Literature Chapter 10 Homework Americans May Offer Views The Unique Position

Unlock access to all the studying documents.

View Full Document

Chapter 10

Freedom and Confinement (p. 679)

STRUGGLING AGAINST STEREOTYPES: POEMS (p. 680)

CHRYSTOS

Today Was a Bad Day like TB (p. 681)

Even before Europeans arrived on the shores of mainland North America, their dis-

eases preceded them, spread by travelers from the islands where contact first took

place. Measles was especially deadly. Some historians maintain that explorers and

settlers from Europe found little resistance because so many of the indigenous nations

of the eastern seaboard of the Americas had been decimated by epidemics, leaving

large areas seemingly uninhabited and ready for the taking. Native Americans have

been particularly susceptible to tuberculosis, and as the disease reappeared with new

force in the 1990s, statistics revealed that new cases numbered 16.5 per 100,000 peo-

ple among Native Americans in 1995. The rate means that this ethnic group has more

than twice the risk of contracting TB of the general population in the United States

and five times the risk for non-Hispanic whites. So when Menominee poet and activist

Chrystos says in her title “Today Was a Bad Day like TB,” the simile has added mean-

a stereotype that continues to oversimplify Native American culture in the minds of

many enthusiastic onlookers. More recently, Native Americans have been

characterized in popular thought as victims robbed of their culture and dignity,

unable to cope with the modern world but cut off from their traditions. Perhaps each

of these stereotypes began with a grain of truth—clichés usually do. But the

stereotypes are also fallacious oversimplifications or overgeneralizations about a group

whose history, culture, and degree of involvement in mainstream society are

heterogeneous and complex.

Some members of this diverse ethnic group prefer the term Native American, but

others insist on being called American Indians or on using specific group names:

Choctaw, Laguna Pueblo, and so forth. Richard Rodriguez insists that, far from

vanishing as a racial and ethnic group, Indians live on in the faces and many of the

customs of Hispanic Americans. Chrystos, who did not grow up on a reservation and

calls herself an Urban Indian, has chosen as a political act to discard all of the

European ancestry of her mother’s family and to fully identify herself as a Menominee

like her father. Growing up feeling like an outsider, she moves to the inside of the

Native American group and fights to retain the distinctiveness of the traditions that

remain. She angrily battles against the theft of items of culture for economic gain in

“Today Was a Bad Day like TB” and in other texts.

other groups exist only in relation to them.

When the speaker retches, trying to “get it out,” she compares her rage to

tuberculosis. But the disease does not go away as she painfully coughs up her own

body fluids. Like a bacillus, the harm done by the destroyers of native culture cannot

be expelled. Both are the result of the same sort of invasive callousness. Students

should not deceive themselves that Chrystos is speaking metaphorically when she

expresses rage toward all whites. Yes, she is angry. Even the punctuation and the

structure of the poem deliberately subvert the rules of traditional English verse.

The crude language of the poem’s final lines is appropriate to the theme. Subtlety

would be lost on those who are unable to see the enormity of their intrusion, as she

shows us in earlier lines. Many students believe that the anger of Chrystos or Native

Americans who protest the appropriation of cultural symbols for sports team names is

extreme and unjustified. They see such complaints as whining about inconsequential

DWIGHT OKITA

In Response to Executive Order 9066 (p. 682)

Quickly scanning through Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D.

Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, the reader might believe that a benevolent govern-

ment wished to do a favor for Americans of Japanese descent. Internment in concen-

tration camps is not mentioned. Instead, military officials are instructed to “prescribe

military areas . . . from which any or all persons may be excluded,” with no specific

indication of what people are intended. Anyone the military considers a threat may be

kept out of “military areas” as defined by “the appropriate Military Commanders.”

This is to be done to prevent “espionage and . . . sabotage to national defense material,

national defense premises, and national defense utilities.” There is no indication in

the order that such categories include the prosperous farms and businesses of Japanese

Americans who had spent years carving out lives for their families in California, Ore-

gon, Washington, and Hawaii. It is not surprising that it came as a shock to some fami-

lies when they found themselves first in makeshift stalls or shacks thrown up on race-

tracks, fairgrounds, and livestock enclosures, and later in deserted areas that amounted

to prison camps. Executive Order 9066 states in two separate places that the people

were killed. Barbed wire and guard towers surrounded the camps, and those trying to

escape could be shot. In his 1995 novel Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson

imagines how it might have been: “He remembered Manzanar, the dust in the bar-

racks, in the tar-papered shacks and cafeteria; even the bread tasted gritty. They’d

worked tending eggplants and lettuces in the camp garden. They’d been paid little,

the hours were long, they’d been told it was their duty to work hard” (162). Many sons

and husbands also felt it was their duty to serve their country, the United States, in the

war. They fought, even while their families were imprisoned as potential saboteurs.

