 E-mail this site to a friend.
 The
main transformations in American literature over the last thirty years
have had a strong effect on poetry as well: the consolidation of African-American writers, the
emergence of Native-American, Asian-American and Chicano writers, as well
as gay writers, to name but a few. Most of this falls under the rubric of
“multiculturalism”, a phenomenon which in its criticism moves in two
directions: first, to de-centralize the literature of mainly white male
writers, their literary techniques, and political ideology; second, to
promote the idea of many “centers”, or mainstreams, each with a
different ethnic or gender base, in order to empower those people who have
previously been marginalised by social and cultural hegemonies. Connected
with the decorums of post-structuralism, this has led to the dismantling
of the totalizing narratives of literary history and their replacement
with a multiplicity of smaller narratives that fully respect the internal
cultural dynamics of different ethnic groups, i.e., we should not dismiss
certain works merely because they do not adhere to our notions of
literature, but we should examine the tradition of the source group and
judge by those standards.
This suggests there is now comparative
literary studies within the study of American literature in general, but
the reality is otherwise. In practice, there is little or no criticism
that is able to relate persuasively any strand of multicultural literature
to the language and forms of its putative ethnic tradition; rather, the
work is praised for certain thematic characteristics that it shares with
other ethnically unrelated multicultural literary works. One of the
consequences of these developments is that there seem to be no criteria
for critical discrimination within the enclosure of multicultural
literature, even while those writers outside its pale are summarily
dismissed (John Updike being the white male target of choice). There are
two possible reasons for this. First, the type of critical judgement that
would discriminate between works might be felt to be anathema to the
multicultural project of recognition for all. Second, in some cases,
especially where Native American literature is concerned, the literary
critics prosecuting these agendas do not appear to have a sure grasp of
the cultural traditions of the source ethnicities (they do not speak the
languages, they have not lived among the people), so that their judgements
about the continuities between older oral traditions and present-day
literary production are not firmly grounded. It might be countered that
often the writers themselves do not speak the language and have perhaps
only lived with other members of their ethnic group in their childhood,
but in what way does it make sense then to say that these writers belong
to a separate culture or ethnic group? And how can they claim to be
extending a culture whose language they do not know? It makes more sense
in such cases to see the writers as belonging to a more widespread
phenomenon in Western countries which has people searching through older
religions for alternatives to Enlightenment rationality and modern
technology, and not as recovering their ethnicity.
This raises the question of what
constitutes ethnic difference. It should be noted that the ideas of ethnic
difference that are insisted upon in the U.S. at the moment would not pass
muster in other parts of the world. The ethnicity of a woman who is one
quarter Choctaw living in Chicago and whose only language is English is
very different from an ethnic Hungarian woman living in Slovakia whose
children go to a school where subjects are taught through Hungarian and
whose traditions, songs and ceremonies remain those of Hungary, because
she shares these values with her immediate community. As Nathan Glazer
argues in We Are All Multiculturalists Now (1997), it is only in the case of
African Americans that it is accurate to speak of a rejection of the
dominant American culture and polity, and therefore of the existence of a
separate culture (his indicator for the failure of assimilation is
intermarriage). Also, if a certain number of people communicate more
intensively among themselves than they do with others, then over time it
becomes natural to see them as a separate group with their own public
discourse. Integral to this idea of the direction of communication is the
question of audience: if the Hungarian woman writes poems or songs, she is
unlikely to approach her Slovak neighbors for a response. Of course,
language plays a very strong role in the maintenance of ethnic difference,
but it is not essential. In the U.S. now that most ethnic groups have
abandoned their language and are rapidly assimilating through
intermarriage, it is difficult to talk of a particular ethnic audience,
other than African American. Once cultural production is not directed
within a particular group but outwards, what is left is the performance of
an ethnicity that has been lost long before. Nothing saps an indigenous
culture more than having to perform it for outsiders more than for itself.
