American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice
336
American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice
336eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
This anthology of contemporary American poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, explores issues of identity, oppression, injustice, and social change. Living American writers produced each piece between 1980 and the present; works were selected based on literary merit and the manner in which they address one or more pressing social issues.
William Reichard has assembled some of the most respected literary artists of our time, asking whose voices are ascendant, whose silenced, and why. The work as a whole reveals shifting perspectives and the changing role of writing in the social justice arena over the last few decades.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781613320686 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Village Press |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Ted Kooser is one of the the most highly regarded poets in the US and served as the United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006.
Sherman Alexie Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, Sherman J. Alexie, Jr. grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, WA.
Elizabeth Alexander is a professor in the English and African American Studies Departments at Yale University.
Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), writer in residence for The Chickasaw Nation, is an internationally recognized public speaker and writer of poetry, fiction, and essays.
Read an Excerpt
[Section intro]
Section Two: That Which Holds Us Together, That Which Pulls Us Apart
We each have our own sense of what it means to be American. This sense is derived from a vast and shifting catalog of influences, including cultural and social messaging, the constant pressure of normative behavior, everything we see, hear, and read, prejudices and preferences, and our individual experiences. Everywhere we turn, we’re bombarded by sometimes subtle and oftentimes bombastic messages about what it means to be an American, how to act like an American, how to defend America, and who and who isn’t a “real” American. We all have to contend with constantly competing ideas about what defines the great experiment that is the United States of America. This social and cultural noise can make it difficult to critically reflect on our own experiences, our sense of self, and what shapes our identity. Most of us have, to some extent, multiple identities, and we’re often pulled in several directions at once when someone asks us who we are, what we are, where we’re from. The stories, poems, and prose in this section explore the lives of individuals who find themselves at intersections, places where one sense of self clashes with another, where one individual or group tries to gain control over another. The work here simultaneously defines what it means to be American and defies any easy definition of that label. The United States is a living organism, never at rest, and never the same thing twice. It exists because of the dynamic play between unity and tension. This same sense of tensegrity is what holds up the work in this section, with each piece defining, in moments of clarity, an individual’s sense of an American self, filled with conflict, confidence, and a myriad of unanswered questions.
[Contribution to Section Two]
The Secret to Life in America
by Ed Bok Lee
My brother sits me down and tells me
the secret to life in America.
I’m twelve years old when this happens.
He grabs my shoulders and says:
No one likes an immigrant.
It reminds them of when they fell down
and no one was around to help them.
When they couldn’t talk.
As children when they got lost in public.
Cold and wet, everyone hates an immigrant.
So don’t trust nobody.
The whites, they’ll teach you to hate yourself for being silent.
They’ll punish you for fighting back.
They’ll love the taste of your food and culture, and sister...
and yet spit you out.
The Blacks, at first you’d think they understand loss.
But to them you’re just another cracker with a bad case of jaundice.
Don’t expect shit from them,
they can’t afford to be generous.
Latins laugh at you behind your back.
Do you know this? I’m trying to tell you how it is in the city,
he says.
I ask my brother if I can go outside now.
No!, he screams. Our father is dead
and now I have to teach you how to survive
in America.
Fags are everywhere.
And they want you. ‘Cause
to them you’re exotic and cute
and will do all the dirty work.
The Chinese look down on you
for using their alphabet. The Japanese have raped your women through the centuries
and will do it again. In fact, never do business with other Asians,
‘cause they’re the greediest people alive.
Next to Jews.
Now I’m crying, because my brother has pulled off his work shirt.
Open your eyes!
This is where that black boy pulled the trigger
over twenty dollars and a candy bar! Here is where the whites punctured my kidney in a parking lot outside of Denny’s
And the Mexicans just kept drinking their beers.
This is the bruise on my soul where every American girl ever looked at me
like I was still the enemy.
This is where agent orange first set in.
This is where the DMZ line is still drawn!
Taste the barbed wire on my tongue!
See where that fat white teacher called me a freak for getting a B in math! Feel
my broken immigrant’s throat
that couldn’t tell him to Fuck Off!!!
These are my yellow hands!
This is my cock!
These are my eyes wide open!
This is my heart filled with cigarette smoke!
This my aching back which brought you here and buried our father!
This is the cheek mother slapped
for the way that I called her
ignorant.
This is the GQ subscription sister gave me for Christmas.
Here is my blood, which tastes just like tears.
These are my dreams for the future
dead and shriveled in the corner.
This is my broom. This the face
I couldn’t save from myself.
Are you listening to any of this?
Yes, I tell him. I’m listening.
You’re lucky, he says. You’ll go to college
when you grow up.
