Rachel Risinger

LITR 5731: American Minority Literature

Final Exam

Essay 1

Personal Prejudice and the Art of Book Selection

I will freely admit that I have an automatic bias that kicks in whenever Oprah Winfrey endorses something.  If she suggests anything, I immediately question that thing’s efficacy or entertainment value, and this is largely the biggest reason I had for not reading anything by Toni Morrison up until my enrollment in the Minority Literature seminar. In fact, the copy of Song of Solomon which I got from Half Price Books was in pristine condition, the spine had never been cracked open, and within its pages there was a newspaper article torn out of the Houston Chronicle discussing Oprah’s inclusion of the book in her book club. I concluded that whoever had previously purchased the book did so because “she who must be obeyed” bid them to do so and I wouldn’t get anymore out of the book than the person who fobbed it off on the used bookstore had.  I could not have been more wrong.  Song of Solomon challenged and energized my reading as much as Correigidora by Gayl Jones and White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.

Toni Morrison’s descriptions of life within a minority community bring forth a richness of experience and character development that drew me in and expanded my literary horizons, despite my earlier prejudices. The people who inhabit Song of Solomon could be from anywhere and from anytime, their minority status does not necessarily define them so much as it seems to emphasize the sameness of human beings regardless of minority group. Human beings in general are subject to greed, avarice and sloth. Outward appearances may cause us to ostracize each other; however it is the human condition that unites us all under the skin.  Morrison has mastered the dissection of our foibles in this book, and I look forward to reading more of her work.

I could not think of any more singularly in your face poem than Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise, which, like Night by Ellie Wiesel, I read long before Oprah ever started her book club. Still I Rise reads like a naughty little aside that speaks as much of emergent feminist awakening in Angelou’s voice as it does of the hope that racial equality is possible.   I feel that Still I Rise best fits in with Objective 4, the minority dilemma of assimilation versus resistance. While it is certainly true that the African American population’s participation in the development of America was forced, (Objective 1) once several generations had been born and the economic situation that required cheap labor had been dealt a crushing blow, the minority population had to make a choice whether active resistance to assimilation or assimilation itself was the best way to exploit the opportunities that America had to offer them.

But then in the seminar we read and discussed Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz and her poem You Men. And this is where I have to admit to being possessed of early twenty first century myopic self-centered  thinking because it never occurred to me that such a feminist poem would have survived publication n the late 1600’s. That Sor Juana Inez had such ideas I find completely believable, the relations between men and women have never exactly run smoothly and it is well documented that many women entered convent life to exercise choice rather than live the life society prescribed for them. Men as well, entered the priesthood for pragmatic reasons. I really wonder what or Juana would have said had she been afforded the academic opportunities and social freedom available to women today. Sor Juana best illustrates Objective 2, representing the differences in class among a minority population. In her case, she is an educated woman, which puts her streaks ahead of her contemporaries, but also makes her another minority. Outside of the church, she does not have access to a community of educated men to discuss her ideas with.

My own presentation didn’t go very well from my viewpoint. Discussion questions that I fretted over for several days met with blank stares and shuffling paper when I presented them to the class. Given that I’d sent my question in to Dr. White for his approval, I’m telling myself that Dr. White and I are the only ones in the room who even bothered to read the selection regarding Juan Diego and the Virgin of Guadalupe, or it is a big topic of conversation in other literature courses on campus and my classmates had already talked it to death in other classes. Either way, my presentation did not go as well as I’d hoped.

I can see the concept of Multicultural/Minority Literature studies becoming so broad in the next twenty years that entire degrees may have to be built to accommodate interest in the discipline. In order to foster more interest in obtaining a college degree for more students, more concentration of some subjects needs to be offered, and I think fostering interest in non-mainstream literature would be a good way to go to build enrollment.  One of the frustrations I felt in the course was reading Black Elk Speaks and having to constantly remind myself that while Black Elk might be speaking, someone else was writing, and I found it difficult to absorb what was being said with the ease and delight that I found in reading the other post midterm selections in the class. That being said, I will be forever grateful that I have been exposed to Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros.

Essay 2

If all I was looking for were Identity Markers, I’d read the National Enquirer.

I think the one concept that unites the books, Bless Me Ultima; Love Medicine: Woman Hollering Creek and the poem, You Men by Sor Juana Inez De La Cruz is the way women are treated as a minority within their own minority groups. Within an isolated population, it does not necessarily follow to the thinking of a casual observer that the minority will further stratify itself and create a minority within itself. I think all the works I have mentioned clearly demonstrate that there is no level of society in existence today that does not exhibit stratification along gender lines, and stratification among the membership in each gender.

