Crossing Ocean Parkway:

Memoir as Cultural Contact Zone

 

by Marianna De Marco Torgovnick

 

In 1989, Bensonhurst, the Italian American neighborhood in Brooklyn where I grew up, became the site of the racial murder of Yusuf Hawkins. My reactions in the weeks after that murder were the origin of Crossing Ocean Parkway. In March of 1996 I was invited to be the keynote speaker at a con­ference on intercultural relations in Bensonhurst. I used the lec­ture to reflect on the subject of memoir and the theme of relationships within and between cultures.

 

Memoir as cultural contact zone: I am aware of a certain para­dox, perhaps even a certain contradiction in my title. The term “contact zone” comes from Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, where it describes colonial encounters. As a term, it refers to cul­tures coming together for the first time and then over time, during which the reactions between and among cultures will run in a cir­cle from curiosity and fear—to understanding and misunderstand­ing—to admiration and distaste, and so on. The term often carries with it the idea of hierarchies among and (something I would want to stress) within cultures—so that, in any contact zone, one or more groups may be seen as dominant and others as subordi­nate. But I invoke the image of a circle rather than a vertical model of hierarchy to come closer to what I believe to be the truth about zones of cultural contact: that perceptions of (not nec­essarily the realities of) mastery and control, of victimization and cooperation will modulate and change over time within any contact zone and are likely to vary if measured among the differ­ent groups and individuals participating in the contact. For example, various protests around the murder of Yusuf Hawkins cast Italian Americans or blacks as “the abusers” or “the abused.” In a similar way, after the Crown Heights incident in 1991, both African Africans and Lubavicher Jews felt themselves to be vic­tims. Cultural interaction should be understood according to a multidirectional model that will play itself out in many dif­ferent ways and at many different levels over time.

In some sense, memoir would seem to be the antithesis of writ­ing about cultural contact. Memoir is a form of autobiographical writing that differs from autobiography in several significant ways. First, memoir has less obligation than autobiography to cover the span of a complete life; it is the freest and most idiosyncratic of autobiographical genres. Autobiographies often begin with the narrator’s birth (and frequently with an account of the narrator’s parents); then they typically take the narrator forward, with more or less completeness, to the point in life at which the writing takes place. Diaries and letters are similarly, but even more strongly, tied to chronology; gaps may appear in a person’s life, but when entries are dated such gaps will immedi­ately be noticeable. Memoir has no such obligation either to com­pleteness or to strict chronology. It tends to be focussed on a cer­tain period or a certain theme in the narrator’s life. Its obliga­tion is to be true to memory as much as (or even more than) to be true to fact. I am not saying that memoir can lie or distort facts with impunity: indeed, I believe that is not so. But memoir—like its sibling, autobiography—combines techniques from non-fiction and fiction. If autobiography is now recognized (as it generally is) as something other than a purely factual genre, memoir has even greater fictional license. Indeed, memoir is the process of making what has been interior to a life—emotions, and the per­ceptions of experience—exterior. It would seem to involve a dou­ble process: making things clearer to oneself and then presenting them in as clear a way as possible to one’s reader. In this sense, memoir would seem to be responsible just to the writerly self or, extending outwards, to the intimate circle of writer and reader. On the face of it, it would not seem to have a place within the so­cial realm of cultural contact, cultural relations. Memoir might even be described as among the most solipsistic of genres.

What I would like to explore in this essay is my sense that any such polar separation of memoir and cultural contact is wrong. Memoir is necessarily cultural contact zone because all of us are also cultural contact zones of one kind or another. Indeed, many memoirs treat the following aspects of the writer’s life: family, education, ethnicity and race, politics. Often, these four topics are intimately connected.

Let me list some recent memoirs that I’d like to use as exam­ples in order to say more about memoir and cultural contact:

Henry Louis Gates’s Colored People is, as many of you will know, a memoir about growing up black in the 1950s and 60s in a mill town in West Virginia.

Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory is about a Mexican American’s relationship to language and questions of identity and empowerment through language.

Edward Said’s After the Last Sky is about Palestine as it exists in the writer’s memory and as it exists from the point of view of his position as a professor at Columbia University who is also an activist for Palestinian nationhood.

Alice Kaplan’s French Lessons is about a Jewish girl from upper middle-class and larely WASP Minnesota who develops an avid love of the French language and French culture.