The school writings of children who were interned in the camps reveal physical dis-

comfort, mixed with cheerful trust in the goodness of life. They complain about the

cold or the heat, the sandstorms, the fence, and the cramped conditions requiring

whole families to share one room. But they enjoy the outdoors as children might on a

camping vacation and wax eloquent about “the good drinking water, the free food, the

free electricity and free water.” Unlike their parents, they did not have to be con-

cerned about what would happen when it was time to resume their lives. Even before

the war, laws prohibited free and clear ownership of property by Asian immigrants,

In the first stanza of “In Response to Executive Order 9066,” Dwight Okita’s

young female speaker tells the relocation officials that she has packed “three packets of

tomato seeds” in preparation for her journey. She introduces her friend Denise, who

calls tomatoes “love apples.” When the speaker’s father says “they won’t grow” in the

internment camps, the obvious connection is that love probably can’t survive there

either. Although the next three stanzas continue to describe the speaker’s relationship

with her white friend, a friend who abandons her as a result of prejudice, the tomatoes

are not mentioned again until the final stanza, thus framing the poem with a

metaphoric image. Once the seeds of friendship have been planted, young Miss

Ozawa claims, they will come to fruition, given time. The assumption seems

optimistic about the ability of love to overcome hate, given time. Perhaps this is based

on naiveté. After all, her letter begins with a polite acceptance of the government’s

“invitation,” as if it were a vacation. She is being a good girl when she packs her

galoshes, because this is the sort of thing a mother might remind her to pack. This is

ironic if she is going to Manzanar or another desert camp, however, and again implies

that she doesn’t grasp the situation. But Denise is naive as well, accepting the

assumptions of her elders that Japanese Americans will be more loyal to Japan than to

America. Furthermore, no Japanese American was convicted of espionage against the

United States through the whole course of World War II, a fact that cannot be wholly

attributed to concentration camps, because none in Hawaii were interned and many

Japanese Americans served heroically in the U.S. military. It is an especially effective

device to have a young girl speak about such prejudice, because the audience can

empathize with someone who is obviously no danger to her country. Both content and

style—concrete words like hot dogs or messy room, for example—indicate that she is

American rather than Japanese. Her friend’s rejection seems doubly hurtful because

the injustice is so clear. Because the bombing of Pearl Harbor came as such a shock,

many Americans could not believe that the Japanese had been able to carry it out

without help from collaborators in Hawaii. There was great fear that such an attack

would be mounted against the West Coast of the United States. Nevertheless, as

government studies maintain, the main reason for internment seems to be the

visibility of people who looked like the enemy. “Japs” became demonized as a racial

group, while animosity toward the enemy in Europe, so like mainstream Americans in

appearance and culture, tended to be focused on the figures of Adolf Hitler, Benito

Mussolini, and their followers, rather than all ethnic Germans or Italians.

Chrystos in “Today Was a Bad Day like TB” is furious at the betrayal of her

culture by those who sell Native American possessions to whites who reveal their

unconscious biases by misusing the artifacts. Her tone is bitter as she takes the insider

stance as a member of a group that has been wronged, condemning the outsiders—the

PAT MORA

Legal Alien (p. 684)

Pat Mora’s poem “Legal Alien” expresses irony even in its title, as so often the opposite

term “illegal alien” makes the news. The speaker is legitimate; however, her status brings

its own issues. She lives in the space in between; rather than living in the margins, the

speaker is actually in the middle, as in the space where two circles overlap in a Venn

diagram. At first glance, most readers would consider being bilingual an advantage, offer-

ing access to the best of two worlds. Mora gives a hint of the divisiveness of being “Bi-

lingual” and “Bi-cultural” by inserting a hyphen in each word, implying that the person

who is bilingual and bicultural is split in two. She also capitalizes the words, as if they

were proper names or nationalities, in a poem in which few words are capitalized. The

poem consists of one complex sentence with conversational quotations and parenthe-

tical comments woven into it. Referring to herself as “American but hyphenated,” the

speaker frames her poem with hyphenated words, those of the first line and the final

word: Bi-laterally. This final word has political connotations; it is a word often used to

describe a truce or other agreement to which both sides agree. But the speaker feels pre-

judged by both sides; perhaps the only point the two sides of her ethnicity can agree up-

on concerns her position, one in which she can never be right.

