The Lens of Memory in "Working in a Region of Lost Names," "The Thinking Men," and "Belonging to the Land"

In “Working in a Region of Lost Names,” by Fred Arroyo I kept being struck by some of the beautiful language an imagery that the author uses. Passages like, “The countryside unfolded in gold and green and blue that late afternoon, the darker shapes of the orchards coloring with apples, plums, and peaches” (43); “There was a smell of cantaloupe and dust mixing in the air drifting in through the pole-barn doors that I still can’t seem to lose” (43). The author then goes on to communicate that this style is entirely consciously created, saying “I suddenly discovered that things can be beautiful in themselves because of the care I take to see them.” (50). Not only is this characteristic a feature of his writing style, but it is a lens with which he chooses to see the world and reinterpret events in his life, especially pertaining to his father. I felt that Arroyo’s depiction of his father was incredibly gracious and forgiving; he chooses to look back on his father’s life and the men like him with compassion and admiration for their struggles rather than judgment for their vices. Rather than being angry and resentful towards his father for the silence that built up between them even in Arroyo’s childhood, and the alcoholism that took a toll on his family, Arroyo chooses to look for the beauty in his memories and creates a kind of vividly colorful and emotional, bittersweet tapestry of their time working together. The center of gravity in the story came for me in the passage: “When the presence of the Green Giant cannery no longer exists, when it seems wiped away from Niles’s memory, I’ll still return to a region of lost names, a region where I can work to remember how those men lived with dignity” (51). And the dignity seems to be the most important part to Arroyo, that his father and the men like him who left Puerto Rico to make a life in California can be given a proper place in memory.

In “The Thinking Men” by Nikky Finney the first thing that caught my attention was the form. Because it felt more like poetry than the other two essays, and therefore used language in a more condensed way, I had to read it twice to feel like I really entered it into the piece. I liked that the piece seemed to come out of the epigraph, that maybe the author read the passage in a history book and then imagined all of these skilled black workers who helped build this great school building (I tried to Google “Old Main” and I think it was the original building at Knox College, but I’m not entirely sure).  I noticed that the author used a lot of ampersands and numbers to give the feeling that these were skilled construction workers who were very knowledgeable in math, and in fact the words “math” and “mind” are continually repeated top emphasize that these men were intelligent, strong, and skilled. This is all to undergird the ironic injustice that these black men who helped to build a university were then forbidden to take part in the institution.

Finney also emphasizes how these men put themselves into the building and so in a way it should belong to them. She writes: “With or without quill or lead a signature/can still be minted in vermillion mud” (164). She also attributes these men with profound hope, as they say, “We raised this place in the name of the new day coming, how we would,/one day be counted, along with the day to day blight/of life equally wormed out” (164). It is clear these men see education as a great source for hope in the future, that if their descendents can one day be admitted into universities, then they can finally hope to have real racial equality.

“Belonging to the Land” by David Mas Matsumoto is another piece about racial injustice. I felt it was a very effective strategy to open with Matsumoto’s childhood conceptions, or more accurately lack of conceptions, about race and then the crucial statement, “But that was before they told me that he was Mexican and I was Japanese” (309) that foreshadows the struggles to come. I felt the center of gravity in this essay came when Matsumoto says, “At least nature—bad weather, spring frosts, hailstorms, rain on the raisins—was democratic. It didn’t matter the color of your skin or your religion or where your family came from. But human nature was worse, it left scars that would not heal” (314). When I read this statement I felt like it ties the whole essay together; that there are two huge and uncontrollable forces that rule our lives—nature and human nature—and one is arbitrary and treats all people equally, and the other is arbitrary and can be full of injustice. The internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII is one of those dark moments in the history of human nature, where fear overtook sense and justice.