Becoming American, Staying Alien
A statement uttered in innocence by a little boy in Yankton, South Dakota made me first realize that people saw me differently than how I saw myself. It happened a few weeks after I arrived in the United States to start my freshman year at a small Catholic girls’ college. The realization, though not immediate, changed how I viewed the world and myself. I discovered for the first time that day what being an “alien” meant. It is a feeling I share with many who choose to leave their place of birth and start anew in a different country. In the United States, at least, we graduate from “nonresident aliens,” to “resident aliens,” and lastly to “citizens.” But though we may don the mantle of citizenship we are never allowed to forget that we came here from someplace else, that we are not the same as others. We become Americans but we always remain aliens.
The first few weeks in the States whirled by—I settled into my new surroundings, struggled with loneliness, and missed my family and home. I soon formed new friendships and enjoyed telling them about life in Pakistan. In those early months I mostly wore my Pakistani clothes: shalwar-kameez suits and dupattas—the baggy pants and loose tunics and a long scarf, which one of my friends initially thought were my pajamas.
A couple of weeks after settling in at the college I headed downtown to do some shopping. I wore a Pakistani shalwar-kameez suit of gauzy cotton embellished with embroidery; a matching dupatta flung about my shoulders completed my ensemble. My loose, soft, flowing clothes felt perfect on that typical Midwestern summer day languid with heat and humidity.
It was my first foray alone. I was nervous, but on a mission—to acquire my first pair of blue jeans. In Karachi, my conservative family wouldn’t allow me to wear Western clothes. Though I could now wear whatever I wanted, I had not intention to digtch my Pakistani clothes and planned on wearing them as much as my new jeans and shirts.
Keyed up, I hurried toward Fantle’s, Yankton’s sole department store. I couldn’t wait to indulge in the American way of shopping—being able to try on clothes before making a purchase. In Pakistan either tailors made our clothes or we sewed them at home. clutched my purse to my side—it contained what I had set aside for my purchases that day, a grand total of about thirty dollars. I was ready to splurge and relished the idea of trying on several pairs jeans before making my selection. I hurried on, practically giddy imagining myself in those jeans.
Sheathed tightly within my thoughts, I almost ran into the little boy who suddenly appeared in front of me, pointing his index finger at me, saying something. Maybe it was his accent or maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but his words did not penetrate my ear. What clown? Where? I looked around. Nope, no clown.
Then I heard the boy again. “Mommy, look at the clown.” A moment of disbelief. Then a slap of truth—I was the clown. The kid was pointing at me, looking at me, talking about me. The jeans would have to wait until another day. Shocked, sad and confused, I turned back and hurried to my dorm room. I was not what I always thought I was. I was not normal. I was different enough that a child saw me as a clown. Not that my clothes were clownish, for the child had no frame of reference for such attire. But I had never considered myself unlike others. Sure, I knew I looked different; spoke a different language; and had a different religion. But I accepted those differences as part of being in the world. I had grown up in multi-hued family with a father who was quite dark, a mother who was very fair, and sisters of varying complexions. Diversity was part of my life. I never thought that being different was a bad thing or placed you in a category that set you apart.
Time passes. That incident slipped deep into my memory. And, yes, a few days after being called a “clown,” I went back to Fantle’s and bought my first pair of blue jeans. But the boy had also touched a nerve. I began to feel uncomfortable, or perhaps even ashamed of my Pakistani clothes for I soon packed them away and only wore them occasionally.
Putting away my shalwar-kameez suits was a way for me to fit in. Not to stand out and be riducled. It was also a time when this country was not as diverse as it is today. And people South Asia were rare in most parts of the United States, especially in the flyover parts—the heartland. The “alien” invasion, when immigration rules were relaxed, was still a decade or more in the future. I still don’t wear Pakistani clothes most of the time, but I do wear them to parties, charity balls, and other social occasion—they are my formal clothes now. I stand apart from the other women. That early nagging feeling that I look odd in those clothes is now gone. But sometime the words of that little boy echo in my mind. And I smile. While I will always remain an “alien,” I also know I am an American.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Worlds Apart
James Agee’s elegiac essay memorializing a summer evening in Knoxville did nothing to make me feel better about the preceding essay by James Wright, which distressed me so. Wright’s descriptions of Jim Crow days were disquieting and Agee’s poetic paean to his tranquil life only heightened the realization that those two worlds existed in orbits that seldom came in contact. The blacks probably knew more of the white world, which they serviced, but whites probably knew little of the black world.