Being bilingual and bicultural carries certain advantages. The speaker is able to

function in two cultures, is “able to sit in a paneled office”—that is, has the distinct

advantage of being gainfully employed—and is able to enjoy the advantages of Mexican

culture represented by being able to order food, itself an economic plus. The poem can

be read closely for differences between her references to being Mexican and her

references to being American. For example, the English question “How’s life?” is

answered by the Spanish sentence for “They’re driving me crazy.” Though she doesn’t

The stereotyping that Mora describes is more subtle than the racism described in

the earlier poems in this cluster. Here, the prejudice comes from both sides. If the

bicultural person takes pride in one heritage, she is at risk of denying the other. While

Chrystos is angry about the appropriation of Native American culture implied in a

white person’s illegitimate imitation, Mora seems simply frustrated, going crazy over

her ethnically split personality. We might question whether her position is of necessity

psychologically damaging. Unlike the situation in the poem by Louise Erdrich, in

which the stereotypes of dominant culture are internalized at the expense of self-

esteem, the innocent bewilderment of Okita’s letter writer, or the sarcasm and anger of

TOI DERRICOTTE

Black Boys Play the Classics (p. 685)

A search for Web sites on African Americans and classical music quickly uncovers

AfriClassical.com (www.chevalierdesaintgeorges.homestead.com/index.html), which has

concentrated on the topic since 2000. Opera singers Leontyne Price and Jessye Norman

spring to mind when thinking of African Americans in classical music, but the Web site

lists “52 composers, conductors, and instrumental performers—Africans, African

Americans, and Afro-Europeans. Many are alive today, but one lived 500 years ago!

These artists are unknown to most of us, yet are so numerous this site can present only a

fraction of them. They have made enduring contributions to Classical Music.” The Web

site also has audio. Instructors and students will find other examples of African

Americans playing classical music online. Because people of African descent have long

been part of European and American society, it should not be surprising to find them

involved in many different artistic genres. However, the stereotype of African Americans

engaging in jazz, blues, gospel, rap, or other popular forms perhaps makes the sight of

“black kids” playing Brahms surprising to the people in Penn Station. The “[w]hite men

in business suits” take the young men for granted as street musicians who are working for

contributions, but the men of color “stand with their mouths open”—their surprise and

Luther King Jr. and others spoke at the march on Washington and Marian Anderson

stood in the same spot and sang the National Anthem.

It should not be surprising that the boys in Penn Station play Brahms on stringed

instruments. But the stereotypes remain. By showing them in “ratty / sneakers & T-

shirts,” the poet identifies their probable economic status. This poverty may be what

readers rightly or wrongly expect. But the music goes against expectations. The

speaker asks, “Why does this trembling / pull us?” The word trembling catches the

vibrations of the violins and the cellos and hints at the emotional vulnerability of the

players and the watchers/listeners. She has just described a small child, absorbed in

the music and the young men who are playing, the experience evoking worship. The

“pulling” is emotional and physical, a response that only music or another deeply

aesthetic experience is capable of bringing out. We are attracted to those who make

music like iron to a magnet. In the final lines, Derricotte offers two explanations for

the audience’s response: perhaps from different listeners, perhaps describing

wavering feelings within each listener. The child, the “brown men,” and the players

become “one” as they experience the music together. Of course, this penultimate

image implies much more: that human beings all share certain responses and that

people of different skin colors are not different where it counts. However, the final

line wryly undercuts this idea of equality, which after all borders on cliché. Readers

might discuss tone at this point. Is the line meant to be taken seriously, indicating

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Blood (p. 686)

