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Title: Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory
Author: Michael M.J. Fischer
in: James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.): The Poetics and Politics
of Ethnography.
University of California Press: Berkeley, 1986
Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory
Michael M.J. Fischer
I. Conclusions and Re-Visions
"History as celebrated by Mnemosoune is a deciphering of the invisible,
a geography of the supernatural. . . . It throws a bridge between the world
of the living and that beyond to which everything that leaves the light
of day must return. It brings about an "evocation" of the past.... Memory
appears as a source of immortality...." Jean-Pierre Vernant
"Our period is not defined by the triumph of technology for technology's
sake, as it is not defined by art for art's sake, as it is not defined by
nihilism. It is action for a world to come, transcendence of its period-
transcendence of self which calls for epiphany of the Other." Emanuel
Levinas
This paper brings together two indirectly related ethnographic phenomena
of the 1970s and 1980s - the florescence of ethnic autobiography and the
academic fascination with textual theories of deferred, hidden, or occulted
meaning (1) - in order to ask whether they can revitalize our ways of thinking
about how culture operates and refashion our practice of ethnography as
a mode of cultural criticism. just as the travel account and the ethnography
served as forms for explorations of the "primitive" world (see Pratt in
this volume) and the realist novel served as the form for explorations of
bourgeois manners and the self in early industrial society, so ethnic autobiography
and autobiographical fiction can perhaps serve as key forms for explorations
of pluralist, post-industrial, late twentieth-century society.
The recent proliferation of autobiographical works that take ethnicity as
a focal puzzle seems to be poorly accommodated within the traditional sociological
literature on ethnicity. Works such as Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman
Warrior (1976), Michael Arlen's Passage to Ararat (1975), and
Marita Golden's Migrations of the Heart (1983) are inadequately comprehended
through discussions of group solidarity, traditional values, family mobility,
political mobilization, or similar sociological categories. Immigrant novels
of rebellion against the family, intermarriage, and acculturation are more
relevant to these sociological conceptions.
What the newer works bring home forcefully is, first, the paradoxical sense
that ethnicity is something reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation
by each individual and that it is often something quite puzzling to the
individual, something over which he or she lacks control. Ethnicity is not
something that is simply passed on from generation to generation, taught
and learned; it is something dynamic, often unsuccessfully repressed or
avoided. It can be potent even when not consciously taught; it is something
that institutionalized teaching easily makes chauvinist, sterile, and superficial,
something that emerges in full-often liberating-flower only through struggle.
Insofar as ethnicity is a deeply rooted emotional component of identity,
it is often transmitted less through cognitive language or learning (to
which sociology has almost entirely restricted itself) than through processes
analogous to the dreaming and transference of psychoanalytic encounters.
Second, what is discovered and reinvented in the new works about
ethnicity is, perhaps increasingly, something new: to be ChineseAmerican
is not the same thing as being Chinese in America. In this sense there is
no role model for becoming Chinese-American. It is a matter of finding a
voice or style that does not violate one's several components of identity.
In part, such a process of assuming an ethnic identity is an insistence
on a pluralist, multidimensional, or multifaceted concept of self: one can
be many different things, and this personal sense can be a crucible for
a wider social ethos of pluralism.
Third, the search or struggle for a sense of ethnic identity is a
(re-)invention and discovery of a vision, both ethical and futureoriented.
Whereas the search for coherence is grounded in a connection to the past,
the meaning abstracted from that past, an important criterion of coherence,
is an ethic workable for the future. Such visions can take a number of forms:
they can be both culturally specific (e.g., the biblical strains of black
victories over oppression) and dialectically formed as critiques of hegemonic
ideologies (e.g., as alternatives to the melting pot rhetoric of assimilation
to the bland, neutral style of the conformist 1950s),
Two preliminary examples are both retrospective accounts expressing surprise
at the power of politically charged crystallizations. In American Immigrants
in Israel (1981), Kevin Avruch quotes an American who wryly recalls
exploding at SDSers who attacked Israel in 1967, giving them Israel's case
in great detail: "At the time, I didn't know where that attitude and all
that information came from." Similarly, Marita Golden remembers being in
high school when Martin Luther King was assassinated:
"The days after King's death saw an invisible barricade of tensions rise
between the white and black students at Western High School. The black students
did not know then that in a few months many of us would repudiate our white
friends, no longer finding them "relevant." Finding instead their mere presence
inconsistent with a "commitment to the struggle," which is what our lives
became overnight. (p. 15)
These passages illustrate a lack of explicit knowledge, a sense of the buried
coming to the surface, and the compulsion of an "id-like" force. The id,
as Freud originally used the term, was merely das Es, the it-ness of experience,
made particularly potent for the Germanspeaking child, who is referred to
in the neuter-das Kind-and who only gradually develops an acknowledged,
engendered, individuated self. The recognition of something about one's
essential being thus seems to stem from outside one's immediate consciousness
and control, and yet requires an effort of self-definition.(2) Ethnicity
in its contemporary form is thus neither, as the sociological literature
would have it, simply a matter of group process (support systems), nor a
matter of transition (assimilation), nor a matter of straightforward transmission
from generation to generation (socialization).
In some ways, the contemporary reinvention of ethnic identity through remembering
is nothing new. The Pythagorean notion of memory (which fascinated Plato)
also conceived of the world as one of oblivion, of superficial appearances
behind which lay the hidden realities. Only the soul that engaged in memory
exercises, in recollections, in preserving the knowledge of this world when
proceeding to the next and avoiding the waters of Lethe (or Ameles) when
returning to this world from the celestial realms would be able to escape
the cycles of rebirth, the flux of meaningless repetitions, and the entropy
toward reductions of human beings into mechanical or bestial ciphers. Only
through memory, honed by constant exercise and effort, could one purge the
sins of past lives, purify the soul, ascend and escape from oblivious repetitions.
(3)
So, too, contemporary ethnic re-creations are given impetus by the fear
not merely of being levelled into identical industrial hominids, but of
losing an ethical (celestial) vision that might serve to renew the self
and ethnic group as well as contribute to a richer, powerfully dynamic pluralist
society. In exploring why white America produces biographies, while black
America produces autobiographies, Arnold Rampersad (1983) points out that
autobiography (at least in its most potent forms) is predicated on a moral
vision, on a vibrant relation between a sense of self and a community, on
a retrospective or prophetic appeal to a community of spirit, be it religious
or social, or on what Hans-Georg Gadamer might call a feel for a moral tradition.
Ethnic anxiety, that feeling welling up out of mysterious depths, is not
the only interesting aspect of contemporary expressions of ethnicity. Rather,
they seem to be a reflex of more general cultural processes. To a Westerner,
late twentieth-century society globally seems to be characterized by surface
homogenization, by the erosion of public enactments of tradition, by the
loss of ritual and historical rootedness. Cultural elements seem to be increasingly
fragmented, volitional, arbitrary matters of personal style. Celebrations
and rituals in the United States, for instance, often seem to be ironic,
reflecting goodnatured nonbelief, skeptical, hedonistic, and commercial
in overtone.(4) And yet, clearly, these are reactions to the superficialities
of such situations: as Benjamin and Freud in differing ways pointed out,
language itself contains seclimented layers of emotionally resonant metaphors,
knowledge, and associations, which when paid attention to can be experienced
as discoveries and revelations. Indeed, much of the contemporary philosophical
mood (in literary criticism and anthropology, as well as in philosophy)
is to inquire into what is hidden in language, what is deferred by signs,
what is pointed to, what is repressed, implicit, or mediated.
What thus seem initially to be individualistic autobiographical searchings
turn out to be revelations of traditions, re-collections of disseminated
identities and of the divine sparks from the breaking of the vessels. These
are a modern version of the Pythagorean arts of memory: retrospection to
gain a vision for the future. In so becoming, the searches also turn out
to be powerful critiques of several contemporary rhetorics of domination.
In a period when the writing and reception of ethnography are subjects of
much interest and debate among anthropologists (see Marcus and Fischer 1986),
the perspectives on ethnicity embodied in autobiographical literature suggest
new ways of reading and writing ethnographies.
II. Disseminations and Pro-Vocations
"The word's power does not consist in its explicit content-if, generally
speaking, there is such a thing-but in the diversion that is involved in
it." Chaim Nachman Bialik
The strategy of this paper is threefold: ethnographic listening, attention
to cultural criticism, and attention to experimental writing. First of all,
the strategy is to listen to the voices of several ethnic groups through
autobiographies. Autobiography was chosen because, like ethnography, it
has a commitment to the actual. Autobiographical fiction was also included
because the modalities of veracity in our age can no longer (if they ever
could) be limited to the conventions of realism. Indeed, as Murray Baumgarten
rightly points out, ever since the massive linguistic disturbances of Nazi
Deutsch, Stalinist Russian, and other forms of twentieth-century double-think,
including the deadening language of American officialese, "realism as trust
in language is no longer readily available"; it is as if "surrealist montage,
cubist collage, and existentialist parable are the only appropriate possibilities"
(1982:117). Moreover, the conventions of realism, especially as practiced
in traditional ethnography, themselves contain and are made coherent through
allegorical metaphors (see Clifford in this volume).
Indirection (see: Bialik above) is inherent in language use and should be
exploited consciously rather than ignored, denied, and allowed to mislead.
During the past two decades ethnic autobiographers have produced brilliant
explorations aimed at rediscovering the sources of language, and thereby
also the nature of modern reality.
In thinking about how to read, analyze, and interpret these contemporary
autobiographical texts, it occurred to me that the ethnic search is a mirror
of the bifocality that has always been part of the anthropological rationale:
seeing others against a background of ourselves, and ourselves against a
background of others. The juxtaposing of exotic customs to familiar ones,
or the relativizing of taken-forgranted assumptions, has always been the
kind of cultural criticism promised by anthropology. This bifocality, or
reciprocity of perspectives, has become increasingly important in a world
of growing interdependence between societies: members of cultures described
are increasingly critical readers of ethnography. No longer can rhetorical
figures of the "primitive" or the "exotic" be used with impunity: audiences
have become multiple."Bifocality" moreover must increasingly be a shorthand
for "two or more" cultures in juxtaposition and comparison. Successful cross-cultural
comparison requires at least a third case to avoid simplistic better-worsejudgments,
to foster multiple axes of comparison,(5) and to evoke a sense of the larger
universes in which cultures are situated (see also Marcus in this volume).
Cultures and ethnicities as sets are more like families of resemblances
than simple typological trees.
The ethnic, the ethnographer, and the cross-cultural scholar in general
often begin with a personal empathetic "dual tracking," seeking in the other
clarification for processes in the self. One thinks perhaps of the great
Islamic scholar and Catholic mystic Louis Massignon, who used Sufism as
a proxy for his own dilemmas in a post-Christian, anti-mystical world. Examples
could be multiplied. Among the most sensitive and best anthropological works
are those that bring personal engagements of this sort into play, albeit
usually only as a subtext, rarely highlighted or explicitly acknowledged.
One thinks of the association between the late Victor Turner's engagement
with Ndembu ritual and symbols and his turn to Catholicism; of Stanley Tambiah's
work on Buddhism in Thailand, which, unlike so much written about Buddhism
by Westerners, treats it with respect as a potent political force, in an
oblique attempt to understand its dynamics in his own troubled homeland
of Sri Lanka; and perhaps even of Strauss, whose work on American Indian
mythologies might be understood as an act of atonement for a world destroyed,
parallel to the creation of the Talmud-that is, a preservation together
with a critical apparatus permitting regenerative use by future generations
.(6) Such engagement need not be ethnic or religious in content: Steven
Feld's accounting of Kaluli aesthetics, utilizing his performer's knowledge
and skills as well as his academic ones, is one of the finest recent examples.
He is able to provide not merely a convincing description but, more important,
a critical apparatus (7) that gives the reader a set of conceptual tools
with sensory and cognitive bases radically different from our own.
