Hunger in New York City (Criticism)

Criticism

Jhan Hochman

Jhan Hochman is a writer and instructor at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon. In the following essay, Hochman provides an overview of “Hunger in New York City” and analyzes what “hunger” means to Ortiz as a Native American.

In “Hunger in New York City,” Simon Ortiz writes of hunger as a gnawing, aggressive, omnipresent need that will never be satisfied because it cannot be satisfied. For Ortiz, hunger is not merely the biological desire for food to nourish the body, though it is that as well; it is, more than anything else, a voice that is always there, asking him to justify himself, his life, and the choices he has made.

The speaker describes hunger’s paradoxical nature in the first stanza when he writes that “Hunger crawls into you / from somewhere out of your muscles.” It is paradoxical because it is at once something that wants to get into the body and yet is already a part of it. By saying that it “crawls” Ortiz underscores how insidious hunger can be, how subtle. His inability to physically locate hunger or provide any definitive description of it also emphasizes its elusive character.

Hunger asks for things, both concrete and abstract, in the second stanza. This asking positions hunger as a kind of vampire or parasite, working from the outside in, desiring of its “victim” information (blood) about the victim’s life, his memories, his emotions. It comes to you, asking for food, words, and wisdom. It asks about young memories of places you ate at, drank cold spring water, or held somebody’s hand. The stuff of memories is the stuff of life, but what does hunger want with this information, and why is it so demanding? And why does hunger’s tone change in the third stanza and become more parental, more solicitous?

We can answer these questions if we consider the speaker’s hunger to be a voice, not outside of himself, but inside his own head. This voice wants to know what the speaker has made of his life. He has internalized the voice of a parent or parents because it is parents who ask questions such as “How are you, son? Where are you? / Have you eaten well?” But this voice is not the voice of the speaker’s biological parents; it is the voice, rather, of parental responsibility. When hunger asks “Have you done what you as a person / of our people is supposed to do?” we begin to understand hunger as a concern with, and a driving need to fulfill, the desires of a group of people, in this case Native Americans.

Significantly, this voice haunts the speaker while he is in New York City, an international symbol of urban culture. As a Native American, Ortiz has written about his people’s ties to the land and the destructive and alienating effects that Western culture, particularly city culture, has had on their traditions and identity. These effects are evidenced in the images he chooses to represent New York City: “the concrete of this city, / the oily wind, the blazing windows, / the shrieks of automation.” Ortiz has not, however, flatly rejected the city. Like members of many cultures who have had their land and way of life ripped from them by the “progressive” forces of industrialized Western capitalism, Ortiz has grown to depend on the very thing oppressing him in order to survive: “ I have hungered, / truthfully and honestly, for them / to feed myself with.” Ortiz reaffirms this is his prose, saying, “Just as it claimed land and sovereignty, American society and culture can claim your soul.”

How, then, does Ortiz deal with this situation? How does he answer this hunger, this voice hounding him, asking him to account for himself? He prays. “So I sang to myself quietly: I am feeding myself with the humble presence of all around me; I am feeding myself with your soul, my mother earth; make me cool and humble. Bless me.” In this last stanza, Ortiz learns how to deal with his hunger. He does this not by taking his sustenance from the city but by finding it within himself. He feeds himself “with the humble presence / of all around me.”

In his introduction to Woven Stone, a collection of his poetry, Ortiz writes that reality is living in the here and now. “Being present with and for ourselves, being responsible to ourselves and, consequently, for our role in social struggles and changes in the Americas is a major part of this. Too often we have, as victims of colonialism, longed for the past nostalgically and whimsically, although there is appropriate importance in what elders say about remembering the past. And too often we look abstractly at a romanticized future that is past.”

Underscoring the resolution of the speaker’s conflict between the past and the present, between his desires and responsibilities, is the poem’s shift from the second person to the first in the fourth stanza. This shift emphasizes the relation between tribal (“you”) and individual (“I”) identity, and the speaker’s realization that only by calling on his “true parent” (mother earth) can he achieve satisfaction from his hunger.