Cathy N. Davidson’s Thirty Six Views of Mt. Fuji is about an American academic coming to terms with and “finding” herself in contemporary Japan.

I could go on, adding such notable writers of memoir as Eva Hoffman, Brent Staples, and so on. But even this brief list will allow me to make some points about memoir and cultural contact. First, I would point out the different levels at which “culture” is imagined in each of these books. The levels run a gamut from the relative specificity of Gates’s 1950s Piedmont, West Virginia, as represented by his family and friends, to the generalized idea of “the American” in Japan in Cathy Davidson’s memoir. A rule of thumb suggests itself: one’s sense of cultures within a culture fragments and multiplies the closer one is to that culture and the more time one spends in it. Davidson is aware, of course, that there are many groups within Japan: bururaki [social outcasts] and yazuka [gangsters], fellow academics and salarimen [businessmen], males and females, adults and children. Each of these groups makes an appearance in her book, but the broad con­trast of herself as an American woman against a generalized sense of Japan is often enough for her purpose, which is to repre­sent an outsider’s view of Japan that both aspires, and does not aspire, to replicate an insider’s view.

Gates, on the other hand, is writing about a society he knows well and indeed grew up in—the society that formed his first ideas about reality. Yet he writes from the double vantage point of being a child in West Virginia and being an adult who no longer lives there (in West Virginia, in the 50s and 60s). Indeed, the book is pervaded by a sense that, in a way, “there is no there there” anymore. Gates’s title, “Colored People” deliberately uses a word no longer used except in certain instances (like Gates’s book) to designate a time and culture that is also in the past. That culture still has points of connection with its modern day self and with other African-American and black cultures within the US. But the rules which governed Gates’s West Virginia were the rules of his parents’ generation; often, they just do not operate in the same way today, even when they persist.

Just sticking with these two books for a moment will allow me to make another point about memoir and cultural contact. Often the narrator of memoir, even if he or she speaks out of a particu­lar ethnicity, really represents hybrid ethnicities rather than a single one. Davidson is an American from Chicago obsessed with Japan. She is also of Polish, Jewish, Italian descent (the N. she uses as an initial stands for Notari). She was married for many years to a Canadian citizen—and all these cultures are part of her ethnicity by birth or affiliation. Gates is an African Ameri­can who writes with great eloquence about African-American scholarly and cultural issues (he has, for example, written won­derful pieces on Colin Powell and the O. J. Simpson verdict in The New Yorker). But he has been married a long time to a white woman of Anglo descent and has children of mixed racial her­itage. Indeed his book begins with a preface in the form of a let­ter to his two daughters. Although Gates does not dwell on the fact (indeed, he gives the information only indirectly), his daughters are the descendents of West Virginia blacks on the paternal side, and the descendents of West Virginia whites on the maternal side. Gates himself has taught at Cornell, Duke, and Harvard. He is a cultural hybrid, although the importance of “race” as a category in the United States tends to make his sense of identity as a black man strong and insistent. I will not belabor the point any further: the point is that cultural identity today is more than ever both likely to be and likely to be recog­nized by the writer of memoir as multiple, shifting, and at times even conflicted.

The hybrid nature of my identity was indeed a central point of my own foray into the writing of my memoir, Crossing Ocean Parkway. When I published that book under my full name, Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, I was doing an act of ethnic self-identification. My previous work as a scholar had always been published under the name Marianna Torgovnick, so that it was widely assumed that I was Slavic or Jewish, even though I always corrected those assumptions when they came to me. My book was largely about having, in effect, a composite ethnic identity. By birth, I have pure southern Italian-American roots and I have found these roots to be an extraordinarily strong part of who I am. But my marriage to a Jewish-American man has also become part of my cultural identity. My education into American academic culture, which has customs and ways of thinking of its own, is also part of who I am. So is having lived in the South after spending the first twenty-five years of my life in Brooklyn and the next five in Massachusetts.

Let me turn now to two other memoirs on my list: that by Richard Rodriguez and that by Edward Said, both of whom have appeared on the MacNeil Report on PBS and may be known to you this way, in addition to being known through their books. Rodriguez’s Hunger for Memory turns on his decision to leave a graduate program in English despite the lure of excellent posi­tions open to him as an Hispanic American under affirmative action. It records, but does not fully ironize, his subsequent rise to fame as a speaker against affirmative action programs and then as a writer more generally on American life.

