During the fun-filled days of kindergarten, my homework-less afternoons were packed with a variety of activities. English classes, ballet classes, folklore classes, origami classes… everything that the private schools offered and my mother accepted on my behalf. Since I was an only child, she was always afraid that I would somehow be missing on things, lacking interaction with my peers and turning into an old soul. Not that being an old soul (or as we say in Macedonian: a child reared with grandmothers around) was something to be ashamed of, or even to be discouraged. I think that she just wanted me to have fun with kids my age, before having fun with my grandparents in the evenings.

Out of all the activities that I attended in those pre-school (and early primary school) days, the one that I enjoyed the least was ballet. I still get the chills as I visualize the gruesome point-shoes and tightly rounded hair in an unfashionable bun with a flowery twist. You see, I was a tomboy growing up, and would soon ditch the crepe satin for the basketball jersey. But, there was this boy in my class who loved it all, the smell of talc, the dressing room fret, the leaps, the music, the lights, and the parents’ applause. His name was Bojan and he made it seem all too difficult for the rest of us, the ungracious ones. He continued with the lessons and enrolled at the academy, graduating first in his class. I haven’t seen him lately, except on stage (yes, I do enjoy the ballet from a spectator’s position nowadays), but as I read between the lines of the exciting reviews he receives, he is not doing all too well, personally speaking. Why would someone as talented as he is be suffering from a severe case of melancholy? Well, for starters, he is a man in a woman’s profession without the feminine characteristics. Or as sturdy Macedonian men would say, “A guy who’s not gay and dances in tights, give me a break, can’t be true.” So what is someone like Bojan to do, being such an “oddball” in his community, which, in turn, would seem happier with his talents and his professional orientation if he simply matched their expectations for his sexuality? He said in one of his many interviews that he wanted to be remembered for his dancing, for he was first and foremost, a dancer.

I am constantly reminded of Bojan and his wish for professionalism from his audience and his neighbors, as I read Sherri Tucker’s essay, “When Subjects Don’t Come Out” . Even though her subjects are spatially and temporarily removed from the case of the Macedonian dancer, there is at least one important reference that applies to all of them. Tucker’s subjects, the women musicians in the all-woman big jazz and swing bands during World War II, and my childhood acquaintance, the dancer Bojan, insist on their identities as artists, as real musicians and as a legitimate dancer. Every other identity through which they realize their lives is not up for public debate. And once again, the reasons why they choose to do so (or better are forced to choose so by the dominant culture’s stand), is what keeps on baffling us as readers, as scholars, as friends.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Tucker’s essay on her coming to terms with her project’s goals and her subjects’ obstinacy in helping her accomplish those goals, mostly for its pulsating and vibrant style. Rarely do we come across (in academia) an article that is both valuable for its text and context. Instead of retreating to one’s shell after a rather unpredicted brush with one’s ego, Professor Tucker emerges as a virulent scholarly voice by asking the questions rather than supplying the expected answers. Her asking “What is revealed, when is it revealed, and why? When do silences fall, and what purposes do they serve?” is applicable to any present-day attempt at studying humanity, its make-up, its choices, its discourse.

How do we, then, study humanity in a segmented world, through the now distinctive categories of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, which stand to represent our furthering apart rather than coming together as one, one great world of plenty? Do we celebrate the differences or the universality of out traits? Do we allow for a comparative approach? Do we work within a specialized field, and from time to time compare notes with the other teams? Do we generalize based on a number of case studies? Do we allow for an interdisciplinary approach, and if we do, do we give the right of way to the social sciences? Do we question the categories themselves as they are being defined or reshaped by our findings? Do we allow for a fluidity of dialogue between them?

America has long been perceived by the outside world as a human “melting pot”, a place where different races, ethnic groups, are to experience a liberated life in a constant pursuit of private and communal happiness. However, the solidification of this myth has been challenged by a more recent image of America as “the salad bowl”, where the diverse races and ethnic groups do pursue a life of dreams, but are not always greeted with the same outcome, the desired dream, due to their “otherness”, in a community where such a difference is not celebrated or praised. Nonetheless, America does exhibit the demographics of a fairly rounded representation of the world’s races, ethnicities, classes (to an extent), gender and sexuality variants. And it provides the perfect battle-field ground for their redefinition and refiguration, especially when the categories of gender and sexuality are at hand.

Another essay, i.e., other two essays by historian Joan W. Scott, question the post-modernist conception of gender, as one of the more recently added categories of social discourse. In “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”, Scott takes us on a consciously bumpy ride through the panoramic viewing of gender as a latter-day social category, treating it as a way to examine the organization of the relationship between the sexes. She begins by looking closely at the approaches most historians use when dealing with gender, the descriptive and the casual approach. She also examines the various theoretical positions that historians elicit when working from one or the other mentioned approach within their studies. Needless to say, Scott is unsatisfied with the way her predecessors and some of her peers have been ‘working’ within and without this social category. She is mostly unsatisfied with the shortcomings of their methods, being either too expansive and all-encompassing or too rigid and limiting.

