Christine Ford

Walking a Mile in Different Shoes: My Learning Experience

          I am pretty sure that when I started my graduate career, I would never have guessed I would take so many American Literature classes, let alone one on minority literature. Of course, I do not mean to denigrate the topic, since I have now come to thoroughly enjoy it, but studying American minority literature was never a part of “the plan.” The plan included a lot of long dead white guys (the longer dead, the better) and as much British literature as possible. Two and a half years later, I find myself enrolled in two classes involving race issues in literature and discovering a great respect for a body of work I had never previously considered.

          Reading the slave narratives was what really caught my attention and got me on board for the rest of the semester. I had read Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs several times before and never had much of a reaction, but this time was different. Our class focused on how the issues these narratives raise—lack of voice and choice, triumph through adversity, double minority status of black women—are still alive and well today, albeit in new forms. For me, this took the slave narratives out of the category of simply being sad stories of a past I would just as soon forget to relevant social commentary for today. When we moved on to Song of Solomon, I was able to see how Macon Dead and Milkman were a product of this past, how it was still affecting them, and how it still affects African Americans today. During this time I chose my research topic on golliwogs, and through my research on that infamous toy/character, I found that other countries’ perceptions of minorities are informed by their own interactions with these groups, just as ours are.

          Perhaps one of the most affecting things throughout the semester for me was hearing from my classmates who are members of these minority groups. Corey Porter discussed the same thing in his 2007 midterm, recalling the vigor one of his classmates had in her comments: “I do remember, however, Rosa being very excitable in our discussions—a couple times she mentioned that, like Cisneros, she was of Mexican descent and grew up in Chicago. I think this connection, or this understanding, of cultures makes Woman Hollering immeasurably more meaningful to Rosa than it is to me.” I had no personal experiences or even prior academic knowledge to bring to the table, so when my classmates mentioned their personal experiences as part of the minority culture, our readings gained a whole new level of meaning. For example, we talked about the color code frequently in class, pointing out examples in many of our readings of how blackness is often equated with being unattractive and even morally bad, and whiteness is equated with beauty and moral superiority. This would have remained solely a literary construct for me had Denielle Alexander not mentioned her own experiences as a dark-skinned African American woman. She talked about living with the stereotype that lighter skin is more attractive and the negative comments she has had to put up with about her darker skin color. It was at this point that the color code stopped being simply Objective 1d and started being a part of the world I live in.

          I lost a little of this momentum when we transitioned into Native American literature. In reading through other finals, I noticed several other students said the same thing, and at least for me, I think the issue of relevancy is what makes it harder to connect with. For one thing, we do not live in an area with many Native Americans, making it a culture that very few in our class were familiar with and could not speak to with as much immediacy. Then the books themselves were more challenging. Black Elk seemed impersonal after the highly emotional slave narratives and Song of Solomon, and its focus on Black Elk’s visions/prophecies kept me at arm’s length. Most of the class said they liked Love Medicine, but again I couldn’t connect to it. There was so little hope in the stories—most of the characters were poor, many had drug and alcohol problems, and it seemed that for them, being Native American was only a hindrance in making a good life. After having African American literature become so real for me, I wanted that same experience to be repeated.

          The move into our last big topic, Mexican American literature, found me once more on solid footing. Those two years of college Spanish came back to me, especially the delight I had felt when I read “House on Mango Street” in Spanish. My classmates once again offered their cultural anecdotes, and our resident Catholics helped me understand the Virgin Mary a little better. Much as I enjoyed our two big books, the poem “Green Chile” is what truly stood out for me. The sights, smells, tastes, and textures the poem so vividly describes paint a picture that draws me in—even if this were a culture I knew nothing about, this poem’s sensory description would make it come alive and leave me curious for more.

