Lost Cultures

I really liked the documentary about the Japanese internment camps we watched in class. The Japanese internment camps are a stunning reminder of the kind of intolerance and inhumanity that existed within our own borders. Americans tend to have this superiority complex about their history claiming over and over again to be the great patriots of justice and equality. It is this attitude that leaves these festering stains on American history hidden beneath the rug. As the numerous poems, novels, essays, and the limitless array of country music will tell you, there are many things to be proud of as an American. We live in a pretty great country filled with brilliant minds and endless possibilities. What we cannot forget about our country though is that it was not built and preserved upon foundations of peaceful protest and gentle war tactics. This nation was established on a foundation of spilled blood and ruined cultures. Native Americans, Japanese Americans, African Americans, the list of the displaced, mistreated, minorities goes on. They were stripped of their culture, humiliated, discriminated, and left for the history books to gloss over. What can we do about it now? So much time has passed and the perpetrators of these inhumane acts are long since rotting in their graves. The victims of the conquest of America can still be witnessed today. They are the decedents of these lost cultures-the ones left questioning their real identities wondering who their people might have been before they had become Americanized.

I don’t think that there is a simple answer as to what can be done to make up for the deeds of the past. There is no price tag one can place on what was lost while forging this country. If history had not unfolded as it had we cannot say what our country would be like now. All we can say is ‘sacrifices had to be made’ and shuffle our collective feet until the subject is changed. Maybe documentaries like the one we watched in class could be a starting point. They keep the memory of what happened alive -- keep people talking about these lost people. Literature and the arts in general are probably the best asset towards keeping the spirit of these lost cultures alive. The more stories, documentaries, and pieces of art dedicated to this subject, the longer we can keep the memory alive. 100 years from now the memory of these events will be even further distorted and buried in the dusty pages of the history books, but if a piece of literature remains to stir the imagination and rekindle the memories of the past these lost cultures can survive.

Rocky Horror

Driving home tonight I heard a local radio station doing an advertisement for the USD theater group’s production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A little spark went off in my head and I immediately began pondering what deranged character I would portray while attending the production, but in the middle of a Janet/Magenta tossup I had a spark of brilliance. At least I thought it was brilliance, after reading this you might think otherwise, but for now we can classify it as sheer brilliance. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (RHPS) is a phenomenal representation of identity in crisis dealing with issues of gender, orientation, assimilation, and general culture shock. RHPS is infamous for its openly sexual, often perverse, strangely irresistible musical ballads and fishnet clad characters, but within the boundaries of purely scholarly review, it does seem to show merit for this class.
The main character, Dr. Frankenfurter, is an alien from another planet somewhat trying to assimilate with the humans he encounters. He adapts to sex very quickly, though with a few spins into gender and orientation confusion along the way. He is a self proclaimed ‘sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania’ and spends most of the play dressed in full drag luring unsuspecting men and women into bed. Within his character alone one can see evidence of an immigrant struggling with assimilation and a man struggling with his identity as a bisexual transvestite. Then you take into consideration the frightened squares, Janet and Brad who act as the ‘others’ within the madhouse that is Dr. Frankfurter’s castle. Brad even goes so far as to mention that they must assimilate with the customs of these people if they wish to make it through the experience alive. Even though they are witness to the madness within the castle for a brief span of time (one evening presumably) they quickly begin to transform as they adapt to these strange people’s folk dancing and mating customs.
Yes, I may be reaching a bit in a few of my definitions, but I feel that one of the main goals of a class should be to take away the ability to observe the contents of said class in the real world. Granted, RHPS has very little to do with the real world itself, it is an observable relic of pop culture that litters the real world and a significant enough contribution to the arts that the esteemed theater group at USD decided to use it as their spring musical. For these reasons, I feel that viewing the production of RHPS Saturday night should be a grand finale to this class and encourage anyone who can to show up in full drag to appreciate the solid learning experience and diverse cultural…there will be vulgar dancing and men in fishnets, really, do I need to butter you up more? That's what I thought--I’ll see you there.

