Sunworshippers by Cathy Song
"Sunworshippers" by Cathy Song is a poem that explores the complex relationship between the speaker and her mother's traditional views on beauty and self-worth. The poem begins with the mother's admonitions about sunbathing, suggesting that excessive sun exposure can ruin one's chances of marriage by damaging the skin. This perspective reflects Old World values that the speaker grapples with as she navigates her identity as a young woman. The speaker’s internal conflict leads her to develop an eating disorder, anorexia, which she uses as a means to assert her individuality and autonomy in contrast to her mother's teachings.
Through a tone that blends sarcasm, resentment, and a touch of delight, the speaker critiques the mother's restrictive views on the body and self-acceptance. The poem ultimately portrays a journey of self-exploration and transformation, where the speaker's heightened self-awareness allows her to connect deeply with art, literature, and music. This intellectual awakening, however, is tinged with irony, as it stems from her struggle with anorexia. The poem concludes with an unresolved tension between mother and daughter, serving as a driving force for the speaker's creative expression and writing. Overall, "Sunworshippers" encapsulates themes of identity, familial expectations, and the quest for self-love within the framework of cultural traditions.
Sunworshippers by Cathy Song
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1993 (collected in School Figures, 1994)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“Sunworshippers” is included in School Figures, a collection populated by various characters from Song’s family. As the idiosyncrasy of relatives often gets on her nerves, she cannot accept them at face value and must negotiate, with herself, for ways of coming to terms with her family heritage. “Sunworshippers,” like Song’s many other poems characterizing members of her family, exemplifies this position.
The poem begins with the poet’s recollection of her mother’s preachy lectures about sunbathers: “Who will marry you/ if your skin is sunbaked and dried up like beef jerky?” Raising her daughters by Old World precepts, the mother would make them wear hats and gloves when they went for a drive and would use an umbrella under the sun. Contemplating her mother’s philosophy about the body now that she is a woman, the speaker relates how, in her struggles against those disagreeable preachings, she became anorexic. In a voice that is at once sarcastic, resentful, and perhaps mixing delight with regret, she satirizes the mother’s view of the body. Taking a deliberately confrontational stance, she interprets the mother’s cautions against exposure to the sun in terms of prohibitions against loving oneself “too much.” As if to retaliate, she eats less and less.
Despite its alarming development as a health issue, anorexia also serves as a conceit for the speaker’s construction of her identity. Akin to being a portrait of the artist as a young woman, the poem reaches some sort of epiphany by celebrating the speaker’s hypersensitive and even mystical capabilities. As someone with a heightened awareness of self, she “devoured radiance,/ essential as chlorophyll.” It is under these strange circumstances that she experiences an intellectual coming-of-age, so that she can finally claim that “Undetected, I slipped in and out of books,/ passages of music, brightly painted rooms// to weave one’s self, ropes of it, whole/ and fully formed, was a way of shining/ out of this world.” Since the context for this experience is anorexia, there is an implied irony that this moment of extreme brilliance may be a form of delusion induced by fasting. The tension between mother and daughter that started the poem remains unresolved. Paradoxically, this lack of resolution is what keeps the poet motivated to write.
Bibliography
Chang, Juliana. “Reading Asian American Poetry.” MELUS 21, no. 1 (Spring, 1996): 81-98.
Chun, Gary. “Poet Sings of Journey of Life.” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 11, 2002.
Cobb, Nora Okja. “Artistic and Cultural Mothering in the Poetics of Cathy Song.” In New Visions in Asian American Studies: Diversity, Community, Power, edited by Franklin Ng et al. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1994.
Fujita-Sato, Gayle K. “’Third World’ as Place and Paradigm in Cathy Song’s Picture Bride.” MELUS 15, no. 1 (Spring, 1988): 49-72.
Hugo, Richard. Foreword to Picture Bride, by Cathy Song. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983.
Lim, Shirley. Review of Picture Bride, by Cathy Song. MELUS 10, no. 3 (Fall, 1983): 95-99.
Song, Cathy. “Cathy’s Song: Interview with Cathy Song.” Interview by David Choo. Honolulu Weekly 4 (June 15, 1994): 6-8.
Song, Cathy, and Juliet S. Kono. Introduction to Sister Stew: Fiction and Poetry by Women. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1991.
Sumida, Stephen. And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawaii. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991.
Wallace, Patricia. “Divided Loyalties: Literal and Literary in the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song, and Rita Dove.” MELUS 18, no. 3 (Fall, 1993): 3-19.
Zhou, Xiaojing. “Intercultural Strategies in Asian American Poetry.” In Re-placing America: Conversations and Contestations, edited by Ruth Hsu et al. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000.