It should be clear that I am not advocating a reductive reading of ethnographies
in terms of the biographies of their authors. It is true that professionals
may adjust their readings of ethnographies according to their knowledge
of the writers. This makes reading richer and more informed. It allows the
reader to bring to the text many of the nuances, tacit understandings, and
implicit perspectives that informed the writer-to bring, as Plato might
say, a dead text to fuller life. (8) But in the case of casual or unsophisticated
readers, reading in terms of the biography of the writer can be invidious
and destructive, explaining away the text rather than enriching it. What
I am suggesting instead is a reading of ethnographies as the juxtaposition
of two or more cultural traditions and paying attention both in reading
and in constructing ethnographies to the ways in which the juxtaposition
of cultural traditions works on both the conscious and unconscious levels.
For many the search in another tradition, such as perhaps Golden's in Nigeria
or my own in Iran, can serve as a way of exploring one's own past, now disappeared
forever. One needs authentic anchorages that can allow a kind of dual or
multiple tracking (between self and other), that generate a rich, sympathetic
curiosity for detail and cultural logic, that can be subjected to mutual
criticism or mutual revelation from both traditions. At the same time, one
needs a check against assimilating the other to the self, seeing only what
is similar or different. One must avoid comparison by strict dualistic contrast.
A third, fourth, or fifth comparison inevitably involves multidimensionality,
and a sense of larger universes of significance. In ethnic autobiographies,
the trying on of alternative identities is one technique for achieving this
multidimensionality.
The strategy for writing this paper, then, has been to juxtapose five sets
of autobiographical writings, those of Armenian-Americans, Chinese-Americans,
Afro-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Native Americans. The idea is to
allow multiple sets of voices to speak for themselves, with my own author's
voice muted and marginalized as commentary. While it remains true that I
stage these voices, the reader is directed to the originals; the text is
not hermetically sealed, but points beyond itself. Parallel writings from
my own ethnic tradition are evoked in the introductions and conclusions
as points of further contact, in order, as Tzevtan Todorov puts it (1982/1984:
250-5 1), to avoid "the temptation to reproduce the voices of these figures
'as they really are': to try to do away with my own presence 'for the other's
sake' ... [or] to subjugate the other to myself, to make him into a marionette."
What emerges as a conclusion is not simply that parallel processes operate
across American ethnic identities, but a sense that these ethnicities constitute
only a family of resemblances, that ethnicity cannot be reduced to identical
sociological functions, that ethnicity is a process of inter-reference between
two or more cultural traditions, and that these dynamics of intercultural
knowledge provide reservoirs for renewing humane values. Ethnic memory is
thus, or ought to be, future, not past, oriented.
If multiple voices are engaged in this experiment, so, too, it is hoped,
will multiple readerships. By invoking the discourses of a number of different
groups, access is provided to them for rejoinder. The discourse of the text
is not sealed by a professional rhetoric or authority that denies standing
to nonprofessional interlocutors. At the same time, it draws members of
these different ethnic discourses into the comparative project of anthropology.
It does not allow ethnics to protest merely on the terms of their intuitive
understandings of their own rhetorics, but attempts to conceive of such
intuition as but one valid source of knowledge.
Finally, the ability of texts such as those reviewed in this paper to deliver
cultural criticism without the stereotypic distortions that traditonal cross-cultural
categorizations have often produced is an important model for ethnography.
No greater indictments of racism in America exist than Charlie Mingus's
Beneath the Underdog, Raul Salinas's "A Trip Through the Mind Jail,"
the angry writings of Frank Chin, the portraits of trauma by James Welch
or Gerald Vizenor. None of these, however, merely indicts, and certainly
none blames only oppressors outside the self and ethnic group; all fictively
demonstrate the creation of new identities and worlds. Rather than naive
efforts at direct representation, they suggest or evoke cultural emergence
(see Tyler in this volume). One of the reasons for the relative sense that
these portraits are less stereotyped is their attention to the ineffectiveness
of textual techniques- that is, the self-conscious employment of such devices
as transference, dream-translation, talk-story, multiple voices and perspectives,
the highlighting of humorous inversions and dialectical juxtaposition of
identities/traditions/cultures, and the critique of hegemonic discourses.
In the fashionable jargon of the day, they illustrate intertextuality, inter-reference,
and the interlinguistic modalities of post-modernist knowledge. On the practical
level, such selfconscious and virtuoso technique could contribute to a reinvigorated
ethnographic literature, one that can again fulfill the anthropological
promise of cultural criticism: of making our taken-for- granted ways recognizable
as sociocultural constructions for which we can exercise responsibility.
In the working draft of this paper, the five sources (ethnicities) of ethnic
autobiography each provided a separate section. I attempted to suggest something
about the range or historical trajectory of autobiographical writing within
each ethnicity, as well as to highlight in each section a different sense
of, and technique for capturing, ethnicity. That organization, although
close to the ethnographic discovery strategy, proved unwieldy for readers.
In the present draft, I have reversed the hierarchical stress: each section
focuses on a writing tactic, yet I retain the division by ethnicity because
there does seem to be some connection between particular experiences of
ethnic groups and the techniques used to capture, reveal, or exorcise those
experiences. This does not mean that any tactic or technique is used exclusively
by writers of a given ethnicity. (Quite the contrary: all these techniques
are available to, and are used by, writers of all ethnicities.) However,
what a simple organization by technique alone would endanger is the sense
of historical trajectory of writing in each ethnic tradition. (9)
A simple organization by technique alone also leads to the danger of reducing
the polyphony and texture of multiple styles of any ethnic writing tradition
into a mere example for an univocal argument.
Among the elements of texture (apart from style, multiple techniques, and
dialogue with predecessors) are explorations of psychoanalytic and feminist
perspectives. It is striking the degree to which contemporary autobiographers
are fond of deploying psychoanalytic language and/or logic to describe or
model ethnic processes. Somewhat less innovative are the ways ethnicity
is engendered. Cultural heritage is often figured in paternal or maternal
imagery. Children pattern themselves, after all, on both same and opposite
sex parents (or other adults) in complex, often reactive, ways. One ethnographic
way to ask if and how contemporary debates about gender roles are reflected
here is to pay attention to both male and female authors, male and female
imagery.
We proceed from the pain of silence to the wisdom of laughter.
Transference
My ancestors talk
to me in dangling
myths.
Each word a riddle
each dream
heirless.
On sunny days
I bury
words.
They put out roots
and coil around
forgotten syntax.
Next spring a full
blown anecdote
will sprout.
Diana der Hovanessian , "Learning an Ancestral Tongue" (10)
Michael Arlen's Passage to Ararat (1975) is an archetypical text
for displaying the "transference" mechanisms of ethnicity, and for coming
to terms with an id-like force, experienced as defining one's self, yet
coming from without. Crucial here is the conquest of an anxiety that manifests
itself through repetition of behavioral patterns, and that cannot be articulated
in rational language but can only be acted out. The analogy here is with
the third of the three modes of communication routinely distinguished in
psychoanalytic therapy: cognitive, rational, conscious investigation; translation
from dreams into linear, textlike verbalizations (thereby introducing the
distortions of the mediating language); and transference, in which no text
is produced, but rather a repetition toward the analyst of behavior patterns
previously established toward some prior significant other.
Michael Arlen's ethnic anxiety begins with the silence of his father about
the Armenian past. By attempting to spare children knowledge of painful
past experiences, parents often create an obsessive void in the child that
must be explored and filled in. Arlen claims he has no obvious childhood
experiences except the warmth and family happiness of eating in the Golden
Horde Restaurant (a favorite, as well, of William Saroyan's). Yet the silence
of his father is a dramatically enacted ambivalence full of import for the
son: the father attempts and spectacularly fails to become English, changes
his name, (although a writer) does not write or talk about Armenians, marries
another exile (a Greek-American), dresses "with the meticulous care of the
idle or insecure," attempts to hold court at the St. Regis Hotel, comes
home to meals "devoid of taste or personality," paces in "a little room
euphemistically called the library," sends his children to boarding school,
and eventually moves to America when anti-foreign speeches are made in Parliament.
In America, he feels himself an ineffectual Armenian, abetted by his uncertainty
about how to treat his children; yet he lands his first American job with
what his son remembers as a virtuoso triumph of Armenian wile: movie producer
Louis Mayer asks him what he is going to do; he responds that he has been
talking to Sam Goldwyn (who had told him to try racehorses). Mayer: How
much did he offer you? Arlen, Sr.: Not enough. Mayer: How about $1,500 for
thirty weeks? Arlen: I'll take it.
Michael Arlen's statement about the Golden Horde Restaurant being his only
real Armenian childhood experience is followed by a statement of ambivalence
about his father. Indeed his text is structured -beginning, middle, and
end-with paternal imagery. Beginning:
"I was only slightly curious about my Armenian background-or so I thought,
although if I had understood how to acknowledge such matters, I might have
known that I was haunted by it. Mostly I was afraid of it.... What was I
afraid of? ... Probably of being exposed in some way, or pulled down by
the connection: that association of difference ... with something deeply
pejorative ... And in the end I came to hate my father for my fear.... I
loved him too ... He was my father. But also I was afraid of him. Something
always lay between us-something unspoken and (it seemed) unreachable. We
were strangers." (1975:7)
Arlen describes the ambivalences (paralleling his father's) generated in
himself: the childhood fears that his Anglo-American camouflage would come
undone (terror for himself when he sees a Jewish boy being beaten; a Scottish
boy asserting that Arlen could not possibly be English); the fear of getting
too emotionally close to Armenians; and above all, being unable to read
about the massacres of the Armenians by the Ottomans (becoming angry, but
irrationally not at the Ottomans). (11)
To exorcise this anxiety, Arlen visits Soviet Armenia. Initially the ambivalence
recurs: inability to feel anything at the monuments; anger at the tourists'
slurs and stereotypes about Armenians confided to him as apparently simply
an American tourist. Eventually, however, there is engagement, a movement
outside of himself, a recognition of connections between his personal dilemmas
and those of other Armenians. Arlen ignites the anger of his Armenian guide
by asking about Armenian submissiveness to the Ottomans, their collusion
in their own second-class status. The guide accuses him of wanting to tear
down his father ("Fatherland, father. It is the same thing" 1975:981):"'All
that Anglo-Saxon coolness and detachment.... Not like a proper son!' . .
. And then Sarkis suddenly took my hands in his, and I looked into his face
and saw that he was crying" (ibid: 99).
Following this cathartic breakthrough, a picture of an eighteenthcentury
merchant from Erzurum brings an associative flash. The face reminds Arlen
of his father: "burning eyes in a composed, impassive face": "I realized
at that moment that to be an Armenian, to have lived as an Armenian, was
to have become something crazy ... crazed, that deep thing-deep where the
deep-sea souls of human beings twist and turn" (ibid: 103).(12) His father
had attempted to free him of the pain of the past, but suddenly Michael
Arlen remembers his father telling him "with suprising severity and intensity"
(P. 139) when he was eight to learn to box. Arlen speculates on the effects
of centuries surrounding majority population, Armenian of provocation from
the protest, mob response (the classic dynamic, Margaret Bedrosian comments,
of a bully committing a misdeed on the sly, then feigning being wronged
when the victim cries out; and she cites the Ottoman interior minister Talaat
Bey: "We've been reproached for making no distinction between the innocent
Armenians and the guilty, but that was utterly impossible in view of the
fact that those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow" [Bedrosian
1982: 2341). Such an environment leads to a
turning inward: "The eyes [of the portrait] seemed almost to burn out at
me. Burning eyes in a frozen face ... did he set his expression, freeze
part of himself, his face-all save the eyes, which no man can control-and
tap his finger on the coffee cup, and curl and uncurl his hand inside his
well-cut pocket ... and manage?" (102 - 3) - Such an environment
Arlen speculates leads to arts of miniaturization, in this case not a creative
expression through smallness, but an obsessive gesture, an effort to become
invisible.
