Essay 1 – My Learning, Illustrated in Poetry

          This semester really jolted my literary senses. I had never studied so many varied texts as we did in Dr White’s American Minority Literature class. In college I had read maybe one slave narrative that I can remember, and I think I may have read a novella by Cisneros in elementary school, but that’s about it for my experience in American minority literature prior to this semester. Studying African American, Native American, Mexican American, and gay literature all in this one semester was both a thrill and a challenge for me. In order to illustrate my learning experience for the purpose of this final essay, however, it will be necessary for me narrow my focus of this semester. I have decided to highlight the poetry we studied, since this was also a new area for me and one I very much enjoyed.

          As far as poetry is concerned for this semester, I found that we had a number of objectives to help me focus my study and aid my understanding of minority poetry. Objective 1c[i] asks us to observe literary strategies such as “double language” that minority writers use to gain voice and choice. Objective 5a[ii] points to the power of poetry to help others understand and share the minority experience. Objective 5c[iii] says that literacy is a sign of modernity and a path to empowerment. Objective 7[iv] focuses on minority representations of America’s dominant culture in areas like poetry and literature. Keeping all of these objectives in the back of my mind while reading and studying the poems for our class made the experience more meaningful.

          The first type of poetry we studied this semester was African American poetry. We read poems by Jupiter Hammon, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Maya Angelou. I was very moved by Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” and I thought that Denielle’s reading of it in class was beautiful. Looking over the poem now and the notes that I took from the class discussion that we had over it, I am still very excited by this poem. However, I was most inspired by Jupiter Hammon’s poem, “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, With Penitential Cries.” This poem, written and published by a man who was a slave his entire life, along with the slave narratives we read by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, led me to study the topic of American slave literature in both of my Research Posts for this semester. I was especially interested to see how they used literature to empower themselves (Obj 5c) and I wanted to gain a more emotional understanding of their experiences through their literary expression (Obj 5a). In our class discussion of “An Evening Thought,” there was much debate over the many potential meanings of the word “salvation” in the poem (an example of “double language” from Obj 1c). Are we to read “salvation” as meaning freedom from slavery? Or death, and thereby an escape from slavery? Or is the poet talking about his own religious salvation or salvation for the slaveholders and thereby legal freedom for the slaves? The language in Hammon’s poem is working very hard here. I had never spent so much time and thought on a single poem, and my mind was stirred and I was very moved by Hammon’s words. I like to think that I have a better understanding of the feelings and struggles of certain African Americans, thanks to the beautiful and carefully chosen poems we read this semester.

          After our African American unit, I was excited to find a similarity between the Native American and Mexican American literature we read in the middle of the semester (to be illustrated by my discussion of their poetry)—much of it can be studied in terms of their emphasis on borders, margins, space, and the dichotomy between their respective minority culture and the American dominant culture. I admit that I have not read any poetry from either culture outside of what we read for this class, so my little thesis may not hold, but it seems interesting to me for now. Also the ability to understand both groups as native minority groups in America—rather than Native Americans being the only “native” group and Mexican Americans being understood as immigrants—was an intriguing idea to me. (I am referencing our class discussions that mentioned the U.S. border states like Texas and California as having been part of Mexico before the U.S. eventually took them. I also perused several of the previous semester’s final exams searching for support of my connection between Native and Mexican American literature, including Danielle Lynch’s 2006 Final Exam submission[v], but I did not find anything so explicit.) I noticed both the Native American and the Mexican American poetry focusing on the minority’s representation of the dominant culture (Obj 7) by showing the difference between the two. Native American poet Simon J. Ortiz’s poem, “The Margins Where We Live,” focuses on spaces and margins between places. “Green Chile,” by Mexican American poet Jimmy Santiago Baca can be read as showing the separation between the narrator’s modern (dominant culture), decorative preference for red chiles, and the tradition and ceremony of his grandmother’s preparation of the green chile. Pat Mora’s “Señora X No More” is also a Mexican American poem, this one bridging the distance between the Spanish-speaking woman’s total illiteracy and the literacy of the dominant American English culture. I had never heard of this concept of “borders” as a way to consider minority literature, and I think it works well with the Native American and Mexican American literature we read this semester.

          Gay literature was yet another brand-new experience for me this semester. In this unit I realized that I may be most interested in poetry because it can help me understand an otherwise unknowable experience (slavery and most other minority experiences besides homosexuality are foreign to me, of course, but it was during our unit on gay literature that I most appreciated the chance to live vicariously, as in Obj 5a). While the Whitman poem we read was insightful in its complexity, and Juan did an impressively educational interpretation of it, I found it hard to connect to. Frank O’Hara’s poem, “My Heart,” was the one that really grabbed me. I read this poem quickly before class and even then, in my hastiness toward it, it spoke to me. I liked how personal the voice of the narrator sounded and the last few lines, with his bare feet, unshaven face, and wishing that “the better part of [his heart], [his] poetry, is open,” left me feeling open and light. I did not exactly feel happy but I felt like I wanted to be happy, like I was open to happiness. I felt like I understood him in that poem, even if that is not what he meant exactly.

          As I said in the beginning, this semester was a lot for me to carry, but I think I came out of it balancing all that I learned. I dealt with many diverse texts, styles, and genres and enjoyed them all very well. This semester gave me many opportunities to understand where a few American minorities have been and where they hope to go in future generations. I hope this paper has illustrated the growth I have made with my discussion of the class’s poetry assignments.