She offers a remedy, though, in the second part of her essay, outlining the main postulates she as a historian attributes to the social category of gender. Rejecting the fixed and stagnant quality of the man/woman binary opposition when treating gender in social terms, she goes on to define gender as “a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and … as a primary way of signifying relationships of power.” In reference to the two main parts of her definition, she provides the readers with a few subsets, namely specifying four interrelated elements, regarding the existing differences between the sexes. As far as the second part of her definition of gender goes, Scott maintains (by strong argumentation and a few examples) that the unique position of gender as a social category “provides a way to decode meaning and to understand the complex connections among various forms of human interaction.” All things considered, her rescripting of the way the category of gender is to be perceived by historians and to be used in their analyses of human interaction, bridges the gap between the American Marxist feminists and the Anglo-American school working within the terms of theories of object-relations, as well as the French school working within the terms of theories of language.

In the second essay by Scott, titled 'Experience', the gender category is viewed through one of it significant components, the subject of experience, i.e., Scott examines the way social historians can usefully implement the authority of experience when dealing with race, class, gender representations. She once again positions herself against her predecessors’ and her peers’ rendition of the role experience plays in historical analysis, to conclude that experience and language are not to be separated and looked at in isolation from one another. Since “subjects are constituted discursively, experience is a linguistic event (it doesn’t happen outside established meanings), but neither is it confined to affixed order of meaning.” As a linguist, I very much agree with her turn at examining the validity of a subject’s experience in connection to the subject’s “life in language”. Therefore, in order to understand and incorporate the everydayness of a subject’s life, a historian cannot go past the experience of that everydayness as imbedded in the language of that everydayness. For, “what counts as an experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, always therefore political.”

Bearing in mind Scott’s understanding of the link between the subject’s experience and the subject’s language, we may extrapolate the impetus behind George Chauncey’s attempt at shedding light on the gay male world in New York City between 1890 and 1940, and its remarkable impact on the establishing of the recent, almost “irreplaceable” dichotomy, homosexual/heterosexual, in contemporary culture. Chauncey sets out to question the old dogma that the gay male world was initially a middle-class phenomenon, something that only the middle class’s resources could conjure, or for that matter that it was solely a product of the elite medical journals. He does so by concentrating his case study’s focus on three distinct New York City’s neighborhoods, mostly populated by gay men, in the fifty years preceding the Second World War, before “the decline of the fairy and the rise of the closet.”

By reconstructing the topography of the gay meeting places, and examining the importance of that topography for the social milieu of the gay world and the homosexual relations in it, as well as tracing the boundaries of this world at a time when a large portion of its participants (homosexually active men, as defined in contemporary terms) would not identify themselves as “fairy” or “queer”, Chauncey manages to produce an ethnographic study of class and gender identities amidst a dominant culture’s parameters for their acquisition and construction, incorporating the power of language as a denominator and identity policing factor.

Unlike Chauncey’s thousands of nameless protagonists, the members of the Combahee River Collective forge their feminine and lesbian identities in print, without mediators, since present day circumstances allow for such an act of celebration and actualization. In their collective statement, they share with the readers the origins of their organization, their beliefs, together with the problems they face as a collective of Black feminists and lesbians, touching on their issues and current projects. I applaud the strength of their individual and collective identities as members of a distinct race, class, gender, and sexuality; however, in reference to their statement that once Black women were free, everyone else in the world would be also free, since theirs is the freedom that would “necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” , I would like to add that no matter how invigorating such a statement may be to the party claiming it, there is to consider a rather large population of Islamic women (disregarding the denominator of race or class) trapped in life without the prospects of freedom. I would say that once this population was free, we might make claims of a more colorful world for us all.

Last but not least, (pardon the conventionality of a closing paragraph), we have to consider Ann Schofield’s contribution to the understanding of American identity as it is viewed through the lenses of gender and sexuality. Establishing an essential simultaneity between the discourse of history and the discourse of fictional representation in the story of Lizzie Borden, Professor Schofield accounts for the impact of Lizzie Borden’s story on American culture (itself a two-part celebration of the fictional and the historical in this story’s discursiveness), points towards the complex nature of American identity as seen through the fictional representation of one “American myth”. Within Lizzie Borden’s fictional testimonials, Professor Schofield finds the quintessentially American theme and the un-American heroine, to an extent. According to Professor Schofield, the gendered nature of Lizzie as a subject for fictional re-telling of tragic romances and/or feminist quests makes her a useful analytic tool, even more so, because of the complexity and the contradictions that one such (gendered) nature brings forward to the discussion table. And I agree; it is the subject’s gendered (this should not only refer to the attributes of the female sex) nature that questions the foundations of the social categories of race, class, ethnicity, and recently sexuality. Whether this pattern of paradigm questioning and restructuring, now in vogue, within the interdisciplinary field of American Studies is going to continue in the following years, with the same energy flux as it is proposing now, depends largely on the state of affairs in the American way of life. The optimist in me would like to see this great country of good people surpass, in the near future, the age-old stale arguments of racial superiority, class advantages, biological determinism, and a hegemonic sexual regime. The realist in me hopes that the scholars in American Studies will continue to be on the forefront of American cultural identity, signifying its diversity, complexity, and unquestioning beauty, especially when balancing between the categories of gender and sexuality.

