by bela
1/6/2009 8:02:00 AM
She started out on a Sunday. It was considered a lucky day. No one ever set off for America on a Saturday or a Tuesday. Tuesday was a most unlucky day. The airline companies did not make a note of this, and traffic continued to ebb and flow across the great ocean. Any clear day in any week of any month in a year was an exceptionally convenient day for travel. To them, but not to her.
Contrary to the belief of the customs officer it wasn’t her first time on an airplane. It was her 238th time. And she had traveled across the great sea patch on a number of occasions before. Once as a teenager and then as a determined young adult. This time it was different. This time she had a hidden agenda. Most people thought that she was going on a hiatus, taking some time off of work to enjoy herself before everything that life threw on a girl’s plate after a certain age came into play: marriage, children, a stable job, grandchildren, a stable pension. She saw no point in diluting their understanding for her life. It was contrary to her nature. They were older, she was younger, and there was no pending need for an additional parting sorrow. She knew why she boarded the distance carrier, so did her parents. That was more than enough.
Every time she left her home, she kept thinking of all those who had gone before her. Almost two million people had gone, before her, looking for all that they couldn’t find at home. Money, security, freedom, expression, happiness. Some stayed, and became Americans. Most men (young brides in their bridals costumes wept quietly at home) returned, with the promises that their bodies could not fulfill. God knows how many folk songs reminded her of all these migrant workers and their tortured existence in the Promised Land. And all the stately tombstones and fiery flowers keeping vigilance for the ones who attempted the American Dream. Her voyage was different from theirs. She wasn’t going to work endless hours in unsavory conditions, scraping together a buck or two, coming home victoriously saddened, by time present and time past. She was going to be a student.
Why did she need travel all across the ocean, her aunts would constantly pester her grandmother (benevolently so), when she could study here at home, close to her ancestry and heritage. Her grandmother was already a master spokesperson for her granddaughter’s attempt at “outside education”. She simply replied: “Since she will not be studying her own heritage, but that of other people. Those that call themselves Americans.” Needless to say, her aunts were not satisfied with such an incongruous answer. As if there weren’t enough people in America to study their own heritage, they had to recruit others to do their job. To this her grandmother would once again remind her sisters-in-law that she herself was not Macedonian, and yet out of love for her husband and his people’s art, she had dedicated her entire life to the study of Macedonian cultural artistry, teaching Macedonian students of Macedonian literature for over forty years, something that she would not change for all the riches in the world. The aunts would then talk of the weather and its effect on rheumatism.
She boarded the plane, head and shoulders upright, standing tall, smiling and waving. Her mother hid the tears away through the brim of her hat (she was definitely the most stylish European one had ever seen), her father hugged her, trying to impart his good-natured laughter and courage on his daughter. Being her parents, letting her go into the world, looking for an understanding, was all the support she needed and all the comfort she sought.
Twenty-three hours later, no luggage in sight, she came to the heartland of America. Maybe it was the high temperatures and the level of humidity, but she did not feel as if she were embarking on any heartland, of any country. She felt most welcomed by the older student who came to meet her and another student from Africa at the airport. That was one of the better moments in the first days of her stay, or what was to be her intellectual repose in America’s heartland. Everything else resembled a most peculiar combination of bureaucratic paraphernalia and a constant joggling act, involving multiple mixers, potlucks, hello-how-are-yous, and of course, her favorite, the specification of an area of interest to focus one’s studious eyes on. What was she interested in, now that she was here, ready to pursue it, whatever IT may be, further? She wanted to scream from the top of her lungs, EVERYTHING. She was interested in everything. She wanted to learn it all, to absorb it all, to know it all. She wanted to own the keys of the kingdom (since her people had always thought and spoken of America as the kingdom of a poor man’s dreams, she took to their myth as her modern-day spin on democratic principals and everyone’s right to live a free life pursuing happiness). Or at least to have a reliable duplicate set so that she could enter its premises at any time.
To her dismay, she soon realized that even everything, this beautiful all-encompassing entity, had to be compartmentized. Everything was made of a multitude of somethings, some things that needed a label, a box, an agenda. So she gathered all of her strength, cleared her chest and chopped her everything into meaningful somethings. Surprisingly, it proved to be a much easier task than she had initially thought it to be.
