lee My Father, in Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud 65
whiskey, battered, beat, and even death. The household is brought into chaos,
and the mother clearly disapproves. Yet those who jump to conclusions of child
abuse — a frequent reaction among students — must account for a verb such as
romped and for the child’s holding on to his father rather than struggling to get
away. In fact, it is the child who holds on “like death” — an ironic simile — and
the father whose hands show signs of injury and wear, perhaps a reversal of what
might be expected of an abuser. Still, those who argue that the father is an abuser
could say that it is the knuckle that is battered. Are these the scars of a man who
works hard, or has he been injured by striking something — or someone — with
his fist? No, the poem is characterized by playfulness, the sentimentalist could
respond. The title refers to the father lovingly as “My Papa,” and the regular
rhythm and rhyme have a dancelike quality. Father and son participate together
in the dance, while the mother — not, we may note, mama — stands aside,
unwilling to “countenance” such behavior. The formal word used to describe
her face invites the connotations of stern disapproval while neatly providing the
rhyme. The sense of male solidarity in the rough and dangerous play that
excludes the woman may be a subtext worthy of discussion.
LI- YOuNG LEE
My Father, in Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud (p.386)
Even a cursory reading of his poetry and his philosophy reveals Li- Young Lee to
be a profoundly spiritual poet. He sees poetry and religion as intertwined, as a
deep sort of yoga in which the whole mind and being of the poet are absorbed
and reflected. Perhaps Li- Young’s most frequently anthologized piece is
“Persimmons,” a poem, like this one, in which his father appears as a character.
In the final stanza, the elderly man, now blind, sits on the cellar steps in the
family home as his son looks for a lost item. When the son finds several paintings,
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the old man touches with his hands the surface of one scroll he has made of
persimmons “so full,” says the poem’s speaker, “they want to drop from the
cloth.” The father goes on to say, “Some things never leave a person: / scent of
the hair of one you love, / the texture of persimmons, / in your palm, the ripe
weight.” In another poem — “The Gift” — the poet lovingly describes his father’s
voice as “a well / of dark water, a prayer” that he hears as the man gently removes
a splinter from the child’s palm. While our understanding of the current poem
is enhanced by knowing that the elder Mr.Li was a devout Christian who was
imprisoned because of his faith, the scenes in “Persimmons” showing the artist
and in “The Gift” revealing the father can provide added dimensions as we read
“My Father, in Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud.”
The first line of the poem simply repeats the title, but the enjambment after
this phrase forces the reader to pause imperceptibly before getting the slightly
paradoxical information in the rest of the sentence that the father is reading “to
himself” — a phrase often used to mean a person is reading silently. Nor is the
speaker sure of what the father is reading, whether Psalms or news. Juxtaposed,
the two seem equivalent, but they are far from that — the Psalms being sacred,
ancient, and perhaps eternal, given that the father is in heaven; the news being
worldly, current, impermanent, contingent upon tomorrow’s ephemeral events
for its context. The title itself, and the echoing first line, are themselves paradoxi–
cal and ironic, echoing the prayer that casts God as our father who art in heaven,
followed by the surprising image of “reading out loud” with an embodied human
voice. Then we follow the speaker’s reasoning as he tries to determine if his father
is thinking about what he has read or is “listening for the sound / of children in
the yard.” The scene suggests that the poet imagines his father in heaven behav–
ing exactly as he must have seen him do many times in the past. Undoubtedly,
the speaker has at one time been one of the “children in the yard” for whom the
father listens, ready to protect and soothe. Even if we have not looked at other
poems or at biographies, readers sense that the father has been a good one and
that the son has tender feelings toward him. Since we can assume that the son
feels “grief” for the father who has died, we can assume that he imagines his
father still watching over him. Indeed, if God is the father to whom he refers, the
metaphor of God as a loving father works, just as in the Lord’s Prayer.
The influence described in stanza 2 adds a sterner dimension to the picture
of the father- son relationship. Were this the only poem by Li- Young Lee that a
reader had encountered, the impression might be that this father offers a rather
cold sort of love despite the vigilance toward children in the opening line. To
most readers, the images here will sound negative. By ending the first line with
the word grave, the poet invites connotations that connect both to death and to
seriousness in life. The efforts of the father to indoctrinate his son seem to have
had the opposite effect. Yet the speaker does not seem bitter, simply realistic
about the influence. In the third stanza, the autobiographical elements seem
clear. At a certain point in the poet’s childhood, his father escaped from the
oppressive government of Indonesia and then moved from place to place in Asia
before coming to America. The image of listening for God but also for informa-
tion about current affairs before taking action (a radio) echoes the listening
reader in the opening lines, reading either “Psalms or the news”: both spiritual
and political realms must be considered in decision making. The picture is of an
ook-lynn Grandfather at the Indian Health Clinic 67
idealistic but pragmatic father. In this untidy balancing between worlds where
one finds guidance less in logical precision than in intuition caught “under a
lintel,” the two men are alike. The stern perseverance of the father in stanza 2
was burdensome and counterproductive, but the son discovers perhaps that even
this trait has come as the result of being a person “powerless, / to whom knowl-
edge came while he sat among / suitcases, boxes, old newspapers, string.” In the
final stanza, the speaker realizes that the guardian is less godlike than human.
Even in heaven he “waits” to see what the next moment will bring. The poem
ends with a question, signifying perhaps that life is always contingent.
Like Hayden, Clifton, and Roethke, the speaker of Li- Young Lee’s poem
looks at his father from the perspective of adulthood. While Clifton bitterly
rejects the father who has failed his family, seeming to think only of himself, the
other poets recognize the vulnerability underneath the facade of manly persever-
ance and hard work. Hayden tells us of “chronic angers” and Roethke of drunk-
enness, while Li- Young recalls a rule- bound scholar. Yet with honest pictures of
fallible human beings who loved their sons comes recognition and reconcilia-
tion. Merely writing the poem seems a fitting way of honoring the father.
