American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice

A good literary anthology has much in common with the musical playlists we make for our love interests. Every inclusion is a clue to the compilers' personality and our ambitions for the relationship. What song to start with, where to drop a classic fun song to make the listener smile, where to place the overly obvious love song, or the thoughtful or familiar one, and what song to conclude with-- all are vital decisions to a successful mix-tape. As the mix-masters, we feel there is no room for error. Anyone who doubts the importance of such a gift in a relationship probably hasn't been in love during the last thirty years.

William Reichard's anthology American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice succeeds the same way a perfect playlist does. Although the aims are different, the immediacy and deliberation in this collection reflect the care and attention to minute details that make this book of varying themes and voices a cohesive vision.

'The world is a harmony of tensions, ' wrote Heraclites of Ephesus, and he might have been describing one of the primary energies that holds the United States together, Reichard states in his introduction. The voices that rise are far different from one another. They are individuals attempting to find their places in a family or relationship or the work-place or the community or in adversity or in war or natural disaster or love or apathy. It is apparent, as the anthology continues with its collection of voices, that the larger question is how do these voices with their individual concerns rise to create a singular vision of America?

Reichard wisely begins the anthology with a short story by Louise Erdrich that acts as an invitation to the entire volume. Narrated by a young, pregnant Native American woman, Future Home of the Living God takes the reader through various misinterpretations of appearance and cultural and genetic inheritance. The narrator encounters a Vietnamese nurse and notes, The perfect Minnesota Nice accent is surprising, coming from such an exotic and elegant person. She later reveals that the name given to her by her adopted Minneapolis liberal parents is Cedar Hawk Songmaker while her given name from her biological Native American mother is Mary Potts. The incongruity between interior and exterior spaces and assumptions of the characters in the story mark the tension in America that Reichard names as the object of this anthology.

Some of the writers featured in this collection are familiar and widely anthologized. On a train ride, a stranger leaned over and asked, Have you read Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina before? as I was reading its excerpt. I hadn't, and he insisted I read the full novel. He flipped through the anthology's index: Jonis Agee, Nickole Brown, Alison Hawthorne Deming, B.H. Fairchild, Nick Flynn, Eric Gansworth, Yusef Yomunyakaa, Ed Bok Lee, Kristin Naca, Adrienne Rich, Scott Russell Sanders, Patricia Smith, and Brian Turner, among many others. The new and fresh writers are exciting and Reichard allows them to coexist and flow from one to the other and from their more famous contemporaries with sensitive placement. What rises from the thicket of voices is a search for belonging that sometimes ends in questions with no resolution, and which sometimes rhyme with another's search deeper in the volume. From Bobbie Ann Mason's vision of a disintegrating marriage in Shiloh to Ray Gonzalez's Proustian meditation in Praise the Tortilla, Praise Menudo, Praise Chorizo to D.A. Powell's environmental and personal cancer inside a little sea - so many of the writers vocalize very particular concerns about themselves or characters or experiences and thoughts, and the point of these differences and tension is that together they reveal a larger image of the American experience.

American Tensions in some ways reminds me of Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood. Thomas' play is a dizzying collage of people in a small Welsh town that ends up, through the inhabitants' gossip and dreams and memories, telling the solid story of their village. Reichard has collected many unique speakers, logically placing them in specific sections with loose themes of family and class and environment, and allows them to jump and fade and blend into one another. The conclusion is far different than Thomas', of course, reflecting the reality that America does not have a static identity. The identity of its people is always fluctuating and changing, searching for peace and justice. It is messy. It is a cacophonous chorus that somehow exists together, and through fluidity, change, and difference rises in breath and tone and creates a varying, strange, unique, and startlingly beautiful chord.

As a playlist captures the complex and sometimes competing forces within a relationship, revealing much about the essential interplay between composer and audience, so too does American Tensions provide a timely snapshot of our nation's post-identity literary landscape and the real uses and purposes we make out of writing and reading.

In his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, Jean de Crevcoeur, a French-American writer who immigrated in 1755, wrote that, [in America] individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.

The seductive simplicity of this idea caught on. Other writers latched onto the vision of American identity as the result of a great melting pot. In 1875, Titus Munson Coan wrote:

The fusing process goes on as in a blast-furnace; one generation, a single year even-- transforms the English, the German, the Irish emigrant into an American. Uniform institutions, ideas, language, the influence of the majority, bring us soon to a similar complexion; the individuality of the immigrant, almost even his traits of race and religion, fuse down in the democratic alembic like chips of brass thrown into the melting pot.

Ralph Waldo Emerson called it a smelting pot, while Henry James saw it as a, vast hot pot. Israel Zangwill, who popularized the idea of the melting pot in his 1908 play of the same name, projected that America would be an increasingly homogeneous society bound together by its national identity.
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American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice, is an anthology of fiction, essays, and poetry written in the last three decades that directly challenge this ideal. Editor William Reichard built the anthology around the idea of tensegrity, an architectural term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller to describe a kind of structural stability created by a balance of tensions. Through this analogy, American identity is the result, not of a trajectory toward sameness, but of the fragile, yet flexible cohesion created by, isolated components in compression inside a net of continuous tension.

