Jamiedbarker’s Weblog

February 17, 2009

Yusef Komunyakaa’s Taboo

Filed under: Narrow List Dr. Sell — jamiedbarker @ 4:43 am

 

The most striking poem out of this collection is Komunyakaa’s poem “Satchmo, USA” which is obviously about Louis Armstrong and the music he created and how the music connects African Americans. Komunyakaa’s poet identifies several places that a common African American history, such as The Cotton Club and Congo Square, but what I believe is most significant about this poem is the manner in which it connect and unites African Americans by means of Armstrong’s music. The speaker of the poem mentions many different places, not only from the United States such as New Orleans, Culver City, The Cotton Club, and Lincoln Center, but from around the world with such places as Buckingham Palace, African soccer fields, and the Sphinx. By showing so many places where Satchmo’s music has gone, it demonstrates the importance of Satchmo’s (and other jazz musicians) music worldwide. Although jazz may be most important to African Americans, it is also important worldwide. The importance the music has to the speaker is indicated in the line which says “When you blow// I feel like you’re talking/ to me” (42-44) which is most likely felt for a lot of people who listen to his music. Because of the time in which Armstrong lived and performed and because he was an African American, many African Americans were able to look up to him because of his status and success as if he was a representative of who they were, therefore providing a voice to the voiceless. This idea is presented early on in the poem, “Here, in the inner sanctum,/ I see you toting buckets of coal/ to Storyville’s red-light house.// You are a small figure/ raising to fire/ at God in the night sky,// but when I turn to look/ out at the evening star/ your face is mine” (7-15). In these three lines, Satchmo, who is already presented within the poem as being the music on “the turntable” (line 5) is also three other people, including the speaker. Satchmo is also in other places within the poem, either in person or in music, suggesting that is he with these people in music, but that these people are able to identify themselves within his music, and thus see Satchmo as representative of them. Further evidence for the fact that Armstrong’s music spoke for many African Americans appears late in the poem where the speaker tells of the trouble that Armstrong faced: “confessions & curses/ drip from your trumpet,/ & notes about the FBI// dogging your footsteps/ since ’48, float like ghosts/ of reefer smoke in an alley.// Ike wanted you to change/ your words about Little Rock” (lines 52-59). Armstrong did have a problem with Eisenhower for his inaction on the desegregation of the schools in Little Rock as cited in the New York Times (Louis Armstrong, Barring Soviet Tour, Denounces Eisenhower and Gov. Faubus”. New York Times. September 19, 1957. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/armstrong-eisenhower.html) and the FBI did have a file on Armstrong, as stated in (Bergreen, Laurence (1997). ‘Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life’. New York: Broadway Books page 472). Satchmo’s status didn’t shield him from oppression, thus even though his status did elevate him, he still fought many of the same fights that plagued African Americans. Finally, and perhaps most telling for the connection between Armstrong and African Americans is found in the final lines where the speaker tells of how his music takes his listeners “to a woman standing in a cane field/ circled with peacocks” (lines 74-75). These two lines are indicative of slavery in America’s past and how many African Americans can draw their heritage back to those times, just as Satchmo can, but perhaps equally important, much of the strife that all African Americans face germinated from that period.

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s book I Love Artists

Filed under: Broad List Dr. Sherwod — jamiedbarker @ 4:42 am

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s book I Love Artists contained a few poems of interest, but her writing style was rather sterile in that her poems seemed to contain little emotion and used a very technical language in the majority of the poems she wrote. For example, her poem “The Four Year Old Girl” begins with these five lines “The ‘genotype’ is her genetic constitution./ The ‘phenotype’ is the observable expression of the genotype as structural and biochemical traits./ Genetic disease is extreme genetic change, against a background of normal variability./ Within the conventional unit we call subjectivity doe to individual particulars, what is happening?/ She believes she is herself, which isn’t complete madness, it’s belief” (lines 1-5). The poem is about a child dying of a disease, but is written in a manner in which all emotion, which one would expect to be present, is absent. It is apparent that this is a type of protest poem about the medical field or insurance companies, or the callused nature that many people in our society have about death and war, where people are reduced to numbers, studies, and reports, but, the impact of this poem is lessened by the fact that this is the tone of many of the poems within the book. Although there are poems within this collection that are not as distant and less devoid of emotion, this is by no means the only poem with this type of tone.

            What is also interesting about the poetry of Berssenbrugge is that it is written in a matter where race and ethnicity is not only not a factor, but the reader is only rarely given a glimpse into the race of the speaker. This seems as though it should not be a big deal, but after reading many books of poetry by African American, Latino/a American, Asian American, and several other ethnicities, the idea of race or ethnicity usually becomes apparent somewhere within the poetry. Be it Sonia Sanchez or Amiri Baraka’s overt exclamations or the more subtle instances by Gary Soto or Alan Chong Lau, the idea of the speaker’s race is usually more apparent. Even in poems such as “Chinese Space” we are only told of the speaker’s family background as she discusses her grandfather being Chinese. Unlike the poetry of those aforementioned poets, the speaker in this poem focuses more on the garden than on what the garden means to her in an overt expression of being Chinese. The crux of what the speaker is implying within the poem can be surmised in the final three lines where the speaker is discussing what is means when “the person/ becomes sufficient” (lines 31-32). The speaker states, “The family poses in front of the hotel, both self-knowing and knowing others at the same time./ This is so, because memory as a part of unfinished nature is provided/ for the experience of your unfinished existence” (35-37). Because the main subject of this poem is the “Chinese Space” which is spoken about, nearly exclusively in the previous lines, I believe that these last lines, although speaking directly of the photograph, are about what it means to the speaker to be Chinese and to have this kind of legacy, such as memories and a relative who had a garden like the one she described as being a “Chinese Space.” As such, the lines indicate that, to paraphrase, where we come from only makes up part of who we are, thus, regardless of one’s racial or ethnic background, that only partially makes up who we are as a person. One of the only other poems where the speaker discusses being Chinese is in the poem “Nest” where the speaker discusses her mother tongue, Chinese, and the meaning of the language she shares with her mother and the idea of changing the mother tongue for her daughter. She discusses the importance of language in the poem, but again, the importance of what it means to be a certain ethnicity or race is not a main issue within the poem. Obviously language is a large part of one’s ethnicity and culture, thus changing the main language for her daughter is of great significance, focus is on the individual rather than the collective culture, much like “Chinese Space.”