GRANDPARENTS AND LEGACIES: POEMS (p.389)
ELIZABETH COOK- LYNN
Grandfather at the Indian Health Clinic (p.389)
When we ask student readers to approach a text written by someone with a
worldview and a sense of history that differ dramatically from their own, we
should be willing to give them context or point them toward sources of informa-
tion. Researching issues in Native American thought will reveal that controver-
sies exist within this diverse group of people as well. One Web site from a branch
of the Choctaw tribe, for example, begins with a barb against political correct-
ness: “No Native Americans here. Just us Indians.” Growing up in a politically
active Sioux family, however, Elizabeth Cook- Lynn takes a combative stance
toward anyone who seeks to commercialize or trivialize Native American tribal
traditions. She has been particularly critical of writers such as Michael Dorris,
arguing that they claim an authenticity they do not possess and unfairly appropri-
ate and deracinate selected aspects of Native American cultures for personal
status and economic gain. While she strongly believes that she must write in
order to preserve ethnic values, Cook- Lynn makes us aware that presenting bits
and pieces of the complex interweaving of lives that comprise a particular tribal
ethos can mislead us into thinking we get it when we couldn’t possibly do so.
Items such as “ gourd- shell rattles” cannot be taken in isolation, nor can a long
segment of history in which contact with whites compelled both voluntary and
involuntary revisions of tribal culture to be bypassed in favor of a romantic
golden age of the mythical noble savage. “Grandfather at the Indian Health
Clinic” should be read with these points in mind.
In the poem, the narrator’s attitude toward her grandfather might be best
characterized as accepting and realistic. She understands that the roles are
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reversed, that she as the “youngest child” should not be in the position of making
sure this tough old man pulls his collar up. That she recognizes his reluctant
acquiescence seems in itself respectful and caring. Most readers will find affec-
tion between the lines, and we do not find sentimentality, though any mention
of the word grandfather has been seen to evoke sentimentality in some college
students. In a family in which elders are to be respected, an “easy rage” with a
grandchild, especially one of the younger grandchildren, may be the norm and
does not imply abuse or lack of affection. In fact, the word easy carries a sense of
familiarity and comfort. Intergenerational conflict may be more often a matter
of negotiating a changing world than a reflection of personal issues. The elderly
man has been independent and in charge of his own life, but the Indian Health
Clinic is a different environment, for which he needs a guide. Being guided by
a “youngest child” symbolizes the change and helplessness that have come with
both age and dependence on an alien, dominant culture. We can infer from his
long journey on his own, from his work as a cowhand and rodeo rider, and from
the symbolic detail that “he turned his hat brim down in the summer rain” that
this man has led an active life in which he could stoically master whatever hard-
ships came. But now it is winter, both literally and figuratively, and he must
submit to the care of others.
NIKKI GIOVANNI
Legacies (p.391)
From her first recognition as a poetic and political voice of the black arts move-
ment of the 1960s and 1970s to her current involvement with young people as a
professor at Virginia Tech, Nikki Giovanni has celebrated and articulated her
African American heritage. Rather than following the literary and cultural tradi-
tions of white America, Giovanni uses the rhythms and vocabulary of her family
and neighborhood in her message and in the way she delivers it. Like many
hogan Heritage 69
black people of her generation, she seeks to recover and preserve a distinctive,
powerful family and cultural history and to express it to her contemporaries and
their children and grandchildren. Her grandmother, Louvenia Watson of
Knoxville, Tennessee, is for the poet a tangible link with this heritage, and Nikki
Giovanni — now grandmother age herself — serves as such a link to younger
people. The poem expresses a strong sense of this continuity, going all the way
back to West African customs and ways of being in the world. We therefore need
to see beyond the everyday images of the poem to the longer chain of human
experience they may symbolize.
In a similar way, the dialogue of the poem has surface meaning, but the
granddaughter, at least from the poet’s distance, hears instead something
unspoken in the dialogue. Although she seems to reject it, the child holds the
legacy too dear to spoil it with everyday use, is afraid — superstitiously or oth–
erwise — to touch the gift that her grandmother wants to pass on to her.
Folklore can be a way of doing something, such as making rolls. The child
seems to be thinking of a more spiritual, mystical link. When the grandmother
wipes her hands, she seems to give up on the idea that children will ever be
able to grasp the legacy their elders want to give, but we know that the poet has
recognized the motives of both generations. What is passed along cannot be
articulated by either.
Pride is an important concept in the poem and in the ideology of the poet;
being proud of one’s heritage is her implicit message. The compressed, idiom-
atic language and conversational rhythms, although not formally structured, are
nevertheless poetic and help prove her point that this way of writing poetry — this
African American way — is just as legitimate as any other, is in fact part of the
legacy. Linguists tell us that the surface meanings of words form only a part of
the story of any given discourse. We might encourage students to think of times
in which they have spoken at cross- purposes with older family members, know-
ing but not acknowledging that what was said was simply a code for something
of deeper significance.
LINDA HOGAN
Heritage (p.392)
As a Chickasaw, Linda Hogan has a heritage that is a mixed bag, and in this
poem she hints at the multiracial history that complicates it. Originally from the
Southeast, the Chickasaws were considered one of the “civilized tribes” and
were known in the nineteenth century as slaveholders whose cruelty almost
matched that of their white neighbors. At the same time, they sometimes wel–
comed runaway slaves, and both blacks and whites were known to marry into
the Chickasaw nation, with children given full recognition. None of this pre–
vented theU.S.government from seizing Chickasaw lands, however, or forcing
the relocation that took the Chickasaw nation, including Hogan’s ancestors, to
Oklahoma. Later, when oil was discovered on new Chickasaw lands, white
speculators often married Native American women to gain title to mineral
rights, further victimizing their families. Hogan traces her blond coloring
to such a marriage, explaining why she describes “white breasts that weigh
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down/ my body” and why she calls her “whiteness a shame.” Images of deathly
white contrast with images of black and brown throughout the poem, with both
oil and tobacco — important substances in Chickasaw history — recurring as
ambiguous stains. The poem’s last stanza recalls a history of dispossession, a
heritage of ambiguity and confusion of self, a compass that points in two direc–
tions at once.
