I‘m an English professor because I love to help students probe the texture of a masterfully crafted image or the gnarly complexity of a brilliant sentence; because I cherish those moments when a student’s face registers that an epiphany has just landed. But increasingly, I value teaching literature because of what it can do for the future of the past.
We live in a nation plagued by historical amnesia, by a tendency to sanitize troubling chapters of the past. Ironies that should be front and center in our national memory are often airbrushed out of the history books in our nation’s classrooms — like the fact that America was “founded” by genocidal robbers on land stolen from the people who were there before them. Or that we are a nation established by slaveholders on principles of individual liberty. Or that after the Civil War, America effectively re-enslaved the freed slaves for the next hundred years through sharecropping, lynching, and the convict-lease system.
Facts like those are difficult to reconcile with the idealized view of the past favored by the Texas State Board of Education. Because that body approves textbooks statewide in the second-largest textbook market in the country, publishers cater to its likely reactions before they go to press. Recently a Texan named Roni Dean-Burren complained about the “Patterns of Immigration” section in her son’s textbook. It noted that “The Atlantic Slave Trade … brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations,” suggesting that her ancestors had come to the United States willingly and had been paid for their labor.
The approved social-studies and American-history textbooks that five million Texas students began using this past fall were based on state guidelines that play down the role of slavery in sparking the Civil War, and fail to mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws. To avoid offending statewide textbook-adoption panels in almost all Southern states, publishers regularly whitewash America’s past.
In a course I co-taught last fall to Stanford freshmen, “Race and American Memory,” four students designed a final project that juxtaposed passages from textbooks used in Texas high schools with passages we’d read by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Solomon Northup, undercutting the textbooks’ glib distortions about slavery with the words of writers who bore witness to slavery themselves.
If textbooks mention lynching at all, it is most often in the form of statistics that lie flat and affectless on the page. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s story “The Lynching of Jube Benson” takes students inside the head of a man whose judgment was so distorted by racial stereotypes that he found himself lynching a man he had thought of as a friend. Dunbar’s story “The Tragedy at Three Forks,” about a jealous white woman who first commits arson to hurt a rival and then allows two innocent black men to be lynched for her act, provides another perspective on the history of a crime so common that for decades the New York office of the NAACP hung a banner from its window announcing “a man was lynched today.”
Literature can help us hear voices from the past that were silenced. In her poem “I Expected My Skin and My Blood to Ripen,” the contemporary Native American poet Wendy Rose thrusts us brutally into the excruciating pain of lives not only cut short but also violated in death, on December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee, S.D. The poem — which begins with an extract from an auction catalog advertising items plundered from the dead, followed by a monologue written from the perspective of a woman killed in the massacre — makes clear the poet’s view that Indian art and artifacts get more respect than the Indians themselves did.
Literature can prompt us to re-examine what we thought we knew about a place. In a Stanford course on the American West that I teach with a political scientist, a historian, an art historian, and a geologist, my colleagues tend to focus on the West as a place of wide open spaces and mobility.
Literature can help us hear voices from the past that were silenced.
But when I have students read Chinese poems carved on the walls of the Angel Island immigration station and Maxine Hong Kingston’s description in China Men of her father’s detention there, or fiction and poetry about Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, their picture of the West is complicated by images of confinement and segregation. Miné Okubo’s pioneering graphic novel Citizen 13660 brings to life what families like hers experienced in relocation centers. Lawson Fusao Inada’s poem “Concentration Constellation,” in Legends From Camp, traces a riveting image that no history book ever evoked, the constellation that emerges when we connect the locations of the camps on a map: “a jagged scar, / massive, on the massive landscape …"
Students learn from my historian colleague about the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which set the border between the United States and Mexico.
But it is the poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction by writers from the Lower Rio Grande Valley that allows them to grasp the repercussions of a treaty that ever after would divide families and individual psyches. In Borderlands/La Frontera, by Gloria Anzaldúa, or George Washington Gomez, by Americo Paredes, or The Valley, by Rolando Hinojosa, the U.S.-Mexico border comes into view as — in Anzaldúa’s words — a “1,950-mile-long open wound / dividing a pueblo, a culture, / running down the length of my body, / staking fence rods in my flesh / me raja me raja …" It is “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds …"
Literature can invite us to attend to the past in ways that can have an impact on the future. I once asked Michael Harrington what had given him the idea to write The Other America, a book that inspired the War on Poverty and its legacies, including the Head Start program. His answer? Reading John Dos Passos’ USA. Reading that novel, Harrington claimed, was also directly responsible for inspiring many of his peers to work for social change.
Teaching literature can set off chain reactions, empowering writers of the future to revisit the past in fresh ways. The term after I assigned Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy in an American-literature survey at the University of Texas at Austin years ago, a young Vietnamese immigrant in the class, Thanhha Lai, showed up in my office to thank me. The other students didn’t share her gratitude at being required to read an 800-page novel in addition to material from the anthology that my colleagues usually assigned for that course.
But Thanhha said it had made her want to become a writer: She wanted to write the Amerasian American Tragedy. She hasn’t written it yet, but the coming-of-age novel-in-verse that she did write, Inside Out and Back Again, won a National Book Award in 2011. That book and its sequel, Listen, Slowly, offer new perspectives on the Vietnam War and its aftermath that will shape how a new generation of young people will understand that chapter of the past.
An assignment I was given in high school prompted me to re-examine the past myself, and it changed my life: Write a paper on how Mark Twain used irony to attack racism in Huckleberry Finn. That paper ignited a lifelong engagement with issues of race and racism in America’s past as well as with the work of Mark Twain.
It led me, in Lighting Out for the Territory, to excoriate the powers-that-be in Hannibal, Mo., a town that runs on Twain tourism, for its failure to acknowledge the role of slavery and racism in its past and in Twain’s work, and for its erasure of African-American life in Hannibal during the century and a half after emancipation. Hannibal may have been keen about historic preservation, but the history it chose to preserve involved little white boys playing marbles, not little black boys sold from their mothers.
Faye Dant, a fifth-generation Hannibal resident whose ancestors had been enslaved there, said that book, and my earlier book Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices, had inspired her to work to recover and preserve for future generations the history that the town had ignored. Her efforts culminated, in September 2013, with the grand opening of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center. The black-history museum is now the first building visitors encounter when they turn off the highway en route to the Mark Twain Historic District.
In hindsight, history often looks inevitable. But it rarely is. It is shaped by the choices individuals make as events are unfolding, by their distinctive perspectives and understandings of their world. Literature can help us enter into those moments when choices must be made and can help us grasp the consequences of those choices. Coming to terms with a past shaped by human actors, in all their messy complexity, can influence how our own words and actions shape the future.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin is a professor of English and director of American studies at Stanford University and the author of, most recently, Writing America: Literary Landmarks From Walden Pond to Wounded Knee (Rutgers University Press).
