56 pages • 1 hour read
Geoffrey CanadaFist, Stick, Knife, Gun: A Personal History of Violence
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Structural Racism
Much of what is difficult about Canada’s neighborhood, and his experience of growing up in it, can be attributed to structural racism. This racism is rarely mentioned directly in the book yet is implied and pervasive throughout it. Canada and his family live in an almost entirely black and Latino neighborhood, which also happens to be violent and poor. As Canada states about his chaotic public school, there are only “a few white students whose parents had not yet managed to flee the crumbling tenements of the Bronx” (42). It is in large part because of racist policies in hiring, schooling and policing that families like Canada’s remain trapped in the Bronx. Canada’s single mother must find a way to survive and to take care of her family on a combination of welfare and minimum-wage jobs; as Canada tells us, minimum wage is “all that they paid even the most competent black woman in 1958” (14).
The neighborhood is, moreover, not taken seriously by the police, as is seen by a disturbing encounter in Chapter 3 of the book, between Canada and a pair of white policemen. The policemen have been summoned to Canada’s family’s apartment because of a robbery: Canada’s older brother Daniel has had ten dollars stolen from him, which is, as Canada points out, “probably one-fifth of what we had to live on for the week” (27). However, to the cops, it is clearly an insignificant theft, especially for a violent area like the Bronx, and their attitude is indifferent and contemptuous. Canada states of them, “It was nothing they did, it was what they didn’t do. They didn’t take us seriously” (28).
The book shows the degree to which this racism is self-perpetuating: the more it continues, the more it justifies its reason for existing. Canada’s public school is violent and chaotic because an area like the Bronx has difficulty drawing dedicated, serious teachers; therefore, the school will only get more dangerous, and will have that much more difficulty attracting aid. Likewise, the attitude of the white cops in Chapter 3 is clearly that there is little point in policing a petty crime like robbery in a place like the Bronx, which they see as a hopelessly violent and troubled neighborhood. Yet their fatalism and inaction will only lead to an increase in this violence, which will in turn make these cops (and other cops like them) that much more reluctant to intervene.
In the book’s Epilogue, Canada makes a direct plea against this sort of fatalism. In speaking of the gun violence that has become endemic to his neighborhood, he makes the point that if there were “an outside enemy” inflicting this level of violence on children, we as a country would use all of our resources to fight it. He then asks, “What happens when the enemy is us? What happens when those American children are mostly black and brown?” (123) It is a rhetorical question; his point is that neighborhoods like his own have been left alone for too long, at least in part due to the cycle of racism and indifference. He then states that gun violence will soon “overrun the boundaries of our ghettos” and that for this reason alone, we should all be concerned about this “new national cancer” (123). While he is speaking overtly about gun violence, he is also speaking about the racism that indirectly gave rise to this violence in the first place, and the degree to which this racism affects all of us.
Codes of Machismo
While Canada has a strong and supportive mother figure in his life, his world is otherwise almost entirely male. Canada tells us that there are “female counterparts” to the male gangs that dominate his own life; however, these female gangs make no real appearance in the book, other than to be briefly mentioned (33). This shows the segregation between men and women that exists in Canada’s world.
Moreover, it can be understood that even the female gangs in Canada’s neighborhood are adhering to certain codes of machismo: that is, to an exaggerated masculinity. The presence of these codes is felt by Canada early in the book; he tells us, at the end of Chapter 1, that even at the age of four, he knew that he “needed some clues on which I could build a theory of how to act” (10). He needs to learn these clues in order to cope with what he already senses to be the violence and lawlessness of his neighborhood, and he will learn them soon enough. He will learn them not from any adult authority figures, who (other than his mother) are rare and ineffectual in his life, but rather from the other boys in his neighborhood. These boys have invented their own strict rules and codes of behavior in order to compensate for the unpredictability and lack of structure in their lives, and these rules are inseparable from traditional codes of manliness.
These codes do not only have to do with fighting and with one’s readiness and ability to fight, but just as importantly with projecting toughness and strength, which means hiding one’s feelings of vulnerability. Canada soon learns that it is forbidden, during or immediately preceding a fight, to let your fear and confusion show on your face. He learns this the first time that he is made to fight a neighborhood boy his age: “During the time I was sizing up my situation I made a serious error. I showed on my face what was going on in my head” (36). Also, while it is acceptable to cry during a fight (at any rate, if you are a younger boy) it is not acceptable to cry for one’s mother, as the character of Butchie does in Chapter 4. He does so in the middle of getting badly beaten up by the other boys, and it only makes the boys beat him more savagely, especially since he is getting beaten up in the first place for being gentle and feminine. While the savagery of his beating has partly to do with teaching him a lesson and keeping up the tough reputation of the neighborhood, it can also be understood to have psychological origins. It is the boys’ suspicion and fear of their own “weak” feminine sides that perhaps leads them to punish Butchie as furiously as they do; in beating him up, they are attempting to stamp out all traces of vulnerability and gentleness within themselves.