It is the earth and his people’s relation to it that Ortiz needs to reclaim. Memory plays a major role in Native-American poetry in general, and in Ortiz’s in particular. Memory allows traditions to survive. Ortiz writes, “I have often heard Native American elders repeat ‘We must always remember,’ referring to grandmothers and grandfathers, heritage, and the past with a sense of something more than memory or remembering at stake. It is knowing present place and time, being present in the here and now essentially, just as past generations knew place and time whether they were Acoma, Lakota, or Mayan people. Continuance, in this sense, is life itself.”

The simplicity of Ortiz’s poetic language helps him locate himself and his people in the here and now. Rather than the dense, ironic, emotionally distant style of so much modern and contemporary poetry, Ortiz opts for a direct, unadorned style that has more in common with speech than writing. Ortiz explains this, maintaining his simplicity is a response to an oppressive “reality that’s so powerful you can’t expect it to recognize you. Especially if you are a people who has been historically subjected to the meanest, cruelest treatment by social and economic forces backed up by military power.”

Corruption and oppression must be fought with honesty, not language games. A major part of becoming healthy and positive, Ortiz says, “has to do with the consciousness we have of our selves, the language we use (not necessarily only native languages but the consciousness of our true selves at the core of whatever language we use, including English), and our responsible care for and relationships we have with our communities and communal lands. This is the way as Native Americans we will come into being as who we are within the reality of what we face.”

If this is a poem about one Native American’s response to the untenable situation of having to survive in a city and a country which has been and continues to be hostile to his very existence, how are non-indigenous peoples to read this poem? While some readers might admit to or recognize their own complicity in the oppression of others, this complicity continues to exist by the very fact of our continued silence, our reluctance to enact change. This tradition of complicity is born of ignorance, not of remembering. Unlike that of Native American peoples — in which history frequently is passed through the oral tradition — mainstream American society has depended on history books and the stories told in movies and on television for their versions of the past.

Not surprisingly, these stories, more often than not, have favored the victors and demonized the vanquished. “Hunger in New York City” might be viewed as both an expression of an oppressed people’s response to their treatment and, implicitly, as a reproach to those responsible for their situation. It has the possibility of creating in readers a hunger similar to the one described in Ortiz’s poem, a hunger born of responsibility to others.

Source: Jhan Hochman, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

Sean Robisch

Sean Robisch teaches composition and literature at Purdue University and holds a Ph.D. in American Literature. His fiction has appeared in Hopewell Review and Puerto del Sol. In the following essay, Robisch explores the role of history in Ortiz’s poetry.

Simon Ortiz has been an important influence on what we think of as “American” literature since his first collection of poetry, Going for the Rain, appeared in 1976. He writes with what Willard Gingerich has called, in the Southwestern Review, a “clairvoyant sophistication that sees the continual rebirth of spirit in all materialism.”

Ortiz’s work first appeared during what has been called the Native American Renaissance, the beginning of which may be during the year between the founding of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1968 and N. Scott Momaday’s receipt of the Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn in 1969. Among the many reasons that Native American (or American Indian) literature has been important to the course of literature in general is that it has challenged, strengthened, and resurrected stories of national and individual identity — of what it means to live in the United States and what it means to “be American.”

During the time when the British colonists were still trying to build a new England, a rebellion took place in the Southwest that preceded the more famous colonial revolution of the late 1700s. Many Pueblos joined with the Navajo and the Apache and rose up against the Spanish occupation of their land; they succeeded in securing their freedom until 1692. Later, during the 1840s, a new occupation would take place, this time by primarily Anglo-Saxon pioneers settling the land and trying to build a new nation, rather than merely a new England. During these times, people living in such places as the Acoma Pueblo were fighting to maintain their language, traditions, and beliefs as the land was being invaded.

We may be able to see why these times would be important to Simon Ortiz’s work, not only because he is Acoma, speaks the language, and knows the history, but because he is a reader and a believer in the transformative power of language. In World Literature Today, Robert Berner has written that Ortiz is at his best “when he adapts the traditional poetic utterances of Indian people to poems of his own which are simultaneously personal and traditional.” Many poets have used the past in their work, but for Ortiz, events of the present may be directly linked to, even understood in terms of, the course of history in America.