A great deal of autobiography goes into the writing of Naomi Shihab Nye, whether she

is writing young-adult fiction or subtle poems like “Blood.” As part of a family that has

lived in the United States and in Israel, Nye knows a great deal about the ethnic stere-

otyping represented by the poems in this cluster. Her poem begins by quoting her fa-

ther: “A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands.” The image captures the

playfulness of her father, the irony of stereotypes, and the hand-eye coordination im-

plied in the lightning-quick action of catching a fly. Later in the poem, the speaker’s

father tells her that a “true Arab” would understand the spiritual significance of giving

back to the sky the family name—Shihab, for “shooting star”—when one dies. The

two images take the reader from the ridiculous to the sublime, with the magic of wa-

termelon as a healing substance in between. By choosing these three bits of family and

ethnic folklore out of many possibilities, Nye paints a remarkably wide picture of the

culture in microcosm. “True Arabs”—in the world of the poem—are quick, witty,

wise, magical, and cosmically connected. Therefore, when a girl comes to the door “to

see the Arab,” the reader knows a bit about what an Arab may be, although the sort of

By talking within the group about what makes a “true Arab,” the dialogue in this

poem challenges the simplistic stereotype. However, such definitions within an ethnic

group can lead to chauvinism as well as self-respect. Ethnic groups within a larger

culture risk becoming insular and defensive, holding on to esoteric knowledge that

leads to more discrimination and prejudice, because xenophobia—fear of the

unknown, of foreigners—thrives in an atmosphere of ignorance. When we engage in

discussions of what makes a “true American,” the worst sort of arrogance may emerge.

Gender stereotypes reign as we ask what makes a “true man” or a “true woman”;

regional prejudices come out as we try to define what makes a “true” Texan, or New

Yorker, or Tarheel, or Sooner. Immigrants with British accents or travelers from one

part of the United States to another are familiar with being asked to demonstrate their

amusing accents, in much the same way as the girl in the poem asks to see the Arab, as

if he were a museum exhibit or a performer in a freak show. Curiosity can be genuine

and has the potential to enhance understanding between cultures, but a danger exists

when curiosity is left as simply an awareness of an exotic Other rather than a person

with whom we might engage in dialogue.

Many readers can relate to the final two stanzas of Nye’s poem, in which both she

and her father are dismayed by news from the Middle East. It is really too much for

the heart to bear. Readers may notice at this point a possible double meaning for the

title. The word blood has the obvious meaning of kinship, the figurative meaning of

horror (“the headlines clot in my blood”), and the literal meaning of blood shed in

war. When we read the words “neither of his two languages can reach it,” we

understand the sense of futility as her father is unable to articulate the bewildering

reality of religious and ethnic conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis. The speaker

of the poem seeks to articulate her grief with powerful metaphors: “the headlines clot

in my blood . . . this tragedy [has] a terrible root / is too big for us. . . . I drive into the

The last lines of the poem invite the reader to think about answers to the three

questions she proposes. Who, indeed, would look at war and oppression and call

human beings civilized? We might ask for definitions of civilization, recalling that in

Native American history, the “civilized tribes” were defined by European settlers as

those who lived much like the settlers did, including adopting the practice of

enslaving other ethnic groups. Early civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia (present-

day Iraq) existed because wide-scale farming, war, and building projects required

forced labor. Perhaps, because civilization is connected with living in the city, the

speaker drives to a rural setting to think. It may be that civilization itself is the “tragedy

with a terrible root” that Nye describes as she describes the front-page image of war.

The victim of war, perhaps representing the ethnic group to which both he and the

speaker belong, is “[a] little Palestinian . . . [and a h]omeless fig.” The images

foreground vulnerability and inspire empathy. The question “Where can the crying

heart graze?” may be rhetorical, implying that no such place exists, even at the end of

her desperate drive. This space outside of civilization brings no peace; it provides only

the quiet in which to formulate questions. The final question seems ironic, because

the whole poem has raised the issues of definition, asking what makes a “true Arab”:

catching flies, applying healing watermelon, and looking to the stars do not have the

power to change this situation. Like the penultimate question, the final one may have

no answer. Can anything be done to bring about peace and justice? Could we answer

the question: “What is a caring human being to do now?”

