Literature, Life-Writing, and Identity

Rationale

Janet Mock stresses in no unclear way the importance of finding stories that reflect our own – of having our fears and doubts and hopes and inspirations reinforced by others who have trod our path and tell us that we can make it. These concepts will be central to the work chosen for students to study in this unit. Additionally, we will strive to focus as much as we can on stories from folks outside of our own culture and perspective. In her TED Talk, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about the danger of what she calls a “single story.” She equates it to early books she read: “How impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. . .I loved those American and British Books I read [growing up in Nigeria]. But the unintended consequence was that I didn’t know that people like me could exist [in books].”⁴ Adichie goes on to equate this type of single view to people, revealing that her American roommate at her American college was indeed shocked to find that she listened to Mariah Carey and not “tribal music,” and even surprised that she knew how to cook. This person had a single internal story about what it means to come from Africa, and could not imagine that a person from Africa could be like her. This type of perspective is dangerous. Simple misunderstanding of culture between college roommates may seem innocuous but it is a smaller example of multi-cultural misunderstandings that can lead to, or be rooted in, prejudices. A single story is a dangerously limited way to confront literature, or art, or history, or each other.

The stories we tell have tremendous power with regard to identity. They can reinforce our sense of power and security, while they can also impair or even destroy those things. Hilde Lindemen Nelson in her book Damaged Identities: Narrative Repair, proposes that narratives of the dominant culture, or “master narratives,” and exposure to them, can be damaging to the identities of those who are not of the dominant culture and could perceive themselves as less. She defines a master narrative as “the stories found laying about in our culture that serve as summaries of socially shared understandings.”⁵ Also, it is damaging to the very members of the dominant culture who, often unconsciously, go along minding nothing of any culture outside their own. Why would they need to? They see themselves everywhere – the main focus of popular films, books, and music. Why make the time and effort necessary to search out cultures and experiences outside of your own when yours, the life and experience you already know, is so prevalent and accessible, requires no extra effort, and reinforces everything with which you are comfortable and secure?

This question seems hypothetical, but there is an answer: because it is damaging. It fills the dominant culture with ignorance and unconscious (or conscious) arrogance. While at the same time, the suppressed or misunderstood culture suffers prejudice based upon that pervading and unchecked misunderstanding. Adichie’s story about her college roommate may seem harmless, maybe to some even insipid, but really it is simply a lighter, more subtle example of an American condition that is much more dangerous and harmful.

In this unit, we will look at Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, a genre-defying epic poem of sorts where she professes to suffer greatly from seemingly small things as an African-American woman. A man at a store who cuts blatantly in front of her in line and, upon noticing, apologizes and says truthfully that he did not see her. A store clerk asking her if she thinks her credit card will work even though he asked no such thing of her friend who checked out before her. An as-of-yet unmet new therapist insisting with violent language that she (Rankine) get off her property, only to apologize after realizing that this is in fact her new client. “You take in things you don’t want all the time,” she says.⁶ It can and does make people feel like less; to feel unappreciated, undervalued, and even unseen. These persistent vexations can seem insignificant when isolated. But day after day, time after time, piling up into an amalgam that becomes a part of one's identity, they can lead to significant psychological and emotional impairment, and when surfacing back up into the world can erupt into unrest, upheaval, even violence.  

This is the damage of dominant versus suppressed culture. This is the danger of a single story.

So we will look at many stories: of other cultures, of experience, of hardship and triumph, of anxiety and strife and suffering born of being outside of the dominant culture. We will focus a lot of our time on what Nelson would call “counter-stories – a story that resists an oppressive identity and attempts to replace it with one that commands respect.”⁷ These stories are intended to both repair damaged identities (those misrepresented by the master narratives of a dominant culture) by piecing together the positives of one’s identity, and to illuminate the misrepresented story for said dominant culture.⁸ The dominant group may not even realize they are undervaluing the suppressed group. It’s common for both to believe the single story of the dominant culture. Hence the importance of multicultural study.

Some of the counter-stories highlighted herein have a positive, inspirational tone; some have a fairly negative, exploratory, or even intense tone. We will deal with both negative and positive examples of human nature and human experience. It will be necessary to ask ourselves tough questions and explore challenging texts, concepts, and sometimes read stories that are difficult to read, understand, or accept. If anyone questions this, easily point them toward inclusion of standard curricular texts like The Grapes of Wrath, The Jungle, Lord of the Flies, and other disturbing, desperate, negative portrayals of sad or unjust truths about human nature. Just because the texts spotlighted in this unit are not part of the standard canon (read: dominant culture) does not mean their themes of adversity should be discounted due to their challenging or intense nature. In fact, that is exactly what makes their study, scrutiny, and consideration necessary. We need to explore stories of adversity and extreme experience to face and confront adverse, extreme realities. But there are also texts in this unit with wholly positive viewpoints and messages, humor, even inspiration. Students and their teacher, through this unit, will be shocked and horrified by some of the art herein, and in turn lifted into the hope of what could someday be – and what in some cases already is – through art, literature, spirit, and effort.  

This unit will propose (or agree with the presupposition) that multicultural texts and reading are important to identity, and that identity driven texts promote reading. David Denby, a writer for The New Yorker, recently released a book called Lit Up, wherein he outlines his experience spending time in English classrooms in the northeast tri-state area, analyzing what works – instruction, teacher-student rapport and interaction, and the books themselves that are most effective – for students to improve their reading or even, really, to become readers. He shares some interesting, authentic examples of what happens when students begin reading multicultural texts like Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Kite Runner: “[the students’] reading and talking became an act of liberation and self-creation.”⁹ Exploring experiences outside of our own complicates our thinking and therefore stimulates us intellectually far more effectively than topics comfortable and domestic to us. Additionally, according to Jill Campbell of Yale University, in multicultural fictional texts – texts through which we encounter characters and experience different from our own – we encounter a narrator we don’t know, and therefore nothing is being asked of us. We are not being asked to invest anything, or to prove who we are.¹⁰ And so while reading, we can be ourselves completely and therefore have an unfettered lesson on who we are based on our reaction to their experience. “If not life-saving, it can help us [learn to] survive as well as to thrive.”¹¹