of the forgotten, like his own life it also reﬂects a constant hope for spiritual

rebirth. In the anthology Contemporary American Ethnic Poets, Linda Cullum claims this sanguinity is primarily what makes his work so distinctive: Unlike a growing number of “prison writers” who infuse their work with rage and desolation, Baca writes poems dealing with spiritual birth and triumph over tragedy . . . marked by themes of transformation, self-actualization, and metamorphosis.

His work has been widely recognized for its emotional honesty and passion, earning a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1986), the Pushcart Prize (1988), the American Book Award for Poetry (for Martín & Meditations on the South Valley, 1989), and the International Prize (for A Place to Stand, 2001). Despite the critical acclaim, no writer is immune to controversy. The release of Blood In . . . Blood Out: Bound by Honor was met with disapproval by some members of the Hispanic community, who claimed the movie portrayed their culture in a negative manner. Baca addresses their criticism in Working in the Dark: Reﬂections of a Poet of the Barrio: In this ﬁ lm I have cried out my rage, and nakedly shown the pain and abuse of life behind bars. All of this is an authentic part of our reality, and to deny it is to make us less than what we are. I write to reveal all the treasures of Chicano experience, all that I have learned about life through our heritage, with nothing left out, of the suffering and the joy, because all of it has made us who we are. I believe that we will never overcome our obstacles unless we tell the whole truth, and in everything I write this is what I strive to do. (89)

Although Baca’s work has done much to shed light on the cycle of neglect and oppression that has long prevented Hispanic and Native American peoples from being accepted as equally American by their Anglo neighbors, Baca knows sometimes

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

words are not enough. In 2005, he founded Cedar Tree Inc., a nonproﬁt foundation that “works to give people of all walks of life the opportunity to become educated and improve their lives” (jimmysantiagobaca.com). Cedar Tree provides individuals with free instruction, books, writing material, and scholarships. In 2006, Baca was awarded the Cornelius P. Turner Award, which recognizes GED graduates who have made outstanding contributions to society in the ﬁeld of education, justice, health, public service, or social welfare. Despite everything he has done to illuminate the injustices of American society, Jimmy Santiago Baca feels he can never stop “working in the dark to create for my people our own unique light” (Working 21).

Martín & Meditations on the South Valley (1987) In her introduction to this book of poetry, Denise Levertov likens Martín & Meditations on the South Valley to a hero tale: Passing through the desert he emerges into a green and fertile valley of love and birth, but he has learned that the valley will be his to keep only if he cherishes it. The vow to never abandon his child . . . extends beyond the child . . . [to include] Martín’s self. . . . Thus, the poem is essentially a myth of redemption. (xiv–xv)

The desert through which Martín must pass is similar in many ways to the harsh landscape of Baca’s own life. Both experience abandonment and life on the streets. Both struggle to understand the cruel circumstances fate has dealt them. And both eventually become heroes, rescuing themselves from life in prison to ﬁ nd solace and acceptance through creation. In the second portion of the book, Meditations on the South Valley, Martín’s home burns down, destroying 10 years’ worth of his writing. Martín struggles with the “end of all the cities and peoples I had become” (54). While Martín rebuilds his home,

his family is forced to move from the South Valley to the Heights, a place that represents success to some, but loss of self to Martín. Surrounded by walls that are “strangely clean and new,” among “the ceramic faces of women” and “buddha-cheeked men / who all wear straw hats / to walk their poodles” (55), Martín strives to understand the difference in cultures, ﬁ nding that “in the Valley an old truck symbolizes prestige / and in the Heights, poverty. / Worth is determined in the Valley / by age and durability, / and in the Heights, by newness / and impression” (59). The cultural divide leaves Martín feeling lost and he searches for deeper meaning in Aztlán, the land of his forefathers. Geographically, Aztlán refers to the mythic home of the Aztec people, believed to be the area annexed by the United States after the MexicanAmerican War—speciﬁcally Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California. But for Martín and the Chicano people, Aztlán is more than a place. As Robert Franklin Gish explains in Beyond Bounds, Aztlán is “la sagrada tierra, the mother, the nourisher,” and for the writer “also a muse, an inspirer, the means of artistic revelation and epiphany” (139). In seeking out Aztlán, Martín discovers not only his history, but also the pieces of himself that he has lost.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the lines “Then, / the fairytale of my small life / stopped / when mother and father / abandoned me, and . . . I came forth into the dark world of freedom” (5). What does Baca’s juxtaposition of the concepts of fairy tale and freedom imply? Do you associate freedom more with childhood or adulthood? Why? 2. Part 6 of Meditations on the South Valley discusses the life lived “between breakdowns and break-ups.” In what ways might such a life be fuller than “a life with everything perfect”? Discuss your answer fully. 3. Martín describes rebuilding his house as giving birth, yet he says he “became a child of the house” (100). In what ways is childbirth an opportunity for the parents to be reborn? Give speciﬁc examples to support your argument.

Jimmy Santiago Baca 39

Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems (1990) While the publication date on this anthology is 1990, 12 years after Baca’s release from prison, most of the poems were written during his incarceration. Reﬂected within the lines is Baca’s deepening sense that America has failed to fulﬁ ll its promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness equally for all citizens. Baca tells the interviewer John Keene that while the outward results of such denials are easily witnessed, his poetry is concerned with what lies beneath: The other side of life, however, is a bit more complicated and concerns what happens in our souls, what constitutes all the cosmic and spiritual clashes that rearrange the plates of our spiritual landscapes. . . . I don’t try to harvest my poetry from what happens in society’s institutions as much as I try to reap the poems from what’s happening behind the boundaries of society. (Keene)

The poems themselves emerge from behind the boundaries of society, from prison’s depths and the ignored alleyways of the barrios, challenging readers to see the people there. The collection’s title poem, “Immigrants in Our Own Land,” likens the newly incarcerated to the recent immigrant. Both go to new lands, seeking to “get away from false promises, / from dictators in our neighborhoods, / who wore blue suits and broke our doors down when they felt like, / swinging clubs and shooting guns as they pleased” (12). They hope for a better life in the new world, of “being able to ﬁ nish school . . . learning an extra good trade.” Instead they ﬁ nd “it’s no different here. It’s all concentrated” (12). In the poem “So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs from Americans,” Baca tackles political rhetoric head-on, challenging those who complain of immigrants stealing their jobs to show him “just where the hell are these ﬁghters” (24). The poem begins amicably enough; readers smile with the opening lines “O Yes? Do they come on horses / with riﬂes, and say / Ese

gringo, gimmee your job?” and with Baca’s tonguein-cheek portrayal of people being mugged, the thieves demanding not money or jewels, but their jobs. Baca’s humor serves dual purposes: to expose the inanity of such claims and to jolly readers into letting down their guard. Once readers are disarmed, nodding along with Baca, he delivers his rebuttal: 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 have something. (24)

In an interview with John Keene, Baca describes the employment situation for many Chicanos as a “slave system that nobody wants to recognize.” When one examines the types of jobs many of these “Mexicans” are taking—receiving as little as ﬁve dollars for an entire day’s hard physical labor—it is difﬁcult to imagine who would want the job in the ﬁ rst place. Baca contends that many Chicano workers take such low-paying jobs because those jobs are the only ones available; the need to pay their bills and feed their families puts them “completely at the mercy of these employers.” Despite the hardships faced by the people in his poems, Baca writes not about loss of power, but of the healing that results from reclaiming power. In discussing the role of a poet, he says: I do believe the poet’s job in the real sense of the word is to always be there where the emotional and psychic and spiritual earthquakes are happening, and to be strong enough to be able to sing in those big chasms. . . . We need to get to the epicenters before they happen, so we can participate in that power. Not be the victims of it. (Keene)

“Healing Earthquakes” details the journey of the poet into that chasm of “streets torn and twisted like gnawed bark” to “the crumbled houses of my people, / Through the scorpion-tailed magnums and / carbines / Held at their heads” (59). The poet

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

lifts his people, not by adding to the violence, but by “splitting its own body and heart,” so that “a lesser man by all the law books” may become more. The seeming incompatibility of the two words in the title adds to the force of the poem, implying that healing cannot occur through gentle persuasion, but must be wrenched from earth’s soul and bled from earth’s veins. Baca says that is how he determines whether he has written a good poem: “If it feels like I’ve hit on a jugular . . . if I can feel it in the poem, then the poem’s okay” (Keene).

For Discussion or Writing 1. The inmates in “Immigrants in Our Own Land” go to prison “thinking they’ll get a chance to change their lives.” How do the changes they experience differ from their expectations? Are those changes intended by the penal system? Does the American prison system truly offer the chance for rehabilitation? 2. In “Immigrants in Our Own Land,” Baca describes inmates’ being “sent to work as dishwashers, / to work in ﬁelds for three cents an hour.” Examine the role of inmate work programs. Should inmates be forced to work? Who beneﬁts from such programs? 3. Examine the claims addressed by Baca in “So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs from Americans.” How has America’s immigration policy determined the jobs available to immigrants? 4. Consider the ways in which the United States deﬁnes the value of its citizens. How is “a man awaking to the day with ground to stand upon and defend” (“Healing Earthquakes”) both disdained by America and the very deﬁnition of America?

Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio (1992) After the release of his ﬁ lm Blood In . . . Blood Out, Baca faced criticism regarding his portrayal of Chicanos. Working in the Dark is, in part, his answer to those critics. The autobiographical essays in this volume justify his right as a Chicano to testify to what he has seen. Baca writes about the

deep-seated bigotry in an America that outwardly claims equal rights for all citizens while denying many of those rights on the basis of ethnicity. He writes of oppression not to justify the wrongdoing of Chicano individuals, but to explain the circumstances that have reduced a once-proud people to second-class citizens. Through his earlier works, Baca described the tremendous obstacles placed in his path by poverty and racism. Here Baca further addresses those factors that might hinder minority success, detailing how language and poetry gave him the power to surmount them when so many others cannot. Baca cautions readers that he is “no polite singer, like so many poets of the European tradition. I am myself, Chicano, and I follow the wind-swept trail of my people, and how they convey emotion and song in their rituals” (62). His writing is angry and profane when it should be, using necessary metaphors to describe the horriﬁc treatment he suffered in penal institutions, places he condemns as “America’s worst nightmare” (13). In the ﬁ rst section of this book, he takes readers inside this nightmare, to view the beatings and conﬁ nement, the isolation and despair, the utter humiliation that deﬁ ned his life as an inmate. It was his search for escape from self-hatred that led him to books and to writing, guiding him to ﬁ nd in language a freedom that could not be conﬁ ned by jail walls: Writing bridged my divided life of prisoner and free man. I wrote of the emotional butchery of prisons, and of my acute gratitude for poetry. . . . I wrote to sublimate my rage, from a place where all hope is gone, from a madness of having been damaged too much, from a silence of killing rage. I wrote to avenge the betrayals of a lifetime, to purge the bitterness of injustice. (11)

In another essay, Baca returns to San Quentin years later, not as inmate, but as actor and screenwriter, to ﬁ lm the movie Blood In . . . Blood Out. The disparity he experienced during this time, spending his days among the stark conﬁ nement of the hopeless and forgotten, his evenings walking free among the privileged and forgetful, created in him the feeling

Jimmy Santiago Baca 41

that he was inhabiting two worlds. Such reeling disequilibrium stirred his old hatred and helplessness: The urge grew in me to foment a revolt: tear down the walls, herd the guards into the bay, burn down everything until nothing was left but a smoldering heap of blackened bricks and molten iron. And I was ﬁ lled with a yearning to escape, to go home and live the new life I had fought so hard to make. (17)

Baca left San Quentin realizing that his wounds would never completely heal, but they had helped to form the poet he had become. And that poet felt an obligation to tell the whole truth about what it means to be Chicano.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Baca condemns the prison system as entrenching, rather than reforming, criminality. He writes, “Conﬁ nement perverts and destroys every skill a man needs to live productively in society” (Working 16). What alternatives might we consider for the rehabilitation of nonviolent criminals? Justify your answer. 2. In “Imagine My Life,” Baca describes his early experiences with school. Compare JUDITH ORTIZ COFER’s experiences with the educational system to Baca’s. How is language, both spoken and written, reserved for the privileged and used as a weapon against the poor? 3. Baca has written, “Government grants and academic security are stultifying for the poet. Government should have no hand in poetry, in saying what poetry is, or validating this poet or that. The poet’s work is private and lonely” (Working 42). Do you agree or disagree with that statement? Defend your answer.

A Place to Stand (2001) As a small child, Baca struggled to understand the events around him and the choices made by the adults in his life. As an adult, he began to understand that our choices are inﬂuenced by the context

in which we live. He has endeavored his whole life to understand the contexts of his parents’ lives, but his questions have always been met with reluctance or refusal. After the births of his sons, Baca realized that they would have questions, too, questions about his life and the contexts of the choices that would make him ﬁ rst prisoner, then poet. Although much of his poetry is rooted in his own experience, Baca did not want his children to have to sift fact from ﬁction. According to the prologue of A Place to Stand, he wrote this memoir so that his children would “know their father’s story, good parts and bad . . . so that they can make wiser choices where I did not and be invigorated with the courage and honor to live better lives” (6). His memoir is also meant as a model for young Chicano people, who Baca says have been taught as a culture that it is “much better to keep your silence and not try to overreach yourself.” He wants them to “break the silence” so that they may see their “feelings are reafﬁ rmed a million times throughout the day by other people who feel the same way” (Keene). In this memoir, Baca has broken the silence about what it means to grow up Chicano in American society. One of the most important themes of Baca’s memoir is the power of childhood experiences to shape the adults we become. As a small child, Baca accompanied his mother to the local jail after his father’s arrest for drunk driving. Although his father was dangerous when he drank, Baca had difﬁculty reconciling the confusion and helplessness he felt at leaving his father behind in such a fearsome place. He writes: In time I would become all too familiar with such places, not only with those very same cells down on Garcia Street but with a long string of others as well, on different if equally dusty streets, with different but similar jailers, different but similar men. That initial encounter, however, never left me. It remained a ﬁxed, haunting reference point to which I would return to time and again. Whether I was approaching it or seeking escape from it, jail always deﬁned in some way the measure of my life. (3)

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Jail may have deﬁ ned the measure of his life, but it was Baca who would determine what would happen within the conﬁ nes of that life. Whereas many inmates turned to violence as an outlet for the rage instilled by the dehumanizing conditions of prison, Baca turned to language. He read whatever he could get his hands on—letters, religious pamphlets, the dictionary—until he ﬁ nally found a “defense against the madness” in the works of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (214). In the sensory deprivation of solitary conﬁ nement, language gave him vision: “Words electriﬁed me. I could smell and taste and see their images vividly” (185). He poured his soul into journals, letters, and poetry, writing his way through the narrow bars of his cell to a spiritual freedom. Baca’s poetry took many forms in prison. Sometimes he would sell his poetry to other inmates, so they could impress their wives and girlfriends with tender words, but most of the time Baca’s poetry reﬂected the insanity of prison life. He wrote about the institutionalized abuse prisoners suffered, the sharp racial divisions between prisoners, and the daily struggle to remain human. One of the ﬁ rst poems Baca published, “They Only Came to See the Zoo,” was written from his prison cell and is printed in this book. The poem reﬂects the helplessness an inmate feels when he realizes that the legislators touring the cell block on a fact-ﬁ nding visit are really only there for their own publicity. He uses imagery of the desert and death to portray the loss of hope and the sacriﬁce of will suffered by those within the prison system. In an interview with Gabriel Meléndez, Baca admits the poem was also a call to action: That was some sort of voice in me talking to another voice in me, saying, “you’ve lived this: Did you tell them? Did you tell them?” It was almost the voice of guilt saying, “your obligation is to write!”

The hardest component of any memoir is to portray through a snapshot into the writer’s life a universal lesson or truth. The truth in Baca’s memoir is evident in the ﬁnal chapter. Emerging from prison,

Baca works hard to earn his GED and to build a home for his new family. With his poetry gaining popularity, this could easily be the happily-ever-after of fairy tales. But Baca takes his story to an honest ending: His life is not perfect upon his release; his parents and brother all die in separate, tragic incidents; and he is left trying “to understand how so much injustice could happen to such good people” (263). There is no answer to that question, but Baca ﬁnds a sense of peace when he is ﬁnally able to forgive: I began to forgive them [his parents] for what they had done or not done. I forgave myself for all my mistakes and for all I had done to hurt others. I forgave the world for how it had treated us. (264)

For Discussion or Writing 1. How does the title “They Only Came to See the Zoo” provide context for the poem? Does the title support or undermine the underlying message? 2. Discuss the lines “Our muscles warped and scarr’d / wrap around our skeletons / like hot winds / That sweep the desert ﬂoor / In search of shade, / Sleeping each night / In the hollow of petriﬁed / Skulls.” How might these lines describe more than the physical condition of the inmates? 3. A Place to Stand ends with a multitude of images: Church bells are ringing, it is raining, a baby is being baptized, the church is conducting a special service to apologize for sins against indigenous peoples. How do these images, both individually and collectively, contribute to the resolution of Baca’s memoir?

The Importance of a Piece of Paper (2004) In his ﬁ rst collection of short stories, Baca delves into the complexities faced when traditional and modern attitudes collide. He shows readers the heart and soul of characters who struggle to maintain a sense of self while searching for their places

Jimmy Santiago Baca 43

in a society that would ignore them. These stories, as does his poetry, spring from Baca’s own passions and experiences. In the title story, “The Importance of a Piece of Paper,” readers meet Marisol and her two brothers, Pancho and Adan. They are a family bound to the land by their parents’ farm and the land grant that connects the entire community. Adan, despite protest from his siblings, sells his share of the land to Jaylen, an outsider, inadvertently causing personal disaster for Pancho and endangering the entire community’s way of life. Within the larger frame is a love story: Marisol falls in love with the outsider. Baca uses Pancho’s disapproval of their relationship to illustrate further the trauma of Adan’s selling his land to a white man: The two cultures seldom mixed. Whether anyone admitted or talked about it openly, the ill feelings between Hispanics and gringos were real and present. The differences went deeper than mere cultural customs; there was long-standing, deep resentment toward Anglos for what they had done to Chicanos in the past. (71)

However, it is not cultural differences or racial tension that come between Marisol and Jaylen; they are divided over a legal issue. Jaylen does not understand the community’s reliance on an old land grant. He ﬁ nds its rules a nuisance. When he sues to dissolve the land grant, Marisol must choose sides. The impetus for this story originated in part in Baca’s concern that the Chicano people have “been disenfranchised from our culture, from our language, from our political base, from our land” (Gish 138). Baca has done more than write about the issue: Through his involvement with the Atrisco Land Rights Council in Albuquerque, he works actively to preserve a century-old agreement that granted 49,000 acres on the West Mesa of Albuquerque to the Chicano community there (Gish 138). “Runaway” is perhaps the most heart-wrenching story in the collection. Through the character of Juanito (called Runaway because of his propensity

for ﬂ ight), readers gain insight into the hardship of life in an orphanage. Runaway, as is Baca, is taken from his grandmother at a young age and placed in an orphanage. Runaway continually escapes from Saint Anthony’s Boys’ Home, returning each time to his grandmother, whose failing eyesight concerns him. As part of his punishment for his truancy, Runaway is ordered by Sister Anna Louise to buff the tiles in the chapel. While he is there, Father O’Neil, known for his “transgressive behavior with some of the kids” (187), rapes a newcomer in a confessional. Runaway takes the victim, a mute Indian boy, to the inﬁ rmary. The Indian runs away and when he returns he is “caked in grime” (209). Sister Anna Louise orders Runaway to clean the boy, who is unresponsive. Runaway is disgusted and resentful of the chore until he notices “red liquid mixing with the brown water in the drain. He followed the red liquid up the boy’s legs to the buttocks and realized where the blood was coming from” (214). Runaway takes the boy, whom he nicknames “Bullet,” under his wing, telling his friends, “He’s been through a lot—treat him straight up” (216). Baca tells the interviewer John Keene that the shower scene between the two boys in this story is symbolic of what the Chicano people must do in order to reclaim their Chicanismo, which he describes as “a state of being, which has to do with compassion and humility and patience and love.” In washing the Indian child’s body, the Chicano boy is representative of the act of contrition that Baca suggests is necessary to grieve fully the loss suffered by his people.

For Discussion or Writing 1. As so many literary couples before them do, Marisol and Jaylen, in “The Importance of a Piece of Paper,” face social disapproval. Find and compare other examples of forbidden love. How does society’s censure limit the choices available to each couple? Why does the theme of forbidden love hold such universal appeal? 2. What is the signiﬁcance of Jaylen’s profession to the story entitled “The Importance of a Piece of Paper”? How does each character’s occupation

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

(Marisol as a student of Chicano studies, Pancho as a racehorse trainer, Adan as lawyer, and Jaylen as archaeologist) add layers to the story? 3. In Baca’s original version of “Runaway,” the shower scene entailed Runaway’s kneeling to wash Bullet’s feet (Keene). What signiﬁ cance does each version carry? What are some possible reasons that Baca may have made the change? 4. After a particularly bad beating, Runaway takes his bruises as a sign that he is turning black: “He was tired of being himself and having the same life everyday. He fully believed that a deserving person could be transformed, if the divine powers willed it so” (202). What are the roots of Runaway’s belief that he can be beaten into something better than he is? Does society share that belief?

poem” (Working 64). Find examples of rebirth and metamorphosis through his work. Why are these themes so vital to his writing? 4. In Working in the Dark, Baca writes about the effects society’s expectations had on him: They told me I was violent and I became violent, they told me I was ignorant and I feigned ignorance. It was taken for granted that I would work for slave rations at the most foul and ﬁ lthy jobs, and I did. It was taken for granted that I could not resolve my own problems, and I relinquished control of my life to society’s masters. (35)

Who are “society’s masters”? How is each of us beneﬁted or hindered by their expectations?

WORKS CITED

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON BACA AND HIS WORK 1. Baca writes that he was tempted to become “as blue-eyed and blond-haired an American as anyone.” Compare this sentiment with the feelings experienced by CHANG-R AE L EE’s Henry Park in Native Speaker. How does the desire to assimilate into an oppressive culture affect minorities within that culture? Discuss America’s racial makeup as “melting pot” versus “tossed salad.” What does each metaphor imply about the process of assimilation? Which metaphor is more accurate? 2. In an interview with John Keene in 1994, Baca claims that many poets who have done prison time are lauded as heroes, “except in America, where those hailed as poets usually have never walked within a planet’s distance of prison.” Is the United States reluctant to herald people who have been in prison as poets? Why? 3. Rebirth and metamorphosis are common themes in Baca’s work. He even uses them to describe his role as a poet: “I am born through the coupling of words and my birth-cry is the

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Baca, Jimmy Santiago. Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems. New York: New Directions, 1990. ———. The Importance of a Piece of Paper. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2004. ———. Martín & Meditations on the South Valley. New York: New Directions, 1987. ———. A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet. New York: Grove Press, 2001. ———. Working in the Dark: Reﬂections of a Poet of the Barrio. Santa Fe, N. Mex.: Red Crane Books, 1992. Cullum, Linda. “Jimmy Santiago Baca.” In Contemporary American Ethnic Poets: Lives, Works, Sources. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Forché, Carolyn. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1993. Gish, Robert Franklin. Beyond Bounds: Cross-Cultural Essays on Anglo, American Indian, and Chicano Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Keene, John. “Poetry Is What We Speak to Each Other: An Interview with Jimmy Santiago Baca.” Callaloo: A Journal of African American and

Jimmy Santiago Baca 45

African Arts and Letters, Winter 1994. Available online. URL: www.english.uiuc.edu. Accessed January 10, 2007. Meléndez, Ganriel. “Carrying the Magic of His Peoples in His Heart: An Interview with Jimmy Santiago Baca.” Las Americas Journal. Available

online. URL: www.english.uiuc.edu. Accessed January 10, 2007. Moyers, Bill. “Jimmy Santiago Baca.” In The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Kathy Higgs-Coulthard

Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995) Revolution begins with the self, in the self. (“The Scattered Sopranos”)

tre’s Spaghetti House, for instance, she offered to wash dishes so that she could listen to the George Wallington Quartet while out back with her huge soapy pot. Another job, at the exotic dance club Mona’s, required keeping a cab at the curb for the dancers and angry patrons. At the Open Door, she often had the opportunity to hear Miles Davis, whose jazz later inﬂuenced her writing. While working on her master’s degree, Bambara served as program director at Colony Settlement House. From an early age, she was surrounded by those who raised critical questions and issues—especially her mother and others who expounded their views at speakers’ corners in Harlem. Her short stories in particular reﬂect a political voice that began early on. While teaching and serving as the director of the SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) at City College of New York from 1965 to 1969, Bambara became involved in community organizations and with sociopolitical issues. Her membership in this community of ideas was critical to her. The sense of community she developed in Harlem recurs as a regular theme in her short-story collections Gorilla, My Love and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive; a novel, The Salt Eaters; and Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, a posthumously published collection of ﬁction, essays, and interviews. Before her own writing was independently published, she edited many anthologies. The ﬁ rst,

iltona Mirkin Cade was born on March 25, 1939. She spent her childhood in Harlem observing and “adopting people” (Deep Sightings 208–209). For the rest of her life, she would hold Harlem as her ideal community in terms of diversity, freedom of political discussion, and shared culture. As a “truth-seeker,” she enjoyed comparing different opinions and perspectives. She cared as much about the questions being asked as the many different responses and found it necessary to understand them all. Perhaps this is why her voice speaks to audiences so strongly. She began her writing as the neighborhood scribe, drawing up contracts for car sales and letters of complaint (219). Her keen ability to ask questions was matched by her gift of simply listening. Her mother gave her space; she “had great respect for the life of the mind,” Bambara wrote (212). In kindergarten, Miltona shortened her name to Toni. She came upon Bambara later in life, when she was pregnant with her daughter, and took it as her last name. Fittingly, as a writer, artist, teacher, activist, mother, and ﬁ lmmaker, Bambara was constantly evolving. Toni Cade Bambara attended the Modern School and in 1959 graduated from Queen’s College (Deep Sightings 222). To fulﬁ ll a creative need and to maintain her connection with the arts, she often volunteered to model for art classes. She worked numerous odd jobs in the Village—at Montmar-

Toni Cade Bambara

The Black Woman (1970), occurred at the height of the Civil Rights and women’s movements. She contributed three essays to the collection, which also featured the writings of NIKKI GIOVANNI, A LICE WALKER , and others whose works were just becoming well known. Bambara felt the anthology would “open the door and prove that there was a market” for black women’s work (Deep Sightings 230). Her instincts to keep the price as well as the size of the book small helped make the collection a success. As a result, Bambara’s popularity soared. The literary world began to look to her as a spokesperson for women’s issues. Answering calls to give lectures and workshops helped her to solidify a network of women who would continue to inﬂuence and guide her. Her second anthology, Tales and Stories for Black Folks, was published in 1971. Bambara describes the collection as stories she “wished [she] had read growing up” (Schirack). These stories reﬂect the African-American family, heritage, and oral tradition. What Bambara loves most about the book is that its reﬂections of a positive black family were something her students could identify with, allowing them to experience and share in a work based on their cultural traditions. Bambara put her students’ writings into the text, giving them much more than a grade—even if it was nothing more than the knowledge that everyone on campus owned a copy. Gorilla, My Love, a collection of short stories with overlapping themes and characters, was published in 1972. In the preface, Bambara claims not to have based her stories on actual experience—neither people nor events—in any way. Regardless, she created a wide range of believable characters—dealing with ageism, loss of control, love, power, education, family, identity—with whom her readers could identify. Bambara also struck a nerve with readers through her use of humor, as when one of her characters responds to her ﬁ rst surgery: “Jewel awakened . . . overwhelmed with . . . an irretrievable loss, till she remembered it was only her tonsils after all” (Gorilla, My Love 99). With this collection as well as the rest of her work, Bambara made use of an unmistakable

vernacular that established identity, characterization, and, at times, setting. Gorilla, My Love reads as an oral tradition in which something is to be learned and treasured in each of the stories. The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, a second collection of short stories, was published in 1977. Between the two publications, Bambara traveled extensively. In Cuba, she saw women actively participating in the resolution of class and color conﬂ icts. Her return from Cuba made her realize how her writing could become a “weapon in a [political] struggle” (Deep Sightings 219). Similarly, in Vietnam, she was “struck by the women’s ability to break through traditional roles, traditional expectations” (Schirack). While traveling, she raised critical questions and took needed materials like penicillin, building materials, mops, diaphragms, and blood plasma to various locales; all the while, her own perceptions and writerly abilities were developing (Deep Sightings 233). After a second trip to North Vietnam became unfeasible, Bambara moved with her daughter to Atlanta and turned seriously to compiling the stories that would become The Sea Birds Are Still Alive. “Most of those stories,” she said, “had not been published; been hanging around the house, and they were completed during that spring and summer” (234). Bambara’s focus turned once again to her writing. Her ﬁ rst novel, The Salt Eaters, written in 1978 and published in 1980, came about somewhat by accident. The novel began as entries in her journal. Raising yet another critical question, Bambara wondered why spiritual and political people were so separate and in her writing tried to work out the puzzle. She had hoped that the two worlds would merge in a short story, whose main character, Velma, would contribute to the synthesis of spiritual and political. However, Bambara says that the work grew on her, soon becoming too large for her favorite genre. As the novel developed in length and complexity, Bambara found, “I was writing quite beyond myself in a number of ways” (235). Unfortunately, reaction to the novel was mixed, with reviewers ﬁ nding that Bambara’s strength lay in short ﬁction rather than in the novel form.

48 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

The power of the spoken word was not lost on Bambara, who began to look at her work in theatrical terms. The presentation of The Sea Birds was shaped by a short story written in seven sections. Between acts, she envisioned having music played, greeting cards from children in Vietnam being read, and artwork shown. Despite growing requests for public appearances, Bambara preferred to stay focused on her writing. “I am frequently asked to give a paper at a conference and I refuse,” she has said of this time. “I don’t do papers unless I am being paid to write an essay that is going to be published somewhere. . . . But I’m not going to do a talk and a paper. People then ask me to give a talk” (216). And so her writing took precedence over a more public existence. Yet all of these impulses to pursue various media made up Bambara’s aesthetic—intersecting, dividing, and reforming. Soon Bambara began to see ﬁ lmmaking as a place to make her own rules and access African-American culture on her own terms. This took her to the founder-director of the Scribe Video Center, Louis Massiah. Preferring to learn editing, she learned that many ﬁ lms are actually structured and given substance in the editing room. Already experienced in creating work that spoke visually to readers, she believed she could extend this strong visual sense to the screen. In “Gorilla, My Love,” for example, she had created a vivid image in this scene: “Mississippi Ham Rider brought his guitar and his granddaughter. He had on a white shirt and left the greatcoat at home. He mumbled his greetings and straddled a chair, dislocating my leg in the process. . . . Teddy heaved big bowls of things onto the table. There were collard greens and black-eye peas and ham hocks and a long pan of cornbread” (55). Surely enough, “Gorilla, My Love,” “Medley,” and “Witchbird” were easily translated into ﬁ lm. Bambara held a blatant distaste for Hollywood’s version of blacks and felt an urgency to change the industry. Her ﬁ rst documentary, The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986), won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Using her “truth-seeking” philosophy, she relied on interviews and eyewitness accounts. In this 90-minute gun battle of an

emerging black organization, the MOVE headquarters in Philadelphia and Cobb’s Creek community were affected; ultimately, a bomb was dropped on the headquarters and 61 surrounding homes, killing 11 (Schirack). Diagnosed with colon cancer in 1993, Bambara refused to be beaten. She continued working, determined to “kick cancer’s ass” (4). Just before her death on December 9, 1995, her documentary W. E. B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices, which she worked on with Massiah, was released. Two additional works, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations (1996) and Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), a novel, were posthumously published, a tribute to a ﬁghting spirit that worked up to the very end. Toni Cade Bambara understood her purpose in any of her selected media. The many and diverse roles she played are reﬂected in each of her works. In an interview with Kay Bonetti of the American Audio Prose Library, Bambara said, “When I look back at my work with any little distance, the two characteristics that jump out at me is one, the tremendous capacity for laughter, but also a tremendous capacity for rage” (Bonetti 1). It is these twin impulses that are operative in so many of her creative works.

Gorilla, My Love (1972) The title story in this collection, “Gorilla, My Love,” questions adults’ treatment of children. Bambara introduces the reader to the character Hazel, variously nicknamed Scout, Blackbird, Miss Mufﬁn, Peaches, and probably many others, depending on the situation and to whom she is talking. The narrator, a ball of emotion by the close of this story, “with grownups playin change-up and turnin you round every which way so bad,” blames Hunca Bubba for the turmoil in her life and her uncertain sense of identity (20). “Grownups ﬁgure they can treat you just anyhow,” Hazel asserts (15). She ﬁ nds an ally in her brother as he cries beside her. Only another child can understand how she is feeling.

Toni Cade Bambara

The story “My Man Bovanne” has the audacity to look at parents from their own perspective rather than as the people who continually embarrass us. We see Hazel admittedly, perhaps intentionally, enjoying herself at a party to the dismay of her children. Each one takes a turn at reprimanding his or her Mama. But at 62, Hazel is dancing for herself. She knows the consequences even as she is choosing to partner with Bovanne. She understands that he is no longer someone desirable to the neighborhood, although at one time this blind man ﬁxed children’s skates and whatnot. She recognizes and has sympathy for his blindness and awkwardness. She narrates the negative responses from onlookers as she dances, but it makes her enjoy the dance all the more. From Joe Lee’s frown to Task’s embarrassment over her “makin a spectacle of [herself],” the tone of the party has changed in a few swings of her hips. The argument transforms, as we learn that her children are not so much upset about her dancing as by her disregard of Mr. Trent that evening. Her Man, Bovanne, and their dance have become a political statement, and his blindness a symbol. In “Raymond’s Run,” the dynamic of Hazel’s family is present from the very ﬁ rst paragraph. The layering of characters in this short story allows the reader to learn about the narrator, whose responsibility for her brother, Raymond, exists in each word. In Hazel’s interactions with neighborhood peers and adults, it becomes clear what Hazel values in herself and what she appreciates—and does not—in others. She has created a space for herself through running: “I run. That’s what I’m all about” (28). Her family, too, appears to share this talent. By the close of the story, we see that Hazel’s running has transformed her as well as her relationship with her brother. Bambara constantly reminds us of the way that one life leans on another. Such is the case with the story “Playin with Punjab.” That moment of being off-balance and accounting for and adjusting to the weight before regaining balance is one of Bambara’s many storytelling talents. It is in these moments when one character’s story changes another’s. Through the politics in this particular story, it seems that the neighborhood’s voice is lost.

“The Lesson” teaches its characters about cultural and economic differences. Miss Moore, “the only woman on the block with no ﬁ rst name,” feels the need to take care of the children of the neighborhood, seeking to teach them what she deems important during the summer months (87). Her students, however, resist her efforts, submitting only at their parents’ demand. Miss Moore has the power to see beyond the here and now for her students’ lives and attempts to create lessons by imparting her knowledge to them. They respond with sarcastic comments and wisecracks; only in retrospect do they recognize Miss Moore’s wisdom. At Miss Moore’s suggestion, the students go to New York to window-shop at the toy store F. A. O. Schwarz. As children are known to do, they claim the toys they see as their own. When they begin their usual teasing of one another, Miss Moore is ready to challenge one student whose wish list starts with a microscope, asking him to explain its use, while another simultaneously laughs at and is awed by a paperweight. Miss Moore prods the children to think about what their homes are like. “It’s important to have a work area all your own,” she says (91). Soon the students are caught up in looking at the incredible toys and comparing price tags, vying to ﬁ nd the most expensive and intriguing item. The sailboat that Flyboy ﬁ nds wins. Then the comparisons begin. It starts with the world with which they are familiar already, the one in which sailboats cost a quarter, rather than the “one thousand one hundred ninety-ﬁve dollars” of the boat in the window. At Miss Moore’s prompting, they are forced to admit that their boats do not sail and are eventually lost. This symbol in the story deepens as the narrator asks Miss Moore why someone would pay that much for a toy when he could have a real one. This is a question she cannot or does not answer. Anger wells in the students as they line up in front of the mailboxes at Miss Moore’s request. She asks them what they think of F. A. O. Schwarz. Bambara creates a struggle between Miss Moore and the narrator over Sugar’s response about “this not being much of a democracy” (95). Through

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

the irony of this statement and the narrator’s ﬁ nal reﬂection, the reader is able to discern who the actual winner and loser are. In Bambara’s story “The Survivor,” marriage is both negated and romanticized. The journey that Jewel takes in her mind is paralleled by a bus ride to the sweetness of Miss Candy’s. As in many of Bambara’s works, strong women are exercising their power and control. But it is difﬁcult to separate Jewel’s acting from real life, leading the reader to ponder which is fact and ﬁction. This blurred line creates a more complete picture of Jewel. Meanwhile, the conﬁdence Miss Candy exhibits deﬁ nes a survivor as the person who blames herself for mishaps. And Jewel has much to feel guilty about. In “Sweet Town,” a mother-daughter relationship is sliced by love. Bambara takes the reader through a summer romance that ends all too suddenly for Kit. As is often the case with ﬁ rst loves, Kit’s innocence is shattered and she is left fantasizing about reuniting. “Basement” is as difﬁcult to read as any story in the collection. Bambara explores the lengths we go to protect ourselves and to gain and keep friends. She delves into what we allow others, especially our parents, to know about us, and how their expectations of us shape who we are and how much we tell them.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read Mark Twain’s preface to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Bambara’s “A Sort of Preface” to Gorilla, My Love. In what ways are the two similar? Consider the literary devices each author uses, as well as the narrator’s stance. Explain the differences and similarities you ﬁ nd, supporting your response with references to both texts. 2. In her writing, Bambara often addresses the importance of names and naming. Why is this focus such an important one for her? Compare the ﬁ rst chapter of Gorilla, My Love to the ﬁ rst chapter of SANDR A CISNEROS’s House on Mango Street. What does each say about the importance of a name? Cite from both texts to support your answer.

3. A frequent theme for Bambara is the relative merit of innocence and experience. Now that you have observed this theme in Gorilla, My Love, read ﬁve or six poems from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Which do you feel contributes more to life, innocence or experience? Why? Support your response with citations from both Bambara’s and Blake’s texts.

“Medley” (1977) A section of The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, “Medley” is one of the short stories that Bambara has translated into ﬁ lm. The ﬁ rst line of the story drops us into the middle of the action. We are immediately within the consciousness of Sweet Pea, the main character, glimpsing her identity through what she is not. Bambara’s uses of repetition and alliteration welcome us into the aptly titled “Medley.” The mix of emotion is immediately evident in the ﬁ rst few pages. Sweet Pea draws comparisons of her work as mother and as manicurist. She knows she is good at giving manicures and feels she is making connections with each of her clients. Sweet Pea identiﬁes each character by what it is he or she does and what he or she is good at: “Stories are not Hector’s long suit. But he is an absolute artist on windows” (110). The way she describes each character’s passion turns stereotypes upside down. Suddenly, window washing becomes an art form, a skill to be envied and desired. Nor does Sweet Pea neglect anyone’s hands, which she sees as extentions of our identities. As she considers each person’s hands and his or her gifts, Sweet Pea reﬂects on her own, struggling to put her life in order. From all of the disparate compartments in which she lives, there are pieces of her own identity to be gleaned. The ﬁ nal scene shows the character’s transformation and her ability to leave the apartment and step boldly out on her own.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Bambara often depicts her characters in terms of a microcosm, or small world, which she builds

Toni Cade Bambara

from the pieces of their ordinary lives. In so doing, she appears to see her literary characters as having heroic dimension. How does Bambara’s evidentiary theory of heroism differ from traditional ones—say, Aristotle’s view of a hero as a great man upon whom the fate of many people depends? Is it possible to have heroes today? Why or why not? Justify your answer with references to speciﬁc experiences and observations in the story. 2. According to Sweet Pea, “Music and water [are] the healthiest things in the world.” What do you think she means? Do you agree or disagree? Explain your answer in global terms.

The Salt Eaters (1980) Bambara opens her ﬁ rst novel with the revelation that her main character, Velma, has just attempted suicide. The book is divided into chapters emerging from Velma’s consciousness, as she ﬂoats from memory to memory. Each chapter includes characters signiﬁcant to Velma, all with their own parallel stories. Each character depicts Velma in terms of her status as wife, friend, godchild, and political activist. It is difﬁcult for the others to think of Velma as suicidal, since each recollection is of a time when she displayed great strength, despite facing signiﬁcant hardships. In the ramblings of a spiritual healer, Minnie Ransom, the reader begins to see the justiﬁcation for Velma’s suicide attempt and to question whether she really wants to die. Reading about the “difference between eating salt as an antidote to snakebite and turning into salt, succumbing to the serpent” not only explains the title, but also provides insight into why Velma does attempt to take her life (8). The character Minnie Ransom holds power symbolically through her name and spiritually as a healer. Bambara casts Minnie as the essence of traditional African culture, with an ability to transport herself mentally to Africa, where she can consult Ole Wife, a healer of consequence. Minnie questions why she must deal with Mrs. Velma Henry, who, unlike most of the others she attempts

to help, is extremely difﬁcult to reach. Her struggle with Velma has caused Minnie to reﬂect on the changes in the new generation. The reader learns bits and pieces about Minnie’s mentor, someone she knew among the living in her youth. It is not long before the reader encounters Velma’s friends on the bus, traveling to visit her. However, rather than focus on these friends, Bambara draws attention to the unrelated bus driver, Fred Holt. Fred considers the lives of all those he meets as personal reminders of what he does not have. The passengers on the bus become an extension of Fred: The musicians remind him of what he once wished he could be; the women gossiping make him reﬂect on just who his friends are; even an overheard conversation between a couple make him reﬂect on his lonely life and home. Fred seems to have come up missing in every aspect of his life, but the reader develops empathy for him despite his jealousy, envy, and even self-loathing. James “Obie” Lee, Velma’s husband, ﬁ nds hope in Velma’s suicide attempt. He sees his wife in a way that he has been unable to before her attempt. Their daily activities seem to have lost the spark that they once had, early in their marriage. A civil rights activist, in dangerous ways, he has a strong desire for progress. Obie is synonymous for yearning in the novel. Morals are tested through the character of the journalist Buster. Although he has attempted to follow leads in the political underground workings of African Americans, when he reaches a dead end in a potential story, he is more concerned about meeting deadlines than in writing the truth. The political factions he encounters in the community point to an inability of African Americans to unite. Bambara’s obvious statement made through Buster is one readers will see in many of her other works, as she often points out the differences between the generations. Palma, the stereotypical big sister, is not sure just what to feel upon hearing the news about Velma. Her perspective takes Velma out of the victim’s role. For the ﬁ rst time, the reader feels Velma’s strength as more than the undercurrent it has previously been. Palma sums it up in a way that gives order to the previous chapters: “Velma was

52 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

always all right, it was the people around her that were kept in a spin” (144). Fred actually closes this chapter, as his feelings of worthlessness overwhelm the pages. He ﬁ nally begins asking questions that may be read as his—and by extension Velma’s— ﬁ rst glimmering of hope. The change in Velma begins in chapter 7. Within each character, salt references become more numerous and signiﬁcant. Bambara reminds the reader of the ways in which salt can be a double-edged tool for harm or healing. The most obvious symbol is suggested by Obie’s tears. Bambara uses this human-manufactured salt as tangible evidence of the pain these characters feel. She explains Velma’s suicide attempt by the events leading up to the main act, as she portrays how Velma’s pet causes have led to her degradation. The “radioactive waves” that she puts out are felt in the people surrounding her. Or is it that they are sending the waves to her and causing her to feel ill? Despite this questioning, Bambara reiterates that the power to heal is within Velma. She must choose her wellness. Bambara intertwines religion and African spirituality to make Velma’s baptism and rebirth inevitable. So strongly visual is Bamara’s depiction of the events of Velma’s life, the reader senses the drama of it all, watching along with the characters as Minnie directs the documentary of Velma’s breakdown, reenacting and critiquing each facet of her life.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Velma plays multiple roles—as wife, friend, goddaughter, and so on. Have these roles taken her to the edge of reason? How might Velma view the most signiﬁcant role of a woman? Use examples from the text to support your answer. 2. Bambara often intertwines music—ranging from classical to pop in origin—into her work. How does this use of music add to The Salt Eaters? Be speciﬁc in your response, including citations from the text. 3. Read Langston Hughes’s “Jukebox Love Song” and “In Explanation of Our Times.” Write a well-developed essay on how Hughes’s poems and Bambara’s novel complement one another in terms of theme and tone.

4. The carnival that takes place in the novel is represented as something both carnal and symbolic. Most of Bambara’s characters are touched by it in some way. Choose several characters, explaining what the festival signiﬁes for each. Cite speciﬁc examples from the novel.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON BAMBARA AND HER WORK 1. Read The Bluest Eye, by TONI MORRISON. Explain the contempt held for the Shirley Temple doll in this early Morrison novel. Compare and contrast this symbol with one of your choice from Toni Cade Bambara’s work. Discuss in particular how the superimposition of an ideal can affect one’s sense of worth. 2. Bambara believed that writing could serve as a “weapon in a struggle.” Select three incidents from American history in which this statement has proven to be true, discussing how each contributed to a particular struggle. WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

“American Passages: A Literary Survey, Unit 16: The Search for Identity: Authors: Toni Cade Bambara.” Available online. URL: www.learner.org/amerpass/ unit16/authors-1.html. Accessed September 23, 2006. Bambara, Toni Cade. Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations, edited by Toni Morrison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996. ———. Gorilla, My Love. New York: Random House, 1972. ———. The Salt Eaters. New York: Random House, 1980. ———. The Sea Birds Are Still Alive. New York: Random House, 1977. Bonetti, Kay. “An Interview with Toni Cade Bambara.” Columbia, Mo.: American Audio Prose Library, February 1982. Butler-Evans, Elliott. Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

Toni Cade Bambara

Heller, Janet Ruth. “Toni Cade Bambara’s Use of African American Vernacular English in ‘The Lesson.’ ” Style 37, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 279–293. hooks, bell. “Uniquely Toni Cade Bambara.” Black Issues Book Review 2, no. 1 (January–February 2000): 14–16. Parker, Bell, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. New York: Doubleday, 1979.

Schirack, Maureen. “Toni Cade Bambara.” Voices from the Gaps: Women Artists and Writers of Color. University of Minnesota, 26 April 2001. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn. edu/artistpages/bambaraToni.php. Accessed September 23, 2008. Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983.

Carrie Morton

Amiri Baraka

(Leroi Jones) (1934– ) Art is political by its very nature. It has an ideology and reflects its creator’s value system. (“Talk with Leroi Jones,” New York Times 27 June 1971)

us look away from the real world so that ‘the pleasure of the text’ is a titillation of empty sensuality. All’s well in the big house while the great majority—slaves, serfs, the generally exploited—suffer out of sight” (Trodd 375). In part because of this insistence upon the political nature of art, Baraka is a controversial ﬁgure in American literature. Even more controversial, however, is his use of art to advocate violence. As with “Black People,” his poems often call for violent action. For example, in “A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand” (1969), he writes: “We have awaited the coming of a natural / phenomenon. . . . But none has come. . . . Will the machinegunners please step forward?” (Harris 210). Not only using art to advocate violence, he also imagines art as violent: In numerous poems he demands that writers be warriors, describes language as a weapon, and fashions poems themselves as daggers, ﬁsts, and poison gas. Following this lead in the late 1960s, the Black Students Union at San Francisco State College began to use as their symbol an image of a black man holding a gun and a book, and in 1970 the Black Panther Party member Emory Douglas told artists to “take up their paints and brushes in one hand and their gun in the other.” Douglas added: “all of the Fascist American empire must be blown up in our pictures” (Douglas 12). The pen had become a sword. These calls to violence echo the rhetoric of the black militant leader Malcolm X, as do Baraka’s

n July 1967, Amiri Baraka was arrested for illegally carrying a weapon during a time of riots in Newark, New Jersey, also known as the Newark rebellion. At the trial, the judge read Baraka’s poem “Black People” (1967) to the all-white jury. “I’m being sentenced for the poem. Is that what you are saying?” responded Baraka (Hudson 51). Though not published until after the riots, “Black People” seemed a call to violence: “We must make our own World, man, our own world, and we cannot do this unless the white man is dead. Let’s get together and kill him my man . . . let’s make a world we want black children to grow and learn in” (The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, Harris 224). The poem was admitted as evidence of a plot to ignite violence, and on January 4, 1968, Baraka was sentenced to three years in New Jersey’s state penitentiary and ﬁ ned $1,000; the conviction was overturned on appeal. This incident illustrates the relationship between politics and art that is at the center of Baraka’s work—a body of work that encompasses, at the time of this writing, 14 books of poetry, 24 plays, ﬁve books of essays, four anthologies, and a novel. As he explained in a recent interview: “All art is political. It takes a stand, it wants to convince you one way or another. Those who claim ‘art should not be political’ are making a political statement.” No literature exists in a vacuum, he added, and any suggestion to the contrary is meant “only to have

Amiri Baraka 55

repeated critiques of nonviolence: As Malcolm X does, Baraka notes that nonviolence as a “theory of social and political demeanor” simply means “a continuation of the status quo” (Home 144). In fact, Malcolm’s inﬂuence on Baraka was profound. Malcolm was killed while speaking in Harlem on February 21, 1965, and in response to the assassination, Baraka wrote “A Poem for Black Hearts” (1965). Here he celebrates and mourns “Malcolm’s / heart, raising us above our ﬁ lthy cities . . . Malcolm’s / pleas for your dignity, black men, for your life.” Again, the poem imagines words as weapons—“ﬁ re darts” (Harris 218). Also in response to the assassination, Baraka left his white wife, moved uptown to Harlem from his Greenwich Village home, and embraced black nationalism. This was the ﬁ rst of Baraka’s two major transformations. Born Leroi Jones on October 7, 1934, in a lower-middle-class neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, he attended predominantly white public schools, then Rutgers University and Howard University, before beginning military service in the U.S. Air Force in 1954. After his release from the military in 1957, he attended graduate school and moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village, where he quickly met and married a white woman, Hettie Cohen. The couple went on to have two daughters. Baraka lived in the Village from 1957 to 1965, working as an editor, poet, dramatist, and jazz critic. He befriended numerous Beat writers, including Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara, and established a magazine called Yugen, which published Beat literature. As part of the Village’s bohemian, avant-garde crowd, he published his ﬁ rst major collection of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), which has a stream-ofconsciousness Beat aesthetic. By 1962, however, he was pulling away from Ginsberg and rejecting the otherworldly poetics of Beat writers: “The one huge difference between myself and say, Allen G,” he told a friend, is that “I have a program . . . based on realizable human endeavour. . . . I want to put together a body of work that will at least provide some text that can be referred to in the event of the desired explosion”

(Poetry and Poetics 99). Then, in his poem “Western Front,” later published in the collection Black Magic (1969), he ﬁ nally severed the link: “Poems are made / by fools like Allen Ginsberg, who loves God, and went to India / only to see God, ﬁ nding him walking barefoot in the street, / blood sickness and hysteria” (Harris 216). Ginsberg responded with his own poem, observing in Ankor Wat (1968): “Nothing but a false Buddha afraid of / my own annihilation . . . Leroi I been done you wrong / I’m just an old Uncle Tom in disguise all along / Afraid of physical tanks” (32). Instead of his Beat friends, Baraka began to seek out black nationalists, including Stokely Carmichael. Moving to Harlem in the wake of Malcolm’s death, he also married a black poet, Sylvia Robinson, in 1967, and the same year converted to Islam. To express this transformation, he changed his name: from Leroi Jones to Imamu (spiritual leader) Amiri (warrior) Baraka (sacriﬁce). He later explained of this name change: “[it] seemed ﬁtting to me . . . and not just the meaning of the name, but the idea that I was now literally being changed into a blacker being” (Watts 310). In turn, Robinson changed her name to Amina Baraka. Becoming more and more engaged with black nationalist politics, Baraka assumed leadership of his own black Muslim organization, Kawaida. From 1968 to 1975, he chaired the Committee for Uniﬁed Newark, a Black United Front organization, and was also a prominent ﬁgure in the National Black Political Convention, which convened in 1972. The Beat poet had become a black nationalist. Emphasizing his transformation still further, Baraka published a series of black nationalist poems. One, “leroy” (1969), observes: “When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to / black people. May they pick me apart and take the / useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave / the bitter bullshit rotten white parts / alone” (Harris 224). His hostility toward all white people appears in numerous other poems from this period, and his rejection of cross-racial collaboration was even more evident during an infamous encounter with a white woman. She stated her desire to help solve

56 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

racial tensions, and Baraka replied: “You can help by dying. You are a cancer. You can help the world’s people with your death” (Harris xxv). Advocating black revolution, Baraka argued, that “Black People are a race, a culture, a Nation” (Harris 167). He believed that art could create this black “Nation” and challenged black artists to create a “Black Poem” and a “Black World” in his 1966 poem “Black Art” (Harris 220). Later explaining that he “wanted to go ‘beyond’ poetry” and achieve “action literature” (Autobiography 275), he called for poetry that both described the situation of black people and showed how to change it. He also founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BART/S) in Harlem, to assist the creation of a black culture. Focused on community art, BART/S produced “plays that shattered the illusions of the American body politic, and awakened Black people to the meaning of their lives,” as Larry Neal described it in 1968 (34). Baraka then founded the Spirit House Players, which produced two of his plays about police brutality: Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself (1967) and Police (1968). This attempt to make art act in the world fueled the Black Arts movement, which boasted Baraka and Neal among its ﬁgures, along with Addison Gayle, Jr., Hoyt Fuller, ISHMAEL R EED, and James Stewart. The Black Arts Movement stressed cultural heritage, the beauty of blackness, and a “Black Aesthetic”—it was, Neal noted, “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept” (29). Equally important to the Black Arts Movement was a belief that political action would emerge through artistic expression. Art had to be social and political in nature: Neal observed that the artist and the political activist were one, and Stewart added that white Western aesthetics were “predicated on the idea of separating . . . a man’s art from his actions” (Black Fire 9). One new aesthetic that Baraka explored instead was the jazz avant garde. He believed that music articulated an authentic black expression, explaining in 1966 that “Negro music alone, because it drew its strengths and beauties out of the depth of the black man’s soul, and because to a large extent its traditions could be carried on by the lowest classes of Negroes, has been able to survive the

constant and wilful dilutions of the black middle class” (Mitchell 165). Musical freedom as social activism continued the work of Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, and in a recent interview Baraka observed that the Black Arts Movement was on a continuum with the Harlem Renaissance (Trodd 375). Alongside this interest in music, the movement’s poets stressed the orality of poetry. Baraka noted in the same interview, however, that the Black Arts Movement was “a version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a form of the Indigisme of Haiti, the Negrissmo of Latin America, literally a sorting out and repositioning of cultural meanings, symbols, history.” It was “an attempt to capture the minds of the people, to inﬂuence and direct them,” he added, and explained that this was important because culture is one of the main tools of political organization by the rulers of any society. “We can tell what side you’re on, what you celebrate, what you condemn . . . by your art,” he concluded. “Art sez Mao is the ideological reﬂection of the world” (Trodd 375). Baraka’s references to Mao are in fact representative of his worldview after a second major transformation: from black nationalist to thirdworld Marxist, in 1974. A trip to Cuba in 1960 had begun to radicalize his thinking about oppression in the third world, and in the mid-1970s he proclaimed a complete identiﬁcation with the artists he had met on his trip. Dissatisﬁed with Kenneth Gibson’s black bourgeois leadership of their Newark organization, and newly impassioned by theories of African socialism, he refashioned the Congress of African People as the Revolutionary Communist League. He still insisted that “poetry should be a weapon of revolutionary struggle,” as he put it in 1979 (adding that otherwise poetry was “an ornament the imperialists wear to make a gesture toward humanity”) (Selected Poetry 237, 239), but now proclaimed that this “struggle” was against the capitalist state. And while he continued to aim his art at the black community, he explained in 1974 that not all whites were enemies: “It is a narrow nationalism that says the white man is the enemy. . . . National-

Amiri Baraka 57

ism, so-called, when it says ‘all non-blacks are our enemies,’ is sickness or criminality, in fact, a form of fascism” (Harris xxviii). The enemy was simply ﬁ rst-world oppressors. Marking this second shift in his political and cultural identity, Baraka changed his name again, dropping Imamu to be known as simply Amiri Baraka. In recent years, Baraka has continued to court controversy and has faced accusations of anti-Semitism. He was selected poet laureate of New Jersey in 2002, a position he was forced to resign in the wake of the scandal over his poem “Someone Blew Up America,” about the 9/11/2001 disaster. Though Baraka’s life and art falls into these three periods—Beat generation, black nationalism, third-world Marxism—the thread that runs throughout is his stated belief that “ethics and aesthetics are one” (Trodd 375). Pointing in a recent interview to Bertolt Brecht’s description of a “Theater of Education or Theater of Instruction,” as opposed to “Psychological Theater,” Baraka summed up his central philosophy: “If poetry is not to tell us something . . . then it serves what purpose?” (Trodd 375).

“Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” (1961) In 1961, Baraka published his ﬁ rst book of poetry. Titled Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, it earned him critical acclaim. Throughout the poems, Baraka draws upon the styles of the Beat poets, the Black Mountain poets, and the poet William Carlos Williams to combine stream of consciousness, projective free verse, and dialect. The collection is introspective and melancholy, as evidenced in the title poem: “Nobody sings anymore,” writes Baraka, wistfully. This title poem, “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” is also signiﬁcant for its contrast between the imaginative and the mundane. The poet is “accustomed” to the mundane: running for the bus, walking the dog. Even the stars hold no magic: “each night I get the same number.” Baraka emphasizes the repetitive nature of his days

by beginning three lines in a row with And: “And now . . . And each . . . And when. . . .” It is only when we reach the end of the poem that it offers a break from this pattern of meaninglessness. The poet encounters his daughter, to whom the poem is dedicated, engrossed in prayer. It seems as though she is “talking to someone,” and yet there is no one in the room—she speaks into “her own clasped hands.” This act of childhood imagination contrasts with the poet’s own sense of the mundane. When certain stars are not visible, he sees this absence as a sign that “nobody sings anymore,” while his daughter responds to the apparent absence of God by praying into the silence. The moment expresses Baraka’s search for a responsive God. Over the following years, he would decide that the term Black ideals described the kind of God he wanted to believe in, explaining in 1965 that he sought a “righteous sanctity out of which worlds are built” (Harris 165). He went on in later poems to criticize the Western world’s tendency to “peek” into its “clasped hands” (as he describes his daughter’s prayer in “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note”). For example, in the poem “When We’ll Worship Jesus” (1975), he attacks capitalist America’s tradition of Christianity as “the oppression of the human mind” and observes: “We aint gonna worship jesus cause jesus dont exist / xcept in song and story . . . in / slum stained tears” (Harris 253).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read some Beat poetry, especially that of Allen Ginsberg. What features of this poetry can you ﬁ nd in Baraka’s “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note”? How would you describe the tone of these poems, both for the Beats and for Baraka? Explain your answer. 2. Consider the long history of imagining the moon and stars as symbols of constancy—for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To the Moon,” John Keats’s “Bright Star,” Walt Whitman’s “A Clear Midnight,” and W. H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Night.” Why might it be signiﬁcant that for Baraka, the stars are inconstant? Cite examples from the texts of the poems to justify your answer.

58 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

“In Memory of Radio” (1961) As does his “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” Baraka’s poem “In Memory of Radio” appears to contrast the innocence of the childish imagination and the experience of the adult mind. Though the poem is written in free verse and has a conversational tone with direct addresses to the reader (“The rest of you . . . see what I mean?”), it seems to be an elegy nonetheless—mourning a loss of innocence. Baraka remembers with nostalgia the radio shows of his childhood and examines himself now: in a world that cannot enjoy that fantasy world of radio. The world cannot even understand the word love—instead, he explains, the word love has been inverted to become evol. Yet far from seeking a return to that world of innocence and make-believe, Baraka is in fact criticizing the creation of false realities by the mass media. The poem’s central ﬁgure is a superhero of the 1930s and 1940s called “The Shadow,” who destroys evil while wearing a cloak of invisibility. Baraka quotes the superhero’s catchphrase: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.” The Shadow’s alter ego is Lamont Cranston, a millionaire playboy, and Baraka uses the image of a double self to examine the dividing line between reality and appearance. His poem asks the reader to question the media’s world of makebelieve—that world of “Let’s Pretend.” One danger of the media’s make-believe world is its assistance of a consumerist culture: The media tell Americans how to “get saved & rich!” Instead, the poem references and aligns itself with the Beat writer Jack Kerouac, who, as does Baraka, critiques the consumerism of postwar American culture. Of that consumerism, Baraka asks bitterly: “It is better to have loved and lost / Than to put linoleum in your living rooms?” As well, Baraka protests the creation of a commodiﬁed religious culture, which means that the process of being “saved” can be marketed and sold and is as important as getting “rich.” This combination of consumerism and religion means that the Shadow might as well be divine: “Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?” asks Baraka. Examining the real “evol,” whereby mainstream America worships mil-

lionaires, linoleum, and religious propagandists such as “F. J. Sheen” (priest and author of 1950s books like Life Is Worth Living, The Way to Happiness, and Thinking Life Through), Baraka is one of the poem’s “unbelievers.” And unlike those unbelievers, he is a critic who does choose to “throw stones.”

For Discussion or Writing Read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). What similarities can you ﬁ nd between the tones and styles of Kerouac and Baraka in this poem?

“Notes for a Speech” (1961) In his early poetry, Baraka expresses “the emotional history of the black man in this country as its victim and chronicler” (Benston 110). “Notes for a Speech,” as one of those early poems, is a meditation on the black man’s loneliness: Excluded from white America, he is also disconnected from black Africa. It lays out the poet’s isolation, exposing his racial identity. Echoing W. E. B. DuBois’s famous comment in 1903 that the black American exists in a state of “twoness . . . an American, a Negro” (3), Baraka notes that white culture tends to “shy away,” and yet Africans are only his “so called people.” Here Baraka positions himself within what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., refers to as the “wild zone of the hyphen between African and American” (47). He imagines the social space occupied by African Americans as a no-man’s-land: a seemingly abandoned place where newspapers are “blown down pavements / of the world.” The gaps in Baraka’s poem, created by its structure as a series of shorthand “notes” (“Who / you” instead of “Who are you”), further develop the theme of a no-man’s-land—as though the true expression of black identity is hidden somewhere in the poem’s gaps. This strategy of imagining a no-man’s-land was a trope in numerous poems, novels, and stories by black writers of the 20th century. For example, in his story “The Man Who Went to Chicago” (1945), Richard Wright describes black workers who are “separated by a vast psychological distance from the signiﬁcant processes of the rest of the hospital—just as America had kept [them]

Amiri Baraka 59

locked in the dark underworld of American life for three hundred years” (250). Baraka’s focus on the existential isolation of African Americans would soon translate into the solution of black nationalism—a nation within a nation, and so a home for black people in white America. By 1965, he was celebrating the African heritage of African Americans. Africa is no longer the “foreign place” of “Notes for a Speech,” but rather, as in “Ka’Ba” (1966), black Americans have “African imaginations.” No longer the “ugly man” of “Notes for a Speech,” instead Baraka is the “beautiful” man of “Ka’Ba,” with a belief that the “Black Man must aspire to Blackness,” as he stated it in a 1966 essay (Home 248). This shift from dislocated black American to proud African American is visibly on the horizon in “Notes for a Speech” through the capitalization of Africa but not american.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Setting “Notes for a Speech” in the context of Baraka’s later poetry (including “Ka’Ba” and “Wise I”), what transformations do you see in his approach to the question of “blackness” and national identity? How does Baraka take up the problem of his marginalized “Americanness” and cultivate isolation as a solution instead? 2. The poem uses the word own three times, once to refer to land, and twice to refer to death (“deaths apart / from my own” and “My own / dead souls”). Twice, Baraka calls attention to the word by positioning it at the end of a line. What connection is Baraka making between land (or lack of it) and death? Is being nationless, without a “people,” a form of social death for Baraka? If so, how else does the poem communicate this idea of homelessness or dislocation as a form of death?

later moment in time (“as now”). In 1903, DuBois explained the “peculiar sensation” for a black person in America of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” This meant, DuBois added, existing “within a world which yields [the black man] no true self consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (3). Now Baraka, who has frequently referred in interviews to the work of earlier black writers, including DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Frederick Douglass, echoes DuBois’s concept. He imagines the difference between his unacknowledged inner self and his despised outer self—an outer self deﬁ ned by white America’s gaze and perspective. Constricted by the views of others, he can only see through “slits in the metal.” Baraka conﬁ rms that the poem is a revision of DuBois’s 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk by emphasizing that the division between outer and inner selves is a division between “ﬂesh” and “soul.” The form of the poem further expresses the sensation of being trapped. Baraka repeats the phrase “or pain” in the fourth stanza, as though he is unable to escape an ever-recurring hurt and must experience it over and over again. As well, on three occasions in the third stanza Baraka opens a parenthesis without closing it. The two sets of parentheses in the fourth stanza, and the one parenthesis in the ﬁfth stanza, are therefore still three layers deep when they create a fourth layer. One of his initial sets of parentheses opened in the third stanza is eventually closed at the end of the ﬁfth stanza, but this still leaves the rest of the poem embedded two layers deep. By building these containing layers, Baraka is echoing the theme, as he expresses it in the poem, of “enclosure.”

For Discussion or Writing

“An Agony. As Now.” (1964) The ﬁ rst-person speaker in Baraka’s “An Agony. As Now.” is trapped “inside someone who hates me.” Exploring this idea of self-alienation, Baraka is taking up W. E. B. DuBois’s famous formulation of “double consciousness” and applying it to this

1. Read the ﬁ rst chapter of W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Does DuBois see anything potentially positive about “double consciousness”? If so, does Baraka take a less optimistic view than DuBois of the ultimate result of double consciousness? 2. How far has Baraka internalized white racism to imagine blackness itself as a limitation in this

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

poem? Is it in fact the black body that is responsible for imprisoning the self, rather than the world’s perception of the black body?

“A Poem for Willie Best” (1964) Baraka’s long verse ode focuses on the black actor Willie Best, who played a stereotyped black buffoon in ﬁ lms of the early and mid-20th century. “A Poem for Willie Best” takes up the same theme as “Notes for a Speech” and “An Agony. As Now.”—a theme that Baraka later referred to as “the whole question of how [one relates] realistically to one’s environment if one feels estranged from one’s environment and especially a black person in a white situation” (Watts 104). Hidden behind his minstrel performances, Best is disconnected from himself and so might as well be disembodied—a face singing “alone / at the top / of the body.” The poem also fashions Best as a sacriﬁcial lamb to white America—a Christ ﬁgure, “nailed stiff” on a “cross.” Here Baraka echoes a long tradition in African-American literature of imagining the black man as white America’s Christ, building on poems like Langston Hughes’s “Christ in Alabama” (1931) and Countee Cullen’s “Christ Recruciﬁed” (1922) and “The Black Christ” (1929), as well as stories like W. E. B. DuBois’s “Jesus Christ in Texas” (1920) and drama like Georgia Douglass Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in the South (1925). Yet, in the case of Best, Baraka offers an end to the dynamic of estrangement, dislocation, victimhood, and sacriﬁce. He crafts a clear turning point: While trapped behind a mask like the speaker in “An Agony. As Now.” and experiencing a divided self like the speaker in “Notes for a Speech,” Best is reaching the point of escape. He is about to break from his performance and thus from the white stereotypes of African Americans: “He said, I’m tired / of losing. / ‘I got to cut ’cha,’ ” writes Baraka toward the end of the poem, exposing the “renegade / behind the mask.” Noting in an interview about “A Poem for Willie Best” that the problem of environmental estrangement was even more pronounced for “a person who

is growing more and more political” (Watts 104), Baraka signaled in this poem his own ongoing politicization, and his own imminent shift to racial radicalism.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Baraka uses numerous parentheses in this poem. What is the effect of this device? Why are some of the parentheses left open? 2. Read the poem aloud. What is the effect of the poem’s line breaks? Do they alter the pace from beginning to end? How do these breaks add to or detract from the theme of the poem? What is its theme?

Dutchman (1964) In March 1964, Baraka’s one-act play Dutchman opened in New York. The story of a deadly encounter between a white woman and a black college student, it was what Baraka himself referred to the following year as the “theatre of assault.” Going on to lay out his manifesto for a new kind of theater, Baraka explained: “The Revolutionary Theatre should force change . . . must EXPOSE! . . . must Accuse and Attack anything that can be accused and attacked . . . it is a political theatre, a weapon to help in the slaughter of these dimwitted fat-bellied white guys who somehow believe that the rest of the world is here for them to slobber on” (“The Revolutionary Theatre” 4–6). To its shocked audiences and dazzled critics, Dutchman seemed just that kind of revolutionary theater. It went on to win an Obie Award, was proclaimed “the best play in America” by Norman Mailer (Harris xx), and in 2007 was controversially revived in New York. While making him famous, Dutchman also signaled the explosion of Baraka’s long-building anger toward white America. The two characters, Lula and Clay, meet on a New York subway car. They ﬂ irt, and eventually Lula provokes Clay into anger, then stabs him to death and throws him off the train. Other white passengers are impassive. The play ends with Lula’s sizing up another black male victim; the cycle will continue.

Amiri Baraka 61

This message of the seemingly unstoppable race war between black and white Americans is reinforced by the play’s setting: The train car rushes ever onward in one direction, toward an unavoidable end. Baraka provides further reinforcement for this warning through the play’s title, which refers to Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman (1843)—an opera based on the myth of a legendary ghost ship that can never go home, thus is doomed to sail the seas forever. Again, Baraka implies that his Dutchman, the subway car’s conﬁ ned space of white oppression, will sail on until the judgement day of black revolution. Baraka’s decision to end the play with the cycle continuing, and the message that Clay might as well be any black man, is echoed by his construction throughout of entirely allegorical characters. Lula enters the subway car eating an apple and proceeds to tempt Clay, her black Adam, as a 20thcentury Eve. And in tempting and then destroying Clay, Lula is not only Eve but also a symbol of white America’s seeming acceptance, then cruel denial, of black Americans. The characters are larger than they are, their story more signiﬁcant than that of two individuals: Conﬁ rming that the play goes beyond realism, the stage directions insist that the subway is “heaped in modern myth.” Yet Baraka also questions the origins of racial myths, symbols, and stereotypes. Lula, and by implication white America, seems responsible for most of those constructions. She tells Clay that he is “a wellknown type” and goes on to reference a series of racial stereotypes, from the fugitive slave (“escaped nigger”) to an “Uncle Tom” to what she calls a “middle-class fake white man.” In part, Clay has lost his individuality not because the play seeks to make him a symbol of the black man, but because white Americans like Lula—and black Americans such as the jacketed, polite Clay himself—have made the black man inauthentic. As well, Clay seems buried beneath the weight of history: The ﬂeeting presence of a conductor who dances a minstrel-style shufﬂe step is the embodiment of slavery’s racial legacy. Baraka’s solution to these constraints of racial stereotypes is either art or violence. On the one hand, when Clay ﬁ nally reaches a state of real emo-

tion, he argues that Bessie Smith’s music communicates the message: “Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass.” On the other hand, Clay also argues that Charlie Parker “would have played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the ﬁ rst ten white people he saw.” Here Baraka offers two choices: to rebel through music or to abandon music and rebel. And while Clay seems to settle upon the solution of action rather than art, telling Lula in anger that they “will cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the ﬂesh can fall away from your bones,” this remains only a rhetorical gesture. It is Lula who moves beyond rhetoric and commits murder. Failing to act, Clay pays the price. In a sense, the respectable, middle-class Clay is Baraka himself—struggling between artistry and activism, and on the brink of a transformation whereby he would collapse the distinction and embrace art as a radical tool of violent activism. When the play appeared in 1964, John F. Kennedy and Medgar Evers had been murdered, along with four little black girls in the Birmingham church bombings. Malcolm X’s message of black power was gaining supporters, and he was about to be killed himself. The following year, Baraka would kill off his old self, like Clay. He would leave his white wife, move to Harlem, change his name, convert to Islam, and begin a new, revolutionary phase. Dutchman, then, is in part Baraka’s search for his own inner militant, the “renegade / behind the mask,” as he states in “A Poem for Willie Best” (1964). Brieﬂy, Clay had found that self behind the facade, telling Lula that she does not see beyond it to the “pumping black heart.” And though this discovery occurs in vain for Clay, Baraka would take it to Harlem, and beyond, through his advocacy of black power, black revolution, and black art.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read the opening pages of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). What resonances are there between these pages and Lula’s advice to Clay that he “pretend the people cannot see you . . . that you are free of your own history”? In what way does Clay take the advice given by the

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Invisible Man’s grandfather to “live in the lion’s mouth”? Explain. 2. Consider the setting of the play—the New York subway, or what the stage directions call the “underbelly of the city.” Bearing in mind the long history in African-American literature of imagining underground spaces (for example, in Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground,” from 1942; Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, from 1952; and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, from 1972), what might be the signiﬁcance of this setting?

“Ka’Ba” (1966) After his embrace of black nationalism in 1965, Baraka set about transforming the very notion of blackness. Returning to W. E. B. DuBois’s famous description of “double consciousness” (3)—a theme in earlier poems like “Notes for a Speech” (1961) and “An Agony. As Now.” (1964)—Baraka now asked that blacks no longer see through white eyes. He declared a hatred for the black middle class, equating its values with Euro-American values, and instead used his experimental poetry to subvert traditional forms and accepted values. If “white” and “black” were signiﬁers for “good” and “bad,” then Baraka would use the terms differently, celebrating what he often called “black magic”—or what James Brown expressed when he sang, “Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud.” Baraka’s poem “Ka’Ba” calls for that “magic,” for “spells” and “sacred words.” It announces that the world of black Americans is “more lovely than anyone’s.” We are “beautiful people,” he adds. Here his poem echoes the rhetoric of the 1960s and 1970s “Black Is Beautiful” movement. For Baraka, however, that beauty is speciﬁcally an African beauty: From the idea in “Notes for a Speech” that Africans are only his “so called people,” Baraka has shifted to celebrating the “African imaginations” of black people in America. He is expressing one of the tenets of black nationalism: the assertion of black Americans’ identity as a people of African ancestry. One of the ways to invert negative sym-

bols and stereotypes, he proposes, is to redeﬁ ne the African-American past—a past otherwise evoked by the images of slavery in his poem (“gray chains . . . We have been captured, / and we labor to make our getaway”). Others would echo Baraka’s pan-African pride: For example, the Black Panther Party member Stokely Carmichael called for pan-African political organization, explaining in Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism (1971) that the only way forward for black power was a socialist panAfrican revolution. Baraka, too, would later deﬁ ne his poem as calling for revolution: In a recent interview, he explained that the poem’s “sacred word” is “revolution, not only in a spiritual context, but in a context of class struggle.” The poem was, he added, part of his attempt to solve “the whole question of the uniﬁcation of Black people” (Banks 2).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read TONI MORRISON’s novel The Bluest Eye (1970), which tells the story of a black girl’s internalization of white standards of beauty and her wish for blue eyes. How does Morrison apply the message of “Ka’Ba” speciﬁcally to women? Explain. 2. Consider the poem’s opening image, in which black people defy physics and “call across or scream across or walk across” a space that divides them. How does Baraka embed this possibility of conquering space in the poem’s space? In your analysis of this question, consider such aspects of the poem as line breaks, stanza breaks, pauses, and white space.

“Will They Cry When You’re Gone, You Bet” (1969) In 1969, Baraka was at the height of his passion for black unity. After 1965 and his embrace of black nationalism, he had shifted from introspective, semiautobiographical poetry to forge a collective voice in his work. This transformation has been described by Paul Vangelisti as a reinvention of “the ﬁgure of the poet,” and a movement from lyric self-

Amiri Baraka 63

consciousness to “lyrical communism” (xix). “Will They Cry When You’re Gone, You Bet,” however, mourns the failure of some black people to join the collective struggle for revolution and separatism: He attacks those who seek to integrate with whites in America, describing it as a desertion by friends who follow a mirage of attentive “white women” that isn’t “really there.” Baraka imagines the process of separating from whites as “going off from them,” away from “the white heat.” It is better, he explains, to accept the “bitter water” of black life than believe the promises of “white drifting fairies” and devious “white women.” Here Baraka repeats one of his common strategies: symbolizing white America as a woman. In several poems, and most famously in his 1964 play Dutchman, he offers white women as the embodiment of white America’s false temptations, ﬁckle warmth, and deathly allure. This has drawn the anger of both black and white feminists, who protest the implied misogyny of such symbolism. In fact, Baraka’s symbolism in this poem is part of his broader gender politics, which again has been attacked by feminist critics. In 1970, for example, he explained that the recovery of “healthy African identities” depended on distinct gender roles and a submissive femininity: “We do not believe in ‘equality’ of men and women . . . nature has not provided thus” (“Black Women” 148–52). As well, several of his poems discuss raping white women as a way to counterbalance the oppression of black men. This rhetoric of violence was echoed by the black activist Eldridge Cleaver, who famously described his rape of white women as “an insurrectionary act” (33). The black feminist bell hooks has criticized such rhetoric, noting that Cleaver and Baraka were the embodiment of a Black Power movement that had discarded “chivalrous codes of manhood” and lionized “the rapist, the macho man, the brute who uses force to get his demands met” (106). Along with Baraka and Cleaver, other Black Power advocates stressed masculine regeneration at the cost of female empowerment. This even encompassed women’s roles within the movement: The Black Power activist Elaine Brown later observed

that a woman in the movement was considered “at best, irrelevant”; a woman asserting herself, “a pariah.” Brown explained: “If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was said to be eroding black manhood, to be hindering the progress of the black race. She was an enemy of black people” (357).

For Discussion or Writing 1. The Black Power movement often seemed a cult of masculinity. In response, Michele Wallace denounced it as a “vehicle for black macho,” explaining in 1979 that “black males who stressed a traditionally patriarchal responsibility to their women and children, to their communities—to black people—were to be considered almost sissiﬁed. The black man’s sexuality and the physical fact of his penis were the major evidence of his manhood and the purpose of it.” She added: “Male black power activists [seemed] spurred to action by their genitals, which pointed unfailingly at white women” (62). Take at look at Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968). How accurately does Wallace’s description match Soul on Ice and Baraka’s poem? 2. Read Baraka’s poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” (1964). Written while he was still married to a white woman, the poem is shocking for its call to rape white women. But while he issues an instruction to “rape the white girls,” he also instructs, “choke my friends.” He makes a similar connection to that in “Will They Cry When You’re Gone, You Bet,” which describes the betrayal of friends and the temptations of white women. What is the signiﬁcance of that connection?

“AM/TRAK” (1979) “AM/TR AK” showcases Baraka’s belief in poetry as a musical performance. It is one of several poems in which he attempts to translate poetry into music: From the late 1960s onward, he became increasingly interested in poetry as a process of performance and revision, rather than

64 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

as a static and ﬁ nished product. He adopted the improvisatory aesthetic of jazz—embodying the cadences and movements of free jazz and bebop in particular. As he explained in an interview: “Poetry since the sixties [is] much more orally conceived rather than manuscript conceived . . . more intended to be read aloud. . . . To me [the text] is a score. . . . I’m much more interested in the spoken word” (“An Interview with Amiri Baraka” 20). The poem “AM/TR AK” is therefore at once a poetic biography of John Coltrane and an imitation of Coltrane’s jazz style. Baraka chants phrases and words at varied intervals, imitating the jazz technique of repetition and riffs. Words are often repeated for their sound rather than their sense—as though they are notes in a piece of music. And these word repetitions, a form of jazz riff, suggest that Baraka is repeatedly redeﬁ ning a word’s meaning, as though that meaning can evolve during the poem’s performance. In the fourth section of the poem, he also imitates Thelonious Monk, who collaborated with Coltrane: Repeating duh (sometimes hyphenated as duh-duh), Baraka evokes Monk’s accented tunes. Then, echoing Monk’s style of letting notes ring after the piano’s keys have been struck, Baraka’s last repetition of duh is extended: “Duuuuuuuuuhhhhhh.” Though seemingly nonsense, these parts of the poem are aurally conceived. They are political, too. As one scholar notes, Baraka “blackens the white avant-garde poem with scatting—a jazz singing technique that substitutes nonsense syllables for traditional lyrics” (Poetry and Poetics 107). Baraka’s moments of nonsense in “AM/TR AK” are a protest against the apolitical stance of the white avant garde. In fact, as did other Black Arts Movement poets of the late 1960s and 1970s, Baraka understood performance as a political strategy for reaching mass audiences. He noted that poetry “must be a musical form,” that it is “speech musicked,” and explained that his ideal poetry “is oral by tradition, mass aimed as its fundamental functional motive” (The Music 243). Poetry as music would

reach that “mass,” he added, because it went beyond the purely intellectual and so was a form of “socio-aesthetic activism”: “There are areas of the brain that can only be stimulated by new feelings, feelings not expressed by the formally intellectual (though they may be pointed to!)” (The Music 265–266). But Baraka’s embrace of poetry as a musical medium was based on his understanding of cultural aesthetics as well as activist efﬁcacy. In his autobiography of 1984, Baraka noted that “the fact of music was the black poet’s basis for creation. And those of us in the Black Arts Movement were drenched in black music and wanted our poetry to be black music. . . . Its rhythms, its language, its history and struggle. It was meant to be a poetry we copped from the people and gave them right back, open and direct and moving” (237). Baraka believed that jazz, in particular, was a direct expression of the African-American experience, adding in his book The Music (1987) that its “sound, its total art face, carries the lives, history, tradition, pain, and hope, in the main, of the African American people” (319–320).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Watch an online video of Baraka reading his own poetry (www.pbs.org/wnet/foolingwithwords/main_video.html). How different is the experience of seeing/hearing the poem from that of reading it on the page? Does Baraka succeed in performing his poem as music? 2. Baraka ends the poem with a mention of his own arrest in the wake of the Newark rebellion of 1967. He notes that he heard of Coltrane’s death while in jail. What might be the signiﬁcance of this connection between Baraka’s imprisonment and Coltrane’s death?