work in the sort of job Mora describes in her poem, becoming fluent in both

languages. Students who have lived through the experience of being “hyphenated

Americans” may offer views on the unique position of various ethnic groups, although

instructors should be sensitive to their possible reluctance to share and should not call

on “token” students, making assumptions based on names or appearances. To single

out individual students would be to fall into the trap of stereotyping. As we look back

over the poems, readers may disagree about which speaker seems angriest, making a

case for submerged rage that is expressed with irony or sarcasm rather than openly

angry statements like those made by Chrystos. A case could be made for Nye’s poem as

the saddest, making it a good choice as the final poem in the cluster. Thinking about

the question of which speaker seems “most understanding,” you will need to clarify

what is meant by “understanding” and question whether the tolerance implied would

be appropriate in poems that seek to have readers face difficult truths, perhaps

examining our own preconceptions of certain ethnic groups. Do the poets refuse to

allow readers the comforts of denial? The “most understanding” speaker may be the

naive fourteen-year-old Japanese American girl preparing to make a forced move to an

internment camp. The underlying irony of the text—the author and the reader know

more about history and institutionalized racism than does the speaker—highlights the

innocence of her “understanding” and tolerance. No understanding is possible when

stereotyping becomes government-sanctioned profiling.

DAVID HERNANDEZ

Words without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go (p. 688)

“Words without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go,” penned by poet David Hernandez,

grapples with the complexities of racism and language. The narrator, perhaps

Hernandez himself, writes that his surname allows him to say aloud “the slur

beginning with s.” In an effort to combat the harm of slurs, many persecuted groups

have reclaimed racist, sexist, and homophobic language for use amongst themselves.

(Note the reclaiming of the term “queer” by some members of the LGBTQ

community, for example.) With such reclamations of language, people hope to shift

the meaning, the intention, behind the words. The use of ethnic and other slurs by

people outside those groups serves to marginalize, hurt, and dismiss individuals from

consideration. In Hernandez’s words, slurs are “meant to make a person of my race /

smaller, a speck inside his own skin.” The use of such slurs stems from deep-seated

insecurities over the perceived loss of patriarchal, heterosexual, white privilege.

Hernandez’s title, “Words without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go,” comes from a

quote by Claudius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Claudius’s meaning here is that words

must have thoughts—beliefs, intentions, desires—in order to reach heaven (or, in

simpler terms, to earn forgiveness one must really mean it). We might read Hernan-

dez’s choice of title as reinforcing his sense that language matters deeply. It might also

REMEMBERING THE DEATH CAMPS: POEMS (p. 690)

MARTIN NIEMÖLLER

First They Came for the Jews (p. 690)

Students and instructors interested in placing the literature of the Holocaust in histor-

ical and cultural perspective will find excellent materials in books, in scholarly jour-

nals from numerous discourses, and in Web sites on the Internet. Although indiscrim-

inate searches may provide excellent opportunities to evaluate texts of divergent quali-

ty, we need to direct students first to legitimate sites such as the U.S. Holocaust Me-

morial Museum (www.ushmm.org). At this writing, the Simon Wiesenthal Center,

another excellent source of information, includes on its site (www.wiesenthal.com) a

document refuting thirteen “revisionist arguments” often posted by hate groups. This

text can be used both as a source of historical background and as an example of how to

effectively respond to opposing views by presenting counterarguments referring to var-

ious types of evidence, by clarifying misleading interpretations of statistics, and by

pointing out fallacies such as equivocal use of language and false claims of authority.

Far from being a bystander or a collaborator, Martin Niemöller, along with

theologian Karl Barth and Christian activist and eventual martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer,

spoke strongly in opposition to Hitler’s attempts to use the Protestant churches of

Germany to persecute Jews and other outsiders. But he reminds us in the poem that

oppression approaches gradually and builds in intensity with each step. For this pastor

of a large Lutheran congregation, the realization that Nazi policies were dangerous to

freedom came as early as 1933 when the state began to tell the church that Jewish

converts and those married to “non-Aryans” should be prohibited from serving as

pastors. Gradually, the racist philosophy of the Nazis began to co-opt Martin Luther,

the founder of German Protestantism, as an Aryan hero, and some Nazi apologists

insisted that Jesus Christ was not a Jew but a godlike Aryan superman. The reading of

the Old Testament and the teachings of St. Paul, who boldly declared his Judaism,

began to be frowned upon, and SS troops would attend church meetings to see that

such policies were carried out. The melding of Aryan racial pride and the trappings of

Christianity became very popular as “German Christianity” and the “positive

Christianity movement” were preached at rallies and even from many pulpits. The

youth programs of the churches began to be supplanted by Hitler youth groups.

