Dear Friends And Fans, We Are At The Finale.

 While my own awareness is not much expanded by this seminar, perhaps I can help to expand another seminar-attendee's understanding. My task would be easier done if the other would ask the right questions, but asking the right questions requires a wisdom of “What Must Be Known” to be known. Therefore, I must also take a bit of the part of a guide, putting on display points that I believe could have garnered a greater amount of interest. I shall not pretend to be a guru, but there is value in my life having been experienced as a traveler, observing locals of various locales as well as other travelers far from home (and occasionally (Read: “Frequently.”) missing the mark, culturally, as a natural outcome of this condition). Prithee, do not to find my arrogance here repugnant. No, really, I insist.

My contact zones have been in countries, wilderness, schools, and businesses, and have put me in the way of other people's business. I have been personally involved in crossing into someone's home arena and making it a contact zone. Sometimes my contact zones could easily become conflict zones because the boundaries involved are raised on somebody's moral grounds, whether on mine or on the other party's. In such cases, I try to indicate that perhaps our time and energy would be better spent at one of our other borders. The most frustrating times for planning construction of bridges is when I realize that a bridge is hidden behind a boundary of the cunning language of moral scare tactics despite the border itself actually being amoral. My contact zones chase me around, because I am a wandering individual by upbringing: There is not an established normalcy that I can completely adhere to in any location for long, just facades to hide behind.

Griffin, in Black Like Me, had once had a common history that was acknowledged by the majority of people in his country. Then he altered himself and got treated in some ways like a beast. He found that he had not merely inverted his skin tone: The contact zones that he returned to and went through had an inverse relationship to him compared to what they originally meant to his kind of person. The people around him who identified with him on a superficial level did not recognize that they were actually a foreign contact zone for Griffin, and the people who should have treated Griffin somewhat familiarly felt like he was invading their space, forcing a contact zone into their personal bubble. He became someone who had to rely on his ability to blend in rather than truly fit in in order to survive as a social creature...much like me.

Joe's house in Keesha's House is a contact zone of people of differing types and yet also the same type. The type they all are is at-risk teenagers in need. Because of their commonality, their common need, they get along. But Joe's house is more of a refuge than a contact zone. People become familiar to each other naturally by seeing each other around and by frequently interacting, and thus their differences become less important or apparent to each other. If this were not so, then a teen would soon leave. Yes, they might not have elsewhere to go, but that simply forces them to use their youthful adaptability, malleability, and hardiness to weather one another until their sense of abrasion is worn away.

 Familiarity crafts a boundary into a border, so the more time someone spends in a contact zone, the less of an alien experience it is compared to the first encounter people there had. For example, having gone many times this semester to the Deaf Christian Fellowship, I have become familiar to its members and they have become familiar to me. However, their church meetings remain a contact zone for me. This is because their culture is still not actually my own culture despite my becoming comfortable among them. Even when I adopt some of their mannerisms and customs, I am not fully assimilated. By saying I am not assimilated, I am not saying I am not accepted. I am quite welcome among my Deaf friends every Sunday. But no matter how much I may choose to make and achieve in making myself the same as members of the Deaf community, I will still be someone with a very unique past within that group. No matter what the appearance, an individual brought in from the outside still thinks like an outsider. Over time, the differences that separate people's ways of thinking and perceiving the world might erode via the effects of formal and informal (re)education, but the foundation of this experiential boundary will always exist (well, maybe not in the case of amnesia and total brainwashing, but I'm not equipped to discuss this outlier within this essay, and it is honestly a topic that would require a few research papers to be covered justly). People will bridge this boundary more and more as time goes on, and the more one feels at home among a new group, the more s/he will try to bring the resources from his/her side of the boundary to the group's side. But learning to actually think the way one makes oneself look and act to fit in is a long process full of mistakes and yearning to relapse. The leopard may change his spots and the man may change his skin, but it is not as easy as Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories portray the process. One can behold another's appearance and imaginatively assume that one can perceive all the history and motivations that went into crafting every detail of that person, to perceive what makes one unique and yet the same as everyone, as Richard Blanco does in eloquent words in poems such as Mother Picking Produce and Mexican Almuerzo in New England, fancying a picture other people's lives and thought-life as if their memories were his also. But, honestly, these poems use the mental skill of fabrication, the crazy cousin of memory. 

