The Big Questions

The city of Los Angeles has a strong reputation of being equally thrilling and depressing. It is home to the celebrities, glamorous mansions, and high-end shopping, but it is also the setting for a great deal of crime, poverty, drug trafficking, and prostitution. Joy Harjo addresses this split personality beautifully in “The Path to the Milky Way Leads through Los Angeles,” pointing out its visual wonders and internal problems. The form of the poem—not stanzas, but long sentences with little punctuation—resembles the energy of the city. She notes that the city is a “place of recent invention,” which is true because L.A. is constantly changing, producing bigger and better things. Harjo uses striking imagery to depict the scenery of Southern California in line 6: “Yet, it’s perpetually summer here, and beautiful. The shimmer of gods is easier to perceive at sunrise or dusk.” It sounds as if the speaker admires the “city named for angels,” but she also shows uncertainty about her surroundings. She claims that you can “sell your soul for less than a song to a stranger who will sell it to someone else for a profit/until you’re owned by a company of strangers,” emphasizing the materialistic, phony nature of the city. The parts that jumped out at me most were, “We must matter to the strange god who imagines us as we revolve together in the dark sky on the path to the Milky Way” and “So what are we doing here I ask the crow…” She appears to be asking a very philosophical question: what are we, humans, doing here, on Earth? In the poem, she is seeing so many wonderful and terrible things at the same time and questioning what she is supposed to do with all of it and how we are all connected. The answer she is looking for is as simple as the last line, “collect the shine of anything beautiful I can find.”
As children, we enjoy hearing stories about princes and princesses living happily ever after in a magical kingdom. We find comfort in knowing the ending is a happily ever after situation. Mitsuye Yamada tells a much different kind of fairytale in “A Bedtime Story.” The poem even begins with the traditional “once upon a time,” but it does not unfold the way we might expect. The first two stanzas describing the poor old woman’s travels actually remind me of the beginning of Beauty and the Beast, when the old woman is turned away by the handsome prince. I thought there would be some lesson about not judging people by appearances, but I think the message of the poem is actually to appreciate nature and be grateful for what you have. The woman is so thankful to have seen the full moon that she actually thanks those who did not offer her shelter. I did not understand why this was such a “memorable sight” because we see full moons all the time, but perhaps it was a blue moon, or the moon is very significant to the Japanese, or she was simply amazed at nature’s wonders. The speaker—comfortable in her own Seattle home, a luxury the old woman did not have—voiced my exact thoughts when she asked, “that’s the end?” showing that she also expected a more traditional ending, in which the woman became wealthy somehow. The old woman did come across a fortune, but not what we typically consider to be fortune. The father probably tells this story to instill certain values in his daughter, to appreciate what is in front of you and be respectful of nature’s gifts and humbled by its power.
In Julia Alvarez’s “Queens, 1963,” we heard a foreigner’s perspective on adapting to American culture. This concept is also present in Bharati Mukhergee’s “A Father.” The story focuses on one man’s struggle to balance his traditional Indian faith with his new American life in Detroit. While I feel sympathy for the young girl in Alvarez’s poem, I feel none for Mr. Bhowmick. He is a paranoid, stubborn, and bitter man. Although I have never had to experience the difficulty of getting accustomed to a new country, I recognize that it is mainly a matter of maintaining your belief system. Everyone deals with that delicate balance on a daily basis. However, this story is an example of when beliefs go too far and actually harm another human being. Mr. Bhowmick probably experienced his fair share of racism as a new citizen of the United States, yet he has no problem being racist toward others when considering the father of his unborn grandchild. He disapproves of his wife and daughter for wanting to change experience a new culture, even though they showed no signs of disregarding their own heritage. To hit his pregnant daughter in the stomach because he does not agree with a decision she made is absolutely horrible—I actually cringed when I read the last sentence. It is very important that everyone is entitled to their own religion and customs, but the whole point of freedom of religion is freedom. There is no reason for a person to bring physical harm to someone who does not share their beliefs.
This week’s poems and story address several of the major themes we have been discussing all semester: living for the moment, nature, religion, and American city culture. They are all asking deep, philosophical questions. What is our purpose in life? How are we all connected to one another? What is my happy ending? How do I hold on to my morals in everyday life? We all want answers to these big questions, but the only way to receive them is just to be, to love, to laugh, and to have faith.