“Wise I” (1990) “Wise I” is part of Baraka’s epic poem in progress, “Why’s/Wise,” which lays out in several parts the history of African Americans from the days of

Amiri Baraka 65

slavery to the present. As in some earlier poems (including “AM/TR AK”), Baraka makes this poem distinctly musical. For example, he creates the effect of a key shift in a musical riff by repeating the phrase “oom boom ba boom” as a variation on “omm bomm ba boom.” But Baraka is in fact less interested in imitating the jazz aesthetic of AfricanAmerican musicians than he is in adopting the style of the West African griots. These artists were, he has explained, “African Singer-Poet-Historians who carried word from bird, mouth to ear, and who are the root of our own African American oral tradition” (Harris 493). In fact, Baraka has had a long-standing interest in the impact of African art and music on American styles. As early as 1963, in his book Blues People, he analyzed the impact of African musical traditions on the development of jazz as “an American sound.” Here he explains that after emancipation, former slaves encountered a hostile and dominant white culture and so chose “to fashion something out of that culture for [themselves], girded by the strength of the still evident African culture.” That “something” that they fashioned, he explains, was “indigenous to a certain kind of cultural existence in this country” and was “jazz” (79). “Wise I” is also notable for its showcasing of Baraka’s humor. While his early poems, from the late 1950s and early 1960s, focus on the themes of death and despair, of moral and social corruption, and of self-hatred, and his black nationalist poems of 1965–75 are militant in tone, racially aware, and celebrate what he calls “black magic,” his later poems frequently exhibit a comic sensibility. As he explained in an interview in 1998, he was intrigued by a “sense of the wonderful, the bizarre, and the comic.” Though continuing to portray the struggles of the oppressed, Baraka had now found “the smile at the bottom of the world,” adding that, after all, in the “masks of drama, one smiles, one frowns” (Salaam 10). “Wise I,” therefore, acknowledges the long history of slavery in America but does so in a tragic-comic tone: “Probably take you several hundred years / to get / out!”

For Discussion or Writing 1. The Native American writer Sherman Alexie is known for his trademark aesthetic of biting wit. He explained in 1998 that “humor is the most effective political tool out there, because people will listen to anything if they’re laughing. . . . I never want to be earnest. I always want to be on the edge of offending somebody, of challenging one notion or another. . . . Humor is . . . about questioning the status quo” (West 28). In 2003, Alexie then wrote an article full of sardonic laughter: “Ha, ha! The United States is the freedom-loving country where Americans fought each other over the right to own slaves! Ha, ha, ha, ha! The United States is the democratic country that didn’t allow women to vote until 1920! Ha, ha, ha, ha! The United States is the moral country that accepted Jim Crow laws until 1964. Ha, ha, ha, ha!” (Alexie B3). Do you see any of this sardonic laughter in Baraka’s other pieces of work, aside from “Wise I”? And if Alexie’s sarcasm is an attempt to protest the image of the noble, tragic Indian, what might be the purpose of Baraka’s dark humor? Is it just to celebrate the “the wonderful, the bizarre, and the comic,” or does it seem designed to insult and provoke readers in any way? 2. In his epigraph to the poem, Baraka mentions the traditional hymn “Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen.” Read the lyrics to this hymn and listen to a recording at www.indiana. edu/~jah/teaching/2004_03/sources/ex2_ trouble.shtml. How has Baraka incorporated the rhythms and message of this hymn into his poem?

“Monday in B-Flat” (1994) This seemingly simple poem takes up several of Baraka’s common themes. The title, “Monday in B-Flat,” makes one of his many references to jazz music: He imagines the sound of police sirens are in a musical key (B-ﬂat). He also embeds the musical rhythms of jazz in the poem: Playfully, he

66 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

offers a line-break pause after “Be here,” so that the reader approaches the poem as two four-line stanzas, with an extra line that reads “in a minute!” While not pausing for a whole minute, the reader is asked to imagine that pause as the time it takes for “The Devil” to arrive in response to a 911 call. It also expresses his long-standing equation of white America as a hell for black people, the country’s ofﬁcials all devils: Here the police force is “The Devil.” He expanded on this idea in 1998, explaining in an interview that black people “have to deal with the beast everyday.” He was, he added, “talking biblically . . . [about] our everyday struggles with 666” (Salaam 10).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read the poem aloud. The ﬁ rst stanza has the singsong rhythm of iambic pentameter and includes a rhyme. The second stanza has the natural rhythms of speech. Why does Baraka choose to write each stanza with a different rhythm, and how does that help his distinction between praying and calling 911, or the spiritual and the physical worlds? 2. Take a look at Langston Hughes’s short poems, especially “Youth” (1924); “Sea Calm” (1926); “A Little Lyric (Of Great Importance)” (1943), which is only seven words long; and “Dream Deferred” (1951). What points are Hughes and Baraka making with these short poems? Hughes’s short poems in particular have often been dismissed as simplistic and infantile, but is there any rhetorical power inherent to poems of this length?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON BARAKA AND HIS WORK 1. Baraka’s work is controversial because it often calls for violence. Who exactly does he imagine is the audience for these calls to take violent action, and does that imagined audience seem to shift over the course of his career? 2. Baraka believes that art is a form of activism. What action is his reader expected to take after reading Baraka’s work? What is the process by

which Baraka imagines his words might change the world? In her article “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” Toni Morrison argues that for writing to be considered African American, it has to include the presence of the ancestor. How important is this idea of “roots” to Baraka, and who are the “ancestors” in his work—slaves? abolitionists? earlier black writers? Baraka is often criticized for “essentializing” blackness—for overdeﬁ ning black as x, y, and z. How in fact does his work deﬁ ne blackness, and how does that deﬁ nition evolve over time? Although the Black Arts Movement is over, today there are still artists who believe in black separatism. How did Baraka inﬂuence later artists? Can you identify any lines of continuity between his poetry and 21st-century rap, hiphop, or ﬁ lm, for example? Baraka’s autobiography, The Autobiography of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1984), details his childhood. How does he describe the transition from innocence to experience in this autobiographical account? How might this transition have affected his poetry?

WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Alexie, Sherman. “Relevant Contradictions: In Defense of Humor, Irony, Satire, and a Native American Perspective on the Coming War on Iraq.” Stranger, 27 February 2003, pp. B2–B4. Banks, Simóne. “20 Minutes with Amiri Baraka.” Scheme Magazine, 19 February 2007. Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of Amiri Baraka/ LeRoi Jones. New York: Freundlich Books, 1984. ———. “Black Woman” (1970). In Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays since 1965. New York: Random House, 1972. ———. Home: Social Essays. New York: Morrow, 1966. ———. Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones. New York: Morrow, 1979. ———. Video of Baraka reading “Wise, Why’s Y’s” (1990). Available online. URL: www.pbs. org/wnet/foolingwithwords/main_video.html. Accessed September 23, 2009.

Amiri Baraka 67

Baraka, Amiri, and Amina Baraka. The Music: Reﬂections on Jazz and Blues. New York: Morrow, 1987. Benston, Kimberly. Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976. Brown, Elaine. A Taste of Power. New York: Anchor Books, 1992. Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: Delta, 1999. Douglas, Emory. “Art.” Nation, 211 (19 October 1970). DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam, 1989. Efﬁong, Philip Uko. In Search of a Model for AfricanAmerican Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka and Ntozake Shange. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Black Aesthetic. New York: Doubleday, 1971. Ginsberg, Allen. Ankor Wat. London: Fulcrum Press, 1968. Harris, William J. “An Interview with Amiri Baraka.” Greenﬁeld Review 8, nos. 3–4 (Fall 1980): 19–31. ———. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. ———, ed. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991. hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1984. Hudson, Theodore R. From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1973. Jones, LeRoi. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Morrow, 1963. ———. “The Revolutionary Theatre.” Liberator, July 1965, pp. 4–6.

———, and Larry Neal, eds. Black Fire. New York: Morrow, 1968. Lacey, Henry C. To Raise, Destroy, and Create: The Poetry, Drama, and Fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1981. Mitchell, Angelyn, ed. Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994. Morrison, Toni. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” Black Women Writers 1950–1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 339–345. New York: Anchor Books, 1984. Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” Drama Review 12 (Summer 1968): 29–39. The Ofﬁcial Web Site of Amiri Baraka. Available online. URL: www.amiribaraka.com. Accessed June 24, 2009. Reilly, Charlie, ed. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Salaam, Kalamu ya. “Djali Dialogue with Amiri Baraka: Conversations with Established and Emerging African American Writers.” Black Collegian, February 1998, pp. 10–13. Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Trodd, Zoe, ed. American Protest Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Vangelisti, Paul, ed. Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961–1995). New York: Marsilio, 1995. Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. 1979. New York: Verso, 1990. Watts, Jerry Gaﬁo. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press, 2001. West, Dennis, and Joan M. West. “An Interview with Sherman Alexie.” Cineaste, Fall 1998, p. 28. Wright, Richard. “The Man Who Went to Chicago” (1945). In Eight Men. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1987.

Zoe Trodd

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) “Cathedrals,” the blind man said. He sat up and rolled his head back and forth. “If you want the truth, bub, that’s about all I know. What I just said. What I heard him say. But maybe you could describe one to me? I wish you’d do it. I’d like that. If you want to know, I really don’t have a good idea.” I stared hard at the shot of the cathedral on the TV. How could I even begin to describe it? But say my life depended on it. Say my life was being threatened by an insane guy who said I had to do it or else. (Raymond Carver, “Cathedral”)

raries, commented that Carver consistently wrote about difﬁcult emotional questions. “I don’t think of Ray in terms of being minimalist. I don’t think he was an emotional minimalist at all. He was dealing with what was, at least for me, major emotions” (Halpert 34). Most critics agree that Carver revolutionized American prose writing. Randolph Paul Runyon remarks, “The problem here may be that Carver has been the most inﬂuential minimalist . . . while at the same time the least representative” (4). Born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938 and raised in Yakima, Washington, the author had humble beginnings. His mother, Ella Casey Carver, worked as a waitress, retail clerk, and stay-at-home mother, while his father, Clevie Raymond Carver, worked at a sawmill. At age 18, Carver married Maryann Burke, who gave birth to their ﬁ rst child six months later. Their daughter, Christine LaRae, was followed a year later by a son, Vance Lindsay. That same year, Carver enrolled at Chico State College, where he met the writing teacher John Gardner, who later went on to become a world-renowned novelist. Of Gardner, Carver stated, “Until I met John Gardner, I had no sense of serious literature. . . . Everything was more or less of equal merit, or value, until I met Gardner” (Gentry and Stull 234). Carver described Gardner, who was only in his twenties at the time, as a busy

aymond Carver, a writer known for his short stories and poetry, is often hailed as one of the great literary minds of the 20th century. Active primarily during the 1970s and 1980s, Carver had a substantial impact on prose writing. The critic Ewing Campbell has said, “Not since Ernest Hemingway has there been a more imitated American author” (ix–x). Published during his lifetime in Western Humanities Review, December, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, and the New Yorker, Carver took the world of periodical ﬁction by storm. His stories have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and the O. Henry Awards series, on multiple occasions. His short-story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) garnered a National Book Award nomination. Often categorized as a literary minimalist, Carver wrote with precision and a seemingly muted style. He resisted the label, however, considering it a pejorative classiﬁcation. According to the writer Jay McInerney, “Ray wrote the way that he wrote and he thought it was a belittling term. He didn’t believe his work was any more minimalist than anyone else’s” (Halpert 49). As did many of his contemporaries, he questioned the usefulness of these types of terms. William Kittredge, one of his contempo-

Raymond Carver

man and a chronic reviser. But Gardner famously provided Carver with a key to his office so Carver could have a place to work. “He had a lot of correspondence from other writers in his office,” Carver said once in an interview, “which I naturally read. Anyway, I learned a good deal about this and that from all my snooping” (Gentry and Stull 4). Carver later transferred to Humboldt State College. That same year, 1963, one of his earliest published short stories, “Pastoral,” appeared in Western Humanities Review and his poem “The Brass Ring” appeared in a now-defunct magazine called Targets. (Depending on what they count as an officially “published” short story, some critics list “Pastoral” as his fi rst published work. He had published several pieces in student magazines previously.) Carver left Humboldt with a B.A. that spring and, in fall 1963, attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he remained for less than a year. Carver often explained his decision to drop out as a fi nancially motivated one: “[A $500 scholarship] wasn’t much money for a year’s worth of study, even with the $2 an hour I earned working in the university library and the money my wife earned working in a restaurant. There was no way we could make it through a second year in Iowa” (Gentry and Stull 74). Moving back to California, Carver took a job as a janitor for the next two years. Switching to the night shift in 1965, he was able to enroll in a poetry workshop at Sacramento State College. In 1986, Carver reflected on his teacher at Sacramento, Dennis Schmitz: “He was for many years—and still is—an inspiration to me, even though our poetry is very different” (Gentry and Stull 180). In 1967, the short story “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” was included in Best American Short Stories, but in the same year, fi nancial troubles forced the Carvers to fi le for bankruptcy. Carver’s father passed away that summer. A few weeks later, Carver took a job at Science Research Associates, editing textbooks, and moved to Palo Alto, California. Some time during that summer, he also met Gordon Lish, who had published some of Carver’s work at Esquire. Lish later took a position at Knopf and became Carver’s

book editor. “He was always a great advocate of my stories,” said Carver, “at all times championing my work, even during the period when I was not writing, when I was out in California devoting myself to drinking, Gordon read my work on radio and at writers conferences and so forth” (Gentry and Stull 234–235). In recent years, Lish’s role in editing and shaping Carver’s early stories has become controversial. In 2009, the Library of America published a collection entitled Raymond Carver: Selected Stories, which included “Beginners,” an early draft of a story that became, after much editing and compressing, the famous story “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.” In 1968, Carver’s wife received a scholarship to attend Tel Aviv University. Carver took a one-year leave of absence from Science Research Associates to travel with Maryann to Israel. They arrived in June, and in Maryann’s words, “Ray and my daughter both became very disgruntled” (Halpert 93). An explosion at a bus depot, which the Carver children often passed through on their way to school, was the last straw for Carver. He delivered an ultimatum to Maryann, pledging to take his children back to the United States with or without her. She left with him, however, and the entire family returned via cruise ship. Throughout the early 1970s, Carver began to experience substantial success as a writer and a writing instructor. He lectured at U.C. Santa Cruz, U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Santa Barbara, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in 1971 and, according to Maryann, earned two nicknames: Running Dog and Feather in the Wind. “He kept his job teaching at Santa Cruz while teaching in Iowa and flew back and forth without either school knowing about it” (Halpert 94). In 1973, while lecturing at the Iowa Writers’ Worskhop, Carver resided at the Iowa House Hotel one floor below John Cheever. “The entire time we were there,” said Carver, “I don’t think either of us ever took the cover off our typewriters. We made trips to a liquor store twice a week in my car” (Gentry and Stull 40). While Cheever famously spent a month

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

at Smithers, an alcoholic rehabilitation center in New York City, Carver’s drinking habits became more pronounced. Alcoholism and mounting family problems forced Carver to resign in December 1974 from a one-year position at U.C. Santa Barbara. The Carvers fi led for bankruptcy for the second time and returned to Cupertino, California. In 1976, Carver was hospitalized four times for alcohol-related incidents. He and his wife separated and sold their house. Of the failed marriage, Maryann said, “I was so deep in that relationship—and he was too—that past clichés don’t cut it. . . . We’d been in it forever. I met the love of my life when I was fourteen years old, for God’s sake” (Halpert 100). Maryann and Carver tried to reconcile briefly but parted ways permanently in summer 1977. During that same year, Carver published one of the great works of his career, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, a book of short stories. The collection earned Carver a National Book Award nomination. In 1977, Carver quit drinking and met the poet Tess Gallagher, whom he later married. He earned a Guggenheim Fellowship and published another book of short stories, Furious Seasons. Within two years, Carver and Gallagher were living together in El Paso, Texas. He also won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1979, but Gallagher recalled this period as a time of tension: “I remember feeling afraid when I was fi rst with Ray that living with him might turn out to be like stepping into one of his stories. It seemed that a very thin membrane might separate the world of chaos and order when Ray’s perceptions came into play” (Carver Country 16). Carver struggled to write and, according to Gallagher, distrusted the work he did when sober. But over time the author was able to return to a period of profound achievement, writing what some consider his best and most richly textured stories. “As the years of sobriety and literary accomplishment accumulated,” said Gallagher, “Ray’s face lost an almost bloated vagueness it had carried when I’d fi rst met him. The jawline fi rmed up and the muscled places, where humor and a sense of confident

well being had come together, seemed to restore a youthful mischief to his looks” (Carver Country 18). The 1981 collection What We Talk about When We Talk about Love preceded the 1983 collection Cathedral, often regarded as Carver’s best work. During this period, Carver and Gallagher lived and taught at Syracuse University in New York and traveled extensively throughout Europe. Destinations included Switzerland, France, and Italy. In 1982, Carver’s mentor John Gardner was killed in a motorcycle accident. In spring 1987, Gallagher and Carver traveled to several European cities, but that fall, Carver became ill. Doctors removed two thirds of his cancerous left lung in October. This surgery provided a short reprieve from the illness, but in March 1988, the cancer returned, this time appearing in his brain. He went through a seven-week course of radiation treatment in April and May. A collection of short stories, Where I’m Calling From, was released in May. But in early June, doctors discovered a resurgence of cancer in Carver’s lung. Amid mounting health problems, Carver and Tess decided to marry. The ceremony was held in Reno, Nevada, on June 17. He died of lung cancer on August 2, 1988, at the age of 50. Reacting to Carver’s death, Tess wrote: “Besides the plain fact of Ray’s genius being gone from the world, part of this outpouring was no doubt due to the fact that Ray was so young—barely fifty. We had all expected and hoped for many more years of his writing and company. It was a life cut short, and we suffered the loss as it was—an aberration, a blow, a chastisement to us all in our faulty assumptions about the future” (Carver Country 19). The following summer, Carver’s fi nal book of poetry, A New Path to the Waterfall, was published. Authors and critics have commented on Carver’s significance as a writer. Tobias Wolff, who fi rst became friends with Carver in the late 1970s, theorized that Carver will continue to be an important writer long into the future: “I have a strong suspicion that Ray will be one of those writers who will be read with care and love as long as people read our language. He has penetrated a secret about us and brought it to the light, and he does it again

Raymond Carver

and again. You have to go to the water and drink. There’s something pure and cool and honest in his vision of life, and the beauty of his language, its exactness, its cadences, and its music. People will go back to it again and again and again” (quoted in Halpert 11). Several major works analyzing Carver’s writings have appeared since his death. While the majority of reaction to Carver’s work during his lifetime described him as a minimalist, several critics of late have attempted to delve beneath the label that Carver so openly deplored. Adam Meyer’s 1989 essay “Now You See Him, Now You Do Again: The Evolution of Raymond Carver’s Minimalism,” published in Critique magazine (reprinted in part in Campbell), exemplifies the standard narrative that Carver began as a minimalist and matured with Cathedral. The 1995 collection Narrative Turns in Minor Genres in Postmodernism includes an essay by W. M. Verhoeven entitled “What We Talk about When We Talk about Raymond Carver: Or, Much Ado about Minimalism.” G. P. Lainsbury, in his introduction to The Carver Chronotope (2004), discusses the critical context of Carver’s minimalism. In Halpert’s book, several of Carver’s contemporaries respond to the term. Most notably, Geoffrey Wolff uses the expletive bulls—t as a response to the term (112). Saltzman entertains an extended discussion on the “controversy” surrounding Carver’s minimalism, analyzing as well the claim that Carver ought to be categorized as a postmodern writer (5; for more information, see Saltzman 1–20). Randolph Runyon also weighs in on the minimalist debate in the introduction to Reading Raymond Carver. Even though Carver has for the most part escaped labels as a regionalist, recent work has attempted to establish a geographical or social aesthetic throughout his work. Lainsbury discusses his wilderness aesthetic, while Saltzman notices Carver’s attention to the working classes of the United States. “Carver stays faithful to the gross tokens of American culture—the stuff of waitresses, fi shermen, salesmen, mail carriers” (17). Likewise, scholars have begun to look at the politics of legacy and influence in his work. Carver listed Anton Chekhov

as one of his most direct influences. During his lifetime, he had interactions with Robert Altman, John Cheever, Richard Ford, John Gardner, Jay McInerney, William Kittredge, and Tobias Wolff. Lainsbury writes about connections between Carver and Hemingway, as well as Carver and Kafka. In 2009, Carol Sklenicka published the fi rst full-length biography of Carver, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life. There other several other important biographical sources. Carver’s own works, of course, can be seen as partially autobiographical, while the 1990 collection Carver Country attempts to juxtapose autobiography and fiction in an attempt to paint a more textured portrait of Carver and his work. Tess Gallagher’s Soul Barnacles (2000) attempts to consolidate several documents pertaining to Carver’s life. Gallagher’s travel journal from the couple’s 1987 trip through Europe is included, as is Gallagher’s eulogy of Carver from Granta (Autumn 1988). Interviews, reprinted essays, and letters make up the remainder of the collection. Halpert’s . . . When We Talk about Raymond Carver collects interviews from 10 people who knew the author, including his fi rst wife, Maryann, and several writers. A memoir by Maryann titled What It Used to Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver was published in 2006. Conversations with Raymond Carver collects more than 20 pieces of journalism pertinent to Carver’s life. Some of these articles quote Carver in narrative form, while others reprint interviews with him in question/answer form. Several articles are regionally based and provide unique perspectives into Carver’s legacy. Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography of Raymond Carver (1993) also provides reminiscences about Carver, reprinting some previously published essays. Although Carver never wrote a novel, several critics have attempted to construct a Carver worldview across the broad range of his fiction and poetry. Lainsbury argues, “Thinking of Carver’s output as one large novel . . . is not as strange as it might at fi rst seem,” adding later that “the Carver chronotope makes artistically visible a discrete historical moment in the ongoing project that the world

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

knows as America” (8). Carver Country (1990) reprints poems and selected short stories of Carver’s alongside photographs by Bob Adelman, who was a friend of his. These photographs add insight into the places that inspired Carver, as well as the people who touched his life. The work also includes several unpublished letters and photographs of Carver’s notebooks and drafts. Tess Gallagher wrote the introduction to Carver Country, saying the collection “became a story, both of Ray’s life as a writer and a man, and also of our lives together as writers, lovers, and helpmates” (8).

“Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” (1976) The last piece in the 1976 short-story collection of the same title, “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” is one of Carver’s great achievements. Carver’s subdued prose represents effectively a sense of moral ambiguity. Arthur Saltzman explains, “On the whole, things remain lukewarm; arid marriages and formulated phrases are the norm. Desires, doubts, and all manner of considerations flow sluggishly through the narrowest of verbal channels” (73). Ralph Wyman, the main character, feels purposeless as a young college student, until he comes under the influence of a teacher named Dr. Maxwell: “He had been educated at Vanderbilt, had studied in Europe, and had later had something to do with one or two literary magazines back East. Almost overnight, Ralph would later say, he decided on teaching as a career” (226). This tale mirrors Carver’s own experience in college, approximating his relationship with John Gardner. Also reflecting an autobiographical voice is the author’s decision to name Ralph wife’s, whom he meets in a Chaucer class as a college senior, Marian. Most of “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” takes place years later, when Ralph discovers his wife’s infidelity. Confronting her about an incident two or three years past, he fi nally hears the extent of her indiscretion and flees his home. The central confl ict of the story, however, is not the

indiscretion itself but rather the main character’s reaction to it. Ralph, as do many of Carver’s characters, occupies a zone of moral ambiguity, a space of indecision. “He thought how Dr. Maxwell would handle a thing like this,” states Carver, deciding “Dr. Maxwell would sit handsomely at the water’s edge” (245). Wyman’s idealized decision to contemplate his situation by the pier is interrupted when he accidentally bumps into a street thug, who takes offense and beats him into unconsciousness. Returning home perhaps even more defeated than when he left, Ralph must decide what to do about his wife and family. As his wife knocks on the locked bathroom door and his children cry in the background, Ralph speaks the title phrase, “Will you please be quiet, please?” which reflects his desire to avoid the confl ict rather than address it. In Ewing Campbell’s words, “The crisis resolves itself fi nally to his amazement and with his apparent acceptance of the old Marian and the new Ralph Wyman, for the old one died somewhere in the night” (30). The fi nal passage of the story reflects this sense of acceptance or, perhaps more appropriately, the decision to let go, as well as the powerful sexuality that dominates the story. Marian sits on the bed where her husband intends to sleep and begins stroking his lower back. “He tensed at her fi ngers, and then he let go a little. It was easier to let go a little. Her hand moved over his hip and over his stomach and she was pressing her body over his now and moving over him and back and forth over him. He held himself, he later considered, as long as he could. And then he turned to her. He turned and turned in what might have been a stupendous sleep, and he was still turning, marveling at the impossible changes he felt moving over him” (249).

For Discussion or Writing 1. How does Carver address questions of morality in this short story? To what degree can actions be categorized in terms of right and wrong? How does Carver address mainstream ideas about forgiveness?

Raymond Carver

2. Ralph, in an effort to make sense of his wife’s infidelity, attempts to sit by the docks and watch the sunrise, primarily because he imagines this to be what his mentor would do in his place. What does the disruption of Ralph’s plan indicate about Carver’s sense of aesthetics?

“Furious Seasons” (1977) “Furious Seasons,” published in the short-story collection of the same title, has been pointed out as something of an oddity when placed in the Carver oeuvre. While many of Carver’s critics skip this collection when analyzing Carver’s work, Saltzman includes an entire chapter on the collection, noting, “Apart from the title story, in which Carver makes surprising use of stream-of-consciousness techniques, the fictions in this collection are generally faithful to such conventions as narrative framing and defi nitive closure” (76). The title story, however, is nonlinear, surrealistic, and abstract to the point of obfuscation. The main character, Lew Farrell, jumps between several locations, including a bedroom where he confronts his sister about her pregnancy and a goose-hunting trip with his friend Frank. Long passages describing the landscape and the weather interrupt these interior scenes. The story closes with this focus in mind: “The gutter water rushed over his feet, swirled frothing into a great whirlpool at the drain on the corner and rushed down to the center of the earth” (110). Shifts in verb tense complicate the narrative even further. The implication at the end of the story is that Farrell was responsible for impregnating his sister and has somehow caused her death. “Her carries her out to the porch, turns her face to the wall, and covers her up. He goes back into the bathroom, washes his hands, and stuffs the heavy, blood-soaked towel into the clothes hamper” (109). Halpert appropriately describes the ambiguity of the story’s conclusion: “Whether or not Farrell is guilty of incest and murder is obscured by his subjective meanderings and lapses of focus; he shifts back and forth between robot-like desensitization

and surreal images of suffocation and violence” (96). The style of this work is often compared with that of William Faulkner.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Describe Carver’s stylistic choices in this short story. How does his sense of surrealism compare with other writers’? What makes his voice distinct? 2. What can be said about the literary importance of Carver’s landscapes and his sense of place? How does the weather contribute to the impact of this work?

“What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” (1981) Perhaps one of Carver’s most thoughtful works, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” is essentially the story of a predinner conversation revolving around concepts of love. “My friend Mel McGinnis was talking,” opens the story. “Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right” (170). While a discussion about love creates the crux for this work, Carver does not abandon his patented realism in favor of an abstract, intellectual debate. Four friends in Albuquerque, “all from somewhere else,” drink from a cheap bottle of gin while discussing this topic (170). Mel, driven partly by his experiences as a doctor, insists that love is an absolute, while Terri, his wife, recalls her previous partner, Ed, who threatened Terri and Mel’s life in the name of love and ultimately killed himself for the same stated reason. “He did love me though, Mel. Grant me that,” Terri pleads, but Mel remains unconvinced. “I’m not interested in that kind of love,” he says. “If that’s love, you can have it” (174). While the narrator, Nick, and his wife, Laura, avoid center stage for most of the story, the conversation eventually turns to the recently married couple. “Well, Nick and I know what love is,” Laura says, but her idealism cannot last, not in this setting. “Stop that now. You’re making me sick.

74 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

You’re still on your honeymoon, for God’s sake,” Terri reminds them (175). Nick almost escapes the entire story without making a stand, but his fi nal comment seems to carry some interpretive meaning: “Eat or not eat. Or keep drinking. I could head right on into the sunset” (185). When questioned about the comment, which Laura sees as perhaps a kind of depressed resignation, Nick replies, “It means I could just keep going. That’s all it means” (185). Perhaps the meaning of the story resides somewhere between Nick’s desire to keep going and his implied resignation. As the story progresses, Carver gives the impression that even though Mel may have “the right” to make claims about the absolute nature of love, his version of the emotion simplifies a deeply complicated philosophical question. Mel admits, “But sometimes I have a hard time accounting for the fact that I must have loved my fi rst wife too. But I did, I know I did” (176). Mel does not insist on his own authority, instead concluding, “It seems to me we’re just beginners at love” (176). But drunkenness provides the only closure available in this short story. The characters, slipping into stupor, never go out to dinner, and their debate trails off into a rant about Mel’s former wife. According to Geoffrey Wolff: “ ‘What We Talk about When We Talk about Love’ I admire so much because, fi rst of all, I don’t think there has ever been anything even approximately as good written about drinking. I’ve done enough drinking in my life to know how it feels, what happens to syntax, what happens to diction, as the light begins to come down in the room and the stuff goes further down in the bottle” (115).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Some critics have suggested that Carver’s dinner conversation approximates and updates the viewpoints of several classical thinkers. What philosophers’ writings, historical or contemporary, could Carver be in conversation with? How would his views compare with the ideas of these thinkers? Why do you think so? 2. Carver seems to provide arguments in favor of two systems of love: one based on actions and

the other grounded primarily in sentiment. Which version is more applicable to your own life? Why is this the case? Explain your answer.

“Cathedral” (1982) “Cathedral” has often been pointed to as one of Carver’s most surprisingly textured works. In the words of Carver’s former student Jay McInerney, “Something remarkable happens in that story that usually doesn’t happen in a Carver story. It has a different kind of ending. The ending of a usual Carver story leaves you on the brink of an abyss, and you look down into it. In ‘Cathedral’ it’s more like you’re looking up to the sky and the sun is coming out” (Halpert 48). Noted for its optimism as well as its depth, “Cathedral” has a simple plot, on the literal level. The fi rst-person narrator is jealous of his wife’s relationship with Robert, a blind man for whom she used to work. After Robert’s wife, Beulah, dies, he plans to visit the narrator’s wife. “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit,” says the narrator. “He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me” (356). The narrator’s awkwardness intrudes as he attempts to make small talk. He thinks about the scenic train ride along the Hudson River that Robert has taken and even asks him which side of the train he sat on. Of course, the scenery is of no consequence to Robert, but he undercuts the narrator’s assumption that the ride held no meaning for him. “I hadn’t been on a train in nearly forty years. Not since I was a kid. With my folks. That’s been a long time. I’d nearly forgotten the sensation,” he says (362). This response asserts Robert’s connection to the experience in two ways. He can feel the train, of course, and has a nostalgic relationship with it. Similarly, the narrator assumes that Robert does not smoke because he “couldn’t see the smoke [he] inhaled” (363). Once again, the assumption proves false: “This blind man smoked his cigarette down to the nubbin and then lit another one” (363). Unlike that in many Carver stories, the theme in “Cathedral” is growth and change, not stasis. The blind man’s disability allows Carver to medi-

Raymond Carver

tate on seeing and knowing in several ways, but the conclusion makes this metaphor overt as Robert and the narrator work together to draw a cathedral. (A television documentary on cathedrals triggers the realization that Robert does not know what a cathedral is and that the narrator is unable to explain it.) “His fi ngers rode my fi ngers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now” (374). The narrator closes his eyes at the conclusion of the tale, entering Robert’s universe. When Robert asks what the cathedral looks like, he replies without looking, “It’s really something” (375). While Carver denies his readers an outright epiphany, a sense of conversion can still be observed. Campbell suggests the narrator “will view from now on his wife’s experience in a manner different from his initial attitude, that his attitude toward Robert will be wholly different also” (66). In this manner, “Cathedral” stands as an articulation of Carver’s optimism.

For Discussion or Writing 1. See whether you can trace the narrator’s use of common expressions that rely on his sense of sight. To what degree does Carver use wordplay in “Cathedral”? As the character’s attitude toward his blind acquaintance changes, does his language? Why do you think that is so? What does this change contribute to the work as a whole? 2. Why does Carver use a cathedral as the central metaphor for this piece? What does it represent? How does it relate to the theme of vision and seeing? What would be the consequences of a completely different metaphor?

“Where I’m Calling From” (1989) As in many of his stories, Carver’s personal vulnerability becomes a focal point in “Where I’m Calling From.” The story is set in an alcohol treatment center called Frank Martin’s and reflects Carver’s “trying to navigate through the mirrorings of his own disease” (147). The story is based upon Carver’s own experience at Duffy’s, “a treatment center in

northern California within sight of Jack London’s house” (Carver Country 12). For the majority of the story, the narrator listens to his acquaintance J. P. talk about his own life. J. P. explains that he fell down a well at a young age. His fear can be seen as a roundabout way for Carver to discuss his own apprehensions about quitting alcohol: “He suffered all kinds of terror in that well, hollering for help, waiting, and then hollering some more” (281). Carver relates that J. P. wet his pants in the well and that “being at the bottom of that well had made a lasting impression” (281). Years later, says J. P., he became a chimney sweep, but the story of J. P.’s career turns out more appropriately to be the story of his marriage. He meets a female chimney sweep named Roxy, learns the trade from her, and eventually marries her. When she becomes pregnant, she stops working, but he continues with the career she helped him build. J. P’s story, presumably like the narrator’s, is then marred by alcoholism. Interspersed with J. P’s story are realistic scenes of the narrator at Frank Martin’s drying-out facility. Another resident, Tiny, falls to the floor one day and goes into convulsions, which are caused by his withdrawal. According to Douglas Unger, Carver adapted an experience of his own to create this scene: “Ray hit the floor several times, like the character Tiny in [‘Where I’m Calling From’]. That’s where the detail is from. Ray was the one who was on the floor with his heels clicking. He was then terrified to quit drinking” (Halpert 59). Once again, fear becomes a central element in this short story. “But what happened to Tiny is something I won’t ever forget,” says the narrator, adding later: “So every time this little flitter starts up anywhere, I draw some breath and wait to fi nd myself on my back, looking up, somebody’s fi ngers in my mouth” (280). Not coincidentally, the main character’s stay at Martin’s coincides with the winter holidays. As New Year’s Eve passes, the absence of alcohol becomes palpable: “‘I don’t want any f—ing cake,’ says the guy who goes to Europe and places. ‘Where’s the champagne?’ he says, and laughs” (291). The main character’s discomfort, the reader discovers, is enhanced by apprehension about his girlfriend, who was waiting for the results of a follow-up from a doctor after a disturbing Pap smear

76 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

result. The narrator reveals that his girlfriend’s bad news triggered his alcohol relapse and his return for a second stay at Martin’s. While apprehension and terror remain central motifs, Carver provides a glimmer of hope. Upon meeting J. P.’s wife, Roxy, he asks her for a kiss, with the explanation “I need some luck” (294). His mannerism recalls J. P.’s story about kissing Roxy for the first time, but his hope that the kiss will give him luck seems to be the narrator’s own conclusion. Roxy grants him his request and wishes him luck. As the story moves to a close, he contemplates calling his girlfriend and his wife, who had asked him to move out some months before. “She’ll ask me where I’m calling from, and I’ll have to tell her. I won’t say anything about New Year’s resolutions. There’s no way to make a joke out of this” (296). At the conclusion of the story, Carver emphasizes the ongoing difficulty of a task like quitting alcohol. He provides some hope but does not gloss over the reality of the narrator’s situation.

For Discussion or Writing 1. A feminist critique of Carver’s story might focus on how the narrator addresses spousal abuse, spending more time sympathizing with the abuser/addict than the victim. How does gender relate to the abuse/victim matrix Carver explores? Does it deserve to be criticized? Are there other elements of Carver’s gender relationships that deserve to be scrutinized? Justify your answers. 2. Carver’s story has been hailed as a powerful depiction of addiction and the difficulties of overcoming it. What kinds of rituals, customs, and emotional needs are associated with alcohol? How successful is Carver at depicting addiction, and why?

“A Small, Good Thing” (1989) Expanded from an earlier story titled “The Bath,” Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing” has often been analyzed in terms of revision and maturation. Saltzman notices that the expansion decreases “the distances that separate Carver’s characters from

one another and Carver’s narrator from the story he relates” (144). The story relates the death of eight-year-old Scotty Weiss, the son of Ann and Howard Weiss. Injured in a hit-and-run car accident at the opening of the story, Scotty remains in a coma for the majority of the tale. Ann and Howard rush to the hospital to be by his side, and, in the process, Ann forgets about a cake she ordered for Scotty’s eighth birthday. Ann and Howard, devastated by the accident, are forced to face genuine tragedy for the fi rst time. “Until now,” Carver states, “[Howard’s] life had gone smoothly and to his satisfaction—college, marriage, another year of college for the advanced degree in business, a junior partnership in an investment fi rm. Fatherhood” (379). Likewise, Ann is forced to reach out for a long-forsaken sense of faith: “I almost thought I’d forgotten how, but it came back to me. All I had to do was close my eyes and say, ‘Please God, help us—help Scotty’ ” (384). While Scotty is expected to survive, a rare condition called a hidden occlusion results in his death. The doctor apologizes profusely, but it is all but impossible to get past the event itself. The original story, “The Bath,” ends shortly after Scotty’s death, as the doctor attempts to console the bereaved parents. In the expanded version, Carver pursues a plot thread that originally was undeveloped. After forgetting to pick up the birthday cake at the bakery, the Weisses receive several increasingly aggressive phone calls from the baker. He cannot understand why the cake has been forgotten, and his calls border on harassment by the time Scotty dies. Ann suddenly realizes who must be calling, however, and she and her husband travel to the bakery to confront the baker. Upon realizing what he has done, the baker begs forgiveness. “I’m not an evil man, I don’t think,” he says. “Not evil, like you said on the phone. You got to understand what it comes down to is I don’t know how to act any more, it would seem” (404). The Weisses do not verbalize their forgiveness, but they allow the baker to make partial reparations by accepting warm cinnamon rolls from his oven. The baker insists that “eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” but the

Raymond Carver

couple does not respond (404). Instead, they listen to the baker’s story. “Though they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say. . . . They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving” (405).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Critics have often discussed the differences between “The Bath” and the longer version reprinted as “A Small, Good Thing.” Try to imagine this story as ending when the Weisses leave the hospital. How would the piece differ? How would its statement about life be affected? Why? 2. What is your appraisal of the baker? Is he an “evil man,” as he fears? To what extent do you think he deserves forgiveness? To what degree, if any, do you think the Weisses actually grant him forgiveness? Explain your answers fully.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON CARVER AND HIS WORK 1. As you read several of Carver’s stories, think about the idea of a Carver chronotope or worldview. How successfully does he articulate a fairly consistent vision of the world? What are the rules governing this reality? What kind of place is it? What kinds of people are we meant to admire? 2. Minimalism has been called the central controversy of Carver’s writing. Do you think his works should be read as minimalist? What aspects of his work most consistently reinforce this label? What is the benefit of the term? Why do you think Carver found it so offensive? 3. Some have criticized Carver for relying too heavily on the biographical events in his own life. Do some research on Carver’s life, specifically looking for aspects most closely paralleled in his writings. Do you think this criticism is fair? Do you think it should be a criticism?

4. Read some of the poetry of Tess Gallagher (Carver’s wife). How does it compare with her husband’s writing? Can you fi nd parallel events or experiences discussed in both their works? Stylistically, how do their approaches to these events differ? Can you see evidence of Gallagher’s influence on works like “Cathedral”? 5. Read some of Carver’s poems. How do they differ from his short stories in style and subject matter? Do they participate in the same chronotope as Carver’s fiction? 6. Carver’s depictions of alcoholism are often described as incredibly accurate and powerful. How does his treatment of alcoholism compare to treatment of similar subject matter by other writers? Can he be compared to his contemporary John Cheever? What about comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway? Why or why not? 7. Discuss how Carver’s short stories often focus on working-class Americans. What is the significance of Carver’s socioeconomic aesthetic? Who, according to Carver, deserves to be written about? Why is this the case? Discuss your answer. 8. Carver’s landscapes are often seen as being as central to his work as any of his characters. Do you agree or disagree? Read Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, noting how landscape figures in this novel. Does the setting in Hardy’s work play a more or less important role than in Carver’s literary world? Why or why not? WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Bethea, Arthur F. Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver. New York: Routledge, 2002. Campbell, Ewing. Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Carver, Maryann Burk. What It Used to Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006. Carver, Raymond. Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver. Produced by Bob Adelman. Introduction by Tess Gallagher. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990.

78 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

———. “Cathedral.” In Where I’m Calling From. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. ———. “Furious Seasons.” In Furious Seasons. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1977. ———. “A Small, Good Thing.” In Where I’m Calling From. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. ———. “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.” In Where I’m Calling From. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. ———. “Where I’m Calling From.” In Where I’m Calling From. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. ———. “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” In Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? New York: McGrawHill, 1976. Gallagher, Tess. Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray. Edited by Greg Simon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Gentry, Marshall Bruce, and William L. Stull. Conversations with Raymond Carver. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

Halpert, Sam, ed. . . . When We Talk about Raymond Carver. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1991. Kleppe, Sandra, and Robert Miltner. New Paths to Raymond Carver: Critical Essays on His Life, Fiction, and Poetry. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. Lainsbury, G. P. The Carver Chronotope: Inside the Life-World of Raymond Carver’s Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2004. Rayson, Paul. Carversite: Raymond Carver. Available online. URL: http://www.carversite.com. Accessed June 24, 2009. Runyon, Randolph Paul. Reading Raymond Carver. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992. Saltzman, Arthur M. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

Matthew Lavin

Sandra Cisneros (1954–

)

I am a writer. It is my job to think. I live my life facing backwards. (“Ghosts and Voices” 71)

out a sister as an ally against her brothers and the constancy that results from living in a permanent home where friendships could ﬂourish, Cisneros turned to books for companionship. As undesirable as this solitude was at the time, Cisneros reﬂects on it as “a perfect beginning for a writer in training” (“Only Daughter” 256). In the absence of companionship, Cisneros found plenty of time to write and read—activities that made her imagination swell and created a voice in her head for narrating, even embellishing, life’s experiences with omniscient asides. Routinely, when her mother gave her simple instructions for buying bread and milk at the grocery store, she would replay the instructions like a novella:

andra Cisneros was born on December 20, 1954, the only daughter of a Mexican father and a Mexican-American mother. Alfredo Cisneros had ﬂed Mexico for the southern part of the United States years earlier, too ashamed to face his father after failing his ﬁ rst year of college. From there, he traveled north into the barrios of Chicago, where he met Cisneros’s mother, Elvira Cordero Anguiano. At the time, Elvira was just 17 and living with her parents. Cisneros’s maternal grandfather was a large, generous man, who would freely share his food and home with anyone because he “knew what living without meant” (“Never” 70). But Elvira’s family never had much, and when Alfredo would visit, she was embarrassed by the poverty of her home. From the start, Elvira had been impressed by his fancy clothes and air of importance. Despite the meager living he was making in the United States, he was from a home in Mexico City “that was neither rich nor poor, but thought itself better than both” (“Never” 71). After they married, Elvira gave birth to seven boys and two girls, but Cisneros’s sister died young, leaving the future author to fend for herself in a world of young men. Lost amid her brothers, who would not stoop to play with a mere girl, Cisneros lived a lonely childhood. This loneliness was only heightened by her family’s seasonal migration between Chicago and Mexico City to satisfy her father’s nostalgia. With-

“I want you to go to the store and get me a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk. Bring back all the change and don’t let them gyp you like they did last time.” In my head my narrator would add: . . . she said in a voice that was neither reproachful nor tender. Thus clutching the coins in her pocket, our hero was off under a sky so blue and a wind so sweet she wondered it didn’t make her dizzy. This is how I glamorized my days living in the third ﬂoor ﬂats and shabby neighborhoods where the best friend I was always waiting for never materialized. (“Ghosts and Voices” 70)

But Cisneros was not the only woman suffering from this transience: Alfredo’s family, disapproving

80 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

of his choice in marriage, made visits to Mexico equally difﬁcult for Elvira. In her story “Never Marry a Mexican,” Cisneros writes of her mother’s efforts to dissuade her from marrying a Mexican—or any Latin man, for that matter—because of her own hardships in marriage. Whether in Mexico City or Chicago, her mother had to “put up with all the grief a Mexican family can put on a girl because she was from el otro lado, the other side, and my father had married down by marrying her. If he had married a white woman from el otro lado, that would’ve been different. That would’ve been marrying up. . . . But what could be more ridiculous than a Mexican girl who couldn’t even speak Spanish?” (69). Elvira’s regret in marrying so young is given voice in “A Smart Cookie,” in The House on Mango Street (90). With a heavy sigh, she tells the ﬁctional Esperanza that she “could’ve been somebody” had she not let her shame in being poor stop her from reaching for any of her many dreams. Determined to give her daughter what she herself did not have, she sternly tells Esperanza to study hard and stay in school. Cisneros’s mother, wanting to spare her daughter the unhappiness she had experienced as a woman ﬁ nancially dependent on her husband, went to great effort to instill in her a belief that education was her right and privilege. She ensured that Cisneros had her own library card and excused her from the domestic chores traditionally expected of an only daughter so that Cisneros might have more time to read and study. Such concessions gave Cisneros what she would later ﬁguratively name “a room of her own,” a reference to Virginia Woolf’s theory that all women writers should have a space in which their imaginations could freely ﬂourish and be freed from domestic concerns. When Cisneros reﬂects on why her mother did it, she supposes it was “because she didn’t want me to inherit her sadness and her rolling pin” (“Notes” 75). During their seasons in Chicago, Cisneros’s family scraped by in apartments in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Although he always regretted his failed education, Alfredo found ways to support his family, usually through upholstery—a skill taught him by his uncle. Years of dreaming of a house of

their own were ﬁ nally realized when Cisneros was 11 years old. Barely ﬁ nding the down payment, the family purchased a house in the Puerto Rican neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago. This is the house that inspires the vignettes of Cisneros’s acclaimed House on Mango Street. As she describes in her book, the house was a far cry from the one her parents had built in her imagination, dilapidated on the outside and overcrowded on the inside. In her writing, Cisneros complains about its lack of space in which to ﬁ nd one’s self: In my home private space was practically impossible; aside from the doors that opened to the street, the only room with a lock was the bathroom, and how could anyone who shared a bathroom with eight other people stay in there for more than a few minutes? Before college, no one in my family had a room of their own except me, a narrow closet just big enough for my twin bed and an oversized blond dresser we’d bought in the bargain basement of el Sears. The dresser was as long as a cofﬁ n and blocked the door from shutting completely. I had my own room, but I never had the luxury of shutting the door. (“Guadalupe” 46–47)

This worn-down house becomes the literal and ﬁgurative place from which, as a writer, she escapes in search of new ways to see herself as a Mexican American, a woman, and a daughter. Although Cisneros would not begin to call herself a writer until her junior year in college, a poetry project on the Vietnam War gave her acclaim as a poet among her high-school peers, who acknowledged the talent she showed in her sophomore year. This reputation and interest in writing got her the position of editor of the school’s literary magazine. Still, she confesses that at the time she was “more a reader than a writer . . . I was reading and reading, nurturing myself with books like vitamins, only I didn’t know it then” (“Notes” 74). When it was time to apply to college, Cisneros’s parents were in full support. Her mother wanted her daughter to be educated and self-sufﬁcient, and her father wanted her to surround herself with eli-

Sandra Cisneros

gible husbands. Where else could she meet a nice professional to sweep her off her feet? She enrolled at Chicago’s Loyola University, where in 1976 she earned a B.A. in English. She claims that because her father expected her to marry instead of getting a job after graduation, she never had to justify her decision to study “something silly like English,” a major that promised the same kind of poverty in which she had grown up (“Only” 11). This gave her the “liberty to putter about embroidering [her] little poems and stories without [her] father interrupting with so much as a ‘What’s that you’re writing?’ ” (11). With the help of a creative writing instructor during her junior year of college, Cisneros applied and was accepted into the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. Her experience there fell short of her expectations; she was dissatisﬁed with the instruction she was receiving. As the only Hispanic in her group, Cisneros felt she was learning and discussing other people’s experiences. These sentiments boiled over in a seminar called Memory and the Imagination. As Cisneros tells the story, the class was discussing The Poetics of Space, by the French theorist Gaston Bachelard, and his postulation that the structure of a house offers a language for the human experience. Cisneros felt more out of place than ever in this discussion. She was not familiar with the academic language they were using; nor had she experienced the upper-class homes after which they were modeling their discussion. As she reports of her fellow classmates, “They had been bred as ﬁ ne hot-house ﬂowers. I was a yellow weed among the city’s cracks” (“Ghosts and Voices” 64). As a child, she had read of such houses in her books, and her parents had promised her such a house, but the best they could offer was their dilapidated bungalow in an impoverished inner-city neighborhood. Sitting in that classroom, she began to wonder what she could possibly offer such a discussion. Suddenly it occurred to her that it was her uniqueness in the group that would make her a writer. Of this epiphany she writes: You know, you always grow up thinking something’s different or something’s wrong, but you don’t know what it is. If you’re raised in a multi-

ethnic neighborhood, you think that the whole world is multi-ethnic like that. According to what you see in the media, you think that that’s the norm; you don’t ever question that you’re different or that you’re strange. It wasn’t until I was twenty-two that it ﬁ rst hit me how different I really was. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know who I was. I knew I was a Mexican woman. But, I didn’t think it had anything to do with why I felt so much imbalance in my life, whereas it had everything to do with it. My race, my gender, and my class! (Rodríguez Aranda 65)

It was at that moment that Cisneros decided to write about something she knew no one else in her class could write about—her own childhood. Thus originated the childlike voice that would speak in her poetry for so many years and would map identity in her ﬁ rst publication, The House on Mango Street (1984). Armed with this new outlook, Cisneros received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1978. Cisneros has published a number of works that deal with her struggle for identity. In 1980, her ﬁ rst collection of poetry, Bad Boys, was published by Mango Press; these poems were reprinted in a second collection, My Wicked Wicked Ways. In 1984, she published the writings about her house that started on that fateful day in Iowa, The House on Mango Street. Although she clariﬁes that these stories are not all as her family would tell them, she claims they are all true because “every piece of ﬁction is based on something that really happened” (Rodríguez Aranda 64). This book, as was the ﬁ rst, was released by Arte Público Press in Houston, a publisher famous for its dedication to documenting the Hispanic experience in the United States. Originally only 500 copies were printed, but, as readership grew, Random House took over the publication rights and has been the primary publisher of Cisneros’s works ever since. Since earning national acclaim for The House on Mango Street, Cisneros has written numerous works. Woman Hollering Creek (1991) has won many awards, including the PEN Center Award for Best Fiction of the West, the Anisﬁeld-Wolf

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Book Award, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. Subsequent publications include Loose Woman (1994) and Caramelo (2002), which was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction, one of the most prestigious awards granted in the United Kingdom for a single work of ﬁction and the only one judged solely by women. In her adult years, Cisneros has learned to detach herself from the patriarchal grip of traditional Mexican culture and has grown to appreciate the men in her life, especially her father. Despite his reluctance to acknowledge the professional value of writing while Cisneros was in school, he took great pride in her work when reading her ﬁ rst publication. To Cisneros, her father represents the majority of the country uninterested in reading, but for whom she insistently writes. In 2000, Cisneros set up the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation, in honor of her father, to beneﬁt promising writers. In explanation, she writes of her father: “A meticulous craftsman, he would sooner rip the seams of a cushion apart and do it over, than put his name on an item that wasn’t up to his high standards. I especially wanted to honor his memory by an award showcasing writers who are equally proud of their own craft” (Rice). This ﬁdelity to high quality, a lesson learned from her father, is something Cisneros has often expressed a wish to abide by in her writing. Also acknowledging the legacy of her father’s Mexican roots, Cisneros’s writing often reﬂects on the injustices to her ancestors because of their language and mourns the “essential wisdom” lost as those ancestors sacriﬁced their language for the safety and prosperity of their children. As a result of this loss, Cisneros writes, she and other second- and third-generation Mexicans “live like captives, lost from our culture, undergrounded, forever wandering like ghosts with a thorn in the heart” (“Offering” 1010). In an effort to reconcile her language with those of her ancestors and to reconﬁgure perceptions of identity for the Mexican-American woman, Cisneros incorporates Spanglish into her writings. Joining Spanish and English—or, for her, the old and the new—“gives [her] a way of looking at [her]self and at the world in a new way” (“Offering” 1011).

My Wicked Wicked Ways (1987) In her poetic preface to this collection of poems, Cisneros tells readers these are her “wicked poems from when. / . . . I sinned” (x). She then explains that the sin of which she is speaking is not debauchery, but choosing a path different from what her Mexican-American cultura would have her follow. As a whole, these poems chronicle her attempts to renegotiate her ideas of a female self within the barrio, her family, her culture, and the world. The collection is divided into four parts, which can be read as the progression from childhood into female autonomy and empowerment. In the ﬁ rst two sections, “1200 South / 2100 West” and “My Wicked Wicked Ways,” Cisneros draws a picture of the restrictions set up for women in barrio life and within the family. “1200 South” returns readers to a Chicago barrio not unlike that in The House on Mango Street, where poverty and violent male domination create a condition of female dependency and objectiﬁcation. These ﬁ rst 20 pages are ﬁ lled with images of the dysfunctional female body, ranging from the betrayals of puberty to the ultimate submission of death. Consequently, this section presents the barrio, as Adriana Estill suggests, as “a restrictive, masculine, space that threatens the well-being of the girls that inhabit it” (28). In “Wicked Ways,” this female dysfunctionality mutates from a physical one to a communal one. The stories told in this section are of women unable to perform as the submissive wives expected by their culture; their celebration of manlike behavior—such as “chug[ging] one bottle of Pabst,” being “rowdy,” and living alone—sets them apart as “wicked.” Cisneros, unable to “[keep] the master plan, / the lovely motion of tradition,” as her brothers have, reconciles herself to her birth “under a crooked star” and begins to align herself positively with her female predecessors and their “unlucky fate” (26, 38–39). In the two ﬁ nal sections of the collection, Cisneros abandons the barrio and home to begin using foreign lands and space as an arena in which to negotiate her identity. In “Other Countries,”

Sandra Cisneros

Cisneros charts a literal and ﬁgurative exile into foreign lands where she can experiment with malereserved roles of sexuality and independence. She ﬁ nds liberation not only in her ability to take a lover, but also in her equal ability to reject one. As she asks of a male companion whom she deserted in Venice, “Isn’t freedom what you believe in? / Even the freedom to say no?” (50). As if freed from the restrictions of home, Cisneros looks for traces of identity within “her own body and consciousness” (Estill 35). This sexual liberation gives a jump-start to the more generalized self-liberation poeticized in the ﬁ nal section, “The Rodrigo Poems.” For the ﬁ rst time, the speaker is no longer dependent on the deﬁ ning terms of a literal place such as the barrio, the home, or even the foreign lands in which she can pretend to be someone else. Instead, she transcends the idea of a spatially constructed identity, her own body becoming a map she uses to explain her ever-shifting sense of self.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In the poem “For All Tuesday Travelers,” in My Wicked Wicked Ways, and the short story “Never Marry a Mexican,” in Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros writes as the lover of married men. Compare and contrast the two works to explore the differences you can identify between the speakers’ tones. How does the difference in genre inﬂuence your attitude toward each speaker? Discuss your responses fully. 2. In “By Way of Explanation,” the speaker describes herself with allusions to numerous places and artistic references. Research these places and works of art; then discuss how their inclusion shapes our understanding of the speaker.

The House on Mango Street (1984) The House on Mango Street is a collection of 44 vignettes set in and around the only house Cisneros knew as a child. Although each vignette can be read as an isolated narrative, when combined, these

literary sketches create a novel that maps the way the narrator, a young girl named Esperanza, begins to know and understand the world around her. The book is dedicated in both Spanish and English to “the Women,” presumably those of whom she writes—women who outside the novel live silently and without autonomy, but through our young narrator ﬁ nd a voice. Sharing Cisneros’s regret over her family’s move into their one and only permanent residence, Esperanza is embarrassed by her family’s house, which in no way compares to her imaginative construct of home. Instead of the white house she has seen on television, with a picket fence and bathrooms to spare and trees around the perimeter, this house is decrepit, with “bricks . . . crumbling in places,” and has only one bathroom for the family to share (4). The space deﬁciency on the inside is personiﬁed in the house’s outward appearance, by windows “so small you’d think they were holding their breath . . . and the front door . . . so swollen, you have to push hard to get in” (4). Unable to see her house as the equivalent to her friend Alicia’s remembered home in Guadalajara, Esperanza looks forward to the home she can only dream of and swears against Alicia’s urgings that when she leaves Mango Street she will never return. The things that disappoint Esperanza about her family’s house are largely structural and aesthetic. Her complaints might lead us to believe that her dream home would be the new and improved version of all her dislikes. On the contrary, Esperanza describes her dream home by the presence or absence of things on the inside rather than by the façade of the outside. Not only will her home be made up of all her favorite things, but it will also include her stories, void of the ﬁgures that she has perceived as the source of restrictions in her life. She wants “not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own” (108). Her wish to remove the male, especially the father, ﬁgure from the dynamics of a house reveals her desire to alter the restrictive male-dominated paradigm that prevails within her Mexican-American culture. For Cisneros, storytelling is the best way to “reinvent” the

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Mexican-American woman’s sense of self without “reject[ing] the entire culture” (Rodríguez Aranda 66). Everywhere Esperanza looks, she is surrounded by women who live a quiet existence while locked away in the houses of the men closest to them. Most disturbing to Esperanza is the story of her greatgrandmother, who was quite literally taken as a wife by Esperanza’s great-grandfather. She laments being forced to share a name with her great-grandmother, a once wild, then broken “wild horse” whose fate was never more than “sadness” and “waiting” (10). Cisneros resents their connection: She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza, I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window. (11)

Esperanza can easily ﬁ nd similarly fated women in her neighborhood. Rafaela, whose husband worries she will leave him, sits locked away in his house. From the window she can hear the music of the dance hall, representative of the youth she has been denied. Instead of dancing, she is doomed to “lean on her elbows,” stare out the window, and dream of a Rapunzel-like rescue while waiting for her husband to return (79). Destined for a similar lifestyle, Mamacita, “the big mamma of the man across the street,” went to live with her son after he worked for years around the clock to save money to bring her to the United States. Now “she sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio show and sings all the homesick songs about her country in a voice that sounds like a seagull” (77). Given the malcontent of these homebound women, it is surprising to ﬁ nd that so many of Esperanza’s peers who manage to escape from their fathers’ controlling hand seem to choose to reimprison themselves in the same restrictive structure. The limits to their dreaming may be explained by the limits of their experience: As “prisoners in houses ruled by their fathers, they seek escape in

the only way they know how: by acquiring their own household to rule over—a house in which they might rule themselves” (Sugiyama 17). Marin, who is older than Esperanza and sells Avon products out of the aunt’s home where she lives, looks forward to the day she can leave the house to take on a “real job downtown,” where she “can meet someone in the subway who might marry [her] and take [her] to live in a big house far away” (26). Sally makes the same backward move when, after years of her father’s trying to beat the sex appeal out of her, she marries a traveling salesman who hits her and forbids her to talk on the phone. More unfortunate than the rest, she is even denied the luxury of looking out her husband’s window. But the house, or apartment, is only one symbol of the oppressive conditions in which these women live. While the house provides an image of male-enforced imprisonment, the physical restrictions that deﬁ ne male perceptions of beauty appear just as frequently. In her study of foot binding, Michelle Scalise Sugiyama looks into the physical and symbolic “crippling” effect of the practice of foot binding on women, as it “requires, ultimately, submission and dependence” (18). Inside and outside the houses around Mango Street, we see these references to foot binding, most often masked as beautifying. The fact that Mamacita is noticeably large emphasizes her noticeably small feet, which are “soft as a rabbit’s ear” and ﬁt into a “tiny pink shoe” that mesmerizes Esperanza (76). The threat of this crippling effect reaches its climax in “The Family of Little Feet,” when Esperanza and her friends receive cast-off shoes from a family that is described as small. The grandmother’s willingness to submit herself to “velvety high heels that made her walk with a wobble” simply because “they were pretty” explains the women’s disturbing compliance to reduce themselves to objects in the landscape of male perception (39). When Esperanza and her friends put on the shoes, they, too, transform into images of sexuality to the men who see them on the streets. Children’s legs, “skinny and spotted with satin scars where scabs were picked,” turn into long women’s legs that frighten Esperanza by their foreignness (40).

Sandra Cisneros

Signiﬁcantly, this transformation into sexual beings happens on the streets and ends on the porch of Lucy’s house, where the girls leave the shoes for her mother eventually to throw away. This shows what is true throughout the novel: Although life inside a house is tainted by what cannot be experienced, life outside promises the dangerous threat of sexual objectiﬁcation. Esperanza explains the terms by which women must abide on the maledominated streets of her neighborhood when she complains: “The boys and girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours. My brothers for example. They’ve got plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside they can’t be seen talking to girls” (8). This disregard for women on the streets heightens into a dangerous threat in “Red Clowns,” when a group of unknown boys rape Esperanza. Just as devastating as the violation is the incongruity between the experience and the myth she has been taught about sexual experiences: “Sally, you lied. It wasn’t what you said at all. What he did. Where he touched me. I didn’t want it, Sally. The way they said it, the way it’s supposed to be, all the storybooks and movies, why did you lie to me?” (99). Despite Esperanza’s growing determination not to end up like the women sadly framed inside their husbands’ and fathers’ windows, the world beyond the construct of house proves to be just as undesirable, as women are reduced to sexual objectiﬁcation. The opposition between house and street speaks to the dichotomy Cisneros sometimes describes in traditional Mexican culture. Traditionally, Mexican women have had two prominent role models: la Virgin de Guadalupe, the angelic mother ﬁgure, or la Malinche, the mistress of Cortez who was a traitor to her people. In “And Some More,” the girls’ argument over the possibility of multiple names for snow comes off as nonsense because, as Lucy asserts, their belief system only allows for “two kinds. The clean kind and the dirty kind” (35). The same is so of Mexican women: They can aspire to be good women who marry, have children, and live docile amid a patriarchal hierarchy; or they can fall from that aspiration to become one-dimensional objects of men’s sexual desires. Because there is no in-between, in the myth

or in the lives of the women who make up Mango Street, it is no surprise, as Leslie Petty observes, that Esperanza’s search for an acceptable role model leads to frustration and the desire to turn her back on the neighborhood altogether. Limiting the women in her stories to these extreme opposites, Cisneros shows how artiﬁcial and conﬁ ning such cultural stereotypes can be, and through her creation of Esperanza, she imagines a protagonist who can embody both the violation associated with la Malinche and the nurturing associated with la Virgen de Guadalupe, all the while rejecting the feminist passivity that is promoted by both role models. Therefore, Esperanza transcends the good/bad dichotomy associated with these archetypes and becomes a new model for Chicano womanhood (Petty 123). By the close of the novel, Esperanza has retracted her decision to turn her back on her community, learning that regardless of where she is, she “will always be Esperanza. [She] will always be Mango Street” (105).

For Discussion or Writing 1. At the end of the novel, Esperanza tells readers that the reason she is leaving Mango Street is so that she can go back. What does she hope to accomplish while she is away? What might be her purpose in returning? Explain your answer. 2. Sally resembles the women in the movies Esperanza admires in “Beautiful and Cruel.” Where does Sally’s power lead her? How has Sally’s story inﬂuenced who and where Esperanza wants to be? In what ways? Support your answer with citations from the text. 3. Read Emily Dickinson’s poem “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” Comparing this poem to The House on Mango Street, how does each writer go about identifying herself within her community? Do you see similarities in their strategies? If so, what are they? Discuss your answer.

“Hairs” (1984) As one of the shortest chapters in The House on Mango Street (1984), “Hairs,” which is frequently

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

excerpted and anthologized, succinctly exempliﬁes Esperanza’s efforts to negotiate ideas about herself in context of the otherness that surrounds her. As if aware of the more threatening danger that will accompany perceived differences between ethnicities and social classes in “Those Who Don’t,” this young Esperanza cautiously limits the perimeter of her inventory to the nuclear family, where similarities are abundant and differences are inconsequential to an individual’s sense of belonging. Keeping her observations within the family allows this rudimentary exercise in comparing and contrasting to act as safe practice for future distinctions of self and other—a vital step in the coming-of-age process that runs through The House on Mango Street. Less like a story and more like a poetic character sketch, this vignette is packed with vivid images of the different types of hair sported by those in Esperanza’s family. Her father’s hair is “like a broom, all up in the air”; Esperanza’s hair is “lazy” for “it never obeys barrettes or bands”; Carlos’s hair is “thick and straight” and never needs a comb; Nenny’s hair is “slippery—slides out of your hands”; and Kiki “has hair like fur” (6). In each case, Esperanza’s metaphor is as descriptive of the individual’s personality as it is of his or her physical appearance. This seems to be especially true of Esperanza’s adoring portrayal of her mother’s hair, which begins as a description and evolves into a memory: But my mother’s hair, my mother’s hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles, all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you, holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is the smell when she makes room for you on her side of the bed, still warm with her skin, and you sleep near her, the rain outside falling and Papa snoring. The snoring the rain, and Mama’s hair that smells like bread. (6–7)

Typical of Cisneros’s attempts to challenge sensory association, Esperanza begins to know her mother’s hair as a smell, a place, and a feeling of comfortable safety, rather than just a visual object.

In the context of the novel, “Hairs” foreshadows Esperanza’s progressively conﬁdent decision to be unlike the women in her neighborhood, who remain caged in houses not their own and restricted by the expectations of womanhood. Underlying Esperanza’s affectionate description of her mother’s hair are the one-dimensional role her mother plays and the metaphorical pin curls that describe her mother’s identity, wrapped up in her husband and children. But Esperanza does not have hair like her mother’s and will later realize the signiﬁcance of this difference. Ten years after its publication in The House on Mango Street, Random House published this chapter as a book in its own right, calling it Hairs/ Pelitos (1994). In this publication, Cisneros’s comparisons are accompanied by colorful illustrations by the artist Terry Ybáñez. In her hand, distinctions among family members are made not only by hair type, but also by skin colors that resemble Sesame Street characters and icons of each person’s interests, which frame the page. Papa is surrounded by images of shoes, dice, coffee, and a nightlife that Esperanza apparently associates with him; Esperanza has ﬂowers, high-heeled shoes, and a monkey framing her world; Carlos is busy with sandwiches, baseball, cars, and birds; Nenny is accompanied by her mother and enjoys herself on a playground; Kiki is riding his bike while faces of clowns border his pages; and her mother sits among candy, ﬂowers, laundry, and their house. Accentuating and elaborating on the differences between family members limit the interpretation of the vignettes to merely an act of comparing and contrasting and creates a rich concept book for children. However, reading “Hairs” out of the context of The House on Mango Street stymies a fuller understanding of the part this chapter plays in Esperanza’s progression toward self-awareness.

For Discussion or Writing 1. When restored to its context in The House on Mango Street, “Hairs” “heralds [Esperanza’s] ﬁ nal decision not to accept the imposition of certain conventions regarding her person” (Hernandez 1). Review the stories following “Hairs”

Sandra Cisneros

in the collection, looking for other foreshadowing of Esperanza’s eventual act of independence. Do you see a steady progression toward deciding who she wants to be? Why or why not? Explain. 2. A concept book is one that is “designed to teach very young children concepts and behaviors; their intention is didactic: the conveying of information” (Russell 67). Read Arnold Adoff’s Black Is Brown Is Tan (1973) and Norma Simon’s All Kinds of Families (1976). Consider how each book uses pictures to teach the words on the page, compared to the ways in which Cisneros’s “Hairs” does so. Comment on your observations, making speciﬁc references to each text.

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) This collection of 22 stories and character sketches chronicles the various experiences through which women learn to know what the critic Mary Pat Brady refers to as “shifting terrains of power” (118). Although the collection uses childhood topography and much of the same playground politics found in The House on Mango Street to negotiate power, it also includes the grittier voice of My Wicked Wicked Ways. While some sketches offer models of blatant deﬁance of patriarchal authority—such as the pickup truck–driving, husbandless Felicia, who “holler[s] like Tarzan” and uses profanity reserved for men in “Women Hollering Creek”—in the majority of these pieces it is merely the rationale behind myths of gender and authority that is put in question. Often, the constructs of hierarchy Cisneros chooses to critique are unremarkable relationships and occurrences of everyday life, such as birthdays, girl talk, eating, and trips to the movie theater. In “Eleven,” Rachel is upset that on her 11th birthday, she has no more of a voice to assert herself against classroom authority and majority opinion than she had when she was three or in the subsequent years since. “What they don’t understand about birthdays,” she explains, “what they never tell you is that . . . when you wake up on your eleventh birthday,

you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t” (6). The authoritative “they” she describes here represents the weightiness of Rachel’s belief system. For her, the empowerment that should be her earned right is as elusive as a “runaway balloon” (9). Still, unachievable empowerment becomes an issue of gender in “There Was a Man, There Was a Woman.” Here the only evident difference between the man and the woman is that the woman stares at the moon and cries, while the man “swallows” its eternalness. Carefully constructed, the only tangible reason for this difference is his male-engendered sense of empowerment. Beyond the stories, there is much to be read in the telling of them—Cisneros’s technique itself is a structure of authority. In many of the sketches, attempts to loosen patriarchal holds on women and their own sense of self are subversively made in the narrative structure. Woven within a plot or character sketch are “seemingly unsystematic asides and digressions” that “shrewdly exploit complex relationships between reader, narrative voice, text, and spatial gestures” (Brady 120). In stories like “Salvador Late or Early” and “Mexican Movies,” we see challenges to conventions of a story, such as the avoidance of a formal plot. In “The Marlboro Man” and “La Fabulosa: A Texas Operetta,” gossips circumscribe absolute truths with their versions of the story. The power of storytelling is perhaps most evident in “Eyes of Zapata,” in which Emilio Zapata’s ﬁ rst wife, Inés, retells his story from her point of view. Recreating his life through her storytelling generates a sense of power in her voice and even creates a dependency he feels upon her. As she tells him, “I am a story that never ends. Pull one string and the whole cloth unravels” (100).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the images of deformity in “Barbie Q” to those in Denise Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls. What similarities do you see in the images created by the two writers? What differences do you see in the effects of these images within the larger contexts of the poem or short story? Discuss your answer fully, citing from each text.

88 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

2. In “Mericans,” what are the implications of the nationality these children are claiming? Discuss the issues to which dual nationality gives rise. How does Cisneros treat them in this collection of stories? What conclusions do you draw? Explain.

“Bread” (1991) This story, published in Woman Hollering Creek (1991), is typical of Cisneros’s sensory-laden narratives that rely on simple, daily occurrences to expose deeper, more complicated landscapes of the mind. Recalling a memory, the speaker tells of a moment in a past affair with a now married man, in which the two lightheartedly enjoyed an afternoon of cruising the city, eating bread, and listening to music. As a memory, seemingly unnecessary details—such as the type of bread, the street they bought it on, the color of the car, and the musical instruments performing the tango to which they are listening—are as signiﬁcant as, if not more important than, the larger elements of the story, such as plot and character development. Never do we learn the lovers’ names, the expectations of their relationship, or the terms that begin and end their affair. Instead, the focus is on the sensory experience of simply eating bread. What better way to communicate the ephemeral pulse of an affair than to speak of the immediate satisfaction of hunger? Much of what we are told of their feast speaks equally of their relationship. Like “the whole car smell[ing] of bread,” the affair is all-encompassing, intoxicating, but ﬂeeting (84). The presence of physical allure in their relationship is drawn into the lived metaphor as the speaker describes the look of the bread as like a “fat ass” as they “ripped big chunks with our hands and ate” (84). In retrospect, the act of eating bread provides a moment by which to remember the relationship instead of the relationship’s providing a moment in which to remember the eating of bread. Even in this short glimpse of their affair, there is indication of the eventual separation. Despite the lovers’ momentary connectedness in the story—they

listen to their music so loud because they are “the only ones who could stand it like that”—there is a world of difference in the way they are perceiving the city and, we can assume, all that exists in it. When her lover shares how “charming” he ﬁ nds all the city buildings, the speaker is not able to see what he sees. As if viewing a different landscape, the speaker tells us that all she could see in the buildings was a memory in which “a cousin’s baby . . . died from swallowing rat poison in a building like these” (84). These disparate interpretations reveal disparate experiences within the same socioeconomic landscape. Where the lover sees “charm,” he neglects to see the poverty and struggle of so many of those who occupy this building and others like it. The speaker’s refusal to romanticize the landscape, as her lover does, afﬁ rms her resistance to ignoring the wholeness of the lived city experience. This determined resistance can best be understood when considering the role a cityscape plays in social constructions of identity. Monika Kaup emphasizes the signiﬁcance of our attitudes toward city structures as a way of validating or rejecting our history. She says: Architecture is a master code for the construction of identity. Buildings and cities express social aspirations and values; they function as barometers of social permanence and change. By reading the built environment we can decipher attitudes toward history. Both nostalgia and amnesia, the sense of the past and the dream of modernity, are expressed in architectural structures. (361)

From the standpoint of this reading, the speaker’s “sense of the past” prohibits her from forgetting the injustices of these buildings to her community, just as her lover’s “dream of modernity” prevents him from seeing those injustices. In the end, the speaker seems content with agreeing to disagree: “That’s just how it is. And that’s how we drove. With all his new city memories and all my old. Him kissing me between big bites of bread” (84). As in many of the other stories in Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros chooses to reveal larger

Sandra Cisneros

social criticism not as the obvious subject of the story, but, as Mary Pat Brady observes, “masked as asides” to the less threatening subject (121). Focusing on the feast of bread, rather than the different perspectives on civic injustice, then, can be seen as a “strategy for making dangerous revelations” (Brady 121). Although this gap in their experiences and perspectives seems to have no immediate effect on the afternoon—perhaps because the speaker chooses to live the smaller, more ephemerally satisfying moment rather then the larger, socially responsible one—it does seem to hint at the pain that the speaker lets slip has passed between them.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read “Eyes of Zapata,” looking for the “asides” that are given outside the main plot of the story. What similarities do you see between the speaker of “Bread” and Inés of “Eyes of Zapata”? What do your conclusions tell us about the women of this collection, to whom Cisneros is giving a voice? Explain your answer. 2. Why do you suppose the speaker uses bread to explain their relationship? How would using another metaphor change our understanding of their relationship?

“My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn” (1991) As the ﬁ rst vignette in the Women Hollering Creek collection, “My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn” carries considerable weight in the book’s emphasis on female rejection of patriarchal, even colonial restrictions on women. Longing to be a part of Lucy’s family, the speaker, who sounds much like Esperanza of The House on Mango Street, develops a fetishlike admiration for her friend. She believes she and Lucy are alike enough to pass as sisters, with their “arms gummy from an orange Popsicle [they] split” and their simultaneous loss of their teeth (5). And, if passable as a sister, then the speaker could live in Lucy’s house, where “there ain’t no boys” and she could “sleep with sisters you could yell at one at a time or all together” instead of

sleeping “alone on the fold-out chair in [her] living room” where she is surrounded by brothers (4). The speaker attempts to live this dream by modifying her physical appearance to match Lucy’s. Persistently, she sits in the blazing sun waiting for her skin to darken until “it’s blue where it bends like Lucy’s” and for the heat to bake into her head “the dust and weed grass and sweat” until it is “all steamy and smelling like sweet corn” (3, 4). As the title of the vignette indicates, it is the smell of Lucy’s hair that is most charming to the speaker. But she seems only able to explain her affection for it and what it represents in a string of compounded associations and metaphors familiar to child’s play: “Lucy Anguiano, Texas girl who smells like corn, like Frito Bandito chips, like tortillas, something like that warm smell of nixtamal or bread the way her hair smells when she’s leaning close to you over a paper cut-out doll or on the porch when we are squatting over marbles” (3). In this description, Lucy’s hair is like other warm, comfortable smells present in both Texan and Mesoamerican cultures. Because her friendly encounters with Lucy, involving such things as marbles and paper dolls, trigger these associations, Lucy then becomes an everyday bridge between modernday America and ancient Mesoamerica. Signiﬁcantly, this is not the only appearance of Lucy’s hair in Cisneros’s work. Lucy enters into many of Esperanza’s adventures in The House on Mango Street; her hair, warm and smelling of corn, serves as a sharp contrast to the coldness of the living room that surrounds Lucy’s dead sister’s wake in “Velorio” of My Wicked Wicked Ways. Discussing the meaning of these recurring references to Lucy’s hair, Adriana Estill points to Gloria Anzaldúa’s comparison of Mexican women and corn, or maize, as crossbreeds intended for preservation. Estill customizes this comparison to speak directly to the smell of Lucy’s hair in Cisneros’s writing: In our culture, which is preoccupied by the visual, any sensuality not based on sight destabilizes the drive towards meaning. . . . By metaphorically opening up the children’s world, the smell of corn, potentially refers us to maize, to an indigenous history, to a female subjectivity

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

that cannot be colonized by the oppressive material or social conditions that surround her. (29)

In the context of this reading, the speaker’s affection for Lucy’s corn-infused hair begins to represent her desire to live in a time before women’s estimation of themselves was limited by the patriarchal restrictions imposed upon them. In terms of her own immediate world, the speaker wants to be surrounded by women while her female consciousness is developing, thus prohibiting thoughts of patriarchal injustice from forming her ideas of self. Her desire to be a part of Lucy’s amazonesque home life presupposes her desire to live beyond the reach of male-derived restrictions for women. Lucy’s is a house of all women “and one father who is never home hardly” and who holds only a ghostlike presence in his work shirts that hang from the clothesline (4). The father’s absence is not an afterthought; nor is the fact that in Lucy’s house “some of the windows [are] painted blue, some pink, because her daddy got tired that day or forgot” (4). Whether or not they are transitioning from blue to pink or pink to blue is ambiguous and does not seem to matter to the occupants of the house. What does matter is that readers recognize these traces of a former male hierarchy that has been usurped, opening the house to an environment of ﬂourishing womanhood. The King William District near San Antonio, Texas, is a historically protected neighborhood known for its proximity to the Alamo, German settlers, pecan trees, and the restoration and conservation initiative of the 1950s. But perhaps its most recent history-making moment was in a courtroom, in which Sandra Cisneros was reprimanded for painting her historic Victorian home periwinkle—a color that all agreed could not have been around 200 years ago. Unable to prove her case, Cisneros agreed to repaint her house a more traditional “Tejano” color scheme: pink with red trim. Such dogged nonconformity has become a trademark of Cisneros not only to the residents of King William District, but also to her readers, who have gleaned much from the way her literary wrestling with individualism and culture has paralleled that in her life.

For Discussion or Writing Examine the theme of developing female consciousness in this work. How is it deepened by wider historical and cultural references?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON CISNEROS AND HER WORK 1. The search for identity is a common theme in modern literature. Read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Compare the Invisible Man’s search for identity with that of one of Cisneros’s characters, such as Esperanza in The House on Mango Street. Compare and contrast the two heroic journeys in terms of the cultural backgrounds of the main characters, the inﬂuences on each of them, and their ultimate conclusions. Support your assertions with references to each text. 2. Research the topic of colonialism, especially as it pertains to Latin America. What similarities do you see between colonialism and patriarchal societies? What similarities do you see between revolutions of independence and revolutions of feminism? How are these apparent in Cisneros’s work? WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Brady, Mary Pat. “The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.” American Literature Journal 71, no. 1 (March 1999): 117–144. Cisneros, Sandra. “Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession.” Americas Review 15, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 69–73. ———. “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess.” In Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, edited by Ana Castillo, 46–51. New York: Riverhead Books: 1997. ———. Hairs/Pelitos. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. The House on Mango Street. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1984; New York: Vintage Books, 1991. ———. My Wicked Wicked Ways. Bloomington, Ind.: Third Woman Press, 1987; New York: Knopf, 1992.

Sandra Cisneros

———. “Never Marry a Mexican.” Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Random House, 1991; Vintage Books, 1992. ———. “Notes to a Younger(er) Writer.” Americas Review 15, no. 1 (1987): 74–76. ———. “An Offering to the Power of Language.” In Literature and Ourselves, edited by Gloria Mason Henderson, William Day, and Sandra Stevenson Waller. 3rd ed., 1009–1011. New York: Longman, 1997. ———. “Only Daughter.” Glamour, November 1990, pp. 256–257. ———. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Random House, 1991; Vintage Books, 1992. Doyle, Jacqueline. “More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street.” Melus 19, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 5–35. Estill, Adriana. “Building the Chicana Body in Sandra Cisneros’ My Wicked Wicked Ways.” Rocky Mountain Review, Fall 2002, pp. 24–43. Ganz, Robin. “Sandra Cisneros: Border Crossing and Beyond.” Melus 19, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 19–29. Hernandez, Martin Jorge. “In the Language of Children.” Americas Review 46, no. 6 (November/ December 1994): 61. Kaup, Monika. “The Architecture of Ethnicity in Chicano Literature.” American Literature 69, no. 2 (June 1997): 361–397. Mullen, Haryette. “A Silence between Us like a Language: The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek.” Melus 21, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 3–20. Newman, Maria. “Sandra Cisneros: Her New Book, Her New Look.” Hispanic 15 (2002): 44–47.

