Multicultural Literature Seminar Response #1 -- by Wanda Carr

Multicultural literature seems to entail a variety of facets that show its characters in situations where they are attempting to break through the barriers, which they have been taught to accept as the proper notion of who or what they ought to be. Through their narrative incidents, the characters are striving to keep their individuality while at the same time attempting to blur the crisply hewn edges of the biological and sociological traits that individualize them in order to fit into the larger society. Attempts to mesh differences into oneness can and will inevitably create conflict. However, the stories created to enlighten an audience with the individual author’s reality in that situation have the ability to momentarily create some semblance of what it might have been like to walk through that time and space in his or her shoes.

It would be difficult to say that any reader could completely understand just by reading the stories exactly what it must be like to live the life of the authors whose stories have been shared with us, but we are faced with a grotesque understatement of the oxymoron that it is to live as an individual in a society that expects everyone to conform to whatever notions and intentions it has created as what makes a person acceptable. We see from the visions shared with us through the author’s words “the triumph and the tragedy all at once.”(Mossman)

Just as members of the society in which they live, readers must be able to put characters in a story into some sort of an understandable category. The tendency is to read such literature and assume that after finishing, one can now associate with members of a different race, social order, or biologically disabled group. The problem is that the message being conveyed through the author’s voice is saying just the opposite. They are trying to show what it was really like, not so that the reader will after reading completely be Black or disabled or homosexual or whatever else, but rather to show their side of the situation in an attempt to convey the frustration that happens to people who are expected to assimilate into one, big, society and live happily ever after when there are still people out there treating them like some kind of freak. The truth is, it will never happen. And no matter how well versed a reader feels that he or she might be in the ways of Blacks, disabled bodies, and the like, what they know is probably in some way, shape, or form simply a forged set of stereotypical, preconceived notions that have nothing to do with the way things really are.

The authors of multicultural literature also don’t want readers to feel sorry for them. They don’t want to be treated differently once the reader finds out what or who the author might be. They don’t want to “end up having to listen for hours to the story of the” reader’s life in an attempt to make up for any preconceived misconceptions that they might have had.(Derricotte) And just because they write about what it is like to hear others make jokes about racial issues does not mean that they are writing about racism. They are artists like any other author. Their media happens to be their own life story. Yet they are in their story like characters on the stage of life, acting as the society around them dictates that they should act in any given situation in order that they, like everyone else who inhabits the earth, fit in.

So then one might assume that the role of multicultural literature is one of showing readers what it is like to be a member of a biological or social group different from his or her own when really one might argue it is rather the story of how one group learns to act in order fit in with another. In some cases, like Mossman, learning to use the disability or racial difference to play on someone else’s emotions in an attempt to make a buck or get some sympathy clearly shows that the reader’s insinuation to feel sorry for him is wrong. In other cases, like Kothari, learning not to draw attention to herself as an outsider by eating what the host serves is an attempt to be considered a polite visitor rather than resisting to eat something just because a stereotype says that someone from her country should not eat it.

One can learn about cultural, social, and biological differences through the reading of multicultural literature. However, there is more to be learned from the author than just what it is like to be different from the rest of society. Differences are not always what they may be preconceived as being. The story is not really about the differences that set people apart from the norm but rather about how the characters have learned to use their individuality to fit in with the group but still remain an individual.