Ever since her first encounter with American culture products (Disney cartoons, Dr. Seuss’s books, J. D. Salinger’s stories, Friends, ER and the like, The Simpsons, the minimalistic prose of Raymond Carver, Woody Allen’s films, Jackson Pollock’s art, the Pisan Cantos, Broadway musicals, The New Yorker, the fiction of Philip Roth, Robert Coover, John Cheever, Eudora Welthy, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, Ursula K. LeGuin, Walker Percy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, the poetry of Baraka, James Dickey, Randall Jarell, Allen Ginsberg, the plays of Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Sam Shepard, James Baldwin’s craft, and all that jazz), she knew that she was going to take her initial infatuation further. She had never settled for a by-stander’s position on anything in her life and this wasn’t going to be an exception. She had to seek out a way to harness this fascination with American culture, to tame it, to study it closer, to truly understand the moving wheels behind its delightful products. Then and there she knew that she had to get a closer look.
Now, in the heartland, she is looking. She sees others like her; they are not foreigners to this land, they are its citizens, and yet, they all struggle as they are looking. They are convinced that they are all looking for different, unique things within the kingdom. Something not recorded before, something genuine, something overlooked, something forgotten, something trendy, something important, something trivially mandatory, something meaningful. She loves to observe them as they are articulating their somethings; she especially enjoys their disagreements even though they are in pursuit of the same truths. And as every of their sightings comes to an end, she is once again reminded that there is no absolute truth about American people, (look at the bountiful splendor of the diverse natures of her classmates), no unfaltering fact about American national identity, no uniformity in American culture products, whether they be verbal, written or visual representations of American dilemmas or views.
How can she then pursue her study of American culture and its products when what she once considered to be the uniformly integrated body of American people no longer exists as such? Or even better, since it never did exist as such, in the first place, in the kingdom itself, (except for the efforts of the money-making entrepreneurs whose joyful commercial representations of what can pass as American simply enhances the already stereotyped version of the kingdom’s people in the eyes of the outside world), she has lost her everything. Perhaps she should have listened to her aunts’ advice, stayed at home and contributed to the wide pool of the fantastical representations of the Macedonian self, how great Macedonians were, how indispensable their contributions to the developments of culture (with a capital C) have been throughout the years, how unappreciating the world (especially the American part of it) is to their constant toil under the sun, how…a story told a million times.
She wasn’t interested in telling that story. She wanted to tell a generically different one, about her understanding of American culture products, and their playful interaction with her own culture’s products. There had been too long a chasm between American culture products and the isolation they had been studied in, either by Americans themselves or outsiders like herself, creating a confining space of peaceful reflection and affirmation whose silence was too loud to be ignored. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t of a violently radical nature; she liked working within the system.
Now that she had found the system, she has to look into its mechanisms.
Every day she looks into their structure, examining closely their composition, trying to see if there is something within their bodies that she can relate to. And every day she learns something new.
She learns that the American cultural mechanism is a virulent and complex body of many interweaving wheels, as many as there are Americans who operate it. She learns that in order to operate it, one needs to read carefully the fine print in the manual, sometimes more than once. She also learns that one needs to consult others who had previously used it, or who are using it at the same time as she is, in order to help run it better and with greater speed.
She learns of the forces that come out of the mechanism. These colorful and divergent fluxes she has met before. She has enjoyed them. She has attempted to tame them with her analyses. Now, she does not only observe them for what they are, but for what they may become, outside the gates of the kingdom. She learns that they are to be her somethings. She is happier now, or at least more at peace with herself.
Among these vibrant forces, she chooses the ones that reside on the outskirts of the mechanism. The reason for the peripherality of these strikingly American fluxes is the geographical displacement of their creators. Namely, the Americans that created them did not remain within the realms of the kingdom to do so. They had to travel, near and far, like her, in order to create American culture products (stories, poems, novels, paintings, music, sculptures, letters, diaries, ethnographies, exhibits). However, she understood this displacement as an impetus for the creation of authentic American artifact. She understood this as she was looking for her own people’s culture products on the peripherality of the Macedonian (Eastern-European) culture mechanism. And she found them…these artifacts that her people treasured as the highest form of their existence preserved in time…were created by her fellow people while they too were geographically displaced, within the kingdom that she sought to open.