Pérez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. Petty, Leslie. “The ‘Dual’-ing Images of Malinche and la Virgen de Guadalupe in Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.” Melus 25, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 119–132. Rice, David. News and Press. 29 August 2005. Available online. URL: www.david-rice.com/subpage2. html. Accessed May 13, 2006. Rodríguez Aranda, Pilar E. “On the Solitary Fate of Being Mexican, Female, Wicked and Thirty-Three: An Interview with Sandra Cisneros.” Americas Review 18, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 64–80. Saldívar, Ramón. Chicano Narrative: The Dialect of Difference. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Sanborn, Geoffrey. “Keeping Her Distance: Cisneros, Dickinson, and the Politics of Private Employment.” PMLA 116, no. 5 (October 2001): 1334–1348. Sandra Cisneros: Ofﬁcial Web site. Available online. URL: hyyp://www.sandracisneros.com. Accessed June 24, 2009. Sugiyama, Michelle Scalise. “Of Woman Bondage: The Eroticism of Feet in The House on Mango Street.” Midwest Quarterly 41, no. 1 (Autumn 1999): 9–20. Thomson, Jeff. “ ‘What Is Called Heaven’: Identity in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek.” Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 41,524. Available online. URL: http://ﬁndarticles. com/p/ar ticles/mi_m2455/is_n3_v31/ai_ 15801067/?tag=content;col1. Accessed July 11, 2005.

Carey Emmons Crockett

Judith Ortiz Cofer (1952–

)

Early on, I instinctively knew storytelling was a form of empowerment, that the women in my family were passing on power from one generation to another through fables and stories. They were teaching each other how to cope with life in a world where women led restricted lives. . . . I took what they gave me and made it into a weapon for myself. (Silent Dancing)

became the basis for Cofer’s ﬁ rst stories, told to herself during the quiet siestas of rainy afternoons. Not all of Cofer’s childhood was spent in Mamá’s house in Puerto Rico. Economic pressures caused her father to enlist in the military prior to her birth. When he returned after her second birthday, it was not to rejoin his family on the island but to move them to Paterson, New Jersey, the site of his new naval commission. While Cofer’s father viewed the move as the only way to ensure his children a highquality education, her mother wanted the family to remain on the island, where they could grow up surrounded by their island heritage. Ironically, part of that heritage dictated that it was a wife’s duty to follow her husband. The move to Paterson led to a split in Cofer’s world. When her father was home on leave, the family lived in a neighborhood of mostly Puerto Ricans, described by Cofer as “a microcosm of Island life” where residents recreated the sights and sounds of Puerto Rico. Frequently, however, her father was stationed on ships that were gone for months at a time; then her mother would travel back to Puerto Rico with the children. This dual lifestyle presented Cofer and her younger brother with what she refers to as “conﬂ ictive expectations: the pressures from my father to become very well versed in the English language and the Anglo customs, and from my mother not to forget where we came from.”

udith Ortiz Cofer begins her memoir Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood with this line from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: “A woman writing thinks back through her mothers.” These words form the perfect epigraph, not only for the memoir, but also for Cofer’s entire collection of work. She is a woman who writes by thinking back through her mothers; the cuentos, or stories, that she weaves are rich with the tapestry of family. “I feel that there is this invisible umbilical cord connecting us and in my case, it became a literary umbilical cord. I feel that the life of my imagination began with the women of my family” (Acosta-Belén). Born in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, on February 24, 1952, to Jesús Ortiz Lugo and Fanny Morot Ortiz, Judith Ortiz Cofer is descended from a history of storytelling. The primary narrator in Cofer’s life was her maternal grandmother, most of whose stories carried a lesson, her grandmother’s way of imparting important values. Mamá (as everyone in the family called her) would gather everyone around a giant mango tree that sported a natural ledge, the perfect throne for a storyteller, and describe the exploits of archetypal characters, such as María La Loca (literally, Crazy María), who lost everything pursuing love, and María Sabida (Smart María), who became the embodiment of the prevailing woman, using cleverness and inner strength to solve problems. These same characters

Judith Ortiz Cofer 93

The transient lifestyle also made it difﬁcult for her to ﬁt in among her peers. Continually trying to reconcile the expectations of two very different cultures caused Cofer to feel she was “a composite of two worlds . . . I saw myself as different. Never quite belonging because after all, I speak English with a Spanish accent and Spanish with an American accent” (Acosta-Belén). As if trying to reconcile two worlds was not enough, when Cofer was in high school, her father retired from the navy and moved the family to Augusta, Georgia. Relatives had convinced him it was a better place to raise teenagers, although for his daughter, suddenly the only Puerto Rican in a school of nearly two 2,000 students, it was “like moving from one planet to another” (Day 158). Still, she managed to excel in her studies and was awarded a scholarship to Augusta College in Georgia. It was during her freshman year that she began to date John Cofer, a fellow student. They were married in 1971 at the age of 19; their daughter, Tanya, was born 18 months later. Despite the difﬁculty of attending college while raising a young child, both graduated from Augusta College, Cofer with a B.A. in English in 1974. The couple then took their young daughter to Florida so that Cofer could pursue her master’s degree at Florida Atlantic University. During her time in Florida, Cofer lost her father in an automobile accident. With no husband to keep her in the States, Cofer’s mother returned to Puerto Rico. Although Cofer began her master’s program with the intention of teaching, she started composing poems and stories as a way to fulﬁ ll needs that writing a thesis could not. Compared to the poetry she was reading in her classes, she considered her own work unpublishable. Then one day over lunch, her ﬁ rst department chair, Betty Owen, suggested that Cofer write down some of the stories she had been sharing. Cofer admitted that she had been doing just that. After much coaxing by Owen, Cofer sent out a few poems to potential publishers. “Latin Women Pray” was her ﬁ rst poem to be published; it appeared in 1981 in New Mexico Humani-

ties Review. That was all it took for her ﬁ nally to consider herself a writer. Finding time to write was another matter. With a husband, a child, and a job, Cofer could have easily written only when it ﬁt conveniently into her life. Instead, she decided to become serious. She describes her decision in an interview with Stephanie Gordon: When I needed to write and had a strong urge, I had a child, a husband, and a job. I didn’t want any of it to disappear; I just wanted to ﬁ nd an opening in my busy life to write. I realized that window had to be constructed out of time no one else wanted, and I was out of energy by the time I got home at night. My solution was to get up two hours before my child. My ﬁ rst book of poetry and my novel The Line of the Sun were both written between the hours of ﬁve and seven A.M. My point is that writers must make difﬁcult choices sometimes, in order to create.

At that time, most writers of Puerto Rican descent were publishing in journals geared toward a Puerto Rican audience. Cofer had been surrounded by literary and university journals throughout her higher education, so it was natural for her to submit her poems to more mainstream publications, such as the New Mexico Humanities Review, the Southern Humanities Review, Kenyon Review, and the Georgia Review, all of which readily accepted them. Her ﬁ rst chapbook, Latin Women Pray, was published in 1980, followed by two more in 1981: Among the Ancestors and The Native Dancer. In 1985, Cofer was honored with the poetry award in the Riverstone International Chapbook Competition for her chapbook Peregrina (meaning pilgrim). In 1987, she published two more collections of poetry, Terms of Survival and Reaching for the Mainland. Despite her love for poetry, Cofer felt she “had a long story to tell and needed . . . freedom to tell it without the constraints of language that poetry imposes” (Ocasio). To meet that need, she began to

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

work on a novel based on stories she had heard as a child about her uncle Guzmán. While her poetry had gained widespread recognition, her ﬁ rst novel was met with resistance by the publishing community. “I was told that Puerto Ricans don’t read. I thought that was a foolish thing for the publisher to assume. But also, I didn’t write it for just Puerto Ricans to read. If the publisher had been wise he would have known that people write out of their experiences, to share mainly with people who need to know what it’s like to be different” (Gordon). After several rejections from New York publishers, The Line of the Sun was chosen in 1989 by the University of Georgia Press as the ﬁ rst original novel it would publish. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1990. That same year, Silent Dancing: A Partial Memoir of a Puerto Rican Childhood was accepted by a small but important publisher, Arte Público Press in Houston—the preeminent publisher of Latino literature and critical studies. Silent Dancing received the 1991 PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation in Nonﬁction and was selected for the Pushcart Prize. Silent Dancing is autobiographical, but Cofer cautions readers that all people have different versions of events: “Only the camera could have recorded it [her childhood]. I didn’t write Silent Dancing as a camera, I wrote it as a poet” (Kevane). Pulling family and friends into the limelight can have a negative effect on those relationships, but Cofer was ready: I took care, ﬁ rst of all, to write a foreword in which I discussed Virginia Woolf’s theory that the past really belongs to the teller [who is] basically a witness and a participant and not liable for getting everyone else’s version of the past right. I wanted to express that this is how I absorbed the events around me. I did it in the form of creative non-ﬁction, which means I put at the core of each of the pieces real events in real time. I was accurate in my historical time, but I felt free to dramatize conversations that I remembered or recalled without claiming that they were word for word accurate. . . . I was after a poetic truth. (Lopez)

While Silent Dancing is openly autobiographical, other works fuse parts of the author’s own life with the lives of ﬁctitious characters. This is the case in The Line of the Sun and The Meaning of Consuelo. Both novels are told from the perspective of young Puerto Rican girls who live in the United States. Marisol is especially reminiscent of a young Cofer, with her navy father and her mother always yearning for the island. Cofer believes it should not be surprising when authors use their own lives as material for their books. In regard to her own work, she states: Autobiography plays a large part, but it’s really a logical process. It’s not that it’s boring, but most everybody knows what it’s like to be professional in middle-class America. Not many people know what it’s like to be a Puerto Rican woman growing up in the 1960s. Why should I reach out and invent something, when my own life provides me with interesting material that is not readily available to the public? I thought to use my life ﬁ rst, because it was there. (Ocasio)

Blending fact with ﬁction can cause critics to circle, but Cofer fends them off with a quote from Emily Dickinson: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” She says she feels at liberty to cross over boundaries because literature has a truth that has nothing to do with the dictionary deﬁ nition of truth. I think there’s factuality and there’s truth. I can say to you, “My father was in the Cuban missile crisis,” and tell you the dates, but that is not as meaningful as the fact that we lost contact with him for six months and thought he was dead. The truth is what I felt about my father disappearing, not that he was actually on a ship in Cuba at that time. Truth is what I can make people feel. (Ocasio)

In an interview, Cofer described the limits of poetic truth by saying that the writer “has a pact with the reader and that is, your job [as a writer] is not to fool the reader or irritate the reader. It’s not

Judith Ortiz Cofer 95

necessarily to please the reader. You have a deal to make with the reader to tell the story as honestly as possible.” After her success at tackling the boundary governing objective truth, Cofer decided to challenge another boundary, that of genre. She had been writing poems, essays, and ﬁction about the central issues of growing up as a Latina in America for many years when she decided to lay out all the pieces she had been working on and “saw that they could be put together like a collage” (Gordon). That collage became The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women. Through its use of multiple genres, it ﬁ nally merges in a single work what she had inherited from her ancestors: her grandfather’s love of poetry and her grandmother’s art for storytelling. Again publishers shied away, this time because the book could not readily be classiﬁed for a particular bookstore shelf. Although Silent Dancing had also combined poetry and creative nonﬁction, it had done so under the genre of “memoir,” giving publishers an overarching classiﬁcation. Cofer turned to her old ally, the University of Georgia Press, which published The Latin Deli in 1993. Early the next year, it received the Anisﬁeld-Wolf Book Award, in recognition of its contribution toward the understanding of racism and the appreciation of the diversity of cultures. Out of curiosity, Cofer has looked for The Latin Deli in bookstores and found it in a variety of places, including, to her amusement, among the cookbooks. The issues Cofer has chosen to address in her work have made her the target of critics, some of whom call her openly ideological. While she admits much of her work revolves around political issues, she states: I am not a political writer in that I never take an issue and write a story about it. The people in my stories deal with political issues but only in accordance with the needs of their personal lives. My politics are imbedded in my work as part of the human experience. (Gordon)

One example she gives is her story “American History,” which appears in The Latin Deli. It takes

place on the day Kennedy was shot and describes a young girl’s inability to feel “the right way about the president’s death” because she is excited about her ﬁ rst date. When the boy’s mother rejects her because she is Puerto Rican, the girl is faced with a political situation. Cofer says, The story doesn’t end with a speech on prejudice but with the heartbreak of a girl still unable to comprehend that it all comes together and affects her life: the death of a president, life in America, prejudice, the plight of the immigrant. (Gordon)

Cofer has also been criticized for intermingling Spanish and English within her work. Critics have long debated the validity of bilingual texts; Rafael Cancel Ortiz has gone so far as to criticize Puerto Rican writers for presenting “the Puerto Rican as a stuttering, ambivalent individual, incapable of expressing himself/herself coherently in either Spanish or English” (110). Responding to an interview question from Carmen Hernández regarding whether her inclusion of Spanish words was “a kind of code-switching,” Cofer suggests that code switching refers more to the style of Nuyorican writers (Hernández 101). Celia Genishi has deﬁ ned code-switching as “the alteration of languages or dialects to convey social meaning” (133) and John Christie refers to it as a “sort of cultural hybridity,” giving the example of la marketa, a word derived from the Spanish la bodega and the English market. He states that by combining the two words into one, the writer calls to mind a “distinctly separate chain of connotations and emotional meanings that may or may not have anything to do with either ‘bodega’ or ‘market’ ” (2006). Cofer, however, does not employ hybrid words, nor does she change the language to convey meaning. Instead, she describes her work as “interlingual writing” and uses Spanish words and phrases to remind readers that what they are reading “comes from the minds and thoughts of Spanish-speaking people” (Hernández 101). She further states that in her case,

96 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

the two languages are necessary to re-create or recall a particular image since bilingualism is an intrinsic part of my personal experience. English is the main language of my education; Spanish—of my imagination and creativity. . . . I use Spanish words and phrases almost as an incantation to lead me back to the images I need. . . . My native language and my Puerto Rican heritage are the “stuff of life” in my work. English is the vehicle for my artistic expression. (Acosta-Belén)

Christie supports that position, writing, “Spanish is the language that communicates precisely the Latino’s emotional memory.” There are some words that have such heavy connotations within a language that translation falls short. That one word must be used, untranslated, in order to convey just the right meaning. One example would be Cofer’s poem “El Olvido” from Terms of Survival. The poem’s title, directly translated, means “omission” or “forgetfulness”—words unable to reﬂect accurately the images rendered in the mind of a young Latina who heard her mother describing a child who had forgotten his mother as falling into el olvido (Hernández 101). Despite the critics, Judith Ortiz Cofer has continued to defy deﬁ nition. Realizing the appeal of Cofer’s work to young adults, an editor suggested that she try speciﬁcally to target that population. The result was An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio, Cofer’s ﬁ rst book published by a mainstream press. It was heralded by Publishers Weekly as “twelve consistently sparkling, sharp stories [that] recreate the atmosphere of a Puerto Rican barrio” and received multiple awards, including the Americas Award for Children and Young Adult Literature (Honor Book, 1995), the American Library Association’s Reforma Pura Belpré Medal (1995), and the School Library Journal Best Book of the Year List. Cofer has since published several books of poetry and ﬁction, as well as two books that focus on what it is like to be a woman writer. She lives on a farm in Georgia with her husband, John Cofer, a high school algebra teacher, and continues to teach

at the University of Georgia, where in 2006 she served as the Regents’ and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing.

The Line of the Sun (1989) Although told through the eyes of Marisol, a young girl born in the United States to Puerto Rican immigrants, this novel is really the story of Marisol’s uncle Guzmán, who has acquired mythic proportions through the stories his family passes on about him. As a young boy he is full of mischief, causing even his own mother, Mamá Cielo, to refer to him as her “niño del diablo” (demon child). Matters only get worse as Guzmán matures, until ﬁ nally Mamá Cielo is persuaded by a close friend to take Guzmán to see a spiritist, a local woman referred to by the villagers as La Cabra (she-goat). Against her better judgment, Mamá Cielo leaves Guzmán with La Cabra in the hope that he will be cured of his evil ways, but La Cabra—or Rosa, as Guzmán comes to know her—seduces him. The townspeople drive La Cabra away, leaving Guzmán devastated. Guzmán travels to America, where he eventually meets Marisol, the niece for whom he has become such a hero. But to Marisol he is a disappointment. On the run from a migrant camp where he was held against his will and forced to work, Guzmán stays with Marisol’s family but soon wears out his welcome as he tries to convince his sister to leave El Building, the only place she feels safe. Like most ﬁ rst novels, The Line of the Sun is highly autobiographical. Marisol is reminiscent of the author as a child and faces many of the same issues: a navy father, a mother who longs for the island paradise of her homeland, the child as cultural bridge between family and society. The character of Guzmán is based on stories Cofer heard as a child about her uncle Guzmán. She began to ask herself “What if?” questions, inventing scenarios and imagining how he would react. Through the characters of her novel, Cofer explores the ways in which cultural forces, both in Puerto Rico and in the United States, inﬂuence the

Judith Ortiz Cofer 97

choices available to individuals. Guzmán’s ﬁ rst love, Rosa, is particularly affected by those forces. The townspeople are blatantly hypocritical in their treatment of Rosa, publicly branding her “La Cabra” (which literally translated means she-goat, but on a deeper, connotative level implies whore). Privately, however, they seek out her services as medium and spiritual adviser. When her affair with Guzmán comes to light, Rosa is shunned and ridiculed and eventually run out of town, while Guzmán is seen as the victim. Characters such as Rosario, Marisol, and Melinda further illuminate the implied threat of social ostracism that keeps women within culturally deﬁ ned boundaries. As a child, Cofer was well aware of her mother’s desire to return to Puerto Rico. The character of Marisol’s mother, Ramona, shares that ache for her homeland. She ﬁ nds solace in El Building, described as “an ethnic beehive” where adults “conducted their lives in two worlds in blithe acceptance of cultural schizophrenia” (170–171). The inhabitants of El Building recreate the sights and sounds of their homeland, engendering in Ramona a “garrison mentality” (172) causing her to resist her husband’s desire for a single-family dwelling and, eventually, Guzmán’s insistence that she move her children out of El Building to avoid impending trouble. Through characters such as Marisol and Ramona, readers see the struggle of immigrants to deﬁ ne themselves within a new culture, and their endless journey toward answering the question, Where is home?

For Discussion or Writing 1. Although the reader is told on the ﬁ rst page that Guzmán’s sister is the narrator’s mother, Cofer does not reveal the name of the person telling the story until well into the book, on page 177. Why does she wait so long? Why does Cofer choose to tell this story from the perspective of Marisol? Is Marisol an effective narrator? Why or why not? 2. What do you think Marisol means when she says, “I learned about waiting at that time, a woman’s primary occupation” (179)? Discuss your answer fully.

3. At the end of the book, Marisol admits, “This broken man . . . had little to do with the wild boy I had created in my imagination” but describes her uncle as “a good man and brave, even if ﬁ nally not the hero of my myth” (282). What has led her to this conclusion? Do you agree or disagree with her assessment? Explain.

Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990) After the publication of The Line of the Sun, people began to ask Judith Ortiz Cofer how much of it was based on actual events and people. Those questions were partly responsible for her second book, a collection of autobiographical essays. In the preface, Cofer describes her purpose and process for writing about her childhood experiences: “I wanted the essays to be, not just family history, but also creative explorations of known territory. . . . I wanted to try to connect myself to the threads of lives that had touched mine and at some point converged into the tapestry that is my memory of my childhood.” Cofer cautions readers that in writing these essays, she “faced the possibility that the past is mainly a creation of the imagination also.” To illustrate her point that many factors inﬂuence how one remembers an event further, she includes in her memoir the ensayos (she says the Spanish word for essay, meaning “practice,” better deﬁ nes her style) “The Black Virgin” and “The Last Word.” In “The Black Virgin,” Cofer describes her ﬁ rst memory, her father’s homecoming when she was only two years old. That memory is challenged by her mother’s version of the incident in “The Last Word.” These two stories act as bookends, framing the rest of Cofer’s childhood for the reader in terms of how events are remembered and presenting a context for understanding the true meaning of memoir. The stories and poems in Silent Dancing give insight into the issues that have helped to shape the writer Cofer has become, themes that continue to surface in her later works. One such issue is that of language as power. “One More Lesson”

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

illustrates how early in her schooling one of Cofer’s teachers taught her a valuable, although unintentional, lesson. The teacher had written something on the board and then left the classroom. Because she could not read the language, one of Cofer’s classmates was able to convince her that in order to use the bathroom, she had only to write her name beneath the teacher’s message. The teacher returned and, seeing her out of her seat, threw a book at the back of Cofer’s head. The lesson? “Language is the only weapon a child has against the absolute power of adults” (66).

For Discussion or Writing Discuss the controversy regarding James Frey’s 2003 “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces. How does Cofer’s view regarding the formation of memory affect the deﬁ nition of memoir? Explain.

The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women (1993) The Latin Deli has been described by Ed Hall of Atlanta Magazine as “a marvelous patchwork memoir of a woman’s growth away from one tradition and toward another.” Despite that description, The Latin Deli is not strictly memoir; it blends ﬁction, poetry, and essays to tell the stories of women who have lived their lives in El Barrio, the Latino community of Paterson, New Jersey. Cofer addresses the hardships faced by the Latino people who have immigrated to the United States: women who feel displaced and yearn for their island paradise, men who struggle to maintain strong cultural morals within their transplanted families, and the teenagers who are caught between cultures, forced to follow the discipline of Puerto Rican fathers while living among American peers. In order to cope with their feelings of isolation in an essentially foreign culture, the families stick together, creating in El Barrio a miniaturized version of their homeland. The title poem, “The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica,” describes one feature of El Barrio, which the Latinos visit “all wanting the comfort of spoken Spanish” and the experience of

having the owner conjure up “products from places that now exist only in their hearts.” The Latin Deli contains one of Judith Ortiz Cofer’s most anthologized short stories, “American History.” It is a story that has intergenerational appeal, telling the tale of Elena, a teenager described by her mother as acting enamorada (like a girl stupidly infatuated). Elena is enamorada, for she has fallen in love with Eugene, a boy who recently moved into the only house on the block with a yard and trees. Elena watches him from her reading perch on the ﬁ re escape of El Building (the tenement in which her family lives), until she ﬁ nally has the nerve to approach him on the way home from school. They become friends, and Elena is delighted when Eugene invites her to his house to study for a test. On the day that she is to meet Eugene for their study date, the gym teacher dismisses class early, telling the students, “The president is dead, you idiots” (12). Elena knows she should be as upset as the rest of the nation over Kennedy’s death, but she cannot help feeling excited over her date with Eugene. Her mother chastises her for going out on such a tragic day, telling her that she is “heading for nothing but humiliation and pain” (13). Elena goes anyway. Eugene does not answer the door. Instead, Elena is met by his mother, who informs her that Eugene will be moving soon and does not need the pain of making friends, only to leave them behind. The rebuke seems to be thinly veiled prejudice and sends Elena back to her empty apartment, where she tries to feel grief for the loss of the president but can only mourn her own loss. “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named María” explores another type of prejudice faced by Latinas in the United States, that of stereotyping. In this essay, Cofer describes her experiences as a Puerto Rican girl trying to ﬁt in, only to be singled out and stereotyped because of her Hispanic appearance. She discusses how “mixed cultural signals” perpetuate stereotypes and promote misunderstandings. One example she gives is differing cultural signals sent by clothing styles. As Cofer writes, “When a Puerto Rican girl dressed

Judith Ortiz Cofer 99

in her idea of what is attractive meets a man from the mainstream culture who has been trained to react to certain types of clothing as a sexual signal, a clash is likely to take place” (151).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Research the meaning of Ars Poetica. Why does Cofer choose to include it in the title of her poem “The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica”? 2. When describing the relationship between El Building and Eugene’s house in the story “American History,” Cofer writes that El Building “blocked most of the sun” (10). In what way is that symbolic of El Building’s effect on Elena? 3. What made President Kennedy such a hero to the American people? Why would he be considered a saint by the Puerto Rican community (in the story “American History”)? Justify your answer. 4. What causes stereotypes to evolve? How do the media perpetuate the stereotyping of ethnic groups? In what ways are those ethnic groups impacted by such stereotypes? Explain your answer.

An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio (1995) As easily as she crosses the borders of genre, Cofer traverses the limitations of audience. Many of the pieces Cofer has written for adults appeal to young adults, addressing universal themes that speak to all readers, regardless of age. An Island Like You resulted from a request by an editor that she write speciﬁcally for younger readers. Cofer sets the tone for her book in the last stanza of a poem entitled “Day in the Barrio”: . . . At days end, you scale the seven ﬂ ights to an oasis on the roof, high above the city noise, where you can think to the rhythms of your own band. Discordant notes rise

with the trafﬁc at ﬁve, mellow to a bolero at sundown. Keeping company with the pigeons, you watch the people below, ﬂowing in currents on the street where you live, each one alone in a crowd, each one an island like you.

While the book is organized as a series of short stories revolving around the lives of barrio teenagers, it is actually a novel depicting the universal lessons of love and loss, peer pressure and parental expectations, social and ethnic discrimination, and the constant struggle for one generation to gain its independence from another. All these themes are addressed through the quests of individuals to become part of the larger community—in essence, for each island to be recognized as important to the world in which it exists. Many of the stories are interconnected, as is the case with the story of Doris. Introduced to readers in “The One Who Watches,” Doris is Yolanda’s invisible friend and later becomes a heroine by organizing a birthday party for a social outcast in “White Balloons.” Doris starts out content to follow Yolanda, but as Yolanda takes more and more risks, she realizes that she needs to follow her own heart. In “White Balloons,” Doris befriends Rick Sanchez. Ostracized because of his sexual preference, Rick returns home to the barrio a successful actor. He wants to make a difference in the barrio by starting a juvenile theater group, but the adults forbid it. Doris feels a connection to Rick when she thinks about his childhood: “I know from experience that you basically have two choices once you’re made to feel unwanted here: to leave home or to try to become invisible like me” (147). She vows to help Rick achieve his dream, organizing and planning an original production. But Rick passes away before the play is performed and Doris shrugs off her invisibility to throw him the birthday party he never had as a child of the barrio. Arturo also identiﬁes with Rick, but for different reasons. Introduced to readers in the story “Arturo’s Flight,” Arturo feels like he does not

100

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

belong. He is interested in poetry, which in the barrio “makes you suspicious as to your sexual preference” (32), and after being asked to recite a poem in class one day, he is harassed relentlessly by other students. In order to shock them into seeing him differently, Arturo dyes his hair purple, a plan that backﬁ res and causes him to lose his job. Arturo appears again in “An Hour with Abuelo,” where he learns that the elderly are not as boring as he thought, and again when he helps Doris with the theater group and the party. As Arturo and Doris struggle along with the other characters of An Island Like You to deﬁ ne their own place in a society that is in itself marginalized, they learn that they are not alone. Through their interactions with others, they ﬁ nd they are surrounded by other people who feel like isolated islands, everyone simultaneously searching for acceptance.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Doris never says why she was “made to feel unwanted.” Does it matter to the story? Most people have felt rejected at one time or another. Why does acceptance by society mean so much to us that it was designated by Abraham Maslow as one of humanity’s basic needs? 2. Cofer portrays the society of the barrio as very unforgiving. How does this compare to your opinion of high school society? American society in general? 3. The main characters in An Island Like You are teenagers who feel invisible, yet they act as if the elderly are invisible. What causes one person to marginalize another? What groups have been historically marginalized by mainstream America? Are there any groups that remain so?

The Meaning of Consuelo (2003) Regarding the common themes in her writing, Cofer said in an interview, “I have three or four obsessions and whether I want them to or not, they peek through.” As do many of her earlier works, the novel The Meaning of Consuelo explores

Cofer’s obsession with language. Set in the 1950s, the story takes place in San Juan, the capital city of Puerto Rico, where Consuelo lives with her family in a well-kept modern subdivision. Consuelo learns early on that words deﬁ ne the world in which she lives and even who she is expected to be: “I was expected to live up to my name, Consuelo, from the word meaning comfort and consolation; Mili, from the word milagros, a miracle, was supposed to bring the light into our lives. I was to console, care for, and watch over her” (13). Later, as she watches the people around her label one another, Consuelo learns that words carry weight beyond their dictionary deﬁ nitions. There is the cross-dresser, María Sereno, referred to as la fulana (the outsider; he or she is never called by name) and publicly ridiculed. The people on the island separate themselves into groups based on class: la gente decente and la polilla, the gentle people and the common urbanized peasants, “who, like termites were to be found wherever they could build their messy nests and procreate” (101). Even Consuelo’s closest cousin, Patricio, is not safe from the label of maldito y perdido (damned and lost), put on him by his family because they suspect him of being homosexual. When Patricio begins to pull away from Consuelo, she is hurt but realizes he pushes her away because he “had been afraid of saying the words that would deﬁ ne him, in any language” (74). Language rules Consuelo’s life, deﬁ ning not only the people and the social circumstances under which they live, but also the events that befall them. When the tragedia that is later revealed to be schizophrenia begins to take over Mili, Consuelo learns that her “family had words for every occasion, even pain and sorrow” (154), but while language can imprison, words can be the “keys to power and freedom” (155). She begins to “see language as a weapon of destruction, as well as of self-defense” (50) and ﬁ nally learns how to wield it in order to deﬁ ne for herself the meaning of Consuelo.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine the ways in which language is used as a weapon in American culture. Discuss two or

Judith Ortiz Cofer 101

three of them, comparing them to Consuelo’s experiences. 2. Consuelo deﬁ nes la familia as “a crown of thorns and roses” (100). What has led to this view of family? Do you agree or disagree with her view? How does the author create such a view? Explain your answer, citing from the text for support. 3. Consuelo’s idea of the role of women in Puerto Rican society is explored through phrases like “Another rule for a mujer decente: If one gets in trouble, we all pay” (35) and “It was a woman’s burden and her privilege to sacriﬁce her own needs and desires in order to one day reach that pinnacle of praise: Se sacriﬁcó por su familia” (59). What effects do social deﬁ nitions have on individuals? How do such deﬁ nitions serve the community? What social deﬁ nitions exist in mainstream American culture? 4. Compare the relationship of Consuelo and Mili to that of Kate and Anna in Jodi Picoult’s novel My Sister’s Keeper. In what ways are family members responsible for one another? How does this differ from culture to culture?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON COFER AND HER WORK 1. A common character in Cofer’s writing is that of the Espiritista, the spiritualist whom other characters go to in order to seek help through the divine or magical. Examine the role of the spiritualist in Puerto Rican culture, using examples from Cofer’s work and your own research. 2. In The Meaning of Consuelo, the term la fulana is deﬁ ned as a term used to refer to the outsider (3). Examine Cofer’s works for characters who ﬁt that deﬁ nition. Compare and discuss the way they are treated by their communities. What characteristics cause people in mainstream American society to be classiﬁed as outsiders? 3. Many of the characters in Cofer’s works seem to view the United States as a form of salvation. Yet many Americans live below the poverty level. Examine the concept of the “American dream.”

Discuss how it functions in works by Cofer and earlier American works, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. How has the American dream changed since the 1950s? How easy is it to achieve today? WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Acosta-Belén, Edna. “Judith Ortiz Cofer.” In The New Georgia Encyclopedia. Athens: Georgia Humanities Council and University of Georgia Press, 2005. Available online. URL: www.georgiaencyclopedia. org. Accessed August 29, 2006. ———. “A Melus Interview: Judith Ortiz Cofer.” MELUS 18, no. 3 (1993): 83–97. Bost, Suzanne. “Transgressing Borders: Puerto Rican and Latina Mestizaje.” MELUS 25, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 187–209. Cofer, Judith Ortiz. Personal Interview with Author. 25 September 2006. ———. Call Me Maria: A Novel in Letters, Poems, and Prose. New York: Orchard, 2004. ———. An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio. New York: Pufﬁn, 1995. ———. The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. ———. The Line of the Sun. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. ———. The Meaning of Consuelo. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. ———. Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990. ———. Terms of Survival. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1987. Day, Frances Ann. Latina and Latino Voices in Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. Faymonville, Carmen. “New Transnational Identities in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Autobiographical Fiction.” MELUS 26, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 129–157. Genishi, Celia. “Codeswitching in Chicano Six-YearOlds.” In Latino Language and Communicative Behavior, edited by R. P. Duran. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1981. Gomez, Alma, Cherríe Moraga, and Mariana RomoCarmona, eds. Cuentos: Stories by Latinas. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983.

102 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Hernández, Carmen Delores. Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Press, 1997. Judith Ortiz Cofer, interview by Stephanie Gordon, in AWP Chronicle, October/November 1997: 1–9. Judith Ortiz Cofer Web site. http://Available online. URL: www.english.uga.edu/~jcofer. Accessed June 24, 2009. Kafka, Phillipa. “Saddling La Gringa”: Gatekeeping in Literature by Contemporary Latina Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Kevane, Bridget, and Juanita Heredia. Latina SelfPortraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. Ocasio, Rafael, and Rita Ganey. “Speaking in Puerto Rican: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer.” Bilingual Review, May–August 1992, pp. 143–146. Ortiz, Rafael Cancel. “The Language Conﬂict in Puerto Rican Literature.” Americas Review, Summer 1990, pp. 103–113.

Kathy Higgs-Coulthard

Billy Collins (1941–

)

We are all so foolish, / . . . / so damn foolish / we have become beautiful without even knowing it. (“Nightclub”)

illy Collins ends each poetry reading with the preceding lines from his poem “Nightclub.” He says he is “totemistic” about the habit, but the words also serve as a summary of his poetry and his philosophy of life. These lines are also key to understanding his immense popularity, even among those who have previously disliked poetry, because they hint at an acceptance of and contentment with the lives each of us has been given. In an age that hungers for spirituality and relief from hectic lives, Collins points out that we are each beautiful and can find solace, and even humor, in our little corners of the world. Collins’s career has in his words “gone from 0 to 60” in a short time. From his fi rst book of poems, The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988), which he had great problems having published, to his latest, Ballistics (2008), published by Random House, Collins has become the most sought after poet in the country. His readings are attended not only by literati, but also by those who have never written a poem. Collins has achieved what most poets only dream of—fi nancial success. His appeal is in his common themes, often discussed with underlying humor, and in his disregard for the accoutrements of poetry: rhyme, meter, and standard poetic form. This is not to say his poetry lacks form, but dialogue with the reader, not literary gymnastics, is always Collins’s goal. He says form is only a “box for the poem to live in,” which should be tidy, but subordinate to the clarity of the message.

The easiest way to understand Billy Collins’s ideas about poetry is to go back to a poem he wrote early on but still adheres to, entitled “Introduction to Poetry”: I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light ... I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, ... But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. ...

The “torture” is what Collins believes has turned students away from poetry. Searching for metaphors and parsing for meter take the poem away from the student. The same turning away from traditional forms that makes his poems popular also makes them difficult to analyze. If teachers cannot teach deconstruction, how are they to teach poetry? Collins discusses this question in his introduction to Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry. He says opacity

103

104 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

has become so connected with modern poetry that readers have taken to novels and short stories instead, but that the goal of the poet is clarity. “Too often the hunt for Meaning becomes the only approach; literary devices form a ﬁeld of barbed wire that students must crawl under to get to ‘what the poet is trying to say.’ ” To clarify, he practices what he calls “ironic deﬂation” against the loftiness of the literary traditions. He even advocates taking poetry away from the classroom. When he teaches poetry classes he does not ask, “What does the poem mean?” but “How does the poem operate?” In other words, how does it move from one point to another (Weich 4)? Again, in “Introduction to Poetry,” he says the reader should “probe,” “feel the walls,” “waterski across the surface” to see how the poem gets from the beginning to the middle to the end. These three parts are the only poetic form to which Collins sticks. Most importantly, students should read the poem out loud so that they use their own voice and breathing to make the poem theirs. That immediate injection of the personal is what makes his poetry live—and what ﬁ lls his poetry readings. The importance of hearing poetry was perhaps indicated to him by his mother, whom Collins remembers as often singing in the kitchen and quoting poetry to her son. He was born in New York City on March 22, 1941. His mother, Katherine, was a nurse who had been born in Canada, and his father, William, was an electrician. Because he was an only child and a late-in-life child, he referred to himself as “their baby Jesus.” Collins was a bright child and an avid reader, and his father hoped that he would go to the Harvard School of Business. Occasionally his father would take home a copy of Poetry magazine, an act that the poet later said he probably regretted. Collins was educated in Catholic schools and became enamored of the Beat poets while in high school. He recalls taking the train into New York City in the late 1950s to hang out around the wannabe Beat crowd, then going home to his snug bed in the suburbs. He wrote for his high school newspaper but had no poetry published until he submitted “The Discovery of Scat” to Rolling Stone, for which he was paid $30. He

graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 1963. Collins only became interested in poetry again after being admitted for graduate work at the University of California, Riverside, where he says, “I spent the ﬁ rst year reading” (Howard). In 1968, Collins was hired at Hunter College in New York; shortly afterward, it became Lehman College of the City University of New York. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College, a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College, and an adjunct professor at Columbia University. He lives with his wife, Diane, an architect, in northern Westchester County in New York. Collins’s poems have now appeared in every major poetry magazine and journal, as well as mainstream publications such as the New Yorker, Paris Review, Harper’s, the American Scholar, and the Atlantic Monthly. He has received many fellowships, including one from the National Endowment for the Arts. His career gained steam when he read his work and was interviewed by Terry Gross on National Public Radio (NPR). Garrison Keillor has also been intrigued by Collins’s work, leading to an appearance on NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion. This exposure, combined with publication of three more books in the 1990s— Questions about Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning—cemented Collins’s popularity. When he received the June 2001 call from Dr. James Billington of the Library of Congress saying that he had been selected as the United States poet laureate, Collins had never met another poet laureate. So successful was he as poet laureate, he was appointed to another term in 2002. His progressive idea was to take poetry out of its ivory tower and to put it in the subways and buses instead. He even convinced Delta Air Lines to include a poetry selection in its entertainment options. Much of his acclaim was due to Poetry 180, a Web site for high school students. He hoped to begin each high school day with a poem—mostly modern ones—to be read along with the sports schedules and events. Every day of the school year, a single poem was to be read to all students for enjoyment, but not analysis. The Web site received over 1 million hits in the ﬁ rst year, from users in not only the United States, but also Algeria, Bhutan, and Norway. The

Billy Collins 105

site resulted in two books, Poetry 180 and 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. Poetry 180 reﬂects Collins’s belief that poetry should be taught in reverse chronology. Instead of beginning with Beowulf or The Canterbury Tales, he believes in starting with a poem like Theodore Roethke’s “My Father’s Waltz” to intrigue students, eventually working backward to the classics. The collection and its sequel, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, feature poets such as Carol Ann Duffy, M ARY OLIVER, Sharon Olds, May Sarton, Robert Bly, Jane Kenyon, GARY SOTO, Donald Justice, James Tate, and William Stafford. The poems constitute what Garrison Keillor calls simply “good poems,” those pieces that somehow touch your heart and make you stop a minute and think, “That’s a good poem.” The collections also include the occasional work by Hardy, Coleridge, and Anne Bradstreet. In short, Collins has selected poems much like his own, which, although not meant to be analyzed formally, are nevertheless easily understood and invite the reader to make a personal connection. Collins’s poems are often called “accessible,” according to Collins a “modiﬁer so overused that it has begun to have the aural effect of ﬁ ngernails on a blackboard.” He substitutes “easy to enter,” feeling that reading a poem should be like a welcoming homecoming: “Poems that are hospitable toward their readers, poems in which a human voice is clearly sounded—poems with the front door left open” is a description of both the poems he loves and the poems he writes (180 More Extraordinary Poems xvi). Another way Collins describes poetry is “imaginative travel.” He says, “If a poem has no clear starting place, how can it go anywhere? If a poem does not begin in lucidity, how can it advance into the mysterious?” His poems are ﬁ rst ﬁ rmly grounded in setting, the where and when, to orient the reader. From there, they usually advance to the mysterious, a sort of fanciful disorientation. For instance, “I Chop Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of ‘Three Blind Mice’ ” starts in the kitchen, where the poet is chopping vegetables, but goes on to delve into the animals’ thoughts. Collins calls this mental progression “beginning in terra ﬁ rma and

progressing to terra incognita.” He says he hopes to lead the reader in the same way Virgil led Dante in The Divine Comedy. His meanderings, his imaginative travels, always have a plan, a beginning, a middle, and an end. He explains the three stages thoroughly in his poem “Aristotle.” The poet credits the rhetoric training in his Jesuit high school for his Aristotelian form. Collins sidesteps the question of which poets have inﬂuenced him. He talks often about the conversational poems of Coleridge, and many critics also argue that Robert Frost or Walt Whitman has inﬂuenced his conversational style. His movement from speciﬁc to general or mysterious is the form Emily Dickinson often used. While Dickinson often borrowed the meter of her poems from the hymns that she could hear from the nearby Congregationalist church in Amherst, Collins uses the cadences of human conversation, often a conversation between the poet and the reader. More important, Dickinson’s view of the world from her upstairs window, where she wrote of birds coming down the walk and snakes darting through the grass, is akin to Collins’s fascination with household objects, such as salt shakers and oranges on the kitchen table. Collins seems to poke fun at this stance in “Monday”: “The birds are in their trees, / the toast is in the toaster, / and the poets are at their windows.” He continues, “the poets are at their windows / because it is their job for which / they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon” (The Trouble with Poetry 7). However, he is dead serious in saying that it is the job of the poet to observe common things and to weave them into the vast fabric of our lives. One of Collins’s earlier poems was “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes,” a poem not about seducing Emily but revealing her poetic starting point: “You will want to know / that she was standing / by an open window in an upstairs bedroom, / motionless, a little wide-eyed / looking out on the orchard below” (Sailing Alone around the Room 119). The wide-eyed poet standing at a window, often holding a cup of tea or listening to jazz, is seen many times in Collins’s own poems. More admiration for Dickinson is seen in Collins’s introduction to The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, published by the Modern Library. He

106

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

says of her and other poets, “All poets must close the doors on the world to think and compose.” Dickinson writes from her bedroom, while Collins often writes from the solitude of his kitchen. In “Design,” he pours salt on the kitchen table and makes a circle with his ﬁ nger. This design becomes more than a doodle in grains of salt but the design of life, fate, and the universe. In “Tuesday, June 4, 1991,” he calls himself the “secretary to the morning whose only responsibility is to take down its bright, airy dictation” (Sailing Alone 58). Both poets see their roles as amanuenses of the world. An example of a more direct comparison is in “Breathless.” As does Dickinson, who loved to imagine life after death, Collins writes about his own burial. He says, “let me rest here / in my earthy little bedroom, / my lashes glazed with ice, / the roots of trees inching nearer, / and no dreams to frighten me anymore.” Compare this with Dickinson’s “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers” and “I Died for Beauty,” two of her many poems about the architecture and furniture of death. In another poem, he pictures his mother and father buried under a slab of granite (a favorite Dickinson word), and when the father sits up to admonish his son, who has been speeding past the cemetery, the mother quietly tells her husband to “just lie back down.” This is reminiscent of the post-death conversation in Dickinson’s “I Died for Beauty.” As does Dickinson, Collins avoids “metronomic rhythms and end rhyme” (Howard). He loves to make fun of traditional poetic forms. In “Sonnet,” he says: “All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now, / and after this one just a dozen.” He goes on, saying that sometimes the “iambic bongos must be played / and rhymes positioned at the end of lines” (Sailing Alone 146). In “Paradelle for Susan,” he makes up a form, saying in a note that the paradelle is “one of the more demanding French ﬁ xed forms appearing in the langue d’oc love poetry of the eleventh century” (116). This was his affectionate joke on his fellow poets, who frantically searched their dictionaries for the paradelle, only to ﬁ nd that Collins had created it. In “American Sonnet,” he suggests that the current sonnet is the postcard in which writers “do not speak like Petrarch or wear a

hat like Spenser / and it is not fourteen lines,” but in this age, postcards are the true “compression of what we feel” (26). Close readers of Collins will ﬁ nd very little of his personal life in his poetry. He dislikes confessional poems and remarks that people read his poetry to ﬁ nd out not about him, but about themselves. There is something in him of the polite gentleman, one who would never think of talking about his personal life. While most of us write when we are either sad or happy and have the need to express this emotion to the world, Collins says his best time to write is when he has nothing to say. He approaches human emotion “like a bankshot,” approaching obliquely. He also ridicules poetry workshops, which people attend to learn to put their emotions on paper. “Workshop” is a poem about the inane comments that are heard in poetry workshops, and of this poem he says that it is his attempt to “bite the hand that feeds him,” as much of his life’s work includes conducting poetry workshops (Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes 78). Collins is a poet of simple things. Readers ﬁnd in his poems mice, cows, bowls of oranges, hats, musical instruments, and books, but these common objects are paths into complex and human thoughts. For instance, in “The Death of the Hat,” a man’s felt hat is the entry into a poem about the death of his hardworking father. In “The Best Cigarette,” he tells of living in the moment. “The Lanyard” is a poem of a young boy weaving a plastic neck strap, but the real topic is the impossibility of ever paying back your mother for what she has done for you. He writes often about art, especially still life. “I usually ﬁnd myself in front of the still lifes,” he says in “Metropolis,” as the careful examiner of the connection between things. He continues, “I can ﬂoat suspended in the air around the glittering things / whose shadows will never lengthen / and whose weight no hand will ever feel” (The Art of Drowning 24). In other words, he declares himself to be an artist with words. The topic of many of Collins’s recent poems is the reader. “You, Reader” compares the poet and the reader to the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen table: “I wondered . . . if they were still strangers to one another / like you and I / who manage to be

Billy Collins 107

known and unknown to each other at the same time” (The Trouble with Poetry 4). His four latest books begin with a poem to the reader, a sort of welcome mat to the collection. He calls this his attempt to form a “temporary companionship with the reader, without being presumptuous” (Weich 1). He talks to the reader as if the two were face to face, quietly sharing the surprising ending of the conversation. Like Whitman and Dickinson, Collins is a distinctly American poet. He became aware of this fact while giving poetry readings in England. He noticed that the audience there did not follow him when he used phrases like “eggs over easy” but realized that he needed to use American idioms in order to maintain his conversational tone. He points to Whitman as the progenitor of distinctly American poems. Whitman’s veering away from convention, the “freedom from the box of the stanza and the harness of the iambic,” eventually led to the Beat poets, such as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (“What’s American about American Poetry?” 2). Although Collins is well traveled, he rarely writes poems about his travels. For instance, in “Shoveling Snow with Buddha,” Buddha shovels not in Asia, but in a New York driveway. In “Lines Written Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey,” he pokes fun at Wordsworth and the English romantics and their idealization of the past: “Nothing will be like it was / a few hours ago, back in the glorious past.” Unconventional but successful, Billy Collins just might be the poet who inﬂuences American poetry of the future, just as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman have inﬂuenced it in the past. Certainly his approach to poetry is quintessentially modern American.

“Consolation” (1995) This poem was written after Collins and his wife had to cancel travel plans to Italy, ones that had been in place for a long time. At ﬁ rst feeling cheated out of the trip, he concludes that staying home is more pleasurable than traipsing around Italy. The poem legitimizes American language as well as common American experiences, like eat-

ing ham and eggs at a local restaurant. Americans seem to believe that Europe, with its long history and monarchies, is somehow better than their own country. Collins disagrees. As travelers know, dealing with a foreign language is challenging. Collins mentions the confusion of foreign road signs, billboards, phrase books, and maps but then says that in his own country “all language barriers [are] down, / rivers of idiom running freely.” He illustrates with an American idiom, “eggs over easy.” The relationship of language to the American experience depends on its unique idioms, for they are a form of secret code that binds us together. The waitress is Dot, a name never found in a foreign country. After his cafe breakfast, Collins climbs back into his car “as if it were the great car of English itself / and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off / down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even to Bologna.” The poem relies on no, not, and never several times to compare the easy life around home with the tiring days touring castles, cathedrals, and tombs. Do we really have a good time traveling? As in “American Sonnet,” tourists “express the wish that you were here / and hide the wish that we were where you are / walking back from the mailbox.” This poet’s view is that we cannot truly understand or appreciate being American until we travel to a foreign country. Collins says that he has tried extensive travel but now he wants to stay home.

For Discussion or Writing 1. List the words and lines that emphasize the negative or challenging aspects of foreign travel. What is Collins’s point? Why do you think so? Discuss. 2. On one level, “Consolation” is a poem of language. Which words and phrases are about American speech? What are the speaker’s conclusions? Do you agree? Why or why not? Discuss your answer.

“Nightclub” (1995) This is one of Collins’s many poems about jazz. It begins with the theme of many songs: “You are so

108

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

beautiful and I am a fool / to be in love with you.” Collins jokes about love, saying no one wants to admit that he is a fool about it. “You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool / is another one you don’t hear.” As often happens, the humor occurs in the beginning, before the poem veers off in a serious direction. Because he is listening to the songs of Johnny Hartman, “whose dark voice can curl around / the concepts of love, beauty, and foolishness,” the poet is reminded of a scene in a bar at three o’clock in the morning. At this point the air and the poem become hazy—smoky, really—as those “beautiful fools” left in the bar are intoxicated by either the liquor or the music, or both. They are “slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream,” led by a large man playing the saxophone. Then a curious thing happens: The saxophonist hands the instrument over to Collins, who goes into a long bebop solo about the theme not only of this poem, but of all his poems: “We are all so foolish, / . . . / so damn foolish / we have become beautiful without even knowing it.” Here is a poem that starts out naturally, as if the speaker is having an intimate conversation with the reader. Because the two are such close friends, the speaker can offer an important piece of advice: Time is ﬂeeting, and we should each take time to slow down and acknowledge the beauty that each of us has.

For Discussion or Writing 1. “Nightclub” is an early Collins poem. What similarities in theme do you ﬁ nd between this poem and some of his later work? Select one or two of his later poems and discuss how they adhere to or differ from his earlier thematic explorations. 2. Read two or three Collins poems that contain references to music. What does his grounding in music—especially jazz—add to the poems? Explain your answer.

“Forgetfulness” (2001) Of all the poems Collins reads (especially to a literate, middle-aged audience), none is more popular

than “Forgetfulness.” The poem attacks the familiar problem of not being able to recall facts that in a youth were readily accessible. The poem begins in a Mexican ﬁshing village that the reader might have encountered on vacation but moves on to mythology—the River Lethe, to be exact, which the reader may or may not remember from college. By Collins’s not mentioning the river except to say, “whose name begins with an L, as far as you can recall,” the reader is forced into a sort of audience participation, in order to ﬁ ll in the correct name. When Collins then mentions the nine muses, literate readers will be able to recall at least one or two of them. To this point, the poem is humorous. Collins then alludes to the common fear that if we cannot remember the little things now, will we eventually forget how to “swim or even ride a bicycle” in the future? He also alludes to the brevity of life, the wistfulness we all feel when youth and love are but a memory: “No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted / out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.” The poem includes many of Collins’s hallmarks, such as the view from a window and the moon. It also includes the reader, who is the “you” in the poem. It is reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” in which the speaker stands at a window on the beach, watching the light on the straits and talking with a companion about the human condition. “Forgetfulness” never fails to get a chuckle at the beginning, but as the poem progresses, the reaction of the audience turns to pensive musing. As he so often does, Collins begins on terra ﬁ rma and ends on terra incognita.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” What similarities do you ﬁ nd between it and “Forgetfulness”? Why is Collins’s poem more humorous than Arnold’s? Discuss such elements as imagery and tone. 2. Where does Collins make the tonal changes in this poem? What do they contribute to its overall effect? What is that effect? Justify your answer with citations from the text.

Billy Collins 109

“Marginalia” (2001) As “Forgetfulness” does, this poem appeals speciﬁcally to those familiar with literature, but even more to English majors. After all, it helps to have at least heard of Conor Cruise O’Brien and to understand what Collins is talking about when he mentions Irish monks in cold scriptoria. The poem is about a common experience all readers have had: ﬁ nding notes in the margins from previous readers. These are comments we have all mumbled to ourselves—“Nonsense,” “Please,” “HA!!”—when we have read the notes of others. Educated readers can relate when Collins says, “And if you have managed to graduate from college / without ever having written ‘Man vs. Nature’ / in a margin, perhaps now / is the time to take one step forward.” The ﬁ rst eight stanzas of the poem serve as the beginning, grounding the reader in the here and now. At the ninth stanza, the poem reaches the middle, for now it is not about “you” but about “I,” a personal vignette about Collins’s reading The Catcher in the Rye in high school. We can see him, a bored, lonely ninth grader in the summer, lying on his stomach on the family couch and reading to pass the time. Most of us can still recall those confused times of puberty, and the scene is made even more poignant because he is reading Catcher, a coming-of-age story of a New York boy. Then the poem reaches the third part, the end, with “how poignant and ampliﬁed the world before me seemed / when I found on one page / a few greasy smears.” A “beautiful girl, I could tell,” has written in the margin. Young Collins is in love, and it does not matter that there is little connection between egg salad stains in the margin and love. We can understand that this is what the boy has been looking for, and the enigmatic girl becomes fascinating to the reader as well. With this poem, Collins has also “pressed a thought into the wayside, / planted an impression along the verge,” and his thought is that no matter how well read and scholarly we become, nothing can compare with the joy of young love.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Characterize the main speaker in “Marginalia.” What techniques does Collins use to make this character accessible to his reading audience? How do these techniques contribute to the success of the poem as a whole? Explain. 2. How is the main speaker in “Marginalia” similar to Holden Caulﬁeld in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye? Would it be helpful to discuss the two works together? Why or why not?

“Osso Buco” (2001) Collins has said, “My poetry is suburban, it’s domestic, it’s middle class, and it’s sort of unashamedly that” (Weich 1). No poem shows this reality more than “Osso Buco.” Here is the contented householder after a delicious meal, a little tipsy while sipping a second glass of wine, watching the candlelight play on the table, conﬁdent that his agreeable wife will join him in bed later. This is as good as life gets. And this is not just any meal, but a meal of osso buco, a dish that includes not only a portion of lamb, but also the bone and marrow. Bone forms the crux of the meal and the poem; it not only is a solid image, but also contains the marrow. Collins scoops out and eats the essence of the animal’s life. He likes “the sound of the bone against the plate” because it is solid and real, but he also likes the “secret marrow, / the invaded privacy of the animal.” The poem compares “hunger and deprivation,” the topic of most poems, with “hunger and pleasure,” the topic of many of Collins’s poems. He knows that many in the world lack food, but that does not prevent him from enjoying his meal. In the ﬁ nal part of the poem in the last 10 lines, he and his wife go to bed and to sleep, where they drift down into “the dark, soundless bottom . . . into the broken bones of earth itself, / into the marrow of the only place we know.” “Osso Buco” is emblematic of Collins’s work because it begins with a hospitable, congenial welcome into his warm kitchen, then travels to the imaginative realm, in which he makes the reader equally comfortable.

110

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

For Discussion or Writing 1. One of the words Collins emphasizes in the poem is marrow. What are the various meanings of the word? Why do you think Collins emphasizes this particular word in his poem? 2. Which images point to the comfort that Collins feels after a good meal? How do they add to the tone of the piece?

Here is a man who ﬁ nds contentment in his corner of the world and invites us to do the same.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What is the importance of the title? How does the title emphasize the theme of this poem? Discuss your answer fully. 2. What symbolic elements does Collins choose to depict the day, especially at dawn? What do they contribute to the speaker’s point of view?

“Tuesday, June 4, 1991” (2001) His wife is off to take her botany ﬁ nal, the painter is working on the front porch, and the speaker is inside his house reveling in being a poet. He is recording his day, living in the moment, doing what stenographers do in courtrooms, and “when there is a silence, they sit still as I do.” His ﬁ ngers hover over the keyboard ready to record. He likens himself to Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century diarist, but London is not burning, and Collins records only the simple things: the clematis climbing over the window, the woodpile, and the small garden of herbs. “Yes, this is the kind of job I could succeed in, / an unpaid, the contented amanuensis of suburban life.” Sound, or lack of it, is important. Music is playing, he can hear the rumble of trafﬁc on the highway, and his ﬁ ngers drum softly on the keys, but at the heart of the home are silence and contentment. It’s a “sun-riddled Tuesday,” and sunlight splashes through the leaves in the garden. We are reminded of Emily Dickinson’s poem about a certain slant of light on a winter’s afternoon. From the idyllic June morning in a small New England town, the poem moves into mythology. He imagines Aurora as his companion, not his student wife (“who would leave her sleeping husband in bed”): “But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, / barefoot, disheveled, standing outside my window.” Collins enjoys his life so much he determines to get up even earlier tomorrow, so as to prolong the day. “So convinced am I that I have found my vocation / tomorrow I will begin chronicling earlier at dawn.” Aurora will offer him “a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.”

“The Lanyard” (2005) The unifying image of this poem is a woven plastic cord, worn around the neck, to which a key can be attached. Lanyard making is a common craft experience for children at camp, and Collins made one for his mother at an early age. However, he forgot about it until adulthood, when he saw the word lanyard in his dictionary. Then he was sent “suddenly into the past,” a time when he thought a plastic cord was an even trade for all his mother had given him: her own milk, hours of nursing him when he was sick, thousands of meals, clothing, and a good education. As a child, we do not see or understand these sacriﬁces; we believe that a small gift is enough. As an adult, we know that there are no gifts great enough to repay a mother. Again, the poem has a deﬁ ned beginning, middle, and end, but this time it goes from the present to the past and then back to the present. We are in Collins’s study, where he happens to see a familiar word in the dictionary. He remembers crossing red and white plastic strands over and over. Then we see the poet as a child and the many acts of kindness by his mother, unappreciated at the time. The poem ﬁ nishes with Collins as an adult, with a wish that he could give his mother a second gift, “the rueful admission that when she took / the twotoned lanyard from my hands, I was as sure as a boy could be / that this useless, worthless thing that I wove / out of boredom would be enough to make us even.” The gift he would give her is a thank you, for letting him be a foolish child, and an afﬁ rmation that he grew up to cherish her.

Billy Collins 111

The poem works because the reader can also recall childish gifts made for parents that, at the time, were believed to be works of art. We might also remember our innocent sincerity, during a time when most of us are unaware that nothing we can do for our parents will “make us even.”

have been grown in a Middle Eastern country, an area with many buildings with their faces blown off. From the speciﬁc references to ripped blue and white wallpaper and goldﬁ sh on a shower curtain to the oblivious picnickers, “Building with Its Face Blown Off” is a cheerless verbal still life of a home.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How does it affect the poem that the speaker is an adult, looking back? Which lines capture the innocence of the child? Explain your answer. 2. Which lines capture the worthlessness of the gift? How do they contribute to the tone of the poem?

“Building with Its Face Blown Off” (2005) Americans are constantly bombarded with media images of destruction in other countries. We are on the comfortable other side of the world, and we feel guilty that we can go on with our lives, even go on picnics, when the lives of others are shattered. This poem contrasts with “Osso Buco”; rather than suggesting contentment, domestic tranquility has been destroyed. Here we “suddenly” see a life-stopping scene: A home has been bombed. Soldiers are poking around the rubble. Lives are exposed when the side of the building is demolished: “The bathroom looks almost embarrassed,” “the sink sinking to its knees,” and the shower curtain ﬂaps in the wind. Collins compares the house to an opensided dollhouse, but here the furniture cannot be set right, and the picture of the grandfather cannot be straightened. From this haunting scene, the camera backs up, showing a wider view. Life goes on and people cross the one remaining bridge. Crows settles back onto the charred trees. The third part of the poem is in a far-off country, probably the United States, where a couple shares a picnic. The civilities of life go on. He pours wine; she unpacks a wicker hamper with “bread, cheese and several types of olives.” This is a scene of plenty. The reader must wonder whether the selection of olives might not

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read Billy Collins’s poem “The Names.” Compare the attitudes of the speakers in the two poems. Which do you think is more convincing in supporting the theme of each poem? Why? 2. This poem and “Osso Buco” offer contrasting views of a communal gathering at a meal. Discuss which one is more successful as a poem, according to your deﬁ nition of what a poem should accomplish.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON COLLINS AND HIS WORK 1. Read several of Emily Dickinson’s “Death” poems. Look especially for similarities to Collins’s poetic form and word choice. Find speciﬁc words or ideas that also appear in the poems of Billy Collins. Discuss what the two poets’ work has in common in its exploration of death, citing examples from each to support your answer. 2. Why do you think Billy Collins is known as an quintessentially “American” poet? Which of his poems poke fun at the idealization of Europe? Discuss two poems that do so. WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Billy Collins: Complete Resource for Billy Collins Poems, Books, Recordings. Available online. URL: http://www.billy-collins.com. Accessed June 24, 2009. Collins, Billy. The Apple That Astonished Paris. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988. ———. The Art of Drowning. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. ———. Nine Horses. New York: Random House, 2002.

112

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

———. Picnic, Lightning. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. ———. Questions about Angels. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. ———. Sailing Alone around the Room. New York: Random House, 2001. ———. Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes. London: Picador, 1988. ———. The Trouble with Poetry. New York: Random House, 2005. ———. “What’s American about American Poetry?” Writers on America. U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs. Available online. URL: www.usinfo.org/zhtw/DOCS/ writers/collins.htm. Accessed September 6, 2006. ———, ed. 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. New York: Random House, 2005. ———, ed. Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry. New York: Random House, 2003. Dickinson, Emily. The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Introduction by Billy Collins. New York: Modern Library, 2000. “Felicitous Spaces: An Interview with U.S. Poet Billy Collins.” Terra Incognita. Available online. URL:

www.terraincognita.50megs.com/interview.html. Accessed September 6, 2006. Howard, Edgar B., prod. Billy Collins: On the Road with the Poet Laureate. CD-ROM. New York: Checkerboard Films, 2003. Lund, Elizabeth. “Poet Laureate Promotes ‘Events for the Ear.’ ” Christian Science Monitor 25 April 2002. Available online. URL: www.csmonitor. com/2002/0425/p15s01-bogn.html. Accessed September 23, 2009. Merrin, Jeredith. “Art Over Easy.” Southern Review 38 (Winter 2002): 202–214. Taylor, John. Review of Picnic, Lightning, by Billy Collins, Poetry 17, no. 5 (February 2000): 273. Weber, Bruce. “On Literary Bridge, Poet Hits a Roadblock.” New York Times, Sunday, December 19, 1999. Available online. URL: http://www.nytimes. com/library/books/121999collins-publish-war. html. Accessed March 2007. Weich, Dave. “Author Interviews: Billy Collins, Bringing Poetry to the Public.” Available online. URL: www.powells.com/authors/collins.html. Accessed September 6, 2006.

Kathy Higgs-Coulthard

Rita Dove (1952–

)

My intention has never been to make the beautiful object on paper, although I think that beauty beguiles us so well that no matter how horrific the topic, if the poem is beautiful, it convinces. (quoted in Moyers)

hen Rita Dove was asked to read at the ﬁ rst state dinner of President Bill Clinton, she chose what is perhaps her most politically provocative piece to date, “Parsley.” The poem recounts the 1937 slaughter of 20,000 Haitian farmworkers. Dove chose that particular poem because she “wanted to talk about the uses to which power has been put . . . [and] how necessary it is in all avenues of life to be able to imagine the other person” (Moyers 127). The willingness to tell the truth, even when it is inconvenient or uncomfortable, and the desire to use poetry to express the “many different aspects of human joy and triumph and tragedy” deﬁ ne Rita Dove, a poet who earned the Pulitzer Prize and served as poet laureate of the United States, both well before most contemporary writers attain the pinnacle of their careers. Born into a middle-class home in Akron, Ohio, on August 28, 1952, Rita Frances Dove was raised to believe that education and effort were vital to a well-lived life. Her father, Ray Dove, was the only one in a family of 10 children to graduate from high school and go on to college. During World War II, he mastered Italian and German “to know the language of the enemy” (Steffen 13). At the time that Ray earned his master’s degree in chemistry, racial discrimination permeated the tire and rubber industry of Akron. While the rest of his classmates were employed as chemists, Ray was hired to operate the elevator. Despite the frustration this must have

caused, Ray concealed his struggle from his family and was a model of the belief in hard work and pride in a job well done. It was only through the persistence of a former professor that Ray eventually broke through the racial barrier to become the ﬁrst black chemist in the industry. Rita Dove’s mother, Elvira Elizabeth Hord Dove, also placed a high value on education. Elvira graduated from high school at the age of 16, after skipping two grades. Although Elvira was awarded a scholarship to Howard University, her parents were fearful of sending their young daughter off to Washington, D.C., and declined the offer. Dove credits her mother with helping to cultivate her deep love of literature. As a child, Dove read everything she could get her hands on, from the backs of cereal boxes to volumes of Shakespeare. She states that she had an advantage over other children because no one ever suggested to her that a piece of literature might be too difﬁcult. Her parents encouraged a love for books by allowing free access to their ample collection, supplemented with frequent trips to the local library. Dove was allowed to borrow any book in which she was interested, with the only requirement that she ﬁ nish reading what she had taken out before going back for more. An intense desire to conquer the language of her father’s books led Dove to begin to learn German in the seventh grade. When she was not reading, Dove liked to “eavesdrop” on the adults as they told stories in kitchens

113

114 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

and at family gatherings. She says her own desire to tell stories stems in part from “listening to these stories being told and how they would affect their listeners” (Carroll 83). The emphasis on story in the Dove household caused Rita and her siblings to turn to reading and writing as a pleasurable way to ﬁ ll the long summer months. It became a ritual of sorts for Rita and her older brother, Tom, to create a summer newspaper. Dove confesses that as each summer wore on, she would eventually quit and form her own magazine, entitled Poet’s Delight, but never got further than designing the cover (Ratiner 205). As early as third grade, Dove began her ﬁ rst novel. Entitled Chaos, the story was about “robots taking over the earth.” Each week she wrote a 20-line chapter based on the spelling words her teacher assigned (Selected xx). Despite her love of writing, Dove thought of it as “some game that [she] would one day have to put away in order to become an adult.” It was only when a high school English teacher invited her to a book signing by John Ciardi that Dove realized writing “was really something adults did and were respected for” (Carroll 84). Dove’s hard work in high school earned her national recognition as one of 100 students across the United States to be invited to the White House as presidential scholars. Yet, when it was time to declare a college major, Dove chose prelaw. Dove says she believed her parents expected her to be a doctor or a lawyer. Although she tried to live up to those expectations, she found herself constantly rearranging her schedule to ﬁt in creative writing courses. In her junior year, she ﬁ nally found the courage to tell her parents that she had switched her major to English. Dove graduated with a B.A. from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1973. Her outstanding academic achievements earned her summa cum laude and national achievement scholar status. In 1974, Dove traveled to Europe on a Fulbright Scholarship. Being abroad had a profound impact on Dove, both politically and as a writer: I began to stop taking for granted that what I heard about our foreign policies was neces-

sarily the truth. . . . Being in Germany for a year and intimately in contact with another language sharpened my appreciation for my own language—what it could do, and what I hadn’t asked it to do for me. (Moyers 115)

Dove cites her knowledge of the German language as the greatest inﬂuence on her work: “Put the verb on the end of a sentence and you’ve got to suspend everything until then and then revelation comes in a rush.” She began to experiment with whether an English sentence could be “stretched to sustain suspense like that” (Steffen 14). Dove’s poetry was not the only part of her life to be heavily impacted by her ﬂuency in German. While working on her M.F.A. at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, she accepted an invitation to serve as translator for a fellow student, Fred Viebahn, a German writer. Dove received her M.F.A. in 1977 and turned down an offer of a tenure-track position in Florida to join Viebahn at Oberlin College in Ohio. The two were married in 1979. The Yellow House on the Corner, Dove’s ﬁ rst published book of poetry, was released in 1980. Through the seemingly disconnected issues of family history, slavery, and budding sexuality, Dove explores one’s ability to rise beyond the expectations of others. While critics responded favorably, citing Dove’s “storyteller instincts” and her “determination to reveal what is magical in our contemporary lives” (McDowell), the volume was largely overlooked by academia. After her marriage to Viebahn, the couple lived in Berlin and Israel, hoping to support themselves through freelance writing. Dove began working on her second book of poems during that time but worried that she was losing her English. To manage the damage, she switched her concentration to prose, which she felt did not require the “precise tone of a phrase” that poetry demanded (Steffen 15). When asked in an interview whether crossing the fence between poetry and ﬁction was difﬁcult, Dove responded, “Just as it’s tragic to pigeonhole individuals according to stereotypes, there’s no reason to subscribe authors to particular genres, either.

Rita Dove

I’m a writer, and I write in the form that most suits what I want to say” (http://www.gale.cengage. com/free_resources/poets/bio/dove_r.htm). That form has more often than not been poetry, but Dove’s forays into other genres have included a collection of short stories (Fifth Sunday, 1985), a novel (Through the Ivory Gate, 1992), drama (The Darker Face of the Earth, 1994), and the lyrics for a number of musical arrangements. It is possible that Dove’s aversion to stereotypes stems in part from the incredible pressure placed upon “any member of a minority who ‘makes it.’ ” Dove describes success for a black woman as a double-edged sword: As a model he or she must be perfect; no slipups or “you’ve let us down.” As a special case, he or she is envied, even reviled. Move away from home court and you’re accused of being “dicty”: return and you’re a prodigal. Write about home and you blaspheme; choose other topics and you’re a traitor. (Steffen 21)

Dove refuses to view her genetic composition as an encumbrance. She accepts that any individual views topics from his or her unique perspective, ﬁ ltered through a lens tinted by race and/or gender. Dove claims it is part of her “political/personal mandate” to represent life in all of its complexities: That means that if I am writing a poem in which I notice a ﬂower, if I felt it was important to talk about this ﬂower, I would be dishonest not to do it just because I thought it wasn’t directly about being black and a woman. Besides, how do I know it ISN’T about being black or a woman? (Steffen 17)

Dove herself is certainly not to be typecast. She began her career as a writer at the end of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), an artistic branch of the Black Power movement that began in the 1960s. Although she understood the reasons for the common topic and tone undertaken by that group, Dove felt that the “blighted urban world inhabited by the poems of the Black Arts Movement” did not

115

reﬂect her own experiences. Timing is everything in life, and Dove admits that writers like A MIRI BAR AK A (a.k.a. Leroi Jones) and Haki Madhubuti (formerly known as Don E. Lee) laid the groundwork for a new generation of black artists to “walk up to the door they [BAM] had been battering at and squeeze through the breech” (Rowell, part 2). Although some have interpreted Dove’s “Upon Meeting Don L. Lee, in a Dream” as an attack on BAM, Dove states that it was never meant as a rejection of the poet or BAM, but instead was written as an “allegorical rendering of what happens when two artistic generations collide” (Rowell, part 2). One should not infer from the lack of raw anger in Dove’s poetry that she has never had cause to feel frustrated about race relations or political issues. She states that as a partner in an interracial marriage, she has her share of things to be “plenty angry about,” but that “it is very hard to think when you are angry.” Instead of letting emotion rule her response, Dove prefers to “ﬁ nd a way around the anger so you can do something about it.” For her, that way is being “as clear as possible” in her poetry (Ratiner 214). Dove’s desire to avoid stereotypes and be as clear as possible is best reﬂected in the effort she puts into crafting characters who cannot be easily dismissed. These personae are especially well rendered in her 1986 poetic tribute to her maternal grandparents, Thomas and Beulah. According to the critic Pat Righelato, the book “began as a poem” and “grew poem by poem” (Righelato 68) into a two-part reﬂection on the lives of those who lived during the great migration of the early 20th century. Although Dove modeled the characters after her grandparents, she cast the mold loose enough to allow the story to “reinforce a larger sense of truth that is not, strictly speaking, reality” (Righelato 72). To effect that “larger sense of truth,” it was necessary for the characters to be reﬂective of more than isolated individuals and at the same time avoid “stock characterization.” In Dove’s words, it became her mission to “restore individual human fates to the oeuvre.” To accomplish this, she begins with the most basic building block of a story, the characters: “I don’t

116

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

want you to think of a particular character simply as ‘this black angry person.’ . . . If you can see this man as an individual, then he cannot be lumped into a group and dismissed” (Ratiner 215). Thomas and Beulah was immediately recognized as a literary triumph in which Dove “planed away unnecessary matter: pure shapes, her poems exhibit the thrift that Yeats called the sign of a perfected manner” (Helen Vendler, writing for the New York Review of Books). Selecting poetry as the form for biography allowed Dove to focus on deﬁ ning moments in the lives of the protagonists through linking vignettes. Her stated goal for the volume was to “call my grandparents in to show how grand historical events can be happening around us but we remember them only in relation to what was happening to us as individuals at that particular moment” (Moyers 124). The volume was awarded the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. With the publication of Grace Notes in 1989, the public was allowed a glimpse into another facet of Dove’s life, her love of music. The title is taken from the role grace notes serve in a musical composition: Each poem within the collection “testiﬁes to those moments added to the basic melody of life that ‘break with the ordinary’ but make all the difference” (Steffen 28). Music permeates Dove’s life. She describes her childhood home as being ﬁ lled with music as diverse as Bessie Smith and Fauré. Her maternal grandparents played the mandolin and guitar and Dove learned early on to sing and play the cello, later adding the viola de gamba and modern dance and ballet to her repertoire. The musicality of Dove’s writings results from her deep understanding of the inherent power of music to create epiphany: It has given her the experience “of something clicking into place, so that understanding went beyond, deeper than rational sense” (Ratiner 210). Dove describes poetry as a “sung language” capable of helping us “to relive the intensity of a moment” (Ratiner 211). Her fellow poet Steven Ratiner praised Dove’s debut novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992), for the “sheer musicality of her language . . . which, by turns, wails like a jazz riff, soars like a gospel choir, and simmers with a classical elegance.” The story,

which grows out of several of the pieces included in Fifth Sunday, follows Virginia King as she struggles to deﬁ ne her own personal identity within mainstream America. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed Dove United States poet laureate and consultant on poetry. Barely in her forties, Dove was the youngest person ever to attain this prestigious position. In her acceptance speech, she stated, “If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are who are keeping society together” (Molotsky). During her two terms as poet laureate, Dove consistently shone a light into those shadows, championing the work of those often overlooked by mainstream America. She introduced a poetry and jazz program to the literary series, provided an audience for young Crow writers, and organized a two-day conference entitled Oil on the Waters: The Black Diaspora (Molotsky). While the post of poet laureate is often viewed as a career capstone, it has been just one more jewel in Dove’s literary crown. Since leaving the post, she has served as poet laureate of Virginia, earned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP’s) Great American Award, been named one of Glamour magazine’s “Outstanding Women of the Year,” and received 22 honorary doctorates, among innumerable other honors. Far from the reclusive writer, Dove has accepted her role as spokesperson for poetry with multiple television appearances on shows as diverse as the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour and Sesame Street and in 1994 hosted and produced a national program for children entitled Shine Up Your Words. Despite the demands on her time, she still manages to carve out time for writing. Her most recent works include three volumes of poetry, Mother Love (1995), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), and American Smooth (2004); the play The Darker Face of the Earth (theatrical premiere, 1996); several musical arrangements; and her newest venture, Sonata Mulattica (2009). Dove continues to share her passion for writing with her students and cur-

Rita Dove

rently serves as Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, a position she has held since 1989. No matter the subject or the genre, the writings of Rita Dove serve as a bridge—between individuals, cultures, countries. In the poet’s own words: I write a poem and offer it to you, the reader; and if, on the other end, you can look up from the page and say: “I know what you mean, I’ve felt that, too”—then both of us are a little less alone on this planet. (Ratiner 218)

The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) According to Therese Steffen, Dove’s ﬁ rst published volume of poetry, which contains such important poems as “Geometry,” sets the tone for her entire body of work by demanding “the liberty to move unfettered across boundaries and all facets of world culture” (164). Pat Righelato credits Dove’s “antiphonal mode of expressing contrasting voices” to an “openness to history” and her “intimate sense of the contemporary” (6, 34). The volume opens with “This Life,” in which “the idea of charmed romance is tested by the actualities of travel” (Righelato 9). The female speaker of the poem is a traveler, “a stranger in this desert.” She leaves her traveling companion and ventures out, where she encounters a man. Although the man tells her “the same thing / as that one, / asleep, upstairs,” she is drawn to him. Righelato ascribes such temptation to the “feminine susceptibility to the idea of romance as charmed destiny” (9), which is common in the fairy tales read to youngsters. Dove uses the image of this new man in whom “the possibilities / are golden dresses in a nutshell” to introduce the realm of fantasy: In the Grimm Brothers’ story of Allerlierauh, a princess hides ﬁ ne dresses in a nutshell in order to escape from the incestuous intentions of her father. The notion of charmed destiny is furthered by the speaker’s allusion to a Japanese woodcut she loved as a child, in which a young girl gazed at the moon while awaiting her lover. Although the girl in the

117

woodcut waits eternally, in the speaker’s fantasies the lover arrives in “white breeches and sandals.” The speaker’s belief in charmed destiny allows her to realize the lover in the woodcut had this man’s face, “though [she] didn’t know it.” Despite the speaker’s yearning to be the heroine of her own fairy tale, she allows herself to be grounded by reality. The man before her is not the perfect prince, but just the craggy nutshell that represents the fantasy. Thus, she resolves “our lives will be the same” as those of the people captured in the woodcut—who, although destined to be together, are eternally apart. The female speaker in Dove’s trilogy of adolescence also yearns. The three poems address the stages of sexual maturation, in which young girls struggle to understand their changing feelings and integrate their newly acquired knowledge of sex into what they have always known about the world. It is in “Adolescence—I” that the speaker is introduced to the notion that boys might be the source of some future pleasure. There is an air of secrecy as the friends gather “in water-heavy nights behind grandmother’s porch.” Linda shares her newly acquired information that “a boy’s lips are soft,” and the speaker’s universe is widened by that knowledge. “Adolescence—II” portrays the same girl now “sit[ting] in the bathroom, waiting.” Although she does not divulge why she waits in the night and for whom or what she waits, one can infer from the sensations she describes—“sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert”—that she is anxious, perhaps even conﬂ icted about its arrival. The girl is not surprised at the arrival of “three seal men” and in fact the line “I don’t know what to say again” implies that she has seen these creatures before. They leave her clutching at “ragged holes . . . at the edge of darkness.” Righelato postulates that the girl is awaiting the onset of puberty, her anxiety reﬂective of the “fears and pleasures of sexuality” (25). In the ﬁ nal installment of the trilogy, the girl acknowledges her ripening body, which has begun to grow “orange and softer, swelling out,” and dreams of the fairy-tale arrival of her true love. She envisions that they will meet “by the blue spruce,”

118

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

where he will confess that he has loved her in his dreams. The poem contrasts the “scarred knees” of a young girl with earlobes “baptized . . . with rosewater” and “lipstick stubs [that] glittered in their steel shells.” But even in fantasy, her maturation has a price: She sees her father over the shoulder of her lover, carrying “his tears in a bowl, / And blood hangs in the pine-soaked air.” Righelato describes this vision as “Freudian displacement” (25), whereby the girl’s fear of the unknown is transferred to her father.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Address Righelato’s claim that women are susceptible to the “idea of romance as charmed destiny.” What effect does such a belief have, if any, on society? If fairy tales instill a belief in “charmed destiny,” what might we expect from the messages of contemporary culture? 2. Examine the use of the carnation in “Geometry” and “Adolescence—III.” Where else does the carnation appear in Dove’s work? What does the ﬂower symbolize in each poem? Why do you suppose Dove chooses that particular ﬂower?

“Geometry” (1980) This poem is in Dove’s collection The Yellow House on the Corner. Unlike the female speaker in other poems in the volume, the young girl in Dove’s “Geometry” is not preoccupied with her impending adolescence, but with proving a theorem. She tells us with conﬁdence, “I prove a theorem and the house expands.” The girl’s mathematical proﬁciency results in “windows jerk[ing] free to hover near the ceiling,” but the violence implied in the verb jerk is tempered by the sigh of the ceiling as it ﬂoats away. Steffen suggests that the poem reﬂects a female speaker’s “decisive step from the past into her own future” as “the old structures called home break up or are outgrown” (79). The girl is not afraid when the disintegration of her house leaves her “out in the open” because she realizes that it is her own independence that has caused the boundaries to disappear. While she may

harbor some of the same self-doubt that plagues other young adults, she trusts that she, as the butterﬂy-windows, is “going to some point true and unproven.” It is also possible to examine the poem in light of the cultural and academic repression endured by African Americans within the United States. Dove began her career at a time when African Americans were demanding not only equal rights but also recognition for their artistic contributions to American society. More and more black artists, actors, and musicians were weaving themselves into the fabric of America, causing a shift in preconceived notions of culturalism. According to Steffen, “Cultural space, as distinguished from place and location, is a space that has been seized upon and transmuted by imagination, knowledge, or experience” (44). In this context, the expansion of the house in “Geometry” represents the widening of the speaker’s cultural space. Dove has admitted in multiple interviews to an early fear that she would be “pulled into the whole net of whether this [her work] was black enough, or whether I was denigrating my own people” (Pereira 173). This dread prevented her from seeking publication as early as she could have. The speaker in “Geometry” might also reﬂect Dove’s own internal conﬂ icts over the consequences of her poetic skills: freedom from preconceived cultural conﬁnes and simultaneous exposure to public censure.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Pat Righelato suggests that “Geometry” is a counterpart to Wallace Stevens’s poem “Not Ideas about the Thing, but the Thing Itself” (16). Analyze the similarities between the two poems and discuss the validity of Righelato’s claim. 2. Analyze Dove’s works in relation to “Geometry.” Which poems align themselves with Therese Steffen’s suggested theme of the process of individualization? 3. Helen Vendler has suggested that “Geometry” serves as a comparison between mathematics and poetic form, especially in the hands of Dove, who “avoids proof by propositions in favor of the cunning arrangement of successive

Rita Dove

images, which themselves enact, by their succession, an implicit argument” (4). Discuss the ways in which Dove’s poetry accomplishes this.