Agee’s essay is the prologue to his famous novel A Death in the Family, in which he draws heavily from his life. I have read this essay before and loved its lyricism and poetic influences and its evocation of the calm that pervades a quiet neighborhood as the day draws to a close. There is a sense of community and continuity in Agee’s retelling of the familiar, mundane ritual of those who live in his neighborhood. Everything is orderly, routine and little menacing intrudes on this perfection. Sounds and things, like the noisy tram, are imbued with a certain magic that beguiles the young child through whose eyes the essay unfolds. But that quiet and charm of the evening is tinged with something not said—that even in a city like Knoxville there are the cinder yards where life was hard and much different. In other words, there’s a disconnect between Agee’s portrayal of life and that of Wright’s.
It was a probably a coincidence that Agee’s essay came right after Wright’s harrowing account of his life in the book, but the juxtaposition of the two was perfect. Even though Agee is not black, I am glad that in class we read Agee as part of a group of essays black essayists for it brought into sharp focus the injustices recounted in theirs. Where Wright’s essay focused on his search for jobs and the difficulties he encountered because of his color, the men in Agee’s were all gainfully employed and belong to the same social strata—white, lower-middle class office workers or small businessmen.
Reading about the tranquility of that Knoxville summer evening only heightened the sense of frustration of violence and day-to-day humiliations that black people faced Wright documents Wright’s documentation of the violence and of living Jim Crow exposes the falsity of popular conceptions of the easy life in the South. He makes it clear that he never knew this Edenic South that Agee evokes in his essay. It made me wonder if Wright happened by Agee’s neighborhood would he feel the same dread that he described so well in his essay:
Where Agee saw only the beauty, Wright would have seen the menace, cruelty and the ugliness of Jim Crow. He probably would have hurried thorugh the neighborhood, before someone noticed his intrusion and beat him to make sure he would remember never where his place was—among his own kind.
Through Wright’s telling it’s easy to see the inner feelings of the black experience of prejudice and what it took to survive as shown in the elaborate ritual that had blacks never thanking a white person for a courtesy because then it maybe construed as expectation or as Wright wrote, “to have said: "Thank you!" would have made the white man think that you thought you were receiving from him a personal service.”
The contrast in the language of the two writers also highlights their differences. Agee’s writing is vivid and poetic; his words are carefully chosen, precise and imagistic as seen in his phrasing of the night becoming “blue dew.” There is foreboding too, but it’s subtle and there is affirmation of the continuity of life throughout. Wright’s essay beats with a faster pulse of frustration, as he breathlessly recounts his anecdotes, each affirming the institutionalizing of Jim Crow.
James Agee’s elegiac essay memorializing a summer evening in Knoxville did nothing to make me feel better about the preceding essay by James Wright, which distressed me so. Wright’s descriptions of Jim Crow days were disquieting and Agee’s poetic paean to his tranquil life only heightened the realization that those two worlds existed in orbits that seldom came in contact. The blacks probably knew more of the white world, which they serviced, but whites probably knew little of the black world.
Agee’s essay is the prologue to his famous novel A Death in the Family, in which he draws heavily from his life. I have read this essay before and loved its lyricism and poetic influences and its evocation of the calm that pervades a quiet neighborhood as the day draws to a close. There is a sense of community and continuity in Agee’s retelling of the familiar, mundane ritual of those who live in his neighborhood. Everything is orderly, routine and little menacing intrudes on this perfection. Sounds and things, like the noisy tram, are imbued with a certain magic that beguiles the young child through whose eyes the essay unfolds. But that quiet and charm of the evening is tinged with something not said—that even in a city like Knoxville there are the cinder yards where life was hard and much different. In other words, there’s a disconnect between Agee’s portrayal of life and that of Wright’s.
