Random Worries

I gave my presentation today.  It was a little frustrating because one minute in all the two girls in front of me did was watch the clock.  That's not very validating.  I wanted my presentation to be less about moving through my proposal and a little more about learning something new.  Well, I tried.

I really don't know what else to say about this.  I guess the idea is that I leave in 17 days and I should be preparing myself for that.  But what else is really necessary?  You don't care what I'm really going through because it has to connect back to my Field Study in some way, and so I keep going around in circles thinking of things to say without saying what I really need to say.  At this point EVERYTHING connects to the fact that I'm leaving the country, that I'm doing a field study, but...don't let me try to convince you of that.

That's alright. There's a time and a place, I guess.  But the longer this goes on, me saying nothing, the closer I get to spending this time on a n/a grade, which means that I'm just wasting my time.  Apparently I'm in a bad mood.  Just figured that one out.  Or cynical.  Maybe both.  I guess the problem is that I want to be happy about this, and I am, but it's been dragging out so long that I can't really be very excited.  Before I went to London I had a summer to work.  I don't even know if I'll get the loan I applied for.  And I am worried about money.  But when it comes to money I've never once wondered why I was doing this.  Money never seemed to be a problem--even though it is probably the second biggest problem after the fact that I HAVE NO WHERE TO STAY IN PARIS.  That's a big problem, right?  I think so, and yet here I am, 17 days away, doing nothing about it.

I want to care, but I don't.  Maybe I'll get in a car accident and so it won't matter and that's why I'm not worried.  That's morbid.

Sorry.

I'm going to miss my sisters.  I do miss my sisters, though the older I get the less I miss home.  London cured me of that.  I was so homesick by the end of London, and then I was home for 8 months and then I never felt homesick again.  Boy, what's Paris going to do to me?  I already have trouble missing people.  I think maybe I'm broken.  Old news, right?

Also, if I do find a place to stay, probably I'll end up never leaving my apartment.  Just saying.

I think I need to allow myself a movie a weekend.  Did I put aside money for that?  Probably not.  Am I going to do it anyway?  Yeah... I am.  When one is working, one cannot convince oneself they cannot afford everything one wants.  Unless it's a car, a house, or a baby.  I think I'll always be able to talk myself out of those.  A movie a weekend, and 2 food purchases a week out on the town.  Maybe.  It'll depend on whether I'm living with a host family or not.  (Oh yeah, worry #1, fun.)  Okay, but again I hate the word mitigate because I don't know right now how to fix these problems.  But I'm thinking about them, shouldn't I get SOME credit for that?

Something else I'm worried about?  My best friend.  I can't be happy, because if I'm happy she'll just remind me she's NOT happy...because her boyfriend leaves in 2 weeks, and we go to London in 2 weeks, and then she comes back to Provo which she's not happy about.  Okay.  Well, I'm thinking of a way to be a part of her life even if I'm off in Paris.  She's just feeling sorry for herself right now because she's not going off doing something cool, but these are choices she made for herself, and if they're right, then she's going to be fine, and she'll be doing good things, and they'll be plenty cool.  But I still worry about her.

I worry about who I'll be when I get back.  What my family will think of me, what others will think of me.  But mostly where I'll go after that and what my next adventure will be.  I'm afraid of being stuck somewhere or in the middle of something that doesn't make me happy.  So I like to plan adventures a little in advance.  I like to tell myself that something to look forward to makes me happier.  The truth is, it doesn't, it just makes me feel more useful and more interesting, which in turn makes me feel like I'm doing all of this to surprise people or to make people think I'm crazy rather than because it's something I think I ought to do for myself. That's an idea, hm?

Who knows what comes.  I'm thinking past Paris.  I still can't believe I'm doing this.

Well, welcome to some of my crazy worries.  They may or may not be here tomorrow.

Watching a Field Study: Part 1 - Making a Dent

There are so many different ways of being good with people, or bad with people, we often get stuck in thinking one way is right, or that someone else's way is wrong.  I'm not sure why we do that.  It occurred to me how right I am for a Field Study, and how wrong I feel for a Field Study.