Homelessness seems to be a negative concept at first, but the last stanza
raises questions. The grandmother says that “it is wise to eat the flesh of deer /
so you will be swift and travel over many miles.” This hints at a tradition that
predates the “civilized” farming life of the nineteenth century and that sees the
return to wandering as an ironic return to Chickasaw roots. Hogan uses her
elder relatives to find both a personal heritage and a link to the larger history of
Native America, a history that is largely one of loss. The black saliva spilling
onto her from her grandmother’s snuff is a startling image, but it becomes
“sweet black liquid like the food / she chewed up and spit into my father’s
mouth / when he was an infant.” Anthropologists have speculated that the ori–
gin of kissing in human society may stem from mothers and grandmothers
chewing up food for recently weaned children, and the concept may be touch–
ing if we can get past our knowledge of hygiene. Tobacco in Native American
tradition is “medicine” to cleanse the body and “medicine” in a magical and
religious sense. The image of being covered by night can be comforting. Still,
much bitterness and justifiable anger emerge as Hogan looks at her “heritage.”
Like Hogan, readers who are honest will at least find ambiguities in their family
histories.
Hogan’s poem, like her family history, is complex. When oppressor and
oppressed exist together in our bloodlines, how do we avoid the self- hate that
Hogan seems to battle? Perhaps others deal with the conflict by choosing which
ancestors to internalize. Nikki Giovanni, brought up in Ohio, didn’t come to
know her Tennessee grandmother well until she was a teenager, but she took the
older woman as a symbol of strong, black womanhood. Hogan’s poem, however,
says as much about the ancestors she does not mention as those that she
describes. She becomes the white ancestor who causes the sufferings of her
family.
The last two stanzas of Hogan’s poem differ from the earlier stanzas in per-
spective, and their seeming flatness may reflect the attitude of an observer who
has stepped outside the picture for a moment. It may be, however, that Hogan’s
voice becomes particularly Native American in these stanzas, taking on the tone
of orally transmitted wisdom. Giovanni’s tone is that of an adult making sense of
the legacy of her grandmother and her spiritual connection to herself, though
there are echoes of the child in both. In each poem, the speaker/poet is dynamic,
and the ambiguity allows the reader to be involved in sorting out the heritage the
poet describes.
The speaker in Elizabeth Cook- Lynn’s poem also provides subtle clues
about the relationship between the speaker and her grandparents. Although
she does not explicitly say that she admires her grandfather and has internal–
ized his self- reliant qualities, her care for both his body and his spirit shows
respect for him. Linda Hogan’s brief reference to her grandfather seems less
positive, and the longer descriptions of her grandmother lead the reader to see
ríos Mi Abuelo 71
the older woman rather than the man as a more powerful influence. While
Cook- Lynn’s grandfather’s few words connect us to his experience as a Sioux,
we hear nothing from Hogan’s Chickasaw grandfather. Even with the assump–
tion that he may not have spoken because others in the family had lost their
tribal language, we are still left with Hogan’s use of the word fear in connection
with her grandfather and his silence. It is through his actions that she learns
“to kill a snake / when you’re begging for rain,” the word begging carrying its
own negative connotations. Therefore, readers may see Cook- Lynn’s grandfa–
ther as positive and Hogan’s grandfather as negative. However, if we think in
terms of culture, it may be that the speakers — and certainly most readers — fail
to see qualities that might reverse our original evaluations. Perhaps what seems
like superstition and alienation in Hogan’s grandfather is closer to Native
American heritage than is the cowboy independence of the grandfather in
Cook- Lynn’s poem. We have no real way of knowing what is underneath the
ALBERTO RÍOS
Mi Abuelo (p.394)
At the personal Web site of Alberto Ríos, information on the poem “Mi Abuelo”
can be found in a section devoted to helping students with research. This is a
testimony, perhaps, to Ríos’s philosophy of education and his dedication to dia-
logue and to what he has termed the “language of listening.” Accompanied by a
picture of his grandfather, Margarito Calderón Ríos, a broad- faced man with a
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bushy mustache who fought in the Mexican Revolution, Ríos has posted his
reply to a student who asked for help with a presentation on the poem. This reply
illuminates some of the poem’s imagery and provides a bit of the poem’s back-
ground. We find that “Mi Abuelo” is a companion poem to a sestina about Ríos’s
grandmother, “Nani.” Nani was an important figure in his early life. Ríos’s grand-
father died before the poet was born, but Ríos felt connected to both grandpar-
ents and found ways to communicate with both of them.
Ríos recalls being punished for speaking Spanish at school, even on the play–
ground. Speaking Spanish was a bad thing to do, and he lost his ability to speak
his first language until relearning it (though he says it actually had not gone away)
in high school and college. Since his Nani could not speak English, Ríos explains
that he learned a language that used gestures and eyes as well as a language based
on her nurturance: “she would cook, and I would eat.” Although Spanish is his
first spoken language, the early nonverbal language that he used in his interac–
tions with his grandmother is the true first language that we all learn. It is “a
language we can all claim together, or reclaim: it’s the language of listening”
and is not unlike “the language of art and science, of kissing and architecture.”
This goes beyond simply hearing the words that someone is using to express ideas
and feelings: it includes “finding meaning” in both verbal and nonverbal
dialogues.
Ríos is able to listen not only to the languages of food and kissing but also to
the whispers of his dead abuelo. As Ríos explained in an interview, in his father’s
Mexican cultural heritage the border between the living and the dead is not as
fixed as it is in his mother’s English traditions. Growing up celebrating Día de
los Muertos (Day of the Dead) as well as Thanksgiving and Memorial Day, he
came to feel that the grandfather who had died before he was born was “part of
every family gathering” and an important figure in his life. So he listens for his
abuelo to speak to him from the grave and interprets his language for us.
