Comparison of themes and techniques in two literary works

¶ … self: Using race as a method of self-exploration rather than of definition in Aurora Levins Morales' 1986 poem "Child of the Americas" and Patricia Smith's 1991 poem "What It's Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren't)"

Both Aurora Levins Morales' 1986 poem "Child of the Americas" and Patricia Smith's 1991 poem "What It's Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren't)" examine the impact of race upon the author's sense of self and identity. America is supposed to be a class-blind and race-blind society where all people are created equal. However, throughout most of American history there has been either a subtle or not-so-subtle undercurrent of racism in terms of how citizens of non-white ethnic groups have been treated. Members of historically discriminated-against groups wish to retain their heritage without losing their individuality. The struggle to be a unique person who transcends easy categorization yet who also honors her heritage defines both the Morales and the Smith poems.

For Morales, the struggle to craft an identity lies in the difficulty of honoring her 'hyphenated' characteristics as a Latina, Jewish, Puerto Rican, and American simultaneously. For Smith, her difficulty lies in being an African-American woman in an America that defines black womanhood in terms of negatives, as something to be erased with hair straightening or is exotic, sexual and primitive in a negative way. Both poets must create a new narrative and a new sense of voice for themselves, to be regarded as worthy of speaking as poets. They also seek to redefine their status as fully sexual beings in positive ways.

Aurora Levins Morales begins her poem proclaiming "I am a child of the Americas," stressing that she is both a North American yet also of Central America. She says that Spanish is in "my flesh, / Ripples from my tongue, lodges in my hips" in the sense that it defines her appearance, her language and culture. It is where she comes from and is part of her heritage. However, Morales also clearly characterizes herself as an English language writer: "I speak English with passion: it's the tongue of my consciousness, / a flashing knife blade of cristal, my tool, my craft" she states. Her secondary language also informs her consciousness but she is clearly a hyphenated American not simply a Latina or Caribbean resident. "I am not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return. / I am not taina. Taino is in me, but there is no way back. I am not European. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there." (Taino refers to the native people of Puerto Rico).

Morales expresses the classic exile's fate in literature but her poem does not mourn this status -- rather it celebrates her unique positioning as a source of creativity, specifically linguistic creativity. Speaking and understanding different languages does not create barriers to self-expression. Rather it opens the poet's eyes to new ways of speaking and seeing herself that uni-cultural inhabitants might lack. The flashing knife blade of English she refers to, using a metaphor that suggests both a classical rapier wit and also the stereotypical 'knife fight' of a Latino a la West Side Story, is a source of unique inspiration, never regret at what might have been lost as the result of migration. Living 'betwixt and between' mainstream, homogenized American culture and the culture of the various identities that are encompassed in her background sustains her.

The poem is notably absent of nostalgic regret and the desire to look back at the ways things could have been, had Morales simply remained in her homeland or if her homeland had remained untouched by colonial outsiders and intruders. It is a powerful statement of identity and security in the poet's sense of self. The poem echoes the Latino critic Roberto Bolano (2000) in his speech "Literature and Exile" to the Austrian Society for Literature:

Of course, a refrain is heard throughout Europe and it's the refrain of the suffering of exiles, a music composed of complaints and lamentations and a baffling nostalgia. Can one feel nostalgia for the land where one nearly died? Can one feel nostalgia for poverty, intolerance, arrogance, injustice? The refrain, intoned by Latin Americans and also by writers from other impoverished or traumatized regions, insists on nostalgia, on the return to the native land, and to me this has always sounded like a lie. Books are the only homeland of the true writer, books that may sit on shelves or in the memory.

So long as she can write, suggests Morales, she has an identity. The various components that make up the mosaic of her identity, such as being America, Puerto Rican, Jewish, a "a light-skinned mestiza of the Caribbea" are all aspects of her art and character, but no single shard of the mosaic sums up her character entirely. All of her must be considered fully to gain a complete picture of this "a child of many diaspora, / born into this continent at a crossroads."

The need for Morales to make such a sweeping claim lies in the fact that there is often a temptation to make a blanket characterization of Latina literature, and to define Latina writers merely by their ethnic identity. This form of tokenism and exoticization is almost as bad as denying the profound influence that ethnicity can have in shaping one's worldview. The collection from which the poem is drawn, Getting Home Alive (1986), written in collaboration with her mother, Rosario Morales, is an attempt to both lay claim to the specialness of Latina heritage as well as to allow for the multiplicity of Latin American identities contained in one persona. "Important themes in Getting Home Alive are female Puerto Rican identity, third world and working-class feminism, women's relationships, Puerto Rican multiple identity (Latin American, African, Jewish, North American)" (Miguela 2011).

Morales also addresses the difficulties of multiplicity of identity when a member of one of the groups she belongs to marginalizes the other. Within Morales' identity -- Jewish, American, Latina, Puerto Rican -- prejudice, anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny can still occur between members of the component groups. This makes balancing her multiplicity of identities all the more important, so she does not marginalize a single aspect of her character. "I have a personal commitment to confronting racism wherever I find it -- including in Jewish communities -- and in confronting anti-Semitism wherever I find it, including in communities of people of color" Morales stated in one interview (Doughty 1995).