Although the early stages of this Nazi appropriation of religion prompted

Niemöller’s vocal opposition and organized action within the Protestant churches, he

did not believe at first that Hitler was responsible for these actions. Niemöller was

passionately patriotic and had worked politically in the years between World War I

and Hitler’s election to see that Germany found a strong, anti-Communist leader. He

had been a supporter of the monarchy and served as a U-boat commander in World

War I. He had voted for the National Socialists, Hitler’s party, in 1933 and in the

previous election and had even engaged in armed resistance to Communist attempts

to gain control of the country. Later, he would come under harsh criticism for

unsuccessfully volunteering from a prison cell to command a U-boat for the Axis even

though he was quite aware by this time of Hitler’s nature and the evils of Nazism.

Still it is important to understand the strength of Niemöller’s patriotism and the

complexity of the divided loyalties felt by veterans of World War I and their families.

His sons served in the army even while their father was in solitary confinement, first in

Sachsenhausen, then in Dachau. Hitler’s hatred of Niemöller was personal. The pastor

discovered Hitler’s pettiness and cowardice in 1934 when he attended a supposed

meeting of church leaders to find that Hermann Göring had tapped his telephone and

used a careless joke to embarrass Hitler and imply that Niemöller considered him easily

influenced. When his arrest in 1937 failed to result in a conviction, Hitler told officials

that Niemöller was to be considered his “personal prisoner” and was under no

circumstances to be released. For a long period of time, Niemöller was literally

Students appreciate the simplicity of “First They Came for the Jews,” but they

often oversimplify it by assuming the argument to be specific to Niemöller’s

experience or to a time and place that has nothing to do with us. Most will get the

message without explicit explanations, though they may not apply it to themselves. It is

important to communicate the complex historical setting, one in which prejudice was

accepted throughout Europe and America, with the classes of people mentioned in

the poem seen as threats to freedom and cultural values. In composition classes, many

instructors use war propaganda along with images from current advertising campaigns

to have students analyze persuasive appeals. Reading the literature of the Holocaust in

perspective can help students realize how “commonsense” constructions of reality

when unexamined leave room for the gradual acceptance of irrational and destructive

ideas. Marshall McLuhan once said that we don’t know who first discovered water, but

it is unlikely to have been a fish. An important goal of education may be to teach the

fish how to see the water that surrounds them, to question the assumptions they have

internalized as part of a culture. Students might suggest current substitutions for the

groups mentioned in Niemöller’s poem to make it speak even more clearly to an

American audience six or seven decades after the events of the poem.

This poem is didactic rather than lyrical, and its repetitions reflect the author’s

sermonic style. Many readers find its simplicity moving and find strength in its

forthright presentation. As a response to a specific historical event, the poem may be

taken literally and its voice added to the list of witnesses whose collective experience

educates us about the Holocaust. But it can also serve as a symbolic reminder that

apathy can be dangerous and that evil comes on so gradually that we tend to ignore it

until it directly affects us. Traditionally, those in power have access to the means of

publication, and in many eras and locations these are the people who are heard. But

NELLY SACHS

Chorus of the Rescued (p. 691)

The pleas expressed by the speaker of Nelly Sachs’s poem might be made by a survivor

of any severe traumatic experience, but as a person who escaped Nazi Germany in 1940,

leaving friends behind, Sachs captures the very real pathos of those who can no longer

speak for themselves, often speaking in the voices of victims who died. Without actually

experiencing the death camps, the poet was haunted for all her life by the horrors of the

Holocaust. In her acceptance of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966, she expressed the

identification that had permeated her life, declaring, “I represent the tragedy of the Jew-

ish people.” Perhaps this is the reason she uses the first-person-plural pronoun in this

poem, in which she speaks as a survivor. Yes, the survivors will accept freedom and safe-

ty. But they cannot forget what was left behind, the pain that was meant for them, the

fear and dread the poet felt herself, and the torture and death she experienced vicarious-

ly through others. So, as a survivor, she asks that she not be given more than she can

stand, much as a person who has almost died of thirst must take small sips of water at

first. The “worms of fear” do not go away, and those who have lived through such trau-

ma feel alienated, as if in a different part of the universe: a “constellation . . . buried in

dust.” She asks that the sun of her new universe be shown to her gradually. Being out of

the horror is almost too much to bear. And to be shown “any angry dog” would utterly

destroy the survivors: any hint of fear might bring it all back.

