America - Outside Looking In

 Sorry, but this post is more about notes for a novel I want to write, “Chasing Ashes”. 

Coming back here to Muncie after prison has taught me just how much I am out of step. The gap I was gone filled with COVID-19 and the opioid crisis. I see and hear the effects, but they have no emotional resonance with me. 

Then, too, there is an idea gained from my reading in America about paying attention to the views of America from the edges. There are a lot of edges in America. Race remains the largest and greatest. Class and caste are in there, too. 

These pieces are examples of what I mean by views from the edges.

‘I was born in a melting pot. Melting isn’t fun’: Jon M Chu on Wicked: For Good, Ariana Grande – and living the American dream (The Guardian)

In a deceptively fun way – Crazy Rich Asians was the highest grossing romcom of the 2010s – both films tell a complicated, uncliched story about multiculturalism. “Melting pot is way more difficult than a word,” Chu says. “Melting is not fun. I got to be born in a melting pot, and feel the swirl and actually not even realise that I was melting until much later in my life. And maybe it’s not melting at all. Maybe it’s a soup in which we’re all still our own selves, in the same bowl. Not becoming one thing, but at the same time, knowing that coming together is part of the dream.”

Breathing Life into America’s Indigenous Stories (Electric Literature)

Bareerah Ghani: In the opening chapter, you write that all indigenous peoples are related but that your humanity remains deeply particular, “tied to our places of origin.” When you identify yourselves in your language, you essentially say, “we are our lands and our lands are us.” I am fascinated by your choice of the word “humanity.” Can you talk about it in connection with how land and indigenous identity are inseparable?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: In my people’s language, as in all of the Salish languages, the root word for people and land are actually one and the same, which has fascinated me ever since I started learning my language about ten or fifteen years ago. There’s this idea that there’s something essential about our humanity that is supposed to be tied to the land and the places that we come from, and perhaps vice versa, that land also lives in some relationship to humanity. I find there is something essential in the view that Native people, that people are supposed to live in relationship to their places. And I think we live in a moment in time wherein we are increasingly alienated from one another and from the land.

***

JBN: I think we’re in a moment in time wherein old myths about America as a land of immigrants, as a more tolerant melting pot, as a democracy, a land of opportunity, are very much falling by the wayside. I think that that has led to a broader crisis of meaning. What is the story of this land and this country? In that search, I would humbly suggest we turn to the First People and stories of this land to understand it. There’s a surprising amount of richness that stories that were nearly killed off by colonization but somehow still persist can bring to our conversation about what it is to be upon this land. Not just as Indigenous peoples, but as all people on this land. That has often been very much discounted. The story of Thanksgiving, for example, is one of the founding myths of this country and what’s really happening in that story is that the Natives were kind enough to let these starving pilgrims come over for a feast. That’s such a Native thing to do, such a generous act between neighbors, and of course, even those basics of the story are not remembered that way. There are countless other examples.

Part of what I’m trying to do, especially in the reported parts of the book, is to show how Native stories and the presence of Native people can reshape our understanding of these big ideas and myths about what it is to be American. For example, myths of race, assimilation, and colonization can add depth, not only to our understanding of Native people, but to our understanding of this place more broadly. 

Reckoning with the American Dream in Las Vegas (Electric Literature)

Like many new migrants to the city, I came to Las Vegas to chase an opportunity made possible by its wealth—though in my case, it’s a writing fellowship hosted by UNLV, offering me support for a new book I’m writing, and not a job in a casino or in the city’s various resorts and restaurants. This isn’t my first time in America, since I have been to this country for graduate school, as a visitor on writing fellowships, and during my childhood, when my family accompanied my mother while she pursued her PhD on a Fulbright. I navigate my new home with a mixture of familiarity and a newcomer’s wariness. My first few days in Las Vegas have me pulling out the accent I acquired during my graduate school years in Texas, and performing day-to-day tasks with the feigned confidence of a newcomer who nervously awaits the inevitable mistake that will lead to their exposure. I know the assumptions Americans make of people with foreign accents who don’t have the usual catchphrases at hand when purchasing an item or talking to someone on the street: these are assumptions my own parents have had to deal with during their own visits to America, cementing their status as outsiders when navigating the most quotidian of interactions. 

***

It’s one thing I notice about Filipinos overseas, whether I meet them at a party or at a store, in the dry, open landscape of Austin, Texas or in the lush, rolling hills of Wellington, New Zealand: an eagerness to name the occupations they once held in our motherland, or else a curiosity in regards to the roles I once occupied in a country they also unhesitatingly call “backward,” “corrupt,” and “poor.” Sooner or later, their criticisms of our shared homeland fall away, revealing a sentimental attachment to the lives they left behind and the identities they shed to survive in a land that promises new beginnings. They may be Uber drivers or salespeople in this new country, but in the Philippines, they were engineers, accountants, bankers. Those who tell me, “Pride can’t feed you,” when they begrudgingly learn that I’m an artist in this country, and not a nurse, will also randomly mention the prizes they won for their research back home and the businesses they helped start from the ground up, their eyes turning wistful as they stare into a past that remains invisible to other people’s eyes. If they’ve resigned themselves to taking their pride down a few notches in these faraway lands, their memories of their past selves remain intact, waiting to be pulled out like museum pieces preserved in glass when they meet a fellow countryman who carries a similar burden of memory, and knows the full weight of their loss. 

***

Then again, don’t I have Filipino relatives and family friends who are Trump supporters, who justify their political leanings by launching into rants about “illegal” immigrants sitting around and getting free housing, healthcare, and education, while they sacrifice everything to reap these benefits for themselves and their children? I have seen this selfishness before, from people who haven’t necessarily been left untouched by the munificence of the American Dream—I’ve sat inside their large houses as a welcome guest, while they complained about how unfair it was that they’ve had to pay such steep a price for the life America has given them, while others, by virtue of their disadvantage, have it easy.  

On the uses of a legendary past (Engelsberg ideas) makes a point that is worth brining up here:

Yet it is Oakeshott who understands what others have only grasped at. We cannot prevent the legendary past from being mistaken for history proper. It is integral to our political and social present. It shapes, consciously or unconsciously, the very essence of the political, fashioning the present by repurposing the bric-a-brac of the past. In his own idiosyncratic style, Oakeshott reminds us to acknowledge the philosophical distinction between the legendary and the historical, and to steel ourselves against myth masquerading as fact.

Most of what Americans call history is myth. We may no longer believe George Washington could not tell a lie, but we do not fully agree he was human. We may see a Manifest Destiny that looks more like genocide and racism to the Native Americans. That we have done terrible things as people does not justify doing more terrible things under the cover of a mythological virtue.

 sch 11/22