Measuring such a transition in the direction of cultural production with
any exactitude is difficult, but in looking at the poetry produced under
the rubric of multiculturalism, it is hard not to suspect that this is
happening in America at the moment.
The showcase of multicultural literature
is Paul Lauter’s Heath Anthology
of American Literature (1990). It proposes a radical re-reading of the
American canon in which, for instance, Harriet Prescott Spofford is
allotted more space than Ernest Hemingway, Sterling Brown more than
Wallace Stevens, and Charles W. Chesnutt more than William Faulkner. Its
contemporary poetry section is just as radical in its choices and
omissions: although the youngest poet included was born in 1955, there is
no white male poet born after 1930. The only two white women included
after this date, with the exception of Sylvia Plath, Marge Piercy and
Carolyn Forché have engaged the editors’ concerns with gender and
politics in obvious ways. As for the poetry that is included, its
stylistic range is limited: apart from the historical collage of Simon
Ortiz’s From Sand Creek (1981)
and occasionally a breathless surrealism reminiscent of the Beats, there
are two predominant modes.
The first is largely autobiographical
anecdote in unstanzaic free-verse whose lines contain between two and five
feet. It is a style that has gained widespread currency in Britain,
Ireland and the U.S. over the last 25 years or so, the most likely reason
being the ubiquity of writing workshops in many social institutions
(libraries, universities, school, and, more recently in an interesting
turn, in legal firms and prisons). Relations between lovers and family
members are frequently dealt with, as are relations to nature. The tone of
this work tends overwhelmingly towards the elegiac. The structure of the
poem usually follows the same pattern: a particular event is narrated, and
then by way of conclusion attention focuses on one detail or image. There
is an effort to avoid a concluding general statement, and leave the reader
suspended in wonder and awe at the end as, presumably, the poet was:
instead of a curt closure, there is a kind of shimmer and fade. Whereas Keats
ended his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with a metaphysical equation (Beauty
= Truth, Truth = Beauty), perhaps the best example of what is called
poetic closure, the authors of this type of poem shy away from abstract
summation. This owes much to Confessionalism and, more particularly, the
ambivalent ending of a poem like Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour”.
For the poets of multiculturalism this
personal mode is often made political through stories that recount the difficulties experienced in America by their
respective families. The poems do not uniformly harangue the
political and social structures of the adopted country, but rather recount
stories of migration and the hardships it involved. Below I quote from
Janice Mirikitani’s “For My Father”:
He
came over the ocean
carrying
Mt. Fuji
on
his back/Tule lake on his chest
hacked
through the brush
of
deserts
and
made them grow
strawberries
we stole berries
from the stem
we could not afford them
for breakfast
his
eyes held
nothing
as
he whipped us
for
stealing.
Many
Japanese immigrants to America worked in strawberry farming on the West
Coast of America, and the detailing here, although the immediate scope is
familial, evokes the collective fate of Asian-Americans. The children
steal the strawberries because the family is poor, and ironically it is
for precisely the same reason that the father beats them, as he wishes to
improve their standard of living. The emptiness in his eyes is the
emptiness of economic imperative. Stylistically the poem conforms to the
period style I outlined above; I would only add that the calm tone is
employed to set off the general sense of injustices suffered (that of the
children at the hands of the father, but also of the father in the grip of
poverty). A further important feature is the declaration of connection
with the source ethnicity in the first lines.
In “Braly Street”, Gary Soto visits
the neighborhood in the San Joaquin Valley where he was brought up. Once
home to many different immigrant groups, it is now an industrialized area
(“The Molinas, Morenos, / The Japanese families / Are gone”). The
poet’s memories of his uncle and father focus the wider sense of loss:
In
’57 I sat
On
the porch, salting
Slugs
that came out
After
the rain,
While
inside my uncle
Weakened
with cancer
And
the blurred vision of his hands
Darkening
to earth.
In
’58 I knelt
Before
my father
Whose
spine was pulled loose.
Before
his face still
Growing
a chin of hair,
Before
the procession
Of
stitches behind
His
neck, I knelt
And
did not understand.
