Cultural Appropriation: The Ants Go Marching One by One
Children's Songs and Contemporary Life
“Cultural appropriation” is a term flung at writers for not “staying in their own lane,” meaning writing about cultures and experiences not their own. When Jeanine Cummins’ novel, American Dirt, appeared in 2020, it received high praise from several luminaries, including Oprah, and the Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros, who wrote: “This is the international story of our times. Masterful.” Almost immediately, a backlash swept the author off her book tour—though fortunately not off the New York Times bestseller list. Myriam Gurba, another Chicana writer, claimed the book was full of stereotypes, written only for a white audience, and badly written. I’m softening her language, but this photo of her promoting her memoir, Mean, says a lot. She is mean. She’s also an enormously talented writer. But talent isn’t wisdom, and her message isn’t wise. The idea that Cummins, who is white (but has a Puerto Rican grandmother) shouldn’t write about Mexicans because her whiteness dominates the narrative is foolish. Even assuming she can’t possibly understand what she hasn’t lived personally—an assumption I would not make—the effort to understand is praiseworthy. That’s how we understand each other: by trying to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.
There’s one point Gurba makes that’s worth evaluating. She says Cummins doesn’t get the jesting relationship with death enjoyed—yes—by Mexicans:
Mexicans have over a hundred nicknames for death, most of them are playful because death is our favorite playmate, and Octavio Paz explained our unique relationship with la muerte when he wrote, “The Mexican…is familiar with death. [He] jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it. It is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.” Cummins’ failure to approach death with appropriate curiosity, and humility, is what makes American Dirt a perfect read for your local self-righteous gringa book club.
“Appropriate curiosity and humility?” Does she mean fatalism? No thanks to that, and yes, it’s good that Americans don’t routinely think of death as a playmate even if we’re often forced to face it daily—given the ease with which mass shooters acquire guns. Gurba asserts Cummins’ supposed sense of the USA as “good” and Mexico as “bad,” apparently because of this misunderstanding of Mexican attitudes toward death. Yet Cummins is hardly saying America is perfect—quite the reverse. For her, the United States aspires to be a place where people can be safe, where they don’t have to reduce the terror of death by joking about death as a pal. In any case, if Cummins didn’t have a Puerto Rican grandma, she’d be qualified to write her novel. She’d be equally qualified if she were Vietnamese or Russian. Hasn’t Gurba read Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese writer (since 1983 a British citizen) known for The Remains of the Day, set in a British Country house and deeply engaged in the hidden yearnings of a British housekeeper and butler? It’s a pitch-perfect rendering of a culture not his own and a time preceding his own.
We’re living in a world in which writers who put a toe out of their own ethnic space get condemned for doing so. I think fondly of Alexander McCall Smith’s The Number One Ladies Detective Agency. Smith is a Scottish, white academic writing about a Botswanean woman detective named Mwa Precious Ramotswe. From Gurba’s point of view, how dare he? But his books are wonderful. Or how about Kafka’s unfinished novel, Amerika? Inspired by the desire to write like the Victorian novelist, Charles Dickens, Kafka embarked on a tale heavily influenced by pictures from a travel guide of a place he’d never visited. His characters have European names and on the few occasions when they eat, it’s sausage. They seem determinedly Central European—that is, his culture and place stick out all over the book. Do we condemn Kafka’s Amerika for not understanding what Americans eat? I don’t.
It’s an old story to find literary influences—now often called “appropriations” everywhere, and I find one of my favorite kiddie counting songs has now been appropriated. “The Ants Go Marching One by One” includes at least ten verses in most versions, each one punctuated by the antics of the “little one” who stops to suck his thumb (rhymes with one), bump his knee (or climb a tree). The song borrows its melody from the American Civil War song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” which in turn is lifted from an earlier Irish melody.
