THE FOUNDATION:
American identity is a complex phenomenon to ponder. Demographic statistics, citizenship status, and geopolitical allegiances all count for something, but literature is more adept than politics at uncovering the imaginative aspects of American identity. Some years ago, I read Benedict Anderson, who famously identified a nation as an “imagined community.” If this is true, it’s also true that each person taps a personal imagination when regarding that nation.
In Zami and WHEREAS, Audre Lorde and Layli Long Soldier write from unique perspectives, expanding our multicultural understanding of American identity. Lorde’s is an individual’s coming-of-age story that expands outward to embrace a community of women. Long Soldier’s is a traumatizing story of the American frontier that employs experimental language in a quest for real accuracy. Imagination prompts both writers to consider alternative forms of belonging.
THE PROMPT:
Reflecting on the impact of Lorde, Long Soldier, and one additional writer on our syllabus, describe how experimental writing/film/music has changed your view of American identity (or American culture more generally). Focus on imaginative artistry that, however unusual it might be in its delivery, presents you with a clear-eyed view of life in postmodern America. What are the major ideas will you take away from ENL 336? How do you imagine America now?
Briefs:
We start our final unit with a “biomythography” in which a queer woman of color describes her coming-of-age. Audre Lorde’s central question emerges early: “To whom do I owe the woman I have become?” (4). Note: Zami is not an autobiography, since it is more invested in plurality and cooperation than it is in individualism. Let Lorde’s early question inform your reading.
Pages 13-14: The identification of “home” looms large for a Caribbean family whose journey from Grenada to Carriacou to NYC is signified by food (in delicious detail) and “friending.”
Pages 32-33: This scene is representative of many where young Audre learns from (and resists) her mother, a powerful woman deeply devoted to her daughters. Each conflict is underscored by a tough form of lovingkindness, as evident in the intimate grooming ritual here: “The radio, the scratching comb, the smell of petroleum jelly, the grip of her knees and my stinging scalp all fall into – the rhythms of a litany, the rituals of Black women combing their daughters’ hair.”
Pages 37-42: Audre’s encounter with Toni, a well-dressed “doll-baby come to life.” Audre’s first episode with sexual desire is one of objectification and possession: “this delectable creature in front of me was most certainly a girl, and I wanted her for my very own – my very own what, I did not know – but for my very own self. I started to image in my head where I could keep her.” Audre is interrupted in her exploration of Toni’s doll body (“an embarrassing and terrible act”) by her mother, but without explicit notice and without punishment. Her thrill and terror would last, for a little bit: “I don’t know how long I looked for Toni every day at noontime, sitting on the stoop. Eventually, her image receded into the place from which all my dreams are made.”
Page 46: Audre’s older sisters listen to radio dramas and make up stories of their own. “I thought the very idea of telling stories and not getting whipped for telling untrue was the most marvelous thing I could think of…”
Pages 58-59: Audre learns what “colored” means, both at home and in her new Catholic school. “I grew Black as my need for life, for affirmation, for love, for sharing – copying in my mother what was in her, unfulfilled.” This quote shows Audre’s complicated relationship with her complicated mother, and also forecasts the strength she would later find in identity politics.
Pages 70-71: Denied service at an ice cream parlor during a vacation in Washington, DC, Audre renders the facts of segregation, which would make headlines in later years, with personal pain.
Pages 71-80: Throughout chapter 11, Lorde’s physical maturation is described in richly sensuous terms as she juxtaposes cooking, sexual awakening, menstruation, and the nurturing acceptance her mother shows her. The mortar and pestle rhythms and the smell of “a new ripe fullness” extend beyond her mind to a body that “felt strong and full and open,” and to an identity she can share with her mother, who hugs her: “I could smell the warm herness rising from between her arm and her body.” The whole chapter stands as an example of familial love.
This section of Zami (chapters 12-18) follows young Audre Lorde from Hunter High School in NYC to her first job in Stamford, CT. Friends, rivals, and lovers play a role in her maturation.
Pages 81-83: Hunter HS becomes a “lifeline” to Audre as she explores influences outside her family circle. Challenges exist, including prejudiced classmates and a condescending guidance counselor (84). Audre joins a group of outsiders, “a sisterhood of rebels,” who call themselves The Branded: “We learned how to mock the straight set, and how to cultivate our group paranoia into an instinct for self-protection.” But even within this group, Audre feels a distance. She develops an existentialist pose: “I had discovered a new world called voluntary aloneness.”