The first time I read Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, I was made to believe that the engaging singularity of the main protagonist, the boy Richard, was simply a good example of a skillfully crafted by-product of the author’s use of the Marxist parable paradigm. In that respect, the boy Richard and the author Richard Wright were two distinct (almost opposing) entities, the latter molding the physicality and the emotional text of the former through the skillfulness of his craft. I suppose that this rather limiting interpretation of a text whose body transcends the confines of the page suited the design of my high school’s literature curriculum, firmly positioned in the trenches of a socialist reading of western fiction as produced by its own social outcasts, dissidents or self-exiles, emigrants. However, after having myself immersed in Black Boy’s structural tapestry with all of its nooks and crannies, I could not freely juxtapose Wright’s text to Gorky’s spin-off of the ‘genuine’ Marxist parable, given as such in The Mother.

So when I entered university, I came to it anticipating a broader understanding of the literary values and aesthetics; my grandparents had promised that such revelations would indeed come. In my third year, I took a course on African American Literature that did help heal my initial dissatisfaction with the interpretation of Wright’s text. The instructor pointed out the obvious autobiographical nature of the novel, a sentiment that had escaped me before, yet he persisted on guiding our discussions towards a satisfying comparative literature ideal. As we read Black Boy for the second time (it seemed that most of us had a similar initial contact with the novel), we looked at its cryptic stance as a prerogative for the intended individual historiography of an alienated existentialist in modern society. Dostoyevsky and his Notes from Underground served as our ‘objective correlative(s)’.

Now, as I visit the text for the third time, with a new agenda in front of me, I am beginning to sense our (my classmates and mine) misguided analyses of Wright’s autobiographical text. Even though I still believe that this novelesque narrative allows us to position it next to Dostoyevsky’s Notes , while reading Black Boy for the third time, I realize that in order to carry out a comprehensive comparative study I must question what this autobiographical narrative stands for on its own. In other words, to come full circle, I have to begin by looking at the narrative from the perspective of a life-story and all that such a perspective ascertains.

To complicate things further, if we look at Wright’s age when he wrote Black Boy (he was approaching his fifth decade), and his choice for the story’s ending (Richard as a nineteen-year-old youth, moving from Tennessee to the North), what we are left with is a rather unusual attempt at employing ‘standard’ autobiographical techniques. Nonetheless, the conscious choices that Wright makes as he weaves in his life’s story bring us closer to his autobiographical self than we have come initially to expect.

Donald B. Gibson’s essay, titled ‘Richard Wright’s Black Boy and the Trauma of Autobiographical Birth’ attributes several of the text’s discrepancies, regarding the actual life of young Richard Wright (namely, his lack of boyhood friends as presented in the text, which was not the case in his real life), to Wright’s determination to create his early life as a product of incredulous will power and unbending individualism. This fierce commitment to the power of ‘one’ (exhibited by Richard, age four, six, eight) is seen by Gibson as an almost direct result of Wright’s relationship with his parents and, to an extent, with his maternal grandmother: ‘Falling to find the necessary support and sustaining function in adults or in a community, he had to rely upon himself – to cultivate those qualities in himself, to become self-reliant, a strong individualist. That is why in the book Wright differs from every other black person who appears in that world.’ (493) Therefore, Wright’s Richard is not to blame for the lingering sense of separateness between his and his community. He didn’t have a saying in the outcome; it came as a direct response to his parents’ failure to provide shelter, comfort, understanding and courage to his as a young man. Consequently, ‘Black Boy is at once an explanation and defense of Wright’s separateness from a black community and a strong protest against the plight of all the black boys and girls, men and women subjected in his words, to “ethics of living Jim Crow”.’ (494)

As Gibson singles out Richard’s presence from that of his parents, his brother, his grandmother, the other participants of his early and late childhood days, through the boy’s undeniable sense of self, set in opposition to the other selves, we are drawn to examine the narrative even closer. We can almost see the fire, sense the hunger, the fear of sexuality, the constant threat of violence, all of the actual and metaphorical associations of Richard’s existence, how they affirm his self-recognition and help acknowledge the absence of a warm, comforting motherly love. On that note, Albert E. Stone’s study, titled ‘The Childhood of the Artist: Louis Sullivan and Richard Wright’, considers young Richard’s resolving of his Oedipal complex as he discovers his artistic calling. Stone views the ‘freezing’ of Wright’s love for his mother as an ‘antithetical and necessary sequel to the fire previously felt for her.’ (138) ‘Hot’ is replaced by ‘cold’ in an almost matter-of-fact way. But the conventional explicitness, Stone argues, is needed to ‘complete the transformation of the deep fantasy at the core of Richard Wright’s life and identity into the manifest “meanings” of his life and career.’ (142)

These ‘manifest meanings’ of Wright’s penmanship are imbedded in Black Boy as in no other of his later works. They teach us about American injustice, bringing us to bear witness to a young adult’s struggle while forming his black subjectivity amidst a racist society. Abdul R. JanMohamed’s article, titled ‘Negating the Negation as a Form of Affirmation in Minority Discourse: The Construction of Richard Wright as a Subject’ explores Wright’s writing as a successful attempt to repel hegemonic formation by turning himself into a ‘mirror that reflected the negation back at the hegemony.’ (108) JanMohamed disassembles Wright’s text, in reference to the author’s personality and the socio-political circumstances of his formative and later years, to conclude that Black Boy stands as a triumph of ontogeny over phylogeny, its publication and literary success representing ‘an affirmation, a vindication of his strategy of negating the racist negation.’ (121)

All things considered, Black Boy exerts on the behalf of the reader a nuanced approach, one which takes us away from our comparative literary enclaves and into the interpolating layers of the text itself, literal and metaphorical, historical and imaginary, eponymous and symbolical, creating their own tapestry within the discourse of a single life-story. Only by recognizing the plurality of this text’s make-up may we further our sense of a comprehensive comparative literary knowledge and render it a truth-worthy cross-cultural representation.

