Contemporary and Multicultural Voices

This is Unit Eighteen of American Literature, part one of two: the writing of the last fifty years, and the argument about who gets to write the American story. Unit seventeen closed on a stage searching for a voice the public words had lost. This unit is the period in which that search became an argument about authority, and that is the governing idea part two pays off. The witness dates the shift to the close of the nineteen eighties, when minority writing became a major fixture on the American literary landscape, in drama as well as prose, and the exam's fifth period, its largest, holds all of it. Toni Morrison sits at the centre: an editor who published other writers before publishing herself, the first African American to take the Nobel, and the author of the novel the board's ninth sample question asks about. Around her: Alice Walker putting Zora Neale Hurston back in print, Maxine Hong Kingston mixing memoir with Chinese legend, a Native American Renaissance that begins with a Pulitzer and runs into a second wave, Latino writing arriving as what the witness calls a relatively new group, and two books about Vietnam. By the end you will be able to say what the period covers. To account for Morrison's career and her own term for her method. To place Walker, Kingston, Tan and Lahiri. To describe the Native American Renaissance. And to place the Latino writers and the two Vietnam books.

Eight entries on the period's central novelist: a career that began in an editor's chair, and four novels after it.

A canon widened, then tested.

AML 1701 What "Contemporary" Covers on This Exam

The witness records that the close of the nineteen eighties and the start of the nineties saw minority writing become a major fixture on the American literary landscape, in drama as well as prose. The board's fifth period runs from nineteen forty-five to the present and includes these writers. Contemporary names a period rather than a style.

An editor who published others first.

AML 1702 Toni Morrison: The Editor and the Novelist

Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, took degrees from Howard and Cornell, and worked as a senior editor at Random House, where she championed Angela Davis and Toni Cade Bambara. She published her first novel in nineteen seventy and was the first African American to take the Nobel. She taught at Princeton as emerita.

A girl praying to be seen differently.

AML 1703 *The Bluest Eye*

Published in nineteen seventy and set in her own Lorain, the novel follows a young Black girl who prays for blue eyes. The witness says Morrison weaves her narrative around a girl who, in the void of her social persona, constructs a beautiful and poisonous fiction. The board asks this as her first novel.

A borrowed standard, a broken child.

AML 1704 Pecola Breedlove and the Standard of Beauty

Pecola Breedlove is the child at the centre. The witness recounts that a man called Soaphead Church tricks her into believing a poisoned dog's death is God's sign that her prayer has been answered, which pushes her over the edge. The standard she measures herself by is borrowed from elsewhere. Her mother Pauline also narrates.

A man tracing a name backward.

AML 1705 *Song of Solomon*

The anchor calls the nineteen seventy-seven novel a story of a man coming to terms with his African American identity, and gives two instances of her method: a character who gives birth to herself and so has no navel, and another who learns to fly as African tribesmen did. The supernatural events are not decoration.

A newspaper account, made a novel.

AML 1706 *Beloved*

The witness records that Morrison found a mid-nineteenth-century newspaper account of a woman who tried to kill her children rather than let them be recaptured into slavery. That woman, Margaret Garner, is the source of *Beloved*, which won the Pulitzer Prize in nineteen eighty-seven. The historical case is named Margaret Garner.

A haunting that is a recovery.

AML 1707 The Ghost and the Recovered Voice

In the anchor's summary the ghost of a slain baby haunts the home of an escaped slave. The witness says recovering the voice of the unheard is the premise of the book, because fiction can reach what historians and newspapers never recorded about such a life. Fiction here does work that the records cannot do.

Realism, blended with the unverifiable.

AML 1708 Morrison's Nobel and the Technique of Enchantment

Morrison called her technique enchantment, a blending of historical realism with the myths and supernatural tales she learned as a child, and said that was how the world was for the Black people she knew, who had a connection with things not empirically verifiable. Enchantment is Morrison's own term for it.

Seven entries: a quilt two sisters argue over, a reputation rescued, and three writers of immigration and its second generation.

Rural Georgia to a Pulitzer.

AML 1709 Alice Walker and *The Color Purple*

Walker grew up in rural Georgia, the daughter of a sharecropper and a maid, attended Spelman and Sarah Lawrence, joined the Black Arts and civil rights movements, and edited at Ms. magazine. *The Color Purple*, of nineteen eighty-two, won her the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The novel was later a widely seen film.