I am good with people, but perhaps in a different way than Field Studies tries to teach.  Asking questions, being so procedural, sincere people asking insincere questions to get sincere results.  It works, but was never the way I imagined doing it.  I know that once people get out into the field that's not necessarily the way they do it, either.  I was just thinking that the moment someone begins asking questions of someone else to get a particular answer, the question stops being sincere.  I do this everyday, don't I?

"How are you?"

But what I've been learning is perhaps how wrong I feel for a Field Study and yet how Field Studies is the only right program for the way I want to go about learning.  What other program would let me go to Paris to study African American expatriates?  What other program?  And what other program would let me go to France to live there, to study there, without being tied to someone else's agenda?  I could study in France doing some kind of Direct Enrollment, but I wouldn't be taking classes about things I want to study because the point would be studying in France, not WHAT I'm studying in France.  I could go on a Study Abroad, but again, the point wouldn't be to go to France for any particular purpose, but I'd be paying through the nose to go to places that have nothing to do with what interests me (or more likely, because everything interests me) have nothing to do with my focus of study, which is American Studies, American culture.

I keep harping on about American this and American that. Mostly because I don't believe in anything American; and I also believe in everything American.  I always liked the sentiment of Plato's: "I am from the world."  And I believe we can have world citizens, rather than American citizens or French citizens.  But, I don't know.  I'm still fiercely patriotic and I don't think anyone has the right to truly criticize this country unless it also loves it.  I am not this way because my country deserves it, or because my country is superior; maybe I am this way for the opposite reason.  Because it is home; because it's got so far to go in my approximation.  Because there's so far it could go.  And maybe I've got a little bit of that mon pays pride.

I teach the Family History class every week at church.  I think family history work is very important, but why the hell are we doing family history work for strangers?  I don't mean, why do we go to the temple and get baptized for strangers, one could consider that service for others.  I mean, why are we searching for names of people we are related to, birth dates, and then ask these people to be baptized and sealed to our families when we've done nothing else to find out who they are?  I mean--why would you want to be attached forever to someone you don't know?  For this reason, I find it so important to find out as much as you can about someone, not necessarily BEFORE you do temple work for them, but during and after as well.

A friend offered me tea  yesterday.  I tried it for the second time in my life.  The last time I tried it was probably about two and a half years ago.  I still don't like it, though this cup of tea had sugar in it, at least.  I still have a box of tea bags that Jake gave me my senior year of high school with a mug.  The mug I use every day, the Earl Grey tea I've never touched.  But I've also never been able to throw it away.  Because Jake was certain that someday I'd try tea.  I always said I didn't drink tea, it was a religious thing.  Now I don't care so much, and I'd drink tea if I liked it.  Two and a half years ago I finally broke down and told Jake I'd try some of his tea.  It was green tea.  He didn't put sugar or honey in it.  Grossest thing I've ever tasted.  But I remember when there was a time tea was just something I wouldn't do.  I thought I'd always feel that way.  Now I don't think I see any point.  Do you think I'll ever get to that point with alcohol?...Just kidding.  I think about Jake often, especially when I think about Family History work.  Because he's made such a big impression in my life and yet I'm not sure if anyone really knows it the way I do.  If someone were to ask my sisters about me, I'm not sure they'd have a clue who I was to anyone other than them.

Why does this matter?  Well, I just think about Field Studies, and how we have these experiences that take a fraction of a second that change who we are.  Or we meet these people that just leave these impressions we'll never iron out.  And who will know?  But worse, who will have those experiences if they aren't taught to appreciate them?  For I fear that every day I have experiences that could change me, if I'd let them, but so often I don't.  Field Studies is about teaching people HOW to have those experiences, and how to let other people make dents in you so that you'll never be the same.  Because what's the point of living life the other way?

I think this is one reason I'm sad to see Field Studies go.

Proposal: Background & Significance; Literature Review

“So here we stand, on the edge of hell, in Harlem, and wonder what we will do, in the face of all that we remember.” – Langston Hughes

Location

            I’ll be studying in Paris and with the help of Anderson and Wells’ Paris Reflections will be able to walk through Paris with some understanding of where African Americans lived, worked, and socialized in Paris (Anderson and Wells).