The emotional state of the speaker is fragile and desperate, as the metaphors of the

poem show. The survivors are like macabre musical instruments played by a personified

death; the image of bones and sinews being changed into objects to create “mutilated

music” recall the atrocities committed against the bodies of human beings in the death

camps. Images of dust recall the grave and add to the sense of fragility; these rescued

people could fall into dust like an ancient piece of fabric. According to the last lines, it is

“leave-taking” that keeps their bodies together, because breath and soul are gone. So, the

reader understands that it won’t take much to cause these “rescued” people to fall apart.

Throughout the poem, there is interplay between pronouns: the speaker and other

survivors are referred to as “we” or “us” while the rescuers, including—presumably—the

reader, are addressed as “you.” As the poem nears its end, the pronouns merge into

ambiguity. Absent from the poem are those who were not rescued. Is the “you” of the

final line the reader? Or could it be the one (or ones) left behind? The rescued are able

to greet people like the reader because they have left others. It is very sad for “leave-

taking”—loss, renunciation of joy, perhaps even survivor guilt—to be all that holds a

person together individually and as part of a community.

Literature of the Holocaust strikes a chord with many readers far beyond its

connection to their own lives. People who have lost loved ones to illness or the

MARIANNE COHN

I Shall Betray Tomorrow (p. 693)

The photograph of Marianne Cohn that accompanies her poem on the Web site

“Holocaust: A Call to Conscience” (www.projetaladin.org/holocaust/en/poetry-corner/

i-shall-betray-tomorrow-marianne-cohn.html) seems strikingly contemporary. Only

twenty-two years old when she was executed for her attempts to save Jewish children

from the Holocaust in occupied France, she could pass for one of the students in our

college classes. Looking at us from behind her glasses, she looks intellectual, strong,

and accepting of no nonsense. It is not surprising that her poem is ironic and defiant.

But she does not minimize the situation of the prisoner of conscience. There is a limit

to human endurance, and the speaker of the poem does not fool herself that she will

be able to endure past today. Perhaps behind the bravado, however, is the knowledge

that today is really all we have: when tomorrow comes, we will call it today. An

alternative title for Cohn’s poem has been used: “I’ll Crack under Torture Tomorrow

(Not Today).” We might ask students to consider the differing implications of the two

titles: is the idea of breaking under torture qualitatively different from the pejorative

concept of betraying? The result, of course, may be the same. Perhaps the difference

lies in the imputation of shame and guilt.

The title is ironic. She does not plan to betray. The speaker hopes her statement is

not true. In fact, what she seems to plan is the suicide that will thwart the betrayal.

Perhaps suicide is a betrayal in itself, because it allows the torturers to win a Pyrrhic

victory, but she realizes that this is her only way out of the real prospect of betraying

other people involved in the Resistance. The speaker knows she is in a desperate

situation, but her attitude is realistic and admirably defiant. She resists to the end.

That she is contemplating suicide as a victory over her torturers is made explicit,

beginning at line 14. She determines “to betray life / To die” and states that “the file is

for my own wrists.” The admission that she will betray tomorrow (probably by killing

herself) belies her confidence about being able to resist torture. Most military experts

concede that torture works on the strongest and most highly trained persons: John

the readers in our classrooms, who are likely to become “bystanders” who ignore or

accept the victimization of others until it actually affects them. His purpose may be to

encourage readers to open their eyes and not allow such abuses of power to be allowed

again. Sachs speaks for survivors, and her purpose may be to show readers that getting

over such trauma, even for those who escaped early, is not easy and may even be

impossible. Cohn vividly evokes the true experience of torture and communicates the

terrible decisions it requires. Her purpose may be simply to express the agony and to

help readers understand the agonizing difficulty of withstanding torture. Therefore, the

three writers provide three perspectives, each more intense than the one before. Had

she survived, Cohn might have written a poem like Sachs’s “Chorus of the Rescued.” It

is telling that when she was captured, Cohn was in the process of rescuing children in

peril, children much like Nelly Sachs when she escaped Germany as a young person.