It was a probably a coincidence that Agee’s essay came right after Wright’s harrowing account of his life in the book, but the juxtaposition of the two was perfect. Even though Agee is not black, I am glad that in class we read Agee as part of a group of essays black essayists for it brought into sharp focus the injustices recounted in theirs. Where Wright’s essay focused on his search for jobs and the difficulties he encountered because of his color, the men in Agee’s were all gainfully employed and belong to the same social strata—white, lower-middle class office workers or small businessmen.
Reading about the tranquility of that Knoxville summer evening only heightened the sense of frustration of violence and day-to-day humiliations that black people faced Wright documents Wright’s documentation of the violence and of living Jim Crow exposes the falsity of popular conceptions of the easy life in the South. He makes it clear that he never knew this Edenic South that Agee evokes in his essay. It made me wonder if Wright happened by Agee’s neighborhood would he feel the same dread that he described so well in his essay:
“Negroes who have lived South know the dread of being caught alone upon the streets in white neighborhoods after the sun has set. In such a simple situation as this the plight of the Negro in America is graphically symbolized. While white strangers may be in these neighborhoods trying to get home, they can pass unmolested. But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target.”
Where Agee saw only the beauty, Wright would have seen the menace, cruelty and the ugliness of Jim Crow. He probably would have hurried thorugh the neighborhood, before someone noticed his intrusion and beat him to make sure he would remember never where his place was—among his own kind.
Through Wright’s telling it’s easy to see the inner feelings of the black experience of prejudice and what it took to survive as shown in the elaborate ritual that had blacks never thanking a white person for a courtesy because then it maybe construed as expectation or as Wright wrote, “to have said: "Thank you!" would have made the white man think that you thought you were receiving from him a personal service.”
The contrast in the language of the two writers also highlights their differences. Agee’s writing is vivid and poetic; his words are carefully chosen, precise and imagistic as seen in his phrasing of the night becoming “blue dew.” There is foreboding too, but it’s subtle and there is affirmation of the continuity of life throughout. Wright’s essay beats with a faster pulse of frustration, as he breathlessly recounts his anecdotes, each affirming the institutionalizing of Jim Crow.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Transition
In his essay Notes on a Native Son, James Baldwin speaks from a more political point of view in a voice that seethes with anger yet is also realistic in its acknowledgement of the harm that could be done if such anger is not harnessed. The essay in our anthology is chapter one of Baldwin’s book of the same name, which is a tour de force of cultural criticism from the 1950s, one that not only portrayed the realities of black life but also offered hope despite the rage it documented. Baldwin’s writing has a visceral quality to it that is lacking in Richard Wright’s prose. I found that Baldwin synthesized the problems faced by blacks and addressed them from a political as well as a personal perspective.
Wright too spoke of the injustices he suffered because of his race, but his demeanor seemed too gentlemanly and reticent to me. As I noted in my earlier blog entry, I thought Wright’s anger was muted and there was almost a fatalistic acceptance of the treatment he received. The persona of the narrator, in Wright’s essay never seemed to merge with the collective persona of the black people, which is what I liked so much when I read Baldwin. Baldwin, in the words of Cheryl Butler, “soaked up like a sponge the motions of all who surrounded him” (53).
Wright’s work remained rooted more in the personal with the occasional nod to the universal character of his suffering. If Wright’s Jim Crow essay unfolds in a series of anecdotes that are mostly personal, Baldwin’s opens with a bang and pulls in both his personal world and the one he inhabits. While Baldwin also recounts anecdotes, his style leans more toward using a mixture of disparate images and scenes that effectively show the chaos confronting him and others like him. Baldwin doesn’t wait to move methodically from the personal to the universal, but mixes them right away in the opening paragraphs. In the first ten or so lines of he piles on the information in a staccato bursts of short sentences that accentuate the urgency of the situation. We find out that his father died a few hours before his mother gave birth to her last child, a race riot broke out in Harlem shortly after the father’s funeral, the day when Baldwin also celebrated his nineteenth birthday. Baldwin’s essay vents his anger and that of others around him. I found a sense of catharsis in Baldwin’s that I felt was missing in Wright’s.