February 7, 2009

Trauma Culture: The Politics of Loss in Media and Literature by E. Ann Kaplan

Filed under: Theory List Dr. Watson — jamiedbarker @ 2:48 am

Trauma Culture: The Politics of Loss in Media and Literature by E. Ann Kaplan is another book that had an overabundance of colorful tabs along the right edge indicating the multiple areas of interest. Kaplan begins with a discussion about 9-11 and trauma, stating “as Freud pointed out long ago, how one reacts to a traumatic event depends on one’s individual psychic history, on memories inevitably mixed with fantasies of prior catastrophes, and on the particular cultural and political context within which a catastrophe takes place, especially how it is ‘managed’ by institutional forces” (1). I believe that this statement describes quite well the manner in which the trauma associated with the oppressive and racist culture of the United States is one that inflicts trauma upon an individual, but this trauma can be compounded by the cultural memory of slavery and violence against African Americans through out history. This is further validated as Kaplan discusses family trauma, as described by on the same page as it is portrayed in film: “Some of the films and other texts I study deal with World War II and the Holocaust, but the narratives involve not internees or soldiers buy relatives of internees or women and children living in terror because of World War II. Other films are about descendants of indigenous peoples in postcolonial contexts, who are also living in terror still after centuries of displacement and attempted annihilation. Such daily experiences of terror may not take the shape of classic trauma suffered by victims or survivors, but to deny these experiences as traumatic would be a mistake. Instead, I extend the concept of trauma to include suffering terror. This should not make the term meaningless. Rather, one recognizes degrees and kinds of trauma.  The impact of a major public event on relatives indirectly involved in terror I call ‘family’ or ‘quiet trauma,’ following other scholars” (1) This is precisely what I am talking about when I talk about the affects of slavery on some African Americans and the trauma that is the result of this history. This discussion continues on the next page, “One finds the complex interconnections between individual and cultural trauma—such that, indeed, where the ‘self’ begins and cultural impossible reactions end may seem impossible to determine” (my italics). This cultural trauma would be a combination of the potential trauma from slavery and other historical trauma mixed with experiences of others or cultural beliefs, such as the evil of whites and the police versus the actual incurred traumatic experience that may arise from actual confrontations.

 

Kaplan, later in the chapter, describes Kristeva who identifies two types of trauma, military or political and the personal and claims that both of these types of trauma damage “our systems of perception and representation” (Kristeva 222, Kaplan 5). Kaplan states that “This is important because there are some who want to reserve the concept of trauma only for public events, like the Holocaust” (5).

 

On page 26 Kaplan discusses Frued and Josef Breuer and the manner in the symptoms of hysteria are the result of trauma. Kaplan writes about their essay in Studies in Hysteria that “the clinicians not the way in which other ideas including fantasies get attached to the traumatic event. ‘A memory,’ they say, ‘of such a trauma… enter[s] the great complex of associations, it comes alongside other experiences, which may contradict it, and is subjected to rectification by other ideas’ (9). They note that after an accident, memory of the danger and repetition of the fright ‘become associated with the memory of what happened afterwards—rescue and the consciousness of present safety’” (26).

 

On page 34, Kaplan discusses Cathy Caruth’s definition of trauma, which is “‘a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or set of events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming form the event.’ The pathology, she notes, consist ‘solely in the structure of the experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but not belatedly in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it’ (Caruth, Trauma 4-5) ” (Kaplan 34).

 

I found a very important distinction which I need to keep in mind when undertaking study I this field. Kaplan states on page 39: “a main problem in trauma studies, which is distinguished different domains within which people work to relate to trauma. A basic distinction is that between the trauma victim and her work with a clinician (itself a contested site), and the work of scholars studying trauma (also a contested site). A second distinction is that between the many varied scholarly discourses about trauma—be these psychological, psychoanalytic, political, philosophic, sociological, or historical—and images of trauma in film and popular culture studied mainly by literary and media scholars. In practice, there is slippage between these arenas, but each discourse makes its own contribution. Each contributor needs to specify the terrain of her research so as to avoid speaking across, rather that to, one another” (39). I think it is imperative, as I work in the field, to remember the differences and remain in the second type of discourse and not venture into the first type. I am thankful to find this in Kaplan’s book so not to incur future embarrassment. I knew not to attempt to analyze the poet by their poetry, and I think this solidifies the idea of not doing so.

 

Pages 39 through 41 Kaplan discusses vicarious trauma which is defined by Pearlman and Saakvtine as “the deleterious effects of trauma on the therapist” (40). Kaplan asks on page 41 “why has the distinction between traumatic situations per se and vicarious ones not been written about much in literary and cultural studies? Why has the fact that most of us encounter vicarious, rather than direct, trauma not received more attention?” This is very interesting to me and plan on examining the affects of vicarious trauma on minority ethnic groups as well as those affected by direct trauma.

 

The writing of Janet Walker brings great validity to the examination of texts and the influence that trauma has on the text. As I have said only a few line earlier in regards to analyzing a poem is not the same as analyzing the poet, one can analyze the speaker of the poem and find palpable examples of trauma in the subject matter, actions, and dialogue of the poem. It would not be much a stretch, however, to say that the poets experiences obviously shape the subject matter and demeanor of the speaker of the poem in some way. Walker uses the term “traumatic paradox” and says that it deals with the manner in which “a common response to real trauma is fantasy” (Walker, “Traumatic Paradox” 809, Kaplan 42). Kaplan continues to discuss Walker and states about Walker, “She goes on to argue that the most effective films and videos about trauma are ‘those that figure the traumatic past as meaningful yet as fragmentary, virtually unspeakable, and striated with fantasy constructions” (809). Yet such memoirs are not ‘fiction’ in the usual meaning of the term. The writer struggling to communicate something powerful that happened in the past, something that the writer remembers (in the senses given above), but which we are no to read as a literary rendering of ‘truth’ as in the case of a witness in a court of law” (43).