Constructing a cultural identity is as easy as mastering the nuances of a foreign language while traveling to the country of its origin on an eight-hour flight. There are gifted individuals among us who may be able to carry out this task in less than eight hours. Fortunately or not, they are few in number. However, for most of us, nowadays, the process of constructing our cultural “selves” is the journey of a lifetime, struggling to position ourselves within a culture that is no longer (re)presented as monolithically uniform.

We constantly do battles with our cultural heritage (who we were before we were “we”, “I”) and our cultural repose (who “we” or “I” are now that we contribute to the “living out” of the cultural legacy), since for the most part these two notions are at odds with each other. In other words, we might be born into a certain ethnic group which, in turn, due to various social, political, religious circumstances may distinctly reshape and restructure its beliefs and customs, so that it strikes the outsider as non-existent in the first place. Therefore, when an individual decides to reaffirm his/her cultural identity against the background of strong ties to the indigenous culture which he/she was born into and the greater social milieu which he/she has assimilated to (as a result of education, religious conversion, power accessibility, etc.) the outcome may prove disheartening both to the individual and to his/her audience.

Often these palimpsestic attempts at coming to terms with “the individual” versus “the cultural” self are carried out in the arena of autobiography, a genre whose flexibility offers the author/protagonist the ability to assert himself/herself in front of a larger audience as he/she sees fit. Whether the audience will fully comprehend the “portrayed self” as the author/protagonist’s “true” self is not necessarily the principal claim behind an autobiographical work. When the personal becomes public through the act of writing it down, publishing it, or in the case of pre-literate autobiographies, when it becomes a part of the community’s oral narrative, an act of healing and/or an act of pain emerges. In the following paragraphs, I will try to examine Charles Alexander Eastman’s autobiography From Deep Woods to Civilization as both an act of healing and an act of pain.

Written and published in the first two decades of the twentieth century, this story of an Indian boy who rises to the position of a university educated doctor (Dartmouth College and Boston University), scholar, lecturer, lobbyist for Native American rights, government appointed official, differs both in its composition and intended audience from the pre-literate Native American autobiographies. Eastman’s unique life experience, beginning with his idyllic Indian boyhood and ending with his choice to retire in nature after having spent a socially-packed life under the influence of western Christian tradition, sets him apart from American Indian autobiographers in the early nineteenth century whose personal narratives may be closer to the six forms of American Indian pre-literate autobiographies. Nonetheless, From the Deep Woods to Civilization is a remarkable effort to verbalize a man’s life as he struggles to locate his personal and communal “self” while undergoing inevitable acculturation.

In his essay “Charles Eastman, Nicholas Black Elk, and Construction of Religious Identity” , Bradley J. Monsma reads Eastman’s autobiography as an attempt on the behalf of the author to use his personal identity/experience/life as a bridge between the two cultures in which he resides, the Sioux and the American. For Monsma, “Eastman’s personal identity becomes the model for his vision of tribal identity…as he was able to assimilate the white world, so should all other Native Americans.” In order to validate his attempt at creating a reliable cultural narrative, Monsma argues that “Eastman constructs his own self-image to mirror the values of the Anglo-Saxon American self-image.” Such an interpretation of Eastman’s portrayal of himself and his life experience stems from the influence of social Darwinism, quite a popular theory at the time, and throughout Eastman’s formative years. It also provides a convenient loophole for Eastman the lobbyist to support the Dawes Severalty Act that was designed to encourage Native Americans, by relinquishing the rights to their land, to take up farming and join the competitive individualism of American dominant culture. In essence, Eastman’s personal story is his culture’s act of healing, now that they are to understand the importance of adapting their tribal identity to modern white ways.

Although tempting to place Eastman’s personal narrative within the confining space of “bi-cultural composite authorship”, I would argue that there is more to this beautifully simplistic tale of hard-won victories. Eastman embraced Christianity as a key component of his assimilation to the dominant white culture, an ethic that often times seemed to be closer to the religious practices of his people than those of devout Christians. From the Deep Woods to Civilization bears witness to the events prior to the Wounded Knee Massacre and its subsequent repercussions on the Lakota Indians, along with detailed transcriptions of conversations between Eastman and a number of Native American chiefs while he was working as a Y.M.C.A official, (almost) in charge of Christian recruitment. All of these accounts point towards one undeniable fact – Eastman questions white man’s Christianity. In the final passages of his autobiography he examines the history of Christian cruelty and violence: “Why do we find so much evil and wickedness practiced by the nations composed of professedly “Christian” individuals? The pages of history are full of licensed murder and the plundering of weaker and less developed peopled, and obviously the world to-day has not outgrown this system. Behind the material and intellectual splendor of our civilization, primitive savagery and cruelty and lust hold sway, undiminished, and as it seems, unheeded.” (Italics added) In this respect, Eastman’s personal story is an act of pain, constructing and deconstructing one man’s struggle to come to terms with his newly embraced faith and the understanding of morality in the eyes of his people’s cultural heritage.