Of course, both authors protested the prevalence of injustice for blacks, but Wright’s lacked the forcefulness found in Baldwin’s. Although protest essayists speak in autobiographical terms they also speak on behalf of the “the disenfranchised from a relatively privileged position of access,” Brian Norman notes (29). But it seemed to me that the focus of Wright’s leaned more toward the personal, while Baldwin focused not only on what he felt but also on how his family (particularly the father) and those around felt. Baldwin mixes his experience with those of others in order to access “truths tested by the ‘crucible of experience’” (Norman 29). I found Baldwin more compelling to read, despite his polemics because he reached beyond Wright’s indignation and recitation of oppression to an articulation of “ truth about self, about his fellow man, and about the general state of society” (Butler 53).
Butler, Cheryl. The Art of the Black Essay: From Meditation to Transcendence. London: Routledge, 2002.
Norman, Brian. The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division. Albany: SUNY, 2007.
In his essay Notes on a Native Son, James Baldwin speaks from a more political point of view in a voice that seethes with anger yet is also realistic in its acknowledgement of the harm that could be done if such anger is not harnessed. The essay in our anthology is chapter one of Baldwin’s book of the same name, which is a tour de force of cultural criticism from the 1950s, one that not only portrayed the realities of black life but also offered hope despite the rage it documented. Baldwin’s writing has a visceral quality to it that is lacking in Richard Wright’s prose. I found that Baldwin synthesized the problems faced by blacks and addressed them from a political as well as a personal perspective.
Wright too spoke of the injustices he suffered because of his race, but his demeanor seemed too gentlemanly and reticent to me. As I noted in my earlier blog entry, I thought Wright’s anger was muted and there was almost a fatalistic acceptance of the treatment he received. The persona of the narrator, in Wright’s essay never seemed to merge with the collective persona of the black people, which is what I liked so much when I read Baldwin. Baldwin, in the words of Cheryl Butler, “soaked up like a sponge the motions of all who surrounded him” (53).
Wright’s work remained rooted more in the personal with the occasional nod to the universal character of his suffering. If Wright’s Jim Crow essay unfolds in a series of anecdotes that are mostly personal, Baldwin’s opens with a bang and pulls in both his personal world and the one he inhabits. While Baldwin also recounts anecdotes, his style leans more toward using a mixture of disparate images and scenes that effectively show the chaos confronting him and others like him. Baldwin doesn’t wait to move methodically from the personal to the universal, but mixes them right away in the opening paragraphs. In the first ten or so lines of he piles on the information in a staccato bursts of short sentences that accentuate the urgency of the situation. We find out that his father died a few hours before his mother gave birth to her last child, a race riot broke out in Harlem shortly after the father’s funeral, the day when Baldwin also celebrated his nineteenth birthday. Baldwin’s essay vents his anger and that of others around him. I found a sense of catharsis in Baldwin’s that I felt was missing in Wright’s.
Of course, both authors protested the prevalence of injustice for blacks, but Wright’s lacked the forcefulness found in Baldwin’s. Although protest essayists speak in autobiographical terms they also speak on behalf of the “the disenfranchised from a relatively privileged position of access,” Brian Norman notes (29). But it seemed to me that the focus of Wright’s leaned more toward the personal, while Baldwin focused not only on what he felt but also on how his family (particularly the father) and those around felt. Baldwin mixes his experience with those of others in order to access “truths tested by the ‘crucible of experience’” (Norman 29). I found Baldwin more compelling to read, despite his polemics because he reached beyond Wright’s indignation and recitation of oppression to an articulation of “ truth about self, about his fellow man, and about the general state of society” (Butler 53).