Presumably, Cohn would have wanted those children to live free and happy, rather

than mentally imprisoning themselves in the darkness of the Holocaust, as Sachs seems

to have done. We might imagine Cohn saying, “Bring on that sun, damn it! I want the

full force of it in my face.” Otherwise, evil wins.

KAREN GERSHON

Race (p. 694)

Karen Gershon survived the Holocaust because she was one of the Jewish children

evacuated to England in 1939, the year World War II officially began in Europe. Her

parents did not survive, however, dying in the concentration camp that would have

undoubtedly reserved the same fate for her. When she speaks of her refusal to hate,

therefore, her words carry the authority of one who has a great deal to forgive and per-

haps even more survivor guilt to carry.

Issues may be raised about the appropriateness of any stance that takes the

German people off the hook for their complicity in raising the Nazis to power and

accepting the racist views and repressive measures that led to the eventual atrocities.

As we have noted in other introductions in this cluster, Nazi attitudes did not develop

and continue in a vacuum. People in many countries were willing to let outsider

groups be assigned the blame for economic and social problems following World War

I and a worldwide monetary depression. Stereotypes that denigrated Jews were the

Martin Niemöller’s family, even Niemöller himself, feel that patriotism required them

to serve in the armed forces of a government they knew to be unjust?

Gershon challenges her readers to go beyond the categories that separate and

label people. It is interesting that she uses the loaded word race as the focus of her

poem. Caricatures perpetuating stereotypes of supposedly Jewish features still may be

seen in England, Gershon’s adopted country, and the same sort of pictures were used

sometimes necessitate that ethnicity be listed on forms, some individuals choose to

leave such spaces blank. At the same time, studies seem to be indicating the

importance of genetic inheritance even in the development of personality traits once

considered to be learned behavior. Students might consider how such information

should be used as the field of genetics develops. How can we resist attempts to classify

and limit people? Gershon resists judgments that are based on seeing individuals as

symbols of an ethnic group, and by using the word race, she is able to use its negative

and arbitrary connotations to strengthen her argument against such categorization.

When Gershon’s speaker returns to Germany, she finds that her features identify

her as part of a group. She indicates that this is not her usual experience but

something that takes her by surprise. She had expected to blend in. For this reason, we

can be fairly certain that she does not imagine her reception but responds to reality.

Writing in the 1960s, Gershon may be voicing the thoughts of most living Jews when

her speaker imagines herself as one of the dead. Few families escaped knowing

someone who had died, and the sense that one had survived a close call was not

limited to Jews on the European continent or those like Gershon who had fled just

before or during the war. People who live after being involved in a disaster that kills

many of those around them are sometimes said to suffer from survivor guilt, to

irrationally believe that they are wrong to have survived when so many have died.

Gershon may also speak for many when she admits her tendency to see all

Germans as evil. Even in her rejection of hate, she still assumes that the Germans do

harbor thoughts of hate, the assumption still existing even as she vows not to hate

people for their race. In the Bible, Cain is the first murderer, having killed his brother

Abel because God loves Abel best. When God asks Cain where his brother is, Cain

takes shelter in denial. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he responds. So God exiles him

Enjambment makes the poem read smoothly, as if the narrator speaks to us in a

conversational tone. But she uses the poetic devices of rhyme, alliteration, and parallel

structure to unify the poem in a subtle way. Style does not dominate, however, and the

content of the poem seems more important than any self-conscious literary quality.

Some readers will contend that wallowing in guilt or anger over the actions of our

parents and grandparents serves no purpose and that such events should be forgiven

and forgotten as we move on. Although it is admirable to accept people as individuals

rather than as stereotypes, however, there may be value for a culture in examining the

structures and attitudes that lead to group actions like slavery, discrimination, and

genocide, even though most people now living did not participate in them. Because

we live with the results of actions taken in the past, assumptions need constant

reevaluation, not so that we will feel guilty or be filled with rage, but so that we see

ANNE SEXTON

After Auschwitz (p. 695)

Writing in the 1950s, the German Jewish philosopher T. W. Adorno questioned the

ethics of creating literature in the wake of the atrocities of the Holocaust. “To write

poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” he insists. No one could possibly capture the hor-

ror of what took place, some Holocaust scholars maintain. To attempt to express in art

what can be expressed only by a scream is to trivialize and take aesthetic pleasure in

the agony of victims who are no longer alive to speak for themselves. And it is particu-