“Parsley” (1983) This poem is in the Dove’s second collection, Museum, which the critic Malin Pereira describes as containing “poems of unofﬁcial history” (Ingersoll 152), a description the poet happily embraces:

119

second attempt involved a sestina, chosen for its ability to convey obsessiveness through repetition, but she found the form “too playful” for this purpose (Vendler 6) and settled instead on multiple forms within the same piece. The result is a songlike refrain from the Haitians, in which their attempted praise of the general’s deceased mother (“Katalina, mi madle, mi amol en muelte”) is answered by the compounding fury of the general at their inability to pronounce even her name correctly.

For Discussion or Writing I suppose what I was trying to do in Museum was to deal with certain artifacts we have in life, not the ordinary artifacts, the ones that you’d expect to ﬁ nd in a museum, but anything that becomes frozen by memory, or by circumstance, or by history. . . . The other thing was to get to the underside of the story, not to tell the big historical events, but in fact to talk about things which no one will remember but which are just as important in shaping our concept of ourselves and the world we live in as the biggies, so to speak. (Ingersoll 6)

Dove began many of the poems that were to be included in Museum while she was in Europe, which afforded her the distance she needed to see history and the world from a new perspective. Most notable of these poems is “Parsley,” in which Dove explores the underside of an event that occurred in the Dominican Republic. In 1937, the dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the executions of 20,000 Haitian blacks. What struck Dove about this atrocity was not just the magnitude of the massacre, but the “very bizarre and ultimately creative manner” in which it was carried out (Moyers 127): In order to segregate the Haitians from the Dominicans, the general demanded that each of the cane-ﬁeld workers be forced to say the Spanish word for parsley. The difference in the two dialects would cause the Haitians to pronounce the word as pelejil, while the Dominicans would roll the r to say perejil. The poem originally began as a villanelle told entirely from the perspective of the Haitians, but Dove felt that there was much more to be said. Her

1. How would the overall effectiveness of “Parsley” differ had Dove remained true to her intention that the story be told entirely from the perspective of the Haitians? Justify your answer. 2. “Parsley” required Dove to combine multiple forms within one poem. Locate another work by Dove in which multiple perspectives are portrayed through differing techniques. Discuss the effectiveness of the piece. Support your analysis with citations from the text.

Thomas and Beulah (1986) Although Dove’s poetry had already begun to attract critical recognition, it was with the release of her third volume, Thomas and Beulah, that she was propelled to the rank of Pulitzer Prize winner. The volume explores the underside of the Great Migration and the March on Washington through the viewpoints of two people whose lives are caught up in its aftermath. Dove states that she based the characters of Thomas and Beulah on her ancestors: I call my grandparents in to show how historical events can be happening around us but we remember them only in relation to what was happening to us as individuals at that particular moment. (Moyer 24)

Dove roots the story in historical fact, infusing the poetry with the riches of her research into the Akron of the 1900s, the experiences of African Americans, and her own family. Yet through

120

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

her choice of form, she manages to avoid the tendency of narrative to get “bog[ged] down in the prosier transitional moments.” Dove describes her process as “trying to string moments as beads on a necklace” so that her lyric poems “when placed one after the other, reconstruct the sweep of time” (Righelato 72). Pat Righelato credits the success of the volume to Dove’s combined poetic techniques, which create “tension between temporal continuity and disjunct episodes taken out of time” (72). Despite the great amount of research Dove puts into her work, she does not allow herself to become constrained by fact. Instead, she allows for the needs of the story, creatively ﬁ lling in the gaps left by “History” to reﬂect “history” best. In this way she is able to breathe life into these ancestorsturned-characters. Her ear for the musicality of language and the need to ﬁt everything into the prescribed package of poetry can also sometimes affect the strict adherence to fact. For example, Dove changed the name of her grandmother from Georgianna to Beulah because she needed a name that would portray femininity without overpowering the line in which it appeared (Steffen 105). The story of Thomas and Beulah begins with Thomas. Originally Dove’s plan for the volume was to tell the entire story from his point of view, but as she wrote, the voice of Beulah kept popping up, wanting to tell her side of the story: “Dusting” was my grandmother’s way of stepping into the work and kind of throttling me, saying, “Wake up Girl! I’m here, too! I wanna Talk!” So that poem became the bridge from one book to the next; it proclaimed, “This is an ongoing story.” “Dusting” led me to write the Beulah section in what turned out to be an entire book, yet it was also the linchpin, opening the door from room to room. (Dungy 1033)

The kernel for “The Event” was from Dove’s own family history. While traveling north as part of a song-and-dance team, Thomas’s best friend was killed in a drowning accident. Dove says she wrote many of the poems in the volume out of a desire to understand how the “sweet, wonderful, quiet

man” whom she knew as her grandfather had come to terms with his guilt over the death of his friend (Moyers 124). Dove’s grandfather never spoke to her of the drowning; all the details were told by his wife, who had not been present at the event. “The Event” is the opening poem because the death of Thomas’s best friend becomes a lens for viewing the rest of Thomas’s life. His guilt over having uttered a dare, which caused Lem to leap to his death, colors everything else. The placement of the poem also provides the reader with an entry point into the story. In that ﬁ rst poem, Dove ﬁ rmly grounds the reader in time and space: It is the time of Negroes and riverboats, and we join Thomas as he sings along the trail of the Great Migration. The image of “Thomas, dry / on deck,” with all that is left of Lem “a stinking circle of rags, / the half-shell mandolin” at his feet, gives readers all the information they need to comprehend that events in the future will be tainted with the odor of this tragedy. After Lem’s death, Thomas takes on some aspects of his lost friend: He learns to play the mandolin and affects Lem’s carefree attitude, but as the long lines of “Straw Hat” reﬂect, Thomas eventually resigns himself to a life in the work barracks. The heaviness of a solitary life has settled Thomas into “a narrow grief.” He gives up his jaunty attitude, content just to “sleep third shift” on a mattress he shares with two other men whom he has never met. Music has lost its ability to comfort or entertain; it has become “like a woman / reaching into his chest / to spread [the pain] around.” However, the tip of his straw hat in honor of a woman hints that Thomas still harbors some playful gallantry and a hope for the future. Righelato asserts that more than serving as a transition between Thomas’s carefree bachelor days and his married life, “Straw Hat” also “expresses the anonymity and degrading conditions of labor that young male migrants found in the North” (77). It is the speciﬁcity of Dove’s poetry that makes it so arresting. Through details such as mattress ticking that “smells / from the sweat of two other men,” she draws readers into the underside of the great migration, helping them to see for themselves the unspoken truths.

Rita Dove

Thomas ﬁ nds work in “The Zeppelin Factory.” At the time of its building, the Goodyear Zeppelin Air-Dock was heralded as a symbol of innovation and success for Akron, Ohio. The emotion captured in Dove’s poem, however, reﬂects Thomas’s trepidation at the magnitude of the factory, which devours him and his fellow workers into its “whale’s belly.” True to Thomas’s intuition, the Zeppelin does not gain acclaim for Akron. Its launch is marred by the death of one of Thomas’s coworkers when high winds reveal the blimp’s inability to function properly in inclement weather. Thomas is deeply affected by this tragedy, questioning the worth of his own life in the lines; “Here I am, intact / and faint-hearted.” The remainder of the poems in Thomas’s cycle reﬂect increasing loss of conﬁdence as he sacriﬁces his free spirit to become family man and provider. He grows to resent Beulah and his own frailty, which prevents him from going to ﬁght in World War II. His frustration is magniﬁed by his relegation to assembly-line labor while “women with ﬁ ngers no smaller than his / dabble in the gnarled intelligence of an engine” (“Aircraft”). “The Satisfaction Coal Company” is the center of Thomas’s trilogy of decline. The poem serves as a bridge between “The Stroke,” which signals Thomas’s impending death, and “Thomas at the Wheel,” in which he dies. “The Satisfaction Coal Company” gives Thomas a chance to reﬂect on his life through the lens of his retirement. While it is a comfort that the “gas heater takes care of itself,” it is also a symbol that Thomas has become obsolete. His ability to provide for his family and their need to be provided for have ended; now his major problem is “What to do with a day.” Thomas’s empty hours leave him ample time to look back on the past. He thinks almost longingly of a time when the need to keep his family warm had necessitated the second job of sweeping the ﬂoor at a coal company to earn scraps of coal for the family’s furnace. Despite Dove’s tendency to “pull back from using overt blues idiom,” Pereira claims that a blues motif runs throughout the volume. She suggests that Thomas and Beulah are “blues artists who sing the pain of brutal experience with lyrical expression” (103). As if the dual themes of loss and pain

121

were not enough to support Pereira’s assertion, Thomas articulates the irony inherent to the blues when he is able to see his own death as a joke. Beulah’s life is no less difﬁcult. Although Dove denies that the poem “Taking in the Wash” was “ever on a conscious level . . . about incest,” Pereira interprets the relationship between Beulah and her father as incestuous, citing as proof the mother’s righteous anger in the lines “Touch that child / and I’ll cut you down / just like the cedar of Lebanon” (Pereira 179). In “Dusting,” Beulah takes stock of her life and its dreams deferred. In the doldrums of her most domestic chore, she thinks back upon her youth, when she met a “silly boy at the fair” whose name at ﬁ rst eludes her. She does remember his kiss and the “rippling wound” of the ﬁsh she won from him. As “her gray cloth brings / dark wood to life,” the details become clearer: a time when she returns home to ﬁ nd the water in the ﬁsh’s bowl frozen and resuscitates the ﬁsh by defrosting the ice that has encased him. It is only when Beulah resigns herself to the fact that “that was years before” that the name of the boy occurs to her: Maurice. Throughout Beulah’s poetic cycle, she is deﬁ ned in respect to what she means to others: She is her father’s “pearl”; then her name grows to mean “promise” and, ﬁ nally, “desert-in-peace.” In “Dusting,” readers get a sense of the toll this has taken on Beulah. In discussing “Beulah’s martyrdom in the solarium,” Righelato assures readers that Beulah’s role as homemaker insulates her from the harsh realities that Thomas must face in the wider world (95). Beulah can immerse herself in thoughts, in memories of what was and wistfulness for things that might have been, and ﬁ nd not only disappointment, but comfort.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the circular components of Thomas and Beulah, focusing on the volume as a whole, the images of circles within the poems themselves, and the intersecting circles that transcribe the lives of each character. 2. In the poem “Missing” (Mother Love), Dove states that a lost child is “a fact hardening around its absence.” Categorize the losses in Thomas

122 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

and Beulah. How are the characters affected not only by their own losses but by each other’s? 3. Discuss the symbolism of the USS Akron. What is represented through its presence, the characters’ reactions to it, and its fate? 4. Discuss the use of names within Thomas and Beulah. What is signiﬁed by the fact that Beulah is never mentioned by name in the ﬁ rst section? 5. The critic Righelato has suggested that Jacob Lawrence’s paintings numbered 47 and 48 in the migration series depict the conditions faced by young migrants of Thomas’s time. Using those paintings as an example, create a pictorial time line to reﬂect pivotal events in the life of Thomas or Beulah.

Mother Love (1995) Dove began writing the poems in Mother Love as a reaction to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke’s collection explores the Greek myth of Orpheus, a skilled musician who journeys to Hades to bargain for the return of his wife. Although Orpheus is able to strike a deal with Hades and Persephone, his love for his late wife is so powerful that it prevents him from upholding his promise, and she is lost forever. Dove also writes of a consuming love, choosing as her topic the unbreakable bond between mother and daughter. Pat Righelato suggests that the poems in Mother Love represent Dove’s “search to underwrite a new sense of feminine identity, one that will give due weight to that which pulls women to the earth” (171). To accomplish this, Dove explores maternal love in its many forms, seamlessly stitching modern references into the fabric of the myth. “Sonnet in Primary Colors” stems from Dove’s fascination with the underside of history. Written “for the woman with one black wing / perched over eyes: lovely Frida,” the piece commemorates the life and work of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Kahlo contracted polio at an early age and later suffered severe injuries as the result of a collision between a trolley and the bus on which she was a passenger. Kahlo spent the majority of her life in isolated pain

and a tumultuous marriage, the grief of which she translated into oil paintings. The majority of her work consisted of self-portraits. Dove, known for her deliberate choices regarding form, writes in the introduction to Mother Love that the sonnet “defends itself against the vicissitudes of fortune by its charmed structure, its beautiful bubble. All the while, though, chaos is lurking outside the gate.” Dove claims that the sonnet is particularly suitable for conveying the “cycle of betrayal and regeneration” because “all three—mother-goddess, daughter-consort and poet—are struggling to sing in their chains.” Many critics have pointed out that although Dove has labeled this a collection of sonnets, the poems she has included depart from the traditional form and function of the sonnet in several ways. Dove has acknowledged this by her inclusion of herself as poet in the three that struggle in their chains. She embraces the sonnet but changes it to allow the full register of her song. Wheeler has suggested that Dove “violates the sonnet form” in order to conjure more fully the violated world reﬂected in the Demeter/Persephone myth (151).

For Discussion or Writing 1. What is accomplished with the use of the word present in line 4 of “Sonnet in Primary Colors”? 2. Examine the poems in which Dove has created portraits of historical ﬁgures. What do the people in the collection represent? What does Dove’s poetry tell us that history does not? How is Dove’s choice of form related to the person she seeks to render? 3. Explore Mother Love as an expression of T. S. Eliot’s “mythical method,” whereby the writer “manipulates a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” (Righelato 169).

On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999) Dove’s desire to view history in terms of the many histories of which it is composed is reﬂected most perfectly in her volume On the Bus with Rosa Parks. In these collected poems, she re-creates the

Rita Dove

individual life experiences that both led up to the need for a “Rosa Parks” and resulted because of Rosa Parks. The idea for the collection arose from a comment made by Dove’s daughter, Aviva, as they were transported between conference sites in Williamsburg, Virginia. Aviva reportedly leaned over to her mother and whispered, “We’re on the bus with Rosa Parks.” The remark resonated with what Dove already felt about the circular nature of history and stimulated the “meditation on history and the individual” that is the basis of this volume (On the Bus 91). By invoking the name of Rosa Parks in the volume’s title, Dove immediately activates readers’ prior knowledge of history. Most Americans associate Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a bus with the inception of the Civil Rights movement. Dove would like to draw the reader’s attention to the smaller details, thus revealing the larger reality: “History is often portrayed as a string of arias in a grand opera, all baritone intrigues and tenor heroics. Sometimes the most tumultuous events, however, have been provoked by serendipity” (Time 100). Through her poetry, Dove illuminates the minor accompaniments that provide the background for the “intrigues” and “heroics.” The volume is divided into ﬁve sections. “Cameos” introduces a series of poems depicting the hardships of an African-American family during the depression. Despite Joe’s insistence that he “ain’t studying nobody,” the couple ultimately strives for the same American dream as everyone else. Through their hardships and biases, Dove sheds light on the roles of men and women, blacks and whites, in the time prior to Parks’s historic stand. Where “Cameos” provides an intimate look at the dreams and heartaches of one family, “Freedom: Bird’s-Eye View” steps back to examine the institutional biases that have affected generations of Americans. Written after Dove’s tenure as poet laureate of the United States, the second section addresses the “artistic health of the nation” (Righelato 181). In “Singsong,” Dove recreates the freedom inherent in youth, when a child’s knowledge that the “moon spoke in riddles / and the stars rhymed” is yet unchallenged. In essence, she

123

is recalling the innocence of childhood, before we realize our differences and the societal rules to which we will be held. On Dove’s 11th birthday, her whole family drove to Washington, D.C., so that her father could participate in the March on Washington, but Rita was left behind with a relative. In an interview with Camille Dungy, Dove discusses the feelings she had “watching history occur . . . on TV” (4). The Civil Rights movement and the Watts riots also happened when Dove was too young to participate. She says that “looking through those kinds of frames” inﬂuenced the way she views events. “Singsong,” then, opens that same frame to the readers, so that they may see that the world is “already old.” The ﬁ nal line, “And I was older than I am today,” remarks on the invincibility that characterizes innocence. As we age, we become more vulnerable to the world. As do many of the poems in “Freedom: Bird’sEye View,” “Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967” has an autobiographical feel to it. Dove has often commented on the hours she spent reading and how, as a child, the library was the only place she could go whenever she wished. In “A Chorus of Voices,” she tells the interviewer Steven Ratiner of an incident at a library that had a great impact on her life. A librarian had refused to allow her to check out a risqué novel by Françoise Sagan. Dove’s mother wrote a note insisting that Dove be allowed to check out any book she wanted. Although the incident itself was less than dramatic, to Dove it represented the moment when she knew her parents trusted her (Ratiner 205). The freedom to discover “all the time in the world” had been granted her, and sometimes she found “all the world in a single page” (On the Bus 33). While some may have been overwhelmed at the magnitude of information available, Dove embraced it as a quest to discover “the stuff we humans are made of,” taking a scrawled message on the boarded-up doors of an old garage as encouragement: “I can eat an elephant / If I take small bites” (33). The ﬁ nal section shares the collection’s name and challenges readers to abdicate the comfortable role of historian and accept that each person is an active participant in the formation of future histories. It is

124

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

a call to action, requiring that readers ask themselves the same question a young Rita Dove asked of herself in winter 1955: “Would I have been the person to remain seated on the bus?” The ﬁrst few poems explore the precursors of the Montgomery bus boycott—the mounting frustration of people made to walk “a gauntlet of stares” (77) and the gradual realization that “Our situation is intolerable, but what’s worse / is to sit here and do nothing” (76). The duet “Claudette Calvin Goes to Work” and “The Enactment” captures the rising tension and the search for the right symbol to unite “those who can’t help themselves” (80). By the time Dove introduces “Rosa,” the stage has been set for a richer understanding of the woman who changed the nation by “doing nothing.” History gives us digestible facts: The law in Montgomery, Alabama, of 1955 required separate seating for “coloreds”; Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man; on the day of Parks’s trial, Martin Luther King, Jr., organized a boycott of buses, which lasted 381 days. We can read those facts and remain unaffected. Poetry, however, has the power to distill those facts into images that elicit a visceral response. Dove accomplishes this by drawing Rosa with barely a whisper: rendering her “serenely human” through a “sensible coat” and the “clean ﬂame of her gaze.” Yet the volume does not end there. The remaining poems turn the frame inside out, reversing the vantage point so that now we may see the way history has affected the individual. In “QE2. Transatlantic Crossing. Third Day,” Dove recognizes the privileged difference between those who “simply wish to be / on the way” and those who, like Rosa Parks, must “wait on a corner, / hunched in bad weather . . . to feel / the weight of [themselves] sink into the moment of going home.” While she does not ask for sympathy, Dove admits that she would go home “if [she] knew where to get off.” This feeling of dislocation is recurrent for a generation for whom the landscape has so drastically changed. Dove furthers the theme of diaspora with her ﬁ nal poem, “The Pond, Porch-View: Six P.M., Early Spring.” In direct opposition to the speaker

in “Singsong,” who “ran the day to its knees” and dreamed of “trees to swing on, crickets for capture,” here the speaker has “come down to earth” and recognizes the fact that she has “missed the chance” to make her life what she had expected. Dove again invokes the image of the bus, herself viewing the world from a “chair in recline” through a window that has rendered her world smaller than it should be. The ﬁ nal line echoes an earlier warning from “Freedom Ride”: that we had better consider with care when we “pull the cord” because “where you sit is where you’ll be / when the ﬁ re hits” (77).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the role of bystander as history’s enabler and the tendency of individuals to stand by and allow wrongs to accumulate into atrocity. How can an individual effect change when there is no Rosa Parks to stand behind? 2. Dove has often discussed her belief that history is what the world is allowed to remember. How has the widespread use of the Internet changed the way history is viewed and recorded? How would that knowledge have affected this poem?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON DOVE AND HER WORK 1. In The Poet’s World, Dove claims each poem has its “house of sound, its own geographical reverberations. And we could analyze poets for their preferences in domiciles, linguistically speaking.” Apply Dove’s challenge to the poet herself. Where does the poetry of Rita Dove reside? 2. Compare the poetic domiciles of Rita Dove to those of Gwendolyn Brooks. How does A House in Bronzeville differ from The Yellow House on the Corner? What can you infer about the inﬂuence of race in each poet’s work? 3. Compare the doll scene in Dove’s Through the Ivory Gate with TONI MORRISON’s treatment of dolls in The Bluest Eye. What role do toys play in the formation of gender and racial identity? 4. In Dove’s poem “Dedication,” the speaker says:

Rita Dove

What are music or books if not ways to trap us in rumors? The freedom of ﬁ ne cages!

What do you think is meant by those lines? Do the speaker’s words reﬂect Dove’s thoughts on music and books? Create a case where being trapped in such a “ﬁ ne cage” is not the negative experience one might imagine. Support your argument with examples from Dove’s work. 5. Dove describes a poem’s power as a physical reaction that involves our entire body: A poem convinces us not just through the words and the meanings of the words, but the sound of them in our mouths—the way our heart beat increases with the amount of breath it takes to say a sentence, whether a line of poetry may make us breathless at the end of it, or give us time for contemplation. . . . Even if we are reading the poem silently, those rhythms exist. (Ratiner 213)

Choose any poem of Dove’s to which you have had such a complete physical response. Describe what it is that the poem evokes for you. 6. Discuss the themes of individual and cultural identity within the context of Dove’s work. How does the poet resolve the “sense of belonging and not-belonging” (Steffen 114) that has deﬁ ned the lives of many minorities within the United States? 7. Many poets cite music as a primary inﬂuence in their writings. Dove offered the following explanation for its role in her work: I believe that language sings, has its own music, and I’m very conscious of the way something sounds, and that goes from a lyric poem all the way to an essay or to the novel, that it has a structure of sound which I think of more in symphonic terms for larger pieces. . . . I also think that reso-

125

lution of notes, the way that a chord will resolve itself, is something that applies to my poems—the way that, if it works, the last line of the poem, or the last word, will resolve something that’s been hanging for a while. And I think musical structure affects even how the poems are ordered in a book. Each of the poems plays a role: sometimes it’s an instrument, sometimes several of them are a section, and it all comes together that way too. (Ingersoll 153)

How is this inﬂuence manifested in a speciﬁc poem or poems by Dove?.

WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Carroll, Rebecca. I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like. New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1994. Dove, Rita. Grace Notes. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. ———. Mother Love. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. ———. On the Bus with Rosa Parks. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. ———. “Rosa Parks: Her Simple Act of Protest Galvanized America’s Civil Rights Revolution.” Time 100, 14 June 1999. Available online. URL: www.time/com/time/time100/heroes/proﬁle/ parks01.html. Accessed January 10, 2009. ———. Selected Poems. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. ———. Thomas and Beulah. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1986. ———. The Yellow House on the Corner. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1980. Dungy, Camille. “Interview with Rita Dove.” Callaloo 28, no. 4 (2005): 1027–1040. Available online. URL: http://people.virgina.edu/~rfd/dungy%20 interview.pdf. Accessed January 10, 2009. Ingersoll, Earl. Conversations with Rita Dove. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2003. McDowell, Robert. “The Assembling Vision of Rita Dove.” In Writers and Their Craft, edited by Nicolas Delbanco and Laurence Goldstein. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991.

126

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Molotsky, Irvin. “Rita Dove Named Next Poet Laureate.” New York Times, May 19, 1983, p. C15. Available online. URL: www.nytimes. com/1993/05/19/arts/rita-dove-named-nextpoet-laureate-ﬁrst-black-in-post.html. Accessed January 4, 2009. Moyers, Bill. “Rita Dove.” The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Pereira, Malin. Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Ratiner, Steven. “Rita Dove—a Chorus of Voices.” In Giving Their Word: Conversations with Contemporary Poets. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Righelato, Pat. Understanding Rita Dove. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006.

Rowell, Charles. “Interview with Rita Dove, Parts 1 and 2.” Callaloo 31, no. 3 (2008). Available online. URL: http.//callaloo.tamu.edu/Rita_ Interview%20P2.html. Accessed January 3, 2009. Steffen, Therese. Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Vendler, Helen. “Rita Dove: Identity Markers.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Available online. URL: www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nap/ helen_vendler_dove.htm. Accessed January 5, 2009. Wheeler, Lesley. The Poetics of Enclosure: American Poets from Dickinson to Dove. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002.

Kathy Higgs-Coulthard

Louise Erdrich (1954–

)

Soon we are trying to travel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. (The Bingo Palace)

er settings include Ojibwa reservations on the Great Plains, small North Dakota towns, the Twin Cities region of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and rural New Hampshire. Her characters are extended families of mixed Ojibwa, German, and French background shaped by Native American and Roman Catholic traditions. This is the world Louise Erdrich creates in her ﬁction and poetry, and it is the world that has shaped her own life and art. Born in Little Falls, Minnesota, on June 7, 1954, Erdrich was raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota, the eldest of the seven children of Rita Gourneau and Ralph Erdrich. Her childhood was shaped by small-town life, her Catholic school days, her parents’ careers as teachers in a Bureau of Indian Affairs school in Wahpeton, and visits to her mother’s extended family at the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation. Her father surrounded the family with poetry and with recordings of Shakespeare’s plays, nurturing Erdrich’s love for language and story. Erdrich went to Dartmouth in fall 1972, a member of the college’s ﬁ rst coed class. After earning her bachelor’s degree, she returned to North Dakota, where she worked at a variety of low-paying jobs, including waiting tables and working at a truck weigh station, as well as teaching writing through the Poets in the Schools program of the North Dakota Arts Council. She earned her M.F.A. in creative writing on fellowship at Johns Hopkins

University in 1979 and worked in Boston as editor of the Indian Council’s magazine the Circle. As a Dartmouth undergraduate, she had met Michael Dorris, then a writing instructor and a faculty member in the newly established Native American Studies program. When Erdrich returned to Dartmouth as a writer in residence, they renewed their acquaintance, corresponding and offering each other feedback on manuscripts in process. After their 1981 marriage, Erdrich and Dorris collaborated intensely and extensively on their writing. Their custom was to read each other’s drafts, offering substantive comments and suggestions. They did a great deal of writing together, even publishing under the joint pseudonym Milou North. Their major shared work, published under both their names, was The Crown of Columbus (1991), released for the quincentenary of the European arrival in the Caribbean. Working with Dorris, Erdrich published a short story entitled “The World’s Greatest Fisherman,” which won the Nelson Algren Fiction Prize in 1982. Its success prompted them to expand the story into Love Medicine (1984). That ﬁ rst novel won Erdrich a number of major prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award (1984), the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for the Best First Novel. Love Medicine was the ﬁ rst in Erdrich’s series of novels about several extended families living in

127

128

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

the ﬁctional town of Argus and the Ojibwa reservations in the northern plains. Since 1984, she has produced a steady stream of novels dealing with the lives of Ojibwa, mixed-blood, and European Americans, most of whom are related to the Lazarre and Kashpaw families introduced in Love Medicine. Critics identify these novels as her Argus cycle or the North Dakota saga. The ﬁction draws on Erdrich’s own ancestry, stories of family and the northern plains, the struggles of reservation life and of Native American adaptation to urban life. The multivocal narration and spiraling chronology established in Love Medicine continue to characterize Erdrich’s ﬁction. Erdrich has told interviewers that her Ojibwa and mixed-blood characters seem to have lives of their own, that she cannot “call them up at will.” She says that some minor characters even insist on emerging in later novels as more fully developed individuals. For instance, Erdrich felt she had to ﬁ nd out more about the truck driver June meets in a bar in the opening pages of Love Medicine; she discovered that he was really Jack Mauser of Tales of Burning Love. Similarly, after the publication of Tracks, she knew she would have to return to the character of Father Damien, whose story is fully revealed in Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Just as Love Medicine began as a short story, so did many of Erdrich’s later novels. Her short ﬁction appears regularly in magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and Esquire. Between 1985 and 2006, six of Erdrich’s short stories appeared in the O. Henry Prize Anthologies of Best American Short Stories: “Saint Marie” (1985), “Fleur” (1987), “Satan: Hijacker of a Planet” (1997), “Revival Road” (2000), “The Butcher’s Wife” (2002), and “The Plague of Doves” (2006). Erdrich began her serious writing career as a poet, in both her undergraduate and master’s work. Her ﬁ rst book of poems, Jacklight (1984), was followed by Baptism of Desire (1989). The new and collected poems of Original Fire (2004) won the WILLA Poetry Award from Women Writing the West. Erdrich’s poetry addresses issues of identity: personal, communal, cultural, and spiritual. She

explores images drawn from the natural world of earth, water, sky, animals. The poems often blend Ojibwa myths—including the trickster tales of the “Old Man Potchikoo” prose-poems—and symbols from Roman Catholic liturgy, such as those in Baptism of Desire. Themes of coming of age, love, and parenthood also recur. Some characters and relationships that Erdrich explores in her poems resurface in her novels; in Baptism of Desire, 15 poems in a section called “The Butcher’s Wife” might be seen as sketches for characters and relationships that make up The Master Butchers’ Singing Club: Otto is much like Fidelis, while Eva and Delphine resemble the ﬁ rst and second “Mary Krögers.” Her poetry and ﬁction draw on the same sources and give evidence of similar stylistic features; many reviews of her ﬁction make mention of her rich lyrical and image-laden prose style. The many narrative voices in her novels echo the Native American oral tradition. In traditional culture, families passed on their lore, their genealogy, their beliefs in the supernatural, and their traditions of healing and medicines by telling stories, generation after generation. In these cultures, most listeners already know the stories, their characters, and their plots; in the act of telling, the teller gave life to the ancient tale. In Love Medicine, for example, Erdrich gives several characters the task of telling the story of June Kashpaw. Each character’s relationship to June shapes the particular version of the story. Thus, while Albertine and Lipsha both recall events of June’s life, each one’s story is distinctive because of the character’s experiences and way of speaking. Some of Erdrich’s narrators, including Nanapush in Tracks and Lipsha in Love Medicine, directly address the reader, involving him or her in the creation of meaning as tribal elders would involve the next generation in learning family tales and lore. Erdrich understands the power of the spoken story: She told an interviewer that although she does not read her drafts in process aloud, she enjoys doing public readings of her work, and she tries to do the reading herself when her novels are made into audiobooks. Another distinctive trait of Erdrich’s ﬁction is the nonlinear or circular chronology of the stories.

Louise Erdrich

Anthropologists who study Native American culture have shown that the sense of time and space of indigenous people is quite different from the perceptions of European Americans. While the Western world conceives of time as a linear progression from one event to the next, and human history as a succession of events leading (inevitably) toward progress and perfection, Native American cultures understand time as cycles or spirals, as in the progress of the seasons. Similarly, while Western images of history emphasize ever-growing human achievement (as in technology or science), indigenous people are generally more concerned with relationships within the immediate and the extended human families, as well as the relationships of humans with the natural and spiritual worlds. Indeed, Erdrich’s stories are invariably about the bonds that join her characters, whether through blood, accident, or choice. Likewise, many major works of literature in the Western European tradition often feature a solitary hero on a quest to ﬁ nd his identity through a series of adventures and conquests. This heroquest genre includes texts from The Odyssey and The Aeneid, through Pilgrim’s Progress and Don Quixote, to Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Updike’s Rabbit novels. In contrast, as William Bevis and others have pointed out, ﬁction by Native American authors often emphasizes a central character wounded by his or her experiences in the outer world (often the urban white world) who needs to return to traditional ways in order to ﬁ nd healing and wholeness. Erdrich has discussed this homecoming image in interviews, and her novels— from Love Medicine through The Painted Drum— consistently illustrate this journey from family/ home/reservation outward through difﬁculty and challenge, and back to the safety and healing of home. Critics frequently compare Erdrich’s ﬁctional universe to that of William Faulkner. Argus and its environs are like Yoknapatawpha County, with many generations of complicated extended families and sometimes bizarre individuals, the apparently disjointed and nonlinear narrations, and the mul-

129

tiple narrators whose stories sometimes blur the story as much as they clarify it. Her novels are also marked by what Erdrich calls “survival humor”: The characters’ approach to life that is sometimes sly, sometimes bawdy, sometimes darkly ironic. Oppressed people need to ﬁ nd ways to get through the difﬁculties that surround them without succumbing to the pain. The image of the Native American trickster often provides humor as well as salvation. A transgressive escape artist like Gerry Nanapush, a goodhearted innocent like Lipsha, a wily schemer like Nanapush all illustrate aspects of a native folk hero who subtly deﬁes and cleverly outwits the oppressor. Because so much of her work deals with Native American characters, themes, and traditions, many scholars read her work through the lens of multicultural criticism. Erdrich and Dorris told several interviewers that while one “can’t write a book about Native Americans without being political,” they never want the literature to be “polemical.” They see themselves less as Native American writers than as writers who are Native American (Erdrich is Chippewa, Dorris Modoc). Nevertheless, Erdrich’s connection to her Chippewa/Ojibwa heritage has continued to involve her in action on behalf of Native people. In 2002, for instance, Erdrich joined forces with two poets—Al Hunter, a Canadian, and her sister Heid E. Erdrich—to present a Native Writers Workshop at Turtle Mountain Community College. Sponsored by the National Book Foundation’s American Voices Program, the week-long session provided 11 students, ages 22 to 53, with group and individual instruction in poetry and ﬁction, mining their own family histories for stories and themes. In addition to her novels and poetry, Erdrich has written award-winning children’s books. In The Birchbark House (1999), she offers middleschool readers an alternative picture of life on the prairie, telling the story of Ojibwa people on the shores of Lake Superior as the white American westward movement makes contact. Seven-year-old Omakayas and her family have to adapt their lives as white culture changes their world permanently.

130

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Erdrich has been honored with numerous creative writing fellowships, including those from Johns Hopkins (1978), the MacDowell Colony (1980), the Yaddo Colony and Dartmouth (1981), the National Endowment for the Arts (1982), and the Guggenheim Foundation (1985). In addition to the O. Henry Awards, she has received numerous honors, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas in 2000, the Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year Award in 2000, and the Minnesota Humanities Prize for Literature in 2002. When Erdrich and Dorris married in 1981, he brought to the marriage his three adopted Native American children, all of whom had been born with fetal alcohol syndrome. (Dorris’s book The Broken Cord tells the story of their eldest son’s life.) Dorris and Erdrich together had three daughters. Their personal relationship began to unravel in 1991, when their eldest son was killed in an accident, and accusations of sexual abuse were leveled against Dorris. They separated in 1995, and Dorris took his own life in April 1997. Since then, Erdrich has lived with her children in the Minneapolis area, writing and operating a small business called Birchbark Books, Herbs, and Native Arts.

“The Red Convertible” (1981) Originally published in the summer 1981 issue of Mississippi Valley Review, “The Red Convertible” reappeared as a chapter in Love Medicine in 1983. In the story, two young men, half brothers from a North Dakota reservation, buy a red Oldsmobile convertible from a lot in Winnipeg and then spend a glorious summer joyriding to Alaska and back. As summer turns to fall, the United States Marines remind the older brother, Henry, that he has enlisted. While he serves in Vietnam, his brother Lyman restores the car to its summertime glory. Upon his return, Henry’s severe emotional damage from what he has seen and done disturbs Lyman enough that he takes a hammer to the car, hoping that Henry will pour himself into the therapeutic job of repairing

it. They celebrate the renewed car by driving to the Red River, in spring ﬂood. There, unable to continue living, Henry gives the keys to Lyman and leaps into the river. Stunned but sympathetic, Lyman rolls the car into the river, giving it back to his dead brother. As the narrator of the story, Lyman portrays himself as clever, entrepreneurial, and lucky. He had gone from dishwasher to manager of the Joliet Cafe by the time he was 16; when a tornado leveled the restaurant he used the insurance money to treat his extended family to a ﬁ ne meal and still had enough to pool with Henry’s two paychecks to buy the Olds. They found themselves in Alaska because they promised to take a pretty hitchhiker home. The idyllic summer of driving the convertible, spending time with Susy’s family, and relaxing together was a bonding experience for the two young men. Their closeness makes it extremely difﬁcult for Lyman to witness the pain inﬂ icted on his brother by the war. Henry no longer laughs or jokes, he sits motionless for hours in front of the television, and he is simply “jumpy and mean.” The perfectly restored convertible is a stark contrast to the damaged Henry. One day, something he sees on television makes him bite his lip, but he is so far from reality that he is unaware of the blood running down his chin, even into the bread he eats for dinner. Lyman and his mother know that a psychiatric hospitalization and medication will merely take Henry further from reality (“They don’t ﬁx them in those places”), so Lyman decides to give Henry something to ﬁ x: He beats the car to a ruin and waits for Henry to notice and to act. After Henry’s death, the snapshot their little sister takes of them and the restored car becomes both a treasure and a wound for Lyman.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Erdrich describes the Red River in its spring ﬂood stage. Tell how the scene at the river illustrates both life and death for the characters in the story. 2. The story ends with Lyman’s describing the car in the river “running and going and running and running.” What metaphorical meanings does that phrase have?

Louise Erdrich

“Jacklight” (1984) The title of this poem, the ﬁ rst poem in Jacklight, Erdrich’s ﬁ rst published book of poetry, refers to a light used as a lure by nighttime hunters. The speaker of the poem, an unidentiﬁed “we,” has responded to “this battery of polarized acids, / that outshines the moon” by approaching as far as the edge of the woods. Most of the poem, chantlike, is the speaker’s repetitive assessment of the hunters’ smell and their violence. The poem ends with the speaker’s statement of challenge to the hunters, who will be at a disadvantage as soon as they enter the woods, the speaker’s natural habitat. Erdrich describes the hunters with words suggestive of violence and brutality. Their minds are “like silver hammers / cocked back,” and there is “caked guts on their clothes.” The speakers smell not only the hunters themselves, but also “their mothers buried chin-deep in wet dirt” and “their sisters of crushed dogwood, bruised apples, / of fractured cups and concussions of burnt hooks.” Although they appear “faceless, invisible,” to the speaker, they are nevertheless dangerous. But in the last stanza, the power dynamic changes as the hunters “put down their equipment” and step into the woods, where they will be powerless. The speaker is satisﬁed with this change in the hunt, because the hunters do not know “how deep the woods are and lightless. / How deep the woods are.” That ﬁ nal statement, in its monosyllables, expresses the speaker’s conﬁdence that the hunters are now at a disadvantage. The identity of the speaker is open to interpretation: animals or the natural world facing human hunters? Women facing dominating men? Native people facing the incursions of white culture? Erdrich provides the poem with an epigram that states that one Chippewa word means both ﬂ irting and hunting game; another Chippewa word denotes both rape and choking a bear with bare hands. If, then, the acts of hunting and killing game can be expressed with the same words as pursuing and taking a woman, perhaps Erdrich is challenging the reader to worry less about the difference between the hunter (with clenched ﬁsts, acid, and raw steel) and the hunted (at

131

home in brown grass in knotted twigs), and to give more thought to the apparent need for violence and domination in human relationships.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine the stanzas in which the speaker describes his/her/their environment and actions. Which senses predominate? Contrast these descriptions with the sense imagery used for the hunters. 2. Which consciousness seems superior: that of the hunters or that of the hunted? Explain. 3. What is the artistic effect of the repetitive sentence structure, the lack of variety in the verbs? Compare the ﬁ rst stanza to the second-to-last stanza. Note the vowel sounds that predominate, especially in the ﬁ nal stanza. How do these language choices affect the mood of the poem?

“A Love Medicine” (1984) In this understated elegy, the speaker stands with her sister Theresa against the violence of a rainy night and the violence of a man. The poem’s title alludes to a Native American way of spiritual and physical healing: In the italicized last lines, the speaker promises help, rescue, healing for her sister. The poem begins gently enough, with the image of light rain and the blue light outside a dairy bar. Theresa is compared to a dragonﬂy, green and golden, which belongs to the “night of rising water.” Laughing, Theresa leaves her man in the foggy dimness. When the setting shifts to the banks of the raging Red River in the fourth stanza, the sense of violence increases, and the metaphors of setting merge with the experience of the character, jarring and pitching, sockets and arches against ﬁ stwork and pilings. The man has followed Theresa, inﬂ icting cold blows, “his boot plant[ing] its grin / among the arches of her face.” The damage is done: As Theresa gropes her sightless way home, the streetlights are “seething,” the trees are “aching,” while the river maintains

132

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

insistently violent background sounds. The speaker offers three parallel sentences to describe her sister’s broken condition: “I ﬁ nd her” . . . beaten down in tree roots, grass, ditch water, while the rain continues to pour on the river. In the ﬁ nal stanza, the narrative voice shifts from singular to plural; as the speaker joins her sister, the violent action is stilled. Since they can see the moon, the sky must have cleared, the rain has stopped, “and the water, / as deep as it will go, / stops rising.” The love medicine of the title has been offered in the speaker’s compassion for her battered sister. Her mere presence heals: “Sister, there is nothing / I would not do.” Ojibwa tradition records two kinds of love medicine: One is the kind that can be purchased from someone who knows how to concoct a potion or blend the right herbs and grasses, but the other is obtained directly from a person with “the touch,” a person whose heart heals. Erdrich’s poetry and ﬁction are full of characters who—like the speaker in this poem—see with the heart the suffering of another, who give the presence of a compassionate heart to heal what no potion can touch.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Trace the nature imagery in the poem: water, earth, light and darkness, living creatures. Is nature dangerous or healing? Explain. 2. A recurring theme in Erdrich’s poems is human domination of the natural world, or man’s domination of woman. In “A Love Medicine,” how does the natural world/woman resist, even triumph over, such domination? 3. Why is it important for the characters in this poem to be anonymous, even faceless? Explain.

“Dear John Wayne” (1984) In this poem, the speakers are contemporary Native Americans at a drive-in watching a John Wayne western on a hot August night. These real Indians are joined by history with the movie Indians and the movie cowboys, embodied by Wayne’s

character. Through the poem, Erdrich poses many questions about cultural dominance, about the effects of one culture’s seizing, possessing, and destroying what belongs to another. Under the star-lit sky, the screen is ﬁ lled by the image of the movie star’s face. With almost Godlike power, John Wayne’s eyes gaze out over the audience, and the italicized lines—apparently quotations from one of the movies—voice domination over the listeners. The culture represented by that ﬁctional character, and its vision of violent domination of the land and its people (“Everything we see belongs to us”), glow from the movie screen. In contrast to these larger-than-life images and sounds, the spectators see themselves as “speechless and small.” Nevertheless, the speakers challenge that domination. “The eye sees a lot, John, but the heart is so blind. / Death makes us owners of nothing.” Noting the scars on the enormous face, the speakers refer to the cancer that eventually killed the actor, a disease in which a cell is “burning, doubling, splitting out of its skin.” Similar uncontrollable power may well consume any dominator from within. Dramatic victories over the vanquished are costly and may be only temporary. If the “good guys” in a typical western are the cowboys, then the Indians must be the “bad guys.” The poems’ speakers challenge such a simple division of the world into “good guys” and “bad guys.” Many kinds of violence are alluded to in the poem, from mosquitoes to nuclear weapons. Dean Rader, an English professor at the University of San Francisco, says that “Dear John Wayne” is “one of the best and most important American poems” of the late 20th century, “a tour de force of public and private tensions.” As the Native Americans watch the movie, they are simultaneously cheering John Wayne’s victory and identifying with his victims. Lounging on the hood of their Pontiac sedan, they are unthinkingly participating in the exploitation of native peoples in consumer culture. Erdrich’s skillful creation of a multileveled dialogue allows her to pose many questions to America’s dominant culture, as well as about that culture.

Louise Erdrich

For Discussion or Writing 1. List the different groups whose conﬂ icts are suggested in the poem: for example, cowboys versus Indians, moviegoers versus mosquitoes. What is the implied relationship among these conﬂ icts? 2. Explain the poem’s title: Is Dear an adjective, or is it the address of a personal letter? How does the interpretation of that one word inﬂuence your understanding of the poem? 3. Watch one of John Ford’s great westerns starring John Wayne, such as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Fort Apache, or Stagecoach, and put yourself in the place of the speakers in the poem. How would the reactions of Native people to those movie heroes be different from those of the audience the moviemakers probably had in mind?

Love Medicine (1984) Erdrich’s debut novel weaves together stories of four generations of an extended family of Ojibwa and mixed-blood characters in Argus, North Dakota, and the nearby reservation. As teenagers, Marie Lazarre and Lulu Nanapush both set their hearts on Nector Kashpaw, who marries Marie but cannot give up Lulu. The story is framed by the Easter morning death of June Kashpaw, abandoned as a child and adopted by Marie. When word of her death reaches the reservation, the clan gathers to remember her, reclaiming her story and their own. Lipsha, another of Marie’s adopted children, discovers that June was his mother, and that he shares in the spirit power of the Pillager clan, from whom he descends through his father, one of Lulu’s sons. Between the sons and daughters of Nector and Marie, and Lulu and her clan of eight sons and a daughter by various fathers (including Nector), Erdrich shows the power of family to sustain people through difﬁculties and the power of love— domestic and romantic—to assure survival. Erdrich’s cyclic narrative structure in Love Medicine begins in 1981, cycles back to 1934, and then returns full circle to 1984. The interaction of the

133

characters and the interaction of the various versions of the family saga demonstrate Erdrich’s engagement with traditional values and images while the characters are ﬁ rmly rooted as well in contemporary American life. A trademark of Erdrich’s ﬁction is her use of multiple narrative voices. The 1993 edition of Love Medicine comprises six sections or chapters told, wholly or in part, by third-person narrators focused on the inner world of six different characters: June, Gordie, Marie, Lulu, Albertine, and Lyman. Fourteen chapters have ﬁ rst-person narrators: Marie and Lipsha speak three chapters each, while Lyman, Albertine, Nector, and Lulu each narrate two sections. Through this multivocality, some critics claim that Erdrich enacts the communal nature of Native American life; others describe it as a postmodern awareness that there is no single version of truth; still others attribute the technique to a feminist artistic mode that illustrates women’s shared responsibility for life and relationships. The construction of individual and community identity is another continuing theme in Erdrich’s ﬁction. In Love Medicine, identity is related to gender, ethnicity, religious practice, and family. For many of Erdrich’s male characters, manly behavior is tied to aggressiveness. Lulu’s sons are shown shooting cans off fence rails; Nector and Eli are hunters. Too often, that aggression is directed toward women: The army veteran Henry, drunk and depressed, rapes Albertine; King Kashpaw has learned to control his wife by shouting at her and hitting her. The ﬁ rst-grader King Junior hates the violence so much that he chooses to be called Howard to dissociate himself from his violent father. Erdrich’s female characters often combine traits that are generally considered both masculine and feminine. For instance, Marie is the nurturing mother and faithful wife, but she also knows how to take charge of her own life. She buys and lays the linoleum for the kitchen ﬂoor and waxes that ﬂoor to bar her unfaithful husband’s return to the home. But when he arrives at the door, terriﬁed to enter, Marie takes the initiative and reaches through his fear to draw him back to the family.

134

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

The Kashpaw twins, Eli and Nector, represent old and new ways of being Indian, giving Erdrich an opening to challenge white America’s stereotypical images. When their mother sent Nector to boarding school, she kept Eli hidden on the reservation, where he learned the ways of the woods and spoke the old language; when he is an old man, apparently on the edge of dementia, his children and grandchildren worry that he will forget what English he knows and be lost to them, since, as modern young people, they speak only English. Nector, on the other hand, took his “American” education to Hollywood, getting killed over and over again in westerns, becoming a poster boy for the vanishing Indian. When a famous artist makes Nector the model for her painting The Plunge of the Brave, later mounted in the statehouse, he ﬁ nds himself the image of the noble savage. However, Nector understands that this image of the Indian is the image of a doomed man jumping to his death. Returning to the reservation, Nector settles down with Marie as a family man and eventually is elected tribal chairman. In her portraits of these brothers and their different approaches to traditional and Anglo life, Erdrich shows value and loss in both worldviews. Nector’s son Lyman continues the slide into white culture when he decides to bring economic development to the reservation by building a tomahawk factory to produce traditional artifacts. The workers he hires—cousins, neighbors, friends— are unable to work together. The breakdown in communication extends into a literal breakdown of the machinery, ruining Lyman’s plans for industrialization. Another central issue in Love Medicine and throughout Erdrich’s ﬁction is the role of religion in the characters’ lives. While some characters, such as Eli, preserve the beliefs and traditions of their ancestors, most of them have accepted Christianity to varying degrees. Missionaries introduced Catholicism to the reservation, and the nuns at Sacred Heart convent in Argus shape the children in the reservation school. In the 1934 episode in Love Medicine, teenaged Marie decides to test her vocation at the convent, entering into conﬂ ict with

the very peculiar Sister Leopolda, whose version of Catholicism is spiteful and egotistical rather than generous and loving. In contrast, some characters, such as Eli, have maintained the old ways of the reservation. Lulu’s eldest son is Gerry Nanapush, whose father is the mysterious Moses Pillager, who practices the old medicine. Gerry’s son with June is Lipsha, another of the “thrown-away” children adopted by Marie and Nector. As he learns his identity, including his Pillager ancestry, Lipsha discovers that he has “the healing touch,” access to the old medicine way, and begins to make use of his spiritual powers for healing. Many scholars have discussed Erdrich’s presentation of the extended family. While blood relationships are certainly important to the characters, alternative connections often establish stronger family ties. Hertha Wong notes the pattern of incorporating “thrown-away children” into families. Marie raises her own children with Nector but also remains sensitive to the abandoned children in the community, taking them into their home and raising them as her own. An important consequence of the characters’ identity formation is their relationship to the Anglo world off the reservation. Some characters yield to the pull of white society, but few ﬁ nd happiness outside the Ojibwa community. Marie’s daughter Albertine studies nursing in Fargo, but a terrifying hotel-room episode with Henry sends her back to the family. Marie’s grandson King Kashpaw virtually rejects his Indian identity, living miserably in Minneapolis with his wife, Lynnette, and their son. Beverly Lamartine has a blond wife and a career in the Twin Cities but still feels tied to the reservation by his son with Lulu. That son, Henry, returns from active duty in the army so damaged by his Vietnam experiences that he commits suicide. His half brother Gerry Nanapush resists the inﬂuence of white America, landing in the penitentiary for a variety of crimes, asserting that no white man’s concrete walls can contain a Chippewa. Gerry’s cousins King and Lynnette Kashpaw betray him, inviting the police to their apartment to apprehend him after he escapes from prison.

Louise Erdrich

The central character of “Saint Marie,” the ﬁ rst of the ﬂashback chapters, is 14-year-old Marie Lazarre. Raised on the reservation by the extended family and educated in the mission school, she yearns—she thinks—to be accepted at the Catholic convent and absorbed into the religion and culture of white society. Torn by competing pulls, she mothers “thrown-away” children to compensate for her own abandonment.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In your judgment, who is the main character in Love Medicine? Argue for June, Lipsha, Marie, Lulu, or Nector as the character who uniﬁes the novel. 2. One of Erdrich’s trademarks is her use of multiple narrators. What advantages does this technique provide in the novel? How would chapters/segments change if Erdrich had used a different narrative voice for particular incidents? What is the effect of mixing ﬁ rst- and third-person narrative voices? 3. The spiritual world is very real to the characters in Love Medicine, whether they are drawing on traditional beliefs or on the Catholic teachings learned from missionaries. Find incidents in which characters are helped and/or damaged by their commitment to religious beliefs and practices. 4. In the novel, Erdrich illustrates the conﬂ ict between the attractions of city life in “white” America and the pull of traditional life of the reservation. What happens to Erdrich’s characters who yield to the seductions of white America and leave the reservation?

“Fleur” (1986) While working on her M.F.A. degree at Johns Hopkins University, Erdrich produced a 300-page ﬁction manuscript that she set aside, since her primary focus at that time was poetry. Ten years later, she took up the manuscript again and condensed what she deemed valuable into a short story, which was published as “Fleur” in the August 1986 issue

135

of Esquire. That story, in turn, became the seed of Erdrich’s third novel, Tracks, published in 1988. In the novel, “Fleur” has become the second chapter, “Summer 1913, Miskomini-Geezis, Raspberry Sun,” with Pauline Puyat as narrator. Ostensibly, the narrator of this short story is telling the reader about the mysterious and threatening Fleur Pillager, but through her language and attitude, she reveals a great deal more about herself. The focus of the story is the summer Fleur spent working in a butcher shop in the town of Argus, where her silent power threatens the male coworkers. After a month of losing to Fleur at cards, the three men assault her behind the slaughter pens. The next day, the oppressive heat blooms into a tornado that roars through Argus, sending the men running to the meat locker for shelter. The narrator, who did not respond to Fleur’s cries during the assault the night before, slams the locker door shut but neglects to tell anyone of the men’s whereabouts until they are found frozen three days later. Lily, Tor, and Lily’s dog are dead, and Dutch only barely survives. Later, back on the reservation, Fleur gives birth to a child. Despite its title, the short story is more about its narrator than it is about Fleur. Sometimes the narrative voice is plural, suggesting that the speaker is passing on the lore of the reservation women, who keep their distance from Fleur in dread of her mysterious powers. As a girl, Fleur survived three drownings. Each time, though, the man who rescues her dies unexpectedly by water. The women conclude that Fleur is aligned with the water monster Misshepeshu, and because she keeps to herself, no one can ﬁ nd out the truth. The narrator shares in those negative judgments of Fleur, but, in her own shaky identity, she is extremely threatened by Fleur’s utter directness and self-possession. The narrator has gone to Argus because she refuses to stay on the reservation. She wants to associate herself with her mother’s white Canadian heritage rather than her Native ancestry. Unable to accept herself as she is, she wants to be invisible, to be erased. In the closing paragraphs of the story, the narrator admits that she can look Fleur straight in the eyes only in her dreams.

136 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine the narrator’s descriptions of Fleur’s unusual behavior. Summarize the judgments made about her by the people on the reservation. How much of their opinion is based on fact and how much is based on their own fears of the unknown? 2. Who is responsible for the deaths of Tor and Lily?

The Beet Queen (1986) In her second novel, Erdrich focuses less on the Ojibwa than on the white and mixed-blood people in the North Dakota town near the reservation. Abandoned by their mother, Karl and Mary Adare ride a freight train to Argus to live with their aunt Fritzie and uncle Pete Kozka, owners of a butcher shop, and their cousin Sita. Karl, age 14, leaves town as quickly as he arrived, while Mary, age 11, takes root. Erdrich follows life in Argus as Mary and Sita grow to womanhood. With Celestine James, Mary assumes responsibility for the butcher shop and shares, with her neighbor Wallace Pfef, in the raising of Celestine’s (and Karl’s) daughter, Dot. Dot’s coronation as queen of the Beet Festival is the culmination of a novel in which the characters struggle to ﬁ nd family connectedness. The Beet Queen covers a span of 40 years, from 1932 to 1972, in direct chronology, unlike the nonlinear structure and ﬂashbacks of Love Medicine. Erdrich writes most of the chapters using ﬁ rstperson narrators, scattering among them several short segments in which a third-person narrator ﬁ lls in information that the main characters could not know themselves, particularly the fate of Mary and Karl’s mother, Adelaide, and her third child, a baby adopted by a Minneapolis couple. Six major characters narrate the 16 chapters of The Beet Queen. While most have a single voice, chapters 2 (1932) and 13 (1972) are voiced communally by Sita, Mary, and Celestine. Mary Adare is the central character of the novel, the speaker in ﬁve chapters. As a girl, she is “square and practical,”

and as an adult, she is independent and frank and a shrewd businesswoman. Having seen what happens to delicate and ﬂ ighty women like her mother, Adelaide, and her cousin Sita, she determines to control her own life and destiny with whatever assets are at hand. As butcher, sausage maker, gardener, and cook, she excels, but she also sees visions and tells fortunes. Critics point out that through the character of Mary, Erdrich challenges stereotyped expectations of men’s and women’s behavior. Sita Kozka, on the other hand, is “all girl,” interested in fashion, jewelry, and ﬁ nding a man. Displaced in her own family by Mary’s arrival, Sita works as a model and sales clerk in a Fargo department store until she is nearly 30. Her marriage fails along with the fancy restaurant she runs with her husband; with her second marriage, her frustrated dreams lead to a ﬁ ne suburban house, then drug dependency, disconnection from reality, and a slow slide into madness. The third female character to narrate four chapters is Celestine James, the steadiest woman in the novel, not prone to the ﬂ ights of fancy and emotional turmoil that Mary endures. After a surprising and peculiar two-month relationship with Karl Adare, Celestine becomes pregnant but chooses to raise her daughter alone. Karl Adare, like his mother, is unreliable, unsteady. He is constantly on the move, trying various careers and establishing short-term liaisons with women and men as he struggles to establish his identity. In the three chapters that he narrates, he exhibits emotional extremes, seeking connections but lacking the relational skills to maintain them. As with Karl, Wallace Pfef does not know his sexual identity until an encounter with Karl in a Minneapolis hotel. In his house, Wallace keeps a photo of a “poor dead sweetheart” that is nothing more than a framed picture he bought at a house sale but that excuses him from the socially sanctioned routines of courtship and marriage. His character is one of the nurturing men Erdrich develops in her novels: He serves as midwife at Dot’s birth, stands as her godfather, and shares in raising the child whose baptismal name is Wallac-

Louise Erdrich

ette. A civic leader, he is the one who spearheads sugar-beet cultivation in Argus. Dot Adare narrates the ﬁ nal chapter. She has grown up to be a sturdy young woman like her mother, and feisty like her aunt Mary. But she goes home, drawn back to her mother and the others who love her. Among the essential themes in The Beet Queen is the connectedness of family. The death of Mr. Ober, her longtime lover and father of her children, leaves Adelaide abandoned. She in turn abandons her children and ﬂ ies off with Omar the Aeronaught Extraordinaire. Mary attaches herself ﬁ rmly to the Kozka family but alienates Sita in the process. In her turn, Sita tries unsuccessfully to ﬁnd herself but is unable to ﬁ nd happiness with either Jimmie or Louis. Dot Adare becomes the center of a curious alternative family with her mother, Celestine; her aunt Mary; and her “uncle” Wallace Pfef; her biological father, Karl, is never really part of her life. One day, as Celestine is nursing the baby, she notices a delicate spider at work in the child’s hair: “A web was forming, a complicated house.” This web becomes a metaphor for the complex of relationships that Erdrich creates in the novel. In the novel’s ﬁ nal scene, that “complicated house” is uniﬁed. All of the main characters are reunited at the Beet Festival: Father Jude Miller, the baby brother of Mary and Karl, happens to be in Argus on the day of the festival, unrecognized by his siblings. Russell Kashpaw, the most decorated veteran, rides a ﬂoat in the parade. Sita Kozka Bohr Tappe is there, too, even though she had died earlier that morning. Mary, Wallace and Celestine, even Karl, are very proud of their daughter; as angry as she is, Dot reconnects with her mother and those who love her so well. In The Beet Queen, as in her other novels, Erdrich challenges readers’ expectations of gendered behavior with nurturing men like Wallace Pfef and assertive women like Mary. Even so, the stereotyped categories cease to have meaning in the novels, as Erdrich builds characters of both genders who are strong, nurturing, rational, spiritual, and practical. A character type that often surfaces in Erdrich’s ﬁction is the trickster, the comic

137

shape shifter. In The Beet Queen, Karl comes and goes, escaping from disasters, assuming a variety of identities. But others ﬁt this pattern as well, including the tomboy Dot, who becomes the Beet Queen; Wallace Pfef, with his blend of hidden and visible identities; and the unintentionally comic Mary, with her turban and Ouija board. The Beet Queen takes place in the town of Argus, North Dakota, where parts of Tracks are also set. Pete Kozka and his butcher shop appear in both novels, as do Russell Kashpaw, Fleur Pillager, and Celestine James, the daughter of Dutch James and Regina. While The Beet Queen covers approximately the same time span as Love Medicine, the only signiﬁcant link between the novels is the presence of Sister Leopolda (Pauline from Tracks), who is teaching at St. Catherine’s School when Mary enrolls in the seventh grade.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In an interview, Erdrich has suggested that the central motif of The Beet Queen is air, hinting that earth, water, and ﬁ re would be central in other novels. Locate as many references to air, ﬂ ight, and ﬂying as you can. Which characters are associated with ﬂ ight? What do these allusions reveal about the characters? Why? 2. Traditional family structures are few in The Beet Queen; instead, many kinds of family relationships are established. What are the common bonds that connect these “families”? What characteristics make for stable relationships? Why? 3. Unlike Tracks and Love Medicine, The Beet Queen focuses on characters who are not Native Americans. In your judgment, how does The Beet Queen affect Erdrich’s classiﬁcation as a Native American author? Justify your answer. 4. Find several of the comic scenes in the novel and analyze the sources of humor, considering such scenes as the following: Mary’s falling off the sliding board, Sita’s kidnapping, Mary and Mrs. Shumway’s naughty box, the Jell-O salad, the Christmas pageant, and Wallace and Dot at the dunking booth. What do these scenes add to the work as a whole? Explain.

138

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Tracks (1988) In Tracks, Erdrich tells the story of the Ojibwa people during the years 1912 to 1924, when U.S. treaty law established the reservation system in tribal territory, removing the land from the Indians’ control. Nanapush, one of the central characters, is a tribal elder—a man who bridges the past and present; he saw the last buffalo hunt but who also reads and writes English. During winter 1912, he saves Fleur Pillager after her entire family has died of tuberculosis. That rescue bonds the old man to her as a father. During a summer tornado in Argus, Fleur survives unharmed, but the three men who rape her in the slaughterhouse yard do not. Another survivor, a mixed-blood girl named Pauline Puyat, shows a deep-seated hatred for Fleur. Despising her Indian heritage, Pauline chooses to “become white” by entering the convent, erasing her past to be what Indians can never be. As Sister Leopolda, she becomes “a merciful scavenger, . . . the reservation crow,” tending to the sick and dying, mortifying herself beyond all good sense. Meanwhile, Fleur snares Eli Kashpaw’s heart, bears a child, and lives apart, separating herself from contact with white men. She refuses to comply with U.S. law and with the lumbermen who have bought the Pillager land by destroying the forest before the loggers have a chance to cut it themselves. With his wives and children dead, Nanapush eventually marries Margaret, the widow of his old friend Kashpaw. However, he does not accept Catholicism as she does. Nanapush pragmatically selects from the old and new ways what will best serve the survival of the people. In another terrible winter, he saves Fleur’s daughter Lulu, gives her his name, and raises her after Fleur abandons the settlement to move westward, away from the American incursions. In the chapters narrated by Nanapush, he is passing on to Lulu the story and legacy of the mother who has abandoned the child. Published four years after Love Medicine, Tracks is a prequel to that novel, opening in 1912, 22 years before the earliest episode in Love Medicine, and introducing the ancestors of its characters. The baby borne and abandoned by Pauline (later Sister Leo-

polda) and raised by the Lazarres is Marie, one of the matriarchs of Love Medicine. Lulu is the other. In addition to shedding further light on the earlier generations of their extended families, Tracks also provides the political background for the development of the reservations. Twenty-ﬁve years after the Dawes Act, the grace period has ended, and the Native people now owe taxes on the lands allotted to them by the 1887 law. With no cash income, the people have few choices. They can either sell their land for ready cash or borrow against the land to meet their immediate needs, driving themselves deeper into debt and into default, at which point the land reverts to the government. Erdrich uses only two narrative voices in Tracks: Nanapush, a wily tribal elder, and Pauline Puyat, a mixed-blood girl who despises her Native heritage and yearns to be white. The character of Nanapush echoes the Ojibwa mythic ﬁgure of Nanabozho, a comic healer and liberator of the people. As a tribal elder and witness to the end of the old ways, Nanapush passes on the lore of the people, especially to his adopted (grand)daughter Lulu. But having been educated in the mission schools, Nanapush also reads and writes English, deciphers the “tracks” on the papers, and tries to rescue the people and their land through his command of the white men’s language. Language is the chief weapon in his arsenal; he uses talk to confuse and trick his enemies, to rescue the dying, to outwit the powerful. He attends mass with Margaret but prefers the old ways of belief and worship. Pauline, on the other hand, rejects her Indianness. She tries to burn away her Ojibwa heritage by becoming a nun, an act not permitted to Native girls by tribal custom. Simultaneously repulsed by physical existence and sexually attracted to Eli Kashpaw, she buys a love potion from Moses Pillager and drugs Sophie Morrissey so she will seduce Eli. Watching their encounter from the bushes, Pauline participates vicariously in their lovemaking. Later, she snares Napoleon Morrissey and strangles him with her rosary beads, but not before becoming pregnant with his child. It is a child she desperately wants to destroy; when she delivers the baby, Ber-

Louise Erdrich

nadette Morrissey rescues the child because Pauline thinks the baby is the spawn of the devil. Fleeing to the convent, Pauline becomes Sister Leopolda and imposes savage penances on herself to drive out the devil, the devil of her Indian blood. These conﬂ icts—between old and new ways, traditional and Christian beliefs, Native custom and Anglo laws, Nanapush and Pauline—are the framework of the novel. Erdrich clearly sympathizes with Fleur, who refuses to speak English, live in the reservation settlement, and comply with American regulations. In Erdrich’s hands, Nanapush straddles the two worlds, seeking to harmonize when possible, and to rescue when harmony is impossible. Nanapush is able to survive in both worlds, but Pauline can exist in neither. The novel emphasizes hybridity as the way to the future. The novel also offers insights into traditional Ojibwa beliefs about death and the afterlife. The windigo is a spirit of death, a cannibal whose hunger is insatiable. Ojibwa who are lost in the wilderness are prey to the windigo, susceptible to madness in his clutches. The dead walk a three-day journey westward; at one point, Fleur walks into death to gamble with the windigo, trying to save the life of her child. In Fleur, Erdrich creates a representative of traditional Ojibwa spirit power. The Pillager totem is the bear, anijinabe, which is also the Ojibwa word for their people. Fleur dabbles in powerful medicine, overpowers Eli’s spirit and lures him to her cabin, works with the physical strength of a man at Kozka’s butcher shop, and holds some sort of power over the sea monster Misshepeshu, as shown by her surviving three drowning episodes. Pauline is sure that Fleur’s child was fathered by Misshepeshu. In Fleur’s ﬁ nal appearance in the novel, it is easy to believe that her power is too great to be explained: With her possessions piled on her cart, she smiles coolly at the gathered loggers, and the forest begins to crash to the ground around them. She retreats into the forest, representing unyielding resistance to the incursions of white American ways. With Fleur gone, her daughter Lulu is in the care of Nanapush, elder, trickster, storyteller, grandfather. Although he sends her to the mission school,

139

he also makes a point of teaching her the stories of her family, of her mother. Erdrich establishes the duality of 20th-century life for Native Americans: to know their past, their spirit power, and to ﬁ nd ways to live in the white man’s world without losing their Native souls. It is not an easy task. With this historical background to the lives of Kashpaws and Lazarres, Morrisseys and Lamartines, Erdrich lays the foundation for the clans whose lives will occupy a succession of novels and stories. Frustrations and despair, alcohol and failure will dog the characters’ lives, but the steady hope for the future lies in her characters’ ﬁdelity to what is best in their heritage: powers of spirit, of family connectedness, of healing relationships. These strands continue in Erdrich’s ﬁction and poetry, inviting readers to participate in the cultural hybridity that assures survival.

For Discussion or Writing 1. With no objective third-person narrator, readers of Tracks have only Pauline’s and Nanapush’s versions of events. Although neither narrator is completely reliable, which of the two are you more likely to believe? Give reasons justifying your answer. 2. Fleur is perhaps the central character of the novel. In your judgment, why does Erdrich not allow the reader to hear Fleur’s version of events? Explain. 3. As you read Tracks, note the images of tracks that Erdrich works into the text. How does she vary the meanings of the metaphors to illustrate her themes? What does this shifting of meanings add to the novel? Explain.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON ERDRICH AND HER WORK 1. Examine the strong female characters in Erdrich’s work. Discuss their roles in holding their extended families together, passing on traditional ways, and resisting oppression from white culture or from dominating men.

140

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

2. Both traditional and Christian believers revere the power of the supernatural world. In Erdrich’s work, which theology seems to offer more hope? Give reasons for your answer. 3. Examine one of Erdrich’s characters who appear in multiple works, such as Fleur Pillager. How does that character change over the course of various works? What aspects of the character never change? WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Beidler, Peter G., and Gay Barton. A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Bloom, Harold, ed. Native American Women Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998, pp. 24–37. Chavkin, Allan, ed. The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Erdrich, Louise. The Antelope Wife. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. ———. Baptism of Desire. New York: HarperCollins, 1989. ———. The Beet Queen. New York: Holt, 1986. ———. The Bingo Palace. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. ———. The Birchbark House. New York: Hyperion, 1999. ———. The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. ———. Four Souls. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. ———. Grandmother’s Pigeon. New York: Hyperion, 1996. ———. Jacklight. New York: Holt, 1984.

———. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. ———. Love Medicine. New York: HarperCollins, 1993, 1984. ———. The Master Butchers’ Singing Club. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. ———. Original Fire: New and Selected Poems. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. ———. The Painted Drum. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. The Range Eternal. New York: Hyperion, 2002. ———. Tales of Burning Love. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ———. Tracks. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. ———, and Robert Spillman. “The Creative Instinct.” Interview. Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/weekly/interview960506. html. Accessed June 30, 2009. Jacobs, Connie A. The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Sarris, Greg, Connie A. Jacobs, and James R. Giles, eds. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004. Stookey, Lorena L. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999. Voices from the Gaps. “Louise Erdrich.” Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/bios/entries/ erdrich_louise.html. Accessed June 24, 2005. Wong, Hertha D. Sweet, ed. Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Eileen Quinlan

Carolyn Forché (1950–

)

I have been told that a poet should be of his or her time. It is my feeling that the 20th-century human condition demands a poetry of witness. . . . If I did not wish to make poetry of what I had seen, what is it that I thought poetry was? (quoted in Moyers)

hen Carolyn Forché began writing at the age of nine, she did not intend to change the way the world viewed poetry. She did not plan to be a political activist. In fact, when her mother, Louise Blackford Sidlosky (a writer herself before retiring to devote more time to her growing family), introduced her to poetry, Forché saw it as a way to escape from the nonstop commotion inﬂ icted on her as the oldest of seven children. Years later Forché would become famous for her poetry of witness, challenging the strict division between political and personal poetry by introducing the broader category of social poetry, a poetry that attests to the horriﬁc consequences the political can wreak on the human soul. Born Carolyn Louise Sidlosky on April 28, 1950, in Detroit, Forché says as a child she “wrote obsessively, the way some children draw obsessively” (Ratiner 148). That passion for writing led her to Michigan State University, where she switched majors ﬁve times, searching for something compatible with writing. She ﬁ nally settled on international relations, and, in 1972, Forché became the ﬁ rst person in her family to graduate from college, earning a B.A. in international relations and creative writing. Detroit, the capital of the American automotive industry, was not an easy place to ﬁ nd a job in the early 1970s. Foreign manufacturers were beginning to dominate the marketplace, causing

downsizing and rampant unemployment. Luckily, Forché had inherited a nomadic spirit from her paternal grandmother, Anna Bassarová, who had lived with the family for most of the poet’s childhood, often disappearing for long periods and returning with stories of visits to Indian pueblos, Amish communities, and myriad other places where she blended easily within cultures not her own. Forché left her native Michigan to take a job in Washington, D.C., at the Epilepsy Foundation of America, where she worked until she learned of an opportunity to attend a newly formed master of ﬁ ne arts program at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She applied and was accepted on a full teaching scholarship. While at Bowling Green, Forché wrote about issues concerning her life up to that point. Many of her poems reﬂected the strong sense of community she learned growing up in her large Czech-American family and living in the same neighborhood in rural Catholic Detroit throughout her childhood, focusing on the spirituality of family bonds, exploring the Czechoslovakian and Native American cultures. Other poems displayed her deep awareness of nature, invoking images from the northern regions of the country or exploring the sensuality of nature. These poems became the basis for a manuscript that she entered in a competition for poets under the age of 40 who had yet to publish a volume of poetry. The Yale Series of Younger Poets prize is the most

141

142

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

prestigious award available for young poets; shortly after Forché completed her M.F.A. and was hired to teach at San Diego State University, she was notiﬁed that she had been selected to receive it. The winning manuscript became her ﬁ rst published collection of poetry, entitled Gathering the Tribes. While teaching at San Diego State, Forché became friends with Maya Flacol, who asked Forché to translate her mother’s book of poetry into English. Working from a Spanish edition, Forché discovered that translating poetry was not as simple as substituting one word for another. The poetry of Flacol’s mother, Claribel Alegría, was fraught with images with which Forché had no experience—the horrors of life under military dictatorship. Forché agreed to spend summer 1977 in Spain with Flacol at the home of Claribel Alegría. Forché spent her days translating poetry and her afternoons immersed in the company of international writers and artists who congregated at Alegría’s home. Through them, Forché began to gain a deeper understanding of the hardships of Latin America and an intense desire somehow to make a difference. Back in San Diego, Forché returned to teaching and writing letters on behalf of Amnesty International. She continued to work on translating Alegría’s poetry (publishing Flowers from the Volcano in 1983 and Sorrow in 1999). She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, allowing her a year of expense-free travel to work on her writing, but before she could begin her travels, her experience in Spain followed her home in the form of Alegría’s nephew, Leonel Gomez Vides. Vides schooled her in El Salvadorian history, relevant to her plans for further translations of Latin American poets. He taught her about the past and present political climate of Central America, and, when he had completed his tutelage, Vides revealed his true motivation: “Claribel tells me you’ve won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Congratulations! So what are you going to do with your fellowship year?” (Ratiner 155). Vides explained that El Salvador was going to be at war soon, and that Forché had the opportunity to be there from the beginning so that through her

poetry she could inform people back in the United States about the conditions of war. Although Forché believed that poets did not carry the same credibility that journalists did, Vides insisted that the job required a poet. “What are you going to do,” he asked, “write poetry about yourself the rest of your life?” (Ratiner 155). That challenge spurred Forché into accepting his invitation. Over the next two years, Forché traveled extensively in El Salvador, where she met her future husband, the journalist Harry Mattison, who was covering the war for Time. Forché worked closely with Monsignor Oscar Romero, a local church leader, and became immersed in the struggle against the widespread violence being inﬂ icted upon the people of El Salvador by their own government. When the climate became too dangerous for her to stay, she returned home, charged by Monsignor Romero to convince the United States to stop its military aid. Shortly after her departure, Monsignor Romero and six American churchwomen were murdered. Back in the States, Forché struggled to ﬁ nd an audience to which she could voice the injustices she had witnessed. She testiﬁed before the House Subcommittee on Western Hemispheric Affairs, urging them not to send further military aid to the region. Despite her eloquent appeal, the aid was approved. Meanwhile, Forché had completed a manuscript of her Salvadorian poems. Publishers shied away because of its intense political nature, but Forché found a willing audience in the crowds who attended her poetry readings. A chance encounter with Margaret Atwood led Forché to submit her manuscript to a new publisher; in 1981, The Country between Us appeared in bookstores. Although it received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and was the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, the book was attacked by both the political Right, who called Forché everything from naïve to hysterical, and the Left, who accused her of using the conﬂ ict in El Salvador to further her own poetic ambitions. Forché believed that the attacks were mainly the result of “the cyclic debate peculiar to the United

Carolyn Forché 143

States concerning the relationship between poetry and politics” (Ratiner 161). Poets were not expected to inﬂuence public policy with their writing, and, by choosing as her subject the political hotbed of El Salvador (which was receiving military support from the United States), Forché had stepped over some imagined line. In her defense, she began to call for a new way of thinking about poetry, a manner that allowed for works that were neither strictly personal (typiﬁed by the emotional) nor political (focused on controversial issues or events), but rather blended the two in a way that required a new classiﬁcation, that of social poetry: The poetry of witness reclaims the social from the political . . . the social had been irrevocably invaded by the political in ways that were sanctioned neither by law nor by the ﬁctions of the social contract. (Forché, Against 45)

In addition to outwardly defending the legitimacy of her work, Forché found herself waging an internal struggle. Her experiences in El Salvador had left her feeling that something in her had been broken. She traveled and worked in a variety of positions that allowed her to combat injustice, including as a journalist for Amnesty International and as the Beirut correspondent for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. She also worked in South Africa with her husband, covering the antiapartheid campaign. During this time, Forché continued to write, but she felt what she was capturing on paper was disjointed, unlike real poetry. She saved it all in notebooks, considering it notes toward future poems. She recalls: Something happened along the way to the introspective poet I had been. My new work seemed controversial to my American contemporaries, who argued against its “subject matter,” or against the right of a North American to contemplate such issues in her work, or against any mixing of what they saw as the mutually exclusive realms of the personal and the politi-

cal. Like many other poets, I felt I had no real choice regarding the impulse of my poems, and had only to wait, in meditative expectancy. In attempting to come to terms with the question of poetry and politics, I turned to the work of Anna Akhmatova, Yannis Ritsos, Paul Celan, Federico García Lorca, Nazim Hikmet, and others. I began collecting their work, and soon found myself a repository of what began to be called “the poetry of witness.” (Forché, Against 30)

In 1986, Forché and Mattison conceived a child; as his birth neared, they moved to Paris, France, so he would not be born on South African soil. While waiting for the baby to arrive, Forché kept busy by translating a French text that she had found in the apartment’s cupboard. It turned out to be a book of poems by Robert Desnos, a poet who died in the concentration camps. (Her translation was published in 1991 as The Selected Poems of Robert Desnos.) In his writing, she found the beginnings of an explanation for why her own poetry had taken such an unexpected turn. Forché found the poetry of witness to be a poetry of extremity, requiring a form of language to which the American literary public was unaccustomed. In order to convey the horrors that they have witnessed accurately, Forché claimed poets needed to resort to language that was itself extreme, as in the case of Desnos, whose poetry was at times violently obscene in order to portray accurately what he had witnessed. Other times, there is simply no language to describe what has been witnessed. As Forché writes, “The narrative of trauma is itself traumatized” (Against 42). Writers are rendered unable to articulate directly that to which they must give voice, causing them to rely upon fragmented images to convey a greater meaning. Forché maintained that the trauma had left a mark on the writer that could be felt in his or her work, even when it was not speciﬁcally about war. She cites as example Paul Celan and claims, “If . . . a poet is a survivor of the camps during the shoah [the Jewish term for the Holocaust],

144

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

and the poet chooses to write about snow falling, one can discern the camps in the snow falling. The camps are in the snow” (Ratiner 163). In 1987, after the birth of her son, Sean-Christope, Forché returned to teaching in the United States. Over the next two decades she would teach at several institutions, including the University of Arkansas, Vassar College, George Mason University, Skidmore College, and Columbia University. Still, Forché remained fascinated by the mark of trauma on language itself. She began to organize the poetry she was accumulating into a collection. While she worked, she received grants and fellowships from the Lannon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Art Council, and the District of Columbia Art Council. She took over a decade to complete the book, which includes the works of more than 144 poets, and in 1993 the volume was published as Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. In describing the anthology, Forché says she wanted it to be “a symphony of utterance, a living memorial to those who had died and those who survived the horrors of the 20th century. I wanted something that wasn’t a statue that pigeons could defecate on. I wanted something that would stay alive like language stays alive” (Ratiner 163). Working so intensely with the poetry of other writers who had witnessed atrocities gave Forché a lens through which to view her own changed writings. She returned to her notebooks and began to see in them a mosaic, many individual voices speaking through the same poem. To write their message in a meaningful way, Forché knew she would have to step away from the ﬁ rst-person lyrical style of her earlier works. Forché found a unifying thread for what she calls “these swatches of human language” in the work of Walter Benjamin. His “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” describes an angel of history who perceives history as one single catastrophe. Forché uses this idea as the basis for her fourth book, The Angel of History. Published in 1994 and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Angel of History gives voice to the unspoken words of those

who have suffered during the calamity we call the 20th century. In 1998, Forché was presented with the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award in recognition of her work on behalf of human rights and the preservation of memory and culture. The foundation routinely presents awards to people whose work in a cultural ﬁeld furthers dialogue, understanding, and peace in conﬂ ict areas. Forché’s most recent collection of poetry, Blue Hour, was published in 2003. Her inspiration for the title was the predawn light that the French refer to as l’heure bleue. The poems themselves are hauntingly reminiscent of the writing style Forché adopted for The Angel of History, seeking to give voice to those who have lost theirs, but she returns to the ﬁ rst-person lyric in some, letting her own memories of childhood and child rearing mingle with images of atrocity. The most recognized poem in the collection is “On Earth,” a 46-page poem that has been described by David Need as illustrating “the unraveling of our hopes at immortality by arranging the movement of a dying person’s thoughts in an abecedary—a poem in which the lines are arranged in dictionary order—so that even as one adheres to that order, life unravels, and language breaks.” Since the publication of Blue Hour, Carolyn Forché has continued to write and is currently working on a collection of essays. In 2006, Forché accepted a position at Skidmore College in New York, where she serves as professor and director of the creative writing program.

