Writing the "American" Self

The chicano people are a people who were uncertain of their identity as a people and culture until relatively recently in their history.  The mestizo, or mixture of blood created their race, and it is through examining this history of her people that we see Gloria Anzaldua create her Autobiographical “I” as she tells her story and the story of her people.

Mrs. Anzaldua is a chicana- a woman of both Indian and Spanish heritage who is a Mexican-American.  She lives close to the “border” between the two countries.  She immediately challenges this concept, stating that the sexual, social, and psychological borders are far more important and have more effect on her people.

She creates her own “I” in the mind of the reader by challenging the reader with new information about her people.  She doesn’t dote on her Caucasian readers by keeping the text 100% English.  She doesn’t baby them with familiar stereotypes about the Mexican people.  Instead, she challenges them by retelling the American story of the Alamo as the last stand of some treacherous cowards invading Mestizo soil.  She turns the illegal alien controversy on its head by declaring that Chicanos do not invade the border, the border has invaded them.  She uses historical references to back up her point that California down to Texas was historically a part of Mexico until it was usurped by the Caucasian government of the United States.

She brings a contemporary focus to who she is as a person by discussing the harsh life waiting for immigrants in the US, as well as the economic shackles placed upon her people in Mexico in the form of US owned maquilladoras.  These sweat shops underpay their millions of workers, forcing many of them to illegally cross the US border in an attempt to feed their family.

This essay shatters stereotypes and tells gives us a clearer definition of who the author is, and who her people are.  She uses history as a tool to create her own “Autobiographical I.”

My first reaction after reading James Baldwin and Gloria Anzaldua back to back was to seriously question Professor Vander Zee’s motives for having us read these two stories together.  Baldwin’s autobiography is written from the perspective of a black man living in Harlem at the beginning of the twentieth century, while Anzaldua’s text is written from the perspective of a female Chicano (a mexican / american / native indian) writing about her life in the southwest in the mid to late twentieth century.  At first glance, it seems difficult to draw the connections.  However, while they are discussing two very different microcosms, Anzaldua and Baldwin meet in the macrosphere of autobiography through the way they discuss their intersectional identities and their struggles as artists experimenting in a field of tradition.

Both of Anzaldua and Baldwin are dealing with borderlands, struggles with bicultural and even multicultural identities and this connects these two writes, as  Anzaldua notes in her introduction how “the psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands, and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest” (2).  Both of these writers seem to feel the stress of being stuck between different identities, black and white, mexican and american, and are trying to find their self in the midst of their seemingly fragmented selves.  Baldwin describes himself as a “a bastard of the west” (6), which is made even more interesting by the fact that he mostly talks about his father in the exert we read for class.  Anzaldua describes herself as a “border woman” who grew up between two cultures (2).  While their experiences are different, they both feel alienated from the “normal” American white society and their own ethnic society.  This seems to leave them suspended in a kind of existential crisis.  Where they seem to find their true identity, their sense of being and belonging, is as writers, as artists.  Anzaldua states, “living in a state of psychic unrest, in a borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create” (95).  Similarly Baldwin discusses the copious amounts of terrible African American literature and how he struggles to be defined as an African American writer or to associate more with his love of Faulkner or Shakespeare.  Baldwin states, “This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of ife that order which is art” (7), and the disorder in these writers’ lives is what fuels their writing.  While they may express intersectional identities, I feel as if they come to terms with the fact that this is not a negative thing or at least are trying to convince the reader that this is not a bad thing.  So in the end, I thank this class for letting me be able to draw connections between what appears to be two very different writers.

When I was seven, (it’s always seven when I recount any story from my childhood and I wonder why that is) I got lost in the woods between my grandmother’s house and the beach attached to Cold Spring Harbor. One moment, I was pushing past thick, waxy green leaves and jumping over the bends in the thin tree trunks and suddenly, all I could see were trees for miles in every direction. I tried to work my way back to her house, sniffing around for a whiff of her old dog or the steaks she was making for dinner, but it was hopeless and the sky was getting darker. I walked until I reached a clearing with a large oak tree in the middle with a tree house in its branches. I climbed the ladder made of slats of wood and entered the establishment through a small portal in the floor. The inside was covered in spider webs and the only thing other than me in it was a broken old chair. I laid down on the floor and fell asleep.

