21st Century Authenticity
Home and Walls in an Urban Context/The Walls We Create for Ourselves
written by Rye Purvis, May 2011
Like a fish stuck in a claustrophobic fishbowl, I feel suffocating.
The invisible walls confine my identity and in the most interior complex way.
Not many people know, the whispers from my mother, my father, my sister, my brother, my grandmother, grandfather, aunts, and uncles.
it’s not easily spelt out. not as easy as A,B,C. It’s hidden underneath,
behind the invisible walls.
your ignorance, my ignorance, it feels too late
I feel rugged, all sap taken from my body,
as i try to understand why i should care for
these people who will never know the whispers,
nor care.
i represent my invisible wall to you, and them, and us.
that’s the best way i know how to defend, offend.
it is the way my mother taught me, and the way i will teach those growing around me.
it is the way of my people, your people, and our people.
The journey i’ve made for the past four years at SFAI has been long and arduous to say the least. I’ve discovered the urban context, leaving behind a rural community and family all located in New Mexico. The transition from rural life to urban life, accentuated by the mileage between family and education, brought the aspect of “home” and “identity” to the forefront of my studies. As a person of half Native American and half Anglo descent, I find it incredibly interesting the barriers between both “cultures” founded through American media, literature, anthropology, beliefs, and all around living. It wasn’t until moving from New Mexico to San Francisco in 2007 that the barriers became more apparent, outside of my comfortable walls of home and identity.
In the guide book Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, author Robert J.C. Young brought up a notion of psychological borders created from physical borders: “Some of us are walled out. Many walls are no home. These are the ones with no windows. They are the walls that stretch through the countryside or zigzag across the city, built as border fences to keep people and things out.” (66) Walls function as both mental and physical barriers, from large scale examples of the Mexican and American border to the smaller scale existence of Native American reservations. Both examples (among many other) ignite sociological, political, and ignorant repercussions on to the American general populace. As Young said “Many walls are no home,” the confines and separation between an American “normal” versus the “other” leaves little comfort for those separated. To look at the history of America, the whole concept of “normal” and subsequent “other” has been threaded throughout text, imagery, and media documented since Columbus’ “discovery” of the America’s.