The
ravages of illness come to stand for the erasure of a whole immigrant
culture from the area. The poet feels sadness, not anger, at the loss. In
Mirikitani’s poem the enjambments were more abrupt, which gave it a
jerky, staccato quality. Soto’s lineation for the most part divides the
sentences into natural speech units, and thus his story moves with more
anecdotal fluency. But in terms of tone, voice, theme and free-verse style
there is little separating these poems. Anybody can be poor, anyone can
die from cancer, but here such suffering is raised to iconic status for
generations of immigrants. Such a use of emblematic story is a stock
literary strategy. However, what it suggests here is that these poets’
work, one Chicano, the other Japanese–American, is conditioned,
thematically and stylistically, more by their adopted culture than their
source ethnicity.
My larger point is that the same is true
of most, if not all, of the multicultural poets presented by the Heath.
Brief passages from two poets’ work are clearly insufficient and it is
impossible to close-read the whole poetry selection. I provide two other
examples. The first is from Michael Harper’s “Camp Story”:
All
across America the refugees
find
homes in these camps
and
are made to eat
at
a table of liberty
you
could have had
if
you could not spell
or
count, or keep time.
I
see you, silent, wordfully
talking
to my brother, Jonathan,
as
he labors on the chromatic
respirator;
you kiss his brown
temple
where his helmet left
a
slight depression
near
a neat line of stitches
at
the back of his skull.
As
far as it is possible to gather from Harper’s telegraphic style, the
addressee worked hard in a refugee camp—as employee and not refugee. He
approaches the poet’s brother who has, it seems,
been injured in action. (And it would seem that he is a member of
the extended family.) The balance of blame against what might be called
the Establishment is clear: there is the irony of the refugees “made to
eat / at a table of liberty”, and also there is the vague sense of
injustice at the fate of the addressee having to work hard to “save the
family / homestead from the banks of the river”. These are consolidated
by the family’s loss of one of its children, as if to say that although
African Americans, as citizens of the United States, are willing to
sacrifice their family members for defense of the country, they are repaid
with ersatz liberty. Stylistically, I can see nothing that differentiates
this from Soto. The final example is from Garrett Hongo’s “Off from
Swing Shift”:
His
left hand reaches out,
flicks
on the Sony transistor
we
bought for his birthday
when
I was fifteen.
The
right ferries in the earphone,
a
small, flesh-colored star,
like
a tiny miracle of hearing,
and
fits into place.
I
see him plot black constellations
of
figures and calculations
on
the magazine’s margins,
alternately
squint and frown
as
he fingers the knob of the tuner
searching
for the one band
that
will call out today’s results.
Further on, Hongo remarks how this man received injuries in World War II
when fighting for the Allies. He listens to the radio for a big win to
save him from his fate, but Hongo forcefully steers the poem’s
conclusion towards elegy: “But no one calls / the horse’s name, no one
/ says Shackles, Rebate, or Pouring Rain. / No one speaks a word”.
Whether Hongo, who as a critic is healthily wary of multicultural
discourse, is attempting here to convey a sense of injustice suffered by
Asian-Americans in the U.S. or not, within the multicultural context of
the Heath there is very little
range for interpretation. And once again, in stylistic terms, Hongo’s
poem is identical to Soto’s and Harper’s (right down to the tic of
“I see him […]”, which Harper had also).
The second predominant mode is more
public in its voicing, and is to be found in African-American,
Native-American, and Latino poetry. It owes much to the poetic
rhetoric of the Black Arts movement, and before that to the Beats. It
lends itself well to public performance, and thus is often more trenchant
in its judgements and assertions. Indeed, assertion of ethnic origins is
its dominant theme. I quote from Wendy Rose’s “Story Keeper”:
We
are that kind of thing
that
pushes away
the
very song
keeping
us alive
so
the stories have been strong
and
tell themselves
to
this very day,
with
or without us
it
no longer matters.
