Jessi Snider

July 12, 2008

(1 hour 45 minutes writing)

Beyond Difference

            Multicultural studies for me have always been about “celebrating difference,” and as this is universally a theme in such courses, I have never had great cause to question this assumption.  Until now.  Studying the immigrant narrative and the revelations it offers into immigrant, minority, and dominant culture experiences has shaken away prior notions and has served as a springboard for reevaluating positions I readily took for granted.  Each story is unique, yet each feeds into a larger narrative, which taken collectively tells the story of America.

            Each type of literature that we studied offered an insight into individual experiences and larger group dynamics.  Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur’s “Letter III:  What is an American” set the class off on a brilliant note by writing about the America of old built upon the industriousness and entrepreneurial spirit that we take such pride in.  He declares that “here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men” whose labors are “founded on the basis of nature, self-interest.”  In the spirit of rugged individualism, here the American Dream is presented in all its glory:  each person goes as far as he or she so chooses, radically free to decide his or her own destiny.  This is a narrative we have heard our entire lives, and while there is some truth in it, it is hardly the entire story.

            Perhaps the most important thing I learned this semester, and will never forget, is the difference between minorities and immigrants, a distinction I did not know existed. Learning that these groups are differentiated by their contract with America, and choice to be here or not, rather than as groups determined by power relations or numbers alone, served to clarify the specific relationships these groups have within greater society.  For example, in more traditional explanations, Asian immigrants are construed as minorities even though economically they are one of the most successful groups in the U.S. and on paper look more like Anglo-American than other “minority” groups.  Like the immigrants in the Pakistani/Indian literature we read, as well as the African immigrants I learned about in my research posting, coming from abroad by choice creates a different “social contract” with this nation that often results in different outcomes for these specific groups.  True minorities, African Americans and Native Americans, did not ask to come here and therefore choose not to assimilate, making them enduring minority groups.  New World immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean have their own unique status, for they may come to America by choice, but often feel that it was necessitated out of direct U.S. interference in their native lands.  This creates a group whose narrative falls somewhere between that of the immigrant’s and minority’s.  Looked at in this manner, each group’s relationship to the dominant culture is better understood and vague correlations drawn in typical multicultural learning environments are better fleshed out, emphasized, and elaborated.  In short, I have never experienced a better method for understanding American group dynamics than by looking at their narratives, extrapolating out the stories, and drawing conclusions based on the findings.

            Particularly interesting to me was seeing the liberating force immigration could potentially provide for women.  In Chitra Divakaruni’s “Silver Pavements, Golden Roof,” a young Indian woman comes to stay with her aunt and uncle in America whom she assumed to be very successful.  Instead, she finds an impoverished couple complete with a depressed working class husband and subservient, broken wife.  Aunt Pratima, the wife, never pursues her own agenda and on the one occasion when she disobeys her husband’s wishes, he physically assaults her.  Witnessing all of this, the narrator is confused and hurt.  She makes her way out onto the apartment’s balcony where it is snowing and she notices “that the snow has covered my own hands so they are no longer brown but white, white, white” (83).  This scene could be read in many ways, but I choose to read it as the narrator separating herself from the domestic violence of the “good” Indian wife she has just witnessed, and instead embracing the ideals of America, however challenging and mixed up they can be.

Likewise, in Bharati Mukherjee’s “A Wife’s Story,” the protagonist Panna continuously makes strides to understand America on its own terms.  When feeling insulted after watching a play, she writes that “a play like this, back home, would cause riots…This play, and all these awful feelings, would be safely locked up” (58).  Here she is coming to terms with free speech and the fact that sometimes what others say in America does not seem right or appropriate, but that in most cases, they still have the right to say it.  Though not always at ease in her new environment, America is still subtly working its liberating magic upon her, drawing out her sense of individualism and subjectivity.  At the end of the story, as she stands admiring her naked form in the mirror, she feels that she is “free, afloat, watching somebody else” (69).  While hardly a sexism-free utopia, America still offers a certain amount of equality between the sexes that women from more traditional cultures may not have experienced before.  Overwhelming, frightening, or invigorating, change is never easy, but for women in many of these immigrant narratives, a newfound sense of freedom charged their immigrant narratives with a sentiment that was profoundly uplifting,

            Always a student of human behavior, learning the motivating factors of the specific groups, immigrant, minority, and dominant culture, proved particularly interesting to me as well.  For example, in Junot Diaz’s “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,” the narrator expresses significant fear or discomfort with authority.  When calling a girl’s house, he suggests that one should hang up if her dad answers sounding “like a principal or a police chief, the sort of dude with a big neck, who never has to watch his back” (277).  While perhaps unconsciously aware of this phenomenon, having this notion of authority as oppressor revealed unequivocally by the minority stories we read, accurately served as yet another differentiating tool in separating dominant culture narratives, which typically portray authority figures as friends or protectors, from that of other groups.  Such subtleties appear on the surface to be inconsequential, but serve to explain acceptance/resistance patterns among specific groups, and finding these patterns in literature makes them seem all the significant.

              The “Research Posting” exercises were particularly beneficial as well as they forced me to research topics I knew little about and probably would not have encountered otherwise.  I ashamedly admit that like so many others I wrongly assumed that most groups of Asian immigrants fit the “model minority pattern” based on No Child Left Behind test scores and general statistics.  Though I knew it theoretically, my first research posting taught me that within every statistic there are deviations, and this stereotype was no exception.  I knew nothing of the unique struggle of Cambodian immigrants and feel better informed as a result of the exercise.  Likewise, my second research posting taught me that African immigrants had the highest educational achievements of any other group, but that American misperceptions about Africa and our general tendency to lump together all people of the same skin color keep this group’s achievements all but secret to the general population.  This particular assignment drove home the point that the color code is alive and well in America and that even different social contracts and high achievements cannot entirely free African immigrants of the burden of their darkness.

            Above all else, this class broadened my understanding of American society via the different types of narratives.  I cannot overemphasize how refreshing such a systematic approach to multicultural literature is, being that it gets beyond “celebrating difference” and instead creates a structural basis upon which to better understand not just the narratives themselves, but their bearing on people, this nation, even humanity.  Oftentimes students of literature are criticized as being out of touch with reality, focusing too much on contrived stories that have little resemblance to actual life; this class proves that the junction between narrative and life exists, that it is worthy of study, that “life” comes in many colors, and that individual narratives do combine to tell a larger story.  I think the word I’m looking for here is relevance.  This class makes seemingly diverse narratives relevant, and that is something that anyone should be able to appreciate.