Sunday, October 21, 2012

Alienation and Assimilation Discussion Post (U.S. Women's Multicultural Life Writings 10-21-12)

Discussion 1 - Alienation and Assimilation
 
Melanson, Joseph

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”.

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