After reading the essay "Preacher's Striptease," I really resonated with Kasdorf's frustration at all the attention her work was getting for being ethnically Mennonite. To reduce her work to merely a window into Mennonite culture is neither fair to her nor the literary world. For example, one of her better known poems, entitled "Mennonites," is not just a poem about being Mennonite. According to Kasdorf, "'Mennonites' comes from a frustrated desire to sort out identity questions about my ethnic and religious community of memory" (The Body and the Book, 66).
Teachers who teach that the poem is just an example of culture also deprive their students from realizing the actual meaning behind the poem. One textbook printed discussion questions to Kasdorf's "Mennonites," which directed attention to the stereotypical elements of Mennonite culture in Kasdorf's poem while missing the poem's message.
Some readers were puzzled by the word "chaff" in the last line of Kasdorf's poem, which reads:
"We lift, as chaff lifts towards God."
According to Wikipedia, the word "chaff" can refer to the protective casing around seeds from cereal grain, or in the metaphorical sense, something worthless. The placement of this word at the end of the poem is a huge clue to the actual message and tone of the poem, but readers at a Mennonite college faculty retreat didn't see it that way. According to Kasdorf, this usage puzzled them so much that they "concluded that the author did not know the meaning of the word chaff" (The Body and the Book, 69). I can only imagine Kasdorf's frustration that people would think a poet, somebody who literally makes art with words, wouldn't know the definition of a word she used in a poem. I think Kasdorf reminds us all not to reduce our favorite "ethnic" authors as nothing more than "ethnic" authors; while most authors are shaped by their ethnicity, they are not necessarily bound to it.
I totally agree with your last sentence, Jake! I think simply saying that Julia Kasdorf is a Mennonite writers dismisses all the other aspects of her identity that are likely important to her, such as her gender, her sexuality, her geographical location, etc. We cannot simply reduce writers, or anyone for that matter, to one small aspect of their identity.
ReplyDeleteJake, very well said, my friend! I, too, was struck by the group of college professors who concluded that Kasdorf didn't know the meaning of the word "chaff." I also appreciated you pointing out that just because a poem is thought of as ethnic literature, does not mean that it fully represents the culture or that that is the only purpose of the poem. In reading ethnic literature, that is something that we can't forget. Thanks, Jake!
ReplyDeleteAmen to this post. Thank you for providing the definition of Chaff. That does add a lot of meaning to the poem. I feel like we could all be grouped into categories of our writing. We could be college writers, Mennonite writers, young adult writers, most of us could be ethnic writers, but I agree it's important to not define someone's art by these groupings and let the words speak.
ReplyDeleteThe mind has a strong desire to categorize things. This works against our desire to know and be known as individuals. When categorizing writers by their ethnicity, there is always the danger of over-generalizing and missing the individuality of that artist. You make a great distinction--that while authors are shaped by their heritage and ethnicity, they are not bound by it. And our interpretations should be informed, but not bound by it, either.
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