 

The third chapter investigates collective or cultural trauma. Kaplan says of collective and cultural trauma,

“While individual trauma is always linked to the social sphere, give that social conditions shape trauma’s impact, traumatic events may affect the discourse of an entire nation’s public narrative. It would be reductive to apply to the collective or national trauma phenomena common in individuals, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome with the ‘splitting’ or dissociation it may involve. Yet history seems to provide examples of national ‘forgetting’ or displacement that require explanation, such as long delay in wide public and international discussion of World War II suffering, especially the Holocaust, or the delay in confronting slavery or the decimation of Native Americans in the United States. But even here are problems. Does an entire nation forget? Or only the perpetrators? Do dominant and powerful groups engineer a ‘forgetting’ through controlling discourses? Groups that have been victimized in a nation don’t ‘forget’—at least not in the same way as do the perpetrators. We need to heed Dominick LaCapra’s warning that ‘historical trauma is specific, and not everyone is subject to it or entitled to a subject position associated with it’ (Writing History 78). Yet, people in a nation who have been through a catastrophe such as war may need to ‘forget’ those experiences because they are too painful to deal with in the immediate aftermath of suffering. Kai Erikson ‘has argued that the social tissue of a community can be damaged in ways similar to the tissues of mind and body’ (Robben and Suarez-Orozco 24). Robben and Saurez-Orozco go on to explain, “Massive trauma ruptures social bonds, undermines community, destroys pervious sources of support and may even traumatize those members of a community, society or social group who were absent when the catastrophe or persecution took place (24)” (66-67).

It is this phenomena that makes me believe that the trauma that people of various ethnic groups have suffered though remain part of the collective culture and impact many within that culture. Japanese Americans, for example that have had relatives that lived in the United States during WWII and may have had relatives in the interment camps or have knowledge that they exists, as well as the racism that was perpetrated against them during and after the war would have to live with the scars of the cultural trauma and can be found in some of the poetry that I have read thus far. The impact of the past on African Americans and Native Americans, however, overshadow any other scars in regard to cultural trauma. More so than individual experiences, I believe that cultural trauma is what impacts the poetry of minorities and will be the main focal point of my investigation, unless the speaker within a poem identifies a specific trauma that occurred within their life.

 

Kaplan continues for the next few pages discussing collective and cultural trauma ultimately discussing the manner in which film and cinema are able to “become the mechanisms through which a culture can unconsciously address its traumatic hauntings” (69). I think this is true for literature as well. More importantly, Kaplan says on page 72, “I see melodrama as an aesthetic form (on the stage an in popular fiction) as produced from the traumas of class struggle and in the context of search for identity, social order, and clear moral rules by which to live in modernity. Stories and images, given shape to fictional lives, were needed as a disruptive modernism go underway to bolster other modes creating a new stable society. Personal and social traumas were displaced into fictional melodrama forms where they could be more safely approached” (72). It was this quote that brought escapism through fight versus flight to the forefront of my thinking in regards to trauma as discussed (or as an undertone) in poetry. Kaplan continues her thoughts more in depth on the next page saying, “The notion of melodrama repeats in fictional form and suppressed cultural trauma to do with the overthrow of prior authority parallels Freud’s theory developed toward the end of his life in Moses and Monotheism. Freud theorizes that the trauma of the Jews in the killing of Moses repeated an earlier crime of the primal horde’s murder of the powerful father-leader. Traces of the crime continue throughout history. Extending Freud’s theory, it is reasonable to argue that at certain historical moments aesthetic forms emerge (sometimes in a useful way) to accommodate fears and fantasies related to suppressed historical events. In repeating the trauma of class struggle, melodrama, in its very generic formation, may evidence a traumatic cultural symptom” (73).

 

In the fourth chapter Kaplan begins by discussing vicarious trauma in the media. Stories passed down from friends and relatives, documentaries, historical narratives, and other means of learning from the past can have a significant impact on how one understands their world and the history which molded our society and formed who we are. Much of history is riddled with violent atrocities and abuses directed toward specific ethnic groups perpetrated by other ethnic groups and can lead to resentment and ill feelings between the groups, such as the history between the Irish and the English, or, well, pretty much the English and everyone else. The impact that this learning and retelling of history can create vicarious trauma within individuals as well as collective or cultural trauma. Kaplan states, “Arguably, being vicariously traumatized invites members of a society to confront, rather than conceal, catastrophes, and in that way might be useful. On the other hand, it might arouse anxiety and trigger defense against further exposure” (87).

 

This type of trauma, however, such as a person hearing the recollections of a friend or relative discussing trauma inflicted upon them, should not be confused or treated as trauma directly inflicted upon them. Kaplan says of this, “In a certain sense, all media response should be seen as at most vicarious trauma, not as experiencing trauma itself. Even then, in some cases, vicarious trauma (as Hoffman noted for clinicians) may be a misnomer, since (to adapt Hoffman), spectators do not feel the protagonist’s trauma. They feel the pain evoked by empathy—arousing mechanisms interacting with their viewer has had firsthand traumas that are similar to those being portrayed. Nevertheless, it is possible to distinguish among spectator responses, as with therapists’ reactions, in terms of degree of arousal” (90).

 

To have a clearer understanding of vicarious trauma it would be useful to note the list of relationships to perceptions of trauma as outlined by Kaplan: “1) direct experience of trauma (trauma victim); 2) direct observation of another’s trauma (bystander, one step removed); 3) visually mediated trauma (i.e. moviegoer, viewing trauma on film or other media, two steps removed); 4) reading a trauma narrative and constructing visual image of semantic data (news reader, three steps removed); 5) hearing a patients trauma narrative” (91-92). Understanding these various types of experiences of trauma can benefit our overall comprehension of how different steps away from trauma can be identified. What also needs to be taken account of is the idea of empty empathy which portrayed by the media and other outlets of “empathy elicited by images of suffering provided without any context or background knowledge” (93).

