LITR 5731: Seminar in American Minority Literature

Sample Student Final Exam Submission, spring 2006

Karen Daniel

Minority Literature as an Expander of my Cultural Outlook

When I first enrolled in UHCL, it was as an undergraduate, primarily pursuing a teaching certificate in whatever content area I could finish quickest.  If I went the mathematics route, I would have to “waste” an entire year re-taking the basics to remember what I was doing—thus I became a Literature major.  My feelings towards the degree were somewhat romantic—I would follow in the footsteps of my mother who had recently passed away and fall in love with the romantic and ancient classics.  Instead, in my first semester, I ended up enrolled in minority literature, adolescent literature, and modernism and that was the beginning of my fascination with and love of, American Literature as a whole, and minority literature in particular.  I gave up all hope of “loving” the classics that same semester as I suffered through Humanities, still not something I am drawn to!

When I hear some of my fellow students discussing the type of literature they prefer, they overwhelmingly like the stuff I had originally thought I would be immersing myself in, and few of them have any real respect for more modern literature.  I find that baffling.  So much of modern literature has such deep social messages that I find it compelling and interesting, but minority literature in particular fascinates me as it enables me to gain a greater understanding of cultures that are so much a part of the society I function in, yet so divergent from the life I have personally led.   

It has been especially interesting to me to take minority literature as an undergrad and then to retake it at the graduate level.  Some of the books were the same and some were different, but the general paths we followed were parallel.  Taking this class has shown me just how much my understanding of the issues in the texts has expanded in the past three years. 

When I took it as an undergraduate, I don’t believe I had ever read any of the authors we discussed.  My limited scope of experience with minority literature was with the works of Alice Walker, whom I had (and actually still have) somewhat of an obsession with.  Reading Maya Angelou three years ago was an awakening for me, but reading Morrison in this class has been a much deeper experience.  Morrison draws me in with her prose, and her voice comes through so clearly in everything she writes that after reading Song of Solomon in this class (and Paradise in another class at the same time) I am hooked.  I am not so thrilled about Push.  While I understand its value, I take a certain issue with the author’s approach.  Morrison conveys her messages with such grace, and is such an amazing writer that, for me, Sapphire is in a tough spot following her in the syllabus. 

None of the other literature is quite as fascinating to me as the African American literature, but I did enjoy the Mexican American books.  Ultima is another book that we had read in the undergraduate class that I understood much better this time around, but Cisneros was my favorite.  Ironically, I was also reading some of her books in other classes this semester, so perhaps I just got comfortable with her style. 

The part of the class that I found the most difficult to engage with is the Native American readings and I am constantly trying to understand why that is the case.  While I enjoyed reading Black Elk, I could not seem to work up the same sort of emotional reaction to it that I had with the other minority works.  And Lone Ranger I just plain don’t care for as much as I do the other books we read.  I know why I don’t like Lone Ranger with its stream of consciousness style, but I am not sure that I can put into words why Black Elk doesn’t engage me.  Perhaps it is because it is difficult to find a true “voice” in the novel so it doesn’t seem as personal to me. 

It is precisely that dimension of becoming personal with the narrator that I find so fascinating about all of the other books we read.  I think growing up in the North and West, and going to school so long ago, I received a pretty good history education, but, reading about slavery in a history book, and reading about slavery and the devastation that is still lingering on so many years later as a result of it, are two very different things.   Far from being racist, I think prior to reading so many wonderful minority literature books, I was just simply complacent.  I just really believed that while things had been horrible for African Americans a couple of centuries ago, okay, maybe even fifty years ago, that things had changed dramatically, and that they should have gotten on with it by now.  After all, I had lots of friends that were Black and Hispanic that were doing just fine.  As far as the Native Americans, all of the ones I knew lived on Barona reservation in San Diego and received rather large checks from the government each month, so my view of that culture was especially limited.  I mean, they lived for free in San Diego; how bad could things be? 

So I guess, in essence, this class, and to some degree the previous undergraduate class, opened my eyes and changed my perceptions of a lot of issues facing minorities in this country.  It has made me question the way I see things around me and the way I position minorities in our culture.  Much more than just affecting me with wonderful writing, Minority Literature affects me from a sociological point of view that is apparent when I try to write about our readings.  While I love some of the writers for their style, it is the messages they convey, and the thought processes those messages provoke, that make this class such a great experience for me.  There is little doubt in my mind that, given a choice, this is the literature I would choose to teach.  I think there is so much that can be done with it to expand the views my future students, either at the high school or secondary levels, that, approached correctly minority literature functions on a deeply cultural level rather than just as a literature genre. 

