Senior Citizen Adventures


PEOPLE PROGRAM ADVENTURES, SPRING 2020



"To imagine the spirit of poetry is much like imagining the shape and size of knowing.  It is a kind of resurrection light; it is the tall ancestor spirit who has been with me since the beginning, or a bear or a hummingbird."



Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave: A Memoir (2012), p. 164



In slantwise tribute to indigenous peoples of the Americas, a few People Program senior citizens and I shall begin ADVENTURES IN ETHNIC AMERICAN LITERATURE in Spring 2020.  It is an exercise in making a culture of reading, an experiment in seeing, hearing, and learning from the representative voices of five ethnic groups.  Old age is defiant.  We shall have joy of reading, reading truly, reading through the lens of our life histories.  Ishmael Reed's efforts to promote pragmatic multiculturalism are foundational; they are hidden dimensions in our civic discourses as we refer but sparingly to theory and maximize practice.



We shall read

1.       Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

2.       Maurice Carlos Ruffin, We Cast a Shadow

3.       Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

4.       Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

5.       Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter

in thematic clusters: the earth and acquisition of knowledge; coming of age ---the middle passage from birth to death; moral and ethical issues in society. The clusters direct attention to many other themes, to what  W. E. B. DuBois meditated on in The Souls of Black Folk, to  flaws D. H. Lawrence illuminated in Studies in Classic American Literature, to possibilities Toni Morrison explored in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.  We'll orient our adventures with two questions ---WHAT IS AMERICAN? and WHO ARE AMERICANS?  Our questions are open-ended.  They ordain responses.  The preclude the bad faith of certain answers.



Indeed, we will try to articulate radical conservative, centrist, and liberal points of view in civic discourse, rub ideas against one another until a fire bursts forth.  We shall argue about the principles of democracy as they can manifest themselves from ethnic perspectives.  We want to know how we are threatened by ascending neo-fascism, by the horrors of spreading insanity.  Most of us are comfortable with symbiosis between politics and art, because we make the journey toward enlightenment.



We urge those outside the circle of People Program to make their own adventures in ethnic American literatures.







Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            November 11, 2019




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