 

Finally, Kaplan discusses her place as a critic in film and what it means to be a critic dealing with trauma. There have been times and will be times that I ask myself (and I a positive others will as well) what business do I have in the field of cultural studies, trauma studies, African American poetry, and multicultural poetry. After all, aren’t I part of the oppressive group that is responsible for the oppression of many of the cultures I am studying? With the aid of Kaplan, I am better equipped to answer this question. What I am doing is attempting to be a translator, suffering like many others from white guilt, and as such, I am hoping to help bridge the gap between cultures in order to bring peace and understanding. I am doing it because, although I have not consciously attempted or successfully oppressed anyone, there are undoubtedly those of my historical bloodline that have aided in the building and sustaining of an oppressive culture and I wish to undo some of the wrongs of my ancestors. Perhaps I will be able to also demonstrate to some African Americans and people of other cultures the perspective on ONE white man as he interprets poetry written by those outside of his own culture. In regards to trauma, I have been fortunate enough to have had several psychological classes as an undergraduate, thus I am not completely unfamiliar when it comes to psychology, especially trauma.

The study of African American poetry, Native American poetry, and poetry of other cultures which were oppressed, attacked, or enslaved by another is of particular interest of me in relation to trauma studies because of the traumatic histories of these cultures and the scars that maybe intertwined within the culture and people. Kaplan discusses this saying “This makes a great deal of sense in the context of ancestors of indigenous peoples who suffered violence and catastrophe through Western invaders of their land. Much Native American fiction (such as that by Louise Erdrich) includes images of powerful haunting, and readers will see the relevance to the phantom in Toni Morrison’s Beloved [or August Wilson’s The Piano Player]. In these cases, subjects are haunted by the trauma of their parents even as their lives may take on less catastrophic forms. Those to whom the catastrophe happened may only recall the past indirectly or dimly because of the blockage to cognition; they may suffer a delayed response in the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts, or behaviors [Yusef Komunyakka comes to mind]. But in transgenerational trauma subjects are haunted by tragedies affecting their parents, grandparents, or ancestors from far back without conscious knowledge. In a sense, transgenerational trauma is a kind of unconscious vicarious trauma. It is partly in order to bring such tragedies to consciousness that filmmakers like Alanis Obomsawin undertake their work” (106). The same can be said for many poets which I am examining in my other lists.

 

Trauma and Recovery by Judith Lewis Herman

Filed under: Theory List Dr. Watson — jamiedbarker @ 2:47 am

Trauma and Recovery by Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. is an investigation of trauma that occurs in the aftermath of violence and is very pertinent to my study of trauma in literature. Herman says in her introduction “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialect of psychological trauma… When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom” (1). With poetry being such a personal art, it is only expected that if trauma does exist within a person or a culture, that it will appear, either directly or metaphorically, consciously or unconsciously, in the poetry of that individual.

            What is important with trauma studies and multicultural studies, especially, for example, with African American poetry from the Black Arts Movement as said by Herman, “To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins victim, this social context is created by relationships with friends, lovers, and family. For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered. The systematic study of psychological trauma therefore depends on the support of a political movement. Indeed, whether such study can be pursued or discussed in public is itself a political question… Advances in the field occur only when they are supported by a political movement powerful enough to legitimate an alliance between investigators and patients and to counteract the ordinary social processes of silencing and denial. In the absence of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness” (9).

            In the second chapter, which deals with terror, Herman defines trauma and the affects that trauma has on the body and psyche. For my study, what is most important in regards to a person’s reaction to a threat forces the body into a state of hyperarousal which “evokes intense feelings of fear and anger. These changes in arousal, attention, perception, and emotion are normal, adaptive reactions. They mobilize the threatened person for strenuous action, either in battle or in flight. Traumatic reactions occur when actions is of no avail. When neither resistance nor escape is possible, the human system of self-defense becomes overwhelmed and disorganized. Each component of the ordinary response to danger, having lost its utility, tends to persist in an altered and exaggerated stat long after the actual danger is over” (34). It is precisely this type of reaction (of fight or flight) that numerous poets write about in their poetry, either consciously or unconsciously. Hyperarousal is a psychological state where the body goes on permanent alert from what has been witnessed or occurred to the person. Hyperarousal is the first symptom of post traumatic stress disorder and can be identified by the fact that “the traumatized person startles easily, reacts irritably to small provocations, and sleeps poorly (35). In his study of combat veterans, Abram Kardiner understood such symptoms to be the result of “chronic arousal of the autonomic nervous system. He also interpreted the irritability and explosively aggressive behavior of traumatized men as disorganized fragments of a shattered ‘fight or fight’ response to overwhelming danger” (35-36). Such hyperarousal is not unique to war and battle fatigue, but to any occasion where an event overwhelms the senses and creates a life threatening instance for the victim. Violence from the streets perpetrated by bigotry, racist police, or an overtly racist society can create and atmosphere of threat which may, at times, transform into a life threatening fear felt not only for an individual, but for a community. Such threats are palpable in the poetry written during civil rights and the verbalization of fight is apparent in the poetry of Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, and Sonia Sanchez.

            After the event, the aftereffect of the trauma is still present within the person and prevents the person from the normal course of their life. For the patient, Herman says “It is as if time stops at the moment of trauma. The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciousness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep. Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event. Thus, even normally safe environments may come to feel dangerous, for the survivor can never be assured that she will not encounter some reminder of the trauma” (37). Therefore, it would be only natural that the retelling or the reaction to various circumstances associated with the trauma would surface within the writing of a person who has suffered the effects of a traumatic event. Herman continues on page 39 saying “Traumatized people relive the moment of trauma not only in their thoughts and dreams but also in their actions… Adults as well as children often feel impelled to re-create the moment of terror, either in literal or in disguised forms. Sometimes people reenact the traumatic moment with a fantasy of changing the outcome of the dangerous encounter” thus, as I previously stated, a person suffering from the aftereffects of trauma would most likely write about the event, given that they were a writer. In some instances, as in some of the poetry of Komunyakka about war, the trauma is directly expressed within the poem, but in a majority of the poetry that I have read in this study the expression of trauma is written in a manner which is less apparent, not necessarily metaphorical, but as a theme through out, such as travel. “More commonly, traumatized people find themselves reenacting some aspect of the trauma of the trauma scene in disguised form, without realizing what they are doing” (40).