Anxiety confronted, diagnosis explored, the book ends again with the father,
with dreams as an index of the liberation achieved. Michael Arlen recalls
his father's anxiety dreams about his father: not being able to understand
his Armenian. Michael Arlen reflects that he, Michael, no longer dreams
so frequently of his father (his passage to Ararat has been liberating).
As he puts it, the need to set the father free has been met (P. 292).
Arlen's text is straightforward and self-conscious,(13) describing ethnic
anxiety as an approach-avoidance to a past that is larger than oneself,
that is recognized by others as defining of one's identity, and yet that
does not seem to come from one's own experience. It makes one feel not in
control of one's own being. It is a historical reality principle: individual
experience cannot be accounted for by itself. It expresses itself in repetitions.
(14) Yet he concludes weakly on a false note. He claims his is a tale of
conquest, of finding peace and security: "How strange to finally meet one's
past: to simply meet it, the way one might finally acknowledge a person
who had been in one's company a long while, "So it's you" (253). Anxiety,
he seems to say, is relieved by establishing continuity with the past where
previously there was breach, silence, anxiety. There seems to be almost
a failure here to create for the future, something perhaps figured in the
text by the absence of his American-Greek mother.
Michael Arlen is but one of a gradually growing number of Armenian literary
voices, several of whom have been reviewed in a recent dissertation by Margaret
Bedrosian. The theme of puzzlement, of obscure fathers, is a strong recurrent
one, but maternal imagery can be equally strong. (15) In another medium,
the painter Arshile Gorky uses images of his mother and transferencelike
techniques of indirection, repetition, and reworking. Gorky (born Vosdanig
Adoian in 1904 of a line of thirty-eight generations of priests) was a survivor
of the massacres, child of a mother who died of starvation at thirty-nine,
not eating so that her children might live. He chose the names "the bitter
one" (Gorky) and Achilles (Arshile) whose wrath kept him from battle until
a new wrath impelled him to act. Abstraction and expressionism were for
him techniques, not of spontaneity and the autonomous unconscious, but of
masking vulnerable truths. During World War II, he issued an invitation
for a course in camouflage: "An epidemic of destruction sweeps through the
world today. The mind of civilized man is set to stop it. What the enemy
would destroy, however, he must first see. To confuse and paralyze his vision
is the role of camouflage" (quoted in Bedrosian 1982: 355). His paintings
are carefully reworked images: of his mother, of his natal village near
Lake Van, of the family garden in that village, of the Tree of the Cross
used by villagers to attach supplications to God. His slogans were clear:
"From our Armenian experience will I create new forms to ignite minds and
massage hearts!"; "Having a tradition enables you to tackle new problems
with authority, with solid footing."
Transference, the return of the repressed in new forms, and repetitions
with their distortions are all mechanisms through which ethnicity is generated.
They also suggest possible writing tactics. Three uses of transference and
repetition can be distinguished in recent ethnographic writing. First, there
is the discovery or eliciting of psychological patterns of transference
proper among ethnographic subjects, as in the work of Gananath Obeyesekere
(1881), where, moreover, such systematic patterns generate new social forms.
Second, there is the analysis of hange through intended repetitions that
in fact work through misappropriation or distortion. The classic such highlighting
of the indirection of cultural dynamics is Marx's observations on the French
Revolution using borrowed language and costumes from the Roman Republic
and on history never working out the same way the second time. (16) Marshall
Sahlins's recent book on Captain Cook and the structural changes Hawaiian
society underwent in the period following his death similarly exploits the
delineation of intended repetition or reproduction of cultural forms leading
to unintended distortion, inversion, and change. Third, and perhaps most
intriguing, there is the suggestion of Vincent Crapanzano in Tuhami
(1880) that in part the dynamic of the interviews between himself and Tuhami
was one of mutual transference, with Tuhami placing the ethnographer in
the uncomfortable role of curer. Crapanzano suggests that many ethnographic
situations partake of this ambiguity: informants present and tailor information
as if the anthropologist were a government official, a physician, or other
agent of aid or danger; the anthropologist is placed in positions that constrain
his actions, and he, too, creates roles for the informant. In other words
the emergence of ethnographic knowledge is not unlike the creation of ethnic
identity. Crapanzano hints at this also in an article reporting a possession
case, where he interviews the husband, Muhammad, and his wife interviews
the wife, Dawia. (17) Not only do the possessed couple present different
versions of the same event, but these versions depend upon the interlocutors,
there being perhaps even a mild rivalry between the two ethnographers. By
recognizing such dynamics of gaining information and insight, anthropologists'
informantscollaborators gain a more dynamic role, and we begin to see our
own bases of knowledge as more subtly constructed through the action of
others. Our knowledge is shown to be less objective, more negotiated by
human interests, and the subject for greater responsibility in the interactions
and ethical honesty of fieldwork (in Tyler's sense in this volume).
Dream-Work
Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1975) is an archetypical
text for displaying ethnicity processes analogous to translations of dreams.
just as a dream needs to be translated into a text or linear verbal discourse
so that it can be analyzed by someone who has not experienced the visual
imagery, so Kingston's text is developed as a series of fragments of traditional
stories, myths, and customs imposed by parents, but not adequately explained,
at critical points of her childhood, which thus are embedded in consciousness
to be worked out through, and integrated with, ongoing experience. This
process of integration is analogous to that experienced by the analised
in psychoanalytic therapy, who must translate from the imagery of dreams
into verbal discourse so that both he and the analyst can reason through
it. The process of articulating what it means to be Chinese-American, for
Kingston, is the process of creating a text that can be interrogated and
made coherent.
The first fragment, "No Name Woman," is the tale of a father's sister who
has an illegitimate child, is forced by the enraged villagers to have the
child in a pigsty, and who then commits suicide. The story, says Kingston,
was told to warn young girls ("now that you have started to menstruate"
[5]), but also to test the American-born children's ability to establish
realities: to distinguish what is peculiar to one's family, to poverty,
to Chinesenes. The obscure story gains force as Kingston considers the alternative
possible interpretations it might contain: was this aunt coerced (a figure
of female obedience) or was she an active temptress: indeed why, since she
was married to a husband off in America, was she still in her natal home
rather than in her husband's parents' house-previous transgressions? The
aunt became an allegory of internal struggles for the adolescent Kingston:
all young women wish to be attractive to the opposite sex, but selectively:
how to make a Chinese fall in love with me, but not Caucasians, Negroes,
or Japanese? Ambiguities explode: women are, of course, devalued in Chinese
society, yet this aunt's father had had only sons before the aunt was born
and had attempted to trade a boy-infant for a girlinfant: presumably, he
loved his only daughter and perhaps encouraged her rebelliousness.
The ambiguities of the woman's role are elaborated in "White Tiger." Kingston
was taught she would grow up to be wife and slave, yet she was also taught
the song of the warrior woman a variant of the great Nishan Shaman legend
(18) -who avenged her family like a man. The story of Fa Mu Lan, the warrior
woman, is of going up the mountain into the clouds, where she learns spiritual
and physical strength, biding her time until at twenty-two she returns to
become a warrior. The parallel for Kingston is the unreal devaluation of
girls in her Chinese communal setting, from which she finds an escape into
American society, where she can become a strong person in her own right.
Like Fa Mu Lan, she feels she must stay away until strong enough to return
and reform the stifling Chinese immigrant community.
"Shaman" is about the ghost stories Kingston's mother told as work stories
to chill the heat in the family laundry; tales of heroes who would eat anything
in great quantities ("The emperors used to eat the peaked hump of purple
dromedaries ... Eat! Eat! my mother would shout ... the blood pudding a
wobble in the middle of the table."); stories of wartime horrors. Her mother
was a woman of accomplishment and strength: she had a diploma from a school
of midwifery, and knew how to recite genealogies to talk back her children's
frightened spirits after nightmares and horror films. Such familial powers
can also be repressive ("Chinese do not smile for photographs. Their faces
command relatives in foreign lands - "send money" - and posterity forever
- "put food in front of this picture"") and regressive (whenever she would
return home, Kingston would regress into fear of ghosts, nightmares of wartime
airplanes, and lethargic illness).
These and other "talk stories" in the volume (and the companion volume Chinamen)
show how stories can become powerful sources of strength, how they work
differently for each generation, how they are but fragmentary bits that
have to be translated, integrated, and reworked. ("Unless I see her life
branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help.") Part of the fragmentary
context of the stories, of the unexplained customs, of the paranoia about
non-Chinese, and of the general secrecy about origins is grounded in survival
tactics that the immigrants developed against the discriminatory immigration
policies of the United States against Asians. People changed names, lied
about their ages and ports of entry, and generally covered their tracks
so that their lives became unintelligible to their children (who being half-American
were not entirely trustworthy either). Non-Chinese are called ghosts, but
for the American-Chinese children, ghosts are the bizarre fragments of past,
tradition, and familial self overprotectiveness that must be externalized
and tamed.
"Dream-work" can be prospective, as well as retrospective: daydreams as
well as working through past experiences. Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan,
and Shawn Hsu Wong, as well as Kingston, utilize the dilemmas of Chinese-American
males to explore further the novelties of Chinese-Americanness suggested
in "White Tiger." Kingston there describes the need to get away from Chinatown
to gain the strength to redeem (recover, change, and create) her identity.
The further task is to construct or find images that are neither Chinese
nor European. There are no clear role models for being ChineseAmerican.
Being Chinese-American exists only as an exploratory project, a matter of
finding a voice and style. Among the exploratory tactics are efforts to
claim America, to assert aggressive sexual identity, to imaginatively try
on other minority experiences, and to question both hegemonic white ideological
categories and those of Chinatown.
This project is doubly important for writers: for personal selfdefinition,
and also to overcome those publishers and critics who consistently reject
any writings contradicting popular racist views of AsianAmericans as either
totally exotic, as no different from anyone else (denial of culture), or,
finally, as model minorities (humble, wellmannered, law-abiding, family-oriented,
hard-working, educationseeking).
In response, as Elaine Kim describes (1982), Frank Chin calls himself a
Chinatown cowboy, insisting on his roots in the American West and his manly
ruggedness. This pose is particularly useful against the exotic stereotype
of Chinese as "pigtailed heathens in silk gowns and slippers, whispering
Confucian aphorisms about filial piety." The pose is also useful against
the model minority stereotype used: (a) to depreciate blacks; (b) to deny
the history of Chinese-Americans (Chinese do not turn to the government
for aid because for so long the government was hostile to their legal status
and they thus had to hide from the government, with the consequence that
poverty, suicide, and tuberculosis flourished in Chinatown unnoticed by
white society); (c) and to emasculate Asian-American males. Chin recalls
the classic situation in school where blacks and Chicanos are asked why
they cannot be like the Chinese: stay out of trouble, mind your folks, study
hard, and obey the laws: "And there we chinamen were, in Lincoln Elementary
School, Oakland, California, in a world where manliness counts for everything,
surrounded by bad blacks and bad Mexican kids ... suddenly stripped and
shaved bare by this cop with no manly style of my own, unless it was sissiness"
(quoted by Kim, p. 178).
If these racist, ideological stereotypes need be countered, so, too, Chinatown
needs to be exposed. Chin images Chinatown as decaying beneath an exotic
facade, as a senile living corpse, populated by inhabitants imaged as bugs,
spiders, and frogs, engaged in activities imaged as funerals (preservation
of decaying pasts under ivory masks). Heroes cowboys must escape to survive.
Like Kingston, Chin moved out, preferring to build strength in Seattle,
returning only on temporary forays to the battleground of change in San
Francisco. In his writing, Chin attempts to create a tough, aggressive,
back-talking young male hero, an adolescent sexuality and aggression that
are perhaps signs of a new voice and identity not yet found.