I don’t remember who found me or when they found me. I don’t remember anything else and now I wonder if it was a dream. But I do know that I hadn’t thought about that day since this past fall over fall break when I went to visit my perpetually unstable rock of a life love, Matt, in Atlanta, Georgia where he attends school. I got there, with my blood rushing, on the verge of crying the second I saw him. Our reunions always warrant this exact reaction from me. My heart feels heavy and my head feels light and he always puts his arms out knowing that I’m ready to sleep in them after months of their vacancy. I had been there for only three hours when he asked me if I wanted to eat mushrooms the following day. I had thought about it before and it had appealed to me as a one time experience, but had decidedly turned it down several times when it had been offered. But there was something engaging about the prospect this time, and I hope that it is deemed appropriate for me to discuss the experience on a class blog in the spirit of nature writing, experimentation, and introspection. I had researched the drug extensively before and continued to research it for the rest of night. By the next morning, I told Matt that I would do it with him.

It was ten a.m. and we had already ingested the dry, stringy fungi between handfuls of Cheerios, washing the bits down with Powerade, trying to mask the taste. We lay in Lullwater Park, holding hands, looking at the trees, and asking each other, “Do you feel it, baby?” At first, I didn’t. And then suddenly, the tree above me stretched its limbs as if waking and I uncontrollably, with every emotion inside of me, began the slowest, most quiet, sob I had ever produced. It was unbelievably beautiful and scary at the same time and I desperately wanted to be wrapped in its limbs. He asked me why I was crying and I couldn’t speak. The emotion was overwhelming. When the crying was over, the effects were in full force and we traveled to the woods paths that twisted throughout the park, venturing to the denser area of the woods to smell what different flowers smelled like and so that I could put my bare feet on a tree that had fallen over. As we were exploring, we came across an old tower that shot out of the canopy of the trees, and was covered in vines and graffiti. He asked if I wanted to go inside and I burst into tears yet again. The tower represented everything that had ever hurt me or scared me. It was looming and dripping with wetness from the vines. I stood outside of it for fifteen minutes, staring at the adjacent river, when suddenly I realized I could conquer it. It wasn’t scary. It was somewhere where we could rest; somewhere that could protect us from how lost we were in the park. My memory expanded and I remembered the treehouse and how I hadn’t been scared to sleep in it. I went up to the tower and saw Matt standing in it, with light from the open roof pouring onto him, illuminating everything I have ever loved about him and everything I have despised. He was the sixteen year old I fell in love with and the twenty year old who sometimes abandons me between these emotional visits. I am the fool who loves a fool; I’ll never deny it.

When we got back to his house, I searched furiously for paper and a pen, needing desperately to write down something, anything, about the nature I had just experienced and was continuing to experience as the trip began to ease me back into normalcy. What I wrote, I have posted at the bottom of this entry.

My parents didn’t raise us with religion in the house, but they raised us with faith in each other and in nature, rather than in a God or a church or temple. To this day, I feel most connected to myself when I am with the people I love, mostly my family, and in nature, and therefore, my Lullwater Park experience was my salvation. I am not condoning drugs here, I am condoning the experiences that remind us of our faith, whether it be religious or not. Since the experience, I try to spend most of my time outdoors. It clears my head and more importantly, it reminds me of those that I love and the place where I feel the most safe, lost in the woods with a good place to sleep, cradled by the idea of those who love me unconditionally.

A Record of Life

Down by a pluff mud covered

river bank, memory is sitting

only survived by time once it’s gone.

Carol Ann said the loneliest feeling is being in love.

I believe it is standing on the white asphalt

in white light, even dust falling- uncatchable.

Looking at green growing in a hazel iris,

looking at you, looking     past     you.

Wave your hand once to show

we are really here, love.

We made it.

We are one thing-

here, in a bed, breathing.

And now I’m remembering grammar is

just another social construct.

Like everything but time, which is,

as always,

a sidewalk we walk on.

“Don’t ever die,” Frazier said to his father one year when he was eight.  Frazier had heard it on an episode of the Wonder Years when Fred Savage told his father never to die.  Frazier liked that line, he liked what it stood for, not that the father would stay alive forever but that the father would always be alive to Frazier.  At least that’s how Frazier took it.

