Meryl Bazaman

Trickster: Immigrant Resistance or Immigrant Assimilator?  

When the Trickster starts a-walking

He sends the whole world asque

just when you think that it's all through

It’s just a birth of something new

(Gogol Bordello, “When the Trickster Starts A-Poking.” Multi Kontra Culti Vs. Irony. CD. Rubric Records. 2002.) 

Who or what is the trickster? What role (if any) does the trickster play in the ongoing Immigrant Narrative? Modern literature alludes to the trickster as a resisting figure. Through this manipulation of language to the point of lying by omission, the trickster as a character reclaims a sense of autonomy and self-determination that are core desires of the Immigrant Narrative. Yet, what if the trickster is an assimilationist? What if the force of the trickster character acts as a literary device that allows contrasting wants of the Old and New World to exist simultaneously while it converts the Old into the New? Or what if the trickster is a forceful character that provides the opportunity for the immigrant to become neither part of the master narrative or his or her original minority and/or immigrant narrative?

             Most Contemporary literature treats the trickster as a figure of resistance frustrated by a domineering force or being. In order to assert its agency, the trickster manipulates the meanings in his verbal and written exchanges with the dominant party. This results in his willfully transgressive transformation into “the one who perpetrates the lie...” (Chabon, xi). By communicating in ways where connotations are dubious and intentionally ambiguous (ways arguably akin to lying), the trickster survives in the hostile environment. Like the third stage of the Immigrant Narrative (Objective 2c), this interpretation of the trickster mirrors that of the immigrant resisting the dominant culture.  

            However, the resisting, defiant trickster as immigrant is problematic because it is more crucial to the Minority Narrative, a narrative that is substantially different from the immigrant narrative because its defiance arises from people such as the Native Americans and African Americans that were forcibly subjugated and enslaved (Objective 3a). As a result of this resistance being more essential to the Minority Narrative, I believe another method for understanding the trickster in the Immigrant Narrative is necessary. So what definition of trickster is more appropriate for the Immigrant Narrative? According to Ammons, “Tricksters and trickster energy articulate a whole other, independent, cultural reality and positive way of negotiating multiple cultural systems” (xi). Viewed as a mediating force, tricksters can allow for the fourth and fifth stages of the Immigrant Narrative to occur; that is, trickster characters help immigrants to assimilate (Stage Four) and rediscover their ethnic identify (Stage Five). By embodying literary characters in immigrant literature and spoken lore, tricksters allow the conflicting forces between the old and new world to coexist.

                 So where are examples of the trickster functioning as a cultural mediator between the requirements of the old world and the new? The first I found was in the work of Ed Cray and his articulation of what he dubs “the trickster rabbi.” In his extensive research of jokes told by first, second, and third generation American Jews, Cray discovered that the rabbi trickster apparently:

… is no venerated Ghetto scholar meditating on the Talmud and mediating the petty squabbles of his flock. This is an American rabbi, a fully acculturated fellow who gives as good in the twentieth century as his forebearers got for generations. Jewish he is, to a humorous fault, but he is no longer the long-suffering scholar; offered equality, he is going to take it (Cray, 333).

Moving beyond the passive resistance of the Old World Jewish forefathers and mothers against the prevailing dominant groups in Eurasia, the American trickster rabbi is a representational space where mirroring the dominant culture in its open assertiveness is acceptable (Objective 3c). While allowing a safe venue for assuming dominant culture characteristics, the trickster rabbi also provides the American Jew with a degree of security in resuming the characteristics that keeps him or her accepted by the immigrant enclave he or she might still reside in. Although unmistakably Jewish, the “trickster rabbi” simultaneously becomes naturalized. Those that share jokes or short stories with the trickster rabbi can both assimilate and openly maintain aspects of a heritage that would otherwise be openly shunned and punished in the old country.  

                 Yet, where does this occur in literature? If we can best understand the Immigrant Narrative in written words and texts, where in literature does the trickster function in this reconciliatory and decision making manner? Furman offers a demonstration in his analysis of the literary works of Early Jewish American writers and Gish Jen’s novel Mona in the Promised Land; however, Furman expands this decision making process to include the provision that an immigrant doesn’t only have to choose which parts of an ethnic or minority identity or dominant culture one wishes to keep but can choice among all minority/ethnic identities that exist along with the dominant culture (Objective 3e). After comparing and contrasting Gish’s character Mona, a second generation Chinese immigrant who decides to become Jewish, with the frustrated Jewish character of Sara Smolinsky in Anzia Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers, Furman concludes that these women can apply the force of the trickster to understand “the freedom to choose one’s cultural identity lies at the heart of this new civic promise” (Furman, 216). According to Furman, Gish and Yezierska’s trickster characters do not need to choose between the dominant culture and their immigrant/minority cultures; rather, they can choose what they would like to incorporate from all inhabitants in the US. In this new spirit, an immigrant can arise something different all together. By employing the tricksters of literature, those that occupy and attempt to occupy these new identities, Furman presumes that the immigrant living in multicultural America can play by his or her own rules regardless of Immigrant or Minority Narrative.

            The search for the trickster in the Immigrant Narrative reveals what is a literary and spoken force of choice. I was pleased to find that the trickster does play a substantial role in the Immigrant Narrative as characters who act as mediators and decision makers in the conflicting worlds of Old and New. Although in the rabbi trickster force, Cray was thought to only mediate between the dominant culture and the immigrant’s culture, I now find more contemporary works that are relevant to the Immigrant Narrative believe that the trickster can function as a negotiator and not a resistor (for resistance is a stronger core component of the Minority Narrative). The trickster allows the immigrant to bring to life, to birth something new, whether through the talk, the walk, or the written word. The trickster helps the immigrant determine how he or she will identify culturally.

Works Cited

Ammons, Elizabeth. Introduction. Tricksterism in Turn of the Century American Literature

            A Multicultural Perspective. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons and Annette White Parks. Hanover:

            University Press of New England, 1994. vii-xiii. Print.

Chabon, Michael. Foreword. Trickster Makes This World. By Lewis Hyde. New York: D&M

Publishers Inc. 2010. xi-2. Print.

Cray, Ed. “The Rabbi Trickster.” American Folklore Society 77.306 (1964): 331-345. Web.

            http://www.jstor.org/stable/537381 

Furman, Andrew. “Immigrant Dreams and Civic Promises: (Con-)Testing Identity in Early

Jewish American Literature and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land.” MELUS  25.1

(2000): 209-226.Web.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/468158

White, Craig. LITR 5731 American Immigrant Literature Syllabus Course Objectives.

            http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/5731im