Perhaps all individual stories turned into cultural narratives, due to the presence of an audience (one’s self or one’s readers), heal through painful recollections of the individual, or at least attempt to provide a rationale so that the healing process may begin. Eastman’s American-Indian self has presumably healed through its commitment to civilization as the highest form of existence, and yet Eastman retrieved from modern life to the silences of the woods, similar to those of his Indian boyhood.

I have my grandmother’s hands – my mother likes to remind me of this every now and then.

Have they always been like this? – I ask. There is indeed a knobby sense of touch in her reach. Almost 80 years old; the touch, not my mother. Every time she mentions this claim of an idiosyncrasy I think of her grandmother, my great grandmother. I imagine that she’s always been around; only the wrinkles and the torn white skin came later. Now, that is.

I should tell you, before I begin telling you anything else, that I have no sense of vision. I inherited this from her, my mother. No practical spirit, either. Also her. And the hands. They seem alright for the present. I suppose it is my lucky draw. My brother has a bad breath.

Her presence was luminous, and yet she was the most silent person I have ever known – my mother continues with her ancestral diatribe. I usually unplug at this moment in the lengthy version of ‘how she came to have the knots for hands she has’, but today I decide to listen.

She tells me – Your great grandma was more than a quiet participant in the great noise that is our family. She rarely opened her mouth, and when her lips parted, all she seemed to muster was: “more coffee, anyone?”

Imagine a life stuck between refreshments and afternoon recess. And with my family. No wonder she chose silence.

It was an older kind of a world – my mom continues with the story – but I felt at home in it. I felt loved, wanted, needed. No one desires me here. She stops. I look up from the rackety newspaper and give her a cordial nod. It seems to work, at least for awhile; and yet, all I want to do is scream, from the top of my lungs – DESIRE? WANT? NEED? I have never felt any of these, not the real thing. No one desires me here – except maybe the pimpled faced boy across the street, but he certainly doesn’t count. I have always been taken for an unbearably quiet, unnerving child. Perhaps it is a result of my intolerance of light. And the constant blinking. I like to keep to myself. Yet somehow, whenever I think of the time my mother and I spent together, I think of that solitary figure, the great grandmother. I think of her solitude in the midst of all the family clutter. And I envy her, as much as I envy my mother, for her hands and her determination to tell stories, over and over again.

Do you want some tea? – I ask.

She responds. She accepts. She does my favorite thing – she smiles. If any, my mother has a beautiful smile – I’d love to my dear, and she sends me one of those – ‘I love you my pup’ kind of a smile. I nod and disappear into the kitchen.

I try to work the kettle but as always it is way too loud for my taste. It reminds me of an old Gestapo-like structure, the noise it accounts for, all the hissing sounds that come with the hot water. The odiousness of it, the irreproachability. I refuse to surrender to the sounds, and tip top around the kitchen space, hands gloved with mittens over ears, doing a quazi-Indian routine, to avoid the shrillness of the his.

Tea and crumpets in tow, I return to the room, to my mother, who has in the meantime occupied herself by reliving other patched-up past memories. I place the tray on the empty wooden table, right in front of her so that she doesn’t ask me to fetch her anything (I hate those short-hand orders), when she impels me to speak – Why do you hate me so much?

I thought I had dodged a bullet with the semi-official nod of approval when this comes along. It must be that time of the month – she picks the first two weeks to test my patience. My father died the first week of a rainy November and she uses his death date as the perfect calendar recall – to pester her children with the dullness of a suffocating love.

Of course I love you – I retort. I do not say it often enough, it might wear off – I add.

This last remark gets her going. She’s on fire – All I ask of you, and your brother, is to acknowledge my existence. Nothing more. I did not raise you with hatred. Your father, god rest his soul, loved you. I love you. But you seem to have forgotten that. I do not blame you. I wish I could forget. I wish I could, but I have not option. I’ve been blessed with the curse of long memory.

Mom – I say – I do love you, and I come whenever I can. You understand, right? (Indeed, I come twice a month. I, too, follow a schedule.)

This time, it is her silence which drives me insane. She can tell that I find it excruciating when other people play the quiet card. It is annoying, especially coming from someone who is all heart and light, like my mother. I count, silently. 1 minute. 2 minutes. 2 minutes 20 seconds. 21 seconds. A new record?

I refuse – and she speaks (she has not mustered the art yet) – to believe in long distances and broken promises. I did not raise negligent and forgetful children. – She even gives me one of those looks, you know the kind when an older person thinks that they have outsmarted you by beating you at your own game, while teaching you a valid life lesson.

This is her way – her way of letting me know that despite all, all my choices (moving away from home, living out of wedlock with a man twice my age who hates family reunions) and my imperfections (my vision and my stubborn ways), she loves me, like no one ever can love a stray cat. And all I can think of in those few moments before I find the strength to cross over the several (five) steps to the lounge chair she peoples and give her an excuse for a hug is ‘God, what if I turn up just like her in 50 years’ time?’