Pages 85-97 (chapter 13): Enter Gennie, one of a handful of Lorde’s black classmates at Hunter HS. Gennie is, for Audre, “the first person in my life that I was ever conscious of loving. She was my first true friend.” Gennie lives on the edge and encourages Audre to follow her lead into a world of pleasure. “Suddenly life became an exciting game of how much time I could spend with the people I wanted to spend it with. We learned to appreciate each other’s softness behind the lockers, calling it all different kinds of names and games… I learned how to feel first and ask questions afterward. I learned how to cherish the first façade and then the fact of being an outlaw.” Gennie’s tough posture masks a vulnerability, however, and her broken home affects her broken heart. Her suicide attempts are described by Lorde in heart-wrenching detail.
Pages 107-15: After learning she is pregnant, Audre weighs her options, eventually deciding on abortion by Foley catheter. A fierce reminder of reality for women in pre-Roe v. Wade America.
Pages 118-21: Having flunked out of Hunter College, Audre takes solace in living independently on Spring Street and developing the interests she had developed outside the classroom at the Harlem Writer’s Guild: “Writing was the only thing that made me feel like I was alive.” Hosting members of The Branded at her apartment (they are on break from college), Audre cultivates an air of independence, despite the hurt she feels after the abortion. She also decides to “have an affair with a woman,” and soon she will, with a former high school classmate named Marie.
Pages 132-42: Working at a factory in Connecticut, Audre gets sized up by a co-worker named Ginger, who informs her of Black history she doesn’t know (Crispus Attucks). Ginger regards Audre as a “slick kitty from the city”: “She built up an incredible mythology about me and what my life had been in New York, and I did nothing to dissuade her…. She saw me as a citified little baby butch – bright, knowledgeable, and secure enough to be a good listener and make the first move.” But, finally, Ginger is forced to ask her: “Are you gay or aren’t you?” It’s a defining moment for Lorde, who answers “Yes.” But she is not yet totally open: “On a true and deeper level, Ginger and I met as two young Black women in need of each other’s warmth and blood-assurance, able to share the passions within our bodies, and no amount of pretending that we were pretending could change that. Yet, we were very much invested in the denial of our importance to each other. For different reasons, we both needed to pretend we didn’t care.”
In chapters 19-23 of Zami, Lorde enters the mid-1950s, a time of political and personal change.
Pages 150-53: Lorde’s relationship with Bea, an affluent white woman who lives in Philadelphia, reflects her new attitude toward commitment during a time when “meeting other lesbians was very difficult.” For Bea, the sex is more theoretical than visceral, which disappoints Audre. Still, “Bea’s acknowledged gayness was some connection, some living reality within the emotional desert around which I existed.” Bea is reserved and inscrutable, but for Audre “the prospect of breaching that insurmountable calm endlessly sparked my desire.” But an end does arrive when Audre decides to go to Mexico, and Bea spends an entire weekend crying on Audre’s doorstep.
Pages 154-60: Traveling to Mexico, Audre says, “I felt myself unfolding like some large flower.” Seeing other women of color makes her feel visible to herself; it’s an “affirmation” of identity. In Cuernavaca, staying with Frieda and her daughter, Audre meets a group of single women, American expats, which she will call the “café con leche crowd.” They are liberal refuges from McCarthyism; many may be gay or bisexual, but they aren’t open about it. Audre is intrigued.
Pages 161-76: Audre’s relationship with Eudora is her deepest relationship to date. With her “direct manner,” “openness,” and “informed freedom and authority,” Audre knew that she was attracted, and she “knew Eudora was gay.” Eudora is a breast cancer survivor, and an alcoholic, with an initial reserve Audre is determined to break through. “Night after night we talked until dawn in this room about language and poetry and love and the good conduct of living. Yet we were strangers. As I stood there looking at Eudora, the impossible became easier, almost simple. Desire gave me courage, where it had once made me speechless.” Caressing Eudora, Audre feels “a new reality within me, some half-known self come of age, moving out to meet her.” This combination of desire and identity is expressed quite strongly. Eudora is a complex and haunted person whom Audre truly loves, one “who showed me the way to the Mexico I had come looking for, that nourishing land of light and color where I was somehow at home.” Yet Eudora sends Audre away for the same reason Audre sent Bea away: Audre needs to move on toward who she’s becoming. “I felt myself pass beyond childhood, a woman connecting with other women in an intricate, complex, and ever-widening network of exchanging strengths.”