            The trauma creates a feeling of helplessness within the victim and in order to overcome the helplessness, the patient needs to regain control of the event, which can be accomplished by writing about the event. Herman says about this regaining control over the event experienced by a man named Janet, a patient of Freud, stating “In his use of language, Janet implicitly recognized that helplessness constitutes the essential insult of trauma, and that restitution requires the restoration of a sense of efficacy of power. The traumatized person, he believed, ‘remains confronted by a difficult situation, one in which he has not been able to play a satisfactory part, one to which his adaptation has been imperfect, so that he continues to make efforts at adaptation” (41). Paul Russell, as paraphrased by Herman “sees the repetition compulsion as an attempt to relive and master the overwhelming feelings of the traumatic moment” (42). Not only to patients suffer from these symptoms, but they also experience a numbing to the world around them accompanied by amnesia. What is most interesting is that the patient’s experience of both sensations. Her states of this, “In the aftermath of an experience of overwhelming danger, the two contradictory responses of intrusion and constriction establish an oscillating rhythm. This dialectic of opposing psychological states is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the post-traumatic syndromes” (47).

Yusef Komunyakaa’s Neon Vernacular

Filed under: Narrow List Dr. Sell — jamiedbarker @ 2:30 am

Yusef Komunyakaa’s Neon Vernacular had several poems which I was interesting in discussing. It was my hope that the collection of new and selected poems would have more new poems written for Neon Vernacular but this was not so. What I did find to be very help is the fact that the collected poems had several sections taken from books which I will not be exploring on my list. From these sections I was able to find several poems that I would also like to discuss. The first poem I would like to discuss is “Changes: or, Reveries at a Window Overlooking a Country Road, with Two Women Talking Blues in the Kitchen.” This is a very unique poem, not only to Komunyakaa, but as a poem in general. The poem’s structure of three voices, two in a conversation on the left hand side of the page written in a Black English dialect and a third speaker, more akin to Komunyakaa’s typical voice written on the right hand side of the page. It is apparent that the third speaker is listening to two women, as indicated in the title, and the two women speakers do not appear to be aware of the third listening. The third speaker references the women during the poem and refers to them as “my grandmamma/ & an old friend of hers from childhood/ talking B-flat blues” (lines 14-16). The majority of what the third speaker is referring to in the right hand section is the beauty of the Black English language and how it is poetic and musical. It is a celebration for the beauty of African America and is noteworthy, not only because of the uniqueness of the three voices, but because of all that the poem mentions, from Hughes to Mingus and the pride that exists in all things African American.

 

The second poem that I wanted to discuss comes from the selection from Toys in a Field entitled “Please” which discusses the aftereffects of trauma. Many of the poems selected from Toys in a Field dealt with the aftereffects of war or with war itself. In “Please” the speaker is telling of a memory of a mission he led where his soldiers were ambushed. Although this retelling appears voluntary, he also said that the same memory haunted him the night before “while making love” (line 30) where he “cried out,/ Hit the dirt!” (lines 31-32). Unlike many of the poems which I have read during this endeavor that demonstrate the affects of trauma via fight versus flight which has manifested with in the poem, “Please” addresses the influence of trauma on the speaker directly and tells of the regret and flashbacks associated with the tragedies of war. 

 

Another poem dealing with trauma is found in the selection take from February in Sydney entitled “When Loneliness Is A Man” describing a man recounting mistakes and misfortunes which occurred in his life. More important than the various mistakes and losses listed in the poem is the man’s reaction to them. In the poem we find the man drunk and still drinking which is a psychological escape thus an attempted flight from the memories and realization of the negative things that have occurred within one’s life. Rather than fleeing in a physical since by means of travel, the man is fleeing by means of alcohol in response to trauma associated with losing loved ones by death or emotional turmoil.

February 3, 2009

Marjorie Agosín

Filed under: Broad List Dr. Sherwod — jamiedbarker @ 8:09 pm

Marjorie Agosín is American born, but spent time in Chile, the returned to the United States in 1971 as a Chilean exile. Her poet in Zones of Pain is filled with images of trauma that focuses mainly on the women of Chile. My reasons for choosing Agosin are because I felt that I did not have an ample female presence in the list, but more importantly, when examining trauma in poetry, Agosin is a magnificent example. Unlike other poets that I have read thus far, Agosin engages trauma directly rather than the indirect methods that other poets use, especially those that exhibit that fight or flight response in the writings. In her poem “The most unbelievable part” the speaker discusses the traumatic events which he or she (and for simplicity’s sake, through the rest of this blog, I will refer to the speaker as she) witnessed, such as on lines 18 and 19: “bought furniture made of broken bones/ dined on tender ears and testicles.” The speaker also discusses the feeling of terror that she and others felt knowing atrocities like these were going on: “now nobody could stroll along the avenues/ without terror bursting through their bones” (27-28). What made these atrocities worse in the speakers eyes is that they were perpetrated by “nice people/ just like us” (33-34). Within the poem Agosin is able to present an image, both of the trauma being witnessed by the people as well as the reaction of the people. Similar to this poem, Agosin describes an account of trauma being inflicted upon a speaker in “Torture” and is able to discuss the outcome of the trauma in her poem “Remembering the Mad Women of the Plaza De Mayo” yet these poems only recount one aspect, unlike “The most unbelievable part” which tells both.