Said wrote After the Last Sky to explore the condition of exile that had shaped his life and, one might add, his career. The book was written before the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, even before the Intifada. It urges Israelis and Arabs to stop their dance of demonization and hatred and recognize a common heritage of displacement.

Both these memoirs either record an act of political interven­tion (Rodriguez’s stand on affirmative action) or are conceived quite explicitly as political intervention (Said’s polemic for Palestinian recognition). They have controversial points to make about intercultural relations, ones that are likely to provoke dif­ferent responses from different readers. Rodriguez wants to claim that affirmative action policies are wrong; moreover, he wants to use his own life history as proof that English is the language of public life in the US and hence that any attempts to educate Hispanic children in Spanish is misguided at best and, at worst, damaging and prejudicial. Said wants to claim that relations between Israelis and Arabs are bad—a statement with which few would disagree; but he further wants to enlist his reader’s sympathy for Palestinians and to advance their claims for land—and both these claims would be rather more controversial.

These two memoirs are relatively clear examples of memoir as a zone of cultural contact. But they represent, I would suggest, only the furthest, and most political end of a continuum of mem­oirs that similarly have political goals, are motivated by cer­tain ideas about cultural contact, or find themselves, whether they anticipated it or not, in zones of cultural contact.

Now let me pick up the final example from the list of memoirs I have cited—Alice Kaplan’s French Lessons. One of the fasci­nating aspects of this book to me was how Kaplan’s seemingly arbitrary career choices turned out to be a direct heritage from her parents. Most specifically, her father, Sidney Kaplan, had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials; he died suddenly of a heart attack the night before Alice’s ninth birthday. Her profes­sional interest in French took—not so coincidentally, as it turned out—the form of a fascination with French fascists, more particu­larly the desire to make them speak, to make them expose them­selves, very much as a trial prosecutor might. In citing Kaplan’s book, I am not trying to suggest a form of biological or even fam­ily-based determinism. But I am definitely saying that one’s relationships with parents not only will typically become the subject matter of memoir but will often turn out to drive the mem­oir and the life it records. What is more, at some point, when one encounters one’s parents as an author, one will experience sur­prises and, in addition, one will encounter unexpected forms of cultural contact.

This was certainly true in my own memoir. As I have said, Crossing Ocean Parkway originated in my distress at a moment of cultural contact gone terribly wrong: I refer to the murder of Yusuf Hawkins on a Bensonhurst street in 1989. This sad event stimu­lated my first autobiographical writing; I have since learned that it was also the occasion for the founding of groups working to improve cultural relations in Bensonhurst. For me, then, the act of writing memoir was simultaneously a definitive entrance into the arena of cultural relations. Indeed, in various parts of Cross­ing Ocean Parkway, I address the following issues of cultural con­tact as they played out in my life: being Italian American; leav­ing Italian-American culture; having an idealized, stereo­typical image of Jews; being unfamiliar with certain decorums of Yankee culture; learning the ways of a college town; being caught up in a medical system that was unable to save my first child’s life; being a woman, a daughter, wife, and mother; and being a cultural critic. What I learned from writing and publishing this book is that I was not just writing about these zones of cultural contact—I was writing from within them because they were all inside of me. Writing memoir is a process of discovering oneself and unless you have been fostered by wolves, part of what there is to discover is your relationship to various human cultures and sub-cultures. The hybrid nature of my own cultural identity was a central theme in my memoir. What I also learned in writing Crossing Ocean Parkway is that the zones of cultural contact inside oneself (like those in the social world) are always inter­acting—and also always evolving and changing.

 

I would like to give an extended example, using the theme of parents and the writing of memoir, specifically my parents and the writing of my memoir. In fact, I’d like to cite a passage that talks about my parents to give you some idea of how I felt when I was writing Crossing Ocean Parkway and how I feel now that it is finished and out in the world. The two paragraphs I’m going to read describe what happened on August 23, 1989 (my younger daughter’s birthday) when my parents, who were visiting me in North Carolina at the time, heard the news about Yusuf Hawkins:

 

“Oh, no,” my father says when he hears the news about the shooting. Though he still refers to blacks as “coloreds,” he’s not really a racist and is upset that this innocent youth was shot in his neighborhood. He has no trouble acknowledging the wrongness of the death. But then, like all the news accounts, he turns to the fact, repeated over and over, that the blacks had been on their way to look at a used car when they encountered the hostile mob of whites. The explanation is right before him but, “Yeah,” he says, still shaking his head, “yeah, but what were they doing there. They didn’t belong.” The “they,” it goes without saying, refers to the blacks.