History

America between the wars

            In 1918 about 1 million American troops had been deployed to Europe to aid the Allied forces in their fight against Germany in the Great War.  13% of those drafted were African American who served in segregated units.  American history dictates the Great War as a conflict started by the old world and ended by the new, with Americans as the heroes and saviors of a long, bloody and “total” war.

            Apart from the brief and fatal Spanish Influenza brought back to the United States in 1918 by troops who had served in Europe, the years just following the war are regarded in the United States as a time of great prosperity, or the “party” decade of American history.  This decade was coined “The Jazz Age”: the age of flappers, alcohol, pushing social boundaries, speakeasies, mob control, the Charleston; the age of plenty, of luxury, of free expression, and of scandal.  The young were in charge, changing the way Americans dressed, the way they consumed, the way they spoke, and the way they spent their time.  The music was loud, boisterous, got people moving; youth started buying race records on the corners, listening to jazz, and the blues; they went to the pictures every weekend, spent late nights dancing and drinking—involved in rampant law-breaking.  The war which many Americans had just returned from was largely ignored as an influence on the lifestyle many Americans turned to. (Britten and Mathless)

            In actuality, the 20s were an Age of Uncertainty, particularly for the facet of Americans who were racially marginalized.  In the early 1900s, African Americans began moving north into cities with greater employment opportunities.  The Great Migration changed the demographic of northern cities, and during America’s short involvement in the Great War, many African Americans filled those job openings left by white volunteers and draftees.  The summer race riots of 1919 which took place in Chicago, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington D.C., and Nebraska, among many other places, evidenced the great uncertainty about race relations in the United States after the war.  There are two primary reasons recognized for these riots, first that many white veterans returned to the States to find their jobs taken by black workers, or returned to homes much changed by black presence and felt a need to restore order; second, that many black veterans assumed equal treatment would be afforded them in homecoming celebrations, or assumed they would be treated with respect as veterans of the United States Army after having been treated with respect by white Frenchmen (Stovall 26-27).  Lashing out in uncertainty and hatred, white mobs killed and lynched men without trial, accused men of rapes, harassment and murders they did not commit, destroyed African American housing districts which left many dead or homeless, and burned down entire sections of cities (Gates 262-265).  The Chicago Race Riots alone left 38 dead and over 500 injured[1]; that summer 10 of those lynched in the south in 1919 were black veterans (Stovall 27).

            Having wrongly assumed that perhaps they, as veterans, had earned the respect of their fellow Americans, many African Americans who had served in Europe during the Great War returned to France as musicians, performers, writers, artists, and intellectuals, to a place where they felt appreciated and valued.  Thought the racial freedom many African Americans reported having experienced in Europe was not entirely the case (Schmeisser 109-110), the French ideal of an élite (Barlow and Nadeau 47-59) allowed these cultural contributors the chance to give of their talent without apparent racial discrimination (Whalan).

            Meanwhile, those who stayed behind were the predecessors to the civil rights movement that would take full effect thirty years later.  (“We return.  We return from fighting. We return fighting.” – W.E.B. DuBois)

France entre-deux-guerres

            France was not America entre-deux-guerres.  In many ways, France was aware of the anxiety that riddled the twenty years between the two wars.  By the war’s finish, everyone knew someone who had died in the war because 6000 men were killed every day of the duration of World War I; out of 38,000 communes in France, only one did not lose someone to the war.  Furthermore, 5 million acres of French farmland had been destroyed, and by the beginning of WWII the number of cities with populations over a million had doubled in France as it became harder to sustain a lifestyle in the country. (History of France)

            Before the war, Europe had had high hopes for its future, but instead “European civilization had managed to produce the most destructive, bloody war in human history. . . . This lost self-confidence lay at the heart of the Roaring Twenties in Paris, leading many thoughtful Parisians to look toward other traditions as a way of restoring their shattered faith.”  Lifestyles drastically changed, many of which influenced American culture as well.