If the experiment of God's Crucible, had gone as planned, 21st century American literature should reflect those earlier writers' projections of a uniformly-complexioned, homogenous national identity. Instead, the perspectives in American Tensions say otherwise:

I think perhaps my identity, our place in time, the muddy river of reality, all this is bundled in shadow. (Louise Erdrich)

We were
afraid, and like a pack of hungry
dogs, we marked
each other - safety pins and blood,
scratched things like best friends
forever then vomited
bile into the mud. (Nickole Brown)

As the gods in olden stories
turned mortals into laurel trees and crows
to teach them some kind of lesson,
so we were turned into Americans
to learn something about loneliness. (Tony Hoagland)

Say help is coming, say help is coming,
then say that help's running late.
Shrink from their clutches, lie to their faces,
explain how the levies grew thin.
Mop up the vomit, cringe at their crudeness,
audition their daughters for rape.
Stomp on their sleeping, outrun the gangsters,
pass out American flags. (Patricia Smith)

Make it like it never happened, the commercial promises.
Even if I glued the shards together, I would comprehend
The fissure webbing the porcelain, the pressure points of weakness,
Which is my undoing. (James Cihlar)

In spring I would lie down among pale anemone and primrose
and listen to the river's darkening hymn, and soon
the clouds were unraveling like the frayed sleeves of field hands,
and ideology had flown with the sparrows. (B.H. Fairchild)

Now scientists are saying that crib death is caused by a virus. Nobody knows anything, Leroy thinks. The answers are always changing. (Bobbie Ann Mason)

The writers featured in American Tensions are both established and emerging, some with many publications, some with only a few, but what binds them together is that they are embodiments of the legacy of that melting pot sales pitch. Their stories reflect that American identity may owe a great deal to the constant reminder that it is not an assimilated, uniform everyperson, but a messy, fractious web of cultures, myths, relationships, and races.

There's a lingering irony here: the original ideal of the melting pot, though rallied around by politicians and romanticized in popular culture, was originally created by American writers. Appropriately, it is now being torn down by their descendants. Thirty years from now, a new group of American authors will pull apart the current viewpoint: which is, perhaps, the nature of the tensegrity Reichard is pointing out. Poet Nick Flynn describes it this way:

starlings
fill the trees above us, so many it seems

the leaves sing. I can't see them
until they rise together at some hidden signal

& hold the shape of a tree for a moment
before scattering.

As a playlist captures the complex and sometimes competing forces within a relationship, revealing much about the essential interplay between composer and audience, so too does American Tensions provide a timely snapshot of our nation's post-identity literary landscape and the real uses and purposes we make out of writing and reading.
--Sam Woodworth, Fogged Clarity: An Arts Review

The melting pot isn't an easy blend, as the boiling nature within it can prove quite nasty. American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice is a collection of fiction, poetry, essays, and much more from various authors who speak on the continued push forward as America tries to be that harmonious union of peoples up front, and the much darker conflict that lands underneath it all. Through literature and nonfiction, these writers provide many opinions and views to grant readers the many conflicting perspectives in our nation today. For those who want to gain a greater understanding in our nation's push for equality, American Tensions is a thoughtful and very highly recommended read.
--Midwest Book Review

The writers featured in American Tensions are both established and emerging, some with many publications, some with only a few, but what binds them together is that they are embodiments of the legacy of that melting pot sales pitch. Their stories reflect that American identity may owe a great deal to the constant reminder that it is not an assimilated, uniform everyperson, but a 'messy, fractious web of cultures, myths, relationships, and races.'
--LJ Moore, SF Books Examiner

As a playlist captures the complex and sometimes competing forces within a relationship, revealing much about the essential interplay between composer and audience, so too does American Tensions provide a timely snapshot of our nation's post-identity literary landscape and the real uses and purposes we make out of writing and reading.
--Sam Woodworth, Fogged Clarity: An Arts Review

The melting pot isn't an easy blend, as the boiling nature within it can prove quite nasty. American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice is a collection of fiction, poetry, essays, and much more from various authors who speak on the continued push forward as America tries to be that harmonious union of peoples up front, and the much darker conflict that lands underneath it all. Through literature and nonfiction, these writers provide many opinions and views to grant readers the many conflicting perspectives in our nation today. For those who want to gain a greater understanding in our nation's push for equality, American Tensions is a thoughtful and very highly recommended read.
--Midwest Book Review

The writers featured in American Tensions are both established and emerging, some with many publications, some with only a few, but what binds them together is that they are embodiments of the legacy of that melting pot sales pitch. Their stories reflect that American identity may owe a great deal to the constant reminder that it is not an assimilated, uniform everyperson, but a 'messy, fractious web of cultures, myths, relationships, and races.'
--LJ Moore, SF Books Examiner