Perhaps because as a historical personage high up in the army of the
Mexican Revolution he is a powerful figure in family folklore, or perhaps simply
because he is dead, the grandfather evokes ambivalent feelings in his grandson.
Ríos knows how the man looks in a photograph on his grandmother’s wall, which
he says is sometimes the only scrap of reality he has about him. At this point, his
abuelo would be literally a flat, two- dimensional character. But as he listens, the
writer fleshes out the corpse and imagines him speaking mysterious things. His
abuelo seems to be able to predict the future. But if he is wrong, this is a false
prophecy: Can the great man be wrong? More frightening than deliberate lies
might be his seeming omniscience even though he lacks power and knowledge.
If the ancestor figure is “at best . . . a liar,” then perhaps he is at worst weak,
mistaken, and self- deceived.
Another alternative to being a liar, of course, is to be a teller of truths. Some
readers may feel that this is the worst- case scenario the speaker fears — that the
vocalizations he hears from the grave are true, that his abuelo communicates
something about reality. When the corpse repeats “my hair is a sieve,” the narra-
tor is angry and shouts to the dead grandfather that he is not a sufficient ancestor,
implying that he is not a whole man. The phrase may disturb him because it
seems meaningless yet is repeated. Does the dead man mean that everything sifts
through into his head? That understanding moves upward through his hair in
ríos Mi Abuelo 73
the way that liquid rises through the sieve tube of a plant? That he knows all? He
justifies himself with the strange statement that he “has served ants.” Ríos
explains that this line is autobiographical, that he remembers seeing an anthill
on his abuelo’s grave the first time he visited it as a child and wondering whether
the ants had gone into the grave and eaten his grandfather’s body. The dead man
confirms this.
The implications of this image, however — taken with the lines in which his
abuelo speaks of hills as “slowest waves” and the speaker sees him as a “ ripple-
topped stream in its best suit, in the ground” — is that the man in the grave has
become an integral part of the natural world. According to Ríos, this sense of
being a part of the environment is embedded into the Spanish language,
whereas in English we must often use the pronoun I, creating a sense of separate-
ness from and responsibility for acting on the environment. So while the grand-
father seems odd and crazy, his words may carry this sense of oneness with the
earth.
The grandson discourses with his dead grandfather about the woman they
both love — “his wife,” who is the poet’s Nani. He also relives the old man’s
childhood memories and his struggles to find home remedies rather than trust
doctors: these imagined memories are based on stories passed down in the
family. Those of us who did not know our grandparents share this frustrating
imaginative task of sorting out the stories of their lives and our consequent heri-
tage from bits and pieces. When the poet says that his grandfather “speaks
through all the mouths in my house,” he says something about how we learn
about our ancestors through oral tradition and through the assumptions about
reality that are passed down in families without our even being aware of them.
The grandfather lives on through the voices of his family, whether or not they
realize they are continuing to pass on his words.
Margarito Calderón Ríos is an imposing presence, even in death. On the one
hand, this can be a positive notion. On the other hand, an important element of
critical thinking involves bringing the unquestioned assumptions of family lore to
light for examination. We can encourage student readers to become more aware
of the influences of family and culture on their thinking and to communicate with
their ancestors and bring them into perspective. When the speaker of the poem
says that his grandfather’s “fever is cooled now,” we may take this in an ironically
literal way: a corpse is cold and can no longer experience passion. The statement
may be taken to mean, however, that the grandfather’s panicky repetition of the
phrase “my hair is a sieve” can now be calmed as the poet acknowledges its
truth — that everything sifts for all of us — and as the language of listening frees the
ghost to rest in peace. The last lines may indicate that the poet wants to continue
his dialogue with the dead man, since he says, “I look down the pipe, sometimes.”
On the other hand, when he looks down the pipe in the final lines, he leaves us a
visual image rather than the auditory images encountered earlier in the poem.
Perhaps now that his grandfather is “an ordinary man” to him, he can communi–
cate with his abuelo through vision — using something like the language of gesture
and eyes he shared with his grandmother.
For Ríos, the dead grandfather is godlike in his power over the minds of the
living. The corresponding figures in other poems in this cluster seem more mor-
tal. Elizabeth Cook- Lynn shows us a man in the winter of his life, holding on to
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JuDITH ORTIZ COFER
Claims (p.396)
The title of Judith Ortiz Cofer’s poem may have multiple meanings. The speak-
er’s grandmother has reached the time of life when she is finally able to claim
her own territory, and she does so: she alone has a claim on her bed and her
body. Like Virginia Woolf’s assertion that a woman requires “a room of one’s
own” to become a writer, the grandmother’s edict is that she need no longer
share her space. Like Woolf in another way, the old woman seems to have killed
any “angel” that might have at some point occupied her house: she claims the
right to speak her mind. Yet the grandmother is haunted by claims upon her
life. She recalls children who died stillborn or were miscarried. Perhaps those
undeveloped babies who “drowned in her black waters” still claim her happi-
ness, for they occupy the center of the poem. When we hear Grandmother’s
voice in the italicized lines 13 through 15, it is unclear to us whether her
memory of her dead babies has stolen her days or whether she refers to the living
daughters to whom she speaks. Likely, she views them all as thieves who made
claims on her.
In addition, because the grandmother “made a pact / with man and nature,”
those entities exerted their claims in the past. She agreed to “bear / the weight of
sex” and to accept childbirth and loss as consequences of this covenant. One is
reminded of the curses in Genesis spoken by God as he drives Adam and Eve
out of the Garden of Eden for disobedience. Adam is cursed by having to sweat
over his labor, trying to get the soil of the earth to yield. Eve will endure another
sort of labor, her childbearing becoming painful, and she will give birth in sor–
row. The first simile used to describe the grandmother in this poem, “a Bedouin
tent,” has a Middle Eastern flavor that perhaps invites biblical connections,
although none seems evident. One can imagine, however, the grandmother now
ofer Claims 75
spreading out her claim to cover all the area between the tent poles, a matriarch
at last. The final simile of the poem has her “like the sea . . . claiming back her
territory.” This image is striking and ironic, because when the sea claims the
land, the land is engulfed and disappears. The claimed land dissolves and mixes
into the vastness of the ocean, leaving nothing to claim. Perhaps it goes to the
shipwrecked ones who drowned within her. The comparison of her dead babies
to naufragos foreshadows the simile that ends the poem. The “black waters”
metaphor for her womb has a poisonous ring to it, however. It implies that the
grandmother believes her body was poisonous to her children.
