The heat kills me. I sit in the car, slumped, with my feet pressed
against the windshield leaving scuffmarks where I'd been. I've got all
my books in the backseat because I'm supposed to be making study lists
for my oral exams, but instead I've got a fantasy novel I've read at
least ten times before in my lap, page corner folded. My clothes are
sticking to me even with the air-conditioning cranked up and Mark is
driving, because he likes it.
We are on a two-week tour of the Midwest, by way of a wedding. Ten
states between our apartment and our destination, we make lists of
things we mean to do, record stores and relatives scattered along our
route. Thankfully, we share affection for truck-stop fare and roadside
attractions, meaning that we'll probably consume about twenty-five
pounds of candy between us and are all too willing to drive hours out of
the way to stand before a scale recreation of Stonehenge, constructed
with old junked cars painted steel-gray. (We do this, snapping
photographs in frank admiration.)
It's a perfect vacation, except that I can hardly think in this heat,
I keep falling asleep to escape it, and where did I put my sunglasses,
anyway?
::
We are talking about the strike, still. (Mark is no doubt bored silly
with my deconstructive efforts.) Last semester six undergraduate
students went on a hunger strike, existing on fluids and camping in
tents with about eighty others, also protesting, in front of the
administration building.
Calling themselves the Third World Liberation Front in tribute to the
original movement to include ethnic studies curriculum in the academy,
the flyers were everywhere. Doors, bathroom stalls, wherever a piece of
8 1/2 X 11 paper might stick with a bit of tape. Each day they read
something like, "FOUR days and counting -- students are starving," for
an education, for "our histories."
It's not that I had issues with their demands (more faculty hires for
ethnic studies, which happens to be my graduate department, less
downsizing); but the slogan "students are starving" made me itch,
uncomfortably. I want to know, did they consider the politics of hunger
before striking?
Talking to Mark about my discomfort, but not sure how to articulate
it, he tells me a high-school story about skating downtown Indianapolis,
where the homeless would shout out,
"Gleam the cube!" and ask to see some handstands.
(This, of course, is a reference to the late 80s' Christian Slater
flick, also starring the Powell Peralta team. It should also be noted
that Mark tells stories to make a point.) Someone, somewhere, was on a
hunger strike, and it came up in conversation between Mark and a
homeless man, who said, "Hey, I've been on a hunger strike for three years, and I still haven't had my demands met!"
Just so. Now, I admit: I'm a critical girl and I don't let go easily,
but it seems important to ask. Who has the luxury to go on a hunger
strike, to go hungry (for just a little while) to make a political
point, and for whom is hunger not a strategy but a normative condition,
the way they exist from day to day? And since the undergraduates were
especially invoking the "third world," what do the politics of hunger
and hunger strikes mean in that more global context where hunger
describes systematic underdevelopment and not simply a tactic?
It was supposed to be symbolic, and no doubt compelling (the media
coverage had been on the sympathetic side), but not unproblematic. And
knowing the students involved (many of them fond of throwing around the
terms "community," "the people," "working-class"), I want to know how
the question of material inequity (as in, their material privilege
versus that of the "third world," as well as local homeless and poor),
so trenchantly foundational to the politics of hunger, was ignored.
::
Somewhere in Nebraska we wake up to a painted concrete landscape
outside our motel window and in the parking lot, a flat tire. Taking it
to an auto shop in town, we watch the resident manager, a young white
man our age, ask a co-worker to patch up our car. We watch an insectoid
machine disembowel the deflated tire, and Mark says, "I was this close
to ending up working in a place like this," holding his hands close.
It bothers me to hear some of my friends (derisively, if
gently) generalize Mark as "a straight white boy," when most have yet to
meet him -- and if they did, would they change their minds? I mean, would they
bother? I remember feeling contrite when I put the pieces of Mark's
childhood together, growing up in a working-class family, a child of
divorce, in a highly-segregated Midwestern city. Did I ever assume he
had it easy, or at least easier than me?
But it's never actually that simple, is it? Picking and choosing your
allies and enemies according to identity politics. I mean, I'm in an
ethnic studies department supposedly full of "allies" but when someone
feels comfortable enough to write on the graduate student list-serv,
"this queer shit makes me sick," directed at me, I find myself deserted.
(Can you say you've never been betrayed by "your kind"?) We rattle off
the markers of gender, race, sexuality, class and even nation, but do
these necessarily explain how we experience these things,
how we then explain ourselves? (And the "how" is just as
important as the "why" of social relations.) Striated by gender, nation,
and sexuality, what if I've become "Asian" different from other Asians?
What about those political and psychic differences that can't be
explained by appealing to bodies or their social locations?
And still it doesn't matter how much work I've done around the
politics of race, nation and sexuality in "the scene" or elsewhere
because what it boils down to, in that split second between casual
chatting and a rearing of heads, is this, incredulous: "You're dating a
white guy?"
As if I've sold out, been duped. Goddamn, give me some credit, will
you?
I put my arm around Mark and think these things to myself, fiercely.
::
Sarah takes us to the Museum of Science and Industry, all of us hyped
on the possibilities awaiting us at the Mold-a-ramas -- glass-covered
machines that shake and steam and spit out still-soft wax molds of
various objects for only a dollar each. (Think grass-green busts of
Abraham Lincoln, white space shuttles and gray submarines.) We hold
these in our hands (Sarah bites hers) and marvel at the many wonders of
wax.