          In the end, I think discovering the reality of Objective 5a is what truly sold me on the course: “To discover the power of poetry and fiction to help ‘others’ hear the minority voice and vicariously share the minority experience.” Trying to understand people who lived long ago in a culture very different than mine is what fascinates me about old British literature, and I found that minority literature is rather the same, only much more immediate. The minority groups we studied are people I know, with cultures that exist right alongside mine, and having an awareness of and appreciation for them that I didn’t have before speaks strongly for ability of literature to change minds and hearts.

Native American and Mexican American Narratives

          In contemplating why I was more drawn to Mexican American literature than to Native American literature, I began to look through our course objectives to see if they could shed any light on the matter. When I re-read objective 3, which contrasts the dominant culture American dream with “alternative narratives of American minorities” and saw the Native American narrative described as “Loss and Survival”, I realized that it is this narrative that I find so hard to read. Their stories are not happy or easy ones because their cultural narrative is full of darkness; they are a people who have lost their land time and time again, been subjected to countless lies from white settlers and government, and even now find themselves struggling to survive in reservations that are often poor and lacking in resources for their communities. The Mexican American narrative, on the other hand, is described as “The Ambivalent Minority, which is reflected in the widely varying stories we have read. Their fiction is not lacking a sense of Mexican identity nor does it express unhappiness over belonging to a minority culture, but it often seems to have difficulty reconciling their group identity with American dominant culture, which makes no pretense of understanding or accommodating their cultural differences. I want to compare these two narrative modes, to gain a better understanding of how each functions and how even though these are both minority cultures that have suffered at the hands of mainstream America, they each picture themselves differently.

          Black Elk, both in terms of history and within the structure of our class, marks the beginning of the loss and survival narrative for Native Americans. After receiving his great vision as a child, Black Elk often feels burdened by the responsibility he feels this vision has placed upon him. He watches his people lose their land to the Wasichus and even begin to be absorbed into white culture and fears that they will never return to the old ways: “You see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead” (276). This quote, the very last lines of Black Elk’s narrative, reminded me very much of Yeats’ famous lines from “The Second Coming”—“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; /Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”--with the same note of utter despair and loss when faced with a world that is changing beyond all recognition. Throughout his narrative, Black Elk expresses disgust when his people fall into any of the Wasichu’s ways, such as living in square homes (“It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square”) or, much worse, defecting to the Wasichu’s side in the fight to keep their lands. Every time something seems to go right for his people, they suffer a terrible setback, eventually giving in to the white man’s demands for their own preservation. Loss and survival are here shown as inscribed into the very history of the Native American peoples and pave the way for later authors, like Louise Erdrich, to expand them into literary narratives.

          The lives Erdrich portrays in the short stories that comprise Love Medicine are really no happier than Black Elk, even if the people aren’t starving or fighting anymore. Now their battles are with what looks like almost inescapable poverty, with a desire to keep the old ways and yet still be relevant in the mainstream culture. They are all powerfully tied to the reservation; even those who leave always seem to come back. Albertine is a good example of this. Through the course of the book we find that she runs away at fifteen, stays gone for a while, eventually attends college, and then returns home for her Aunt June’s funeral. She doesn’t really understand her heritage and by now, those who could answer her questions are too old to help her: “I wanted him to tell me about things that happened before my time, things I’d been too young to understand. The politics for instance. What had gone on?….I wanted to know it all” (19). She is back on the reservation, the land set aside especially for the Indians, yet she has almost no Indian identity left.

 Lyman Lamartine finds himself in a similar spot. He leaves the reservation and when he returns, he wants to revive his father’s vision of setting up a tomahawk factory. What he does not realize that his purely mercenary venture to make cheap Indian souvenirs has been co-opted by his mother, a “back-to-the-buffalo type,” into a full out power struggle between him and her. Lyman wants to use his Indian connections to make money, yet finds in the eventual crumble of his factory that what he really wants is a chance to connect with his mother: “Marie Kashpaw was going to say that I was of the outer and the inner, and though I whirled in the homeless suites and catered lunches of convention life I could come back…She was going to tell me that I had a place” (323). Having a place is what the reservation becomes. For a minority group who long ago lost their land and are still struggling to survive, the reservation is a piece of home that is always theirs.

