american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 107
out, the lion has a connection to Africa as well as to Yeats’s “rough beast
slouching toward Bethlehem” in “The Second Coming” (305). And,
lest we forget, the lion is popularly known as the king of the jungle, and
since Bob Marley’s “Concrete Jungle” (1970) urban ghettoes have
often been referred to popularly as “jungles.” Levine’s “Lion,” then, is
an imaginary construct embodying the rage of Detroit’s African
American community and the guilt of a middle-class white man. The
voice of the poem reflects these divided concerns.
Like “They Feed They Lion,” a collective experience of oppression
is the central tenet of Sherman Alexie’s “Evolution” (The Business of
Fancydancing 1991). However, unlike Levine, Alexie, a Spokane/
Coeur d’Alene Indian, uses a narrative voice infused with parody and
satire in order to cast the contemporary Indian reservation as a space
controlled by the malicious forces of colonialism. In “Evolution,”
Alexie’s rhetorical strategy departs from Native American oral traditions,
while foregrounding elements of magic realism. He has said
that his work “has nothing to do with the oral tradition” because he
“typed it” (“Sherman Alexie” 14), a claim that strikes me as protesting
too much and as a dismissal of the historical and cultural forces
that shape all writers. In contrast, John Newton writes that Alexie
“stresses instead his own easy affiliation” with popular culture and the
culture of the contemporary reservation (414), spaces that are hybrid,
dynamic, and multicultural, and that are impacted by a variety of
traditions, both oral and written, from which Alexie liberally borrows.
Alexie sketches the contemporary reservation in “Evolution” as a
surreal combination of popular culture, supernatural occurrences, and
what Jennifer Gillan has called “the structural elements of the representation
of Indianness—the Indian as savage or child” (103) or, in
“Evolution,” as savage, childlike alcoholic. These representations of
what it means to be an Indian from a stereotypically conservative white
perspective, moreover, “are central to the narrative of the United
States as a nation” (Gillan 103–104) in that the purity, thriftiness, and
Protestant work ethic of white America had a foil in the supposed laziness,
savagery, and chemical dependence of the Indian. In “Evolution,”
moreover, the union of a supernatural world and a rational one in the
techniques of magic realism offers an alternative vision to the sterile,
stagnant, and oppressive white, Western ethos, and it complicates the
relationship between popular and Indian cultures. In doing so, it
mocks the supposedly evolutionary superiority of whites to Indians,
and shows that oppression is not a historical condition, but a present
fact of life. The poem thus foregrounds William Faulkner’s famous
quote: “the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” 16