May 14, 2013- My Identity Uncovered: How Reading & Writing Reformed My View on Culture

One of the most difficult struggles that I had in life was identity; growing up in a minority community, being Black was celebrated and necessary. There were no Hispanics, Whites, or Asians that helped to create ethnic diversity; there was only Black, and that was the expectation. I was the exception. My family had always encouraged celebrating who we were. The power of enjoying yourself and those of like characteristics was spoon fed to me from childhood.

 I’d hear stories of the struggles and triumphs of my family, and how distant relatives worked their way slowly into the middle class. The worn and old house in Greenville, South Carolina in which I lived was the very representation of the work that my family put in to reap such modest rewards. But through all this, I was still confused; why were we only celebrating one part of our family history? Why were we so biased against all of the Whites, Hispanics and Asians that have filtered through in our family and created the other parts of who we are? I didn’t understand how we can focus on the triumphs of one part of our identity and not the multitude of others. With my own motivation, I began to discover these answers through reading and writing.

As a child, I adored reading; there were few moments when you saw me without a book in my hands or near. Reading was my passageway to the world outside of my own. It was my escape from the grief and pain of family, and the paradise that I had not yet encountered myself. My books were my refuge, and thus my path to finding out not only who I was inside at the time, but who I could potentially be in the future. This discovery began with understanding the people who were like me and expanded from there.

In the late 1990s there was a series titled My Name is America that I found in my elementary school library. The series focused on the stories of individuals from different cultures and places throughout America, and used their perspectives to tell about the struggles and victories they had. The main book that stood out to me was The Journal of Joshua Loper: A Black Cowboy, The Chisholm Trail, 1871. The author, Walter Dean Myers, took me on the first ride of Joshua Loper through his eyes. His journal entries helped me to discover an identity that was not exposed to me before. In my community, Blacks weren’t cowboys, we weren’t adventurous, and we didn’t write journals. 

The story was one about Joshua following his dreams despite his surroundings, his history, and his perceived limitations. Joshua stood up, pursued his heart’s desires, and triumphed over his obstacles despite being the son of a former slave and free man. I could imagine his world and the challenges he faced exploring territory that was not common for people like him—Black people in the immediate post-slavery era. His story, like mine, was one of stepping out of the cultural norms and facing some of the unknown.

From this moment, my desire to read more was fueled by wanting to learn more about the cultures that live in America. Thinking through the conversations between my paternal great-grandmother and I, I knew that we were part Cherokee from her parents. This was my next step in discovering more about my identity. I surrounded myself with books about the Cherokee culture, since the original Cherokee lands included the Carolinas. I discovered a new world and imagined myself in the trees and woods around me. I saw myself in their minds, hearing their oral narratives, and passing on story after story about the history of their people, understanding where they came from. At that moment, I was no longer just a Black male in the South, but I was discovering an underlying identity; one that was not reflected in the color of my skin, but the blood in my veins, and the instincts in my gut.

I began to write about my thoughts and emotions during this period of time. Inspired by Joshua Loper, I wrote in a journal the many moments of learning something new, and tracked my progress on discovering my once clouded identity. This journal held my growing pains and confusion as I tried to reconcile why I must only identify as Black. This was the first time in my life that I had to really separate myself from my family and friends and track uncharted territory. I was no longer able to accept the status quo of my culture, nor that of my family. I could not continue living as only a segment of who I was; I only yearned to learn more about myself, and books continued to lead the way.

My growth and development became contort in the information I absorbed in my books.  My family began to wonder whether I would become reclusive and closed to the outside world, but for me, the world was only growing.  I read about culture after culture, life after life, and accomplishment after accomplishment, and I continued directing myself towards understanding how the characters thought, and recording how I contemplated my life in a similar manner.  My interests developed from simply wanting to learn about the cultures to wanting to become part of the cultures.  I first found my encounters with Spanish through this desire.  I had known that there were many family members of Latin American descent in my family, but I had little to no interaction with them.  With reignited interest and passion, I challenged myself to learn as many languages as possible, including Spanish,  and to embed myself in the culture. 

This seed began to sprout with small conversations with Spanish speaking friends and opened to formally learning to read, write and speak Spanish in school.  As I gained more vocabulary and my fluency increased, I began to read texts in Spanish opening my mind to the various cultures of Central and South America.  I explored the jungles of Costa Rica, the deserts of Mexico, the vibrant colors of Colombia, and the beauty of the Ecuadorian Highlands.  I discovered more than my own personal background, but the lives of strangers who may never walk through the streets of Greenville, South Carolina or New York City.  Their culture was not part of mine, yet I felt like it became my own.  I began to understand that my life was interconnected with the lives all around me, and that interconnectedness was the part of the human experience that I could not gain within the boundaries of my family. It was not that my family was wrong in how they supported Black culture over the others, but they didn’t feel the immediateness and urgency I felt to know who I was and how I could use that to my advantage.

I never knew that reading and writing could take me from a child with a confused and fragmented identity to someone who is confident and whole in whom they are. Literacy was the gateway to opening up new worlds and cultures that I never experienced, and it placed me on the path to successfully integrating various cultural aspects into my daily life. From reading The Journal of Joshua Loper to reading poetry works by Jose Marti, I have grown tremendously in my knowledge of cultural identities and what it means to be part of something greater. What began as a search for identity turned into a passion for knowledge about languages and cultures.