Reader: Kenny O'Brien

Respondent: Amanda Mooring

Recorder: Liz Sydnor

"The Truth Is"

By: Linda Hogan

Unsettling America, p. 295-296

Biography:

From the book we learn that "Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw poet, novelist and essayist. She is the author of a novel, Mean Spirit, and of several poetry books, including Savings and Seeing Through the Sun, which received the American Book Award." Hogan has taught at the University of Minnesota and is currently an English professor at the University of Colorado, where she earned her M.A. in 1978. Hogan has received numerous other awards for her writings, including the Five Civilized Tribes Playwriting Award, the Guggenheim Award and the Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year Award, as well as many others.

Course Objectives:

4a: To identify the "new American" who crosses, combines, or confuses ethnic or gender identities. (e.g., Tiger Woods, Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey, Halle Berry, k.d. lang, Dennis Rodman, RuPaul, David Bowie)

4b: To distinguish the ideology of American racialism--which sees races as pure, separate, and permanent identities--from American practice, which always involves hybridity (or mixing) and change. These attitudes and practices often transfer to gender and class.

5a: To discover the power of poetry and fiction to help "others" hear the minority voice and vicariously share the minority experience.

5c: To regard literacy as the primary code of modern existence and a key or path to empowerment.

5e: To emphasize how all speakers and writers may use common devices of human language to make poetry, including narrative, poetic devices, and figures of speech.

6b: To question sacred modern concepts like "individuality" and "rights" and politically correct ideas like minorities as "victims"; to explore emerging postmodern identities, e.g., "biracial", "global", and "postnational".

Interpretation:

Hogan's whole poem is dominated by her use of metaphor. Her "pockets" represent her duel identity conflict, one pocket representing her Caucasian self and the other pocket representing her Chickasaw self. The entire conflict stems from Hogan's inability to unify her two "pockets" into a harmonious union. Characteristics of how she views each side of herself can be seen in how she holds her hands in her pockets or what should or should not even be in them. Other examples of her use of metaphor include her describing herself as a "tree" with "grafted branches bearing two kinds of fruit", her comparing herself to an "old civilian conservation corps passed by from the great depression" and her use of "shoes" at the end of her poem.

Questions:

1. How do men perceive and women identify with the conflict depicted in the poem?

2. What feelings or emotions are brought about by Hogan's use of imagery in the poem?

Discussion:

Will: I am the least masculine heterosexual male in the class I know, and I identify with women. Also, I am half Asian and half white: one side Vietnamese and the other backwoods. I often wonder which side to go to, and I see she wonders the same.

Kenny: I see the pocket images as the Chickasaw pocket and the white pocket. White hand is the white man's pocket, and she states that she is not a thief--Ashamed but not really. You look at her she looks Chickasaw---and she says that one part is not what she is. The second stanza emphasizes her true mask.

Liz: One foot leads the other and you choose which one to walk with first.

Amanda: Left foot leads in a march.

Jennifer: Right foot could be wearing a moccasin, and the left could be wearing a white shoe.

Dr. White: Notice that she is goofing around or making fun, like a joke. She seems to do that a lot on her poetry. She does play on words with the sole: could be soul/spirit or could be sole of the shoe.

Karen: Have dual culture with a lot of shoes and tells who the people are in their culture. Also is there a tree that can bear more than two trees? In this she is trying to say that she is two things at once or that she wants to be both things.

Jennifer: Can you graph on a tree?

Dr. White: Hybrid trees do happen.

Jennifer: Says that there is technology of graphing.

Amanda: In the fourth stanza, conservation corps was big in the depression after that not used until Baby Boom. Hand in keys image refers to property and Indians do not believe in property.

Kenny: I agree. Did not say much about Hogan because Shaista covered it.