Make up blog

This week we had an interesting survey on multicultural poetry and we had authors coming from many different countries, bringing their differences, belief and hopes to the US. It was interesting when you were talking about the “constraint” which “forces” immigrants to learn English to be able to communicate with others and have a better life. Sometimes, I think, this is not the case. I can easily imagine Chinese or Mexican immigrants in big cities who cannot speak English, simply because they are surrounded by other Chinese or Mexican people, they have their own newspapers, TV channels, and even schools. This way they do not have to assimilate, to learn English and they are not forced to lose one part of their selves. Of course, this is the result of the second part of the 20th century which made the US (and the world as well) more multicultural, in the past immigrants really had to assimilate (just think of Polish or German immigrants who became real Americans in the course of one generation). And this is what Lorna Dee Cervantes is talking about in her poem entitled “Refugee Ship”. Although born in California, she is like an outsider; her family is not part of the dominant English-speaking Anglo-Saxon society. She is forced to learn English, and unlike her grandmother, she is going to assimilate into the dominant culture. Her grandmother still reads the Bible- religion is a very important part of the lives of Mexican Americans. She has to notice that, although she speaks English, her appearance is different from that of the other English speakers: “bronzed skin, black hair”. In other words, she is a typical Mexican (a “Chicana”- with all the discrimination and disadvantages of this origin); everyone can notice that from a mile. She feels a captive on a refugee ship maybe because of her low-class Mexican origin, her mother tongue or her “barrio” in which her family lives. The fact that the last line is written in Spanish just strengthens her bilingual origins and her inability (or impossibility) to decide between the two competing cultures. The poetry of Li-Young Lee has of course, similar features. In his poetry, we can even witness his struggle with the English language, like in the poem entitled “Persimmons”. I can easily imagine that struggle, not because I am not a native speaker of English, but because Asian people are coming from a really different world. Their languages (even their names) are very different from English, they grew up reading Eastern philosophers, their languages are not full of Latin (or Greek) borrowings, and this makes their language learning process much more difficult. This is recorded in “Persimmons”, the struggle with the new language, with the new culture (just think of Mrs. Walker who brought an unripe persimmon to class calling it “Chinese apple”, he knew the difference but could not say it). Towards the end of the poem we can see the importance of art; maybe that could help the father survive his first times in the US and brought back the nostalgic days spent in his native country.