   Over the next few days, the TV news is even more disturbing. Rows of screaming Italians, lining the streets, many of them looking like my relatives. The young men wear undershirts and crosses dangle from their necks as they hurl curses. I focus especially on one woman who resembles almost completely my mother: stocky but not fat, mid-seventies but well preserved, full face showing only minimal wrinkles, ample steel-gray hair neatly if rigidly styled in a modified beehive hairdo left over from the six­ties. She shakes her fist at the camera, protesting the arrest of the Italian American youths in the neighborhood and the incursion of more blacks into Bensonhurst, protest­ing the shooting. I look a little nervously at my mother (the parent I resemble) but she has not even noticed the woman and stares impassively at the television.

 

As I wrote my essay, I was trying hard to be aware of different reactions within Bensonhurst to the murder, and indeed believed that there were different reactions, many of them as complex as my own. But I was also reacting to stereotypes in the news and on T.V., stereotypes I recognized as having at least some factual truth. And I was aware of my own relative distance from the events, a relative distance that my parents could not feel. My parents did not share the racial hatred on the T.V. screen; they would never have gone to protest rallies against blacks. But they also did not exactly see the blacks in the neighborhood as one of them, fellow citizens of Brooklyn. And that, of course, was the horrible source of the murder.

So there were zones of cultural conflict even among blood rela­tives, Italian Americans sitting around the kitchen table and in front of the T.V. That was my point as I wrote the passage. But reading it now, I can see other (and somewhat uncomfortable) points as well. I tried hard to be scrupulously fair to Bensonhurst; but I wonder now whether I did not take a little license in render­ing my parents. For example, I assumed my reaction to be differ­ent from my parents’—more objective, more sophisticated, even if we all perceived injustice to have taken place. In addition, I took care to show that my father verbalized his distress and emotions but I perceived my mother’s reaction to be “impassive.”

It is this gender difference between how I represent my father and mother that moved me most as I wrote this piece for Voices in Italian Americana. For to some extent, this tiny moment in my book played out cultural and gender dynamics that I probe and criticize in Crossing Ocean Parkway as a whole: Italian Ameri­cans have been, I say in my book, less active in the cultural arena than Jewish Americans, and sometimes even hostile to it—espe­cially for females: that is why I identified with Jewish Ameri­cans. Beyond that, I talk in Crossing Ocean Parkway about how, in my family’s life, my father represented a link to the larger culture of Manhattan, “the city,” more than my mother did. But in an uncomfortable way, in the passage I have cited, I repli­cated the same patterns I was protesting. As a female growing up in Bensonhurst, I had felt excluded unfairly from the social world of culture. Yet I assumed my mother to be “impassive” about political issues while my father was not.

In writing the passage I have just read, in writing Crossing Ocean Parkway as a whole, I was consciously entering cultural contact zones and I knew some of the borders: indeed I had used the name of one important border—Ocean Parkway—in my title. People from New York or (more specifically) from Brooklyn, will know immediately, as I do, the differences between neighbor­hoods like Bensonhurst and the Midwood area around Brooklyn College; between Manhattan Beach and Coney Island; between Kings Plaza and Fulton Street. But, in addition, I was rethink­ing—and ultimately reevaluating—my relationship to my Ital­ian-American roots, and to my parents. None of these processes stopped during the writing of Crossing Ocean Parkway—and none of them has stopped yet.

If memoir is cultural contact zone, its borders are partly un­known because they keep expanding. In fact, when I added an Af­terword to the paperback edition of my book (to be published in December 1996), I added an essay on my mother, probing a possi­bility I was not ready to consider while writing the book itself: the possibility that what I had long imagined as conflict be­tween me and my mother over the issue of culture might really have been a shared resentment. My mother, I knew, had never had a formal education. But now I see that she was not “impas­sive” about this fact from her past. In fact, as I discuss in my Af­terword, I have recently learned that she is deeply resentful about never having gone to school because she was sent (at age two) to Calabria, living there on an isolated farm until she re­turned to New York at age sixteen. As Italian-American females, my mother and I were both denied access to the instruments of power. In the 1920s, in Calabria, she did not have the means to undo, as I did, the withholding of education and knowledge. But, like me, she felt aggrieved by subordinate status.