Butler, Cheryl. The Art of the Black Essay: From Meditation to Transcendence. London: Routledge, 2002.
Norman, Brian. The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division. Albany: SUNY, 2007.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Discomfort
I felt relieved after finishing James Wright’s essay about the old Jim Crow days—Thank god those days are mostly behind us, and we are now in a place where a black person might become this country’s next president. Wright presented his story in a series of anecdote that draw the reader into the narrative with their familiar tone. The criticism is muted, even when some of the images that a reader confronts are horrible and insidious—such as the girl who is raped by a white man and forced to marry a black man to save the white perpetrator. The anecdotes piled on one on another, but they never managed to reach an arc or an “aha” moment when the narrative coalesces for the reader.
I expected that narrative arc until the very end. And as the essay wound toward a conclusion, and especially after reading that the narrator had a yearning for books, I was convinced that the narrator would migrate to the North and find success. But instead I got the last scene of him as a delivery boy, still in the South, who seems to have internalized the cruelty that he faces.
When I finished the essay I felt dismayed and bothered. I wasn’t quite prepared for its suggestion that, over time, Jim Crow laws could insinuate themselves so deeply into the lives of those they affected and find a certain degree of acceptance without much protest. I wanted to see rage and a call to rise up and not take it anymore but I got only a sigh of resignation. I didn’t like the passivity and questioned if the narrator too had learned the Jim Crow lessons well and had resigned himself to silence and an acceptance (okay, maybe tacit acceptance) of what he had learned. I don't want to sound unduly harsh and must acknowledge the Wright did bring the Jim Crow experience to the forefront and that it was a useful way to begin a dialog on that issue. Perhaps in the time that he wrote that is all that he could do without sounding radical and incurring the wrath of the majority.
Despite my disappointment about the essay’s conclusion, I found Wright’s use of language in the essay clever and interesting. I noted how Wright reverses the hierarchy of language and roles so that his white characters speak in dialect rather than the black characters. His narrator is erudite and speaks in measured tones, as do most of other black characters. Only one black character slips into dialect is—the elevator operator at the end, who says is I am sure Wright had some reason for doing this, but I’m not sure what it was. Maybe he intended to send some sort of a message that a person can’t be judged on appearance alone.
Later, thinking about my reaction to Wright, I recalled that James Baldwin, who respected and looked up to Wright, had had a falling out with him in the same issue. Baldwin railed against the simplicity of Wright’s portrayal of black life and criticized him for not writing more forcefully about the problems that confronted blacks. The two men never reconciled and Baldwin’s bitterness about Wright’s lack of responsibility as a writer is evident even in his essay “Alas, Poor Richard,” written as (sort of) memorial after the latter’s death. Baldwin first lauds Wright's achievements but soon excoriates his shortcomings and proclaims that Wright’s work (especially Native Son) can “no longer be read as it had been read in 1940, as a militant racial manifesto.” He proclaims his love and respect for Wright but is unable to forgive Wright’s failure at never becoming “the social and polemical writer he took himself to be.” Maybe Baldwin went a bit far, but I couldn't help but agree with him.
I felt relieved after finishing James Wright’s essay about the old Jim Crow days—Thank god those days are mostly behind us, and we are now in a place where a black person might become this country’s next president. Wright presented his story in a series of anecdote that draw the reader into the narrative with their familiar tone. The criticism is muted, even when some of the images that a reader confronts are horrible and insidious—such as the girl who is raped by a white man and forced to marry a black man to save the white perpetrator. The anecdotes piled on one on another, but they never managed to reach an arc or an “aha” moment when the narrative coalesces for the reader.
I expected that narrative arc until the very end. And as the essay wound toward a conclusion, and especially after reading that the narrator had a yearning for books, I was convinced that the narrator would migrate to the North and find success. But instead I got the last scene of him as a delivery boy, still in the South, who seems to have internalized the cruelty that he faces.
