Crossing the Borders

I was talking to a colleague yesterday, agreeing that both our daughters had become fantastic teachers. At the same time, lamenting that both seemed to have sipped some of the Kool Aid that we had unknowingly served them— this business of calling out “cultural appropriation” when stepping over some imaginary line their generation has drawn. This disturbing trend that everyone needs to stay in their own lane and that if you’re “white,” you can create a piece about the Potato Famine in Ireland but not Japanese incarceration in the U.S.. If you’re Asian, it’s okay to teach yoga but you can’t say “Namaste” in class unless you’re Indian. (These are two actual examples from high school students). Which, as Black activist songwriter Melanie DeMoore notes, has the Republicans rubbing their hands with delight as the Left sends everyone back to their own corner, back to separate tribes. 

 

As someone who has spent a lifetime crossing borders and bringing back riches to be integrated into a new, larger, more inclusive culture, I find this deeply disturbing. Of course, cultural appropriation is real and damaging and I can give a thousand examples of people with political and economic power benefitting from stealing from the cultural treasures of the poor and disenfranchised. But that is different from cultural sharing, a practice I will defend until my last breath. At the same time we need to give more voice and opportunity for people within cultures to be “culture-bearers” and represent first-hand, we also have to recognize that what we celebrate in other cultures, particularly in the field of the arts, is something both exquisitely unique to the time/place/ circumstance of those cultural creators and also deeply universal, available to and able to touch all. And that simply being born into a culture does not confer that power to represent— it is earned by the long, hard work of tuning into that universal and available to all. 

 

To this point, I just read a powerful few passages in Kim Rosen’s book Saved by a Poem. While so many have dismissed cultures they know nothing about (especially all of us touched by white supremacy), my contacts with people, musical studies and brief immersions in Dzodze,Ghana/ Kerala, India/ Ubud, Bali (for example) often have me romanticizing cultural and artistic practices from these places that have much to teach the world. But over-romanticizing a culture can be as dangerous as dismissing them, as there is not a single culture worldwide that doesn’t have harmful thorns amidst its roses. 

 

The Maasai in Kenya, for example. I know absolutely nothing about them and I’m sure a visit to a village would have me impressed by certain qualities I witnessed. But I do know that some practice a form of female genital mutilation that is not to be excused by the power of tradition and my inability as a Westerner to understand it. In Kim Rosen’s story, she visits a center that rescues girls from this barbaric practice. Many escape their families to travel alone through dangerous country to seek out refuge in this safe haven. Kim was visiting the center and one day, the girls were singing while cooking and then asked her if she knew a song. She recited a poem by Mary Oliver instead and because the girls knew some English, they sat in rapt attention. As described by Kim:

 

“By the end of the poem, tears were running down my face and several of the girls were crying as well. Several of them dove toward me, wrapping their arms around my waist. There was a long silence. Then one of them asked ‘Who is this Mary Oliver? Is she Maasai?”

 

As Kim says earlier in the story, “Within the potent space of public poetry recitation, any and every boundary line we humans draw around ourselves instantly disappears. It is holy without being denominational, political without being sectarian, intimate without being bound by gender, age or culture.” That’s why you and I can read the poetry of Sappho, Rumi, Basho, Mirabai, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Yeats, Rilke, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Maya Angelou and countless others and feel them speaking to us across centuries, geographical borders, genders, life experiences. That’s why Mary Oliver, a white woman living on Cape Cod and in her 50’s when she wrote that poem, could speak to Maasai teenage girls halfway across the world. If we all go back to our little corners of personal identity and only listen to the music, see the art, hear the stories of people just like us, what hope do we have to become larger? 

The poem Kim recited is titled “The Journey.” Because both our joy and our suffering is universal, it had the power to touch people different—on the surface— in every way from the poet. Once you read the poem below, you can see why it moved them: 

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice -- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. "Mend my life!" each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voice behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life that you could save.