Jeffrey Paul Chan, Kim notes, writes not dissimilarly: both use the image
of Chinatown as a chicken coop. In his search for a new style for the Chinese-American,
Chan also plays with the roles of other minorities, especially that of the
American Indian. The Indian is attractive because he has (to outsiders)
unquestionable roots in America. This is a theme that both Kingston and
Shawn Hsu Wong also develop: the need particularly of Chinese-American males
to mark and appropriate the land. Wong's narrator is haunted by the ghosts
of grandfathers who built the railroads, imagining their struggles, their
letters home to China, and even fantasizes himself as an old night train
filled with Chinamen, running along the tracks, heart burning like a red
hot engine. These grandfathers laid roots in the land, like "roots of giant
trees," like "sharp talons in the earth of my country." Rainsford, the narrator
of Homebase (1979), has a white girlfriend, who patronizes him, telling
him that he is the product of the richest and oldest culture in the world,
a civilization that invented many of the components of modern life, making
him feel even sharper anxiety about having nothing of his own in America.
He rejects this "love," and she, classically, tells him to go back where
he came from: go home. But home is here. It is an American Indian who shows
him how to find his American roots: he should retrace where his people have
been, all over America, see the town he is named after. He does this, determined
that America "must give me legends with spirit," and dreaming of a reconciliation
with a Chinese-American girl in Wisconsin whose grandfather from China had
fled the West Coast. In Chinamen, Kingston, too, emphasizes the theme
of men claiming America, writing of railroad workers-heroic and masculine
at times such as the strike of 1869: bare-chested, muscular young gods-victimized,
kept womanless, dying in the wilderness. But, says one of them, "We're marking
the land now."
Dream-work-simultaneously the integration of dissonant past fragments and
the daydreaming "trying-on" of alternative possible identities-is both descriptive
of one way (or one set of ways) ethnicity works and suggests a writing tactic
of fragments. Here, too, Crapanzano's Tuhami, referred to above,
might serve as an example of a recent ethnographic text that exploits this
tactic. The reader is presented with a puzzle: to help the author analyze
bits of interviews in which the informant draws equally on reality and fantasy
for metaphors with which to describe the impossibilities of his existence.
Tuhami is a member of Morocco's subproletariat; the style of his discourse
perhaps illustrates what Pierre Bourdieu provocatively calls the truncated
consciousness of many members of such subproletariats.(19) If so, Crapanzano's
recording of Tuhami might provide an access to the discourse of an emergent
new social class, analogous to the emergent discourse of Chinese-American
writers' concern with chicken coops and railroads, cowboys and Indians.
Other similar writing tactics are easily imaginable, such as the use of
the juxtaposed viewpoints of different informants and/or authors (20) and
Rashomonlike descriptions from different perspectives . (21)
Alternative Selves and Bifocality
Two recent black autobiographies by Charles Mingus and Marita Golden develop
the notion of multiple selves and examine the reality constraints on enacting
alternative selves. They also explore the use of alternative selves to challenge
dominant hegemonic ideologies, the one by applying an ethnic aesthetic (thus
being ethnographic in style as well as content), the other by pioneering
the bifocality that anthropology has always promised. Alice Walker, another
black writer, notes: "When I look at people in Iran and Cuba, they look
like kin folk" (Bradley 1984: 35-36). This is echoed by Maxine Hong Kingston
and American Indian writer Leslie Marmon Silko, who portray young men in
American uniform in southeast Asia severely disturbed by the inability to
distinguish the enemy from kinfolk. As a humanist cultural criticism of
nationalist, class, and other hegemonic political discourses, these observations
signal the potential for a powerful counter rhetoric, similar to those developed
by the small nations of Europe, those on the wrong side of history, whose
"disabused view of history" is the "source of their culture, of their wisdom,
of the 'nonserious spirit' that mocks grandeur and glory" (Kundera 1984).
Mingus's Beneath the Underdog (1971) utilizes a tripartite self as
narrator; a telling to a psychiatrist as the overall narrative frame; and
an obsessive focus on a father figure. The tripartite self is introduced
on the first page, and reflected upon again near the last (p. 255): an inborn,
ever-loving gentle soul who always gets taken; a frightened animal that,
from experience, learns to attack for fear of being attacked; and a distanced
third who stands apart watching the other two. The three selves appear throughout
the text as alternating, interbraided voices-like the call-and-response
of a jazz session-keeping the reader alert to perspective and circumstance.
Equally striking is Mingus's textual strategy of posing the autobiography
as a telling, a talk-story, to a Jewish psychiatrist ("remember saying you
came to me not only because I'm a psychiatrist but also because I'm a Jew?
And therefore could relate to your problems?" p. 7). This allows the author
to play with four subdevices, like improvisatoryjazz themes that reappear
periodically. First, there are the psychological devices of fabrication
(involving the reader in sorting out the puzzles of identity, control by
the self versus control by outside forces), and changing the subject or
crying (signals of blockages, avoidances, pain, and irrational compulsions).
Second, the theme of pimping is used as a multi-register metaphor. It describes
the narrator's use of women as a childish way to prove his manhood (breaking
out of subordination and dependency-the pimp as master-by imposing subordination
on others). It is a metaphor of economic survival, of the dilemmas of black
musicians who cannot make it on music alone, but must prostitute themselves
and others, meaning among other things a regressive dependence on women
("He wanted to make it alone without any help from women or anyone else,"
p. 132). That is, narrator as both pimp and prostitute. And it is a bitter
description of the racist economic system controlled by whites ("Jazz is
big business to the white man and you can't move without him. We just work-ants,"
P. 137). The third device is recurrent dreams about Fats Navarro, a Florida-born
Cuban musician who died at twenty-six of tuberculosis and narcotic addiction,
who serves throughout the book as an alter ego to whom the project of writing
a book is confided. The book is to achieve liberation, both economic (fantasies
of fat royalties) and spiritual. The dreams include meditations on a death
wish, centering on the idea that one can die (only?) when one works out
one's karma, precisely what was denied Fats.
Finally, the use of the father figuration is, of course, also part of the
narration to the psychiatrist- the fourth subdevice-but it also introduces
an element of choice and retracing of genealogical connection ("Some day
I may choose another father to teach me," p. 96). Mingus's father appears
first in his childhood traumas (being dropped on his head, having his dog
shot by a neighbor, kindergarten accusations of being a sexual pervert,
and above all paternal beatings and threats of castration for bedwetting,
later discovered to be due to damaged kidneys). The father gave him his
first musical instrument, but being emotionally unresponsive also set up
a longing for a real father. (The father's own anxiety structure is analyzed
as stemming from being a frustrated architect condemned to life in the Post
Office, and as manifesting itself by teaching his children a false, racist
sense of superiority on the grounds that they were light-skinned.) Midbook,
Mingus returns to find out about his father, and hears yet again that he
is not fully black, that he is a descendant of Abraham Lincoln's cousin,
and that "a lot of talking about freedom ... [is] a waste of time 'cause
even a slave could have inner freedom if he wanted it." "That's brainwashing
by the white man." "Careful, boy-you ain't totally black." (95)
White connections are not the only troubling ones. Class prejudices within
the black community also threaten young Mingus. The father advises: "So
tell them your grandfather was an African chieftain named Mingus" (96).
There is also a certain amount of play with alternative ethnic masks. Mingus
grows up in Watts and is light-skinned; in the mirror he thinks he can see
strains of Indian, African, Mexican, Asian, and white, and he worries that
he is "a little of everything, wholly nothing" (50).
Mexican is a major alternative identity ("Mexican Moods"). (22) His first
girlfriend when aged five was Mexican; so was a girl who almost snagged
him into marriage at seventeen. Later, in San Francisco, a Jewish musician
had tried to give him a break in a white union: he was accepted as Mexican
until a black musician turned him in. Jewishness is another ethnicity played
with, particularly through his Jewish psychiatrist and the psychiatrists
at Bellevue, who initially seem like Nazis threatening lobotomy, but who
eventually midwife a feeling of respect and love: "The truth is doctor,
I'm insecure and I'm black and I'm scared to death of poverty and especially
poverty alone. I'm helpless without a woman, afraid of tomorrow.... it was
easy to be proud and feel contempt and say to these beautiful women, "I
don't want your dirty money!" so that was one good thing that happened in
Bellevue, having a feeling of love and respect for them again.... My music
is evidence of my soul's will to live beyond my sperm's grave." (245-46)
The wild humor, excessive sexuality, and anguish of Mingus's style help
pose the contradictions and puzzles of his ethnic search: the differences
among the women upon whom he depends-two mistresses, a middle class black
wife, and a blond nurse; the tentative trying on of other minorities' identities;
the hint of exploring African connections; and the sense of mixed blood
or heritage. Mingus's critique of racism is poignant, macabrely humorous,
a verbal jazz-blues, sophisticated in style and technique, wielding an ethnic
aesthetic to bring the reader to a perspective and understanding.
Marita Golden's Migrations of the Heart (1983) explores the African
connections more directly, and illustrates a different form of critique,
perhaps less innovative in style, but pioneering an old promise of anthropology
to be a "bifocal" mode of cultural criticism. Golden marries a Nigerian
and goes to Nigeria to reexperience her Americanness. The marriage fails.
The story is a painful, yet eventually strengthening, recognition that identity
is not to be constructed with the free will of romantic fantasy. There are
reality principles that constrain: traditions, growth patterns, and dynamics
beyond the ego. Several schemata structure Golden's text: repetitions of
the father figure, countervailing but secondary mother figures (mother,
mother-inlaw), rebellions and gradual tempering into mature womanhood, and
a skillful portrait of the devastating dynamics of an intercultural marriage
that does not work.
The patriarchal figures (father and husband) with which she struggles seem
to be the primary vehicles for ethnicity-work.
"[My father] was as assured as a panther ... he bequeathed to me-gold nuggets
of fact, myth, legend.... By his own definition he was "a black man and
proud of it." . . . Africa: "It wasn't dark until the white man got there."
Cleopatra: "I don't care WHAT they teach you in school, she was a black
woman.". the exploits of Toussaint Ouverture. (3-4)
Yet also:
"He was a hard, nearly impossible man to love when love meant exclusive
rights to his soul ... he relied [on his many women] ... to enhance the
improvisational nature of his life." (3-4)
Her African lover, then husband, is almost a double to her father. His assurance
first attracts her: "enveloped in the aura of supreme confidence that blossomed
around all the Africans I had ever met ... I'd read about my past and now
it sat across from me in a steak house, placid, and even a bit smug....
I rubbed my fingers across his hand. "What're you doing?" he asked. "I want
some of your confidence to rub off on me," I said." (50-5 1)
Both men have areas of reticence she cannot penetrate. With her father the
mutual lack of understanding is manifested in his demand that she get rid
of her "natural" hair-do, in his (and her) inability to share grief when
her mother dies, and in his taking up with another woman, whom she resents.
With her husband, the mutual lack of understanding lies in his familial
and patriarchal traditions, for instance, his sharing of economic resources
with his fraternal group at the expense of his conjugal family. Initially
she finds the patriarchal, masculine Nigerian culture attractive:
"Lagos is an aggressively masculine city, and its men exude a dogmatic confidence....
it was this masculinity that made the men so undeniably attractive. Nigeria
was their country to destroy or save. That knowledge made them stride and
preen in self-appreciation. This assurance became for an AfroAmerican woman
a gaily wrapped gift to be opened anew every day." (84)
Ultimately, she feels the assumptions of this culture to be devastatingly
denying of her sense of self. Women, she is told by another wife, are forgiven
almost everything as long as they fulfill the duty to set the stage on which
their men live. Life is complicated in Nigeria, particularly when her fiance
resists marriage until he feels financially independent, when she finds
a job and he cannot, later when he demands a child before she is ready,
and when he gives money to raise his brother's children at the expense of
her comfort.
