Discussion 1 - Alienation and Assimilation
9/23/2012
In
“War Doll Hotel” by Kiana Davenport, we are given the glimpse into what
it was like for her growing up, and her later running away from her
home in Hawaii, and the denial of her mixed race, to go to New York City
in the hopes of finding a sense of belonging on the mainland. She finds
a group of women hoping to do the same, some moving on to success like
her, and others who are destroyed by the big city.
Davenport
has a special ability to fit in with whites, giving her a unique
perspective to see them when they are amongst themselves, comfortable
with their own kind.
For instance, she relates
her experience sharing an apartment with the “racquet-swinging blondes
from Massachusetts” who thought she was from a rich family who could
afford to live in Hawaii year round, and the writer she dated whose
family made racist remarks and jokes in front of their African-American
help. They did not now that she was of mixed race and probably would not
have reacted the same way towards her as they did.
Her
journey through this life in the ability to hide her darker and less
socially acceptable self taught her many things. For instance, “I
learned that recognizing who you are isn’t the subtext of a life. It’s
the main point” (14).
Her stay at the YMCA
taught her that “such profoundly dislocated, homesick young women could
buoy each other up, assemble, and take aim;
well, that was the important thing. New York, the target, was
insignificant. Targets change” (15). I liked this statement for its
profound truth. We go through many stages in life and are forced into
situations with people. In all of them we have to find friends and
companions to accompany on our journey, leaving some people behind, as
others leave us behind. As we move through life the things and places
that we place importance upon change, and whoever we are is not static,
but continually changes.
In
“All My Relations” by Joyce Zonana we have the story of a woman who
earns her Ph.D. and cannot find a job except in Oklahoma, forcing her to
leave familiar territory in which she was already comfortable and
accustomed to, to find employment in her chosen profession of teaching.
She,
like all of us in different parts of our lives, lets others intimidate
her. Sitting next to the state trooper at her road test, she is unable
to control the car, to master the rules of the road before this state
trooper who seems like a metaphor for the people who we let do this to
us, those who are barely even there, who come and go out of our lives
for mere minutes, yet we give them this power over us, letting them
decide where to go, how we succeed and fail.
In
both of the stories we find the problem of alienation in a world that
forces us to find how we can assimilate. Both of the women are not able
to appreciate the culture and ethnicity to which they were born until
they are much older, and have left their familiar worlds. Once they are
separated from which they came from, they later learn to appreciate what
they were born into, and Zonana even goes so far to begin to pursue a
degree in order to learn more about her people’s history and culture
from which she came.
I myself am of a mixed
race, Caucasian-mixed (French, Irish from my maternal grandfather,
Ukrainian from my father), and Mexican-American, and possibly Native
American from my maternal grandmother, she does not know if her father
was Indian or not she thinks he might have been. I was always a dull
shade of brown, yet I could become dark brown in the summer depending
upon how much time I spent in the sun. I never felt connected to
anything, no culture or people to be proud of, yet now as I am older it
doesn’t mean anything to me, it is more of a matter of how proud of
yourself that you are, of being proud of the person that you have
created. I heard a song on the radio today that summarizes it for me.
“It doesn’t matter where you came from, it only matters where you’re
going”.
