The Tree Inside My Head

Several years ago, around Halloween, I was informed of a sickening and racist story while leading a workshop at an affluent, mostly white, local high school. As part of a writing exercise on persona, I asked students what costumes they planned on wearing for Halloween. The class laughed nervously and all eyes turned to Robert. “What’s so funny?” I asked. Robert explained he had been suspended for two weeks the previous year for the costume he wore. “What could be so bad?” I asked.

“I went as a Mexican,” Robert said, with no apparent remorse.

“What does that mean? I asked. How could you dress ‘as a Mexican’?”

“Simple,” he said. I wore dirty flannel clothes and carried around a Fisher-Price lawnmower. No one else in the class was laughing now, and it seemed that no one else shared his bigoted views.
I tried to salvage the discussion – talking about stereotypes as sort of super-imposed, one-size-fits-all costume, a simple-minded attempt at characterizing an entire people in a cheap two-dimensional manner. I even tried to indict Robert and people like him as posers, trying to assert a superiority over other people, people of whom they had very limited knowledge. I’d like to say I made a difference, that I made Robert see the light, but no such conversion took place that day.
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Even though Daphne graduated from high school over10 years ago, she remains one of my most memorable students for something she said outside of class. In fact, it was on graduation day. While wearing her cap and gown she came over to say, “Thank you for teaching a poem by a Mexican author. It made me feel like I could do something great.” The poem in question was “A Tree Within” by Octavio Paz and the class had occurred five years earlier in an 8th grade Language Arts class. Frankly I didn’t remember the poem leading to a particularly successful class discussion, nor do I remember Daphne as having been moved in any way by the poem. What was significant was the mere fact that we had read a poem in class by a Mexican author.

I had a similar experience in my own school life. I remember taking an Anglo-Irish Lit. class in grad school in which we read Yeats poems and the Joyce story “The Dead,” which features a scene set in Oughterard, County Galway, my father’s hometown. For the first time in my life, I was proud to be Irish-American. Suddenly, my white trash, Mick roots were cool and European. My father, himself a laborer, who also wore a uniform of flannel, who left school in the second grade to work, and who had never learned to read, had given me the cachet of cool. How I loved to hear the professor say that Joyce was the greatest writer of the century and that tiny Ireland, one-fifth the size of Illinois, had produced four Nobel laureates. “A litter better,” he’d add looking over the horizon line on his bi-focals, “than Illinois has done.”
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What image pops to mind when we hear the word “Mexican”? As someone who has never traveled to Mexico, my first associations are artists, the Mexican authors I’ve read or painters I’ve admired at the Mexican Fine Arts Museum in Chicago. “What image pops to mind when we hear the word “Irish?” I have spent much of my life assuming people picture drunkards and terrorists,

I have no illusions that we can eliminate stereotypes merely by presenting global voices to our students. But I think it is important that students have a chance to read great writers from other cultures, and that the powerful words of these writers can challenge our narrow world-view.
As the speaker of that Paz poem Daphne admired so much puts it, “There, within, inside my head/the tree speaks./Come closer – can you hear it?”

Have you ever felt represented by literature? When has literature challenged a stereotype you or someone you know has held?