I don’t know, I tell him.
Work your ass off and move away from this shit hole out to the suburbs. Maybe marry a white girl.
I don’t know, I tell him.
Go off and write.... Poetry.
I won’t, I say.
Yes you will. And when you do,
do me this one favor.
What, I ask.
Lie.
And make our father and me
the heroes
you always needed us to be.
Table of Contents
"Acknowledgments
Foreword by former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser
Introduction by William Reichard
Section One: The Lives We’re Given, The Lives We Make
Louise Erdrich
“Future Home of the Living God”
B. H. Fairchild
“Speaking of Names”
“The Machinist, Teaching His Daughter to Play the Piano”
“Work”
“Keats”
Bobbie Ann Mason
“Shiloh”
Dorothy Allison
Bastard Out of Carolina (an excerpt)
Nickole Brown
“The Root Woman”
“The Smell of Snake”
“Trestle”
“In Winter”
“Straddling Fences”
Tony Hoagland
“At the Galleria”
“Dialectical Materialism”
Patricia Hampl
The Florist’s Daughter (an excerpt)
Nick Flynn
“Other Meaning”
“Seven Fragments (found inside my father)”
“Father Outside”
Jonis Agee
“Good to Go”
Patricia Smith
“Man On The TV Say”
“Only Everything I Own”
“Inconvenient”
“What To Tweak”
“Golden Rule Days”
Mark Nowak
“$00/Line/Steel/Train” (excerpts)
James Cihlar
“Lessons”
“Lincoln Avenue”
“Resolution”
“Undoing”
J. C. Hallman
“Manikin”
Hilda Raz
“Avoidance”
“Said to Sarah, Ten”
“Trans”
“Aaron at Work/Rain”
Greg Hewett
“Hymns to Nanan”
Section Two: That Which Holds Us Together, That Which Pulls Us Apart
Adrienne Rich
“An Atlas of the Difficult World” (excerpts)
Kristin Naca
“Speaking English Is Like”
“Uses for Spanish in Pittsburgh”
“Grocery Shopping with My Girlfriend Who Is Not Asian”
“Speaking Spanish Is Like”
Sherman Alexie
“Indian Education”
Kenny Fries
The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (excerpts)
Elizabeth Alexander
“Fugue”
“Overture: Watermelon City”
Brian Turner
“Observation Post #71”
“Here, Bullet”
“AB Negative”
“Night in Blue”
Ray Gonzalez
“Praise the Tortilla, Praise Menudo, Praise Chorizo”
“The Magnets”
“These Days”
Marvin Bell
“I Didn’t Sleep”
“Bagram, Afghanistan, 2002”
“Messy”
“Poem Post-9/11/01”
David Mura
“First Generation Angels”
“The Young Asian Women”
“Father Blues for Jon Jang”
“Minneapolis Public”
Scott Russell Sanders
“Under the Influence”
Heid Erdrich
“Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects”
“The Theft Outright”
“Butter Maiden and Maize Girl Survive Death Leap”
“The Lone Reader and Tonchee Fistfight in Pages”
Mark Doty
“Charlie Howard’s Descent”
“Tiara”
“Homo Will Not Inherit”
“Beginners”
“Art Lessons”
Javier O. Huerta
“Toward a Portrait of the Undocumented”
“Blasphemous Elegy for May 14, 2003”
Eric Gansworth
“The Rain, the Rez, and Other Things”
Yusef Komunyakaa
“Autobiography of My Alter Ego” (excerpts)
Philip Bryant
“1959, Loomis Avenue”
“Akhenaten”
“The Glue That Held Everything Together”
Diane Wilson
Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past (excerpt)
Scott Hightower
“Conjuring War”
“Falling Man”
“But at the Church”
Ed Bok Lee
“Polygutteral”
“Burnt Offering: Mid-November”
“Frozen in the Sky”
“The Secret to Life in America”
Section Three: The Edge of the World – The Contemporary Environment
Alison Hawthorne Deming
“Culture, Biology, and Emergence”
Bill McKibben
“Designer Genes”
Deborah Keenan
“So Much Like A Beach After All”
“It Is Fair To Be Crossing”
“Not Getting Tired of the Earth”
“Between Now and Then”
Donald Morrill
“Lone Tree, 1986”
D. A. Powell
“continental divide”
“cancer inside the little sea”
Anthony Doerr
“Cloudy Is the Stuff of Stones”
Linda Hogan
“Humble”
“Rapture”
“The Radiant”
“The Night Constant”
Barrie Jean Borich
“Waterfront Property”
Emily Watson
“Alice & Emily, Diana & Dunes”
Rights and Permissions
Contributors
About the Editor"