Jonathon Anderson

What Conquering Nations Do

Spike: I just can't take all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.

Willow: Uh, the preferred term is...

Spike: You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what Caesar did, and he's not goin' around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story.

                                                                                    -“Pangs,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer

            It’s easy for us to forget that there is a historical precedent, stretching back at least to ancient Greece, for economic and military world powers to conflate their ascendency with notions of the superiority of their culture. Reasons for this are not obscure; quick reference to Franklin’s Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America and Baudrillard’s America highlight the blend of (sometimes unintentional) arrogance, reductionism, and ignorance that attends interactions with unfamiliar cultures. Franklin’s ironic observation, “Savages we call them, because their Manners differ from ours, which we think the Perfection of Civility. They think the same of theirs…,” and Baudrillard’s imperfectly informed[1] comment on the Hispanic guides at the Alamo in San Antonio, who “hymn the Americans who stole their lands,” both raise the question of what the relationship between a dominant culture and its marginalized groups should be (Baudrillard 2). On the one hand, assimilation to a dominant culture can open the door to civic modernization, advancements in quality of life, and greater economic, educational, and creative opportunities, but on the other hand, entire cultural heritages with rich and important histories can be severely attenuated or wiped out completely (see Celts, Vikings, and Vandals). Attempts to explore this nuanced and tangled question can quickly go awry not only because of its urgency in a country like the United States, but because of the heightened sensitivities of political correctness, an indignant sense of “legitimate discontent,” or the knee-jerk defensiveness of the closed-minded[2].

            The stories of American immigrants and minorities do, in fact, have their fair share of dominant culture characters who function as antagonists. Mr. Kephart in Djanikian’s poem, “In the Elementary School Choir,” reacts to an Egyptian, immigrant fifth-grader’s mispronunciation of “Des Moines” like this: “Mr. Kephart led me to the map on the front wall, /And so I’d know where I was, / Pressed my forehead against Iowa.” Jeremy Brothers is similarly abusive to Ralph Chang in Jen’s “In the American Society,” drunkenly attempting to force Chang to take off his suit jacket and dress shirt in the middle of a country club party. “Take off your shirt,” orders Brothers, “or I’m going to throw [your] jacket right into the pool.” Vicki Koob in Erdrich’s “American Horse” is determined to swoop into the lives of Albertine and her son, Buddy, so that she can “find that boy and salvage him.” We may worry a little over what she means by “salvage.” She apparently wants to save him from a family life that she defines with reference to “the old man crazy as a bedbug” and his “mother intoxicated somewhere,” although what we find in the text is basically a disgruntled, weathered, and protective war veteran uncle and a spirited, but disillusioned mother. Koob’s “trained and cataloguing gaze” searches meticulously for environmental details that can be pressed into the service of her prejudices, and her detached righteousness leaves no room for subtlety or, it seems, for doubt.

            Encountering characters like this may be uncomfortable for us, something like the strangeness of listening to a recording of our own voices. In a sense we are seeing ourselves through the eyes of marginalized groups. What might be thoughtlessly explained away as “kidding around to make sure he doesn’t forget,” “a party foul,” or “doing what’s best for everybody concerned” can easily become traumatic for those on the receiving end as a result of the social pressures to assimilate, to measure up to a “model minority,” or constantly to cope with “marked status” that may already be in play in the lives of immigrant or minority individuals. The problem with discussing these characters in more than just a passing, single-adjective, kind of way is that we quickly recognize many of their attitudes and prejudices as symptomatic to the dominant culture in general, which may further suggest a new sort of self-suspicion that threatens our sense of personal history or identity.

            If the antagonizing dominant culture characters can have the effect of making us skeptical of our attitudes and beliefs, the dominant culture characters in supporting roles do little to reassure us. “Whitegirls” in Diaz’s “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” are “the ones [Yunior] wants the most,” because, to Yunior’s knowledge, they are the most promiscuous. Through the course of the story, though, we begin to see a picture sketched out for us of these white girls using him and other boys like him for a variety of social reasons, including status in the social milieu of their own suburban schools, periods of rebelliousness against their parents, or even a warped sense of cultural inclusiveness. At any rate, Yunior compels himself to think of his interactions as transactions. He realizes, in his jadedly precocious way, that “whitegirls” instinctively want to safeguard their “unmarked” status: “she will want to wash up. In the bathroom she will hum a song from a radio and her waist will keep the beat against the lip of the sink.” She may be “slumming it,” but she still senses that she is separate from Yunior’s world (another instance of the marginalized individual’s opposition to “the well-fed, well-dressed world – the frigid whitewashed wall of cleanliness” from Yezierska’s “Soap and Water?”).

            Less exploitative is Mrs. Hamma in Mohr’s “The English Lesson.” We find out that she is a junior high history teacher who travels to a Lower East Side public school in New York City each Tuesday evening to teach Basic English for adults, but the text soon hints at complications in her motives. She is “convinced that this small group of people desperately [needs] her services,” intoning her paternalistic psalm about “making every lesson count toward improving [the] conditions” of “these people,” with their “miserable, dreary, uninteresting, and often revolting jobs,” to anyone who will listen. To be fair, she really does seem sincere about doing her part in her capacity as an educator to give her immigrant students the opportunity for language acquisition. Mrs. Hamma is representative of a more benign iteration of the dominant culture that is largely unaware of its condescending attitudes and prejudices.

            Leslie Marmon Silko offers us one of the least objectionable dominant culture characters with Father Paul in “The Man to Send Rain Clouds.” When we first meet him, we see immediately that he is an agent of assimilation. “I hope I’ll be seeing you at Mass this week – we missed you last Sunday,” he tells Leon. The central conflict of the story concerns Leon’s request for Father Paul to sprinkle holy water on his grandfather’s grave even though he has had a traditional Native American funeral service instead of a Christian one. In the short conversation the two men have about it, Father Paul at first respectfully declines, with a “distant” voice and a tired look in his eyes, saying “You know I can’t do that.” However, when Leon starts to leave, the priest stands up, asks him to wait, and collects his overcoat and container of holy water to follow him to the unsanctified grave. Silko tells us that, as Paul sprinkles the grave, “it reminded him of something – he tried to remember what it was, because he thought if he could remember he might understand this.” Regrettably, understanding does not visit him, although he does seem to be somewhat aware of a spiritual component to the actions of the funeral party. The interesting thing about the way this story progresses is that in this case it is the dominant culture character who capitulates instead of the minority characters.

            Jean Baudrillard says of us that America “is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved” (28). I think this accounts for both our admirable naiveté in reaching for the impossible and our blindness to our own inadequacies. When Crevecoeur wrote that “the American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must entertain new ideas, and form new opinions,” he opened the door to the possibility of the kind of “American exceptionalism” that renders us forgetful. For the dominant culture, it will always be the voices of the marginalized, the dominated, and the immigrant and minority groups, who are ready to remind it what it dreams itself already to be.

Work Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. America. London: Verso, 1988. Print.