She reaches out. For the first time I notice how fragile her shoulders have turned, how barren her once voluptuous chest. Should I worry? Is it possible that I might lose her too? Now, when life is a mess, and my brother, with his disassociated self, only contributes further to a disastrous state of things. Quality of breath aside, he is the resident family pain, if there ever was one: a loud, insulting, lascivious bear-like bore. A bully that came out of this heart that winds down in front of me. No, I decide this scenario is not plausible. No, this fiery tongue-in-cheek lady cannot go. I will not let her.

I cannot believe that life could be so cruel to such an auspicious mind – she comes back full swing. She means me, I am the failed protégée. Apparently, when I was a kid, four or five, or six maybe, a local washed-up talent scout informed my parents of my MENSA potential. Yes, I did graduate from school, undergraduate at Brown, graduate at UofR. And I am afraid of living alone, dying alone and changing the indoor lights in my apartment’s hallway, alone. I work at the information desk at the local community college. I do not teach inspirational courses with inspirational titles. I do not write for Hallmark cards or a prime-time sitcom. I am unpublished, I have perished from the academic radar. No publishing house would touch my thesis – no interest in 17th century Japanese art prints; it has all been done before, I’ve been told. So I went quietly insane, and my vision followed. You might say I am my mother’s quiet disappointment.

I know Mom, I know I’ve let you down – I seem to agree. At this point, I’d better agree with her line of thought or I’d never be able to get out of Dodge. These visits drain me emotionally. It takes me almost two weeks to recover, and then time for another visit comes along.

It’s not you, my dear – she’s finally admitting it – it’s what it should have been. I used to think it was important to know the surface of things. I almost believed that you of all would be able to know it, the surface of things. And to contribute, to matter. To be in the world not just as one more body but as a mind that generations to follow would remember. I now see that I pushed you too hard, your fragile self was not prepared for any of it. Please, forgive me.

This is my queue. Each of our visits ends with a plea – to forgive her for something that was never there. And I humor her wish, I tell her she’s forgiven (for something she’ll never know she had not committed).

I leave her in the solitude of her thoughts. I am too ashamed so I leave her while she’s talking. This way she will be lost long enough for me to make my quick exit. That is my contribution to my mother’s life. I come, I humor, I leave.

My grandfather was a strong supporter of man’s contribution to the dismaying complexity of social order. He contributed my sense of guilt: after cheating on my grandmother, he lost his appetite and a 100 pounds. He shrunk himself with contribution. So do I. My poison – trying to avoid the truth, telling my mother how I plagiarized my way in and out of college. The auspicious mind, my ass.

In the Prologue to his study of moral life in the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulag, titled Facing the Extreme, Tzvetan Todorov examines the ‘moral acts’ of Tadeusz Borowski’s stories about life at Auschwitz. He juxtaposes the ‘real’ experiences of the ’real’ Borowski at Auschwitz with those of the author’s central character, also named Tadeusz, as Borowski’s pitiless accounts of life in Auschwitz are told in the first person. Todorov draws his readers’ attention to a clear distinction existing between author and protagonist (we learn that the ‘real’ Borowski behaved totally differently from his narrative self, his commitment to the well-being of others exceeding the realms of mere devotion), since he is primarily interested in the implications of Borowski’s narrative choices. By writing himself in the totality of human degradation and corruption encircling the hierarchical structure of the camp(s), Borowski, according to Todorov, writes about the horrors of Auschwitz the only way he saw fit/possible: assuming full responsibility “for the worst humiliation that the camp inflicted on its inmates.”

What does this historically and socially detached observation encompass? Do Todorov’s assumptions about Borowski’s choice of an engaging narrative strategy reflect on the author’s views about the state of morality in a totalitarian project? Is morality just another social construct whose viability depends on the maintenance of strictly outlined democratic principles of political organization?

If we are to look for affirmative answers to these perplexing ambiguous questions on the pages of Borowski’s truthful prose, the search for a certain definiteness escapes us as we read accounts of the author’s alter ego joining the ranks of kapos, assisting in the expedient “relief” of the totalitarian state’s burden, helping men, women, children, living, dead, crippled, all in all people who walk on two different paths, reach the same end, the crematorium one-sided doors. Tadeusz, the central character of Borowski’s photo-texts, continuously negotiates a pitiful and cynical existence as he reaches for a body in the suffocating darkness of the ramp trains, another man’s trinkets, the residue of a turnip soup container. He declares that “the whole world is really like the concentration camp…the world is ruled by neither justice nor reality…the world is ruled by power”, and we get the feeling that here Borowski is not speaking only from his own ‘hands-on’ experience. Todorov revisits this narrative choice on the part of the author as an attempt to expose the world for what it is, a battlefield where humanity engages in survival tactics. In other words, Borowski’s recollected and refigured memories fashion a narrative illustration of the principals behind Social Darwinism, which may account for the absence of ‘little acts of heroism’ on the pages of his collection.