Ortiz grew up during the 1950s and 1960s, when uranium mining was a major industry on Pueblo lands (he worked for a uranium company after high school) and long after the United States had been established as a single nation in the opinion of most of its population. But that establishment was still being conducted, often through many of the same harsh methods used one hundred years prior. During Ortiz’s own childhood, schools had been designed to separate Acoma and other Pueblo children from their families and to prevent them from speaking their languages. A government program was begun that gave American Indians a oneway ticket to a big city in order to look for a job and move into the dominant culture.

The color barrier was still obviously advertised: all over the country there were segregated bathrooms, water fountains, and buses. And because to be “colored” often meant merely “dark-skinned,” not only African American, the frictions of culture and race were complex for those people whose families had lived on the North American continent for many centuries before the establishment of the United States, Canada, even Mexico. This is why the conditions of history are so important to Ortiz’s work; they have never stopped affecting the way we think today about culture, race, and — most importantly to Simon Ortiz — language.

He has said, “What I do as a writer, teacher, and storyteller is to demystify language.” This means he wants to make sentences and poetic figures accessible and practical, to correct the idea that poetry is something only for certain people and not for all of us. He became a writer in part to answer some of the big questions: “What is loneliness?” “What is love?” And, in light of “Hunger in New York City,” we could add the question: “What is hunger?”

Used to address such questions, writing becomes a way for us to remember, to build upon those things others have said, so that as we learn more, remember more, we may come closer to some answers. Going for the Rain, the book in which “Hunger in New York City” appears, is about a journey that takes place on many different levels of experience, including the preservation of memory through writing poems. In the course of his journey, the poet asks several of the big questions, and provides us some material by which we might consider them ourselves.

The book is divided into four parts, an important number symbolizing the four principle directions. The four parts of Going for the Rain mirror a Pueblo rain ritual in which the rain must be brought back from a long journey, what Ortiz calls the poet’s “travelling prayer.” This is one level of experience on which the book takes place, the one calling on ancient journey stories. Another level, demonstrated well in “Hunger in New York City,” is the experience of what it is like to be an Acoma poet in an industrial, non-Acoma society.

Still another level to the book is found in Ortiz’s construction of the journey; we are invited to travel outside the self and back inward again, which is triggered by a long train trip the poet has made to New York to visit a friend and give the friend a gift of Arizona sage. It is important to know these larger issues about Going for the Rain in order to appreciate what is underneath “Hunger in New York City.” It fits in the perspective of the poet’s train trip across the country from the ancient South-western

desert, his inward journey, and his encounter with a megalopolis. Simon Ortiz calls his use of the ancient and the introspective in a present-time story a “sense of continuity essential to the poetry and stories in the books, essential to Native American life in fact.” In “Hunger in New York City” we get an example of one moment of observation in the midst of that continuity, which tells us many things about the larger issues addressed in Going for the Rain.

Ortiz often uses the term “story” in reference to a poem. We are so used to being trained in the meter, rhyme, and other technicalities of poetry (which certainly affect how it works) that we may forget the role of narrative in any form of writing. The narrative line tells a story, and in Ortiz’s work the story that happens right in front of us — in this case, in the poem — is often only a small part of a much larger story of history, spirituality, or self-understanding.

Consider, for instance, what you mean when you say “I’m hungry.” You might be thinking of eating a meal, but you might hunger for something else as well. This is where the big questions surface again. If you are lonely, though you have a full stomach, you may hunger for companionship. If you are away from home, perhaps you hunger to return. Many books considered holy by those who believe in their teachings contain metaphors about hunger and thirst to represent the yearning for God or enlightenment. All these things are happening in “Hunger in New York City,” beyond the visible hungers of the poor and starving created by the same conditions that built the new England. “Hunger in New York City” seems, on the surface, to be sparse and simple, but is rich and multi-layered.