Frazier said this to his Father.  Standing in their old living room, Georgia Yellow pine floors creaky under their feet, and looking out onto their old front lawn sectioned off from the road by decaying wooden planks with railroad spikes hammered through them.  “Don’t be silly,” the father responded.  “Everyone dies at some point, but don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.”  He said this to Frazier without looking at him.  The father stood there, hands in his khaki’s and looked out the window onto their lawn.

***

Frazier had a shark’s tooth once.  He got it from a field trip to somewhere in 2^nd grade.  When Frazier was younger, he’d stare at it.  It came in a plastic casing, the top of which was a magnifying glass of sorts.  He would look down at the tooth, examining its contours, the calcified gray and black and white patterns of it and wonder where it came from. Wonder what species of shark it belonged to.  Frazier would put it under the scrutiny of his eye, never once opening the case, never wanting to touch it, to feel it.  Never wanting to hold it and examine it more closely.  He looked at it through the filter, the safety of the plastic lens.  Frazier doesn’t have the shark’s tooth anymore.

***

In the breast pocket of a blue wool suit that Frazier has never seen, that’s where the shark’s tooth is.  In the breast pocket of a blue wool suit that he’s never seen and buried six feet beneath the surface in a plot of St. Augustine grass that’s shadowed by a Live Oak tree and surrounded by hundreds of replicated granite headstones that say the same thing but don’t.  “I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.”

Having long been disenchanted with the idea of working in the food industry, I opted out of city life to spend last summer at my mom’s country house in western North Carolina.  Don’t let the name fool you–this was no sprawling cottage with bi-weekly landscaping and a multi-million dollar property.  In fact, the place is more like a spruced up parsonage with more than a few leaks and stains in the ceilings.  Luckily, most of my time was spent away from home as it was.  My summer job was to act as an assistant trainer and exercise rider at a local barn training Tennessee Walkers.  Simple enough, I thought. 

Two weeks and a near heat stroke later, I came to appreciate the shade of the surrounding forest.  After most of my work was done, I’d take the opportunity to ride through the woods just when the cool air began to arrive.  I cannot imagine a more peaceful place than the solace a lone ride offers.  The birds remain quiet, and the only sounds are the steady steps of the horse underneath me as we trudge through wild, uncut grass.  The occasional snake slithers away from under our feet into the nearby bushes, but neither I nor my horse seem to notice.  Instead, we are concentrated on the road ahead, on the surrounding greenery (for different reasons, I assume), and of the overall feeling of complete and utter freedom.  There is no traffic, no cries of sirens as they blaze past the intersection on King street.  Only the steady rhythm of my favorite horse’s head as she nods a pattern to her pace. 

It is here and now that I am most content.  I feel small, like a fraction of what I must be–but it is all I need.  I have company.  I have time.  And I have peace.  Later on, I will cross a small river, overcrowded with stones smoothed by the current.  My horse will not hesitate, but plunge into the cool waters and drink deeply.  Meanwhile I will let my hair down and close my eyes to better feel the breeze that whips between the surrounding pines.  The woods smell like smoke–but always the good kind, like a summer bonfire.  And I will stay just long enough to think of nothing else until I am here again.

Cherished were the days when I could take this quiet walk.  They consumed me and filled me entirely with a peace and satisfaction that seemed to be missing in all other aspects of life.  The summer passed all too quickly, and the sounds of sirens are back outside my window.  But when I’m feeling stressed or overwhelmed, all I have to do is close my eyes and think back to those summer afternoons when I felt entirely whole.  And when I do, the rest of the world often seems to slip away like the wind over the weeds on those green, wooded trails.