Pages 176-83: Lorde revisits her existentialist pose: “I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt… There were no mothers, no sisters, no heroes. We had to do it alone, like our sister Amazons.” Back in NYC, Lorde espies divisions in Uptown and Downtown that affect her own self-understanding as a Black lesbian: “During the fifties in the Village, I didn’t know the few other Black women who were visibly gay at all well. Too often we found ourselves sleeping with the same white women. We recognized ourselves as exotic sister-outsiders who might gain a little from banding together. Perhaps our strength might lay in our fewness, our rarity. That was the way it was Downtown. And Uptown, meaning the land of Black people, seemed very far away and hostile territory.” But the existentialist in her survives: “If nobody’s going to dig you too tough anyway, it really doesn’t matter so much what you dare to explore.”
In the final chapters of Zami, Lorde details her relationship with Muriel and delineates the dynamics of racial and sexual difference in 1950s NYC. The narrative turns philosophical.
Pages 194-95: Lorde explains codes of clothing choices in bohemian subculture. She meets Muriel, who breaches the gap left by Gennie. Lorde notes “the similarities of our lonelinesses.”
Pages 196-97: Lorde notes a disconnect when a heterosexual friend (Rhea) asks about her affair with Muriel: “She did not dare to see the similarities and so she could not see the differences.”
Pages 203-05: Lorde espies the divide between racial difference and sexual difference, bonding with Felicia while pointing out Muriel’s ignorance: “Muriel seemed to believe that as lesbians, we were all outsiders and all equal in our outsiderhood. ‘We’re all niggers,’ she used to say, and I hated to hear her say it. It was wishful thinking based on little fact; the ways in which it was true languished in the shadow of those many ways in which it would always be false.”
Pages 220-21: At the Bagatelle, NYC’s most permanent lesbian bar, Audre senses her outsider status as a Black woman, noting how subcultures often reify aspects of the dominant culture they oppose. Lorde also laments the scripted roles of a Butch/Femme aesthetic. “For some of us… role-playing reflected all the depreciating attitudes toward women which we loathed in straight society. It was a rejection of those roles that had drawn us to ‘the life’ in the first place. Instinctively, without particular theory or political position or dialectic, we recognized oppression as oppression, no matter where it came from.” Despite her disavowal, this is the moment when Lorde’s thinking turns theoretical. By the 1970s, her essays (many collected in the volume Sister Outsider) became the cornerstone of an emerging Queer Studies movement.
Pages 224-26: Another important section on racial difference within the lesbian community, with Lorde noting, “Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.” Too often, a bohemian retreat becomes “the reality” at the expense of the substantial reasons leading you there. And yet Lorde recalls that “gay-girls were the only Black and white women who were even talking to each other in this country in the 1950s.” And she suggests that “self-preservation warned some of us that we could not afford to settle for one easy definition, one narrow individuation of self.” Instead, Audre becomes a “Sistah Outsider,” alive in a constantly shifting multiplicity and difference. This is a very postmodern conceptualization of identity.
Pages 241-53: After a (literally) painful separation from Muriel, Audre meets Afrekete (Kitty), a woman from Harlem whose fleeting relationship nonetheless indicates how women of color can love and support each other.
Pages 255-56: Looking back on her early years, Audre celebrates a collective identity, “a bridge and field of women. Zami… A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers.” She returns to the roots of her mother’s home in a way she could never have predicted.