Bitterness and seawater have much in common. Little life can grow and
survive in either. The grandmother gave her youthful years to others; now that
she can have freedom, the time may be late. She would be justified in feeling
negative about her life. Her repeated words must cut her children, however,
especially her daughters. One would hope that the grandmother’s attitude is
not typical. She has been brought up in a traditional culture in which mothers
shoulder an unfair proportion of child care. The claims of the children on
their parents are fully justified, since children deserve their parents’ attention,
and anger might best be directed toward a culture that fails to make men see
their responsibilities to help bring up their children. Many mothers feel over-
whelmed by their children, even today with more access to day care and more
nurturing of children by men. Grandmother’s response is neither typical nor
unusual.
Through details that show the grandmother’s ambiguous, even negative, emo–
tions about motherhood, Cofer resists sentimentalizing the relationship, and the
speaker’s attitude conveys brutal honesty without condemnation. With the excep–
tion of Elizabeth Cook- Lynn’s “Grandfather at the Indian Health Clinic,” the
other poems in this cluster center on relationships between grandparents and
children and the heritage they share (or the child’s regret about their loss); but,
despite her litany to each daughter that children “steal your days” (her “legacy” to
them), Cofer’s “Claims” is about the grandmother herself rather than the speaker
of the poem. We feel the grandmother’s losses and her bitterness and rejection of
her children; she speaks aloud the thoughts that many mothers hide. On the other
hand, it is difficult to judge the character or personality of Cervantes’s grandmother
in “Refugee Ship” because details are scanty and the reader does not know what
she thinks. Because Cervantes gives the detail of the Bible being always by her side
and places her grandmother in the kitchen, we may infer that Cervantes’s grand–
mother is more orthodox and traditional than Cofer’s. Nevertheless, because
Cofer’s grandmother ends her statement about the misery of motherhood with the
word “amen,” we can assume that she also is religious; we do not know (in the
absence of language from her) if Cervantes’s grandmother has a better opinion of
her own position as a mother and grandmother or even if she has questioned it.
Considering which grandmother might make the same decision about sex as
Cofer’s grandmother, the reader would be reaching to assume that Cervantes’s
grandmother would feel the same way. Perhaps a better candidate for breaking
free of sex would be the grandmother of Linda Hogan’s “Heritage” or Hogan’s
grandmother’s own mother, a Native American woman who has borne a child to
a white man.
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GAYS AND LESBIANS IN FAMILIES: POEMS (p.398)
ESSEX HEMPHILL
Commitments (p.399)
During the last years of his life, before he died of the complications of AIDS,
Essex Hemphill was not reticent about his homosexuality. Above all, perhaps, he
was a poet who wanted to be seen and heard. Although “Commitments” speaks
explicitly of silences and of the family relationships that depend on masking his
true identity, the longing to be seen and heard sets its tone. He refuses to remove
himself from his place in the family, even though he knows that someday some
family members will want to literally cut him out of the picture. The opening
lines hint at his coming death, and we hear the echo of a cliché about the eternal
quality of the soul in his assertion “I will always be there.” It sounds like a reas-
surance, but it is also a declaration of his intention. It says, “I’m here.” And it is
not his dead body but his “silence” that will be “exhumed” — dug up from the
grave — perhaps when people know him without his mask of practical invisibil-
ity, perhaps when he is dead. He names relationships and gives pictures the typi-
cal details of a backyard picnic in which the foods identify a family with roots in
the American South.
But to echo the silence of his earlier stanza, line 16 adds a spatial equivalent of
silence; his “arms are empty,” childless. And the hopes of his aunts to see his wedding
are empty, too. If he could marry the person of his dreams, these aunts might not
attend the wedding, and if they did, they would not throw rice, the symbol of fertility
in marriage. After giving us a vision through the camera lens at holiday celebrations,
he repeats his image of empty arms, juxtaposing it with an elaboration upon empti–
ness: “so empty they would break / around a lover” (lines 26–27). The image is
enigmatic, the word break making us think of voices breaking in sadness, of vulner–
ability so fragile it could shatter, or of longing so demanding it would hold on too
tightly and break as a result. Although he is part of the family in a pragmatic way, he
tells us that he is “the invisible son” (line32), contrasting emptiness again with the
permanent visual record of the photographs and the appearance that all is well. As
an African American, Essex Hemphill was familiar with the metaphor of wearing a
mask, but his poem subtracts by presenting images of emptiness rather than adding
a protective identity. Like the “invisible man” of Ralph Ellison’s novel about the
African American struggle to be recognized and made truly visible, Essex Hemphill
as a homosexual man in an African American family evokes the tensions of visibility
and invisibility, of silence and poetry.
Although questions implicitly give students the impression that they can
come up with an answer to explain the conflicting statements in “Commitments,”
assure them that sometimes a poem may be about the conflicting feelings and
tensions in a situation. Perhaps we will want to create a different definition of
invisible, one that takes the possible allusion to Ellison into account or that con-
siders a misreading of who one really is as a part of invisibility. A part of the
person he is has been buried with his silence and perhaps will come to light. But
things dug out of graves cause fear and disgust, and he is realistic enough to know
that his relatives will not welcome the visible breaking of his silence.