In Black Like Me, Griffin also falls prey to this false connection by conceiving a whole backstory for the character that he is becoming as he gazes at his new reflection. However, Griffin quickly saw that he was still clearly camouflaged poorly after his Sci-Fi-worthy transformation, and even when he made further adjustments to his costume and performance, he did not automatically gain the opinions and subconscious attitudes of his new “brethren.” Yes, Griffin describes a shift inside his own mind when he occurring had to receive the same treatment as Black Americans for a while before he could honestly empathize with the perspective they espoused. Even after he had adopted many of the characteristics and perspectives that marked Black culture in America, he quickly and easily resumed his old ways once he brought his “whiteness” back into the light. In the same way, the homosexual character Harris of Keesha's House found that he could no longer hide his sexual orientation under a heterosexual shroud. Before Harris came out of the closet, nobody knew that they were constantly creating a contact zone of an entirely different moral notion and modus operandi regarding romantic desire and the intimate interaction of bodies. What both Griffin and Harris discovered was that revealing the spirit that invigorated them caused many within the group that once identified with them to consider them traitors. Ironic that people can get along fine and function like a unit until one speaks their mind.

Regarding getting ideas out in the open, I had been holding onto a somewhat unexamined and undeveloped notion that being included or “allowed in” by a group was probably all that was needed for “membership.” While this is somewhat true, it is only the minimum requirement. Being fully involved and fully acknowledged requires more: More in common with the others members, more of the same motives, more commitment to the group's goals and rules, more capability for producing the same ideas and lines of reasoning. A member might avoid being an outcast despite not thinking and feeling and experiencing life the same way as the rest of the group, but holding onto the ways of an outsider will pull that member to the fringe of the group. The closer to a group's defining border a member is, the more likely s/he will feel “on edge” among the majority of the group with which s/he fits in best or must cast in his/her lot.

People who cross borders into a foreign environment need to have a “safe-house” to run to when the sheer relentless strangeness becomes overwhelming. People of a subculture (rather than an outside culture), or even just plain “uniquely unlike” group members, who live like a country locked within another country find that a border or boundary can suddenly arise from almost anywhere, catching them off guard and causing an exhaustion or injury that their mainstream “fellows” cannot see or understand. Therefore, these people need to have a safe-house, too. These are the types who may disappear inexplicably on a daily basis only to reappear not very long afterward as if nothing unusual is going on. They tend to have trouble explaining their need for a refuge and may have some trepidation about revealing any details about its existence, nature, or location. Unlike someone who is clearly an outsider to the group, they cannot say “That's what people in my group do” because they are talking to people who are in their group yet don't do the same things, and they can't wave them away with a dismissive “It's none of your business, you wouldn't understand” because that's what an outsider does and the person doesn't want to be fully excluded. I can say this sort of thing about this type of “Inside-outsider” (or “Border-lander”) because the characters who flock to Joe's house in Keesha's House are this type, and I am as well...although for reasons differing from the characters in that book. Then again, each of them has reasons differing from those of the next character.

Now to speak a bit about myself: My “safe-house” in most circumstances has often been a restroom. What a fantastic coincidence that the word itself indicates a retreat from the outside world, someplace in which one can relax no matter what the greater surroundings may be. Granted, the relaxation is meant to indicate a relaxation of the bowels, but the fact remains that a location set aside for something that most of the public around the world agrees it does not want to see is a refuge one can count on for temporary social relief, as unorthodox as it might seem to some people. I couldn't always count on rules for privacy to be the same everywhere I went, but the boundaries surrounding the facilities that facilitate excrement at one's discretion tend to socially and physically solid. Thus, restrooms are ideal places to prevent an invasive form of bridge-building.