Two sisters, one quilt, two claims.

AML 1710 "Everyday Use" and the Quilt

The anchor says Walker's themes coalesce in "Everyday Use", where two sisters, Dee and Maggie, have led very different lives and argue over a quilt. The quarrel is about who inherits a family's past and what inheriting it means: use it, or preserve it as an object. The argument is over heritage rather than fabric.

A living writer restoring a dead one.

AML 1711 Walker and the Recovery of Hurston

The anchor names one of Walker's recurring commitments as acknowledging the contributions of under-appreciated African American writers, Zora Neale Hurston among them. Her nineteen eighty-three essay collection *In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens* is the book where that argument is made. Hurston had gone out of print before this.

Memoir and legend in one book.

AML 1712 Maxine Hong Kingston and *The Woman Warrior*

The witness says Kingston, author of *The Woman Warrior* of nineteen seventy-six, carved out a place for her fellow Asian Americans. The book mixes memoir with family stories and Chinese legend, and it is the text through which the identity question is usually taught. It is not a novel and not only a memoir.

A marriage plot, replaced.

AML 1713 The Identity Plot in Postwar Fiction

The witness proposes the identity plot as a rubric for twentieth-century novels, in the way the marriage plot serves the nineteenth. American novels after nineteen forty-five explore the tension between individual and collective identity and question competing notions of authenticity. The rubric is the lecturer's rather than a period label.

Mothers in one country, daughters another.

AML 1714 Amy Tan and *The Joy Luck Club*

The witness describes Tan's luminous novels of Chinese life transposed to America after the Second World War, naming *The Joy Luck Club* of nineteen eighty-nine and *The Kitchen God's Wife* of nineteen ninety-one. David Henry Hwang made the same mark in drama with *M. Butterfly*, and his work belongs to the stage.

Nine stories, and a Pulitzer.

AML 1715 Jhumpa Lahiri and *Interpreter of Maladies*

Lahiri was born in London to Bengali parents and raised in Rhode Island. Her first collection, nine stories centred on the Indian American experience, appeared in nineteen ninety-nine and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her first novel, *The Namesake*, followed in two thousand and three. The anchor records mixed reviews in India.

Five entries on the Native American Renaissance: a chant novel, a Pulitzer that opened a generation, a reservation tetralogy, and two poets.

A novel built on a healing ritual.

AML 1716 Leslie Marmon Silko and *Ceremony*

Silko, of mixed Pueblo descent, wrote *Ceremony* in nineteen seventy-seven, and the witness calls it critically esteemed with a large general audience. Like Momaday's work, it is a chant novel, structured on Native American healing rituals rather than on a conventional plot. Chant novel is the witness's term for the form.

A Pulitzer that opened a generation.

AML 1717 N. Scott Momaday and the Native American Renaissance

Momaday's *House Made of Dawn*, of nineteen sixty-eight, won the Pulitzer Prize, and with *The Way to Rainy Mountain* it evokes the beauty and despair of Kiowa life. The witness says these authors most often write the loss of a traditional life based in nature. Erdrich is called the movement's second wave.

One reservation, four novels.

AML 1718 Louise Erdrich and *Love Medicine*

Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and sets most of her work in the North Dakota lands of her ancestors. *Love Medicine*, of nineteen eighty-four, is the only debut novel to win the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it grew into a tetralogy. The anchor compares it to Faulkner's county.

A reservation childhood, from inside.

AML 1719 Sherman Alexie and the Reservation Story

Alexie is a registered member of the Spokane tribe who grew up on the reservation and left it for a high school where he was the only Native American student. He published two poetry collections in nineteen ninety-two, and writes in "Superman and Me" about learning to read there. The anchor records poverty and a scholarship.

Two poets, from tribal ground.

AML 1720 Joseph Bruchac and Carter Revard

Bruchac, a member of the Abenaki tribe, has written more than one hundred and twenty books and published "Ellis Island" in nineteen seventy-five, in which the speaker describes immigrating. Revard, half Osage, was the first Native American to win a Rhodes Scholarship, in nineteen fifty-two, and writes Osage material and medieval England together.

