Revisiting "Heritage" by Lorna Dee Cervantes
In some cases, my ideas won't change much after class discussion. Some pieces of literature are so complex that we could spend hours and maybe even days discussing all the different angles it could be viewed by and the different possibilities for themes, but this poem to me was pretty straight forward. The speaker was a Mexican-American woman that visited Mexico to find her roots. Again I will say how much I loved the Spanglish; I love all poems like that because it really makes them come to life.
It makes me wish I had a heritage, a different culture, to take into my heart, a different language that only my friends and family understood. But then I think of how I grew up feeling different in the first place, and how being from a different country could make fitting in that much harder. I'm not saying that being of a different culture makes you the outcast, it's just the fact of being outside of the culture you live in's norm, if that makes sense.
It would be worth it though, because growing up without a religion or a strong culture makes you feel kind of empty sometimes. It is ironic to want to not belong just so you CAN belong. To say, I don't want to be like everyone else. I want to be different like them. I will give you an example, because I don't want you to think it's race I'm talking about.
I was raised by Atheists. On my own, I decided I wanted to be different from them. Be different from my whole family and follow my heart. I started reading the Bible in middle school, but I never really felt comfortable enough to walk into a church. Now that I'm at NW and away from my family, I desperately want to belong with other Christians, but because of the way I was raised, I feel I may never fit in. So in a way, I can relate to this speaker because I feel her pain of wanting to belong where you know you SHOULD belong.
Until next time,
Keri Jo
Girl, you amaze me. Consider this your formal invitation to the Bible study I'm in, led by another girl in our class. :) We meet on the 3rd floor of the union at 8pm on Mondays - can you make it?
ReplyDeleteCattie, I, too, find Keri amazing. A wonderful writer. And that leads me to the thought I had as I was reading this post, Keri. Often we writers turn to writing because we've always felt ourselves "outside" whatever was going on or wherever we were. So we observe, and through our more detached observations comes our writing. That's not to say that feeling a sense of "belonging" would compromise your ability to write. But it is a trait that I've recognized in most writers and have come to accept in myself. What's liberating about it is the realization that we're not flawed in some way; it's actually a gift.
ReplyDeleteOf course, I'm not a psychologist. (sigh)
I will try to make it tomorrow Cattie, thanks so much for the invite.
ReplyDeleteMy feelings toward myself as an outsider seem to add to my poetry as well. It's packed full of raw emotion. But I can't make a fortune off of my poetry, so journalism it is.