The primary frames of Golden's book are the portraits of a marriage gone
awry, partly for reasons of culturally conflicting assumptions, and of a
woman gradually freeing herself from dependencies and unexamined notions
of identity. But what is important here are the reflections on what it is
to be a black American-again, an identity to be created, and a sociological
reality to be struggled for. just as Africa is initially an over-romanticized
image of "my past," an image of self-confidence, one that inevitably is
shaken by a closer lookNigeria has its own problems, an American does not
slip so easily into an African set of roles-so, too, America is not to be
accepted in its realities of racism or individual fantasies (such as those
of her father). Golden returns from her ordeal in Africa to Boston (Boston
because it is not Washington or New York, where she grew up and where there
are too many regressive pulls). There she finds the racial atmosphere almost
unbearable. One has the feeling, however, that she will now help to change
the situation simply by being a stronger, richer person.
This use of Africa is what anthropological cultural criticism ought to be
about: a dialectical or two-directional journey examining the realities
of both sides of cultural differences so that they may mutually question
each other, and thereby generate a realistic image of human possibilities
and a self-confidence for the explorer grounded in comparative understanding
rather than ethnocentrism. It is perhaps what Margaret Mead promised in
Coming of Age in Samoa and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive
Societies,and failed fully to deliver. These influential books helped
Americans see that American adolescent patterns of rebelliousness and American
sex roles were not 11 natural," but culturally molded, and so might be altered
through different child-rearing methods. Such cultural criticism of America
worked by juxtaposing alternative patterns elsewhere in the world: that
is, real world examples, not utopian fantasies. In today's more sophisticated
world, we know that the Samoan and New Guinea societies are more complicated
than Margaret Mead described, as also is America. Marita Golden's narrative
points to some of the complexities on both sides of any cultural divide
that need to be addressed in contemporary anthropological efforts at cultural
criticism (see further Marcus and Fischer 1986).
inter-reference
And Louie would come through- Within the dark morada average
melodramatic music, like in the chains rattle and clacking prayer
mono-tan tan taran! Cruz wheels jolt
Diablo, El Charro Negro! Bogard the hissing spine to uncoil waiting
smile (his smile is deadly as tongues
his viasas!). He dug roles, man, of Nahuatl converts who slowly
and names-like blackie, little wreath
Louie ... rosary whips toftay one another
Jose Montoya, "El Louie" Bernice Zamora, "Restless Serpents"
Perhaps the most striking feature of Mexican-Amcrican writing, present in
other ethnic writing too, but brought to its most explicit and dramatic
level here, is interlinguistic play: interference, alternation, inter-reference.
This was the subject of the first Armenian poem cited above. It is clear
in the texture of black English. Some Mexican-American writers use Spanish,
others English, some have alternating/mirroring pages or chapters of Spanish
and English (reciprocal translations). Chicano literary journals (El
Grito, Entrelinas, Revista Chicano-Riquena) are resolutely bilingual.
Spanish phrases occur within the flow of English, and Spanish words and
grammatical structure take on changes influenced by English. Indeed, for
some pochismo or calo, the Chicano slang, takes on a privileged
role. Says Bernice Zamora:
"I like to think of Calo as the language of Chicano literature ... It is
evolving as a literary mode, and the writers I enjoy most for their consistency
of Calo are Cecilio Camavillo, Jose Montoya, and Raul Salinas. I am fond
of Calo because of the usage of English phonemes with Spanish gerund or
verb endings ... eskipiando [skipping] ... Indios pasando we watchando ...
I teach Calo with the premise that it is a conflict of languages resolved."
(Quoted in BruceNova 1880: 208)
Ricardo Sanchez provides an example of bilingual insistence:
"Soy un manitc, por herencia y un pachuco por experiencia [I am a native
New Mexican by heritage and a pachuco by experience] ... I was born number
13, the first one in the family to be born outside of New Mexico and Colorado
since somewhere en el siglo 16 [in the sixteenth century] ... soy mestizo
[I'm a mestizo], scion to the beautiful and turbulent reality of indo-hispanic
concatenation, ay, mi abuela materna [my maternal grandmother] was born
in the tewa pueblo of San Juan, there between taos and espafiola ... un
mundo, ni espafiol ni indfgena: ay, mundo de policolores [a world neither
spanish nor indian. ay, world of polycolors] when mindsouls se ponen a reconfigurar
[start to restructure] new horizons." (Bruce-Nova1880: 2 2 1)
But of far more interest than simply linguistic interference or code switching,
and the education debate generated over bilingualism, is the fact, as Michel
Serres puts it, "Il faut lire l'interference comme inter-reference" (it
is necessary to read interference as inter-reference). (23) What keeps the
interlinguistic situation vital is not merely the continuing waves of Mexicans
entering the United States and the flow back and forth across the border,
so that gradual disappearance in an English environment is less likely,
but the cultural vitality of references to Mexican history, Spanish civilization,
and pre-Columbian civilization, as well as to particular Chicano styles
(such as the pachuco "zoot suit" subculture of El Paso and Los Angeles celebrated
in Montoya's "El Louie," a figure paralleling the black Staggerlee (24)
" or cultural environments (such as the Penitentes cult of New Mexico described
in the opening poem of Zamora's "Restless Serpents").
Poetic autobiography-and the outright novelistic fiction of Rudolfo Anaya,
Ron Arias, and Rolando Hinojosa-has perhaps been more boldly experimental
here than prose autobiography. But, if one considers Jose Antonio Villarreal's
Pocho (1959) as a veiled auto- 0 biography (it is often counted as the first
major Chicano novel, although Villarreal does not like the label "Chicano"),
then together with Ernesto Galarza's Barrio Boy (1971), Richard Rodriguezs
Hunger of Memory (1981), and Sandra Cisneros's ("semi-autobiographical")
The House on Mango Street (1983), prose autobiography has set out
many of the thematic preoccupations of Chicano, writing.
Villarreal establishes the themes of immigration, dealing with Mexican religious
and sexual inhibitions, and familial relations in Pocho. In The Fifth
Horseman (1974) he reworks the Mexican genre of novels about the 1910,
revolution so as to create a positive ancestral figure for the contemporary
Chicano: a protagonist who after the "success" of the revolution refuses
to join the victorious army in plundering the people, and, staying true
to the revolution, flees to the United States. Villarreal's father, indeed,
fought for Pancho Villa, coming in 1921 first to Texas and then to California.
(Both father and son returned eventually to Mexico; the son recently once
again returned to the States.) Galarza's Barrio Boy styles itself
as originating in oral vignettes, and thereby explores the preoccupation
of Chicano writers with preserving what has been largely an oral culture,
albeit attached to the worlds of Hispanic literacy. Rodriguezs Hunger
of Memory is an argument for English as the medium of instruction in
schools, retaining Spanish only as a language of intimacy; its descriptions
of the two very different worlds are intended to deny that success in North
America can be accompanied by retaining the communal richness of the barrio.
Rodriguez has roused a storm of controversy, exposing deep class divisions
among Mexican-Americans, but also pointing to the ambiguity of middle class
Mexican-American writers using the figure of the poor as a vehicle of expression
rather than writing about their own experiences. Many Chicano commentators
acknowledge the didactic nature of Chicano writing in the I 96os as a key
component ofthe rise of a political movement. Cisneros is one of a number
of writers who have begun to write more directly of themselves; she uses
a fragmentary, richly evocative, vignette style, in English.
The antagonism/anxiety directed towards Rodriguezs autobiographic argument,
as well as the commentary on the political didacticism of earlier Chicano
writing, pose the key issues for the creation of authentically inter-referential
ethnic voices, as well as alerting us to the diversity within the ChIcano
(not to mention the larger Hispanic American) community: diversity of class,
of region (in Mexico; Texas vs. California vs. Chicago), ofgenealogy (pride
in Spain vs. pride in pre-Columbian ancestry).
The most famous poems of the Chicano movement, for example, Rudolpho's "Corky,"
Gonzales's "I am Joaquin," Alurista (Alberto Urista)'s Floricanto en
Aztlan, and Abelardo Delgado's "Stupid America," are open searches for
enabling histories of Chicano identity. "I am Joaquin" builds on Mexican
history, picturing the United States as a neurotic evil giant (invader of
Mexico; demander of assimilation into a whirlpool or melting pot that would
deny Mexican-Americans their ancestry) and the Chicano nation as a counter
giant in the process of creation through blood sacrifices (of the past and
perhaps future: the example of Israel is posed). Alurista, influenced by
Carlos Casteneda, constructs a somewhat different heroic past, centered
less on H ispanic- Mexican history, and more on a pre-Columbian mythos (flori-canto,
"flower-song," is a Spanish translation of the Nahuatl for "poetry"); Aztlan,
the region of northern Mexico including what is now the southwestern United
States, is a realm of ancient wisdom, far older than the Anglo settlements
and more in tune with the harmonies of nature and the universe. Delgado's
short poem exposes the inability of Anglo America to recognize in Chicanos
their rich antiquity, creative modernity, and synthetic fertility. Chicano
knives can be put to use in creative sculpture, as in the past santeros
carved religious figures; Hispanic modernity in painting (Picasso) outpaced
Anglo, and barrio graffiti could be much more, given the chance; literature,
too, can be powerfully synthesized out of a bicultural situation: witness
this poem:
stupid america, see that chicano
with the big knife
in his steady hand
he doesn't want to knife you
he wants to sit on a bench
and carve christfigures
but you won't let him.
he is the picasso
of your western states
but he will die
with one thousand masterpieces
hanging only from his mind.
Inter-reference here encompasses both folk tradition (santeros) and
high modernism in the Hispanic world (Picasso), bringing them to consciousness
in Anglo America (the English medium), while criticizing the oppression
and cultural deprivation imposed by America.
The search for enabling histories and myths in much early Chicano writing
took the form of seeking out cuentos (stories), and much of the literary
ideology was one of capturing and preserving an oral culture. Galarza's
Barrio Boy presents itself as a written version of oral vignettes
told to the family. Tomas Rivera's y no se lo trag— la tierra
(and the earth did not part) alternates a short anecdote with a longer
vignette vividly recreating archetypical crises and dilemmas of the exploited
poor Chicanos of Texas; the effect is of a collective voice of the people,
powerful and searing, with that eternal, but not ahistorical, quality of
folktales, the quality that Walter Benjamin identified as coming from shared
experience. Curers and grandparents, often female (curanderas, abuelitas),
figure as important sources of tradition, of mysterious knowledge, and of
cultural strength: the curandera Ultinia in Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me
Ultzma (1972) is one of the richest of these figures; Fausto in Ron
Arias's The Road to Tamazunchal (1975) is a comic male abuelito counterpart.
Both Anaya and Arias move beyond retelling of' oral folk culture, using
"magical realism" to create a richly inventive universe pregnant with Chicano
associations. Ultima is still a healing figure, using traditional lore on
the side of good. A former encyclopedia salesman, Fausto is already a very
modernist old man, who instead of passively yielding to failing health,
brilliantly creates an active end game, hanging out with a young teenager,
inventing relations with a Peruvian lama herder, transporting himself to
ancient Cuzco, acting as a coyote to bring wetbacks into the United States,
and teaching them how to earn a living without working by playing corpse.
Thanks perhaps to knowledge gained from his encyclopedias, Fausto's end
game is full of allusions and parodies. Rolando Hincjosa's Rites and Witnesses
(1982) works the oral mode in a wildly comic, but less magical, direction,
being largely constructed of dialogues set in major institutions that manipulate
his characters' lives in mythical Klail City, Belken County, south Texas
(a bank that knows everyone's genealogies and business, in all senses, the
better to stay one step ahead of them in manipulating real estate, politics,
careers, ranching, and banking; the Army, which brings together a Chicano
from Klail City and a Cajun from Louisiana to fight in Asia under Sgt. Hatalski).
Satire here functions like a hall of mirrors to reality, rather than attempting
to create a counter world. It is a series of mirrors that reflect deeply,
with a scalpel's precision, revealing ever deeper layers like a cuento
de nunca acabar (story without end).
