In grade school one year we put on a patriotic performance, in which I was one of the lucky girls chosen to be Lady Liberty and in which we sang with gusto the song, “What’s More American.” Anybody remember that one? . . . “What’s more American than corn flakes, the fourth of July, or Uncle Sam? What’s more American than football, T.V., the mighty Superman? What’s more American than saying, I am, I am, I am!” This song resurfaces in my head around every fourth of July as I plan how we will celebrate our country and what it means to be an American.
During my third year of grad school, I was assigned to teach a class I hadn’t taught or heard of before: “The American Experience,” a literature class for non-English majors. Planning the class was both exciting and excruciating because, as we all know, there is no singular “American experience.” Of all the possible American experiences, which should I include in the class? Of course, that was the point of the class in the first place: asking questions about what it means to be an American and what counts as American experience requires engagement with the histories of conquest, expansion, immigration, and nation-building as well as with concepts, like individualism, self-creation, and alienation.
This morning as the “What’s More American” song floated around in my head, I thought about the lyrics—what in my own personal experience represents being American to me and to those around me? Here’s a sampling of my thoughts:
*As a 19-year-old, studying abroad in Austria and away from home for my first fourth of July, I planned a little rooftop dinner and experimented countless times trying to make chocolate chip cookies with no recipe, no chocolate chips, and Austrian ingredients and measuring devices. Chocolate chip cookies represented home to me. They were decidedly American.
* When I was in high school, we had a foreign exchange student from Mexico. She lived with us and my older sister went to Mexico to live with her family. In the short time that she lived with us, my mom carefully planned a trip to Yellowstone. In my mom’s mind, the national parks are what’s American. This girl could not go back to Mexico having been so close to Yellowstone (5 hours) and not have seen it. But our exchange student seemed much more interested in the Madonna cd I had brought for the drive. Madonna. That’s what was American to her.
* My first semester of grad school, I took a course on literacy and orality. For one project, I interviewed different members of my family and my husband’s family to write a kind of family history of literacy practices. When I called my husband’s Italian grandma, I asked her why she does not speak fluent Italian—after all, her parents emigrated from Italy with their children. “Once they got to America,” she told me, “They stopped speaking Italian to us. Only English. They spoke Italian to each other. We were American then,” she said, “we spoke English and changed our name.” They changed the pronunciation of their name from “Pavia” with a soft “a” to “Pavia” with the same “a” sound as in “pave.” In their minds, the long a sound was American.
* After I finished my master’s degree, my best friend and I backpacked around Europe, but we soon learned to steer clear of the other young Americans and to eschew the label of our nationality since almost every other young American we met on trains and in hostels was loud, obnoxious, and concerned more about how much they could drink than about the beauty of the world around them.
Yet to Annie Dillard, awareness of the beauty around us is decidedly “American.” In An American Childhood Annie Dillard writes about her own childhood in Pittsburgh, particularly about her own process of wakening to self-consciousness and consciousness of the world around her. When I first read her book, I wondered why she included “American” in her title—perhaps it was her way of saying that in America, many of us enjoy enough prosperity and plenty of freedom that we should engage in this kind of awareness of the world around us. We have been given a beautiful, varied nation and the opportunity to open our eyes and hearts and see what’s around us. For Dillard, I think, taking the chance to notice and see beauty was crucial to her American childhood.
What about for you? What’s more American for you? What are you celebrating or thinking of this 4th of July weekend?
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