Following up on our conversation

I wanted to follow up on a few threads from our conversation and you blog entries, and to share some links and other background info with you.

In our discussion of how we come to internalize our culture's ideas about race, someone wondered whether xenophobia might be natural, a kind of instinct. I would encourage all of us to be very suspicious of the word "natural," as well as the phrase "common sense." Both frequently cover for hegemonic ideology--for ideas the mainstream of our culture takes as given, but which are in fact historically produced, and which we can destabilize by examining them. Race is an excellent example of such a category, so central to our culture that it feels natural and obvious to us--and yet the concept of "race" was invented sometime during the beginning of Europe's colonial age, in the 16th and 17th centuries. (Why and how? This is a topic we'll be reading some about as the semester progresses, but I can also always point you towards more material on the subject if you'd like.) Race is a construct, created by people and subject to historical change. Obviously the fact that race is a fiction doesn't make it any less powerful, or its material and economic effects any less real.

I believe someone also pointed out how early in childhood we begin to be conscious of racial categories and stereotypes. That's certainly true. Check out this incredible short film (7 minutes), A Girl Like Me. Black teenaged girls talk about race and beauty issues, and then one does an experiment, talking to black children as young as three about their preferences for a black or a white doll.

I really enjoyed our discussion of how meaning is made and transmitted, and how the things we say have a way of carrying more information than we might intend. I was struck when Nick said, "Obviously, communication is receiver-oriented." It struck me at that moment that since this is a poetry class, it will be very important for us to talk about how language works as a medium of communication. We'll need to talk about signifiers (the noises we make with our mouths, the marks we make with pens on paper or with pixels on screens) and signifieds (the shared cultural ideas that those noises and marks refer to). In everyday language--say, when I say to you, "Please get out a sheet of paper"--the signifieds are the important part. I'm not worried about how aesthetically pleasing my utterance is--what I care about is getting you to do what I've asked. But in literary language, the signifiers start to matter more. Prose novelists shape sentences to have rhythm and flow, to sound good to the ear. Poets work even more closely with signifiers, creating patterns of rhyme, repetition, assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia--all effects based upon signifiers. In his essay "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World," Ron Silliman traces how the rise of industrial capitalism has been accompanied by an increased focus on signifieds in the way we use language, and a decreased focus on what he refers to as "the gestural"--that is, to the pleasure of using language, the pleasures of nonsense syllables ("hickory dickory dock," "hey nonny nonny," "de doo run run run de doo run run") and repetition. I find it interesting that so many of the slave songs we read rely so heavily upon repetition in their structures. I think this has partly to do with the fact that they're oral creations, and thus rely on rhyme, rhythm, and repetition as mnemonic devices. I also think this has to do with the fact that many of these songs were also likely used while working, to keep teams of workers in rhythm with one another (as you can see in the chain gang scene at the very beginning of O Brother, Where Art Thou?). But I also think that the repetition in these songs, like the repetitions in lots of poetry from all over the world and in all kinds of historical moments, has to do with the sheer pleasure of repetition--the fact that the human mouth enjoys the sensation of it, and the human ear is satisfied and soothed by it.

The last thread I wanted to pick up on was the persistent imagery of death that Nick and Vic mentioned in their blog posts, accompanied by the imagery of flying that Sarah noticed. If you've read Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, you're probably familiar with the myth of the flying African (and if you haven't read it, I recommend it highly!). Naomi Van Tol discusses it succinctly in the "All God's Children Got Wings" section here. Thus, in familiar spirituals like "I'll Fly Away," singers are singing in part about the legend of slaves who literally could fly home to Africa. A related concept is the African-American euphemism "going home" for dying. ("Sister Margaret went home last Tuesday, and she will be sorely missed.") At least some slaves believed that the souls of the dead went not to some fluffy-cloud Heaven in the sky, but back to their beloved homelands; thus, a slave born in African could hope to return there after death. This hope was particularly important to captured Africans who committed suicide or infanticide during the Middle Passage, a practice you'll see illustrated in the Kyle Baker text for next week. Finally, I'll point out that a perusal of the Old and New Testaments will reveal that enslaved African Americans were by no means the first oppressed people in the Judeo-Christian tradition to ascribe a kind of moral virtue to suffering, or to accept earthly existence full of misery in the belief that patience and martyrdom would be rewarded in the afterlife.