Gathering the Tribes (1976) The manuscript for Gathering the Tribes, produced while Forché was enrolled in the M.F.A program at Bowling Green University, was selected by Stanley Kunitz to receive the 1976 Yale Younger Poets prize. Gathering the Tribes is a richly woven tapestry of heritage and nature, blending threads of Native American culture with Forché’s own Slovak

Carolyn Forché 145

ancestry to tell stories of kinship and ritual, sacriﬁce and ceremony. With the lines “That from which these things are born / That by which they live / That to which they return at death / Try to know that,” Forché invites readers into “Burning the Tomato Worms.” From there she tells us of Anna—“Heavy sweatered winter woman / Buried the October before I was grown”—and a granddaughter’s struggle to understand the legacy left to her. The portrait Forché paints, of a child who both loves and resents her elder, rings true to the duality of child-adult love. The poem also explores the dual feelings of guilt and pleasure that accompany ﬁ rst love. The speaker secretly meets a boy in the barn but is sure her grandmother knows, because “It was all over my face,” yet her grandmother does not speak of it. The reader is left to guess at whether her silence is a form of disapproval or tacit acceptance. The character of Anna is based on Forché’s own paternal grandmother, who lived with Forché for most of her childhood. The real Anna ﬁ rst left Slovakia for the United States when she was 11 years old and worked in a needle factory to earn enough money to bring over her own parents and grandparents. That spirit of self-determination and hard work is evident in the lines “She had drawn apple skin / Tightly bent feet / Pulled babushkas and rosary beads / On which she paid for all of us.” Forché describes her grandmother as a woman who wandered, often disappearing from the family home for weeks, returning with stories of her stays with Native Americans or Mennonites. Forché admits to inheriting some of that nomadic lifestyle; the results are evident in the seamless way she immerses readers in other cultures. One example is the poem “Alfansa,” based on the true story of Chimayo, New Mexico, and its legendary shrine, El Santuario de Chimayó. Thousands pilgrimage travel there each year, believing the shrine to be the site of miraculous healings resulting from a cruciﬁ x found in the early 1800s by a local friar. In her poem, Forché addresses El Posito, the sandpit where the cruciﬁ x was reportedly found: “People come to this Santuario, / smear themselves with

mud, light candles. / Lift dry mud from the mud well to their mouths. / (It ﬁ lls by itself while they sleep.)” Alfansa, of the southwestern Pueblo Indians, “strings Chimayo’s chilis, / like sacred hearts, tongues of ﬁ re tied together”; she is old and suffers, but even in her pain she hears the voice of Maria and is told the secret of Chimayo’s El Posito by “a voice of hills.” Note that some poems in the book have content intended for mature readers.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Why do you think Forché chose the title “Burning the Tomato Worms” for this poem? Discuss your reasons, supporting them with evidence from the text. 2. In the poem “Alfansa,” why does Alfansa weep as she ﬁ lls the mud well with baskets of soil? What deﬁ nes a miracle? Examine other sites where miracles have reportedly occurred. What explanations could account for the miracles? Does the possibility of human involvement in a miracle rule out the divine or support it?

The Country between Us (1982) When Forché received the Guggenheim Fellowship allowing her a year of travel, she thought she would research foreign poets for possible translations. Instead, she accepted an invitation to travel to El Salvador, which was on the brink of war. By arriving when she did, and with Leonel Gomez Vides as her guide, Forché was able to see the conﬂ ict from the inside, immersing herself in the ﬁght for human rights. For two years, she worked closely with Monsignor Oscar Romero and his church group, doing whatever needed to be done, from writing reports for human-rights organizations to searching for missing people in morgues. While she was there, people risked their lives to educate her about their ordeals in the hope that she would return to America to educate the world. The sum of these experiences changed her deeply; she was no longer the person who had boarded the plane

146

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

to El Salvador. Her poetry, which had always been focused on the world she knew, changed as that world expanded to include the atrocities of war. Forché produced seven poems focusing on her experiences in El Salvador, many dedicated to the people she encountered there. They were eventually published as part of her second poetry collection, The Country between Us. It was immediately criticized as being too political, too hysterical, an overreaction to events she could not possibly understand. One critic even suggested that Forché had designed the entire trip in order to further her career. The focus of the most criticism was the poem “The Colonel,” which describes a dinner at the home of a high-ranking ofﬁcer in the military regime. It is like dinner at any American home: a cop show on the television, pet dogs, daughter, son, wife. But “Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs,” and after dinner the colonel “returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table.” Critics claimed this could not have happened, but later the New York Times conﬁ rmed that it was not uncommon for Salvadorian soldiers “to cut the ears off the corpses of rebels to verify enemy casualties to commanders” (Farrah 20 May 1986). The ﬁ nal poem is dedicated to Terrence des Pres, a friend of Forché’s. Like Forché, de Pres is famous for his writings about atrocities (most notably The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps) and his challenges to the relationship of politics and poetry. “Ourselves or Nothing” describes the toll this had taken on him: “the chill in your throat like a small / blue bone, those years of your work / on the Holocaust. You had to walk / off the darkness, miles of winter / riverfront, windows the eyes in skulls / along the river.” Forché shared de Pres’s friendship, his home, and many of the same experiences. In telling readers about the effects writing has had on him, it is almost as if she is giving us a glimpse into the internal struggles she herself has faced. In fact, the lines “Go after that which is lost / and all the mass graves of the century’s dead /

will open into your early waking hours” seem to be a warning: If you join in a war against atrocity, you will be haunted by what you see. Yet even as she issues that warning and describes what it is that haunts her, she charges the readers to do it anyway: “Everywhere and always / go after that which is lost.” When asked in a 1995 interview with Bill Moyers to name “the country between us” to which the title of the collection refers, Forché responds: The country between us is perhaps the distance between one human being and another, how long it takes one human voice to reach another human voice. It’s probably also a reference to El Salvador, which was the country that came into my heart when I was just becoming an adult, and the country which probably shaped my moral imagination. But perhaps it is the United States too, because for me the United States is very complex. It was the people of the United States who all through that war were very concerned and who cared about human rights and responded very favorably to all appeals while at the same time the United States was a government that didn’t seem to know how to listen to any of that. So I have two countries in my mind: the country of my people and the country of the government that I knew as I was growing into adulthood.

For Discussion or Writing 1. “The Colonel” was met with harsh criticism; some accused Forché of making up the whole episode to dramatize her point, while others said she wrote the poem purely for its shock value. Many modern songwriters have been accused of the same thing. In what ways might Forché’s idea of poetry of witness also apply to modern music (speciﬁcally rap)? 2. In describing the colonel’s house in the poem “The Colonel,” Forché intersperses details of war with the mundane items found in American homes: “There were daily papers, pet dogs,

Carolyn Forché 147

a pistol on the cushion beside him.” How does this technique affect the overall feeling of the poem? 3. “Ourselves or Nothing” includes the lines “There is a cyclone fence between / ourselves and the slaughter and behind it / we hover in a calm protected world like / netted ﬁ sh, exactly like netted ﬁsh.” Who is the “we” to whom Forché refers? How does this view of world relations both beneﬁt and harm the “netted ﬁ sh”?

The Angel of History (1994) After completing The Country between Us, Forché went through a period when her writing seemed to her more like fragmented images than poetry. She collected her writings in notebooks but did not attempt to publish anything other than translations or anthologies of the poems of other writers. Through the examination of poetry produced by writers who have endured extreme situations, Forché began to notice a commonality. Their work seemed deeply rooted in the heart of the trauma, changed in signiﬁcant ways regardless of whether a particular poem was about the trauma or not. This work turned out to be a valuable process for Forché, allowing her to see in her own disconnected writings a wholeness interpretable only through the trauma. She returned to her notebooks and began to examine the interrelatedness of the images, seeing them in a new light: I had this idea that language, human spoken language, might be like radio waves in the universe, always intact as they move onward. Everything that’s ever been said stays in the universe in some way—that the earth is somehow wrapped in the poem. There’s a line [in The Angel of History] that says: “The earth is wrapped in weather, and the weather in risen voices.” And all I could feel when I was writing was that I was somehow pulling at these pieces, these fragments, these swatches of human language. (Ratiner 165)

To give adequate voice to “these swatches of human language,” Forché needed to move away from the ﬁ rst-person narrative. She described her process of writing in an interview with David Wright: I didn’t want to write The Angel of History in a confessional lyric mode. Or in a mode that was explorative of the self and its sensibilities. . . . I knew I wanted to write in a mode of wakeful listening; in a mode of receptivity; in a mode of recording rather than in a mode of pronouncement or confession or establishment of lyric identity and selfhood. (Available online. URL: www.nimblespirit.com)

Her poems became a story, told through the eyes of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” who perceives all of human history as a single, continuous calamity. Therefore, this volume of poetry feels less like a collection of poems and more like a novel, told in parts. One of these parts, entitled “The Angel of History,” interweaves the story of Ellie, a survivor of the German invasion of Poland who has lost two sons (one to winter and one “to her own attempt to silence him”), with that of 44 Jewish children hidden until they were discovered and taken to Auschwitz. “The Garden of Shukkei-en” tells of two women visiting the Garden of Shukkei-en, a restored ornamental garden in Hiroshima, Japan. One woman was present when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945; she tries to tell the other what it was like but warns, “Nothing I say will be enough.” As she describes in vivid detail what she has seen, she wonders, “Perhaps my language is too precise, and therefore difﬁcult to understand?” Those lines, which seemingly contradict each other, speak to the common theme Forché has described in language about atrocity: that it is at once not enough and too much. It is, as Forché has quoted Jabès, “the wounded words” that are left to the poet (Forché, Against 41).

148

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

For Discussion or Writing 1. Consider the line “Perhaps my language is too precise, and therefore difﬁcult to understand?” from “The Garden of Shukkei-en.” Usually precision in language serves to clarify, rather than obscure. Give other examples of precise language and discuss the effect they have on understanding. 2. Forché includes a selection by Paul Valéry describing scholars’ attempts to translate a book received from an angel. How does Forché’s use of Valéry’s parable relate to the poems in her book, which mostly address atrocities of war? Compare this to the children’s book Seven Blind Mice, by Ed Young (1993). What lesson might these stories hold for us regarding the future?

Blue Hour (2003) In describing the circumstances in which this book was written, Forché writes:

turning every thing of reality into a poem and every poem into a thing of reality. “Blue Hour,” the collection’s title poem, is dedicated to the poet’s son and describes how one’s view of the past—in this case, the FrancoPrussian War—can be reshaped by the gift of a new life. The poem admonishes that one “shall not say adieu when a country ceases to be” and tells us that although she sits and learns French while her infant sleeps, she does this overlooking cemetery walls and reliving the horror of war. While her son sleeps, the speaker revisits her own childhood, where isolation and conﬁ nement masquerade as medical treatment oddly like the asylum where her grandmother burned to death among other patients, chained like inmates to bedrails. This comparison leads her to conclude that “one can live without having survived.” When her son awakes and looks at her, those memories fade and she is able to put memory in its place and say, “Adieu, country,” after all.

For Discussion or Writing When my son was an infant in Paris, we woke together in the light the French call l’heure bleue, between darkness and day, between the night of a soul and its redemption, an hour associated with pure hovering. In Kabbalah, blue is hokhmah, the color of the second seﬁrah. In Tibetan Buddhism, the hour before dawn is associated with the ground luminosity, or “clear light,” arising at the moment of death. It is not a light apprehended through the senses, but is said to be the radiance of mind’s true nature. (Blue 71)

After reading this description, it is easy to see how the poems in Blue Hour might have been conceived, sitting in that luminous dark, hovering between thoughts of life and thoughts of death. The poems themselves hover, balanced on a thin line of conscious choice and accidental pairings: abundance and grief, cofﬁ ns and cups, cribs and smoke. Ghostlike, these paired images haunt the reader until they blend among one’s own thoughts,

1. “Blue Hour” juxtaposes the speaker’s childhood in a time when “it was not as certain that a child would live to be grown” with that of her infant son in postwar France. How does the America of today differ, both politically and socially, from the America when your parents were in high school? 2. Consider the phrase “The human soul weighs twenty-six grams” from “Blue Hour.” How would you assign weight to something so immeasurable? Choose something that cannot be deﬁ nitively measured and give it a concrete value, supporting your position.

“On Earth” (2003) “On Earth” was published in Blue Hour and is perhaps the most striking poem of that collection. The poem is prefaced with a quote from George Burgess, which gives us context for Forché’s poems:

Carolyn Forché 149

In the immediate vicinity of death, the mind enters on an unaccustomed order of sensations, a region untrodden before, from which few, very few travelers have returned, and from which those few have brought back but vague remembrances; sometimes accompanied with a kind of homesickness for the higher sphere of which they had then some transient prospect. Here, amidst images, dim images, of solemnity or peace, of glory or of terror, the pilgrim pursues his course alone, and is lost to our eye.

In contemporary culture, we often hear of a dying person’s life’s ﬂashing before his or her eyes. “On Earth” puts us in the mind of that person and ﬂashes her life before us as a long list of events—things experienced and witnessed, as well as unfulﬁ lled longings and regrets. The list itself is free-ﬂowing, not categorized in terms of meaning or importance and links each item to the next in the personal way only one mind could, by the free association of experiences. The extrinsic organizational pattern for the overall poem is based on third-century gnostic abecedarian hymns that have an alphabetical progression. Forché goes beyond the basic abecedary, which is organized by the beginning letter of each line, to categorize the items in her poem also by the alphabetical nature of the prepositional phrases, conjunctions, or articles with which the mind associates them—at the city’s edge the aged cooling towers, between here and here, the same rose sold to every mourner—and by so doing weaves a complicated path through memory’s journey along the road between life and death.

For Discussion or Writing 1. “On Earth” has been described as the transcription of a mind passing from life to death. Write nonstop for ﬁve minutes, listing all the images that would ﬂash before your eyes at the end of your life. 2. Choose one image from “On Earth” that is particularly signiﬁcant to you. Discuss your reaction to that image and its signiﬁcance to the overall poem.

3. How does the use of punctuation contribute to the poetic style of “On Earth”? In what ways would changing the punctuation affect the overall meaning or feel of the poem?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON FORCHÉ AND HER WORK 1. In an interview, Carolyn Forché said, “Poetry can’t be placed in the service of anything other than itself” (Faulkner). Do you agree or disagree with that statement? In what ways have people tried to place poetry in the service of something other than itself? 2. Forché has stated that “citizens have an obligation to act upon or voice support for their principles” but that “no special obligation accrues to writers” (Faulkner). Douglas Lain and Tim Jones have suggested that “artists have both the ability and the moral obligation to combat deceit and distortion. It is the ability to illuminate even difﬁcult truths that deﬁ nes an artist” (www.petitiononline.com/Aawii/petition. html). With whom do you agree and why? 3. Upon publication of Gathering the Tribes, Kenneth Rexroth compared Forché to Muriel Rukeyser, whose ﬁ rst book of poems, Theory of Flight, received the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1935. Review Rukeyser’s biographical information and the sample poems available online from Modern American Poetry (www.english.uiuc. edu/maps/poets/m_r/rukeyser/rukeyser.htm). In what ways are the two poets similar? How are they different? Explain your response, citing from each text. WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Farrah, Doug. “Salvadorian Soldiers Tell of Cutting Off Ears of Dead Rebels.” New York Times, 20 May 1986, p. A5. Faulkner, David. “Introduction at NYS Summer Writers Institute.” Writers Online 1, no. 4 (Summer 1997). Available online. URL: www.albany.edu/writers-inst/ olv1n4.html. Accessed August 12, 2006.

150

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Forché, Carolyn. The Angel of History. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. ———. Blue Hour. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. ———. The Country between Us. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. ———. Gathering the Tribes. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1976. ———, ed. “Foreword.” In Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1993. Modern American Poetry: Carolyn Forché. Available online. URL: http://www.english.illinois.edu/ maps/poets/a_f/forche/forche.htm. Accessed June 25, 2009. Moyers, Bill. Interview with Carolyn Forché. The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets, edited by James Haba. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Available online. URL: www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/index. htm. Accessed August 6, 2006. Need, David. “The Blue Hour: Opening HeartWorlds, Breaking Language.” OysterBoy Review:

Print and Online Journal of Fiction and Poetry 18 (Winter 2003–2004). Available online. URL: www. oysterboyreview.com/issue/18/index-reviews. html. Accessed July 30, 2006. Ostriker, Alicia. “Beyond Confession: The Poetics of Postmodern Witness.” American Poetry Review 30, no. 2 (March–April 2001): 35–39. Ratiner, Steven. “Carolyn Forché—the Poetry of Witness.” In Giving Their Word: Conversations with Contemporary Poets. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Smith, Leonora. “Carolyn Forché: Poet of Witness.” In Still the Frame Holds: Essays on Women Poets and Writers, edited by Shelia Richards and Yvonne Pacheco Tevis, 15–28. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo, 1993. Wright, David. “Assembling Community: A Conversation with Carolyn Forché.” Nimble Spirit: The Literary Spirituality Review, 20 February 2000. Available online. URL: www.nimblespirit.com. Accessed July 18, 2006.

Kathy Higgs-Coulthard

Nikki Giovanni (1943–

)

It’s better to take a chance and be wrong than to be safe and dull. (quoted in Virginia Tech Magazine)

ikki Giovanni’s poetry constantly weaves the stories of yesterday with today’s reality. Her earlier poetry plays off Langston Hughes and other Harlem Renaissance poets and adds short word allusions to bigger events. At the same time, Giovanni serves as a bridge to the rap artists of the 1990s and beyond. Her content shifts with personal milestones and tragedies. Her poetry is rhythm-based, readable work that draws in many reluctant readers. She wrote during a speciﬁc political and cultural time; she shaped the movement of her day and the movement shaped her. Giovanni’s identity was inﬂuenced by several strong women, especially the grandmother who pushed her into an activist’s life. She grew up in a house of books and music, with parents who were educators and grandparents who taught as well. But this was not a quiet family. Nikki Giovanni was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr., on June 7, 1943, in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Yolande Cornelia and Jones “Gus” Giovanni. It was her sister, Gary Ann, three years her senior, who started calling her Nikki. The Giovannis moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where her father had grown up. During this time, Yolanda and the girls made frequent trips to Knoxville to visit her parents. Yolanda’s mother, Emma Louvenia Watson, would remain a constant inﬂuence on Nikki’s life. Giovanni completed ﬁ rst through third grade at Oak Avenue School and then transferred to St.

Simon’s, which she attended through eighth grade. It was her seventh-grade teacher, Sister Althea Augustine, who would have a tremendous impact on Giovanni’s life. When her sister, Gary, transferred to Wyoming High School as part of a desegregation effort, both she and a friend walked out of a classroom when the teacher said that Emmett Till “got what he deserved” when he was killed by white men in the Mississippi Delta in 1955 (Fowler). For Giovanni, the Till murder would energize the Civil Rights movement and remain an important part of the historical African-American struggle. Giovanni enrolled in an all-black high school in ninth grade, but because of tensions between her parents, she left Cincinnati to live with her grandparents back in Knoxville, where she attended Austin High School. Here she was inﬂuenced by her French teacher, Mrs. Emma Stokes, and an English teacher, Miss Alfredda Delaney. Giovanni later wrote about Delaney in the poem “In Praise of a Teacher”: “It was, after all, Miss Delaney who introduced the class to ‘My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends—/ It gives a lovely light.’ And I thought YES. Poetry is the main line. English is the train.” Giovanni’s grandmother also played a central role during this time. As the biographer Virginia Fowler notes: “Her grandmother, who is involved in numerous charitable and political endeavors, becomes an increasingly important

151

152 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

inﬂuence on her, teaching her the importance of helping others and of ﬁghting injustice. When a demonstration is planned to protest segregated dining facilities at downtown Rich’s department store, her grandmother Louvenia cheerfully volunteers her granddaughter Nikki” (xxxiii). Giovanni was encouraged by both Stokes and Delaney to apply for early admission to Fisk University in Nashville. In the book Racism 101, Giovanni recalls in “Remembering Fisk . . . Thinking about DuBois”: “The Ford Foundation played a small but signiﬁcant part in my decision. It seems, if memory serves me well, that they had sponsored a study about taking talented students from high school early, as early as the sophomore year, testing them for intellectual readiness, and encouraging certain institutions to accept them as college freshmen. . . . Most of us, it is fair to say, are bored in high school. I jumped at the chance” (31–32). Upon entering Fisk, Giovanni encountered problems, for she was “unprepared for the conservatism of this small black college. Almost from the outset she runs into trouble with the Dean of Women, Ann Cheatam, whose ideas about the behavior and attitudes appropriate to a Fisk woman are diametrically opposed to Giovanni’s ideas about the intellectual seriousness and political awareness appropriate to a college student” (Fowler xxxiii). Giovanni was expelled from Fisk and returned to her parents’ house in Cincinnati to help care for her nephew, Christopher. She worked at a Walgreens drugstore while taking classes at the University of Cincinnati and helping her mother with charity work. In 1964, Giovanni reentered Fisk University with the support of the dean at the time, Blanche McConnell Cowan, who encouraged her during her years there. Giovanni later wrote in “Poem (for BMC No. 1)”: I was water-logged (having absorbed all that I could) I dreamed I was drowning That no sun from Venice would dry my tears But a silly green cricket with a pink umbrella said

Hello Tell me about it And we talked our way through the storm. (lines 5–10)

While at Fisk, Giovanni majored in history, edited the student journal, reestablished the campus chapter of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and was involved in various writing workshops. She found a mentor in the writer in residence, John Oliver Killens, who coordinated the ﬁ rst writers’ conference at Fisk. Killens and three friends had formed the Harlem Writers Guild in the early 1950s and worked for social causes and racial equality. Though he knew both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, Killens identiﬁed with Malcolm X: “My ﬁght is not to be a white man in a black skin, but to inject some black blood, some black intelligence into the pallid mainstream of American life.” Under Killens’s mentorship, Giovanni continued to write and met inﬂuential ﬁgures such as Dudley Randall, the founder of Broadside Press, and (LeRoi Jones, A MIRI BAR AK A), one of the main leaders of the Black Arts Movement. After graduating with honors in 1967, Giovanni moved back to Cincinnati, where, later that year, her grandmother, Louvenia Watson, died. That loss had a profound impact on Giovanni, who turned to writing several of the poems that were published in her ﬁ rst volume, Black Feeling, Black Talk. Giovanni worked with the Settlement House (a kind of community center) through the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work but “never did make it through grad school,” she notes in “My Road to Virginia.” She explains that “Dr. Louise Shoemaker thought I was more suited to writing and suggested that I should give myself a chance in that ﬁeld. . . . And why did I have a difﬁcult time in the M.S.W. program? I’m not institutionprone. Most times, in any dispute between an institution and a person, I take the side of a person” (139–140). In April 1968, Giovanni attended the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr., about which she wrote:

Nikki Giovanni

His headstone said FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST But death is a slave’s freedom We seek the freedom of free men And the construction of a world Where Martin Luther King could have lived and preached non-violence. (Black Feeling, Black Talk)

She then moved to New York City and published her second volume of poetry, Black Judgement (1968), which Broadside Press offered to distribute. While she was teaching at Queens College, her book talks and readings attracted the attention of national and international press. In August 1969, she returned to Cincinnati to give birth to her only child, Thomas Watson Giovanni. Giovanni was a regular guest/host on the television program Soul!, an entertainment show that promoted black art and culture and featured such names as Muhammad Ali, Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier. By the end of 1970, she had become an established voice in the black literary scene and was named Woman of the Year by Ebony. In the following year, she published a book of children’s poems and her memoir Gemini, which is part biography and part commentary on the world around her. Gemini prompted a reviewer in Time to write: “She is also one of the most visible, not only because she is beautiful but because she is a shrewd and energetic propagandist. In this interim autobiography, both poet and propagandist underscore that point about black love and happiness. Part memoir and part manifesto, it is a plainspoken, lively, provocative, confusing book.” But it was the 1971 release of the album The Truth Is on Its Way, which sold 100,000 copies in six months, that truly “launched her career as a national speaker and reader of her own poetry” (Fletcher). It was her ﬁ rst recording that set apart Giovanni as a poet to be heard rather than read. Between 1972 and 1973, Giovanni received many accolades for her writing and her strength as a woman, published more books (including Ego-

153

Tripping and Other Poems for Young People and A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni), and celebrated her sister’s graduation from Xavier University by traveling to Paris and going on an African lecture tour. Over the next decade, Giovanni continued to publish, travel, and speak internationally, and receive honorary doctorates from various universities. Her writing output slowed, however, when she moved back to Cincinnati to be with her ill father, who was diagnosed with cancer and died in June 1982. Giovanni has served as visiting professor at Ohio State University, Mount Saint Joseph’s College, and at Virginia Tech, where she obtained a permanent position in 1989. In 1988, she published Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles, a collection of what one reviewer called “autobiographical essays” on a wide range of issues. Giovanni later reﬂected to City Beat, “I am iconoclastic. I wrote a book called Sacred Cows and Other Edibles and the point was that we take ourselves way too seriously. You have to laugh. I’m black. I laugh at everything. You have to laugh; otherwise, you’ll be against yourself” (Wilson). In 1994, Racism 101, a collection of previously published essays, was published. In it, Giovanni takes on a variety of topics ranging from higher education to the making of the ﬁ lm Malcolm X to the science ﬁction television series Star Trek. Giovanni notes: “I tried to vary by subject so you wouldn’t be reading the same idea either in embrace or under attack, you know? I just wanted to write an interesting book and look at the world I inhabit. I’m a poet; I believe the image will reveal itself” (14). In 1995, Giovanni was diagnosed with lung cancer. She notes: I smoked my last cigarette on Tuesday, February 7, at 9:00 a.m. in the parking lot at Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. I don’t have any trouble remembering this because I was to go into surgery at 10:00 a.m. and I, quite frankly, was unsure of the results. If I survived the surgery, it would be my last cigarette because I

154

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

would have successfully had a cancerous tumor removed from my left lung. If I did not survive the surgery, well, I still wouldn’t have another cigarette. (“A Deer in Headlights”)

Giovanni wrote the introduction to the book Breaking the Silence: Inspirational Stories of Black Cancer Survivors, by Dr. Karin Stanford. Upon her recovery, Giovanni has continued to publish poetry, essays, and children’s books while speaking and teaching. In 2004, her sister and mother died. Nikki Giovanni’s writings are rooted in the context of the Civil Rights movement and the struggle of the black American. Her voice during the height of debate in the 1960s and 1970s put Giovanni’s poetry at the forefront of the Black Arts Movement (BAM). Founded by the writer and activist Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones), the movement has been called the “single most controversial moment in the history of African American literature—possibly in American literature as a whole” (Time). The Black Arts Movement, in its production of myriad forms of art, challenged the canon of literature, which up to this time had been predominately represented by “dead white men,” and presented “politically engaged work that explored the African American cultural and historical experience” (poets.org). Many felt that Giovanni’s Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement captured “the militant attitude of the civil rights and Black Arts movements of that time” (Hiltz). That attitude included her “call of urgency for Black people to realize their identities and understand their surroundings as part of a white-controlled culture.” The Black Arts Movement is sometimes referred to as the sister arm of the Black Power movement, with groups such as the Black Panthers and controversial ﬁgures like Malcolm X calling to the nation’s consciousness militant voices that stood in contrast to some of the more peaceable approaches of the Civil Rights movement. In short, the Black Arts Movement did not march quietly through the streets singing “We Shall Overcome” so much as it “shouted emotional/political/cultural charged words as ‘Bitter Black Bitterness/Black Black Bitter Bitterness/

Bitterness Black Brothers/Bitter Black Get/Blacker Get Bitter/Get Black Bitterness/NOW’” and ever notice how it’s only the ugly honkies who hate like Hitler was an ugly dude same with lyndon ike nixon hhh wallace maddox and all the governors of mississippi and you don’t ever see a good-looking cop perhaps this only relates to the physical nature of the beast at best interesting for a beast and never beautiful by that black standard (“Ugly Honkies, or The Election Game and How to Win It”)

Most of what has been written about Nikki Giovanni will include some synonym for controversial or militant or activist, and for many readers that is the draw of her writings. For those seeking poetry that strictly adheres to established rules and forms and a consistency of voice, Giovanni’s writing will disappoint. For instance, one reviewer remarked that her “Kidnap Poem” contained “all the typical crap . . . the lack of punctuation for no real reason, the clichés weakly masked by NG’s trying to fob this off as being from the POV of a child, the poor music, reasonless capitalization (& its lack), meaningless enjambment, etc.” (Schneider). For the reader of Giovanni, the term voice seems to be a priority. As Fowler notes, “The development of a unique and distinctive voice has been perhaps the single most important achievement of Giovanni’s career” (xxi). In fact, many people turn to Giovanni’s poetry and essays after hearing a public reading. For Giovanni, Fowler continues, that is carrying on a central cultural theme of being black: “In her poetry Giovanni attempts to continue African and African American oral traditions, and she seems in many ways to have less reverence for the written word than for the spoken” (xxi). On this theme of voice, it is also important to consider the content of Giovanni’s writings, which

Nikki Giovanni

began with that militant, in-your-face voice within the Black Arts Movement. The thread that weaves its way through her work is “the centrality of race and gender,” as notes Fowler. That focus remains consistent even in later poems, although, as Ryan Wahlberg and Bianca Ward note, “She shows a new emphasis on a universal struggle for truth, exchanging her earlier ‘indignation,’ for the individual quest for beauty” (Wahlberg and Ward). Giovanni continues to be “truth-telling,” as she tells many of her audiences, and perhaps that may be why her writing is compelling: She and her poetry are accessible and yet difﬁcult to categorize (or “institutionalize,” as mentioned earlier). Kheven Lee LaGrone may have been accurate in the observation “Giovanni’s activism is not an easy, simplistic, ‘get-whitey’ militancy. It’s more reﬂective than that—her questions have changed with the world. She hasn’t mellowed; she’s matured” (LaGrone RV-9). It is indisputable that Giovanni’s words have moved some critics to vilify her forms of writing and the content of her emotionally charged ideas. And yet, 30 years after her initial thrust into the social consciousness, Giovanni’s poetry, children’s books, and nonﬁction remain a strong voice in the human struggle for honest admission of past mistakes.

“Nikki-Rosa” (1968) “Nikki-Rosa” was the nickname given the poet by her sister, Gary Ann (Fowler 381). Some consider this piece Giovanni’s signature poem. In this “childhood remembrances” poem, the speaker refers to speciﬁc events from her life that could be seen as constituting a “hard childhood”— but she wants all to know that really “[she] was quite happy.” The poem gives the reader a glimpse of how the speaker views her own childhood and what in life really mattered to her. The speaker reveals what it is like to remember growing up “Black”; in lines 2 through 26, she recalls memories that reﬂect the tone of Langston Hughes’s poem “Dream Deferred” or Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun. Fowler outlines the time

155

that Giovanni’s family was “in Woodlawn” (line 3): “The family leaves Glenview and moves brieﬂy to Woodlawn, a suburb of Cincinnati. Father teaches at South Woodlawn School and works evenings and weekends at the YMCA. Because Woodlawn has no elementary school for black children, sister Gary lives with father’s half brother and his wife, Bill and Gladys Atkinson, in Columbus, Ohio, where she attends second grade” (xxxi). This explains the lines “they never talk about how happy you were to have / your mother / all to yourself” (lines 6–8). The speaker fears that people—“biographers,” which could mean literally the people who will write about the poet or, more universally, the reader of the poem who lacks similar experience— will not grasp the importance of the “Hollydale” event to her family. Hollydale was a subdivision located outside Cincinnati and intended for blacks. As had others, Giovanni’s father had invested in the project; he purchased the land but was unable to obtain ﬁ nancing to build the house. Fowler suggests, “Because they were Black, they could not ﬁ nd banks to lend them the money” (382). The family sold their share of the investment and instead purchased a house in Lincoln Heights. The speaker makes reference to her parents’ relationship with a concessive tone: “And though they fought a lot / it isn’t your father’s drinking that makes any difference / but only that everybody is together” (lines 22–24). Later, in 1958, Giovanni would have to move to her grandparents’ home in Knoxville. But despite the poverty of her growing-up years, she does she want to be pitied, for she notes in the poem, “they never understand / Black love is Black wealth” (lines 29–30). The importance of the black family, Giovanni illustrates, is not based on external, material items (a nice house with indoor plumbing) and all of the niceties of living (quiet, tranquil family interactions). Rather, according to the speaker, the strength of the black family is the togetherness of the entire family— something the white person does not understand. Happiness, she notes, is achieved through from family; family is happiness. As Kevin Lashley observes, “Giovanni’s constant guard against the harmful effects of

156

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

dominant white society on American Blacks contributes to her popularity among a Black readership similarly on guard. And to many readers, her work offers a sense of hope where there otherwise is none.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. What similarities do Langston Hughes’s “Dream Deferred” and “Nikki-Rosa” share as they relate to dreams and families? How do their perspectives differ? Do both poems describe the same reality? Cite examples from each poem as you explain your answer. 2. Giovanni’s narrator says “no white person” can ever understand “Black love.” What does she mean by this comment? Is she herself stereotyping the “white person”? 3. The poem’s speaker is concerned that “biographers never understand” her father’s pain regarding the Hollydale situation. As you consider past events that you feel have shaped you, what do you think biographers will get wrong in your life? Why? What do you hope they will interpret correctly?

“Ego-Tripping” (1970) Originally published in the volume Re: Creation (1970), this poem reappeared as the title poem in the 1973 children’s collection Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People. It serves as a reminder that there are bigger and “badder” things out there than humanity. Of all the people who have a right to boast, it is the “I” of the poem— and the poem supplies a list of reasons why this is so. The ﬁ rst stanza may draw a connection between the Black Arts Movement and its predecessor, the Harlem Renaissance, as both movements’ writers drew upon Africa as their heritage (“congo,” “fertile crescent,” “sphinx,” “pyramid”). For instance, notice the echoes of these lines from Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1926):

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the ﬂow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. (lines 1–6)

Giovanni echoes the pride of the “I” in the poem. After the indication that this “I” can compete with nature and the stars, the reader arrives at the colloquial line “I am bad.” The poem connects not only the place-names of Africa, but some of the human names. “My oldest daughter is nefertiti” (line 12) is a reference to “one of the most celebrated of the ancient Egyptians,” Fowler notes, “despite the fact that relatively little is known of her” (402). The name Nefertiti means “the beauty has come” or “the beautiful woman has come.” Most sources indicate she was the wife of Amenhotep IV (sometimes known as King Akhenaten), and, depending on the source, most believe that she helped him raise six daughters. When one of the daughters died, Fowler explains, the “parents’ mourning was depicted in wall paintings.” The speaker of the poem also refers to Hannibal, known for his military prowess and his conquests of the Punic Wars. Legend has it that he rode elephants to cross the Alps. She mentions that her “son noah built new / ark,” perhaps a speciﬁc allusion to a contemporary person and Newark, New Jersey, or less symbolically, another vehicle for saving people. Last, the speaker says she puts the person of Jesus (God’s son) into the things that “I” have done—speciﬁcally that she is “the one who would save.” This “I” is also involved in creation: She has made diamonds, uranium, jewels, oil, and gold. All of these things are traced back to the origin, or the birthplace: the Congo. And throughout the poem, Giovanni includes colloquial elements to connect past to present, sometimes using lofty language, “giving divine perfect light” (line 6), and following

Nikki Giovanni

it with “I am bad” (line 7). When she boasts, “I am so hip even my errors are correct” and then “I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal,” she uses the common modiﬁer so to qualify perfect, divine, ethereal, and surreal. Interestingly, Giovanni tells a story about ﬂying with her son to Zaire and explaining that Zaire was called Congo: “ ‘The Congo!’ he said excitedly. ‘Mommy you were born here! We must be in Africa.’ He was beaming. And so was I. I was never so happy that I had written a poem than I was at that very moment. ‘Yes, Thomas. We’re in Africa. I was born in the Congo’ ” (Collected 368).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Giovanni, as in her other poems, makes bold claims through the speaker in “Ego-Tripping.” Some may interpret those claims as pride in one’s heritage, whereas others may see them as a step backward because of the emphasis on one culture rather than a celebration of all cultures. Compare the assertions of black identity in “Ego-Tripping” with claims made in other Giovanni poems. 2. Is using African imagery a positive way of celebrating black heritage? What is the nature of the relationship between African-American and African culture? Why did writers of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement draw heavily from African heritage? Has there been a shift in later generations of black artists? 3. What is the impact of Giovanni’s use of colloquial language? Why does she use such phrases and words, and does she accomplish her overall purpose through their use? 4. What poetic effect does Giovanni create in her selection of speciﬁc historical events and people?

“When I Die” (1972) Published in the 1972 volume My House, this poem gives directions about how people should respond when the speaker dies. But in this last will and

157

testament, the speaker takes one last honest swing at those who have perpetuated injustice on her and on black women. She is direct and sometimes punishing with her words toward those who “hurt me,” the government for its failure to protect the rights of black women, the “black man” who criticized the poet, and “everyone who loved me.” She is speciﬁcally concerned that her son be told the correct story of the poet’s life—one that is about living “the true revolution.” Whether signiﬁcant or not, Giovanni, in both this poem and most of her earlier works, uses the uncapitalized ﬁ rst-person pronoun. Perhaps this indicates or represents how the poet views herself in retrospect, or perhaps it is a way to de-emphasize the individual and encourage the viewing of this poem’s narrator as one who is speaking truth. Perhaps the lowercase i is trying to underscore a theme within Giovanni’s work: to focus on the truth and not so much on the speaker of that truth. Whatever the reason, Giovanni will all but drop the i for I in her poetry beginning with the volume Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983). The ﬁ rst stanza of “When I Die” is reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno, in which the poet metes out just and appropriate punishment for the crime committed. The “crime” here is that if those “who ever hurt me” cry, it is not because of regret for their actions but because they are crying false tears. These people (or ideas) are “the evil that passed itself off as a person.” The speaker’s wish that these people cry until their eyes fall out evokes a common idiom in American culture. Note, too, that in some cultures it is said that the eyes are the windows to the soul. “A million maggots” may be a reference to the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s “Au Lecteur” (“To the Reader”) in his volume Flowers of Evil (1857): “like hives of maggots, thickly seething / Within our brains a host of demons surges” (lines 21–22). Giovanni’s speaker claims that she (or truth) has “probably tried to love” this type of “person.” The poet’s political criticisms arise in the second stanza, in which she singles out the National Security Council (whose purpose is to advise and assist the president on national security and foreign policy),

158

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Interpol (which facilitates international police cooperation even where diplomatic relations do not exist between particular countries), and the FBICIA Foundation, which is Giovanni’s way of saying both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) really function as one unit. All of these governmental organizations, Giovanni notes, protected themselves more than they considered protecting their citizens (and, more speciﬁcally, the black woman). In the third stanza, the speaker instructs her listeners to take those things that represented her work (poetry, books, pictures, posters) and “let them burn—throw acid on them—shit on them” because that is what in truth has been happening all along. Perhaps here Giovanni wants the reader to focus not so much on the poet, as again, on the message of truth. Her work and life, the speaker continues in stanza 4, will only “[scare] white folk” and make “black ones truly mad.” If anything, this stanza articulates the racial tension of the 1960s and the 1970s. For Giovanni, along with others in the Black Arts Movement, the vehicle for this “do what you do” sentiment is art. The speaker has a special, speciﬁc message for her son, however—to tell him the story of how she lived and the story of wanting “rebirth.” Here the agent holding the speaker back is not so much white repression or past events that cannot be changed, but her own people, who lack vision and fail to break free of history. In coupletlike fashion, the poet ends with the truth: “Revolution,” or radical change, results from “touching.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. List the various things the poem’s speaker wants done when she dies. Do these seem consistent with the conclusion she draws in the end—“and if ever i touched a life . . .”—or is this merely wishful thinking? 2. How can we reconcile the revolution of the Black Arts Movement with what Giovanni concludes constitutes “revolution”?

3. Why does the speaker single out Giovanni’s poem “Nikki-Rosa” as being one that she does not want read when she dies? 4. How is this poem structured like a Shakespearean sonnet? How does the structure affect its impact on the reader?

“Stardate Number 18628.190” (1995) This poem was originally published as “Light the Candles” in Essence, a magazine that describes itself as “the deﬁ nitive voice of dynamic African American women.” The original title seems to reﬂect the overall tone of the piece, while the revised poem refers to the Star Trek series, to which Giovanni makes periodic references in her talks. For Giovanni, to explore space is a “no-brainer”; she is a fan of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Space Shuttle program. As she told students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she spoke at NASA in February 2003 as the “token black person” during Black History Month. The format of the poem is a style that Giovanni begins to experiment with in the volume Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983), characterized by the use of block paragraphing and ellipses. The speaker reminds the reader, “This is not a poem” at the beginning of stanzas 1, 3, and 5. For Giovanni, as mentioned previously, poems are the vehicle for art, and preexisting institutions—such as a set way of writing poetry—are meant to be destroyed. Or, in Giovanni’s case, deliberately stated: “This is not a poem.” Stanza 1 begins with a small yet familiar metaphor that the speaker recalls: something as simple as a hot drink in the beginning of spring. Giovanni then uses another familiar metaphor, that of a quilt, which evokes memories of family history and perhaps reinforces the idea “Black love is Black wealth.” Here she may be referring to what white people do with quilts, treating them as something more to be admired than to be practically useful. For the poem’s speaker, however, the quilt is made from family history and is thus comforting and “here to keep me warm.”

Nikki Giovanni

The speaker begins stanza 3 with “This is not a sonnet,” referring to the 14-line form that was popularized in the 1200s and revived in the late 1500s by writers such as Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. The sonnet, to the writers and readers of that era, was a vehicle of rhyme and meter. Not so for Giovanni, who turns to the rhyme and meter of her experiences: hymns, spirituals, and a progression of popular vocalists and performance artists known to the poet. Among them are the opera singers Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price and the blues singers Betsy Smith, Dinah Washington, and Etta James. To the poem’s speaker, the voices that truly reﬂect “Planet Earth” are the voices of black women such as these. And in stanza 3, the common objects and events that make up the experiences of the speaker are what truly matter. So what is this poem that is neither a poem nor speciﬁcally a sonnet? “It is a celebration of the road we have traveled,” states Giovanni. “This is the Black woman,” she continues, and the full range of all she has experienced. It is a celebration of others who have suffered harm or death because of what they represented include blacks who fought in wars and were assassinated.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What is poetic about the science ﬁction series Star Trek? What is it about the television series that energizes Giovanni’s poem? How is the tone of the poem affected when the title is changed from “Light the Candles” to “Stardate”? Discuss your answer fully. 2. Is the stardate a literal date (in Star Trek terms), or do you think Giovanni just made it up? You might consider a letter that Horace Greeley addressed to Abraham Lincoln entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” Why does Giovanni make this reference and what similarities do the letter and this poem share? 3. Why does Giovanni write “This is not a poem,” even though the work follows the general tone and form of her poems? Is the statement true in any way?

159

4. Read a few issues of the magazine Essence, for which this poem was ﬁ rst written. How does the editorial content of that magazine reﬂect the overall tone of this poem? Discuss.

“Train Rides” (1999) Published in the volume Blues: For All the Changes, “Train Rides” continues Giovanni’s “truth-telling” expression, connecting trivial things in the nearpresent (what one wears and when) to the neartrivial train rides of her past. But, as seen in most of her poetry and writings, she will use the vehicle of words to note truth as she sees it and expose that truth’s implications as they relate to the poet. This particular volume of work was accepted fairly well, but some critics thought Giovanni was being lazy and relying too much on the poet’s personal life as subject matter for her rants. A main thread in “Train Rides” is the notion of a black male and the desire to be that “beautiful boy.” Society is at fault for building institutions to make sure these boys/men do not fulﬁ ll their destinies or dreams; according to Giovanni, that institution is the prison—a place, she notes, for which there is “no excuse.” The speaker makes a small confession that at one time she thought prisons might be a good idea but now admits that is no longer true. What is true is that money could be spent on other things, such as better roads, but for the speaker, railway systems are the ideal mode of travel. And to complicate matters further, the speaker is going to rail against those black men who are not “beautiful” but are “foolish things” such as a “lawn jockey.” The occasion of the poem is an October day, which may or may not be technically the “ﬁ rst day of fall,” but it feels like it. It is a time of transition in nature (working with the soil), but also in fashion. The speaker depicts the petty people (including the media) who emphasize the trivial things in life as the “fashion police” because their role is to shame the individual. Much of Giovanni’s poetry echos this idea of living in fear of being shamed.

160 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

As she told a college audience in 2002: “I think it’s so sad, that we have a whole generation that’s afraid. Afraid to speak up, afraid to say anything that may offend somebody, and yet your rights are being taken away slowly” (Brown). She continues this theme with the scene of coming face to face with a mother mouse; the speaker is afraid because “humans don’t do very well with other life forms.” The mother mouse will not abandon her babies, and thus the speaker recognizes a universal truth in the role of the mother mouse. The occasion of the poem reminds the speaker of the trips she and her sister would take from Cincinnati, to Knoxville, traveling to her maternal grandparents’ home. Giovanni points out that it is a congregation of black men who protect the two girls during their travels. Now, she laments, the black man is no longer in the position of protecting, as he should be, and is instead in prison. Although she admits that segregation is not right, she points out that the “Band of Brothers” watched over them. The speaker then states that she has a “lawn jockey,” which for many African Americans and other is an offensive reminder of the days when blacks were servants to whites. But she has one of them anyway, explaining, “I collect foolish things, but they make me happy.” The prime example of the embodiment of a lawn jockey is those who stand in the way of progress for blacks, who are “despicable” and “lack good sense” and “common compassion.” The speaker singles out Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who makes “Thurgood Marshall turn over in his grave” by taking advantage of some of the beneﬁts of desegregation while arguing that it does not work. For Giovanni, growing up in segregated America is a thing to be celebrated because of the sense of “keeping it real” and preserving that sense of community.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How does the speaker’s admission that she has a lawn jockey in her yard affect the tone of the poem? Many African Americans ﬁ nd lawn jockeys offensive. Why would the speaker’s collection of such “foolish things” make her happy?

2. What impact does the title have on the rest of the poem? How would you interpret this poem if you did not know its title? Compare the fondness for railways in this poem with the attitudes in stories such as Donald Crews’s children’s books Freight Train, Bigmama’s, and Shortcut. 3. Read “Train Rides” and “Possum Crossing.” Explore the notions of interruptions by nature in both works. 4. Giovanni often returns to the idea of the “beautiful boy,” especially in the context of rap and hip hop as well as in her criticism of the prison system. In the late 1990s, when the well-known rapper Tupac Shakur was killed, an Ebony writer noted that Giovanni responded by calling rap a “ ‘petition,’ a plea from young people to look at their lives.” Giovanni added, “That’s one reason that beautiful boy [Tupac] is dead, because he tried to ‘keep it real’ ” (Kinnon). Explore Giovanni’s concept of the “beautiful boy” in both her writing and her public speaking.

“Possum Crossing” (2002) This poem appeared in Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems, published in 2002. For some readers, it sounds like an environmental statement, a variation on a “be kind to animals” sermon. However, such an interpretation would signal a complete shift from the poet’s larger work. In Giovanni’s later writing, we see her draw upon the entire world around her. In this poem, as in her other work, she continues to explore the relationship between the individual and the surrounding world. “Possum Crossing” is no different: She reminds the reader that as we climb into our man-made vehicles and rush to our destination, there is a whole world out there and we should remember it. In stanza 1, Giovanni describes in an almost uncharacteristic way a scene: the beginning of a car trip. What is different about this stanza is that it can be considered a normal, formatted structure describing an everyday scene. The stanza has four

Nikki Giovanni

lines and no rhyme scheme, but a syllable form of 6-8-8-8. The car is the thing that interrupts the scene; its “lights cast an eerie glow.” The alliteration of “slick street” provides the anticipation for the next line’s “Hitting brakes.” The speaker does not seem to have learned from past encounters with animals in the road. The problem, she notes through her words and punctuation, is that the animals themselves seem to be bothered by the rushing of humans in their cars: “Mother-to-be possum occasionally lopes home . . . being / naturally . . . slow her condition makes her even more ginger.” The speaker’s message, then, is in stanza 3: “We need a sign POSSUM CROSSING.” By shifting from the ﬁ rst-person singular (the I of the story) to the plural (the We of this stanza, including the “coffee-gurgling neighbors”), the speaker is not so much telling the world to look out for nature, but to look out for herself—for she, too, is one of those neighbors whose “coffee splashes over the cup.” The sign is to warn, to remind herself (and others) of the context of nature and the world and history: for, she notes, in stanza 4, the place in history that the birds have because of their heritage as the “living kin of dinosaurs.” The irony is that in the next moment, that bird could become what it is eating from the road. Giovanni may also be making a reference to humans here, and perhaps this is where the lesson lies: Like the dinosaurs, we are not “invincible.” Back in real time, the speaker, who has not been paying attention to her driving, catches the reﬂection of light off some kind of animal. The ﬁ rst four lines of stanza 5 reﬂect the stream of thoughts racing through her mind; she then catches her breath, as indicated by the line length and ellipsis. The thing in the road, surprisingly, is “a big wet leaf” that is described in living terms (“struggling . . . to lift itself”). And the poem makes the connection: All living things are in the yearning, the evolution to be better.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In this particular poem, Giovanni focuses on the theme of nature and how humanity interacts

161

with it. Often a poet will draw conclusions or lessons from these types of interactions. What is Giovanni’s intention in describing various aspects of nature juxtaposed with an everyday experience such as driving? To aid in your discussion or writing, begin by listing the contrasting elements of nature and human existence. 2. The traditional haiku generally presents a scene—perhaps from nature—and then surprises the reader with a touch of irony in the ﬁ nal line. With this in mind, how does “Possum Crossing” function like a traditional haiku? 3. Select other poets or writers who use nature as their main subject matter—for instance, Robert Frost, BARBAR A K INGSOLVER , or Henry David Thoreau. Compare and contrast the messages expressed by those writers with Giovanni’s theme in this poem.

“Have Dinner with Me” (2002) Like many Americans, Giovanni was deeply affected and disturbed by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Her volume Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea contained ﬁve poems about the events. These included “Desperate Acts,” in which she admits that it is hard to understand “Why angry men commit / desperate acts”; “9:11:01,” in which she denounces George W. Bush and says he “blew it” by not asking citizens, especially African Americans, for the United States to be forgiven; “The Self-Evident Poem,” in which she reﬂects on the plight and history of blacks and feels “sorry for the white folks who still do not understand this is another century and we just can’t keep bombing the same people over and over”; and “My America,” in which Giovanni responds to Hugh Downs (a news anchor during the time of the attacks) by saying her country is “Not a bad country . . . neither the best or the worst . . . just a place we call home.” In “Have Dinner with Me,” the speaker pleads for a renewed sense of community. The ﬁ rst stanza

162 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

describes falling people as well as “Windows on the World,” the restaurant on the top ﬂoors of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Seventy-three staff members and 77 guests were reportedly in the restaurant during the attack. Speciﬁcally, Giovanni singles out “the brother and the sister” some identiﬁed as Norberto Hernandez and Claribel Hernandez in one of the most controversial photos in the media coverage of the attack that became known as “The Falling Man” and showed a man jumping from the building. (It was discovered later that the man was not Norberto and that his remains were in fact found in a stairwell.) This does not, however, detract from the poem, for the reference reminds the reader that individuals were going about their work to serve others and to help their families. Giovanni’s message to the reader is an oft-referenced stanza, a message that is consistent with her major concerns: “This is a time of neighbors / This is a time of neighborhoods.” In a kind of summary, she brings the poem’s pacing to a close by reviewing the “helpless characters” of the last stanzas with the verbs “Feed . . . Pet . . . Call . . . Eat . . .”: all neighborly things to do.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What impact does the later identity of the Falling Man have on the poem? Consider TIM O’BRIEN’s take on “truth” in his story The Things They Carried: “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” Discuss the impact of O’Brien’s statement as it applies to this poem and to other written works that may include historical inaccuracies. 2. As with other tragic events in a country’s history, the attacks of September 11, 2001, caused many people to attempt to articulate the emotion of the moment and to understand the meaning behind the events. Gather several other artistic and journalistic reactions to the events of September 11, 2001, and compare and contrast the meaning of those texts with Giovanni’s poem.

“Quilts” (2003) The real story behind this poem is its occasion: In 2003, the Contemporary QuiltArt Association called together 40 poets and 40 quilters “to do something special,” according to Gayle Bryan, former president of the association. The association matched up the quilters with poets; each pair would collaborate for a year “investigating the intersections between textile art and poetry, ultimately creating artforms that fused the two genres.” The quilter Sally Sellers approached Giovanni with the project after her daughter heard Giovanni at school. Seller notes that she struggled with ideas for her quilt she called “I’m Not Sorry,” until she received Giovanni’s poem “Quilts.” Following the poem’s ﬁ rst lines, Sellers composed her materials from mostly used and stained linens. “Nikki’s words reminded me that imperfect tablecloths were far more interesting than the pristine folds of fabric stashed away in the linen closet,” Sellers said. For Sellers, to highlight the stains in her quilt with gold beads was to play off Giovanni’s idea that “the stain was what was to be celebrated.” The poem is an interesting extension to her earlier work “When I Die,” written when Giovanni was 25 years old. Now, 35 years later, we see the poet considering mutability and age and how she will be remembered. “Quilts,” as “When I Die,” does not offer an apology or regret for the past. Although the poem’s speaker states, “I am a failure,” it is not in the usual sense. The failure arises from becoming older—and this is what marks the most noticeable difference between the two poems. Giovanni continues the metaphor of the quilt as a life throughout the poem, utilizing words such as fading, frayed, and failing. And though the poem longs for those younger days, the speaker is nonetheless content with those memories. The speaker’s “plea” appears toward the end of the poem, when she hopes her words or actions will provide comfort to the young and companionship for the old. Giovanni alludes to this quilt imagery in other poems as well, notably “Stardate Number 18628.190” in the lines “This is not a poem / This is a summer quilt.” Fowler notes that this is

Nikki Giovanni

“a metaphor of family history and family love; the pieces of the quilt are scraps of cloth, each of which reminds the speaker of an event and a person in her family’s history . . . the quilt’s value is based on its warming, life-sustaining, and life-nurturing powers” (xxiii–xxiv).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Find a photo of the quilt Sally Sellers made in collaboration with Giovanni (at the time of this writing, accessible at www.poets.org/viewmedia. php/prmMID/5946). How effective is the quilt by itself? How would you describe the quilt’s overall impact along with its detail? How is the meaning of Sellers’s piece enhanced by Giovanni’s poem? How is the Giovanni poem enhanced by Sellers’s quilt? 2. In his poem “Ars Poetica” Archibald MacLeish attempts to describe the art of the poem. He ends with the lines “A poem should not mean / But be.” MacLeish’s contemporary Carl Sandburg attempted the same challenge of deﬁ ning poetry in the preface of “Good Morning, America.” Some poets, such as Robert Blake, have deﬁed traditional deﬁ nitions of poetry by combining it with other genres. Challenge the assertion that a poem should be able to stand by itself. What are the beneﬁts and drawbacks of multigenre art?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON GIOVANNI AND HER WORK 1. Who is Giovanni’s intended audience? From her poetry and essays, defend your answer. Then consider how she treats that audience and identify the tone she uses to address it. 2. Respond to Giovanni’s thoughts on the intersection of art and truth: “I like to think that if truth has any bearing on art, my poetry and prose is art because it’s truthful. I say that while recognizing that every time a truth is learned a new thesis, synthesis, antithesis is set in motion” (Sacred Cows).

163

3. Respond to Giovanni’s justiﬁcation of the black perspective and why she thinks that viewpoint may be superior: “I’m totally convinced that any Black women who consciously circled the earth, let alone landed on another planet, would have a very different view of the heavens as well as the meagerness of earth. I think Black people, and Black Americans especially, are the only people to really view earth from its proper perspective since we have no land that we can in any historical way call our own” (Sacred Cows 61). 4. Giovanni thinks poets bear the responsibility of recording history: “I like to tell the truth as I see it. I hope others do the same. That’s why literature is so important. We cannot possibly leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people” (Sacred Cows 61). What is your response to Giovanni’s claim? 5. Some have termed Nikki Giovanni the “poet of the people,” while others say she is a social poet. Where do you place Giovanni in her overall contribution to the poetical canon? WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Brown, Coryn. “Nikki Giovanni Spits Wisdom at Temple.” Temple News 21 November 2002. Available online. URL: http://temple-news. com/2002/11/21/nikki-giovanni-spits-wisdomat-temple. Accessed February 25, 2007. Fletcher, Gilbert. “Painted Voices—Nikki Giovanni.” The Black Collegian and IMDiversity, 2006. Available online. URL: www.black-collegian.com/ african/painted-voices/nikki.shtml. Accessed February 19, 2007. Fowler, Virginia C. Conversations with Nikki Giovanni. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. ———. Nikki Giovanni. New York: Twayne, 1999. Giovanni, Nikki. Acolytes: Poems. New York: William Morrow, 2007. ———. Black Feeling, Black Talk. 1968. ———. Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement. New York: William Morrow, 1970. ———. Black Judgement. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1968.

164

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

———. Blues: For All the Changes: New Poems. New York: William Morrow, 1999. ———. The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968– 1998. Introduction by Virginia Fowler. New York: William Morrow, 2003. ———. Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. New York: William Morrow, 1978. ———. Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1973. ———. An Evening with Nikki Giovanni. Interviewed by Pearl Cleage. DVD. Atlanta: History Makers, 17 June 2005; broadcast on PBS February 2006. ———. Introduction. In Breaking the Silence: Inspirational Stories of Black Cancer Survivors, by Karin Stanford. Chicago: Hilton, 2005:. ———. Love Poems. New York: William Morrow, 1997. ———. “Meet the Poet: Nikki Giovanni.” Harvard Graduate School of Education, Askwith Lecture Hall, Longfellow Hall, Boston, 4 February 2003. Available online. URL: http://forum.wgbh.org/ wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=1213. Accessed February 20, 2007. ———. My House. New York: William Morrow, 1972. ———. Nikki Giovanni ofﬁcial Web site. Available online. URL: www.nikki-giovanni.com. Accessed February 19, 2007. ———. The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni. New York: Perennial, 2003. ———. Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems. New York: William Morrow, 2002. ———. Racism 101. New York: William Morrow, 1994. ———. Re: Creation. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1970. ———. Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles. New York: William Morrow, 1988. ———. Spirit to Spirit. Directed by Mirra Banks. VHS. PBS, 1987. ———. Those Who Ride the Night Winds. New York: William Morrow, 1983. ———. The Truth Is on Its Way. Album. 1971. ———. “Truth Is on Its Way Concert Webcast” [podcast]. James Madison University, 27 February 2006.

Available online. URL: http://media.jmu.edu/ special/8_822.asx. Accessed February 23, 2007. ———. The Women and the Men. New York: William Morrow, 1975. Harris, Sally. “Nikki Giovanni: ‘It’s Better to Take a Chance and Be Wrong Than to Be Safe and Dull.’ ” Virginia Tech Magazine 12, no. 2 (Fall 1990): 10–12. Available online. URL: http://scholar.lib. vt.edu/ejournals/VTMAG/v13n1/page10-12. html. Accessed February 19, 2007. Hiltz, Virginia, and Mike Sells. “Nikki Giovanni.” Black Arts Movement Web site, University of Michigan, 1998. Available online. URL: www. umich.edu/~eng499/people/giovanni.html. Accessed February 19, 2007. “Hustler and Fabulist.” Time, 12 January 1972. Available online. URL: www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,877663-1,00.html. Accessed February 25, 2007. Jago, Carol. Nikki Giovanni in the Classroom: “The Same Ol’ Danger but a Brand New Pleasure.” NCTE High School Literature Series. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1999. Kinnon, Joy Bennett. “Does Rap Have a Future? Will Gangsta Rap Sink Hip-Hop?” Ebony, June 1997. Available online. URL: http://ﬁndarticles.com/p/ articles/mi_m1077/is_n8_v52/ai_19448530. Accessed February 28, 2007. LaGrone, Kheven Lee. “Nikki Giovanni’s Questions Change with the World.” San Francisco Chronicle, 1 August 1999, p. RV-9. Available online. URL: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?ﬁle=/ chronicle/archive/1999/08/01/RV84534.DTL. Accessed February 24, 2007. Lashley, Kevin. “Nikki Giovanni.” Africana Research Center, 2006. Available online. URL: http://php.scripts.psu.edu/dept/arc//index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=68&Ite mid=78. Accessed February 24, 2007. Nikki Giovanni Website. Available online. URL: http://nikki-giovanni.com. Accessed June 25, 2009. Pulfer, Laura. “Poet Nikki Giovanni’s Art Not for Sissies.” Cincinnati Enquirer, 3 June 1999. Available online. URL: www.enquirer.com/columns/

Nikki Giovanni

pulfer/1999/06/03/lp_poet_nikki_giovannis. html. Accessed February 19, 2007. Schneider, Dan. “This Old Poem #24: Nikki Giovanni’s Ego Tripping.” Cosmetica.com, 21 September 2002. Available online. URL: www.cosmoetica.com/ TOP24-DES22.htm. Accessed February 28, 2007. “Visual Verse: Poetry Meets Fabric.” Poets.org, 2004. Academy of American Poets. Available online. URL: www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5946. Accessed February 25, 2007. Wahlberg, Ryan, and Bianca Ward. “Nikki Giovanni.” Voices from the Gaps: Women Artists and Writers of Color. University of Minnesota, 23 May 2001. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla. umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/giovanni_nikki.html. Accessed February 19, 2007.

165

Wilson, Kathy. “Nikki Giovanni on Computers, Contributions and Cops.” City Beat 08.1521 February 2002. Available online. URL: www.citybeat. com/2002-02-21/books.shtml. Accessed February 19, 2007. Wood, Brenda. “Spotlight: Nikki Giovanni.” 11Alive. com/WXIA Atlanta. Available online. URL: www.11 alive.com/news/article_news.aspx?storyid=91554. Accessed February 5, 2007. “WPA Film Library Announces Exclusive Representation.” WPA Film Library Newsletter September 2002. Available online. URL: www.wpaﬁlmlibrary. com/wpanews/Volume_02.html. Accessed February 24, 2007.

Chris Judson

Joy Harjo (1951–

)

This land is a poem of ochre and burnt sand I could never write, unless paper were the sacrament of sky, and ink the broken line of wild horses staggering the horizon several miles away. Even then, does anything written ever matter to the earth, wind, and sky? (Harjo and Strom 30)

imberley Blaeser describes Joy Harjo as a writer who “challenges the boundaries between the oral and written” (253). Those familiar with Harjo’s life might argue that the need to challenge boundaries was something instilled in Harjo at birth. Joy Harjo was born May 9, 1951, as Joy Foster, the daughter of Allen W. Foster, a full-blooded Muscogee (Creek), and Wynema Baker Foster, who was part Cherokee. She later changed her name to Joy Harjo, a family name that means “courage.” Although her parents raised her in the urban landscape of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Harjo says she has never considered that her only home. In an interview with Sharyn Stever, Harjo associates the feeling of displacement in her work to the 1832 forced removal of her ancestors from Alabama: Displacement is a spiritual condition. It is not only physical displacement, but displacement of spirit as well. The original stories ﬁ rst occurred in another landscape, the older spirits live there, a particular matrix that feeds us. It’s linked up to the heart. (The Spiral of Memory 75–76)

Harjo calls upon that matrix when she writes, invoking the spirit of her ancestors as muse and spiritual guide. That connection is so strong that Harjo admits it is, at times, as if an old Creek Indian enters the room and stands over her as she writes (Spiral 37).

While the inﬂuence of Indian ancestry has beneﬁted her writing, being “mixed blood” (as she refers to herself) has not always been easy. There was no reservation for the Oklahoma Muskogee, and Harjo often felt caught between two cultures. She found speaking difﬁcult and school a frightening experience. Her teachers were frustrated by her muteness and often threatened to call her parents. Life at home was not much better. Her father suffered from alcoholism and her parents divorced when she was eight. As a young child, Harjo found a way to express her pain and confusion through drawing. Art was a strong presence in Harjo’s life; her grandmother and her favorite aunt, Lois Harjo Ball, were both painters. Painting allowed Harjo to communicate without words, giving her opportunities to succeed in school. When Harjo was 14, she left home to attend the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a boarding school she describes as “sort of like an Indian Fame school,” referring to the ﬁ ne-arts school portrayed in the 1980s television series (Spiral 119). But life is never as easy as it is on television, and the same year she graduated she gave birth to her ﬁ rst child. For many women, becoming a mother at such an early age perpetuates the cycle of poverty, but Harjo wanted to show her new son, Phil Dayn, a better way. She enrolled in the University of New Mexico as a premed student, soon switching her

166

Joy Harjo

major to painting. It was during this time that Harjo became friends with Leo Romero, a poet who took Harjo to readings by native writers. The magic of language was nothing new to her; some of her strongest childhood memories involve her mother, who worked as a waitress and cook, sitting at the kitchen table composing “heartbreak songs” on an old typewriter. Still, it was not until the Acoma poet SIMON J. ORTIZ and the Laguna Pueblo poet and writer L ESLIE M ARMON SILKO took her under their wings that Harjo began to see the power of poetry to express the deep wounds and great joys of native peoples. She read more and more poetry, seeking out writers like Scott Momaday, James Welch, Roberta Hill, and Richard Hugo, authors whose work resonated with personal meaning for Harjo. In her last year as an undergraduate, Harjo transferred to the English department as a creative writing major. She explains the shift in an interview with Laura Coltelli: I found that language, through poetry, was taking on more magical qualities than my painting. I could say more when I wrote. Soon it wasn’t a choice. Poetry-speaking “called me” in a sense. And I couldn’t say no. (Spiral 60)

Poetry entered Harjo’s life at a difﬁcult time. She was raising two young children (Harjo’s daughter, Rainy Dawn, was born four years after Phil) and was involved in a relationship with a volatile man who alternated between drinking and disappearing. She had no car and had to walk to classes, pushing a stroller loaded with school supplies, baby items, and her kids. Harjo was deeply depressed. Her ﬁ rst poems were borne of that depression; she describes them as poetry that made roots from the compelling need to speak, to hear, to walk gracefully from one century to the next—despite the lines at the food stamp ofﬁce, changing diapers, writing papers for classes, organizing for political action—without the luxury of a wife, a washer and dryer, a cook

167

or nanny or a known library of publications by Indian writers. (How We Became Human xx)

In 1975, those early poems were published in a chapbook entitled The Last Song. While many of the poems stemmed from Harjo’s own experiences, both as an Indian and as a woman, they touched on universal truths, exposing the deepest meanings in the simplest things. Norma Wilson addresses Harjo’s ability to capture the realities of life in her 2001 The Nature of Native American Poetry: “Rather than romanticizing the lives of Native American women, Harjo writes truthfully about the fragmented families of many of them and their consequent suffering” (112–113). This truth is especially revealed in the lines of the poem “Conversations between Here and Home,” where Harjo warns readers, “Angry women are building / houses of stones. / They are grinding the mortar / between straw-thin teeth / and broken families” (Human 11). In 1976, Harjo graduated from the University of New Mexico with a B.A. in poetry and received an Academy for American Poetry Award that same year. Despite her apparent success, Harjo explains that poetry did not immediately transform her life: I did not walk off into the sunset with poetry, or hit the town with a blaze of gunﬁ re with poetry guarding my back. Rather, the journey toward poetry worked exactly as the process of writing a poem. It started from the inside out, then turned back in to complete a movement. (Human xix)

In 1978, Harjo completed her M.F.A. at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was awarded her ﬁ rst of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; she received the second in 1992. Harjo’s second volume of poetry, What Moon Drove Me to This?, was published in 1980 and contained all of the poems from The Last Song, along with 48 new poems. Its release was met with acclaim from literary critics such as Andrew Wiglet, who

168

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

said, “At her best the energy generated by this journeying creates a powerful sense of identity that incorporates everything into the poetic self, so that ﬁ nally she can speak for all the earth” (Wilson 112). The earth for which Harjo speaks is one of myth (meaning cultural stories based on truths) and heritage, where horses can be “ﬁ nely tuned spirits of the psyche” (Spiral 28) and a woman can see herself in the “continuance of blue sky” and “the throat of the mountains” (Human 25). Despite Harjo’s decision to trade paintbrush for pen, the inﬂuence of her beginnings as a painter deeply informs her writing. In an interview with Marilyn Kallet, Harjo admits, “I made the decision to work with words and the power of words, to work with language, yet I approach the art as a visual artist” (Wilson 110–111). As if to nurture this side of herself further, Harjo studied ﬁ lmmaking at the Anthropology Film Center in Santa Fe in 1982. This training not only allowed her to accumulate numerous screenwriting credits, including public-service announcements and teleplays, but also served to enrich her poetry. Published within a year of her ﬁ lm studies, Harjo’s third collection, She Had Some Horses, is much more graphic than her previous writings. Place had always been an important facet of Harjo’s work, but after Harjo’s ﬁ lm training, the poems become so grounded in place and the personas depicted in the poems so formed that readers have taken them for real. This is especially the case with “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window.” Many readers have approached Harjo about the woman in the poem, “sure that they knew her, or one of her cousins, her sister, or they had read about the story in the newspaper where they lived, be it New York or Lincoln, Nebraska, or Albuquerque” (Spiral 19). Harjo’s ability to set the scene, to make a woman so real that readers feel they have known her, is what gives her poetry such force. It is also in this volume that Harjo’s writing begins to take on its own unique style, combining familiar literary techniques with her own sense of Indian tradition and ceremony. A primary example is Harjo’s use of repetition. Where other poets

repeat words or phrases to create a feeling of balance or to accentuate meaning, Harjo uses repetition as a way to include the reader in the ceremony of the poem. Harjo says the technique is effective because “repetition has always been used, ceremonially, in telling stories, in effective speaking, so that what is said becomes a litany, and gives you a way to enter into what is being said, and a way to emerge whole, but changed” (Spiral 17). Giving readers “a way to emerge whole, but changed” is something Harjo does intentionally, believing that poetry should be part form and part function: “In a native context art was not just something beautiful to put up on the wall and look at; it was created in the context of its usefulness for the people” (Spiral 43). As does CAROLYN FORCHÉ, Harjo uses her poetry to depict a true picture of the world. Although that world is not always pretty, Harjo writes that “the poet is charged with the role of being the truth teller of the culture, of the times . . . there is something about poetry that demands the truth, and you cannot separate the poem from your political reality” (Spiral 141). Political reality is always evident in Harjo’s poetry. She does not shy away from the complex issues of America’s colonization and oppression of people of color and what she calls the “myth of Christopher Columbus’s ‘discovery’ ” (Reinventing the Enemy’s Language 21). In 1986, Harjo was invited to present a paper at a conference on aboriginal education in Vancouver. There she met other women concerned over the loss of indigenous cultures. Through a lively discussion over coffee, the women began to recognize the need for an anthology where native women “could speak across the world intimately to each other” (Reinventing 21). Over the next three years, Harjo worked closely with her fellow native poet Gloria Bird to gather and edit essays, poems, and stories by contemporary native women from more than 50 tribal nations into an anthology entitled Reinventing the Enemy’s Language. Since 1989, Harjo has published six additional books: Secrets from the Center of the World, for which she composed poetic prose to be paired with

Joy Harjo

landscape photographs by the astronomer Stephen Strom; In Mad Love and War (1990), which received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award and the William Carlos William Award; The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994), which featured Harjo’s own reﬂections on her poems and earned the Oklahoma Book Arts award; A Map to the Next World (2000); a children’s book entitled The Good Luck Cat (2000); and How We Became Human (2002). Additionally, Harjo’s poetry, essays, and short stories have been published in numerous magazines, journals, and anthologies. In 1992, Harjo added musician to her list of professions, forming an all–Native American band called Poetic Justice. The band recorded two CDs, Furious Light (Bethesda, Md.: Watershed, 1986) and Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century (Boulder, Colo.: Silver Wave Records, 1996), on which Harjo plays soprano and alto saxophone and reads her poetry to music. Later Harjo would form a new band, Joy Harjo and the Real Revolution, and produce an additional CD entitled Native Joy (Brooklyn, N.Y., Mekko Records, 2003). Harjo says she does not separate “the self that practices the art of saxophone from the self who writes poetry . . . [but that] I initially felt closer to jazz than I ever did to any of the poetry I ﬁrst read.” She attributes that connection partly to difference in form: “Music doesn’t have the added boundary of words” (Spiral 101). The other reason Harjo may have felt closer to jazz than to poetry may be due to what Gloria Bird refers to as “conventional Euro-American standards of what constitutes good literature” (Reinventing 28). Those standards have led to a canonization of literature in the United States that has historically excluded women and people of color. This exclusion also initially caused Harjo to decline offers of teaching positions at universities: “I had run from teaching in the universities . . . I was afraid that in that atmosphere, in that place, I was going to lose my poetry” (Spiral 119). Eventually Harjo accepted a position at the University of Colorado and was able to ﬁ nd a way to include her vision of poetry in her teaching. Since then she has taught at Arizona State University, the University of Montana,

169

the University of Arizona, the University of New Mexico, and the University of California. Poet, essayist, ﬁ lmmaker, editor, musician, professor, mother, woman, Indian: For Harjo, these are not separate titles, but rather phases “in a continuous exploration of the self and the surrounding environment,” a journey necessary for her life’s work of “reclaiming the memory stolen from our peoples when we were dispossessed from our lands east of the Mississippi; it has to do with restoring us” (Spiral 11; Reinventing 59). Harjo’s journey continues as she strives to ﬁ nd the perfect way to tell the story of us all, noting with each new experience that her vision “expands, deepens. Eventually, I might succeed in not needing words; perhaps the perfect poem is wordless” (Spiral 86).

She Had Some Horses (1983) Norma Wilson calls Harjo’s third volume of poetry “an exorcism of the kind of fear that can paralyze an individual or a culture” (2001). In fact, the collection begins and ends on that note with the framework of paired poems, “Call It Fear,” in which Harjo gives name to the “edge where shadows and bones of some of us walk backwards,” and “I Give You Back,” in which Harjo releases the fear that would haunt her. Between those two poems are other voices, other “Survivors” and “Things I Should Have Said,” all tied together because of what has held them back. “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window” is frozen on the ledge of a tenement building on the East Side of Chicago. She has no name, though her children do, and she is stuck there, between ascension and decline, so that all who see her may see themselves. To Harjo, her name is The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window, and while other poets might have considered the phrase too awkward, Harjo knows it as the woman’s rightful name. The name is reminiscent of Indian surnames, like Black Cloud or Running Bear, and through its repetition the woman becomes worthy of it.

170 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window could be anyone. Readers begin to know her through the layering of concrete details upon the repetitive framework of what the woman is—“She is a woman of children. . . . She is her mother’s daughter. . . . She is all the women. . . .”—and what she sees: “She sees Lake Michigan. . . . She sees other buildings. . . . She sees other women. . . .” Through the incantation that names her, the woman becomes so real to readers that many have approached Harjo to say they have known her. And though the Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window was not based on a real person or event, Harjo told Sharyn Stever in an interview that the woman followed her “in spirit so to speak” from an empty rocking chair she saw on a visit to the Chicago Indian Center. The woman is real because she is born from “a woman’s need to speak, to be seen in a cityscape that deemed her invisible,” and she speaks for us all (Spiral 81). A common theme in Native American literature is the role of memory. Harjo acknowledges the importance of memory in preserving traditions and language, in passing a culture onto the next generation. But Harjo also says there is another type of memory: I see it as occurring, not just going back, but occurring right now, and also future occurrence so that you can remember things in a way that makes what occurs now beautiful. . . . People often forget that everything they say, everything they do, think, feel, dream, has effect. . . . (Spiral 24)

This type of memory is invoked by Harjo in the poems of this anthology. In “Skeleton of Winter,” Harjo is “memory alive . . . an intricate part of this web of motion,” where she can see with “the othersight.” “Remember” implores readers to go beyond the act of thinking about the past, to remember what is and has been as “alive poems,” so that we may “remember that you are this universe and that this universe is you.” The title poem, “She Had Some Horses,” was inspired by Simon J. Ortiz’s poem/song for his

daughter, “There Are Horses Everywhere” (Human 212–213). While the poem obviously makes use of repetition, its purpose is not so obvious. On the surface, readers can feel the building of momentum, the ceremonial aspect of the phrase “She had horses” pulling them into the poem, inviting them to chant with Harjo. The deeper effect is that readers become comfortable with the pattern of the poem and its opposition of phrases (“She had horses who lied. / She had horses who told the truth. . . . She had horses who whispered. . . . She had horses who screamed . . .”), so that when Harjo turns the poem on end with the last line, “These were the same horses,” readers are stunned into recognizing that in this poem, as in many of life’s conﬂ icts, polarity is more often a function of the way one chooses to look at things than actual circumstances. Harjo ends the collection with an attempt to “gather up all the wounded: women, the tribe and other tribes, and provoke a healing in the way that sometimes only the power of language can, by facing fear, addressing it, standing up to it, for fear is a real entity” (Spiral 78). In the poem “I Give You Back,” the wounded are given voice through Harjo’s litany of release and her reminder that fear only has power when we let it consume us. Inspired by “A Litany for Survival” from Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn, “I Give You Back” is Harjo’s reaction to the hate and destruction that fear can instigate.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read Carl Sandburg’s poem “New Hampshire Again.” Compare the techniques of repetition and imagery used by Harjo and Sandburg. Think of an event, person, or place that is central to who you have become and try to capture it in the form of an “I Remember” poem. 2. When asked what the horses in her poems represent, Harjo has replied that she feels “a sense of privacy about the act of poetry itself. I feel this especially about the horses. I have a kinship with horses that is beyond explanation” (Spiral 109). Why do you think Harjo may be reluc-

Joy Harjo

tant to spell out for readers the meaning of the horses? What do the horses represent for you? 3. Analyze Harjo’s use of animals in her poetry. Which animals are most common in her work? What does each animal represent in the Creek culture? Does Harjo use each animal consistently with its Creek symbolism? If not, how has she adapted the animals to suit the need of each poem?

Reinventing the Enemy’s Language (1997) Harjo and Bird begin this anthology with an introduction that explains its absolute necessity. They remind readers that “not very long ago, native peoples were 100 percent of the population of this hemisphere. In the United States we are now one-half of one percent, and growing” (21). They describe the continued struggle of indigenous peoples for survival in countries where their lands have been stolen and their customs and languages all but eradicated. The book is necessary as a forum for indigenous peoples to show the world that they are “still here, still telling stories, still singing whether it be in our native languages or in the ‘enemy’ tongue” (31). To that end, Harjo and Bird have collected poetry, ﬁction, prayers, and narratives from 87 writers to represent the literature of the aboriginal people of North America. They believed strongly that “to understand the direction of a society one must look to the women who are birthing and ultimately raising the next generation” (21), and so they invited only women to submit their work. The writers they chose to include are diverse, ranging from the Arctic Circle to the southern United States. Despite their differences, they are all women and have known the same cycles within their lives. Harjo and Bird use these cycles to form the organization for the anthology: genesis, struggle, transformation, and the returning. Harjo herself has two pieces in the anthology, choosing to be heard at both the genesis and the returning. “Warrior Road” is an autobiographical piece in which Harjo addresses the births of her chil-

171

dren. Through detailed description of the sterile, impersonal hospital and the cold detachment of the hospital staff, she emphasizes the inability of some governmental programs to meet the needs of the people they claim to serve. Although the hospital was built to fulﬁ ll the government’s agreement to provide health care to the Indian people, the staff treats Harjo with disdain because of her heritage, going so far as to offer sterilization as a convenience best provided at the moment of birth. But “Warrior Road” is more than an indictment of the medical system’s treatment of Native Americans. By juxtaposing her own birth with the birth of her son, the birth of her daughter, and ﬁ nally the birth of her ﬁ rst grandchild, Harjo illuminates the cyclical nature of life and the never-ending connection of family. Although her own mother is not with her at the birth of her son, Harjo feels “the sharp tug of my own birth cord, still connected to my mother. I believe it never pulls away, until death, and even then it becomes a streak in the sky symbolizing that most important warrior road” (55–56). “Perhaps the World Ends Here” is aptly the last piece in the anthology. Reﬂecting on the origin of the collection, on women gathered around a kitchen table, the poem suggests that all of life is centered there, at the kitchen table. It is at that table where we are nurtured and at that table where we face our losses. By centering life’s events around the table, Harjo suggests that it is in each detail that the greater meanings of life are contained.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare Reinventing the Enemy’s Language with Against Forgetting, an anthology edited by Carolyn Forché. What do the editors state as the goals for each anthology? Is such a compilation the most effective way of attaining those goals? 2. Discuss the meaning of the anthology’s title. Harjo grew up speaking English. Why would she consider it the “enemy’s language”? Why do bilingual writers in America choose to write in English, rather than in their native tongues?