The concepts I have been talking about in this essay are not particularly new to me, and the important information covered in class tended to run along the same lines I've already been fed for years. Black Like Me was the only written work that gave me much to look at with intellectual interest, which I respected for its depth even if the subject matter was an old hat on a dead horse for me. At the time it was written, though, it was still touchy material to create and set loose upon the American public, so it reads as such. Plus, the approach that Griffin took was quite unique for his time and even for our time! He truly dove into his research with body and soul, and thus emerged with a prize worth displaying and discussing. Perhaps he should mount his skin on a wall, as a trophy and as a symbol of how he bridged a boundary with great daring and dedication. I, ahem, mean that in the most respectful, admiring, and poetic, albeit sociopathic, sense possible.

But I ask: Was it enough? When people are still forced to retreat into safe-houses as happens in Keesha's House, has every boundary been bridged? Are not the same principles of bigotry still functioning in the psychological frame of the Human Being, so that it will react with hostility towards its own kind that it sees as being of unlike kind based on slight variations? Is there not oppression of people occurring categorically even if or when racist attitudes are mostly dealt with? How do we know when a border is too open or too closed? Will people only stop to consider such questions when people perish trying to bypass a vigilant force protecting the border, as in Luis Urrea wrote about in The Devil's Highway? A shame we cannot regress to childhood to learn at what point we twist our mentalities so unhealthily, then reach around and return ourselves to a state of innocence. Alas, that is but useless idealism put in a statement: People have never been fully innocent, and we like our boundaries.

Deaf Christian Fellowship

A Deaf church. Can a fellowship of about 15 people be called a church? Is a church without a defined “Mission Statement” still a church? What if pastoral duties are undertaken by a man with a degree in history rather than one who graduated from seminary? What if one of teachers and leaders is a woman? What if...what if the members of the church are Deaf?!

If you had little to no problem answering “Yes” to these questions (I won't insist on unconditional affirmative answers; Feel free to trail qualifiers after each “Yes”) then welcome to to the Deaf church located on the campus of Goshen College. Please note that “Deaf church” contains a capital letter following the format of Deaf Culture's rule regarding written reference to itself.

Wait, what?

“Wait, what” what? Were you unaware that “Deaf” identifies a culture as well as a sensory state? Well, now you know. Anyway, the Deaf church on Goshen College's campus is officially named the “Deaf Christian Fellowship,” although I have not seen that name being used by any of the actual members when referring to it in conversation. I suppose the members and attendees don't feel much need for using a formal name for their fellowship.

According to Phil Harden Jr., the presiding pastor, known churches for the Deaf are rather sparse in the area, the closest being in South Bend and in Fort Wayne, and at least the former of these is “having trouble staying afloat.” Perhaps these churches draw most of the Deaf Christians in the tens of miles range, thus accounting for the small membership of the Deaf Christian Fellowship. Or perhaps the Deaf community close to Goshen is not spiritually inclined towards following Jesus Christ. As the Pastor put it: “You could say that threatening the survival [of the Deaf church] is the Deaf people themselves...if they don't come. Social people will go bowling to basketball tournaments...they'd rather go there. But there are Deaf people who like church.”

So perhaps there are Deaf Christians who don't realize that they can get to a church that they can be edified by more comfortably and personally than some might experience in a Hearing church. From what I have seen of the interactions of this Deaf church's members with each other and with the Hearing members of the church that houses theirs (the Deaf church meets in a room in the building used by College Mennonite Church), the Deaf church members have longer, more informative, and more expressive conversations with people possessing ASL skills than they do with people who can only speak a language (and hope that the Deaf all lip-read proficiently).

