Flashes of Insight

Reading In Short was a really neat way to wrap up or readings in the class because it was so clear to me how these pieces used many of the strategies we’ve been discussing all semester about the nonfiction short form. The good ones, the ones that pulled me in, had such intention, such a deliberate delineation of scope and description that led to the nuggets that make a piece of writing like this so satisfying. I began reading In Short over winter break, and in returning to it, I realized that one vignette had stayed with me in the back of my mind this whole time—“Volar” by Judith Ortiz Cofer. I felt this piece really worked to create a series of comparisons of dualities in order to describe Cofer’s family dynamics. There is the duality of child versus adult, how Cofer is perceiving the world and how she perceives her parents in the adult world. The duality of fantasy versus reality, which is also freedom versus constraint: how her dreams of becoming a comic book hero and flying around the neighborhood shape the reality she wishes to experience juxtaposed with the harsher light of reality where her parents are afraid of the landlord and have to constantly worry about things like money. Finally there is Home versus America. Here is where I think the piece really creates an emotional poignancy, in the way Cofer is able to show the reader the complex emotions her parents are feeling and how she as a child perceives them, without really using any of the cliché, obvious adjectives like “my mother was sad and a little wistful.” Instead we get clues, just as Cofer did as a child, that help us interpret the scene: “Mi vida, please understand…And I knew that soon she would rise from the table. Not abruptly” (35). Here, it is clear that her parents are unhappy but not at each other. They enjoy their time alone in the morning, use terms of endearment, and her father speaks “patiently” and “gently” to her mother, showing that they have a strong and loving relationship (35). The addition of “Not abruptly” here I felt was really beautiful: the speaker’s mother is not angry at the father for saying that they cannot go to Puerto Rico; she knows the there are constraints beyond either of their control; she knows they have chosen an American life and homesickness is a part of that.  

Another of my favorite vignettes, not surprisingly, was “White Men Can’t Drum” by Sherman Alexi. With usual Alexi deftness, the author is able to take humor, sadness, and anger, perfectly balance them and make it look easy. While being memoire-esque in nature, this piece really reveals so much about American culture. Alexi as the speaker remains the storyteller who tells us of our own blind faults and in that way reveals that these concerns are deeply important to himself. He begins with the contradictory stereotype of Native Americans in American history as either savage or noble, barbaric or deeply spiritual. He then goes on to tie this contradictory construction to the historical appropriation of other cultures by white men. The men’s movement “blindly pursues Native solutions to European problem but completely neglects to provide European solutions to Native problems” (154). Here Alexi points out the cruel irony that while white cultures decimated Native American culture, they are now taking an interest in it NOT out of an effort to honor it, make amends, or help Native Americans themselves but to steal it to apply to their own problems for a “cure.” Such an appropriation is arrogant and makes little spiritual sense. Instead of ranting, though, or having an entirely bitter attitude full of hatred for these men, Alexi exposes the true problem lying at the heart of what he sees: an anxiety in America, across races, around masculine identity. And he is ale to look at these white men with compassion as well as irritation at their injustice because it is a kind of anxiety that Native American men have been going through for hundreds of years.