172 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

How We Became Human (2002) In her introduction to How We Became Human, Harjo reminds readers that “Compassion is the ﬁ rst quality of a warrior; and compassion is why we are here, why we fell from the sky. The kitchen table is the turtle’s back on which this work is accomplished” (xxvii). It is that theme, of woman as compassionate warrior, that links the pieces in this collection. Harjo tells readers in her notes at the end of the book that “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” was inspired by a classic Iroquois creation story about a pregnant woman who falls through a hole beneath the Great Tree and begins a new world on the back of the Sea Turtle (222–223). In Harjo’s story, the woman falling is Lila, who had “seen God and could tell you God was neither male nor female and made of absolutely everything of beauty, of wordlessness,” and she is caught by Saint Coincidence “in front of the Safeway as he made a turn from borrowing spare change from strangers” (96, 98). Saint Coincidence turns out to be Johnny, a boy Lila had known years earlier in Indian boarding school. Their coming together could be symbolic of the divine intervention of God or the chaos of coincidence, but to the stray cat on the corner they represent a disturbance in the web of earth that created a “wave of falling or the converse wave of gathering together” (99). Lila, like most of Harjo’s female personae, is different from many of the women in Anglo poetry. She does not wait to be rescued from the drudgery of her Dairy Queen job. When she feels the urge to ﬂy, she leaves “on the arms of one of the stars” to “ﬁ nd love in a place that did not know the disturbance of fear” (98). Lila knows intuitively that as birds do in ﬂ ight, “everyone turns together though we may not see each other stacked in the invisible dimensions” (96). And although it is Johnny who catches and saves Lila from her fall, ultimately Lila will rescue him from “wandering without a home in the maze of asphalt” (95). As Lila does, the woman in “The Deer Dancer” displays the warrior qualities of compassion and transcendence. When the woman in the red dress

enters the “bar of broken survivors,” no one knows her, although they recognize her as from a tribe related to deer. One man takes her for “Buffalo Calf Woman” and is deeply affected. A woman, Richard’s wife, tries to attack her. The others in the bar simply watch as she takes off her clothes and dances on a “table of names” (69). In order to understand the layers of meaning in “The Deer Dancer,” it is necessary for readers to be familiar with the myths upon which the poem is based. Harjo provides a brief description of the stories in her endnotes. Buffalo Calf Woman is from Lakota lore and was said to have appeared to the Lakota in two forms: a beautiful woman and a buffalo. She taught the people how to live and promised to return “every generation cycle” (216). When Henry Jack sees the woman in the red dress, he believes she is Buffalo Calf Woman returned, and he transforms his life because of that belief. The speaker in the poem explains, “Some people see vision in a burned tortilla, some in the face of a woman,” referring in part to the pilgrimages people have made to see the face of Jesus, which is said to have miraculously appeared on a tortilla (67, 217). The speaker in the poem sees “the woman inside the woman” in the red dress and knows her for the Deer Dancer. Although the traditional Mvskoke Deer Woman is portrayed as a sexual temptress who lures away and bewitches the weak, the speaker sees her as “the myth slipped down through dreamtime. The promise of feast we all knew was coming. The deer who crossed through knots of a curse to ﬁ nd us” (69). So, while the woman in the red dress represents threat to some (Richard’s wife), to Henry Jack and the speaker she represents hope and salvation. Not all of Harjo’s compassionate warriors are ﬁctionalized. In her poem “For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, Whose Spirit Is Present Here and in the Dappled Stars (For We Remember the Story and Must Tell It Again So That We All May Live),” Harjo addresses the spirit of a woman who was active in the American Indian Movement: “Anna Mae, / everything and nothing changes. / You are the shimmering young woman / who found

Joy Harjo

her voice, / when you were warned to be silent, or have your body cut away / from you like an elegant weed” (70). In the endnotes, Harjo gives readers the actual story of Aquash’s death: In February 1976, a body was found on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Unable to identify the body, a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent ordered the hands severed and sent to Washington, D.C., for ﬁ ngerprinting. The cause of death was listed as exposure and alcohol. Aquash’s family later reported her missing and a second autopsy was ordered, which found no alcohol in her blood and the actual cause of death an execution-style murder. The leader of the American Indian Movement called the mutilation an act of war, but Harjo tells Aquash’s spirit that rather than give in to “a righteous anger,” the women “understood wordlessly the ripe meaning of your murder” (71). In an interview with Helen Jaskoski, Harjo says poems like the one about Aquash develop from a responsibility she feels to be “one of those who help people remember . . . to keep these stories alive” (Spiral 58). The stories Harjo keeps alive are often difﬁcult to tell, as with the case of Jacqueline Peters, a woman lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in 1981, whose story is told in the poem “Strange Fruit.” Some stories are so overwhelming that Harjo cannot write about them right away. She says these stories need time to take shape and that “the sheer weight of memory coupled with imagery constructs poems” (Spiral 55). Harjo’s “The Flood” is poetic prose that tells the story of a young girl who is called upon to be a warrior in defense of herself. This story, as do most of Harjo’s pieces, balances between fact and ﬁction, myth and reality. Although the story is written in the ﬁ rst person, Harjo says, “The ‘I’ is not always me, but a way I choose to speak the poem,” adding that the stories she tells are always true “on some level” (Spiral 67). “The Flood” is based in part on a Muscogee tribal myth in which estakwvnayv, a water snake who can transform himself, represents the power of the Lower World (Human 223). The girl in the

173

story faces the water monster, who “appeared as the most handsome man in the tribe” and walks “the stairway of the abyss” to return as his wife. Harjo could have written a simpler story, telling about a girl who tries to kill herself when her parents promise her in marriage, but she invokes myth as a framework to provide a depth of meaning. David Treuer addresses the use of myth as a basis for ﬁction in his essay “The Myth of Myth”: “Myth and language here are not important in and of themselves. They are important because they lend resonance or deeper sonority to the action” (147–148). It is the girl’s belief in the water monster that explains her actions and makes the story work. The girl’s belief also functions to caution readers that everything in the story is not what it appears. She is at once a “proverbial sixteen-yearold woman” with an “imagination larger than the small frame house at the north edge of town, with broken cars surrounding it like a necklace of futility, larger than the town itself leaning into the lake,” who was lost when she drove her car into the lake, and the survivor who hurries away from the cashier in the convenience store because she “cannot see myself as I had abandoned her some twenty years ago” (103). Readers are left to decide whether they should believe this story told by an imaginative child who believes so strongly in mythology that she uses it to explain her life. Whether they believe or not, the story is cautionary. The girl warns that “the power of the victim is a power that will always be reckoned with, one way or another” (103). Harjo also uses the story as a forum to warn of cultural loss, writing, “They’d entered a drought that no one recognized as a drought, the convenience store a signal of temporary amnesia” (103).

For Discussion or Writing 1. “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” illustrates Harjo’s belief that everything we say and do has an impact on the world. Discuss the implications of that belief for relatively small acts like going to see a particular movie or buying a certain product.

174 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

2. Discuss the use of the convenience store as a metaphor in both “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” and “The Flood.” 3. What is the signiﬁcance of the deer dancer’s stripping off her clothes? How is nudity a metaphor for rebirth? 4. Compare the versions of “The Flood” that appear in How We Became Human and Talking Leaves. How does the physical structure of the writing differ? How do those differences affect meaning? 5. Water is a common metaphor in literature. Analyze Harjo’s use of water in “The Flood,” describing the multiple metaphorical uses she employs and their effect on the story.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON HARJO AND HER WORK 1. For Joy Harjo, poetry is only one means of expression. Examine some of the other forms she has used, speciﬁcally in Secrets from the Center of the World (in which Harjo’s writing accompanies the photography of Stephen Strom) and the albums she has produced (where Harjo’s poems are spoken to music). How does combining music or photography with poetry enhance the meaning of language? 2. Harjo has said that she has felt constricted by the “male-centeredness” of the English language (Spiral 69). How is the English language male? What has led to that maleness? What concepts are difﬁcult to communicate in English, and how else might they be expressed? 3. Many writers of color have been criticized for portraying negative aspects of their cultures, yet Harjo maintains that “part of the process of healing is to address what is evil” (Spiral 140). Why are people protective of the way their cultures are portrayed? Does the title poet entail responsibilities? If so, what are they? 4. The persona Noni Daylight appears in several of Harjo’s poems; then, Harjo says, “she left me and went into one of Barney’s [Bush] poems. I

haven’t seen her since” (Spiral 29). Track the journey of Noni Daylight, listing the poems in which she appears and discussing her role and growth throughout them. Why do you think Barney Bush chose to use Noni Daylight in his poem? Has he kept her true to Harjo’s vision of her? Why has Harjo “not seen her since”? 5. Discuss the following statement by Joy Harjo: I’ve known some of the greatest warriors in my lifetime. They’ve stood up in the face of danger, in the face of hopelessness. They’ve been brave—not in the national headlines, but they’ve been true to themselves, and who they are, and to their families. Their act of bravery could have been to feed their children, to more than survive. (Spiral 57)

Consider the unconventional heroes you have known. How is a lifetime lived in truth to oneself more of an accomplishment than one momentary act of selﬂessness?

WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Blaeser, Kimberley M. “Cannons and Canonization: American Indian Poetries through Autonomy, Colonization, Nationalism, and Decolonization.” In The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States Since 1945, edited by Eric Cheyﬁtz, 183–187. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Bryan, Sharon, ed. Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Coltelli, Laura. “The Circular Dream.” In The Spiral of Memory: Interviews, edited by Laura Coltelli, 60–74. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Gould, Janice. “American Indian Women’s Poetry: Strategies of Rage and Hope.” Signs 20, no. 4 (Summer 1995): 797–816. Harjo, Joy. How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. ———. Map to the Next World: Poetry and Tales. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.

Joy Harjo

———. She Had Some Horses. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1983. ———. The Spiral of Memory. Edited by Laura Coltelli. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. ———, and Gloria Bird, eds. Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.

175

———, and Stephen Strom. Secrets from the Center of the World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989. Treuer, David. Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual. St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2006. Wilson, Norma C. The Nature of Native American Poetry. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.

Kathy Higgs-Coulthard

Barbara Kingsolver (1955–

)

Storytelling is as old as our need to remember where the water is, where the best food grows, where we find our courage for the hunt. It’s as persistent as our desire to teach our children how to live in this place that we have known longer than they have. Our greatest and smallest explanations for ourselves grow from place, as surely as carrots grow in the dirt. (Small Wonder)

orn on April 8, 1955, in Annapolis, Maryland, Barbara Kingsolver spent most of her childhood in rural Kentucky. As the second of three children of Dr. Wendell R. Kingsolver, family physician and part Cherokee descendant, and Virginia “Ginny” Lee Henry Kingsolver, homemaker and avid birdwatcher, she enjoyed tremendous freedom to explore the terrain of their Kentucky home. Kingsolver developed a passion for the life sciences, which she credited to “having grown up among farmers, and . . . having parents who were deeply interested in natural history . . . creating education, entertainment, and pets out of snakes and turtles and every kind of thing we could ﬁ nd” (Snodgrass 9). For most of her childhood, the family had no television, ﬁ lling their spare time with read-alouds punctuated by visits from the bookmobile. At the age of eight, Kingsolver received a diary and began to write almost daily. Despite the numerous notebooks she ﬁ lled, she denies ever envisioning herself as a writer: I’m in awe of those people who from early childhood seem bent on a passionate vocational path. . . . I planned to be a farmer and a ballerina and a writer and a doctor and a musician and a zookeeper. (High Tide 130)

Wendell Kingsolver exempliﬁed for his family the importance of “doing what you think is right

regardless of whether or not that’s ﬁ nancially or otherwise regarded” (DeMarr 2). His children learned early on about the cruelties inherent in racial and class discrimination. When Kingsolver was in second grade, her parents accepted a publichealth posting deep in the African Congo, plunging their young children into a world where they were total outsiders. After a brief return to Kentucky in 1966, the family then moved to St. Lucia in the Caribbean, where Dr. Kingsolver provided medical care at a convent hospital. Even as a child, Kingsolver was aware of contrasts between the cultural beliefs of the native obeah and the Catholicism of the settlers. Kingsolver’s memories of the landscape and customs of the island would coalesce years later in the short story “Jump-up Day.” Despite the family’s return to the United States and Kentucky, Kingsolver continued to feel like an outsider. She was deeply shy, a condition exacerbated in sixth grade when she stood a full head taller than her classmates. Preoccupation with books and writing further isolated her from peers. She conﬁdes in “Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen” that she saw herself as “less valuable than everyone around” (Small Wonder 146). In the essay “How Mr. Dewey Decimal Saved My Life,” Kingsolver describes Nicholas County High School, which required shop for boys and home economics for girls. Kingsolver quips, “And so I stand today, a woman who knows how to

176

Barbara Kingsolver 177

upholster, color-coordinate a table setting, and plan a traditional wedding—valuable skills I’m still waiting to put to good use in my life.” Kentucky’s rank on educational spending in the 1970s was one of the lowest in the nation, but a school librarian rescued Kingsolver by inviting her to sort and catalog books. Through that process, she began to envision a life for herself beyond Nicholas County. Kingsolver’s voracious reading “jarred open a door that was right in front of me. I found I couldn’t close it” (High Tide 51). Kingsolver graduated as valedictorian in 1972. To remain in Kentucky meant limited options, so she left home to attend DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, on a music scholarship. Citing the impracticality of the arts as a profession, she switched to biology, though she still indulged her creative side by jotting poems in the margins of her science notebooks (DeMarr 6). She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1977. Greencastle was by no means urban, but Kingsolver’s speech was noticeably tinted by her Kentucky home, again branding her an outsider. She describes herself as “stunned to discover that the world knows almost nothing about ‘hillbillies,’ and respects them even less.” That realization caused “an undercurrent of defensiveness” that she says has guided both her work and her life (www.kingsolver.com/faq/answers.asp). Kingsolver was drawn to political activism, but she soon sought a break from the politics of the United States. After college, she traveled to Europe, trying a variety of jobs, including housemaid, medical transcriptionist, X-ray technician, archaeologist, and editor. She returned to Kentucky with a greater perspective on America, resolved to “live inside this amazing beast, poking at its belly from the inside with my one little life and the small, pointed sword of my pen” (McMahon). However, Kingsolver’s return to Kentucky was short lived. In 1979, she loaded up her car and drove to Tucson, Arizona, where she completed a master’s degree in evolutionary biology and ecology at the University of Arizona. Upon graduation, she served as a science writer, a position that

allowed her to combine her two greatest loves— science and writing. Gradually, Kingsolver began to see herself as a professional writer. During the day, she worked as a freelance journalist, reporting, for example, on the strike against the Phelps Dodge copper mine in 1983. She attracted national attention for her unique insight into the lives of the women who held the line while their husbands sought work elsewhere. Kingsolver’s work was eventually published in 1989 as Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983. At night, she gave free reign to her imagination, crafting stories and poems that often overlapped with her nonﬁction. Meanwhile, Kingsolver married the chemistry professor Joseph Hoffmann in 1985. Although the couple divorced in 1992, their time together produced not only a child (Camille, born in 1987), but also Kingsolver’s ﬁ rst novel. The Bean Trees began as a way to ﬁ ll the insomnia that plagued Kingsolver’s pregnancy. She wrote huddled in a closet so as not to disturb her sleeping husband. The same day that Kingsolver brought home her new daughter, Camille, she received news from her agent: The ﬁ rst draft had been auctioned to publishers—a rare feat for an unknown writer. Kingsolver describes her ﬁ rst novel as the “longest letter to you [her mother] I’ve ever written. Finally, after a thousand tries, I’ve explained everything I believe in, exactly the way I’ve always wanted to: human rights, Central American refugees, the Problem That Has No Name, abuse of the powerless, racism, poetry, freedom, childhood, motherhood, Sisterhood is powerful. All that, and still some publisher has decided it makes a good story” (Small Wonder 170). Readers found her work to be accessible, yet layered with political truths, a balance Kingsolver works hard to maintain: I want to write books that anybody can read. . . . I want to challenge people who like literature, to give them something for their trouble, without closing any doors to people who are less educated. (DeMarr 19)

178 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

The Bean Trees received an Enoch Pratt Library Youth-to-Youth Books Award and was declared a Notable Book by the American Library Association and the New York Times. In 1990, Kingsolver’s short stories were anthologized in Homeland and Other Stories. The title piece examines loss of culture through the eyes of a child burdened with remembering her Cherokee heritage. “Rose-Johnny” examines the ostracism of individuals for perceived differences. Each story in the collection examines the theme of how community and place can inﬂuence individuals. Homeland garnered an American Library Association award. With the release of the novel Animal Dreams in 1990, Kingsolver attracted the attention of academia. Scholarly articles examined her use of place and community and proclaimed her work— with its subplots of Guatemalan refugees, cultural annihilation, and governmental meddling in foreign affairs—as political. Kingsolver embraced the label, remarking that “most of the rest of the world considers social criticism to be, absolutely, the most legitimate domain of art.” In her essay “Jabberwocky,” Kingsolver describes ﬁction as “the antidote that can call us back from the edge of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another. By virtue of that power, it is political, regardless of content.” Animal Dreams received many awards, including the Pen/USA West Fiction Award and the Edward Abbey Award for Ecoﬁction. It was also a New York Times Notable Book. In 1991, Kingsolver grew weary of what she describes as the “clamor of war worship” in the United States, where yellow ribbons began to feel like “a prayer of godspeed to the killers” (High Tide 108–109). She moved her family to the Canary Islands and lived there for nearly a year. Upon returning to the United States, she faced many changes in both her professional and personal lives. Her divorce from Hoffmann left her embroiled in a legal battle over her own writing. Another America/Otra América (1992) introduced the world to Barbara Kingsolver the poet. Despite critical praise, Kingsolver says, “I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more

accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house aﬁ re, or the coincidence of both on the same day” (Small Wonder 229). The poems included in Another America reﬂect that serendipity, as in “What the Janitor Heard in the Elevator,” which uses a real conversation to portray the near invisibility of the lower class. Pigs in Heaven, released ﬁve years after The Bean Trees, revisits the characters of Taylor and Turtle and follows their struggle to remain together. The critic Mary Jean DeMarr suggests that the book corrects a serious ﬂaw of Kingsolver’s ﬁ rst novel, “the apparent suggestions that a Native American child might be given away lightly . . . [and] that the welfare of the child is the only issue to be considered” (DeMarr 15). Through alternating viewpoints, Kingsolver explores “the places where disparate points of view rub together—the spaces between . . . the sticky terrain of cultural differences” (High Tide 154). Pigs in Heaven received the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, and an American Booksellers Book of the Year nomination. It was also a New York Times Notable Book. Kingsolver met her second husband, Steven Hopp, an environmentalist, while serving as a visiting writer at Emory & Henry College in Virginia. The couple cowrote several essays and articles on natural history and, in 1996, celebrated the birth of their daughter, Lily. Despite the political undertones of her ﬁction, some critics have dismissed it as “chick lit,” a label Kingsolver abhors: “I don’t feel my books are mainly for women. . . . Moby-Dick is a whale book, but I don’t think only whales should read it” (Epstein 33). She adds that her whole life she’s “been reading white guy books and there’s plenty of those in the world” (Perry 159). Kingsolver moved politics to the forefront with the 1998 publication of The Poisonwood Bible. Although her family spent two years in Africa during the 1960s, it was only years later that Kingsolver began to understand the United States’s role in the political turmoil of the Congo. Kingsolver admits it would be easy to lecture on the evils of

Barbara Kingsolver 179

colonialism in developing countries, but instead she uses political allegory to illustrate the humanity behind the headline and examine the question “Given this is what we did as a nation in Africa, how are we to feel about it now?” (Kanner). The Poisonwood Bible is perhaps her most successful book yet, earning the National Book Prize of South Africa and a nomination for the PEN/ Faulkner Award. It was named the American Booksellers Book of the Year, a Los Angeles Times Best Book, and one of the New York Times’s “Ten Best Books of 1998.” In 2000, President Bill Clinton honored Kingsolver with the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s most prestigious award for service through the arts. After the intense research and heavy moral lessons of The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver returned to Appalachia for the setting of her next novel, Prodigal Summer. The terrain of the Kentucky hills may be comfortable for Kingsolver, but she admits in her essay “Taming the Beast with Two Backs” that the book itself, which she describes tongue in cheek as “an unchaste novel,” is a bit shocking, even to her. The story focuses on the triumph of life over death, with a heavy reliance on procreation to illustrate that theme. The critic Amanda Cockrell describes the novel’s theme as “people sex, bug sex, coyote sex . . . and the drive to pass on your genes” (Snodgrass 166). Kingsolver says that the topic of sexuality is taboo when used by women writers but argues that writers often mine personal matters for universal truths, and that sex should be no exception. While Kingsolver is best known for her novels, it is in her essays and poetry that she opens herself to readers, sharing personal interests and deeply held beliefs. “Letter to My Mother” describes the guilt and loss that plagued her after she was raped by an acquaintance in her own home. The attack left her with a deep understanding of “the vast ocean of work it is to be a woman among men, that universe of effort, futile whimpers against hard stones” (Small Wonder 168). “This House I Cannot Leave” and “Ten Forty-four” (Another America) also address the rape, illustrating wounds that go much deeper than “a trace of hair or blood or sperm.”

Not all of Kingsolver’s essays and poems are so personal, but all address issues in which she takes a personal interest. After the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, HarperCollins released Small Wonder, described as Kingsolver’s “extended love song to the world we still have.” The book begins as a reaction to one horriﬁc moment in world history and explores the event by discussing “who we seem to be, what remains for us to live for, and what [Kingsolver] believes we could make of ourselves” (Small Wonder xiv). Kingsolver’s essays challenge readers to examine their own lives for ways to become more responsible members of our worldwide family. Kingsolver led the charge by helping her own family in “realigning our lives with our food chain.” She describes her family’s journey of turning away from processed foods in the 2007 nonﬁction book Animal, Vegetable, and Miracle. Whether creating poetry, essays, or ﬁction, Kingsolver begins each work with an unmistakable grounding in place and asks readers to remember that every book we pick up “is made from the hearts of trees that died for the sake of our imagined lives. What you hold in your hands right now, beneath these words, is consecrated air and time and sunlight and, ﬁ rst of all, a place” (Small Wonder 40).

The Bean Trees (1988) At a glance, The Bean Trees, with its plucky heroine Taylor Greer, may seem a simple coming-of-age story: A young girl leaves home in search of freedom and eventually ﬁ nds it through increasing responsibility to the world around her. Yet, as is true of all Kingsolver’s works, a careful reading reveals multiple layers. The Bean Trees is the bildungsroman that it appears, but through Kingsolver’s treatment, Taylor becomes much deeper than the typical female protagonist who is forced at story’s end to forfeit her independence in order to gain the love of a man. Taylor understands that dependence on a man is not her life’s goal. As a result, she is free to redeﬁ ne coming of age as “being able to behave

180 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

with dignity when her desires are counter to her knowledge of what is right” (DeMarr 66–67). A major theme within The Bean Trees is that of identity. As the main character, Marietta, drives from Kentucky to Arizona, she longs to leave her old life behind. She decides to begin by changing her name but believes that “a name is not something a person really has a right to pick out, but is something you’re provided with more or less by chance” (11). That belief results in part from her own name, which was chosen for the town in which she was born. Marietta accepts a new name from the town in which her car runs out of gas, Taylorville. The ease with which Marietta transforms into Taylor implies a disregard for the importance of names, yet through her relationships with other characters Taylor grows to understand the power of a name to deﬁ ne a person. Taylor ﬁ rst encounters Turtle as a “round bundle with a head” (17), lacking a name and any notion of personality. The ﬁ rst real trait Turtle displays is tenacity, grabbing on to Taylor with the ﬁerce determination of a mud turtle that “won’t let go until it thunders” (22). Taylor names the baby after the personality trait that deﬁ nes her and decides to keep that name even when she later learns that the child’s name at birth had been April, illustrating her belief that names can be more than chance. The characters of Estevan and Esperanza deepen Taylor’s understanding of the link between name and identity. Taylor ﬁ rst meets Estevan and his wife through Mattie, owner of the auto shop Jesus Is Lord Used Tires. The couple are refugees from Guatemala who put aside their own needs for anonymity to help Taylor adopt Turtle. To blend in with their adopted society, they Americanize their names, changing Estevan and Esperanza to Steven and Hope. Taylor seems to mourn their loss of identity more than the couple themselves, telling them: “I love your names. . . . They’re about the only thing you came here with that you’ve still got left. I think you should only be Steven and Hope when you need to pull the wool over somebody’s eyes, but keep your own names with your friends” (207). Ironically, Estevan and Esperanza had already sac-

riﬁced their “own names” when they ﬁ rst entered America, choosing Spanish names because their Mayan names could not be pronounced in English. Through Estevan and Esperanza, Taylor is able to see that true identity begins with home and family and deepens through the choices we make. Political concerns are central to The Bean Trees and are at the forefront as the characters struggle with large issues on a personal level. Millie’s auto shop, which serves as a front for a shelter for refugees, introduces Taylor to the Guatemalan refugees Estevan and Esperanza. Through this couple, Kingsolver draws a parallel between the Mayan people and Native Americans. Taylor is told by Estevan that the Mayan people speak 22 different Mayan languages (193) and she learns that Mayan is as incomplete as Native American in deﬁ ning the vastly unique cultures each term is meant to describe. Like many conquered indigenous peoples, the Maya were transformed into slaves in their own lands. Yet the Maya have preserved their heritage and customs, as well as more than 22 distinct languages, despite governmental efforts to erase the entire Mayan culture. Periodically, the Maya have revolted against their oppressors, only to be beaten down by forces with better training and more advanced weaponry. In the 1980s, the Guatemalan military escalated their attempts to erase pockets of resistance in what has come to be known as the “Silent Holocaust.” According to statistics listed on the Web site for the Global Exchange, in one decade of systematic repression, torture, and genocide, military death squads were responsible for the deaths of 200,000 civilians and the destruction of 440 Mayan villages. As Estevan shares his story with Taylor, she learns about the abduction of his daughter in a ploy by the government to force him to reveal the identities of 17 members of the teachers’ union. Taylor is astounded by his decision not to go to his daughter. When Estevan asks what she would have done, Taylor responds, “I really don’t know. I can’t even begin to think about a world where people have to make choices like that.” Estevan’s answer, “You live in that world,” is a gentle reprimand to those of us

Barbara Kingsolver 181

who would claim innocence of complicity in world events (137). Estevan and Esperanza also draw attention to the fate of those who immigrate to the United States seeking escape from political oppression. Although the 1986 Immigration Control and Reform Act included amnesty for illegal U.S. immigrants, the reality is that once here, immigrants are often treated as trespassers who have no right to take jobs away from “real Americans,” an attitude that conveniently ignores the fact that the forefathers of Americans were themselves immigrants. Taylor is praised by Mattie for helping Estevan and Esperanza in their struggle to remain in the United States, but she shrugs it off, saying, “I can’t see why I shouldn’t do this. If I saw somebody was going to get hit by a truck I’d push them out of the way. Wouldn’t anybody? It’s a sad day for us all if I’m being a hero here” (188). Taylor’s willingness to help Estevan and Esperanza, despite the risk to her, and her belief that it is something anyone would do, echoes a persistent theme in Kingsolver’s work: Community and family are necessary for survival of the individual. It is the theme of interconnectedness that forms the basis for The Bean Trees. Kingsolver uses Taylor’s inexperience as a mother to illustrate the need of new parents for familial and community support. Taylor’s ﬂ ight from Kentucky has left her without those support systems, yet Taylor is adept at forging new friendships and gains with her new boss (Mattie) a surrogate mother and parenting advice. Taylor’s search for a home leads her to Lou Ann, who is also a single mother. Together, the two form a quasifamily that Taylor resists at ﬁrst because they have fallen into the stereotypical roles of an old married couple. Eventually, Taylor accepts their interdependence and admits that she loves Lou Ann. Related to the theme of interdependence is the issue of child welfare, which Kingsolver explores through Turtle. Taylor acquires Turtle when a stranger thrusts the baby at her in the deserted parking lot of a bar. Before long, Taylor discovers Turtle is not an inanimate object, but a girl whose gender “had already burdened her short life with a kind of misery I could not imagine. I thought I

knew about every ugly thing that one person does to another, but I had never even thought about such things being done to a baby girl” (23). Despite Taylor’s inexperience as a parent, she is able to protect Turtle from the abuse she suffered as a baby. But the truth is, Taylor has a lot of help. In her essay “Somebody’s Baby,” Kingsolver discusses the American distaste for other people’s children and our national “creed of every family for itself,” suggesting that Americans do not cherish their children the way other cultures do because “the worth of children in America is tied to their dollar value” (High Tide 101). Taylor’s ability to string together an impromptu support system for her small family illustrates Kingsolver’s belief that children “thrive best when their upbringing is the collective joy and responsibility of families, neighborhoods, communities, and nations” (High Tide 104).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss Mary Jean DeMarr’s assertion that the typical bildungsroman requires a female protagonist to choose between maturation and femininity (66). How is this reﬂected in Kingsolver’s novel? Take a stand for or against her claim and support your opinion with examples from Kingsolver and other writers. 2. In her search for a home, Taylor interviews with Fei, La-Isha, and Timothy to join their cooperative. What does the exchange illustrate about the American class system? 3. Compare the plight of Estevan and Esperanza to the struggles described in JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA’s Immigrants in Our Own Land.

Animal Dreams (1990) Animal Dreams explores the concept of national memory, speciﬁcally the ability of individuals to distance themselves from tragedy by forgetting about it. The book is dedicated to Ben Linder, an engineer who moved to Nicaragua in the 1980s to construct an electrical dam. Antigovernment contras ambushed the construction site, killing Linder

182 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

and two Nicaraguans, Sergio Hernández and Pablo Rosales. Kingsolver has spoken out in her essays against the funding provided to the contras through President Ronald Reagan’s covert war in Central America. In Animal Dreams, Kingsolver puts a human face on the conﬂict by infusing the character of Hallie Noline with Linder’s commitment to service and then subjecting her to a similar fate. Although Hallie is central to the story, it is her absence that makes a statement: She is off in Nicaragua serving as a “cross between Johnny Appleseed and a freedom ﬁghter” (30). Hallie is not so naive as to think she can save the world through pest management, yet she is content to help where she can. Codi is “the sister who didn’t go to war” (7). Raised by her emotionally unavailable father, Codi longs for unconditional love, yet she constantly distances herself from others by drifting through places and jobs. Codi even invents alternate lives for herself in conversations with strangers to avoid any “discussion of what I was really” (203). Kingsolver admits that there was a time in her life when she, too, would reinvent herself to strangers: “I strove for new heights in perjury, trying to see how absurd a yarn I could spin. . . . Through my tales I discovered not exactly myself but all the selves I might have been” (High Tide 260–261). Although Codi may not consider herself the hero her sister is, even she cannot stand idly by when she discovers that Black Mountain Mining Company is polluting Grace’s water. The ﬁ nding, uncovered when Codi’s students examine the pH levels of the river, allows Kingsolver to return to the theme of ecology. The Stitch and Bitch Club raises money through the sale of piñatas to have Grace declared a historic preserve. Codi also allows Kingsolver to examine the issue of cruelty to animals. In discussing the “sport” of cockﬁghting, Codi tells her boyfriend, Lloyd, that she “can’t feel good about people making a spectator sport out of puncture wounds and internal hemorrhage” (191). Codi’s wording depicts the exact manner in which Lloyd’s brother dies, a death that serves as a metaphor for the viciousness of such events.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In 2007, the United States adopted the Animal Fighting Prohibition Enforcement Act, allowing a felony charge for those involved in the interstate transport of animals for ﬁghting purposes. Discuss the issue of animal blood sports in light of Kingsolver’s novel. 2. The Stitch and Bitch Club saves Grace by having the town declared a historic landmark. Research the history behind the National Historic Landmark Program and the process required to nominate a site (visit the NHL Web site at www. nps.gov/nhl). Debate the issue of making Grace a historic landmark from the viewpoint of the parties involved.

Pigs in Heaven (1993) Pigs in Heaven picks up the story begun in The Bean Trees. This time, Taylor and Turtle are the refugees, embroiled in their own battle for rights as the Cherokee Nation investigates the legality of Turtle’s adoption. Kingsolver admits that after the publication of her ﬁ rst novel, she felt compelled to return to the story: “I had completely neglected a whole moral area when I wrote about this Native American kid being swept off the reservation and being raised by a very loving white mother. It was something I hadn’t thought about, and I felt I needed to make that right in another book” (Perry 165). In addressing her oversight, Kingsolver examines the issue of outsider adoption from multiple perspectives. Taylor, adoptive mother of Turtle, sees the adoption as a rescue from an abusive family. Annawake Fourkiller is a Native American attorney who represents the Cherokee Nation’s interests in preserving a heritage nearly decimated by outsider adoption. For her, the interests of the tribe must always be considered over the needs of the individual. Therefore, she sees Turtle’s adoption as theft from the tribe; the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act supports her position. As the two square off over the fate of Turtle, their personal experiences make it nearly impossible for either to see the other’s side.

Barbara Kingsolver 183

Kingsolver uses the peripheral character of Jax, Taylor’s boyfriend, to step back from the issue. Through a conversation between Jax and Annawake, Kingsolver illustrates the ways in which culture can inﬂuence perception. Jax points out that Annawake’s guiding myth is “Do right by your people,” and Annawake counters that the guiding myth of America is “Do right by yourself” (88). Kingsolver addresses that issue in an interview with David Gergen: Our great unifying myths tell us things like anybody can make it in this country if he’s smart enough and ambitious enough. . . . But it works only to an extent, because the other side of that story is that if you’re not making it, you must be either stupid or lazy. So a lot of selfblame goes along with poverty.

Taylor’s struggle to support herself personiﬁes the breakdown of that myth. Her conversation with Kevin (a would-be suitor) further demonstrates the faulty assumption by mainstream America that “if you can dream it . . . you can be it” (210).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Kingsolver claims that the United States was founded on myths that no longer work for most citizens (Gergen). How is that portrayed in this novel? Discuss examples of myths that have contributed to the “American way of life.” 2. Examine the references to the media in Pigs in Heaven in light of Kingsolver’s essay “Careful What You Let in the Door” (High Tide). 3. What does Taylor mean when she admits most commercials are made by “the guardians of truth” (Pigs in Heaven 295)? What implications does that have for American society?

The Poisonwood Bible (1998) Kingsolver’s most celebrated work to date, and her most controversial, emerged from her need to understand the events she had witnessed as a

child in the Congo during the 1960s. Kingsolver discussed the seed of the story in her 1986 essay “Why I Am a Danger to the Public,” in which she described her desire to address “the brief blossoming and destruction of the independence of the Congo, and what the CIA had to do with it.” The story took nearly another decade to germinate into the 543-page novel, which avoids taking a didactic stance on the evils of colonialism in third-world countries by focusing on the experiences of the Price family as missionaries in the Congo and their guilt over American complicity in the events they witness. In the author’s note, Kingsolver informs readers that the novel is a work of ﬁction, but that her invented characters have been surrounded by “historical ﬁgures and events . . . as real as I could render them” (ix). The book’s bibliography reﬂects the intense research required to attain the level of accuracy that Kingsolver demands of her work. Although Kingsolver introduced the Price family in “My Father’s Africa,” which appeared in McCall’s in August 1991, The Poisonwood Bible provides a closer examination of their time in Africa. The novel is unique in both form and narrative method. It is structured using seven “books,” six of which are named for books of the Bible (or, in the case of “Bel and the Serpent” and “Song of the Three Children,” for books of the Apocrypha, which is not included in the King James Bible). The structure serves both to align the family’s experiences with biblical themes and to underscore Nathan’s beliefs. The ﬁ rst ﬁve books begin with Orleanna, the dominated wife of the Baptist minister Nathan Price, who is speaking years after the family’s exodus from Africa. Following Orleanna’s narrative, each book is subtitled to orient the reader in place and time and to reﬂect the focus of the four Price daughters on issues that directly impact the family. The structure also mirrors the dynamics of the Price family, in which Orleanna is a buffer between the strict biblical rulings of Nathan and their four daughters. The last book does not have a biblical title and serves as an epilogue in which Kingsolver pulls back to give a broader view of the novel’s events.

184

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

The question Kingsolver hoped to answer through The Poisonwood Bible is “How do we live with it [America’s role in the assassination of the Congolese president Patrice Lumumba] and how do we move on? Given that this is our history, what do we do with it?” She found that “one thing is very clear, there isn’t a single answer—there’s a spectrum of answers” (Kanner). To convey that spectrum, Kingsolver uses the multiple voices of the women of the Price family: Orleanna, subservient wife to Nathan Price, a Baptist missionary; and the four Price daughters—Rachel, the twins Leah and Adah, and Ruth May. Each perspective offers its own take on coping with the weight of guilt. Through the Price family, Kingsolver delves into the political hotbeds of genocide, the Congolese exploitation of its own people, female circumcision, and colonialism in third-world countries. Multiple viewpoints allow Kingsolver to step back from these issues and see them fresh through the eyes of the innocent. At the onset of the novel, the Price children are quite young and thus reﬂect events through that naiveté; as they mature, their ability to understand those events in a historical context deepens. Although he is not given a voice of his own, Nathan Price is a strong presence in the novel. Kingsolver uses his character to personify the attitude taken by the United States toward third-world countries: “Nathan stands for the conqueror and for the hyperbole of our cultural arrogance” (Snodgrass 157). Rachel, the eldest daughter, sums up his personality as “the Father Knows Best of all times” (131). Throughout the novel, the United States adopts this attitude, both literally in terms of CIA involvement and ﬁguratively through the character of Nathan Price, both of whom presume to know more about what is best for the Congo than those who reside there. Nathan’s time in the Congo is a political allegory meant to reﬂect America’s highmindedness and arrogance. Nathan takes his family to Africa because he wants to give salvation to the uneducated. Yet, to his incomprehension, the Africans do not want his deliverance. Nathan’s primary obstacle is the basic assumptions each culture holds about the world. Similarly, a father-knows-best atti-

tude precludes an openness on America’s part to understand that so-called less developed countries may be capable of deﬁning their own needs. Kingsolver best illustrates this difference through linguistic misunderstandings between Nathan Price and the Congolese people. The language of the Kikongo is complex; words may mean different things, depending on how they are spoken. Nathan’s arrogance prevents him from attending to the minute differences in inﬂection that could aid his communication with the Congolese. The most salient example is rooted in the novel’s title. The Kikongo word bangala can refer to something that is very precious, and it is that meaning Nathan intends when he preaches that “Tata Jesus is bangala.” In his ignorance, Nathan uses an alternate pronunciation of the word bangala, and his statement actually translates to “Jesus is poisonwood,” a reference to an African tree with such poisonous wood that burning it can release fatal fumes. While Nathan (were he not deaf to the nuances of African languages) would consider his own words blasphemous, his inadvertent claim that “Jesus is poisonwood” actually holds more meaning for the Congolese, who have lost much to those intending to enlighten them. Kingsolver furthers her theme of cultural differences when Nathan’s attempts to convert the Congolese to Western thought backﬁ re. Nathan tries to convince the Congolese of the importance of a democratic election, only to stand by while the “congregation of his very own church interrupted the sermon to hold an election on whether or not to accept Jesus Christ as the personal Saviour of Kilanga” (327). Despite Nathan’s insistence that “Jesus is exempt from popular elections,” Tata Ndu holds an election in which “Jesus Christ lost, eleven to ﬁ fty-six” (334). As is true of all of Kingsolver’s works, the theme of family is central to The Poisonwood Bible. Unlike the other families who populate her stories, the Price family seems to conform to the “Family of Dolls Family Value” mind-set. Ironically, it is the one family in Kingsolver’s work that cannot survive intact. Nathan’s tyrannical behavior as head of house results in the meek defeat of his wife, Orleanna, who remains by his side despite his abusive treatment of

Barbara Kingsolver 185

her and his inability to “see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison on her.” Although Orleanna reviles Nathan “with every silent curse she knows,” she fails to retaliate because she believes such an attack would more likely “strike the child made in his image” (191), in other words, her own child. Kingsolver describes her own experience with a painful marriage in “Stone Soup”: A nonfunctioning marriage is a slow asphyxiation. It is waking up despised each morning, listening to the pulse of your own loneliness . . . it is sharing your airless house with the threat of suicide or other kinds of violence, while the ghost that whispers, “Leave here and destroy your children,” has passed over every door and nailed it shut. (High Tide 138)

In many ways, Orleanna is representative of all women who are trapped in loveless marriages but stay for “the sake of the children.” The daughters react to Nathan’s domination by at ﬁ rst trying all the harder to win his affections: “They elongate on the pale stalks of their longing, like sunﬂowers with heavy heads . . . they’ll bend to his light” (191). Orleanna predicts that a day will arrive when each daughter “turns away hard, never to speak to him again,” yet the fulﬁ llment of her prognostication is not of their own choice, but through the death of Ruth May and their father’s eventual mental deterioration. Despite Nathan’s domination of them, three of the Price girls survive; Ruth May’s death serves as a reminder to women that a decision to stay with an abusive husband for the sake of the children is based on a faulty premise.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare The Poisonwood Bible to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with speciﬁc focus on theme and character motivation. How is Africa employed as a character in each work? 2. A common theme in Kingsolver’s work is the belief that “bloodshed is necessary for preserving our way of life” (Small Wonder 182). How is this theme manifested in The Poisonwood Bible?

3. How might the story have been different if told through the eyes of Nathan Price or Anatole Ngemba? Why does Kingsolver give neither man a voice in the story? 4. Analyze the character of Nathan Price. What causes his fanaticism and emotional distance from his family? How does he change or fail to change through the course of the novel? 5. How is Adah’s hemiplegia important to her development as a character? How does it contribute to the story? What does her recovery symbolize, and what does she gain and lose because of her recovery? 6. Discuss Orleanna Price’s plea that readers not “presume there’s shame in the lot of the woman who carries on” and her comparison of such women to “the backbone of a history” (383). Is this self-justiﬁcation on her part, or is it a valid explanation of her actions throughout the novel? How does her statement change the way we look at history?

Prodigal Summer (2000) Within the pages of Prodigal Summer, Kingsolver returns to her Appalachian homeland to explore the “connections between humans and our habitat and our food chain” (Snodgrass 166). The book is divided into three parts: “Predators,” “Moth Love,” and “Old Chestnuts,” each with its own ecological lesson. “Predators” follows the effort of the forest ranger Deanne Wolfe to restore the coyote to its place as the keystone predator of Zebulon Mountain. Deanne lives a solitary life, ﬁ lled with quiet moments of celebration, as when she tracks a young family of coyotes and locates the sire. Kingsolver’s belief that “a mirror held up to every moral superiority will show its precise mirror image” (Small Wonder 6) is reﬂected through Eddie Bondo. Bondo goes to Zebulon Mountain to hunt a lambkilling coyote. Throughout their relationship, the pair wrestle with irreconcilable differences: Wolfe attempts to persuade Bondo that destruction of the coyote will cause an imbalance in nature, while

186

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Bondo counters that protection of the coyote is just a matter of choosing one animal over another. The one thing on which they can agree is that “living takes life” (323). Lusa Landowski, introduced in “Moth Love,” ﬁ nds herself marooned in the Widener homeland, surrounded by a “hurricane of hateful women,” when her husband, Cole Widener, is killed in an accident (40). Her struggle to ﬁnd her place in the overbearing family is eased when she steps in to care for the orphans left when her sister-in-law dies of cancer. Before her marriage to Cole, Lusa specialized in moth pheromones, and her role in Prodigal Summer as “champion of nature” is illustrated by her love of honeysuckle and commitment to nonchemical methods of pest control (Snodgrass 106). “Old Chestnuts” is an apt description for the third set of characters. Garnett Walker, vocational agriculture teacher and farmer, longs to reestablish a chestnut tree named for his father by crossbreeding original stock with a blight-resistant strand. His neighbor, Nannie Rawley, disrupts his plan with her beekeeping and aversion to pesticides. “Everything alive is connected to every other by ﬁ ne, invisible threads,” Rawley informs him in an effort to convince him that killing off one insect allows the prey of that insect to multiply (216).

get.” Why did Americans feel it was necessary to declare they would remember that date? Discuss the role of forgetfulness as a way to distance one’s self from atrocity in light of Kingsolver’s essay “Jabberwocky” (High Tide). 2. Read Suzanne Cleary’s poem “Anyways” (Trick Pear 2007). Discuss Kingsolver’s use of language as preservation of cultural values. How is Kingsolver’s use of Appalachian vernacular the “powerful instrument” AUGUST WILSON describes when discussing his use of black dialect? 3. In response to questions regarding the meaning of symbols and metaphors in her works, Kingsolver has said: That’s going to be different for every reader. I can’t bear the idea that every symbol I’ve created could be only one thing. That would be static and impersonal. I want it to mean whatever it means to you. (www. readinggroupguides.com/guides_P/pigs_ in_heaven2.asp#interview)

How might symbols be open to reader interpretation? Explore Kingsolver’s symbols and possible meanings for each, supporting your interpretations with rationales from your own life.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Study the issue of sanctioned hunts of nonpredatory species for population control in your area. Are such measures necessary? What factors may have contributed to the increased populations of these animals? How are these tactics portrayed in the novel? 2. Examine the way Kingsolver transforms Jewel Widener from “an empty vessel” to Lusa’s savior (70). Is this transformation convincing to you?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON KINGSOLVER AND HER WORK 1. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many Americans rushed out to buy bumper stickers with the slogan “We will not for-

4. Kingsolver claims political power is evident in novels that can “make us weep over the same events that might hardly give us pause if we read them in a newspaper” (“Jabberwocky” High Tide). Examine the work of a popular novelist who is not widely considered political and argue its inherent political nature in terms of Kingsolver’s deﬁ nition. 5. Compare the character of Ruth May in The Poisonwood Bible to that of the ghost child in TONI MORRISON’s Beloved. 6. Throughout her work, Kingsolver repeatedly questions the reliability of media in conveying world events and the accuracy of what comes to be known as history: “History is never much more than a mirror we can tilt to look at ourselves” (Kanner). Compare the political climate

Barbara Kingsolver 187

and events as described in Kingsolver’s novels to the portrayal of each in popular media. Discuss the factors that may contribute to inaccuracy in media coverage and the measures individuals may take to be better informed. 7. Dialogue is one of Kingsolver’s favored techniques for examining cultural differences. Examine the conversations between Jax and Anna Fourkiller (Pigs in Heaven), Leah Price and Anatole Ngemba (The Poisonwood Bible), and Taylor Greer and Estevan (The Bean Trees). Then choose two characters from separate works and construct a conversation in which they discuss the realities of poverty in America. WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Barbara Kingsolver Ofﬁcial Web site. Available online. URL: www.kingsolver.com/home/index.asp. Accessed May 20, 2009. Beattie, L. Elisabeth. “Barbara Kingsolver.” In Conversations with Kentucky Writers. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996. Bowdan, Janet. “Re-placing Ceremony: The Poetics of Barbara Kingsolver.” Southwestern American Literature 20 (Spring 1995): 13–19. DeMarr, Mary Jean. Barbara Kingsolver: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999. Epstein, Robin. “Barbara Kingsolver Interview.” Progressive, February 1996. Gergen, David. “Barbara Kingsolver: November 24, 1995.” Online NewsHour. Available online. URL: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/kingsolver.html. Accessed June 25, 2009. Kanner, Ellen. “Barbara Kingsolver Turns to Her Past to Understand the Present.” Available online.

URL: http://www.bookpage.com/9811bp/barbara_kingsolver.html. Accessed June 30, 2008. Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal Dreams. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. ———. The Bean Trees. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. ———. High Tide in Tucson. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. Homeland and Other Stories. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. ———. Pigs in Heaven. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. ———. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. ———. Prodigal Summer. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. Small Wonder. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. ———, Steven L. Hopp, and Camille Kingsolver. Animal, Vegetable, and Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. McMahon, Regan. “Barbara Kingsolver: An Army of One.” San Francisco Chronicle, 28 April 2002. Murrey, Loretta Martin. “The Loner and the Matriarchal Community in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven.” Southern Studies 5, no. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1994): 155–164. Perry, Donna. Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out: Interviews. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Rubinstein, Roberta. “The Mark of Africa.” World and I 14, no. 4 (April 1999): 254. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Barbara Kingsolver: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004.

Kathy Higgs-Coulthard

Maxine Hong Kingston (1940–

)

Readers ought not to expect reading always to be as effortless as watching television. (“Cultural Mis-reading by American Reviewers”)

“W

ho is Maxine Hong Kingston?” asked the critic John Leonard in his New York Times review of The Woman Warrior. “Nobody at Knopf seems to know,” he continues. “They have never laid eyes on her. She lives in Honolulu, nicely situated between the Occident and the Orient, with a husband and small son. She teaches English and creative writing. There is no one more qualiﬁed to teach English and creative writing” (78). Maxine Hong was born on October 27, 1940, in Stockton, California, to Tom Hong (who had renamed himself after Thomas Edison) and Chew Ying Lan (Brave Orchid). Maxine—whose family called her “Ting Ting”—was the eldest of six American-born children. Two previous children had died in China before her mother immigrated to the United States. Her father, a scholar and teacher in China, immigrated to America in 1924 and worked a series of jobs, including in a New York laundry that he started with friends, who later swindled him out of his share of the business. Kingston’s mother studied and practiced medicine in China before immigrating in 1939 to America, where she worked in the family laundry business, in agriculture, and in housekeeping. Maxine was named after a blond gambler who always seemed to win in the illegal gambling house that the Hongs managed in Stockton. One of her father’s main jobs at the gambling establishment was to “take the blame for the real owner” and be arrested (China

Men [CM] 242). He never did have a police record because he used multiple aliases, and, after all, “white demons can’t tell one Chinese name from another or one face from another” (CM 242). The Hong family later owned the New Port Laundry and lived in a tough neighborhood on the south side of Stockton. (Years later, Kingston’s mother and father still lived in the same area, despite their children’s urging them to move to a nicer neighborhood.) The children put in many long and grueling hours at the laundry, but it was also the place where Maxine especially, with her mother, neighbors, grandfathers, cousins, aunts, and uncles coming and going, learned to talk-story. She listened to stories and songs, “village ditties,” as she called them. “I never knew,” Kingston says, “until I got to college and was taking Asian Lit Class, that that was important poetry. I just thought it was my parents’ tales. . . . And then I thought later, oh, Tu Fu, and Li Po—this is important stuff” (Chin 70). Kingston was surrounded by creative and imaginative stories; however, the stories often “transmitted the cultural conception . . . that girls were inferior, a useless drain on family resources” (Simmons 7). Expressions such as “When ﬁshing for treasures in the ﬂood, be careful not to pull in girls” hurt and confused young Maxine (The Woman Warrior [WW] 52). She listened, but she also began writing at the age of nine: “The day was very clear to me,” she recalls. “I was in the fourth grade and all of a

188

Maxine Hong Kingston 189

sudden this poem started coming out of me. On and on I went, oblivious to everything, and when it was over I had written thirty verses” (Robertson 89). The school years were hard for young Maxine in many ways—she did not ﬁt in the social circles— but she did excel in academics. In 1955, she won a ﬁve-dollar prize from Girl Scout Magazine for her essay “I Am an American” (Simmons xi). She was awarded 11 scholarships to attend the University of California at Berkeley, where she began college as an engineering major (Simmons 10). But what she felt was her duty to help the American space program gave way to her love for reading and writing, and she soon became an English major (Yeh). She graduated with a B.A. in English in 1962. While at Berkeley, she met and married Earll Kingston, a fellow English major. A son, Joseph, was born in 1963. Both Maxine and Earll taught in the high school in Hayward, California, and were very active in the peace movement, joining with thousands of others in protest against the Vietnam War (Simmons 13). For Kingston, the war was a “special agony . . . as Americans went to kill Asians—‘gooks’—and as the media churned out images of strange small people in silly pajama-like garb, who, it was widely expressed, did not value human life in the same way that Americans did”; additionally painful for Kingston was that she had two brothers in the service during the Vietnam War (Simmons 11). Escalating violence and drug use caused the Kingstons to leave the area in 1967, but despite settling in Hawaii, they still found war all around them. Kingston credits a broken movie projector with helping her ﬁ nally get started in writing down the stories of her ancestors. On a vacation to the tiny island of Lanai, the Kingstons went to see a movie, but the projector broke down. Maxine had nothing else to do but sit down and begin writing an outline for what would become The Woman Warrior and China Men (Yeh). The Woman Warrior debuted in 1976 to dazzling critical praise—although Kingston was troubled by many of the stereotyping and exoticizing reviews—and won the National Book Critics Circle Award as best work of nonﬁction. It became

an immediate best seller, launching Kingston into nearly instant literary fame at the age of 36. Published at the height of the feminist movement, this book about the lives of women—many heroically strong—was embraced by feminists, academics, and general readers alike. Of it, John Leonard says, “Those rumbles you hear on the horizon are the big guns of autumn lining up, the howitzers of Vonnegut and Updike and Cheever and Mailer, the books that will be making loud noises for the next several months. But listen: this week a remarkable book has been quietly published; it is one of the best I’ve read in years” (77). It is interesting that The Woman Warrior—a memoir—begins with this line of warning from Kingston’s mother: “You must not tell anyone . . . what I am about to tell you” (3). And then Kingston proceeds to tell. Much of Kingston’s writing is about her journey from silence to voice, from her earliest years when she did not talk—“My silence was thickest—total—during the three years that I covered my school paintings with black paint”—to her difﬁculty with translating between two languages and two cultures to ﬁ nally tell her own talk-story (WW 165). Kingston deﬁ nes talk-story as “a tradition that goes back to prewriting time in China, where people verbally pass on history and mythology and genealogy and how-to stories and bedtime stories and legends. They pass them down through the generations, and it keeps the community together” (quoted in Simmons 6). Both The Woman Warrior and its sequel, China Men, draw on autobiographical and historical fact, but Kingston adds contemporized myth, legend, fantasy, and talk-story to create a genre that is difﬁcult to categorize. Noting that The Woman Warrior is subtitled Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, Kingston emphasizes the genre in the subtitle by saying, “After all, I am not writing history or sociology but a ‘memoir’ like Proust” (“Cultural Mis-readings” 102). And yet, when The Woman Warrior hit the market, the world took notice. It was a groundbreaking work, which Kingston describes as, “riding the border between ﬁction and nonﬁction” (Skandera-Trombley 35). She states:

190

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

I’m writing about real people and these real people have powerful imaginations. They have minds that make up ﬁctions constantly, and so if I was going to write a true biography or an autobiography I would have to take into consideration the stories that people tell. I tell the dreams that they have and then when I do that, that border becomes so wide that it contains ﬁction and nonﬁction and both going toward truth. (Skandera-Trombley 35)

The widening border served a practical purpose for Kingston as well. She states in a 2003 interview: The way that I wrote when my mother and father were both alive was very different than the way I write now. In Woman Warrior and China Men, I wrote their stories in such a way that I protected them [her parents] from being deported. Both of them were illegal aliens, and I wrote about their coming from China to Cuba to America. I made up a new genre that is a mix of reality and imagination, and I did that because I was thinking that if immigration authorities read my books they could not ﬁ nd evidence to deport my parents. (Alegre and Weich)

In 1977, Kingston became a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii at Honolulu. She returned from Hawaii in the mid-1980s to her alma mater, UC Berkeley, where she became a senior lecturer; today, she is an emeritus professor there “To best appreciate The Woman Warrior, you do need to read China Men,” Kingston advises (Lim 23). China Men (1980), the sequel to The Woman Warrior, was originally conceived by Kingston to be written alongside The Woman Warrior—not separated by gender: “I once meant for them to be one large book,” said Kingston. “But the women’s stories and the men’s stories parted into two volumes, naturally replicating history and geography: the women stayed in China and maintained communities; the men sailed off to Gold Mountain,

where they built bachelor Chinatowns” (Lim 24). As Kingston’s ﬁ rst book had, China Men received high praise, winning the National Book Award in 1981. Both books are based on Kingston’s life and the lives of her parents and ancestors—a collage of stories of the men and women, past and present, in Kingston’s life. Kingston’s ﬁ rst attempt at “straight” ﬁction was the novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), which won the PEN USA West Award for ﬁction. It tells the story of Wittman Ah Sing, a ﬁ fth-generation Chinese American and would-be playwright, and is set in San Francisco in the 1960s. Wittman, a Walt Whitman incarnate, wants to set a new standard for being American: “The common man has Chinese looks” (Tripmaster Monkey [TM] 34). With the creation and performance of his play, he is able to transform his anger at living in a racist and materialistic society into communal love and peace. In 1991, while returning home from her father’s funeral, Kingston learned that the hills of Oakland, California, were on ﬁ re and that her home was completely destroyed, along with the manuscript for her nearly completed book to be titled The Fourth Book of Peace. Rather than succumb to the loss, she recreated the lost ﬁction—a sequel to Tripmaster Monkey—alongside her own account of life after the ﬁ re, including her experiences teaching writing to local Vietnam veterans. The result is a melding of nonﬁction and ﬁction entitled The Fifth Book of Peace (2003), in which Wittman Ah Sing returns as a main character. In this book, Kingston advocates a spirit of nonviolence and peace in the global community. Kingston continues to be a visible writer and a visible peace activist. Her stories are often about men and women who are silenced—and Kingston feels an obligation to do the talking for them, to imagine what her ancestors might have done, or thought, or said. Kingston is forced to create her own scenarios, to ﬁ ll in the gaps. She says: “I’ll tell you what I suppose from your silences and few words, and you can tell me that I’m mistaken. You’ll just have to speak up with the real stories if I’ve got you wrong” (CM 15). Kingston was arrested

Maxine Hong Kingston 191

in March 2003—along with many other women, including her fellow authors A LICE WALKER and Terry Tempest Williams—while protesting the Iraq War in front of the White House in observance of International Women’s Day. She says of her vision for global peace: “I want to be able to manipulate reality as easily as I can manipulate ﬁction. Do we imagine the world? If we imagine characters, can we cause them to appear in the real world? What if I could strongly write peace, I could cause an end to war” (Seshachari). Kingston rides the borders and blurs the boundaries between the genres of ﬁction and nonﬁction, reality and imagination, and seems to meld the Chinese and American experiences—and the languages. She states, “My hands are writing English, but my mouth is speaking Chinese. Somehow I am able to write a language that captures the Chinese rhythms and tones and images, getting that power into English. I am working in some kind of fusion language” (Alegre and Weich). Part of this fusion, this melding, is the way Chinese myths have been “transmuted to America,” as Kingston says (Simmons 16). As culture evolves, so must the stories. “Stories and myths stay alive when they change like that,” she says. “That is being alive. But when they are frozen in one version, that’s when they die” (Skandera-Trombley 36). She adds, “Like the people who carry them across oceans, the myths become American” (Lim 24). These border crossings and transmuted myths have served Kingston in creating her own identity as a Chinese American. And the transmutation continues: On the one hand, Kingston’s books are about ugly conﬂ ict—cultural conﬂ ict, gender conﬂ ict, the conﬂ ict of being a hyphenated Chinese American in an often-hostile white America. But on the other hand, her books are also full of beauty: Riding the border between ﬁction and nonﬁction allows for beautiful prose. Although Kingston calls the language in The Woman Warrior “stilted and complicated . . . because I was trying to ﬁ nd a language for a very complicated story” (Lim 5), readers and critics alike most often ﬁ nd Kingston’s prose stunning, “a poem turned into a sword” (Leonard, “Deﬁance” 77).

The critic Maureen Sabine once claimed that Kingston has “secured a place in the American canon as the living author most frequently taught in U.S. universities” (4). Her works cross academic disciplines and are taught in many interdisciplinary courses: Asian studies, postmodernism, women’s and gender studies, family history, memoir, folklore, history, anthropology—the list goes on. Kingston notes that “China Men is listed in the Dewey Decimal system under California history” and adds, “My work is in so many categories that essentially it has not been categorized” (SkanderaTrombley 34). Among the many awards and honors she has received are the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature (1999) and the title National Living Treasure of Hawaii. In 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded Kingston a National Humanities Medal for inspiring “a new generation of writers to make their own unique voices and experiences heard” (“Famous Berkeley”).

“No Name Woman” (1976) “ ‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you’ ” (3). The opening line of “No Name Women,” the ﬁ rst chapter in the book The Woman Warrior, often anthologized as a stand-alone story, foretells the pattern that continues throughout the story: silencing and the ensuing attempts to ﬁ nd a voice for women, particularly the story’s narrator (young Kingston) and her nameless aunt. The haunting story, told as a cautionary tale by Kingston’s mother—“ ‘Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you’ ”—is about her father’s only sister, whose name is never mentioned because of the shame she causes the family when she becomes pregnant years after her husband left to seek his fortune in Gold Mountain (America) (5). Married as one of 17 brides in “hurry up weddings—to make sure that every young man who went ‘out on the road’ would responsibly come home”—she was to maintain the home and maintain the traditional ways

192 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

while her young husband was away. When the villagers discover the impossible pregnancy, they raid the house on the night the baby is to be born; the aunt gives birth in a pigsty, then drowns herself and her newborn baby in the well. The story of Kingston’s nameless aunt instructs her about being a Chinese woman, instruction that she must hold up against what she sees as “American-feminine” (11). She learns about the lowly status of women—that “to be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was a waste enough”; that “women in old China did not choose” (6)—and that being a daughter-in-law in China means that a woman’s in-laws could have “sold her, mortgaged her, stoned her” (8). She learns about “Chinese-feminine”: hair removal with a depilatory string, the abandoned practice of foot binding, loud talking, and walking pigeon-toed; however, she must view these in relationship to the American-feminine ideal—which for young Kingston felt quite the opposite. Kingston ﬁ nds confusion in feminine identity and in other aspects of the story as well. She needs more information to make sense of the story, but since her mother has “told [her] once and for all the useful parts” (6), and her father forbids any mention of the aunt’s name, Kingston is forced to read between the lines. She constructs her own story with what might have happened in an effort to make her aunt’s life “branch into [hers],” using a series of perhaps’s and might have beens: perhaps her aunt had a lover, or she might have been raped (8). With all the possibilities of what may have happened to her aunt, Kingston ﬁ nally recognizes, as Judith Melton notes, “that her aunt was no adulterer who brought destruction onto her family; she was an ordinary woman caught in the punishing beliefs of feudal China” (76). With her pregnancy, the nameless aunt has upset the Chinese tradition and the village structure— she has made a break in the “roundness” (13). She is punished by the villagers “for acting as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them” (13). Roundness is symbolic here of community and wholeness, where the sins of one could pull

down many. Community is more important, more necessary, than the individual. Signiﬁcant, too, is that the “real punishment was not the raid . . . but the family’s deliberately forgetting her”—in effect, silencing her—which Kingston ends by “devot[ing] pages to her” and telling the story (16). The telling serves as both an act of self-empowerment and an act of open rebellion against her mother’s admonishment.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What attitudes about feminine behavior are prevalent in this chapter? What does the narrator learn about the “proper” roles for women? In what way(s) does she rebel against those attitudes? 2. Research the practice of Chinese foot binding and read Ruth Fainlight’s poem “Flower Feet.” Think about foot binding in terms of creating helpless women and as a form of beauty. In what ways do women hurt themselves in today’s world for beauty’s sake? 3. The mother in the story tells cautionary tales, or warning tales—“a story to grow up on,” as Kingston says. What cautionary tales have you been told? Has reality differed from those stories? If so, how? 4. Read “No Name Woman” in conjunction with the chapter “White Tigers.” Explore the attitudes about motherhood in each story. 5. Read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and discuss Hester Prynne in connection with Kingston’s nameless aunt. In what ways are the two women similar?

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976) Throughout The Woman Warrior, Kingston searches the memories of her childhood growing up in Stockton, California, but she is haunted by China, a place where she has never been, which she knows only through the tales and stories—the talkstories—told by those around her, particularly her

Maxine Hong Kingston 193

mother. Confused about her Chinese-American identity, she asks members of her community: Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate the peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing up with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies? (6)

She gets little help in answering the question. Her father is often silent, and her mother is an unreliable storyteller. In the last chapter, Kingston accuses her mother: “You lie with your stories. You won’t tell me a story and then say, ‘This is a true story,’ or ‘This is just a story.’ I can’t tell the difference” (202). The Woman Warrior has ﬁve chapters, each one a story that can stand on its own (“No Name Woman” and “White Tigers” are often anthologized), and each one focusing on a particular woman whose story teaches young Kingston about her identity as a Chinese American. Many of the stories that Kingston tells are about women on the margins, marginalized in life and often completely silenced in history. From the stories that young Kingston hears, she learns that the repression of self is good for the community; thus, a conﬂ ict is precipitated between the suppression of the individual and the celebration of an individual’s story. Telling the story—often in open rebellion against demands not to tell—is an assertion of the individual, the capital I. In the ﬁ nal chapter, Kingston tells of her schooling and the inability to talk: “The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl” (166). It was easier to read aloud than to talk aloud, but young Kingston “could not understand ‘I’ ”—a genderless word, a letter with only three bold strokes, whereas the Chinese version had seven “intricate strokes” (166). Kingston points out that there is a “Chinese word for the female I—which is ‘slave’ ” (47). Her journey to ﬁ nd a voice is also a journey to ﬁ nd the capital I.

In a disturbing scene that goes on for seven pages, young Kingston tortures a quiet, timid Chinese girl in the bathroom at school in an effort to force her to speak. She pinches her cheeks, pulls her hair, screams at her, ridicules her, pleads with her: “ ‘I’ll let you go if you say just one word,’ I said. ‘You can say, ‘a’ or ‘the,’ and I’ll let you go. Come on. Please’ ” (179). She lashes out at this girl in a self-hating rage. She hears the stories of the worthlessness of girls, the powerlessness of growing up as a ChineseAmerican female, and says, “I am useless, one more girl who couldn’t be sold.” She wants to believe that “they only say, ‘When ﬁshing for treasures in the ﬂood, be careful not to pull in girls’ ” (52). “But,” she continues, “I watched such words come out of my own mother’s and father’s mouths. . . . And I had to get out of hating range” (52). Young Maxine feels confusion because her mother told her that she “would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught [her] the song of the warrior woman,” Fa Mu Lan, the legendary woman warrior who takes her aged father’s place as a soldier, and dressed as a man, leads armies (20). Kingston’s adaptation of the myth is mutilayered: Fa Mu Lan’s power is derived as much from the words carved on her back (the burdens of the entire Chinese population) as from the sword in her hand. She wins battles, leads armies, marries, gives birth to a son (all the while disguised as a man), avenges the Chinese population, and becomes a legend of “perfect ﬁ liality” (45). Kingston carries words on her back as well—chink and gook—and she imagines herself as an avenger: Her revenge will be the “reporting” (53). “The reporting,” she claims, “is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words” (53). Kingston, when talking about the importance of words, says in a 1996 interview, “One kind of example I have in mind is to take the word ‘swordwoman’ and to look at its similarity with ‘wordswoman’ to include the idea of the woman warrior taking on the power of words” (Meachen and Williams). Certainly Kingston is a “wordswoman.” In the ﬁ rst chapter of The Woman Warrior, Kingston’s

194 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

mother tells her the horriﬁc story of her pregnant aunt (No Name Woman), who is brutally attacked by Chinese villagers and punished for her sexual sin: “Don’t tell anyone you had an aunt,” her mother says. “Your father does not want to hear her name. She has never been born” (15). But Kingston rebels against the admonishon. She tells the story that she knows and speculates on the parts where her mother is silent. She tells of No Name Woman; she tells of smothered baby girls and young girls sold as slaves in China. Kingston tells the ugly stories, she tells the painful stories, and she reports the words that she carries as a burden on her back. As does Fa Mu Lan, whose heroic deeds are an assurance that she will escape her gender’s fate of invisibility and silencing, Kingston, through her own reporting, her own talk-story, her own act of deﬁance, her words, ﬁ nds her voice in her family, in her Chinese history, and in her own American history. In the chapter entitled “Shaman,” Kingston’s mother, Brave Orchid, a looming presence throughout the book, is seen as a strong, heroic woman scholar with “a room of her own,” who defeats ghosts, earns a medical degree, eats anything (in China, “big eaters win”), and delivers babies, but she is also a woman who may have killed baby girls (90). She tells young Kingston, “The midwife or a relative would take the back of a girl baby’s head in her hand and turn her face into the ashes” that had been left by the bedside. “It was very easy” (62). Again, Kingston is confronted with conﬂicting messages. The fourth chapter, “In the Western Palace,” tells of Brave Orchid’s sister, the timid Moon Orchid, and her visit to the United States to reunite with her husband after a 30-year separation. Living in the United States and practicing medicine, he now has a second wife and family and knows nothing of Moon Orchid’s visit. Brave Orchid insists that Moon Orchid “go to [her] husband’s house and demand [her] rights as First Wife,” plotting the different ways that her sister might dramatically surprise her husband. When they ﬁ nally meet outside his ofﬁce, her husband tells her she is like a character “in a book [he] had read long ago” (154). Moon Orchid is unable to assert herself. She cannot stand up to her bossy sister or her husband; she

is silenced, declared insane, and placed in a California state mental asylum. In the ﬁ nal pages, Kingston writes a story of reconciliation, a seamless blend of two stories between Kingston and her mother: “The beginning is hers, the ending, mine” (206). Kingston’s legendary hero, Ts’ai Yen, is a woman whose poetry changes the sounds of captivity into beautiful music, and “it translated well” (209).

For Discussion or Writing 1. In the chapter “White Tigers,” look at the way the narrator reacts to sexist ideas about women. How does she rebel against these ideas? In what ways does she subscribe to them? 2. We all may have words “carved on our backs”— Kingston says two of her words are chink and gook (53). Or we might carry stories or “words to grow up on” as part of us. What words might you have “carved on your back”? What stories do you carry with you? What do these words and stories tell you about the values of your culture or family? 3. In the ﬁ nal chapter, the narrator/young Kingston resorts to physical abuse, verbal taunts, bribery, and pleading in her attempts to make the girl speak. Why is she so cruel and so intent on forcing the girl to speak? What is Kingston saying, in a broader sense, about women’s being historically silenced? 4. “Those of us in the ﬁ rst American generations have had to ﬁgure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods ﬁts in solid America” (5). Consider this statement and the subtitle of the book, A Girlhood among Ghosts. What do the ghosts symbolize?

China Men (1980) Originally conceived as a part of “one huge book” with The Woman Warrior, China Men was instead published as a sequel in 1980. With China Men, Kingston moves away from the resentment that often ﬁ lled The Warrior Woman and toward a voice of reconciliation. Unlike her ﬁ rst book, which has

Maxine Hong Kingston 195

“ﬁve interlocking pieces, each one like a short story or essay,” and myths seamlessly integrated into the stories, China Men comprises 18 chapters, with the myths as separate entries—the pattern of “a myth, and then a modern story, and then a myth,” symbolizing that the myths were not as integrated into the lives of the men (Lim 5). Kingston claims that while the women were caught up in the old myths, the men thought, “Why not be rid of the mythical, and be a free American?” (Lim 24). The stories—most of which take place on American soil—are about Kingston’s father and many male relatives and sojourners: grandfathers, uncles, cousins, brother. The stories are particular to blood relatives, but they also tell the tale of the collective male heritage of Chinese Americans: workers in laundries, laborers in sugarcane ﬁelds, builders of railroads, and makers of America. A chapter called “The Making of More Americans” is a reference to Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, an allusion that “grounds [Kingston’s] work in the American tradition” (Lim 5). A prevalent theme in China Men is the search for the American dream, which is symbolized in the Chinese name for America— Gold Mountain—a name derived from the worldwide gold rush to California. A major part of the American dream was to “get rich quick” and return to the homeland, but many Chinese went through successive generations in the United States, from sojourner to settler to citizen (Chua 61). Other references to the Hong family’s becoming American are artfully arranged throughout China Men. When relatives go to Stockton to visit Kingston’s family, they are taken to the place where “two of our four grandfathers had had their house, stable, and garden” (171). The relatives take pictures and say, “This is ancestral ground, their eyes ﬁ lling with tears over a vacant lot in Stockton” (171). Ancestral ground establishes a claim to the land, a spiritual rootedness that reveals a sacred hold on the ground—a claim to being an American that was hard fought and hard won. A particularly poignant chapter is “The Brother in Vietnam.” When Kingston’s brother receives a Secret Security clearance while in the military, “The government was certifying that the family was really American, not precari-

ously American but super-American, extraordinarily secure—Q Clearance Americans” (299). As in Kingston’s ﬁ rst book, silencing is a consistent theme in China Men (which makes the granting of the secret security clearance in the ﬁ nal chapter all the more meaningful). A grandfather is told by his white employer to be silent as he clears land in Hawaii: “Shut up. Go work. China-man, go work. You stay go work. Shut up” (101). Other grandfathers and fathers—who worked in American ﬁelds and on American railroads—were symbolically silenced, at least until the last few decades, by their absence from American history texts. And much as in The Woman Warrior, when Kingston lacks knowledge of the story because of silences, her only resort is to guess. Her father’s story of arrival in the United States takes on several different versions; after telling how her father was smuggled from China in a small crate in the ship’s cargo hold, she states: “Of course, my father could not have come that way. He came a legal way, something like this” (53), and Kingston then proceeds to tell the story of her father’s stay on Angel Island and his subsequent interrogation before being allowed to enter the country. In a 1996 interview, Kingston relates that when she teaches China Men, her students always think the real version is the legal entrance through Angel Island. But in recent years, her mother has told her that her father did indeed come as a stowaway, hidden in a box, and “he did it three times” (Meachen and William). While The Woman Warrior is a story of the struggle to ﬁ nd voice, the I, Kingston claims that with China Men, “ ‘I’ achieved the adult narrator’s voice. The ‘I’ becomes more whole [than in The Woman Warrior] because of the ability to appreciate the other gender” (Lim 23). Kingston’s ﬁ rstperson voice becomes more distant as she moves throughout the book, and she becomes “a listener by the end” (Chin 59).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read the ﬁ rst chapter, “On Discovery,” as a cautionary tale for men, much as the ﬁ rst chapter of The Woman Warrior is a cautionary tale for women. What is Kingston’s warning?

196 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

2. Why does Kingston include “The Laws” in the center of China Men? Look at the language of the chapter. How is it different from Kingston’s prose in other chapters? Why? What effect does this have? 3. How was Kingston’s father’s life changed with the arrival of his wife in New York? What was his life like before her arrival? What did her arrival change? 4. Why does Kingston end the book with the chapter “My Brother in Vietnam”? How is this title particularly signiﬁcant in terms of being an American?

Tripmaster Monkey (1989) When Maxine Hong Kingston set out to write her ﬁ rst novel, she did so in part to answer the reviewers and critics of The Woman Warrior, who often characterized her portrayal of Chinese women as stereotypically exotic and mysterious and questioned whether Kingston was writing about the “typical” Chinese-American experience. With Tripmaster Monkey, Kingston reveals a protagonist who is anything but stereotypically exotic and typically Chinese American. He is, in fact, American. Michelle Cliff observes: “To underline the Americanness of Wittman, Hong Kingston has named him for the most American of American poets.” She continues, “To play with his name is irresistible. Wittman Ah Sing the body electric. Wittman, Ah hear America Singing” (Cliff 11). The Kingston scholar Diane Simmons tells us that “from her earliest work, Kingston has taken it as her mission to intervene in the process by which the identity of the powerless is invented by the stories of the powerful” (140). In Tripmaster Monkey, Kingston sets the ﬁctional Wittman Ah Sing on a journey to “construct an identity by integrating his own dual inheritance,” while ﬁghting off cultural stereotypes (Simmons 140). Tripmaster Monkey is a book with “American rhythms . . . with slangy American, present day language” (Chin 71). Kingston shows the reader over and over again that Wittman is indeed not Chinese American, but American. Wittman

feels he has very little in common with the “freshoff-the-boat” Chinese immigrants, whom he rather derisively labels as F.O.B.s. He reminds us that he is a ﬁfth-generation native Californian, whose greatgreat-grandfather “came on the Nootka, as ancestral as the Mayﬂower” (41). Much as she does in China Men, Kingston again reminds us that there are other stories, less often told and heard, of the making of America. The people who traveled to the United States on the Nootka helped build America in an important and essential way, just as those who arrived on the Mayﬂower did. Wittman Ah Sing is a year out of college as a liberal arts major in 1960s San Francisco. He is a writer, a reader, a beatnik, a hippie, a Walt Whitman incarnate, a drifter, a draft dodger, and a young man who is ﬁ red from his job in the toy section of a large department store after setting up a pornographic scene of a Barbie bride and the organ grinder’s monkey doll: “A green razzberry to you, World,” he says as he walks away (65). He goes on unemployment, falls into an impromptu wedding ceremony ofﬁciated by a draft-dodging mail-order minister, and works on the Great American Play. Marilyn Chin calls Wittman a “precocious and unhappy and alienated anti-hero, wading through the shit of American life” (60). But Wittman is also struggling against alienation; he is working toward integration in his quest for identity. The novel opens with Wittman’s contemplating suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge: “Anybody serious about killing himself does the big leap off the Golden Gate” (3). This moment of isolation and alienation is only temporary for Wittman, for not long after, Wittman, the “fool for literature,” is reading Rilke aloud to passengers on a crosstown bus, mile after mile, striving for integration, trying to be part of a community (10). As in all of Kingston’s writings, the community versus the individual is an ongoing theme. The narrator of Tripmaster Monkey (Kingston claims the narrator is female, although she is never directly noted as such) states, “Anybody American who really imagines Asia feels the loneliness of the U.S.A. and suffers from the distances human beings are apart” (141). The vision of community is “a Chinese thing,” says Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston 197

(Moyers). Wittman, much like his namesake Walt Whitman, is looking for a communal village in a land where individualism is held in highest esteem. Ultimately, Wittman takes the vision of an integrated community to the stage as he puts on his play at a theater in Chinatown, a play based on the epic Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms, “required reading for every literate Chinese child,” says John Leonard, who continues, “Chinese have been staging one version or another of it in theaters and opera houses in America ever since the railroad and Gold Rush days” (“Of Thee” 771). And Wittman is staging a version of his own. Wittman thinks, “whaddayaknow, I’ve written one of those plays that leave room for actors to do improv, a process as ancient as Chinese opera and as far-out as the theater of spontaneity that was happening in streets and parks” (141). His play will be the joining of cultures, ideas, and people. As Derek Parker Royal suggests, “Wittman’s theater is one of multiple possibility,” refusing to deﬁ ne itself in terms of “any static or categorical representations” (142). Wittman is trying to change the world, “solv[ing] the world’s problems through fun and theater. And with laughter,” says Kingston. She continues, “The reason this is all set in the Sixties is that the monkey was here in the Sixties. Abby Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, you know? They were monkey spirits, trying to change the world with costumes and street theater . . . and bring[ing] chaos to established order” (Chin). Wittman is modeled on the trickster monkey, “one of the most beloved anti-authority ﬁgures of Chinese literature” (Simmons 143). As monkey, Wittman can challenge materialism, consumerism, corporate America, and military authority. Bharati Mukherjee describes Wittman as “a werewolf, a shape-changer. He is the Monkey of Chinese legends, a tripper through seventy-two reincarnations, a savior, a discoverer of Inner Truth” (279). He is also playful and full of fun. Wittman’s ancestors immigrated to California not for the gold rush (which drew many Chinese to “Gold Mountain”); instead, they “came to play”— his mother was a Flora Dora showgirl named Ruby Long Legs, and his father, Zeppelin Ah Sing, was a stagehand and, later, an onstage emcee (250).

Kingston states in an interview that she wanted Chinese Americans to have a reason to immigrate to America other than gold—a wonderful, honorable reason “like the Pilgrims, like religious freedom” (Moyers). “We came for fun, to put on shows,” she says. It is part of the monkey spirit. While Wittman’s monkey spirit is playful, it also transforms into a reader. “Wittman’s mind is like an English major’s mind,” says Kingston (Moyers). She says that she imagined herself as part of a community of “writers both living and dead,” and Wittman is very much a part of that community as well (Sabine 6). Kingston asks Wittman to discover what he is going to do with all that knowledge—all the knowledge that is gained from a liberal arts degree and a life as a reader. “I want to see,” states Kingston, “whether Wittman can take all this wonderful literature and make the world a better place” (Chin 60). Kingston and Wittman know that America is multilayered, multilingual, culture clashing, and certainly not easily divided into neat categories. “He’s tripped out,” as Caroline Ong sees him, “not on any of the mind and reality-altering drugs abundant in San Francisco in the 1960s, but on words and language, ﬁctions and histories, handed down from his cultural past”—from a Chinese and an American and a global past (285). And Wittman’s ﬁ nal trip (at least for now) is to collect everyone he knows together to perform his version of the Chinese stories of heroism and community, a trip that surely draws counterculture community together.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Maxine Hong Kingston claims, “I loved being a young person in the ’60s. There were many, many wonderful adventures” (Seshachari). Do a cultural study of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the Beat generation in particular. What were the times like? What are some of Wittman’s traits and beliefs that might characterize him as a beatnik? 2. Read Allen Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California.” Note Walt Whitman’s presence in the poem. What was Ginsberg protesting? What did he ﬁ nd abhorrent? How does this relate to the situation of Wittman Ah Sing?

198 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

3. Do you like Wittman Ah Sing? Do you ﬁ nd him offensive? Wittman claims that he wants to offend. Why do you think he wants to be offensive? What purpose does it serve? 4. Kingston tells us that the subtitle His Fake Book is a jazz term. It is “a book of tunes that the jazz musicians improvise off” (Skandera-Trombley 41). Think about the subtitle in regard to Wittman. Why do you think Kingston would use this subtitle?

“Restaurant” (1981) Throughout her life, most of Kingston’s writing has been dedicated to prose rather than poetry, though much of her prose is certainly infused with poetic language. In her short book To Be the Poet (2002), Kingston writes, “I want poetry to be the way it used to come when I was a child. The Muse ﬂew; I ﬂew. Let me return to that child being, and rest from prose,” which causes her to labor, “draft after draft like a draft horse” (4, 10). Like much of her prose work, Kingston’s poem “Restaurant” is about people on the margins of society—in this case, restaurant workers. As do the Chinese railroad workers in China Men, who labor under horrible conditions and long hours—yet are nowhere to be found in the photographs taken at the momentous driving of the symbolic Golden Spike at the joining of the transcontinental railroad in 1869—the workers in “Restaurant” labor unseen and unnoticed. The Asian studies scholar Garrett Hongo states that he, like many Asian Americans, “was forever ﬁghting the stereotype, the dehumanized image of Asians in America, the invisibility of our historical, social, and cultural presence in this country” (xxi). The workers in Kingston’s poem, who have a variety of backgrounds—all of them on the margins—seem destined to the same fate of invisibility. The poem opens with a sickly image: “The main cook lies sick on a banquette, and his assistant / has cut his thumb,” and the litany of names of “other” and “outsider” begin: “China,” “Mulattos,” “Black so called musician,” “Broads,” “Whites,” “porters,

who speak French, from the Ivory Coast”—all outsiders who label and are labeled as “other.” The workers are subject to gender barriers, language barriers, and cultural barriers within the busy underground restaurant. They are nameless workers who are not seen and are too busy working to “see” themselves. The speaker states, “In this basement, / I lose my size. I am a bent-over / child, Gretel or Jill.” She becomes small, even more unseen and unnoticed and unreal, presenting “an image of stunted growth and a nascent imaginative self hopelessly grounded by social constrictions” (Colanzi 66). Yet Kingston inserts a possible playful feeling here as well. Gretel and Jill, characters from fairy tale and nursery rhyme, survive traumatic events through cunning and play. Likewise, the nameless workers will survive as well: They will take a “nibble of a slab of chocolate as big as a table.” They will rise “out of the sidewalk into the night,” albeit to “wonder at the clean diners behind glass in candlelight.” Kingston creates an underground world where workers labor until the early-morning hours and go up to an outside world where they are nonparticipants. They can only look at the privileged from behind the glass.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which speaks of the beauty of hard work. Can we read Kingston’s poem as a poem about the value of work? 2. Read Langston Hughes’s poem “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria.” Think about the many people who work behind the scenes in less desirable jobs. How is this poem similar to Kingston’s?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON KINGSTON AND HER WORK 1. Research the role of the trickster in Native American culture. How does this trickster compare to a Chinese trickster as portrayed in Kingston’s work?