lorde Who Said It Was Simple 77
AuDRE LORDE
Who Said It Was Simple (p.400)
The tree metaphor Lorde uses in her opening stanza is rich. The anger she feels
is old, deep, invisible, multifarious, knotted — like tree roots. Root- bound plants
are trapped, often unable to grow even when transplanted. The damage is too
profound. The poem apparently is set at a lunch counter during the early 1970s,
before a protest march against sexism or possibly for gay rights, although nothing
in the poem specifically indicates what the protest march is about. Lorde’s white
“sisters” in protest are served by the partially black counterman who ignores the
black men (are they gay men, and is this a gay rights march?) sitting at the
counter — as if the lessons of nondiscrimination of the civil rights movement
never took place. Lorde recognizes the contradictions and ironies of the
scene — both the counterman and the white women remain enslaved by their
mind- forged manacles of (at least) racism and sexism, despite the historic echoes
of integrating lunch counters during the civil rights movement. For Lorde, the
mirror (where she sees her black skin) and the bed (where women are the sexual
slaves of men in a patriarchal culture) are symbols of her continuing cultural
marginalization as black, female, and lesbian. Of course she is being ironic in
her final stanza, where she recognizes that the goals of what was then called
“women’s liberation” may founder on the classist, racist, and possibly homopho-
bic contradictions embedded in it.
Essex Hemphill and Audre Lorde both use the notion of invisibility in their
poems. Hemphill’s invisibility involves his being in but not part of his family — a
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kind of ghost whose homosexuality is ignored or marginalized even when he is
present at family gatherings. Lorde, on the other hand, is very present at the
lunch counter, observing and ruminating. In fact, her sexual preference may be
evident to her comrades at the lunch counter. She uses the tree metaphor to
suggest what is truly invisible — not herself but the twisted roots of racism, sex-
ism, and homophobia that define her. Her anger is palpable; Hemphill’s is per-
haps more complex, cut with a wistfulness and longing to be more accepted for
what he is in his family.
MINNIE BRuCE PRATT
Two Small- Sized Girls (p.402)
Like Essex Hemphill, the poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt finds herself in
conflict with the values of the culture into which she was born. Hers is the
dilemma of a child of the rural American South who loses much by breaking
away from traditional mores. Pratt lost her parents, her extended family, and
her children as well. Her book Crime against Nature, from which this poem is
taken, deals with the consequences of the legal term echoed in its title. It was
because she was a lesbian that custody of her sons was granted to their father
when her marriage was dissolved, and the threat of possible conviction for
“crimes against nature” was used as a club to keep her from fighting the court’s
ruling. Pratt had already been involved in feminist activism when in graduate
school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and had helped to
establish women’s collectives in the nearby towns of Durham and Fayetteville.
She identifies herself as part of a group of “ anti- racist, anti- imperialist Southern
lesbians.”
Along with lesbians and gay men who transform the pejorative queer to
make it a proclamation of pride, Pratt explores definitions of gender but is also
passionate about issues of race and all forms of discrimination. She refuses to
accept cultural stereotypes about the body, whether they deal with gender, sex,
or ethnic origins. She resists inflexible definitions within the gay and lesbian
community, arguing that to criticize some lesbians as being too butch and
others as not being true lesbians is to fall into the trap of discrimination and
oppression. As a Southerner who has taught at traditionally black colleges, Pratt
resists biologically determined definitions of human diversity. “I can’t be the
only one,” she writes in a short story, “who grew up trained into the cult of
pure white womanhood and heard biological reasons given to explain actions
against people of color, everything from segregation of water fountains to lynch-
ing.” She challenges any attempts to place people into such predetermined cat-
egories. Although her poetry has political implications, she explains that she
began to write poetry not because she had “become” a lesbian but because of
something more personal: “I had returned to my own body after years of
alienation.”
Students will differ in their beliefs about “crimes against nature” in terms of
sexual behavior. Inevitably, students will speak of ancient laws — even current
laws in some states — prohibiting sodomy and making illegal certain heterosexual
practices within marriage. In 1999, Pratt’s home state, Alabama, was debating the
pratt Two Small- Sized Girls 79
legalization of sex toys and aids for medical purposes, with many politicians argu–
ing that since they might be used outside of heterosexual marriage, such devices
should remain banned. We might want to extend the question outside of the
sexual arena. How might a person unfamiliar with the term and its history in
America attempt to define “crimes against nature”? As war, perhaps? Or as envi–
ronmental destruction? Pratt’s nature imagery in the poem evokes a hot summer
on an Alabama farm, but it also shows the kudzu devouring everything and the
wildfire that the cousins set blossoming like some brilliant growth. The garden
imposes order on nature, just as the girls turn corncobs into the images of human
beings. We can encourage students to explore the symbolic connotations of sen–
sory details that seem at first to be here only for verisimilitude. An issue might be
raised about the nature of the kudzu vine, for example, an all- enveloping vine that
is not native to the South.
The first numbered section of the poem shows the cousins as little girls on
their grandmother’s farm. In the second, we see them as adults linked to the
earlier scene by certain images — Grandma’s bedspread, “rough straw baskets”
like the corncobs of their youth, kudzu — and we discover that both have
endured custody battles. Pratt compares her “crime against nature,” a sexual
transgression, to her cousin’s desire for a garden, somehow symbolic of her free-
dom of action. This, too, has been deemed a crime against nature, an unreason-
able demand for a woman to make. The third section of the poem places their
different attitudes in political perspective but has a sense of futility; they have
traveled different paths but are accused of transgressing, of stepping out of their
preordained “natural” roles.
The sections reveal a progression of awareness. Pratt begins with the vague
busyness of little girls doing what they have seen others do, moves on to their
break with tradition in the present, and ends with the philosophical realization
that no matter what path they took, they have been “made wrong.” The phrase
has a double meaning. They have been made to seem wrong, though they
havenot done anything wrong. But they have also, in the culture’s implicit value
system, been made wrong; with female bodies, they are vulnerable to judgments
about how they must behave in the world. A definition of cousins may be made
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RICHARD BLANCO
Queer Theory: According to My Grandmother (p.404)
In “Queer Theory: According to My Grandmother,” part of Richard Blanco’s
2012 collection Looking for the Gulf Motel, Blanco offers a first- person narrative
of a grandmother scolding her grandson about his seemingly effeminate behav-
iors. From urinating with the seat down to eating popsicles, the behaviors in
question are seen as constructing the grandson’s gay identity. Indeed, the young
boy is continually under surveillance, as implied by the repeated admonition
“I’ve seen you. . . .” Male and female gender roles are clearly circumscribed
here, and readers will likely pick up on the differences in how others in the
family perform gender. The mother, for example, hosts Tupperware parties and
likes to kiss her son, whereas the father visits the barber shop. There is little
ambiguity between their roles. The grandson is explicitly encouraged to avoid
the kinds of behaviors his mother exhibits, and the poem goes so far as to suggest
that the mother might be encouraging him in ways the grandmother distrusts.
