Reading the World: Where I'm From Poem

*Click on poem to enlarge and open in a new window

Reflection:

Writing this poem at the beginning of this semester affected how I view my identity and culture.  I have identified my culture in the past largely based on less personal metrics.  White, female, upper middle class socioeconomic status, or possibly Jewish, Hungarian, Catholic, or Irish.  This assignment brought out a more subtle and personal depiction of my familial and cultural identity.  This poem feels personal in a way that "white" does not.  It also paints one picture of my complex identity.  I think that my poem describes my "way of life" or way of interacting, which parallels Fiske's (1989) definition of culture.  There are many different versions of the "Where I'm From" poem that we all could write; this speaks to our multiple identities and the complexity of classifying who we are.  I think that it is often an American value to believe that we are self-made individuals who are products of our own ambition.  This poem made me feel extremely lucky.  What I chose to include about the California upbringing and the New Orleans more recent past made me recognize how fortunate I feel to have had such rich experiences.  As Geertz (1973) culture may be defined as the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.  There are many narratives that we all have about who we are and where we come from.  This class and this assignment have helped me highlight that we all possess a culture and the recognition of this can be a powerful tool in the analysis of power, text, and everyday interactions.