Two autobiographical poems that like "Stupid America" depend less on creating
new myths of Mexican or Aztlan pasts illustrate the richness of inter-reference:
Raul Salinas's "A Trip Through the Mind jail" (1969) written in jail and
dedicated to Eldridge Cleaver, reflecting on the destruction of his childhood
barrio in Austin, Texas; and Bernice Zamora's "Restless Serpents." Salinas
elegantly reviews the trajectory of childhood and youth, thereby making
a powerful indictment of the oppression in these barrios. The first half
of the poem describes childhood scenes of playing in chuck-holed streets,
learning game playing that turns aggressivity inward, bribing girls with
Juicy Fruit gum (an apt euphemism, using a prepackaged, sterile consumer
good from outside for seducing tabooed objectives), ethnic rejection at
school, and being scared by La Llorona (the weeping woman who inhabits streams
and kidnaps naughty children). The second half parallels the first in the
transformations of youth: hanging out at Spanish Town Cafe, the "first grown-up
(13) hangout" (13 = marijuana), sniffing gas, drinking muscatel, chased
by the llorona of police sirens, painting graffiti (pachuco "could-be artists").
The barrio is gone, but "You live on, captive in the lonely cell blocks
of my mind." The poem, dedicated to Cleaver, names Chicano barrios across
the States. The poem's description is a powerful indictment, but the poem's
result is strength: "you keep me away from INSANITY'S hungry jaws," providing
"identity ... a sense of belonging," which is "so essential to adult days
of imprisonment."
We turn finally to Bernice Zamora's Restless Serpents. The beauty
here, in part, lies in the way she injects a female (she rejects "feminist")
(25) point of view, counterposing it as a healing potential against the
self-destructiveness of the male worlds depicted by Salinas, Montoya ("El
Louie"), and the Penitentes cult she describes. The cult of flagellation
during Easter week is fascinating and attracts her to its pilgrimage center;
but as a woman she is not allowed into the center. She offers an alternative
imagery, of locomotion to the center (swimming instead of riding up dry
arroyos), of natural cycles of life-giving blood (instead of the exclusively
male death-dealing blood sacrifices of flagellation and mock crucifixion).
The serpents perhaps are the selfrenewing (periodically skin-shedding) images
of ancient Mexico (the descending plumed serpent gods). As Brucc-Nova (1982)
puts it, at the beginning of Zamora's 58-poem book, the mythic beasts are
restless, wanting their due; the cosmic order is out of phase, the rituals
are wrong, inwardly turned, self-destructive aggression; at the end an alternative
ritual, nuanced in the imagery of communion and the sex act, male ingested
by female, soothes the serpents. Other women writers too use this subtle
technique of undermining an initial point of view and showing it in a different
light through women's eyes. Evangelina Vigil's "Dumb Broad" describes a
woman in fast 8 a.m. bumper-to-bumper traffic with both hands off the wheel,
the rear view mirror turned perpendicular, as she teases her hair, fixes
her lipstick, puts on eyeshadow, and so on; the poem ends triumphantly with
her "sporting a splendid hair-do," tuning the radio, lighting a cigarette,
and being handed coffee, the refrain "dumb broad" now, as it ends the poem,
being subverted, almost a commuter's "El Louie."
It could be said that inter-reference is what ethnicity is essentially all
about, but rarely is the contribution of interlinguistic context so clear
and so obviously rich as a vehicle for future creativity: between English
and Hispanic worlds; among subcultural styles, mass culture, and "high"
culture; between male and female worlds. The subversiveness of alternative
perspectives (feminist, minority) for the takenfor-granted assumptions of
dominant ideologies, and the polyphony of multiple voices (English, Spanish),
are models for more textured, nuanced, and realistic ethnography. (26)
Ironic Humor
"...the yet unseen translation where Indians have been backed up into and
on long liquor nights, working in their minds, the anger and madness will
come forth in tongues and fury"
Simon Ortiz, "Irish Poets on Saturday Night and an Indian"
Dicksters must learn better how to balance theforces of good and evil
through humor in the urban world
Gerald Vizenor, Wordarrows
Perhaps nothing defines the present conditions of knowledge so well as irony.
Ever more aware, in ever more precise ways, of the complexity of social
life, writers have had to find ways to incorporate, acknowledge, and exploit
our increasingly empirical understandings of the context, perspective, instability,
conflict, contradiction, competition, and multilayered communications that
characterize reality. Irony is a self-conscious mode of understanding and
of writing, which reflects and models the recognition that all conceptualizations
are limited, that what is socially maintained as truth is often politically
motivated. Stylistically, irony employs rhetorical devices that signal real
or feigned disbelief on the part of the author towards her or his own statements;
it often centers on the recognition of the problematic nature of language;
and so it revels-or wallows-in satirical techniques. (27)
Recent Amerindian autobiographies and autobiographical fiction and poetry
are among the most sophisticated exemplars of the use of ironic humor as
a survival skill, a tool for acknowledging complexity, a means of exposing
or subverting oppressive hegemonic idcologies, and an art for affirming
life in the face of objective troubles. The techniques of transference,
talk-stories, multiple voices or perspectives, and alternative selves are
all given depth or expanding resonances through ironic twists. Thus, talk-stories
or narrative connections to the past, to the animated cosmos, and to the
present are presented as the healing medicine not only for Indians but for
Americans and modern folk at large. Searing portraits of Indian pain are
wielded to expose white poets' appropriations of Indian holism with nature
as romanticizing, trivializing, and hegemonic whitewashing. Openness to
construction of new identities is promoted by the fact that almost all writers
acknowledge a creative sense of being of mixed heritage.
N. Scott Momaday, perhaps the high priest of the healing power of the word
("The possibilities of storytelling are precisely those of understanding
the human experience") (28) is a skillful experimenter with multiple voices
and perspectives. His first memoir, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969),
traces the migration route ofthe Kiowas from Montana to Oklahoma, each chapter
told in three voices: that of eternal legendary stories; that of historical
anecdote or ethnographic observation, often a single sentence or two in
impersonal, flat, descriptive or scientific prose; and that of a personal
reminiscence, often lyrical and evocative of a mood. Personal experience,
cultural norm or generalization, and visionary tale are thus interbraided
so as to capture, and re-present in mutual reinforcement, the separate levels
of meaningfulness, while at the same time exposing and heightening the rhetorical
vehicles that shape these levels. A lean, sparse, yet sharp and multidimensional,
poetic effect is achieved.
In a second memoir, The Names (1976), Momaday plays with childhood
fantasies, seeing himself sometimes as a white confronting hostile, dumb,
unappealing Indians, and at other times seeing himself as the Indian. Such
options come both from his experience and his genealogy. Momaday is Kiowa
on his father's side, and his mother styled herself as an Indian, although
only one of her great grandmothers was Cherokee. She was not accepted by
the Kiowa, and the family moved to New Mexico, where Momaday had experiences
with the Navajo, Tanoan Pueblo, and being a member of a gang of white toughs.
Momaday's life history, his physical features, and his ideas about the potencies
of story telling are incorporated into the character of John Big Bluff Tosameh
(along with the introduction to The Way to Rainy Mountain) in his
Pulitzer-prize winning novel House Made of Dawn (1968). The focal
character of this novel, Abel, is a victim of illegitimacy (not knowing
his father or his father's heritage, Navajo perhaps) and exclusion by other
Indians. Abel is a transformation of the figure of Ira Hayes (the Pima Indian
who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jilra and after the war fell mortal victim
to the role, provided by white society, of outcast alcoholic Indian). Abel,
too, is a veteran, but his problems are primarily caused by Indians and
non-Anglos. He is an embarrassment to Tosameh by fulfilling the white stereotypes
of the violent, superstitious, inarticulate Indian. He is redeemed by returning
to his dying grandfather and entering a ceremonial race the grandfather
had once won. Through the ritual he is able (Abel?) to recall the Navajo
prayer song, "House Made of Dawn," which earlier he had unsuccessfully sought.
Leslie Marmon Silko (a mixed blood Laguna)'s Ceremony (1977) deals
with the same issues in very similar ways. She, too, uses the device of
an Indian traumatized by war (in his memories the killing of Japanese merges
with the death of his uncle Josiah; his prayers to stop the Philippine rains
cause him guilt for the drought and loss of animals suffered by his family
and people: "Tayo didn't know how to explain ... that he had not killed
... but that he had done things far worse"). She, too, uses character types
to explore the proper integration with the present world. Tayo, the protagonist,
is half-Mexican, half-Laguna, and thus looked down on by his long-suffering
Christian Laguna aunt. The latter's son, Rocky, adopts white outlooks and
education, and is thought to be the family's great hope to escape Indian
Poverty. He, however, is killed in the Philippines (wrong solution), causing
Tayo to add survivor's guilt to his confusions. Enio, Harley, and Leroy
are the stereotypic Indian veterans who try to recapture their sense of
belonging to America by drinking and telling stories of their more potent
days. Emo carries around a little bag of teeth of Japanese soldiers he has
killed, and eventually turns his frustration on his fellow victims, killing
his two buddies. It is Tayo in the end who represents the path out of" the
mixtures and confusions of the Indian-and of modern America.
His redemption comes through two old medicine men, particularly Old Betonie
who lives on skid row in Gallup. Old Betonie not only insists that one must
confront the sickness-witchery in oneself and not take the easy way out,
writing off all whites ("It was Indian witchery that made white people"
[139]), for witchery works largely through fear, but he also insists that
the healing ceremonies themselves must change ("things which don't shift
and grow are dead" [133]). Indeed, his ritual implements consist of cardboard
boxes, old clothing and rags, dry roots, twigs, sage, mountain tobacco,
wool, newspapers, telephone books (to keep track of names), calendars, coke
bottles, pouches and bags, and deer-hoof clackers: "In the old days it was
simple. A medicine person could get by without all these things. All these
things have stories alive in them" (123). Ceremonies and stories are notjust
entertainment: "They are all we have to fight off illness and death" (2).
Tayo must confront the witchery in himself, in his fellow veterans, and
in America. The climax occurs along the chain-link fence of a uranium mine
near an atomic test site. The problem of the Indian is analogous to that
of the whites:
Then they grew away from the earth ... sun ...
plants and animals ...
when they look
they see only objects
The world is a dead thing for them ...
They fear the world.
They destroy what they fear.
They fear themselves.
Humor is a critical component of the healing talk-stories that restablish
connections to the past, to the cosmos, and to the present. Humor is a survival
skill against witchery and evil. Gerald Vizenor, a half-Chippewa (Anishinabe)
Indian activist, is a major practitioner of the fine art of the trickster.
Wordarrows (1978) is a series of portraits drawn from his experience
as director of the American Indian Employment and Guidance Center in Minneapolis,
which also informs his comic novel Darkness in St. LouisBearheart
(1978). He says he refused to work with the Communist Party, which attempted
to support his organizing activities, "because in addition to political
reasonsthere was too little humor in communist speech, making it impossible
to know the hearts of the speakers" (1978: 17). The portraits in Wordarrows
are full of sadness, but also small absurdist victories. There is Baptiste
Saint Simon IV or "Bat Four," told by his father that he is stupid and a
backward and a fool, who tries to become a trickster, balancing energies
of good and evil, but "hard as he tried, and in good humor, he failed as
a trickster and settled for the role of a fool. Evil was too much for him
to balance. As a fool ... he was a brilliant success," talking hilarious
nonsense to get his case dismissed in court, to weasel money out of his
social worker, and so on (1978: 54). There is the "conference savage," or
"nomadic committee bear," who never washes or changes his clothes, goes
to all the conferences, and sleeps with white women as a kind of "foul bear
racism test." And there is the story of the cripple who sells his wooden
leg for a drink (the leg has a label on it to be mailed back), for which
the white moral is "stop drinking," but the tribal moral is to find free
booze with a wooden leg. No wonder there is thus also "Custer on the Slipstream,"
a Bureau of Indian Affairs employee and reincarnation of Custer, who suffers
his own nightmares of humiliation at the hands of the Indians, and so spends
all his time in his padded chair. Darknes in St. Louis Bearheart,
which gets a preview in Wordarrows, is an absurdist comedy set after
the collapse of American civilization, after oil runs out and the government
takes back the trees on the reservations for fuel, forcing a pilgrimage
of the Indians from their sacred forest lands, led by Proude Cedarfair (clowns
and tricksters). Along the way they meet and overcome a series of enemies,
such as Sir Cecil Staples, the monarch of unleaded gasoline, who wagers
five gallons worth of gas against the bettor's life; the fast-food fascists,
who hang witches from the rafters to season before cutting them up for take-out
orders; and the government regional word hospitals, modelled on the BIA,
set up on the theory of Congress that social problems and crime are caused
by language, words, grammar, and conversations. (Sir Cecil Staples's mother
had been sterilized by the government for having illegitimate children while
on welfare; so she became a truck driver and took to kidnapping children
from shopping malls, raising them in her truck, and when they were grown,
setting them out at rest-stops.)