The more recent melody and lyrics to “The Ants Go Marching One by One” have been appropriated by the drag queen Nina West, and before I remark on her appropriation, I’ll borrow from the handiest AI chat, Perplexity, its findings on the problematic nature of cultural appropriation:
Cultural appropriation involves the dominant culture taking elements from a minority or oppressed culture, often without understanding or respecting the original cultural context and significance . . . It can be seen as a continuation of the oppression and exploitation of minority cultures by dominant cultures, especially when the dominant group profits from using cultural elements without permission or giving credit . . .Cultural appropriation can reinforce harmful stereotypes about minority cultures and erase the real cultural meaning and history behind certain practices, symbols, or styles . . .It denies minority cultures the ability to control the representation and use of their own cultural heritage and intellectual property . . .Even if done with good intentions, cultural appropriation can be hurtful and disrespectful to members of the originating culture, who may view it as their culture being trivialized or disrespected.
I borrow these comments since they’re in sync with Myriam Gurba’s—and those of many others. Why not apply such standards to Nina West’s appropriation?
And what is she appropriating? In the original song, counting is almost incidental to the adventures of the little one, apparently last in line and always successfully completing some task, as in: “the ants go marching eight by eight/the little one stops to shut the gate.” Then the ants do their usual thing—march down into the ground to get out of the rain. They are very sensible ants. There are, of course, variations to the lyrics, but the little one’s always doing something, and when we get to ten, the little one stops to say, “the end!” before the ants go down into the ground yet again. If there’s a message, it’s that the ants work together in an organized fashion, respectfully and that the little one—the child—feels happily in charge. Spurred on by his ability to climb a tree, shut a gate, pick up sticks, he feels a sense of accomplishment.
The Nina West version keeps the counting, but loses the activity and the triumphs of the little one. In a word, it loses the individualism of the little one, who is that favorite of American culture, the underdog who triumphs, running the show from the end of the line. In the Nina West version, we have “families marching one by one in the big parade.” All they do is march in that big parade, and there’s no little one spicing things up. Instead, we get a litany of types of families: one with two mommies, one with two daddies, a trans family, a non-binary one . . . and by the time we get to “Ace, bi, and pan” families I’m wondering if anyone’s ever a doctor, a lawyer or a baseball player. Do we really care that somebody’s in a family with asexual, bisexual and pansexual parents?
No, I’m not somebody who wants to rush the kid into child protection because the parents aren’t a regular old heterosexual mom and dad. I had those, and would have had a happier childhood with sane parents who happened to have less traditional sexualities. But defining oneself by one’s sexuality seems empty. A dad who is gay isn’t living gayness all the time. He’s presumably going to work—regulating motors, stacking cans, offering bank loans, acting in commercials, selling life insurance, anything that one actually does to make money and, in the best of circumstances, express oneself. Some of us have jobs we love and some of us love nothing more than getting away from work at the end of the day, but work and love are the elements of life, not just love. I wonder how much love there is without work.
So I object. I object to the idea of children being asked to name a bunch of sexualities, many of which they can’t understand. I object to the repeated activity of being in the big parade—the activity goes with the notion that one’s sexuality should be both displayed and accepted. In general, I don’t think sexuality should be displayed unless I’m paying to see a performance. If I go to see a drag queen, it’s because I’m want to enjoy the campy outrageousness of it all. Nina West worked with RuPaul and I’m sure she’s a pro. But to appreciate a drag queen’s sexuality, you have to be an adult, and by the way, quite a few drag queens are speaking out against performing in front of children. I’ve watched interviews between children and drag queens. You can find them on YouTube, and to my mind these children don’t look happy; they don’t feel comfortable around a guy with big hair, prosthetic breasts, and a mountain of make-up. One little boy, asked “am I scary?” by the drag queen jiggles his foot and gulps.