 

One other poem that I wanted to mention is “The blood is a nest” because it was the only poem I found in this collection that did deal with the fight or flight response. A very short poem, whose narrative speaks volumes for the feelings of the speaker. It is my belief that the blood spoken of in the poem is not the blood of the speaker, but the blood spilled in the land where the speaker is from. I draw this from the fact that the speaker identifies herself as flying and the blood as the feathers in a nest. The speaker states in the fifth line that she has no answers and that “The questions stayed behind/ in my flight” (lines 8-9). It is my belief that the speaker is leaving behind the bloodshed, the questions of the bloodshed, and is attempting to leave behind the memory of the bloodshed through this metaphorical flight. The speaker is attempting to leave these questions and everything related to this trauma by leaving her home behind her as flies away. If one wanted to, it would not be hard to relate this flight to the exile that took place in Agosin’s life as well as all the bloodshed. The flight could be real in that since, especially since she did have to leave her home. I would be more willing to say that this flight is psychological in that the speaker, as is apparent within the poems, suffered and witnessed a great deal of trauma and desires to leave it behind and forget the event entirely. This is alluded to in the poem as the speaker says she has no answers and desires to leave the questions behind.

February 2, 2009

Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience by Angelo N. Ancheta

Filed under: Theory List Dr. Watson — jamiedbarker @ 10:04 pm

Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience by Angelo N. Ancheta was an interesting book because it allowed me to understand the idea of racism beyond the bounds of black and white issues, which is primarily how I understood racism growing up. Although I knew racism permeated all cultures, I never realized just how deeply it impacted people of Asian descent. Such a statement may sound ignorant, but my upbringing was such that I was taught that all people were equal and it was very wrong to judge someone on how they looked. For me, I understood that there were white people that hated black people and likewise, but it wasn’t until I was out of high school that I really realized that racism existed beyond black and white. By no means am I saying that I didn’t know that racism impacted people of Asian heritage, I guess what I am saying is that I didn’t realize how much it impacted people of Asian descent. I knew about the internment camps during WWII and knew that several wars involved our country again Asian countries, but never gave much thought as to the racism that would arise from those wars, nor did I realize to what extend Asian Americans were persecuted.

One of the first passages of the book which drew my attention appear on page 45 where Ancheta spoke of how racism actually operates on an unconscious level. He draws upon the ideas of Charles Lawrence and discusses how “Theories of cognitive psychology support the view that racial differentiation begins on an unconscious level. According to cognitive theory, categorizing and stereotyping are normal processes through which people perceive the world and make sense of it” (45). I found this interesting and informative to explain some a reason why some people may be racist, but, like many things, know why and how something might work doesn’t make it right. Several pages later, Ancheta visions of race in discrimination law and the complex method of antidiscrimination laws and the importance that race plays in our society. The idea of being “color blind” is one that superficially sounds fair, but, in reality reinforces racism by ignoring it. As Ancheta discusses, the system is already set up to give advantages to whites, thus, by ignoring race, we as a society are simply reinforcing the racist system. I should note that by racist system, I am discussing the examples Ancheta pointed out, such as the “apportioning [of] resources such as government contracts or enrollment in higher education” (49). However, to be conscious of race may help remedy certain problems, “Color-conscious visions, on the other hand, are rooted in principles that see race-consciousness as a necessary remedy to discrimination and as promoting the benefits of inclusion that accure to institutions and to society in general from a diverse population” (49).

 

In the third chapter, Ancheta discusses the problem that many Asian Americans faced by sharing the same racial ancestry of the “enemy” of the United States. Ancheta examines the supreme case of Fred Korematsu. “The original Korematsu case typifies how ‘looking like the enemy’ undermines the protection of basic rights, and how legal doctrine skews considerations of race in laws of discrimination in the ‘natural interest’” (63). This is not only outrageous in many respects, but describes the plight of many Arab Americans and visiting Arabs today. Ancheta continues on by discussing how Arab Americans, Asian Americans, and Latino/a Americans face the burden of always being seen as “foreign” and never accepted as truly American. Such an idea calls upon some the poems of Gary Soto where, even though he is American born, he is told in his poem (the speaker is identified as Soto and is in the first person) to run when the border guards approach even though he is American working in a field. Because the people of these three groups are not black or white, people assume them to be a part of a foreign other, as outlined by Ancheta, Arab Americans are thought to be terrorists, Latino/as are thought to be illegal immigrants and Asian Americans are thought to be part of a competing industry, or worse, as part of an old enemy by people who fought in WWII, Korea, or Vietnam. While this is obviously racist stereotyping, Ancheta appears to disarm his argument twenty pages or so later by stating that “For Asian Americans, the immigrant experience is a person experience. Two out of every three Asian Americans is an immigrant, and the parents or grandparents of most Asian Americans born in the United States were immigrant as well” (83). This seems to undermine Ancheta’s dismay with being asked where he is from and the common assumption many have about Asian Americans. Ancheta believes it wrong to assume an Asian American person to be from another country, yet this fact seems to suggest that a majority of Asian Americans are foreign born or first or second generation born. I know this is knit picking, but, I believe it undermines some of his argument.

 

Lastly, Ancheta discusses the difficult and complex differences between race and ethnicity in regards to Asian Americans. Saying that someone is Asian American is definitely oversimplifying someone’s ethnicity, especially when we consider the rich traditions and vast differences between Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean people. The same argument can, in a sense, be made about white people, though, but usually isn’t because many whites have been in the United States for so many generations. African Americans have had their roots broken, thus attempting to find one’s ethnic roots is nearly impossible, and, many African Americans have resided in the United States for many generations, as well. Ancheta ends his chapter, however, by negating part of his argument by stating that “Identity is, by definition, a personal matter… Identities shift and evolve, expand and contract, regardless of what the law says. But the law can—and should—change to address the richness of multiple identities. Asian American experiences demonstrate that race is only one of many dimensions defining personal identity” (147-148). It is precisely this quote that I am in most agreement with.

