what is the literature of the United States?

Is geopolitical power accompanied by cultural visibility? Sometimes it is, sometimes not. China would be an example of a country that influences our lives by geopolitics and global economy without making us read any of its books. The United States, as I believe, used to be popular as a source of aestetic inspiration only locally and episodically, in specific moments and places such as Poland at the beginning of the 1990s. For the rest, we don't read so many new American books at all, and I believe the American impact is to be felt more in the domain of literary studies than original literature. 
But here it is, the American literature, crucible of peoples, settlements, diasporas. At the beginning, there were the Native Americans and their oral legacies. Their voice appeared in print almost at the time of the American revolution: In 1771 the first work by a Native American in English, A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian, by Samson Occom, from the Mohegan tribe. But this was only an isolated text, and the country was shaped, of course, by the political writings of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Alexander Hamilton. 
American literature gained momentum quite quickly, and among its first writers there are many that make part of the global canon, like Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden. I would say that at the brink of the 19th and the 20th century, American literature was more eminent than it is today, illustrated by such names as Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851), Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and the rest of them.
The transatlantic modernist wave that followed the ww1 was illustrated by many American names, such as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Even the Depression era had valuable literary outcomes, such as the novels of John Steinbeck. 
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I have read

William Wharton, Birdy (1978)
Ursula K. Le Guin, Planet of Exile (1966), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974)
William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)
Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird (1965)
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (1958)
William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)
​Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)

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I have written

... nothing ...

eternal boyhoods
(at a distance of several decades, thousands of kilometres from the Mountain)

I had mixed feelings while reading that old American classic, Kerouac's Dharma Bums. The book, originally published in the late 1950s, had an abundant descendants, even in such places, distant in space and time, as the early 1990's Poland. I found the spiritual sons of Kerouac, those useless Polish boys, choking with newly acquired liberty after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, while we, little females, were supposed to ogarniać (an umbrella verb, resuming activities aiming at reasoned control of all aspects of the reality, domestic chores, providing food and clothing in an impoverished country, cleaning, washing, sewing and making repairs, turning habitable the rabbit cages where we were supposed to live, looking after minors, feeding them and cleaning their anuses). The eternal boyhood that Kerouac provided with a Buddhist bible of its own is still alive, still with us, long after all Dharma vaporised, and we, the present day women of Poland are still dragging its dead weight. It explains my allergic reaction. I even wondered if the aim of the novel wasn't actually critical; some of the scenes are indeed grotesque by the contrast of the sublime and the crass reality the heroes live like in a phantasmagorical dream. But it was probably too early for this. Most probably, Karouac sincerely meant and believed all those stupid things he wrote.
Well, neither sex nor abuse of alcohol are not completely unknown in the history of Buddhism (I write about it myself on this page, in the section dedicated to Bhutan). But it is very clear that this naïve, American Buddhism is as incompetent as it is terribly mislead. Of course, the heroes, under one mountain trip and another party, are not in the least on the right path toward the Illumination, and very far from discovering their True Nature of Buddha. They are simply cheating themselves, in the darkness of American maya, more confusing than at any other geographical location. 
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that Kerouac created something new and lasting, and the beauty of many of his pages is striking. He contributed to a cultural movement that, at a distance of several decades and many thousand kilometres, brought my own early experience of Buddhism, lived in a zazen session in Falenica, in the suburbs of Warsaw. But I didn't read this book at the time. Perhaps if I had read it, I wouldn't sit in that zazen session. Because it was not a part of my eternal girlhood. To the contrary.



Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums, read in a Polish translation: Włóczędzy Dharmy, trans. Marek Obarski, Warszawa, Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 1994.

Kraków, 13.09.2021.