When I finished the essay I felt dismayed and bothered. I wasn’t quite prepared for its suggestion that, over time, Jim Crow laws could insinuate themselves so deeply into the lives of those they affected and find a certain degree of acceptance without much protest. I wanted to see rage and a call to rise up and not take it anymore but I got only a sigh of resignation. I didn’t like the passivity and questioned if the narrator too had learned the Jim Crow lessons well and had resigned himself to silence and an acceptance (okay, maybe tacit acceptance) of what he had learned. I don't want to sound unduly harsh and must acknowledge the Wright did bring the Jim Crow experience to the forefront and that it was a useful way to begin a dialog on that issue. Perhaps in the time that he wrote that is all that he could do without sounding radical and incurring the wrath of the majority.
Despite my disappointment about the essay’s conclusion, I found Wright’s use of language in the essay clever and interesting. I noted how Wright reverses the hierarchy of language and roles so that his white characters speak in dialect rather than the black characters. His narrator is erudite and speaks in measured tones, as do most of other black characters. Only one black character slips into dialect is—the elevator operator at the end, who says is I am sure Wright had some reason for doing this, but I’m not sure what it was. Maybe he intended to send some sort of a message that a person can’t be judged on appearance alone.
Later, thinking about my reaction to Wright, I recalled that James Baldwin, who respected and looked up to Wright, had had a falling out with him in the same issue. Baldwin railed against the simplicity of Wright’s portrayal of black life and criticized him for not writing more forcefully about the problems that confronted blacks. The two men never reconciled and Baldwin’s bitterness about Wright’s lack of responsibility as a writer is evident even in his essay “Alas, Poor Richard,” written as (sort of) memorial after the latter’s death. Baldwin first lauds Wright's achievements but soon excoriates his shortcomings and proclaims that Wright’s work (especially Native Son) can “no longer be read as it had been read in 1940, as a militant racial manifesto.” He proclaims his love and respect for Wright but is unable to forgive Wright’s failure at never becoming “the social and polemical writer he took himself to be.” Maybe Baldwin went a bit far, but I couldn't help but agree with him.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
White Albums
I have loved Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album” for its voice and the way in which it captures the anomie and the chaos of the late 1960s. The era is mirrored in the narrator’s state of mind—discordant emotions, vertigo, dread, a conviction that no narrative could possibly speak to the prevailing condition (not just hers but of the country too). Nothing makes sense and there’s a palpable feeling of confusion (or is it loss?) in an essay that promises no happy ending.
After this latest reading of Didion’s I dug up the other “White Album”— the one by the Beatles. I hadn’t listened to it in years, but it got a lot of play in ’69 and ’70, at the height of the Vietnam war, when I too took part in protests, student marches, and strikes (even getting tear gassed in Minneapolis when one march turned rowdy).
The double covers of the album are now no longer crisp and white. And each side is imprinted with a dark grey ring from the two LPs within. There’s no title as such, only “The Beatles” engraved on the album’s surface. When the album was new, the letters melded into the white. Today, flecks of grime—from all those years ago—cling to the letters and give them prominence.
I thought of how both Didion’s essay and the album captured the disaffected feeling of a defining era. The Beatle’s “White Album” was a diverse, eclectic, blend of several musical forms that challenged the prevailing notion of popular music in the West. It also screamed “change” and “freedom”—to try things differently, either musically or otherwise. And it entertained, shocked, and provoked its listeners. Many of us tried to find meaning (both apprartent and hidden) in the lyrics, the titles and the new Eastern inflections and instruments. We didn’t know what we were doing then, but in some ways we were trying to make sense of not just the Beatles but also our world.
Much like first the listening of the album, the essay, at first reading feels confusing—all those names, those events, and a state of mind that figures so prominently in the narrative. It seems the essay would fall apart at any instant and spin out of control. But Didion’s personal experience and knowledge of the events and her incorporation of her own mental distress adds layers of complexity and her tight authorial control keeps the essay moving along from scene to scene. The work that went into this essay is not evident at first reading, but after my third or fourth time with the essay, I could see how elements that seemed disparate at first all cohere together in a loose arrangement.
