The final post of my high school career, B!!! How crazy is that?
I wasn't really sure onn what to write my blog post about with this novel, because it's a difficult one to relate to on the surface. Benji is a black boy, he has a summer house, he lives in the city -- there's a whole laundry list of conditions of existence that I just don't have in common with him. And, yet, I also found some of the lessons Benji was learning throughout this novel so incredibly poignant and familiar. Particular, there's this recurring theme of duality, conflict of identities, and "posing" that, in my opinion, is an integral part of any coming of age story, regardless of the rest of someone's identity.
For Benji, this seems to manifest in a couple of ways, generally positioned around the premise of his confusing racial condition. Benji is a black boy with a beach house, stuck in an awkward position between pride for his race, acceptance of his socioeconomic state, distance from his school peers, and distance from his Sag Harbor buds (in the words of Earl Sweatshirt, Benji at the beginning of this novel might feel like he's "too black for the white kids and too white for the blacks").
Benji's novel-long struggle with identity and self presentation is such a crucial part of this book, undeniably. His willingness to ebb and flow, and his sort of hesitance to put up fronts, in my opinion, are what make him such a likable character. If he had wanted to front he'd still be an interesting narrator, but there's something about his sort of disenchantment with being a poser, that sense of disillusionment. Of course, I think this has a lot to do with Ben being the narrator, and having that space to analyze Benji's behavior. Nonetheless, it's not mocking poserism, and Ben never seems to dislike poser behavior, but the ability to see how those attitudes pan out after the novel takes place, I think, gives Ben the space to critique them (think of the literal posing with guns and the eventual gun violence that seeps into the gang -- he's certainly not fond of the way that the fake ones sort of plant that seed in his friends).
I guess I don't really have a point with this post, I just really enjoyed that part of Benji. It's rather refreshing and appealing, and I guess Ben has a great amount of distance from which he can reflect on his days in Sag. Anyway, that's it!!
Yeah, I feel like the most relatable part of Benji is the not fitting in kind of thing. I'm p sure everyone feels that at one point. Also the idea of like living up to an idea, or growing up and bringing his family to Sag, or stuff like that. Awesome last post.
ReplyDeleteClara, I really enjoyed this blog post. I think that adolescence is often a time of "poserdom" and trying on different identities like clothing, to see which one fits best. Of all the narrators that we've encountered in this class, Benji has by far been my favorite, and the one that I've related to the most. Maybe that's just because he's not white, and because he's the one closest in setting to us. But I think it's also because _Sag Harbor_ represents this conflict between identities really well.
ReplyDeleteBenji's epiphany (if we can call it that) that he must "embrace the paradox" of his identity reflects his relatively chill views on "poserism"--he's cool with being a kid wearing a Bauhaus t-shirt (at the beach!) who is also conversant in the works of Afrika Bambaataa and Run-DMC (at a time when many kids felt compelled to choose cultural "sides," so as not to seem inauthentic in either category). He doesn't care if he seems like a "poser" in either category, or like his choice in footwear gives him less authority to drop knowledge about Bambaataa.
ReplyDeleteApparently, Whitehead has retained those fluid musical and cultural tastes: I was struck by the acknowledgments in _The Underground Railroad_, where he makes a point of thanking Sonic Youth and Prince, because he was listening to _Daydream Nation_ and _Purple Rain_ constantly while finishing the novel. These two albums are HUGE in my own personal musical autobiography, and they reflect my own small version of identity crisis as a white punk/skater kid who liked Sonic Youth but was also obsessed with Prince. There were many social context where it was cool to admit to the SY, but not so much the Prince.
I agree completely. Benji's internal struggle to find his identity is what drives the plot of the book, and is fundamentally about when he is being a poser as opposed to being real. His realizations in his "epiphany" are what brings this stage in his coming of age to a conclusion.
DeleteClara, this is *such* a relatable post. I agree that poserism really is fundamental to the coming of age process, and is an essential part of any coming of age narrative. In _A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man_, Stephen spends a significant amount of time contemplating how others see him as a "church boy" even when he feels far from it. A large part of each story we read this semester was a feeling that the person the outside world perceives isn't synonymous with who the protagonist is inside. I know it seems like the classic "no one understands me" vibe, but there's a reason it's a teenage cliché. I think Benji worries about the discontinuity between his two identities as much as anyone else, but he seems to care more about the effect it has on himself than what anyone else things.
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