The feminist movement reigned during the period, and a new fashion of women (called les garçons) cut their hair short and began wearing men’s clothes.  They discarded their corsets and started showing their legs, they smoked in public, and began working to fill the need caused by all the loss of men in France. (History of France)  After the trauma of war, “Paris seemed bent on having a good time; the war was over, and young people now had the freedom to experience life to the fullest. . . . One result was a new interest in Africa and blacks as a whole” (31).

Jazz and African Americans in France

Though “race music” as it might have been called by Americans, was introduced in Europe before the Great War, and records of bands which toured through Germany, France and Britain were found years later, it didn’t have much of an influence on Europe until after the First World War (Lotz).  However, because some black music got into Europe before the war, Lotz argues that its influence in Europe needs to be reassessed because it shaped how African American artists were received in Europe later.

            Most attribute the inextricable introduction of Jazz to France to the African American soldiers who served in France during the Great War.  Though American units were segregated, undoubtedly soldiers played the blues and jazz while they were in Europe.  Immediately following the war, there was a high demand for revues and black musicians in Paris to play Jazz for the French.  Such revues was how Josephine Baker came to Paris; her overnight success in Paris kept Baker in the city, singing, dancing, and performing in shows until she returned to New York for a short stay.  She was not received well (Read: the Reception of Jazz in America) and returned to Paris.  Other African American expatriates gathered in Montmartre, where their musical expertise was enjoyed by the French.  In truth, the French demanded black musicians for their clubs, preferring them to white musicians. “ ‘ If there was any racism it was our people that used to give preference to the colored musician,’” one French musician said; he performed in blackface so he would have the chance to play with a black band (Stovall 38-39).

            (Include: (Archer-Straw), (Jackson “Making Jazz French”) & Django Reinhart)

Influence on America

Alexandre Dumas (Martone),

Significance

            I’m interested in studying African American expatriates in Paris simply because when one learns about the “Jazz Age” of American history, not only is the French perspective of the War, and France’s influence on American society often ignored, but more important the African-American perspective is disregarded.  Little, if anything, is ever taught of the Summer Race Riots which took place after the First World War, or how the freedoms blacks experienced abroad played an influential part in the civil rights movement of the 1950s-70s.

            If we do mention Paris or France during the Jazz Age, it is always in reference to the Anglo-American expatriates: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.  Though worthy of mention, these white writers only represent a fraction of the American expatriates in Paris at the time, and are only a fraction of contributors to the American-Parisian culture that influenced America.  This is one of many examples of a “white-washed” history.  As the entire “Jazz” Age, it can be argued, was the gift of black America to the United States, and for that matter, to France, why the story of the history of Jazz is not told in an American History context is entirely beyond me (Beregot and Merlin).

            Though what I primarily want to study is how French culture influenced the black expatriate musicians in Paris and what they perhaps brought back to the United States because of their experience in France, ultimately, I think the significance of studying this facet of American culture is to treat it as main-stream American history, rather than marginalize it as “African-American History.”

African-American Expatriates

Short Visits

Langston Hughes

W.E.B. DuBois

Long Visits/Stays

Josephine Baker – Complete Record Works, 1926-27

Ada “Bricktop” Smith

Others

Claude McKay - Banjo

---

[1] http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1032.html

Healing Time

Our most recent reading about Monochronic and Polychronic time of course made me begin to wonder which I adhered to most, or best.  Before reading Hall's article I stumbled across a post written by Averyl Dietering--who is going to the UK--and agreed with her about Monochronic time.

For those of you who don't know Hall's theory about the two different times, M-time is best described as compartmentalizing your time into a schedule.  It's what you imagine the President's day is like, with everything from meetings with ambassadors to time for tucking his children into bed mapped out for him.  Or, if you knew what my last semester was like, where I had every day to the half-hour mapped out just so I could get everything done, it's like that.  The idea of M-time is that the only way to complete things is to compartmentalize them, to schedule them, to do only one thing at a time and then be completed.  Hall says that those who adhere to M-time often refer to time as being wasted, killed, saved, lost, or made-up (266).  P-time is organic, fluid, and chaotic to someone who operates in M-time, but it is most like a mother's schedule, Hall says.  "How else can one raise several children at once, run a household, hold a job, be a wife, mother, nurse, tutor, chauffeur, and general fixer-upper?"  If that example doesn't work for you, think of how you learned the Native-Americans treated time.  It's about people, Hall says, and the people who deal in P-time are usually never alone, very little is private, and rarely are people excluded or is time compartmentalized.  P-time is about keeping people informed, getting people the things they need, and rarely keeping to a schedule, or a queue, etc.

