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Responses to "The Gift Outright"
Rudy: Do you think this poem is
excessively Eurocentric?
Charles:
Damn skippy . . . Who was here before those explorers,
debtors from prisons, indentured servants and slave
traders???
Kam: Yes, Guthrie-esque before Woody's
This land is your land, this land is my land... The Israelis
have the same attitude about Israel. Jewish kids, even in this
country are taught to recite a poem from a young age about how
the land was empty and given to them by God. The same way white
South Africans swear no blacks lived on the land before their
arrival.
Mackie: Absolutely not. Just the
opposite. It encourages developing a long look away from
Europe. It is, however, a blind, perhaps witless,
extolling and praise of American imperialism and colonialism.
Let's face it, "Americans" did colonize Amerindians.
The First People of this land. The poem is white-skinned,
Americo-centric. I think that's what you sensing about
this "poem". Mistah Chaahlee-centric.
Rudy: I think your assessment is
accurate. The poem is to a slight degree anti-Eurocentric in its
first half. For it calls for a new nationalism, American rather
than British. The last four lines are exceedingly troubling:
"(The deed of gift was many deeds of war) / To the land
vaguely realizing westward, / But still unstoried, artless,
unenhanced, / Such as she was, such as she would become."
Of course none dare call Frost "racist."
Maybe we need indeed to develop new terms to describe the
consciousness that produced the poem. Clearly, we cannot place
Frost in the same category as America's white lower middle
classes, the so-called "Silent Majority." His attitude
toward nonwhites, I suspect, is much more sophisticated, though
"witless": "The deed of gift was many deeds of
war." Here he seems to glorify conquest (of the Indians,
the Mexicans, and the Spanish).
There seems a total absence of the Negro
altogether. Maybe that is what Ellison was responding to when he
spoke of "invisible men." They are there but their
presence is insignificant. Some might say we ask too much of a
single poem.
Kam: I agree, but I feel like I
understand those lines: "manifest destiny."
Rudy: I wonder what comes to mind when
politicians speak blithely of the "American people."
It is very narrow in its conceptualization in the imagination of
most white Americans, I suspect. It is not altogether that
different from Robert Frost's blind conceptualization in this
poem "The Gift Outright." It's probably not
"overt" but so much a fabric of American society that
it becomes the natural state of things. Are you
familiar with Ronald Walters' White
Nationalism, Black Interests.
Jerry: Rudy, I do like the phrase you
used—blind conceptualization. It fits Frost well. The
poem also has a peculiar significance in 2005 as land
developers blindly conceptualize progress (profits) by
appropriating the property (or trying to) of displaced tsunami
victims in Asia. And we know very well what is in the
planning for New Orleans. Thanks for giving me a new way
of using Frost to communicate lessons about appropriation to
students. Frost was following in the tradition of Shakespeare's The
Tempest.
Rudy: Yes, I saw the evening news and
some Indonesian fishermen were talking about the results of the
tsunami and how developers and the government were coming in
seizing their land and that there was nothing that could be done
about it but concede. I also remember Shakespeare’s Caliban.
Frost recited the poem on Meet the
Press, initially 50 years ago, and they showed it again last
Sunday and so I went online to find the full poem.
As far as New Orleans, there are indeed
elites in New Orleans that feel Katrina gave them a “gift
outright,” a New Orleans without the wrong kind of Negroes.
Thanks for reminding me that the poem is indeed relevant to the
New Orleans situation.
Floyd: Rudy, It is precisely because
of commentary like that found in Robert Frost's poem that I
often question quite critically Blacks folks' employment of
"we" when discussing aspects of American society, as,
for example, the way Cornel West does in his latest book,
"Democracy Matters." Who is this "we"
and are we as Black people actually a part of the conversation?
There are other instances in which generalizations are made.
Last semester, a Black student in my bebop course wrote that
Billie Holiday was hardly accepted by Americans except as a
singer. I asked the student: "Accepted by whom?
Black people loved Lady Day.
Who gives a damn whether whites valued her?"
We need to break the supposed connection
between rightness and whiteness!
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* * * posted 28 December 2005 |
