Anarchy in the Tenth Grade by Greg Graffin

Anarchy in the Tenth Grade": A Retrospective Analysis of an Adolescent's Search for self

So much of an individual's later life is contingent upon his or her search for a coherent sense of self, as achieved in childhood and adolescence. The personal essay entitled "Anarchy in the 10th Grade" by punk music legend Greg Graffin, as well as short stories such as Ernest Hemingway's "Indian Camp," and Sandra Cisneros' "Hips" all detail the phenomena of coming of age in young adolescence. The authors show how internal and external struggles to achieve a sense of identity, although common and even necessary to people of this age group, can be intensely painful. In his short story, Hemingway shows a young boy physically developing a sense of his manhood, in after seeing his father help an Indian woman give birth. Cisneros' narrator debates the intricacies of the female form from a female perspective, viewing the prospect of having an adult body with a mix of fear, hope, and disdain. But perhaps the most unique selection from the second section of the ninth edition of The Conscious Reader, entitled, "A Search for Self," shows how an apparently alienating art form, that of punk, can form a more positive, unique, and vital sense of self than more conventional means, such as gaining a sense of one's masculinity or femininity in relation to one's elders, as do Cisneros and Hemingway. Thesis: {Though the adolescent 'tribal identity' of punk may seem limiting, Graffin emerges from his struggle stronger and more open in his perspective on life, than individuals who pursue a more socially acceptable form of adolescence.}

Graffin characterizes his adolescence early on as one in which he was always forced to be in reaction to something. He admits he did not initially choose this reaction. His opposition to his adolescent environment was forced to include even the clothing of his peers. Unlike the wealthier students of his suburban California enclave, he had to wear Payless Shoes and velour shirts from Kmart. Note how important brand names are in defining identity in Graffin's adolescent setting. What one wore and what one could afford, or what one's parents could afford, was equated with an individual's sense of self.

Graffin's sense of not being the same as others penetrated even deeper than the class markers of status he observed in the world around him. Even his hair, he felt, was wrong, too fluffy to conform to the standard rock hairdo. Like Cisneros's female narrators, he experienced his own physicality as strange and alien to those around him. However, because his sense of physical alienation was something that could be 'bought and sold' in the form of clothing and good haircuts, Graffin had no assurance that he would grow into a stable sense of a male body. The adolescent Graffin felt that his body would always be wrong, no matter how he matured.

The sense of physical alienation Graffin experienced was paralleled in his sense of social alienation because of the broken nature of his family. Graffin's father was living far away in Wisconsin. Few other individuals in his Los Angeles area came from so-called broken homes. Graffin, to find his place, quite consciously assumed an alliance with geeks and nerds, partly because, it is also implied, he felt he could not get along or be accepted by anyone else. He felt he needed the protection, as many adolescents do, of a tribe or group, where he could feel accepted. These were the only people whom he felt accepted by, those upon the margins of high school society.

Thus, his sense of physical alienation was not only somatic, or bodily, for Graffin, but was also experienced as a loss of his sense of physical place in the world. Los Angeles was initially a new and disturbing environment to the young adolescent Graffin. He did not understand the language of slang he heard around him, taking months to realize that 'party,' rather than meaning merely having a good time with others actually meant, in wasted L.A. teenage-speak, 'getting high,' or a specific kind of 'good time.' The disdain with which he relates this anecdote also shows that, for all of his anger and anarchism, Graffin was seeking a kind of personal liberation that could not be easily found in narcotics.

Instead, Graffin put his own talents to use, in creating his identity through music, rather than trying to conform to the culture that rejected him. Although he initially became an outcast out of necessity, he grew proud of his status, as well as his ability to play music by ear and to learn about cutting edge individuals in the music scene. At age fifteen, he says he explicitly 'went punk.' Now, rather than accepting his lower social status in terms of clothing, he made his own clothing a statement about his identity. By cutting up his own clothing and cutting his own hair, he made a statement about himself, that he did not need a great deal of money to look the way he wanted to look. Neither his mother's poverty nor his parent's wealth could define his appearance. His body was his own. He was an anarchist, a punk, and proud that he did not fit in with the crowd. Looking different and feeling different, he states, were synonymous in the punk movement.

Graffin writes his essay in retrospect, so he is also critical of his fifteen-year-old anarchist self. He admits that he looked upon women mainly in highly objectified terms. He was not interested in the alternative perspective of women as individuals. Rather he was interested in the way they looked. This added, adult perspective enriches his essay, however, much more than it would if he wrote it simply from the perspective of his older, fifteen-year-old self. Rather than simply expressing frustrated anger about not fitting in, the essay highlights how a child's sense of alienation can be channeled into positive areas. Poverty of clothing becomes a distain for materialism and expressing one's self through tatters. An inability to be part of Los Angeles, middle-class suburban culture forces an adolescent boy to take refuge in his musical talent as well as his anger.

Graffin is interesting, however, also because his life cannot be fully encapsulated by a conventional 'punk' narrative. He meets his future wife not in the standard punk 'Sid and Nancy' relationship of musician and groupie, but because both of them attended the same college and took the same class critical of American culture. Graffin's decision to seek higher education shows that he is not simply a mindless follower of any movement, either the music scene or the suburban wasteland of the 1970's. Graffin says that to attend college is not a punk gesture. Without saying so explicitly, the author may feel this way because to attend college means that an individual still has an interest in learning about previous schools of thought and cultural movements from the past, rather than simply seeking identity through a singular musical, cultural movement of 'the moment.' But the author, quite evidently felt that he benefited from this decision, as he discovered his wife in this location. His praise of college life suggests that his anarchism and love of punk was a positive form of self-expression but that his self-expression could never be fully hemmed in by any social movement, even one as valuable as punk. Eventually, Graffin decided to pursue graduate school, because he was so taken by the intellectual environment of university life.