Shailja Patel’s and Esmeralda Santiago’s Differing Views
on Communication with Regards to Zen Buddhist Teachings
The narrator of Migritude, through use of anecdotes, illustrates
that strong communication can persuade the audience to think differently about
how we treat ethnic minorities; however, strong communication is in direct
contradiction to Zen Buddhist teachings about communication. But the main heroine of the transnational
novel When I Was Puerto Rican, Negi, views
communication as a means of improving herself, which shares more parallels to Zen
Buddhist teachings on communication than does the aforementioned. Strong communication can change society, but
toned-down communication can have an even larger effect.
Zen Buddhist
teachings on communication is similar to Christian, Hindi, and African
religions in many respects. Buddhist
philosophy about it had been wholly unknown to me until I read Thich Nhat
Hanh’s work, The Art of Communication, during
this semester in addition to the required readings. Their philosophy can be summarized by the
following quotes: “Everything—including love, hate, and suffering—needs food to
continue. If suffering continues, it’s
because we keep feeding our suffering.
Every time we speak without mindful awareness, we are feeding our
suffering” on page 7; and “you just need to sit down and breathe in and
out. In just a few seconds, you can
connect with yourself. You know what is going on in your body, your feelings,
your emotions, and your perceptions” on page 15, which correlates closely to
their philosophy on meditation (Hanh). Another way of interpreting Zen Buddhist
philosophy on communication is that you should not cause more pain via
communication than necessary, or at all, because the language used would come
back to haunt you. So this could be done
by: first, toning down communication that seems negative; make it something
positive; criticize in a way that does not hurt the other person yet still gets
him or her to change; and thirdly, be in control of one’s emotions through
natural means of breathing, meditation, and being truthful to yourself. With that said, my understanding of Zen
Buddhism is somewhat limited.
Although the novels
are somewhat different in genre—one is a poetic performance that encompasses
many topics, the other, an autobiographical fiction—we can extrapolate
information about the narrator-of-Migritude’s
and Negi’s philosophies on communication.
Negi exemplifies an active stance with regards to reacting to society’s
turmoil because she is young and rather naïve throughout the narrative, which
is a bildungsroman. However, communication for Negi is
apolitical, and this is in stark contrast to the poetic performance, Migritude, for the narrator of that
novel believes communication, as a kind of monologue and soliloquy, is
necessary to commence discourse on heated, political issues that are unique to
her ascribed status as a member of the minority to Kenya and the USA. Communication for Negi is used as a means of
revealing her somewhat stable and poor society, Puerto Rico. Her environment is in stark contrast to the
displaced, or diasporic, status of the narrator in Migritude.
The narrator of Migritude believes in communication as a
means of finding outer happiness; her soliloquy in front of the audience jolts
or shocks people into seeing the realities of life for minorities. She says for instance, “As if Palestine will
never be anything but a social justice summer camp. A case study in genocidal oppression for
wealthy American teens with wanna-be-radical parents” (Patel, page 34). Patel
goes on to explain (in her DVD performance and the poetic performance, Migritude) that “Israel is the apartheid
South Africa of our times. The only
country in the world whose constitution allows torture” (Patel, page 36). I
was immediately shocked and not offended, but I was in a thoughtful frame of
mind after hearing her say it in her tone of voice in the performance. In
this way, Patel does not communicate Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen Buddhist teachings,
as he expresses them in The Art of
Communication, because she does not “convey only compassion and understanding”
for the Jews, rather, she seeks empathy and critical thinking; Patel, in contrast
to Zen Buddhist concepts of how to communicate, conveys inner rage and
suffering (Hanh, page 51). However, there is a place for “mindfulness” in Zen Buddhism:
“Knowing how to handle suffering, you know at the same time how to produce
happiness,” writes the monk on page 35; and, “the foundation of love is
understanding and that means first of all understanding suffering” on page 46
(Hanh). So, in a way, Patel is still in
step one with respect to Zen Buddhists who have progressed from that point to at
least step two. And, according to Hanh, one
must practice the alleged “Right Speech” to understand suffering, which is a
wholly different topic and cannot be covered in this essay.