Being a member of a minority group does not make one immune from criticism of being racist, which makes Morales all the more determined to celebrate her full sense of self. "There are differences, as well, between the ways Chicanos and Puerto Ricans have been colonized, and in the specific ways racism has impacted us. These specific histories of oppression can create challenges to our capacity to build alliances" (Doughty 1995). In celebrating the different aspects of herself, Morales creates a sense of 'group' identity in her poem that still allows her to be a unique individual -- a child of many Americas, a speaker with one voice that can speak in many languages.

The greatest source of inspiration for Morales is in the body. Although cultural definitions of the self may be incomplete and limited, the body, in Morales' poem, never lies and harmoniously harbors the author's collage of elements in all of their complexity (Miguela 2011). The poet speaks of herself as "Caribena, island grown. Spanish is my flesh, Ripples from my tongue, lodges in my hips: the language of garlic and mangoes…I am of Latinoamerica, rooted in the history of my continent: I speak from that body," a body that is whole.

In contrast, Patricia Smith's poem "What It's Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren't)" is far more distrustful of the speaker's body and the way society regards that body. Smith speaks of being made to feel uncomfortable about her sexuality even as a prepubescent:

first of all, it's being 9 years old and feeling like you're not finished, like your edges are wild, like there's something, everything, wrong, it's dropping food coloring in your eyes to make them blue and suffering their burn in silence. It's popping a bleached white mophead over the kinks of your hair and primping in front of mirrors that deny your reflection.

The body that Morales celebrates in its non-whiteness is something that Smith feels profoundly uncomfortable with even before she has breasts. Like the protagonist of Toni Morrison in her classic hymn to black beauty The Bluest Eye, Smith longs for blue eyes and she is even willing to do violence to her body to attain that standard of beauty. The title of Morrison's seminal novel refers to the young protagonist "Pecola Breedlove's intense desire for blue eyes. She believes herself ugly and unworthy of love and respect, but is convinced that her life would be magically transformed if she possessed blue eyes" (The Bluest Eye, 2008, Reading Discussion Questions)

The sense of wildness and unfinished quality is not necessarily within Smith the poet, but is a common stereotype projected onto black women as wild and untamable. Smith may dislike the stereotype, but she cannot help internalizing it. She feels unfinished because she is regarded as unfinished, and even members of her community urge her to straighten her hair. This is completely different from the joyous, affirmative sigh "I am complete" at the end of Morales' poem. Just as Morales admits that all experiences with racism and discrimination are different, Smith's poem demonstrates how African-American women frequently lack assurance of their sense of self and that their physical qualities are regarded as alien to what is considered 'good' and 'American.' (The young Smith's wearing white to cover up one's tallness seems an attempt to mask blackness and presumed 'badness' with clothing). Morales' instability of identity lies in multiplicity of national cultures, but Smith, even as a young, black girl, but carefully balance her sense as an American and African-American with even greater care and psychological discomfort that Morales. This is not immediately obvious, which is why the title of the poet suggests that Smith is instructing the white reader, rather than merely stating a list of external identities possessed by the poet like Morales.

The extent to African-Americans as 'other' is hard-wired within American culture is revealed in Smith's stress upon her youth in her poem. Unlike Morales, her poem begins with the poet is a literal child, not a figurative child of the Americas, when her socialization into black female sexuality begins. The poem begins in lowercase, as if written in the voice of her nine-year-old self. The commonplace rituals of black girlhood, like getting one's hair straightened are revealed as negative socialization techniques to make the author mistrust her inherent beauty as a black woman. The sense of not being 'okay' and not being accepted is reinforced by the child's own community. Although Morales in her interview speaks of the tensions of being both Jewish and Puerto Rican, Latina and American, the struggle is far more visceral in Smith's poem as she portrays her hair being straightened with harsh, white chemicals, echoing the experiences of many black women: "Even though I could tell from the way my grandma touched my scalp / she loved me / what she was lettin' me know / maybe god didn't love me & my brown krinkly short head of hair was a mark / lettin' the whole world know / god is not on this chile's side" (Sekyai 2003:1). A black woman may be regarded as sexual by the dominant cultural norms, but never as beautiful: "African-American women are not seen as the archetypal symbol of womanhood, as is the case for White American women. Notions of womanhood in the United States inevitably include standards of beauty" that are difficult for white women to attain but are literally impossible for black women to aspire to emulate (Sekyai 2003:1).

In Smith's poem, still speaking in the voice of a 'black girl' acquiring sexuality is seen as a negative, rather than positive transition, a disturbance, rather than a positive act of growth, rather than Morales' voluptuous celebration of hips and garlic in her sense of herself as a Latina. For Smith, becoming a black woman:

It's finding a space between your legs, a disturbance at your chest, and not knowing what to do with the whistles, it's jumping double dutch until your legs pop, it's sweat and Vaseline and bullets, it's growing tall and wearing a lot of white, it's smelling blood in your breakfast, it's learning to say fuck with grace but learning to fuck without it, it's flame and fists and life according to Motown, it's finally having a man reach out for you then caving in around his fingers.