Hybridity but not Fragmentation - Bread Loaf Weeks 3 & 4

Food resources have been much more relaxed this summer than in previous years. Just ran down an hour after lunch to grab a cup of tea and a couple of plums for Sorina and myself, and was not greeted by either locked door or belligerent kitchen staff. I have been eating quite well, which I hope alleviates any fears that I might be here starving (Ben).

Interesting week ... I had a collapse into tears and frustration the weekend before last, which made me put things into perspective. It's wonderful and terrible being here at Bread Loaf -- a schizophrenic situation in which I'm both incredibly stimulated and yet unable to process anything. What frustration it is to get back an essay on which you had a total of one day to work and hear that everything there is excellent work but you should have noticed this and this and this as well, or done more with that. Which of course was true. But I'm trying to give myself credit for what I achieved; I'm amazed that I noticed what I did given the time constraint and the fact that I am a relatively slow thinker. I simply did not have the time to spend mulling over the poem.

On Thursday I gave a presentation on a theme in Midnight's Children, a novel I've come to appreciate more and more through study. Admittedly, the novel requires a lot of attention to read -- not like Harry Potter, which everyone was reading this weekend! -- and was probably not the best choice for me to start on immediately at the end of a hectic school year when I was getting over Valley Fever. So to give it a second chance, I chose this novel for my presentation requirement and did come to terms with my distaste for the main character. I realized in my study that Salman Rushdie is struggling with the question of whether a country (or an individual) can be hybrid and heterogeneous without becoming fragmented. It's a question relevant to the United States today, and inherent in all of our discussions of immigration and language. For example, can we allow Spanish as well as English language signs to go up without encouraging fragmentation within our society? And what after all is American society? The fear is based on a sense that to have a country one must have a shared set not only of ideals but of practices -- religious and cultural -- in order to have any coherence or solidarity as a country.

In the case of India, we have an incredible multiplicity of religions (Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, and so on, though the latter are branches of Hinduism as I understand), many regions with different customs and languages (Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati, etc.), and many social classes and castes. Moreover, we are dealing with a country that for hundreds of years was artificially held together by a foreign regime who encouraged cultural splintering as a way of keeping the natives from uniting and rising up against their colonizers. The caste system became more rigid under the British, not less, and the British tended to privilege Muslims over Hindus because they saw the former as a more civilized religion due to its monotheism. Then when the British left the country, they authorized the splintering of India into two countries, India and Pakistan (East and West Pakistan). Instead of calming the hostilities between Muslims and Hindus, this exacerbated their differences and caused rioting, since of course there were Muslims living in the area designated for Hindus and Hindus in the area designated for Muslims, and they did not necessarily wish to leave. And of course any Indians were opposed to the splintering of their country for any reason. (Please add to this if you have more to say about Partition and the British Raj...it's a complicated subject, but I'm just sticking to what's necessary for you to know about for my presentation.)

So my thought was that Rushdie was getting at the question of hybridity (as a positive thing - many perspectives contained within one body/nation) vs. fragmentation (as a negative thing - the many perspectives competing and destroying one another) through the metaphor of the physical body of his protagonist, Saleem. Saleem is born on the stroke of midnight the 15th of August 1947, when India achieved its official independence from Britain. Thus his life is linked to the country's and they mature together, suffer together, and fall apart together. In this way, we can read Saleem's personal experiences not only on the literal level but on the metaphorical level as representing the nation. His incestuous desire for his adopted sister (who becomes the symbol of a pure Pakistan) echoes India's desire to reunite with Pakistan. And so on.

Friday was the beginning of the Big Weekend -- called "mid-term break" here -- when the generous directors of Bread Loaf give us a whole day off of school to lounge and luxuriate in our freedom. Almost everyone took the opportunity to leave campus, and I did also, sort of, when I went down to Middlebury College to participate in a college counselors convention. For clarification, college counselors are not the Middlebury admissions assistants, but representatives from high schools who help their students apply for and choose which college to attend. It had been organized to introduce college counselors of particularly underrepresented groups to the college and also to get the counselors' opinions on what needed to be done to make the environment more friendly for these underrepresented students. Let me be frank: for students of color (although there was a brief nod to sexual, class and religious differences). For example, the counselors suggested that the college train its professors in racial / ethnic approaches, to alleviate the problems of a) professors misunderstanding student perspectives in their writing and in class and b) professors regarding students as THE representative of their color / culture / nation. I've seen that even a bit here, when my Indian Prose professor turns to the one student in the class of Indian descent -- who is as American as I am, and whose parents come from the diaspora -- and asks her for her opinion, based on her own experience.

It was a very hard day for me, because as much as I believed in the concept of what was being attempted, I felt that it wasn't happening within the group itself. Rather than encourage collaboration and hybridity, the college counselors there seemed to revel in their fragmentation and separation from the mainstream. To give two examples, none of the counselors of color wanted to walk with the white-looking tour guide and opted for the black tour guide, although it turned out that the white tour guide was actually an international student and half Argentinian. Tables at lunch and dinner were pretty evenly divided down color lines; one woman I sat next to got up after I sat down and moved to another table.

I feel strange writing this on the blog, but I need to get it out there: I have never felt so white in my life, even when I lived in countries where I was the ethnic minority. My comments were taken the wrong way - it was as though I were expected to behave in a certain way, and everything I said would just conform to expectations, regardless of intention. I still haven't fully processed the experience. I understand, on a cognitive level, that this situation was deliberately designed to get people to share their experiences, and that color for them represented culture as well. But I was hurt all the same. It was a relief to get back to the Bread Loaf campus and just feel like me, not a representative of my race and class!