Yet fighting, for these boys, is also one of their only emotional outlets. A fighter who is brave and committed, in Canada’s neighborhood, is known as a fighter with “heart”: “Having heart meant that you were unafraid, that you would fight, even if you couldn’t beat the other boy” (49). Typically, “having a heart” is a phrase that is understood as signifying compassion and softness. Among Canada’s group of peers, however, it means something more complicated: having the courage to lose a fight, to make yourself in all ways vulnerable while still trying your best. This is the closest that these boys allow themselves to come to softness and openness, at least when they are in public, and they put on their stoic poker faces immediately afterwards: “You couldn’t dwell on issues that caused fear or anger. Things happened, you acted, you moved on. If you didn’t, you might never make it out of the Bronx alive” (61).
The Destabilizing Impact of Guns
In this book’s Epilogue, Canada states that because of the increasing presence of guns in his neighborhood, “there are no clear rules to follow” and that “the codes of conduct [are] deteriorating” (122). By “rules” and “codes of conduct,” he is referring to the rules and codes that he himself grew up with, as a young boy in the Bronx. His memoir describes the many unofficial rules of his neighborhood, when he was a child, which allowed him to survive: drop, don’t run, when a gun is accidentally pointed at you; speak in a calm manner to defuse a violent situation; don’t show your feelings on your face. In addition to these rules, which might be called street knowledge, Canada refers in the last chapter of the book to his “Christian upbringing” (117). He credits this upbringing as being the force that finally caused him to throw away his purchased gun and turned him away from the path of violence.
The book illustrates the many ways in which guns can upend these rules and codes: both moral codes and codes of behavior. Because Canada grew up in the Bronx at a moment when guns were present but not yet common in his neighborhood, he is well-placed to observe how they can change and escalate a situation. He has seen firsthand the difference between a fight with fists (which might be violent but which is also hemmed in by protocol and tradition) and a fight in which guns are present.
As the book illustrates, the difference between guns and fist-fighting is not only a difference in destructive potential. Guns are not only more powerful and destructive than fist-fights, they are also more confusing. Their purpose can change, depending on their context. Gunfights can be objects of fascination, as is seen at the beginning of Chapter 6, when a startled Canada observes the other children in his neighborhood running towards the sound of gunshots, rather than away from them. He also observes in this chapter: “We all knew that guns were the ultimate weapon. Little did we know that one day guns would forever change the codes of conduct that we worked so hard to learn and to live up to” (65).
Guns can hide in car glove compartments and be more understood than seen, as passive instruments of self-protection, or they can be taken out of car glove compartments and threateningly waved around, as one man does with Canada and his friends at the end of Chapter 9. When Canada purchases a gun of his own, he does so in the remote town in Maine where he is attending college; in such an isolated, peaceful place, his gun is good for little else besides target practice, and he soon puts it away and forgets about it. As he states about the gun in this setting, “It was simply a tool for me” (114). It is only when he returns home to the Bronx over the holidays that his gun takes on a volatile new life and presence for him: “When I look back on the power the gun had over my personality and my judgment, I am amazed” (115).
Canada’s point in the Epilogue is that there are now many children in the Bronx who have known nothing but guns, and who have none of the support system and sense of community that allowed Canada himself to escape a violent destiny. They are both more armed and more helpless than was Canada; they live in a “war zone,” as opposed to a dangerous neighborhood, and their priority is to protect themselves rather than to defend their neighborhood’s tough reputation.
While during Canada’s childhood it was mainly adults who carried guns, it is now children who are armed, a change that first came about, as Canada states, with the drug trade in the early 1980s. Such codes of conduct that these children have are violently fatalistic: Canada quotes contemporary Bronx teenagers as saying that they would “rather be judged by twelve than carried by six” (122).
This sentiment–that it is better to be in prison than to be dead–is, as Canada further notes, a justification for gun violence: “shoot first: [o]dds are you’ll live, and if you’re arrested and convicted at least you’ll still be alive” (122). Canada shows how gun violence, like the racism that this memoir also recounts, is self-perpetuating; the more people have guns, the quicker people also are to use them.