The
flower merges with the mud,
songs
are hammered onto spirits
and
spirits onto people;
every
song is danced out loud
for
we are the spirits,
we
are the people,
descended
from the ones
who
circled the underworld
and
return to circle again.
I
feel the stories
rattle
under my hand
like
sun-dried greasy
gambling
bones.
These are the concluding 21 lines of a poem with 101 lines: the ending is assertive, and
declamatory. What it asserts is the continuity of ethnic identity,
in Rose’s case of the Hopi tribe. The conclusion moves away from a
general statement like “we are the people” (Rose was not to know that
a beverage company would later have Michael Jackson sing just that to
promote its product), to the realm
of personal perception, as though to physically validate the abstract
awareness which came before. The gambling bones, as ethnic prop,
underwrite the authenticity of the realization. Hongo himself places this
kind of work profitably within the context of post-colonialism thus:
Post-colonial
critics have identified this approach, this culturally nationalistic approach, as an aftereffect of the colonial process in
which the new political/cultural regime, after overturn of the colonial
power, reproduces the structure of colonial institutions and practices
within colonized societies attempting de-colonization under the sign of
the revolutionary, the organic, and the authentic.
What is deemed authentic in these configurations, therefore, are
provisional political constructions of a society attempting to redefine
itself with cultural referents recognizably antagonistic to the former
colonial powers or ruling set of values. This society creates a centrism,
an essentialism along different alignments, reproducing its own version of
the marginal and Other in a process that, though revolutionary, is
nevertheless hegemonic.
In her criticism, Rose’s hegemonic approach takes the form of a
patronizing tone which replicates that used by some scholars when
discussing Native American literature. Her essay, “The Itch”, begins
with the sentence: “A curious phenomenon that Native scholars in the
United States have long noted and regarded as pathological is the tendency
for European immigrants to take off their ancestral heritage as if it were
no more than a sweater and assume the new identity ‘American’”.
In its formal aspects, “Story Keeper”
is identical to the poems quoted previously: it is written in free-verse
paragraphs with lines varying between two and four stresses. The tone is
more public, the reliance on autobiography greatly lessened, but it is
stylistically identical to Mirikitani, Soto, Harper, and Hongo. The
lineation accommodates natural phrasing (i.e., no line end with an
article), but the short lines are used for the most part to break up the
usual conversational flow of anecdote or proclamation, and give the poem a
more elegiac or ceremonial pace. Like the previous poems, the lines are
arranged into verse-paragraphs in the same way that prose is. Strong indicatives appear frequently. The stylistic similarity of
these poems should give pause for thought. The source ethnicities being
celebrated here are Japanese, Mexican, African, Japanese–Hawaiian,
Oneida, and Hopi, and most of these poets presume that their particular
ethnic background makes them different. Why then do they all sound the
same? The answer seems to lie in the fact that their work is more
conditioned by the target culture than the source ethnicity; or, in other
words, it is the discourse of multiculturalism that is the major influence
on their chosen mode of poetic expression.
What context do the Heath
editors provide for this work? Linda Wagner-Martin, in her introduction to
the period 1945 to the present in which all of the above poets fall,
comments:
To
choose to read a novel by a Native American writer, and thereby learn
about the frustrations of living within that culture today, becomes a
political act. Similarly, for a reader to withdraw—to read only
eighteenth- or nineteenth-century texts, or only literature about certain
traditional themes—is a different kind of political choice. The same
literacy that could open minds through broadening and new information can
also be used to narrow the reader’s understanding.
This
is problematic in several respects. On the less significant level, which eighteenth- and nineteenth century texts does she mean?
Obviously something like Mansfield
Park and not Poems on Various
Subjects, Religious and Moral. On a more important level it excludes
the possibility that some people might be sympathetic to Native Americans
and read about their plight in books and newspapers, but not appreciate
the literature.