James Welch (of Blackfeet and Gros Ventre parentage) uses a grimmer sort
of ironic comedy. His novel Winter in the Blood is about a Blackfeet
man whose emotions become frozen (shadowy inversions of Michael Arlen's
eighteenth-century Armenian merchant) in an inverted Western: the cowboy
here is the Indian whose horse is out of control and who watches helplessly
as a death occurs (the tableau happens twice, framing the text). Welch also
writes poetry. With sensitive irony, in "Arizona Highways" Welch writes
of love for a Navajo girl: he feels cut off from his ethnic (general Indian)
roots by his education and craft as a poet; he feels white ("a little pale"),
flabby ("belly soft as hers"), and overdressed ("my shoes too clean"). Instead
of being an inappropriate lover, he tries to be a spiritual guide, but feels
himself instead a malevolent ghost. Such irony can be searing, as in "Harlem
Montana: just of the Reservation":
We need no runners here. Booze is law ...
When you die, if you die, you will remember
the three young bucks who shot the grocery up,
locked themselves in and cried for days, we're rich
help us, oh God, we're rich.
Several meanings coalesce here, as Michael Castro points out (1983: 165):
the image of desperation in poverty, the despair of having locked themselves
in from both white and Indian worlds, unable to use the riches of either.
The imagery of the inability to discover and express one's identity, of
being adrift and lost between worlds, recurs:
In stunted light, Bear Child tells a story
to the mirror. He acts his name out,
creeks muscling gorges fill his glass
with gumbo. The bear crawls on all fours
and barks like a dog. Slithering snake-wise
he balances a nickel on his nose. The effect
a snake in heat. ("D-Y-BAR")
Castro again: Bear Child cannot find himself, let alone the traditional
wisdom and power of his bear namesake and totem; his attempts at recovery
through acting out his name are but a pathetic charade, and Welch leaves
him at the bar, "head down, the dormant bear."
These images of pain are cautions against the trivializing, superficial
romanticism with which many whites attempt to appropriate Indian consciousness.
"Many Indian writers perceived [Gary] Snyder's acclaimed book [Turtle
Island] as part of a new cavalry charge into their territory by wild-eyed
neo-romantics seeking to possess not merely their land, as had the invaders
of the previous century, but their very spirit" (Castro 1983: 159). Thus
Silko:
Ironically, as white poets attempt to cast off their Anglo-American values,
their Anglo-American origins, they violate a fundamental belief field by
the tribal people they desire to emulate: they deny their history, their
very origins. The writing of imitation "Indian" poems then, is pathetic
evidence that in more than two hundred years, Anglo-Aniericans have failed
to create a satisfactory identity for themselves. (Quoted in Castro 1983:
213)
Again, commenting on Maurice Kenny's (a Mohawk) refusal to play 16 savior
and warrior, priest and poet ... savage and prophet, angel of death and
apostle of truth," Castro says (169):
Kenny comically reminds us of how the eagerness of spiritually starved whites
to romanticize the Native American denies the Indian's contemporary reality
and humanity, at the same time obfuscating the fact that what America has
become is now our common problem:
Again I spoke of hunger:
A "Big Mac" would do, instant coffee
plastic pizza, anything but holy water.
Irony and humor are tactics that ethnographers have only slowly come to
appreciate, albeit recently with increasing interest. A number of analyses
now exist of previously unnoticed or misunderstood ironies (either intended
or unintentionally revealing) in past ethnographic writing-see Crapanzano
in this volume, James Boon 1972) on Uvi-Strauss, Don Handelman (1979) on
Bateson. Increasingly attention is being paid to the uses of laughter among
ethnographic subjects (Bakhtin 1965, Karp 1985, Fischer 1984). Ethnographers
are pointing out the rhetorical devices they employ (Marcus and Fischer
1986). Considerable potential still exists, however, to construct texts
utilizing humor and other devices that draw attention to their own limitations
and degree of accuracy, and that do so with aesthetic elegance, and are
pleasurable to read, rather than with pedantic laboredness. The stylist
closest to such an ambition in anthropology is, perhaps, Levi-Strauss (and
in literary criticism, Jacques Derrida). This, I recognize, is a personal
judgment, and neither Uvi-Strauss nor Derrida are unproblematic. They are
less models to emulate than examples on which to build in more accessible,
replicable ways. For the time being, pedantic laboredness is also difficult
to avoid, because editors and readers still need to be educated to understand
such texts. Subtlety is a quality that seems often (but not necessarily)
to run counter to the canons of explicitness and univocal meaning expected
in scientific writing. But, as Stephen Tyler has eloquently pointed out,
the demand for univocal meaning is often self-defeating (Tyler 1978).
III. Re-Collections and Introductions
Postmodern knowledge ... refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces
our ability to tolerate the incommensurable.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, ThePostmodern Condition
Ethnicity is merely one domain, or one exemplar, of a more general pattern
of cultural dynamics in the late twentieth century. Ethnic autobiographical
writing parallels, mirrors, and exemplifies contemporary theories of textuality,
of knowledge, and of culture. Both forms of writing suggest powerful modes
of cultural criticism. They are post-modern in their deployment of a series
of techniques: bifocality or reciprocity of perspectives, juxtapositioning
of multiple realities, intertextuality and inter-referentiality, and comparison
through families of resemblance. Insofar as the present age is one of increasing
potentialities for dialogue, as well as conflict, among cultures, lessons
for writing ethnography may be taken from writers both on ethnicity and
on textuality, knowledge, and culture.
Ethnicity. Substantively what have we learned? First, that the different
ethnicities constitute a family of resemblances: similar, not identical;
each enriching because of its inter-references, not reducible to mechanical
functions of solidarity, mutual aid, political mobilization, or socialization.
It is the inter-references, the interweaving of cultural threads from different
arenas, that give ethnicity its phoenixlike capacities for reinvigoration
and reinspiration. To kill this play between cultures, between realities,
is to kill a reservoir that sustains and renews humane attitudes.
In the modern, technological, secular world, ethnicity has become ¥ puzzling
quest to those afflicted by it. But rather than establishing a sense of
exclusivity or separation, resolutions of contemporary ethnicity tend toward
a pluralistic universalism, a textured sense of being American. (We are
all ethnics, in one sense', perhaps; but only some feel ethnicity as a compelling
force, (29) only some have an ear for the music of its revelations.) Not
only is the individualism of ethnic searches-posing the struggles of self-definition
as idiosyncratichumanistically tempered by the recognition that parallel
processes affect individuals across the cultural spectrum, but the tolerance
and pluralism of American society should be reinforced by this recognition.
The recreation of ethnicity in each generation, accomplished through dream-
and transferencelike processes, as much as through cognitive language, leads
to efforts to recover, fill in, act out, unravel, and reveal. Though the
compulsions, repressions, and searches are individual, the resolution (finding
peace, strength, purpose, vision) is a revelation of cultural artifice.
Not only does this revelation help delegitimize and place in perspective
the hegemonic power of repressive political or majority discourses, it sensitizes
us to important wider cultural dynamics in the post-religious, post-immigrant,
technological and secular societies of the late twentieth century. In these
societies processes of immigration and cultural interaction have not slowed;
quite the contrary. There is increasingly a diversity of cultural tapestry
that is not-as many have assumed-being homogenized into blandness. The great
challenge is whether this richness can be turned into a resource for intellectual
and cultural reinvigoration.
The possibility always exists that the exploration of elements of tradition
will remain superficial, merely transitional to disappearance. In the first
generation of immigration, problems are communal and family-related; in
later ones vestiges remain at the personal level, and they, too, will disappear.
This is the traditional sociological stance: the Yiddish theater is replaced
by assimilated Jewish writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Saul
Bellow, and they, too, will pass. There is, however, another, more exciting
possibility-that there are cultural resources in traditions that can be
recovered and reworked into enriching tools for the present, as Arshile
Gorky deploys his mother through his painting. It is, suggests Robert Alter
(1982), not Roth, Malamud, and Bellow who define a Jewish renaissance in
America indeed, they are totally encapsulated in immigrant adjustments-but
rather, the establishment of a new serious, post-orthodox, Jewish scholarship
by such writers as linguists Uriel and Max Weinreich, historians Jacob Neusner
and Gershom Scholem, philosophers Hannah Arendt and Emanuel Levinas, and
literary critics Harold Bloom and Robert Alter himself, all resolutely modern,
yet able to involve the past in a dialogue generating new perspectives for
the present and future. (30) Or more generously, as Murray Baumgarten suggests
(1982), what is enduring about Malamud, Roth, Bellow, Singer, and Henry
Roth is the interference between Yiddish and English that the texture
and idiom of their English preserves, reworks, and gifts back with new richness
to English; and the inter-references to dual or multiple cultural
traditions. Jewish ethnicity and other ethnicities have always grown in
an interlinguistic context. The future of Jewish writing may depend upon
the creation of a renewed inter-referential style: Cynthia Ozick (1983)
would do it through the recreation in English of a liturgical and midrashic
voice; Shmuel Agnon and Jorge Luis Borges do it through a mirroring play
in which ancient narratives are placed in modern settings with resolutions
echoing ancient texts. One of the most important of contemporary Jewish
projects in ethnicity is Jewish feminism, particularly by those who feel
themselves orthodox (e.g., Greenberg 198 1; Heschel 1983; Prell-Foldes 1978).
For here is a context, par excellence, demanding hiddush (creative interpretation),
informed knowledge of the texts and traditions of the past so rich that
new possibilities may be discovered.
Writing Tactics. Contemporary ethnic autobiographies partake of the
mood of meta-discourse, of drawing attention to their own linguistic and
fictive nature, of using the narrator as an inscribed figure within the
text whose manipulation calls attention to authority structures, of encouraging
the reader to self-consciously participate in the production of meaning.
This is quite different from previous autobiographical conventions. There
were once times and cultural formations when there was little self-reflection,
little expression of interiority, and autobiography served as a moral didactic
form in which the sub . ect/narrator was little more than a sum of conventions,
useful today primarily for exploring the logic and grounding of those moralities
(Fischer 1982, 1983). Romantic poetics made the author/narrator and his
or her interiority central: knowledge itself was thought inseparable from
the cultivation of individual minds. Realism again de-emphasized the individual,
elevating social and historical references, making the individual the locus
of social process: this is the moment of the classic immigrant-assimilation
story of struggle between marginal individual and on the one side family/community
and on the other side noncommunal society. The characteristic of contemporary
writing of encouraging participation of the reader in the production of
meaning-often drawing on parodic imitation of rationalistic convention (Kingston,
Mingus, Vizenor), or using fragments or incompleteness to force the reader
to make the connections (Kingston, Cisneros, Momaday)-is not merely descriptive
of how ethnicity is experienced, but move importantly is an ethical device
attempting to activate in the reader a desire for communitas with others,
while preserving rather than effacing differences.