Five entries on Latino writing and the border: a newly visible field, a Pulitzer, a desert, a healer, and a five-year journey.

A newly visible body of writing.

AML 1721 Sandra Cisneros and *Woman Hollering Creek*

The witness names Cisneros among the leading writers of Mexican American descent and cites her collection *Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories* of nineteen ninety-one. Latino American writing is described there as a relatively new group on the literary horizon at that date. The witness wrote before the field's expansion.

A Cuban-born novelist, and a Pulitzer.

AML 1722 Oscar Hijuelos and the Latino Novel

The witness names Oscar Hijuelos, the Cuban-born author of *The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love*, of nineteen eighty-nine, as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, and groups him with Cisneros and Rudolfo Anaya as the leading Latino American writers of the period. Latino writing covers several national origins rather than one.

A desert, and two words in tension.

AML 1723 Pat Mora and the Border Poem

The anchor calls Mora a leading figure in contemporary Chicana poetry. Born in El Paso to grandparents who left northern Mexico during the revolution, she wrote *Chants* in nineteen eighty-four around the magic of the desert, and "Legal Alien" and "Immigrants" come from her first two books. The border is her subject and her home.

A boy, a healer, a village.

AML 1724 Rudolfo Anaya and *Bless Me, Ultima*

The witness names Anaya as a leading Mexican American writer and calls *Bless Me, Ultima*, of nineteen seventy-two, a poetic novel. It follows a boy in rural New Mexico and the healer who joins his family, and it founded Chicano fiction courses. The witness's own word for the book is poetic.

A five-year journey, ending in Pennsylvania.

AML 1725 Li-Young Lee and the Immigrant Lyric

Lee was born in Jakarta to Chinese parents in exile. His father, once physician to Mao Zedong, was imprisoned nineteen months, and the family trekked five years through Hong Kong, Macau and Japan before reaching the United States in nineteen sixty-four. His first book, *Rose*, appeared in nineteen eighty-six, and his poems centre on the father.

Four entries to close the part: a black wall in Washington, a rucksack that carries feeling, and working lives told in very few words.

A poem at a black wall.

AML 1726 Yusef Komunyakaa and "Facing It"

Komunyakaa served a tour in South Vietnam as a correspondent and earned a Bronze Star. "Facing It" appeared in the nineteen eighty-eight collection *Dien Cai Dau*, Vietnamese for crazy in the head, and reflects on his first visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. The collection's title is what the locals called American soldiers.

A drafted objector, writing the war.

AML 1727 Tim O'Brien and *The Things They Carried*

O'Brien was drafted in nineteen sixty-eight though he opposed the war, and served in a division whose unit reached the area of the My Lai massacre a year after it. *Going After Cacciato* won the National Book Award, and *The Things They Carried* came in nineteen ninety. He learned of My Lai while stationed there.

Equipment listed, then feeling.

AML 1728 The Weight of the Things They Carried

The anchor prints Bobbie Ann Mason's response, that the story hit her hardest of anything she had read in a decade, like a hundred-pound rucksack thrown at her, and that the list of things carried extends to the burden of memory and desire and confusion and grief. The response quoted is Bobbie Ann Mason's.

Working lives, in the fewest words.

AML 1729 Raymond Carver and Minimalism

Carver was born in an Oregon logging town to a sawmill worker, and the anchor calls him a chronicler of working-class lives in realistic, often minimalistic writing. One newspaper called him the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the century. He wanted poet on his headstone.

That is the first half of the contemporary period. Part two takes the rest and the procedures. You can say what the exam's contemporary period covers and when the witness dates the widening of the canon. You can account for Morrison, an editor before a novelist, the first African American to take the Nobel, who wrote a girl praying for blue eyes in her own Lorain, built *Beloved* from a newspaper account of Margaret Garner, and called her method enchantment, a blend of historical realism with what cannot be empirically verified. You can place Walker's quilt and her rescue of a writer who had gone out of print, Kingston's memoir mixed with legend, and the identity plot that replaced the marriage plot. You can describe the Native American Renaissance from a Pulitzer in sixty-eight through a chant novel to a reservation tetralogy. You can place Cisneros, Hijuelos, Mora and Anaya. And you can place two Vietnam books and a chronicler of working lives.