Maxine Hong Kingston 199

2. How would you deﬁ ne the American dream? What is the American dream for Kingston? For her ancestors? What are the problems for Kingston in ﬁ nding it? For her ancestors? How does Kingston’s American dream differ from yours? What inﬂuences have shaped the concept of the American dream? 3. Kingston has been chastised by some critics for falsifying Chinese history and distorting traditional myths and legends. What purpose does this distortion serve for Kingston? Why does she want to revision history? Do you think Kingston’s critics are correct in chastising Kingston? How do you feel about Kingston’s changing the myths? WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Alegre, Meil, and Dave Weich. “Author Interviews: Maxine Hong Kingston after the Fire.” Available online. URL: www.powells.com/authors/kingston.html. Accessed July 1, 2006. Chin, Marilyn. “A Melus Interview: Maxine Hong Kingston.” Melus 16, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 57–74. Chu, Patricia P. “Tripmaster Monkey, Frank Chin, and the Chinese Heroic Tradition.” In Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Chua, Chen Lok. “Two Chinese Versions of the American Dream: The Gold Mountain in Lin Yutang and Maxine Hong Kingston.” Melus 8, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 61–70. Cliff, Michelle. “The Making of Americans: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Cross-Over Dreams.” Village Voice Literary Supplement 74 (May 1989): 11–13. Colanzi, Rita. “From Reviews to Ethnography of Restaurants: The Culture of Food in the Writing and Literature Class.” EAPSU Online Fall 2004: 47–86. Available online. URL: www.ship.edu/~kmlong/ eapsu/vol1.pdf. Accessed August 1, 2006. Fainlight, Ruth. “Flower Feet.” Available online. URL: http://amethystgroup.tripod.com. Accessed August 1, 2006. “Famous Berkeley Alumni.” U.C. Berkeley Online Tour. Available online. URL: www.berkeley.edu/

tour/students/famous_alumni.html. Accessed July 1, 2006. Frankel, Hans H. Translation of “Ballad of Mulan.” Available online. URL: www.geocities.com/ Hollywood/5082/mulanpoem.html. Accessed July 1, 2006. Hongo, Garrett Kaoru. The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America. New York: Anchor Books, 1993. Hughes, Langston. “Advertisement for the WaldorfAstoria.” Available online. URL: www.poemhunter. com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6691&poem=32575. Accessed August 1, 2006. Kingston, Maxine Hong. China Men. New York: Knopf, 1980. ———. “Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers.” In Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities, edited by Guy Amirthanayagam, 55–65. London: Macmillan, 1982. ———. The Fifth Book of Peace. New York: Knopf, 2003. ———. To Be the Poet. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. New York: Knopf, 1989. ———. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1976. Leonard John. “In Deﬁance of 2 Worlds.” Review of The Woman Warrior. Originally published in New York Times, 17 September 1976, p. C21. Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, edited by Laura E. Skandera-Trombley, 77–78. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. ———. “Of Thee Ah Sing.” Nation, 5 June 1989, pp. 768–772. Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin, ed. Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1991. Madsen, Deborah. Maxine Hong Kingston. Detroit: Manly/Gale, 2000. “Maxine Hong Kingston Bibliography.” Internet School Library Media Center. Available online. URL: http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/kingstonbib.htm. Accessed July 20, 2006. Meachen, Clive, and Dominic Williams. “Taking Tea with Maxine Hong Kingston.” ManuScript 1, no. 3 (Winter 1996–1997). Available online. URL:

200

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

www.art.man.ac.uk/english/manuscript/backiss/ content/takingtea.html. Accessed July 20, 2006. Moyers, Bill. A World of Ideas with Bill Moyers: The Stories of Maxine Hong Kingston. PBS Video, 1990. Mukherjee, Bharati. “Wittman at the Golden Gate.” Review of Tripmaster Monkey. Originally published in Washington Post, 16 April 1989, p. X1. Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, edited by Laura E. Skandera-Trombley, 279–281. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Ong, Caroline. “Demons and Warriors.” Review of Tripmaster Monkey. Originally published in Times (London) Literary Supplement, 15 September 1989, p. 998. Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, edited by Laura E. Skandera-Trombley, 285–287. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Piercy, Marge. “To Be of Use.” Available online. URL: www.northnode.org/poem.htm. Accessed August 1, 2006. Reuben, Paul P. “Chapter 10: Maxine Hong Kingston (1940– ).” PAL: Perspectives in American Literature. Available online. URL: www.csustan. edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/kingston.html. Accessed July 20, 2006. Robertson, Nan. “ ‘Ghosts’ of Girlhood Lift Obscure Book to Peak of Acclaim.” Review of The Woman Warrior. Originally published in New York Times, 12 February 1977. Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, edited by Laura E. Skandera-Trombley, 88–91. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.

Royal, Derek Parker. “Literary Genre as Ethnic Resistance in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.” Melus 29 (Summer 2004): 141–156. Sabine, Maureen Alice. Maxine Hong Kingston’s Broken Book of Life: An Intertextual Study of The Woman Warrior and China Men. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004. Seshachari, Neila C. “Reinventing Peace: Conversations with Tripmaster Maxine Hong Kingston.” Weber Studies 12, no. 1 (Winter 1995). Simmons, Diane. Maxine Hong Kingston. Twayne’s United States Authors Series, edited by Frank Day. New York: Twayne, 1999. Skandera-Trombley, Laura E. “A Conversation with Maxine Hong Kingston.” In Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. VG: Artist Biography: Kingston, Maxine Hong. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/ vg/Bios/entries/kingston_maxine_hong.html. Accessed June 25, 2009. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Yeh, Emerald. “Maxine Hong Kingston.” Asian Paciﬁc Fund Gala, 2002. Available online. URL: www. asianpaciﬁcfund.org/awards/bio_kingston.shtml. Accessed July 1, 2006.

Susan Andersen

Yusef Komunyakaa (1947–

)

Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It’s a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault. (“Notations in Blue”)

usef Komunyakaa was born Willie James Brown, Jr., in 1947 in Bogalusa, Louisiana, the oldest of ﬁve children. The son of a carpenter and a mother who encouraged her children to learn as much as they could, he has commented on the inﬂuence of a set of encyclopedias his mother bought for them. Reading, listening to a small brown box radio, Komunyakaa gradually expanded his ideology to include not only the Civil Rights Movement taking place around him, but a widening world of cultural inﬂuences. He says that the ﬁ rst book he read entirely was the King James Bible. According to Susan Conley, “He cannot underestimate its effect on his own writing: ‘The hypnotic Biblical cadence brought me close to the texture of language, to the importance of music and metaphor’” (www. ploughshares.org). When he was 16, Komunyakaa discovered James Baldwin’s essay collection Nobody Knows My Name and decided to become a writer. He graduated from Bogalusa’s Central High School in 1965, reading at the ceremony a poem he had written. From 1965 to 1968, Komunyakaa served a tour of duty in Vietnam as an information specialist, editing a military newspaper called the Southern Cross. He also saw combat and for his service in Vietnam he won the bronze star. After his tour of duty, Komunyakaa enrolled at the University of Colorado with a double major in English and sociology. He began writing poetry in 1973 and received his bachelor’s degree magna cum

laude in 1975. He has since published more than a dozen books, most of them collections of poetry. His ﬁ rst chapbook of poems, Dedications & Other Darkhorses, was published in 1977, followed by a second chapbook, Lost in the Bonewheel Factory, in 1979. During this time, Komunyakaa earned an M.A. from Colorado State University (1978) and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine. He also solidiﬁed his desire to make writing poetry his life’s work. Upon receiving his second graduate degree in 1980, Komunyakaa joined the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, where he felt he could hone his poetic voice. For an artist, he believes, “a sort of unearthing has to take place; sometimes one has to remove layers of facades and superﬁcialities. The writer has to get down to the guts of the thing and rediscover the basic timbre of his or her existence.” The result of these further efforts to polish his art was Copacetic (1984), his ﬁrst commercially published book. A collection of poems that demonstrated his incorporation of jazz inﬂuences and everyday speech, Copacetic established the voice that would eventually lead critics to pair Komunyakaa with the playwright AUGUST WILSON for his skill in capturing the vernacular. His use of jazz—a constant in his poems—leads the critic Keith Leonard to observe that for Komunyakaa, jazz is not so much “an exclusively black discursive practice available only to the black artist who is dedicated to deﬁning blackness against racism” as

201

202

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

“a process of self-deﬁnition,” assisting in framing the uniqueness of the individual experience: Neither exclusively ethnic cultural self-deﬁ nition nor an erasure of difference, improvisation in Komunyakaa’s verse is a postmodern introspective practice that rewrites the social discourses that create and justify exclusion, including but not limited to racism, making it the deﬁ ning activity of the mind. Improvisation therefore becomes the deﬁ ning process of all human identity. (826)

After teaching brieﬂy at a number of universities, Komunyakaa moved to New Orleans in 1984. There he at ﬁ rst became an artist in residence in the public schools, working with ﬁ fth graders to explore their creativity. While teaching at the University of New Orleans in 1985, he met and married the Australian novelist and short story writer Mandy Sayer. During the early 1980s, having reﬂected on his Vietnam experiences for more than a decade, Komunyakaa began to write the poems that would give him his greatest fame. He followed Copacetic with I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. In a 1997 editor’s note in Ploughshares, Susan Conley states that Apologize is the book in which Komunyakaa begins to “to tap into the violence of Vietnam” with such poems as “Unnatural State of the Unicorn,” containing the lines “I am a man. I’ve scuffed / in mudholes, broken teeth in a grinning skull / like the moon behind bars” (www.pshares.org). That same year he followed Apologize with Toys in a Field (1986), a limited-edition chapbook in which several of his Vietnam poems appeared. When he began to write about the war, Komunyakaa later told the New York Times, “It was as if I had uncapped some hidden place in me. Poem after poem came spilling out.” According to the poet, he had not deliberately thought about creating poems based on his Vietnam experiences but must have been doing so unconsciously for many years. His next collection, Dien Cai Dau (1988), would explore his memories of Vietnam even more fully.

The title of the work means “crazy” in Vietnamese and is the name given by locals to American soldiers ﬁghting in Vietnam. It won the Dark Room Poetry Prize and has been cited by luminaries such as Poet Laureate Robert Hass for its clariﬁed pictures of the war. When the collection appeared, his fellow poet William Matthews declared: “The best writing we’ve had from the long war in Vietnam has been prose so far. Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau changes that.” Indeed, Komunyakaa has become almost systemically linked with poems about the Vietnam soldier’s experience, including for the ﬁ rst time the experiences of black soldiers. Readers who know little about the totality of his work often associate him with the frequently anthologized “Facing It,” the concluding poem of Dien Cai Dau. Memories of his experiences in Vietnam still fuel Komunyakaa’s creative imagination more than 20 years after the publication of Dien Cai Dau, as a selection from Warhorses (2008), his 12th poetry collection, testiﬁes. The unnamed poem is from the ﬁ nal section of the work “Autobiography of My Alter Ego.” Its speaker is a young man who goes “off to college / with colors & songs in my head. . . . Back then, my whole brain / was a swarm. A hemorrhage / of words & colors. I wanted everything / at once. I wanted to see / & hear everything. I wanted to be / everywhere” (53). But a part of “everywhere” he does not want to be intrudes on his world soon enough: “When my draft notice arrives / I was twenty, with apparitions / of Vietnam on the six o’clock news,” the speaker conﬁdes. Taking the “unopened envelope” to a bar his father owns, he places it on the bar for his father to open. When the letter’s contents are made clear, his father simply calls, “Drinks are on the house / everybody” (54). Not having served in his generation’s war—World War II—the father appears proud for his son to go to Vietnam: “He was now gung ho” (55). The older man does not want “white feathers,” the symbol of cowardice in wartime, “to fall from the sky / onto his doorsteps” (55). For him, his son’s defection would be unthinkable. As for the speaker himself, ironically the poem does not offer even a suggestion of his reaction to

Yusef Komunyakaa 203

the news the letter gives him. The reader is left to puzzle over the speaker’s feelings, which perhaps lie somewhere between those his father expresses and others we hear when he arrives home to show the letter to his mother. For the women in the speaker’s life, it is “another story” from the father’s reaction (54). His mother, whom he has never heard utter a curse word before, says, “Those bastards / sent you their goddamn death letter” and that night begins a long vigil, staring at the mailbox for the second letter she fears, the one eventually announcing his death in battle (54–55). Roberta, evidently an elderly friend, says, “You go upstairs / & start packing your clothes. / You’re my boy, / & you’re going to Canada. / I’m not going to stand here / & let them bring you back dead / in a steel box. My forefathers / ran off to Canada, / & now you’re on your way too” (55). She asserts that Canada, the ultimate goal of many runaway Southern slaves ﬂeeing to the North, can once again provide protection, as it in fact did during the war in Vietnam, when crossing the border was many young men’s means of avoiding the draft. Only a poet with Komunyakaa’s skill with powerful imagery and his insight into the destructive evils of war could create this evocative piece. February in Sydney (1989), the work following Dien Cai Dau, continues to explore Komunyakaa’s fascination with jazz, combining it with an interest in Australian culture, particularly that of the Aborigine people. The poet has published more than a dozen books, including Magic City (1992), a poetry collection focusing on his childhood and New Orleans, and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (1993), for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize and a $50,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Of this volume, the critic Linda Wagner-Martin observes: “The violence of war, the pain of identifying with the Vietnamese, and the anguish of returning to the States ha[s] seldom been so eloquently and hauntingly expressed” as it is by Komunyakaa (www.cengage.com). Notably, he was one of three African Americans to have won the Pulitzer, which had previously been awarded to Gwendolyn Brooks (1950) and to R ITA DOVE (1987). According to the critic Trudier Harris,

Komunyakaa’s receiving the prize not only “elevated his reputation [but] spurred critical and teaching interest in his poetry” (http://www.answers.com). His work became impossible to ignore. After he received the Pulitzer Prize, Komunyakaa’s talents became increasingly acknowledged. By 1994 the poet had won two creative writing fellowships, from the National Endowment for the Arts and the San Francisco Poetry Center Award, and had been named the Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University. Subsequent collections include Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a ﬁ nalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 1975–1999 (2001); Taboo (2004); and Warhorses: Poems (2008). A work in progress, “Requiem,” demonstrates Komunyakaa’s inclination to address current cultural happenings; dedicated to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated his beloved New Orleans in 2005, the poem begins: So, when the strong unholy high winds whiplashed over the sold-off marshlands eaten back to a sigh of saltwater, the Crescent City was already shook down to her pilings, her ﬂoating ribs, her spleen & backbone, left trembling in her Old World facades & postmodern lethargy, lost to waterlogged memories & quitclaim deeds exposed for all eyes, damnable gaze & lamentation—plumb line & heartthrob, ballast & watertable— already the last ghost song of the Choctaw & the Chickasaw was long gone, no more than a drunken curse among the oak & sweet gum leaves, a tally of broken treaties & absences echoing cries of birds over the barrier islands inherited by the remittance man, scalawag & King Cotton . . .

In this latest work, Komunyakaa explores one of the issues he feels are overlooked too often in American

204

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

cultural deliberations—class: “The Katrina situation underlined a problem that we Americans attempt to deny or erase with silence: We talk about race and [W. E. B.] DuBois’ infamous color line, but seldom do we discuss problems of class in America” (Marshall). For Komunyakaa, no cultural issue—however close to the bone it rubs—is immune to poetic investigation. Komunyakaa’s prose is collected in Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). With J. A. Sascha Feinstein, he coedited The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991), which the pair followed ﬁve years later with The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology, Volume 2 (1996). As a cotranslator, he worked with Martha Collins to produce The Insomnia of Fire by Nguyen Quang Thieu (1995). Komunyakaa also served with David Lehman as coeditor for The Best of American Poetry (2003). He has written dramatic works, as well, including Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (2006). In addition to editing the journal Gumbo: A Magazine for the Arts (1976–79), Komunyakaa has published work in numerous periodicals, including Black American Literature Forum, Callaloo, Beloit Poetry Journal, Chameleon, the Paris Review, Free Lance, Poetry Now, and African American Review. A number of the poet’s musical compositions, both those performed live and those recorded, include Slip Knot (2003), a libretto written in collaboration with the composer T. J. Anderson and the historian T. H. Breen. Created at the behest of Northwestern University, where it was ﬁrst performed, the work explores the true story of a Massachusetts slave falsely accused of raping a white woman and ﬁnally executed. Asked how his theory of composing music compares to that of writing poetry, Komunyakaa says that his songs are much more than poems set to music: “I wanted to write a different kind of lyric, with elements of imagery and surprise, the same as a poem. I didn’t want to have the lyric be cliché-driven, which is the situation with most songs. I also utilized rhyme and rhyme-approximations—that’s my other distinction between writing songs and poems” (www.poets.org). Although his lyrics of course include many of the powerful poetic devices and images that mark his poems,

Komunyakaa has said that when he composes for the musical line, he aims to leave the composers of the music free to improvise as their imaginations see ﬁt, giving them “the freedom to be inventive. . . . I want to ﬁ nd an elastic structure, to pull it this way and that, the same way one does with a poem, to give the composer some freedom. Nothing should be ironclad” (www.poets.org). Komunyakaa believes strongly in the power of art to mitigate the negative forces and strains of culture, and his various creative genres speak to that impulse. Komunyakaa’s many additional honors include the William Faulkner Prize from the Université de Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1999 he was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, an honor he shares with poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and A DRIENNE R ICH. Besides teaching at the University of New Orleans, he has been on the faculty at Indiana University and the University of California, Berkeley and in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. In 2008 the Academy of American Poets and the National Council of Teachers of English selected him as one of our most notable American poets, publishing lesson plans for teachers on their Web site (“Get Ready for Poem in Your Pocket Day”). Currently Komunyakaa lives in New York City, where he is Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University’s graduate creative writing program. Critics encountering Komunyakaa’s inventive, wide-ranging poetic style have frequently been at a loss about which literary movement his work reﬂects. They have variously compared him to “Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, A MIRI BAR AK A (Leroi Jones), and William Carlos Williams. The author has acknowledged that his work has been inﬂuenced by these poets as well as by Melvin Tolson, Sterling Brown, Helen Johnson, Margaret Walker, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay,” yet Komunyakaa’s work escapes easy categorization (Ashford). Writing in the New York Times, Bruce Weber observes that

Yusef Komunyakaa 205

Komunyakaa is “a Wordsworthian type [of poet] whose worldly, philosophic mind might be stirred by something as homely and personal as a walk in a ﬁeld of daffodils. His poems, many of which are built on ﬁercely autobiographical details—about his stint in Vietnam, about his childhood—deal with the stains that experience leaves on a life, and they are often achingly suggestive without resolution” (B1). The lack of resolution for the poetic situations that are Komunyakaa’s subject matter greatly accounts for the complexity and staying power his audience has come to expect in his writing. After the publication of Neon Vernacular, the critic Diann Blakely Shoaf observed in the Bloomsbury Review: “The short-lined poem, a staple of the Deep Image movement, has seemed stale and tiresome in recent years, as too often it has been shaped by poets who equate the line with a unit of syntax. Komunyakaa mostly avoids this pitfall, in part because of his sensitive and well-tuned ear, in part because he knows that a short line as well as a long one should possess both content and integrity” (quoted in Contemporary Authors). The poet Toi Dericotte, writing in the Kenyon Review, comments on Komunyakaa’s creative imagination in this way: “He takes on the most complex moral issues, the most harrowing ugly subjects of our American life. His voice, whether it embodies the speciﬁc experiences of a black man, a soldier in Vietnam, or a child in Bogalusa, Louisiana, is universal. It shows us in ever deeper ways what it is to be human.” In an essay from Blue Notes (2000), “Control Is the Mainspring,” Komunyakaa writes, “I learned that the body and the mind are indeed connected: good writing is physical and mental. I welcomed the knowledge of this because I am from a workingclass people who believe that physical labor is sacred and spiritual.” According to Linda Wagner-Martin, “This combination of the realistic and the spiritual runs throughout Komunyakaa’s poems, whether they are about his childhood, the father-son relationship, the spiritual journey each of us takes—alone, and in whatever circumstances life hands us—and the various conﬂ icts of war” (www.cengage.com). Yusef Komunyakaa’s work, notable for its imagery and themes, is now being studied from grade

three on up. Whether one considers him a war poet, a jazz poet, or simply a poet who consistently crafts a telling image in a moving way, he is a deﬁnitely a poet for this or any other time.

“Tu Do Street” (1988) Asked whether he feels that being a poet gives him an added responsibility to speak out against war, Komunyakaa replied decidedly in the afﬁ rmative to the interviewer Tod Marshall, citing a litany of poets whose work has cried out against wars across continents and time: I feel that the artist or poet—more than the politician or professional soldier—is condemned to connect to what he or she observes and experiences. One thinks about Walt Whitman’s visceral Civil War poems; of Siegfried Sassoon and George Trakl and Wilfred Owen responding to the horrors of World War I; of Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem” and Osip Mandelstam’s “The Stalin Epigram” giving voice to an outcry against the repression in the Soviet Union; of Aleksander Wat and Wislawa Symborska and Zbigniew Herbert calling out from Eastern Europe; of Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish in the Middle East; of Federico García Lorca and Miguel Hernandez challenging the silence during the Spanish Civil War; of Max Jacob and Berthold Brecht and Alan Dugan attempting to depict the ugliness of World War II; and the long list goes on and on. Plato was aware of the poet’s obligation as witness. If one is totally connected to his or her feelings, then one sees and hears and witnesses—fully engaged—and one will have to address what one has seen and heard and dreamt. We address the internal and external, and perhaps speaking of both terrains can almost make us whole. (www.poetryfoundation.org)

Often anthologized, “Tu Do Street” is from the 1988 collection Dien Cai Dau. The title, a pun on having two doors, alludes to the racism that black

206

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

soldiers encountered in Vietnam, even from the bar girls and prostitutes. As the speaker enters the Saigon bar, he hears the music of Hank Snow on “the psychedelic jukebox” and is suddenly drawn to his childhood in Louisiana, where in memory “White Only” signs are paired with Snow’s songs (29). When he orders a beer, “the mama-san / behind the counter acts as if she / can’t understand, while her eyes / skirt each white face” (29). Having gone to Saigon for rest and recuperation, he does not at ﬁ rst realize that the racism he knows so well from America has followed him here, so many thousands of miles away. He soon realizes that the soldiers are united only when “machine-gun ﬁ re brings us / together” (29). For black GIs, temporary solace with “these women / we now run to hold in our arms” can be found only “deeper into alleys,” past the off-limits signs where the girls, who seem like “tropical birds” to them, do not care about the color of the soldiers as long as their money is United States green (29). According to the critic Alvin Aubert, An implicit distinction is drawn in the poem between the GIs’ quest for sexless or pre-sexual socialization in the bars and their quest for sex in other rooms . . . [where] the black soldiers have access to prostitutes whose services are available on a nondiscriminatory basis. These assignations take place in “rooms” that invoke a transformational landscape: They “run into each other like tunnels / leading to the underworld.” Implicit in these conduits is a common humanity, linked to a common death, ﬁguratively in sex and literally in war, for black and white GIs alike: “There’s more than a nation / inside us, as black & white / soldiers touch the same lovers / minutes apart, tasting / each other’s breath” (29). What’s “more than a nation / inside” the GIs, black and white, is of course their shared humanity. (122–123)

The speaker comments on the irony that these same soldiers, whether black or white, have “fought / the brothers of these women” back in the bush,

where there was no discrimination between them, only the common purpose of victory over the enemy (29). On the battleﬁeld, Aubert notes, “where interracial camaraderie has immediate survival value, a different code of behavior prevails” (122). Yet the speaker does not blame the women for the inequities he and other black soldiers suffer, even here. They, too, are victims of the war: The bar girls and prostitutes of Saigon are metonymically depicted in “Tu Do Street” as victims, their “voices / wounded by their beauty and war.” These women are also a part of the “nation / inside us” quoted and commented on above, for it is they—“the same lovers” touched by black GIs and white GIs alike, implicitly by virtue of their capacity for motherhood, for bringing life into the world, and as the primary sources of nurturing—who are the conferrers and common denominators of the universal, of the common humanity that populates Komunyakaa’s projected socio-literary commonwealth and makes material his “uniﬁed vision.” (Aubert 123)

Ironically, it is these women who truly, physically unite the soldiers, even more than their common experience of war.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Do some historical research on the peacetime reception soldiers of color received after America’s wars were concluded. You might consider the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, whose story was the basis of the 1989 Academy Award–winning ﬁ lm Glory; the Tuskegee Airmen; the Navajo code talkers; or Ira Hamilton Hayes, the Pima Native American marine who assisted in raising the ﬂag on Iwo Jima during World War II, immortalized in a famous photograph by Joe Rosenthal. What ironies lie in these soldiers’ treatment in peacetime? How do these ironies relate to those of the speaker in “Tu Do Street”? Discuss your answer, citing speciﬁcs both from

Yusef Komunyakaa 207

the historical incidents you research and from Komunyakaa’s poem. 2. Listen to several songs by the country singer Hank Snow. Discuss Snow’s music as a symbol in “Tu Do Street.” Why does Komunyakaa say, “Music divides the evening”?

“Prisoners” (1988) Also from Dien Cai Dau, “Prisoners” is an unusual poem in that it reveals Komunyakaa’s sensitivity to and compassion for the Vietnamese soldiers, as well as for his fellow Americans. The speaker ﬁ rst sees the captured Viet Cong, bound and wearing “crokersacks” (burlap bags) at the helipad, where they have been ﬂown in for interrogation by American troops. He notes how thin they are—“thin-framed as box kites / of sticks & black silk / anticipating a hard wind / that’ll tug & snatch them / out into space”—making the men’s bodies appear almost illusive in their delicacy. Though slight in stature, these men carry a weight, the poet says, that “is the soil we tread night & day” (35). These men are responsible for the danger American soldiers face constantly. The speaker imagines that they “must be laughing / under their dust-colored hoods,” thinking about the rockets that are already aimed at American camps and the sure destruction these rockets will cause in American lives, perhaps before the soldiers’ interrogation even begins. He muses, “How can anyone anywhere love / these half-broken ﬁgures / bent under the sky’s brightness? . . . Who can cry for them?” Next the speaker recalls the actual procedure of getting information from the men: “I’ve heard the old ones / are the hardest to break. / An arm twist, a combat boot / against the skull, a .45 / jabbed into the mouth, nothing / works. When they start talking / with ancestors faint as camphor / smoke in pagodas, you know / you’ll have to kill them / to get an answer” (35). There is no suggestion of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and ﬁtting to die for one’s country) in this

poem; Komunyakaa treats the brutality of war with realism and candor.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read Thomas Hardy’s “The Man He Killed.” Compare it with this poem, dealing especially with theme and tone and discussing how each poet achieves these aspects of his poem. Cite from each text to support your analysis. 2. In “Prisoners,” Komunyakaa invokes elements of earth, air, ﬁ re, and water. Discuss each of these elements as he depicts it and comment on how each adds to the effect of the poem as a whole. 3. Do you sense that the speaker has any reluctance to torture or kill the prisoners? Why or why not? Discuss your interpretation fully, drawing on speciﬁc lines from the poem to support your analysis. 4. The poem ends with the lines “Sunlight throws / scythes against the afternoon” (35). Discuss the symbolism of both the scythes and the sunlight.

“Thanks” (1988) “Thanks,” another prose poem from Dien Cai Dau, is an extended prayer of gratitude for a coincidence experienced by the speaker on the battleﬁeld. Rather than taking place in a bar distant from the ﬁeld (“Tu Do Street”) or on a base at an interrogation site (“Prisoners”), this poem occurs in the jungle, where American soldiers and the Viet Cong are actively engaged in warfare. The occasion for the poem is the accidental saving of the speaker’s life when a random glint of sunlight off the barrel of a Viet Cong soldier’s gun alerts him to danger. Musing about being in San Francisco, arms entwined with a lover, he is hardly aware of his surroundings, much less the presence of a sniper. A tree standing between the two soldiers is another subject of thanks; its limb, which the speaker reaches to pull away from his face, makes him see “the intrepid / sun touch[ing] the bayonet” and

208

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

saves his life (44). He recalls other incidents when fate appears to have stepped between him and death. In particular, he thanks whatever Being he addresses in the poem for the fact that a “hand grenade tossed at my feet / outside Chu Lai” was a dud (44). The deadly potential the grenade carried for him recurs in his thoughts. The speaker owes his life, it seems, to a series of lucky coincidences having nothing to do with skill or merit or dedication to purpose. He does not know why he has been spared but is grateful to the whimsical fate that has taken him safely through to this point. Despite its contemplative tone, “Thanks” reminds the reader of the constant danger inherent in war, and of the caprice that may take one life and save another. With his customary frankness, Komunyakaa creates a tension that remains after the reading of the poem.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Komunyakaa has said that writing a poem “isn’t a process of escape, but is one of confrontation and celebration, a naming ceremony” (Citino 141). What is the poet simultaneously celebrating and confronting in this poem? Explain your answer, citing from the text for support. 2. Consider any aspects of irony in Komunyakaa’s litany of things for which he is thankful. Where do you ﬁ nd this irony? How does it function in the poem? 3. Comment on Komunyakaa’s poetic style in this and other poems in the Dien Cai Dau collection, noting such things as his use of the ampersand for and, his failure to capitalize the initial word in each line, and his reliance on the ﬁ rstperson singular voice for his speaker. How does each of these techniques function in the poem as a whole? What does each add to the poem?

“Facing It” (1988) This poem is the ﬁ nal selection in Komunyakaa’s celebrated Dien Cai Dau. It concludes the poet’s creative journey through his Vietnam experiences,

ﬁ nding him at last in Washington, D.C., at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The poem is a masterpiece of perspective, as its persona is simultaneously a part of the crowd gathered at the memorial, in the stone composing it, back in Vietnam, and in his own reﬂections about the war. “Facing It” is a play on the many actual and ﬁgurative reﬂections a visit to the memorial elicits for him. It begins with a literal reﬂection: The speaker sees “My black face . . . hiding inside the black granite” of which the memorial is made (63). Having arrived to pay tribute to the fallen, he has promised himself that he will not cry or show emotion: “No tears. / I’m stone,” he cries out inwardly (63). Nevertheless, he realizes that he is also ﬂesh and must feel the impact of the memorial as a ﬂeshand-blood human being. It seems as if his emotions are raw. As the light changes, the stone gathers him inside itself, and for a moment he and it are one. In lines 6–13, the speaker is variously inside and outside the memorial. The stone has power over him; it takes and releases him at will: “I turn / this way—the stone lets me go. / I turn that way—I’m inside / the Vietnam Veterans Memorial / again, depending on the light / to make a difference” (63). He cannot maintain the emotional coolness of his resolve but is moved deeply by the simple poignancy of the memorial. The speaker reads the 58,022 names laserburned into the stone, “half-expecting to ﬁ nd / my own in letters like smoke” (63). Seeing the name of someone he knew in the war, he traces it with his ﬁ nger. All at once he is back in Vietnam, seeing the white ﬂash of the booby trap that blew up and killed the man. Next he sees the reﬂection of the list of names on a woman’s blouse, calling him back to where he really stands. He sees the crowd, the ﬂash of a cardinal’s wings, a plane in the sky, and the sky itself. Normalcy temporarily returns. It does not remain for long, however, and a ghostly vision of a dead soldier begins to haunt him: “A white vet’s image ﬂoats / closer to me, then his pale eyes / look through mine” (63).

Yusef Komunyakaa 209

He is no longer just himself, but a conduit for the soldiers memorialized there, regardless of their color. “I’m a window,” the speaker realizes. Heand, by extension, Komunyakaa and his poems— can be a means for giving voice to all the soldiers of Vietnam. After making this admission, he is distracted by movement outside the wall and turns to see what he at ﬁ rst thinks is a woman “trying to erase names” from it, something he presumably will not allow. The poem ends when the speaker becomes aware that the woman is simply brushing her son’s hair. Her tender gesture, he implies, is one performed long ago for those memorialized in the hard surface of the granite wall.

For Discussion or Writing 1. When it was designed, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which is central to this poem, was a very controversial monument, because it is a ﬂat surface with names inscribed, rather than a threedimensional depiction of a person, as so many monuments are in Washington, D.C. After doing some research on the background of the memorial, discuss whether you think it is an appropriate tribute to those who died in Vietnam. 2. In “Facing It,” Komunyakaa gives the poem a title that can be taken more than one way. Read another poem in which the title can be interpreted in multiple ways, such as Grace Yamada’s “Looking Out.” What does the title contribute to each poem by suggesting several interpretations? Support your answer with references to each one. 3. Known for his strong images, Komunyakaa in “Facing It” relies particularly on sensory ones of touch and sight. Select two or three of the sensory images you consider central to the poem and discuss what they add to the effect of the work as a whole.

“Blackberries” (1992) This poem appears in Magic City, the 1992 collection that focuses on the poet’s early years, family

memories, and recollections of New Orleans, the city of the volume’s title. It couples the speaker’s memory of picking blackberries on the side of the road with an association between the berries and race. Out in the “early morning’s / Terrestrial sweetness,” the 10-year-old speaker has gone to pick berries and earn a little pocket money by selling them (27). Accompanied only by his dog, Spot, he turns busily to his task, ﬁ nding the ripe fruit plentiful and delicious. The berries are, he says, “so thick / The damp ground was consecrated / Where they fell among a garland of thorns” (27). He compares the appearance of his juice-stained hands to those of a printer or a thief being booked “before a police blotter” (27). Both have hands that are covered with ink—one, to create a literary work that will be read by many people; the other, to serve as a prelude to payment for his crimes. The berries fall quickly as the speaker, as does the thief in the comparison, “steals” the sweet fruit from the vines and drops it into two half-gallon containers. Komunyakaa invests the simple act of picking blackberries with religious overtones, employing an image from sacred ceremony as the berries spill onto the ground, anointing it with their dark juice. The berry vines also constitute a crown of thorns, like the one worn by Christ in his Passion. When the speaker confesses he is “eating from one [hand] / & ﬁ lling a half gallon with the other,” he defends himself by saying that the pies and cobblers he dreams of are “almost / Needful as forgiveness” (27). It is typical of Komunyakaa’s poetic style to invest even the simplest acts with signiﬁcance. In the second and third of the four stanzas, Komunyakaa’s numerous images describe the speaker’s lush surroundings. The ground is damp; “blue jays & thrashers” excite the interest of his dog; he hears “The mud frogs / In rich blackness, hid from daylight” (27). This young boy is obviously comfortable with the world in which he ﬁ nds himself and appreciates its many beauties. It is a place of rural, romantic calm. An hour later ﬁ nds the speaker back on the main road, where he hopes to sell the berries he has

210

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

picked. “I balanced a gleaming can in each hand, / Limboed between worlds, repeating one dollar” (27). It is easy to picture him, standing between the natural idyll of the berry patch and the commercial reality of being on the side of the road, attempting to sell the fruit. Just as the two cans are balanced, so is he between those worlds. In the ﬁ nal stanza, a new symbol of reality, a “big blue car,” pulls up to the speaker, making him “sweat” (27). The car windows, lowered to permit its driver to purchase the berries, produce a literal and ﬁgurative chill: “Wintertime crawled out of the windows” (27). Not only does the air conditioner inside the car exude a chill, but so does seeing the car’s occupants, a pair of children the speaker knows. They are just his age, perhaps classmates at school or perhaps acquaintances from another place. Regardless of the context in which he knows them, they make him uncomfortable when they stare at him, smirking. Their mocking is clearly reminiscent of many other implied incidents when these two have made the speaker feel inadequate. Instantly he is aware of the great divide between their situations. Although Komunyakaa does not identify the children as white, they are at least of a different class than the speaker. Suddenly he feels this disparity down to his very ﬁ ngertips: When they sneer at him, he says, “It was then I remembered my ﬁ ngers / Burning with thorns among berries too ripe to touch” (27). Just as overripe blackberries almost dissolve to the touch, the speaker’s mood deteriorates at the sight of those smirking children. By the time Komunyakaa wrote “Blackberries,” he had already published a collection of Vietnam poems, many of which explore his blackness, often in contrast to white soldiers as well as to the Vietnamese. Going back to his Louisiana beginnings in the poems of Magic City, he looks at the roots of racial difference as perceived by him and by others. New Orleans is not only the largest city near his hometown, but one with a complex ethnic heritage and makes a perfect background for exploring the complexity of human relationships. From the hurtful slight detailed in “Blackberries,” other poems in the collection investigate more sinister specters

of the racial divide—economic injustice (“Gristmill”), a black World War II veteran who is “blackjacked . . . to the ground” by racist police (“The Steel Plate”), the Ku Klux Klan (“Knights of the White Camellia & Deacons of Defense”), and the lynching of Emmett Till and other innocent black men (“History Lessons”). In each of these poems, Komunyakaa is unﬂ inching in his explorations.

For Discussion or Writing Examine other poems by Komunyakaa that, as “Blackberries” does, explore the signiﬁcance of simple acts. How does Komunyakaa invest these acts with greater meaning?

“My Father’s Love Letters” (1992) Several poems in Magic City are autobiographical, and “My Father’s Love Letters” is one of them. It follows a poem entitled “Mismatched Shoes,” which details the family legend of Komunyakaa’s grandfather and of his own adoption of the Komunyakaa name. The elder man was a refugee from Trinidad, so eager to get away from the plantation on which he worked that, when given a chance to ﬂee to America, he hurriedly reached for the ﬁ rst clothing he could ﬁ nd: “He wore a boy’s shoe / & a girl’s shoe,” according to family oral history (42). Some years later, Komunyakaa relates in the poem, “I picked up those mismatched shoes / & slipped into his skin. Komunyakaa. / His blues, African fruit on my name” (42). The poet expresses his deep affection and admiration for his grandfather throughout. Komunyakaa’s relationship with his father, however, seems to have been a far different one. The next poem in Magic City, “My Father’s Love Letters,” conveys the tension between the autobiographically inspired speaker and his father, a correlation to real life that Komunyakaa has often expressed both literally and ﬁguratively. While the poem is an artistic rendering of their troubled relationship, it does grow from the strain that the poet says existed between the two. It depicts the father as a hostile and inarticulate man, a wife beater who

Yusef Komunyakaa 211

has driven his wife away but never ceases to try to get her back. Every Friday, after returning home from work and reaching for a can of Jax beer (made locally in New Orleans), he asks his son to write to the mother. Illiterate, the father can “only sign / His name” and must plead with his wife through the son (43). His frustration and desire for her are made clear, not only because of his maintaining the ritual of writing, but because of the words that ﬂow “from under the pressure / Of [the speaker’s] ballpoint: Love, / Baby, Honey, Please” (43). Each brief word is capitalized to emphasize the father’s longing. She lives far away from them and occasionally sends “postcards of desert ﬂowers / Taller than men” (43). In each letter to her, the father begs her to return, “Promising never to beat her / Again.” By positioning the word again at the ﬁ rst of the line, the poet conveys the father’s abuse as a habitual occurrence, just as writing the letters is. Each week, writing another, the speaker silently wonders whether his mother laughs when she receives them, holding them “over a gas burner” and watching them ignite (43). The speaker himself rather wishes his mother would not return but does not say why. “Somehow,” he relates, “I was happy / She had gone” (43). He placidly waits as his father, struggling to express himself, becomes “lost between sentences” (43). Despite the tension between the two, the son feels a certain empathy for his father, who stands “With eyes closed & ﬁsts balled, / Laboring over a simple word, almost / Redeemed by what he tried to say” (43). This man, a carpenter who spends his weekdays laboring in a mill, works even harder on the weekend to dictate his thoughts in a letter. Words are not his natural medium, as are the “old nails, a claw hammer . . . a ﬁve-pound wedge” that he has mastered. A skilled laborer, the father can “look at blueprints / & say how many bricks / Formed each wall” (43). Yet trying to build a foundation with language leaves him frustrated and inept. A grown man, he must rely on his son to convey his innermost thoughts. Komunyakaa readily communicates the humiliation the father feels because of his lack of

verbal skill, as the two sit together in the tool shed, where the father exudes a “quiet brutality” (43).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” in which a father is depicted. Compare and contrast Hayden’s poem with “My Father’s Love Letters.” What do the fathers in the poems have in common? How do they differ? What do the two narrators share? Discuss your answer fully, citing from each text to support what you say. 2. Almost half of “My Father’s Love Letters” consists of elements of the workday world—concrete, voltage meters, pipe threaders, and so on. What do these images add to the poem? Address such aspects as tone and characterization, drawing on speciﬁc lines to support your analysis.

“Ode to the Maggot” (2000) “Ode to the Maggot” is in Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000), a collection of 132 poems with four quatrains each. Ranging across topics as disparate as slime molds, nipples, dust, and rollerblades, the volume deﬁes uniﬁed description. In choosing the book as one of its 25 favorites of the year, the Village Voice Literary Supplement proclaimed: “This new volume is remarkable exactly because it’s a category killer, a sustained anti-hierarchy. The poems speak equally to gods and maggots, to the mythical reaches of history, and to erotic immediacy . . . . No turn in any life cycle is taboo as Yusef Komunyakaa examines the primal rituals shared by insects, animals, human beings, and deities” (verso cover). In “Ode to the Maggot” the poet elevates the lowly destroyer to “master of earth,” a powerful force. As a traditional ode would do, this poem pours lavish praise on its subject.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The ode is a very formal type of lyric poem, one classical writers often adopted for special celebratory occasions in which persons of signiﬁcance are honored. Explain the irony in writing about

212

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

a maggot in this fashion. How does Komunyakaa construct the ironic tone in this poem? Cite examples from the text to support your answer. 2. Read “To a Mouse” and “To a Louse” by the Scottish poet Robert Burns. From a handbook of literature, ﬁ nd out about the romantic movement in British and American literature. Compare and contrast Burns’s poems with Komunyakaa’s “Ode to the Maggot” as to tone, imagery, and theme. How do all three poems ﬁt into the romantic tradition? Support your response with speciﬁc references to each text.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON KOMUNYAKAA AND HIS WORK 1. The poetic form known as the ode dates back to the Greeks and Romans. The Chilean poet and Nobel Prize laureate Pablo Neruda is said to have revived the ode in the 1950s in a series of volumes containing odes to commonplace things. As does Neruda, Komunyakaa selects ordinary aspects of life as the subject of his odes. Read one written by Neruda and one by Komunyakaa—“Ode to Dust” or “Ode to the Raccoon,” for example. What similarities do you see in tone? In imagery? Discuss your response. 2. Komunyakaa’s poems often treat mythological beings such as Pan or Venus. Read one of his poems that have an extended allusion to mythology, and then read Edith Hamilton’s prose account of the same character(s) or event(s). As a reader, which do you ﬁ nd more satisfying? Why? Discuss your answer. 3. Read three of Komunyakaa’s Vietnam poems alongside TIM O’BRIEN’s novel The Things They Carried. Compare the two genres as to depiction of character, setting, and events. What images does each writer use to convey the horrors soldiers faced, both during the war and afterward? Discuss fully in a well-organized essay. 4. What is the effect Komunyakaa achieves by assuming the nominative plural pronoun (i.e., we) as the speaker in his Vietnam poems? Discuss his use of this technique in three poems of

your choice, dealing especially with its effectiveness for the work as a whole. Read two poems by Wilfred Owen, a British poet of the World War I era. How are his poems different from Komunyakaa’s in theme and imagery? What do the two writers have in common in their views of war? Discuss your answer, including support from each text. Although Komunyakaa is known more for the irony of his writing than its humor, select one or two of his poems that you consider notable for their humor. Discuss how the poet achieves a humorous tone and in what ways you think this tone adds to an overall estimation of his work. Read the introduction to August Wilson’s play Fences. Knowing that both Wilson and Komunyakaa consider art as a means of social change, what similarities do you see in their approach to that change? Include support from Wilson’s introduction and at least two of Komunyakaa’s poems in your discussion of the question. One of the advantages of studying modern poets is the frequent availability of audio versions of poems read by the poets themselves. Dozens of Komunyakaa’s poems read by Komunyakaa are available on the Internet. (Search the Web to ﬁ nd them; you may refer to such sites as poets.org or poetryfoundation.org.) Listen to at least 10 of the poems, noting Komunyakaa’s inﬂection as he reads. Discuss how his readings contribute to your understanding of the poems, citing speciﬁc examples. Read or listen on the Internet to Komunyakaa’s “Camouﬂaging the Chimera,” noting his use of vivid images. Select three to ﬁve lines that contain images you ﬁ nd especially strong. Discuss what each adds to the effect of the entire work (from “Get Ready for a Poem in Your Pocket Day”).

WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Academy of American Poets. “Yusef Komunyakaa.” Available online. URL: www.poets.org. Accessed June 24 2009. Andrews, William L. et al., eds. The Literature of the American South. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.

Yusef Komunyakaa 213

Aubert, Alvin. “Yusef Komunyakaa: The Uniﬁed Vision—Canonization and Humanity.” African American Review 27, no. 1 (1993): 122–123. Citino, David. The Eye of the Poet: Six Views of the Art and Craft of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Clytus, Radiclani. Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Conley, Susan. “About Yusef Komunyakaa: A Proﬁle.” Ploughshares. 23/1, no. 72 (Spring 1997): 202–208. “Get Ready for Poem in Your Pocket Day.” NCTE Inbox. March 31, 2009. National Council of Teachers of English. Available online. URL: http:// www.readwritethink.org/calendar/calendar_day. asp?id=484. Accessed October 2, 2009. Gotera, Vina F. “Depending on the Light: Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau.” In America Rediscovered: Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman, Jr., and Lorrie Smith, 282–300. New York: Garland, 1990. Komunyakaa, Yusef. Dien Cai Dau. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. ———. Magic City. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992. ———. Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. ———. Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 1975–1999. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.

———. Taboo. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004. ———. Talking Dirty to the Gods. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. ———. Warhorses: Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008. Leonard, Keith D. “Yusef Komunyakaa’s Blues: The Postmodern Music of Neon Vernacular. Callaloo 28, no. 3 (2005): 825–849. Marshall, Tod. “Every Tool Became a Weapon: Talking with Yusef Komunyakaa about Race and War.” Available online. URL: www.poetryfoundation. org. Accessed October 5, 2009. Matthews, William. Dien Cai Dau. Verso cover. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. Shoaf, Diann Blakely. Quoted in “Yusef Komunyakaa.” Contemporary Authors. New York: Gale, 2002. Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Yusef Komunyakaa.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Modern Period: 1910–1945. Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 2006. Weber, Bruce. “A Poet’s Values,” New York Times, 2 May 1994, p. B1. Available online. URL: www.english. illinois.edu/MAPS/poets/g_l/komunyakaa/ komunyakaa.htm. Accessed October 5, 2009. “Yusef. Komunyakaa.” Available online. URL: www. poetryfoundation.org. Accessed October 5, 2009. “Yusef Komunyakaa.” Internet Poetry Archive. Available online. URL: http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/ komunyakaa.php. Accessed June 25, 2009.

Patricia M. Gantt

Chang-rae Lee (1965–

)

For me, that is what fiction should do—bring home for the reader not just an act, historical or not, but the aftereffects, what happens in the act’s wake. And, most interestingly, how people live in that wake. (interview with Ron Hogan, http://www.beatrice.com/interviews/lee)

hang-rae Lee immigrated to America as a small child who could speak no English, yet by the age of 30, he had become one of the country’s ﬁ nest writers. Lee credits much of his success to the example of his father. Lee’s father trained in Korea as a physician and moved his family to the United States from Seoul, Korea, when Lee was only three years old. His mother spoke little English and struggled with everyday tasks, such as buying groceries, in a country with little patience for nonnative speakers, but his father overcame language barriers to build a successful psychiatric practice. While Lee was struck by the power of language and the toll it exacted upon his mother, he was inspired by the success of his father: “My father could have been a surgeon, where language isn’t as important. But instead he chose a profession where talking is everything” (Garner). Lee learned English quickly, ﬁ nding enjoyment in books. When he was 11, he read James Joyce’s “The Dead,” a short story that made him want to be a writer. He says authors like Joyce are so “conscious of their own language . . . you get the feeling that they’re handwriting it out, that very word has texture and contour” (JinAh Lee). Lee majored in English, receiving a B.A. in 1987 from Yale University, but initially suppressed his desire to become a writer, believing that he could not earn a living that way. Instead he went into ﬁ nance, working

on Wall Street as an equities analyst until advice from a friend made him realize he should pursue his love of writing. Lee quit his job and enrolled in the University of Oregon’s M.F.A. program. His early writings were heavily inﬂuenced by authors such as Nabokov, Pynchon, DeLillo, and Styron, and it was not until after the death of his mother, in 1992, that Lee stepped back enough from his love of those works to examine his own reasons for writing, eventually asking himself, “Why did I get into writing if not to connect with life, with humanity, with other people?” (Marcus). In order to make those types of connections, Lee found he had to begin to write about issues that were important to him. Lee discarded the novel-length manuscript on which he had been working and began a new one, focusing on the deeper issues of identity, assimilation, and the power of language, themes that he knew about on a personal level. That story became Native Speaker and the thesis for his M.F.A., completed in 1993. The book was published two years later and won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/ PEN Award and the American Book Award, among other honors. Native Speaker began Lee’s tradition of choosing narrators who are unreliable in that they are unwilling or unable to tell readers the whole story. In discussing Henry Park, the unlikely spy hero of Native Speaker, Lee says, “I wanted to write about

214

Chang-rae Lee

someone who could seamlessly walk about and speak the language, and still feel very isolated, very alien” (Marcus). Park’s isolation is partially selfinﬂ icted; he is emotionally unavailable to his wife and chooses espionage as his profession, a job that requires him to invent elaborate alternate selves in order to maneuver into positions of trust for his subjects. Nonetheless, Park is unhappy with his isolation and the distance it puts between him and his own life; he begins to examine his role as a cultural spy when his wife leaves him. Despite the critical acclaim surrounding Native Speaker, New York’s 2002 attempt to adopt it as the subject of its ﬂedgling One Book, One City program was met with a hailstorm of controversy. Many objections were not related to the book at all, but rather the fear that a government-sponsored reading program might transform the personal act of reading into a “coercive, collective, and politically correct activity that diminished the autonomy and agency of the reader” (Rachel C. Lee). Those who did object to the book itself focused on its possible portrayal of Koreans or Asian Americans in a negative, stereotypical manner. Lee states that his use of Park’s father (a Korean immigrant, trained as a scientist but employed as a greengrocer in New York) was intentional, creating a platform for addressing cultural stereotypes: Henry Park is someone who understands that maybe that’s the way he is, but who acknowledges that that is a stereotype. . . . I think he’s quite dissatisﬁed with his silences, his inaction, his veiled persona. . . . Of course I could have made him an astronaut or this or that. But one of the things that I wanted to do, I wanted to give that particular greengrocer some humanity, to offer him a real human moment . . . in the hopes that I could give him a typically complicated, sometimes contradictory, sometimes not so pleasant life and personality; to make him real. (Plett)

Forcing readers to see the real people behind stereotypical characters is a skill Lee carries over into

215

his other novels. Published in 1999, A Gesture Life delves into the persona of Doc Hata. On ﬁ rst glance, Doc Hata appears to ﬁt the mold of all that has come to embody America’s idea of the Asian immigrant: congenial, hardworking, solitary. But as Doc slowly reveals himself, readers begin to see him for who he actually is: a man haunted by his past, incapable of truly facing his own history for fear it may tarnish the façade he has worked so diligently to build. The idea for Chang-rae Lee’s second novel grew out of an article he read while researching Korea (Garner). The article described the Japanese army’s practice during World War II of forcing thousands of women, mostly Korean, to serve the troops in the capacity of “comfort women.” While the phrase seems compassionate and respectable, what the women were actually subjected to was not. Girls as young as 10 years old were taken from their homes and forced into sexual slavery, a custom the Japanese military claimed would serve to prevent random sexual aggression against women in occupied territories, while curbing the rampant outbreaks of sexually transmitted diseases contracted from prostitutes, as well as boosting the morale of the troops. Lee describes how he felt after reading the article: “I was just blown away. I remember being on a bus after reading what otherwise was a pretty dry academic article on the subject, and I had to get off and walk home just to think about what had happened” (Garner). That thinking led to work on a story told from the perspective of a Korean comfort woman. Lee ﬂew to South Korea and interviewed several surviving comfort women, working to capture on paper what they told him. In a 2000 interview with Ron Hogan, Lee says the story was especially difﬁcult to write because the nature of the crime was so horrendous, it left little room for drama. After a year, he decided something was missing: “I began to feel that what I had written didn’t quite come up to the measure of what I had experienced, sitting in a room with these people. I began to feel that there was nothing like live witness” (Garner). Eventually Lee abandoned the manuscript in favor of a new viewpoint, promoting the minor character Doc Hata to narrator.

216

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

A Gesture Life received even higher critical acclaim than Lee’s fi rst novel, earning him the Anisfield-Wolf Prize, the Myers Outstanding Book Award, the NAIBA Book Award, and the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction, among others. It was also selected for Seattle’s 2003 “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book” program, sponsored by the Seattle Public Library. In Chang-rae Lee’s third novel, Aloft, readers are introduced to another unreliable narrator, but one who appears on the surface quite different from Henry Park and Doc Hata. Jerry Battle is neither Asian nor introspective. He is an outspoken Caucasian man rapidly approaching the age of 60, one who spends more time thinking about food, sex, and money than the needs of his family. What connects Battle to Henry Park and Doc Hata is his unwillingness to talk openly about important issues with those he loves, as well as his inability to see the role he has played in shaping the current circumstances of his own life. When several family members face simultaneous crises, Battle is forced to contend with both past and present, fi nally giving his family the leader they need. Using a non-Asian narrator affords Lee the opportunity to address issues of race, alienation, and language from a new perspective. The fact that Battle has married an Asian woman and produced children he describes as “mixed blood” (30) presents the perfect forum for exploring how unaware members of the majority can be of the feelings of alienation experienced by minorities, even those within their own households. Further, Battle’s aging father faces alienation when he is placed in a nursing home, a socially acceptable form of ostracism to which many elderly are condemned. Battle concedes that words matter, yet he believes others are overly concerned with cultural labels like Asian American versus Oriental. He considers his children Asian American despite the fact that they were born in America, but he has no qualms about calling himself “an average white guy” (73) and an American, even though his own family emigrated from Italy. Battle’s attitude serves to illustrate further the discrepancy in which different types of immigrants are allowed to call themselves “Ameri-

can” without the obligatory hyphenated country of origin, one more way that language (and the way it is used to label people as “Other”) is everything. The idea that language is everything is more than just a common theme for Lee; it is also the way he approaches writing. He confesses, in an interview with JinAh Lee, to being obsessed with language, focusing so much on the weight of each sentence that he has thrown out entire manuscripts when something is not right: “For me, the unit of measure is the sentence, and I really can’t change it sentence by sentence. You spend so much time on that sentence. How can you extract it or make it do something different?” (2000). Lee’s fourth novel, The Surrendered (2010), examines the effects of war on an American soldier, a Korean refugee, and the wife of a minister at an orphanage. Lee currently lives with his wife and two daughters in New Jersey and teaches at Princeton University, where he serves as director of the creative writing program. He admits to his students that all stories have been told before, so new writers should “figure out your own voice . . . it’s in the telling of [the story] that makes a writer special” (JinAh Lee). As for his own writing, Lee says, “I’m trying to figure out my own kind of story which, of course, I never will. I don’t think I ever will. I hope I never do. Once I do, that’s death” (Hogan).

Native Speaker (1995) While many writers address controversial issues at the heart of their work, Chang-rae Lee’s fi rst novel begins that discussion at the molecular level of title and genre. Before readers can even open the book, they are faced with the pairing of the phrase “native speaker” with cover art depicting an AsianAmerican child in a cowboy suit superimposed over the image of an Asian-American adult. There is no doubt the pairing is intentional and meant to call into question what it means to be a native in a nation of immigrants. The fact that many Americans would lay claim to the title native speaker reflects America’s his-

Chang-rae Lee

tory of repression and forgetfulness. As Rachel Lee points out in her article in Melus, when Americans hear the phrase “native speaker,” they think not of “the speaker of Nuahtl, Navaho, or the myriad other native languages,” but of themselves, forgetting that in America English is an immigrant tongue. By pairing the title Native Speaker with the face of an Asian American, Lee reminds readers that immigrants of all origins have equal right to that title. Chang-rae Lee uses the substance of his novel to develop that idea further, never actually telling readers to whom the title refers. It could refer to the novel’s main character, Henry Park, but he learned English through the fi lter of his parents’ Korean and is overly conscious of language. Even his wife, Lelia, upon fi rst meeting him, comments on his deliberate speech, saying, “You speak perfectly of course. I mean if we were talking on the phone I wouldn’t think twice. . . . You look like someone listening to himself. You pay attention to what you’re doing. If I had to guess, you’re not a native speaker” (12). Later, Henry fi nds a scrap of paper under their bed on which Lelia condemns him as a “False speaker of language,” a phrase that seems to haunt him. The title could be applied to Lelia, too: As a trained speech pathologist, she describes herself as “the standard-bearer” for the English language (12). But Henry depicts her as “executing the language” (10), implying that although she speaks well, she kills true meaning. By not directly labeling any one character as the native speaker, Lee invites readers to consider many possibilities. Lee also uses the framework of genre to mirror the deeper controversies within the novel. On its surface, Native Speaker is a spy novel. Yet Lee has chosen to use the genre of spy novel in much the same way that Henry uses his “legends,” the descriptions of his fictionalized lives. The legends are the masks that Henry will present to his subjects while he uncovers their secret lives. Tina Chen describes Lee’s use of the spy story as a mask in her book Double Agency (2005): “As Henry discerns the paradoxical truth, that the masks he wears prevent him from speaking even as they are the very things that enable him to articulate a semblance of

217

self, readers of Native Speaker discover that Lee’s novel itself operates behind the mask of the spy story in order to expose the limitations of form in narrating Henry’s story” (154). Throughout the novel, Lee challenges the conventions of the spy novel, replacing high-profi le daredevil characters with the understated Henry Park, substituting mundane conversations for cloak-and-dagger escapades. In fact, Henry himself describes his occupation as the antithesis of the stereotypical spy: In a phrase, we were spies. But the sound of that is all wrong. We weren’t the kind of figures you naturally thought of or maybe even hoped existed . . . our job was simply to even things out, clear the market as it were, act as secret arbitrageurs. . . . We pledged allegiance to no government. We weren’t ourselves political creatures. We weren’t patriots. Even less, heroes. We systematically overassessed risk, made it a bad word. Guns spooked us. . . . We knew nothing of weaponry, torture, psychological warfare, extortion, electronics, supercomputers, explosives. Never anything like that. (17)

So why does Lee employ the framework of the spy novel when he resists its conventions at every turn? According to Tina Chen, the spy novel affords Lee the opportunity to address prejudicial assumptions about Asians. Chen asserts that both Henry’s demeanor and his profession serve to expose the stereotypes of Asians as “sneaky and inscrutable” (178). By casting Henry as a spy, Lee invokes the cultural memory of all Asian sleuths who have used stereotype to the advantage of their profession and provides readers with a counterexample: someone who is cursed by his own inscrutability. Beyond being inscrutable, his status as an Asian American renders Henry in many ways invisible. He is invisible to the Asian-American people on whom he spies because they perceive him as one of their own, and therefore not a threat, but he is also invisible to non-Asian Americans because they perceive him as different, and therefore not important. This tendency of the majority to interact with minority

218

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

immigrants as though they are nonentities is explicitly illustrated through Henry’s father’s customers. Although Mr. Park earned a master’s degree in industrial engineering in Korea, his limited English and cultural barriers relegate him to the status of a greengrocer. The customers in his store do not see the educated man behind the grocer’s apron; they do not see the man at all. Henry learns, through working in his father’s shop, that “if I just kept speaking the language of our work the customers didn’t seem to see me. I wasn’t there. They didn’t look at me. I was a comely shadow who didn’t threaten them” (53). Such invisibility may seem a desirable trait in spy work; however, as Chen points out, invisibility that is not self-determined can be psychologically damaging, causing a feeling of “fractured identity, the loss of internal coherence, and a longing for wholeness that is ever deferred” (164). Lee expands upon the themes of immigrant status and the importance of language within the body of the novel. Through Henry’s interactions with his father, his wife, and his son, Lee demonstrates the power of words both spoken and withheld. Henry’s dealings with the city councilman John Kwang expose the “ugly immigrant truth” that pervades America. Henry Park is a man who wields words as weapons, crafting backstories to defi ne himself to his subjects and transcribing the minutiae of those interactions into reports for unseen buyers. Yet even as he brokers in language, Henry allows others to use it to shape his true identity. He allows his boss to call him “Harry,” his coworker to call him “Parky.” Through his father, Henry begins to understand the weight of silence, the way in which Koreans tolerate and use silence to their advantage, but white Americans cannot: “We perhaps depend too often on the faulty honor of silence, use it too liberally and for gaining advantage. I showed Lelia how this was done, sometimes brutally, my face a peerless mask, the bluntest instrument” (96). Henry’s relationship with his wife begins with a discussion of race and speech, but, despite their willingness to address such issues, race and speech later divide the couple and contribute to their

separation. An incident involving Henry’s father’s housekeeper serves as the fi rst clue of what is to come. Lelia asks the woman’s name and Henry says he does not know. Lelia cannot reconcile the fact that the woman “practically raised” Henry, yet he does not know her name. Henry attributes the misunderstanding to cultural differences: Americans live on a fi rst-name basis. She [Lelia] didn’t understand that there weren’t moments in our language—the rigorous, regimental one of family and servants—when the woman’s name would have naturally come out. Or why it wasn’t important. (69)

When Lelia leaves Henry, she hands him a list of words. He becomes preoccupied with the words, accepting them as a true description of himself. Despite Henry’s willingness to allow others to defi ne him, when his son is called names by the neighborhood children, Henry denies the power of language, telling him, “They’re just words” (103). Councilman John Kwang serves not only as a subject for Henry’s spy work, but also as the platform from which Lee can address the issue of immigration in America. Although Kwang is “unafraid to speak the language like a Puritan and like a Chinaman and like every boat person in between” (304), to mainstream America he is “just another ethnic pol” (303) and, as such, an outsider, someone who is not “native.” During the course of the novel, Kwang and Henry are faced with several incidents that draw attention to immigrant issues: the random killings of cab drivers, the pattern of extortion and violence of Korean and Chinese gangs, and the arrests of aliens who had been smuggled into the country aboard a freighter. Each of these may seem to be an isolated occurrence, but as Leti Volpp points out in “The Legal Mapping of U.S. Immigration, 1965–1996,” such incidents are inherent in a system that allows “economic demands, exclusions based on moral and sexual concerns, and politics [to defi ne] overlapping and at times competing state policies about immigration.” Henry himself comments upon the troubled

Chang-rae Lee

relationship between America and its immigrants, along with his own role (and his father’s) in that oppression: My ugly immigrant’s truth, as was his, is that I have exploited my own, and those others who can be exploited. This forever is my burden to bear. But I and my kind possess another dimension. We will learn every lesson of accent and idiom, we will dismantle every last pretense and practice you hold, noble as well as ruinous. You can keep nothing safe from our eyes and ears. This is your history. We are your most perilous and dutiful brethren, the song of our hearts at once furious and sad. For only you could grant me these lyrical modes. I call them back to you. Here is the sole talent I ever dared nurture. Here is all of my American education. (319–320)

At this point, the narrative shifts from Henry’s simply telling his story to directly addressing readers. By so doing, Chang-rae Lee draws readers into the novel, linking them to that ugly American truth and reminding them again that while this may seem to be one man’s story, it is really the story of us all; we are all bound together by our inherited immigration, Puritans and Chinamen and every boat person in between.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Create a character study that compares Henry Park to the nameless protagonist of Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. 2. Lee uses a portion of Walt Whitman’s “The Sleepers” as an epigraph for the novel. Why do you think Lee chose those lines to speak for the novel? Read the poem in its entirety. What effect does the context of those lines within the poem have on their meaning and on their relationship to the book? 3. Consider the phrase “A good spy is but the secret writer of all moments imminent” (198). How does Henry succeed or fail in that regard? How might the phrase apply to national intelligence agencies?

219

A Gesture Life (1999) All Franklin Hata wants for himself is a quiet life of respect in the town of Bedley Run. When readers fi rst meet him, it seems he has achieved just that. Recently retired from the medical-supply business he founded, Franklin Hata is greeted by townspeople as a regular fi xture, with “an almost Oriental veneration as an elder” (1). They hail him as “Doc Hata,” and, although he tells them that he is not a doctor, still they go to him for advice, which he freely gives. Doc Hata would have people believe that he has lived his life serving others, that he is the “living breathing expression of . . . privacy and decorum and the quietude of hard-earned privilege” (275), but as the story unfolds we begin to view him as he really is: a man paralyzed by choice, unable to stand up for what he knows is right in the face of societal expectations. In this way, he is an unreliable storyteller, and he readily warns of that: “It seems difficult enough to consider one’s own triumphs and failures with perfect verity, for it’s no secret that the past proves a most unstable mirror, typically too severe and too flattering all at once, and never as truth-reflecting as people would like to believe” (5). The mirrors he shows us are his old store and his home, and while he intends them to reflect his life as a hardworking, dedicated man, instead they reveal deep fissures between who he wants to be and who he has become. Soon after introducing himself, Doc Hata takes readers to his old store, Sunny Medical Supply. Named for his adopted daughter, the store was a source of great pride for him. Beyond being the local supplier of medical and surgical equipment, the store was his connection to the residents of Bedley Run; now that he no longer runs it, he has begun to feel that connection slipping away. As if to erode his place in the community further, three years after the sale, the gold signage is flaking and the same display is still half assembled in the window. Doc feels sorry for the Hickeys (the couple who purchased the place from him), admitting that he initially questioned their ability to run a store

220

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

with limited income and a young child, but implies that most of their trouble is due to a recession and the recent opening of a larger store nearby. When he stops in, Mr. Hickey verbally attacks him, and Mrs. Hickey confides that their son has been diagnosed with congenital heart disease, the fi nancial burden of which has put them on the verge of bankruptcy. Nearly fleeing, Doc Hata takes readers to his home. Doc Hata describes his house as “older vintage” in pristine condition. He tells of the slate swimming pool and the leaded glass and wrought-iron conservatory, the fi replace and the piano. It seems the perfect symbol of a life well lived until he takes readers inside, almost as an afterthought, to a room patched and painted to cover the hundreds of tiny holes that remained when his adopted daughter, Sunny, left. Instead of reflecting a prosperous, happy life, the house illustrates a life barely lived. By the end of the book, even Doc must admit it is nothing but “a lovely, standing forgery” lacking “the thousand tiny happenings” of life that would have made it a home (352). The people who attempt to get close to Doc Hata see past the mirrors he presents. While in the service, Captain Ono, a superior officer, tells him, “There is the germ of infi rmity in you, which infects everything you touch or attempt. Besides all else, how do you think you will become a surgeon? A surgeon determines his course and acts. He goes to the point he has determined without any other faith, and commits to an execution. You, Lieutenant, too much depend upon generous fate and gesture. There is no internal possession, no embodiment. Thus you fail in some measure always. You perennially disappoint someone like me” (266). Sunny, his adopted Korean daughter, for whom he tries to create a home and a successful business, is also disappointed in him and indicts him for his attempts: “All I’ve ever seen is how careful you are with everything. With our fancy big house and this store and all the customers. How you sweep the sidewalk and nice-talk to the other shopkeepers. You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness. You’re always having to be the ideal partner and colleague” (95). While it

is expected that a child be critical of the parent, Sunny’s comments seem more than teenage angst and are confi rmed by Mary Burns, Doc Hata’s romantic interest, who is reproachful of the way he raises Sunny: “You treat her like a grown woman . . . as if she’s a woman to whom you’re beholden . . . you act almost guilty, as if she’s someone you hurt once, or betrayed, and now you’re obliged to do whatever she wishes” (60). The death of Mary Burns, the decline of his old store, and increasing pressure from a local realtor to sell his home combine with the return of his estranged daughter to become the catalyst for Doc Hata’s examination of the life he has lived. Doc has spent his entire life carefully arranging matters so that his past is as distant from him as possible, so he is not the type of person to sit down and write a long confessional. Instead, he tells his story in small increments, reporter style, devoid of any real emotion, parceling out details only as they occur to him. Lee admits much of the story’s drama results from that tension: That was very important to me, that he [Doc Hata] was to just let you know what happened and let it sit there, and the distance between the act described and the calm and placid person telling you about it would be so great that there would be some drama in the telling as well. That for me is part of the drama of the story: How is he going to begin to tell you all these things that he doesn’t want to tell you? (Hogan)

And, although Doc casts himself in the role of paramedic and father, he seems unable to admit his own culpability in the events that occur, describing himself more as the helpless bystander who can only “sort out and address the primary disaster,” not treat the “chronic, complicated difficulty” (77). This difficulty takes the form of two lifechanging situations: Doc Hata’s position as medical assistant in the Japanese army, where he must oversee the health of “comfort women” (Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military), and, years later, his teenage daughter’s unplanned pregnancy. It is through

Chang-rae Lee

brief flashbacks into these incidents that readers understand the deep-rooted reasons behind Doc Hata’s life of gestures.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Many critics have compared Doc Hata to the character Stevens in The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. In what ways are they different? 2. Choose one point in Doc Hata’s life and describe how his life would have been different had he taken “hold of some moment and fully acquit[ted him]self to it, whether decently or ignobly” (340). 3. While the horrific treatment of the Jewish people during World War II is well known throughout the world, Japan was able to keep its military’s use of comfort women a secret; in fact, many people are still unaware of it. Discuss the political, social, and religious factors that account for this discrepancy.

Aloft (2004) In his third novel, Lee chooses as protagonist Jerry Battle, a white upper-middle-class man about to turn 60. From his name, readers might assume Jerry Battle is a man who would meet life’s challenges head on—that is certainly the way his father, “Hank the Tank” Battle, approaches adversity. But Jerry prefers to “decline the real,” hiding both figuratively and literally with his head in the clouds, drifting high above unstable ground. His failure to make purposeful decisions in his life has led to a convergence of all things avoided, which have festered and now pose significant problems: He has fi nally driven away his longtime companion, the family business is in ruin (in no small part due to his son’s mismanagement), his daughter is facing simultaneous pregnancy and grave illness, and his father is resentful of his life in a nursing home. In essence, anything of lasting importance in Jerry’s life is on the verge of being lost. Yet the real story in Aloft is not the events leading up to this crisis, or even its eventual resolution. The real story,

221

told through gradual revelations, is Jerry Battle himself—what he has done or failed to do, and how he will fi nally stand up for what he believes in or watch it all float away. Death is a pervasive issue in Aloft: Jerry’s brother and wife have both died prior to the commencement of the book, his daughter is diagnosed with cancer, his father’s girlfriend chokes to death in front of him, and a coworker overdoses on painkillers. It is a wonder Jerry does not share Doc Hata’s impulse to see himself as “at the vortex of bad happenings” (A Gesture Life 333). But Jerry Battle is very different from the quiet Asians who grace Native Speaker and A Gesture Life. Viewing the world in more visceral terms, he is likelier to comment on food, money, or sex than on his role in the deeper issues of life. Despite, or maybe because of, the ways in which he differs from Lee’s other characters, Jerry provides a platform for further addressing the issues of ethnicity, language, and passivity that are frequent in Lee’s earlier works. Although Jerry would probably not be considered a racist, he is extremely race-conscious. Race is often one of the fi rst things he mentions when describing the people in his life. He tells readers that his daughter says he does so because he is “like most people in this country . . . hopelessly obsessed with race and difference and can’t help but privilege the normative and fetishize what’s not” (12). Jerry prefers to believe that his focus on race is due to his concern for his own children, whom he alternately describes as not “wholly normative of race” (13) and “mixed blood” (30), as a result of his marriage to the Asian American Daisy. While he proclaims himself the “father of Diversity,” he fails to include himself in that diversity, seeming to consider himself more American than the hyphenated minority, despite his own immigrant ancestry. This tendency to view descendants of European immigrants as culturally more American than those of Asian or Eastern ancestry is a common theme in Lee’s work; it is supported by Leti Volpp in her article regarding the impact of immigration law on the cultural diversity of America. Despite his obsession with ethnicity, Jerry does have a moment when he realizes, mostly through his dealings with

222

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

his daughter’s fiancé, the Asian-American writer Paul Pyun (in occupation and choice of subject matter reminiscent of the author Chang-rae Lee), that individuals are not defi ned by their race: People say that Asians don’t show as much feeling as whites or blacks or Hispanics, and maybe on average that’s not completely untrue, but I’ll say, too, from my long if narrow experience (and I’m sure zero expertise), that the ones I’ve known and raised and loved have been completely a surprise in their emotive characters, confounding me to no end. This is not my way of proclaiming “We’re all individuals” or “We’re all the same” or any other smarmy notion about our species’ solidarity, just that if a guy like me is always having to think twice when he’d rather not do so at all, what must that say about this existence of ours but that it restlessly defies our attempts at its capture time and time again. (248)

This sentiment, voiced by Jerry Battle as a White American, represents a shift from the accusatory tone of Henry Park’s “This is your history” speech (Native Speaker 320) to one of hope that America will eventually embrace all of its immigrants. While Native Speaker focuses on the role of language as barrier/bridge between cultures, both A Gesture Life and Aloft explore the complexity of language within families. Both Doc Hata and Jerry Battle know the power of silence—each learned it from his father. For Hata, silence seems less choice than cultural inheritance, but Jerry employs silence with a vengeance, following the advice given by his father after Daisy nearly bankrupts the family to “be a little brutal. . . . Treat her badly, don’t give her any money or attention, or even a chance to bitch or argue” (111). Jerry admits he knows “how effective it can be to say grindingly little at the very moments when you ought to say a lot,” and although he himself has been wounded by his father’s tendency to invoke silence as a form of punishment, Jerry accepts his father’s suggestion,

which only contributes further to Daisy’s mental imbalance. Jerry also allows silence to dominate his interactions with his children, especially his son, Jack. Communication is difficult between the two, in part because of what has not been addressed in the past, namely, the death of Daisy, Jerry’s wife and the mother of Jack and Theresa. Jack was young when Daisy died, and he is profoundly affected by the loss, and although Jerry does not learn the full reason for that until years later, he does see that “for a year or so after she died he hardly said a word, he was just a kid with eyes” (85). Jerry’s natural tendency toward passivity and Jack’s withdrawal after Daisy’s death set a pattern of noncommunication that makes it difficult for them to discuss important matters, such as the state of the family business or Theresa’s illness. When it becomes impossible to avoid the subjects any longer, Jerry laments that his son is not more like him, so that “it would be easier to say something to him that I could be sure was tidy and effective, an impartial communication, like a patriarchal Post-it note with simple, useful information . . . or else something slightly chewier, some charming Taoist-accented aphorism bespeaking the endlessly curious circumstance and befuddlement of our lives” (236). But Jack is not Jerry and eventually Jerry realizes that his noncommunication is making the situation worse, that “over time it’s this already anticipated turbulence that brings a family most harm, the knowledge unacknowledged, which at some point you can try but can’t glide above” (152). Beyond what language does within his family, Jerry is also aware of its power within a culture to defi ne both individuals and their place in society. Jerry’s family is what he calls an “ethnically jumbled bunch, a grab bag miscegenation of Korean . . . Italian . . . and English-German” (72), and while he claims not to notice that much, he often fi nds himself on shaky ground with his daughter and her fiancé, arguing over terms like Asian American versus Oriental. Theresa and Paul believe that the question of race is one that should not be asked

Chang-rae Lee

because it allows for the assignment of the label Other. Jerry does not understand what all the fuss is about but notes that “words matter inordinately to Theresa and Paul” (30) and that they “inordinately fear and respect the power of the word” (73). How easily Jerry has forgotten the history of his own immigrant family, who years before changed their name from Battaglia to the “ethnically indistinct” Battle. Just as Doc Hata leads what Chang-rae Lee refers to as “a life of refraining from things, of being an abstainer in important ways” (Garner), Jerry Battle employs the same sort of passivity. Jerry’s daughter describes him as “preternaturally lazy-hearted” (43); his longtime girlfriend, Rita, claims he uses the death of his wife as an excuse to take the view that “everybody is a potential codependent” (273). What Rita does not see is that Jerry was this way long before his wife died. Although Jerry was the older of the two, he found himself living in the shadow of his brother, Bobby, whose death in Vietnam cast an angelic halo around his memory, impenetrable by his previous behavior or Jerry’s attempts to be the perfect son. Jerry may blame much of his present circumstances on having to parent two children after Daisy’s death, but he credits Bobby’s death with saddling him with the family business, holding him back from a career in aviation (157). Jerry’s father often comments on how Bobby should have married Daisy or should have inherited the family business, but Jerry remembers Bobby as less than perfect, with a tendency of “cutting short his involvement before anything could really develop” due to his “long-ingrained insoluble indifference” (156–157): harsh criticism from someone who admits he has “been disappearing for years” (23). Jerry’s disappearing act manifests itself primarily in the form of distancing himself from problems, both physically (as he does each time he isolates himself in his airplane) and mentally (through his personal motto of “I decline”). He describes this as the tendency to “not want to examine the issues too rigorously, . . . to keep it Un-real, keep

223

the thinking small because the issues in fact aren’t issues anymore but have suddenly become the allenveloping condition” (250). While Jerry claims to “decline the Real,” as if the real were something that could simply be passed on, in actuality what he declines is to accept his role in influencing the outcome of the real, to face the inescapable truth that he can and does have a choice and what he does (or declines to do) affects not only him, but also those around him. He declines to accept that those issues have become the “all-encompassing condition” in part because of his refusal to deal with them. Jerry would have readers believe that his affable, goodguy exterior and his socially acceptable rationalizations somehow make his failure to engage in his own life better than quitting.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How is Jerry’s “quick response” to Daisy’s death indicative of the way he handles all of life’s problems? In what ways does his avoidance actually contribute to the problems? 2. Death and the avoidance of dealing with death are central themes in Aloft. Examine the ways in which Jerry handles Daisy’s illness and, later, Theresa’s. What is his role in each woman’s death? 3. Discuss the symbolism of the novel’s beginning (Jerry flying a plane) and ending (Jerry standing in the recently excavated pool). How are those positions a metaphor for Jerry’s growth?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON LEE AND HIS WORK 1. The protagonists in Chang-rae Lee’s novels are each unreliable storytellers. In what ways are they the best and the worst characters to tell the story? 2. How is the character of Jerry Battle (Aloft) similar to the characters of Doc Hata (A Gesture Life) and Henry Park (Native Speaker)? What makes them each distinct?

224

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

3. Compare CAROLYN FORCHÉ’s poetry of witness to Chang-rae Lee’s attempt to depict the violence faced by comfort women during World War II. 4. Walt Whitman is referred to in both Native Speaker and Aloft. In what ways might Changrae Lee have been influenced by the poet’s work? Cite specific examples. 5. Consider the following excerpt from President John F. Kennedy’s A Nation of Immigrants: There is no part of our nation that has not been touched by our immigrant background. Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life. As Walt Whitman says, These States are the amplest poem, Here is not merely a nation but A teeming Nation of nations. To know America, then, it is necessary to understand this peculiarly American social revolution. It is necessary to know why over 42 million people gave up their settled lives to start anew in a strange land. We must know how they met the new land and how it met them, and, most important, we must know what these things mean for our present and for our future. (Mendoza xxvi)

What might Kennedy have said about the role of fiction, particularly Chang-rae Lee’s fiction, in furthering this understanding?

WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Chen, Tina. Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Corley, Liam. “ ‘Just Another Ethnic Pol’: Literary Citizenship in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker.” In Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites

and Transits, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim, et al. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Cowart, David. Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America. Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. Hogan, Ron. “The Beatrice Interview: 2000, Changrae Lee.” Available online. URL: www.beatrice. com/interviews/lee. Accessed November 26, 2006. Lee, Chang-rae. Aloft. New York: Riverhead Books, 2004. ———. A Gesture Life. New York: Riverhead Books, 1999. ———. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995. Lee, JinAh. “Award-Winning Novelist Discusses the Art of Writing and Reading.” Yale Bulletin and Calendar, 14 April 2000. Available online. URL: www.yale.edu/opa/v28.n28/story10.html. Accessed October 14, 2006. Lee, Rachel C. “Reading Contests and Contesting Reading: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Ethnic New York.” Melus 29, nos. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2004): 341–352. Marcus, James. “Talking with Chang-rae Lee: A Cultural Spy.” Newsday, Newspapers & Newswires, March 26, 1995, p. 34. Mendoza, Louis, and S. Shankar, eds. Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration. New York: New Press, 2003. Parikh, Crystal. “Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and Minority Discourse.” Contemporary Literature 43 (Summer 2002): 249–284. Plett, Nicole. “Chang-rae Lee Finds a Home.” U.S. 1 Newspaper, 9 October 2002. Available online. URL: PrincetonInfo.com. Accessed November 5, 2006. Volpp, Leti. “The Legal Mapping of U.S. Immigration 1965–1996.” Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration, edited by Louis Mendoza and S. Shankar. New York: New Press, 2003.