Deaf-to-Deaf conversations among members of this fellowship can flow at breakneck speeds between people 10 to 20 feet apart, and someone not used to knowing what pauses, gazes, and glances indicate that someone else is signing can find him-or-herself worrying about whiplash as s/he tries to not lose track of the topic or any new information. If someone who uses ASL but is not a fluent signer is involved, the natural signers usually slow down (somewhat...they could still be too fast for the newbie) or repeat signs when asked. However, this grace necessitates that the Hearing person attempting to be a part of the conversation be accomplished at at least the rudimentary level of ASL. Simply signing “Hello,” “Good Morning,” or “Thank You” is appreciated, but only the bare minimum of engaging members of the Deaf church in their own language.

Lip-reading and speaking are not common skills in this Deaf church, with Pastor Phil being the only Deaf member I noticed regularly using voiced words. This seems to be an extension of his overall welcoming attitude towards visitors, not wanting anyone bold enough to venture into the Deaf World to be alienated. The rest of the fellowship is equally welcoming, and an English-to-ASL interpreter is even available for unskilled signers in order to ensure that visitors are not missing out, which is more praise I can say for this fellowship than for some other church groups' attempts at multilingual provision. However, I hope that, regardless of signing ability, the Hearing visitor gets familiarized enough with American Deaf Culture to be comfortable with behaviors such as frequent touching (including hugging), hand waving (not limited strictly to signing), and table-thumping (strong enough to be felt through the surface). A little knowledge of Deaf Culture would do the mostly-unaware Hearing World some good, and more even more, much like how, to finish with another Phil-quote: "The knowledge of God is good for Deaf people...They just don't know it!"

1 Local Business & 6 Ounces

The South Side Soda Shop functions as a contact zone not in the sense that it attracts people who have the specific goal of mingling but rather because it provides a service, product, site , and ambiance that people appreciate and want to have access to. The South Side Soda Shop does not force customers at different tables to interact with each other, but if the patrons care to nose into the business (or leisure) of their neighbors, the only ones stopping them are themselves.
The main point of going to The South Side Soda Shop boils down to eating good food in an interesting place. The main point of running it is to ensure an income, and probably more specifically to ensure an income from a source that provides a fulfillment of purpose for the possession of a particular set of skills, skills that make a diner heaven for people who enjoy that sort of restaurant. I make this supposition as a result of seeing some display of pride in the unique characteristics of The South Side Soda Shop. This does not require that the diner be explicitly defined as a contact zone between people of various categories. The people who run The South Side Soda Shop are not professional event planners. They just allow people to meet up should they wish to do so, provided that the customers are actual customers, not loiterers. I did not see any parties during my visits, nor did I see any info posted about chartering the facility or having a party hosted there, so I assume celebrations are not an official service of The South Side Soda Shop. It's not exactly a loud nor even slightly crazy locale...I mean, shoot, their jukebox is eviscerated.  What the diner supplies is seating, sustenance, servers, and a seriously impressive old-fashioned atmosphere. That's about all. To be able to do its job , the business entity comprises itself of individuals who fulfill the roles required to ensure the whole operation has no holes in it. The diner has waitresses, cooks, and a woman who seems to be occupied with being the hostess, receptionist, and the cashier all in one. The employees seem to be mostly white and female, although most (if not all) of the cooks are male, one of whom is also black. I suspect there is more of traditional cultural expectations dictating the gender division into female waitresses and male cooks, and that the white saturation is due to more of a "Things White People Like" sort of phenomenon rather than any inherent racism. Part of the evidence is that, well, a racist employer wouldn't be likely to tolerate even one member of a despised group within his/her establishment. Secondly, the customer base is primarily White, and none of the items on the diner's menu are of the type typically labeled "ethnic." So it seems to me that The South Side Soda Shop is simply a highly specific "genre" of restaurant, and just as an entire genre of books can be shunned by people who grew up with a different genre. On the set of The South Side Soda Shop, burgers and hoagies are the stars, especially those with the Philadelphian flair of the diner's owner. However, in the world of burgers, The South Side Soda Shop does not have competitive costs nor rival swiftness to some of the greasier joints in the area. This is not to say that the prices are unreasonable nor that the service is sluggish. The South Side Soda Shop just doesn't specialize in franchised fast food. Quick and cheap is to be found at the "local" McDonald's. But suppose that someone wants to at either a place with a true local vibe or a place with food that makes them feel like they're eating in a particular city. This hypothetical person need not be torn apart by indecision, because The South Side Soda Shop fulfills both of these wishes. This diner will appeal to appeal to a crowd that wants to feel like they're eating in a wholesome home-like setting, and the diner will also appeal to a crowd that is driven by a desire for mild amounts of adventure, a crowd comprised of the kind of people that get a kick out of being permitted to intrude into the inner sanctum of somewhere that has a history or perspective separate from their own...that's my guess, at least. I didn't go around asking people while they're eating. That would be breaking a boundary I could clearly see around each table within the first ten minutes of being in the restaurant. The elderly people there did not come to party or debate or any of that, and neither did the middle-aged couples that brought their young children. And neither did any of the few people who did not belong to the two previously mentioned demographics. In fact, people flocked to the privacy of booth tables, and if unfortunate enough to be the overflow forced to the open area tables, they kept to themselves as much as possible. I had better success making eye-contact with the backs of their chairs than with the people themselves. There was a counter with high stools within chatting proximity to the cooks, such as would be expected in most American diners, which nobody ever seated themselves at. But the environment was not hostile nor antisocial, just private. The invisible walls around each occupied table were typically respected by all the customers, with only one or two "violations" that I saw, and even those instances were fairly quick, and I never saw anyone dare to seat themselves at someone's table without an invitation. However, I did notice people watching other people. Observing other customers without engaging them seemed to be a general part of appreciating the environment of The South Side Soda Shop. This struck me as the way people make contact with creatures in an aquarium: Safely from the other side of sturdy glass, with only the staff being qualified to handle actual interactions.
It's a nice place, y'all should go there if you're its sort of crowd. Or even if you're not. Everyone would probably be pleased to see you either way.