But tucked away in the one of the staircases, the anatomical display
of two persons cut into horizontal and vertical slices, pressed between
glass, give me a bad feeling in my gut. Made in the 1940s and 50s, I
wonder who they were that their bodies were donated to science, after
their deaths. Poor, probably, and definitely not white, unless otherwise
criminal. I think about the uneven politics of interiority, and the
history of medical "science" studies of deviance and physiognomy, all
those precise measurements of skull size and finger length taken from
pickpockets, prostitutes, and asylum patients. Whose bodies, whose
insides were afforded privacy? Whose were subject to discipline and
surveillance anyway, because they were always already seen as too much
body, on the verge of erupting?
It. s because they were anonymous, probably typed as "undesirable" and stripped
of certain rights by the state, that they became for once abstract
enough, depersonalized enough to serve as standardized bodies for
medical inquiry -- or simple, public curiosity, watching people poke
at the glass.
While others ohhed and ahhed, I sit down on the steps and wonder if
I'm the only one who thinks this way, all the time.
On our way back, west on I-90, Mark and I are listening to "The
World," a radio program broadcast after NPR, bored sick of the
Dictators, Sleater-Kinney, and Turbonegro after ten days on the road. We
clap (or I do, since he's driving) when a short clip airs about Basque
punk bands, shouting in Basque about independence from Spain. (Our
Minneapolis hostess Lilia is writing her thesis on women in Basque punk
bands, so we especially appreciate the coincidence.) Minutes later, a
woman narrates a short feature on U.S. solidarity brigades to Cuba and I
lean forward to turn it up.
A cheerful 23 year-old from Northern California is interviewed about
her two-week experience in the brigades, working at a Cuban sugar mill.
Her accent screams rich white girl and we groan as she relates her sense
of "really knowing Cuba" now. How do tourists --and make no mistake, she
is a tourist-- even begin to claim to know the "real" after a carefully
chaperoned tour of designated sites and state-sponsored events? (This
applies to any
country with a debilitated economy . usually due to
histories of colonialism, war, or embargoes-- dependent upon the tourist
industry and wealthy foreigners.)
Asked whether the work was difficult, she spunkily replies, "Well, I
don't think Americans are used to hard work. I mean, Americans don't
really work with their hands, you know?" I cover my mouth with my hand
in horror, roll my eyes behind pink plastic sunglasses. Mark and I
wonder out loud, which Americans is she talking about? Her class and
race blindness is astounding, for all that she vaguely desires something
else revolutionary. I mention the agricultural workers who pick the
lettuce she eats in her salads, Mark says something about factory
workers, roofers, and mechanics.
And for whom does a "vacation" mean an opportunity to work? For who
is picking sugar cane a romantic gesture and not a defining (and
back-breaking) condition of economic survival? From what kind of
privilege is the manual labor a temporary escape?
I mean, it's just so loaded. Where would I begin?
::
We stop in Mitchell, South Dakota, to visit the apparently much-famed
Corn Palace. A convention center and community facility, dried corn
murals make up the outer facade of the building. Inside we make smashed
pennies and peruse the tables of corn-related merchandise, relief from
the heat and humidity of the 107-degree weather outside. On our way back
to the parking lot, we notice a car with Jersey plates and an Avail
sticker on the bumper.
Mark says with wonder, "There's punks at the Corn Palace and it isn't
us!"
We decide to drive straight through, taking detours to buy
firecrackers (two-for-one package deals, we set some off behind an
elementary school when we get home) and a sack of White Castles. (For
Mark, not me. I break my vegetarianism with chicken rings, only slightly
less noxious.) We view Mount Rushmore in the dark, distant
indistinguishable lumps looming against a big, cloudless black sky, and
weave two-lane roads between mountainous rocks. Much of it is hazy;
sleeping by the side of the road, I have bad dreams about the rows of
wheat, swallowing Mark up whole and stranding me in Wyoming forever.
In the morning we stop to help a woman with a flat tire; she tells us about
the low rate of rural employment ("The men are ranchers and the women
are teachers") and looks wistful when we grudgingly acknowledge that
jobs (of any kind) are more plentiful in the city. Back on the road we
talk some more about critical theory, rock . n. roll, and the amazing
House on the Rock. The closer we get to California the more often we
stop --every hour, it seems-- to nap at rest areas and (discreetly) in
parking lots; the knots in my shoulders rub together uncomfortably as I
try to adjust in my seat. Coming down out of the mountains and spinning
the dial (without much hope), we catch a punk show on a college radio
station at three a.m., and we sing along in the dark, rejuvenated.
If I had my way, I'd spend half my time in the car with Mark, speeding along
interstates at three a.m., watching to make sure he doesn. t
start running his hands through his hair, a sure sign he. s about
to fall asleep. We'd explore roadside attractions and state fairs,
buying cheap souvenirs of ships in bottles, tin coasters, and yet more
mugs. And I want to wake up in those pre-dawn hours, rolling my head
away from the window, to find Mark eating the last of the Red Vines, an
impromptu breakfast with truck-stop coffee.
Feet up on the dashboard, book in my hand, Mark singing along to the
radio, knowing that wherever we are, I'm home.