At this point in her learning, she also understood that she needed to find support for her observations. The culture products themselves were not enough, they provided the basis for her study, but she needed more than a starting point. She needed a compass. She looked at her classmates, she examined the readings, she followed the discussions, she craved for guidance.
Has she found it yet? Perhaps it’s too soon to tell…but she has come across some that have gone before her, whose own struggles may help her shape her own dilemmas and views. She has found the works of Albert E. Stone, Paul John Eakin, and James Olney. Their resonant voices have given her good directions. Stone’s Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts, Eakin’s Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention, and Olney’s Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-writing and Metaphors of the Self are her pillars.These attempts at discovering how and what she read as an American culture product, of the self and by the self, fascinate her. These studies of life writing, a term inclusive of autobiography, changed the context of her approach to any literary text. These experiments in capturing the fastest growing, most widely read, most complex genre of the last half of the twentieth century, expanded her old world notions of a confessional narrative, a buildungsroman, a travelogue. They led her to see the medium of autobiography in all of its forms (memoir, reminiscence, apology and confession, testament, case-history and life-history, diary and journal, personal journalism, the nonfiction novel or mock autobiography) as a centrifugal American cultural act, translating a personal experience into a public narrative.
In so far, she had read American culture through the autobiography (and similarly inspired writings) of Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Adams, Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright, powerful texts of a masculine nation. Yet she felt that there was more to these essential American narratives than a textual reading would provide. Since autobiography, especially American autobiography is a constructed genre and not just “plain old truth”, she looked at Stone and Eakin’s works as she revisited these texts. She began to read them through and against the cultures and historical moments which had created them. She continued reading other (once non-canonical) examples of the recreated self in the discourse of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Charles Eastman, Jade Snow Wong, Anzia Yeziereska, Malcolm X, Richard Rodriguez, N. Scott Momaday, Maxine Hong Kingston, Saul Friedländer, Gloria Anzaldua, Margaret Mead, Anaïs Nin, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison.
What she encountered in all of these life stories were the pivotal themes of a publically desired “uniform” American culture. The themes of individualism, self-actualization, and the acquisition of power, co-existed and continue to co-exist with American ethnic traditions, the nature of communal identity and the influence of one’s powerlessness in society. Whether these texts were the products of people who fit into conventional/mainstream standards or not, she understood the need to read them multiculturally. These multicultural accounts of a shaping self and the variety of critical approaches to them allowed her to see, within them, the re-shaping of America, from a land of pilgrims to a nation of immigrants to a country of bountifully diverse people, yet all Americans.
The autobiographical selves that she encountered on her journey into the American acts of self-reflexivity were extended metaphors of the public “I”. Such act of composing what may be considered by Europeans to be a “plagiarized self”, she saw, with the help of Eakin and Olney as an act of release, trying to recapture the psychological rhythms of one’s identity formation. The autobiographical self was not a self set in stone; the writing of an American autobiography was not a process of recording an impassive self. She understood this process as an integral part of the drama of self-invention, self-creation, self-perception, of an individual’s cultural identity and a culture’s individual being. She understood through this process the critical goals Gene Wise asserted in his 1979 essay “Paradigm Dramas in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement”. She understood the present-day analysis of American autobiography as a proportioned and pluralistic act of a particular and comparative cultural study of American identity.
With such tools under her belt, she is trying to build a humble cabin, a log house, and she wants to shelter as many of these (geographically) displaced cultural fluxes as she can. Her house will have no hinges, no bolts, no locks. It will, however, have walls. She needs the walls as a reminder, to herself, and to all other students of the American kingdom and its culture products, that their work is not an irredeemable constant, a fictitious fixture, a wall set in stone. Their work is as pulsating with vibrancy as the fluxes themselves, gaining its momentum from the rhythms of the fluxes’ travels.
As she builds her house, slowly, (the winds are too challenging at times), she thinks of her students back home. She thinks of how she may bring them closer to the people whose work they study and enjoy. She realizes that she must think of them too, as she builds her house. Will they like it? Will they enjoy the tour? Will they want to stay and repose for awhile? Will they want to see it expand? She can only hope that they will like it. She try to be their guide, herself equipped with the valuable visuals, her own experiences in the kingdom, trying to get them to look and to see the beauty of the house’s dwellers in all of its splendor and glory.
Currently rated 4.7 by 6 people
- Currently 4.666667/5 Stars.
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