POETKER

Audrey Poetker's works break all the way past the “personal space” kept between people, reaching into the emotional core and “thought space” of poet herself, allowing a reader alien to a would-be mother's point of view to see how it works and to get a sense of how always having such a perspective forced upon her must feel.

Audrey Poetker takes an approach that is intended to lend readers her rare insight into the feelings of a woman desperate for a seemingly impossible conception. Readers unaccustomed to blatant references to the act of sex and to secondary sex traits can feel uncomfortable with Poetker's poems, and readers who are particularly finicky about punctuation might be put off by the disintegration of it all in the last section of “Symbols of Fertility” and in the near-entirety of “Fallen Woman.” But this is poetry, so the poet is allowed to be a little more liberal with her use of language and with the personal content of her pieces. Poetker's prevailing themes are strongly concerned with the treatment of the body, what benefits one's body ought to be able to have or give, what others expect of how one uses one's body, and what functional role one's body ties to one's identity in relation to its interaction with the natural order. If someone cannot handle the heat of the sexual imagery inevitable for such a topic, then s/he should leave the kitchen where Poetker's poems are cooked up. While parts of her poems touch upon the sexual, they are actually more sorrowful works than erotic poems. As the blurb about Poetker's poetry on turnstonepress.com clarifies, Poetker is writing about the body, yes, but more specifically about the "body's emptiness." 