But above all, the passage presents a
crude model of the relations between people, literature and politics: you
read a novel about a particular group’s suffering, and—the implication
is—you act politically on that knowledge. Without doubt, things can work
this neatly on occasion, but reading literature teaches one to attend to
the tone of a speech’s delivery as well as the stylistic resources it
employs as clues to
the character and motivations of the speaker. When we form political
opinions we rarely make fully informed judgements, rather it is a mixture
of some information and exactly the type of intuitions that the
“traditional” study of literature depends upon. Developing the
perspicacity to appreciate the subject
positions in Mansfield Park
can provide healthy checks to the formation of political prejudice.
Wagner-Martin then goes on to face
critics of this literature, saying they object to its subject matter as
“inappropriate” and its “techniques so experimental as to be
unreadable—or, conversely, so simple as to be unliterary”. Yet the Heath’s selection of poetry for the period of 1970 to the present
contains nothing in the least experimental. As for being “unliterary”,
on the contrary it is too
literary, too in thrall to the present poetic period style as I pointed
out above. She then remarks that it is something of a critical tradition
to decry contemporary work in this way “because many readers feel
intellectually more comfortable reading fiction and poetry that are
distant, even remote, from their own life experience”. It is true that
many academics abrogate their responsibility to the republic of letters by
avoiding the contemporary, but the main criterion for Wagner-Martin’s
promotion of multicultural work (leaving aside the misleading comments
about its “technical variety”) is that it portrays the plight of
people now. Once again, if
interested in that plight, it would seem wiser to seek documentary sources
and talk to people concerned than to rely on literature in the way she
suggests.
We can come closer to the critical
strategies employed to advocate multicultural poetry by focusing on the
defense of one particular strand of it, Native American poetry. Lucy
Maddox, in her article on the subject in The
Columbia History of American Poetry (1993) begins by saying that
“[t]he appearance of a discrete chapter on Native American poetry in a
volume devoted to a survey of poetry in the United States is an event
worth remarking”. It has taken this long to be noticed, she argues,
because academics have been reluctant to recognize literature that “has
deliberately foregrounded [] specific racial or ethnic identities”. She
also points to the fact that only recently has a “critical mass” of
writings been reached which makes it appear on the academic radar. She
goes on to note that “[t]he cultural traditions in which Native American
poetry is still grounded are the oldest indigenous traditions in North
America; at the same time, Native American poetry itself is, in the
strictest sense, a twentieth-century phenomenon”. Here we come to
perhaps the most important and most difficult claim to assess.
Maddox’s subsequent discussion makes it clear that she is fully
aware that the switch from Native American languages to English and the
move to the production of poetry as opposed to songs and chants that are
integral parts of tribal ceremonies represent a break with tradition, but
she wishes to claim that it is a break that re-energizes and extends that
tradition, rather than abandons it. In this she is in accord with the
writers themselves. It is impossible to decide ultimately, especially
writing from Europe, how far these writers are performing their ethnicity
for outside readers, as this presumes the idea of some testable
authenticity. (It is their children’s generation of writers that will
determine this.) However, we can make judgements based on literary style
and see how their work fits into contemporary poetry in English.
At this point Maddox heads us off at the
pass. She says that the work of these poets emerges out of oral
traditions, while our separation of genres is to a degree the result of
print culture. The implication is that we cannot bring the same aesthetic
criteria to judge this work as we would to a poem by James Merrill or Ted
Hughes. It would then be fair to expect from Maddox detailed examples of
the continuities between the oral traditions and contemporary literary
production, but in this we are disappointed. She makes no comment
whatsoever on the formal or stylistic aspects of the poetry she is
surveying other than to say that the poems “are meant to affirm and
extend” Native American cultural traditions. Another maneuver favored by
other critics is to say something like: X or Y’s poetry is reminiscent
of the “repetitions of the Indian ceremonial drum”. Similarly, Robin
Riley Fast in The Heart as Drum:
Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry (1999) is given
to statements like the following: “Even paved over with cement, as in
‘Washyuma Motor Hotel’ […], the spirits of the ancient people
survive in the land, their voices powerful and empowering”, with no
information given as to the particular characteristics of the Acoma
mythology which these “ancient people” lived by. And there is Robert
Gish’s spirited defense of Ray Young Bear’s poetry:
This
is not to say, as some have suggested, that Young Bear’s poems just do
not make sense, do not work. They mean. They work. They mean and work
magically. And the magic is moving and elemental. Young Bear’s poetry
moves the reader, quite simply, as close as one can come to being there
with the elders, being Mesquakie, being Native American.