          The Mexican American narrative is of course also concerned with identity, though it focuses on the issues of blending a minority culture into a dominant one. Bless Me, Ultima deals largely with Antonio’s struggles meet his mother’s expectations and his father’s expectations, all while trying to figure out what he wants to do in life. While the novel is largely set in an insulated community, Antonio does have interactions with the dominant culture, especially at school, and he find them somewhat disconcerting. On his first day he is very lonely at lunch and feel alienated from his classmates, with their sandwiches made of bread and his odd tortillas and beans. Upon finding some other Mexican children eating outside, he realizes that he is not so alone: “We found a few others who were like us, different in language and custom, and a part of our loneliness was gone” (59). He is glad for the chance to learn, and finds he has an aptitude for school, but also can’t quite figure out how he ought to relate to this different group. His experience with the golden carp is, to me, symbolic of Antonio’s ambivalence narrative. On the one hand, he is Catholic and comes from a devout family, yet on the other hand he has a questioning mind and seeks out answers that the church cannot provide, which for him come from the legend of the carp. Ultima and his dreams try to help him process through these conflicting viewpoints, but Antonio never really reaches a definite answer about them. The book does not end without hope, but it is ambiguous—we do not know what Tony’s adult life will bring or how these childhood experiences will shape him, only that he has Ultima’s blessing to guide and help him.

          Our other book that features the ambivalent minority narrative is Woman Hollering Creek, which is structured similarly to Love Medicine as a collection of short stories all centering around similar people/subject matter. In the title story, a young Mexican woman gets married and moves to Texas thinking it will be “far away and lovely,” only to find herself isolated and frightened when her husband becomes abusive. Although there are many other Mexican people in the town, it is not like home, and she often inadvertently does the wrong thing, like letting her baby walk around without a diaper in public. She doesn’t really want to go home, but she also doesn’t want to stay there with her dangerous husband: “The town of gossips. The town of dust and despair. Which she has traded for this town of gossips. This town of dust, despair. Houses farther apart perhaps, though no more privacy because of it” (50). In the end she does leave, and while there is much joy when she literally finds her voice driving over Woman Hollering Creek, her confused feelings over her old home and her new one are not resolved.

          “Never Marry a Mexican” deals with similar problems of belonging and not belonging. The narrator Clemencia is a product of a mother who was always looked down on by her husband’s family for being an American born Mexican and not knowing the proper traditional ways of doing things. Sick of never being able to fit in, she warned her daughters never to marry a Mexican, fearing that they too would be caught in the same difficulties of being “a Mexican girl who couldn’t even speak Spanish” (69). Clemencia feels her own life is just as fraught with difficulties as her mother’s was, though not through the travails of married life. She is an artist and as such finds herself without a class to belong to: “I’m amphibious. I’m a person who doesn’t belong to any class….not to the poor, whose neighborhood I share. Not to the rich, who come to my exhibitions and buy my work” (71-2). Much as she tries to hold herself apart by defining herself as an artist, she too gets caught up in the problems of intercultural love affairs, when she realizes why her white lover won’t marry her: “Besides, he could never marry me. You didn’t think…? Never marry a Mexican. Never marry a Mexican…No, of course not. I see. I see” (80). It was one thing when her mother told her never to marry a Mexican—then she was part of the dominant culture, looking down on Mexican men. But now, without her realizing it or wanting it, she has been labeled as minority and as such not worth of marriage by a white man. She calls herself amphibious when it comes to her class, but fails to see that her place within the dominant culture is just as precarious and shifting.

          In re-examining these minority narratives at the end of the semester, I find myself seeing with more open eyes the obstacles each of these groups have to face as they make their way in American culture. Through stories like these we are able to empathize with what it means to be Indian or Mexican and continue to read their stories with greater awareness and appreciation.