Richard Blanco Years ago, when living abroad, a well-intentioned study abroad site director organized Thanksgiving dinner for US-based students. She wanted to honor our traditions and to make us feel at home. It was a generous and thoughtful gesture. However, there was something about it that made the foreignness of the experience feel that much more present and the distance from home that much greater.
Holidays are complex times. It’s well known that incidents of domestic violence are more likely during these periods. It’s like the days that are supposed to be special somehow function like mirrors through which we can see ourselves clearly. Sometimes we don’t like what we see and those of us who are closer to crisis need little for tightly bottled tensions to spill. Most of us, however, live less extreme holidays. Nevertheless, these times when we’re supposed to celebrate something still serve to heighten a sense of our own particular situation at a given moment. If we’re riding high, then the high feels lighter still. If we’re sinking, then the surface can seem unreachable.
With the holidays’ intensity in mind, one of my classes is reading Richard Blanco’s poem “América”. Wonderfully, titled in Spanish, but written mostly in English, it is about an immigrant boy pushing his Cuban family living far from their island to partake in Thanksgiving traditions. It is the desire for a young man to have the experience that, I imagine, he had learned about through friends and school. His family humors him, but the result is to throw their foreignness into all of their faces.
The young boy does, of course, belong in some sense. In the poem he demonstrates his investment in US mythologization of history. He knows what food to make and where to find the recipe. You can almost feel him thinking that it was his family that held him back. Yet for both him and his family, Thanksgiving proves a disappointment. It is one more of the many reminders that they aren’t in Cuba; that the Cuba they knew no longer exists; that while they do belong to the US in some senses, they also do not pertain at the same time.
You can find both the text of the poem and a recording of Blanco reciting it, by using this link.
Whether you’re reading from the US or not, I hope the long gaze into the mirror of holidays, family, and friends is honest for you, but not harsh. I also hope that you get time to read more poetry, less tweets, and enjoy warm conversations.
Holidays are complex times. It’s well known that incidents of domestic violence are more likely during these periods. It’s like the days that are supposed to be special somehow function like mirrors through which we can see ourselves clearly. Sometimes we don’t like what we see and those of us who are closer to crisis need little for tightly bottled tensions to spill. Most of us, however, live less extreme holidays. Nevertheless, these times when we’re supposed to celebrate something still serve to heighten a sense of our own particular situation at a given moment. If we’re riding high, then the high feels lighter still. If we’re sinking, then the surface can seem unreachable.
With the holidays’ intensity in mind, one of my classes is reading Richard Blanco’s poem “América”. Wonderfully, titled in Spanish, but written mostly in English, it is about an immigrant boy pushing his Cuban family living far from their island to partake in Thanksgiving traditions. It is the desire for a young man to have the experience that, I imagine, he had learned about through friends and school. His family humors him, but the result is to throw their foreignness into all of their faces.
The young boy does, of course, belong in some sense. In the poem he demonstrates his investment in US mythologization of history. He knows what food to make and where to find the recipe. You can almost feel him thinking that it was his family that held him back. Yet for both him and his family, Thanksgiving proves a disappointment. It is one more of the many reminders that they aren’t in Cuba; that the Cuba they knew no longer exists; that while they do belong to the US in some senses, they also do not pertain at the same time.
You can find both the text of the poem and a recording of Blanco reciting it, by using this link.
Whether you’re reading from the US or not, I hope the long gaze into the mirror of holidays, family, and friends is honest for you, but not harsh. I also hope that you get time to read more poetry, less tweets, and enjoy warm conversations.