Ethnography as Cultural Critique. Rather than repeat the ethnographic
codas to each of the five writing tactics discussed in part II of this paper,
which conceptually belong here,(31) it is best to end with a challenge,
a call for a renewed beginning. Not much ethnography yet exists that fulfills
the anthropological promise of a fully bifocal cultural criticism. Or rather,
what exists was drafted with less sophisticated audiences in mind than exist
today on all the continents of our common earth.
Cultural criticism that operates dialectically among possible cultural and
ethnic identifications is one important direction in which the -current
ferment about ethnography seems to lead. If this is true, then finding a
context for ethnographic projects in the provocative literature on modern
ethnicity can only enhance their critical potential.
NOTE: My use of "post-modern" in this essay follows that of Jean-Francois
Lyotard (1979): it is that moment of modernism that defines itself against
an immediate past ("post") and that is skeptically inquisitive about all
grounds of authority, assumption, or convention ("modernism"). Lyotard's
definition allows for cycles of modernism that decay and renew, as well
as drawing attention to the various techniques for questioning and deorienting/reorienting-techniques
ranging from surrealism in the arts to developments in the natural sciences
(fractals, catastrophe theory, pragmatic paradoxes, undecidables). Alternative
definitions of post-modernism as either an unlabeled aftermath of early
twentieth-century modernisms Ð or, as Fredric Jameson would have it, a retreat
from politically charged modernism back into bourgeois complacency Ð empty
the term of any substantive meaning and (in Jameson's case) assert unsubstantiated
negative political evaluations. An allied usage of post-modern to that employed
here, and to which I am also indebted, is that of Stephen Tyler (see this
volume).
1. For reasons of space, this second phenomenon will have to remain an undersong,
only alluded to periodically. "Occulted" is a key term from Stephen Tyler's
essay in this volume, an essay with which the present paper is intended
to resonate. "Deferred" invokes Jacques Derrida's efforts to show how metaphors
depend on and create new displacements from meanings in other texts, how
no text exists in and of itself. "Hidden" refers to Walter Benjamin's attempts
at "revelation" or recovery of meanings sedi mented in layers of language.
Others who have become theoreticians of interest for the present mood include
Harold Bloom (like Derrida, concerned with intertextuality in his terms,
"the anxiety of influence"); Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan (as semioticians
interested in the dynamics of what Freud called "the soul," locating what
is repressed, implicit, mediated, or what Tyler calls the "unsaid"); Wilhelm
Dilthey, Clifford Geertz, and Victor Turner (as exploring constructivist
understandings of symbolic meaning, in Geertz's phrase "models of and models
for"); Hans-Georg Gadamer (for his articulation of meaning elicited through
the juxtaposition of historical horizons and cultural traditions); Friedrich
Nietzsche and Michel Foucault (for their inquiries into the hegemonic power
of language); Max and Uriel Weinreich and Michel Serres (for their concerns
with inter-reference and interlinguistics). It is no coincidence that the
interest in these authors-renewed interest in the case of Freud, Nietzsche,
and Berjamin - (a reaction against the New Criticism of the 1960s in literature,
and against Parsonianism in anthropology) appears contemporaneously with
the florescence of ethnic autobiography. There is a commonality of inquiry
characteristic of the present moment.
2. On Freud's usage, see Bruno Bettleheim (1983).
3. On Pythagorean and Platonic notions of memory, see Jean-Pierre Vernant
(1965/1983).
4. Wilcomb E. Washburn, in Victor Turner, ed. 1982, 299.
5. This was the subject of a conference organized by M. C. Bateson at Coolfont,
West Virginia, in June 1984, under the auspices of the Intercultural Foundation,
with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution,
and the Georgetown University Center for Intercultural Studies.
6. The Talmud discusses the minutiae of temple worship, a form of worship
long gone by the time the Talmud was written. It thereby transformed what
once were rules of ritual into a tool for developing argumentation and dialectical
skills (Neusner 1981). So, too, Levi-Strauss has tried to collect myths,
many of which no longer function in their original contexts, and, by collating
them and suggesting procedures for interpreting them, has made them live
again as the subjects of intellectual discussion and intellectual growth
(see Handleman 1982). No one, for instance, will ever again be able to analyze
a single incident, symbolic figure, or single myth variant apart from other
variants and other relevant myths, or be able to ignore the notion of myth
as a kind of language with rules of syntax and meanings generated systematically
through contrastive differences of usage of incidents, characters, or symbols.
7. Feld's account moves from a textual analysis of a poem built around the
call of an abandoned child, to an analysis of the Kaluli typologies of birds
based on sounds, to a musical analysis of songs such as those used in the
Gisaro ritual, to the Kaluli rhetorical analysis of the ways words are made
poetic, and to an analysis of the Kaluli vocabulary and theory of music,
in which sonic structure is coded in metaphors of the movement of water.
Kaluli music, poetry, aesthetics, and epistemology in general are built
around sound, in striking contrast to Western epistemology, which privileges
vision (see also Tyler 1984).
8. See Plato's Phaedrus and the commentary on it by Jacques Derrida
in his Disseminations.
9. For instance, Amerindian writing draws on a long tradition of philosophical,
mythic, and simply humorous engagement with trickster figures. Black autobiographical
writing is also a long-established tradition. One can trace it back to the
slave narratives of Muslim West Africans (and others) brought to America,
and, more immediately in the modern period, black autobiographies contributed
to the core development of the post-World War II civil rights movement.
That movement is hard to conceive of with out thinking of Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man (1952), Claude Brown's Manchild In the Promised
Land (1965), Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969),
The Autobiography ofMalcolm X (with Alex Haley, 1973), Eldridge Cleaver's
Soul on Ice (1968). Chinese-American (like Mexican-American) writing
has generated class-linked differential reactions. Some Chinese-Americans
whose families did not experience the railroads, sweatshops, and Chinatowns
resent Kingston's books as giving further credence to stereotypes. Male
writers, such as Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan, have also criticized
Kingston for pandering to stereotypic exoticism, rather than creating alternative
visions (Kim 1982).
10. Compare William Saroyan carrying fragments of his father's writings
on scraps of paper, like seeds that inspire his imagination (Here Comes
There Goes You Know Who, p. 36).
11. Compare Saroyan's distorted anger at his father (ibid., p. 36).
12.. Compare Saroyan's comic version, as Bedrosian (1982: 287) aptly characterizes
it: "Homeless except for each other, forced to create an entire heritage
through a chance meeting, demonstrating through their boyant, child-like
spirits that life is comic after all, [and adding further historical-epic
depth] these Armenians remind us of the irrepressible and wacky daredevils
of Sassoon."
13. "What [is] one to make of such a story? I use the word 'make' in the
sense of 'to fashion'; or . . . 'to re-create"' (p. 177).
14. Michael Arlen the writer, his father the writer; the father as the immigrant
toAmerica, the guide in Soviet Armenia, the eighteenth-century Erzurum merchant;
the Armenian heritage in general.
15. See for instance the two lovely poems by David Kherdian about an old
man ("Dedeh Dedeh") and an old woman ("Sparrow"), each representing the
Armenian past, reproduced in Bedrosian (1982).
16. See the opening passages of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
17. "Muhammad and Dawia" in V. Crapanzano and V. Garrison, eds. (1977).
18. On the Nishan Shaman, see Stephen Durant (1979). in the Manchu story,
the resolution between the statuses of (a) the powerful female shaman who
teases and taunts the wealthy and powerful and (b) the widowed daughter-in-law
(urun, "work woman") is to take the shaman's implements away, making
her again merely an urun. This, as Kingston's version shows, is hardly a
necessary resolution.
19. "The Disenchantment of the World," in Algeria 1960 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, (1979).
20. Recent examples of such "polyphony" are Birds of My Kalam Country
by Ian Majnep and Ralph Bulmer (1977), and Piman Shamanism by Donald
M. Bahr, Juan Gregorio, David I. Lopez, and Albert Alvarez (1974).
21. See the discussion of N. Scott Momaday below, or in anthropology see
Richard Price's First-Time (1983) in which oral accounts are juxtaposed
to archival ones; or Renato Rosaldo's longot Headhunting (1880) which
pursues a similar goal more discursively.
22. The name of the album that in 1962 he said was his best.
23. L'Interfirence (1972:157), cited by Baumgarten (1982:154), who
develops the notion himself with reference to Jewish-American writing, especially
Yiddishinfluenced writing, but not limited to that set of inter-references.
24. See Greil Marcus's chapter on Sly Stone in his Mystery Train
(1975).
25. Feminism, Zamora says, ignores race. The Chicana's relation to Chicano
men she says is different from that of feminists with their men, owing among
other reasons to the loss of Chicano men to white women. She sees a parallel
problem for black women. (See interview in Bruce-Nova 1980: 214.)
26. See again here note 21 above.
27. Hayden White, from whom this characterization is adapted, has described
the efforts of nineteenth-century historiography and social theory to overcome
the irony of the Enlightenment-by rhetorical strategies of romance, tragedy,
and comedy-only to end in an even more sophisticated and thorough irony
(White 1973). For the present century, see Marcus and Fischer (1986), Lyotar
(1979), and the recent essays of Tyler, including the one in this volume.
28. From the introduction to Vizenor's Wordarrows.
29. See George Lipsitzs "The Meaning of Memory: Class, Family, and Ethnicity
in Early Network Television" (forthcoming) for an analysis of mechanisms
operating im perfectly and ultimately unsuccessfully to homogenize, coopt
and suppress interest in ethnicity.
30. Eric Gould makes a similar point in contrasting the work of Edmond Jabo
with the Jewish ethnic novels of mid-century America (Gould, ed. 1985: xvi).
31. The idea of the paper was that the sections of part II should be staged
"to speak for themselves." Because the first draft did not achieve this
goal in a way readers found illuminating, the second draft (printed here)
has reverted to a more traditional authorial guiding voice. A third, future
version, when both author and readers have become more expert, would again
remove the intrusive interpretations to this place of re-collection and
reconsideration-by reader and author-as to how to do it better.
The ideas for this paper were first developed in a course at Rice University
on American Culture, and I am indebted to the student participants. For
stimulating discussions I would like to thank members of the Rice Circle
for Anthropology (in 1982-84 comprised of George Marcus, Stephen Tyler,
Tulio Maranhao, Julie Taylor, Ivan Karp, Lane Kaufmann, Gene Holland, myself,
and occasional others), as well as the participants in the seminar "The
Making of Ethnographic Texts," particularly Renato Rosaldo, who led the
discussion of the first draft of this paper, and James Clifford, who made
helpful suggestions at a later stage.
This paper is dedicated to the memory of my father, Eric Fischer, who read
from it at his last seder table (while it was being delivered in Santa Fe)
and who died as it was being polished a year laterjust before Shavuot. His
own first and last English-language books- The Passing of the European Age
(Cambridge, Mass., 1943) and Minorities and Minority Problerns (Takoma Park,
Md., 1980) - are very much concerned with similar issues.
The ideas for this paper were first developed in a course at Rice University
on American Culture, and I am indebted to the student participants. For
stimulating discussions I would like to thank members of the Rice Circle
for Anthropology (in 1982-84 comprised of George Marcus, Stephen Tyler,
Tulio Maranhao, Julie Taylor, Ivan Karp, Lane Kaufmann, Gene Holland, myself,
and occasional others), as well as the participants in the seminar "The
Making of Ethnographic Texts," particularly Renato Rosaldo, who led the
discussion of the first draft of this paper, and James Clifford, who made
helpful suggestions at a later stage.
This paper is dedicated to the memory of my father, Eric Fischer, who read
from it at his last seder table (while it was being delivered in Santa Fe)
and who died as it was being polished a year laterjust before Shavuot. His
own first and last English-language books- The Passing of the European
Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1943) and Minorities and Minority Problems
(Takoma Park, Md., 1980) - are very much concerned with similar issues.