Powerbook

The PowerBook

Terrible thing to do to a flower, indeed. I will never be able to look at a tulip or an artichoke the same again. Over the course of this semester I have been disgusted, disgruntled, and delighted over the course reading material and this novel was no exception. (Btw, how does one get added on to the Roripaugh summer reading list? Haha) This novel brings up several key issues such as gender roles, orientation, and the anonymity of the Internet. Gender roles have fascinated me since taking psych 101 my freshmen year. What makes a girl a girl other than the obvious anatomical bits? Why do little girls reach for dolls and little boys for toy guns? Are the roles of maternal care giver and protector imbedded into out genetic makeup at birth? If so, how do you explain tomboys and sissies? There are some fascinating documents written about this topic by people with a much more impressive list of credentials than myself, but I’ve always had a feeling that the whole genetic assignment of gender roles was a load. When I was a little girl, had I been given the choice, I would have run around in the summer without a shirt on just like my brothers, but because my mother insisted that little girls wore dresses and these abominations they called slips, I was forced to parade around in the summertime heat, a prisoner to my gender. I was taught how to be a girl, I didn’t have a clue what the difference was between a girl and a boy when I was born. I was just like my brothers, had my mother not been around to paint my cheeks and adorn my stubborn little body with frills and lace, I would have been content to continue the delusion until puberty began making more noticeable distinctions.
I think the book made some interesting statements about the power that lies within the anonymity of the Internet. This is a phenomena that our generation can most keenly feel the enormity of. Without persecution, we can slip seamlessly from one identity into another and back again into our own well worn shoes in the breadth of a single night. Fire up the transmogufier (yes, I’m stealing from Calvin and Hobbes now) also known as the computer and within a matter of seconds you are a 9th level Jedi priestess with a huge talent and a set that would make Dolly Drool. An endless free pass into a schizophrenics wet dream. Endless opportunities to remake yourself, endless chances to try on different personas and explore who you would be if you could be anybody but yourself. Aside from the feint anchor of an IP address to link you to your location, the chances of being discovered for your shape shifting ways are fairly slim. Anonymous, consequence free, environments tend to lead to unfortunate consequences-we need only look at the 60’s for verification of this. What will the anonymity of the Internet mean for our generation?

Blu's Hanging

I’ll be honest, I almost didn’t make it through all of Blu’s Hanging. The casual way that sexual abuse goes unnoticed and the heart wrenching plight of all the children in this story almost made me toss the book and take a shower. I know it is a realistic picture of what children in an impoverished settings do experience, but some of the details made me feel physically ill.

My heart broke for Ivah-she is in charge of the family at the age of 13 with no one to really explain to her how one really takes care of a family or herself for that matter. She has to watch her father’s mental stability waver, her brothers perversion bloom in his search for companionship and the love he lost when his mother died, and Massie’s future unfold as she is destined to follow in Ivah’s worn footsteps. Massie’s future is sealed, she is bound to repeat the cycle and see what Ivah has seen and hurt like Ivah has been hurt. I think the author is trying to give an illusion to this with the imagery brought about with the hand me down clothes. Ivah puts on her mother’s sweater while Massie slides into one of Ivah’s hand me downs. The cycle of sadness continues on through the passing down of these articles of clothing.

The use of poetry within the novel is intriguing. Poetry seems to be one of those universally binding elements that no language barrier can interfere with. When someone is speaking in poetry they are speaking to a mass audience that can be touched simply by the cadence and the meter of what is being said. I think the language barrier that kept the children from being as clearly understood by the school authorities and those around them is a connection to the theme going on within this course of being a misunderstood minority trying to survive amongst a majority class with its own recognized language regarded as being superior. I had a hard time understanding what some of the characters dialogue meant and had to go back and read some of the passages over a few times, but when the thoughts and emotions of the characters came out in poetry it seemed to crystallize what they were trying to say-not just in one passage, but throughout the entire story.

Charging Elk

Heartsong of Charging Elk
I really enjoyed this novel even if the story was told at an agonizingly slow pace. I thought it was interesting to read about these familiar locations-the black hills, Pine Ridge, Fort Randall-and to read about a leading character from the prairie. Charging Elk’s story made my heart bleed—in a good way. Charging Elk’s story of constant defeat , isolation, and betrayal, is the same you can find in almost any story of an immigrant character trying to adapt to an alien environment. He bumbles his way through language, customs, and manners as best as he can and ends up finally adjusting to the point that he would turn down his one opportunity to return to his home.

This entire story is about the perspective of the alien other. No matter where Charging Elk goes, he is perpetually the outsider. On the prairie he stood out for being the darkest of the lakotas and a so called wild Indian living away from the reservation. In France, he becomes a sexualized creature rather than a human. Every character that interacts with Charging Elk seems to be drawn to his character by his novelty and subdued sexual intrigue. You see some characters describing him based on their impressions of wild west story books, others only judge him based on his performance within the wild west show. He is a walking talking imaginary figure parading around in the real world-how can you not pay special attention to something as unique as Charging Elk? None of the characters are really prepared to deal with Charging Elk as though he were a real man, just as though he were the essentialized version of either the noble native or the screaming dangerous unpredictable savage that scalped innocent pioneers for giggles. I found it interesting that out of all the characters discussed within the novel, only the children treat Charging Elk like a real man. Mr. Soulas is delighted to have Charging Elk as a pet, maybe to go so far as to say another of his children, but he never gives Charging Elk the respect of a grown man. The children are fascinated with him, marvel at him, and give him the tools of language to communicate his thoughts and his past.