The poem takes place when the poet is at the farthest point away from his home. He has just gotten off of a train in New York, and this is the poem he writes out of his initial impressions. He introduces us immediately to hunger and tells us first that it comes from outside of us, is a force coming from somewhere else, not only from the physical muscles and moving inward, but from concrete, land, or wind. So we are introduced to hunger, but we still do not know what kind of hunger the poet means. This will become our quest through the entire poem, with Ortiz feeding us little bits of which kind of hunger he might mean.

How we think of hunger is important to how we read the poem, because our imaginations and the material world may often be at odds. For example, if we say that Ortiz “personifies” hunger, we risk some oversimplification, obvious as the technique might seem. To personify means to give personhood, that is, identity (especially in human terms) to something inanimate. But in Acoma belief, life extends beyond what is animal and may be present in all things. So saying that hunger has life may not mean “personifying” it to an Acoma poet. Therefore, hunger is permitted to ask questions that not only the poet, but the reader, must try to answer.

In the second stanza, hunger is asking “for” many abstractions, ideas that do not all stand for material things — “wisdom,” for instance. In the third stanza, hunger asks yes-or-no questions, the most basic kind, and maybe the most important kind, because these basic questions are about what it means to survive. They are all about, literally, what gives us life.

The fourth stanza of the poem raises an issue found in much of Ortiz’s work — how to answer these basic questions in the midst of a technological and industrial world full of noise and light and distraction. There is some irony here as well. If we are tempted to think of reservation life as impoverished, or to associate hunger with material goods alone, we may not notice the poverty found in the dominant culture’s supposedly greatest achievement — its cities. The poet has come from the desert to New York and immediately thinks to write about hunger, which (we know by the title) lives in New York City just as in other places.

When the poet tells us, “I have hungered, truthfully and honestly,” for the things of the city, he is confessing that this great machinery has lured him even as it has failed to feed him with what he needs. Ortiz has written other works about those hungers unfulfilled by technology, as in his short story “Man on the Moon” and in another poem from Going for the Rain, “Washyuma Moter Hotel.” In the midst of the city, and at the halfway point of his long journey before returning home (which happens in the next section of the book), the poet remembers in the final stanza of “Hunger in New York City” what does feed him.

First, he prays by singing to himself, finally asking for blessing from mother earth. Then he tells us which kind of hunger we met at the beginning of the poem. In the middle of the stanza, quietly situated between the song and the request for blessing, the poet tells us that what feeds his hunger is “the humble presence / of all around me.”

In those lines we learn much about Simon Ortiz’s work. Since he uses poetry to demystify language, he has chosen methods of telling that are particular to the way we live today in order to teach in practical terms about yesterday as well. He does so by writing about fundamental objects and ideas and about those who are struggling along what the Acoma call the heeyaanih, the road of life.

When modernists such as Robert Lowell or William Carlos Williams wrote in this clear, simple language of things, they called it “minimalism” or “imagism.” The Beat Poets of the 1950s, who inspired Ortiz as a poet, also used accessible language written in unconventional ways to talk about the common and struggling person in the city, about the land outside the city, and about the hungers that live in either place. Simon Ortiz has brought these ideas of minimalism and social intelligence together in his work, through a voice that is both Acoma and American, both ancient and contemporary, and toward his goal that “through poetry, prose, and other written works that evoke love, respect, and responsibility, Native Americans may be able to help the United States of America to go beyond survival.”

Source: Sean Robisch, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

What Do I Read Next?

• Simon Ortiz is also an editor of Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing. The anthology points out it is impossible to discuss Native-American art without also discussing Native-American sovereignty.
• In The People Shall Continue, Ortiz teams up with photographer Sharol Graves to present an epic story of the Native-American people, written in the rhythms of traditional oral narrative.
• For a comprehensive collection of Native-American songs, prayers, myths, photos, and literature which captures the traditions, beliefs, and history of Native-American people, read American Indian Voices by Karen Harvey.
• Contemporary Native-American writers are introducing bold new voices to the fiction scene as well as poetry. For a good sampling of their work, read The Lightning Within: An Anthology of Contemporary American Indian Fiction.