POSTMODERN TIMELINES: To date, we have observed a variety of postmodern writings, from the 1950s to the 1980s. It’s only a sketch, since there’s only so much you can do in 14 weeks. We’ve seen experimental writing in the 1950s and 1960s with Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Rechy. In 1965, postmodernism posted a gain as Dylan entered his “rock” phase and Warhol transitioned to film. In the late 1960s, Joan Didion captured the malaise that was always in the background of the era’s revolutionary tumult. But 1965-1975 was notable for another reason: the rise of identity-based civil rights movements: Black Power, Brown Power, the Asian-American Movement, the American Indian Movement, the (Second Wave) Feminist Movement, and the Gay Liberation movement (precursor to LGBTQ), et al. Connected with all of these political movements was a literary component. The Black Arts Movement was a wing of Black Power, the American Indian Literary Renaissance an adjunct to the American Indian Movement, etc.
By the late 1970s, a blend of political and literary/artistic energies in each movement resulted in IDENTITY POLITICS. Social justice advocacy was facilitated by an (exclusive) allegiance to one’s own ethnic/racial/sexual grouping, instead of a consensus view on common civil rights.
Audre Lorde’s essays (in Sister Outsider) announced in detail a political position Lorde hinted at in the later chapters of Zami, namely that Second Wave Feminism was largely a white, upper middle class movement that did not adequately take into account the struggles of poor women, women of color, Third World women, and queer women, among other populations.
Native American (or Native Nation) writers met their own challenges, one of which was the cooptation of their cultural heritage by white countercultural figures: hippies wearing beads and feathers; ethno-poetic writers including “primitive” sources as an avant-garde technique.
Layli Long Soldier is part of a new generation of Native writers who began publishing in the 2010s. She is two generations removed from the American Indian Movement. Along with her contemporaries at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, she is at the cusp of a new movement in which Native poets fashion avant-garde poetry (open poetics) for their own ends.
Long Soldier’s 2017 volume WHEREAS contains an epigraph by Chinese American poet Arthur Sze: “No word has any special hierarchy over any other word.” Sze’s is an avant-garde literary sentiment that is applicable to the non-hierarchical unity Native nations have sought for ages, especially in relation to the Earth, but rarely found in their encounters with frontier imperialists.
Long Soldier’s poems arrange words in shapes and patterns; they invert or elide syntax; they are not at the service of traditional English, which is at base the language of the oppressor. Look at “Three” (p. 8). What do you see and how do you see it? This square will reappear on page 90.
Note also the spare metrical lines in “Diction” and “Vaporative”: Indian avant-garde as “the new new” (p. 25). Also, the up-close looks at frontier violence (pp. 7, 30). Also, the preponderance of grasses, from the cover image, to the mouthful of grassesgrassesgrasses (p. 5), to the “ssshhh” of “grassshhhh” in “Steady Summer” (pp. 31-33). Whitman’s Leaves of Grass has met its match.
In 1973, historian Richard Slotkin wrote an award-winning revisionist account of the American frontier experience entitled Regeneration Through Violence. Four decades later, Long Soldier revisits the USA’s violent past from Native Nation perspective in surreal poems like “Two” (p. 7), about dragging, “Head Count” (p. 30), about scalping, and “Talent” (p. 41), about bow hunting. In “38” (pp. 49-53), Long Soldier speaks more straightforwardly, in declarative (if self-conscious) tones, both about frontier violence visited upon Native peoples, invoking “the largest ‘legal’ mass execution in US history,” and about the efficacy of the English language to translate the meaning or feeling of such violence. “Here, the sentence will be respected,” she writes, reversing her earlier forays into avant-garde experimentalism. “I will compose each sentence with care, by minding what the rules of writing dictate.” In fact, each of her stanzas in “38” is one-sentence long, creating a deadpan effect, as episodes of the Sioux Uprising of 1862 and its aftermath arrive piecemeal. And her deadpan voice is great at highlighting the bitter irony of US history, which doesn’t need any additional irony to expose its mix of tragedy and farce. Of the thousand Dakota people arrested for killing settlers and traders on their stolen land, Long Soldier explains, 38 were “executed by hanging, under orders from President Abraham Lincoln.”
As Long Soldier knows, it is what it is, which is tragic, until she writes it; then it’s weirdly telling: “The hanging took place on December 26, 1862 – the day after Christmas.// This was the same week that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.// In the preceding sentence, I italicize “same week” for emphasis.// There was a movie titled Lincoln about the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.// The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation was included in the film Lincoln; the hanging of the Dakota 38 was not.” Step back a moment and consider how many other violent episodes of US history follow this pattern. Now consider what it would have been like for you to learn US history in the poetic format Long Soldier has adopted in “38.”
