America - a Cry for Change

America - A Cry for Change

The poem "America" written by Tony Hoagland in 2003 is a look into how a student and the speaker view the American culture and society. The student, possibly a teenager feels trapped and locked into an American expectation on how he is supposed to be as a citizen. The speaker (teacher) also expresses a similar view but from an educated older adults' perspective. The student and teacher both feel as though they want to be different in a society of carbon copies but do not feel as though they can make a difference therefore, they conform to American society.

'Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud' (line 1), this stanza implies that there is more than one student who looks this way. Although different in some peoples eye such as the teacher, teens who look this way are many in number because they want to stand out and be an individual but in doing this there are several others who may do the same therefore, voiding the individuality. The teen expresses that 'America is for him a maximum-security prison whose walls are made of Radio Shacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes where you can't tell the show from the commercials'. (lines 2-4) In a maximum-security prison everyone is watched very closely and they have no individual freedom. The prisoners all look the same with their orange jumpers and shoes with no laces. Under the jumpers is where the individual is discovered with their different tattoos or battle scars. The walls of the prison all look the same as the streets we drive on in every city in America. Radio Shacks are typically found in malls and there are Burger Kings on every corner. With the student he may feel as though everyone looks the same but no one bothers to look at the individual under the blue hair or 'phony ghetto clothes' (lines 23 &24), to really see the person and who they really are. There are so many people who look and act a certain way because society dictates it, as with the orange jumper of the prisoner and the Burger Kings. Many people try and become different only to find there are people who will soon replicate them.

The teacher struggles to understand at first what the student is trying to say. He thinks the teen is just trying to talk his way out of an assignment. 'And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is' (line 5), he wants to tell the student that he is making these feelings up. The student then goes onto say that although he feels trapped he has conformed to the mold of American society by driving a foreign car, listening to the music all his friends do and not liking it. He expresses he does not like the music of his friends by saying the 'rap music pour over them like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ball peen hammers' (lines 7 & 8). A Jacuzzi and music are supposed to be a place and activity to unwind and relax. Music is an individual preference but in this instance he is listening to the music with his friends and going along with what everyone is listening to. The student is illustrating both to be very painful. In the next line the student says 'even then he feels buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds of the thick satin quilt of America' (lines 8-10). The feelings of being buried alive are stress, agony and hopelessness. Being captured and suffocated he is being forced to comply to society and the popular culture of America. The 'thick satin quilt of America' (line 10) is a contradiction in itself. Satin is smooth and seamless, it's a continuous piece of fabric and a quilt is usually made of many different fabrics with many different textures. The student is saying America is becoming one type of society and a single culture with no differences from place to place. The culture and society are heavy and overbearing to someone who is impressionable. The speaker then begins to understand that there may be something of legitimate social pain the student is expressing, 'And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain' (line 11). He is still unconvinced on whether the student is expressing a true feeling of distress and not wanting to be like everyone else or if he is saying the words in order to make his assignment sound better in the eyes of the teacher; 'or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade' (line 12).

The next several lines the teacher is remembering a dream he had the night before loosely relating to the subject the student is speaking to. 'And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night, it was not blood but money that gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bill spilling from his wounds and -this is the weird part- He gasped "Thank god--those Ben Franklins were clogging up my heart-- And so I perish happily, Freed from that which kept me from my liberty"-- Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad Would never speak in rhymed couplets'. The speaker stabbing his father would represent a conflict in their relationship. The fact that "it was not blood but money" means the father put work before family. The speaker's father must have stressed how important money and a career was over finding who you are as a person, since the money "gushed out of him". The speaker found it weird for his father to say "thank god" for freeing his body from the money that was clogging up his heart. In thanking God, God was not capitalized like he was not important to him and in the same line "Ben Franklins" which are hundred dollar bills is capitalized stressing that the money was important and regarded before God. By unclogging his heart he was free then to put family first and love them over the worship of money, he could then die happy instead of enslaved by the money. The father said he was kept from his liberty. He was being controlled by his love for money and the status it brought and was not free to live as an individual. The speaker knew it to be a dream because his father did not speak freely; he must have spoken like everyone he was surrounded by. The teacher then took another look at this student whom looked like all the other students 'his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes' (line 23). The speaker then expresses that he too was conforming to American society and culture and does not know how to break free from it. 'I am asleep in America too, and I don't know how to wake myself either' (lines 24-25).

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