It is necessary to introduce a certain distinction here, for the same Tadeusz Borowski also remembered something remarkable about the possibility of humanity’s endurance, “I smile and I think that man will never cease to rediscover man-through love. And that this is the most important thing on earth, and the most lasting.” This realization begs another observation. When and where is such a rediscovery of humanity possible, before or after an individual has experienced unbelievable suffering though prolonged starvation, the constant threat of annihilation, habituating oneself in an environment of imminent terrorization and assault? Is love of/in/among man(kind) possible after the Auschwitzes of the twentieth century? It seems that Tadeusz Borowski’s stories evoke more questions than answers. But then again, resonant art forms tend to stir up conflicting emotions/trials within the reader/spectator. However, if I am to single out one concrete, tangible realization which Borowski’s prose emanates, at least for me, it would touch upon his implicit representation of matters of conscience under extreme situations. As human beings, we are always given a choice. It may be an undesirable one, such as choosing a lesser evil over a greater one. Borowski’s conscious choice as writer was to talk about Auschwitz without holding anything back, thus reminding us, the far more fortunate ones, about the importance of this human right, especially when human actions are dictated by prevalent social conditions of maximum pressure and exertion.

The palette of characters in Stanislaw (Ignacy) Witkiewicz’s play The Shoemakers (Szewcy, 1931-34) seems almost too grotesque and gruesomely impalpable to bear (any) resemblance to the way we view “our” humanity. Even the old master shoemaker Sajetan loses his appeal as a representational artisan, a man of revolutionary thought, once he succumbs to the allurements of power he has seemingly attained by “hammering away” with the previously repressive social system. However, if we allow ourselves to see past the confines of our somewhat prudent social principals, we can approach Witkiewicz’s world and its inhabitants on a sociohistorically constructive basis. The content and structure of The Shoemakers marks a decisive departure for the artist who sought to bring the principals of Pure Form to the theatre. This conscious choice for the versatile Witkacy points to the artist’s acknowledgement of the changing political and social reality of his Euro-centric world in the pre-WW II 1930s. With Hitler’s reign in Germany and Stalin’s hold of the Soviet Union, Mussolini’s enchantment of Italy and the growing unrest among the underclasses (the workers, the peasants) in other European capitalist societies, Witkiewicz’s belief in the redemptive power of art, philosophy and religion were challenged to a point of no return. Thus, when we encounter the commiseration of his players and their on-going conflagration with derisive angst, unrequited passion, futile desire, and ultimate boredom, what we are left with is a horrific sensation that this very personal final statement by a man, an artist who could no longer breathe in his environment, is more poignant than any historical record of the times.

There are no protagonists in The Shoemakers; everyone is caught in a cyclical limbo, endlessly waiting for something, for anything to happen. At the same time, as Witkiewicz’s characters engage in unnerving polemics over the “unimportant” things (since language is an empty vessel which condones no relevant messages), a new breed of man adorns the stage: the Hyperworkoid. This mechanized carrion who lives to serve the new state that master Sajetan and his apprentices have helped bring to life only reaffirms the already presupposed realization that the final stage of “our” humanity is one of static retreat rather than dynamic outburst, violent or otherwise. Such a bleak portrayal of humanity’s emersion into a negation of its own vibrancy and varied dynamics, set against a background of a specific sociohistoric context, prefigures the horror of, on the one hand, the atrocities of the coming war, and on the other hand, the future mechanization of human emotions/actions/doings/artistry. We take pride in the choices we make as liberated human beings. We choose democratic principles, we choose popular culture goods, we choose our own trajectory of life. Needless to say, we like to think that we choose art which enlightens us and speaks for what we have accomplished or what we hope to pursue in the near future. Somewhere in between all of our decision-making, we forget how culturally conditioned we have become, how alike our distinct choices appear to be, how complacent and content we tend to be regarding social and political change, as long as we can afford our choices and pay our taxes. Don’t get me wrong, I myself enjoy watching the movie of the hour and drinking the coffee flavor of the moment. It is precisely this conforming quality of our existence which will recognize the driving forces behind Witkiewicz’s The Shoemakers. Through the play’s apocalyptic vision of civilization’s fall, we can refigure and reinterpret the homogenized and stratified approaches to late 20th century’s understanding of artistic values and cultural representation. Perhaps that way, we may finally learn to embrace our fears and express our vulnerability without feeling ashamed or aggravated.

Thanks to the graces and smarts of a community of 7 (8 - I stand corrected), NOVA has revitalized its School Newspaper! Check it out on the given link:

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s science-fiction dystopia, curtly titled We (1920-21), bears its mark on the development of the genre as contemporary readers have come to know it. Anyone who has read or even heard of Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) will recognize a conjoining link between Zamyatin’s fledgling and these later examples of a well-constituted literary premise. What distinguishes this work from its subsequent follow-ups is the grittiness of the author’s representational style. By employing the logistics of his scientific background (i.e., Zamyatin was an accomplished naval engineer), the author creates the sometime too-mathematically proper rhetoric of his main protagonist, the novel’s narrator D-503.

In a world far removed from the reality of the 1920s (or so it seems), amidst the glass-walled antiseptic environment of The One State, D-503 diligently records his thoughts and observations in a diary format, executing a mathematician’s poem so to speak, that is to (hopefully upon its completion) become part of the cargo on board the Integral, a space vessel that he, D-503, has designed to help spread the happiness of The One State among the savage inhabitants of other planets, other worlds. Zamyatin uses D-503’s observations and later on personal experiences to dismantle the moral failings behind the unfaltering rendition of The One State’s totalitarian government.