Before knowing this, and just reading Averyl's post, I was certain I was an M-time person.  It's what I've done my whole life.  School starts at this time, and work starts at that time.  Lunch with someone and this time, and a review meting at this time.  It's how I've learned to operate, and the way I show I care about people is by not wasting their time.  And I definitely think of time as possible to waste if and when I have much I have to do.  I, for example, do not appreciate when someone is late to a noon meeting we set up, when I have a lunch planned with a friend at 1.  Because I know that lunch friend is operating on M time, and being late is rude.  The person I had a meeting with who shows up at 12:45 is even worse because what they're telling me is that they have no respect for my time.  But that's ONLY because I have something planned at 1.  If I was going to be at work until 4 with no other meetings or plans, I care very little that the person showed up at 12:45.  It doesn't matter to me, because I got things done in those 45 minutes and an hour from 12 is just as productive as an hour from 12:45.

So, I realized that I adhere to M-time, and prefer M-time when I know others are keeping me to M-time.  But I also realized in reading this article that if it were up to me, I would much rather adhere to P-time.  Saturday's, for example, I have always treated as my days.  I hate when people schedule things on Saturdays because I like to be in charge of it as my only day.  It's my healing day.  Yes, I may be doing homework, or I may be sleeping in, or I may be cooking for a crowd, but it's my day and when you M-time schedule my day, I am not a happy person.  This is because P-time heals.  I couldn't give you a scientific reason why I believe that P-time heals, just that you need time where what time it is doesn't matter to feel like you're just human and not a piece of a machine.  And I imagine it's the way life is probably supposed to go, but "civilized" first-world countries can't operate on P-time, or else we don't believe they can and so we don't value it as much.  P-time looks lazy, and maybe from some frame of reference it is, but you don't have to be unproductive within P-time, it's just that when you complete things means means little; the clock means little.

I look forward to this Field Study which I feel will consist of the best of both times.  I expect M-time to get me up in the morning, and P-time to let me wander.  I expect M-time to help me meet people and keep appointments and P-time to let me converse with them with no worries of how long it will take, or how late it is.  I expect M-time to catch a train and expect P-time to let it take as long as it needs to.  M-time is for initiation into life-experiences, but P-time is for living them.  P-time is for healing.

Proposal: Statement of Intent

A. Statement of Intent

            Little care is often taken with American culture by Americans—or anyone else for that matter—but as an American Studies major, I find American culture essential to understanding those who come to the United States, the United States’ place in the world, and the changes that take place routinely within the country itself.  However, there are facets of American culture which are or have been very influential and yet are either rarely studied, or rarely given credence to as a significant part of a whole.  African-American culture is one such part which has altered the United States in astounding ways and yet is rarely given credit within American culture as a whole.

In 2011 I took an American Novels course which gave me a taste for black-American literature, which resonated with me further than the other American literature.  In this class I realized I was beginning to love a culture that was not only in part being lost, but was not being recognized as playing a larger role within main-stream American culture.  The fact that we need an African-American Studies field to augment American Studies is understandable but disappointing to me—American Studies itself should indicate in its every study the presence of black Americans, Latino Americans, Chinese Americans . . . the list could go on.  Separating the races is not a true study of American culture, because America is what it is because of the collision and/or melding of the races.

In 2010 I began studying French, and soon decided I wanted to go to France before I began a Graduate degree.  I wasn’t interested in being with a group of other Americans, since I wanted to be able to practice my language-speaking, but I would have gone any way I could have when I discovered Field Studies and realized it allowed me the opportunity to study my French, but more importantly, meld that interest with my study of American culture.  I fell upon an idea and decided I wanted to study something no one had talked about in my history courses or American Study classes: the African-American expatriates in Paris and how their presence in Paris can or has influenced our understanding of American culture.