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Borderlands/La Frontera
(reading about Glória E. Anzaldúa on the way from Kraków to Leiden)

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It is practically my third year abroad, yet Poland does not forget about me. I'm still called for all sorts of evaluations and official committees. This is directly the reason why I am reading about Glória Anzaldúa right now; my interest in Lesbian Chicana studies might be otherwise moderated. Be that as it may, I am reading the book of my colleague from Łódź, Grażyna Zygadło, as I cross my Europe in the bus, coming back from my old home in Kraków to my new (makeshift) home in Leiden. I am not a mojada myself, not yet, as we cross the Oder. But a new frontier right across my Europe is being rebuilt right under my own eyes. There is a police control where the frontier used to be, and as I've heard, Macron has recently said that "some countries do not need to be in the Schengen zone, if they do not wish"; he means the countries that refused to participate in European policies concerning the refugees. A new refugee crisis is on the way from the Saharan limes of our oecumene. I suppose Poland will be very unwilling of contributing for its solution, even if we used to have such excellent relationships with Libya in old days. They will bring on their own backs the clay to make bricks for the Wall. So strangely oblivious of the fact that they stay on the outer side of it.


**

But let's return to my Lesbian Chicana:

Always pushed to the other side.
In all lands alien, nowhere citizen.

I am the citizen of Europe, at least for the time being. And all its lands are mine, I speak languages of the earth everywhere I step, I collect words, local poems, national songs. They are all mine. Till the moment someone push me to the other side. Anzaldúa says: The words are foreign, stumbling on my tongue. 


***
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In the book there is a photo of an old wooden fence that used to exist on the boarder between Mexico and the United States, long before the idea of modernising it into a proper Wall.

She looks at the Border Park fence
posts are stuck into her throat, her navel,
barbwire is shoved up her cunt.
Her body torn in two, half the woman on the other side
half the woman on this side, the right side.


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I remember to have seen, some years ago when such ideas were still freaky news to laugh at, a couple of rose Dutch girls in a bar at the University of Amsterdam, choking with laughter over a smartphone. They were watching a clip supposed to prove Dutch excellence in comparison to the United States. The giant dam destined to "keep all that water outside" was presented as the ultimate frontier, the supreme fulfilment of Trump's most cherished dream.
Some years passed by, but these girls stand right in front of my eyes; I found them worth remembering, because they were so rose-cheeked, so healthy, in their mental aptitude at finding their own nationalism irresistibly funny.


*****

Zygadło's book aspires to paint a large biographical context of Anzaldúa's writing of convergence, her roots in the American borderland community, the circumstance of being alien in relation to her own culture - not only as Lesbian; even more essentially, as someone who aspires to education, literature, visibility without abdicating of one's own idiosyncrasy. At the end of the Introduction, the author makes an allusion to her own process of writing, in this case, a Habilitation book, which is supposed to give her a place in the academia as a "self-reliant" scholar (samodzielny pracownik naukowy). Certainly, she tries to navigate against the current, proposing her research in gender and queer studies, in a society increasingly conservative and intolerant precisely of those identities. Czy aby uprawomocnić swoje bycie "samodzielną naukowczynią", muszę się opierać na teorii białego zachodniego świata, w którym nadal kobiety są dyskryminowane i nie mają takiej samej mocy sprawczej jak biali mężczyźni, a język, którym się posługują, ciągle jest "obcy"? Czy mogę "udowodnić" swoją samodzielność, posługując się teorią kobiet Trzeciego Świata, jeśli to ona jest mi bliższa i to z nią się identyfikuję? (p. 42).
What are these words, so strangely anachronistic, while gender and queer studies are such an accepted part of the "white Western world's theory", since such a long time? In the international scholarship, this study of Glória Anzaldúa comes so very late. And in Poland?


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(Glória Anzaldúa received the doctoral degree from the University of California Santa Cruz, posthumously.
Also Grażyna Zygadło received her habilitation from the University of Łódź, in spite of academic climate unpropitious for feminist and queer studies.)


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Grażyna Zygadło, "Zmieniając siebie - zmieniam świat". Glória E. Anzaldua i jej pisarstwo zaangażowanego rozwoju w ujęciu społeczno-kulturowym, Łódź, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2019.

Kraków - Leiden, 24-25.04.2019