“[D]on’t let her kiss you — / she kisses you too much” (7–8), the speaker remarks.
At stake are feelings of otherness and questions of belonging, with the grand-
mother’s laundry list of “do nots” highlighting features that might signal differ-
ence to people outside the family.
The poem, through the grandmother’s voice, depicts “gayness” as tied to
stereotypically feminine behaviors, but not all of those listed are easy to catego-
rize. Eating croissants, for example, seems to invoke more of a continental or
class orientation than a feminine one, and reading books on architecture, hang-
ing Star Wars posters, or washing with shampoo will seem gender neutral to most
readers. The grandmother’s list of forbidden behaviors thus reinforces an
extremely limited view of what LGBTQ identity can look like or how it might
manifest individually. And there is little to no safe space in which the young boy
might explore his own identity — his grandmother scolds him for everything
from his bathroom habits to his choice of bedroom decor. Readers might ulti-
mately question whether she is trying to make her grandson more heterosexual
or attempting to protect him from others who might judge him in the future. As
the final lines suggest, she is perhaps more concerned with his outward appear-
ance than his internal preferences or desires.
LITERATURE AND CURRENT ISSUES: SHOULD WORKING WOMEN
“LEAN IN”? (p.408)
DEBORAH GARRISON
Worked Late on a Tuesday Night (p.409)
Deborah Garrison’s poem “Worked Late on a Tuesday Night” acknowledges the
reality of career women’s lives, but it does not necessarily sympathize. The mood
is fairly grim, as suggested by the reference to “haggard / beauties,” and the
remark that “It’s pathetic.” The poem gives no quarter. We are made to feel
garrison Worked Late on a Tuesday Night 81
ARGUMENTS ON THE ISSUE
sheryl sandberg, From Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
(p.411)
rosa brooks, Recline, Don’t Lean In: Why I Hate Sheryl Sandberg
(p.416)
The excerpt from Sheryl Sandberg’s popular Lean In argues that women should
remain “dissatisfied with the status quo” (p. 415) and work unrelentingly to
achieve their goals. Women can, Sandberg maintains, have it all, and in putting
forth the effort to make that happen, women will make the path even easier for
future generations. She paints a clear narrative of progress, beginning with the
claim that women today, in the United States and globally, are better off than
ever. As evidence, she cites the personal experience of her mentor’s mother, who
in 1947 was quite flattered to be told she was as smart as a man. In many ways,
relying on such anecdotes can be persuasive. After all, how many of us have
heard the stories of our mothers and grandmothers’ struggles for acceptance?
And isn’t Sanders a fully credible source? Yet with such an example Sanders also
presumes an equivalence of experience potentially belied by blue- collar workers
or stay- at- home mothers.
In her discussion of the “mommy wars,” Sanders explains that a “good
mother” is generally understood as someone who is “always available to her
children” (p.413). But she rightfully points out that such an ideal is impossible,
particularly if one has career commitments. What appears lost in such a discus-
sion, however, is the question of where an employed and committed mother
might find time for herself. Sanders has been accused of being “tone deaf” to the
struggles of ordinary working women, and readers might see this echoed in the
privileged position from which she writes. What about those who are not, and
will never be, COOs? By framing goal achievement and ambition in either
career or family terms — not necessarily personal aims — it’s not difficult to imag-
ine that, in leaning in so far, one might simply topple over.
Rosa Brooks’s “Recline” is one of many critiques leveled at lean- in advocate
Sheryl Sandberg. Taking Sandberg to task for promoting more- more- more at all
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costs, Brooks argues instead for women (and men) to “lean back.” The tone of
her essay is rather personal, and Brooks tells her readers right from the start that
she “hates” Sheryl Sandberg. She explains that she realized this while multitask-
ing to the extreme, and her initial paragraphs serve to demonstrate her own fully
realized ability to “lean in.” The problem, of course, is that leaning in makes
herunhappy — it stretches her too thin. By “recline,” Brooks means we should
take time for ourselves and create more protected spaces in which we can
breathe and create.
While her argument rejects the “lean in” philosophy, Brooks’s essay never-
theless relies on the refrain that she strongly dislikes Sheryl Sandberg. While she
is careful to explain that she doesn’t mean this personally, readers might never-
theless find such statements troubling, for in making this as much about
Sandberg as about leaning in, Brooks risks reviving the hateful woman- against-
woman routine. In pitting women against one another — or claiming that
Sanders is welcome to go lean in by herself — Brooks performs just the kind of
exclusion and rejection that feminists have worked against for decades.
LITERATURE AND CURRENT ISSUES: WHY Do CHILDREN REBEL
AGAINST PARENTAL EXPECTATIONS? (p.421)
HANIF KuREISHI
My Son, the Fanatic (p. 422)
“My Son, the Fanatic” is a richly personal story about a father learning that his
son, Ali, has become not just a committed Muslim but a religious fanatic.
Readers experience this growing understanding with the father, Parvez, which
means we too are left to speculate for some time about the meaning behind Ali’s
physical and behavioral transformations. In that sense, we, like Parvez, might
struggle to understand how this move to radicalism came about.
Later in the story, when Parvez confronts his son, Ali claims that Westerners
hate Muslims; and when Parvez questions him about what could or should be
done, Ali’s response is jihad. This will surely raise a number of concerns for read-
ers. While many do fear Muslim extremists, particularly after the attacks of
September 11, 2001, Ali’s blanket statement about Western materialists’ hate
likely rings false.