I want to live in France for three months so I might be immersed in French culture, much like these American expatriates were, and so I might better understand what elements of French culture made Paris appealing for these Americans.  I do not feel I can understand the black American-Parisian culture until I understand the elements of French culture that brought musicians, writers, painters, and intellectuals out to Paris after the Great War.

            The men and women who I am interested in studying have been written about before, which is why my anticipated results are not a series of autobiographical sketches, so much as a creative linking of these cultures through the people to better understand African-American-Parisian influence on American culture at the time and it’s holdover in contemporary American culture.  I am not interested in new information but rather a new outlook, one that is particularly of the American Studies field and of an American Studies telling.

Worries & Preparations

The worries keep stacking up.  The initial worry was whether or not I'd be able to speak this language.  People are people.  That's a good thing.  But I think through every word I use when I'm speaking in English, let alone having to think through/figure out what I want to say in a French.


Ce pourquoi, j'ai decidé que je vais écouter un podcast par semaine en français sur l'histoire ou la culture.  Aussi, je vais faire une heure de travaille par jour en français--faire les devoirs, écouter les podcasts, lire les lectures, pratiquer d'écriture ou parler à les autres.


More about that another time, because I can force myself to believe that I'll be better at this language in four months.  My new worry I don't want to overlook this culture simply because it's "Western."  As preliminary reading, I've purchased Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong.  It had the best reviews on French culture for English reading that I could find, and I really don't have the stamina to read a book about French culture in french.  A project for another day.  I hope that this reading will give me an idea of where to go next about French culture.


Parce que je sais que la culture de  nourriture en français est importante, je vais essayer cuisiner une repas française chaque mois, et lire au sujet de la nourriture en « Around My French Table ».


Hopefully these few decisions will help me not only with the language, but with my steps into understanding the culture I'll be entering.  Although my field study 'question' will be important, and I'll want to be aware of a plethora of cultures evident in Paris, I don't want to overlook the main one simply because I'll be in a large city where culture can sometimes seem lost.

A Letter of Marque

Lettres de marque were given to french corsairs--also known as privateers or pirates--by the state to give them permission to act in the name of the crown.  Corsair is french for the italian coruso, or--in English--course.  I'll decide what metaphoric significance the pirate implication has later.  At the moment, it's the 'course' that really interests me.

It may mean little that I'm an American Studies major later in life, but right now it means quite a lot.  The fact that I want to study in France seems a little off the chart for someone who has spent four years studying America, especially when our readings so far have been somewhat clear that the typical "American" viewpoint of the outside world is destructive and ineffective.  But that's what I love about Field Studies--not only was it the only conceivable way to academically tie together a thousand interests that I just couldn't reconcile any other way, it's focus is on teaching us how to leave behind our natural tendencies when entering a new culture and instead enter a new culture ready to experience.

I like this because the truth is, I don't want to find a niche too quickly.  I want to know everything, but I don't want to know everything right now, I want to take my time learning it.  I like finding connections, and I like making them work as I put the world together.  I love paradigm shifts, having the way I think of the world and of people drastically altered.  It's an upheaval that I've always searched for.  As someone who likes to be comfortable, paradigm shifts is where I have always allowed myself to revel in discomfort.

The course I have in mind really will rely on the water and the wind but I have a general destination in mind.  I want to bridge the gap between my interests in American Studies, French, and writing.  Among the many considerations I've given to this project, what I've been most interested in for a couple of months now is a study of African-American expatriates in Paris.  Given the amount of attention given to "the Lost Generation" of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, Elliot, etc. I became interested in the story of those African Americans who served in the same Great War as many other young Americans and yet were not treated as heroes upon their return.  These African-Americans saw France during the war too, and they fell in love with it.  Many of them returned to enjoy some of the freedoms they were denied at home.  It's not that I know who all these people were, or what they did with their lives, or when and if they ever returned to the United States but that I intend to follow the course of their lives, how America shaped it, how France shaped it, where they found solace, how they understood their place as Americans, how they were changed by immersing themselves in french culture, and what Americans can learn in retrospect from their unique "american" experiences.