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English professor Betsy Huang and student Johnny Siever explore the racial and ethnic tensions revealed in the works of American writers Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Sherman Alexie. |
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Meet the Researchers:
It couldn't be any better—where books and music collide
Interview with Johnny Siever
Harmonica player Johnny Siever '05 makes music on campus and around Worcester with fellow Clarkie Zach Galen. While Galen used an Anton Fellowship to explore the link between jazz and philosophy, English major Siever is using his senior honors thesis to understand the connection between the blues and two contemporary American novels. In a recent conversation, summarized below, Siever reflects on the craft of writing, his internship at Rounder Records, and the way his thesis helps him understand the blues in a larger cultural context.
The blues is a musical form associated with the African-American experience. How did you come to do an honors thesis on the blues as expressed in written form, and in relation to Native American culture?
For one of my English classes I was asked to choose a book that I wanted to examine in detail. I play harmonica and wanted to choose something related to the blues. I selected Albert Murray's first novel, Train Whistle Guitar, a somewhat autobiographical, coming of age story about a black boy growing up in Alabama. Much of Murray's writing deals with the blues and what it means in the context of African-American culture and for Americans in general.
Later, for a short story class, I read Sherman Alexie's collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. That collection was followed by his first novel, Reservation Blues, which describes what happens when famed bluesman Robert Johnson arrives on the Spokane Indian Reservation and leaves his guitar to misfit storyteller Thomas Builds-the-fire. Reservation Blues, like Train Whistle Guitar, utilizes the blues as a tool to make a larger point about culture, but in a Native American context.
When I was invited to do an honors thesis in English, I kept returning to Train Whistle Guitar and Reservation Blues. I knew they utilized the blues similarly, and I thought about how I could discuss that using both cultural and literary analysis. The blues is a cultural form of expression, but in the case of these texts the blues is also being used as a literary device. As I've been writing the thesis, I've continued getting into the blues, not just on the level of enjoyment, but from more of an academic perspective. It's cool to see what the blues means in a larger context and from different cultural perspectives.
In regard to the blues and Native American culture, they actually go together well. The blues developed as part of the response to the African American experience of oppression. Native Americans share with African Americans that experience of being oppressed by a dominant white culture.
What have you come to understand about the blues in the course of doing your thesis?
In my thesis, I'm describing a "blues process" that the novels' characters go through. Murray refers to "the blues as such," which is his term for the raw, emotional, and botheration-based feelings that characterize the blues. When those feelings are triggered, the person experiences a moment of recognition. Then, in that moment of recognition, the person defines what those blues are, and is able to confront them. That confrontation is usually a performance, which can take the form of music or a manual task. The performance allows the person to become immersed in the troubling emotion, work through it, and keep going.
A book called The Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha has helped me understand the way a colonized and colonizing culture interact. Bhabha describes how the colonizing culture is mimicked by the colonized culture, which he sees as compliant, but also subversive. The blues is a vehicle for commenting on-in a subtle way-the dominant culture. It's really about the inability to express feelings explicitly because of the circumstances that someone has put you in. Bhabha explains that when mimicry takes place, a gap is created, because the colonized culture isn't able to mimic the colonizing culture exactly. The thing I'm trying to get at is that the blues is that gap. It's the element that remains distinct from the colonizing culture. In that space the oppressed group is able to comment and endure.
Do you think a person can experience or express authentic blues if he or she isn't part of an oppressed culture? Certainly, many people will have felt oppressed as individuals, or hemmed in some way, by their own particular circumstances.
It's been said that you have to be black to play the blues. I don't agree. To me, Reservation Blues illustrates that the blues works cross culturally. The blues allows people from a variety of cultures to address certain kinds of issues and problems, to work through and get beyond them.
Even though Murray's and Alexie's books are set in different cultural spaces, the main characters in both books are enduring periods of growth and change and learning how to navigate obstacles. That process transcends culture. I think the ultimate test of authenticity is whether participating in the blues makes you feel better.
Can you talk about the difference between doing your own independent project and learning in a classroom setting?
Some English courses are process driven; that is, they focus on the "how-to" of writing-theory, sentence structure, etc. I would rather deal with an idea, something that I want to focus on, and learn the writing process as I'm going. And that's what's happening with my thesis.
I can get frustrated with the writing process. Some people think I can just sit down and spend my two hours each day and get to where I want. That doesn't happen. Sometimes I'll sit down and write a few sentences, and it just isn't happening. Other times I'll start to write, and it's like riding a wave. I've learned to just stay on the wave until I fall off. Then right when it stops, you know. Things like that I don't think I would have picked up on in a class.
In doing the thesis I'm learning how I work, in addition to how the writing process works. Having a personal connection to the subject matter makes learning the process of becoming a better writer and a better student more accessible and more enjoyable. And working with my thesis advisor, Professor Betsy Huang, is great because she's really open to letting me figure out the way I go through the process.
You mentioned that you've been taking a writing course newly offered this semester called Writing Out Loud, offered by playwright and theater professor Gino DiIorio and Writing Center Director Anne Geller. How is that working out for you?
In Writing Out Loud we write non-fiction essays, read them out loud every week, and comment on each other's work. From this course I've realized that reading out loud helps me think differently about written text. It's made writing my thesis easier in some ways by showing me different ways of working. I've started to enjoy writing the thesis more than I had initially hoped I would. It's a cool class.
It's also a great class because it brings together two different approaches to writing-Gino brings the playwright's perspective, and Anne that of the more academic writer and essayist. They complement each other, not only in personality, but also through their experience and intensity as writers.
I understand you're completing an internship at Rounder Records in Cambridge.
Yes. Rounder is as a major label for bluegrass music. One of its founders, Marion Leighton-Levy, graduated from Clark in 1970. Marion is very much a Clarkie, very much an intense, intellectual, and academic person, while at the same time being very free and open.
I'm working in Rounder's new publishing department that consists of just one person. As a result, I have the benefit of one on one mentoring. I'm learning about all the steps involved in putting out a book. For me, working at Rounder is an intersection of music and books. That's really what I'm working on in my thesis-the place where books and music collide. I'm also realizing that there are a lot of parallels between what I'm experiencing during this internship and what Albert Murray's main character, Scooter, went through.
It turns out that Rounder puts out some music of particular interest to me. Zach Galen gave me a blues memoir called Mr. Satan's Apprentice, written by Adam Gussow, a harmonica player and English professor at the University of Mississippi. Gussow played with a Harlem guitarist named Mr. Satan. They put out a few albums on a label called Flying Fish, which is an imprint of Rounder Records!
Also, I've been reading The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax. Lomax spent most of his life, beginning in the 1930s, making field recordings of vernacular music in the United States and around the world. It turns out that Rounder Records has reissued the Lomax collection on CD, and they gave me some Lomax CDs. It couldn't be any better.
Are you getting course credit for the internship?
Yes. I plan to write a final paper that will probably be a non-fiction prose essay-a personal narrative of my experience at Rounder. The sort of thing I work on in Writing Out Loud.
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Additional Resources
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Johnny Siever
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Learning how I work