As I think back over my experiences since publishing Crossing Ocean Parkway, I have been more and more aware of memoir as a contact zone—and in ways beyond the shifting knowledge of self and family that I have just described. As I wrote Crossing Ocean Parkway, for example, I became increasingly aware that a zone of cultural contact was being created between Bensonhurst past and Bensonhurst present. As I finished the book, I felt lucky to be living in New Jersey as a visiting professor for six months: it gave me the chance to revisit and sink into the neighborhood in ways that were not always possible on more intermittent visits. As I did so, I became aware not just of continuities with the past (which were certainly present) but of many changes that were of larger scale than I had fully registered when I had visited Brooklyn more briefly. There was, for example, the influx into Bensonhurst and adjacent neighborhoods of Asian Americans and the changeover in local shops from Jewish or Italian ownership and products to Chinese or Korean. On one visit, we stumbled into a new Chinatown in Boro Park, and this astonished me.

There was also the revitalization of the Jewish population by large-scale immigration from Russia and the appearance of Cyrillic on local signs. There were new forms of identification be­tween Italian and Hispanic populations rather different from the separation that had prevailed in my youth. There was in­creasing diversity within black communities, as families from Africa and the Caribbean became an increasingly important part of Brooklyn too. Brooklyn was not, as this overview might sug­gest, becoming one big bubbling celebration of ethnic and racial diversity. There were still tensions and social injustice—some­times it seemed worse than ever. In fact, as I wrote the talk on which this essay is based, I became aware of issues of proprietor­ship with regard to Brooklyn and its social history. To put it bluntly, I am a daughter of Brooklyn, who lived there until 1975 but has lived elsewhere ever since. Surely there are people still living in Brooklyn who know more about cultural contact in Brooklyn than I possibly could—and some of them may even re­sent my addressing the topic of ethnic and racial relations in Brooklyn at all.

The response to Crossing Ocean Parkway made me aware of other ways that memoir sets up both predictable and unpredi­ctable zones of cultural contact. Women responded strongly and well to the book—as I would have expected—since I conceived of it as a book about multiple female points of self-identification. But some women connected with the Italian Americanness of the book. Others with the Jewishness. Others through their own memories of Irish or German-American culture. Others with its evocation of academic culture. Others with its readings of The Godfather or Camille Paglia. There were lots of zones of cultural contact within the category of the “female,” not all of them overlapping.

Nor did men feel excluded, as I feared they might. Some of the warmest responses I got were from Southern men who vi­brated to my evocation of Italian-American culture as something they recognized from growing up in the American South. I got a few really hostile letters or reviews written by men—be it said with regret, with one exception, these few were all written by Italian-American men who felt I had been disrespectful to my heritage. But I also got a lovely letter from an Italian man who had known my friend, Dick Chernick (an important character in one chapter of the book) and filled me in on some information I had never known: when he was a young man in the Navy, Dick studied to be converted from Judaism to Catholicism—and that made sense, given the spirituality of the man I had known. And I got many warm responses from Italian men, like Robert Viscusi, an active figure in the Italian-American literary world.

It was a special thing—and I would have to say a nervous thing—to return to Brooklyn College and talk on memoir and cul­tural contact, and to begin the reflections that I have developed here. I took summer school courses at Brooklyn College when I was an undergraduate. As a graduate student, I learned Latin there with the unforgettable Allen Mandelbaum. From 1968–1971 I lived on East 43 St. and Avenue J and walked a mile from “the junction” every night when I returned from graduate classes at Columbia University, often stopping at a supermarket on Flat­bush Avenue along the way. So I felt the meaning of memoir as cultural contact zone acutely as I wrote this material. In fact, I think of the place and people for whom my talk was written—and the people who are reading it in essay form today—as a part of myself, a part of my personal list of contact zones.

 

Works Cited

 

Davidson, Cathy N. Thirty Six Views of Mt. Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan. New York: Dutton, 1993.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Colored People: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Kaplan, Alice. French Lessons: A Memoir. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, An Autobiography. New York: Bantam, 1983.

Said, Edward. After the Last Sky. New York: Pantheon, 1986.

Torgovnick, Marianna De Marco. Crossing Ocean Parkway: Read­ings by an Italian American Daughter. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.