Black Geographies and the Politics of Place edited by Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods

Filed under: Theory List Dr. Watson — jamiedbarker @ 8:41 pm

Black Geographies and the Politics of Place edited by Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods is a book which you suggested I read because of my interest in the travel of the speakers or characters in poems which exhibited the nature of fleeing as part of the fight or flight response due to trauma. This book did give some insight into my studies. Starting on page 17: “Throughout black history many emotive narratives and songs have testified to the desire always to return—whether this return be through travel, writings, imagination, or the fostering of political affiliations. In the contemporary context, then, we have to see both Africans and African diaspora peoples as also engaging in the redefinition process based on their own historico-social experience” (17). I take from this the idea that the trauma that African Americans may have are based on both the oppression and racism which exists in American society, but also a past of both slavery and diaspora, and as such, not only would the oppression and racism be compounded by a history of slavery, but an unhomeliness due to the kidnapping and diasporic elements of the past. Unlike Asian American, Arab Americans, Latinos/as, or any other minority group, African Americans have a past which holds deeper scars and a collective trauma unlike any other minority group in the United States.

 

These thoughts are continued and expounded upon on the next page, “For the most part… this relocation of African people to different geographical locations often meant subordination or dispossession, with lives that remained constantly debased” (18).

 

The discussion of hip hop within the text was appealing to me because that is something that I am interested in examining in my dissertation, thus I marked several passages, but none that would be useful for my study here. What I did learn, however, is that my idea about trauma and the writing so fight versus flight are not the same as the idea of a Black geography, and I think that is important to distinguish. Unlike the idea of escaping to or from a certain area or community because of ethnic ties (like the sacred sites of African America spoken of on 71 and 72), the escape I am examining is a psychological response and a figurative, sometimes turned physical, escape. This may be expressed through the discussion of a desire to flee a certain area, but escape can also take the form of alcohol and drug use. The desire to escape appears in the literature of African Americans and other cultures, as well as in blues and hip hop lyrics. This is spoken of by Woods on page 72, “From the blues to hip hop, the imprisoned are not discarded as outcasts; rather, they are often considered witnesses to, and students of, a particular stage of regional reproduction and conflict. Also, the expressed desire to escape from the traps of a particular place has made the place, the community, and the intellectual sacred. For example, the anthems of Robert Johnson, in 1936, and Tupac Shakur, in 1996, simultaneously analyze the daily reproduction of regional relations in the Mississippi Delta and urban America while importing their sense of supernatural doom, sacredness, and triumph upon them” (72). I would argue that this is only partially the case. It is the trauma involved within these places which are the main reasons these individuals wish to flee, yet their flight is both physical and psychological. By physically leaving their homeland, even if the flight is not outside of the nation, but a move to a different portion of the same nation, that flight still results in a diaspora for which the individual is left with not only the trauma of the event(s) but the nagging desire to return home. This is compounded in African American culture leading to a double diaspora, and yet the oppression and racism isn’t alleviated by fleeing, and thus the trauma continues from the past, as well as the present. The desire to leave is not just physical, but emotional and psychological, whereupon the person desires not flee to a certain place, even though it may be stated as so, but the desire is to escape the suffering and torment which the individual may be feeling or trying desperately not to confront.

Privilege, Power, and Difference

Filed under: Theory List Dr. Watson — jamiedbarker @ 8:40 pm

Allen G. Johnson’s book Privilege, Power, and Difference has a special resonance for in that he is also a white male examining race from a perspective unlike many that I have read thus far. He began with a stating this and saying how the book could not have anything but a white, male point of view because that is what he is and that he cannot know from his own experience. This was very good for me to hear and reinforced my feelings about going into and studying this field. Although it is a pretty elementary statement, it is one that I believe needs to be said because I don’t believe it is said enough, not only in the field of literature, but in all walks of life. What we know is only what we know because of who we are and what we already know. Johnson goes on to discuss a conversation that he has had with a African American woman about race and gender and how he is treated different by being a white male than she is by being a African American female. Within his story he was able to verbalize the situation that allowed me to better understand and work through my own thoughts on the matter. On paragraph, in particular, really spoke to me:

 

“It is not that I’ve done something or thought bad thought or harbored ill will toward her because she’s black and female. No, the problem is that in the world as it is, huge issues involving race and gender shape her life and mine in dramatically different ways. And it’s not some random accident that befell her while I escaped. A tornado didn’t blow through town and level her house while leaving mine alone. No, her misfortune is connected to my fortune; the reality of her having to deal with racism and sexism every day is connected to the reality that I don’t. I didn’t have to do anything wrong for this to be true and neither did she. But there it is just the same.” (9)

 

This harkens back to a class that I have taken some years back in my master’s program called Abolitionist and Feminist Literature. I may have already spoken of this experience, so I’ll only briefly speak of it here. Being one of only three white males in the class, it was not difficult to begin to feel uncomfortable with the simple fact that we were white and male. It was not hard to realize that all the problems being faced by women and African Americans were the fault of white men. It was not long at all before I dreaded going to the class, but felt that it may have only been my own observation being overly sensitive. After discussing it with the other two white men, however, I was quick to learn that my feelings were not alone and we began calling the class “kill the white man class” because of the discussions in class being directed toward what awful and horrible people white men are. I almost dropped out of grad school that semester. I felt every remark was directed at me and that it was my fault that people from Africa were enslaved and that women have been oppressed for millennia. This was hard because, well, mainly because it isn’t true, I mean, I have not nor would ever want to enslave anyone and I don’t believe that I am responsible for the actions of people that occurred hundreds of years before I was born. Regardless, I felt guilty. I think this is very akin to survivor’s guilt where something happens to one person while the other is unaffected, just as Johnson spoke of above. This is not to say that being born into any race is negative, but that, just as Johnson said, some people have to deal with racism while others really don’t. As the last two sentences above says, “I didn’t have to do anything wrong for this to be true and neither did she. But there it is just the same” (9). It took a while after that class to realize that when people in various classes were talking about the evils of white men, they weren’t necessarily talking about me. It wasn’t necessarily my doing, but, unless I was extremely conscious of my words and actions, I could be part of the problem rather than the solution.