My ears are freezing, snot is running down my face, I’m sore already, and I swear I just saw a rattlesnake or something in the bushes I just whizzed past. I owe this pleasant memory to my lovely father who took great joy in coercing his children to take these cruel and unusual bike rides to the boat ramp. Okay, so I exaggerate sometimes, the thing was like 2 miles from my house, not even, but it seemed an eternity and we lived on the Savannah River, and I don’t know if ya’ll are familiar with this alligator-and-snake-infested-Savannah-River-Power-Plant-radiation-dumping-into-I-swear-the-catfish-glow-and-have-three-eyes-and-shit River, but there’s a lot of wildlife in this area. Namely this one dog that loved me to take him on runs alongside my bike (aka he was chasing me, barking and nipping at my heels as I tried to pedal), mind you, my other two dogs were already running with us (nobody tied their dogs in our neighborhood), getting in my way, punking me with fake suicide attempts when cars drove by, but usually they were following my dad who was probably already there and didn’t really give a hoot that his nine year old daughter was really struggling to make this journey he so loved and I so abhorred. Oh yeah, and I was chubby so throw that into your mental picture too. Fat kid on a bike, pedaling my lard-ass in a thickly wooded area past possums, strange bugs going into my nose and eyes, father nowhere in sight, dogs acting a fool.

Once we finally reached the boat ramp, where normal people move their boats to and from the water, my dad would take me (and my brother when he was old enough to come on these fabulous excursions with us, yes, he made us do this for years) to this cemented area overlooking the water and make me do Surya Namaskar with him, or as many of you yoga-doers may know as “Sun Salutation”. “Aww, isn’t that nice”, some of you hippie weirdos may think, hell no it was not nice. The dogs would slobber all over me everytime I got into plank, mosquitoes biting me all over, I could hear strange animal sounds coming from the trees, and we looked like freaks doing downward facing dog as boats passed by. I remember all this so vividly now of our Boat Ramp trips.

Though I dreaded them at the time, I treasure these memories. I now value the lessons my father was trying to teach me: to spend time in nature, to learn to appreciate it, to exhaust the body and to clear the mind. I’m so thankful he made me go bike riding with him, day or night, rain or shine, even though I resisted (as well as many other outdoors-y activities and adventures, ya’ll have no idea, I could write a book). I think of these rides by the Savannah River everytime I do Sun Salutation in my yoga class, which I take by free-will by the way.

Bang spoons onto pots, half naked and siting at the kitchen counter while your baby sitter from Barbados cooks up grilled cheeses and sings country music’s top ten favorite hits. You will have heard her sing this one before, blasting from the radio beside her bed because sometimes you won’t sleep and the apartment will feel empty when they are gone. Don’t worry. She will let you curl up at the foot of her bed, half watching taped reruns of The Young and Restless. She will love you almost as much as a real mom. Imagine the singer, focus on the song. Now, dream.

Barney will forget to come to your fifth birthday party. The apartment will be decorated, entire class from preschool sitting around your living room and chanting. You will have no idea he double booked himself. You’ll simply cry to your father two hours later when all the kids leave and your left admist the barney posters, crumpled napkins and purple cake. You will cry and then mutter and cry out “Daddy, Barney abandoned ship.” He will fix it with very threatening messages on Barney’s cell phone. Barney and Babybop (his best gal pal) will pick you up from class the next day. They will meet all the kids and walk you from Chambers street through city hall, all the way to your red bricked building. Your parents will take pictures and kiss quietly when you are not looking.

You will go off to high school and hate it. And then to college and still sort of hate it. You will up and use the term jump ship. You will make grilled cheeses after every boyfriend leaves you. For breaks, you will go home and you will finally see parents but kissing other people and you’ll walk through City Hall Park to throw a penny in the fountain. You will dig out old photo albums to see which one of them you look like more. And you will wish for a full nights sleep and eventually take Ambian. You will even stop needing dreams.

I have to admit that I was much more of an outdoors person when I was child. With air conditioning and computers, I tend to veg inside more now. Yet, when I was a kid, I loved to play outside. Before my baby brother was born, playing in the yard by myself and with my imagination was one of the few options I had as an only child. I lived in a trailer until I was eight, and although the trailer wasn’t really special, the yard was. My mother, like my grandfather and great-grandmother, has a unique talent for growing and taking care of plants. Our walkway was bordered with fuchsia-colored azaleas, which bloomed every spring and despite the attraction of bees, the flowers made the yard pop with color. My mother also planted a magnolia tree in the spring of 1990. When I was a kid, I’d take the pit of the dying magnolia flowers and break it a part to explore the seeds and insides. After more than twenty years, that same magnolia tree is still thriving in the trailer park when you drive by—one of the tallest seen from the road.

