Ryan Smith

Something Old, Something New

            All writing conceived under the heavy shadow of a culture which commands either conformity or invisibility deals with, at some level, a painful, competing dualism. Cultures, being as incredibly complex and rich as they are, are not a single expression of belief, but a myriad of faiths, contradictions, and paradoxes; a person caught in between even just two—and there are usually more than two competing—is pulled from many directions at once, as if by horses. The human mind desires simplicity of thought and freedom from the raucous demands of contradictory ideas—it wants peace and quiet. There doesn’t seem to be a clear method for resolving this tension, however, as a step in any cultural direction only excludes and replaces former ways of being. But people don’t often live like this, torn between existential realities and social commitments—not for long, anyway; they find a way to resolve the problem, or they create resolution themselves. A number of our post-midterm authors rethink in this manner, and the simplicity of the switch is surprising: one merely learns to see through or beyond the cultural barriers which maze us into hazy confusion.

            The notion of a meta-identity, or even a non-identity from a certain perspective, relates to course objective four, all subsections included, which asks us to consider “the minority dilemma of assimilation or resistance—i.e., do you fight or join the culture that oppressed you? What balance do minorities strike between economic benefits and personal or cultural sacrifices?” The subheadings bring in useful complexities: 4a asks students to “identify the ‘new American’” who is an amalgamation of cultural forces, and 4b brings up the erroneous American belief in “pure, separate, and permanent identities” in the face of obvious the blending and transformation of cultures. All of these questions and thought experiments work together to help us understand how minority writers—and the people they represent—manage resolving the assimilation/resistance problem. It’s interesting to note that assimilation usually offers “economic benefits” whereas traditional/minority cultures offer actual cultural content. Consider Frida Kahlo’s “Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States”—the Mexican side of the painting is mysterious, spiritual and ancient, whereas the American side is blatant, sterile, and industrial. Despite the contradictions, Frida stands on the border, not exclusively Mexican or American, but formed from and influenced by each. She is a face and facet of the new American, and she is living proof that cultures are not dormant or perpetual, but constantly shifting and blending together.

            Cultural blending can be traced back, in the literature of the course, as far as Native American origin stories. While presenting these stories, in the hopes of inspiring class discussion, I often brought to attention Native willingness to understand creation myths from multiple perspectives, a technique which throws Western ideas of objective, static truth to the wind. Several of these stories not only admitted variance among their own people, but the possibility of spiritual relativism regarding whites as well. Black Elk embodies this flexibility in both his narration to Neidhardt and in his later years as a Catholic. Our class struggled, as critics and readers have done since the work’s publication, with the incongruity between these two spiritual lives, which seem so exclusive—some arguing that his conversion was for simply a mechanism for leading his people safety into the inevitability of Western culture, others claiming that Neidhardt was dishonestly selective about his presentation of Black Elk’s words. Neither option is entirely satisfying, because each refuses to take the idea of syncretism seriously. Arguments often mention the term lightly, almost by obligation, but few consider that Black Elk’s post-Catholicism beliefs may have been something distinct from either system. Those invested in a particular belief frequently attempt to claim human souls for their side—he was a Christian, clearly!—but an honest answer does away with generalities and gets at the details and complexities of human experience. With a limited amount of records, it may never be possible to pin Black Elk on one tradition or another conclusively, but if readers remember the flexibility of his spiritual traditions, and honor the wisdom of his words and life, such games become unnecessary and juvenile. 

            Spiritual epiphanies are essential to two of our Mexican-American texts, and both Cisneros and Anaya examine ways in which minority people can make something new from the ruins of their traditional lives and from the Western society they find themselves inextricably linked to. Tony’s struggle with religious traditions, and with nonbelief, are the backbone of the novel, though there is somewhat of a reversal here; Catholicism, forced onto Central American people originally, has had enough time to become the cultural and social norm/tradition; indigenous beliefs, revealed in part by Ultima (who is a blend herself) and more clearly by Cico’s golden carp religion, have become subversive, or at least unspoken. Tony’s doubt ultimately manifests itself in a desire for spiritual revitalization: “If the old religion could no longer answer the questions of children then perhaps it was time to change it” (248). The “old religion” is Catholicism, but as his dreams reveal to him, religious resolution lies not in one tradition or another, but in a meta-religion which freely borrows and rejects from the old ways and becomes something with spiritual strength all its own. Cisneros has a penitent mirror this revelation in “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” when a woman realizes that the all aspects of spiritual fulfillment and religious devotion are one, that the separations imposed by dogma are arbitrary and impermanent, and that her discovered harmony isn’t abstract or ethereal but present and embodied within herself. As with Frida, the individual resolves cultural contradictions by reimagining culture itself, and by consciously ignoring the borders which senselessly separate us.