Barack's America

One of the more interesting — if not, for most of my students, the most novel — aspects of my undergraduate class in Contemporary American Literature is our discussion of the African-American experience as it can be gleaned from several poems and stories on our syllabus. With Barack Obama poised (or at least this corner hopes) to become America’s next president — and the first black man to occupy the post — I think it’s especially important for young Filipinos to understand just how historic even Obama’s candidacy is, even if he may have nothing directly to do with me and you.

English 42 is a literature course, but I teach it, in effect, as an adventure in American studies. From Day One, I try to impress upon my students the need to understand the world’s most powerful nation and its society — and one that has had a continuing and some say dominating influence on our own culture, economy, and politics — from a Filipino point of view. We’re not pretending or wanting to be Americans, although it’s just as important to try and see things from their perspective. We want to know America through its literature and culture, so we can begin to figure out and get a handle on the complexities of our century-long love-hate relationship with that Northern behemoth. I remind my students that our objective is neither to love nor hate America, but just to understand it better than when we began, and at least divest it of the undue power that mysteries and enigmas often wield over the uninitiated.

To prepare my students for the task ahead, I start every semester not with literature proper but with an overview of American geography and history. It’s amazing — appalling, actually — how ignorant we’ve become, even in this age of the Internet, of exactly where things are, and of what happened even just 20 years ago. Most of us seem to be living literally in the here and now, to the exclusion of almost everything else that doesn’t register on our social screen. (I’ll bet, however, that the average educated Filipino still knows more about America than his or her Stateside counterpart would know about us.)

So we begin with maps and a walk through America’s own colonial past, the trauma of the Civil War, its rise to industrial (and imperial) power, and its passionate — and sometimes contradictory — devotions to such ideals and concepts as freedom, the frontier, the individual, egalitarianism, and that comforting confection, “the American way of life” (for those of us looking in from the outside, “the American dream”).

Through stories like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and John Updike’s “A&P,” we gain insights into the mindset of ordinary people in small-town America, far away from Washington and Wall Street; they are, after all, the farmers and workers who actually elect the American President (even if only about 35 percent of them actually cast a ballot on voting day), and thereby help direct the lives of billions elsewhere on the planet.

But what we Filipinos know least about America has, I think, to do with its minorities, especially African Americans, whom we usually recognize as one stereotype or another. In the 1990s, you had to be one of two MJs — Michael Jackson or Michael Jordan — to be seen as a successful black man in America, and indeed we often think of blacks as being great entertainers and athletes, which is not a bad thing, unless you happen to be a black person who’s neither one nor the other. There is, I suspect, a benign racism in Filipinos (the kind that insists that the only good PBA imports are black ones) shaped by the fact that as nut-brown as most of us are, we see the world through white eyes, and ascribe to whiteness all things good and beautiful. Nobody ever sold a tin or a tube of “blackening” cream in this country.

We try to remedy that ignorance and misunderstanding in class by going over the history of slavery in America and the persistence of racism even long after the Civil War and the passage of the Civil Rights Act. We talk about black music as a form of protest and self-affirmation. We discuss how black Americans — who make up less than 15 percent of America’s 300-million population —exert a far wider and deeper cultural influence than their sheer numbers would suggest. I remind my students that such people and role models exist as black scientists, scholars, and artists — that Bill Cosby has a doctorate in education. Through such poems as Langston Hughes’ sharply ironic “I’m Makin’ a Road” and stories such as James Baldwin’s horrifying “Going to Meet the Man” and Alice Walker’s self-critical “Everyday Use,” we confront realities about America that we Filipinos would perhaps rather not deal with, especially when we begin to realize that we have more in common with Barack Obama than John McCain.

This isn’t to say, of course, that all whites are bad and all blacks are good. Such demonizing oversimplifications serve no one. Rather, between and within black and white are all kinds of shades of gray — and brown and pink and yellow. Unraveling the complexity of human beings and human society is one of literature’s toughest challenges, and I’m glad to engage my students in that pursuit, especially when it veers off to parts unknown.

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The UP Institute of Creative Writing (UP ICW) — of which I recently became director — is now receiving applications for the 48th UP ICW National Writers Workshop to be held in Camp John Hay, Baguio City, from April 12 to 18, 2009 and to be chaired by National Artist for Literature Virgilio S. Almario.

We bring 12 creative writers up to Baguio every summer for a week of intense discussions about their work, and for the past few years we’ve geared this workshop toward what we might call “mid-career” writers: people who’ve already made a mark in writing and who are working on some significant project we can talk about and help them with. We earmark eight of these slots for obvious standouts nominated by the UPICW staff, but four fellowships are available for open competition, open only to such advanced writers.

More details and application forms are available at the UPICW office in UP Diliman and on the ICW website at http://www.up.edu.ph/~icw. The deadline for submission of applications is November 30, 2008. For inquiries, call 922-1830 and ask for Ms. Eva Cadiz.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.