Like most poets, Long Soldier prizes any image that will serve as her vehicle, her metaphorical means of telling a story shorthand. From the beginning, a key image has been prairie grasses (see my previous brief). It’s a surprise, though, when she reveals that she began “38” thinking about grasses: “When the Dakota people were starving, as you may remember, government traders would not extend store credit to ‘Indians.’// One trader named Andrew Myrick is famous for his refusal to provide credit to Dakota people by saying, ‘If they are hungry, let them eat grass.’//…// When settlers and traders were killed during the Sioux Uprising, one of the first to be executed by the Dakota was Andrew Myrick.// When Myrick’s body was found,/ his mouth was stuffed with grass.” Frontier justice? At the start of WHEREAS, when Long Soldier says, “Now/ make room in the mouth/ for grassesgrassesgrasses” (p. 5), she was announcing her ambition to vocalize the language of grasses, and of Dakota history, in experimental, postmodern poetry. But she was also firing a warning shot, holding accountable those whose imperialist embrace of frontier mythology might result in their own mouths being stuffed with grass. It’s like a prairie version of what Bruce Springsteen once sang in “Atlantic City”: “Down here it’s just winners and losers/ And don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line.”
“Wahpanica” (pp. 43-44), after the Dakota word for “poor,” is a surreal poem, and a good one.
Part Two of WHEREAS is conceived as a legal document: stating facts, resolving to address those facts, and asking for immunity from prosecution in bringing matters to public attention.
The occasion for such a document-in-poems, other than the “concerns” of Part One, is a 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. Had you heard about that apology? Neither had I, until I read Long Soldier, and that’s precisely her point. The Congressional Act was an essentially empty gesture. Non-natives didn’t know about it, and Natives had none of their grievances redressed. It was just fancy legalese, verbiage neatly arranged, an official record archived as history, when history truly concerns the lives we live out, and the deaths we suffer.
Fortunately, Long Soldier is adept at seeing large-scale history emerge in the minute particulars of everyday life, the parts that form a whole, while making Lakota people allies of other living forms (p. 64). Small things matter. Pine needles leave an aftertaste, just as tattoo needles leave an indelible mark, and both leave traces of what we’d call heritage, our personal history (p. 80). Marbles and buttons are common objects not that different in size or composition (p. 81). But on the playground, a girl playing marbles occasions fifth-grade boys’ racist taunts, and at home, buttons are the binding force of a sewing project, one that honors the attire of an ancestor in a photograph, and at the same time heals the consciousness of the girl taunted at school.
On pp. 82-83, 85, Long Soldier decides to “place/ A black bracket/ on either side of/ an [idea],” to “cordon it/ to safety away/ from national re-/ solution the threat/ of re-/ductive/ [thinking]:”
Words are cheap, and ideas are to be held dear, so why cheapen the latter by placing it amidst the former? Resultingly, the statement on p. 83 appears as a redacted document, and the free-floating brackets on p. 85 contain the what were once words; newly excised, they have been restored to their status as ideas. In the intervening poem, Long Soldier answers the post of a well-meaning fourteen-year old who has responded to a New York Times article, petitioning the US government to formally apologize to Native Americans. Long Soldier has to inform the girl that an apology has already been offered, but that budget cuts don’t get at the root problems, including Long Soldier’s infected tooth, which for lack of procedural funds had to be pulled (“uprooted”). Natives still suffer out of sight or earshot. Everything hurts, including the truth.
The “Resolutions” answer the preamble of the “Whereas” statements. Notice that the official language that is grayed out on p. 89, leaving “the solemn” as Long Soldier’s main recognition. Boxes seen in Part One reappear on pp. 90, 97, to register abstractly the Native’s relationship to land. In the latter poem, the box forms the boundary of a poetic line, and it’s a boundary that is eventually crossed once “reconciliation” becomes part of the dialogue between the US and the Native Nations. Study the visual aspects in this poem, and in the other box poems: you might come across a revised idea of frontier history, an appreciation of Plains Indians, who organized themselves in circular groupings and who held an original relationship with the earth, suddenly thrust into boxes not of their own making. Long Soldier’s “open poetics” exposes a sad history.
Contessa123
ENGproject.docx
0