I found it ironic that Charging Elk tried so hard to avoid assimilating to the white ways that had his people planting vegetable gardens and living in little huts only to end up in France adopting their language, living in houses, wearing the white clothes, and even at one point planting a vegetable garden. This story almost sounds as though its trying to hammer home an underlying theme of the inevitability of escaping ones fate.

Drown

Drown was not by favorite read so far this semester. The short stories connected together were a little hard to keep up with and made me a little uncomfortable on more than one occasion. I can appreciate the culture differences, I can appreciate the unique fragmented story approach, but I just couldn’t put myself into any of the stories which made it difficult for me to fully submerge myself into this novel. The issue of identity within this novel doesn’t seem to be as pronounced as it was in Baldwin’s Another Country mostly because the characters in Drown all seem to be from approximately the same cultural and socio-economical backgrounds. They’re all poor, latin/Dominican or related minority group, and most all of them touch on the subject of drug use as being part of everyday life. Another common tie between all of the stories is the lack of a strong father figure causing strain on the family unit as a whole. Either the father has entirely abandoned the family, is hiding an affair, or is hinted at being absent throughout the narrator’s life.
Maybe the real aspect of identity that I was missing was the identity of the immigrant after leaving their home country. There was mention earlier in the novel about days gone by when it was a fact of pride to be Dominican, or to be of Latin decent, but in the modern times, the times that the narrator is telling his story, there is an urgency to become fluent in English, to adopt American customs, and leave for the states and the opportunities available there as soon as possible. The modern world encourages the loss of the individual identity in favor of the group identity. There is a distinct lack of pride for the individual heritage in our society. It is no longer as important that we celebrate our roots as it once was. Part of this is because many of us can’t trace back a distinct heritage other than maybe getting as close to the continent that our ancestors came from-Europe (Midwest anyway). We don’t spend a lot of time encouraging the study and celebration of our past because we have been made to worship the identity of our nation as a culture of its own.

Baldwin

Another Country by James Baldwin is startling, intense, graphic, and beautiful. The characters are intricately drawn out as a reflection of Baldwin’s own conflicted personalities; almost as though he were trying to solve his own crisis of identity through the different personalities within his novel. Even before I found out that Baldwin was a gay African American writer, I had a sense just from reading the character descriptions that the author was gay. I don’t mean this in a discriminatory way, there are just clues that I picked up in the way the male characters describe the female characters versus how they describe the male characters.

When Baldwin describes a woman in the novel, whether it be Cass, Ida, Leona, or any number of random bar bunnies, he doesn’t linger on the aspects of the female form that heterosexual men would typically make a point to accentuate. When focusing on Cass, he usually describes the style of her hair-emphasizing its buttery yellowness or the way it’s pinned relative to whom she’s around (pinned back around her husband, Robert, let loose around her lover, Eric). He mentions her trimness, he mentions her eyes briefly, but there really was no mention of her figure, the length of her legs, the sway of her hips, the curve of her lips. When describing Leona, it’s more of a description to point out her smallness, her paleness, her face that was always just shy of being pretty, and the other details that made her a contrast to Rufus. Ida’s beauty gets the most description out of all three, but it’s a very basic sort of cut out description as though the author were following a connect the dots on how to describe a woman’s beauty. The writing felt more forced when Baldwin was describing the women and their different attributes whereas the writing involved describing the male characters seemed to have more passion and life. He captures the intimate details of the male form down to the curl of chest hair springing from beneath a shirt to the scent of their sweat. Baldwin seemed to be writing more from experience, more from the thoughts that were going through his mind while describing the male form. Reading over the way Eric describes Yves was enough to convince me that Baldwin was gay-there’s beauty and sensuality apparent in this description that you don’t find anywhere else throughout the novel. Perhaps this is why Yves and Eric are the only couple really left on solid ground by the end of the book.

The complicated relationships in the novel were fascinating to untangle. I think it was the lack of the characters understanding of their own identities that sank all of the relationships. When looking at Rufus and Leona and Ida and Vivaldo, the characters on their own seemed to have a pretty solid grasp of who they were as individuals. On their own, they were able to function in society without being questioned as to what they were doing or who they thought they were, but it was when they became a part of a controversial relationship that their identity as part of that relationships began to cause them harm. The individual members of the couples lost their identity when they became part of the relationship, they didn’t know who they were as a part of that relationship and when you don’t know who you are, how can you understand anyone else? I think that is the underlying message of the entire novel.