The "rhetorical you" (to steal Esme's phrase!)

Hi all,

I'm missing today's class due to coming in late after what seemed a weirdly, appropriately "Kincaidian" sort of week home in North Carolina tending to seriously ill family members. So, let me first say that I am finding it very helpful to have these blog conversations where I can still feel connected to the ongoing class discourse--this has proven to be a marvelous addition to the class, Dr. Alvarez! Second, I want to start off by discussing Sherman Alexie's work and by responding to the latter part of Esme's latest post, which offers up the handy little phrase, the rhetorical 'you.'

She writes: Many passages in Kincaid's work shake me from complacency in the way the woman on the raft in early December, 1994,did. Imperialism, exploitation, oppression--these are shared legacies, and no one's exempt, no matter when or where she was born. Kincaid writes, "So when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself" (19). I'm not just the rhetorical "you" to whom she writes.

Esme's comments make a striking point--that it is far too easy to read accounts such as Kincaid's or Alexie's and simply assume that the author is laying out nothing more than a position of "us versus them." This (often false) conclusion is one that has much to tell us about why many college students struggle with writers such as Sherman Alexie. Readers often assume that the details of daily life that they read in such works are either literal representations of "what a reservation is really like" or "what Indians are really like," OR are mere symbolism that simply works as a literary vehicle carting around big universal ideas about life. Neither of these positions is precisely true, simply because the truth lies in a complicated state between both of those ideals, and because there is no way to represent a universal you in the first place. There is no "what Indians are like." There is no "what Antigua is like." Life and human experience--both the 'ordinary' and the 'supra-ordinary'--are much more complex than that. In this sense, universalities are conscious social constructs, tools with which we attempt to label and understand the world(s) we live in.

In other words, readers of Alexie's work may assume that this passage below from the poem Powwow is simply serving to elevate Indians and denigrate white people:

did you ever get the feeling
when speaking to a white American
that you needed closed captions?

In this sense, it is tempting for readers to assume that Alexie means "Indians" when he says "you." However, Alexie is doing far more than invoking a rhetorical you in his work (in this case, a rhetorical Indian). Instead, his work also serves to interrogate the very fact that we CAN identify 'rhetorical yous' in human societies. He is decrying the divisions that exist between people, divisions that he must himself encounter on a regular basis as a reservation-raised Indian who has been elevated to a position where 'white America' often considers him to be a "rhetorical (Indian) you" who stands for all Indian people--an utter impossibility, as there are hundreds of distinct American Indian tribes and hundreds more that were completely obliterated in the years of westward expansion. In other words, Alexie acknowledges that these rhetorical yous exist, at the same time that he denounces their existence and demands that human experience count for something culturally and situationally specific, rather than simply serving to establish categories of "us versus them."

That said, he's also not at all shy about simultaneously embracing and expressing a belief in "us versus them," proving once again that the changeable nature of human experience and the ability of human beings to be many versions of 'you' defy our best efforts to label and quantify human experience, whether as an included "us" or as a seemingly excluded "them." It's this soul-deep grappling with the contact zones between self and other that draws me to Alexie's literature as my primary area of academic specialty!

Connie