Kathy Higgs-Coulthard

Cormac McCarthy (1933–

)

The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate. (Blood Meridian)

he third of six siblings, the novelist, playwright, and screenplay writer Charles Joseph McCarthy, Jr., was born on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island, to Charles Joseph and Gladys Christina McGrail McCarthy. Four years later, the McCarthy family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where McCarthy’s father served as chief counsel for the Tennessee Valley Authority. The eldest son named for his father, McCarthy legally changed his named to the Gaelic equivalent of “son of Charles,” adopting “an old family nickname bestowed on his father by Irish aunts” (Woodward). Growing up in Knoxville, McCarthy attended Roman Catholic high school and the University of Tennessee brieﬂy (1951–52) before joining the air force. During his term of service he hosted a radio show and read voraciously. He returned to the University of Tennessee, majoring in engineering and then business administration. While there he published two short pieces of ﬁction and won the 1959–60 Ingram Merrill Award. In 1961, he married Lee Holleman, a poet and fellow student; moved to Chicago; worked as an auto mechanic; and began writing The Orchard Keeper (1965), which won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best ﬁ rst novel. Set in rural eastern Tennessee during a time when this hilly region was still remote and disconnected from what many in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s might have considered civilization, The Orchard Keeper

tells the story of three southerners from different generations who search for their place in the world in the face of urbanization and modernization: Marion Sylder, a middle-generation bootlegger; John Wesley Rattner, a young boy who captures game illegally; and Arthur Ownsby, an older man who is the orchard keeper. Marion kills a man and leaves the body in a peach orchard. Arthur ﬁ nds the body but does not report it to the authorities, leaving the corpse to rot for seven years. At the novel’s close, the outside world, represented by the law and those who enforce it, closes in. Marion is arrested, and Arthur, presumed insane, is sent to an asylum. Not only do the themes encompass the dying of the Old South and the encroachment of the modern world upon rural life—themes worthy of Faulkner in Go Down, Moses (1942) and As I Lay Dying (1930), but also the novel, as with the works of Flannery O’Connor, focuses upon misﬁts, those normally not chosen as subjects. McCarthy’s early outcasts foreshadow his many grotesque characters yet to be created. Fortuitously, McCarthy began a strong working relationship at this time with Albert Erskine at Random House, William Faulkner’s editor until his death in 1962, who had also sponsored Malcolm Lowly’s Under the Volcano (1947) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). McCarthy and Erskine would work together until Erskine’s retirement in the early 1990s. The year of The Orchard Keeper’s

225

226

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

publication McCarthy divorced and sailed to Ireland with money he received from a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. On board the ship he met Anne DeLisle, a British pop singer–dancer who was working on the ship. They married in 1966, traveled extensively, and settled in an artist colony on the island of Ibiza, where he ﬁ nished preparing his second novel, Outer Dark (1968). The McCarthys returned to Tennessee, and Outer Dark was published. A story of incest between a brother (Culla Holme) and sister (Rinthy), Outer Dark contains many of the gothic elements for which McCarthy is known. Ashamed after impregnating his sister, Culla refuses to get help as Rinthy delivers their child; Culla takes the boy and leaves him to die in the woods during the dark night. A tinker comes upon the baby and takes him under his care. Most of the novel deals with the milk-carrying Rinthy’s quest to ﬁ nd her child and Culla’s journey to ﬁ nd Rinthy. An episodic story that, as with Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, uses italics to signal ﬂashbacks, the novel is set in the early 20th-century Deep South, an area much like eastern Tennessee. As with The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark deals not only with a taboo subject but also with sinister ﬁgures, three night riders who torture Culla, cut the baby’s throat, and hang the tinker in a tree, leaving him for vultures. McCarthy’s next book, Child of God (1974), based on actual events, follows the reclusive serial killer and necrophiliac Lester Ballard as he lurks in the woods and caves of Sevier County, Tennessee. With its lyrical style, McCarthy’s narrative tempts readers to empathize with Ballard, who, despite his reprehensible actions, remains a pitiable and alienated outsider dispossessed of both home and community. In the end, Ballard is forced to retreat into the very earth, hiding from an angry mob in a system of caves, and eventually dies of pneumonia in a state mental hospital. The last chapter occurs a few months after Ballard has died and describes a farmer’s discovery of the cave where seven of his victims lie rotting. This macabre and seemingly sympathetic portrait of human depravity garnered mixed reviews from critics, though many were

quick to perceive its literary merits. As Jonathan Yardley wrote in the Washington Post’s Book World, “[Somewhere] deep in Lester Ballard, beneath all that anger and outrage and despair, there is love and yearning. It is that which makes his story so poignant and, in the end, surprisingly and affectingly universal” (1). In 1975, McCarthy penned a screenplay called The Gardener’s Son; he separated from Anne DeLisle in 1976 and moved to El Paso, Texas. In 1979, he published Suttree, a novel written over a 20-year span. Shifting in perspective and fragmented by design, Suttree tells the story of a man, Cornelius Suttree, who leaves his wife and infant son for the life of a ﬁ sherman, living on a houseboat in a community of outcasts. For example, Gene Harrogate, the character who serves as Suttree’s foil, is sent to prison for sexually molesting watermelons. Filled with quirky characters and experimental in style, Suttree has been compared with James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), with which the novel also shares a dark sense of humor. Set in the slums during the 1950s in Knoxville, Tennessee, the novel follows Suttree through his day-to-day experiences. Like Outer Dark, Suttree is an episodic work relying on the reader to stitch together narrative threads. Interestingly, the narrative ends with Suttree’s breaking free of the Knoxville world, setting out for a new life, as did McCarthy some three years prior to the novel’s publication. With its large cast of characters and focus on the suffering outcast, Suttree has been hailed as one of McCarthy’s greatest achievements. In 1981, McCarthy received a MacArthur Fellowship “genius” grant, which supported him while he wrote his ﬁ rst western novel, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (1985), a bloody epic of scalp hunters who terrorize the Southwest in the 1840s that has often been compared with Melville’s Moby-Dick. A historical novel that McCarthy spent much time researching, Blood Meridian chronicles the life of the “kid,” who learns to enjoy violence, and the sinister Judge Holden, a grand, archetypal Ahab-like ﬁgure. While critics praised his use of language, many critics and readers were deterred from reading it by the novel’s graphic vio-

Cormac McCarthy

lence. Nevertheless, it is now viewed as being one of the most signiﬁcant works McCarthy has written and lauded by critics such as Harold Bloom as one of the ﬁ nest works in the American literary canon. In 1990, McCarthy was inducted into the Southwest Writers Hall of Fame. Characteristically, he neither attended nor allowed his picture to be taken. Signiﬁcantly, upon Albert Erskine’s retirement, McCarthy began working with the editor Gary Fiskerton at Alfred Knopf. Through the years 1992 to 1998, McCarthy published The Border Trilogy, a series of novels about the adventures of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham in the American Southwest and Mexico: All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998). As Arnold and Luce detail, “Combining a love story, an action plot, and a coming-of-age narrative, [All the Pretty Houses] sold over 100,000 copies in less than a year’s time” (9). In addition to the readers McCarthy then gained, All the Pretty Horses garnered the National Book Award (December 1992) and the National Book Critics Circle Award (March 1993). Previously a small cadre of dedicated scholars had been following McCarthy’s career closely; after the critical and commercial success of All the Pretty Horses, reviews, articles, books, and dissertations on McCarthy began to proliferate. In 1998, with Cities of the Plain complete, McCarthy married Jennifer Winkley and fathered a son, John Francis, with this, his third wife. They moved to Tesuque, New Mexico, where McCarthy has an ofﬁce at the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary think tank. No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006) are McCarthy’s most recent works, the ﬁ rst a tale of a man on the run trying to escape borderland drug cartels, and the second a story of a man and son struggling to survive in a postapocalyptic world, a future America covered with ash where gangs of cannibals roam the highways in search of their next meal. In June 2007 the reclusive McCarthy shocked both critics and readers by appearing on daytime television for Oprah’s Book Club, resulting in the printing of nearly 1 million copies of The Road, which is slated to become a major motion picture. Clips from this rare interview can be found

227

on various Internet sites, including youtube.com (Oprah’s Web site includes clips from the interview: http://www.oprah.com/media/20080601_ obc_ 267033502COR M AC W EBE A _O_V IDEOv1). By January 2008, Joel and Ethan Coen had won multiple awards for their ﬁ lm adaptation of No Country for Old Men, and Cormac McCarthy had become a well known name, his work topping bestseller lists and taught in high school and college classrooms across the United States. Although McCarthy remained reclusive during the early part of his career and refused to give interviews, he has now been interviewed by the New York Times and by the talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, appeared on television with the Cohen brothers, and had the good fortune of attracting the interest of top-notch scholars who have documented his life and works, most notably Robert L. Jarrett in Cormac McCarthy (1997), Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (1999), and Kenneth Lincoln in his recent study of all the McCarthy works to date, Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles (2009). As Lincoln carefully observes: Distinctly removed from literati, Cormac McCarthy is a college dropout and autodidact spanning popular border cultures and the high broad arts of American letters. He blends adventure tales and excruciating tragedies, mixes high jinks and low spirits, fuses the lyric sublime and revulsive grotesque. This self-made writer cobbles his own hybrid genres from history, literature, and science. The novels and scripts cross tall tales with gritty truth, fuse adult westerns with futuristic apocalypse, pair raw innocence with mesmerizing debauchery, etch pure love of land and natural life-forms into Southern Gothic, city wasteland, and Southwest naturalism. (2)

While critics continue to debate whether his works contain gratuitous violence, whether his worldview is nihilistic, or whether he has neglected women in his works, many agree McCarthy is one of the most signiﬁcant writers in the American literary

228

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

tradition, a novelist whose command of language and epic vision challenge us to confront the brutality of human life and the inevitability of death.

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) A novel that blends history and ﬁction often considered by critics to be McCarthy’s ﬁ nest work, Blood Meridian depicts savage acts done in the name of Manifest Destiny, a term used during the 19th century to describe the expansion from the Atlantic seaboard to the Paciﬁc Ocean as the United States’s responsibility, one ordained by God. Relying upon numerous historical records, the novel follows a gang of scalp hunters led by John Joel Glanton, a member of the U.S. Army in the mid19th century. Although the historical Glanton was initially hired by Mexican authorities to hunt and kill the Apache, eventually his gang began to scalp and massacre citizens, becoming one of the most notorious bands of outlaws in the Southwest. McCarthy went to great lengths in researching and writing the novel, learning Spanish and reading historical accounts, especially My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue by Samuel Chamberlain, a member of the Glanton gang. Further, McCarthy relied upon Audubon’s Western Journal 1849–1850 (1906) by John Woodhouse Audubon (for the full text, visit http://www.archive.org/details/ audubonswesternjOOaudufo) and The Scalp Hunters (1860) by Thomas Mayne Reid (for the full text, visit http://www.archive.org/details/Captain_Mayne_Reid_The Scalp_Hunters). Thus, the novel supplants stereotypical notions of the “Wild West” found in radio shows such as The Lone Ranger and in Hollywood blockbuster ﬁ lms starring John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, leaving us with a bloody history instead of the romanticized mythology of the Southwest. McCarthy relies upon the Glanton gang’s story for the novel’s action, which contains some of the most graphic violence in the literary tradition, violence that has prohibited many readers from making it through the book. At the book’s core lies

the gang’s drive for human scalps, for which they receive $200 apiece. Blood Meridian tells of the gang’s initial hiring to kill the Apache, the gang’s descent into the scalp trade, the pursuit of the gang by Mexican authorities, the gang’s commandeering of a ferry used by Yuma Indians, and the gang’s massacre at the hands of the Yuma. While such graphic descriptions might alone sustain interest in the conﬂ icted past that often was justiﬁed under the name of God, what enables this book to be read and reread are its masterful language and its characters, which transcend the historical framework. The novel’s protagonist, “the kid,” is born during the Leonids meteor shower of 1833, an ominous sign: “Sign of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall” (3). At 14 the kid leaves his home in Tennessee, makes his way to New Orleans and Galveston, and ultimately rides a decrepit mule into the town of Nacogdoches, Texas, in 1849. There he meets the book’s antagonist, who is “bald as a stone” and has “no trace of beard” and “no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them”: Judge Holden, whom the literary critic Harold Bloom calls “the most frightening ﬁgure in all of American literature” and “a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting” (Cormac McCarthy 1). Holden sees violence as endemic to the human condition and war as a sacred ritual: “War is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god” (Blood Meridian 249). While the ﬁ rst chapters of the novel focus on the kid—his birth, travels, and ultimate imprisonment—the violence that follows dominates the narrative in which the kid appears. After the Yuma massacre, however, the narrative shifts to the kid, who along with Holden survives the Indian assault. Ultimately, Holden and the kid meet again in the book’s penultimate scene, when Holden crushes the life out of the kid in an outhouse. At this dramatic moment, the narrative shifts to a brief epilogue that provides another haunting image: a man who makes holes in the

Cormac McCarthy

ground, ritualistically “striking the ﬁ re out of the rock which God has put there” as wanderers behind him search for bones or “move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by prudence or reﬂectiveness” (337). Here and throughout the novel, McCarthy opens up mythic possibilities, asking us to weigh image with word and deed, drawing us to make meaning from a powerful text whose interpretation can be as difﬁcult as its violence is to bear.

For Discussion and Writing 1. Write a well-developed essay on Cormac McCarthy’s use of graphic violence in the novel. As you weigh the purpose and effect of the book’s many gruesome descriptions, decide whether the violent images are gratuitous or necessary. Support everything you say about McCarthy’s use of violence by using historical sources, especially My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue by Samuel Chamberlain, Audubon’s Western Journal 1849–1850 (1906) by John Woodhouse Audubon, and The Scalp Hunters (1860) by Thomas Mayne Reid. Contrast historical passages with detailed descriptions from Blood Meridian. 2. What wisdom does the judge offer? Write a welldeveloped essay on the ﬁgure of Judge Holden and what he may represent. Consider not only what the judge does but also what he says, the wisdom he imparts. Speeches worth glossing can be found on the following pages: 329 (on death), 250 (on morality), and 141, 146, 199, and 245 (on the nature of reality). 3. Compare Judge Holden with Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick. What qualities do the two share? How do both comment upon the order or lack thereof of the universe and the relationship between the human and the divine?

All the Pretty Horses (1992) The ﬁ rst of McCarthy’s novels to be widely read, All the Pretty Horses follows the exploits of

229

John Grady Cole, a dispossessed adolescent who ventures from his family’s ranch in San Angelo, Texas, to Mexico in search of the cowboy life that is quickly disappearing from the American Southwest. Thus the novel is both a coming-of-age story that chronicles Grady’s loss of innocence and idealism as well as a lamentation for the death of an iconic and distinctly American myth: the selfsufﬁcient and morally pure frontiersman. Though McCarthy’s ﬁ rst western novel, Blood Meridian, dramatically questions the idealized picture of the cowboy and America’s westward expansion propagated by numerous western novels and ﬁ lms, All the Pretty Horses offers readers a sympathetic protagonist who tries to live up to the moral codes these works enshrine. John Grady Cole is the last inheritor of a long family tradition of ranching and working with horses. His grandfather, the last real rancher of the family, has died, and his mother proceeds to sell the family spread to oilmen. Unwilling to accept the options open to him in San Angelo, Grady leaves with his friend Lacy Rawlins for the “white space” on the map: Mexico. Grady and Rawlins are joined by a younger boy, Jimmy Blevins, whom they encounter on their way to the border atop a suspiciously valuable bay horse. Whereas Rawlins seems to be slightly more mature than Grady and is quick to recognize danger, Blevins proves to be superstitious, immature, gun-happy, and more than willing to live the cowboy life Grady idealizes. After the three cross the Rio Grande into Coahuila, they have fair luck until Blevins loses his horse, pistol, and clothes in an attempt to evade the lightning of a passing storm. This image of frailty and ill fortune marks the beginning of trouble for the boys: When the three ride into the town of La Encantada, Blevins recognizes his missing bay horse tied up in an abandoned house and they scheme to get it back. During the chase that ensues, Blevins becomes separated from Rawlins and Cole in an attempt to draw off the villagers pursuing them. The narrative then follows Rawlins and Cole as they travel farther south and eventually ﬁ nd work at a ranch owned by Don Hector Rocha y Villareal. After proving his brilliance with horses, Grady

230 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

befriends Don Hector, who entrusts him with his ﬁ nest horses. Grady quickly falls in love with Don Hector’s daughter, Alejandra, and, despite the admonitions of both Rawlins and Alejandra’s aunt, Duena Alfonsa, pursues a secret romance with her. When Don Hector eventually learns of Grady’s transgressions with his daughter, he turns them in to the police captain of Estancia as accomplices of Blevins, who is being held in the town jail for horse theft and murder. The three are reunited in jail and sent to Saltillo prison. En route, the captain stops the convoy and executes Blevins, whose last act is to give Grady the rest of his money from his boot. Grady and Rawlins live in constant fear for their lives while incarcerated at Saltillo: Each day entails another ﬁght with inmates and the two make few friends. Unfortunately, neither Grady nor Rawlins has enough money to buy their way out. Rawlins is stabbed by an inmate and hospitalized. Grady, now alone, uses Blevins’s money to buy a switchblade from one of the few friends he has made in the prison. The purchase proves to be well timed: Grady soon has to kill an assailant wielding a cafeteria tray and a knife. Severely wounded from the encounter, Grady heals in a pitch-black cell where he senses “men had died” only to emerge with the news that Duena Alfonsa has bought their freedom in exchange for Alejandra’s promise not to see him again. Rawlins embarks homeward and Grady hopes to ﬁ nd and marry Alejandra. When he arrives at the hacienda, Duena Alphonsa attempts to dissuade Grady by relating the tragedies that had befallen her and her revolutionary friends. Grady remains steadfast in his idealistic vision of the future despite these warnings and meets Alejandra in the town of Zacatecas. They brieﬂy rekindle their romance in an old hotel, only for Alejandra to return to her aunt despite Grady’s professions of love. Thus defeated he begins the long journey home and, upon passing a sign pointing the way to La Encantada, rashly decides to reclaim the horses conﬁ scated by the captain after their arrest. Grady succeeds in stealing the horses back, takes the captain hostage, and ﬂees northward with a posse pursuing him. Shot in the leg, Grady stops the bleeding by cauterizing

the wound with the ﬁ re-heated barrel of his pistol. Soon afterward, a mysterious group of mountain people carry off the captain, and Grady escapes. After crossing the Rio Grande once more, Grady attempts to ﬁ nd Blevins’s family to return the horse. This eventually lands him in court, where a judge rules in Grady’s favor after hearing his story of how he came to possess the horse. Afterward, Grady seeks the judge’s counsel regarding his guilt at having killed a man and betrayed the trust of Don Hector. As the novel ends, we are left to contemplate John Grady Cole riding in a solitary and desolate landscape, leading a horse whose rightful owner he cannot ﬁ nd, unsure whether he has acted justly in his adventures. Unmoored and exiled from both San Angelo and Mexico, Grady maintains his earnest and romantic dedication to the cowboy way of life, alienating him from human society, and ultimately from himself. Whereas Blood Meridian forces readers to reconsider national myths of the West by emphasizing the violent and amoral character of its conquest, All the Pretty Horses focuses on the psychological and interpersonal tragedies that the cowboy myth creates for a nostalgic 16-yearold making his way in a chaotic world where industry and urbanization are encroaching upon the vast expanses of the old West.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Throughout the novel John Grady Cole encounters characters who attempt to explain the ways of the world to him, including his self-professed “enemy,” Duena Alphonsa. Toward the end of the conversation Cole has with her upon returning to the hacienda from prison, Duena Alphonsa tells him: In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. I’ve thought a great deal about my life and

Cormac McCarthy

about my country. I think there is little that can truly be known. (236)

Later, as Cole contemplates a doe’s death, the narrator observes: He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d ﬁ rst seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world though he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deﬁcit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single ﬂower. (280)

In a well-developed essay, examine how McCarthy’s protagonist is changed by his experiences in Mexico, focusing especially on his encounter with Duena Alphonsa. What sort of knowledge does Duena Alphonsa offer? How is it supported (or undermined) by the events of the novel? Would Cole agree with his antagonist’s pronouncements by the novel’s close? 2. Read McCarthy’s entire Border Trilogy, paying special attention to the similarities between John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, the protagonist of The Crossing. In a well-developed essay, explore Cole and Parham’s differing reactions to loss and their reasons for crossing the border into Mexico. While both characters are drawn to the cowboy life, are wrongfully prosecuted for horse theft, and become violent fugitives yearning for the past, they arrive at this common predicament by dramatically different paths. In your essay, describe how the themes of these two divergent plots resonate with each other and how McCarthy intertweaves them in the ﬁnal installment of the trilogy, Cities of the Plain.

231

The Road (2006) Set in a postapocalyptic future, one when ash dusts the earth, clouds obscure the sun, and human beings have regressed to barbarism, The Road is a radical departure from the western novels McCarthy has been writing for some 20 years. It is a story of a father and son, one dedicated to McCarthy’s son, John Francis. The father and son limp along the road, two vagabonds, like Estragon and Vladimir in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. As with Beckett’s work, there is little to be done. But whereas Beckett stages a surreal setting in which a comedy in the style of Charlie Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy ensues, The Road offers no way of laughing at our fate. But it does offer the authenticity of a father-son bond, one unbroken by countless travels and one that does not end in death. In this sense, the novel deals with what alone is real in a world lacking transcendent values: our dependence upon one another. Although the boy wonders about God and the mother who adopts him at the novel’s close assures him that “the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all time,” The Road portrays a wintry, ashen world where our connection with the divine is through familial bonds, care the only lasting value in a world that has ceased to imagine its own future. Both a book about the end of the world and a gift to McCarthy’s son, the book is a story about stories, each one vital to our understanding and self-preservation despite the fact that all stories, as the man tells the boy, are lies, and the world of the living causes the man to envy the dead. That McCarthy provides a bleak, dystopian setting for a novel professing the importance of paternal love, one with an emotional, even sentimental ending, attests to the work’s many layers of meaning and the many contradictions it records. As it provides little information about what has happened, why the world as it has been has vanished, The Road relies upon our ability to supply likely contexts, whether this context is global thermonuclear war, the sort of asteroid strike that probably ended the age of the dinosaurs, or a biblical apocalypse. All we know is that at 1:17 the world has stopped

232 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

being what it was and has become a nightmarish wasteland. As with all of McCarthy’s masterful storytelling, The Road’s language and texture sustain interest and propel the reader into the narrative, one page quickly turned after another. Where Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy rely upon epic catalogs, Faulknerian sentences, and densely packed prose, The Road is an immediate text, one whose fragmented form mirrors the world it describes. As Kenneth Lincoln aptly observes, “The writing settles into a postholocaust grammar of scree, shards, smoke, fractals, bits and pieces of charnel, dead ﬂesh and sallow bone” with “no plot line or story arc of character development” (165). Instead of the usual elements that stabilize the text and help us take meaning from it, the novel depicts what Lincoln refers to as a “double bind”: “Nobody wants to be in the world and nobody wants to leave it.” Yet it is a story of continuing, of surviving against all odds. Although, as with the brook trout at the novel’s close, this is a world that can “not be made right again,” it is a world that hums “of mystery” (The Road 287).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Write a well-developed essay on The Road as an example of dystopian literature. To help understand the genre and to provide points of comparison, ﬁ rst see Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, another work set in a dystopian future. Next, read another dystopian work of literature such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984. As you deﬁ ne the genre through these works, weigh the vision of the artist in each. Do these writers agree about the future of humanity? How do their outlooks coincide, and how do they differ? 2. While the two authors use radically different writing styles, both Samuel Beckett and Cormac McCarthy depict end-of-the-world scenarios in two of their most signiﬁcant works, Beckett’s Endgame and McCarthy’s The Road. Write a well-developed essay that compares the

two works, considering not only similarities of setting but also the assumptions about life’s meaning and purpose these two works provide. 3. Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road is not only a mainstay of Beat literature but also the story of an American journey, one that traverses American highways as two men explore life’s many possibilities. Read On the Road and then write a well-developed essay on the way Kerouac and McCarthy comment upon the American experience in their road narratives.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON MCCARTHY AND HIS WORK 1. Like William Faulkner writing of the American South and James Joyce of Dublin, Cormac McCarthy enshrines a region in his western novels: the Southwest. First, read a couple of McCarthy novels from his western period, roughly from Blood Meridian in 1985 to No Country for Old Men in 2005. Then, write a comparative essay on the way McCarthy both mythologizes and demythologizes the region he enshrines, using evidence from both texts. 2. In translating works of art from book to ﬁ lm, directors make choices: what to include, how to represent the language they encounter, what to emphasize and deemphasize. In short, they create interpretations of literary works by necessity. Talented directors have transformed several of McCarthy’s novels, notably Joel and Ethan Coen in their adaptation of McCarthy’s 2005 novel No Country for Old Men. First, read McCarthy’s novel. Then, see the ﬁ lm, thinking about how the directors rendered McCarthy’s novel. Finally, write a well-developed essay that analyses the way the Coen brothers interpreted McCarthy’s work. 3. Many have taken McCarthy to task for both the lack of women in his works and the way he represents women in his works. With these critiques in mind, Kenneth Lincoln provides a thoughtprovoking rejoinder:

Cormac McCarthy

No less than the classical masters, cultural historians, or modern prophets and eco-scientists, McCarthy alerts us to the disasters of history, the monstrosities of moral deviance, the absurdities of human fate, the sublime ranges of will and courage, the depths of suffering, pain, and psychopathology. He writes about old-time, frontier, futuristic America from the bottom up, portraying men from the decent and conﬂ icted, to the raw and grimy, to the deformed and malign. He lyricizes landscape, climate, and animals with native reverence. He chronicles the search for justice and redemption with tragic sorrow and heroic stoicism. In lineage with Hemingway’s homosocial focus on male agonies, McCarthy writes unapologetic canticles of masculinity about the challenges, dreams, betrayals, and defeats of men, as Adrienne Rich or Alice Walker focus on women. (3)

After considering the way McCarthy depicts women in at least two of his works, write a well-developed essay that considers both the critique of McCarthy and Lincoln’s defense. Back up everything you say with textual evidence. WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Andersen, Elisabeth. The Mythos of Cormac McCarthy. Saarbrucken, Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller, 2008. Arnold, Edwin T. A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. ———. Cormac McCarthy. Hattiesburg: University of Southern Mississippi Press, 1992. ———. Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. Hattiesburg: University of Southern Mississippi Press, 2000. ———, and Dianne C. Luce. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Rev. ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Bell, James. Cormac McCarthy’s West: The Border Trilogy Annotations. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002. Bell, Madison Smartt. “The Man Who Understood Horses.” New York Times Book Review, 17 May 1992, sec. 7, p. 9.

233

Bell, Vereen. The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Bloom, Harold. Cormac McCarthy. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002. ———. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Brown, Fred. “Cormac McCarthy: On the Trail of a Legend.” Knoxville News Sentinel December 16, 2007. Available online. URL: http://www.knoxnews. com/news/2007/dec/16/1216cormac/. Accessed June 18, 2009. Cant, John. Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. New York: Routledge, 2008. Ciuba, Gary. Desire, Violence and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. The Cormac McCarthy Home Pages: Ofﬁcial Web Site of the Cormac McCarthy Society. Cormac McCarthy Society. Available online. URL: http://www. cormacmaccarthy.com/. Accessed June 18, 2009. Ellis, Jay. No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy. New York: Routledge, 2006. Ford, Adam, and Victoria Ford. The Road by Cormac McCarthy: Notes. Melbourne, Austral.: CAE Book Groups, 2007. Frye, Steven. Understanding Cormac McCarthy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. Greenwood, Willard. Reading Cormac McCarthy. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2009. Guillemin, Georg. The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy. 1st ed. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. Hall, Wade. Cormac McCarthy’s Appalachian Works. 2nd ed. El Paso, Tex.: Texas Western University of Texas at El Paso, 2002. ———. Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. 2nd ed. El Paso: Texas Western Press/University of Texas at El Paso, 2002. ———. Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy: Selected Essays from the ﬁrst McCarthy Conference, Bellarmine College, Louisville, Kentucky,

234 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

October 15–17, 1993. 1st ed. Ed Paso: University of Texas at El Paso, 1995. Holloway, David. The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. New York: London: Twayne, Prentice Hall International, 1997. Lilley, James. Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. 1st ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Lincoln, Kenneth. Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Luce, Dianne. Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. ———. Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West. 1985. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1992. ———. Cities of the Plain. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1998. ———. The Crossing. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. No Country for Old Men. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 2005.

———. The Road. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 2006. ———. The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form. 1st ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Owens, Barcley. Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. Pearce, Richard. “Foreword.” In The Gardener’s Son: A Screenplay. By Cormac McCarthy. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1996. Rudin, Scott. No Country for Old Men: A Coen Brothers Film. Burbank, Calif.: Miramax Films/Paramount Vantage, 2008. Salerno, Robert. All the Pretty Horses. Culver City, Calif.: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2001. Sanborn, Wallis. Animals in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Tatum, Stephen. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002. Wallach, Rick. Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2000. Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” New York Times Magazine, 19 April 1992, pp. 28–31.

Blake Hobby

Larry McMurtry (1936–

)

Texas is rich in unredeemed dreams, and now that the dust of its herds is settling the writers will be out on their pencils, looking for them in the suburbs and along the mythical Pecos. And except to the paper riders, the Pecos is a lonely and a bitter stream. (In a Narrow Grave).

arry McMurtry was born into a cattle-ranching family in Wichita Falls, Texas, on June 3, 1936, and grew up steeped in cowboy culture. In the 1880s, McMurtry’s grandparents William Jefferson and Louisa Francis Jefferson bought a half-section of land in Archer County, west Texas, where they raised their 12 children and watched the last cattle drives headed north (Busby 3). McMurtry writes, in a 1968 essay, that his family members “bespeak the region. . . . All of them gave such religious allegiance as they had to give to . . . the god whose principal myth was the myth of the Cowboy, the ground of whose divinity was the Range. They were many things, the McMurtrys, but to themselves they were cowboys ﬁrst and last, and the rituals of that faith they strictly kept” (Narrow Grave 142). McMurtry’s parents, William Jefferson, Jr., and Hazel Ruth, lived on his grandfather’s ranch until Larry was six years old. Hazel Ruth wanted to be nearer “civilization,” so they moved to Archer City. In a 1978 lecture entitled “The Southwest as the Cradle of the Novelist,” McMurtry explains that it was while living in town and visiting the ranch that he realized “one set of values and traditions was being strongly challenged by another set of values and traditions. . . . I grew up just at the same time when rural and soil traditions in Texas were really, for the ﬁ rst time, being seriously challenged by urban traditions” (quoted in Busby 6). The changes in his family and community that McMurtry wit-

nessed as a child and adolescent helped shape his personality and perspective—and became an important element in much of his writing. McMurtry was “unable to master the ﬁ ner points of ranch work”; he writes that the family found him insufﬁciently “mean” for the kind of work they did (Narrow Grave 158), so he discovered books (Reynolds 6). McMurtry remembers when he was eight years old “sitting in a hot pickup near Silverton, Texas, bored stiff, waiting for my father and two of my uncles . . . to conclude a cattle deal”. He was reading Last of the Great Scouts—a book about Buffalo Bill Cody—when his father and uncles returned to the pickup. When they saw what he had been reading, they reminded each other that they had seen Cody once near the end of his life at a show in Oklahoma. Buffalo Bill Cody was “one of the most famous men in the world, and they had seen him with their own eyes,” McMurtry wrote 60 years after the experience (The Colonel and Little Missie 12). And, although he explains that the heat in the pickup was the most memorable part of that incident, it is signiﬁcant because it clearly illustrates McMurtry’s position between two worlds: a world in which his own father and uncles not only saw Buffalo Bill Cody but also lived the kind of rough, pioneering lives that Cody and his show mythologized; and Larry’s world—a world ﬁ lled with books and stories that gloriﬁed the past his parents and grandparents had experienced.

235

236 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

McMurtry became, as he called himself, a “herder of words” instead of cattle (Reynolds 6). As a teenager, McMurtry was a good student with varied interests. He was an honor student at Archer City High School, where he lettered in band, basketball, and baseball. He was also a 4-H Club ofﬁcer, editorial writer for the school paper Cat’s Claw, member of both junior and senior class plays, fourth-place winner of the district mile race, and second-place winner in editorial writing (Peavy 13). After graduation in 1954, McMurtry began college at Rice University. One semester later, he transferred to North Texas State University in Denton. While working toward his B.A. degree, McMurtry wrote what he deemed 52 “very bad” short stories, which he later burned (15). In 1958, during his senior year of college, he wrote two stories utilizing his cowboy background: one about the destruction of a cattle herd and the other about a cattle rancher’s funeral. Sensing a connection between the two events, McMurtry continued writing a week after graduation. The result was the ﬁ rst 100 pages of Horseman, Pass By. He continued working on the novel, and by 1961, when it was published, he had been through six drafts (Peavy 16). During McMurtry’s years at North Texas State, he published ﬁction, poetry, and essays in Avesta, the student magazine, and the Coexistence Review. The latter was an unauthorized literary magazine that he and his friends Grover and John Lewis began (Busby 10). The second issue of Coexistence Review includes a poem by Jo Scott, a student at Texas Woman’s University. McMurtry and Scott married in 1959 and had a son, James Lawrence McMurtry (15). McMurtry returned to Rice University for graduate school, where his studies focused on English literature. He earned his M.A. in 1960 and was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Although McMurtry was reportedly shy and reserved, he did form long-lasting relationships with several young writers at Stanford. McMurtry connected with Ken Kesey, probably because of their shared western upbringing, as well as the Australian writer Chris Koch. Many of the 1960 Stegner Fellows continue to correspond, offering

support and praise for one another’s success. In a 1994 interview, Kesey said, “When Larry won the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove, it gloried all of us” (Busby 16–17). When McMurtry’s fellowship at Stanford ended, he returned to Texas, where he taught at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth in the 1961–62 academic year. The following year, he went back to Rice to teach English and creative writing. In 1963, Paramount released a movie adaptation of Horseman, Pass By called Hud. Hud was the ﬁ rst of many ﬁ lm and television adaptations of McMurtry’s work. Mark Busby writes: Not only does McMurtry write in such a way that his works lend themselves to ﬁ lm, but he is the product of a generation that grew up on movies and moved into maturity as ﬁ lm itself began to be seen as a signiﬁcant art form rather then mere entertainment. Movies have therefore shaped his imagination, and the more he began to work in the industry, the more his ﬁction began to reﬂect his knowledge of it and the actors and directors with whom he became friends. (279)

Hud and Horseman, Pass By dramatize the demise of the traditional cattle ranch and the displacement of the cowboy. Both the novel and the ﬁ lm mourn the loss of the Texas cattle-ranching way of life while attacking and undermining and undoing sentimental and romanticized notions of what it means to be a cowboy. In 1963, Harper and Row published the second book in what has become known as McMurtry’s Thalia Trilogy, Leaving Cheyenne. In this novel, McMurtry explores the possibilities of fulﬁ llment in various types of southwestern rural life through three characters: Molly, Gid, and Johnny. Gid is a responsible, settled rancher; Johnny is a freedomloving cowboy. Both men love Molly, but instead of choosing either one, she marries Eddie, an oil ﬁeld worker. The novel’s themes include unrequited love, unmet expectations, and generational conﬂict. McMurtry spent most of the 1960s teaching at Rice, except for 1964–65, when he received a

Larry McMurtry

Guggenheim Grant for creative writing (Peavy 22). Gregory Curtis, editor of Texas Monthly, was one of McMurtry’s students at Rice. He describes McMurtry’s teaching style as “polite discouragement” (quoted in Busby 19). McMurtry did not seem very interested in his students’ writing, but, according to Curtis, he inspired by example. The 1960s were also a challenging time in his personal life. In 1964, McMurtry and his wife separated. They divorced in 1966 and McMurtry raised their son, James, who became a successful singer-songwriter (Busby 15). The year 1966 was also when Dial Press published McMurtry’s third novel, The Last Picture Show. In The Last Picture Show, McMurtry “examines [the small west Texas town of Thalia’s] inhabitants—the oil rich, the roughnecks, the religious fanatics, the high school football stars, the love-starved women, —with an eye that is at once sociological and satiric” (Peavy 34). In 1969, McMurtry left Texas, both literally and ﬁguratively. He moved to Waterford, Virginia, where he opened a rare-book store, Booked Up, with Marcia McGhee Carter, the daughter of the Texas oilman-diplomat George McGhee. McMurtry’s romance with McGhee did not last, but their friendship and business partnership did. He lived in the area for nearly a decade, teaching at George Washington University and American University and, of course, writing. He wrote the screenplay for The Last Picture Show, which was released in 1971, as well as his Houston trilogy: Moving On (1970), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), and Terms of Endearment (1975). By 1978, McMurtry was back in Archer City, where, according to Mark Busby’s biography, he spent a signiﬁcant amount of time at the Dairy Queen south of town, thinking about the art of storytelling, the literary critic Walter Benjamin, and his hometown (22). In the early 1980s, McMurtry worked on a screenplay called The Streets of Laredo. No one seemed interested in it, so he switched genres, turning his trail-drive screenplay into a novel, Lonesome Dove, which was published in 1985. Lonesome Dove was a huge success. In the late 1960s, someone had given McMurtry a shirt with the words Minor Regional Novelist printed across the chest. Not surprisingly,

237

photos of him wearing the shirt while “typing . . . playing pool, . . . thoughtfully pondering a book— all activities that a minor regional novelist can reasonably be expected to take part in” appeared in the Houston Post (Ray Isle). While Lonesome Dove is certainly a regional novel, it solidiﬁed McMurtry’s status as a serious and respected major American novelist when it won the Pulitzer Prize. McMurtry’s hometown, which was less than enthusiastic about him after having been depicted so negatively in his writing, honored him by proclaiming one Saturday in October 1986 “Larry McMurtry Day.” In a speech he gave that day, McMurtry thanked the hometown of which he had been so critical: It’s one thing to write a book that appeals to the taste of the people on the [Pulitzer] prize committee. It’s harder to earn the respect of people who know you. The myth is that small towns in America don’t care about their writers and are small minded and intolerant. But here I am, a writer being honored by his hometown. In a sense, you have all helped me with this award. I don’t know if I have ever used a literal event that has happened in this town, but what I have used are the intimations and hunches you have given me. (quoted in Busby 25)

The Pulitzer Prize–winning novel was adapted into a television miniseries starring Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, and Angelica Huston in 1989. The series proved as successful as the book. McMurtry continued writing through the late 1980s and 1990s, publishing The Streets of Laredo (1993) and The Evening Star (1992), among other works. But he also spent time managing his bookstores Booked Up in Dallas and Houston and running the Blue Pig Book Shop in Archer City. He also dealt with some serious health problems: In 1991, he had a heart attack and underwent quadruple-bypass surgery. Fortunately, he recovered quickly and continued working—although the darkness of Streets of Laredo reveals some of the depression McMurtry suffered after his surgery. More recently, McMurtry has been writing about the history of western icons and continuing

238 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

to expand his book business. His most recent public success is the 2005 Academy Award, for a screenplay he cowrote with his companion and writing partner Diana Ossana for the ﬁ lm Brokeback Mountain—a ﬁ lm adapted from a short story by Annie Proulx. Not surprisingly, McMurtry attended the Oscars wearing jeans and cowboy boots with his jacket and bow tie. And he thanked the booksellers of the world in his acceptance speech: “Remember,” he said, “Brokeback Mountain was a book before it was a movie. From the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world. All are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book. A wonderful culture, which we mustn’t lose” (“Winner: Writer . . .”).

The Last Picture Show (1966) The Last Picture Show (1966) satirizes small-town Texans of the 1950s. The novel’s sarcastic dedication to McMurtry’s hometown, Archer City, is just one more manifestation of McMurtry’s conﬂ icted—largely negative—feelings toward his home. The novel begins with Sonny Crawford, a high school senior, surveying Thalia’s main street from the cab of his ’41 Chevrolet truck early one Saturday morning. “Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town,” the novel begins (1). Although Sonny ﬁ nds his friends in the pool hall that morning and continues to interact with others throughout the novel, he remains isolated and lonely—as does nearly everyone else in Thalia. The novel’s main characters, Sonny; his best friend, Duane; the much-sought-after Jacy Farrow; and the coach’s wife, Ruth Popper, fail in their attempts to build and sustain meaningful, mutually rewarding relationships. Although characters in the novel try new things and learn about themselves and each other—The Last Picture Show is a kind of coming-of-age story—they are unable to connect emotionally. Much of the novel’s action revolves around the sexual adventures of Sonny, Duane, and Jacy. Sonny and his girlfriend, Charlene Duggs, break up toward the beginning of the novel. Unaffected

by the loss of Charlene—whom he never really liked and only dated because she was less prudish than the only other unattached girl in school— Sonny pines for Jacy Farrow. Jacy is the daughter of a wealthy oilman and the prettiest girl in school. She and Duane are a couple, despite Duane’s lowly social and economic status. Although Jacy professes to love Duane and, initially, plans to marry him, she uses and manipulates him to get the attention on which she thrives. While Sonny yearns for Jacy, he is surprised by Ruth Popper’s sexual advances. Ruth is alternately ignored and mistreated by her husband, the high school athletic coach, who is a latent homosexual. Ruth is as desperate for attention as Jacy Farrow, but, unlike Jacy, she is a powerless, pathetic character. She and Sonny have an affair that affords Ruth some opportunity for growth and fulﬁ llment. But when Sonny leaves her for a time, she realizes how physically and emotionally dependent she is on a teenage boy who is not nearly as invested in the relationship as she is. For Jacy, sex is a tool. She withholds it from Duane to make him—and the rest of the school— want her more. She decides that the senior-class trip to California is the perfect time to lose her virginity to Duane because all the seniors will know about it. After deciding a relationship with Duane has nothing else to offer her, Jacy breaks up with him and starts sleeping with Lester, a wealthy kid who is part of the social set to which Jacy wants to belong. She puts up with Lester in order to get the attention of Bobby Sheen, an even better target. Sex becomes a mode of climbing the social ladder and a way to keep people talking about her. The characters in the novel are trying to escape— from bad marriages, bad decisions, and boredom. Sex provides a kind of escape. So do movies. Sam the Lion, a character who symbolizes several kinds of displacement, runs the pool hall and the picture show. Showing “comedies and serials and Westerns” to the kids in Thalia helps him recover from the death of his sons, the loss of his wife, and the end of the cattle-ranching lifestyle he had known and loved (4). For Sonny, the picture show is an escape from his distant relationship with his father,

Larry McMurtry

his boredom with school and work, and his unsatisfactory relationships with women.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Why does McMurtry begin his novel with Sonny’s description of Thalia? What is signiﬁcant about the way Sonny views his hometown? 2. How does the picture show function in the lives of Thalia’s residents? What is symbolic about its demise? 3. Analyze the ﬁ nal scene in the book. Why does Sonny go back to Ruth Popper? Why does she accept him? Describe their conversation/interaction. In what ways have the characters changed since their ﬁ rst meeting? In what ways have they remained the same?

Terms of Endearment (1975) Terms of Endearment follows Moving On and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers as the third book in McMurtry’s Houston trilogy. In his preface to the novel, McMurtry explains that he had been reading several 19th-century novelists before he began writing Terms of Endearment, novelists who “had taken a very searching look at the ﬁbers and textures of life” (5). “I doubt that I aspired to such profound achievement [as these European novelists],” he writes, “but I did hope to search at least a little less superﬁcially among the ﬂea market of details which constitute human existence” (5). Terms of Endearment does indeed study the ﬁbers and textures of life. It is a novel about normal—for the most part—middle-class people who live normal suburban lives. It explores parent-child, husbandwife, upstairs-downstairs, and husband/wife-lover relationships in ways that are touching, funny, and insightful. Its characters are likable, absurd, and engaging. Its descriptions are rich and its images evocative. And its themes and conclusions are accessible and meaningful to any thoughtful reader. Divided into two parts, “Emma’s Mother, 1962” and “Mrs. Greenway’s Daughter, 1971– 1976,” the ﬁ rst section’s focus is Aurora Greenway. Aurora is an attractive Houston widow who hates

239

to wear stockings, parks her big black Cadillac two feet from the curb, and has impeccable taste. She expects the world to revolve around her, and most of the time, it does. Aurora is selﬁ sh and manipulative and childish, but she is also intelligent and perceptive and can be generous. And she loves the people in her life—although that love manifests itself in unusual ways. Aurora’s main difﬁculty in the novel is choosing a suitor. Beloved by a four-star general who lives down the street, a washed-up Italian opera singer, a card-playing oilman, and a playboy yachtsman, Aurora cannot bring herself to marry any of them. Instead, she takes the general as her lover and continues allowing the other men to adore her. Emma’s problems in the novel revolve around men, too—mainly her husband, Flap. Emma loves him but recognizes that her mother’s criticisms of him are accurate. She also realizes that she does not have the energy to make him a successful man, and he does not have the drive to do it himself. “Emma’s Mother, 1962” takes up most of the novel, but Emma’s pregnancy with her ﬁ rst child and her relationship with Flap are a signiﬁcant part of Aurora’s life. As Emma struggles to remain close to Flap, she tries to understand her mother better, especially her mother’s marriage to her father. By the time the second part of the novel begins and the focus shifts from Aurora to Emma, 10 years have passed since the birth of her ﬁ rst child, and Emma has given up on her marriage. Flap has become a tenured professor and eventually department head at a university in Nebraska—in spite of which, both he and his wife consider him a failure. He has a mistress named Janice. He is a decent father to their three children, and Emma does not hate him for his inﬁdelity. Instead, she has her own unsatisfying affairs with several men. At 37, Emma is diagnosed with terminal cancer and dies quite quickly. Aurora takes her children to raise. About Emma, McMurtry writes, “Though often praised for my insights into women, I’m still far from sure that I know what women are like; but if my hunches are anywhere near accurate, and if I’m not idealizing her, then Emma is what women are at their best” (7).

240

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

For Discussion or Writing 1. Analyze point of view in Terms of Endearment. What is the effect of readers’ access to characters’ thoughts at certain moments? Why not tell the story from Aurora’s point of view only? Or Emma’s? Or Rosie’s? 2. Why does McMurtry think so highly of Emma? What are her strengths? Abilities? Quirks? 3. Why do you think the novel is titled Terms of Endearment? Refer to Emma’s conversation with Flap on page 400 as you formulate your answer.

Lonesome Dove (1985) Larry McMurtry’s ambivalence toward Texas is “deep as the bone” (Narrow Grave 142). “Such ambivalence,” he says, “is not helpful in a discursive book but it can be the very blood of a novel” (Narrow Grave 142). McMurtry’s being of two minds about Texas and its history animates his nearly 900-page novel Lonesome Dove. According to Don Graham: The most surprising thing about Lonesome Dove was the fact that it was written at all. Just three years before [its publication] McMurtry had cast a cold eye on Texas letters, in a long article in the Texas Observer . . . Texas writers were lazy and unproductive, they were ill-read in the 19th-century masters of the craft, and they spent far too much of their time gazing backwards nostalgically at the vanished and superior past, and the days of cattlemen and land-centered values of small farmers, small towns, and small Dairy Queens. . . . McMurtry’s prescription for curing Texas letters [was to] explore the “less simplistic experience of city life.” (Coming Home)

McMurtry acknowledged, at one point, that although he is critical of the past, he is “apparently attracted to it” (Narrow Grave 141). So instead of taking his own advice, he wrote a western that was

a combination of “nostalgia, nineteenth-century realism, and Hollywood-like heroes” (Graham 312). Lonesome Dove is a story packed with all the elements of a good western: former Texas Rangers, Mexican banditos, prostitutes, lawmen, horses with plenty of personality, farmers, cowboys, and bloodthirsty Indians. But this western story is hardly simplistic or romantic. In-depth character development is one way McMurtry debunks—or at least complicates—the stereotypes of the genre. Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call are aging former rangers who run the Hat Creek Cattle Company, just outside the town of Lonesome Dove. Both men are legends in Texas, and they have almost superhuman abilities. But long before readers see them saving kidnapped women or hanging horse thieves, they are exposed to the two men’s doubts, vanities, and weaknesses. In addition to being the most resourceful, cool-headed man anyone could want in a ﬁght, Augustus (Gus) is lazy and loud. He talks more than he works, and he will argue with anyone he can engage in conversation. Call, on the other hand, feels compelled to work constantly and retreats to solitude every night rather than sit with Gus and the other hands. Both men have serious regrets about women from their pasts. And neither one is satisﬁed with life in Lonesome Dove. When Jake Spoon, a man Gus and Call rangered with years ago, returns to Lonesome Dove talking about Montana, Call decides he wants to start a cattle ranch there. As McMurtry’s other novels do, Lonesome Dove addresses themes of displacement and loss. Life is not what it used to be for Gus and Call: The Indians in Texas have been about beaten and the Mexican cattle ranchers with whom they used to compete are dying off and losing power. Although they would not readily admit it, both men feel unimportant and uncertain about what to do next. Their former occupations and skills have become largely obsolete. Gus does not crave action and physical challenge as Call does, but his desire to visit—and possibly win over—the love of his younger days, Clara, motivates him to agree. So they decide to

Larry McMurtry

head to Montana with their hired hands and several thousand head of cattle, most of which they stole in Mexico. Lorena, another of the novel’s main characters, wants to escape Lonesome Dove, too. Lorena is a prostitute at the Dry Bean Saloon. In order to cope with a life of card playing, alcohol, and the men who visit her, she withdraws mentally and emotionally. She is known for her silence and aloofness. And half the men in Lonesome Dove think they are in love with her—especially Dish Boggett, a skilled cowboy who hires on with Gus and Call. Lorena, even more than Gus and Call, feels trapped in Lonesome Dove. When she and Jake Spoon get together, she decides Jake is her ticket out of the Dry Bean Saloon and the dusty town. She, with some help from Gus, compels Jake to take her with him and the Hat Creek Outﬁt as they head toward Montana. Lorena seems determined—and able—to get what she wants from men, especially weak men like Jake. And as she gets farther away from Lonesome Dove and her former lifestyle, she becomes more human and even allows herself some optimistic thoughts about the future. It seems possible Lorena will conquer her past, her dependence on men, and her fears. She seems to start changing from a victim of circumstance and society and a few particularly brutal men into a capable woman who will determine her own destiny. But Lonesome Dove is not a romance. Lorena is kidnapped by Blue Duck, an Indian with a reputation for cruelty and mercilessness. The kidnapping is the result of Lorena’s own foolish disregard of potential danger, as well as Jake’s carelessness. Gus rescues Lorena eventually, but the experience halts her progress toward self-fulﬁ llment and independence. McMurtry depicts the cattle drive with the same kind of realism. Readers do not ﬁ nd images of contented cowboys singing around an evening ﬁ re after a hard day’s work. Instead, the harsh and sometimes disturbing details of the experience destroy any idealistic notions of a cowboy’s life. Newt—Call’s young illegitimate son who is eager for experience and adventure—is assigned to ride behind the herd. Nearly chocked by the dust kicked

241

up by thousands of hooves, Newt learns that driving cattle is not quite what he had imagined. His daily experiences disillusion him, and the losses he experiences shock and unnerve him. Newt and the entire outﬁt are particularly affected by the death of Sean Allen—a young Irish immigrant who was hired on mainly because he and his brother did not have anywhere to go or anything else to do. During a routine river crossing, Sean accidentally rides into a nest of water moccasins. The snakes kill Sean and his horse while the other cowboys look on helplessly. Newt is haunted by the sound of Sean’s screams as the snakes swarmed over his body. Readers, too, are haunted by the images of Sean’s death—and the other violent and tragic incidents that occur as the outﬁt heads north. Lonesome Dove, though realistic, is not humorless. Some of the novel’s humor is supplied by the animals in the story. Call has a beautiful, powerful horse that is the envy—and fear—of anyone who has anything to do with her. Named Hell Bitch by the Hat Creek hands, the horse has a way of outsmarting and surprising Call—something few humans would even attempt. Gus’s pigs are also comic ﬁgures. They have the run of the place in the beginning of the novel and, according to Gus, are more intelligent than many men he has encountered. The pigs accompany the group all the way to Montana without being eaten by animals or cowboys. Several characters’ intense fear of women also adds humor and depth to the novel. Pea Eye—a dense but likable cowboy—becomes acutely uncomfortable whenever Gus tells him he ought to marry a young widow Pea Eye has interacted with a couple of times. Pea Eye is completely mystiﬁed by women; he cannot imagine what it would be like to live with one. So he does his best not to think about the prospect. Gus and Call and their group do make it to Montana, but at considerable cost and for reasons that never become clear. Gus does not win Clara’s love. And, as the result of wounds sustained during a surprise Indian attack, he dies in a stuffy hotel room in Miles City. Jake is hanged for stealing horses. Lorena, who has become totally

242

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

dependent on Gus since her rescue, collapses and retreats into solitude and silence when she learns of his death. And Call, who pushed everyone to make the cattle drive, stubbornly returns to Texas with his friend’s body—making the journey to Montana seem pointless. Newt is the only main character who seems to have grown and changed in signiﬁcant ways as a result of the long and arduous drive. But even he is hopeless at the end of the novel because Call lacks the emotional honesty and courage to acknowledge Newt openly as his son and thereby pass on to him leadership of the new Montana ranch. Although Lonesome Dove has been criticized for historical inaccuracies, structural problems, and inconsistency (Clay Reynolds in Taking Stock 327), it is recognized as great literature for several reasons. It plumbs the “depths of emotional experience” through several of its characters’ relationships (Sewell, Taking Stock 317). It makes the trail drive a legitimate literary subject. And it develops characters who are “stirring” because they are “real people, and they are still larger than life” (Nicholas Lemann, Taking Stock 327). But “ultimately,” as Mark Busby points out, “the strength of Lonesome Dove is the complex way that it intertwines myth and anti-myth into an intricate whole, for it is not simply an attack on the myth, nor is it simply a formula novel serving up larger-than-life heroes without real human traits” (184).

events and experiences in his life contributed to the development of his personal codes? 5. Analyze the young cowboys’ attitudes toward women. Why are they afraid of—or at least made uncomfortable by—women? How do they think about and treat speciﬁc women, such as Lorena and Clara? 6. The novel begins with an image of the blue pigs eating a rattlesnake. The pigs have a presence throughout the novel—they even make the trek all the way to Montana. What might they symbolize? 7. Interpret the ﬁ nal scene in the novel. Call discovers the saloon—the Dry Bean—was burned to the ground with its owner inside. Why end the novel that way? What does it mean? What is symbolic about Dillard’s ﬁ nal statement, “They say he missed that whore” (843)?

1. How does McMurtry treat western myths, particularly the myth of the cowboy, in his work? How does he express his ambivalence toward Texas? 2. Compare McMurtry’s historical novels to his work set in the present. Which do you ﬁ nd more effective, and why?

For Discussion or Writing

WORKS CITED

1. What is signiﬁcant about the sign Gus posts on the Lonesome Dove property? What is the meaning of the Latin phrase he writes, and what might be McMurtry’s reason for including it? 2. How does McMurtry treat western myths, particularly the myth of the cowboy, in Lonesome Dove? 3. Does Lonesome Dove have a hero and/or heroine? If so, who? If not, what disqualiﬁes the main characters from that role? 4. Using speciﬁc examples from the text, describe Gus’s moral code. What is right and wrong, acceptable or unacceptable to him? Which

Busby, Mark. Larry McMurtry and the West: An Ambivalent Relationship. Denton: North Texas University Press, 1995. Etualin, Richard W. Telling Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill to Larry McMurtry. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Isle, Ray. “Three Days in McMurtryville.” Stanford Magazine, November/December 1999. Available online. URL: www.stanfordalumni.org/news/ magazine/1999/novdec/articles/mcmurtry.html. Accessed June 8, 2006. McMurtry, Larry. The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON MCMURTRY AND HIS WORK

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Larry McMurtry

Superstardom in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. ———. In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968. ———. The Last Picture Show. New York: Dial Press, 1966. ———. Lonesome Dove. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. Terms of Endearment. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Peavy, Charles D. Larry McMurtry. Boston: Twayne, 1977.

243

Pilkington, William T. Critical Essays on the Western American Novel. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Reynolds, Clay. Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. Schmidt, Dorey, ed. Larry McMurtry: Unredeemed Dreams. Living Author Series No. 1. Edinburg, Tex.: Pan American University Print Shop, 1978. Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. “Winner: Writer (Adapted Screenplay) oscar.com. Available online. URL: www.academyawards.com/ oscarnight/winners/bestadaptedscreenplaycategory.html. Accessed June 8, 2006.

Rachel Rich

Pat Mora (1942–

)

Language nurtures me and it also frees me. (Leonard 154)

at Mora’s intimate relationship with words began early. She spent much of her childhood listening to stories told by her mother, aunt, and grandmother. She was born in El Paso, Texas, and her home was ﬁ lled with Spanish and English; for as long as she can remember there were always “two languages sort of streaming in and out of [her] mind” (Torres 248). Both sets of her grandparents immigrated to the United States during the Mexican Revolution, and her parents had to deal with a large dichotomy between their home and school cultures. By the time Mora was born, English was as much a part of her home as Spanish. So from her birth Mora has been bilingual; she literally cannot remember a time when she did not know both English and Spanish. Since both of her parents spoke English and Spanish interchangeably, she has always had a “sense of being at home in two languages” (Torres 244). Her years of education in Texas make her more English-dominant, but her poetry shows a unique blend of the two languages. Mora’s work often includes seamless transitions from English to Spanish and back again. As Mora mentions in an interview, “For the ﬁ rst seventeen years of my life I did not consider anything other than being a nun” (Ikas 131). The Catholic schools she attended for her elementary and high school education had a great impact on Mora’s life. One of Mora’s works, Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints, weaves stories of saints with

carvings of those saints. Her plea to Saint Clare shows how much the religion of her childhood has inﬂuenced her writing: “Spark your Carmen’s pale faith to ﬂare” (Mora 54), her speaker pleads, to persuade the saints to relight her own faith. Mora earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Texas in El Paso, where she majored in English with a minor in speech. Mora went on to teach elementary, middle, and high school very brieﬂy, but she has dedicated “much of her life as a writer and teacher to the preservation of her culture” (Ikas 128). She believes that there is a lack of understanding in the educational system, and teachers need to encourage “people to sing out their names, sing out their lives without embarrassment” (Mora UCTE). If teachers do not honor their students’ home language, then they are making them choose which language is better (Mora UCTE). When Mora writes in Spanish, she does not include translations but instead allows readers to discover for themselves how Spanish and English are both essential to the poem’s meaning. Her dedication to preserving her culture is one of the many reasons her poetry “is dense with cultural allusion” (Augenbraum 178). In 1963, at age 21, Mora married William H. Burnside, but they later divorced. In 1984, she married the anthropologist Vernon Lee Scarborough and, for the ﬁ rst time, left behind her desert landscape for the cityscape of Cincinnati, Ohio.

244

Pat Mora 245

Although Mora was always involved in speaking and writing projects at school, she did not seriously consider writing until she had children. As the children grew up, she began taking notes on possible subjects for writing, but when she ﬁ rst began to write, she says, “Every now and then I wrote a few things, and then they would be rejected, and I would just stop” (Ikas 131). Her ﬁ rst success was in the form of a Hallmark card, but it was not until much later that she began writing seriously. It was partially the inﬂuence of her colleague Larry Lane that drew her writing out of the shadows. He convinced her to exchange writing when she was not sharing her work with anyone. His presence in her life was brief—he died a few months later—but important. Once she began writing, Mora became a well-loved name for both children and adults, but the path to publication was especially difﬁcult. Her writing was an “upwelling” of the pleasure she took in language (Torres 259), but publishers often tried to take the multiplicity out of her writing by making it monolingual. Mora’s particular style of writing about marginalized cultures in several genres makes her work accessible to many audiences. Her ﬁ rst published works were poems, “Disguise” and “Migraine,” which appeared in Poets and Writers in 1981. Her ﬁ rst collection of poetry, Chants, appeared not long after, in 1985. Chants is composed of what Mora calls “desert incantations” between a personiﬁed desert and Mora’s own voice (Beaty 764). After Chants, Mora published Borders (1986), Communion (1991), Agua Santa/Holy Water (1995), and ﬁ nally Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints (1997). She has also delved into the realm of nonﬁction with Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle (1993) and House of Houses (1997). By far, Mora’s most abundant works are children’s literature. She has published more than 30 children’s books, which have won numerous awards, including the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award (2006), the Golden Kite Award (2005), and the Literary Lights for Children Award (2002). Mora’s writing often focuses on the literal and ﬁgurative borders between the United States and

Mexico, English and Spanish, and different cultures. Charles M. Tatum recognizes Mora’s duality, noting that “Mora trafﬁcs between the borderlands as geography and the borderlands as a spiritual site of practical disposition” (Tatum 244). “Gentle Communion,” for example, even crosses the border between life and death when Mamande goes to the speaker, “from the desert” (Mora, Communion 2). As Mora states, “The issue is not so much ethnicity or gender. It is about the way we reach a point of communion as human beings sharing this difﬁcult journey called life” (Ikas 127). Throughout her poetry, Mora manages to include her readers, whether they are bilingual or monolingual. She uses Spanish and English, but the poems ﬂow between them successfully, crossing language and cultural borders concurrently. Mora has a great love for the desert and believes that “women like herself who grow up in the desert acquire some of its resilience and strength” (Tatum 184). All through Mora’s writing, she “employs the imagery of land and matrilineal healing” (Tatum 154), drawing from her childhood a knowledge of the power of women from the desert, evident especially in her grandmother. With her Spanish-speaking maternal grandmother in the house, Mora connected to her heritage from early childhood. In her poem “Gentle Communion,” Mora shows how much of an effect her mamande had on her life. Alongside the gendered poetry is the element of landscape. The desert, an unyielding and complex environment, is “portrayed as a place that offers solace and inner peace” (Ikas 128). Although Mora seems to pull her different experiences into a unique and individual culture easily, she “remains acutely aware of her position as a person living between two cultures” (Augenbraum 180). Her poem “Sonrisas” directly addresses the borderlands where Mora feels she resides. As Augenbraum states in U.S. Latino Literature, “Mora has achieved that status of an internationally respected poet, yet her work remains both accessible and illuminating to the general reader” (182). In other words, Mora’s universality has not diminished her individualism in writing. Readers feel that Mora’s writing applies

246

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

to their personal lives even if they do not share the same background. Liz Gold notices that Mora leaves traces of meanings for those readers who are not bilingual but also gives a special treat to those readers who are (Augenbraum 251). Mora describes her ideal reader as “the person who really hears what I’m saying, who is so open and attentive that the words have a chance of entering the reader” (Ikas). Reading Mora’s poetry is like standing in the desert’s searing heat and feeling a cool breeze lift your hair. Her sense of ﬂow is ﬂawless; when she transitions from English to Spanish, the reader feels as though she (or he), too, can speak two languages. When Mora wants to distinguish between the two languages, she adds crisp consonants and marked accents. Her relationship with Spanish is very intimate because she was educated mainly in English and considers it her dominant language. Spanish, however, was the only language her maternal grandmother spoke. She realized early on that Spanish did not “belong in school” (Torres 248) and thus Spanish became more of a home language for her. Her parents both spoke English and Spanish interchangeably, but Mora still says, “Family-Spanish doesn’t have to, but can often be a very affectionate language” (Torres 248). Mora is grateful to be bilingual because is “allows [her] to name the world in two different ways and also gives [her] two registers in which to work when writing” (Torres 248). She notes that having more than one language can help people ﬁgure out the world around them. Mora encourages everyone to look for his or her own culture and environment. She says, “There is an incredible wealth that is there for us when we go back and do this sort of excavating work and ﬁ nd out about our own particular family” (Ikas 130). Mora’s own family has been a source of inspiration for her, an inspiration she did not know would be there. Her family was “an incredibly loving household” that provided safety and motivated her to do well in school (Torres 248). Knowing her own background, she wants other children to have the same kind of safety at home. Instead of treating Spanish as a secondary language, she would like students to be able to communicate in both languages. Her main concern is “the perception that the home lan-

guage could be a handicap” (Torres 248). One of her goals in writing is to take away the fear of having several languages accepted at home and school, to allay the anxiety some people have, so “that we could have a multiplicity of languages that are educationally sanctioned” (Torres 248). Mora feels a kinship with writers who must cross borders of communication. Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, M ARY OLIVER, and Lucille Clifton are among the authors she cites as her inspiration. She does not claim to share their experiences but instead draws similarities between their situations. For example, she admires Clifton’s courage and tenacity in writing. For Mora, language “nurtures” and “frees” her (Gold 154). Although she is mainly known for her poetry, Mora has also published several prose works. She sees prose as “being practical . . . a way of reaching an audience that . . . poetry may never reach” (Ikas 132). Each of her works is crafted from her many experiences growing up on the border between Texas and Mexico, but her “identiﬁcation radiates from her homespace” (Torres 246). She realizes that readers begin with their own backgrounds and biases, but by reading with an open mind, they can gain a deeper understanding of a culture that is both complex and magical.

“Borders” (1986) At ﬁ rst glance, “Borders” may seem to be about the Mexican/American border, given Mora’s geographical background, but as the poem progresses, it becomes evident that there are many kinds of borders addressed. There are borders between countries and cultures, borders between languages, borders between generations and ages, and borders between genders, and that is where the poem climaxes. Although not all these borders are examined in the poem, Mora certainly describes the many cultural boundaries humans must cross. The speaker of the poem is not able to communicate with her spouse or partner because gender separates them. They may use the same words, but they interpret them differently.

Pat Mora 247

The ﬁ rst section is a border between languages. It deals with a translation, so to speak, from Spanish to English. The point of the ﬁ rst section is to realize that even if one translates from one language to another directly, there is still a difference in meaning. As the poem states, the meaning is “similar but different” (9). Speciﬁcally, luna is translated as “moon,” but the connotation can be distinct in each language. The speaker “tasted luna” (5) with her tongue and felt the long open vowels of moon as a melancholy sigh (8). Here the art of communication, talking, is sensory, giving more depth to the words. As the second section begins, the poem turns toward age distinctions. Children and adults speak on different levels, and with different meanings. The talk of children does not function for adults. Again, speaking is associated with the senses; “the child’s singsong / I want, I want / burned our mouth” is a line rich with physical sensations coinciding with words. Why do the children’s words burn? They burn because the speaker is no longer a child, and it does not matter what the speaker wants anymore, for it is time to move on to adult responsibilities. The poem progresses and the speaker moves from age differences to gender relations. The ﬁ nal section is about a couple, it seems, who have grown apart over the years. Although they were talking to each other, it is as though they were not getting the translation correct (as in the struggle in the ﬁ rst section of the poem) or not deﬁ ning things the same way. The speaker in the poem is asking for help ﬁguring out what her partner is saying so they can communicate. There is a difference here between talking and communicating. Here is the ﬁ nal relationship with the senses and words, for words are “[tossed] back and forth . . . / over coffee, over wine / at parties, in bed” (19–23). The speaker and her spouse spoke, but that does not mean they were communicating. Success and happiness are ambiguous words that have very personal meanings. Perhaps the speaker’s idea of both success and happiness was different from her spouse’s. Even though they have spent time together, varying from a casual cup of coffee to the intimacy of

the bedroom, they have not lost their own translation of words. The spacing adds a dimension of meaning to the poem, as in the ﬁ nal section the word understood is double spaced so the reader understands how the speaker may be yelling it and also disdainfully simplifying her language, making it slower so her husband can understand it. The ﬁ rst two lines of the poem are separate from the rest of the poem, almost a summation of the poem’s plea. They are intelligent, but that does not mean they can overcome the years of gender separation. Several similar phrases are repeated in the poem. As the poem begins, the speaker realizes the difference between Spanish and English, “similar but different” (9). In the second section, the speaker realizes that adults and children are also using the same words for different things, and that she must adjust as she grows older, for “like became unlike” (12). Later, the speaker realizes that her relationship has been the same way. Her spouse was not speaking the same language, though their words sound the same. Again, their language includes more than just the words. The speaker seems to be asking for someone to “translate us to us” or, in other words, make them understand each other (31). The problem between them now is that they are not together, but two people parallel, who, as two parallel lines, will never meet.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What is the difference between translating and understanding the connotation of a word? How do the two people in the poem understand the words but not the meaning? Which words in particular do the couple not comprehend? 2. Does the poem suggest that it is even possible for the couple ever to understand each other? Or are their differences too great and their misunderstandings too deep? Explain your answer.

“Sonrisas” (1986) “Sonrisas” is a poem about two worlds separated by language, attitude, and appearance. The characters

248

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

of the poem seem to be in the ﬁeld of education but are two very different kinds of educators—one, relaxed and welcoming, and the other, tedious and detail-oriented. The speaker is in a position between them, as if in a doorway (1). She does not have to decide between the two worlds; in fact, it seems more that she cannot choose, but is ﬁ xed in between, for the speaker states, “I live in a doorway” (1). The speaker cannot pass between them, to enter one of them and occupy it, but is straddling a line between the two. It seems at ﬁ rst that she is trying to make a decision on where she will go, but then the reader realizes that the speaker is always going to be on the border between the worlds, forever bound by both, so she decides to observe how the worlds collide. The ﬁ rst world is the one of the typical American teachers (or ofﬁce personnel), with bitter coffee and subdued colors and subdued speech and subdued attitudes. These people are always watching themselves, not letting their emotions show. Their words are crisp and careful like click, tenure, and curriculum (4–5). They seem to indicate that the teachers are not just digniﬁed, but also separated. Each word has a hard consonant sound stopping the ﬂow of the sentence. They do not have a sense of camaraderie but cut off their association with appropriate subjects. Each word is also associated with the mechanics of school, how much money to spend, who will still be working there next year, and what the plan is for the future. They do not stray into comfortable subjects that build friendship. In the other room, the women seem a swirl of skirts and steam. These women are still careful but seem more worried about disturbing the other room than about hiding who they are. There are camaraderie and friendship, but a “hush hush” attitude about them. This room is relaxed and contented. Even the word sounds suggest the difference. Instead of hard consonants, the words ﬂow together with gentle s and w sounds. For example, their “laughter whirls with steam” (12–13). Each word in the phrase is able to blend into the next, creating an atmosphere of peacefulness. This room seems to represent the Mexican educators/ofﬁce personnel, with women who are smiling with their

eyes, laughing, and at ease. They are friends, as is obvious by their dialogue and laughter. Despite the obvious distinction between the two rooms, they are connected. The speaker connects them. She is able to understand both rooms, both mentalities. The speaker does have preference for one room over another. The more friendly and open room with “señoras / in faded dresses” is portrayed in a more positive light. On the one hand, the speaker can hear the American teachers with their “quiet clicks” (3) discussing their careers, but on the other she “peeks” into the room with Mexican teachers (9). Why does she hear one group and see the other? The women are identiﬁed by their differences from the norm. In the ﬁ rst room, the speaker notices how distinct the teachers sound. In the second room, the speaker must see them to be able to distinguish who they are because she feels that their language and conversation are a part of who she already is.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Is there evidence in the poem—that is, through tone, word choice, or ﬂow—that the speaker prefers the second room? Why would the speaker feel caught between the two rooms? Does the poem suggest that the speaker is frustrated by the separation or that she has accepted it? 2. Who do you think the speaker of the poem is? Although both rooms are full of people involved in education, is the speaker like them or is she in a different situation? 3. Although the tone of this poem is lighter than that of “Borders,” the speaker is still dealing with cultural boundaries. How do cultures create boundaries even without a language barrier (although these people have that as well)? Support your response with examples from both poems.

“Immigrants” (1986) “Immigrants” uses many different elements of language to show the fear and frustration immigrants must face as they enter their new country, try to ﬁt

Pat Mora 249

in, and, most importantly, make sure their children will be able to ﬁt in. The entire poem is a continuous sentence, listing each fear beginning with the word immigrants. There is no other punctuation in the poem than a question mark. These immigrants are afraid and do not know what they need to do to become “American” enough. The poem begins with a list of stereotypical American actions and items. Rather than encouraging their sons and daughters to remember their heritage, the parents feed them “mashed hot dogs and apple pie” (line 2). Even though their skin may be different from the majority’s, they still buy their children “blonde dolls and blink blue eyes” (3–4), the conventional ideal of fair skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. Also, the dolls with blond hair are typically the ones that have the most accessories. The media enforce the immigrants’ perception that to be American, their child must not be different. They force their children to learn the culture of their environment so that they will be liked. As the poem progresses, the parents try to hide their own origins from their child, refusing to speak in their native tongue, and using “thick English” instead (7). Only in the privacy of their beds do the parents allow themselves to voice their fears. Although the reader has the impression that the parents speak their native tongue in that “dark parent bed,” the poem is written only in English. These immigrants are not allowed to speak for themselves. Instead, there is an omniscient thirdperson narrator who translates all their dialogue into English. This narrator even spells the words they speak differently, including the accent. Speak implies not the normal communication parents and children have, but a stilted and forced form of communication; speaking English, however, still seems better to the immigrants than speaking their native language (7). They whisper their native language only when the baby is asleep, as though it is a curse to speak a language other than English. The sheer number of items in the list overwhelms the reader, just as the responsibility of teaching a child how to be “American” weighs on the immigrants. No capitalization is used unless the speaker is naming something. Interestingly, America is

capitalized at the beginning of the poem, but when quoting the immigrants, a lowercase a is used (1). This capitalization seems to suggest that despite all their work, the parents still wonder whether their child will ever be a capital-A American, or whether their child will remain an immigrant living in the United States.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Several stereotypically “American” items are listed in the poem. Why do you suppose the immigrants force these items on their children? Discuss your answer. 2. The form of the poem is similar to that of an Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet. Why do you think Mora uses this form to describe the situation of the immigrants? How does the use of a formal stanza reinforce their cultural situation? 3. Throughout the poem, a narrator’s voice overshadows the immigrants’ voices. Why do the immigrants not “speak” in the poem? Discuss Mora’s use of the voicelessness of immigrants in the context of current events about immigration policy.

“Gentle Communion” (1991) In the poem “Gentle Communion,” the speaker seems to be either Mora herself or someone with a background similar to hers. She uses a confessional style of writing here, using her own biography as subject for the poem. “Mamande” is Mora’s maternal grandmother. This grandmother lived with Mora as she grew up and her presence inﬂuenced Mora’s life. The poem seems to suggest that Mamande has died, since she “can’t hear” and the speaker will “never know” about her past. The speaker’s grandmother returns to her from the desert, and her memory follows the speaker around, raising questions that cannot be answered. The title suggests that the poem will have subtleties instead of explicit statements. The communion is a gentle one, and the language matches the mildness of the title. Mamande’s simple actions follow the speaker around. Each action is an act

250

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

of service for the speaker. Her grandmother ﬁ rst “[folds] socks” (5), then “sits and prays” (15); she also lets the younger speaker sit in her lap, plays “I Spy” with her, and eats peeled grapes with her. Although the memory is a pleasant one, the tone of the poem is still subdued and melancholy. Her grandmother is not a jovial woman but has a “sad album face” (12). She is not described by her appearance, but by her actions. When she is described physically, each phrase seems to describe how much she has done. For example, her face is compared to an old photo album and her hands are worn “like the pages or her prayer book” (22). The descriptions of Mamande in the ﬁ fth stanza contain much religious symbolism. The reader has the impression that Mamande was very religious in her own way. While the speaker writes, she prays. Apparently, this is an activity she often did, as her prayer book is as used and worn as her hands. Even her presence suggests a religious feeling to the poem; she is “from the desert” and prays in devotion (2). The imagery used to characterize Mamande connects her with children, just as the speaker would have been connected to her grandmother as a child. Although her grandmother had white hair, it “dries white, girlish” (17), and when she prays serenely, she is “like a child” in her posture (20). There is a sense of regret to the poem as well. The speaker realizes that it is too late to ask her grandmother questions. Her past is gone, the past in which she could have made her questions known and had them answered, but as a child, they were “questions I never knew to ask” (6–7). Although the poem begins with a statement about the dead, the character of Mamande is taken back from her literal and ﬁgurative borders to talk with the speaker without words. Another use of the word communion is to describe a situation in which two people communicate without words, beyond words. By the end of the poem, however, the reader becomes very aware that Mamande only “came to [her] from the desert” (2). This location seems to signify not only her grandmother’s place of origin but also the border between life and death.

Compare the experiences the speaker used to have with her present experiences. Now the speaker tries to make her grandmother laugh, but in the past people tried to make her change, smile for the camera, wear makeup, and speak in English (12). Her grandmother still ignores the demands of others and lives her own life, her own history. Later in the poem, the speaker sits in an old chair and remembers vividly the experiences she had playing games with Mamande. The speaker even switches to the present tense to describe the memories better. And yet this switch makes it even more obvious that Mamande is not living. The rich description of eating grapes together is sadly sweet as the speaker realizes her grandmother is gone except from her memories.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Why does Mamande visit “from the desert” (2)? Is Mora equating the desert with death? Discuss your answer. 2. Although the speaker claims to know little about her grandmother, what evidence do you ﬁ nd that shows what the speaker does know about Mamande? Do you agree with the speaker’s claim that Mamande “ignores the questions I never knew to / ask” (6–7)? Does a lack of communication recur in other Mora poems? Which ones? Discuss your responses, citing speciﬁc texts. 3. From Mora’s biography, we learn that her pet name for her grandmother was Mamande. Does this mean that the speaker is Mora? Support your answer with examples from the text.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON MORA AND HER WORK 1. Although “Borders” and “Sonrisas” include Spanish words, neither of the other poems discussed includes Spanish. Why do you think Mora uses Spanish in “Sonrisas” and “Borders,” but not in “Gentle Communion” or “Immigrants”? Support your answer.

Pat Mora 251

2. Mora claims that there are always “two languages sort of streaming in and out of my mind” (Torres 248). How can you tell that she is bilingual from her poetry? Where are speciﬁc examples of her mastery of both English and Spanish? Can you tell whether she favors English or Spanish as a dominant language? 3. Research confessional poetry. Mora seems to use a confessional style of writing, that is, writing from her personal experiences. Which of her poems seems to demonstrate this best and why? Compare and contrast her work with that of another poet of the confessional school, such as Robert Lowell. Support your response by citing examples from both texts. 4. Although none of Mora’s poetry is overtly political, several of her poems seem to address current political situations. Do you ﬁ nd Mora’s poetry to be critical of current U.S. policies? Why or why not? In what ways? Support your answer, providing speciﬁcs on current events. 5. Much of Mora’s poetry deals with different kinds of borders—spiritual, physical, cultural, or geographical. Why do you suppose her poetry centers on this theme? What examples of borders do you ﬁ nd in her poetry? Fully discuss your answer, providing citations from and analyses of several poems. 6. Mora’s poetry is written without major reliance on obvious rhyme or meter. What are some possible reasons she avoids classical rhyme and meter? Are there examples of classical structure in her poetry as well? Support your answer with examples from three of her poems. 7. Compare the work of Pat Mora to that of JULIA A LVAREZ. What impact does the genre have on the subject? Why do you suppose Alvarez chooses prose, while Mora mainly writes poetry? 8. Mora also writes children’s literature. Look at some of these books. In what ways are they like her books for adults? Discuss your response fully.

9. While Mora often uses Spanish in her poetry, she does not provide a translation. Why do you suppose she chooses to omit translation, while authors such as Chinua Achebe in his novel Things Fall Apart provides a glossary? WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Aldama, Frederick Luis. Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Writers and Artists. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Augenbraum, Harold, and Margarite F. Olmos, eds. U.S. Latino Literature: A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Barrera, Rosalinda B. “Proﬁle: Pat Mora, Fiction/ Nonﬁction Writer and Poet.” Language Arts 75, no. 3 (March 1998): 221–227. Christian, B. Marie. Belief in Dialogue: U.S. Latina Writers Confront Their Religious Heritage. New York: Other Press, 2005. Grider, Sylvia A., and Lou H. Rodenberger, eds. Texas Women Writers: A Tradition of Their Own. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1997. Ikas, Karin R. Chicana Ways. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2002, 126–150. Leonard, Frances, and Ramona Cearley, eds. Conversations with Texas Writers. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005, 248–257. Mora, Pat. Agua Santa/Holy Water. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. ———. Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. ———. Communion. Houston, Tex.: Arte Publico Press, 1991. ———. House of Houses. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. ———. Keynote Address. UCTE-LA Conference. Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, 26 October 2007. ———. Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. Ofﬁcial Home Page of Pat Mora. Available online. URL: http://www.patmora.com. Accessed June 26, 2009.

252

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Rebolledo, Tey Diana. The Chronicles of Panchita Villa and Other Guerrilleras: Essays on Chicana/Latina Literature and Criticism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Slovic, Scott, ed. Getting Over the Color Green: Contemporary Environmental Literature of the Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001, 221–224.

Tatum, Charles M., ed. “New Chicana/Chicano Writing.” New Chicana/Chicano Writing. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992, 108–109. Torres, Hector A. Conversations with Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Writers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.

Amber Bowden

Toni Morrison (1931–

)

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. (Nobel Lecture)

oni Morrison became a writer in part to counteract what she saw as the erasure of African Americans from “a society seething with [our] presence” (“Unspeakable” 12). Like so many women and minorities, Morrison grew up surrounded by books written by, for, and about white men. Although she loved those stories for what they offered her, she wondered where the stories about everyone else were. When she became an adult, her love of books

Student's Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, Vol. 5: 1970 to the Present - PDF Free Download (2024)