In “Symbols of Fertility,” the point of the poem is to convey the deep emotional sinking Poetker feels due to her body's failure to cooperate with her desire for offspring. Since this mourning is directly linked to her attempts at reproduction, inclusion of some sexual imagery is natural. Managing to avoid mention of absolutely anything related to sexual characteristics would be a tricky dance that could all too easily result in a troublesomely clumsy and confusing communication. However, if the reader believes that the point of this poem is to be erotic, then the reader is failing to cross the bridge that the poet has crafted for our edification. The reader would either neglect to really read and examine the poem out of trepidation that s/he was crossing a taboo boundary, or s/he would blindly cross the wrong border into a land unmapped by the poem, thus becoming unable to identify the meaningful markers in the textual landscape.

“Fallen Women” and “My kingdom is of this world” are also poems that regard the behavior of people who are driven by desires. “Fallen Women” is melancholic in mood, saturated in ambiguity and hinting at a community's “secret” history, possibly related to promiscuity or to abuse. The imagery lying within it could be taken as references to sexual lifestyles or to death. Perhaps both are meant to be be seen in a reader's interpretation of the poem. The poetic device most obviously functioning as a bridge in this poem is the Point Of View, which is in the Second Person. For a reader like me, who is not a perfect match-up for that which is described in the poem, the declaration that "you" are experiencing the action and emotion of the poem forces the reader to cross over into an alien territory. My mind immediately responds with "No, this not my life history" and "No, I wouldn't do nor feel that." But because the poem insists that I did, I ask myself what someone like me would have to go through to be the person being described in the poem. Thus, I end up feeling a little more like there is common ground for the character in the poem (possibly a younger version of the poet herself) and myself to share.

“My kingdom is of this world” is the one poem of the three covered here that has a ray of cheerfulness in it.   This could be a result of the poet's ability in this poem to step outside herself more so than in the other two poems. She seems to have be comfortable with using Biblical allusions in a way that is a turnabout of the original Biblical meaning. This creates a bridge between her old life in a Christian family to her later one as a nominal Christian (A Capella tells that she describes herself as only culturally Mennonite). The very title of the poem is an inversion of what someone familiarized with the Bible expects, which could be a way to get Christians who have no troubles with faith in God to feel some connection with someone who does. Emily Dougherty provides an explanation of "Symbols of Fertility" being the outpouring of a woman who was "deceived to think that if she prayed hard enough, and had strong faith, she would be able to reproduce." Having moved from accepting the religion of others to rejecting it, she needs to find a way to show her perspective in a way people the members of her former in-group can sympathize with. Therefore, she phrases parts of this poem to make the twist or shift of her perspective easy to spot. So the Biblical allusions are a bridge from a past form of life to her current one. This poem is also her construction of a bridge for herself to the lives of others and onwards to life itself. She is able to able to appreciate other couples' joys vicariously, seeing that there is good in the world even if she cannot have all of the goodness herself. There is irony in the  fact that the bridge she builds gets her to a mental vantage point that lets her look the things which are not at all far from her home on a farm (those of us who read the "About The Poet" page in A Capella: Mennonite Voices In Poetry know that she lives and presumably writes her poems on a farm) without a grim attitude. She appreciates the more basic wonders in life, such as the produce grown in gardens. Or rather, these are the wonders of life, and in that light the fact that Poetker will take advantage of still moments to gaze at things that grow is indicative that she remains fascinated by the ability to create life. Yet this poem does not display an envious obsession; Poetker gives readers no reason to believe that her "rapture" is not a positive experience for her. Perhaps she wrote this poem as a way to demonstrate that she has matured and moved past the boundary of grief over personal inability to a destination of loving life's conquest as a whole.

Works Cited:

"Making Strange to Yourself." Making Strange to Yourself. Turnstone Press, n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2013. <http://www.turnstonepress.com/making-strange-to-yourself.html>.

Hostetler, Ann. A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry. [S.l.]: University of Iowa, 2003. Print.

Dougherty, Emily. "Interpretation - Mennonite Poetry." Interpretation - Mennonite Poetry. Goshen College, n.d. Web. 01 Apr. 2013. <http://www.goshen.edu/mennonitepoetry/Poets/Audrey_Poetker/Interpretation>.