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Crossing Borders
Volume 8, Number 1 - Fall 2009
Conflict & Change: Reading Stories with Young People
by Andee Hochman
My 10th-grade English teacher, Leon Wilk, taught us that all literature had one theme twisting at its core: Conflict. Strife between the Individual and the State, between Propriety and Instinct, between Nature and Civilization. I remember scribbling that notion with my Bic ballpoint and using it to analyze works ranging from Walden to Death of a Salesman. It wasn’t hard to find conflict rearing its reliable head.
Years later, after reading an essay by the prolific science fiction writer, essayist and poet Ursula K. Le Guin, I began to question Mr. Wilk’s pronouncement. Could all literature—from “Little Red Riding Hood” to Beloved—really be reduced to this bumper-sticker summation? Might there be other grand themes—loss, betrayal, greed, longing—that animated the short stories, novels and plays I loved?
Le Guin, in her essay, “Some Thoughts on Narrative,” suggests that the propulsive force of literature is not conflict, but movement and transformation. “Narrative makes a journey,” she writes. “…When the storyteller by the hearth starts out, ‘Once upon a time, a long way from here, lived a king who had three sons,’ that story will be telling us that things change; that events have consequences; that choices are to be made.”
Ah, here was a different way of looking at literature: not as a story of endless antagonisms but as a spiral that might include multiple and shifting perspectives, ambivalence, the two-steps-forward-one-step-back rhythm of real life. I was no longer a high-school sophomore, eager for rules to render the adult world accessible and sane. In a landscape defined by conflict, the outcome was inevitably grim; but in a world where change was the watchword, well, anything could happen.
And then Barack Obama won the 2008 election, and those iconic posters with their one-word mantra remained in windows all over town. In the months after the inauguration, I led a People & Stories group with young people—Cabrini College students, most of them white, and Norristown High School students, predominantly African-American. Many had just voted for the first time.
In “American History,” a Puerto Rican girl experiences the sting of racial and class prejudice when the mother of a classmate, who is white, refuses to allow the girl to study with her son. “I don’t know how you people do it,” the mother says, looking at the lurking tenement where the girl lives.
“Why does Eugene’s mom think she’s so superior?” Marquel asked. “That’s not right, what she says to the girl.” Other Norristown students said it was the phrase “you people” that carried the biggest sting—“almost like Elena was another species.” They recalled times when they had been judged by others because of where they live, how they look or where they go to school.
It was an old narrative—racism and its leaden punch, fear of difference. Yet there was something else percolating through the story, and in our discussion. “American History” is set on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and Elena’s family, like many described in the text, worships the young, idealistic president; they place his picture on their “wall of saints,” along with images of the Sacred Heart.
“Is there a leader whose picture you would hang in your home?” I asked. A number of students—from both Norristown and Cabrini—cited their own grandparents or parents. Others mentioned the Dalai Lama, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks. Many said they would include Obama’s picture in such a display. “He gave me a sense of possibility—that I could do anything under the sun,” said one Norristown student. A Cabrini student noted that Obama, like Kennedy, offered beleaguered people a needed dose of hope.
In the end, it was not the story’s most apparent conflict—the blistering expression of racism—that drew our attention; it was the effect of this incident on the protagonist. At the story’s close, Elena sees snow falling over a street lamp and chooses not to watch it turn to slush on the ground. One student said Elena was choosing to focus on what was possible rather than what was lost or tainted. Others said the image of the snow “like a lace veil” over the lamplight evoked thoughts of both weddings and funerals— occasions when people wear veils. It was an image, one woman said, of both promise and pain, the end of Elena’s innocence but the beginning of a new, more adult part of her journey.
In “Marriage Is a Private Affair,” conflict is certainly evident; it is the story of a young man who defies his father, and his culture, by marrying outside the tribe. His father refuses to speak to him for years, and the village elders pronounce the young man’s transgression to be “the beginning of the end.”
We discussed the power of tradition and the elders’ fear. “If that practice—arranged marriage—can be changed, then what about everything else they believe in?” said a Cabrini student. The son’s choice is threatening because it challenges his father’s own choices, the traditions that undergird his life. The students—all of them—seemed to understand that; they could even see the value of arranged marriages, which bring with them a high level of community support and might, they speculated, be just as successful as marriages “for love.”
And yet…their own lives had already insisted on pushing boundaries and breaking traditions. A Cabrini student talked of her conversion to Mormonism and her parents’ puzzlement as she planned a wedding full of rituals that were unfamiliar to them. Another Cabrini student said his uncle had shocked the family by marrying a woman who was not Catholic. “If his kids weren’t so adorable, we’d probably have a harder time with it,” he said. The Cabrini professor talked of her own family’s uneasy reaction to the fact that she is unmarried.
And Marquel pointed us back to the story’s closing, when the old man learns he has two grandchildren and can no longer bear to cut his son’s family out of his life. “The old man doesn’t want to be forgotten. If his grandkids don’t know him, he’ll be forgotten,” said another Norristown student. The old man stares out a window. A thunderstorm rages, splattering the ground with rain. “It’s a change, a time of change,” said one Cabrini student.
It’s not that Mr. Wilk was wrong. Conflict does occupy a central place in literature, in our daily existence; just read the newspaper on the subject of Iran, or Israel, or health-care legislation. But there is something else, pumping energy and possibility through our stories, the pulse of transformation that carries us from beginning to ending to beginning all over again. The battle lines may be drawn, but it is change—on the page, in our unpredictable lives—that pulls us through.