Many, if not most of us, think of our sexuality as something private—what consenting adults do within four walls and behind a locked door. Pre-adolescent children typically are not comfortable with displays of sexuality. I knew a child who skipped a grade—he was big and tall and looked at least two years older than his actual age, which was about eleven. A girl started poking him during recess—and why was she doing that? He looked annoyed, embarrassed. I tried to explain: she likes you because you’re a handsome boy. He shook his head. “Why doesn’t she just keep that to herself? In third grade, I liked a girl, but I kept it to myself!” Of course, a year later, after hormones had kicked in, he felt very differently. So yes, it’s harmful to insist that a child attend a performance of a guy in drag reading stories, especially if the guy goes on to perform the way he would for his usual adult audience.
The parents mean well: they want to raise children who don’t reject people with colors and sexualities different from their own. But that’s not how you get children to become inclusive. You get children to become inclusive by feeling inclusive yourself. Your children will figure you out—children always do.
There’s more to the problem than the red herring of so-called “inclusivity.” Nina West’s song isn’t promoting that. Between the lines, there’s always shame, and I can see where that comes from. Gay pride started as a defense against shame. As everyone knows, on June 28, 1969 the vice squad raided the Stonewall Inn bar in New York’s Greenwich village, and for once, the patrons, who were minding their own business and enjoying a few drinks, fought back. They wouldn’t be shamed for dating and socializing, and by fighting back, they changed attitudes and won acceptance.
But it’s not love that’s proud. We don’t “love each other so proudly”—we just love. Love is typically patient and humble, even if it’s also passionate. Like sex, it’s often a very private feeling. Gay pride was really about having one’s rights respected, not about love. The Irish playwright and wit, Oscar Wilde, got the ball rolling with his spirited defense of a poem his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, had written. On trial in 1895 for “gross indecency,” a Victorian legal term connoting erotic activities between men, Wilde was asked about the meaning of the poem’s title, namely, “The Love that Dare not Speak its Name.” He replied with great dignity that the phrase meant "such a great affection of an elder for a younger man . . . as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare.” He defended this love as beautiful and fine.
The freedom to hold hands as you walk down the street is something to be proud of, especially for people who have been denied that pleasure, but love itself is not proud; I’d go with the Biblical definition in 1 Corinthians:13, in which love is “patient and kind, does not envy or boast . . . bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” In his sonnet 116, Shakespeare saw the same quality of humility in love:
love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
In other words, the Nina West song says it’s all about inclusion, but the insistence on loving proudly protests too much, undermining the real message. Self-confidence doesn’t display itself or announce how proud it is. So the song doesn’t do the job.
But apart from that it’s dull. Dreadfully dull. We get a list of terms—boomer me had to look up “ace,” which I didn’t realize was short for “asexual” –and no activities. The song implies that we all grow up to become a particular kind of sexuality, not a developed human being, for whom sexuality is just one part of larger life concerns. For many, me included, sex is essential, but there’s something sad and tacky about going around describing oneself as a practitioner
of a certain type of sexuality. Likewise with pronouns. As I’ve said, I prefer verbs—I’m writing, I’m dancing, I’m unpacking boxes. But “I’m a woman who likes men?” Who cares? That doesn’t distinguish my identity from that of billions of others.
Nina West’s song appropriates the traditional idea of a family as a private space in which members support one another’s endeavors and enjoy productive work. When privacy about sexuality is compromised, when the definition of a family hinges on the sexuality of the parents, there’s not much inspiration for a child or anyone else: “I’m going to grow up to be a nonbinary” doesn’t sound as fun as “I’d like to be a fireman.” Or Barbie. Or a vet.
And West doesn’t achieve what she’s out to achieve. If children’s songs emphasized what they often have emphasized—counting, future professions, animals, toys—then the interests of children are met, as are their need for an identity. The notion that adults must provide a range of labels for types of sexuality to children both takes away from the wish to children to make their own discoveries and boxes them in to a set of terms that can be bewildering. The chief means to acquiring identity—education and work—aren’t mentioned And the vocabulary of the song is so weak—all everyone does is march in a parade. Not a particularly realistic approach to life, and the song loses all the fun of the original, namely watching the little one go from strength to strength.