Monday, 23 June 2008: Other Hispanic Americans: Immigrant / American Dream story, or Minority?

Video highlight ("Immigrant Writers' Impact on American Literature" panel discussion): Keith Vyvial

Crossing Borders: The Immigrant Voice in American Literature

A panel discussion as part of the Key West Literary Seminar, Jaunary 8-15, 2004.  Aired on CSPAN2, Jaunary 11, 2004.

Topic:         The impact of immigrant writers on American literature.

Review Objective 2: To chart the dynamics, variations, and

                                stages of the immigrant narrative.

                Background: No single text tells the whole story of

                                      immigration, but the larger narrative

                                     is always implicit.

Moderator: Patricia Hampl, author of A Romantic Education.

• “This isn’t just a choice you make to become the recipient of the lingering life of immigration coming down to you through your family and your heritage.”

• “There is among all the people up here…a different kind of republic – the republic of the imagination to which each person must belong.  This may sound like, and maybe really is, a romantic notion, but writers live by this romance and they dream it into a faith that becomes very firm.”

• “Immigration – a word that has always struck me as cold and sociological, but whose reality is intimate as my own grandmother, idiosyncratic, odd and paradoxical in its gifts and its burdens.”

Panel:  Amy Tan (author of The Bonesetter’s Daughter and The Joy Luck Club)

              Bharati Mukerjee (author of Desirable Daughters)

              Sandra Cisneros (author of Caramelo and “Barbie-Q”)

              Elmaz Abinader (author of In the Country of my Dreams)

              Robert Olen Butler (author of Fair Warning)

Amy Tan:

• Over the last ten years, the landscape of our literature has changed.  It used to be that she was considered a writer of immigrant literature, something she found strange.  She had felt that her sensibilities as a writer were profoundly American.  That was because her assumptions as a citizen of this world were American.  (ex. – She had fully believed that if she were run over in a crowded street, she had the right to sue.  That assumption was challenged the first time she went to China.)

• Another assumption as an American writer is that she has freedom of expression.  She does not think that these are natural assumptions that other writers from other countries have.  They may long for it or come here and discover it.

• The writers on the panel hold differences on what their personal responsibilities are. 

o   Some write to be a mandate to debunk certain mythologies or stereotypes. 

o   Others felt it was important not to look simply at the intimate close-up personal narratives of family, but to look at the larger world and how important that is for writers.

• She felt the panel did not talk a lot about their art as writers.  (How is their art influenced by the personal histories, by where they have come from, by what they consider important, why they write, who they are writing for, do they seek to educate, do they seek to only find the nature of their art through the process of the unconscious?)

• Ms. Tan believes in the desire to let art take its shape almost unconsciously from its place of dreams.  Yet she is also aware of the fact that people, particularly those who come from another country, have a self consciousness imposed upon them by others as well as a need to have a conscience about those they have left behind.  They maintain the idea that they have come to or live in the chosen land while remaining unchosen, and those they left behind are also unchosen.

Bharati Mukherjee

·         The only true American immigrant on the panel.  Grew up in the 40s and 50s in Calcutta, India.

Video Clip.

·         Literature that shaped her were primarily Russian novels in translation.  She pictured what the characters looked like, what furniture they sat on.  She says that something about literature makes you enter that world.

·         Ms. Mukherjee suggests three modes an immigrant can take to tell a story, narratives of:

o   Expectriation – a voluntary border crosser.  They come because they can.  It is an act of sustained self-removal from one’s native culture, balanced by a conscious resistance to total inclusion in the adopted culture.

o   Involuntary exile (entrance) – They feel guilty (maybe even pushed to leave) about the people they left behind.

o   Repatriation – People who see parts of what we think of as the United States as Spanish homeland, French homeland, Native American homeland, and where millions are crossing borders we don’t even recognize as borders.

Question: Do you see any hint of these modes/narrative in the immigrant stories we have read?

The Age of Globalization and the internet have erased borders in some way. (ex. People in Calcutta watching Friends, but processing American art and TV in a different way than people here).

Question: Do you feel that this erasing of borders as she describes helps or damages the world view of America?  Immigrant view of America?

Sandra Cisneros

Gave a story told by her brother about one of his patients.  It is one story of many which happens every day.  A woman had to leave Mexico for economic reasons to help her family.  She crossed the border with the man helping and other men.  When they got to the desert, the men raped her and left her to die.  She walked to the nearest ranch she could find.  American lived there and they also raped her.  Finally able to make it to Los Angeles, she had to prostitute herself to earn a living.  She ultimately arrived in Chicago and was ashamed of story.  Other Latinas through social service agencies helped her understand that she should not be ashamed – she is a survivor.  Her spirit is still going as a testament to her strength.  She is now working to help other women immigrants.

Ms. Cisneros is waiting to hear a story from this women and similar.  These are the real stories we should be listening to and reading.  They will help us to evolve a more humane and compassionate border.

Question:  Can you relate Objective 3 (Mexican American immigrant experiences and identities relative to the USA are unique in ways that may make them ambivalent regarding assimilation to the dominant American culture) to the story Ms. Cisneros told?

Elmaz Abinader

• Feels there is an element of truth and validity, even in fiction books.  Stories are sparked by emotion.

• “When you are a writer of a group who is on the front page, whose people who look like you get arrested at random without representation, who people like you are blamed for the biggest problems in the universe, who are demonized on most television shows and in most movies, something happens to your story because something happens to yourself.”

• She is not writing to represent Arab-Americans as a whole, but she has been sparked by what it means to look like her, to come from a country like hers, her culture which has a religion different from the mainstream religion.  So her story responds not out of representation but out of the evolution of herself.  She finds her perspective to be a gift she can give to people familiar with being demonized.

Robert Olen Butler

• He describes himself as a middle aged white guy from the Midwest whose vague Anglo-immigrant roots have long past into the melting pot.

• He says that artists encounter the world as we all do.  We are all creatures of our own senses.  Our impressions of the world and the senses in the moment is that all is chaos.  The artist has the intuition that behind the chaos is order and meaning.

• The artist goes back to the moment-to-moment flow of experience and recombines it and shapes it into objects that are plays, poems, stories, etc. 

• Writers/artists have the power to create experience that is focused on the order behind the chaos, therefore communicating that knowledge in a way that is unique.  Artists do not write from their heads, they write from the unconscious, the dream space.

• Mr. Butler says that, through breaking down borders, eventually you will break through to a place where you are neither male nor female, not black/ white/ red/ brown, not Christian/ Muslim/ Hindu/ Jew/ Sikh, not Vietnamese/ Palestinian/ American/ Israeli/ Serbian/ Albanian.  You are merely human.  Our deepest hope is to overcome the terrible faults we all fall into as individuals and as nations.

• He suggests that the border not previously mentioned is the most important – the personal border (who is our own and who is the “other.”  We all carry around the terrible conviction/fear that each of us is alone in the world.  Matters which divide us – race, religion, culture, ethnicity, gender – we cling to.   There is a desire to have a sense of self, so we grab at superficial matters and try to make that define who we are.  What results is that we are “this” and the other outside ourselves has no common connection to us.  Then this very other existence in the world is an assault on our own personal identity.

• The great thing about immigrant literature is that these themes of identity can be given.  But ultimately, art is important because it allows us to leave ourselves and find our own face reflected back.  “That is the only thing that can save us.”

Question: What are your feelings about this last “border?” Agree/disagree with Mr. Butler’s statements?