Parvez is a complex character in his own right, which also complicates the
narrative of “us versus them.” Although raised with a Muslim background,
Parvez chooses not to grow a beard and is comfortable drinking alcohol and
gambling — all of which are forbidden and severely at odds with Ali’s new fun–
damentalist allegiance. Also, his relationship with Bettina, a prostitute, is one
that might be read as an embrace of immoral Western values. While these are
relatively surface- level actions, they nevertheless point to distinct differences in
world outlook between Parvez and his son. No amount of beard growing is
likely to repair their relationship or bring Ali back from the brink. The story
concludes with Parvez attempting to beat his son into submission. While this
kureishi My Son, the Fanatic 83
could be read as his own descent into fanaticism, others might see it as a
symptom of Parvez’s acute desperation. It is difficult to miss, however, possible
connections between Parvez’s turn to violence and his son’s own ideological
transformation.
ARGUMENTS ON THE ISSUE
roger ohen, Why ISIS Trumps Freedom (p.431)
abdelkader benali, From Teenage Angst to Jihad (p.433)
In his NewYork Times article “Why ISIS Trumps Freedom,” Roger Cohen
speculates about what might cause young Muslims from stable European
countries to give up their normal lives and join the movement calling itself
the Islamic State. While individual reasons might vary, of course, Cohen
suggests that the Islamic State offers a comforting, highly structured alterna–
tive to the last century’s expansion of Western freedoms. This “burden of
freedom” (p.432) might include the right to marry or have sex with whom–
ever you choose, the right to practice any religion (or none at all), even the
right to die at a time of your choosing. Cohen maintains that radical Islam
exploits this “burden” by offering a sense of place, a clear and unwavering set
of rules to guide and give meaning to one’s life and death. As the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989 offered new freedoms to Eastern Germany, so too has
the mass immigration of Muslims to Western countries expanded the possible
and permissible. In the United States, we might identify similar kinds of
pushback to the expansion of freedoms, including seatbelt laws, North
Carolina’s 2016 attempt to mandate who can use which bathroom, and even
abortion restrictions.
In “From Teenage Angst to Jihad,” Dutch author Abdelkader Benali
chronicles his childhood experience confronting the tensions between his own
Muslim background and the Netherland’s more pervasive Western attitudes.
He recalls the extreme anger he felt when classmates, and even his teacher,
criticized the fatwa against Salman Rushdie: “Didn’t he get that mocking the
Prophet was a moral crime?” he recalls wondering. His anger at that young age
stemmed from questions of belonging and identity, and Benali identifies simi–
lar fears behind recent terrorist attacks. When others seem to “mock and insult
your culture” (p.435), he explains, extremism can seem like a justifiable solu–
tion. The answer is to focus on inclusion and belonging. As a Muslim, Benali
had to find a way to reconcile his religion while living in a secular state — a
challenging task, as religious groups even in the United States have found. At
stake in such attempts is a willingness to accept differences among other
people and avoid attempting to legislate others’ behavior in order to match
your belief system. Benali cites Houellebecq’s claim that “People cannot live
without God. Life becomes unbearable.” Where this becomes particularly
important is when we consider whose “God” and under what conditions this
“God” is followed or worshipped. For Benali, our relationship with the divine,
in whatever form, must be reconciled with the people and communities
around us.
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ARGUMENTS ABOUT A POEM: “DADDY” (p.437)
SYLVIA PLATH
Daddy (p.438)
Often, the voice in a poem is quite different from the poet’s own, and students
need to go beyond the tendency of novice readers to see all poetry as an emo-
tional outpouring of the poet’s soul. The poems of Sylvia Plath, however, invite
a biographical approach. As a confessional poet, writing as part of a 1950s and
early 1960s attempt to bring the life of the poet into the text, Plath incorporated
images of her personal psychological struggles into her poetry. For this reason,
her poetry might first be approached in the context of the post– World WarII
society in which she came of age, when the Holocaust and other abuses carried
out by fascist movements were within recent memory. Before the cultural
changes of the late 1960s, including the resurgence of the women’s movement,
the expectations placed on most daughters were rigidly prescribed. Fathers
tended to be authoritarian and husbands to control the lives of their wives and
children. Thus contextualizing the poem may help current readers understand
the tone and imagery of “Daddy” and allow them to respond thoughtfully to the
alternative views of critics.
Like the speaker in Lucille Clifton’s poem “forgiving my father,” Plath’s
persona angrily rails at a dead man who has left the business of fatherhood unfin-
ished. His early death has made it impossible for her to challenge her father’s
power over her self- image through his approval, disapproval, or indifference. She
has therefore been unable to function as an adult. Because he is absent, she feels,
she has replicated the father- daughter relationship in her marriage. If she is to
break out of the victim position, she must kill the inner father who has caused
her to be self- destructive.
Because her own father was of German ancestry, Plath metaphorically
portrays the father in the poem as a Nazi and the daughter as a Jew, appropriat–
ing the imagery of brutality and war for her own personal purposes. This both–
ers many readers. Other similes seem extreme as well: He is a “black shoe . . .
a bag full of God . . . a devil.” But images of his replacement, perhaps her
husband, seem even more severe, and students may want to discuss the extent
to which she is really angry with her father or with someone else. Although
Plath claimed that the poem was not her own story, she wrote it on the day her
divorce papers arrived. Could blaming her father actually be her way of mas–
ochistically blaming herself for the difficulties of her marriage, of remaining a
victim who tortures herself with guilt? The poem’s assertion that “Every
woman adores a Fascist” recalls the I- must- have- asked- for- it thinking of abuse
victims.
The childish language of the poem may trivialize it for some; it is interesting
that even the bits of German she chooses to interweave are one- syllable words a
child would learn. If Plath is describing her inability to escape a role she
acquired in childhood, however, the juxtaposition of baby talk and brutality
makes sense. The poem seems less about the rebelliousness of young adults and