As we become engaging witnesses to this system’s grim logic, we also partake on another, more subtle point of the plot’s distribution. Namely, there are no individuals in The One State, there are no personal names; there are only assigned numbers. Men units are assigned a consonant signifier (e.g., D-503, R-13, S-), whereas female counterparts are given a vowel sign (e.g., O-90, E-330). From a mathematical perspective, this premise of justifying the existence of a government that has literally reduced its citizens to numerical constituents is unquestioningly wrong, implying a moral error as well. Zamyatin’s narrator, and to an extent his fictional counterpart, does not comment on this obvious failing on the part of the perfect society that he inhabits. This conscious choice resonates more powerfully than any other literary device that Zamyatin incorporates in his narrative, such as situational and/or attitudinal irony. The author allows his readers to understand the mathematical as well as moral fallacy of this premise through the conflicting nature of the main protagonist and his coming to terms with his awakened subconscious.

As D-503’s character lives out his internal conflict, reflected even in his mirror image, we come to grasp the full meaning of Zamyatin’s powerful criticism of any ideology (systematically distributed or not) that displaces human diversity and individuality in the name of uniformity and conformity, reducing our freedoms (even that of loose facial hair) by turning our humanity into a cipher-esque ensemble mechanism. In lieu of this, we also have to comment on the novel’s relentless ambiguity, perhaps, a direct result of the author’s cryptic style as well as an effect of the novel’s piercingly crude theme. Taking into consideration the odyssey of the novel’s publishing history in Zamyatin’s native Russia, then the We-esque Soviet Union, Zamyatin’s artistic attempt at exposing the fallacy behind any repressive system, even a fictional one, is a chillingly prophetic warning against any form of human disempowerment, especially one including the rationality and logic behind the old adage “for the majority’s benefit”. Whether of not we decide to admire the somewhat incongruous stream of thought as attributed to the main protagonist’s self-discovery, or dismiss the author’s style for its inconsistency and unrefined appeal, Zamyatin’s We continuously reminds us of our humanity and what it can all amount to.

The annals of theatre history and theatre production celebrate the work of Joseph and Karel Čapek. During the 1910s and 1920s the brothers Čapek actively participated in the progression of Czech experimental art and literature in general, Josef as a visual artist and Karel as a writer and translator. Following the international appeal of their initial collaboration, the play Rossum’s Universal Robots (R. U. R.), the Čapeks went on to stage the satirical allegory titled The Insect Play (‘And so ad infinitum’). The tripartite structure of the play (not taking into account the prologue and the epilogue) revolves around a rather simplistic premise (hence, the debatable literary qualities of the text in a post-modern read-through): a Tramp departs from the world of (hu)man(ity) and experiences an awakening reverie in the world of the insects. There he encounters butterflies, care-free, vain creatures, obsessed with their appearance and comfort; then come the beetles, a bit kinder beings, at least when it comes to taking care of their own kind; and then the ants, gruesomely dedicated creepers who toil for the perseverance of the one-for-all ideal. The Tramp also meets up with an insect named Chrysalis, a presence whose voice continuously announces her imminent birth and the coming of greatness. At the closing of the play, a few flying insects, referred to as Ephemera, dance in celebration of Chrysalis’ birth. They all, including Chrysalis, die dancing. The Tramp struggles with his new found joy and trust in life, only to give in and surrender to the enticement of the coming light. Synopsis aside, the content and framework of The Insect Play prove far worthier for post-modern dissemination than it may first appear.

If we examine the different classes of life as presented by the Čapeks in their allegorical rendition of humanity’s social and historical development, we come to bear witness to a rather powerfully cynical appraisal of our kind. The butterflies could be viewed as a representation of the narcissistic leisure class, always in pursuit of self-centered pleasures. The beetles hint at the presence of the prosperous bourgeois capitalist middle-class, fiercely protecting their own while profiting from the misfortune of others. Finally, through the ants, we are exposed to an all-too real construal of a collective tyranny, an obvious allusion to the Soviet communist model, turning into a blood-thirsty military dictatorship. However, the message of the Čapeks’ play was received with mixed reviews. Even those critics who acknowledged the importance of the play’s closing scene questioned the writers’ intentions behind the plotline’s negative philosophy. After all, the 1920s were the quintessential happy days (the world was slowly recovering from the devastation of World War I and the Great Depression was a few years away). A 21st century reader of the Čapeks’ cautionary tale may also find the crude simple-mindedness of the allegory and the nihilism of the message overdone, to say the least. Such a reader could even argue that the Čapeks themselves re-thought the depressive tone of the play thus writing a second ending in which the character of the Tramp does not die. And yet, the piercing reality of present-day human society attests to the clarity of the play’s prophetic resonance. The Holocaust, the labor camps of Soviet Russia, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, The Cold War, the Bosnian War, Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia, East Timor, the Ivory Coast, the World Trading Center, Afganistan, Iraq. As the curtain is about to fall, children are seen dancing and singing on stage. There is hope in the world of man as the Čapeks saw it, as long as we allow for our future to grow up and learn from our mistakes.