In continuation
about Zen Buddhist teachings that seem to contradict Patel’s own communicative
philosophy, Patel does not use “peaceful language” in one poem, “The Making”;
and she uses “violent words [and] cruel words” (Hanh, page 53). This stanza, for instance, seems to
contradict Buddhist philosophy about communication:
Make it from rage /
every smug idiotic face you’ve
Ever wanted to smash
/ into the carnage of war every
Encounter / that’s
left your throat choked / with what…
Readers and audience members may react
differently to the facts Patel communicates; some will empathize while others will
misunderstand despite perfect grammar and English. Thus, she will experience the frustration of
telling ”the truth, [but] sometimes the result isn’t what [she] wanted” (Hanh,
page 54). Furthermore, before stating
the facts, she ought to state them with “mindfulness that makes the present
moment into a wonderful moment” for readers and audience members (Hanh, page
83).
Despite Patel’s contradictions
to Zen Buddhist communicative philosophy, her Migritude performance is also very tragic that has dramatic
moments, which are meiosis to the actual realities she’s trying to
communicate. In terms of communication
through entertainment, this is desirable.
Zen Buddhist teachings would disagree, however, in that they imply “the
paths of talking and thinking should be cut off” to avoid a “misperception” (Hanh,
page 20). Does this imply communication
should be avoided to become happy?
According to Zen Buddhism, it is.
So, in contrast, Patel communicates the atrocities and injustices that
occurred in her native country, Kenya, and the audience immediately empathizes
with her use of hard-to-listen-to facts.
As a performer on
stage, Patel allures and daunts her audience somewhat sexually through
nonverbal communication. She
communicates a lot of her intended meaning this way that expects her audience
to decode their various meanings. This contradicts, as a performer, the
intended result of the message to the audience.
According to Zen Buddhism, being “truthful” is key. But sometimes, the audience laughs in less
serious moments due to the verbal communication that Patel conveys in addition
to nonverbal communication. This is not
her intention deep down.
Patel’s Migritude communicates many different
subjects that would not be covered in any typical book, since it has “various
genres… of memoir[s] and political histor[ies] which [are] connected to the
history of [her] family” (Gundara, page 225).
This is in sharp contrast to the main heroine of When I was Puerto Rican, who is perhaps more dynamic in the sense
that her agency for communicating political turmoil is more powerful and deep
than the limitations of Negi’s impoverished setting that affects her
communication. She is also limited due
to her wisdom and age throughout the beginning of the novel. From the very start of her poetic
performance, Patel has a higher sense of political nuance than Nagi because
“she realizes that despite her being a loyal Kenyan, she will never be accepted
as a black Kenyan” (Gundara, page 225). Whereas Negi was born Puerto Rican into an
ethnic minority that is an ascribed status, too, she has a European ancestral background
that places her in an upper, desired position in Puerto Rico.
Negi, the heroine
of the bildungsroman novel When I Was
Puerto Rican, communicates her life’s issues through her various reactions
to her privileged status, (though relatively unprivileged by American
standards). And these issues are
somewhat immaterial, natural, and fatalistic.
Negi is like a Zen Buddhist monk.
For instance, her thoughts turned inward: “I wondered if it were true,
as Mami claimed when she and Papi fought, that he saw other women behind her
back. And if he did, was it because he didn’t love us?” (Santiago, page
92). Her family is nontraditional in
that her father cheats on his wife, possibly, and this causes great pain in
her. She does not seek expression
through talking about the injustices in her country, but she does ask many
“what if things were like so and so?” type questions that Patel asks. When Negi’s mother acquires a job opportunity
in Toa Baja, Negi is very mindful and un-oppositional to her mother: “who’s
going to take care of us?”; and, “will you work every day?” (Santiago, page
112). In terms of Zen Buddhist
communication, they both seek understanding and love which are central commandments
to their philosophy.
Patel’s use of verbal
interpersonal communication is not typical of what one would hear from a Zen
Buddhist monk. Monks, despite diction
that might be loaded with emotion, are very logical and coolheaded most of the
time, like Hanh and the Dalai Lama. This is not Patel’s religion, and she has a
unique art that fuses music with soliloquy and other voices of her mother in
audio clips, and sometimes her sister speaks if I remember correctly, in the
DVD. Patel makes the forgotten
remembered and injustices avenged through her oral poetry, which Zen Buddhists
do without. Negi, on the other hand, has
simpler issues to deal with in terms of communication. She is progressing from childhood to adulthood,
from submissiveness to independence, which is all the more helped by becoming
an American citizen in a country where opportunities abound.
Bibliography
Santiago, Esmeralda. When I
Was Puerto Rican: A Memoir. Jackson:
Da Capo Press, 2006. Kindle
file.
Patel, Shailja. Migritude.
New York: Kaya Press, 2010. Print.
Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Art
of Communicating. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013. Print.
Gundara, Jagdish. “Migritude.”
Intercultural Education 22.3 (2011): 225-226. Online file.