Others might differ with me, but I believe that there is little that is superfluous in this essay. All the maneuvering and the shifts in the narrative line are intended to show that Didion is very much in charge of what she puts on the page. It’s an example of authorial control, with her experience as the pivot point for the narrative. The self is always present and intrudes on the narrative as in her abrupt interjection of her psychiatric diagnosis, which is jarring and gives a reader pause to wonder about Didion’s motive. The mystery is solved soon enough—Didion wants the reader to know that she was convinced that “an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.” Heady days indeed.
I love the irony in this essay too. Despite Didion’s protests how all the disorientation—hers and the nation’s—is adversely affecting her storytelling skills but she produces a story that hangs together quite well. Maybe not coherently and neatly but at least in a way that shows the “senseless chain of correspondence” that was the sixties. And somehow we survived it and so did Didion and perhaps we are all a little better for it.
My two “The Beatles” LPs, although a little scratchy, are still in pretty good shape. I played them a couple of times after reading Didion and relived another time, another place, another life.
I have loved Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album” for its voice and the way in which it captures the anomie and the chaos of the late 1960s. The era is mirrored in the narrator’s state of mind—discordant emotions, vertigo, dread, a conviction that no narrative could possibly speak to the prevailing condition (not just hers but of the country too). Nothing makes sense and there’s a palpable feeling of confusion (or is it loss?) in an essay that promises no happy ending.
After this latest reading of Didion’s I dug up the other “White Album”— the one by the Beatles. I hadn’t listened to it in years, but it got a lot of play in ’69 and ’70, at the height of the Vietnam war, when I too took part in protests, student marches, and strikes (even getting tear gassed in Minneapolis when one march turned rowdy).
The double covers of the album are now no longer crisp and white. And each side is imprinted with a dark grey ring from the two LPs within. There’s no title as such, only “The Beatles” engraved on the album’s surface. When the album was new, the letters melded into the white. Today, flecks of grime—from all those years ago—cling to the letters and give them prominence.
I thought of how both Didion’s essay and the album captured the disaffected feeling of a defining era. The Beatle’s “White Album” was a diverse, eclectic, blend of several musical forms that challenged the prevailing notion of popular music in the West. It also screamed “change” and “freedom”—to try things differently, either musically or otherwise. And it entertained, shocked, and provoked its listeners. Many of us tried to find meaning (both apprartent and hidden) in the lyrics, the titles and the new Eastern inflections and instruments. We didn’t know what we were doing then, but in some ways we were trying to make sense of not just the Beatles but also our world.
Much like first the listening of the album, the essay, at first reading feels confusing—all those names, those events, and a state of mind that figures so prominently in the narrative. It seems the essay would fall apart at any instant and spin out of control. But Didion’s personal experience and knowledge of the events and her incorporation of her own mental distress adds layers of complexity and her tight authorial control keeps the essay moving along from scene to scene. The work that went into this essay is not evident at first reading, but after my third or fourth time with the essay, I could see how elements that seemed disparate at first all cohere together in a loose arrangement.
Others might differ with me, but I believe that there is little that is superfluous in this essay. All the maneuvering and the shifts in the narrative line are intended to show that Didion is very much in charge of what she puts on the page. It’s an example of authorial control, with her experience as the pivot point for the narrative. The self is always present and intrudes on the narrative as in her abrupt interjection of her psychiatric diagnosis, which is jarring and gives a reader pause to wonder about Didion’s motive. The mystery is solved soon enough—Didion wants the reader to know that she was convinced that “an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.” Heady days indeed.
I love the irony in this essay too. Despite Didion’s protests how all the disorientation—hers and the nation’s—is adversely affecting her storytelling skills but she produces a story that hangs together quite well. Maybe not coherently and neatly but at least in a way that shows the “senseless chain of correspondence” that was the sixties. And somehow we survived it and so did Didion and perhaps we are all a little better for it.
My two “The Beatles” LPs, although a little scratchy, are still in pretty good shape. I played them a couple of times after reading Didion and relived another time, another place, another life.
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