Monday, April 27, 2009

Casualties of the Building of the National Symbolic

In her section “America, Post-Utopia,” Lauren Berlant quotes Eric Hosbawn, who said “Americans had to be made….The immigrants were encouraged to accept rituals commemorating the history of the nation—the Revolution and its founding fathers (the 4th of July) and the Protestant Anglo-Saxon tradition (Thanksgiving Day)—as indeed they did, since these now became holidays and occasions for public and private festivity.” She uses the quote to further her exploration of the building of the “National Symbolic,” as citizens celebrated their “national culture” at different moments.

As she states earlier, the idea of “nation” is essentially a mental construct rather than a definition of borders or physical landscape. She writes, “Modern citizens are born in nations and are taught to perceive the nation as an intimate quality of identity, as intimate and inevitable as biologically-rooted affiliations through gender or the family.”

But since this idea of “National Symbolic” depends on the citizens’ participation in the building of meaning and the making of myth, the government institutes plans, events, and laws that reinforce the importance of nation above all else. This comes into play in particular in the lives of immigrants, past and present. Berlant writes, “This is the American utopian promise: by disrupting the subject’s local affiliations and self-centeredness, national identity confers on the collective subject an indivisible and immortal body, and vice versa.” But as she examines in Hawthorne’s critique, this utopian promise is ultimately a fallacy. The nationhood they are given is no more immortal or indivisible than their own cultural, personal, and familial bonds, which in most cases are more crucial in shaping and honoring their individual identity.

This examination reminded me of an aspect of my manuscript, where I explore the effects of assimilation in Cajun culture. The following excerpt ruminates on this idea:

My mom gave up trying to teach me her first language when I was still an infant. It was just too hard, she said. My dad didn’t understand the language, and she was living a long drive away from the rest of her family. I think that it was more than that though. I think that deep down, there was a voice inside her that said it was not okay for her to speak it.

My mom’s first language was French. It wasn’t the flowery, sweet French spoken in movies with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron pirouetting across the screen or by black clad bohemian writers smoking in Parisian underground cafes. Hers had the guts of the swamp and the balm of the bayou behind it. My mom is Cajun and her French was too. It was a language soft and wispy enough to lullaby babies asleep in too hot, mosquito-filled Louisiana summers. But it was loud enough to make yourself heard over the accordion-playin’, fiddle-twangin’, guitar-pickin’ loudness of the band at the local fais do do. It was sultry and sweet, brash and bold, and it was theirs...and hers... for a time. But it was never mine.

My mom’s first day of school, she told me, the words all stopped. It was just after the last putters of FDR’s long drive of a presidency, but his words still carried the sound of his fully fueled Plymouth. “There is room for but one language in this country,” he had said on the radio across miles of American terrain, “and that is the English language.”

Many diverse ethnic communities throughout the United States were asked to give up their rich heritage in return for promises of liberty and freedom, in return for being an American. Here, we’ll take your French, your Gumbo, your Crawfish Etouffée, and we’ll give you English, rifles for war, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
The repercussions of assimilation resounded in the classroom where my mom sat for the very first time. She and a roomful of five-year-olds were told, in a language they had never heard at home and barely heard at all, that they were not to speak French anymore. English, the moving lips said, was the only language they were to communicate in from now on. From that first day, children, dressed in clothes sewn from red-gingham and blue-flowered cotton feed sacks, sat listless in class, unable to understand either their lessons or what the teachers were asking them to do. Some teachers were compassionate, whispering translations in little ears. Others were not. Little boys and girls were shamed, trickles of urine running down their desks because they did not know how to ask permission to use the bathroom in English and were not listened to when they asked in French. This was despite the fact that most of the teachers were locals who spoke the language themselves.

Speaking French was forbidden anywhere on the school ground. If some little girl was overheard outside during playtime disobeying the rule, the afternoon would find her writing “I will not speak French at school” hundreds of times on the chalkboard or kneeling on dry corn kernels in the back corner of the room.

In those classrooms in small town Southwest Louisiana, it was instilled in students that speaking English was equal to being well-educated, to being smart. And in swift chalk lines on the blackboard and the hand-waving dismissal of their words by teachers, these young minds were forced not only to abandon their way of communicating but to deal with the effects of knowing that they were now smarter than the rest of their families- their tanties, their parans, their mommies and daddies.

It was in those small flip-top desks that my mother lost a piece of who she was. She lost a piece of where she came from, and it’s a piece I’m still trying to discover.


--Lisa

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