Race, Gender, Sex - Rollin' the Rs
I wrote this to try to mirror some of the youthful feel of the book because that's what comes across. It is a REACTIONARY piece, not just an intellectual representation of the contents. That is what the assignment asks for. I tweaked it to read a bit better here and there but I think this is what was requested. The full assignment request said: "Read Rolling the Rs by Zamora Linmark and write a reaction paper on it. And talk about how does it deal with the issues of race gender and sexuality?" This does that in an appropriate way.
Rolling the R's is little bites in big mouthfuls. It's an indication that size matters even if largeness itself means little about who will prevail. The little people (the young ones) in the story take on very big challenges and, ultimately, they fail in ways and they are victorious in ways. It is a story about how being honest and forthright comes out on top, and about how dishonesty and deception doesn't pay off, not even for fifth grade kids who shouldn't really be dealing with the issues that make up their lives in this very complex story about stories. It's an adult book by and about childhood characters that are so large in their involvement with a world about them that in many ways their work rises above race and ethnicity in favor of sexuality -- or so it seems.
The vignettes are presented in a hopscotch way, which reflects the child-like quality of the narrative. To me, this adds credibility far above just being a writer's tool. The plots unfold here and then over there and back to here again, pulling from Filipino, Hawaiian or even the valued televised depictions of American culture. It is hard to tell at times what factors the participants really...
Playing their games involves following the idiosyncrasies of the day by jumping around, perhaps on one balanced foot at a time until they can bend over a pickup a marker. Gender queer kids of color living in a straight world of island politics, religion, power, control and raw abuse and manipulation. The compartments that the young people jump between are intricate parts of the American paradise of Hawaii that is itself facing down a clash of its local native culture and the mainstream dominate culture that the actors want to be a part of. And this makes their rather unusual adventures all the more entertaining. It is a mistake to dismiss their engagement with morally questionable activities as just inappropriate for them; the interplay is a much greater balancing act than one might first suspect.
The youth portrayed in this story of stories are deprived from the start on many cultural fronts. They are low-class Filipinos whose people were usually always depicted as being poor workers who eat dogs. Their experience on a different island just makes them more vulnerable to negative perceptions by others of all kinds. They would likely not have been accepted in the Filipino culture on the islands of the Philippines either. Gay, promiscuous, uneducated and trying to survive in a media-dominated life that makes these qualities into popular television and movie plots. These are sex-positive young people who have no idea what it means to have a positive look at their own sexuality, so they just grab for the remote and change the channel to something that seems more comforting.
Intensive stories about explicit youthful and childhood sexuality and identity cannot possibly travel in a straight line. This book reflects this…