At my grandparents’ house, they own six lots around their house (since they were the third family to move into their neighborhood forty years ago) and my green-thumb grandfather has filled most of the land with many varieties of flowers and trees. Visiting their house in the spring is like visiting a small-scale version of a national park—there are numerous bushes of multi-colored azaleas, honey-suckles, camellias, magnolias, roses, gardenias. My grandfather takes care of his lawn and his plants, and because of this, his property remains one of the prettiest in the neighborhood, unaffected by growing technology or concrete. Most of the plants at his house are now rooted at ours. The passion for nature is entrenched in the idea of life and growth; there is magic in digging your hands in fresh dirt and depositing a seed, hoping the roots will take.

Although I don’t have the same concentration of green-thumb passion, I am proud that I haven’t killed the peace lily I was given at the funeral of my best friend, Amber after she took her life. It’ll be two years next week that she’s been gone, but I honor her short-lived life with this lily. I water it every other day and make sure to open my blinds to let the sun in. Its rebirth and blooms gives me hope.

Whenever I go into the woods, or escape the borders of the city for that matter, I tend to pay much more attention to nature. During one of my freshman English classes at a small university in New Hampshire, my professor walked the students to a nearby pond to read Walden by Henry David Thoreau. In an attempt to instill some sort of natural reverence amongst his students, the professor instructed us to consider our surrounding as Thoreau might have done. As we read aloud, it wasn’t hard to become lost in the words, as they seemed to narrate and give life to the water, trees, and birds around us. Though this was a great experience, my linguistic skills lack the merit to remember my time there as prolifically as Thoreau, or perhaps I am unable to recall miniscule the details that he so eloquently expressed. Either way, it makes for an interesting analysis regarding Thoreau’s work in autobiographical terms.

Thoreau’s memory of detail is astounding: “For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle” (391).

Not only does Thoreau paint a vivid picture of the landscape and scenery that surrounded him, he brings them to life with metaphorical interpretations of his memory. I’ve looked through Smith and Watson’s Reading Autobiography and failed to find anything mentioning the use of metaphors in self-narratives. This may be a bit of a stretch, but I find that Thoreau’s metaphorical language constitutes for a category in autobiography. The images he paints with words highly depend on the comparisons to grandness in order to give his memory reassurance of the power that nature had on him in that moment. Thus, Thoreau’s memory becomes a metaphor to bring his memories to life, which would otherwise be mere descriptions of his surroundings.

Within his book, The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois begins every chapter with an excerpt of a song. These paratextual inclusions are particularly telling of Du Bois’ own experience and the tone which the respective chapter takes. Chapter 1, entitled “Our Spiritual Strivings” is one such example.

The poem Du Bois includes at the beginning of chapter one is Arthur Symons’ “The Crying of Water.” Chapter one serves as Du Bois’ thesis statement, so to speak. The Souls of Black Folk is Du Bois’ attempt to illuminate “the striving” in the souls of African Americans. The poem he includes at the beginning of the chapter is significant that it is the paratext to Du Bois’ introduction.

Within Symons’ poem, a wailing sea becomes metaphorical of the speaker’s heart. The speaker is “weary” and “wonder[s] and cries like the sea.” This aligns perfectly with Du Bois’ assertions that the African American race was in a time of “storm and stress.” Du Bois writes that the constant repression of his race has culminated as “inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings.” Like the narrator in Symons’ poem, Du Bois hears the wailing of his race and he cannot help but channel it.

Symons’ poem ends with the speaker concluding that he will spend “all life long crying without avail.” Sadly, this is the conclusion Du Bois flirts with. His introduction offers little hope for the African American condition and it certainly provides no concrete suggestions on how to navigate the divided identity of the African American. Instead, as Du Bois states, the work is a detailed documentation of the “spiritual striving” of a race the author believes has a burden “almost beyond the measure of their strength.” Yet, though Du Bois may not pose a solution and Symons’ poem would indicate that there may not be one, the continuous struggle is what Du Bois firmly believes in. He believes that although the burden may be great, it is not one which cannot be borne. Rather, the belief that one can continue to earnestly struggle for freedom is a sign of hope in and of itself.