 

I think this is what Johnson is talking about at the bottom of page 9:

 

“The hard and simple truth is that the ‘we’ that’s in trouble is all of us—not just straight white middle- and upper-class males—and it will take all or at least most of us to get us out of it. It’s relatively easy, for example, for white people to fall into the safe and comfortable rut of thinking that racism is a problem that belongs to people of color, or for men to see sexism as a women’s issue, or for members of the middle and upper classes to see poverty as people’s own fault…We live in a society that attaches privilege to being white and male and heterosexual regardless of your social class. If I don’t see how that makes me part of the problem of privilege, I won’t see myself as part of the solution. And if people in privileged groups don’t include themselves in the solution, the default is to leave it to blacks and women and Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, lesbians, gay men, and lower and working classes to do it on their own. But these groups can’t do it on their own, because they don’t have the power to change entrenched systems of privilege by themselves. If they could do that, there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place. The simple truth is that the trouble we’re in can’t be solved unless people who are heterosexual or male or Anglo or white or economically comfortable feel obligated to make the problem of privilege their problem and to do something about it” (9-10).

 

This passage really spoke to me an reaffirmed my belief that I could teach African American poetry or multicultural poetry or other similar classes that exist outside of my white maleness. It also helped me put together a stronger retort if and when I am confronted about being a “white boy” or a “honkey professor” teaching out of my element. I firmly believe that we are a world community and we who live in this nation have been fortunate to be born where we have, and as such, as a believer in equality, I believe that it is not only my desire, but my obligation, to work toward a nation and world community free of oppression, where people are judged by their deeds and not by the color of their skin.

 

Other points that I found interesting in the book were:

 

Page 24: the “luxury of obliviousness”

 

Page 39: the idea that belonging to a certain privileged group only increase one’s odds of advantages, but isn’t guarantee.

 

Page 41: “because oppression result from relations between social categories, it is not possible to be oppressed by society itself… belonging to a privileged category that has a oppressive relationship with another isn’t the same as being an oppressive person who behaves in oppressive ways. That whites as a social category oppress people of color as a social category, for example, is a social fact. That doesn’t, however, tell us how a particular white person thinks or feels about particular people of color or behaves toward them. This can be a subtle distinction to hang on to, but hang on to it we must if we’re going to maintain idea of what oppression is and how it works.”

 

Page 71: I think a portion of the second full paragraph helps to validate the idea of fight versus flight in poetry as related to psychological trauma from racial inequality and oppression. The paragraph discusses how getting along with others is beneficial but this is only part of the problem. About being nicer and getting along with people is a good goal, but about this, Johnson says, “I don’t object to this goal, but it ignores the fact that a lot of trouble doesn’t begin and end with interpersonal relations and emotional wounds. Much of it is embedded in structures of power and inequality that shape almost every aspect of life in this society, from economic to politics to religion to schools and the family” (71). It is from some of these embedded structures that I believe many poets are righting about when they speak of fighting or fleeing and it is this oppression from which they are trying to escape.

 

Page 85: “Breaking the paralysis begins with realizing that the social world consists of a lot more than individuals. We are always participating in something larger than ourselves—what sociologists call social systems—and systems are more than collections of people…If patterns of racism exist in a society, for example, the reason is never just a matter of white people’s personalities, feelings, or intentions. We also have to understand how they participate in particular kinds of social systems, how this participation shapes their behavior, and what consequences it produces.”

 

Page 97: This passage, as well as the one previous, was very helpful in allowing me a better understanding of dominance in a individual versus societal manner. “Just because a system is male-dominated doesn’t mean that most men are powerful. As most men will tell you, they aren’t most often due to class or race. Male dominance does mean, however, that every man can identify with power as a value that his culture associates with manhood, which makes it easier for any man to assume and use power in relation to others. It also encourages a sense of entitlement in men to use women to meet their personal needs.”

 

 

Page 115- 116 discusses how racism, sexism, and heterosexism permeates every aspect of our culture and calls on white, heterosexual men to aid in creating a society where everyone is equal because this inequality touches everyone. This passage also discusses the guilt that I mentioned earlier and states about white male guilt: “They have not reason to feel guilty about it because they didn’t do anything. But now it is there for them to deal with, just as it’s there for women, people of color, lesbians, and gay men who also didn’t do anything to deserve the oppression that so profoundly shaped their lives” (116).

Evangelina Vigil

Filed under: Broad List Dr. Sherwod — jamiedbarker @ 8:39 pm

As with several of the other Hispanic poets that I have read thus far, Evangelina Vigil uses both English and Spanish in her poems to communicate her message, and to make several other points the readers, as well. As I have said about other Latino/a writers, the use of Spanish alongside and mixed with English in the poems forces the reader into a position where they have a closer relationship with the writer because they are both bilingual, or, as is with most cases, the reader is forced into an uncomfortable spot of not fully understanding what is being said, and in that situation, the reader is othered. By othering her reader, Vigil places the reader in the state where she and other bilingual speakers have an power advantage over the reader, and as such, she is able to place the reader, regardless of their race in a place where they have less power and can better understand the frustrations that many Hispanics may feel in the United States.

 

The poem which I was most interested in of her collection Thirty an ‘ Seen a Lot was “evening news.” Better than any of the other poems in the collection, I believe this one best encapsulates the frustration of the oppression and economic hardship which many Latinos/as face on a daily basis and the manner in which society casts such hardships aside and fail to acknowledge the problems faced my ethnic minorities. By comparing the community of San Antonio’s West Side with people from India and Haiti, Vigil is able to demonstrate the economic oppression that faces the people living there, but also suggest that the people of San Antonio’s West Side are just as alienated and unwelcomed in American society. Without studying the sociology of San Antonio, we can gather that the majority of the people from that portion of San Antonio are Latinos and Latinas, especially when we consider such lines as “it/ is damn hard making it as a Chicana in the USA” (36-37). Vigil also links the struggles of the Chicanos/as of San Antonio with the people of Central America, South America, and Mexico allowing for a continuity of struggle and community for people of Hispanic decent throughout both continents, but is quick to point out that the economic struggle of people in the United States is not nearly as bad as those south of the American boarder, yet the psychological trauma is much worse in the United States.

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