The Cultural, Historical, and Social Impacts of Minority Literature. ·

I think a large part of the determining factors that “place” minority literature are the methods with which it is taught.  Certainly minority lit could be taught as simply a genre of literature, but for me, this would be difficult to do and perhaps tedious to study.  Although the authors of our classroom texts are essentially artists, I believe they must think of themselves as having a higher calling, as having an important message to convey and a deeper purpose to fulfill than just producing great prose.  Rather than use topics to create art, minority authors use art to create compelling avenues of discovery and discussion. 

A common theme the authors we studied use is the idea of forced or involuntary participation in the dominant culture (objective 1a).  Slave Narratives is of course the most obvious example of this.  The authors of these texts are the voices of generations of African Americans that were kidnapped and placed in bondage for the gain of the majority culture.  However, the repercussions of this did not end with their stories.  Morrison in particular uses her writings to discuss the long-term effects of slavery on African American culture.  She addresses the topic from all sorts of angles from the racial blending that began with the forced miscegenation of slave women, to the destruction of African American family structures that stem the forced separation of many slave families, to the forced illiteracy that effected African American education for generations making them essentially voiceless (Objective 1b).  Knowing that the authors of Slave Narratives had to fight so hard to gain that voice, I find their narratives even more compelling than they would be otherwise, as they were fighting so hard to find that lost voice (objective 1c). 

Another major theme we used to approach our readings was the idea of the alternative dream, or rather the nightmare that minorities were forced to go through in the pursuit of the majority’s American dream (objective 3).  None of the minorities studied share the same American dream as the majority culture as a major part of that dream stems from voluntary participation which was not the case for them.  African Americans, of course, never chose to come here and, as discussed above, their “dream” was a nightmare at its roots (3a).  Native Americans never shared the majority dream either, and were almost as choiceless, watching as American settlers invaded their territories, forcing the ones they didn’t slaughter to give up their land and move onto reservations (3b).  Finally, perhaps the most ambivalent minority of all, Mexican Americans were often in the same position, caught up in a power struggle for the land that is now the Southwest United States.  If they chose stay they were essentially foreign immigrants living on the land they had always lived on (3c).  I am sure that all of these minorities are aware of the American Dream, but, for them, it does not hold the same connotations as it does for members of the majority culture. 

That difference is a great deal of what minority authors are addressing in their writings.  If you look at Fistfight in Heaven, the confusion about identity and what should be aspired to becomes obvious.  Alexie has such a realistic style that I find some of his work hard to take, but his message is clear.  His is a downtrodden and humiliated people who, while dependent on the government of the majority culture, hold much more respect, however grudgingly, for their ancestors’ culture.  They are an ambivalent minority people caught in a struggle for identity between divergent worlds.  They would love the American dream of financial independence and individual respect, but this seems to be always out of their reach, especially if they want to hold onto their own cultural heritage at all. 

This idea of holding onto one’s original cultural heritage, while seeking to join the majority dream culture, at least to some degree, is what makes minority literature about so much more than just literature.  I believe that while minority authors certainly want readers from the majority culture, both for financial reasons and in the hopes that they will gain empathy by reading their books, I think primarily they are speaking to the members of the minority culture about which they are writing in the hopes of reaching them on another level.   Thus their writings become their voices to the world, both seeking to encourage and educate their readers, and perhaps to call them to action. 

As a class, we struck a certain balance between the cultural and literary aspects of the books we read.  Probably due to the types of students in our class (most of us are opinionated to say the least), we spent a lot more time on the cultural, historical, and sociological aspects of the texts, but we did address the idea of literary value and impact.  We especially did this in discussing Push and Best Little Boy, as we had differing opinions about the value of the authors’ styles and/or minority status’.  (Incidentally, it is a sign that this class is about more than just literature that we discussed the literary merits of the works at all.  When reading the canons of literature that is usually not done, as those texts are already established as great works for their literary value alone, and the student’s task is to analyze the message, not the value of the text).  Even when discussing the literary value of some of the works, our class seemed to primarily relate that back to how it functioned to help or hurt the author’s conveyance of his or her message. 

At any rate, I would not want to change our approach at all.  If minority literature has taught me any one thing it is to look at other genres of literature and seek to find the true social message the authors are trying to convey; I tend to find that sort of message in everything I read now rather than concentrating just on how the author has written the text.  When doing research for my journal I came upon a quote in which Cisneros, when sending one of her books to the President, had attached a note to the effect that if reading this book caused him to look at Mexican immigrants in a kinder and gentler way then her book had accomplished its purpose.  With lofty goals like that coming from the authors of minority texts, how can we, as a class, read them any differently than in the social, historical, and cultural ways in which they were intended?