In Bless Ultima and Love Medicine, clearly the older women in the gender group are afforded more of a middling sort of respect by the men in the group, even if this respect is only a notion born out of fear or awe. In the course this concept was introduced as syncretism, the blending of two opposite beliefs in order to manage the day to day life we must all get through. In Ultima, I feel that it is pretty clear that Ultima is held in higher esteem by the men in the society than the other women. She blends especially for Tony, the Catholic faith and the shamanistic beliefs of his Indian roots. For Tony, Ultima represents the Holy Mother and the local Shaman type character. In Love Medicine, the character June is almost deified after death by the men she left behind, especially her former husband and son who begin to exhibit self-destructive behaviors at the thought of no longer having June around to alternately blame their own failings on and or provide the mechanisms for them to participate in self destructive behavior.
This stratification among the members of the "other" group indicates to me a type of class division, which is supposed to me nonexistent in American culture. For my midterm I planned on posting a journal of my research into the matters of class in America and while I found plenty of research to indicate that as a society, Americans have plenty of class distinctions to go around, no two scholars or behaviorists, or economists, or anyone who can get a paper or study on the idea of class in America publish are willing to agree on any one definition of class. I feel that the biggest reason that there is such a lack of agreement on class issues is the fact that America is the land of the special interest group, and whoever is paying for a study or publication of ideas generally gets to dictate the results of any such research. It is just too daunting a subject to undertake for the purposes of a sixteen-week class, especially when outside of academic discourse there seems to be a pretty clear aversion to discussions of class within "our" society.

 People are alright with discussion of class on a purely economic level, the old standard descriptions of lower, middle, lower-middle, etc., in terms of economic assets are palatable, even if those discussing their place on the scale have only a tacit understanding of the divisions among those classes, but bring class distinctions that involve asset accumulation and manipulation or education or ancestry into the conversation, and Americans revolt.  We demand the right to describe ourselves as a completely egalitarian society in which everyone is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and therefore want to bury our heads in the sand, telling ourselves that the playing field in level, when in all truthfulness, it is very far from being level.
You Men by Sor Juana Inez Delacruz is a clear example of the ability of a woman to reach out past the social restraints imposed on her and communicate her very feminist ideas to the literate public of her time. Seemingly through her insight into the actions of men in her poetry, she certainly had interactions with men on a secular level, perhaps before she entered the life of a nun, but I do not think that the poem is in and of itself so much an indictment of men and their behavior as it is a veiled warning to the women who will be tempted into ruin by men.

In remembering the class discussion on this poem I remember that a lot of time was devoted to the question of Sor Juana's sexuality, but I really do not get the sense that her sexual orientation is responsible for the tone of the poem so much as her gender influences its tone. To me, You Men is as much a cautionary tale for women as it is an admonishment to men. I think literate, thinking men of the day would also appreciate the poem's lesson and give a grudging respect towards the ideas voiced in the poem. Again, this would be an example of syncretism, the idea that men can live freely without fear of consequences and women must live with the constant fear of finding themselves in a situation that would cast doubt on their virtue. As it does not enter into Sor Juana's rhetoric that some men would welcome the company of less virtuous women and that some women do not care to live virtuous lives I believe is further evidence that her own sexuality was a moot point in that class discussion.
Sandra Cisneros, author of Woman Hollering Creek, a wonderful collection of short stories about the Latino culture in and around San Antonio Texas gave us loads of discussion regarding the individual motivation of characters as they navigated their way through life. She provided her readers a look into many dissimilar facets of life as a Mexican American, or a Mexican living in the United States, with a clear focus on the differences between the genders. For myself, no clearer was the minority status of women within an isolated population clearer than in Bien Pretty, where Flavio is enthralled with Lupe, they've been embroiled in a tumultuously sensuous affair for weeks until he tells her that he must go home to deal with family troubles, and then drops the bomb on Lupe that not only has he been married twice and has several children, he has not bothered to divorce either of his wives in Mexico. His casual attitude towards her annoyance at this news clearly evidences a lack of respect on his part for women of any description beyond the probably middling respect he gives his mother. This is clearly evidence of a gender-class distinction between the sexes within a minority population. Cisneros presented another opportunity for the class to discuss the sexual orientation of the author as it possibly enabled their description of an opposite sex character. I don’t believe that it necessarily follows that simply because an author exhibits marvelous insight into the thought process of an opposite gender character that the author is homosexual. Frankly, it’s of very little interest to me whether someone is or is not, I’d rather consider the identity of a person as a whole rather than based on an arbitrary identity marker.

 And personally, as a writer myself, I don't think that discussion evidences much insight into the craft and or art of writing. I think it evidences a narrow world view and the disbelief in another's ability to observe the world around them and offer well thought out discourse on the actions of those around them. Of course it could just be that I had a classmate who was just too interested in the more lascivious details of famous people's lives for my taste.

Optional Essay

As a completely unrepentant bibliophile I approach every class as the opportunity to increase my range of reading choices and also exploit the convenience of being able to dismiss works that really didn’t peak my interest as “required.” This was my first graduate literature seminar at UHCL, and I have to say that I really enjoyed it as a whole. My seminar experience up to this point has been in the History department, and the difference between the blood-sport that practicing historians engage in compared to the respectful discussions held in the Literature arena could not be more evident.

I did like the organization of the syllabus in a course website, and the availability of additional resources through the course website was greatly appreciated because I didn’t have to buy additional books for relatively small amounts of class material.

I kept waiting for the Spring Break effect to kick in and for the class to thin out, but that really didn’t happen in the numbers I’ve experienced in my other graduate seminars at UHCL. Attendance seemed to be pretty consistent and I feel that added to the depth of some of the conversations. This increased comfort level allowed us to continue our discussions in a respectful and supportive manner, which was especially important near the end of the semester when we were discussing Andrew Tobias/John Reid’s The Best Little Boy in the World. Our discussion of the author’s realization of his sexuality and his membership in the homosexual community could have ended up with much more disagreement and acrimony than it did.