My point might be countered that it is unfair to expect a
New-Critical close-reading analysis when it is precisely that type
of approach to literature that is being rejected. But what is fair to
expect, then, are some examples of exactly how
the older Native American oral traditions are extended by the new poetry. Which
Indian drum? Which set of rhythms? Which
ceremonies? Gish’s article, which demonstrates no knowledge of Mesquakie
culture, appears in Andrew Wiget’s Handbook
of Native American Literature (1996), and is typical of the other
articles which deal with contemporary Native American poetry: in love with
the mystique of Native America, but hazy on the tribal details. Time and
again, critics well disposed to this literature bandy about platitudes at
the very moment when their professional duty is to provide detailed
analysis and extensive knowledge of particular tribal cultures. Beyond
remarking on its performative aspect, Maddox does not inform us about any
other of its devices or strategies and how they might influence the
contemporary poetic production of Native-American poets. Her position, and
that of the other critics, amounts to the critical smokescreen of special
pleading, for once we do examine it in the ways we have learnt to read
“Anglo” poets, its stylistic conventionality is fully apparent.
At play here is the larger idea of
pan-tribalism as a movement that would unite Native American peoples.
Joseph Bruchac remarks that
The
pan-tribalism which has long been sought by visionary Indians (from
Metacomet and Tecumtha to Leonard Peltier and Vine Deloria, Jr.)
characterizes much of contemporary Native American writing. It has grown
stronger over the past two decades and will continue to grow in strength
in the decades to come. At the same time, through the words of Native
writers, the specific tribal realities of the many nations of Native
America will come into clearer and clearer focus.
To
judge by the criticism now being produced by scholars of the subject,
those “specific tribal realities” are paid only the lip-service of
noting the tribal affiliation in parentheses after the poet’s name. For
all the mention of various tribes, one receives no clear impression
through the Heath Anthology, or
Duane Niatum’s Harper’s
Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry (1988), or
the surveys of Maddox, Fast and Wiget concerning
how the cultures and values of these tribes might differ. Reading through
the Heath one is immediately
struck by the fact that the poems for the most part thematically reflect
the critical concerns of multiculturalism: these poems are concerned with
the loss of ethnic origins, or they celebrate the attempt to regain them,
while the exact characteristics of those origins remain suspiciously
generic; also endemic is the condemnation of white culture. On the face of
it, this might seem unobjectionable, but when we consider that the aim of
multicultural criticism is to recognize the irreducible differences between
various cultures, then we realize how abject its failure is in the field
of poetry. To say that the poets collude with the critics in this is to
put it too strongly, but there does seem to be a common project which in
the final analysis is detrimental to the literature produced.
Certainly, one would expect commonalities given the
fact that the historical experience of Native Americans over the last two
centuries has been so uniformly awful, but one would also expect that the
poets of tribes which have lived
at far-flung places on the American continent for many centuries and not
shared a public discourse, let alone a common language, might have
different things to say. It seems they don’t, and the critics are
satisfied. In this respect, the gaze of multiculturalism (wielded by the
poets as much as the critics) is homogenizing and, in a move that
replicates on the cultural level what happened on the criminal level in
the nineteenth century, identities are erased by the title “Native
American”. If a lexicographer had to choose a set of meanings for this
label based on usage in critical texts, he or she might suggest “in
touch with the earth”, “mythopoetic” and, above all,
“victimized”. You’d have a better chance of finding out what it
really means by reading Paul Muldoon.
|
